around with him and his friends, one of them stole a magazine with a picture of a naked woman on the cover from his father. Like them, I stared at her breasts. They were magnificently large, so large they made her head seem small.
The boy did not let our eyes linger too long at the magazine. Instead, he ripped out a whole page, tore it into pieces, and sold them off one by one. A breast cost a quarter, and for both breasts you had to pay a whole dollar. He ripped out the hairy crotch for me and said I could have it for free. My brother, who was three years older than me, bought the face. It was the cheapest at only a penny. Later, we met up to put all the pieces together with some tape. They told me I had to give them the crotch shot, but I told them I had thrown it over the bridge, even though it was still neatly folded in my back pocket. I just didn’t want them to have that part of her. Even so, someone put a finger into the space where the model’s crotch would have been and circled it around.
“Scared?” my great-grandmother asked me now, with an amused smile.
I wasn’t scared. I was amazed. “How come they don’t look like the boobies in nudie magazines?” I asked.
“Don’t be stupid. You think they’re going to photograph or put in the movies something that looks like these? For a joke they would. But this is for real. This is what they look like if you don’t wear a bra… well, even if you do, no matter. It all ends up looking like this.” She shrugged, lifted her breasts, and stuffed each one back into her bra, patting them like flour dough. “And another thing,” she added. “The first time a guy says ‘I love you,’ your legs will pry themselves open like this.” She held up two fingers and spread them slowly to form a peace sign, and as she did this, she made the sound of a door opening on rusty hinges: “Ewwrrrkk.” Then she shut her eyes tight, threw her head back, and laughed at her own crudeness. The sound of her laughter came mostly from her throat, like a dry cough.
In all the time I knew her, I loved seeing her laugh, how her face would fill with countless lines around her eyes, forehead, and dimples. When she wasn’t laughing, she sometimes let me touch her face and squeeze the skin together to show the places where her laughter had been. But now her laughter wasn’t something I wanted to see.
“That won’t happen to me!” I said, shaking my head vigorously from side to side and puffing my chest out, so full of pride.
“No. Especially you. You think you’re so smart, but in the end that’s the thing that will get you. That ‘I love you’ will do it for you. It gets everybody,” she said with another laugh. “Don’t think you’re some exception now. I know you’re just a kid, but that doesn’t mean you can’t know things. Might not make much sense now, but it will. Eventually.”
WHEN IT DID HAPPEN to me, it didn’t happen like my great-grandmother said it would. It was with a man who no longer had his young face. He did not say anything that had to do with love. And, afterwards, there was a pool of blood on the grey bedsheet.
Looking at that alone, it really could have been anything.
The Gas Station
MARY BELIEVED THERE were two kinds of people in the world. There were those who were seen, and those who were not. Mary considered herself one of the latter.
She hadn’t lived in the town for long, only a few months. It was known for its beaches, and during the summer it swelled with tourists, their talk and oils and heat. When it cooled, the town was quickly abandoned.
Mary was thirty-six years old. She was living in a small white house. It was one of many white houses in the neighbourhood, painted that way because of the intensity of the sun. The one she lived in had a flat roof; it wasn’t a place that needed to deal with snow. Or cold. The house had one of everything. One bedroom, one bathroom, and one kitchen. Each room had a single window, which all looked out onto the same pine tree. It was not a pleasant sight.
Mary worked from home.