A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.
—Germaine Greer
The word “virgin” generally indicates naivety, innocence, or inexperience in a particular context. Virginity can also represent sharing a previously un-shared part of yourself with a partner, and, for this reason, is often associated with intimacy. Writing, too, involves sharing part of you with other people and, like losing one’s virginity, can be frightening, enthralling, or unremarkable. In writing, the loss of virginity can be related to moving from innocence to awareness of the craft of writing. Regret for stories written or published too soon can be equated with unwise choices in sexual partners. Social stigmas can influence your willingness to explore new forms or subjects in writing as well.
In American culture, we have myriad views of virginity. Annelise Pennington notes, “Today, our society has made virgins feel bad for being virgins.” A stigma—a mark of disgrace associated with a particular circumstance, quality, or person—exists on each sides of the issue. According to Voltaire: “It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge.”
Misconceptions and prejudices about virginity can arise from religion, pop culture, love, choice, or bad luck—even myth. In ancient Greece, it was thought that the deepening of a girl’s voice determined loss of virginity. Some medical writers of the time argued that virginity meant no desire. Soranos and Galen suggested that virgin women suffered from less disease than other women. In early Christian writings, the paleness of a woman’s face was an outer sign of virginity. Christianity argued for the value of preserving one’s virginity in terms of the life to come. True virginity resided in the body and the soul. [i] Today, countries including India, Turkey, and Africa place a high value on virginity. A woman’s eligibility for marriage can hinge on virginity testing, a practice that continues despite scientific evidence that the presence of an intact hymen is not a reliable indicator of whether a female has been vaginally penetrated. Women who fail virginity testing are often divorced by their husbands instantly, disowned, beaten by family members, or in some cases, even killed.[ii]
Myths about the loss of virginity are still pervasive in America, too. These myths can lead to rampant misinformation, including that losing your virginity will cause irreversible damage to the body, that it’s going to be pleasurable, magical, painful, bloody, or life-changing. According to an article in The Atlantic, “These myths persist in part because of a lack of information about what happens to the human body, specifically the hymen, during sex—information that’s often not taught in schools, that’s not always found online, and that’s not always available from medical providers.”[iii]
Though virginity can be an embarrassing, confusing issue to explore for anyone, regardless of gender, historically and culturally, women have faced more stringent restraints to their sexuality and intimacy. For this reason, many women don’t feel comfortable writing about sex and desire. Helene Cixous, author of “The Laugh of the Medusa,” says,
[W]omen must write her self: must write about women and bring women into writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies—for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Women must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement. […] I wished that woman would write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim: I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs (p. 875, 876).
Refusing to acknowledge or avoiding the topic of sex in writing only compounds the problem of misinformation. Young people often cast virginity in a shadow of negativity and have trouble taking ownership of their sexuality due to myth and misinformation. A potentially pleasurable experience can be viewed as stressful and unnecessarily traumatic. As writers, it’s our job to help dispel or clarify myths that can be harmful to our health and well-being.
Prompts for More Promiscuous Writing
Do you remember when you moved from innocence to awareness of the craft of writing? How would you describe any feelings of confusion, fear, or worry? How did you make your voice public?
Have you been told that you have to write a certain way or write about certain topics? Is this what you, too, tell yourself? How have you allowed yourself to venture out into new types of writing that might change how you look at the world?
What must break in order to welcome a new writing style or to take a writing risk? Write about a transformative writing experience. What is it like to share your body of writing?
What genres do you write in? What genres are you most comfortable reading/writing? Write about the first time you crossed genres in your writing. What did you notice as you wrote? What most surprised you? What have you yet to explore/share?
What parts of you are pushing your writing in new directions? Do you ever feel pressured in your writing? The loss of virginity for some of us is painful, humiliating, even shameful. We may feel empty during it or afterwards. Make a list of all of the shameful or painful experiences you would never write. Now write them. Go after your desires; make yourself vulnerable to your loved one, which is to say writing.
How do you feel when put out your most vulnerable writing? In what ways do you write to please others and conform to their expectations rather than writing for self-expression or experimentation? How are you self-conscious in your writing? How do you think people will think of you if they were to read your words?
What stretches and leaps do you allow yourself to take in your writing? Is it possible to come back to our innocence once it is gone?
