The City With No Name

I met you on a mission trip. I was seventeen, you were twenty-seven. I thought on that roiling bus ride that the age difference would be enough to wedge you away from me. We were building houses for hurricane victims. Me digging ditches in my overalls, small even for a girl, stick arms and an eating disorder I couldn’t shake, more scarecrow than skin, Louisiana mud up under my fingernails. I had never been so far from home. Valentines’ week and you and your girl were fighting. She’d come into the girls’ dormitory screaming. We lived in that hostel place, where cockroaches skittered on the floor. There were bugs in all our luggage. All the girls sat on the bed with her, squeezing her shoulders, brushing her bleach-fried beauty queen hair. And I alone stumbled out to find you, the Gulf sun setting behind the fire escape shadowing your unpretty profile, your heavy head in your hands wondering what you’d done. I just thought you needed a friend.

You asked me what I thought about God one day, coming out of the bodega, a red bandana tied Rosie Riveter-tight around my sweating head. You swung an orange soda bottle in a plastic bag, me running down the pavement with my arms out, under the drifting willows, the branches scraping my shoulders like a haunting. I was trying to write my own personality then. No one knew me back at college yet. A freshman. I wanted to be a femme fatale, like I’d read about in all my poetry books. I wanted to eat men like air, just no one had let me get close enough yet. I looked over my shoulder, batted my blonde stub eyelashes.

“I like to believe there’s someone up there who forgives us for all that we do,” I said.

You with your wolf smile. “And what have you done?”

I shrugged. “Oh, you know, I have my mistakes.”

“How many?”

“Excuse me.”

“I don’t think you have any. I don’t think you’ve ever even been kissed.”

Face red, tears pressing at the back of my eyes. “Have too.”

I lied, because you’d done it, pinned the butterfly to the corkboard, chased me to the mouth of my warren and chucked a torch right in. There was nowhere left to hide.

“That’s alright, kid,” you said. “I’ll keep your secret.”

I don’t know how to write about you, because I don’t want you remembered, that rusted blasphemy that you made out of my bones. It seems so obvious in hindsight, your finger tugging patient on the thread that held me up.

Then your girlfriend shooting daggers at me from her eyes, on her bunk across from mine, her feet tucked up under the blanket.

“You should watch out,” she said.

“What?”

“He’s not a good guy.”

“Neither am I,” I said, because it fit with the part I was writing for myself. At seventeen I only said things I didn’t believe.

The bus rolled back into town under two feet of snow, the tires parting the drifts like clumsy knives through wedding cake. There you were, in your basketball shorts and holey sweatshirt, walking down the steps with your roommates, joking and shoving about who knows what now. Maybe you were talking about me. I walked alone back to my dorm, my roommate still gone and nothing to eat. The world outside a white wasteland. For a week, I’d lived under the spotlight of your gaze. Now, on the outside, I couldn’t bear it, felt the outline of my skin dissolving. I couldn’t catch my breath for the dead feeling coming up over my head. It felt entirely possible that I would rattle around this room like bones in a coffin for the next four months and nothing would happen to me. That I would be returned unscathed to my mother at the end of the semester. It made me want to pluck the skin from my face, this feeling. I wanted it back, all of it, Nashville barbeque, that crackling flesh on my lips. The railroad tracks that ran up along the marshes by the beach. The King cake baby caught and chipped between my teeth. I wanted it all back. You were just the only number I had to call.

You planned a party around me. Friday. You would buy my alcohol.

What did I want? Or had I never drank before? I was such a baby.

And no worries, if I hadn’t, you would hold my hair back. You would keep me safe. You would even let me sleep in your bed if I couldn’t make it home.

On my first day on campus, the RA in her tight smiling skin handed me a key card and a rape whistle on a blue lanyard. Shiny cold metal. I kept it in the top drawer of my desk. I followed the rules. I didn’t think I needed it. I never walked anywhere at night alone. I avoided the dark alleys, the wooded bends and twists behind the education building. I thought myself safe, running in my mini skirt down the sidewalk in broad daylight, headlong into your teeth.

I had been taught that rape was lightning fast, swift violence, the kissing cousin of war, the foundation of Rome, the humiliation of Judith. Cut and dry, a black and white thing with a bad guy, a head to cut straight from the shoulders.

No one warned me about your slow way, the termite crawl of you beneath my skin for weeks before you ever even touched me.

Everyone told me we were dating.

That first party, on that Friday, I told you I wanted Jager with a Moxie chaser, because it sounded tough and tasted awful. The point of drinking then was to punish myself. Our hands brushed on the red solo cup. You taught me dice games, let me wear your hat, laying on the floor, chin propped in my hand. Your dorm room was a four-way street, a suite, and you never alone. It looked like a family. I wanted that.

