Aimee Bender - The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

He is a bad kisser, but he has very fine hands. We’re in the Mission and he happens to live just a few blocks away on Valencia so we go to his room which has curved-out Victorian windows and a bed on the floor and a poster of a band I’ve never heard of called Swat and next to the poster there is a flyswatter hanging on the wall signed by the band and I think it’s sort of cool. He kisses the back of my neck, and I change my mind and decide he’s a good kisser, and our clothes come off in the way that clothes do, and it’s semidark in his room, and I, for the moment, never want to leave.

He tells me nice things about my body.

While he fucks me, I imagine fucking some woman, my mouth set in a grim way. It’s the three of us in bed: me the woman, me the man, and him, the red-haired guy with the great hands. He thinks I’m just some girly girl, receptacle envelope girl, he doesn’t know what I’m thinking. He doesn’t know that I’m also a shadow on his back, pushing in.

“Oh,” he keeps saying over and over, “oh,” and his eyes are closed in concentration. When we sleep together, he holds me like he loves me. I’ve noticed this: when it’s the first date, and you fuck, the guy holds you much better than he does the next few times. The first date, you’re sort of the stand-in for whomever he loved last, before he fully realizes you’re not her, and so you get all this nice residue emotion. I felt cherished, tucked into his belly, like we’d known each other for years and I was his wonderful girl and we both slept great.

The red-haired guy’s name is, of course, Patrick.

Before he wakes up I run to the bathroom to see what I look like, and I actually look pretty good. Flushed and fuck-able. I go back and he’s still sprawled out on the bed and I fold my body back into his and think about how I want to look to him when he wakes up. I want to be sleeping in a casual sexy way, to make him want me again.

I remember, especially in high school, I was so good at this kind of fake-out. I rehearsed thoughtfulness, I appeared carefree — and how many guys did I trick? As I sat there, hair tucked behind my ear, supposedly lost in a book, thinking this exact monologue, rereading and rereading the same paragraph, waiting for them to see me and want me, caught in this image of myself as a reader. What about staring at ants, wanting to seem close to nature and whimsical? What about staring into space, wanting to seem expansive, trying to find the thoughts that would fit my self-portrait? I fooled so many guys! I was found mysterious so many times, oh that girl, we don’t know what that Susie thinks, and all I’m thinking is what do I look like, and all I’m thinking is that I own their thoughts.

Curled into Patrick, I end up falling asleep again anyway, and when I wake up he’s across the room. I run my finger over the titles in his bookshelf and find a photo album. It’s pretty heavy but I lift it into bed and start flipping through it.

“Patrick,” I say, “who’s in these pictures?”

He’s sorting through videotapes maybe because he wants to watch something. He glances up.

“Friends, old girlfriends, you know, photo album stuff.” The morning light is on his back and he looks pale and beautiful.

“So who’s the most important girlfriend of all these people?” I ask. I can see several women in the pictures, and they’re all attractive which makes me feel both good and bad.

“What do you mean the most important?” He has a yawn in his voice, but I think he’s faking.

“You know, the one you really loved.”

He walks over to me, leaving a pile of videotapes, and flips through the stiff photo album pages fast, and then I know he knows the order really well and that he likes to look at his photos and it makes me want to glue myself to his body.

“Here,” he says, pointing. There are a few photos of a brunette with short hair and a big, smiling mouth, Patrick and the brunette at the Grand Canyon, Patrick and the brunette taking a self-timer picture so that their faces are distorted and their noses look huge.

“That’s the one you loved?”

He nods and leaves the room. He leaves the videotapes all over the floor. I study the girl. She does not look a thing like me. He doesn’t come back in for a while, and then I hear the rustle of the newspaper and I know I’ve lost him for at least an hour. I pick up the phone and call my sister Eleanor. She’ll be up early on a Saturday morning. She has nothing else to do.

“Hello?” Her voice is lower than mine, and sounds like the voice of an older woman.

“Ellie, do you think I should cut my hair short?” I’m naked and I stick my legs up into the air because they look the best that way, all the skin slides up and creates muscles.

“Susie, whatever.” Eleanor is always depressed. Eleanor is fat.

“I think I’m tired of the way I’m looking. Do you want to go shopping with me? It’s early, but maybe later on today?” I love to go shopping with Eleanor because in contrast I look so great in everything.

“I work,” she says.

“Is Mom there?” I ask.

“Yeah, do you want to talk to her?”

“No,” I say, “but will you ask her if she thinks I’d look good in short hair?” There’s a pause while I hear Eleanor ask the question like a good big sister. The tiredness in her voice should make me feel bad but it doesn’t. What it makes me want to do is go take a karate class because I like to hold my hands like that and chopping up a board would feel good — smash, the crack, the thud.

Eleanor says Mom doesn’t care. I say goodbye and hang up the phone. I go into the kitchen and have an English muffin without asking and read parts of the paper with the glamorous people and Patrick looks up and smiles at one point which is very smart of him if he ever wants to see my ass in bed again.

Turns out Patrick is working underneath the city inside a pothole, fixing pipes or something. He gets to lift up the pothole and jump inside. I laugh, I tell him it’s like he’s fucking the city with his whole body but he doesn’t get it, and I think when he doesn’t get something he’s just quiet. In fact, he’s usually quiet. In fact, I talk mostly all the time around Patrick, or anyone.

I go to find him inside the pothole. He told me it was on Divisadero and they don’t reclose the pothole, so there it is, like some hobbit door, opened up to anybody. I slip down into the belly of the street which is incredibly exciting, and it’s dark and it smells pretty awful and I can hear the cars rushing by above me. They seem like they’re going really fucking fast .

“Hey Patrick,” I yell, “hey Patrick, you have guests.” My voice booms out through the passages, and after a while I hear a rustling and it’s Patrick wearing something orange and he does not look happy to see me.

“What are you doing here?” He’s gruff, like his boss is next to him or something, but as far as I can tell, we’re alone.

“I thought I’d come bring you a plant for your new house,” I say, laughing, wishing I had brought a plant and thinking about how witty I am and why doesn’t he love me yet.

“You need to go, Susie,” he says. “It’s totally unsafe for you to be here. You need a special permit.” He won’t even look at me. His hands are gloved and the gloves are covered with oil. I want him to grab me with those gloves and smear oil all over my body and my nice dress and throw me on the ground, with all these cars above us, a ceiling of cars.

“Susie. Go.” His voice is louder now, almost mean. I start to climb back and he puts his hands on my thighs to help hoist me up and I swear it turns me on so much that I practically drop back in there but I want to see Patrick again, and if I did that, I bet he’d lock his doors to me forever.