loose (12 page)

Our first day, Miranda makes friends with a few girls, and Ashley and I go with them to the beach, where the kids in town hang out every night. I meet a nice-looking guy, Ace, who attends a prep school back in the city, and before the night is through we head off together into the tall beach grass and have sex. The following night we do the same. And then he leaves Fire Island for the summer.

I haven’t spoken with Mom in almost a month, and I like it that way, keeping her at arm’s length. I could do without the guilt, without the need to always think of her feelings, and to protect my own from her needs. Times with Dad and Nora are so different, so much more me. I don’t have to keep up my guard. Like today, in the Dunewood house. Nora walks past the sliding screen that leads onto the deck. She’s in flip-flops and a sarong, a white wine with ice in her hand.

“That Giuliani,” she says, shaking her head and gesturing toward the paper Dad’s reading. “He’s ruining New York.”

“Most people would say he’s making it better.” Dad smiles at her.

He sits beside me on a patio chair, the paper unfolded on his lap. I’m on a chaise, rubbing SPF 8 on my legs.

“I’m with Nora,” I say.

“That’s my girl,” she says.

“I mean, it’s nice not to have to put on my wipers every time I come to a light so the homeless guys won’t start cleaning my wind-shield,” I continue, feeling adult enough to comment on this now that I drive. “You know what’s weird, though?” I say, after a moment. “Where did all those guys go?”

Dad laughs. “You do have to wonder. Maybe now there’s some island in the Hudson teeming with men carrying liquor in paper bags. They’re all looking at each other between blackouts like,

‘Where the hell are we?’ ”

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Nora laughs too, but then she gives a fake pout. “I don’t want a nice New York. I want my grungy, dangerous, graffiti-ridden one back.”

“It’s not the real thing unless you have to hide your jewelry inside your clothes on the subway,” Dad says.

“And split your money into different pockets, so in case you get pickpocketed you still have some cash,” I add.

“And avoid Times Square like the plague.” Nora laughs. We join her.

I love hanging out with them.

There is another boy, Justin, who Miranda and her friends covet.

He is adorable. He has shocking blue eyes and sun-kissed hair, skin the color of beach sand. I can tell he finds me attractive. At the dock, after a day of tanning and swimming, I smile at him. He smiles back. He is two years younger than me—a baby. I can feel Miranda and her friends watching our exchange. They are jealous, impressed.

I relish this, so different from the powerlessness I felt when Heath and I were breaking up.

“You’re Kerry,” he says when he comes over.

I tuck my hair behind my ear. I know I got some color today, and I feel pretty. “How do you know my name?”

“Your little sister told me.”

Miranda. I smile that she called me her sister even though our parents aren’t married, that she feels this way about me.

“You’re asking about me?” I say.

“Is that OK?”

I purse my lips. Up close, he’s even cuter than I thought. His wavy hair falls into his eyes and he brushes it away with a hand. I imagine kissing him and immediately my heart starts to flutter.

“I suppose it’s all right,” I say.

He smiles and goes back to his friends. Ashley, who heard the whole thing, grabs my arm.

“Jailbait,” she says, and we both start laughing, remembering the night at the gas station so many years ago.

•

A H o u s e w i t h N o M e n But as I watch Justin now as he walks off with his friends, that old anxiety creeps up. Having talked to him changes things. I want badly to close the space between us.

The next day I find myself watching for him on the beach, and by the time night comes, I am eager to get back to the dock. Like with every guy I am interested in, his point of view takes over my own.

As I put on makeup, as I pick out my clothes, I think, What will Justin think of this? How will Justin see me?

I close in on him as soon as we get there.

“Let’s take a walk,” I say.

We go to the beach. But rather than pull me into the reedy grass, as I expected he would, he climbs the lifeguard tower. I join him and we sit there, watching the thick expanse of stars.

“You can’t see the stars in Manhattan,” he says.

I smile. He’s a romantic.

“It’s beautiful,” I agree.

I look at him, at his features lit by moonlight. This close he smells like ocean air and freshly washed clothes. I want him to kiss me, to touch me. Something, so I know I’m really here. He looks back at me.

