Slut Lullabies (3 page)

He shrugged. “I'll take you.”

“What about Alex and Sera?”

“Alex has money for a cab. You don't. Either way, my family pays for the cab. So I'll take you.”

I followed him to the car. But once inside, he drove toward the cleaners, and I was confused. George lived above the cleaners, and Alex and his parents lived in the building next door. I'd crashed at George's on numerous occasions, on the couch, when it was really late or I was too drunk to go home. But it was only midnight, and all the drama had sobered me. I said, “I don't think Alex expects me to come back here or anything. I was planning to just go home.”

“It's easier this way,” he said. “We'll take you back in the morning.”

I didn't know what to do. I felt dangerously near crying again, but George was not the sort of person one easily cried around—it was obvious he would think me frivolous and immature, and he might even mock me. I chewed on the inside of my mouth and ventured, “Um, Alex and I kind of had an argument.”

“Yeah, I know. My brother's a spoiled asshole.”

I gulped.

He took me to his apartment. I was not so clueless as to fail to consider that he might be trying to get me into bed on the strength of my anger at his brother. But he just handed me a glass of water and left me in the living room, heading to his own bedroom without any attempt at friendly conversation, which was typical. Normally, Alex smuggled me over some blankets and a pillow when I stayed the night, but George hadn't offered. The couch was covered in plastic and would be uncomfortable without a sheet over it—I curled up on the floor with a sofa pillow and a stiff afghan. Horizontal, my drunkenness returned; the room spun a little. Maybe I was just plowed, and that was why I had reacted so strongly to Sera's comments about Mom. After all, she wasn't saying anything I didn't already know on some level. Maybe I was even drunk enough to have misinterpreted what was going on between Sera and Alex: maybe they were only fucking with me. Maybe Alex would turn up later and spoon me in his arms and say he and Sera had taken separate cabs. Maybe Sera would call my house in the morning and, in her Noël Coward accent, accuse, “Can't you take a bloody joke?”

I
couldn't
take a joke. That had always been a shortcoming of mine. This reassured me as I lulled into a hazy, drunken sleep.

In truth, I must have passed out. I only came to when he tried to enter me. Then my body screamed awake, squirming, jerking in protest, but George's heavy arms, hot from contact and rage and want, bore down upon my bones. He used one hand to guide his rigid penis in, the other arm bent across my chest and bearing all his weight so I gasped for air, my arms flailing like dying snakes, unable to strike. His knees ground into my thighs, holding them apart. Once he was up me, he pushed himself onto both arms, grappling with me briefly as I struck at him, but soon my wrists were in his hands, gripped tight and pushed into the plush carpeting while he pumped into me and I shrieked, then begged, then finally murmured listlessly, “Stop, no.” He, too, had been drinking, so his act was perhaps neither as satisfying nor as quick as he'd intended. Near the end he started muttering frantically, “Shit, shit, come
on
!” By the time he climaxed, I was sobbing in pain.

The spasms of the climax seemed to reassure him. “I'll stand up to my father,” he groaned into my neck as they shook him. “Forget about Alex, he's a pussy. I have more money than he does, anyway. Ahhh, you feel so warm.”

I did not bolt for the door when he let go of my wrists, when he rolled off my throbbing legs. My skirt and tights were around my ankles in an indecipherable tangle, my shirt pushed up to my chin, breasts hanging out of my bra so the wires stabbed my tender skin. Semen leaked onto the afghan his mother had made. The clock on the side table indicated that almost four hours had transpired since we'd arrived here and I'd first passed out. Had he slept, too, or spent that time watching me, fantasizing, planning?

George fell asleep on the floor, clutching me. It surprised me, more than anything, that he had not invited me to his bed, so clear was it that this rape had, in his mind, heralded our new romantic relationship. He and Sera and Alex had played a hand of cards, and with a quick reshuffling I was now his. I wept silently while my body went numb and slick under his sweating arm. I did not move until daylight made my nudity unbearable, and I scurried to the bathroom to wash up and rearrange my clothes.

