ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
I am interested: out of all the couples, Jinny and Isaac, Efrem and Isaac, Ryan and Cecile... any I've left out, which one do you like the best?
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The Colossus of Rhodes
- Thread starter ChrisGibson
- Start date
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
Probably Efrem and Isaac but I like the others too especially Ryan and Cecile.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
I almost thought you would say Cecile and Ryan.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
JAYSON
We do not go to church the next morning. Mom and Dad have decided that since we went yesterday it’s not necessary to go today though Mom says something about, “Maybe the evening Mass…” but the way she says it tells me that won’t happen.
I’m still up pretty early and I’ve eaten and gone back to bed when Ryan taps on my door and tells me we’re going to the Weavers for breakfast. Cecile is with him, which makes me assume she spent the night. Mom and Dad are still in bed, recovering from the reception. I remember Aunt Maureen throwing back her head and laughing, “Catherine never could carry her liquor.”
When we get to the Weavers on Aramy, I remember that now Jinny is a Weaver. She’s sitting at the ktichen table the way Aunt Maureen does, smoking a cigarette and drinking orange juice.
“Hey cousins,” she says when we come up the stairs. “Cile?” There’s a wicked look in her eyes. I take a sip of Jinny’s orange juice and my eyes go wide.
“It’s a screwdriver,” she explains, bored.
“Do you ever stop?” I ask.
Jinny just smiles.
Isaac’s frying bacon and flipping pancakes while smoking—an admirable feat—and he says, “Efrem and Anne are coming later. They’re at Mass.”
“Wanna go to the Five-Thirty?” Jinny asks Isaac.
“That sounds about right,” he tells her.
“Where’s Aaron?” Cecile looks around.
Isaac and Jinny look at each other.
“You know,” Jinny says, crushing out her cigarette, “Aaron didn’t come home last night.”
“I hope Mrs. Perizzi can cook,” Cecile says.
Isaac shakes his head: “Cecile, for shame.”
But Cecile takes a cigarette from Jinny’s pack and says, “Shame is a waste of time.”
Anne and Efrem arrive, Efrem pointing out that Aaron Weaver is nowhere in sight.
“I don’t want to think about it,” says Isaac.
“But you were the one that told him to jump on Sandy Perizzi.”
“I don’t recall ever saying, ‘Dad, jump on Sandy Perizzi.’ ”
“Ah, my husband, but you implied it,” Jinny declares, sitting back with her screwdriver.
After breakfast Cecile says, “I want to sleep in my own bed.”
“I’ll take you home,” Ryan gets up and Cecile gives him a look that I don’t understand, and neither does he, and then she says, “I’ll go back with Ef.”
Efrem does not mind being impressed for the duty, apparently. I think that over the years he and Cecile have worked out a don’t ask questions now, just do it system and then they’re gone and we stay a little longer. Then me and Ryan leave and it’s now I realize he must have said something and that Cecile wanted him to take me out. He must figure it out too because we get on Route 6 and start heading northwest.
“I wanna drive around town, see where a good place to work might be, you mind?”
I tell him I don’t.
“I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”
“You’ve got a degree in liberal arts and engineering. Whatever you want to.”
“Are you working on the newspaper tonight?”
“Um hum. And yearbook. Almost done. It’s gonna look sweet.”
“Is that Scott kid still there?”
“Nelligant? Scooter? Yeah, he’s gonna be valedictorian.”
“Cool.”
“If you were Dad you’d—”
Ryan cuts me off, nodding, and says, “Yeah. If I were Dad I’d say, ‘Why aren’t you the valedictorian?’ Dad’s a bastard that way.”
I look at him. There’s a red light. We’ve stopped at the intersection with Williams Street.
“I’ve never heard you say that.” I tell him.
“I’m not sure I ever knew it. But isn’t he?” Ryan’s eyes look at me, turning from green to grey and back again. I’ve never seen him look so real and I nod my head. The light turns green.
“Yeah,” Ryan murmurs, not waiting for my answer. “He is.
“Shit!” All down the wide strip are gas stations and used car lots. Ryan says in a low voice, “You mind if I buy cigarettes?”
“Can I smoke one?”
Now it’s his turn to look shocked.
“It’s just I never...”
Ryan says, “You can take a puff of mine. I don’t want your lung cancer on my conscience.”
He buys Marlboro Ultra Lights. I am completely fascinated by someone who’s been away so long, who used to be so common, who looks just like me and nothing like me, my five years older brother, cashing the cigarette box against the palm of his hand, unwrapping it. He pushes in the lighter. His Cherokee is always so clean. The lighter pops out. I can smell the burning tip of the cigarette.
“Here you go. Be gentle. In fact, don’t even inhale really.”
He passes me the cigarette. But I’ve seen so many people gag on their first cigarette that I’m determined not to. And I succeed. I pass it back. Ryan’s grinning at me.
“So? Change your world, baby brother?”
“Not really, but it just looks so cool when you and Isaac do it.”
Ryan shrugs. And does it. He shoots the smoke out of his nostrils. I think my brother is the coolest shit in the world right now.
“You used to date Scott’s sister, didn’t you?” I suddenly say. We are driving out of the gas station, back onto Route 6.
“Beth Nelligant. Um hum. You know that. That’s how I know Scott. Me and Beth went to Saint Antonin’s together… That shit didn’t work out.”
For the space of two seconds I want to tell him. If he passes me the cigarette I’ll feel close enough to tell him what I haven’t told anyone. Not anyone in two years. I’ll feel close and comradely and get some advice and get it off of my chest.
But the moment passes and we keep on driving.
NEXT TIME WE RETURN TO RHODES WE WILL LEARN MORE ABOUT CECILE TURNER, BUT BEFORE THAT, IT IS TIME TO RETURN TO THE HIDDEN LIVES OF VIRGINS
We do not go to church the next morning. Mom and Dad have decided that since we went yesterday it’s not necessary to go today though Mom says something about, “Maybe the evening Mass…” but the way she says it tells me that won’t happen.
I’m still up pretty early and I’ve eaten and gone back to bed when Ryan taps on my door and tells me we’re going to the Weavers for breakfast. Cecile is with him, which makes me assume she spent the night. Mom and Dad are still in bed, recovering from the reception. I remember Aunt Maureen throwing back her head and laughing, “Catherine never could carry her liquor.”
When we get to the Weavers on Aramy, I remember that now Jinny is a Weaver. She’s sitting at the ktichen table the way Aunt Maureen does, smoking a cigarette and drinking orange juice.
“Hey cousins,” she says when we come up the stairs. “Cile?” There’s a wicked look in her eyes. I take a sip of Jinny’s orange juice and my eyes go wide.
“It’s a screwdriver,” she explains, bored.
“Do you ever stop?” I ask.
Jinny just smiles.
Isaac’s frying bacon and flipping pancakes while smoking—an admirable feat—and he says, “Efrem and Anne are coming later. They’re at Mass.”
“Wanna go to the Five-Thirty?” Jinny asks Isaac.
“That sounds about right,” he tells her.
“Where’s Aaron?” Cecile looks around.
Isaac and Jinny look at each other.
“You know,” Jinny says, crushing out her cigarette, “Aaron didn’t come home last night.”
“I hope Mrs. Perizzi can cook,” Cecile says.
Isaac shakes his head: “Cecile, for shame.”
But Cecile takes a cigarette from Jinny’s pack and says, “Shame is a waste of time.”
Anne and Efrem arrive, Efrem pointing out that Aaron Weaver is nowhere in sight.
“I don’t want to think about it,” says Isaac.
“But you were the one that told him to jump on Sandy Perizzi.”
“I don’t recall ever saying, ‘Dad, jump on Sandy Perizzi.’ ”
“Ah, my husband, but you implied it,” Jinny declares, sitting back with her screwdriver.
After breakfast Cecile says, “I want to sleep in my own bed.”
“I’ll take you home,” Ryan gets up and Cecile gives him a look that I don’t understand, and neither does he, and then she says, “I’ll go back with Ef.”
Efrem does not mind being impressed for the duty, apparently. I think that over the years he and Cecile have worked out a don’t ask questions now, just do it system and then they’re gone and we stay a little longer. Then me and Ryan leave and it’s now I realize he must have said something and that Cecile wanted him to take me out. He must figure it out too because we get on Route 6 and start heading northwest.
“I wanna drive around town, see where a good place to work might be, you mind?”
I tell him I don’t.
“I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”
“You’ve got a degree in liberal arts and engineering. Whatever you want to.”
“Are you working on the newspaper tonight?”
“Um hum. And yearbook. Almost done. It’s gonna look sweet.”
“Is that Scott kid still there?”
“Nelligant? Scooter? Yeah, he’s gonna be valedictorian.”
“Cool.”
“If you were Dad you’d—”
Ryan cuts me off, nodding, and says, “Yeah. If I were Dad I’d say, ‘Why aren’t you the valedictorian?’ Dad’s a bastard that way.”
I look at him. There’s a red light. We’ve stopped at the intersection with Williams Street.
“I’ve never heard you say that.” I tell him.
“I’m not sure I ever knew it. But isn’t he?” Ryan’s eyes look at me, turning from green to grey and back again. I’ve never seen him look so real and I nod my head. The light turns green.
“Yeah,” Ryan murmurs, not waiting for my answer. “He is.
“Shit!” All down the wide strip are gas stations and used car lots. Ryan says in a low voice, “You mind if I buy cigarettes?”
“Can I smoke one?”
Now it’s his turn to look shocked.
“It’s just I never...”
Ryan says, “You can take a puff of mine. I don’t want your lung cancer on my conscience.”
He buys Marlboro Ultra Lights. I am completely fascinated by someone who’s been away so long, who used to be so common, who looks just like me and nothing like me, my five years older brother, cashing the cigarette box against the palm of his hand, unwrapping it. He pushes in the lighter. His Cherokee is always so clean. The lighter pops out. I can smell the burning tip of the cigarette.
“Here you go. Be gentle. In fact, don’t even inhale really.”
He passes me the cigarette. But I’ve seen so many people gag on their first cigarette that I’m determined not to. And I succeed. I pass it back. Ryan’s grinning at me.
“So? Change your world, baby brother?”
“Not really, but it just looks so cool when you and Isaac do it.”
Ryan shrugs. And does it. He shoots the smoke out of his nostrils. I think my brother is the coolest shit in the world right now.
“You used to date Scott’s sister, didn’t you?” I suddenly say. We are driving out of the gas station, back onto Route 6.
“Beth Nelligant. Um hum. You know that. That’s how I know Scott. Me and Beth went to Saint Antonin’s together… That shit didn’t work out.”
