Maidenhead

‘You’re not fine. Fucking hell. Excuse me.’

Me and my dad stood there like that, both our chests caving in while Anna was back at the sink, scrubbing a pot, and then at the fridge hauling out plastic bags. I didn’t know where all that food came from. Eventually, Anna looked at my dad and smiled as encouragement.

‘Anna’s making dinner tonight. Tofu goreng. Do you want to eat with us? Jeff is joining us too. Jody might arrive a bit later because she’s coming in for the weekend.’

‘Since when do you eat tofu?’ Since when does a domestic worker make our dinners?

‘Anna shared her lunch with me a few times,’ my father said.

After you deleted your stash of bikini-fisted cunts? Anna chopped garlic. My father looked at the floor. I wanted to laugh but no laughs would come.

‘After all these years your mother just couldn’t do it anymore,’ my dad said. ‘Your mother and I are getting a divorce. I still have to tell Jeff that this is final. But you know that, correct?’

My father rubbed his face. Anna, with sticky hands, was beside him again with a fresh tissue, like a saviour, or a moth. I wasn’t babying him like my mother thought. But he needed babying, it seemed. And my mother was out of that role, a millionaire now. She’d just sent me and Jeff a package in the mail. It had two Korean bank envelopes inside, one for him and one for me. The envelopes said Korean Kash for my Kids! Kiss, Kiss! in a weird loopy script that I didn’t recognize. Each of our envelopes had two thousand bucks in American bills.

‘Myra. You know that your mother and I are getting a divorce, correct?’

I had two thousand American dollars courtesy of my mother’s revolt.

Anna was back at the garlic, chopping. Her skin seemed moist, her black eyes were bright.

‘I know that Spartacus was the leader of a slave revolution,’ I said. ‘I know that slaves rise up and fight.’

My father looked scared of me. Anna, eyes down, did not.

‘Come on, Dad. Yes. I know that, yes. Divorce, correct. I’ll come for dinner. Thank you, Anna.’

My father’s face settled. It was as if, for one second, he understood my need for spectacle.

§

In my bedroom, healing, I read Aaron’s Weil. The floors shone, the sheets were clean because of Anna. ‘Subordination: economy of energy. Thanks to this, an act of heroism can be performed without there being any need for the person who commands or the one who obeys to be a hero.’

Lee called me the moment I moved from Weil to Bataille.

‘I know you didn’t want me to talk to your father,’ Lee said. ‘I know I crossed that line.’

I read from Bataille in silence: Cruelty and eroticism are conscious intentions in a mind which has resolved to trespass into a forbidden field of behaviour.

‘Myra? Respond. Talk, please. I’m sorry.’

It was my conscious intention to trespass into a forbidden field of behaviour.

‘Look, I just feel like since I kept what happened to me from my parents for so long, I’m really sensitive to it,’ Lee said. ‘I’m kind of on the side of the parents.’

‘You were in Grade 6, Lee. I am seventeen years old.’

‘I know, Myra. That’s why I’m saying I’m sorry. I miss you. I’m sorry. I’m just overprotective. You’re working it out, I know. I don’t want our friendship to be aborted in the process. You’re just in this really raw state of something unreal ... ’

My heart sped up. Lee didn’t understand. Pornography with Gayl and Elijah was real. It was my forbidden field to stomp in – full of hairy red flowers on sharp spotted stalks.

‘Myra? You still exist, okay? You’re real.’

‘Listen to this.’ I cracked open the centre of the book, a section of Bataille that I had never read before: ‘“Silence cannot do away with things that language cannot state. Violence is as stubbornly there just as much as death, and if language cheats to conceal universal annihilation, the placid work of time, language alone suffers.”’ I paused on that, repeating: ‘“Language alone suffers, language is the poorer, not time and not violence.” Hey, Lee, you think I can finish my essay in language that does not suffer?’

‘No. I don’t.’

‘Why?’