Virginity, by being once lost, may be ten times found: by being ever kept, it is ever lost. ’Tis too cold a companion: away with ’t!
―William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well
[i] King, H. (2003). Disease of Virgins: Green Sickness, Chlorosis and the Problems of Puberty. Routledge, pp. 47-48.
Debbie McCulliss spent 30 years as a registered nurse. She became a certified applied poetry facilitator and journal-writing instructor in 2007. She is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins Science-Medical Writing program. Her publications have appeared in Journal of Poetry Therapy, Studies in Writing: Research on Writing Approaches in Mental Health, Women on Poetry: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing by Successful Women, Statement CLAS Journal, The Journal of the Colorado Language Arts Society, and Red Earth Review.
Linda, the high school guidance counselor who convinced me to tutor ESL students in math because I was failing pre-calculus offered me a housesitting job the summer after my first year of college. By then, my grandparents’ strategic refusal to teach my father Spanish so that he could more easily pass as Anglo in school had succeeded into the next generation. As students that resembled my relatives passed exams that white classmates were mysteriously not required to take to graduate, Linda promoted me to faculty and staff as a kindly white girl uplifting the Other. The principal gave me a service aware placard and the local newspaper sent me a scholarship check for my “foreign” language abilities.
Linda would pay me to water the vegetable garden, crush Prozac into the cat’s food, and spray the carpet with ether to dissuade the anxious feline from peeing indoors. If I had any problems, the receptionist at the time share across the street could call the police, only fifteen miles away. If my now badge-holding former classmates didn’t come quickly enough, or arrived in time to kick me between the legs either for being a queer, having a Puerto Rican father, or enjoying “book learning,” I could cross the back fence to an abandoned dairy inhabited by a ex-fire-fighting farmer and the emus, llamas, and other animals he raised.
My dad had all kinds of suggestions for staving off loneliness while housesitting and avoiding “trouble,” which I took to mean an incident that involved me complaining. “Remember how my second-cousin Dino got shot seven times by cops while climbing a fence in his own neighborhood? You shouldn’t do that. Just read a book to avoid feeling creeped out alone in that house; you wouldn’t have gotten into college without reading.” He suggested Solzhenitsyn, whose trembling head-scratching hand was prominently, and disproportionately, featured in an oil pastel hanging in my parents’ living room. A fan of “living simply,” my dad had recited accounts of Siberian work camps throughout my childhood, culminating in a bartering war for the Solzhenitsyn portrait at an Orthodox Church rummage sale. Since alcohol sales enticed people outside of the congregation to make spontaneous purchases at the rummage sale, several other competitors for the portrait were drunk, and my always-sober father made the most coherent offer. For years he continued to recount this example of business savvy with the neighbor who invited us to the rummage sale, the only person old enough to remember Igor, who built the house my parents lived in. Instead of reading about freezing prisons where some of the old timers I grew up around had spent their young adulthoods, I picked up The Shining because my ex-girlfriend compared my repetitive sentences and general paranoia to the main character’s descent into alcoholic beverages and hauntings of the past in the present.
The first day of the housesitting job, azalea dusk purpled the green Swiss chard in the guidance counselor’s garden, my hose nozzle between soil and stem. This, I thought, is the poetic glory of Wine Country. I bent, pushing aside leaves, touched wet plastic, and came fingertip to serrated edge with a kitchen knife. The dewy sandwich bag was likely discarded by the guidance counselor while feeding crumbs to animals over the fence, but the cooking blade seemed out of place. A guttural moan groaned on the wind, overwhelmed by a voice with a snagged Oklahoma twang: “Linda told me to introduce myself to the house-sitter, and I’m guessing that’s you. If you need anything, don’t hesitate to ask.” Dropping the knife with only a little bleeding under the skin, I turned to face the farmer pointing one thumb backwards, elbow veins up. “My house is a half-mile back there. Even an old bomb shelter underground somewhere.” His other hand caressed a silver belt buckle, crossed hatchets for his fire department service beneath red plaid. I assured the farmer that his phone number was under a refrigerator magnet. “I used to think hiding in a refrigerator would protect me if the Russians nuked us. Funny what we believed then.” The phone rang, I turned off the hose, and excused myself inside. Behind me, the farmer’s eyes drifted off towards an imaginary mushroom cloud.
