‘Come? Yes?’
I was thinking: Girls get scared way too often. Girls get stupidly scared. I was not scared.
Telling myself not to be scared kind of worked.
I stood up at the same time as the guy. My stomach was bloated. I was holding it in. The guy had his walking stick in one hand and he covered his bathing-suit strings with the other. The turtle bulged in his back bathing-suit pocket. I held tightly on to my book.
This man likes me, and my family knows nothing about it.
LEE: You have to let people be witnesses. It’s the most human thing, to tell people what happened to you.
GAYL: Nah, a story is visual only. Words are meant to be spit out and forgotten.
LEE: Trauma gets lodged in our bodies. We can’t just spit it out.
GAYL: Trauma’s not a story.
LEE: Trauma is a story.
GAYL: Trauma’s comedy. Trauma’s got the power of unseen forces. At least then, with your body, you can metamorphose it.
§
I felt like I was old enough. If I’d had my own motel room I would’ve just taken the guy back to it, not to do anything, not to pull back the covers, not to scratch, not to strip, just to not be in public with this guy.
I wanted to see myself while it was all happening. I wanted to know how different I’d look when I was eighteen. All the girls and guys in Key West who were just two, maybe three, years older than me. They all had their own motel rooms. They had balconies looking out onto the pool. I saw guys and girls dancing out there and drinking beers when it was two in the afternoon. I knew guys and girls slept together in the same kind of bed that I was sleeping in with my sister. I hated how the sheets were tucked in so tight after the cleaning ladies came every day. I felt sorry for the women who worked at this place because I bet those college kids made a mess of their rooms. We’d had this cleaning lady at home when I was twelve who came to our house once a week. Her name was Faith and she was from Jamaica. Once, when I put my lunch dishes in the sink while she was standing there washing with rubber gloves, she told me that I was a spoiled little brat. I didn’t understand at first why she said that, or why she spoke so harshly to me. ‘You think I’m going to clean up after you?’ she said. ‘Or your mother? You want your mummy to clean up your mess?’ I took my dishes quietly out of the sink and loaded them into the dishwasher. I hadn’t ever been talked to like that. I was trying to think about exactly what I’d done wrong. I remember I went upstairs and called Jen. ‘Guess what Faith just called me?’ I said. Jen cracked up when I told her the whole thing.
‘She’s fucked up and bitter and taking it out on you,’ Jen said. ‘You should tell your mom.’
But Faith wasn’t around much longer after she called me a spoiled little brat. My mother said she had to go back to Jamaica even though her husband there had abused her. I didn’t understand why she had to leave and why she wasn’t ever coming back. When I was twelve I hadn’t even ever heard the word abused before. My mother didn’t explain that to me either, what that meant, a man abusing his wife. She just said that in Jamaica Faith had a lot of problems and it was a place that she didn’t want to be.
‘Canada.’ The guy kept repeating ‘Canada’ as we walked away from the sea. ‘Canada is a good country to be born in.’
I nodded my head. I couldn’t walk fast because my stomach was cramping.
‘I was born in Tanzania,’ he said.
I didn’t say: Tanzania is a good country to be born in.
On the main road of town we passed by a bar where kids were drinking tequilas and beer at an all-day happy hour. I had my towel wrapped tightly around me, my book under the towel. I had only about twenty more pages of Cat’s Eye, but I knew I’d lost my spot. I thought it was weird that the college kids weren’t looking at us, because it was obvious this guy with the dreadlocks was so much older than me. Coconuts lay on the sidewalk, some of them smashed. Maybe the kids didn’t think it was weird that we were together. The guy turned down an alleyway that opened between two white motels, holding out his hand to me. Bushes with spike-petalled pink blooms hung down to the ground. I took the guy’s hand quickly but I looked at the ground. Our hands sucked together. It felt amazing. It made me embarrassed.
‘Okay, you’re okay,’ the guy said, squeezing. ‘Shy is okay.’
There was a little store in the alley with a glass-beaded curtain in the doorway. A woman was sitting on a stool outside. She had long dyed-black hair that was frizzy on top, like she’d been rubbing it with a balloon. She winked as she saw us.
‘Hi, babes,’ she said as we passed, her smile dissolving.
The woman wore green stone earrings that made her lobes droop. A thick turquoise choker held her neck up. The guy nodded at the woman but we kept walking by pretty quickly. That woman definitely knew it was strange that I was with this guy, that he was so much older and that we were holding hands.
‘Your dad gives you money for trinkets?’ the guy asked, leading me way past the store.
I realized how much pain I was in from walking fast and needing to pee.
‘A little,’ I said.
‘Here.’
We were about five blocks from the beach, I guessed, a long way from the last motel. I hadn’t really kept track of exactly where we were. The guy was leading me up a flight of wooden stairs. I wondered how long he’d been in Key West. I followed him down an outdoor hallway. I think it was a motel, but there was no sign. The walls were white-painted wood, with holes in the slats. Spider plants hung from the rafters outside.