For the space of two seconds I want to tell him. If he passes me the cigarette I’ll feel close enough to tell him what I haven’t told anyone. Not anyone in two years. I’ll feel close and comradely and get some advice and get it off of my chest.
But the moment passes and we keep on driving.
NEXT TIME WE RETURN TO RHODES WE WILL LEARN MORE ABOUT CECILE TURNER, BUT BEFORE THAT, IT IS TIME TO RETURN TO THE HIDDEN LIVES OF VIRGINS
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
That was a great portion! Jayson is fast becoming one of my favourite characters. I don't really have much to say other then I enjoyed it! I look forward to learning more about Cecile when we return to Rhodes. I am excited to get back to reading The Hidden Lives Of Virgins. Excellent writing and I hope you have a nice weekend!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
So far I'm having a very nice weekend. Thank you.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
[STRIKE]GHOST STORIES
CECILE TURNER [/STRIKE]
Let me tell you a secret: until this very moment I have thought that there was nothing more important than being happy. I have been lied to. Everyone has been lied to and maybe it’s time to get the hell over it. I am twenty-three years old now and I’m starting to believe that they teach us all the wrong things in school. Why do we have school? At last, I finally made my way out of it. Nearly twenty years of it and now I am completely unequipped for the real world.
But wasn’t the world I was living in real enough?
It’s like waking up from a dream. Everyday I’m shaking my head trying to figure out if I am happy or not and coming to the conclusion that I’m not. And I can’t stay happy for very long. I get anxious. Every since I left school I am anxious every goddamned day. And then I start to think maybe it’s not so important that I be happy. Maybe it’s just important that I not have this anxiety, this thinking about thinking and thinking and what if-ing that comes everyday. It has gotten to the point, God help me, where I am afraid of being afraid, where I am afraid of facing things that will probably never come. I’ll be walking down the street and think to myself, what if the Red Bus suddenly turns over on its side, rolls across the street and hits me? What if that bird over there shits on my head? I heard about a man who got shat on by a bird, and there was some poison chemical in the bird shit. It got into his brain and gave him some fungus. What if I get brain fungus? What if someone I slept with calls me up and says he has HIV, and then I die of AIDS, but no one cares because I’m not important. Then everyone comes to my fucking funeral and all they can say is, ‘Damn, she did have some nice hair. It’s hard to believe it was a weave.’ And I won’t be able to say, ‘Goddamn it, I don’t wear weaves, my fucking hair is my own!’ I won’t be able to say it because I’ll be dead.
What if I can’t measure up to life?
What if… What if?
What will I do when...? Whatever… And all these questions send me into shock.
I don’t tell Mama. I love her, but she doesn’t understand. She would say something like, “Everybody feels this way.” I know. I know everybody feels this way, and everybody seems to manage. But I can’t. I know that I’ve felt this way my whole life, but I wasn’t aware of it until now. You see I wasn’t onto it until just recently. These days I am onto so much so quickly and unable to hide things from myself. I don’t know how I did it before.
It’s late May and it’s warm and beautiful outside. This is when Ryan is home, when he is with me at last and we hold hands a lot and I can smell the scent of his cologne mixed in with his cigarettes and just the scent of his skin. And he is full of worry. I can almost taste the terror in him. He can’t help his fear anymore than I can, and he has more to fear. His mother and father invested everything in building him a pedestal. What if he slips and falls? My family never did shit for me. I can fall all the fuck I want to. Ryan’s dread spreads over my own like acid, and corrodes me a little bit more. Even in the heat I get chilly with the fear. It’s a monster that’s always lurking, but we never talk about it. When we make love is the only time it goes away.
Somehow when we make love there is no happiness and no sadness and no room for either/ors. It’s just ... I don’t know what to call it, but I’m aware of everything in him and it doesn’t bother me. I’m aware of everything in me, and I’m not bothered by myself either, by my terrible fears. I’m so afraid and I don’t know why.
And I know he’s terrified, and when I’m holding his big body in my arms after he’s come, shaking so hard, I know he wants someone to do something, give him some answer.
And I don’t know what to do, because the someone can’t be me. The one thing I don’t have is answers.
I KNOW NOW THAT I WILL never see my mother again, and I’m resolved to it. I treat the whole thing as if she’s dead and for all I know she is. Years after she abandoned me, she would send money and instructions to Mama Walker, occasionally talk to me on the phone. But then that happened less and less and finally stopped happening at all. When I go to church with Efrem on All Saints, I send up a prayer for her. I don’t think it’s dishonest. I think she was dead a long time before she left me. I think a lot of people are dead before they die. I wonder, I really wonder sometimes if the whole world is dead.
When I write like this I wonder what’s wrong with me. Jinny is my own best friend, but I don’t think I’d ever want to say these things to her. Not much. Does it sound silly to say I’d want to have talks like this with men? Men aren’t happy. Men are always pondering and looking for something deep. I can get with that. It’s women, always worrying about who loves them, are they too fat.... that kill me.
I know a lot of people love me. I know a lot of men have loved me and I have to say it doesn’t faze me much because now I know just how much that love can get you. It really doesn’t pay the rent. It can get you a good fuck. But it doesn’t pay the rent. And the kind of love that worships--it can’t help you.
There are three men who actually love me. They don’t worship me, they don’t lust for me, make me grand promises. They know just what I look like without a bra and I take that love and give it back, and that’s the only way that love can mean anything... If you give it back. That’s the only love for me that I treasure, that I know means anything. Efrem’s love made him my brother. Isaac’s love came by accident. I trust him with anything. And Ryan: that’s a love that started with annoyance in my head and a longing in my groin that I did not understand at all.
I’m amazed at how much of what my mother taught me I clung to long after she was gone. There was no reason to believe half of what she said except that she was my mother, but she had given that job to someone else before I hit puberty.
The way I remember her and our house in Missouri before we left forever and she left me forever was darkness on a Saturday and Florida Turner laying in bed like she was dying. And she was dying. It was a depression. I know that now. She would lay in bed the whole weekend, immobile. This was life for me. And then when I knew other people didn’t live like this it was rage for me. Florida Turner with a whole bottle of her goddamned, cheapass champagne, drinking it, going giddy, singing stupid songs, passing out in bed.
This was in the wake of CJ Walker. I’m not saying she wasn’t a fool before. My God, there’s no fool like a middle aged Niggah Fool, and she was all of this, but she was a flat out NUT after CJ.
One day she climbed out of bed and surprised the hell out of me. She hopped out with a violence that I was relieved to see was not directed at me. She struggled into clothes and roughly pulled a brush through her nappy hair. She had no mercy on herself.
“Pack your bags, Cile.”
I can remember that she spoke with no accent. No slang. She spoke—as some people might say—like a white woman. Overly precise. I packed two bags. It took me less than twenty minutes. She said, “Let’s go.”
We got in the car and I didn’t know where we were going.
We stopped at Mc.Donalds on the highway. You know, those rest area complexes with all the trucks parked out front. I thought, where are all these people going? What is their story? Then I wondered what mine was? Where the hell was Florida taking me? Her skin was black and grey, unlotioned and dried out. Her hair was sticking up like she’d rolled out of bed. Florida Turner was not looking at me. Her mouth chewed her food unpleasantly and her eyes were dull. I had to stop looking at them.
Her breath stank.
Missouri, Illinois. Indiana. I never said I had to pee, but she always knew when to stop the car and let me go to the bathroom.
Across Ohio, through Toledo, Lassador, Sandusky. We stop at Motel 6 Saturday night because we can’t sleep in a car. “You don’t know what honkey might come along and kill you,” Florida says. “You don’t know what white folks will do.”
And of course this is true, because I don’t know any white folks, though I’ve heard they are trouble.
All the way to Rhodes, along Lake Erie, onto Route 6 I rehearse the litany of what white people do. White folks shut off your electric. White folks don’t let you vote. White folks keep you down. White folks do not respect you. White folks... yes, honey, they did, enslave you. White people are untrustworthy. You never know what white folks say behind your back after you leave the room. The highest crime: white folks just do not understand us. And why won’t white folks GIVE us something?
And the alternative?
“You caint trust niggahs,” Florida says. “Look at me! I spent my whole life trusting niggahs and here I am.”
And here Mother is, and what a sight she is to see. We are lost in Rhodes. We get out the car on Main Street and get in a phone booth, looking at the city map. People pass us, looking. It is late Sunday afternoon. For the first time in my life, God help me, I do not care what people think when they see me.
We make it to the house and Mrs. Walker opens the door and then there is Efrem, and I am completely amazed and then Florida is asking where CJ is and Mrs. Walker is flat out telling us that her husband blew his brains out at Efrem’s birthday party.
“Did you see it?” I ask him.
He nods his head, as cool as if I’d said, “Do you think the next Friday the Thirteenth movie will be bad?”
And then Florida is leaving me.
¬¬¬¬_______________
CECILE TURNER [/STRIKE]
Let me tell you a secret: until this very moment I have thought that there was nothing more important than being happy. I have been lied to. Everyone has been lied to and maybe it’s time to get the hell over it. I am twenty-three years old now and I’m starting to believe that they teach us all the wrong things in school. Why do we have school? At last, I finally made my way out of it. Nearly twenty years of it and now I am completely unequipped for the real world.
But wasn’t the world I was living in real enough?
It’s like waking up from a dream. Everyday I’m shaking my head trying to figure out if I am happy or not and coming to the conclusion that I’m not. And I can’t stay happy for very long. I get anxious. Every since I left school I am anxious every goddamned day. And then I start to think maybe it’s not so important that I be happy. Maybe it’s just important that I not have this anxiety, this thinking about thinking and thinking and what if-ing that comes everyday. It has gotten to the point, God help me, where I am afraid of being afraid, where I am afraid of facing things that will probably never come. I’ll be walking down the street and think to myself, what if the Red Bus suddenly turns over on its side, rolls across the street and hits me? What if that bird over there shits on my head? I heard about a man who got shat on by a bird, and there was some poison chemical in the bird shit. It got into his brain and gave him some fungus. What if I get brain fungus? What if someone I slept with calls me up and says he has HIV, and then I die of AIDS, but no one cares because I’m not important. Then everyone comes to my fucking funeral and all they can say is, ‘Damn, she did have some nice hair. It’s hard to believe it was a weave.’ And I won’t be able to say, ‘Goddamn it, I don’t wear weaves, my fucking hair is my own!’ I won’t be able to say it because I’ll be dead.
What if I can’t measure up to life?
What if… What if?
What will I do when...? Whatever… And all these questions send me into shock.