The caller didn’t need to introduce herself. “I was talking with my brother in the garden. He sends his love, and mentioned that we should expect a visit. I’d rather it be a visit from you than a visit from Death; you know your father and I are getting older.” I would need a drink later if my mom was in one of these spirals. I could hear the cat skittering into the bedroom closet, a place I resided because of my backwards upbringing, according to my Stephen King-reading ex, and I informed my mom that I would come to dinner as soon as I microwaved Prozac in the cat’s food for precisely seven seconds, as requested. I hung up the phone, turned off the living room lamp, locked the door, and drove towards my parents’ house, passing the graveyard where Linda had said her son was laid to rest after a fatal motorcycle accident decades ago.
At the door, I embraced my mother, her narrow shoulders shuddering at physical affection from the living. “Talking to my brother reminded me of the day I almost crashed into Death. He stepped right in front of the car when I had the right of way. That night I got the call that my brother was dead.” Before I could inquire how she imagined Death would be impacted by a car running Him over, she ushered me to a seat at the kitchen table and proceeded to berate herself for neglecting the wisdom of the deceased, with whom she conversed regularly. “Maybe I should start holding real séances, like my Aunt Thelma and Aunt Emily. You know they used to wear garlic necklaces every day; they were descended from people in Salem during the witchcraft trials.” As my dad readjusted our utensils into symmetrically parallel configurations, I wondered if those ancestors had survived to have descendants by framing fellow townspeople for witchcraft, breathing a sigh of relief at their neighbors’ executions.
Before me was a casserole leaking lukewarm mayonnaise, and my mother reached out her arms and wiggled her fingers to signify that my dad and I should join hands and encircle the watery mayonnaise in prayer to a “deity of our choosing.” Having been raised by relatives who spoke in tongues as often as in the Spanish that he didn’t understand, my dad counted even numbers under his breath during these moments in which my mother was uncharacteristically dry-eyed, not screaming that he better not think of inviting any relatives besides me to dinner, since “those traditional people” would surely criticize her housekeeping. For as long as I could remember, she had been suspicious that my dad’s entire extended family lurked nearby, awaiting an invitation to dinner, a chance to call her a bad wife and mother, presumably twirling their mustaches villainously. I figured that this last image was unlikely to be lived out, since my paternal grandmother firmly believed that anyone with facial hair was “criminally insane.”
Just as my mother opened her eyes and refused to be selfish enough to take the first bite of casserole, I caught a whiff of stale cigarette, out of place in a non-smoking household yet an odor I smelled often during my visits. The neighbor who invited us to that long-ago rummage visited often, so I attributed the scent to her chain-smoking epiphanies: “Everyone has something in their family to be ashamed of” she had replied pityingly when my father mentioned that his family might be Sephardic). The last nicotine-loving resident of the house was Igor, the original architect, who threw weekly accordion-pumping dance parties in the front yard for other friends who missed Russia, not the pogroms or the forced labor camps, but the neighbors they would never see again. I wondered if he would have read Solzhenitsyn or Stephen King, and if he ever offered that neighbor a cigarette as I walked out the front door.
The winding, inconsistently paved roads back to the guidance counselor’s house were so dark that I didn’t see the unseasonal black ice, and by the time I knew what had caused my car to slide spinning, the brake pedal was compressed, the car still in the middle of the not-quite-two-way lanes near the grave yard. High beams moved closer, and I accelerated, nearly driving into an oncoming truck. I thought I saw the farmer through the driver side window, but it was probably someone else with a fire department ball cap. When I parked, the lamp I’d turned off lit the front window of Linda’s house. The front door was still locked, and there was no sign of a break-in, so I turned on every other light in the house, borrowed a few drops of the guidance counselor’s vodka, and sat down to read. Linda’s son looked at me through cracks in a glass picture frame, forever 18.
