Secondhand World Page 6

  Casting Spells

  Ibought a book of spells for seventy-five cents in a used-book store and brought it to Rachel's for a sleepover. We were alone for the night—all the other kids scattered, Jerry and Louise at a party.

  We made popcorn on the stove, with an excess of melted butter and salt, and looked at the book together. Rachel read over my shoulder, reaching for the pages with greasy fingers. It was impossible the amount of pleasure I got from the casual, sloppy grace of that house, the way the floors were always sticky and the air smelled of wet dog hair and bread dough, evidence of unruly life everywhere littering the kitchen counters, the rooms, the stairs, as though—like the popcorn and the bread dough—it must rise and pop and overflow its lid.

  “Oh, definitely that one!” Rachel said, pointing.

  “‘Simple love charms to draw a lover to you,’” I read.

  “For Hero,” Rachel said. “ Your Hero.”

  I felt my face go hot.

  “Is there one in here for pushing a lover away?” I said. “You need that one for Dusty.”

  Rachel rolled her eyes. “Big horny bastard,” she said fondly. She lowered her voice, even though there was no one else in the house. “He just wants to fuck all the time,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Oh, Isa, don't be so naive!” Rachel said. “Me and Audrey went to Planned Parenthood. We're on the Pill.”

  “Why Dusty?” I asked, pressing the witchcraft book open with my palm. He was a dumb jock, and Rachel treated him with open condescension, complaining all the time about his stupidity and his preoccupation with football.

  Rachel gave me a smirking smile and shrugged. “He just does it for me, that's all,” she said.

  We followed the instructions in the book, melting red candles and molding them into a ball. I murmured Hero's name three times and added a strand of my hair to the wax. All the time I was thinking about Rachel going all the way with Dusty, his mammoth bulk pressing down on her. What would it feel like, a penis pushing inside you? I thought about Hero's lanky body, his muscular arms and the delicate translucence of his skin, and I felt a rising heat, a queasiness in my stomach that was mixed with something else, something confusing, a dampness in my underpants.

  I was envious of Rachel and somewhat in awe, not because she was no longer a virgin, though that was part of it. No, it was more the notion that she could have sex and be so nonchalant, leaning over the table with one bra strap hanging off her shoulder, brown hair mussed and brushing at my neck. It was the assurance that I wondered at, the bold physical movement in the world, which I associated with Rachel's womanly body and her knowingness, her overspilling family and the chaos that seemed to me a statement of unyielding confidence and accustomed privilege.

  I thought about my parents’ careful house, the stillness and the silence as the three of us crept along the dusted furniture and the vacuumed carpets—as though we did not so much occupy the space as move within it like stealthy lodgers. If you left a glass on the kitchen counter for more than five seconds my mother would whisk it away, wiping up the wet ring on the Formica with a furious sweep of her sponge. Covering our tracks, removing evidence of ourselves. It seemed to me we apologized for our existence in the very way we lived, bowing and ducking as though to escape the notice of some vengeful god. It wasn't life that was lived there, but eternal penitence.

  My fingers burned from the hot wax as I continued to mold it, catching the drippings as they fell onto the hardening ball, first the burn of pain and then a stiffening of wax on my fingers— a curious sensation but oddly sensual. I didn't really believe in the efficacy of the spell, but still I focused all my longing into that ball, shaping it in my mind's eye to contain every private hope, every stifled wish. I felt a catch in my breath as I thought of Hero's arms, a pull in the womb like the birth of desire.

  Later that night, Rachel taught me how to masturbate with a pillow between my legs and two fingers pressed against me. She demonstrated beside me on the bed, naked beneath her T-shirt, the curls of her pubic hair spilling black to her thighs.

  “Rub in little circles,” she said, two vertical lines between her eyebrows marking her concentration. She made a soft moaning sound. “Yeah, that's right. Right there. Do you feel it?”

  I was embarrassed. Cutie, the largest of the three cats, was lying on the floor across the room, looking at me with a knowing, slightly disgusted air.

  “Doesn't it feel good?” she said.