I don’t tell Mama. I love her, but she doesn’t understand. She would say something like, “Everybody feels this way.” I know. I know everybody feels this way, and everybody seems to manage. But I can’t. I know that I’ve felt this way my whole life, but I wasn’t aware of it until now. You see I wasn’t onto it until just recently. These days I am onto so much so quickly and unable to hide things from myself. I don’t know how I did it before.
It’s late May and it’s warm and beautiful outside. This is when Ryan is home, when he is with me at last and we hold hands a lot and I can smell the scent of his cologne mixed in with his cigarettes and just the scent of his skin. And he is full of worry. I can almost taste the terror in him. He can’t help his fear anymore than I can, and he has more to fear. His mother and father invested everything in building him a pedestal. What if he slips and falls? My family never did shit for me. I can fall all the fuck I want to. Ryan’s dread spreads over my own like acid, and corrodes me a little bit more. Even in the heat I get chilly with the fear. It’s a monster that’s always lurking, but we never talk about it. When we make love is the only time it goes away.
Somehow when we make love there is no happiness and no sadness and no room for either/ors. It’s just ... I don’t know what to call it, but I’m aware of everything in him and it doesn’t bother me. I’m aware of everything in me, and I’m not bothered by myself either, by my terrible fears. I’m so afraid and I don’t know why.
And I know he’s terrified, and when I’m holding his big body in my arms after he’s come, shaking so hard, I know he wants someone to do something, give him some answer.
And I don’t know what to do, because the someone can’t be me. The one thing I don’t have is answers.
I KNOW NOW THAT I WILL never see my mother again, and I’m resolved to it. I treat the whole thing as if she’s dead and for all I know she is. Years after she abandoned me, she would send money and instructions to Mama Walker, occasionally talk to me on the phone. But then that happened less and less and finally stopped happening at all. When I go to church with Efrem on All Saints, I send up a prayer for her. I don’t think it’s dishonest. I think she was dead a long time before she left me. I think a lot of people are dead before they die. I wonder, I really wonder sometimes if the whole world is dead.
When I write like this I wonder what’s wrong with me. Jinny is my own best friend, but I don’t think I’d ever want to say these things to her. Not much. Does it sound silly to say I’d want to have talks like this with men? Men aren’t happy. Men are always pondering and looking for something deep. I can get with that. It’s women, always worrying about who loves them, are they too fat.... that kill me.
I know a lot of people love me. I know a lot of men have loved me and I have to say it doesn’t faze me much because now I know just how much that love can get you. It really doesn’t pay the rent. It can get you a good fuck. But it doesn’t pay the rent. And the kind of love that worships--it can’t help you.
There are three men who actually love me. They don’t worship me, they don’t lust for me, make me grand promises. They know just what I look like without a bra and I take that love and give it back, and that’s the only way that love can mean anything... If you give it back. That’s the only love for me that I treasure, that I know means anything. Efrem’s love made him my brother. Isaac’s love came by accident. I trust him with anything. And Ryan: that’s a love that started with annoyance in my head and a longing in my groin that I did not understand at all.
I’m amazed at how much of what my mother taught me I clung to long after she was gone. There was no reason to believe half of what she said except that she was my mother, but she had given that job to someone else before I hit puberty.
The way I remember her and our house in Missouri before we left forever and she left me forever was darkness on a Saturday and Florida Turner laying in bed like she was dying. And she was dying. It was a depression. I know that now. She would lay in bed the whole weekend, immobile. This was life for me. And then when I knew other people didn’t live like this it was rage for me. Florida Turner with a whole bottle of her goddamned, cheapass champagne, drinking it, going giddy, singing stupid songs, passing out in bed.
This was in the wake of CJ Walker. I’m not saying she wasn’t a fool before. My God, there’s no fool like a middle aged Niggah Fool, and she was all of this, but she was a flat out NUT after CJ.
One day she climbed out of bed and surprised the hell out of me. She hopped out with a violence that I was relieved to see was not directed at me. She struggled into clothes and roughly pulled a brush through her nappy hair. She had no mercy on herself.
“Pack your bags, Cile.”
I can remember that she spoke with no accent. No slang. She spoke—as some people might say—like a white woman. Overly precise. I packed two bags. It took me less than twenty minutes. She said, “Let’s go.”
We got in the car and I didn’t know where we were going.
We stopped at Mc.Donalds on the highway. You know, those rest area complexes with all the trucks parked out front. I thought, where are all these people going? What is their story? Then I wondered what mine was? Where the hell was Florida taking me? Her skin was black and grey, unlotioned and dried out. Her hair was sticking up like she’d rolled out of bed. Florida Turner was not looking at me. Her mouth chewed her food unpleasantly and her eyes were dull. I had to stop looking at them.
Her breath stank.
Missouri, Illinois. Indiana. I never said I had to pee, but she always knew when to stop the car and let me go to the bathroom.
Across Ohio, through Toledo, Lassador, Sandusky. We stop at Motel 6 Saturday night because we can’t sleep in a car. “You don’t know what honkey might come along and kill you,” Florida says. “You don’t know what white folks will do.”
And of course this is true, because I don’t know any white folks, though I’ve heard they are trouble.
All the way to Rhodes, along Lake Erie, onto Route 6 I rehearse the litany of what white people do. White folks shut off your electric. White folks don’t let you vote. White folks keep you down. White folks do not respect you. White folks... yes, honey, they did, enslave you. White people are untrustworthy. You never know what white folks say behind your back after you leave the room. The highest crime: white folks just do not understand us. And why won’t white folks GIVE us something?
And the alternative?
“You caint trust niggahs,” Florida says. “Look at me! I spent my whole life trusting niggahs and here I am.”
And here Mother is, and what a sight she is to see. We are lost in Rhodes. We get out the car on Main Street and get in a phone booth, looking at the city map. People pass us, looking. It is late Sunday afternoon. For the first time in my life, God help me, I do not care what people think when they see me.
We make it to the house and Mrs. Walker opens the door and then there is Efrem, and I am completely amazed and then Florida is asking where CJ is and Mrs. Walker is flat out telling us that her husband blew his brains out at Efrem’s birthday party.
“Did you see it?” I ask him.
He nods his head, as cool as if I’d said, “Do you think the next Friday the Thirteenth movie will be bad?”
And then Florida is leaving me.
¬¬¬¬_______________
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
An interesting start to a new section from Cecile's point of view! I am sorry for what happened with her Mum. I hope she can move past it and heal in the end. Great writing and I look forward to more soon!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Of course, all of this has already happened to Cecile. Um, I'm trying to think what to say about her healing. Why don't you read and decide if you think she has healing or if she just learns to live with her wounds? How do you think you are? Healed, or living with wounds?
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
I guess I really meant being able to live with her wounds.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
We shall see, my friend. We shall see,
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
When I turn over, Ryan’s back is to me. He is snoring, but when I reach over his shoulder his hand comes up and catches mine. I’m amazed at the size and reality of him. I remember him being a weedy pain in my ass when we were kids. I remember him being the last thing I could ever seriously think of taking up with—a white boy. And now I know that really wasn’t the last thing I would take up with. He is NOW the last thing I would take up with, a white MAN. And it does not, absolutely does not matter to me. I think about how it was supposed to. This is the man who runs the world and turns off electricity, who talks behind your back and makes your life difficult. Who is supposed to GIVE ME SOMETHING. When I am lying next to him I am astounded by his solidness, the reality of this man I accidentally fell in love with. We are on that soft pallet in the basement. High up, yellow light is trying to come through thick curtains.
I am old enough now to realize that I am afraid because I believe everything a woman who abandoned me before my first period told me. You can’t trust white people or Black people and apparently there is no one else between those two. The world, every hand and ever tree and stone is turned against you. The clouds themselves are hostile.
I separate from Ryan and lay on my back. Thinking logically, clearly, I can honestly say that there is nothing in my experience to bear that out, so why the hell am I afraid?
Lightly I touch Ryan’s hair.
There are the ghost stories from childhood about bogeymen under the bed, about Mojo Ladies coming to get you if you’re bad, goblins carrying you off. The ghost that cries if you step on the seventh step when you’re going up to your bedroom. The tall lamp with the handle and the conical lampshade whose form turns into a witch when you turn out the light. And then there are the ghost stories that our parents and everyone around us tell us to hold the world together. Do this or that will happen. If you don’t do this, then this will happen to you. You can’t do this or that or else. Or else you’ll be homeless, jobless, loveless. Friendless. Or else you’ll go to a bad school, you’ll go to the poorhouse, you’ll go to hell. Or else. Or else.
Ryan, won’t you give me something? You have. Not what my mother intended. Not what Mama Walker would have wanted. You gave it to me when you were seventeen. Neither one of us saw that coming. That was the something.
Ryan, maybe I have to give you something. I may have to reach deep in me and give you something I still haven’t given. Deep down. You might need it. It was probably always for you.
Ryan, what ghost stories did your mother tell you to make you afraid?
2.
So when I was twelve years old I was plunged headlong into the world of Catholicism. My mother didn’t know anything about it. CJ’s religion had never been an issue when she was fucking him. We were Baptists and backslidden. The term Catholics use is non-practicing. You are either in-service or not in service with them. With Baptists you are either going to church and praising the Lord, or you’re going to hell. So the theology differs I suppose.
Florida told me never to trust another woman. Never to trust the opposite sex and to flat out distrust white people. At the time I knew no white people, but I knew this also meant I was to trust no one at all. I trusted Efrem, and every time I called him on the phone or wrote him a letter I had to overcome a sense of guilt, a sense that if I was found out it would all be over.
Then Florida dumped me off at Efrem’s house, having no idea of my relationship with him, only thinking of hers with his father, and she was gone. Suddenly all of the things she told me not to trust I had to trust.
Looking back it wasn’t even hard. It was just a matter of necessity, and then I was tired of not trusting. In a few efficient moves Mama Walker had me going to St. Antonin’s with Efrem every morning, getting used to the plaid skirts and the little ankle socks, the blue cardigan sweaters. I thought they were the most foolish things I’d ever worn in my life, and I didn’t care that everyone else had them on either.
I was not in the same grade with Efrem, so I had no friends in my year. I sat alone at recess. There was a little porch coming off of a part of the church that was locked away and out of use. Kids sat there and talked or sat there and hid. For some loneliness is unendurable, but I had experienced the unendurable already, having no idea it was unendurable and so this was nothing really. I watched the boys on the playground in their blue trousers and white shirts harassing each other and everybody else. I began to pick up on the idea that these white boys were supposed to be scary. But I had already experienced enough scariness in my life. They didn’t hold a candle to Florida sitting in the house, by herself, face ashen, curtains drawn, murmuring into the dark, “Goddamn, Goddamn, Goddamn.”