Thirty pages later, the lamp turned off, reminding me that it was time to brush the cat exactly fifty strokes, as requested. Retreating down the hall, brown clots in the bathroom’s cream color scheme caught my eye, so I peaked in. Mud speckled the bathtub, damp sod hardening around the drain, as if someone covered in dirt had stopped in to get clean. While I admired the impulse to rid the flesh of germs, I wondered what flesh was being rid of germs, and whether its wearer hid nearby. Intending to drag the cat from the closet and flee the house, I tiptoed towards the bedroom, reached a hand through the doorframe, switched on the light, and felt my pores prickle. I screamed, the cat ran from the closet, and I dived for her, but she was too fast, having pointedly avoided the ether sprayed areas earlier. Falling to the floor, the carpet crawled under me. I scrambled back to the living room, where the lamp had turned back on. Locking the cat inside, yowling beyond salvation, I drove back to my parents’ place.
Walking into the kitchen’s light, coughing the odor of old tobacco onto my arm, I finally saw the ants swarming over my skin, their miniscule legs tickling me. For the remainder of my time housesitting, I sprayed them with the cat’s ether, plied them with liquor to no avail, and yelled at them until throat-dry. Dousing them with cleaning chemicals only strengthened their attacks, and my mother had to help me fix the collapsible dining table after I broke it while trying to punch a line of the invaders.
Ashamed that I couldn’t stop ants from invading her home let alone prevent corpses from lurching into her bathtub, I called the guidance counselor. The lamp was on a timer. The plumbing backed up in the bathtub, and she often found mud congealing there. “And you shouldn’t read genre fiction, especially horror, while house-sitting. Who knows if you would have gotten into college without reading quality literature?”
Linda returned from her vacation tanned and joking that she looked more like her Panamanian mother than usual. It was the only time she mentioned being white-passing and Latina like me. I never told her I was Puerto Rican, and I’ll always wonder if she knew, if she sent me to tutor in an ESL study hall to support la raza or to spread assimilation to my peers, a crawling, hungry, many-legged, ant-like organism that fed on my grandparents, the guidance counselor, my father, and me. When pressed for theories about the knife in her garden, she explained that strangers crossed into her yard from the time share across the street to feed bread to the lonely farmer’s wailing emu. A prehistoric-looking animal and its adoring tourist fans were the only real haunting I experienced that summer, except perhaps for Igor chain-smoking in the last doorway stolen from him by the living, with no home to return to even in the afterlife.
Jenny Irizary grew up in a cabin in the woods, the only Swede-Rican for miles. Searching for her father’s childhood in the San Francisco Mission District, she moved to Oakland and received a B.A. in Ethnic Studies and an M.A. in literature from Mills College.
“Here’s a new package of Titleist balls – orange – so you don’t confuse your drive with mine.” Dad shoots me a wink. “Trust me honey, they’re the best balls for performance. And I know my balls.” Another wink. He shoves some tees in my pocket and heads for the cart.
X returns from the head. “Take these Maxfli’s.” Shoves balls in my bag. “Best new balls on the market. The pro said they improve trajectory. He pats my head. “Anything helps!” And heads for the cart.
At least they were orange.
“You want to ride with me honey?” Dad taps the seat.
“She’ll ride with me, Jim.”
Dad pulls his cap low. Nods and takes off to the first tee. His cart runs over a cone.
On the fifth hole green, Dad replaces my ball with a marker to clear the way for a putt. He stops. Pulls the ball back out of his pocket. Brings it up close for inspection. Glances at me — then throws it in my direction. Yes. He knows his balls.
Standing on the ninth hole green, Dad signals me, out on the fairway, impatiently, waving his cigarette-flare as if directing a 727, then points it spear-like to the right of the flag. His target. My target.
“Take your nine iron and chip slightly to the left. It’ll hit the green and roll down just where you want it,” X orders from his cart-throne. I hop out. Jog to the back of the moving cart and extract the necessary clubs, quickly — the nine (and the wedge) before he speeds off.
Dad shadow swings from the green — a visual demonstration of his previous commands — “Tee up just to the right of the flag. That’s it. With the wedge. Nothing fancy. Just do what I tell you.” He waits there, peering at me, cigarette in his left hand, jabbing toward the target. He waits. He watches. He hasn’t smoked in ten years. He’d be dead in two from it.
I take the wedge. Execute two practice swings.
“Hey! That’s the wrong club!” X stands in the rough, hands on his hips. “The nine iron — I told you the nine iron to the left!” He hits his forehead with the palm of his hand. A favorite gesture.
