Amy Bloom - Love Invents Us

Max circled the little ball up and down my legs on the inside of my thighs, making electric tracks on my skin. He turned me over again onto my back and pulled the blanket around his face like a babushka, to be funny, and threw it back to the end of the bed. He rubbed my arms to get rid of the goose bumps and tucked my hands under his sweater. The hair on his chest was wet.

“You’ll warm up in a minute, sweetheart. Do you want to shut your eyes and just concentrate on what you feel?”

He straightened out my legs and tried to pull them apart. I pressed them together and smiled to show I was sorry. I tried to relax.

“You don’t have to do anything, baby girl. You don’t have to move, or kiss me, nothing. If you don’t like it, you let me know.”

He put the little ball right between my legs, and I almost jumped out of the bed.

“Jesus. What is that?”

“Is that too much?” He put it down and waited.

“Sort of. Like a shock, but it didn’t hurt. It felt weird.” I opened my eyes. I could see how excited he was, sweat rolling down his temples and his neck onto me.

“All right,” he said.

I lay back down, and this time he got his arm around my hips, holding me steady. He put it between my legs, without touching me; it just hovered above me, moving the air. A little breeze buzzed my pubic hair.

“Very easy now,” he said, and he lowered it to my skin, tightening his hand on my hip. It started making muffled overdrive noises as Max circled it around like a tiny metal detector. Hard waves rolled through my legs, from the soles of my feet, burning through my shins, and then right into my center, knocking my head back. I heard Tony’s voice, before he hurt me: Oh, yeah, ba-de-boom. Let me do you like that.

“Oh, yes,” Max whispered, a hundred times. Nothing was left of me but smoking skin, liquefying bone. My hips lifted high under Max’s hand until I slammed down on the bed, released. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, and my legs shook so hard I knew I couldn’t walk out. I curled up deep in the covers and wouldn’t let him touch me.

“All right?” He put it back under the bed. I certainly didn’t want to see it.

I wouldn’t talk, and when he put his hand on my breast, I pushed it away. After a while he got up to change his wet shirt, and I went into the bathroom and saw my wide, blurred face sliding around like Jell-O on a plate.

“Cow face,” I said to the mirror, and came out dressed, my hands fists. Max backed away. I know he wasn’t afraid I’d hurt him. He was worried I’d hate him. He was worried I wouldn’t do it again.

“You are a fucking pervert,” I told him, and even when it took me ten minutes to undo the lock on my bike, he stayed in the house and watched me from the bedroom window. I gave him the finger, which felt like a stupid cow thing to do, but I couldn’t think of anything else that meant I hate you .

It was him calling my house all weekend, but I didn’t pick up the phone and he hung up when my mother answered. On Saturday afternoon my mother called the telephone company to complain. Even when the repairman ran all over the house like a crazed hamster with his ringing belt, my mother following him from phone to phone, I sat quietly in the rec room, opening and closing the dollhouse doors until he left. My mother bought two new phones. Max mailed a letter to me the last week of school, which was stupid. He could have been arrested.

Dearest girl ,

Your absence and distress is killing me. Please forgive me. I didn’t play fair. All I really wanted was to have something special with you. I’m sorry that I frightened you, angered you, whatever I did, I’m sorry. I am sorry and I never saw anything so beautiful in my life. You took my breath away. Please at least have breakfast with me before school ends .

All my love, for as long as you’ll have me ,

M .

I was bored by August. Mrs. Hills house was about a hundred degrees during the day. We had so many fans on we couldn’t hear each other, which was fine with me. She gave me two more cups, and every once in a while she’d point out some handsome white guy on the soaps and say, “Now, that’s a nice young man,” as if the next step was for me to call CBS. Rachel and I were sort of talking again, but she had a new boyfriend, a sophomore who followed her everywhere and smiled when she made fun of his devotion. After teaching retarded children how to swim and learning how to French-inhale, I had nothing to do. Finally I called Max. I put the receiver down when he answered.

He knew who it was and called me back, crying that nothing mattered but me, and I heard my mother making a cup of tea, and I could barely picture him in my mind while he talked and cried. He was a speck.

For a long time I wouldn’t take a ride home, even in bad weather. I did good deeds and played solitaire. I read Baudelaire and I read Georgette Heyer. I spent my mother’s money on the movies and gas and began to watch boys again and smile at them. My body was humming, a cheerful, wild tune just behind everything else. And then I wanted to talk about the books and the boys with Max, and I smelled coffee and Barbasol in my dreams, and we started again.

I was not a cheerleader, I never played team sports, and I never watched them; I never showed school spirit, but I did like the basketball players. I even watched the NBA on TV once, but they were too much for me: huge, big-veined men, hard as trees, plunging across the floor on their big bandaged legs. The basketball players at my high school were all damp skin and calcium deposits, a few good-sized, broadening young men, the rest just tall, lanky boys with cornsilk hair flopping in their eyes until it got ridged and wet in the second half, or brown mushroom Afros wobbling slightly as they ran up and down the court. The white boys got dark half-circles under their arms and big blotches in the middle of their chests and backs, but the black boys ran water. And Huddie Lester soaked and shone like rain on a moonlit night. I was tutoring a ninth-grade girl more interested in not being left back than in actually learning how to read, and we took breaks every ten minutes. During the breaks, Yolanda ran wild in the halls, jimmying lockers and xeroxing her ass in the teachers’ lounge; I watched Huddie shoot hoop.

I watched them practice three Fridays in a row and finally Huddie dribbled over as they broke up into groups of four, shooting endlessly, a dozen balls swishing through nets, bouncing against the hard white backboard and the hard shining floor.

“You like basketball?”

“It’s okay. At least you have to think when you play. Or at least you look like you’re thinking.” Inside, I was smashing my head against the wall.

“Yeah, we think. You tutor Yolanda McKee?”

It turned out Yolanda was good friends with Huddie’s cousin Abigail. We could hear her singing in the hall, loud and sweet, behind the noise of the boys. He rested his hand on the bleacher and bounced the ball lightly, looking somewhere between me and the gym door.

“You go out with Allen Schreiber?”

“No. He’s just a friend.”

“Jon Schwartz?”

“No. Is this a quiz?”

“Yeah. One more.”

“Okay. Could you stop that?” If he was going to ask me out, if he liked me that way , he’d stop dribbling.

He spun the ball up on one skinny brown finger and we watched it turn, orange, black, orange. He popped it down his arm.

“How about pizza after practice? We finish at five, I don’t have to get to the store right away today.”

I don’t know how I said anything. My ears rang yes and my blood jangled and we sat there grinning and breathless until we heard the janitor hollering at Yolanda.