I wondered where she was sometimes. It never really occured to me that Florida might have gone back to the house in Missouri. It still doesn’t. In my mind Flagg, Missouri evaporated like morning dew when we left it. It didn’t cease to exist. It simply became rarefied. And I never pictured Florida doing anything or having a life after she left me. I never pictured her living in a concrete setting. It was always the way people muse about their dead relatives. I wonder where grandma is. Which really amounts to “I wonder what grandma is now... Now that she isn’t what we call living.”
I never once imagined that she would come back for me.
“CECILE, I HAVE COME TO a juncture in my life,” Virginia O’Muil Weaver informed her old friend, pouring cereal into a bowl.
“I have hit the end of the road, and I mean that in a good way. Get me the milk, dear, would you? Thanks.
“Good way? Yes. I’ll explain. Let me get a bite first. These damn things... They get soggy right away. Chex—now that shit is firm forever. Okay, anyway. Like I was saying. I have come to a juncture.”
“You were saying you had come to the end,” Cecile reached across the table for one of Jinny’s cigarettes.
“Exactly,” Jinny wiped the milk dripping from her lip. “You know how people are always wondering what they should be doing, or wishing they were doing something else or wondering when their life is finally going to start? Shit like that?’
“Like Ryan?”
Jinny raised her eyebrow, and then nodded witheringly and added, “And like you too, Miss Turner.”
Cecile frowned. “Yeah.”
“Well, anyway,” Jinny continued. “I woke up beside Isaac this morning. Have you had one of those moments where your eyes are open, you’ve been awake awhile, but then you blink and it’s like you’ve been dreaming. This whole time you’ve never been here. It’s all been a dream. You’ve been some place else?”
Jinny did not wait for Cecile to verify this experience.
“That’s how I felt. Like I was awake. All of a sudden I felt like, ‘Shit, I’m here!’ Here. Right now. In this moment, with my husband, at our home, living our life and it was like my whole life I’ve been on this road, or been told I was on this road and the destination is THERE. Whatever there was. And I blink, and I’m here. And that’s my juncture. And whatever happens next happens here. It won’t happen next. It will happen in this moment. Everything is in this moment. Time doesn’t stretch on and on like a reel of tape. It’s like one moment, a little pool and you go deeper and deeper and deeper. And everything is in it.”
Cecile was quiet a real long time, and then at last she said, “I don’t remember you being this deep in the past. You were cool. But I don’t remember you being this deep.”
“It must be being Mrs. Weaver. I think I soak it up out of Isaac.”
“You must.”
3.
JINNY CALLED IT PRETTY GIRL/FAT GIRL Syndrome, and she had a point.
I hear that lots of girls kiss their first boys early on. But I didn’t get started until fifth grade. And by then I was starting to learn that a girl or a boy for that matter was popular if someone said they were popular. For some reason I was popular and it was not hidden from Efrem or Mama Walker that I was pretty. It wasn’t hidden from me either because everyone told me I was.
The confession is that I didn’t know what pretty was. I never knew what made a pretty girl. I knew what people told me was pretty on me and I paid them attention because I wanted to stay pretty. What twelve year old girl, if she was blessed enough to be given Pretty, doesn’t want to keep it?
I kissed Leon, the only other Black person in our class. And then I met David whom I loved and who rocked everyone else’s world. He was white as everything, and I was shocked as hell to kiss him. Years later I had a lesbian friend in college and she was telling me about the first time she kissed a girl. How shocked she was, and then how shocked she was by how shocked she wasn’t—how natural it was. That’s the same way I felt the first time I kissed a white boy.
And then I was going out with white boys left and right and all of the nasty jealous things I heard didn’t apply to me. All the girls thought I was the taste just because I was Black. And I was pretty and so I fit into the pretty girl’s circle.
The other Pretty Girls; Amanda, Sara, and Lindsay were not, as you would think, snobs. It was not elitism that brought them together, but a strange outcastness that comes from being pretty. And it was not just us, it was our sidekicks, the Frumps, who were outcasts as well by reason of the fact that no girl could envy them and no boy wanted them
Jinny, who found love and orgasm long before either even bothered to look up my address, Jinny Weaver of the hellcat hair and imperious manner who had every man at Saint Clare’s College drooling in her Freshmen wake... was a frump. She was fat when I met her. It was one of the first things I noticed, next to her being white. I didn’t mind either one as much as I thought I would, but there they were. As the years passed she just got fatter. Hell, if she didn’t mind it, then neither did I.
But I did mind other people getting in our shit.
The other frumps were Wendy Linger, who was actually the first girl I know to have sex, but had the worst skin in the world and never bathed, and Donna Metzger. And there were the boys, Jakob and Efrem and Sean, who refused to play ball and would rather read books and look at leaves and sit by themselves. We were a perfect imperfect little tribe of irregulars.
And then one day Ryan Laujinesse reared his head.
.
“Hey Lumps, didn’t I tell you to move?”
I looked up, at first thinking he was talking to me. I had seen him a few times, but never really thought about him. I knew he was Jinny’s cousin. But I had only been to her house a handful of times, even after knowing her two years. Her cousins were never over there. They seemed to inhabit a different world. So until he said that to Jinny I never thought how he really was her blood, and how treacherous blood could be.
They all made fun of her, but Ryan was the worst because, like I said, he was blood, and I could see Jinny just trembling like Jell-o. She was so round and cute and protected and maybe I remembered being unprotected and friendless because of my blood, twice abandoned, taken in by the Walkers, and then by my friends the first who had been Jinny.
So I turned to my brother as I stood up behind Jinny and I said “Did you hear that, Efrem?”
Efrem, to his credit, stood right up behind me as I talked over Jinny to this boy.
“If my very own family talked to me that way, I wouldn’t think they were much of a family.”
“Who do you think you are?” Ryan glared at me and that was the first time our eyes ever locked. I had never seen so much meanness in one little boy and it shook me through. I was like a bowl of water with a pebble dropped in it. I couldn’t speak and then I felt Efrem’s hand on my shoulder and he said cooly—cause he’s always so damn cool: “She is my sister.”
“I am also the one who can put a foot up your ass.”
I had found my voice again.
“Oh, you’re talking—shit,” Ryan tried to sound mean, but the fact that he cringed, and mouthed the word instead of saying it outloud took some of the impact away from it. It made me bold enough to keep on running my mouth.
“That, I am not, and before you get in my face, you might want to ask, ‘Can you whoop my ass?’ I looked at Ef and added,. “Our ass.”
Efrem didn’t even blink.
Ryan looked over each of us in slow turn. I met him eye for eye.
One boy put a hand on Ryan’s shoulder, “Let it go,” he said.
Ryan, unable to work his rage in any other way, bit his bottom lip and slammed the ball on the ground. He caught it springing up from the blacktop, and then growled to the other boys to follow him onto the fields. I shouted something after him, feeling proud, but Efrem murmured into my ear: “You let it go too, Cecile.”
But the truth is it was hard to let it go. Because what I had felt was that savage electric thrill when I was staring at Ryan, telling him off, when we were staring into each other. I had felt something and it wasn’t desire, but it was close. It was raw feeling. I couldn’t stop looking at him. It had nothing to do with Jinny anymore. I absolutely hated him. I couldn’t stop saying that because we had fought, he had offended my best friend and there was no excuse for me being obsessed with him. But I was obsessed. I noticed his hair, how it went over his collar, how red gold it was in the sun. His green eyes. His laugh. He laughed a lot, and what puzzled me was that though it was a hard laugh, it wasn’t always mean. I watched when he would play dodge ball and bend over. I was, from that first time I sassed him off in the sixth grade, filled with a mad passion for Ryan Jonathan Laujinesse, and had no words to articulate this, and nowhere near enough intellectual honesty to realize it.
SO, I HAVE POSTED THESE WONDERFUL STORIES FOR YOU, AND NOW YOU GET TO RETURN THE FAVOR WITH THREE QUESTIONS. THREE AND NOTHING LESS. MORE CECILE TOMORROW NIGHT.
I am old enough now to realize that I am afraid because I believe everything a woman who abandoned me before my first period told me. You can’t trust white people or Black people and apparently there is no one else between those two. The world, every hand and ever tree and stone is turned against you. The clouds themselves are hostile.
I separate from Ryan and lay on my back. Thinking logically, clearly, I can honestly say that there is nothing in my experience to bear that out, so why the hell am I afraid?
Lightly I touch Ryan’s hair.
There are the ghost stories from childhood about bogeymen under the bed, about Mojo Ladies coming to get you if you’re bad, goblins carrying you off. The ghost that cries if you step on the seventh step when you’re going up to your bedroom. The tall lamp with the handle and the conical lampshade whose form turns into a witch when you turn out the light. And then there are the ghost stories that our parents and everyone around us tell us to hold the world together. Do this or that will happen. If you don’t do this, then this will happen to you. You can’t do this or that or else. Or else you’ll be homeless, jobless, loveless. Friendless. Or else you’ll go to a bad school, you’ll go to the poorhouse, you’ll go to hell. Or else. Or else.
Ryan, won’t you give me something? You have. Not what my mother intended. Not what Mama Walker would have wanted. You gave it to me when you were seventeen. Neither one of us saw that coming. That was the something.
Ryan, maybe I have to give you something. I may have to reach deep in me and give you something I still haven’t given. Deep down. You might need it. It was probably always for you.
Ryan, what ghost stories did your mother tell you to make you afraid?
2.
So when I was twelve years old I was plunged headlong into the world of Catholicism. My mother didn’t know anything about it. CJ’s religion had never been an issue when she was fucking him. We were Baptists and backslidden. The term Catholics use is non-practicing. You are either in-service or not in service with them. With Baptists you are either going to church and praising the Lord, or you’re going to hell. So the theology differs I suppose.
Florida told me never to trust another woman. Never to trust the opposite sex and to flat out distrust white people. At the time I knew no white people, but I knew this also meant I was to trust no one at all. I trusted Efrem, and every time I called him on the phone or wrote him a letter I had to overcome a sense of guilt, a sense that if I was found out it would all be over.
Then Florida dumped me off at Efrem’s house, having no idea of my relationship with him, only thinking of hers with his father, and she was gone. Suddenly all of the things she told me not to trust I had to trust.
Looking back it wasn’t even hard. It was just a matter of necessity, and then I was tired of not trusting. In a few efficient moves Mama Walker had me going to St. Antonin’s with Efrem every morning, getting used to the plaid skirts and the little ankle socks, the blue cardigan sweaters. I thought they were the most foolish things I’d ever worn in my life, and I didn’t care that everyone else had them on either.
