Jonathan Nasaw - When She Was Bad

“Are you sure you’re going to be all right now?”

“I’ll be fine, Grandma.”

“I hate to go off and leave you.”

Lily rolls her eyes. “Grandma, I’m seventeen years old, I can take care of myself for two days.”

“Of course you can, dear. It’s just…“No need to complete the sentence-they both know how it ends.

“Dody, she’ll be fine,” chimes in Lily’s grandfather. “Now can we please get this show on the road-I want to be off the highway before dark.” His night vision isn’t what it used to be-but then, as he’s fond of saying, what is?

In the circular driveway at the bottom of the wide marble steps waits a gleaming black Mercedes SUV loaded with enough provisions to have seen Napoleon’s army safely home from Moscow. Dark-haired, dark-eyed Lily hugs her roly-poly grandmother, who smells like stale baby powder. When her grandfather stoops to give Lily a peck on the cheek, the overpowering scent of his aftershave brings tears to her eyes-apparently his sense of smell ain’t what it used to be, either.

Lily waves from the top of the steps until the SUV is out of sight, then heads back inside the two-story, Mission-style Pebble Beach mansion where she’s lived with her grandparents since she was almost five. To celebrate being alone, she sneaks up to her grandmother’s bedroom, steals a cigarette from the pack of Dorals Grandma hides in a bureau drawer, and smokes it out on the balcony, waving it around languidly, wrist bent like some old movie actress.

But the reality of being home alone never lives up to the expectation for long. After a few puffs the cigarette tastes hot and stale, and when she stubs it out and goes back inside, the mansion is so empty and echoey that she can hear the tick-tock of the grandfather clock down in the parlor from her second-floor bedroom.

Flopping onto her bed, Lily switches on the television and clicks through the channels. MTV is showing one of its beach parties, college kids dancing on the sand, the boys in their baggy shorts and scraggly wanna-be goatees, the heavy-breasted girls in skimpy bikinis that barely cover their nipples. Lily is both disturbed and fascinated by the overt sexuality. Scaredy cat, she chides herself-don’t you even want a normal life someday?

Just to see what it would feel like, she strips down to her bra and panties, tries on a few moves in front of the floor-length mirror mounted on the closet door. Oh yeah, she thinks happily, blushing like a pomegranate at sunset, I could do this.

But after only a few seconds of modest abandon, an image from Lily’s past fills her mind. Strong, sharp-scented male hands, large enough to palm her head like a softball, pry her jaws apart; an impossibly swollen, purple-headed penis forces itself into her mouth, choking her; a flashbulb explodes into white glare.

She reels away from the mirror, fighting for breath as if she were still that baby, and sits on the edge of the bed, head between her knees, breathing iiiin and ouuut, niiice and caaalm. A commercial for acne cream is playing; she feels around for the remote and blindly switches off the television, then guides herself through an exercise she’s learned from her psychiatrist, Dr. Irene Cogan. That was then, this -she raises her head, glances around the familiar bedroom-is now. That was a memory, this is the reality. You’re not that helpless baby anymore-no one can touch you without your consent.

And gradually the panic subsides. Lily turns on the bedroom light, slips on a bathrobe and a pair of slippers, and is halfway down the wide, curving staircase when the phone starts ringing. She charges back up the stairs, throws herself across the bed, fumbles the receiver off the hook just before the downstairs answering machine kicks in. “Hello?”

“Is this the home of…Lyman and Dorothy DeVries?”

“Who’s calling, please?” Lily is well-versed in telephone safety.

“This is Sergeant Mapes, California Highway Patrol.”

Everything’s gone quiet, like just before an earthquake. “Yes, this is the DeVries residence.”

“Who am I speaking to?”

“This is Lily. Lily DeVries-I’m their granddaughter. Is something wrong?”

“Is there an adult around I can speak to?”

“Yes-me.” It isn’t the first time Lily has been mistaken for a child over the phone. “Has something happened to them?”

“There’s been an accident. A bad one.” A pause. “A very bad one.” Another pause, as if he wanted Lily to ask him a question. She couldn’t think of one, though-all she could think of was how tired she had suddenly become. “I’m sorry to have to be the one to break the news, Miss DeVries. From what we’ve been able to ascertain, your grandfather seems to have lost control of the vehicle on Highway One, a few miles south of Big Sur. It went through the guardrail, over the cliff, and landed on the rocks sixty feet below. Both bodies were still in the car. If it’s any comfort, they were almost certainly killed outright.”

Lily had to put the receiver under her pillow to muffle the squeaky, unintelligible sounds coming out of it. Too tired, she thought, rolling onto her stomach and closing her eyes-I’m too tired to deal with this.

Lilah comes awake. Her mind is blank at first-no recollection of having gone to sleep, no memories from the preceding day.

This is how it’s always been for Lilah, living as she does in a more or less permanent present. No immediate past, no long-term future, just an ongoing now, the by-product not of meditation, but of an imperious, bonobo-like sexuality that informs Lilah’s every thought and action from the moment she wakes up to the moment she retreats back into the darkness of her mind.

The first thing she does upon awakening is ground herself by rubbing the pad of her right thumb against the pads of the first two fingers of her right hand, as though she were trying to roll a little dough into a tiny ball. She hears a buzzing sound, feels around under the pillow, finds the telephone handset, and replaces it in the cradle. Immediately, it begins to ring; she lifts the receiver and slams it down again, then unplugs the phone from the jack in the wall, strips off her nightgown, and pads naked into the bathroom.

After a steaming hot shower with the spray set on needle-fine, Lilah rubs herself dry with fluffy towels until her creamy skin is pink and tingly from head to toe. She shaves her legs, paints her finger-and toenails, trims her dark pubic hair to the shape of a heart while waiting for her nails to dry, anoints her body with moisturizing lotion, and finishes off with a dusting of lilac-scented body talc.

As often happens, when Lilah returns from the bathroom she can’t find a thing to wear. The drawers and closets are filled with T-shirts, jeans, sweaters, and oversize sweatshirts, but nothing suitable for the Saturday evening Lilah has in mind. It’s almost as if somebody keeps throwing her good stuff out and replacing it with more modest wear.

Eventually she finds her streetwalker outfit-thong, hot pants, midriff-bearing tube top, and of course her red fuck-me pumps with the three-inch stiletto heels-crumpled into a hatbox in the far corner of the closet. It occurs to her she may have stashed it there herself a few days or weeks ago-if so, the event is lost in the cement sea of her memory.

After dressing, Lilah steps out onto the fan-shaped bedroom balcony, with its low curved parapet and potted cacti in terra-cotta urns. Below her, the wooded hills of Pebble Beach fall steeply toward a dark slice of ocean, barely visible through the trees. It’s a cold summer night on the central coast. Cutting wind, no stars. She shivers, glances down at her body. Through the formfitting top, she can see her wide round aureolae have gone all pebbly and her nipples are making little thimble-shaped bumps against the Lycra. Gonna freeze them titties off, girl, she warns herself, turning back into the bedroom and closing the French doors behind her.