My body was shaky with hash. I looked through the eye. I pressed the red little button on the side.
Gayl was in a goddess position. An exposure position.
She pulled aside and pinned back her underwear. She had short black hairs around her cunt like the ring of an eclipse. A part of her down there looked way too red, how my face had been red from Key West, burning alive.
I filmed her until the tape ran out. My eyes went blurry behind the camera. Gayl closed her legs and her eyes. I put down the camera. It was six o’clock. It was time for me to go.
‘Don’t leave,’ Gayl whispered. She looked so sleepy. ‘You can be my little helper.’
‘I’ll come back,’ I said. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow.’
It was weird, for a moment, to leave her there alone on the bed.
‘He’d be so disappointed if I let you go now,’ Gayl said. ‘The bitch got away. Our little bourgie bitch.’
The door was locked, it was locked from the outside. I rattled it back and forth to get out. I remembered that safety pin in the handle. I don’t know how long I was there at the door not wanting to realize that we were locked in. It was on purpose.
When I turned around, Gayl was back at the table.
‘I have to be home for dinner.’
‘Home for dinner!’ Gayl laughed. ‘This is happening, so you just better sit.’
I didn’t want to miss Anna’s dinner with Jeff and my dad, with Jody and Lee. I must’ve look panicked. Gayl was tracing the veins on the back of her hand, her worker’s hand.
‘He was disappointed, you know, that you weren’t so rich.’
I wanted to call my dad. They couldn’t keep me in here.
‘Myra, man, it’s the way of the world!’
I took my money out of my pocket.
‘Yeah, you people travel from wish to wish and want to want. You people think that the world is a playground.’
‘How do you know what kind of person I am?’ I said, holding my two-thousand-dollar-stuffed envelope. ‘You don’t even know me!’
Gayl slammed her hands so hard into the table that one leg collapsed. The hot plate shifted.
‘Did you have your own bedroom growing up?’
My body felt skewered like the table.
‘Myra, sit the fuck back down.’
I did not sit back down. I wanted to stand.
‘I slept on the floor with four brothers.’ Gayl said, looking up at me. ‘Head to foot and foot to head.’
Could the house I grew up in reduce me to this? I stared down at Gayl, at the clear space on her forehead between her eyes.
‘We don’t have this desire to be like you, Myra. I don’t, at least.’
I knew she wasn’t saying this stuff to make me feel bad.
Behind Gayl was the window that faced the sky. The air was now murky and uniform.
I put my mother’s envelope down on the table.