My Body Is a Book of Rules. Elissa Washuta
when I think I’ve convinced you that paradise is in me, you move to Florida, too far away to drive to me or think of me, with your sun-cooked brain trained on learning to fly planes. You finally start getting As and take on a serious girlfriend. In Facebook photos, your sweet tea body, losing the thin layer of baby beluga blubber you needed to keep out the Maryland cold, looks no more real to me than the palm trees that now appear around you in pixelated cell phone photos. I have never been to Florida, and I don’t believe that anyone will turn me on again. My paradise is lost.
#3. You tell me sex is funny, and it’s okay that my boyfriend is knocking on the window. You’ll go.
#2. For twelve months we burrow into your apartment. We keep tallies of our fucking on snow days; we set up a tent on the bed and sweat on each other inside. Later you will bring other girls into the tent, but forever you will know you shouldn’t.
We place one of my épées on the floor, jump over it, and declare ourselves married. You tell me that if I get sick of you, I will have to divorce you.
I am a good wife. When you drink yourself into the hospital, your stomach screaming, I ride in the ambulance because I have no car. The driver is reluctant to let me ride shotgun, but I tell him we have no one else around here, no family nearby, no friends. In the morning, when I am forced to leave the hospital, after you have been given a diagnosis of acute pancreatitis and enough Dilaudid to silence your gut, I take a ride from a stranger. After he drops his son off at school, he says he deals drugs, but not crack. When I shiver, he tells me he’ll warm me up. He says I can do what I want, it’s not like I’m married. . . . I arrive home safe, but you and I know that no matter what could have happened, someone else already ruined me anyway.
When things are good, we sit on the balcony and drink Kool-Aid and Everclear, smoking cigars. When things go badly, you ask me to put out a cigarette on your arm.
Weeks of nausea coincide with a late period and I make you drive me to the drugstore to buy a pregnancy test. I am not pregnant. The nausea stays for months. A radioactive tracer threaded into my veins, and through my gallbladder, tells doctors that the organ has stopped working. After I get it removed, I fall out of love with you; they might as well have excised my heart.
#1. I have given hand jobs, blow jobs. I have been eaten out and fingered. I have tried to fuck, but I was too dry and tight, and my high school boyfriend was too gentle to push. To be a virgin at twenty is to be in danger of being a virgin forever. My vagina feels sealed shut; even using tampons is impossible. So I tell you we have to take it slow. You are the last man to whom I say this.
You stand above me and jack off onto my belly and breasts. You demand that I blow you and that I immediately brush my teeth afterward. You want a naked sleepover. I agree to all these things. I do not agree to what comes after.
I get the morning-after pill at the university clinic. When I cannot stop crying, the doctor says that this boy may have taken advantage of me. I reply that she just doesn’t know the complexities of this exact situation, and I take a handful of free condoms. I bleed all day.
When I get back into the bed that used to be for sleep, I play the scene over in my head, as though I could improve upon it in my thoughts. But still, in every remembering, in the middle of the night you are on top of me. Still, every time, I say no, you say yes, and to you, it is nothing but a difference of opinion.
A Cascade Autobiography
PART 5
When I was nine, in our New Jersey history class, we learned about the Lenni Lenape who had come before us. They seemed even further away than my own Indians because they had been right here, but the textbook said they were gone. When I was ten, a classmate told me she was Indian, too, and I said she was wrong, because she had never said so before. I wanted to be the only Indian around.
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