“You should know something,” he says.

I raise my eyebrows.

“I have a girlfriend.”

“You do?” My stomach sinks.

“Back in the city. We agreed we could see other people this sum -

mer.”

I nod. I try to think of something to say, something to keep him from thinking of this girl. This girl who isn’t me.

“I’m just here to have fun,” I say. I’m remembering Heath’s words.

I just wanted to have some fun. It’s what boys want. I know this well.

And what’s better than a girl who wants the same thing? I could be the opposite to this girlfriend of his. I could be the one who doesn’t want anything from him, the one he then winds up wanting more.

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Justin smiles, believing me. “Cool,” he says, as I figured he would.

“That’s what I’m here for too.”

He kisses me. The magic words have worked.

For two glorious days, Justin and I fool around whenever and wherever we can. We are all over each other, our hands, our mouths, constantly seeking the other. My skin smells like his. And then, as with every boy before him, things start to get difficult. With Justin, it starts when I want to have sex and he doesn’t. He won’t. He claims he and his girlfriend agreed they would not have actual sex with anyone else. I do everything I can to lure him to break this promise.

I move my hips against his. I push him down on the bed. I refuse to do anything to relieve him of his excitement except have sex. But nothing works. He is resolute, and this begins to affect my ability to stay patient with the boundaries of our relationship.

One evening, just a few weeks later, we are all on the dock when I see Justin about to get into a water taxi.

“You’re going somewhere else?” I ask. “I thought we would hang out tonight.”

He looks at me, at the desperation there, and I see I have ruined everything. I have exposed myself once again.

The next night he tells me he doesn’t want to have that kind of relationship with me anymore.

As usual, I can’t let it go.

The following weekend, Justin shows up at the dock with a friend from home. He’s not a remarkable boy in terms of looks. Short brown hair, large nose and mouth. He brought beers and he passes them around with confidence like he’s hosting a party. By this time, Justin is actively ignoring me. I know what he’s thinking. I’m one of those crazy girls, the kind no boy wants. I am determined to prove him wrong. So I approach his friend, and his friend responds to my attention. Justin laughs nervously. He avoids looking at me. I am making him uncomfortable, and I like that. I want him to suffer, but more, I want him to think of me. To think of me with his friend.

•

A H o u s e w i t h N o M e n As the night goes on, his friend puts his arm around me. He exchanges some words with Justin, and soon he and I walk off together.

I look back to see if Justin is watching, and sure enough he is.

It’s a beautiful night, the stars brilliant, the air still. Moonlight casts a silvery glow on the beach grass along the boardwalk. I hear the waves washing over the beach, that soft hush as they pull back.

The guy pulls me by the hand to the back of Justin’s house, where no one is home. We go in a back door and into a laundry room. He pulls me down to the floor, kissing me, his hands already in my pants. It doesn’t feel good. His mouth is sloppy. He is moving too fast, but it doesn’t occur to me to resist. Only once my jeans are off and he’s rolling on a condom do I begin to feel the rise of shame, and then it’s too late. He’s inside me. And then he’s done. I look down at my body. My leg is bent at an odd angle, like it’s not mine. The hair down there is matted and dark. He is sitting near me, zipping up. I don’t dare look at him. I grab my underwear and pants and yank them on, not wanting him to see my nakedness. This guy I don’t know. This guy whose name I can’t even remember.

Later, I walk back to my house alone, trying not to feel anything about what’s happened. What’s happening to me. How I keep setting myself up. I am lightheaded, outside myself, the same feeling I had that morning with Heath at Jeff’s house. Someday I will realize this is a necessary distance, a way to inure myself to the injury of what I’ve done.

I think instead of Justin, how he looked as I walked away with his friend. Only now, in my memory, walking along in the moonlight, do I see his expression. It wasn’t jealousy or longing, as I told myself at the time. It was disgust.

K

b a c k a t s c h o o l that fall, I tell no one about what I did on Fire Island. After the Peter Rafferty episode, I got smart about keeping my sexual activity away from school. By the time I graduate, I will

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not have been physical with one person from my school except Peter, who has long graduated himself by then. Regardless of my actions, I know what it looks like for a girl to have so many sexual partners.

