Infandous (13 page)

I wonder—how can sexual assault be a museum installation?

And looking into the frantic expression on Persephone’s face, I think to myself—
But it wasn’t her fault. She tried to escape.

I am not Persephone. I wanted to be there. I put myself in that room. I asked for it and enjoyed it and moaned for more.

***

The ride back to the LeBlanc house is quiet. Smooth. Bobby LeBlanc’s sedan is leather and steel and money, money, money. I sit in the backseat, in the middle, because both of the girls wanted to sit next to me and it is easier just to ride bitch than listen to them fight. In front, on the center console, Bobby’s right hand holds Naomi’s left. Her enormous diamond catches the light as the road bends, and for a moment I’m blinded by it—all of it, the sparkle of the ring, the twining of their fingers, the girls pressing against my sides, and the gleaming wooden dashboard.

Gods and Lovers
. A whole museum installation about rape.

Sarah’s head lolls onto my shoulder. I want to move but stay still. Naomi looks back at us through the rearview mirror and smiles at the pretty picture of us. Then her eyes meet mine.

She’s thinking about whether or not I’ll say yes. If I’ll go home just long enough to gather up my shit and be back in time for fall semester. I’d make a handy babysitter.

Her intention confuses me. And why she asked
me
, not my mother.

“It’s so nice having you here, Seph.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“The girls sure love when you’re here.” Then, “We all do.”

I break the gaze. I look away.

The never-ending greenscape of Atlanta whizzes by. We slow at last, turning up the long, winding driveway to the Le Blanc house.

Gods and Lovers
. A castle on a hill.

I imagine what an installation of my work would look like, if someone gathered together everything I’ve created into one place. Now, it’s spread like a trail of breadcrumbs all across Venice Beach, pieces of me to guide me home. Collected in a gallery or a museum, it would be a room full of torn-out eyeballs, sliced ears, severed hands and feet. Pieces of children. Split mermaid tails.

The unspeakable shit. Strewn across a town or gathered in a gallery, everyone knows it when they see it.

Eleven

The cicadas in Georgia make such a sound that you forget to hear them after a while. It starts when the weather begins to cool, right around the time the sun sets. And it’s not gradual. It’s like someone’s flipped a switch, and suddenly the loud insect call is all around you, pressing like the day’s heat, invading, inescapable.

Sarah is a veritable encyclopedia when it comes to the little buggers. Apparently she did a report on them for school last spring, and maybe she thinks I’ll be impressed if she rattles off some facts, so that night after we gorge ourselves on Bobby’s World Famous Barbecue, after the sun is down and the cicadas are up, she launches into a lecture.

“Did you know the cicada’s song is loud enough to cause permanent damage to human hearing?”

“I can’t say that surprises me,” I tell her.

“And did you know that people around the world
eat
them?”

“Oh yeah?” I look at Bobby. “They any good with barbecue sauce?”

“A little crunchy, but not bad,” he plays along.

Sarah ignores us both. “And did you know that cicadas have
five
eyes? And that they spend most of their life underground? And that there are twenty-five
hundred
different varieties? And that they were considered a delicacy in ancient Greece?”

“Do they all taste the same?” I ask.

Sarah shrugs. “I don’t know. I’ve never eaten one.” A pause. Then, “But did you know that after a cicada is born, it crawls into the ground and it can live under there for up to seventeen years? And then it finally crawls out, just in time to mate and lay eggs before it dies.”

She looks satisfied, pleased with herself.

I think about that—seventeen years of darkness, of half-life. It makes me think of Sleeping Beauty, the original one, who spent all that time passed out only to wake up a mother.

The back of the LeBlancs’ house is my favorite part. They have this enormous room, the whole length of the house, floor-to-ceiling screen windows on three sides. The screens are interrupted every three feet or so by a tall mahogany post. On the ceiling, five whirring fans stir the heavy Georgia air. There’s a daybed on the far side of the porch, made of gigantic rough-hewn planks, its mattress enveloped in thick linen burlap. Pillows are arranged in clusters: gold and yellow and buttery white, and every now and then one that pops with color—red here, purple there.