When I reentered the room, George was sitting up. He offered me orange juice, and I took it and drank it without speaking. While he drove me home, he was silent as usual, but before I got out of the car he said, “We'll go to a movie and dinner on Friday. Alex and Sera can accompany us if you like. Think of a restaurant you want to try . . . but none of that raw fish or Ethiopian mush you girls like.”

I did not slam the door.

Approaching my front door under George's gaze, if I thought anything it was,
I always knew this would happen
. Not him, not last night's exact scenario, but that prickly sensation on the back of my neck when I found myself in a parking lot alone after dark, or in the deserted restroom of an office building, or when a strange man walked behind me on the street. My fear was the ancient archetype for all women: the knowledge, intrinsic in our flesh, that we can be violated at any time. Now it had happened. It did not occur to me, not once, to call the police—to tell anyone at all. While it would be wrong to say I felt anything resembling
relief
, it might be accurate to say that, finally, I could stop waiting. From now on my life would exist, like my mother's,
on the other side
.

In the living room, Mom was still asleep under our own afghan, which was light and worn from years and store-bought. The TV was off. I sat down at her feet; her toenails were painted seashell pink, but the polish was peeling, her nails growing out. She had several purple splotches on her legs—she bruised easily now. Her head was wrapped in the turban she wore at home; she did not take it off except to shower. Although I was her daughter, and we had lived in this house alone together forever, we were not symbiotic enough that she was comfortable showing me her bald head. Whenever I saw it by accident, I felt a queasy horror akin to remembering my father shooting up, or seeing Tony Guidubaldi's bare feet in our roach infested hall that by rights belonged to him.

I touched my mother's leg, and she opened her eyes and looked at me, but not with any joy at seeing my face, or worry at the expression of pain I wore. Her eyes had gone blank a long time ago. Or maybe I didn't wear any expression of pain, anyway. Maybe my eyes were blank, too. Then, abruptly, below her dead eyes, she smiled.

And suddenly, I could not imagine why I had been so angry at Sera for what she'd said about my mother's past. The clarity of that fury drained from me, and I couldn't remember what was so bad—so inexcusably shameful—about being the neighborhood slut, anyway. With an intensity so rough it doubled me over, I missed the long-past squeaking of my mother's bed, the muffled, complicit adult laughter that excluded me, that rhythmic pounding on the wall our bedrooms shared—the lullaby of my youth. I longed for those days when my mother was still invincible, when I was proud of her for not being like me, but like those brazen girls on the corner who owned our small world. I wanted more than anything to escape the brutal, glaring truths of adulthood: That I never liked those girls, with their gang member boyfriends. That had we grown up together, my mother and I would not have been friends. That my mother never knew me; Sera was the one who understood. That they had both betrayed me. And the fact that I had betrayed them, too, with my secrets, my desertion, didn't help. I was alone. Mothers die. College, with neither my best friend nor my first love, loomed.

“Did Sera call?” I asked, though it was only eight in the morning. Before Mom could answer, I blurted, “You know what? I don't think we should answer the phone today. Let's just spend some time together, you and me. Let's not talk to anyone else.”

“But what if your boyfriend calls, hon?” Mom said groggily. “It's Saturday. Isn't he gonna want to take you out?” She closed her eyes. I wanted to shout:
Don't
!

There is still one secret Sera never learned. One summer afternoon when we were eleven, on the hottest day of the year, I chose to accompany Mom on the bus to pick out linoleum rather than go with Sera's family to the beach. I told Sera's parents that Mom was dragging me against my will, but the truth was, I wouldn't have traded that day for all the cool breezes along Lake Michigan—that I wouldn't trade it now for all the romance of the Aegean Sea. I went because Mom
invited
me. She so rarely invited me. I wore my best, sparkling white jean shorts, like on a date. Sera would have thought I was nuts, but when Mom took me to lunch afterward, I was too excited to eat, full on nothing but the anticipation of our every happiness.

Chad's mother has hired a wedding consultant, because that is what people who christen their sons Chad do. The consultant, Deanna, says it is not her first same-sex wedding. She's savvy to the protocol, which is important to Chad's mother, and to all of the Merrys. An anchorwoman from Chicago's ABC News is among the guests.