  I tried to ignore the cat and started rubbing through my underwear. I felt the warmth intensifying, radiating out from the circles my fingers described on my flesh. “Mmm,” I said. It felt funny, like I suddenly had to go to the bathroom very badly; there was a tingling, a pulsing, and then a kind of pain that seemed unbearable. I let my hand stop. Rachel was moaning more rhythmically now, whispering to herself as her pillow jiggled up and down. I started again, until I felt a rippling sensation, and I shuddered at its passing.

  Rachel, beside me, tossed and thrashed, entwined with her pillow, murmuring, “Oh, God, oh, God!” Her brown hair was everywhere, and I couldn't see her face. I was mortified but unable to stop watching her—where her hand disappeared into the pillow between her legs, where her back was arched and rocking. Finally, she screamed, a full-throated, desperate sound that made me sick with fear and excitement. She opened her eyes and smiled at me, brushing away her hair. Her face was sweaty and her eyes had a glassy expression.

  “Did you do it?” she asked. “Did you get off?”

  I nodded shyly.

  “Isn't it great?” she said.

  I could only blush, but I felt a quiet triumph. It would happen for me, the sweaty exertions and the grappling, the heat and the cooling of the flesh. Rachel wouldn't let me fall too far behind.

  “Totally transcendental,” I said.

  Rachel looked at me for a moment, her face flushed and beautiful. “You crack me up, Isa,” she said, throwing her pillow at me, and we fell into hysterics. Cutie, affronted, got up and left the room.

  Transgressing

  Istarted sneaking out at night, a tricky business given my father's insomnia and the hell to be paid if I was caught. I'd wait a couple hours after my parents had gone to bed, listening to the sounds of the house settling, of maple branches brushing the windows. I would listen until the quality of the silence changed and I could feel the whole house breathing in a sleep-charged monotone. Then I'd dress under the covers and creep downstairs, turn the handle of the door slowly, carefully, and slip out with my shoes in my hand.

  At Rachel's, I would enter the garage and head directly down the stairs to the basement, where a group would already be gathered, listening to Donovan or Jimi Hendrix, getting drunk on Rolling Rock and cheap vodka. Sometimes we'd get high— consuming bagfuls of chocolate-chip cookies and potato chips that Rachel's mom bought as snacks for day care—and watch late-night television, Johnny Carson and Japanese monster movies.

  It was during one of these late nights that Hero showed up. Just the TV and the black lights were on and I didn't know who was coming down the stairs until I saw the purple of his smile, his hair underneath his hat, and the faint glow of his purple skin.

  I didn't think he'd remember me, nor see me in the dark, so I said nothing until Rachel spoke up. “Herold, there's Isa Sohn in the beanbag chair. You two know each other, right?”

  “From the library,” Hero said, sitting next to me on the floor.

  “Right,” I said. “Jack London.”

  “Uh-oh, I think I forgot to return that book.”

  “That's okay,” I said. “I'm off duty.”

  Later I was talking to Hero about the operation I was saving money for. “Asians don't have folds in their eyelids,” I explained. “So they kind of stitch it up to make one.”

  “Why?” he said.

  “So you can put eyeshadow on and it will sort of disappear,” I said. “Like on Caucasian eyes.”

  He didn't say anything, but he didn't hav
e his sunglasses on, and he was looking at me strangely.

  “How much do you have saved so far?” he said.

  “Almost eight hundred dollars.”

  “And how much does it cost?”

  “A couple thousand, I guess,” I said.

  “I'll give you five not to go through with it,” he said.

  I laughed. “Why?”

  He raised a finger and traced across one of my eyelids. “Because,” he said, “I like your eyes the way they are.”

  I grimaced.

  “Really.”

  “But,” I objected, “you don't have five thousand to give me, do you?”

  Hero laughed, showing purple teeth. “True, but I'd find other ways to pay”

  I blushed. He said he liked my eyelids the way they were, without the added tuck, the winsome pleat that would open my eye and send the colored shadows back into the hollowed recesses of the lid. I believed him, and this sent a shiver of pleasure through me, that I could be liked for who I was and not for who I might be, for the reality and not some far-flung potential.

  I told him I called him Hero and he was silent for a long time.