I was not in the same grade with Efrem, so I had no friends in my year. I sat alone at recess. There was a little porch coming off of a part of the church that was locked away and out of use. Kids sat there and talked or sat there and hid. For some loneliness is unendurable, but I had experienced the unendurable already, having no idea it was unendurable and so this was nothing really. I watched the boys on the playground in their blue trousers and white shirts harassing each other and everybody else. I began to pick up on the idea that these white boys were supposed to be scary. But I had already experienced enough scariness in my life. They didn’t hold a candle to Florida sitting in the house, by herself, face ashen, curtains drawn, murmuring into the dark, “Goddamn, Goddamn, Goddamn.”
I wondered where she was sometimes. It never really occured to me that Florida might have gone back to the house in Missouri. It still doesn’t. In my mind Flagg, Missouri evaporated like morning dew when we left it. It didn’t cease to exist. It simply became rarefied. And I never pictured Florida doing anything or having a life after she left me. I never pictured her living in a concrete setting. It was always the way people muse about their dead relatives. I wonder where grandma is. Which really amounts to “I wonder what grandma is now... Now that she isn’t what we call living.”
I never once imagined that she would come back for me.
“CECILE, I HAVE COME TO a juncture in my life,” Virginia O’Muil Weaver informed her old friend, pouring cereal into a bowl.
“I have hit the end of the road, and I mean that in a good way. Get me the milk, dear, would you? Thanks.
“Good way? Yes. I’ll explain. Let me get a bite first. These damn things... They get soggy right away. Chex—now that shit is firm forever. Okay, anyway. Like I was saying. I have come to a juncture.”
“You were saying you had come to the end,” Cecile reached across the table for one of Jinny’s cigarettes.
“Exactly,” Jinny wiped the milk dripping from her lip. “You know how people are always wondering what they should be doing, or wishing they were doing something else or wondering when their life is finally going to start? Shit like that?’
“Like Ryan?”
Jinny raised her eyebrow, and then nodded witheringly and added, “And like you too, Miss Turner.”
Cecile frowned. “Yeah.”
“Well, anyway,” Jinny continued. “I woke up beside Isaac this morning. Have you had one of those moments where your eyes are open, you’ve been awake awhile, but then you blink and it’s like you’ve been dreaming. This whole time you’ve never been here. It’s all been a dream. You’ve been some place else?”
Jinny did not wait for Cecile to verify this experience.
“That’s how I felt. Like I was awake. All of a sudden I felt like, ‘Shit, I’m here!’ Here. Right now. In this moment, with my husband, at our home, living our life and it was like my whole life I’ve been on this road, or been told I was on this road and the destination is THERE. Whatever there was. And I blink, and I’m here. And that’s my juncture. And whatever happens next happens here. It won’t happen next. It will happen in this moment. Everything is in this moment. Time doesn’t stretch on and on like a reel of tape. It’s like one moment, a little pool and you go deeper and deeper and deeper. And everything is in it.”
Cecile was quiet a real long time, and then at last she said, “I don’t remember you being this deep in the past. You were cool. But I don’t remember you being this deep.”
“It must be being Mrs. Weaver. I think I soak it up out of Isaac.”
“You must.”
3.
JINNY CALLED IT PRETTY GIRL/FAT GIRL Syndrome, and she had a point.
I hear that lots of girls kiss their first boys early on. But I didn’t get started until fifth grade. And by then I was starting to learn that a girl or a boy for that matter was popular if someone said they were popular. For some reason I was popular and it was not hidden from Efrem or Mama Walker that I was pretty. It wasn’t hidden from me either because everyone told me I was.
The confession is that I didn’t know what pretty was. I never knew what made a pretty girl. I knew what people told me was pretty on me and I paid them attention because I wanted to stay pretty. What twelve year old girl, if she was blessed enough to be given Pretty, doesn’t want to keep it?
I kissed Leon, the only other Black person in our class. And then I met David whom I loved and who rocked everyone else’s world. He was white as everything, and I was shocked as hell to kiss him. Years later I had a lesbian friend in college and she was telling me about the first time she kissed a girl. How shocked she was, and then how shocked she was by how shocked she wasn’t—how natural it was. That’s the same way I felt the first time I kissed a white boy.
And then I was going out with white boys left and right and all of the nasty jealous things I heard didn’t apply to me. All the girls thought I was the taste just because I was Black. And I was pretty and so I fit into the pretty girl’s circle.
The other Pretty Girls; Amanda, Sara, and Lindsay were not, as you would think, snobs. It was not elitism that brought them together, but a strange outcastness that comes from being pretty. And it was not just us, it was our sidekicks, the Frumps, who were outcasts as well by reason of the fact that no girl could envy them and no boy wanted them
Jinny, who found love and orgasm long before either even bothered to look up my address, Jinny Weaver of the hellcat hair and imperious manner who had every man at Saint Clare’s College drooling in her Freshmen wake... was a frump. She was fat when I met her. It was one of the first things I noticed, next to her being white. I didn’t mind either one as much as I thought I would, but there they were. As the years passed she just got fatter. Hell, if she didn’t mind it, then neither did I.
But I did mind other people getting in our shit.
The other frumps were Wendy Linger, who was actually the first girl I know to have sex, but had the worst skin in the world and never bathed, and Donna Metzger. And there were the boys, Jakob and Efrem and Sean, who refused to play ball and would rather read books and look at leaves and sit by themselves. We were a perfect imperfect little tribe of irregulars.
And then one day Ryan Laujinesse reared his head.
.
“Hey Lumps, didn’t I tell you to move?”
I looked up, at first thinking he was talking to me. I had seen him a few times, but never really thought about him. I knew he was Jinny’s cousin. But I had only been to her house a handful of times, even after knowing her two years. Her cousins were never over there. They seemed to inhabit a different world. So until he said that to Jinny I never thought how he really was her blood, and how treacherous blood could be.
They all made fun of her, but Ryan was the worst because, like I said, he was blood, and I could see Jinny just trembling like Jell-o. She was so round and cute and protected and maybe I remembered being unprotected and friendless because of my blood, twice abandoned, taken in by the Walkers, and then by my friends the first who had been Jinny.
So I turned to my brother as I stood up behind Jinny and I said “Did you hear that, Efrem?”
Efrem, to his credit, stood right up behind me as I talked over Jinny to this boy.
“If my very own family talked to me that way, I wouldn’t think they were much of a family.”
“Who do you think you are?” Ryan glared at me and that was the first time our eyes ever locked. I had never seen so much meanness in one little boy and it shook me through. I was like a bowl of water with a pebble dropped in it. I couldn’t speak and then I felt Efrem’s hand on my shoulder and he said cooly—cause he’s always so damn cool: “She is my sister.”
“I am also the one who can put a foot up your ass.”
I had found my voice again.
“Oh, you’re talking—shit,” Ryan tried to sound mean, but the fact that he cringed, and mouthed the word instead of saying it outloud took some of the impact away from it. It made me bold enough to keep on running my mouth.
“That, I am not, and before you get in my face, you might want to ask, ‘Can you whoop my ass?’ I looked at Ef and added,. “Our ass.”
Efrem didn’t even blink.
Ryan looked over each of us in slow turn. I met him eye for eye.
One boy put a hand on Ryan’s shoulder, “Let it go,” he said.
Ryan, unable to work his rage in any other way, bit his bottom lip and slammed the ball on the ground. He caught it springing up from the blacktop, and then growled to the other boys to follow him onto the fields. I shouted something after him, feeling proud, but Efrem murmured into my ear: “You let it go too, Cecile.”
But the truth is it was hard to let it go. Because what I had felt was that savage electric thrill when I was staring at Ryan, telling him off, when we were staring into each other. I had felt something and it wasn’t desire, but it was close. It was raw feeling. I couldn’t stop looking at him. It had nothing to do with Jinny anymore. I absolutely hated him. I couldn’t stop saying that because we had fought, he had offended my best friend and there was no excuse for me being obsessed with him. But I was obsessed. I noticed his hair, how it went over his collar, how red gold it was in the sun. His green eyes. His laugh. He laughed a lot, and what puzzled me was that though it was a hard laugh, it wasn’t always mean. I watched when he would play dodge ball and bend over. I was, from that first time I sassed him off in the sixth grade, filled with a mad passion for Ryan Jonathan Laujinesse, and had no words to articulate this, and nowhere near enough intellectual honesty to realize it.
SO, I HAVE POSTED THESE WONDERFUL STORIES FOR YOU, AND NOW YOU GET TO RETURN THE FAVOR WITH THREE QUESTIONS. THREE AND NOTHING LESS. MORE CECILE TOMORROW NIGHT.
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
What or who are Mojo ladies? I have never heard of them. Will Jinny ever find some satisfaction or happiness with her life? I mean I know what happens with Isaac but I can't remember if we find out what happens to her. Will we get a lot more of Ryan? I find him interesting. That was some great writing and I look forward to more tomorrow! Have a great week!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Good morning.
1. Mojo ladies are actually women who practice mojo--or magic in the context of a Black community--witches. But when I was growing up, if my mother got tired of me, she would tell me the Mojo Lady was coming and she took little children to hell, so forme, growing up, the Mojo Lady was a demon you threatened children with, like Krampus or the Boogie Man.
I need to repost the story Baptism and repost the final story of Efrem and Isaac. These stories were written over many years and it was only later, after I had experienced my queer life that I realized Isaac and Efrem were in love. So what i'm saying is the stories you first read are newer than what you are reading now. Once I put them together, then I rewrote Jinny's story, but you haven't read what happens to her yet, and that will answer your question about if she finds happiness.
3. There is going to be a lot of Ryan, because Ryan is The Coloussus of Rhodes ore or less. He is a large inspiration for the whole existence of the story.
1. Mojo ladies are actually women who practice mojo--or magic in the context of a Black community--witches. But when I was growing up, if my mother got tired of me, she would tell me the Mojo Lady was coming and she took little children to hell, so forme, growing up, the Mojo Lady was a demon you threatened children with, like Krampus or the Boogie Man.
I need to repost the story Baptism and repost the final story of Efrem and Isaac. These stories were written over many years and it was only later, after I had experienced my queer life that I realized Isaac and Efrem were in love. So what i'm saying is the stories you first read are newer than what you are reading now. Once I put them together, then I rewrote Jinny's story, but you haven't read what happens to her yet, and that will answer your question about if she finds happiness.