The daybed is canopied by silk panels that remind me of the scarves my mother has draped across the windows at home. But those are limp and thin, not really long enough or thick enough, and light from outside seeps through them. Here, on the LeBlancs’ porch, the drapes really
are
just for show. But the irony is that they’re made of real silk and would actually make decent curtains.

Because it’s finally cooled off, we eat dinner out here on the porch. After Sarah finishes telling me all about cicadas, she and Bobby go inside. They invite me to join them—“We can play gin rummy, Seph,” Sarah offers, but I decline.

I sit with my goblet of water and listen to the cicadas scream.

The table where I sit is made of the same distressed wood as the daybed, as are the benches that flank it and the chairs at either end. A long burlap runner lays down the center of the table, and there’s a centerpiece of fresh flowers that wasn’t here this morning. One of the “help,” as Naomi calls the stream of workers—all black, I kid you not—who flow in and out of the house throughout the day must have arranged them. More help takes care of the grounds, the pool, and the kitchen garden. It’s a well-oiled machine, Naomi’s empire, and she rules with a firm but gentle hand. She speaks to everyone in the same beneficent tone she uses with me—a little distant, clearly superior, but not unkind.

I’ve heard her talking to my mom in the same tone and wonder if she always used that voice, even when they were little girls.

My mother never talks to me like that … I don’t think she could talk to
anyone
like that. In spite of her beauty, which could separate her from the rest of us, making her a goddess walking among mortals, my mom is of the people. When I asked her once about our religious views, she told me, “I’m a humanist.”

I looked it up on Wikipedia. It means someone who believes in the capability of people to be ethical and moral, free of a deity or fear of divine retribution. I think it means she thinks people are good.

That used to make me proud of her, that she believes in people, in spite of the shitty way her parents treat her, in spite of the way the guy who knocked her up took off, disappeared.

Now it irritates me. It seems … childish. Maybe even foolish.

People aren’t all good. Maybe not even
mostly
good. And some are bad, all the way through.

I am glad that I’ll be leaving soon. Alone on the screened-in porch, I feel the wind move my hair as it blows across the porch, rustling the silk panels. It smells good, earthy and full of promise. I don’t notice that the cicadas have fallen still until the rain begins, suddenly and hard, like a panel in the sky has drawn back to release it all at once. I’m dry in here, on the porch; I can hear the rain and smell it, but it doesn’t touch me.

I wonder about the cicadas underground, if that’s how they feel—shrouded, protected, just a step away from the danger and excitement above. What makes them dig up, find their freedom? I wonder if it’s something out of their control, like with the Sleeping Beauty Talia, the way her baby sucks out the splinter of flax from her finger, breaking the enchantment. Or do they choose it, decide for themselves the moment they’ll emerge?

If I were a cicada and I were underground, I’d choose a moment like this one to dig free. Nighttime. Stars occluded by clouds. The musty, earthy scent of dirt dampened by rain.

I stand and walk to the edge of the porch. I press my hands and my face against the screen. I close my eyes and breathe.

***

A day later, as we lounge by the pool, Evie says, “I hope I look like you when I’m your age.”

My eyes are closed beneath my sunglasses. “That’s sweet.”

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No,” I say. “Do you?”

“We’re not allowed to date until we’re sixteen,” Sarah chirps. She’s been splashing in the shallow end, in a long shadow cast by the house.

“Not allowed?” I open my eyes. I sit up. Naomi, I see, is watching me to see how I will answer. She doesn’t wear a bikini, though she’d look great in one. Her suit is a sleek black maillot. Strapless, so no funny tan lines.

“Boys can be pretty fun,” I say.

“Plenty of time for boys later,” Naomi says. She can’t help herself.

“I like boys,” Sarah says. “I like everyone.”

“Mama says it’s better not to date a lot,” says Evie. She is older than Sarah. She understands implications and intentions. She is testing me. “Girls who date a lot don’t get to have a white wedding,” she says.

I look at Naomi.

Her eyes are unreadable behind her black sunglasses. “No reason to bloom too soon,” she says, and I can tell from the way she says it that it’s her mantra, something she’s said and said and said until it’s become true. It’s the story she tells.

Blooming flowers. Spreading petals. Jesus fucking Christ.