  “I'm not,” he said.

  “I think you are,” I said with such naked admiration that I immediately felt like an idiot.

  “I've got oculocutaneous albinism,” he said. “It's just something I was born with. It doesn't make me special.”

  I nodded, unconvinced, and he looked at me sharply. “I'm not just some curiosity for your collection,” he said.

  “Neither am I,” I said.

  He looked at me for a moment and we both laughed.

  “Damn!” he said, and touched a purple palm to my cheek.

  Hell to Pay

  Ilost my virginity at a Who concert, under a blanket on the lawn of the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. I told my parents I was going to a Fourth of July barbecue at Rachel's dad and stepmom's. Before I left, my mother gave me a shrewd look. I was wearing a sheer paisley-print blouse with low jeans and a jean jacket on top so my father wouldn't notice just how sheer or how low. I'd braided my hair and pulled it up away from my face, and put on some blush and lip gloss.

  “You look like girl with secret,” my mother said. “For Rachel's family you dress this way?”

  I made a face. “I just want to look nice, Mom.” She continued to stare at me.

  “There is a boy, Isa,” she said. “I know.” She patted my arm. “Go. Have a good time!” Her eyes were bright with complicity.

  Driving up the highway Dusty cranked the tape deck. ‘“People try to put us down, just because we get around…” The windows were rolled down and Dusty was drumming his fingers on the roof of the car; Rachel had her bare feet propped on the dash. My hair whipped across my face, and my eyes stung from the force of the wind. I felt in love with the world, in love with my friends—Dusty with his dope-addled grin, Rachel, Audrey with her sweet, sad eyes, Hero in rock-star black with his arm around my shoulders.

  “Let's just keep driving all the way to Canada!” I shouted.

  “Yeah!” said Dusty.

  “But we have to see the Who first,” Audrey said.

  “Who's on first?” Rachel said.

  “‘Talkin ‘bout my g-g-generation,’” sang Hero, using Rachel's headrest as a drum.

  The parking lot was jammed by the time we got there, and people were pouring toward the gates. Lines were backed up as policemen went through coolers and backpacks. Like most of the others, we had no tickets. You could sit on the lawn for five dollars. I'd been to the ballet with my mother a few times, and there'd always been plenty of room between the islands of blankets and picnic baskets.

  “Oh, God, look at this!” Rachel said. “We're never going to get in.”

  “Here,” Hero said, handing me a blanket. “Me and Dusty'll go scout up ahead.”

  “Will you look at this!” Rachel said again. We were hemmed in on all sides. Scalpers called out, trying to get fifty dollars for seats; dealers, too, shouted, distributing loose joints despite the police presence a few hundred yards away; girls with painted faces danced in bikini tops and see-through skirts; people behind tables sold T-shirts and tapes.

  I stepped up onto the base of a street lamp and scanned the crowd. It amazed me to see all these young people, their faces lit with maniacal joy, not looking as though they had escaped from anywhere or had to lie or answer to adult authority.

  “Can you see them?” Audrey asked.

  I jumped down from the lamp.

  “Hey Isa! Hey Räch!”

  Hero and Dusty ran toward us, waving their hands frantically. Hero took the blanket from me and Dusty grabbed the cooler. “This way,” Hero said. He started scrabbling up a dirt bank. To our left we saw a place where the fence had been torn and trampled. People were streaming in. We followed Hero across.

  “Hey!” came a booming voice behind us. “Come back here! You can't get in that way!”

  We ran down the hill and onto the lawn, where there was not even a postage-stamp space between blankets. “Here,” Dusty said, dropping our stuff on a piece of ground far from the stage.

  We set out our blankets. Audrey went off in search of some friends who'd come up separately, and Dusty and Rachel decided to go explore. Hero and I said we'd stay and hold our spot. We got out some potato chips and a couple of Rolling Rocks. Hero lit his pipe and held it up to my lips as I inhaled.

  “You're looking ravishing tonight, Isa,” he said. He'd taken his sunglasses off, and his eyes were pink, naked-looking. I must've made a face, because he looked at me more closely.

