Two or Three Things I Know for Sure - Dorothy Allison [13]
I rescued her by letting myself giggle. She joined me. I reminded myself that there were just some things we never had talked about before, like sex, money, and broken bones. Certainly we had never discussed love. Sex was dangerous enough, and our family was proof that love was a disaster waiting to happen.
“The woman love you back?” Wanda asked me. “She treat you good?”
“No.” I said it again. “No. She was like that boy you wanted to marry. She treated me just about like he treated you. Took me a long time to grow up and stop falling in love with women who would treat me bad.” I said it as if it were accomplished, as if I were not at that moment in love with yet another hard-eyed bitter woman.
Wanda nodded but didn’t look at me, just sat there twisting the ring on her middle finger and staring into the parking lot across the street.
“Yeah,” she whispered. “Takes a damn long time to learn that, don’t it?”
Women talk about sex in such strange ways—carefully, obliquely, cautiously, almost shamefully. The art of flirting is an art of indirection. The dance is deliberately extended; eyes meet and slide away, limbs barely touch, erotic messages are communicated by the most subtle gestures. It brings out in me the most profound feelings of anxiety and exasperation. I was not raised to subtlety.
Why do people have to make such a fuss over something so simple?
I say, “Talk to me. Tell me who you are, what you want, what you’ve never had, the story you’ve always been afraid to tell.” Women stare at me, blush, squirm—and now and then, a few gather up their courage and flirt back.
But flirting is an art form, separate entirely from the risks and surprises of love, and to love I had thought myself immune. Because I did not turn silly at thirteen, start staying out late and sighing over boys at school, I thought myself too smart, too wise, too special to fall into the trap every other woman in my family knew too well. I watched my cousins mourn over their swollen bellies, wipe puffy eyes and talk bitterly about the boys who had used them so badly, and all I could think was how foolish the whole thing was.
Love was something I would not have to worry about—the whole mystery of love, heart-break songs, and family legends. Women who pined, men who went mad, people who forgot who they were and shamed themselves with need, wanting only to be loved by the one they loved. Love was a mystery. Love was a calamity. Love was a curse that had somehow skipped me, which was no doubt why I was so good at multiple-choice tests and memorizing poetry. Sex was the country I had been dragged into as an unwilling girl—sex, and the madness of the body. For all that it could terrify and confuse me, sex was something I had assimilated. Sex was a game or a weapon or an addiction. Sex was familiar. But love—love was another country.
“Lord!” I shouted. “There has got to be an easier way to get stoned.”
I was staying over at my friend Pat’s house, sitting on the floor leaning against the stereo speakers, which had been blasting rock and roll at maximum volume just moments before. We had been using a process a friend had suggested, a three-step method that began with smoking rabbit weed we’d harvested from the border of the Maynard Evans High School parking lot, then running in place very fast, and then putting our heads between two stereo speakers propped ten inches apart.
“Sure there is.” Pat leaned over and slapped my hip. “First we take a bus to New York City, find us Washington Square Park like in that book you got, flirt with some dangerous-looking people until they decide we an’t dogmeat, and maybe then we get them to sell us some real marijahootchi. That sound easier to you?”
“Less likely to cause nausea, anyway.”
“I don’t know. I like this.” Pat shook her head as if the roar were still echoing in her skull. “It’s like my head is swinging free from my neck. Maybe this is as good as it gets.”
“I don’t think so.” I sat up and watched her