3. There is going to be a lot of Ryan, because Ryan is The Coloussus of Rhodes ore or less. He is a large inspiration for the whole existence of the story.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
When I was fourteen I went on a quest. Not for the Holy Grail, that would have been easy, and what the fuck did I need a chalice for anyway? I was in Weaver’s bookstore and if that hadn’t happened who knows how different all of our lives would be? I had met the loneliest, strangest boy in the world and already thought, ‘What he needs is Jinny and what Jinny needs is him!’ It’s amazing, I have never known what I need, but I can link up two people in a heartbeat. I’ve often wondered why I never linked him and Efrem together and I think its because they didn’t need each other at the time. Efrem certainly didn’t seem to be in need of anyone though I think he thought he was. And when the time came it was like God himself glued those two together.
But anyway, I had matched up Isaac and Jinny and now we were all going to Whitman. Jinny followed Isaac and I followed Jinny, but Efrem stayed at Saint Jude. The someone else who was coming to Whitman shocked the shit out of me. Jinny told me one night at her house. She was absolutely desolate, and I could understand why.
“You should tell Aunt Catherine no!” Anne demanded. She was ten at the time and believed such things were possible. Then she added, “I would never let Jayson go to high school with me.” She couldn’t wait until high school when he went his way and she went hers to Little Flower. Anne understood almost perfectly how Jinny felt about Ryan. But not perfectly because she was only annoyed by Jayson. Jinny actually feared her cousin.
Out of loyalty to her I never looked for him so even though she pointed him out one day I didn’t pay attention. The day I finally saw him, he pointed himself out to us. I was dating Larry Marsh at the time and Jinny was on her way to a class with Isaac.
“Hey cuz,” Ryan said, and as he introduced Jinny to all of his basketball friends I couldn’t get over how nice he was. It was as if he’d sprouted a tail... or a halo.
“And this is the girl who almost kicked my ass,” he said so warmly I really did think it was time to check my temperature, and then he started telling all of these guys—who I knew—about me and they were all murmuring, “Um hum, that’s Cile.”
When he was gone we both stood there in amazement. It was like the scent of flowers after they’re taken away. Jinny said, “We have to go to class.” And all I could think of was the way he laughed and and the way he walked. His smile, how tall he was, the fact that I had never known a white boy to be fine and now that I didn’t have to hate him, there was part of me admitting he was fine to me. But there was something more. It was like I should have known him. Like we ought to be friends and I kept pushing that under my brain.
Like an ice cube in a glass of lemonade it kept bobbing back up.
One day in May, toward the end of our sophomore year, Jinny came to me all red and flustered and grabbed my hands. I thought she was about to tell me she’d finally had sex. God knows she and Isaac were doiing everything else legal and illegal.
“What, girl!” I said.
“I’ll tell you something, but you have to promise not to tell anymone I told you!”
“Now, you’re just being stupid,” I snapped.
“Ryan likes you. He told me. He told me and he said he’ll kill me if I tell you so you can’t tell because... He’ll kill me!”
Jinny expected me to laugh. I schooled my face to do absolutely nothing, but we’d been friends for years now and she said, “Oh, my God, Cile!”
“What?” my voice was harsh.
At first she looked devastated, unbelieving. Then, suddenly Jinny laughed and started clapping her hands and rolling her fat ass on the floor.
“What?” I was louder.
“Oh, my God, Cile! You like him too!”
“”Shut up! I do not.”
“You do! You do!”
“I don’t. I should hit you.”
But the more I said I didn’t, the more it was becoming apparent I did and then I said, “Well if he likes me so much, why doesn’t he ask me out?”
“Because you’re with Larry,” Jinny said, simply.
So I was.
__________________
Ryan turned to me in bed that night.
“Do you know what Ef said?”
“No, but I’m sure it shocked the hell out you.”
“He told me that maybe I had everything I needed to do whatever I wanted and if I didn’t do what I wanted he didn’t feel sorry for me at all. There was no excuse for me not to do whatever I wanted.”
“Well, now that’s one hell of a point.”
“Yes… But it does have one flaw.”
He lay on his back again, the mattress crunched beneath him.
“It really doesn’t take into account the fact that growing up... no one really asks you what you want. And sometimes the better you have it, the richer you are, the more people tell you what you should do and what you will be... the less you have any clue that there even is a real you. And if there is no you... How in the hell can you possibly know what you want?”
Sara Gallagher is back in town. She called the house, but I wasn’t there. And then she called over to Jinny’s parents she didn’t even know Jinny was married. When she learned she called over here.
Sara is the last of the Pretty Girls from Saint Antonin’s, the one we always see. She has been in Atlanta for some time with the family of the father of her child. They are Black. She is not. It was time to come back. She is reconciled to the fact that Bobby will never marry her and Bobby managed to have her raise his kid while he went to Saint Jude’s and then onto college and then onto graduate school while working at that nice law firm in Raleigh.
“I don’t give a shit what they tell you about the plight of the Black man,” Sara says when we get to her house, “that motherfucker has gone off and built a life while I’ve been living with my mother, raising his child. And he probably tells the bitch he’s fucking that he’s got a kid, and she’s probably really sympathetic. I bet it’s a plus for him. She probably thinks, oh he’s a father. No. He’s an irresponsible…” she muttered a curse. “And the mother of his kid is sitting up here in Rhodes not even able to dream of a date.”
Then she adds, “Motherfucker.”
Sara lives over on Amhurst, which is on the southern side of Aramy Sreet. A bunch of little white saltbox houses set on little hills, the kind of neighborhood you’d expect the paper boy to come riding through at any moment. She still looks good. It would never be like Sara to let herself go. After she had Christopher, (Bobby wanted to name him Trashon, but Sara said hell no to that) she was a little on the dumpy side, naturally. Seventeen and all. But even then her face was still beautiful. Sara is ivory colored and smooth skinned with wide caramel eyes. She’s golden really, and her hair is crinkly and down to her shoulders and even when she’s angry, she looks like she doesn’t mean it like, oh hell, it’s just easier to feel sweet and happy.
I think she used to mess with Ryan which is a nice way to say I’m sure she messed with Ryan, which is a nice way to say I know they fucked each other for a while. She is gracious enough not to say it, even though there’s no reason she shouldn’t have. I was completely out of the picture at the time.
“So you finally married Isaac,” she said to Jinny.
“Finally? I’m only twenty-four.”
“Yeah, but you’ve been with him since you were thirteen. Damn, Jinny, you do look good.”
“What about me?”
“Cecile, that’s not news. You have never not looked good.”
“Now, Sara Gallagher that’s bullshit and you know it. You know I know it.”
“She’s with Ryan now,” Jinny said.
“What?”
I said nothing. Just look at both of them.
“Well, now that is about time too. Are you really with him?” Sara said, “or is it that on again off again shit from back in the day?”
“Naw, girl,” I told her. “It’s the real deal.”
“I start at City in the fall,” Sara told us. “Girls, I can almost taste that degree. I remember how much I hated school. I can’t wait now.”
“Isaac didn’t like City.”
“Isaac could afford not to like City,” Sara said plainly. “And what about Ryan? What’s he gonna do?”
“He’s looking for himself,” I said, realizing how snotty my voice was. I’d always felt sympathetic about him until now, sitting across from Sara.
“Really?” she said.
“It’s hard for him,” Jinny said now. “Not knowing what he wants, who he is.”
“Man,” Sara said now, “if he wants hard he should have a seven year old, and a mother always saying ‘I told you so,’ and then try to get his degree and work full time at City.”
She was quiet for a moment, and then Sara said, “Still, it’s all the same isn’t it? I mean I did do this to myself. And one day... when I’m not hustling anymore I’ll have to worry about all of that too, won’t I? I worry about it now. It’s just that now I may not know who I am, but I know who I have to be. Christopher needs me to be his mother.
“You know what? You were lucky or smart, Cecile, because we’re the same in one way. Jinny, you weren’t. You bloomed late. But you and me, Cile, were the pretty ones everybody wanted and I think you felt the same way I did.”
“About?”
“About men,” she said flatly. “Tell me truly, don’t be embarassed, not when I’ve known you since before your first period. How long was it before you realized that our mothers were wrong, and we were turning into our mothers? How long before you realized you didn’t have to pe pretty and you didn’t have to have a man?”
I look at her, not in malice, but in amazement. So many people thought Sara Gallagher, pretty and simple looking, was stupid. And she wasn’t up for philosophy and shit like that. But she always saw straight through everything but men and herself. She always cut to the quick. Now she sees straight through everything including men, herself and myself and I am amazed as hell.
TWO QUESTIONS, THEY CAN BE ALL ABOUT THIS STORY, ALL ABOUT THE OTHER STORY OR WHATEVER. AND..... TOMORROW WE'VE GOT TO GET BACK TO WARM DARK STONE
But anyway, I had matched up Isaac and Jinny and now we were all going to Whitman. Jinny followed Isaac and I followed Jinny, but Efrem stayed at Saint Jude. The someone else who was coming to Whitman shocked the shit out of me. Jinny told me one night at her house. She was absolutely desolate, and I could understand why.
“You should tell Aunt Catherine no!” Anne demanded. She was ten at the time and believed such things were possible. Then she added, “I would never let Jayson go to high school with me.” She couldn’t wait until high school when he went his way and she went hers to Little Flower. Anne understood almost perfectly how Jinny felt about Ryan. But not perfectly because she was only annoyed by Jayson. Jinny actually feared her cousin.
Out of loyalty to her I never looked for him so even though she pointed him out one day I didn’t pay attention. The day I finally saw him, he pointed himself out to us. I was dating Larry Marsh at the time and Jinny was on her way to a class with Isaac.
“Hey cuz,” Ryan said, and as he introduced Jinny to all of his basketball friends I couldn’t get over how nice he was. It was as if he’d sprouted a tail... or a halo.
“And this is the girl who almost kicked my ass,” he said so warmly I really did think it was time to check my temperature, and then he started telling all of these guys—who I knew—about me and they were all murmuring, “Um hum, that’s Cile.”
When he was gone we both stood there in amazement. It was like the scent of flowers after they’re taken away. Jinny said, “We have to go to class.” And all I could think of was the way he laughed and and the way he walked. His smile, how tall he was, the fact that I had never known a white boy to be fine and now that I didn’t have to hate him, there was part of me admitting he was fine to me. But there was something more. It was like I should have known him. Like we ought to be friends and I kept pushing that under my brain.
Like an ice cube in a glass of lemonade it kept bobbing back up.
One day in May, toward the end of our sophomore year, Jinny came to me all red and flustered and grabbed my hands. I thought she was about to tell me she’d finally had sex. God knows she and Isaac were doiing everything else legal and illegal.
“What, girl!” I said.
“I’ll tell you something, but you have to promise not to tell anymone I told you!”
