The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [42]
I may have been excruciatingly shy but I had a gushing in me the size of a swimming pool and I was smart - smart as any of those goddamned boys loitering outside the building-who I suddenly wished were dead - so I said, not quite believing my mouth would even work, “Um, can you help me?” Holding one foot slightly off the ground.
Sienna putting all her crap in her bag not looking at me.
Me waiting in the dead air like a little lost comma.
Sienna taking a hit off of her flask, then without warning, pushing it over at me, saying “This will cut the pain, I bet.” Smiling her Sienna Torres smile. “Can you handle it?”
You have no fucking idea how close I came to lunging at her leg and humping it like a little monkey. You have no idea how close I came to sucking on her hip bone and crying “mamma.”
But I didn’t do those things. Sometimes you grow up in the space of a minute.
I quite calmly took a big old swig of vodka viper’s flask just like my genetic code knew I could, and I never took my eyes off of her watching me, and I liked it, her watching I mean, because it certainly wasn’t the taste of vodka, which though I didn’t show it, like at all, tasted like what I suspected Estée Lauder must taste like if you drank it.
Then she said, “Being bad is good, huh.” And laughed. I bit the inside of my cheek trying not to cough or barf. Trying to be bad, good.
And then Sienna Torres put her arm around my waist. And I put my arm around her shoulders and neck. And I could smell her skin. I didn’t bite her or anything. I didn’t hump her like a little monkey. And she helped me all the way to my mom’s car which miraculously didn’t kill me with embarrassment, bypassing the boymen waiting for her as always.
I was so happy in the back seat of my mom’s car I thought I might make a water shit in my pants. I watched her in the rearview but this time she watched back. I was drunk with her touching me. I could still smell her: chlorine and vodka and Nivea and sh sh sh shaving cream and Suave conditioner. Nothing, nothing nothing nothing else went in my head all night, all week, all the next year. But that night, about halfway home, I reached down and felt something in my sweatshirt front pocket. I slyly put my hand in there behind the head of my driving mother.
It was Sienna’s flask.
Nemesis
ANGER IS FUNNY.
It sits snarling in you your whole life just waiting for perfect ironic moments to emerge. Wanna know why I got a Ph.D. in literature? Because in the graduate fiction workshop at the University of Oregon Chang Rae Lee told me my story was “trite.” I had infiltrated the writing workshops as a grad student in literature because I couldn’t stop wanting to write stories after the Kesey thingee. When Chang Rae Lee told me my story and its sentiments were trite, know what I thought? I thought I wish I’d meet you in a dark Eugene alley out the back door of a bar so I could punch your smug face in you little prick.
I’m not saying I’m proud of that. I’m just saying that if the things we really thought showed up on paper we’d all be … way busted.
All that day I stomped around fuming the fumes of a woman who doesn’t know how to own her own intellect and blames it on men. I knew how to make a sentence hum. But my Kesey credentials didn’t get me very far, I hate to say. Pretty much everyone at U of O who wasn’t in that wild wonderful “class” hated everyone who was, and thus belittled the crap out of us. Punks. Plus our “novel” was a piece of crap so I simply had no literary currency.