I thought of how men were always looking at me. How it happened this one time when I was ten. I was at the supermarket with my father and the guy at the cash said, ‘You better keep a close watch on that one.’ His eyes squinted down at my chest when he said it, at the two lumps pressing up under my shirt. Then the guy made a noise, a grunt through closed lips. My father looked down at me and laughed quickly, too, but it sounded like he didn’t really mean it.
When we got in the car, my father didn’t say a word. He just turned up the news and started driving really fast. I put my forehead against the window and watched us pass all the cars. I could still feel that guy looking right through my shirt. For a second I thought my chest had pushed out more when he was staring at it. I heard my father’s breathing get loud. Air scratched past the hairs of his moustache. Then something started happening. Between my thighs on the seat I felt hot little beats, like a pulse or a bird was whipping around down there. It started getting louder. I had to squeeze my thighs tight. I was trying not to make any sound from the pulsing, trying not to let it come out in my breaths.
When we finally got home, I kept hearing what that guy had said, how it made them both laugh. You better keep a close watch on that one. I didn’t really know what it meant. I thought the guy meant – maybe – I was pretty, but when I tried to think more about what he really meant, I felt strange. Lying on my bed, the pulsing wouldn’t stop spreading. It filled up my underwear with hot little beats. It felt okay, it felt good, but I didn’t want it to keep happening, because I thought my father knew what had happened. I thought, in the car, he could smell it.
Things started to happen more often after that. I would get that feeling around men, older men, men in stores and on the street. It was always when I thought I saw them looking at me, especially the ones I knew I’d never get to meet. The construction men working in crews on the road. The businessmen with their kids and their wives. The guys on the subway who sweat strange perfume. That beating between my legs started happening so much that I thought those men could see right through me. Just from the way I was standing or walking, I thought it meant I wanted them to see. All those beats inside my body, throbbing so loud.
Sometimes I’d imagine a man in my house, a stranger in the bathroom, watching me shower. His two big hands would open a towel when I stepped out. Then he’d dry me, rub me, move the towel really fast back and forth behind my shoulders, behind my back and all the way down. My flesh would shake close to the man’s face. My ass red behind me, my eyes blooming wide. The strange man would follow me into my bedroom, his footsteps sounding in time to my beats. He’d stand over my bed while I pretended to sleep, one of my feet sticking out of the covers. Then one arm would fall out, an arm that led to my chest. If I rolled on my side, the man would see more. He would see how my breasts were starting to grow from my body, how my nipples were hard, how my hair down there was getting thick. If I rolled on my back, the sheet would fall off and the man would see straight up between my legs. I’d spread them for him, I knew I would. I was pulsing so much there I’d have to. I thought that if the man could see me naked like that, just silently watch me, then it would all be okay. I’d stay quiet while he touched me anywhere he wanted. I’d want him to come back every single night, too, so he could tell me how much more hair he was seeing on my vagina. How much more stuff he was feeling down there.
I’d never even really touched myself where I imagined a man doing it. Maybe if I had, everything would’ve been different.
‘Mira, you’re the sweetest,’ John always whispered after licking. He pushed his chin up onto my stomach and wiped his glistening mouth with the sheet. I closed my soaking wet cunt.
Maybe.
I met John when I was fifteen. I was working in this cafv© on the weekends and he started coming in every Saturday, always waiting to order from me. He’d sit there drinking his coffee for at least an hour, looking out the window, then looking at me. One day, he came up to the counter after he finished his coffee.
‘I have to tell you something,’ he said, leaning in. ‘You’re a very pretty young woman, you know that?’
My face got hot. I stared down at my hands.
‘What’s your name?’
My lips were coming apart to speak, but my tongue wasn’t there. John read the name tag pinned to my shirt.
‘Mira? That’s a beautiful name. Mira,’ he murmured. ‘Are you Spanish?’
I nodded, but I didn’t mean yes.
‘I’m John, by the way.’
He reached out a hand but I couldn’t lift my eyes from the counter. I was staring down at his weird rocky knuckles with little white scratches.
‘So, Mira, what do you like to do when you’re not here?’
