Susan Steinberg - Hydroplane - Fictions

But this would have made no difference. He had a good last name, this one. My mother would have said so. Give him what he wants, she would have said. He had a good last name I can't remember. And a first name I also can't remember. The boys called him by his first name. The boys called his father Glass-eye.

And Glass-eye called me something. His son did too. The cops did too. The boys.

They called me Princess.

No. That wasn't it.

Yes. Because I was a Jew.

No. Something else. For another reason.

Now, really, though, this means nothing.

None of it's worth breaking down.

And straw was once hay, I'll guess. And hay was once grass.

It doesn't matter.

What matters is I was standing in straw with the cat. And look. When the teacher told us to keep a blanket in the trunk of the car, I didn't know what for. But on the roadside, I thought, A blanket, I'm supposed to have a blanket. I thought, Perhaps this man, if I had a blanket, would touch me on the blanket instead of in all this straw.

I was on my way to a school. I was a teacher.

I am a teacher. It's my living.

I stand in the front of a classroom.

I stand there talking to a hundred looking eyes.

And sometimes I'll be talking, and I'll look around the classroom, and something, perhaps a student, perhaps a boy in the back of the room, someone who spits tobacco into a cup when I am talking, someone who never says a word in class but sits there, rather, staring at me, will remind me of the man on the roadside.

He said, Looks like you shredded it good.

He said, I can help.

He came nearer.

The teacher never said to carry mace. But I thought of it once in the church basement. We were watching films of car wrecks. I couldn't look at the wreckage. I stared instead at the pitiful stain on the teacher's shirt, thinking how it looked like blood, thinking how his gut stretched the stain into cloud shapes, how pitiful it was. I was thinking how it could pin me down, that gut. I was so high that night I thought his gut was stretching toward me to get me and pin me down. And so I stared instead at that milky eye thinking, Fall out of the socket, Fall out of the socket, Roll onto the table. But it stayed stuck in the socket. And I thought of mace. I thought of how mace wouldn't hurt his eye. I knew it would just coat the eye like any other thing, like a spray of spit, that I would need to spray mace into the other eye to make the eye sting. I would need good aim.

Then the teacher couldn't touch me.

And his son with two good eyes stinging from mace couldn't touch me.

Regardless. I was high and thinking dumb.

The wrecks went on and on.

And his son and I really did change a tire. We did. It was flat, this tire. Nearly shredded. I helped him jack up the car. Every one of my nails had black under it after touching the greasy jack. He said, Listen. He twisted some metal thing around some other metal things. He had names for the parts, but I wasn't really listening. And he was mumbling. He wasn't really saying what he was doing. He was looking at my tits from below me. He was making jokes I didn't get.

He said, Are you Jew.

He said, You know what they say about Jew girls.

But I didn't know, and I still don't. And it never occurred to me to leave his house. I could have left. I wasn't locked in. It was Baltimore and I knew how to get home. There was a bus to take. It went from his corner to mine. I knew where I was. He was on the floor partway under the car. I was standing by him. He could have touched my legs with his face. I could feel him breathing on my legs. But he wasn't holding me there. I wasn't stuck. Look. I went into the bathroom. I looked in the mirror. I fixed up my lipstick. There was a towel on the floor. A smell of cologne. A stain in the bathtub. I cupped water from the sink in my hand and drank. I was beautiful in that bathroom mirror. Do you understand this. I was something else. There was my soda on the kitchen table. The calendar girls with the huge tits. It never occurred to me to leave his house. He called my name from the garage. He said it correctly. I said, I'm coming. It never occurred to me to leave his house, until I was walking home later with my shirt on inside-out. It was night.

My mother said, Would you look at this.

And this is what's funny. That now I'm a teacher. That I teach, that is. That I say how it goes. That all those eyes are looking at my eyes looking at the flat past the window.

They want me to tell them something true.

So this is what's true.

So this man on the roadside is true.

I can't say exactly what he looked like. He was big, I recall. Old, I suppose. His teeth looked rotted. But it was dark. He wore a cross on a chain around his neck. It swung when he leaned in toward me. He wore a hat. He changed my tire. He moved my car to the shoulder. He smoked the whole time. He was breathing hard. He said, Let's go for a ride.

I said, I'm a teacher.

He said, I'll be your student.

He laughed and I thought of his laugh against all that farmland quiet.

And I didn't really get the joke.

I thought, split second, to say, Explain.

When the teacher's son said, You know about Jew girls, I said, What about them.

He said, I like you.

I knew he did. I knew when someone liked me.

We were lying on the greasy floor. I saw light through the garage door windows. The light was white, then red. His mustache scratched my face. When I screamed it scared him. He jumped up saying, What the fuck. He said, Go home.

Tell me why this matters.

Since then there have been many men.

My mother said, You could have been beautiful, You could have been married.

She said, You could have been something else.

We shook hands through the window before I went. I felt her nails, her rings, pressing into my palm.

There was a time I liked her.

When I was young, a kid, my mother would pull my hair, and I would say, Hey, stop that, Ma, and she would say, Hay is for horses, Hay is for horses, and I would say back, Hay is for horses, and she would clap and I would clap, and boy did we laugh our heads off.

Though I don't understand why it made us laugh.

Look.

This man in Missouri was big. He could have crushed me. Really. His gut. His shoulders. We were standing in the straw. There was no moon. I had no mace. He could have crushed me to bits.

My cat ran into the car.

The man stood near, his cross swinging against his chest, then not.

He smelled like smoke.

He could have crushed me to bits.

But I can't take this a step further.

I can't keep pretending he touched me. He didn't.

I wasn't psychic.

Though he could have touched me. You know he could have as he was so big and I was not.

But this is how it goes.

I said something like, I like your cross.

He touched his cross.

He said something, nothing important, and left.

But this isn't about him either. Look. What matters is I made it to where I was going.

And sometimes I'm on the couch at home in Missouri. And sometimes I find myself thinking on the couch about that night. I think about what could have happened. But the man drives off and I'm lying on a greasy floor. And it's me and the teacher's son lying there. He says, Look at you, and he sends his fingers up inside, first one, then two, without any warning, without ever asking, and the light turns red and I scream, Stop, and he presses his mouth to mine and hard and I try to scream and I push him off of me and scream, Stop it, and he screams at me and sends me home.

And I think of my mother saying, as I opened the door that night crying, Would you look at this, Your shirt's on inside-out, you slob.

And I remember the boys, how they looked at me laughing, and I remember what they called me after they went with the teacher's son on the road in the long red car, after the teacher's son said what to call me.