Blood and Phlegm
I lost my virginity when I was 12. I
still haven’t decided if this was a mistake or not.
A few years later, when I was a
freshman in high school, I read about Bob Flanagan in a magazine I
stole from the convenient store down the street from my house. At
first I pretended to read it just to avoid my mother’s prodding to
dress up more, which she always did right before serving dinner.
It actually was Bob's penis that caught
my attention, which was weird for me since everything sexual
disgusted me then. The black and white photo showed a flaccid penis
with two nails driven into a ball sac. It looked like a dead slug on
an autopsy board. I would have kept turning the pages if I hadn’t
noticed the words “Cystic Fibrosis.” Bob Flanagan had this
disease. Scott Berring, who took my virginity, had it too. In the interview, Bob talked
about how hurting himself made him feel in control of his body. I
liked the idea that no matter what, we have control over our
own bodies. My mother saw me smiling and laughed at me. “Why are
you smiling? What are you thinking about?”
“None of your business,” I yelled,
without looking up at her. She was always trying to get into my head.
After dinner I sliced my thigh. I did
it in the bathtub that my mother and I shared. I thought about Bob
Flanagan and Scott as I did it. I don’t know why I chose the thigh.
I just knew that other girls back in middle school did so because
short skirts could still hide the thigh scars.
I used the pair of scissors that I
would later steal from home when I moved out because I was too lazy
to buy my own, the kind of scissors you use to cut construction
paper, blunt scissors. I sat there for what felt like hours, digging
into my skin in the same line, stopping as soon as blood oozed out.
Just a few drops. My mother banged on the door every ten minutes
until she eventually gave up and peed in the sink. I stared at the
blood, noting the way the bathroom light made a slight
glare on the droplets. Then I smeared the blood on my thigh and wiped
it on the bathtub, rubbing it against the porcelain until it turned
from brown to white again. That somehow felt like the best way to
dispose of the evidence, as if it never happened.
Scott Berring was older, 14, and worked a lot. I met him
while he was working, when he bagged my mom’s groceries. He was
less scrawny than the other boys his age, and already getting over
his acne. He had brown hair, which he kept short, and tiny green eyes
that made him seem like he was always thinking deeply about things. I
especially loved his hands. They were so big that he could grab three
apples at once, fitting them all between his fingers.
My mother was too caught up in how her
makeup looked to notice Scott and I flirting. I bet she even thought
all of his coy comments were meant for her. My mother had been
obsessed with male attention ever since my father left when I was
five. I think this is why I always dressed like a tomboy. I didn’t
want to be her.
Scott didn’t mind that I didn’t
wear makeup. He smiled at me and I whispered my number as my mother
counted her change.
We dated in secret. I would sneak out
at night through my window and we’d meet and hold hands in the
woods. We first kissed in the fall. He pulled away in the middle to
puke up phlegm. He tried to lean back in and kiss me again, like
nothing ever happened, but I made him chew a piece of gum first.
At the time I felt like we talked
about everything, but looking back I realize that we only ever talked
about his mother, Tricia. “She just won’t give me any room to
breathe,” he regularly complained. At that time all I knew of Tricia
was her piercing voice that yelled at Scott for not finishing his
treatment in the background when Scott talked to me on the phone.
Scott’s father had died in a car accident when Scott was six. So it
was just Scott and Tricia.
“I understand,” I replied,
thinking about the time my mother felt sad about my father leaving
and came into my room with a glass of red wine and tried to lay with
me, but just ended up spilling the wine on my hair.
Tricia didn’t like me. She also
didn’t know me, seeing as she never allowed me over, but she knew
about me after listening in on one of our phone conversations. This
was a normal thing in Scott’s house. Tricia would write up hard
drafts of every one of Scott’s phone calls with his friends and
then give them to their parents.
Scott and I bonded over our fathers. I
felt like my situation was worse; my father could see me but didn’t
want to. Scott disagreed but I think that’s because his father had
loved him.