There is no protocol for gay marriage in the Guerra clan, although two of Miguel's Miami cousins are gay. They, though, have never attempted to have a knockdown, drag-out celebration of queer matrimony with two hundred guests at a historic theater that has been closed for years and will be opened for the evening just for them. It amazes Miguel: the way WASPs alternately throw Republican fundraisers and gala ceremonies for their faggot sons, whatever whim strikes them. They are entitled to anything. He will benefit from their entitlement now, it seems. If his mother and stepfather weren't considering boycotting the affair, worried God might hurl a lightening bolt at the theater to damn all guests, they might be proud. He is marrying up.

Deanna speaks for Chad's mother now. Miguel understands this as the real reason a wedding consultant must be hired, for a gay marriage most of all. Somebody to play the villain. “When it's over, you should consider shaking hands so none of the guests feel uncomfortable,” Deanna says, staring them straight in the eye where Mrs. Merry would have stammered uncomfortably, looked down at her designer loafers (that Miguel would not know the name of because he is a sorry excuse for a gay man—no fashion sense). “I worked with a lesbian commitment ceremony in July, and that's what they did. It was wonderfully apropos—marriage is a contract after all. Just because the state of Illinois doesn't recognize your union doesn't mean the contract isn't sealed, and that's what people do when they seal a contract—shake hands.”

Somehow, pandering to homophobes who might vomit paella from witnessing two men kissing has been translated into a subversive act against the anti-gay policies of the State of Illinois. This is how things have been going lately. Miguel should be used to it.

“If you even suggest to me that we go along with this, you can forget the whole thing,” he tells Chad that night. “Your mother can just hire some politician to stand in my place and not offend anybody—we're not a couple of eunuchs whose purpose in having a ceremony is to prove how unthreatening homosexuality is!”

Chad is on the computer. They are making their own invitations; that battle took two days to win. He doesn't look up.

“Oh, honey, shaking hands wasn't my mother's idea,” he says. “Anyway, I'm sure Deanna was only joking.”

Miguel stares at the back of Chad's curly blond head. Do they all think he is a child—that he will buy
anything
? Or is Chad the child? Chad does not turn to witness the incredulity Miguel holds on his face, and Miguel cannot translate the expression into words, so eventually his eyebrows get tired of rising, and he has to swallow and close his mouth. Afterward he only says, “You promise? You swear to me we're going to kiss?”

“Of course, baby,” Chad says. “Come kiss me now.” But Miguel doesn't feel like it and goes to take two Advil before bed.

Almost nobody Miguel knows is invited to the wedding. This is not the fault of the Merry clan. In fact, Mrs. Merry—
Elaine, please
—has coaxed him over several Mexican dinners (the Merrys eat Mexican now to make Miguel feel at home, even though Mexico is about the only Spanish-speaking country from which none of his ancestors hail) to invite people he works with, family members from out of town.

Miguel is an options trader at a company where everyone except the boss's busty administrative assistant is male, and nobody else is openly gay. He is reasonably certain that sending invitations around the office would result in his being fired—or gangbanged—to teach him a lesson.

His younger sisters, Norma and Angelina, and their husbands will probably tow his mother's line, so Miriam, three years his senior, may be the only “Miguel contingent.” She has always been his biggest fan and surrogate mother; he, in turn, her mascot. Norma is twenty-eight, and at only twenty, Miguel barely
knows
Angelina. She is not even his sister exactly; she is Miriam's child, born when Miriam was thirteen. After Miguel's father died, his mother took Miguel and Norma and moved to Chicago. Miriam remained in Venezuela with an aunt. By the time Miriam, too, moved to Chicago and into the Guerra home, Angelina was five, and nobody ever spoke of Miriam having given birth to her or almost dying in the process, or even hounded her anymore to confess what
perro
she'd allowed to lie with her and spoil her so young. They spoke instead of sending her to Baptist church meetings to help her find a good man, and also of improving her English so she could get a job if the man was not so good as all that. Angelina called Miguel's mother Mami; they all did.