Lidia Yuknavitch - Dora - A Headcase

I wake up. I’m totally sweating. I look over at my digital clock. It’s five a.m. And something else. I am drenched between my legs.

The whole rest of the “night” I think about that fucking dream. I know exactly what the Sig would say. He’d say I want my dad dead for betraying me. But I have guilt about that, because, you know, wanting your dad dead is kind of not cool. I know what Siggy would say about the woods, too. He’d say it’s a sexual landscape. He’d say what I really want is for Mr. Lechbo K. to penetrate those woods and fuck me silly as revenge against my dumb dad.

Honestly I don’t know what crack pipe that guy smokes sometimes.

Wanna know what I think it means?

I think I dream my dad out of the way so I can find a woman. Maybe my mother. No, I don’t forgive her for her lame-ass lapsed motherhood. But I can still hear the sound of her playing piano in my head. I think when she played the piano she was trying to tell me something. Something about art. But then her marriage tanked and she went numbimbo and I turned into me.

I think the woods in the dream are in the way, and yeah, they may be a vag map, but I think I’m supposed to go straight through them — vag to vag — to see for myself what’s on the other side. I think she’s been keeping a secret all these years.

I put my hand between my legs. Sticky. I bring my hand to my mouth. Salty apples. I roll over on my side. I pull the covers over me. I get fetal. I roll around in the bed under the covers. You come from salty goo. Salty goo comes out of you. Maybe it all boils down to vag’s, but that’s not nothing. Under the covers it’s beautiful and dark.

At about 8:30 a.m. I get a knock on my bedroom door. “Ida?” Fucking Peppina the ho. “Are you decent?” she says.

Am I?

After I pull on my skinny jeans and a Velvet Underground T-shirt I open the door. The look on her face is a cross between frightened and fascist. Honest.

She comes in.

She sits on the edge of my bed. If you’ve lived through teenager you’ve witnessed several of these sit-downs. They are never, ever, good.

Peppina is wearing a red sweater with a V-neck so low her cleavage looks cavernous. If I was a man there would be no way to talk to this woman and look her in the eye. Hell, even as me I can’t look her in the eye. I literally feel vertigo. Like I’m gonna fall into that boob cavern. What a way to go, huh?

“Ida,” Peppina says, and briefly I think wow. We have the two stupidest names in the history of the planet. What’s so hard about coming up with cool girl names? Like Obsidian.

“Your father thinks perhaps you and I might be able to talk more easily about things,” Peppina says. “Woman to woman.” She takes a deep breath.

Dudette. You are so not my mother.

She takes an even deeper breath. I watch her cleavage. Watch out! Those bad boys may blow! I catch myself thinking. Then, really? My idiotic alien dad thinks you should talk things out with me? Perfect.

“I know you are going through a difficult time,” she says, “and I want you to know that I understand. I do. My own parents were divorced when I was just ten years old. I want you to know that you can talk to me. Because of that. Because I understand.”

If I had a voice right now? I’d tell her to fuck the fuck off. Since I don’t? I pick my nose.

She smiles. “Oh Ida. That kind of thing isn’t going to work on me. I’m not … stupid.”

She scoots over closer to me. I can smell her hoo doo perfume. What’s she up to? I sit in my cone of silence and try to will her sweater to fly off.

“Listen,” she says in the voice of a vixen, “How about you and I start over? I’d like to take you shopping.”

Shopping?

Is this woman insane?

She inches over ever closer and puts her hand on my knee. My crotch goes warm. My face gets hot. I shake my head no.

“Ida,” she says, and now she reaches over and holds my face in her hands, “I think we could be friends.”

I yank my face away.

Peppina moves so close to me she’s nearly sitting on me. She takes my face in her hands again. This time, she holds my jaw more firmly. “Ida, I have strong feelings for you. Why, I remember when you were just a child…”

You are so so not my mother.

I avoid eye contact. I stare down. But you know what’s down there. The cavern. Those enormous pendulous orbs. Whiter than bread. The wicked perfume. Her tits rise and fall with her breathing. The perfume gets all up in my nose. I can’t help it. I want to bury my face in her tits. I want to almost maul her like a chimp. Then she lifts my face up toward hers and kisses me about a centimeter away from my lips, all slow motion-y, my mug still between her hands.

I’ve still got the booger from before, you know.

You know how sometimes you do shit you don’t really know where it came from? Yeah. I grab her headful of redhead. My hands sort of disappear in all those waves of auburn hanging around her face and shoulders — I mean it’s mythic — I carefully plant the booger in her perfect hair and then? Eye to eye I lay a big hard wet one right on her mouth.

With tongue.

She pulls back. Slaps me a hot one. I smile. The lingering taste of salt and apples … at least to me.

“That was entirely inappropriate,” Peppina says, her slap hand on her heaving bosom. Such a harsh voice for a vixen.

“I’m going to speak to your father,” she says as she lurches up and toward the door, “your … problems are worse than even I understood.”

Exit a vixen, stage left. I gotta confess. As she’s walking out my teen door? I watch her ass make its beautiful up and down flex with each step beneath her … what do you even call black pants like that? Vixen slacks? I’m pretty sure I can see wetness in the dark space under her ass and between her legs.

Let’s make that shopping date, sister, I go.

In my head I mean.

The second my dad’s ho is gone? I shove my bed against my bedroom door. I shove my dresser across the room and dump it onto the bed for weight. I unplug my TV and put that on the bed too. Then I dismantle all the floor-to-ceiling two by fours from my homemade studio and jam the two by fours between the bed and the walls. I step back. Vaguely the whole shebang looks like a spaceship. Also I superglue the doorframe in the knob area. I figure I’ve got twenty-four hours tops.

To make this room into something they’ll never forget.

ON THE WALL OF MY BEDROOM, WITH MY PURPLE SHARPIE I write “Aphonia.” I draw a big bald girl head with an open mouth around it. I give her very long luxurious eyelashes.

Aphonia literally means “no voice.” The Sig taught me that.

On the other side of my bedroom door the bamorama has begun. It’s them. The first round of parental pounding on my door. The first round of “Ida? Open this door, please.” The first round of my father the alien and his ho bag red head. “Ida, you’re going to have to open this door. Ida, this is not appropriate.” The next “Ida” I hear? I chuck my digital clock at the door. As it flies in the air I see 9:31 p.m. tumbling in space. The thunk stuns them for a minute. I hear them muttering gibberish in whispers on the other side of the wood. Then someone tries the doorknob. Rattlerattlerattle. SUPER GLUE. Tards.

My ass buzzes. Whoever it is can suck it.

If you google Aphonia and check out the Wikipedia page you’ll see all this crap about how when a person with Aphonia prepares to speak, the vocal folds, which ordinarily come together and vibrate, don’t meet. Yeah vocal cord banging is how talking happens. With Aphonia, there’s not banging. So you are soundless. Aphonia can be caused by injury, but also by fear or trauma or stress. What I’m saying is, you could, you know, go voiceless from just being fucked up. Like me.