We Had No Rules Read online

  “I kind of want you to shave it,” I said.

  Stacy rubbed her hands over my head and nodded. “Rite of passage.”

  “But that seems kind of boring, and your head had a funny shape when it was shaved.”

  We both stared at me for a moment.

  Then my sister’s eyes opened wide, almost like she was laughing at a joke. “How about I try something and if you hate it, we’ll just shave the rest of it off?”

  When we came out of the room, it was just about time for Stacy to leave for school. Jill was sitting on the futon in a faded T-shirt and boxers, watching some Woody Allen movie, and when she saw me she nodded with deep approval.

  “You two are so related.”

  The sides of my head were shaved and the very top was a little longer and teased in all directions, like in the Cure poster on Stacy’s wall. I would have stared at my face and thought I looked like a chubby Frankenstein’s monster, but Stacy and Jill kept saying how adorable I looked. I imagined how it might feel to have no breasts and this hair.

  After Stacy left, I wanted to be present in the world with my haircut. I sat next to Jill and helped myself to a handful of her popcorn, which she didn’t acknowledge, so I ate some more. I was bored: Woody was complaining and it was autumn in New York.

  Jill’s eyes started to close and her head bobbed once, then twice. I asked: “Do you have a significant other?”

  She perked up and turned towards me. She closed one eye and then the other, and I felt like I knew something about her.

  “You can say ‘girlfriend’ or ‘dates,’ or ask if I’m seeing anyone,” she said.

  “What do you mean ‘dates’?”

  “Some people have more than one.”

  “Okay, do you have dates?”

  “Of course. Who doesn’t? Oh wait, your sister.” She moved the popcorn and settled more deeply into the futon, which meant, technically, that she moved closer to me.

  “I don’t think I do, either,” I said. She didn’t move, didn’t react, so I kept going. “There was this girl I really liked, and I think she’s gay too, but I don’t know.”

  Jill leaned in close to me. Corn and butter accented her Old Spice smell. She snaked her arm around my shoulder and I didn’t know what to do. I remembered what my sister had said. I kept my body stiff.

  “Is this okay?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  She moved closer. “We both know your sister’s rule.”

  I nodded again.

  She pressed her lips to my ear and I thought I was going to throw up—I had no other sense of what that kind of urgency could mean. “Your first kiss should be with someone who isn’t going to pretend that kiss isn’t happening.” Her lips on my ear made strange shapes out of the words.

  I turned my head towards her. My haircut felt suddenly like just a haircut, and if she thought she was kissing a chubby baby Frankenstein’s monster look-alike, she didn’t show it. She pressed her lips onto my lips and my right hip twitched, and she laughed then kissed me again, and though it was strange to feel the metallic taste of another person’s saliva, someone else’s tongue, it was like I had always been kissing and could spend the rest of my life kissing. I didn’t think of myself as foolish when I let the back of my hand rest on her stomach, but when she put her hand on my breast, I wasn’t really sure if I liked it. I didn’t say anything. I had no sense then that there could be some things I didn’t have to like, that I could say no to.

  She pulled away and sat a little farther from me on the futon. She folded her hands, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if we started praying. I touched my hands together, too.

  “I want to do something for you, but you have to understand that it’s purely instructional, and that I’m not taking on any more dates, so you can’t get jealous that you’re not one of them. Jealousy just can’t exist for you anymore, okay?”

  I nodded. I was trying really hard to listen, but I just wanted her to kiss me again.

  “This is purely instructional,” she repeated, as she pulled off her boxers.

  She shifted and I smelled her, and I felt embarrassed, mostly for myself. She spread her legs and took my hand, and it felt so different from when she held it on the Staten Island Ferry.

  “I want to show you the G-spot. This is something I do for people. So I’ll give you a latex glove and your finger will go inside me. Is that okay?”

  I considered it. I didn’t know what the appropriate reaction was for someone with a haircut like mine.