I slept in your bed that night. You tucked me in like a father, kissed me on the forehead and left me lying in the dark. I could see you through the crack in the door, sleeping under a jacket on the couch. You were always such a gentleman. I felt safe, in these sheets that smelled like you. I didn’t know we were playing chess, you never advancing, always waiting for me to come to you.

I keep a picture of you on the dart board of my mind, way in the back, behind a locked closet door, where no one ever goes. There you are, your double chin, your yellow rat teeth, the stubble that gouged my face. Your thick tongue between thin lips, always tasting like onions and mayonnaise, like you’d just licked the floor of a grocery aisle before leaning down to kiss me. And that vulnerable look on your face when you’d lift your mouth away from mine, eyes still shut, throat jowly and open. Me looking, always looking, thinking that if you kissed me one more time, I’d die.

In the dark sometimes, in the quiet of my grown up bedroom, I walk myself down to the back of my mind. I rip your picture off the wall. I gouge out your eye sockets with my thumbnails, tear your nose into a crater. And I hope, wherever you are, it hurts, that you sit up straight in your bed and remember. You did this to me.

You pulled the sleeves of my sweater up to the elbow, sitting alone on the couch for the first time. Superhero posters all along your back wall. I had no illusions. You were no Bruce Wayne.

But what else did I have to do? A virgin freshman, no one else was calling me. And you looked at my unmarked skin that March afternoon and clucked your tongue.

“What?”

And you told me you’d expected to see scars there.

I grabbed for my sleeves, but you held them tight.

“You just look like the type,” you said.

You smelled it, the lonely and the broken on me, came circling.

“I don’t want to talk about this,” I said.

You didn’t press, just put on a Disney movie, because you liked this, to keep the child in me breathing. You liked this, for me always to seem at once both younger and older than I was.

Our first date, my first date ever, we went to see your mother in the ICU. She was slow dying of lung cancer in a room overlooking the Androscoggin, all the space filled up with her raspy breathing. And me, a stranger blown into her path, uncomfortable in my crop top and high heels. You didn’t even introduce me, just left me standing there like a ghost, a silent witness to all the easy ways a person could be undone. She didn’t speak to me either, but we stayed for an hour in that stale place and I tried not to inhale any departing spirits. I was superstitious like that but you didn’t know me that well, slept with a circle of salt around my bed, always held my breath when we passed a cemetery out on the road. I peeled the skin from the sides of my fingernails.

You took me out for Chinese after, a buffet shop in a strip mall without any windows where the food cooked under red hot heat lamps. And the waitress asked if I was your daughter.

I pulled at my spare ribs, red dye number forty staining my teeth, all the time you pressing your ankle into mine beneath the table.

The English professor assigned Lolita during my Junior year of college. Nabokov’s soaring sentences about how America loves a woman, the arc and fall of his interest. I was the only student who didn’t recoil. I stared at the words dead eyed. I’d been her, Lo, swinging her bobby socked feet at the diner counter. Lo, licking her spoon clean of cherry pie vanilla ice cream.

You’d made me live it.

So when a Senior raised her hand and asked why Dolores didn’t run away, I got myself kicked out of class, by calling out, your leftover bite still slicked smooth over all my teeth:

“What are you, fucking stupid?” I said.

You made a kidnapping out of me, and I called it love.

I went home for Spring break. Your voice followed me, wriggling its way through the phone, echoing from the walls of my childhood home. You wanted to know everything, wanted pictures of everything. It hurt and I didn’t know why. I didn’t know that this, too, was theft. That when I looked at my father’s armchair or my

lonely little bed, I wouldn’t see Christmas and birthdays or bright shining easters anymore. I would only hear everything filtered through your voice, see you holding up every scrap of my life, appraising it under a jeweler’s microscope.

You did it on purpose. You didn’t want me to ever be able to scrub you out.

I will speak around it. I still cannot talk through it. The ice is too thick, and my ship, you fucker, is tired. I was fine where I was, watching Mean Girls in my room, alone. You called me out into the Spring snow, wearing only my brother’s boxers and the tshirt I’d gotten at the last concert I’d seen with my mother. The shirt had P!nk squatting in heels, the words Blow Me, printed in great bubble letters, crackled and tattered from the dryer.

You had always toed the line, left me begging, kissing me on the forehead, teasing. There were ten years between us, you said. I would always have to come to you.

But you paid me no courtesy, strange magician. You waved your wand and turned all my repulsion into desire, made yourself a rarity by making me feel unwanted. This is how you kept me around. After all, who else would want me?

That night, your roommates gone, you shrugged, a little drunk from a party I hadn’t been invited to.