I couldn’t believe it – this guy looked as old as my father! There was stubble around his lips and dark skin under his eyes. Didn’t he know I was only fifteen? I was squeezing my hands together so hard they were going numb. A creeping smile hooked into my cheek. I felt John looking down at me, waiting for me to say something. I knew he must’ve known I was embarrassed.
‘Well, it was really nice to meet you,’ he said quickly. ‘I’ll see you again, Mira, okay?’
He walked so fast to the door it looked like he was limping. I didn’t think he would look back at me from outside, but he did. He turned around and waved. There was this thick feeling under my chin, like his fingers were still there. I was smiling again, that stupid smile that stuck on one side. I didn’t like how he’d made me look. Better keep a close watch on that one. I didn’t like the way he looked, I knew that – his black chin, his thick hair, those scratches on his knuckles – but throughout my whole next week, I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I knew he was going to come in the next Saturday. I kept hearing every small thing he’d said to me: You’re a pretty young woman. You’re a very pretty young woman, you know that? No one had ever said anything like that to me before. It made that feeling beat up between my legs, this time more than I’d ever felt it. I had to cross my thighs and put my hands in between them to make it stop. I wanted it to stop because I thought it was going to make me do something with that guy even though I thought he was disgusting!
I told Nadia what happened, because I didn’t know what I should do when he came back. She said, ?
??Go for it, Mira. Older guys know what they’re doing.’ Nadia cackled, like it was wet inside her throat. Her family was from Russia. I thought it was weird how much older her father was than her mother, who wore makeup and dresses and heels, even in the yard. Her father always sat there in his lawn chair with a newspaper in front of his face and no shirt on, but you knew he was still looking. It seemed like it was a rule of their house that Nadia’s mother had to look like that to show all the other women on our street – the mothers who wore sneakers to go shopping or pantsuits to work – that this was what a real woman looked like. I’d never seen her dad go to work. Nadia was older than me because she was born in Russia and she came to Canada when she was seven. They put her in my kindergarten class to learn English. I remember how Nadia used to scream in a kind of high-pitched gibberish at recess to make all the other girls freak out. I wanted to be friends with her. She reminded me of a rabbit, the albino kind. Nadia used to make these marks on my arms at the park after school. We’d sit together on the back side of the hill and she’d take my arm and put it in her mouth, sort of suck it, sort of bite it, just to make the marks. I got a pattern of heart-shaped bruises where she did it. I think I worshipped her. Nadia was fancy like her mother, kind of threatening like her dad.
‘Finally Mira is going to get laid,’ Nadia said, when I told her about John. She’d been having sex since she was twelve. There were always these young, kind of skinny Russian guys with jutted-out jaws trooping through her house. Nadia said they were part of her father’s business. I imagined that Nadia lost her virginity with one of those guys. I remember when she was twelve and I was ten, she looked like a woman. She’d strut around in her mother’s high heels and braid her hair princess-style. Nadia always talked about sex. She’d say things like: ‘I have to come like a guy does, Mira, I just have to freaking come.’
Nadia said that an orgasm was a muscle contraction and that if you didn’t have a muscle contraction, you didn’t have a real orgasm. Nadia showed me her hand with all the fingers open and said, ‘Like this, just like this.’ She opened and shut her fingers really quick over and over. ‘This is what it feels like. This is how hard it’s got to be.’
I knew that that feeling had never happened to me.
John came back to my work the next Saturday. He came back the next week and the one after that. I started to be able to look at him a little more. We never said much after that first time, just the regular ‘Hi, how are you?’ and ‘Fine, how are you?’ which was okay, because I still did feel a bit creeped out that maybe he was coming in just because of me. He’d started giving me pretty big tips after buying his coffee, too, at least a dollar in coins, pressing them right into my palm. It always felt like he touched me too long when he did that. I thought maybe it was just me, though, and I was worrying about it for nothing.
Then, one Saturday, John came in to see me three times during my shift. Right before he left the last time, he leaned in really close. He smelled kind of weird, like my mother when she made meat.
John said, ‘Do you like Chinese food? Have you ever gone out with your friends for Chinese food? I know a really good restaurant near here.’
I shrugged my shoulders and John touched my arm lightly. ‘I’ll see you later, okay?’