  “Okay,” I said, and I meant it. I felt a deep guilt already, like my sister knew what was happening. And I didn’t want to go through what my sister had—I didn’t want to ever say please the way she had—and as Jill brought my finger inside her and I watched it disappear with a gulp, I felt the certainty that someday I would say please like that, but I hoped it would be under much different circumstances.

  “Okay, so press up.” She winced. “No, with just the pad of your finger.” She relaxed a bit. “Okay, so it should feel, like, marshmallowy, right?”

  I nodded. “Is this sex?” I asked.

  “No. Now palpate for a second. You should also feel something more like just behind the front teeth. Like ridges.”

  She made a little sound. I pressed my tongue behind my teeth and tried to compare it to what I could feel through my gloved finger, but there was no comparison. Her eyes were very distant, as if she were grading me based on an internal rubric. Beads of sweat bubbled up on her nose, little crystal domes. Should I ask if I could kiss her nose? Did I have any agency? I only moved as instructed.

  “That’s totally it.” She smiled at me. “To me, it feels good and a little like I gotta pee.”

  She took my hand out of her, and I felt instantly cold. She pulled on her boxers. I held my damp gloved finger outstretched because I didn’t know what to do with it. Onscreen, Woody had just broken a teenager’s heart.

  “How will I know if it’s sex?”

  She pulled the glove off and kissed my palm. “You’ll just know.” She turned off the movie and stretched her arms over her head. “I need to go to bed. I got a shoot in the morning and an action in the evening.”

  I didn’t know what either of those meant, and I didn’t want to be alone yet with this hand, so I just chose the first one.

  “Shoot, like needles?” I asked.

  “No, like movies.”

  “An actress,” I said.

  “Sort of but more kinda like porn.”

  “Oh, okay, cool,” I said.

  She pinched my cheek. “A friend of ours makes it. It’s fun.” She closed one eye—I waited—but not the other one. She stood, so I stood. “You can ask your sister more about it.”

  She opened the door to my closet, and I climbed in like I was a pet. I didn’t tell her that I hadn’t brushed my teeth yet, that it was eight p.m. and I wasn’t tired. I switched on the light before she shut the door. Through the wall, I listened to the sound of her bed creak as it took her in.

  —

  The phrase You can ask your sister more about it tormented me all night. I couldn’t wait very long in the morning. It was a great act of will that I let Stacy go to the bathroom, take a bite of her toast, drink her coffee. I stared and stared at her, and she looked up at me a few times before finally closing her textbook.

  “You’re creeping me out.”

  “Does Jill do court work too?”

  “No, kind of odd jobs.”

  “Like what?” I asked. I tried to look as nonchalant as I had last night when my finger was inside Jill.

  “Studio assistant work, medical studies.” She paused for a moment, made a decision. “Sex work,” she added.

  “Oh, okay, cool,” I said. “So like porn?”

  “Including porn. A range of things.” She glanced down at the cover of her book and ran her fingers down the front as if to open it but set it aside instead.

  “I did that for a while,” she said.

  I fli
nched and covered my face.

  “You’re thinking of channel sixty-eight, all scrambled?”

  I kept my face covered. I wasn’t going to say anything about the moans, the flash of a boob, a mouth pulsing on a rod.

  “It wasn’t quite like that—though there’s a place for what happens on channel sixty-eight. If it was photos, sometimes I’d have to stay still with my back arched for, like, half an hour, but the people I worked with were positive and respectful.”

  I heard her mouth bite into toast. I still didn’t want to expose my face. I felt like I didn’t want to know all of this—that a G-spot existed, or what a breast reduction was. I didn’t want my haircut or a youth program. I wanted to be home, with my barrettes and my sleepovers and my TV. And my parents.

  “You remember when I called home?” she asked.

  I pulled my hands away from my face. She looked stiff and tense, like she wanted out of this conversation too, but neither of us could stop it.

