The Other Side (9 page)

At first I get tattoos as a late-teenage rebellion. On my eighteenth birthday, Mom calls us at the apartment I share with My Older Sister and tells us she has breast cancer. The next day, My Older Sister and I drive to the tattoo shop downtown. We each pick a design from the wall. She picks a rose; I pick an abstract symbol resembling both a tulip and the female reproductive system. We each sign a release. We each sit down in a chair. In the morning, we drive to the hospital, where the rest of our family—Dad, My Younger Sister, our aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents—holds hands in a circle
around Mom and prays. Then the nurse comes, the doctor comes. My Dad leans down, presses his lips to my Mom's lips. It's the first time I've ever seen them kiss. The doctor says a few reassuring words before wheeling Mom away.

I get a second tattoo a few months after the first: a compass centered just above my pubic hair. There is no occasion, really. It's just a thing I want: something tiny and easily concealed. My Biker Boyfriend kisses it each time he goes down on me.

Soon after, I pierce my belly button and start wearing crop tops to show it off. I watch men watch me walking down the street. Months later, I get a third tattoo: the silhouette of a fire-breathing dragon near my ankle. I pierce my tongue and roll the stud around in my mouth while I sit in class. My Biker Boyfriend says it makes me look
kinky
.

Mom says I look like a freak. We're sitting in a restaurant. She has come to town for a checkup with her oncologist. She says nothing about her cancer except that she is lucky: no chemo, no radiation. She sees my tongue piercing and grabs her purse, her hands shaking.
A damn freak
. She stands, the food on her plate uneaten, and leaves.

A year later, before I think of taking a Spanish class, my parents have stopped speaking to me and My Older Sister. I don't want to ask them for money anymore, so I work as a
stripper to pay for my next semester's tuition. It's not hard work, and I don't actually feel all that slimy about doing it. In many ways,
it's the kind of job a girl like me has spent her whole life training for: there's the makeup and the costume and the hair, there's the stage and the way of coiling and uncoiling my body until at least one man wants to fuck me enough that he gives me all his money.

I make a lot of money at the strip club, and on my nights off I get free drinks at My Biker Boyfriend's bar downtown. But when a group of boys from my high school come into the club, I hide in the
DJ
booth until the bouncers agree to ask them to leave. At the end of my shift, the owner of the club pulls me aside and suggests that this might not actually be the right job for me.

I decide to take a semester off from college, and use my tuition money to buy a bus ticket to New York, where I get a contract with a modeling agency. I spend the whole summer sleeping on other people's couches, in other people's bathtubs, on a chair in the corner of a living room. One night I sleep on a roof. Men take my picture and sometimes give me money. They ask me to take off my clothes and then they take my picture. They call it art. They call it
nude
. More often the men call me nothing at all, but instead offer me a line of blow or ask for a hand job in the bathroom before or after the shoot. My agent, a woman, suggests I wear higher heels, pull my hair back, maybe get a boob job.
Sometimes the photographers drive me and at least two other models to the Hamptons, where someone hands us each a pill when we walk into the party and on every table girls are dancing with their shirts off. If we stay in the city, the photographers take us to a new club opening in some once-unsavory district. We don't pay to get in. We don't pay for our drinks and no one checks our
ID
s. The doorman opens the red velvet rope and a man in a black jacket herds us through the crowd, up to the stage, to the
VIP
section, where the club owners keep sending us bottles and bottles of vodka. The party promoters come by to check on us and one keeps trying to finger me on stage.

Everyone in the club gets to see.

That image, of the self, does not belong equally to everyone. As a woman, I must keep myself under constant surveillance: how do I look as I rise from the bed, and while I walk through the store buying groceries, and while I run with the dog in the park? From childhood I was taught to survey and police and maintain my image continually, and in this role—as both surveyor and the image that is surveyed—I learned to see myself as others see me: as an object to be viewed and evaluated, a sight.

When I leave New York and return to the duplex I share with My Older Sister and My Biker Boyfriend, to the Vision Center in the big box store, to the large lecture classes at the university, I start wearing a black leather dog collar. I don't wear it to school or while cutting lenses at the Vision Center. Not while watching
Oprah
on a Tuesday afternoon. Just while I am out drinking or dancing with my friends. Dressed in all black—black jeans, black leather jacket, black boots—I fit right in at the divey basement dance club downtown, where goth kids drink cheap vodka and watch themselves in the mirrored walls. We're all underage, but I'm the one dating the biker from New Jersey who has an in with every bartender in town. At night, I take him back to our duplex and cuff both of his hands to the headboard of the bed. I pull his pants off and whip his stomach with a leather cat o' nine tails while I sit naked on top of him, just out of reach. I clamp his nipples and pinch the skin on his balls. How long do I torture him each night, his cock rock-hard? Half an hour. An hour, maybe, before he breaks out of the handcuffs, or the rope, or the bungee cords I've used to bind him to the bed or the dresser or the stack of metal shelves in the garage. He breaks free and chases me down the hall, through the living room or the kitchen, up or down the stairs—we're both laughing; I'm not really trying to get away—before he catches me, throws me down on the floor face first, and thrusts straight in.
I cry out each time in pain or mock pain.

Months later I leave My Biker Boyfriend for My Spanish Teacher. It's sudden and it's not exactly for or about sex, though I give him whatever he wants, whenever he wants it: upon waking, after lunch on the weekends, midafternoon when he or I return from class, and in the evening after dinner or before bed. I want him to love me. Even in the beginning it doesn't work: he tells me to sit up straighter, cross my legs, spread them farther apart. He tells me how to undress. He tells me when to talk, what to say, but he doesn't actually listen. If I hesitate or resist, he takes what he wants anyway. He holds me down while I scream and beg him to stop. I cry out in real pain. This is how he sees me: a mirror that reflects his power always.

In our apartment there is only one bathroom. The only mirror we have hangs over the sink. It's easy to avoid. I never see my own eyes looking swollen and puffy. I almost never see the bruises, all the tender openings he's bloodied. When I meet My Older Sister for coffee, the first time I've seen her in months, she says I must be trying very hard to look ugly.
Which is certainly not, I think, the kind of person I meant to become.

To celebrate our first anniversary, My First Husband and I get matching tattoos: a Celtic knot he puts on the fatty part of his arm, near his shoulder; I put the knot on my back, between my shoulder blades, where I can't see it. Sometimes I forget it's there.

When we divorce a year later, I tattoo three flowers on my right ankle. I see them every time I shave my legs, or tie my shoes, or pull my legs up under my body on the couch, in the apartment where I live alone.

After I move in with the man who will become the father of my children, I get a full back piece: lilies, lilacs, and daisies cascading from one shoulder to the opposite hip; and a prayer in a language I don't read or speak because I want to keep it private, secret. When it is finished, I start a half sleeve of autumn leaves. Which becomes a full sleeve: an owl, a tree. I pierce my nose, take out the tongue piercing. I take out the nose ring. I start another sleeve.

Now, old ladies in the supermarket stare and stare at me, holding up traffic at the meat counter, their mouths hanging open. They see me, my tattoos, my beautiful, well-fed children, and can't process. Old men say things like
Why would you go and ruin yourself like that?
They shake their heads. They say,
You would be so pretty if you got those removed
.