No one likes a girl who so willingly opens her legs.

I learned this in fourth grade, when Ariel Devine developed early and kissed two boys under a desk. She was immediately branded as a slut. We were all embarrassed for her, this girl who had so little self-respect she would kiss two boys—two!—without any shame.

Ariel Devine. I remember her first and last names, yet I still can’t recall the name of Justin’s friend.

At my high school, we have our share of sluts too. Two of them graduated the year before. They engaged in the standard fare of sleeping with random boys. I listened to the Jennifers gossip about what they had heard. Kate slept with Seth and a month later with Keith.

Sarah slept with Keith right after she slept with Danny. There were plenty of other girls who were having sex. None of the Jennifers were virgins, and neither were most girls I knew. However, these girls, unlike Kate and Sarah, kept sex restricted to relationships. I gossiped along with them, but secretly I wondered why it was the girls’ fault that the guy didn’t want more than a one-night stand.

For all the ways we were told girls had equal opportunities, all the evidence that we wouldn’t have to struggle to have what men have, this double standard seemed intractable. If a girl had sexual curiosity—and what girl doesn’t?—she was considered a ho. Boys could direct the course of their sexual development; girls couldn’t. It was the oldest dichotomy in the world. And it was also terribly confusing. I didn’t want to be a slut. No one does. But since I didn’t seem able to hold on to guys for more than a few weeks, I didn’t see any alternatives that didn’t include stopping sex entirely.

I had other, less intellectual feelings about these rumors too. I wondered, for instance, why almost everyone other than me seemed to be able to have relationships. I could have sex. Oh, yes. But I could

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A H o u s e w i t h N o M e n not keep a boy’s attention beyond that. Thinking about this opened up a deep hole in my chest, one that seemed to have no bottom. The only answer I could come up with was that I, unlike these other girls, was simply not lovable.

In twelfth grade, we have just one slut: Jeannette Pinker. She is the queen of all sluts. The sluttiest a slut can be. She has made her way through our entire school, stopping only at boys more than three years younger than her. Unlike Kate or Sarah, she is not popular. Nor does she seem to care. She is tall and muscular, with acne scars along her jaw. She laughs loudly and is unimpressed with most everything. She is a scholarship student at our school. The boys tell stories about her. She shaves her pubic hair into a Mohawk. She likes to be tied up. She’ll give head for over an hour. We don’t know whether any of it is true, but we know not to join in on the boys’

snickering. Jeannette scares us. Her sexual power is too raw, too there. Worse, she shows no shame for it. It is as though she has taken this narrow list of options for girls—slut or virgin—thrown them out, and come up with her own. Like she’s saying, “Of course you’re going to call me a slut, but that’s because you let yourself be bound.

I, on the other hand, am not going to let anything stop me from having a good time.” Her attitude is both impressive and terrifying, and no one knows what to make of it.

Like everyone else, I avoid Jeannette. But one afternoon, after speaking with a teacher about a project after school, I find myself alone with her in the parking lot. Our cars are the only ones left. Mine, the Honda Civic; hers a silver Dart. Usually the lot is filled with Mer-cedeses and Audis, typical for New Jersey private schools. I try not to look at her, just open the lock on my door.

But she calls to me, so I glance up.

“Can you give me a jump?” she asks in her hoarse, smoky voice.

I stare at her, not understanding.

“A jump?” She hits the hood of her car. “My battery’s dead.”

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I’m still not sure what she wants me to do. I know how to drive a car, but no one has taught me yet about car maintenance. “I’ve never done that before,” I say.

She laughs, that loud laugh. “Drive your car to this spot, and I’ll do the rest.”

I do as she says, and she pops my hood and attaches her jumper cables. Once she gets her car running, she drops my hood and thanks me.

For an instant I consider saying something to her, something about what’s happening to me, or maybe about Justin’s friend. But what I want to say has no shape to it. It’s just an amorphous feeling, a sense she might release me from my loneliness and the ways I try to quell it. Besides, this is the first we’ve ever spoken. She probably doesn’t even know my name. Anything I say will sound wrong, too intimate. So I just smile.