  “It was bad. I didn’t know what was going to happen. Literally, when I got off the phone, it was like a miracle—a woman I had met at a shelter came by and told me about this gig she had with this photographer, Anthony. Turns out he was looking for ‘young radical women’ and she got me a shoot. That’s where I made friends who connected me to the community. Someone even helped me figure out GED stuff. When Anthony got diagnosed, he didn’t want his landlord or anyone in the building to know—landlord’s son was sniffing around, tripling the rent on apartments. And he wanted to control something. He went and stayed with his boyfriend, told the landlord I was his sister, that he’d be working abroad for a while, and the three of us moved in.”

  She took my cold hands and rubbed them in hers.

  “It’s not like it’s something you have to do, unless, of course, you decide that’s something you want. You can choose what you want to be ashamed of. But you don’t need to be ashamed of me.”

  Her hands, I noticed, were cold too.

  “This is totally different from home,” she continued. “And if you wanted to try to go back and just wait it out until you’re eighteen, I’d get it. Most people manage that way. But I promise, if you stay, I’ll take care of you. Things will feel different, but that’s good. Whatever you’re afraid I went through when I first ran away you’re going through too, but in the gentlest way possible.”

  We sat there, our icy hands clutched together. Outside, I heard the honking of horns, and I felt the rolling jitter of a jackhammer shaking me out on the inside.

  “If I stay, we’ll to have to move.” I pressed her hands to my forehead. “I broke the rules, I think.”

  I gulped and snorted, and she kept her hands clenched on mine and brought them down to look at them. I don’t know what she saw there, what she was figuring out, how my hand could have possibly looked different from before last night, but she snapped her eyes to mine. We held our eyes there, and in that pause I wanted her to see what happened. I wanted her to tell me that it wasn’t sex. But instead, she waited, and I saw the worry spreading across her face, so finally I spoke.

  “Jill wanted me to have a good first kiss, so she kissed me.” The tension on her face eased and her shoulders shifted. She stifled a smile, then put my hands down.

  “That’s—you know—that happens. Did you like it?” There was a quavering in her eyes, and I knew what she wanted my answer to be, and I wanted my answer to be the same as hers.

  “I liked it a lot,” I said. “But it doesn’t need to happen again.”

  “I’m glad it was nice. We don’t have to move, but yeah, let’s not have that happen again.”

  She picked up our dishes and I walked with her to the sink. We stood beside each other the way our mom taught us before Stacy left: her hands in the soapy water, mine drying what she handed me. I dried dishes until every drop of water was gone, because you don’t put away wet plates. The cabinet was up high, and I stood on my tiptoes and wondered whether I could slide the dishes in without breaking them. I turned to get a chair—because no one is gonna help you; you gotta help yourself—but Stacy took the plate out of my hand, soap suds in a bracelet around her wrist as she reached for the cabinet above my head.

  gay tale

  Oh, fuck it. I’m writing lesbian fiction. I know I’d do better to write gay fiction, or in some academic circles, queer fiction. How many people, I wonder, have stopped reading already? A lot of lesbians are scary, and weird. I don’t even like the word.

  One time, before I was considered a lesbian, my boyfriend and I were getting ice cream in our small Southern college town. It was one of those incredibly warm February days when it’s unclear what season it might ever be. Our cones were high and melting quickly, so we licked away fervently as we strolled to the water. A French bulldog approached us with balls so large it seemed like it would be anatomically difficult for him to walk uphill, but he was doing it, and snorting and panting.

  “Oh, hell-oooo,” Ron crooned. He bent down and the dog wagged his tail, sending his balls back and forth like magical pendulums.

  “Hi, friend, hi,” I said, scratching just above the dog’s butt. The dog licked at the air, his claws clacking against the ground as he spun in slow circles to appreciate both of us.

  “That ice cream you got looks good,” the owner said, stepping forward.