“If you really want to, you should do it now, before I change my mind,” you said.

It was my body that climbed into that bed. I have spent years, blaming myself, scraping my skin raw trying to claw you out of me.

You had a Halo poster on the wall opposite your mattress. That’s what I remember, the only thing. My brain has hidden the rest of it from me, locked it away to keep me safe.

Everything but you, standing in the doorway naked afterwards turning the light back on, your stomach draped over your thighs, the full horror of your age and your decay on display. Old at twenty-seven and every inch of my flesh repulsed.

Your voice calling out to me, not telling me you loved me, but jeering, “you fucked an old man.”

You made a joke of these bones. I can’t take them serious anymore.

de Beauvoir tells me that in some cultures, virgins are unlucky. That they are dispatched swiftly, by priests or chiefs, in the bush beside the village, in temples and homes. These grown men come out after the girl with their bodies, bones, hooks, a stick sharpened to a point. That after the bleeding stops, the girl is viable, loveable.

This is how I choose to see you, as ritual, a rite of passage.

Anything else rips my heart too wide, leaves me gasping.

I have to believe that you stole nothing from me.

I came to Easter at your house. We did not speak of resurrections. It was a big step, me walking into your dim kitchen in my heels. Your mama smoking in the armchair. She had you clean out your room, down on your knees, flitting through little walletsized photos of yourself in baseball uniforms.

“When I die,” she said, “the bank’s going to take the house.”

Your room was not a room, but a loft, with a railing overlooking the living room. She could hear all our night noises. You patted the mattress said that I must never have had this much space to play with.

It was a king and you thought yourself king too, with a right to everything.

At Easter dinner, your mama read the roster of the year’s dead. It’s Western Maine, here people die young and stupid. Four-wheeler accident, drunk driver, your high school class is a collection of blacked-out squares, your yearbook resembles a goalie’s puck-bitten mouth. I don’t know your dead.

Your sister sealed up the garage and lit a joint, the smoke playing in the dust on the glass. She left us watching her daughter in her white church dress and kid gloves stained at the fingertips.

“This will be good practice,” you told me, sliding the child onto my lap.

And all I wanted to do was grab her and run for the lock on the bathroom door and never come out.

I went to the Spring Fling dance alone. You refused me, said what did I think this was. You were graduating. Who did I think I was? You made me live with the stone cold knowledge that I had done it all for nothing. I leapt, wild into that night, pink and black tank top, a lace skirt, still too young to know that I was the most beautiful I would ever be. On my own without you, half-drunk in the strobe and the pounding bass in the cafeteria because none of our trysts were ever glamourous, but caught up always in the limit of being kids with no money in the armpit of Western Maine.

I kissed the first boy who danced with me, a stranger with acne craters and a good body. Like Freddy Krueger. I wanted this, for him to take a clawed fist and rip my life apart, tear open the nightmare I’d made of it.

One of your roommates saw me. I came running out after him, chasing him along the sidewalk, screaming, tears streaming down my face.

“Don’t tell.”

The high heel split from my shoe, sending me sprawling. I rolled my ankle, limped bare foot back to your door. You had already locked it. I didn’t know it, but we’d already spoken face-to-face for the last time. I slammed my knuckles into the wood, until I bruised bone, until the RA knelt beside me like I was a child and told me that if I did not stop, she would call the campus police. I didn’t drive myself to violence for the love of you. I don’t want the scene misunderstood. I’d left my best self in that room and now I couldn’t get her back.

In the weeks to come, your voice rose up like spirit messages from my Facebook account. I let most of them dissipate, turn to smoke. But one has stuck with me, for over a decade.

“You just used me to open the floodgates.”

I’d been made filthy in your eye. For that, you stripped me down, pelted me with stones, until I believed it too.

Your influence on me was not so easily cut. You had kept me in the dark, your undiscovered coal, under the careful pressure of your hands. I was your diamond. I only wanted to be my own dull rock again.

It has been a decade. You are my best kept secret. The man I married does not know about you. I see you nowhere, but your body resurfaces for me in strange places, like a corpse bobbing through the swamp of my mind. My pregnant silhouette in the mirror is your stripped bare body at the light switch. You run across my brain with your spool of string, forming connections I can’t break.

I still cannot say the name of the city in which we met. I cannot see it written or hear it said without needing to run to the shower, anxious, like Lady Macbeth at the sink. Out, out, blood.

It was a beautiful place, where the Gulf met the banyan trees, the red eyes of the crocodiles bobbing at night. Trumpets screaming in the dark and me always shaking cockroaches out of my suitcase on my way out the door. You’ve made it all a story I can’t tell anymore.