Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,64
think I want to, because as far as I’m concerned, you don’t have a vagina and won’t for ten years, and even then I probably won’t want to hear much about it, OK? Talk to your mother about this stuff.”
“If I ever met a woman without a vagina, it’s my mother,” Chrissie says.
“Don’t say that,” I say, because you’re supposed to remind people how they actually do love their parents. Chrissie’s mom is away at a summerlong church retreat. For a while she sent Chrissie post-cards that said things like YOU’RE NEVER ALONE WHEN YOU’RE WITH JESUS and I PUT ALL OF MY EGGS IN ONE BASKET AND GAVE THEM TO THE LORD. Chrissie finally wrote back, Can Jesus make me an omelet, then? He’s kind of a crappy mom otherwise. She hasn’t gotten a post-card since.
“Is something wrong?” I ask. “Are you sick or something?”
“No,” she says, “but we tried to have sex last week and I hadn’t done it before and it didn’t work.”
“What do you mean, ‘it didn’t work’?”
“It wouldn’t go in,” she says. “So he stopped and I left because I thought maybe there was something wrong with me.”
“Well, what did you do beforehand?” I ask.
When she answers, it becomes clear to me that this kid has no idea what’s supposed to be happening, and neither does her boyfriend. I feel kind of sorry for her entire generation, because they’ve learned all the theatrical parts of sex so they walk around pouting and posing like little baby porn stars, and all the clinical parts of sex so they know when to demand penicillin, but not the basic mechanical processes of actual pleasure, which everyone assumes someone else has covered. I didn’t know shit about sex when I was her age, but at least I was allowed to say so; no one expected us to be certified experts. It’s not my subject of choice, but I don’t know who else will explain things to her, except maybe Tia, which seems dangerous. When I’m done, I tack on a speech about how she’s fourteen and emotional right now and he’s probably too old for her and even if there’s a condom it could break or fall off and she could die, and besides, she’s not comfortable enough with her body to enjoy anything that happens to it yet, and there’s lots of things she can do that aren’t actually fucking.
Maybe I’ve kind of freaked her out, because somewhere north of Columbia we pass a Friendly’s, and she gets all excited about it. Even though we’re nowhere near Richmond I agree to stop when she asks. She’s dropped the diet stuff, at least, but if you’ve ever seen anything more disturbing than a kid eating a Reese’s Pieces Happy Face Sundae after you’ve just explained to her how to give a proper blow job, I don’t want to hear about it.
Chrissie sleeps most of the rest of the way to Raleigh. I could use her to keep an eye on the map, because I’ve only been down here a handful of times, and I hate this stretch of highway. There’s something about the compressed space of cars that makes people want to say things out loud, maybe just to see what echoes back, and every memory I have of this part of 95 is a memory of argument. The first time I went to Raleigh, I was about Chrissie’s age and my mom was driving. On the way back, we were trying to get out of the state a few hours ahead of the tropical storm that was on its way, but already it was thundering and lightning, and the rain was steadily splattering onto our windshield, distorting everything on the other side faster than the windshield wipers could clear it.
The argument we’d been having was stupid. It was Father’s Day, and she wanted me to call her boyfriend, this jackass dentist she’d been seeing for a while, and wish him a happy Father’s Day. The dentist was always blowing my mother off at the last minute. He yelled when they fought, and sulked when he didn’t get his way. He’d stretched his fairly substantial income to its natural limits, and was always “borrowing” money from my mom that we never got back. You could smell the bullshit coming off of him, unless you were my mother, and then you thought he was the answer to our prayers. I said the dentist had his own kids and I already