Kerry Cohen - Loose Girl - A Memoir of Promiscuity

“I don’t want to live,” Tyler screams between sobs. I see then the bottle in her hand. Tylenol. She opens the top, pushing Mom’s hand away, and pours the bottle into her mouth.

“No!” Mom screams. She digs her fingers into Tyler’s mouth, pulling out the pills and flinging them away. Tyler clenches her mouth, but finally she releases against my mother, both of them sobbing and holding on to each other. I sit still at the counter, my hands gripped tightly together in my lap. My mother and my sister stay like this, unaware of me perhaps, or else unconcerned. So intimate I finally have to look away. My grandparents fly into town to stay with us the month Mom plans to leave. They help Mom pack, and my grandmother makes dinners so Mom doesn’t have to. They take Tyler and me to play miniature golf, giving Mom some space, and Grandpa takes me on long walks like when I visited them in Florida, like we did when life was simple and containable—a firefly caught in a jar. Grandma reminds us often what a strong, brave thing our mother is doing, going off into the world to pursue her dream to become a doctor. She needs our support. She holds a tone in her voice when she says this, a tone warning us not to make Mom feel bad. The day my mother is to leave for Manila, my grandparents drive us all to the airport. My mother cries loudly at the gate, clutching onto Tyler who, heeding our grandmother’s warning, tells her everything will be OK. Tyler’s face is flat, without expression. She looks small and empty to me, a deflated doll. When my mother turns her wet eyes to me, I just shrug. I refuse to give her what she wants. She made her choice. Let her sit in it. Why should I care about her sadness now?

Besides, in many ways her leaving is a relief. No more of her constant need for attention. No more ducking her all-consuming emotions. I give her a quick hug, trying not to inhale her familiar scent. Deep inside, though, her leaving takes its grip. A fishhook latching into my bones. Years later, when I am in college and driving back to my apartment, I will hear a psychologist on the radio discussing divorce, talking about how the scariest part of divorce for children is their fear that if one parent left, perhaps the other one will leave too. I will pull over, the pain rising into my throat, fresh and raw as that day in the airport.

My grandparents help my mother make her way down the tarmac with her bags. Tyler and I stand, silent, and watch her go. A month later, we move in with our dad.

Before boys put their soft, eager hands on my skin, before they pull me into dark rooms and whisper promises I hold on to like rope pulling me from water, before I sink further and further into trouble, I have crushes. Most girls know what it’s like to long for boys in this way, to see the smooth, olive-toned skin of some boy and have their hearts start racing. Overwhelmed by both my mother’s needs and her absence, that sensation feels like desperation. Boys are unknown to me. When my father moved out, women surrounded me. My mother’s anxious insecurity, her long talks with girlfriends at the kitchen counter, my sister’s sadness, these are the things that made up my life. The times my sister and I visited my father in his one-bedroom apartment were always a relief. There was room to breathe. There was no talk about emotions. Even now, at thirteen, living with him without my mother there to temper it, he seems distant and airy, more like a friend than a parent. It is all computer games and Doritos and music turned up loud. Boys are connected to this independence for me. I’ve seen the movies, read the books. I know the ways a boy can make a girl feel. I believe they have the capacity to pull me out of the muck of my life, to save me, and I will believe this for a long, long time. Once ninth grade starts, Liz and I spend time in Leonia, a nearby town, to hang out with her boyfriend, Chris. Her grandmother lives there, and we arrive each Friday after school with our packed duffels. Liz calls Chris, and soon we are walking to the playground behind the library to meet him and his friends. Brian is one of these friends—a dark-haired, quiet, hard boy who is rarely around. When he is, he barely seems to notice me. Liz told me Brian once liked her, and even though Liz has an insecure way of puffing herself up, I believe her. Why wouldn’t he like her? She is beautiful, skinny, and fun to be around. I, on the other hand, am mousy. My thighs touch (a no-no, according to Seventeen magazine), childish freckles cover my nose, and my hair never does what I want it to. It makes perfect sense that he ignores me. But that doesn’t stop my desire for him. It eggs it on. He is unreachable, a fantasy, like all those movie boys. Plus, he is bad. One afternoon I watch him come from the library, a book in his hand. Chris, Liz, a few other kids, and I hang out on the play structure at the playground. I sit dangling my legs off the top of the slide. As Brian crosses the playground, he tears something from the book and lets it float behind him to the ground. Then he walks on. As soon as he is out of view I slide down and get what he dropped. It’s a library pocket for a checkout ticket. He stole a book about Jimi Hendrix. I stuff it into the back pocket of my tight jeans. Chris, who had watched all this, puts an arm around my shoulder.