“Now, you’re just being stupid,” I snapped.
“Ryan likes you. He told me. He told me and he said he’ll kill me if I tell you so you can’t tell because... He’ll kill me!”
Jinny expected me to laugh. I schooled my face to do absolutely nothing, but we’d been friends for years now and she said, “Oh, my God, Cile!”
“What?” my voice was harsh.
At first she looked devastated, unbelieving. Then, suddenly Jinny laughed and started clapping her hands and rolling her fat ass on the floor.
“What?” I was louder.
“Oh, my God, Cile! You like him too!”
“”Shut up! I do not.”
“You do! You do!”
“I don’t. I should hit you.”
But the more I said I didn’t, the more it was becoming apparent I did and then I said, “Well if he likes me so much, why doesn’t he ask me out?”
“Because you’re with Larry,” Jinny said, simply.
So I was.
__________________
Ryan turned to me in bed that night.
“Do you know what Ef said?”
“No, but I’m sure it shocked the hell out you.”
“He told me that maybe I had everything I needed to do whatever I wanted and if I didn’t do what I wanted he didn’t feel sorry for me at all. There was no excuse for me not to do whatever I wanted.”
“Well, now that’s one hell of a point.”
“Yes… But it does have one flaw.”
He lay on his back again, the mattress crunched beneath him.
“It really doesn’t take into account the fact that growing up... no one really asks you what you want. And sometimes the better you have it, the richer you are, the more people tell you what you should do and what you will be... the less you have any clue that there even is a real you. And if there is no you... How in the hell can you possibly know what you want?”
Sara Gallagher is back in town. She called the house, but I wasn’t there. And then she called over to Jinny’s parents she didn’t even know Jinny was married. When she learned she called over here.
Sara is the last of the Pretty Girls from Saint Antonin’s, the one we always see. She has been in Atlanta for some time with the family of the father of her child. They are Black. She is not. It was time to come back. She is reconciled to the fact that Bobby will never marry her and Bobby managed to have her raise his kid while he went to Saint Jude’s and then onto college and then onto graduate school while working at that nice law firm in Raleigh.
“I don’t give a shit what they tell you about the plight of the Black man,” Sara says when we get to her house, “that motherfucker has gone off and built a life while I’ve been living with my mother, raising his child. And he probably tells the bitch he’s fucking that he’s got a kid, and she’s probably really sympathetic. I bet it’s a plus for him. She probably thinks, oh he’s a father. No. He’s an irresponsible…” she muttered a curse. “And the mother of his kid is sitting up here in Rhodes not even able to dream of a date.”
Then she adds, “Motherfucker.”
Sara lives over on Amhurst, which is on the southern side of Aramy Sreet. A bunch of little white saltbox houses set on little hills, the kind of neighborhood you’d expect the paper boy to come riding through at any moment. She still looks good. It would never be like Sara to let herself go. After she had Christopher, (Bobby wanted to name him Trashon, but Sara said hell no to that) she was a little on the dumpy side, naturally. Seventeen and all. But even then her face was still beautiful. Sara is ivory colored and smooth skinned with wide caramel eyes. She’s golden really, and her hair is crinkly and down to her shoulders and even when she’s angry, she looks like she doesn’t mean it like, oh hell, it’s just easier to feel sweet and happy.
I think she used to mess with Ryan which is a nice way to say I’m sure she messed with Ryan, which is a nice way to say I know they fucked each other for a while. She is gracious enough not to say it, even though there’s no reason she shouldn’t have. I was completely out of the picture at the time.
“So you finally married Isaac,” she said to Jinny.
“Finally? I’m only twenty-four.”
“Yeah, but you’ve been with him since you were thirteen. Damn, Jinny, you do look good.”
“What about me?”
“Cecile, that’s not news. You have never not looked good.”
“Now, Sara Gallagher that’s bullshit and you know it. You know I know it.”
“She’s with Ryan now,” Jinny said.
“What?”
I said nothing. Just look at both of them.
“Well, now that is about time too. Are you really with him?” Sara said, “or is it that on again off again shit from back in the day?”
“Naw, girl,” I told her. “It’s the real deal.”
“I start at City in the fall,” Sara told us. “Girls, I can almost taste that degree. I remember how much I hated school. I can’t wait now.”
“Isaac didn’t like City.”
“Isaac could afford not to like City,” Sara said plainly. “And what about Ryan? What’s he gonna do?”
“He’s looking for himself,” I said, realizing how snotty my voice was. I’d always felt sympathetic about him until now, sitting across from Sara.
“Really?” she said.
“It’s hard for him,” Jinny said now. “Not knowing what he wants, who he is.”
“Man,” Sara said now, “if he wants hard he should have a seven year old, and a mother always saying ‘I told you so,’ and then try to get his degree and work full time at City.”
She was quiet for a moment, and then Sara said, “Still, it’s all the same isn’t it? I mean I did do this to myself. And one day... when I’m not hustling anymore I’ll have to worry about all of that too, won’t I? I worry about it now. It’s just that now I may not know who I am, but I know who I have to be. Christopher needs me to be his mother.
“You know what? You were lucky or smart, Cecile, because we’re the same in one way. Jinny, you weren’t. You bloomed late. But you and me, Cile, were the pretty ones everybody wanted and I think you felt the same way I did.”
“About?”
“About men,” she said flatly. “Tell me truly, don’t be embarassed, not when I’ve known you since before your first period. How long was it before you realized that our mothers were wrong, and we were turning into our mothers? How long before you realized you didn’t have to pe pretty and you didn’t have to have a man?”
I look at her, not in malice, but in amazement. So many people thought Sara Gallagher, pretty and simple looking, was stupid. And she wasn’t up for philosophy and shit like that. But she always saw straight through everything but men and herself. She always cut to the quick. Now she sees straight through everything including men, herself and myself and I am amazed as hell.
TWO QUESTIONS, THEY CAN BE ALL ABOUT THIS STORY, ALL ABOUT THE OTHER STORY OR WHATEVER. AND..... TOMORROW WE'VE GOT TO GET BACK TO WARM DARK STONE
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
How far are we through this story? Will we see a lot more of Sara? Excellent writing as always and I look forward to Warm Dark Stone tomorrow!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
We are actually not even half way through. This is a shorter story, though. We will see Sara, but she is not a main character. Thank you, and more Warm Dark Stone tomorrow night. Time to see what Cade is up to.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
CECILE CONTINUED
In time I would be called a player. But when I was with Larry I was just his girlfriend. Sara was so right. Later on I was interested in evening up the sexual score. If a man could be a dog, then I could be the bitch to match. No, not a bitch, a woman. I learned to love men. The impulse, the strange shudder that went through my twelve year old body the first time I saw Ryan, that I didn’t know what to do with, I learned what to do with. I learned very well how to seduce a man and play a man and take a man and drop a man. I learned how to squeeze every drop of pleasure from a man that I could. And when I was done, then I learned to throw his ass away. His used up ass.
And this meant that I learned to become a user.
It is not hard to see that I did a little damage to myself in the process.
Lately, I am becoming conscious of a lot. Mostly myself. It does feel like waking up, and I’m not sure it’s always a good feeling. I think, “I have taught myself to be a real fool. I have done some really foolish things.”
But when I was with Larry I was foolish to the other extreme. I was so… innocent. Maybe stupid’s a better word. He told me how much he loved me, and I think he thought he meant it. He wanted to be with me so. He had to be with me. Our bodies had to commune. Jinny and Isaac never had this sort of talk. For one, they were already messing around in ways inconceivable. But, also, Isaac was never a player. He always loved Jinny, and then she was Catholic. So was I now. But she believed in it. She came from generations of belief mixed with fear, and when we were sixteen and seventeen she could no more have sex before marriage than jump from the top of a roller coaster at Cedar Point.
But I did not believe in anything. Not strongly. I wasn’t like Efrem. I didn’t feel God. I don’t suppose it’s that I didn’t believe that God loved me. Maybe that’s all I believed. I didn’t believe in all the imagery they handed me in school. That kind of God, some white man in a pink nightie with a long beard staring all fierce into my window trying to figure out what I did in my bedroom, I couldn’t believe in. If God loved me it was a far off love. Larry’s was right here, and it was warm.
I wasn’t fool enough to tell Mama Walker I had had sex. I told Efrem, because I had too. He tried to be unshockable, but he hadn’t gained the poker face he has now. And I talked about how beautiful it was. I wrote about the beauty of lovemaking in my journal and the specialness of my unity with Larry.
And then three months later he said he could not commit to this, and dropped my ass.
Looking back honestly on this relationship, I can say that losing my virginity consisted of me on my back in Larry’s smelly bedroom, feeling uncomfortable while he struggled on me and gasped, and then collapsed and kissed me and told me I was beautiful. Meanwhile I was laying there going, “What the fuck was that?”
And then came Tommy and Greg, one after the other. Because when virginity is gone it’s gone, and I had entered a new world. I did not and do not believe in those secondary virgins, in pushing back the clock and being a maiden again. It was gone. It had been taken, and now I was hoping I might find a good man.
I had had three men, three bad sex partners by the time I was a junior. I was breaking up with Greg. Almost as soon as I told him goodbye, the phone rang and someone said, “I hear you’re not seeing Greg. You wanna go out sometime?”
It was Ryan Laujinesse.
“Do you mind?” I asked Sara.
“Mind what?” She seemed completely oblivious.
“Me going out with Ryan?”
“What?” She blew it off. “No, Cecile. I forgot all about Ryan. Do you mind me going out with Bobby?”
“Who?”
“Exactly.”
Sara and Amanda had stayed at Little Flower after I left, and while I was living on the other end of town, out near the University, they were in the same neighborhood with Ryan. He didn’t transfer to Whitman until this year, and so he’d been at Saint Jude’s, and the girls from Little Flower went to St. Jude dances, cheerled (cheerleaded?) for St. Jude’s and acted in their musicals. Sara had a lot of exposure to Ryan. She had a lot of exposure to everyone, but she and Ryan had been something to each other for a little bit, and he hadn’t said a word about me since last year when I was with Larry. He’d gone on his merry way through a merry string of girls. Sara was the last of them, the one who had actually been the most enduring. Still, they hadn’t really broken up because they hadn’t really been together.
So I was on the phone with Ryan, attempting to play it cool, and then the attempt turned into the real thing because there was such a flood of different emotions and questions pouring into my head that they more or less met in the middle and turned into something lukewarm.
“I know I should have come up with a better way to ask you,” he was saying. “But words aren’t really my strong suit. And I told Jinny not to tell you so you wouldn’t know this, but I’ve sort of been interested in you for a while now, and I couldn’t do anything about it. You were with Larry. Then with Greg.”