  “What's the matter, can't take a compliment?” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “Don't tell me no one's ever told you that before?”

  I thought of all the times my mother had said it, ippeo, ippeo, like a mantra committed to memory, and yet for all that, I had never believed her. She was always talking about my eye surgery, and the way concealer could hide blemishes, and how a good haircut could make my face look slimmer. It seemed to me that beauty was a distant destination I might one day reach—with some surgery, plucked eyebrows, and a really great padded bra. And all the time there was the example of my mother, providing the evidence I needed of my own inadequacy, the tantalizing catalog of bypassed genetic combinations, of uninherited radiance.

  I shook my head.

  Hero looked scandalized. “Well, you better learn how to take ‘em, girl,” he said, “because you're going to be getting a lot more of'em.” He pushed me back onto the blankets.

  Sometime during the night Rachel and the others reappeared. At one point I was dancing with Hero, an off-balance jumping-up-and-down dance with our hands pressed on each other's shoulders; another time we were looking toward the stage, which was filled with smoke and different-colored lights, and Hero was close in back of me with his arms around my waist.

  The music was sloppy and raucous. “I Can't Explain,” “The Seeker,” and “I'm Free” from Tommy. We sang along reverentially, swaying on our feet like Weebles.

  I was stoned, or drunk, or just high on the moment, but eventually I was lying underneath a blanket with Hero on top of me, my jeans and panties bunched down around my ankles. I felt the hard bone of Hero's hips, the smoothness of his belly pressing against me as his hands cupped my breasts beneath my blouse. His mouth slid across mine, tasting sweetly of pot, and there was such warmth and urgency to his kisses, a pounding of blood in my head and through my body, the music driving and pulsing, and the closeness of people in ecstatic communion, like a family of loved and familiar faces, rapt and approving, that I wasn't even shocked when I felt him push inside me, so hard and tender at the same time—reaching, straining, and not quite getting—to a place deep within me that I'd never fully considered before.

  “Are you all right?” Hero whispered, after he'd shuddered and moaned and collapsed on top of me.

  In truth it had hurt, but I didn't tell him this. I felt a stickiness on my legs that I thoug
ht might be blood. I looked around and saw blankets writhing and battling all across the lawn, great misshapen animals with multiple limbs trying to break free of tightly woven nets. I laughed.

  “What?” Hero was laughing too, his breath tickling the back of my neck.

  “Ert,” I said.

  “Ert?”

  I giggled stupidly. “Opposite of inert,” I said. “I feel very, very ert.” I was afraid he'd laugh at me, but he just nodded.

  “Like ruth,” he said. “Instead of ruthless.”

  “Actually, I'm Isa, glad to meet you,” I said.

  “Glad to meet you,” he said. “Isadora you.”

  We laughed, and kissed, and then grew silent. The music seemed to be coming from farther and farther away.

  “What do you get when you cross an albino and a Korean?” Hero said.

  “I hope we don't find out,” I said.

  “No, really.”

  “A Korino? An albean?”

  He stroked my cheek. “Ertia,” he said, “and ruth love.”

  Walking back toward the parking lot after the concert, Hero and I were entwined in a blanket. There was a thickness between my legs and I was conscious of walking bowlegged. I thought everyone must be able to tell what had happened to me. It was like I'd been relieved of some troublesome burden and initiated into a new society of Amazon women, with armored breasts and lethal thighs.

  It took forever to get out of the parking lot. Dusty leaned on his horn and swore, and Audrey, who'd smoked too much pot and eaten too many potato chips, opened the door and puked outside the car twice, but Hero and I were in a bubble world where nothing existed except this besotted alliance we'd created.

  We kissed the whole way back, and each time his tongue was in my mouth I felt a shiver, like an aftershock, between my legs, and I was thinking only about when next we might be able to meet, with nothing but our naked bodies and the hungry feel of his hands on me, the pushing in and the sliding out, like some wondrous new machine.

  Dusty dropped me off on the corner of my street and I walked the distance to my house slowly. I knew I was in trouble when I saw the light on in the living room and the back of my father's head framed in the picture window. Even the angle of it looked angry, rigidly straight, propped there like a totem.