Use Me (Free Use Wives #5)

1. One-Fourteen Tallow

ONE-FOURTEEN TALLOW

The first thing to understand about the house on Tallow Street is that it ran on a spiral notebook.

It hung off the fridge by a magnet shaped like a pierogi, and it was where we settled everything.

Phone bill split four ways, long distance itemized by whoever made the calls.

Milk. Who owed Todd four dollars for the pizza on the eleventh.

Scott ran it, because Scott was an engineer and could not help himself, and he ruled a column with a pen and a spine of a textbook and wrote everybody's name at the top in block capitals like we were a small failing business.

By April my name was in it for something other than milk.

But that's the end. In September I was just the girl in the fourth bedroom, the one with the futon and the window that stuck, and I'd been in the house eleven days before I understood the opportunity I'd walked into.

Three men. One bathroom. A twelve-month lease none of us could break without eating the deposit, which none of us had, because we were twenty-one years old and our combined liquid assets were a coffee can of quarters for the machines in the basement.

Nobody could leave. That was the good part.

Todd Ruzicka had the front bedroom because he'd signed first and never let anyone forget it.

Senior, communications, from Parma, built like a man who'd been the second-biggest kid on a football team and then quit and kept eating.

Big shoulders that sloped, big forearms, a gut he was fond of.

He filled a doorway sideways. He laughed at everything including things that weren't jokes, and he wore basketball shorts in every weather, and the fabric of those shorts was thin enough that Todd Ruzicka had no secrets from anybody. That mattered later.

Scott Cauley had the room above the porch.

Mechanical engineering, Roanoke, and he talked so little that the first month I thought he disliked me.

He didn't. He just had a fixed daily allowance of words and he spent them on the landlord.

He was long and dry and brown-armed from a summer of framing houses, and he moved through the kitchen the way you move through a machine shop, which is to say he never bumped into anything and he never hurried and he put every single thing back.

And Aaron Petry had the little room at the back, the one over the kitchen that got all the heat.

Junior, like me, pharmacy program, and he was drowning in it.

Aaron was smaller than the other two and better looking than either and he had a habit of leaving rooms. Not storming out.

Just standing up at some point in a conversation, saying something reasonable about a problem set, and being gone.

I clocked it in week two and filed it under shy, which was wrong, and it stayed wrong for seven months.

Me: Angie Kovak, junior, art history, which my mother has never once said out loud without a pause before it.

Twenty minutes of work a week at the slide library in Barrow Hall, sleeving carousels and running the light box, a job I got because nobody else wanted it and kept because it had a door that locked.

My mother came from Pune in 1971 and married a Slovak from the valley whose whole family thought he'd been abroad.

I got her face and his height and a name, Anjali, that everyone in Ohio decided in kindergarten was Angie, and I stopped fighting it around the time I stopped wearing a coat to the bus stop.

I'll keep the rest of me light. That's not modesty. It's just that this isn't a story about what I looked like. It's a story about what I wanted, which I'd known since I was seventeen and had never once said out loud in a room with the lights on.

Here it is with the lights on.

I wanted to be used. Not seduced, not swept off anything, not taken out to Zeb's for a sub and a conversation about my major.

Used. I wanted to be a thing in a house that men reached for without thinking about it, the way you reach for the good knife, and I wanted the reaching to be so ordinary that nobody stopped what they were saying to do it.

The evening was the enemy. That was the thing I'd worked out by nineteen, after two boyfriends who both thought the correct amount of buildup was four hours.

Every man I'd been with had needed a whole production first, dinner and a tape and a conversation about where this was going, and by the time anybody's hand got anywhere I'd been sitting in my own want for so long it had gone cold and tasted like waiting.

I did not want to be somebody's evening. I wanted to be somebody's convenience.

So. Three men, one house, no exits until May.

I started the last week of September and I started with laundry, because the dryer at one-fourteen ran hot enough to shrink a wool sock into a coaster, and because a girl whose jeans are all in the basement has a reason to be in a t-shirt at four in the afternoon.

The t-shirt was Todd's, actually, which he never got back. Gray, enormous, a sleeve of a shirt from a car dealership his uncle owned. It came to the tops of my thighs when I stood still. It did other things when I didn't.

Underneath it, nothing. Which, fine, is a decision you make once and then just keep having made.

Day one of the campaign I stood at the sink washing two mugs for longer than two mugs have ever needed, with my hip cocked and Todd four feet behind me at the table with a bowl of cereal, and I bent forward to reach the sponge on the far side of the faucet and held it a beat too long, and I heard the spoon stop.

That was it. That was the whole first day. The spoon stopped.

I want to be honest about how slow this was, because in the version people tell each other, a girl decides to do this and the house falls on her by the weekend.

Not true. It took from September to December.

Twelve weeks of me being a walking dare in a dealership t-shirt and three grown men deciding, unanimously and without ever discussing it, that the correct response was to be extremely cool about it.

By mid-October I'd escalated to the low cabinet.

The low cabinet was where the big pots lived, and it was directly below the counter where everybody stood, and reaching into it put me on my toes with my whole ass in the air and the shirt riding up over the backs of my thighs.

I did the low cabinet four times a week. I made spaghetti I didn't want.

And one Thursday, with Scott on a stool at the counter going through the phone bill and Todd in the doorway arguing with him about the four dollars, I went down for the big pot and stayed there, and Todd, mid-sentence, not looking, still talking about the four dollars, set his beer down on the small of my back.

The bottle was cold and wet and it sat in the dip above my ass like the spot was made for it, and he left it there, and he kept arguing.

I want to be careful here, because I've had a long time to think about this and I still don't have a better way to say it. Nothing in my life to that point had gotten me as wet as that beer.

Not being kissed. Not the first time anybody got a hand inside my underwear. A cold bottle parked on my spine by a man who was busy.

I stayed down there. I moved the pots around.

I made a lot of noise with the lids. And the whole time the cold ring of it sat on my skin and I could feel exactly how much of me was out and available, and Todd's voice went on above me about the pizza and the eleventh, and Scott said "you rounded up" in the flattest voice a human being has ever used, and I put my forehead against the inside of the cabinet door and breathed.

He took the bottle back when he left the room. He said "thanks, Ange."

That was the first thanks. There were a lot more of them later, and every one of them worked on me exactly the same way.

Nobody broke that fall. I want that understood. I bent over that kitchen for three months like it was a job with benefits and not one of those men laid a hand on me, and the joke went around and around and nobody ever once picked it up.

But the spoon stopped, and the beer went down on my back, and I went upstairs and put my hand between my legs and came in about ninety seconds thinking about the word thanks.

Progress is progress.