Dad looms on the green straight in front of me. I hesitate. I switch clubs.
His head jerks to the right. Then he throws his cigarette down on the manicured green and heads for the cart.
It had seemed like a good idea. Golf, Dad and X. Common ground. Dad bought me my first set of clubs and taught me the basics. My new husband was impressed. Our vacations consisted of various golf adventures – Hilton Head, the last (where my daughter was conceived). Twenty-four golf clubs in forty square miles. Eighteen holes in the morning. Lunch. Eighteen holes in the afternoon. Half price. Beautiful. Beautiful settings. Adventure-like courses with fairways through forests or next to raging oceans. Rain. Lightening. Nothing stopped us. I have to say that I loved it. I never kept score. It was simpler that way.
Hilton Head.
Our first day on the island proved golf free — a reservation screw up. A hurricane loomed off the coast, creating crazy swells, the waters swirling at unusual levels along the beach and inlets. Raining off and on in the Indian summer heat; we rode bikes along an unpaved beach trail for miles. His adventurous nature took charge. Nothing deterred him and I, of course, trailed behind with delight. Anything crazy, wild and out of the ordinary suited me fine. Rain was just water. Harmless. We came upon a part of the bike path that was washed out. A river had formed.
“Let’s put the bikes over our heads and wade across.”
“Yeah!” I say, feeling like an eight-year-old boy on an adventure with his best friend — the fun friend – and our parents have no idea where we are.
The spontaneous inlet is deeper than expected. Teetering with the bike over my head, I’m almost swept away — water surging up to my ears. Across with the speed of an explorer, he stands on the other side cheering me on. Like an Ironman finish, sand oozing from every orifice, he high fives me as I stagger out. Without a word, we throw down the bikes and race each other over the dunes toward the ocean. The Atlantic crunches and crashes on the unruly shore, clouds blanketing and sprinkling overhead. The beach lies deserted. I dive in, clothes and all. He follows. The smell and taste of the sea all over my body. The water warmer than the windy outside.
“Here’s a wave. Take it.” he yells.
We both turn and paddle, trying to find that high, that glide that we grew up with as beach teenagers in the Pacific. The choppy shore breakers of the East Coast chew us up and spit us out, throwing us through the foam, sloshing us in and out with the rip. The murky gray undulating water of a storm. We float on our backs, sneakers in the air and whoop. Pirates. Runaways. Ne’er-do-wells.
“God, this is amazing! I love the sea. It makes you feel part of it all, you know?” I pronounce.
“I do. I totally know. Man, I feel like a kid. This is the best time I’ve had in, well,
in I don’t know when.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Let’s not grow up? Okay?”
“I know. Let’s not.”
Another set comes in. “Take it! There’s two more coming, man; I can see them! Big!”
“We need fins.” I scream over the deafening pound.
We dive under a rocker. Ride at least three more. Bike to a beach side resort and talk our soaking wet bodies into the bar. Clams, martinis and soup. They lend us towels. We watch some important football game and laugh our heads off. Someone turns up the music. Tom Petty. He grabs my hand. We dance. We laugh. We play. The next day he comes up with a speedboat rental. Neither of us had ever driven a boat. We find a pod of dolphins that trail us – exploring the ins and outs of Calibogue Sound. Another rainsquall.
It’s just water.
I tell myself that that’s what kept me there. That part.
Hilton Head Lakes Golf Club.
“What’d you get on that last hole?” X demanded, lurching the cart toward the next tee.
“Five.”
“Five? How’d you get five? That’s impossible. You had three on the fairway, one to chip up and three on the green.”
He shot a six. So five was unacceptable to a competitive addict. Especially when it was his wife. The wife who was always happy, no matter how bad she played.
“How can you be that damn happy when you just shot a seven?” His head twitched back and forth at odd angles (a lifelong tick) as he inaccurately weaved the cart at break neck speed down the narrow path, branches scrapping the sides.
“It’s beautiful out here. I saw a deer. I could give a shit about the game, frankly.”
“That’s your problem. You don’t take anything seriously. You gotta have passion. You gotta kill to win. That’s why you’ve never been successful. You’re tentative, hesitant, afraid, and lackadaisical. That gets you nowhere in life.” He threw the cart up on the rough. “Where’s your ball?”