“Sorry,” he says and smiles. Chris is great-looking as well, with full lips and big eyes. I smile back, embarrassed at having been seen. In some ways, I harbor a crush on Chris, too. But he’s Liz’s and therefore off-limits.

The three of us and a guy everyone calls Iggy walk down the Leonia streets toward Chris’s house, looking for something to do. I hope Brian will show up again, but know it’s unlikely. It is October and darkness is coming early. Most of the trees are already straggly and bare. Chris and Liz hold hands, and Chris tells us about an exgirlfriend who used to call him every hour just to know where he was. We all laugh at how crazy this girl was. Newly fourteen, I know girls shouldn’t be so demanding. It is one of the many rules I am slowly learning, rules for what boys like and don’t like. I store them in my mind, knowing I need to keep them close if I ever want a boy to like me back.

Chris’s parents aren’t home, so we settle into his living room and turn on the TV. After a while Chris and Liz disappear. It’s no secret they’ve gone off to mess around. The envy I feel is a low ache in my pelvis. I want a boyfriend like Chris. I sit on the worn, yellow couch, and Iggy sits across from me in a La-Z-Boy. Chris’s house is small. It’s clear from the décor his family doesn’t have much money. Most people in Leonia don’t. My mother sent Tyler and me to private school, believing her children should have only the best. But I know only rich people can make such choices. I also know my mother doesn’t like that she can’t control where we go and who we spend time with anymore, now that she’s gone. She would be unhappy if she knew I was spending time with someone like Iggy, and this pleases me to no end. Iggy doesn’t say anything. He pulls out a joint and lights it. He takes a long drag, then holds it out to me. I take it, even though I don’t really like to smoke pot. I don’t like the way it makes me feel full of dread, like I’m forgetting something important, like something dangerous is about to occur. I put it to my mouth quickly, inhaling only a small amount. A cough sits in my throat but I hold it there. I pass back the joint, and Iggy sucks on it some more. He is older than the rest of us, maybe eighteen, and he is notorious for his drug use. Chris says if there’s nothing else around, Iggy buys glue to sniff. He has a shaved head and acne scars on his cheeks, and he always wears the same black leather motorcycle jacket. Looking at him now, I think he could be OK-looking if he wasn’t working so hard to be ugly. Iggy and I pass the joint back and forth. Then he moves to sit next to me on the couch. Chris and Liz are still gone, but I don’t know how long it’s been, the pot curling its way into my sense of time. Iggy, wordless, slips an arm around my shoulder, takes a long drag, and then presses his lips on mine. I flinch, but he is strong. He opens his mouth and blows, shooting the smoke into my throat. I cough, pulling away, and Iggy laughs. His jacket sleeve shifts as he holds the joint up to his mouth again, and I see small, jagged knife cuts on his forearm. I wonder what it must be like to be him. Surely there’s a reason he does all the drugs. I don’t really want Iggy to touch me. He smells like old smoke and unwashed clothes, and as far as I can tell he hasn’t brushed his teeth in a while. But I’m also not about to refuse him. I want him to like me. This matters more than anything else. Maybe those knife marks point to a soft part of him of which I could be a piece. Maybe Iggy is just looking to be loved, like me. So I let his tongue in the next time he leans forward. It tastes sharp from the smoke. I close my eyes and try to imagine this is Brian, which helps as Iggy slides a hand up my shirt and kneads at my breasts. He unzips my jeans and pushes a rough hand down there, and soon his finger is inside me. I lean back, keeping Brian in my mind, knowing I should enjoy it, but Iggy’s movements are too forceful. After a moment he takes my hand and pulls it to his jeans. Obedient, I reach inside and feel the warm, clammy shaft of his penis. It’s the first penis I’ve ever touched. I’ve never even seen a penis before, except for pictures in books, and my cousin’s from when we had shown each other our genitals when we were seven. I’ve never been this close, though, this intimate. It seems wrong, like I’m touching something I shouldn’t, something not for me. Still, I stroke it, knowing this is what he wants, and he pushes his fingers farther into me, which hurts. I stay silent, numb even, as I stroke and fondle until he comes onto my hands. He pushes me away, embarrassed it seems, and takes his fingers out of me. I don’t look at him. I’m embarrassed too. I quickly stand, zip, and go to find a bathroom to wash the hot, messy liquid off my hand. When I come back, Iggy is in the other chair again, rolling an• other joint. I sit back on the couch. He barely looks at me, and it occurs to me we’ve never exchanged more than a few words. I don’t even know his real name. I try to think of something to say, something that will relieve the tension I’m feeling.