  Now that I’m considered a lesbian, I know it’s incorrect to assume you know someone’s pronoun, but I don’t know if you’re ready for me to use the singular they. At this point in the story, I’m still concerned about what you are ready for. She wore long khaki shorts that went to just below the knee—I was crouched down, so I stared at what was visible of her shins. She had a sturdy, stocky body—a powerful man’s shape—and breasts that inflated her black polo. Her pale skin had seen so much sun that it looked ready to slough off. She had a head like a bean, with a very small and handsome face, with brown eyes as deep and round as her dog’s.

  “This is a great dog you got here,” Ron said.

  “His name’s Jasper. I’m Sam,” she said, looking at me.

  I pictured her naked, saw the muscled legs, hips and back, the sagging breasts, and—I couldn’t help it—giant balls, like Jasper. It was one of the most beautiful images I’d ever held in my brain. I was certain that she could see it, too. How could she look like that and not be psychic?

  “I’ve got two cats and another dog that doesn’t like to go out much ’cause he’s old. I got a parakeet that screams all day long. I had two parakeets, but one of the cats ate one. I didn’t cry because I was happy that Susie got to do what she’s supposed to.”

  I turned away, politely, to get my tongue around the cone more where it was starting to drip, and also to signal that it was time to be moving on. It seemed like there might be something wrong with Sam. She stared at me harder, and I realized that the whole time she’d been rambling she’d only been looking at me.

  “That ice cream sure looks good. I’d get chocolate ice cream, and then I’d get cherry, but I don’t think I’d get it in a cone because my hands always got this grease on them from work, you know. I got two jobs and I own my own house and I got a riding mower.”

  She’s trying to turn me into a lesbian, I thought. I could feel her in my brain, working something the way she might work an engine. I heard a sputtering in some wiring. I touched Ron’s back, underneath his T-shirt.

  “Well, we’ll be seeing you,” he said, and we continued on to the water. I felt her watching us.

  “What a strange person,” Ron said. “She must be so lonely here. I wonder if she gets to date much.”

  “Probably why she has all those animals,” I said.

  I imagined her undressing me, how excited she’d be, how she’d keep talking even as I was sitting in front of her naked. It wasn’t that I wanted to be with her, but I felt moved that I could be wanted that way. Ron and I looked out at the water, and as I sat there, in my brain, naked in front of Sam, I felt so feminine. I moved my shoulders the way I im
agined Marilyn Monroe might move hers, and I lifted my chest and exposed my neck. I am so hot, I thought. Never before had I considered making love to myself. It seemed like it must be fantastic.

  “What are you doing?” Ron asked. His face had a laughing shape, and I felt something snap off in me quickly. I felt cold. “You were moving your shoulders in this funny way. I loved it.” He leaned over and kissed me, and even though I often felt shy in public, I kissed him back this time, thinking of her seeing us, and then picturing myself, and I felt whatever had snapped off a moment ago return.

  —

  On our first date, Ron looked at me from his side of the table and said, with great conviction, “I’m into guys.”

  “Oh,” I said, slightly disappointed and confused, not because he liked boys but because he said it in a way that suggested he only liked boys.

  “Are you into girls?” he asked me.

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  After dinner, he brought me into an alley and pressed me against a building. We quickly found ourselves in a habit of having sex in public places: against a highway overpass, on the toilet seat of a gas station restroom, midday in a park with a father and son looking out from the bleachers. The man stood watching us, not in an interested way but more to let us know he’d seen. What I felt, specifically, as I sat up and looked at him, was that he wanted to make sure that I, not Ron, was the one who knew he saw.

  After meeting Sam and her dog, I imagined my breast in her mouth as Ron and I made love. I ached for this scenario to come true, to have him on top of me and to have her, or some other woman, there, doing that.

  “Can you tell me about the time you gave that queen a blow job?” I asked afterwards, curled against him.

  He yawned and stretched his long thin body fully; his hands pressed against the wall and his feet hung off the bed. “I was helping her dress between sets. I lifted up her skirt. She pushed me away.”