I pointed back over my shoulder. He’d passed it during his remonstration.
“Why didn’t you tell me? I don’t know if you don’t tell me.”
“I’ll walk. It’s no big deal. It’s beautiful out here.”
I gladly stroll. Pretending I’m alone. Smelling the wood-infused air, the dampness of morning, the sounds of invisible animals adjusting to human presence. I loved the East. A feeling of traditionalism prevailed. Formality. My childhood roots.
“Did you see where my ball landed?” He screamed his command over the entire fairway. Even the pink plaid woman in the group just ahead took note. The usual battle cry. Every hole. Me – the reluctant sentry. Drive and watch. Watch for the exact trajectory and location of the ball. I never had great depth perception. Pressure + expectation + potential anger = failure. My self-imposed mathematical life equation. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t see the ball. I could stay with it till it peaked, usually; then it would just disintegrate. Dissolve into the sky. Gone.
“Did you see it? Did you see it this time? Huh?”
He was watching. Why the fuck couldn’t he see it? I never asked. Sometimes I’d just lie, hoping that my guess proved to be somewhere in the general vicinity. I began to develop a perverse pleasure out of sending him on impossible hunts. He’d drop me, slightly slowing the cart for a leap off, and then disappear into the woods at high speed.
Perhaps he’d never come out.
“No. I yelled over my shoulder. I have no idea.”
“Typical.”
Our entire marriage played out on the golf course. I could have saved myself a lot of time and pain had I just gone out on the course once and evaluated the dynamics. But it wouldn’t have mattered. I’d never have seen it. I couldn’t leave Dad. I wouldn’t leave X, till he did. Couldn’t quit anything I’d committed to. Didn’t know how.
A ball explodes out of the trees at the edge of the green. Plop – in the sand. Wet sand.
“Throw me your sand wedge.”
The sand wedge was my Christmas present. I’d yet to use it. New. Pristine.
He misses, jamming the virgin club deep into the sand — the ball untouched. He swings, wildly, four more times; the ball continually rolls right back like a homing pigeon. Finally, it explodes free, skating with angry karmic force to the other side, landing in the rough. He smashes the disobedient club in half on the side of the cart. My club. In half. He waits, thrusting the cart to the forward position, a wordless summon for me to forge with him, immediately, to the next conquest.
I don’t finish the hole.
“Golf’s suppose to be fun. Suppose to be relaxing. You’re gonna have a heart attack.”
“Nothing fun about playing lousy. Winning. Now that’s fun,” he states; his hands choke the steering wheel.
The game brought out the worst in him. Fanned the flames of his abusive side and I was his target – in his guns’ sites.
Palm Desert.
“Where’s your dad?” X questions, perplexed as he mounts the green, his ball right next to the cup. “Pull the flag.”
“He left.” Distracted, I walk straight to the cup.
“Don’t walk through my putting line! For Christ sake, how many times do I have to tell you that? Your cleat made a divot – get the sand.”
I follow his orders like a well-calibrated machine. Pull the flag and carry it out of the way, taking care not to stand where my body will throw a shadow on his line to the cup.
He misses.
Mexican Restaurant.
The hostess sits us at a center table, over lit, among a throng of vacationers. A giant plate glass window looks out onto a packed patio where Mariachis perform. A party of five cackles in bursts at the next table. Mom, Dad, X and I sit, disconnected, as if shuffled into pews — the wood chairs upright and uncomfortable. The mariachi horn rhythmically blares in sharp surges. An overly cheery Senorita arrives, out of breath to distribute oversized placard style menus.
“Can I get you some drinks to start?” Her voice hums with a Spanish lilt.
“I want three shots of tequila. Right here. Right now. The best you have.” Dad taps aggressively with his index finger on the cheap wood table. “Presto. Andele.”
She nods, her painted eyebrows arch at a stiff angle.
“I’ll take whatever you have on tap.” I add.
“Tecate?” She checks. I nod, even though it’s my least favorite.
“Ditto.” X confirms.
Mom orders her usual vodka sedative.