One night when we both snuck out,
Scott told me that he hated himself. He was picking at a pimple just
above his left eyebrow as he spoke. It seemed like he was scratching
his forehead the way that philosophers do in sculptures upon grasping
some sort of universal truth. “Why?” I asked. He didn’t answer
me. He never said it again.
I decided to let Scott take my
virginity after he told me about his circumcision. I think it was
because I felt bad for him. He said, “They didn’t even ask for my
permission.” He was four when they did it. “I think that’s why
I have such a terrible temper,” he told me, calmly reflecting.
“I understand,” I said, thinking
about a time when my mom covered my eyes during a sex scene in a
movie we were watching.
“But you don’t understand!” He
yelled and looked at me in disgust. “You’re just a dumb little
girl.”
I didn’t say anything back, just
patted his back as he leaned over to cough up phlegm. I thought about
my father and how he hated me, how his eyes looked at me in disgust
when I was four. Scott had the same look in his eyes. I just wanted
that look to go away. I hated when he lost his temper.
I didn’t quite
understand sexuality then. I had never even masturbated. I just craved
something private, something of my own. Sex seemed a way to assert my
independence. And so the act of losing my virginity didn’t seem
like anything more than a way to free myself from my mother.
We did it the weekend that my mom and
her boyfriend had left to go to a wedding in Florida. She still
didn’t trust me to be on my own so my grandma came to stay.
Now grandma is completely deaf, but
back then she was just mostly deaf. She didn’t even hear the loud
thud my window made when I let it drop after Scott had crept through
it. She also didn’t hear him cough in agony, breathing through his
phlegm, or me yell out in pain when he thrust inside me. I didn’t
know enough to know that it would be painful.
During the entirety of the 4 minutes I
held him hard even though it hurt so much, hoping this would mean he
would never again look at me the way my dad had. But all of that went
away when he finished.
Up until that point I hadn’t any
reason to hate Scott, but I did truly hate him the moment after he
was done and he whispered in my ear, “You’re not a virgin
anymore.” He said it like he owned me, like he was suddenly the one
in control of my body. Maybe being a woman means never being in
control of your body to begin with. I know my mom felt that way when
she brought home men that couldn’t be fathers to me. Men that
looked nice but acted wrong.
I remember lying beneath Scott and
feeling claustrophobic. I told him to leave.
“I can’t,” he replied, the words
catching in the phlegm of his throat.
“What?” I began to feel panic.
“I have no where else to go.”
That’s when he told me that he ran away. “I hate her.”
“You can’t stay here. You need
meds, you need things for your condition.”
He looked uncomfortable when I said
that, like he had deluded himself that I didn’t know about his cystic fibrosis. After a pause, he repeated himself. “I have no
where else to go.”
My bedroom door flew open. I knew it
was Tricia without knowing what she actually looked like. They both had the
same look about them, with small green eyes. She was a beauty
even at her age and full of the same rage that I saw in Scott in
those moments when he spoke of her. Scott was still inside me when
she came in.
She screamed and threw my porcelain
unicorn, the one that my mom had gotten me for my tenth birthday even
though I thought unicorns were childish. The unicorn’s horn broke
off as soon as it hit the corner of my desk. My eyes followed it, the way they do when you have to let things just happen and there’s
nothing you can do about it. She then grabbed Scott by the ear and
pulled him out of me. His condom still dangled on his penis as he
fought her grip. He was mostly screaming about how much he hated her.
I remember laying as still as
possible, convinced that she was a bear waiting to devour me. Those
tiny green eyes watched me as she held down her angry, 14-year-old
boy. I could tell that she was thinking over the possibilities of
terrible things to say to me, searching for the most appropriate one.
I unconsciously tightened my muscles in expectation.
“You are a
disgusting whore, and you will always be a disgusting whore.” She
didn’t yell when she said this, she stated it, which felt more
powerful and terrible. Scott was coughing as he squirmed. He didn’t
defend me.
The last thing I saw was his large
right hand as it clung to my door frame, in vain, but I could hear him
coughing and them yelling all the way down the hall and out the door.
I had forgotten to lock the front door.
