62
Almost sixty minutes into it now: “My name is Jennifer and I am an Incest Survivor,” the woman next to me says.
I doubt very much her name is Jennifer. She trembles and will not stop staring at her small hands. She isn’t bad looking but on the same token she’s not great looking either. It could be the situation talking; maybe if I didn’t have an idea about what is going to be coming out of her mouth I might find her more attractive.
But as I study her and decide yes, she’s not bad after all, she goes and ruins it.
“I’d been sleeping with my first cousin for eight months the first time I got pregnant.” A solitary tear runs down her cheek, flushed red as the site around a compound fracture. “I was fourteen.”
That’s how she starts it off. I wish I’d gotten a cup of coffee before I sat down. Delilah’s hamburger aroma is making me hungry.
“The baby was born with several incestual defects. She—it was a ‘she’—lived for almost a week outside the womb. I named her Desiree.”
I’ve heard a lot of terrible stories but I’ve never really been a fan of these types. Listening to ashamed and broken people trying to piece themselves back together, so fragile a sneeze tears them apart; not my scene.
“My cousin never claimed Desiree and my parents never knew about us. They thought I was just a ‘common’ slut.” She adds air quotes around the word common. “It would be years before I told them I was no ordinary loose woman.”
When Derne arrives I’ll pair up the two of them and call my end of the bargain fulfilled. It’s settled: dinner at Melrose Half-Pounders. Then a few days off. Tie one on every night.
“The next one I aborted. I couldn’t live with myself knowing I’d put some terminally handicapped child into the world to suffer and die. I thought the choice would be hard...but it wasn’t.”
Oh God, lady. Finish up already.
“I don’t think I’d make a very good mother.” She sounds very small saying that.
Maybe I’ll stop by that breakfast diner next to the rail station and look for the waitress who gave me the phone book.
“After a while, Elliot—my cousin’s name is Elliot—did I say that already? He started dating a girl. A cheerleader. Just a run-of-the-mill high school tramp. Her name was Roberta but everybody called her Bobbi.” She says the name in an airhead, California-girl falsetto. Vitriol drips off her tongue with it.
“Elliot dumped me like I was...I don’t even know. I felt so ugly. So damn used. It was so abrupt. It was an insult after all I did. He paraded around with Bobbi the Cheerleader, taking her to meet the damn family, and I had to just sit there in the background and cry. I had to lie about why I was bawling all the time. I was violated. He didn’t care. I had never felt more violated and used.”
Jennifer starts to cry hard, enraged. I eyeball Delilah and I can see why she had a lot of dudes sniffing around. Even knowing what I know about her she is still attractive. Already you can see the first faint marks of her hard life wearing on her, like a car left sitting in the desert. It won’t take long to start to see the sandblasting and the sun blisters on her.
Jennifer stabs one bolt-straight finger onto the table. “I gave him my virginity.” She stabs it again. “I let him finish inside me.” A third time. “I carried his babies. I went through all the humiliation of the first pregnancy.” A clenched fist now. “I lost the baby...he never even consoled me. Why does that surprise me? He wasn’t even there. Just started fucking me again a few months later.”
I shift in the seat. The air around Jennifer is boiling with heat rising from her scars. I start to build the gall to excuse myself and leave the structure altogether. I’m the only dude here anyways. I’m starting to think this is a women’s only group and they just don’t have the heart to tell me. I’ll just stakeout the building for Delilah’s exit and just when my mouth opens Jennifer cuts me off with her continued rant.
“You know what they say, a woman scorned...”
Her face sets hard, decided. “I found them one night.”
I hadn’t noticed until now that Jennifer has tats up and down her arms. She has long sleeves but in her confession she’s been fidgeting, rolling them up to her elbows. She gathe
rs her hair in one fist and her neck is inked as well. I like tattoos but these are ghetto. Looks like prison ink to me.
Prison ink: melted KY jelly mixed with soot, rubbing alcohol and water. They burn candles and collect the soot, then scrape a handful of KY off of their cellmate’s ass. Little bit of toilet bowl water and some rubbing alcohol, stir, do whatever it is they do. You get Jennifer’s artwork.
The confessor’s face settles into a tranquil daze. “I didn’t kill them. I didn’t tell the court this but I was going to. Instead I made Elliot admit to Bobbi the Cheerleader that he’d been with me for years and we’d made babies. I made him cry and tell her that his dad and my dad were brothers. We weren’t ordinary lovers. Our babies weren’t ordinary babies.”
Well, she knows who she is. A lot of people can’t say that about themselves anymore. Not honestly they can’t.
“That’s what Bobbi the Cheerleader was sleeping with. That’s what she was parading around with. Whatever she’d done to him I’d done first. I wanted her to think about that and then see how pretty she felt.”
I look at Delilah and she just has her small chin resting in one of her small palms. Her eyes wet with sympathy for Jennifer the Incest Survivor. Jennifer the arch enemy of Bobbi the Cheerleader. Delilah’s eyes flick over to me. She must feel the weight of my stare. She gives me a smile and drops it the way someone does when they’re not really smiling but do it anyway. I look back to Jennifer.
“Bobbi the Cheerleader puked. Three times. At gunpoint, I made Elliot call me his first lay. I shot him in the leg. I was aiming for his dick but the gun jumped. He almost died. I already had. I died a long time ago. But I still breathe. That’s what he gets for how he treated me. I got eight years for it.”
Probably served her time in Happenstance State Prison. It’s about forty miles out of town, north. It’s a shithole of a women’s prison. I bet little, scorned Ms. Jennifer here is much harder than she looks. Eight years in that prison will sharpen a kitty’s claws. She might just be hot again, ghetto tats or not.