***

It’s a five-hour flight from Atlanta to LAX, but you regain three hours in the air, so even though half a day has passed since Naomi dropped me off at the airport in her sleek silver bullet of a car, it’s barely noon when we touch down.

I’ve spent the time sketching, reimagining Leda and Artemis and Persephone. My headphones haven’t left my ears since the plane took off. Along with coffee and a stale biscotti the stewardess gave me, I’ve fed myself a steady diet of old-school rap.

The landing is a little bumpy, and everyone claps when the Fasten Seat Belts sign finally flashes off. People start unhooking their seat belts and organizing their shit, cell phones out and fingers flying as they text their rides that we’ve arrived.

I take the moment of confusion to pull out a small silver sculpture I’ve made out of soda tabs, loose wire, and the pen spring I found a couple of weeks ago. It’s a tiny wolf. I tuck it into the pocket of the seat back in front of me. A little surprise for whoever sits here next.

I don’t text anyone. My mom is working, and Marissa doesn’t have a car. Now that I’ve reentered my time zone, the party’s over. I’ll have to take the bus.

***

It’s not as hot as Atlanta, but LA’s no great shakes today, either. Waves of heat undulate on the asphalt outside the airport. The tall glass doors slide closed behind me, cutting off the last of the air-conditioning. I shoulder my bag and readjust my headphones before starting for the bus stop.

The bus blows, of course, and it’s crowded, so I end up having to stand for the first half. Finally, after I transfer, there’s a seat for me, and I slide close to the window and watch the flow of people and cars through the graffiti-etched plexiglass. The bus takes us up Sepulveda Boulevard and across Manchester, and then, finally, we turn onto Pacific Coast Highway. There’s a long, slow stretch up PCH, with too many stops to count and a tweaker who yells at the driver and gets thrown off and tired-looking women carrying plastic shopping bags and a couple of kids my age who share their earbuds to listen to music.

My shoulders loosen, and my head gets more firmly attached to my body the closer we get to Venice. The rest of LA is this never-ending amorphous blob of people and cars and buildings and stoplights and smells and sounds, and to the outsider, Venice probably wouldn’t feel much different, but to me it’s palpable. The air shimmers when we cross into the city limits. There’s a smell, a sharpness, a rot-life-ocean tang that tells me I am home.

I get off the bus a stop early and wander down the boardwalk. It feels so good to breathe this air, salty and fresh and not weighted down with humidity. A breeze blows in from the ocean.

A cold drink sounds good, so I poke my head into the Smoothie Shack to see if Lolly is working, and she is, but Kayla the Bitch is behind the counter too, looking like she just tasted something rotten, so I just wave and Lolly waves back and smiles, bouncing on the balls of her feet in the way she does.

I watch the waves for a while. The in and out of them. Sandpipers chase each wave, piercing the wet sand with their narrow bills to search for sand crabs before the next wave rolls in. Back and forth they go, stabbing the sand again and again. From where I’m sitting it’s impossible to tell which birds are successful and which birds fail. They all look the same. By degrees, I feel the weight of Georgia evaporate from me.

It feels good to be back in our own shitty apartment, even though it’s miserably hot and no one is waiting for me. Mom’s left a note for me in her pretty, loopy script—
Hooray! You’re home! I love you! Back tonight.

My phone is dead, dead, dead, so I plug it in before taking a shower. Travel makes me feel gross, and I can’t wait to rinse off all the strangers’ skin cells that I’m sure I must have collected. The tepid water flows down my back and wakes me up a little. I rake shampoo and conditioner through my hair, mixing them in my palm before applying them to save a step.

My phone is ringing when I crank off the water, and I run-hop naked and dripping across the apartment to answer it, sure it must be Marissa calling to welcome me home.

“Annie?”

I consider hanging up but don’t. Instead, I stand there, my hair’s wet tendrils on my neck making me shiver, my skin all goose bumps and my nipples hardened into little rubber nubs.

“Felix,” I say. “Hi.”

“Listen, don’t hang up,” he says, which is stupid, because if I was going to hang up, I would have already. “I get that you don’t want to see me again,” he says, “and that’s okay. Kind of a shame but totally cool. If that’s what you need. It’s just … Annie, did I do something wrong?”