My knees pinned her sides. I lodged there, that tight spot, her ass ridge, and I pumped. I dug my knees into the carpet. Barbra started shaking, popping her back. Yeah, I was in love. I pinched her tit, both her tits, my white cock stuck between her satin green crack. I muffled out love. She fucked the ground moaning. She kept my cock stuck in the ridge of her, shaking and bulging. I shot like a squid on her slippery back.
Cum does not dissolve in the valley. It sits and it sticks. It assimilates.
§
Barbra wrote all over that thousand-page book, smearing her chicken-scratch Hebrew in the margins. She left it on her pillow in the basement like a parting shot.
§
I was the one in the end who had to tell Abigail the truth. She thought my mother’s job in Portland meant that our parents were going to live apart but stay married. Abigail was immature for someone almost twelve years old. That was my sole diagnosis for my sister. My mother had had Abigail labelled with sensory processing disorder. My father had always said that she would just grow out of things. Sometimes I felt like there was a whole other family in my house – a silent shadow family that existed, that took the place of my mom and my dad, Abigail and me. I wasn’t sure, when I was younger, if that was real or a dream.
‘Mom and Dad will be better apart,’ I told Abigail. ‘No more stupid, endless fights.’
‘So, is Barbra gonna stay?’ My sister was looking at me funny.
‘I don’t know. How should I know? Why do you like her so much?’
‘You mean, why do you?’
Abigail reminded me of the Mad Hatter, with her front two buck teeth and oblong-shaped head.
‘I know why I like her,’ Abigail said.
‘Yeah? Go ahead. Tell me.’
‘Because Barbra doesn’t know anything about me or my problems and she still likes me anyway.’
Sometimes Abigail and Barbra went to the park together after dinner. Barbra pushed Abigail, too big for the swing, trying to launch her, I thought, round the whole rusted structure.
‘I don’t get why you act like such a douche around her,’ my sister said. ‘Why don’t you just act like yourself? I like Barbra because she makes me more me.’
It took me a second to understand what my sister was saying. Like, it took me a second to grasp in totality this concept she expressed. Because something exactly like that had occurred to me too – I mean, in what Abigail said first, not me being a douche. My sister reported that Barbra liked her without the knowledge of her problems. Bull’s-eye. This was my problem, too. Barbra thought I was a completely blank slate. My mother said there was no such thing as a blank slate. Barbra had entered our house at the beginning of the summer when she knew absolutely nothing about me, nothing, in fact, about any of us. And we didn’t know her either – how she felt, who she was, what in the world she was actually thinking. And so some kind of lopsided, crisscrossed merger had taken place. For Abigail, this was growth. But for me, it was – I don’t know – violation. Or maybe this was just the fucking human condition. Maybe it was also an unfolding emotional crime. She named me Jew-boy. She told me to hurt her. Barbra drank up all our wine. Barbra thought that my family’s preconceived notions – our natures/our nurtures – could just be burned to the ground.
For her? Who was she? The fucking Messiah?
She was a Jew! We were Jews, too.
And while my sister experienced Barbra’s presence as benevolence, what I got by the end was dissolution.
She came back for me the first Monday in March, the day that I quit school for good. The family room was my study now, coffee table stacked with books. Candles in all her old wine bottles lined the two window ledges, marked with wart lines of red and black wax. Our L-shaped leather couch doubled most nights as my bed. Ash spotted the bricks of our fireplace.
My mother still blamed my father for Barbra. She said the real crime was when the helpers don’t help. My father did not defend himself anymore. ‘We made a mistake,’ he said to me, standing in my bedroom doorway, soon after Barbra left. ‘All of us, everyone, we all made mistakes.’ But apportioning blame to ‘everyone’ – who? Bob Cunningham, the soldier, my mother, her wine? – was a strange way, I thought, of understanding what had happened. I knew, in his gut, that my father blamed me.
In and out of therapy, I’d named Barbra my molester. Molester trumped bitch. Molester, I thought, was more cognizant of both her power and my eventual retreat. Molester soothed me nightly, too, throughout this motherless, father-driven, seven-year cycle of blame.
§
The shyster squatted in front of my books. His blousy beige shirt opened one button too low. He had a leathery breastbone, cattle ribs. I could not believe she actually liked this type of thing. Eventually, he picked out My People Shall Live from my Palestine stack. The shyster liked hot young Leila Khaled with her gun. I seriously could not believe that this guy was her boyfriend. His greasy salt-and-pepper braid hung between his shoulder blades. He looked like he would have faded tattoos, some secret green-bleeding feather, limp on his breast.
I paced behind the coffee table as the shyster used My People Shall Live to pulverize some kind of herb and fill a little carved, clay South American pipe.
‘You know, she likes a little hash to relax.’
God, I hated his lisping and slithery French accent. It was all coming back in this dizzying gust: Barbra’s need for me to be sucked into her shit. She was upstairs in our house in the shower alone. Still a drug fiend, a wine head, a sexual freak. God, was she back here for a renewed bout of hallucinogenic sex torture? Faux-masochistic, violent bitch! Look, I know it wasn’t good for me to curse her in my head. I’d thrown bitch out five years ago. Dr. Bornstein said that it wasn’t good for my healing to fixate on bad thinking, i.e., to call someone who hurt me misogynist names. Bornstein tended to agree with my father that I tended to inner-exaggerate.
But I did not want her back here. Bitch, for seven years I’d been fine.
I’d burned her fuc