Aimee Bender - The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

Back on the street, the cars seem really slow. The air is bright and I can still smell oil in my nose. I have nothing to do and it’s Saturday night almost and I don’t think Patrick is going to want to see me first thing when he exits the pothole. I go to a bar and have a beer. The bartender doesn’t look at me and instead talks a lot to the girl next to me who has a perfect ponytail, and I eat a bag of pretzels and then rip the bag into ribbons. The whole experience only takes half an hour, and I’m sick of being ignored, so I leave.

I walk up the street with beer taste in my mouth, warm and bitter and wonderful, and what do you know, there’s that girl again, the belly button girl, leaning back to show that marvelous hole to the world. She has no fucking idea.

When I walk past her, I want to grab her wrist and drag her down into the pothole, which is just a block or two back. She looks at me and smiles because she knows she has nothing to fear from me, she thinks I’m her ally, but I’m not. I really want to trample down this girl who has her belly button open wide like it’s there just for me. I want to hurt her because she looks like she might be happy and she might have a date and if she doesn’t, she will. I want to fuck her by a Dumpster and cut her down, like she’s a tree, I don’t care if she wants me back, I don’t care if so many people back home love her so much. I walk and I walk and I walk and I end up at Mount Zion Hospital which means I’m near my mom’s house and I go by the house and in the upstairs window I can see a hint of Eleanor, in front of the TV, with potato chips. I don’t really want to touch Eleanor. Mostly I just want her to wake up. Wake up! I feel like pouring water on her a lot. I keep walking; I don’t want to talk to my sister and I definitely don’t want to see my mom.

I pass a haircutter which is a stay-open-late haircutter for last-minute urges. It’s just closing and I go in and ask her to cut all my hair off until it’s really short and sassy, and she’s so tired and beat and I bet she has five kids or something, but she does it anyway, in like ten minutes. She charges me ten bucks, a buck a minute I guess. It looks not good. I keep checking out my silhouette in the windows of stores and shaking my head to make sure the reflection is me. When I touch the back of my neck, it feels nice. I walk in zigzags through the side streets until I hit a fancy hotel and wander in and there is a knot of old rich men and I go up to them.

“Anyone want to buy me a drink?” I ask, and they all smile and they all Want to, but none of them do, they sort of shake their heads in unison like they’re old ducks. I plop down on the red velveteen hotel couch and another older man comes up to me.

“I overheard you,” he says, “and I’d love to buy you a drink.”

I smile up at him. He has gray hair, but he’s quite handsome.

“Great. Whatever you want to get me.” I lean back on the couch and close my eyes while he’s off at the bar. When he returns, I want to appear the image of ease and raw sexuality. I open my legs so there’s just a hint of darkness at the crotch. I lay my arms across the top of the couch like I’m claiming the world, this is all mine, I’m so confident. He returns with a vodka something for me, ten degrees below zero, the glass is frosted up and it slides down like very cold, watery-tasting water. I’m drunk in five minutes.

He asks me questions which I lie about and then wants to know if I want to come up into his hotel room which is a few floors up and I’m not really sure if I want to, but I do.

It’s on the ninth floor and it’s a suite. It’s really nice, with gold antique faucets and no lame landscape paintings on the wall, and a view of the bridge and the city lights which are just now coming on, ten by ten.

He stands behind me and unzips my dress, just like that, and I close my eyes and imagine he’s Patrick. Right now, Patrick is probably wondering where I am and maybe is very sorry because he made me feel so bad in the pothole or maybe he never wants to see me again because he thinks I’m some nut who goes into potholes, and maybe he’s right because here I am in a hotel about to fuck a rich businessman who really, in fact, could be my father.

I keep my eyes closed and feel his hands all over me and I think about his body, if it will be wrinkled with gray chest hairs, and I want to cut his throat with a long sharp knife and that gets me wet.

“This is such a nice surprise,” he says. “I didn’t expect this from my vacation.”

I don’t say anything. My eyes are still closed. He kisses me and it’s an okay kiss and he holds my face and smells nice and there’s a door in me that opens and I feel like I could cry and I could crawl inside his wrinkled-up gray chest and cry and it feels like he took his hand and somehow stuck it through my heart.

I need to go, but I don’t. He guides me toward the bed, and all my energy right now is concentrated on not crying. I don’t even notice when he takes off my clothes and lays me down and I’m just practicing my breathing, one two three, in out. Don’t cry, crying would be bad, but there is a whole cyclone of tears swirling in my throat and I just try to break it down, go away, piece by piece back into my stomach. I put my hands on his arms and the skin slides up a little because he’s this old man, so I decide with my eyes still closed that he’s Eleanor and she lost all this weight and so now her skin doesn’t fit anymore. He’s Eleanor and she’s tucking me in as she did when I was little and Dad left and I kept thinking he would come in through the window and trip over something and die, trying to get me back, and Eleanor would stroke my forehead and tell me there was nothing he could trip on; she would clear the path by the window. I loved my sister so much, that she didn’t laugh at me, that she cleared the path instead. And it makes me want to cry again, my love for Eleanor, and the tears sort of gather while my eyes are closed and I grip those arms and move my hips and I feel so proud of my Eleanor for losing all this weight. And when her skin bounces back to fit her body, oh she will be so beautiful. How I would love it if she would be the beautiful one for a while and I could slide into the background and be ugly and quiet.

His breathing has changed, I barely noticed the way he came in a pleased grunt. He slides off me, hand lingering on my hip. I’ve been waiting for this break so that I could run into the bathroom.

I open my eyes. His face is right there, redder and sweaty, a sappy smile on his face and I politely fake a smile back and excuse myself and go into the antique gold faucets and the little plastic bottles of hotel shampoo and sit on the toilet. For a second, I think I might split down the middle and reveal a six-year-old mess, like a Russian doll except we don’t match. But I don’t, the moment is over, I feel a few tears dribble down but the rush of them that I was swallowing is gone now. I’m just me in my body on the toilet, looking at myself in the mirror with my new short hair that is all messed up.

He’s asleep when I leave, let myself out the door and down the elevator and through the streets to my own apartment. It’s dark and there are no messages on the answering machine, the red light is steady. No one has called me. Patrick has not called me, and we were supposed to have plans tonight.

I stand in front of the mirror and I look at my body in this little dress I’m wearing, and my socks folding over different lengths and I try and forget that I just fucked a sixty-five-year-old man who only bought me one drink. I think about that whole dick fantasy, and I try to get myself to want to fuck myself. Here you go, I say, look at that fine ass, look at that body, you want to take her don’t you, you want to fell this girl.