he’d never known a girl in all his life.
“Let me get your number,” he said. “I’ll take you out sometime.”
I told him I didn’t have a phone but he said that everyone had a phone. I held my hands out, empty. I told him how Cherry didn’t like the house line tied up in case she wanted to play Telephone Testimony, calling up randoms from the phone book and trying to convert them through an even lecture of terror and love. He nodded like he understood and then made a remark about how I wasn’t wearing the bikini today.
“You’re not in the green elf suit,” I said back. Instead he was freshly shaven, a few spots of dried blood on his cheek where a razor had sheared the heads off pimples. His eyes were wrinkled around the corners, but his body was all boy, skinny in his black T-shirt and black sagged shorts, white socks pulled up midcalf. He didn’t dress like a country boy, like the boys of Peaches with their faded jean cutoffs, soiled white shirts that came from a ten-pack. His shirt said Blink 182 and had a picture of a harshly pretty nurse who I strongly suspected wasn’t really a nurse pulling a blue glove over her tattooed arm. I wondered if this was the type of woman Stringy wanted to be with, someone with angles of makeup drawn on, breasts pushed up until they kissed. I couldn’t help but feel that she had taken whatever sexiness I might have had and canceled it out with her own.
“You found God?” It came from my mouth like the deepest routine.
He looked me up and down, side-smiling. “I found you.” Then he told me he’d be back in an hour. I went inside and imagined I’d never see him again, but then after hardly any time at all there he was on the other side of the screen holding up a bright blue bag. “I activated it for you and everything.”
I pulled out a box and inside was a small silver phone with rubber number buttons and a little square screen. I thought of the sapphire earrings from my mother’s old boyfriend, how after he had pushed the posts through my skin they had rusted and made my swollen ears bleed red and yellow pus. I would take them out at night so he wouldn’t know and I’d put them back in in the morning, eyes watering. How he looked at me and pushed my hair back each time he saw me to make sure I was wearing them. The gift had come with a high price.
I handed the phone back to Stringy. “It’s too nice.”
But he set it on the ground before my feet and walked back to his truck, arms up. Said that maybe it was okay for me to take something nice.
LYLE DID IT to me five times. Always in the shed, me on my back. Each time he came to it like a chore, or sports practice of some kind that he was only half interested in, his eyes resigned, his face flushed and exhausted with effort.
I marked them in my notebook where I had once listed my mother’s beers. I tried to make little notes alongside each one—did not hurt as much, was faster this time—but then I stopped bothering. They all became sewn together in my memory as the first time it had happened. The other details fell away, aside from the fact that by that fifth time I was completely rid of myself and made new into a girl with a stone for a stomach, a jittery wire running through my veins. I felt nothing from Lyle, not a tingle or hint of pleasure as it happened. I left my body like I had trained myself to do, and I became better and better at it. I prayed during the time, I didn’t despair. I thought of telephones ringing, my mother on the other end. I pictured Vern’s kind eyes and I tasted the grapes, juice on my lips.
I was fine and things would be well but my eyes grew black with insomnia and I peeled the skin from around my nails and had taken to eating it.
“Are we going to get married?” I asked Lyle after that fifth time. For I still didn’t know what it was all for. A unification of the Body, perhaps, some pact or bonding secret, but what it would provide the land, or the church,