The menu placards, convenient communication barriers, rise for intense Mexican meal scrutiny. The cackles rise in jarring crescendos table left. Dad’s placard lowers. He shoots a scowl. It goes unnoticed among the restaurant populace. A normal crowd.
I smooth the napkin in my lap. I’m not especially hungry.
The Senorita returns with Dad’s potent elixir. He downs them like a freshly docked seaman with scurvy. Manners forgotten. Menus, still raised above eye level, occupy our intense attention.
The mariachis now find our table like an unwanted fly to a bedside light. They sing a love ballad between Mom and Dad. Dad ignores the scene — his head buried in the menu, studying the description of the same meal he gets every time he’s here.
The happy little trio sings unaffected by his disrespect. Eyebrows furrow heavenward to the romantic lyrics of times gone by. Mom, hand to the side of her chin, nods affectionately with a pasted smile. Mom, whom I’m sure, knows nothing of love.
They finish abruptly. X fishes out a tip from his pocket. Dad manages a critical glance. They exit abruptly.
The menus lower, no longer appropriate props in the impending mental, one-sided gunfight. I smell blood, a honed detection skill from my childhood. The blood bath of an unexplained “Dad Bad Mood.”
He pushes his chair back slowly. He rises as if contemplating a strategic move. I wonder if he’s leaving. Something he’s done quite frequently throughout my life. Will he walk home? Possibly. Why? I don’t know. But dinner will be better if he does.
He stands stiff, with a slight lean due to the tequila. He doesn’t move. Stares directly at X. Our eyes rise to him as if expecting a speech. He places his hands on the table, finger tips like a tripod, and leans in, eyes boring through X like a predator ready to leap at easy prey.
“Thirty years ago, I could’ve thrown you through that fucking window,” he hoarsely whispers with his lips pulled tight. “You understand me, my friend?” His voice builds to full room volume. “I could’ve fucking annihilated you – you, you fucking little prick.”
“Jim!” Mom places her hand on his arm to coax him down. He shakes it off. The party of five, to the left of us, quiets. The Mariachis are gone.
X sits speechless. This part of Dad I can’t explain or forewarn to any who enters his target range.
I grab X’s arm. “We’re leaving.” He looks stunned, but my look is definitive enough that he doesn’t fight me. He simply follows. Dad, at this level, is unreachable, nonnegotiable. If X hadn’t seen glimpses of it during the Silverado golf trip earlier that year, I might not have persuaded him to cut out fast.
We left. Left my mother. I didn’t see Dad for two years, till weeks before his death. I had written a letter, asking him not to make me choose. It wasn’t fair. Wasn’t appropriate. I loved him. If that mattered.
He never answered. Never acknowledged the letter existed.
Interstate 10. Palm Desert to LA.
Screaming down the highway. Night in the desert. Still. Cold. Barren.
A lone trinket shack stands lit like a beacon in the dusty distance. A makeshift string of colored lights calls to the motorist — the last bastion before one drops off into the endless miles of dark desert void. He wheels to the right just making it off the road. I ask no questions. He disappears into the rickety store-shed that appears to be just closing up.
It’s then I realize I left my broken golf clubs in dad’s cart. For a moment, I consider going back. Telling X to turn around and go back. For the clubs. Dad will be asleep. Crashed. In the morning, it could all be different. He might not remember. He won’t remember.
The lights of the store-shed go dead. X appears at the car window, brandishing a blade. About nine inches long. A butterfly blade, he brags. Can cut right or left in a fight if one has lightening reflexes. The handle is embedded with an extravagant turquoise, lapis and onyx design, lined in silver. He waves it around. A smile of triumph on his face. Eyes wide. Angry. Revengeful. He chuckles low. An evil chuckle. Evil. He kicks the car in reverse with a spray of gravel, grinds the gears, then explodes toward the ramp for LA.
I slip down in my seat and pretend to sleep.
Tracey Weddle earned a theatre arts degree from UCLA in a time before electricity, then worked in the film industry with screaming directors till it drove her to Northern California where she earned a masters in creative writing from Sacramento State, receiving the Bazzanella Award for best graduate level fiction. She has two kids in college (called “the blow torches” for their delicate personalities) and now lives with two dogs, a bird and Guinness in the Fridge. | Website: www.traceyweddle.com
A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.