When they left, I lay in my bed with
my tank top still on but scooted up just above my navel, my bottom
half naked and still, the sweat drying off by the fan. If my grandma
had woken up at any point and walked in she would have thought I was
just hot. I tried to convince myself that it never happened, and
would’ve succeeded if it wasn’t for the pain. It still throbbed
rhythmically with the sound of my heart. There was also some blood. I
reached down with my index and middle finger to confirm. It wasn’t
much, only a few drops. It clung to my fingers, catching light from
the moon in my window. Instead of washing it off I gripped my hand
into a fist and let it soak into my skin, my own way of making it go
away.
My mom came home the next morning and
that is precisely how she found me. She laughed and pulled the covers
over me and asked if I had trouble sleeping because she wasn’t
home.
“I didn’t have trouble sleeping. What are you talking about?” I said incredulously.
“Really? But your eyes look so blood
shot. You look like a zombie. My little zombie.” She hugged
me and kissed my forehead. For a moment the warmth of her touch felt
nice, but then I remembered who she was and the comfort went away.
“I had a bad dream,” I replied
coldly. My mom pursed her lips in a kissy face, which she meant to
look comforting, but it just felt condescending. “Well, it’s all
right now, mama is here.”
I smiled weakly and rolled over,
ignoring the sad look in my mom’s eyes. Later that day I would
overhear her crying to my grandma about how her boyfriend had
secretly been married. I listened as she screamed in order for
grandma to hear, the sound of her panicked voice carrying through the
dusty insulation of our dividing walls. I hated her so much for being
weak. I never cried, and if I did for some reason, it wouldn’t be
about a man, ever.
I never saw Scott again. His mother
had forbid it. I said then that I wasn’t sad about it, but I still
think about him. The memory makes me feel empty but I’m not sure
why.
Three years later, a year after I
learned about Bob Flanagan, I read in the newspaper that Scott had
died. The paper wasn’t very clear but I knew enough to fill in the
blanks. Scott had had it with his mother and took the car to run away
and got hit by another car. He died instantly. In a strange way I
felt happy that it wasn’t the cystic fibrosis that got him, like he
beat it somehow.
I saw his mother just one more time
before I left that town for good. It was at the grocery store. My
mother wanted me to go with her to buy supplies for my high school
graduation dinner. She was forcing quality time on me before I left.
We passed Scott’s mother in the
exotic/ethnic food aisle, where the buy-one-get-one discounted white
rice sat in stacks on the shelf. She walked past with vacant eyes and
week-old makeup. Her hands pushed at a cart that I’m sure would’ve
kept marching forward on its own if she had suddenly stopped. The
only thing in her basket was a watermelon, shivering over the shaking
cage in a rhythmic motion. The six years had definitely aged her. She
even had a limp that caused her tan, orthopedic shoe to flirt with the tile floor, the sound of rubber or latex, catching at the waxed tile in sync with her slow
gait. She didn’t even see me as she passed.
In the checkout line my mother grabbed
my hand and whispered in my ear, “Was that Scott’s mother?”
I looked back in shock. “Yes.”
“It really is a shame about her
son.” Then she smiled sadly at me and squeezed my hand. That’s
the moment when I realized that my mother knew about me all
along, Scott’s mom had probably told her everything.
It felt strange to look back at her
the way I did, like I hadn’t really seen her before. She looked so
old, but so strong, her eyes probing but without malevolence. Her
years of makeup had taken a toll on the skin beneath her eyes and
lips, and yet she looked more beautiful than she ever had before. My
eyes began to water as I struggled to speak. “You never said anythi
– “ I started. She silenced me with a hug, her heels making it so
that she was still tall enough to lean down and kiss my cheek, her
lips finding my tears as they flowed without control and her arms
tight against my back. She held me tight as I had held Scott that
night, and I fell deeper into her chest, her strength keeping me on
my feet.
Alexandra Gilwit is a media studies grad student at The New School. She has an avid interest in comedy, science fiction, and loves to explore the darker sides of the human condition. Please visit agilwit.com to see what she is currently working on!
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