2. The Joke Gets Older
THE JOKE GETS OLDER
The line arrived in November and I didn't plan it. That's the truth. It came out of my mouth in the kitchen the way most of the important things in my life have.
Todd had come in from the Wagoneer with his hands black to the wrist. The Wagoneer did not start below forty degrees, and every November Todd rediscovered this, and every November he came in swearing and touched the fridge and left a print.
He was telling me about a girl in his production seminar. He wanted to know if calling her at eleven at night was, and I quote, a psycho move.
I was up on the counter with my heels on a drawer handle and the shirt doing what the shirt did. I said, "Todd, I don't know what to tell you. I'm not exactly the person to ask about restraint."
And he said, "What's that supposed to mean?"
And I shrugged and I said, "It means do me whenever you like."
I have thought about this sentence for a long time. It's a good sentence. It's short, it doesn't ask for anything, and it can be laughed at from four directions.
Todd laughed at it from all four. He put his head back and honked at the ceiling and said "Jesus, Kovak," and went to wash his hands, and that was the entire consequence.
So I said it again on Saturday. And on the Tuesday after that, when Scott was moving my drying rack to get at the fuse box.
And to Aaron, once, in the hall outside the bathroom, with a towel on my head and nothing else on at all, and Aaron said "okay" in a voice like a man agreeing to a parking arrangement and went into his room and shut the door.
It became a bit. That's what killed me. Within three weeks it was a house catchphrase, and Todd would say it in my voice when he wanted the remote, and Scott wrote DO ME WHENEVER YOU LIKE at the top of the phone bill page in the ledger in his block capitals, as a gag, and everybody thought it was hilarious.
You want to know what it's like to be a joke that means it? It's like being extremely rich in a country where the money doesn't work.
So in December, three days before everybody went home for break, I stopped joking for about ninety seconds. I want this part on the record properly, because everything after it depends on it and because I've never liked how these stories go vague right where they should be plain.
It was a Sunday. Nobody was drunk. It was four in the afternoon and there was a bowl game on with the sound off and all three of them were in the front room, which almost never happened, and I stood in front of the television.
I said, "I need to say a thing and then I'm going to leave and you can all pretend I didn't."
Todd said, "Oh boy."
I said, "The joke isn't a joke. I'm not being funny.
I'm twenty-one, I'm not seeing anybody, and I like being used.
That's the whole thing. That's the entire kink, there's no second part.
If any of you ever wants to use me, you have blanket permission, starting now and running until I say otherwise, and I'm the one who'll say otherwise, and I'm telling you now that I'm not going to. "
Silence. The quarterback got sacked with the sound off.
Scott said, "What does used mean, exactly."
Which, honestly, was the correct question and very Scott.
I said, "It means you don't have to ask, you don't have to make an evening of it, and you don't have to be nice to me afterward.
It means if you want something and I'm there, take it.
If I ever don't want it I'll say the word no, out loud, and it'll be that easy, and none of you have to think about it any harder than that. "
Todd said, "This is a bit. This is a long bit."
"It isn't."
"It's a really long bit, Ange."
Aaron didn't say anything at all. He was on the arm of the couch with a pharmacology brick open on his knee and he was looking at the page, and he had not turned it in a while.
I said, "Okay. That's it. That's the announcement," and I walked out and went upstairs and lay on the futon with my heart going like a bird in a bag.
Nothing happened.
Nothing happened for three weeks. They went home for break, I went home for break, my mother asked about my grades and my father asked about my car, and I lay in my childhood bed under a poster I'd outgrown and thought about a beer bottle.
Here's what I did about it, since we're being plain. I did what I'd been doing since October, which was to wait until the house was asleep, and lie on my back with the shirt pushed up, and work myself with two fingers while I ran the same three pictures.
Picture one: Todd in the doorway, not stopping his sentence.
Picture two: Scott putting me somewhere the way he put everything somewhere, exactly, without looking at the shelf.
Picture three, and this is the one that finished me every time, and I didn't understand for months why it was the good one: after.
Just after. Me on the floor of the kitchen with my thighs sticky and everybody gone back to what they were doing, and the evidence of it still in me, running out of me slowly onto the linoleum, and nobody having made a fuss about any of it.
That was the picture. Not the fucking. The proof of the fucking, left behind in me, because it was the only thing that couldn't be taken back.
I didn't have the words for that yet. I had the picture and I had my hand and I had about ninety seconds, and the words came in March, and by then it was nearly too late.
The other thing that happened that fall, which I paid no attention to and should have: a piece of paper went up on the front door in October and stayed there.
Mr. Duszak, who owned one-fourteen and eleven other houses on that side of the tracks, informed us in a photocopy that he intended to list the property in the spring, that our lease would be honored through May thirty-first, and that we should keep the porch clear.
Todd threw a shoe at it. Scott read it twice and put it in the ledger. Aaron said, "Technically he has to give us sixty days for a showing," which was the longest sentence I'd heard out of him in a month.
Nobody thought about it again until February. I certainly didn't. I had eleven weeks left of being the funniest girl in the house and I was busy.
The last thing that happened before Christmas was small and I've never forgotten it.
I came out of the shower and went into the kitchen for water with the towel around my hair and nothing else on, which by then was a normal Tuesday at one-fourteen, and Aaron was at the table with his notes spread over three place settings.
He stood up so fast the chair went over.
He said something about a lab and he was through the door and up the stairs before the chair had finished falling, and I stood there dripping on the linoleum with a glass in my hand, and on the table where he'd been sitting was his pharmacology text, open, and a spiral notebook, closed, and a pen on top of it.
He'd left his book. He'd left the whole works.
I thought: God, I've broken that poor kid.
I was so wrong I could laugh.