“And now you think you can?” I said when I could string two words together.
“Huh?” he sounded quiet and dumb and hopelessly white.
“And now you think you can do something about it? About me?”
“I uh,” Ryan seemed very unsure of what he was trying to say, which really surprised me.
“Did I say something wrong?” he said, suddenly.
“No, sir,” I said, and wondered where Florida Turner’s voice had come from. “But I thought you were with Sara.” I wanted to hear from his own lips that he wasn’t.
“Naw. Umh—I mean, no. She’s nice and all. Isn’t she? She’s your friend, right?”
“Yes. Next to your cousin, none better.”
“Yeah, she is nice. But no. It didn’t work out. Anyways, she’s doing real good without me. She’s with Bobby. Seeing him.”
“When you wanna go out?” I said, all at once.
“What?” Ryan said again
“That’s what you called for? When do you want to go out?”
“What about Friday? I got a basketball game. We play Anthony Wayne. And then after the game I’ll come and get you. How’s that?”
“That’s great. Do you know where I live?”
“On the northwest side, right? In the Melbourne.”
“Yeah, but you might need something a little more specific than that.”
For the first time he laughed.
When I got off the phone I came downstairs and told Efrem, “I got a date!”
“And my skin is black. What’s new?” he said, looking up from his Latin book. Then his face changed and he pushed up his glasses.
Now it was me who said, “What?”
“It’s Ryan Laujinesse. Isn’t it?”
“Well, hell, Ef. What if it is?”
On Friday night I went to answer the door, and then stopped and called up the stairs.
Efrem peeked down.
“What?” he said.
I started to talk. The doorbell rang again. I ran to the stairs and said, “I can’t open the door for myself.”
The doorbell rang once more.
“I need to make an entrance.”
I ran up the stairs while Efrem ran down, and then a moment later I heard Efrem talking to Ryan and I remembered that the two of them knew each other.
“Let me see if she’s ready,” I heard Efrem say, and I could have kissed him.
Then after he had come up the stairs, he smacked me on the ass and sent me down, heading off to his room.
“Oh, my,” I said sucking in my breath.
“Is it too much?” Ryan said. “I had to raid my closet and bring out the Catholic school clothes.”
“No, not too much.”
He was in black trousers and a brown jacket that fit well at the shoulders. His copper colored hair was combed back and freshly washed. He held out flowers. He didn’t look awkward like even the best looking high school guys do in suits. He looked just right, and natural, and it was odd to have Ryan standing in my house handsome and eager. He handed the flowers to me and said, “You should put these in water right away.”
“What cemetery did you steal these from?” I wondered out loud, taking the roses to the kitchen.
Ryan, who had been hanging at the open door because I hadn’t had the sense to tell him to come in, followed me.
“Oh, I didn’t steal them,” he said, and from the kitchen I heard someone laughing at the top of the stairs. And then Ryan turned red.
“Oh,” he said. “You were joking.”
Now I wanted to laugh.
MORE TOMORROW NIGHT
In time I would be called a player. But when I was with Larry I was just his girlfriend. Sara was so right. Later on I was interested in evening up the sexual score. If a man could be a dog, then I could be the bitch to match. No, not a bitch, a woman. I learned to love men. The impulse, the strange shudder that went through my twelve year old body the first time I saw Ryan, that I didn’t know what to do with, I learned what to do with. I learned very well how to seduce a man and play a man and take a man and drop a man. I learned how to squeeze every drop of pleasure from a man that I could. And when I was done, then I learned to throw his ass away. His used up ass.
And this meant that I learned to become a user.
It is not hard to see that I did a little damage to myself in the process.
Lately, I am becoming conscious of a lot. Mostly myself. It does feel like waking up, and I’m not sure it’s always a good feeling. I think, “I have taught myself to be a real fool. I have done some really foolish things.”
But when I was with Larry I was foolish to the other extreme. I was so… innocent. Maybe stupid’s a better word. He told me how much he loved me, and I think he thought he meant it. He wanted to be with me so. He had to be with me. Our bodies had to commune. Jinny and Isaac never had this sort of talk. For one, they were already messing around in ways inconceivable. But, also, Isaac was never a player. He always loved Jinny, and then she was Catholic. So was I now. But she believed in it. She came from generations of belief mixed with fear, and when we were sixteen and seventeen she could no more have sex before marriage than jump from the top of a roller coaster at Cedar Point.
But I did not believe in anything. Not strongly. I wasn’t like Efrem. I didn’t feel God. I don’t suppose it’s that I didn’t believe that God loved me. Maybe that’s all I believed. I didn’t believe in all the imagery they handed me in school. That kind of God, some white man in a pink nightie with a long beard staring all fierce into my window trying to figure out what I did in my bedroom, I couldn’t believe in. If God loved me it was a far off love. Larry’s was right here, and it was warm.
I wasn’t fool enough to tell Mama Walker I had had sex. I told Efrem, because I had too. He tried to be unshockable, but he hadn’t gained the poker face he has now. And I talked about how beautiful it was. I wrote about the beauty of lovemaking in my journal and the specialness of my unity with Larry.
And then three months later he said he could not commit to this, and dropped my ass.
Looking back honestly on this relationship, I can say that losing my virginity consisted of me on my back in Larry’s smelly bedroom, feeling uncomfortable while he struggled on me and gasped, and then collapsed and kissed me and told me I was beautiful. Meanwhile I was laying there going, “What the fuck was that?”
And then came Tommy and Greg, one after the other. Because when virginity is gone it’s gone, and I had entered a new world. I did not and do not believe in those secondary virgins, in pushing back the clock and being a maiden again. It was gone. It had been taken, and now I was hoping I might find a good man.
I had had three men, three bad sex partners by the time I was a junior. I was breaking up with Greg. Almost as soon as I told him goodbye, the phone rang and someone said, “I hear you’re not seeing Greg. You wanna go out sometime?”
It was Ryan Laujinesse.
“Do you mind?” I asked Sara.
“Mind what?” She seemed completely oblivious.
“Me going out with Ryan?”
“What?” She blew it off. “No, Cecile. I forgot all about Ryan. Do you mind me going out with Bobby?”
“Who?”
“Exactly.”
Sara and Amanda had stayed at Little Flower after I left, and while I was living on the other end of town, out near the University, they were in the same neighborhood with Ryan. He didn’t transfer to Whitman until this year, and so he’d been at Saint Jude’s, and the girls from Little Flower went to St. Jude dances, cheerled (cheerleaded?) for St. Jude’s and acted in their musicals. Sara had a lot of exposure to Ryan. She had a lot of exposure to everyone, but she and Ryan had been something to each other for a little bit, and he hadn’t said a word about me since last year when I was with Larry. He’d gone on his merry way through a merry string of girls. Sara was the last of them, the one who had actually been the most enduring. Still, they hadn’t really broken up because they hadn’t really been together.
So I was on the phone with Ryan, attempting to play it cool, and then the attempt turned into the real thing because there was such a flood of different emotions and questions pouring into my head that they more or less met in the middle and turned into something lukewarm.
“I know I should have come up with a better way to ask you,” he was saying. “But words aren’t really my strong suit. And I told Jinny not to tell you so you wouldn’t know this, but I’ve sort of been interested in you for a while now, and I couldn’t do anything about it. You were with Larry. Then with Greg.”
“And now you think you can?” I said when I could string two words together.
“Huh?” he sounded quiet and dumb and hopelessly white.
“And now you think you can do something about it? About me?”
“I uh,” Ryan seemed very unsure of what he was trying to say, which really surprised me.
“Did I say something wrong?” he said, suddenly.
“No, sir,” I said, and wondered where Florida Turner’s voice had come from. “But I thought you were with Sara.” I wanted to hear from his own lips that he wasn’t.
“Naw. Umh—I mean, no. She’s nice and all. Isn’t she? She’s your friend, right?”
“Yes. Next to your cousin, none better.”
“Yeah, she is nice. But no. It didn’t work out. Anyways, she’s doing real good without me. She’s with Bobby. Seeing him.”
“When you wanna go out?” I said, all at once.
“What?” Ryan said again
“That’s what you called for? When do you want to go out?”
“What about Friday? I got a basketball game. We play Anthony Wayne. And then after the game I’ll come and get you. How’s that?”
“That’s great. Do you know where I live?”
“On the northwest side, right? In the Melbourne.”
“Yeah, but you might need something a little more specific than that.”
For the first time he laughed.
When I got off the phone I came downstairs and told Efrem, “I got a date!”
“And my skin is black. What’s new?” he said, looking up from his Latin book. Then his face changed and he pushed up his glasses.
Now it was me who said, “What?”
“It’s Ryan Laujinesse. Isn’t it?”
“Well, hell, Ef. What if it is?”
On Friday night I went to answer the door, and then stopped and called up the stairs.
Efrem peeked down.
“What?” he said.
I started to talk. The doorbell rang again. I ran to the stairs and said, “I can’t open the door for myself.”
The doorbell rang once more.
“I need to make an entrance.”
I ran up the stairs while Efrem ran down, and then a moment later I heard Efrem talking to Ryan and I remembered that the two of them knew each other.
“Let me see if she’s ready,” I heard Efrem say, and I could have kissed him.
Then after he had come up the stairs, he smacked me on the ass and sent me down, heading off to his room.
“Oh, my,” I said sucking in my breath.
“Is it too much?” Ryan said. “I had to raid my closet and bring out the Catholic school clothes.”
“No, not too much.”
He was in black trousers and a brown jacket that fit well at the shoulders. His copper colored hair was combed back and freshly washed. He held out flowers. He didn’t look awkward like even the best looking high school guys do in suits. He looked just right, and natural, and it was odd to have Ryan standing in my house handsome and eager. He handed the flowers to me and said, “You should put these in water right away.”
“What cemetery did you steal these from?” I wondered out loud, taking the roses to the kitchen.
Ryan, who had been hanging at the open door because I hadn’t had the sense to tell him to come in, followed me.
“Oh, I didn’t steal them,” he said, and from the kitchen I heard someone laughing at the top of the stairs. And then Ryan turned red.
“Oh,” he said. “You were joking.”
Now I wanted to laugh.
MORE TOMORROW NIGHT
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
That was some great writing! Nice to hear more from Cecile again and I am liking how the story is playing out. I look forward to more tomorrow and I hope you are having a nice night! 
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
I love Ryan and Cecile too. Their first date is some of my favorite stuff, but they are some of my favorite stuff. I really love them and I'm glad to see you enjoying them too. Yes, its been a very nice night. I hope the same thing for you.