Emma Rathbone - Losing It

Across the parking lot in the distance, a man walked in a hunched manner. He was wearing a neon crossing guard jacket. I couldn’t tell where he had come from or where he was going.

“How’s Dad? What’s he doing?”

“Your father went to see if they have electric converters for his laptop. He didn’t bring the right kind of thing.”

“Sounds like you guys are having a blast.”

“Actually a wonderful man took us up a mountain the other day. At the end of it he gave us a small doll made out of beads. But I didn’t have anywhere to put it. I didn’t have a pocket.”

“But about Aunt Viv,” I said, focusing in. “Why aren’t you surprised that she’s a virgin?”

My mom sighed. “I guess it’s because I never knew of her going out with anyone.”

“Well, I mean, what was she like when she was younger? When you knew her?”

I got up and started walking, keeping in the shady part, toward one end of the shopping center, where some hanging letters read “ook World.”

“She was sort of dreamy, Vivienne. Removed.”

“I don’t think of her as being that way. I think of her as being straightforward.”

“She could be like that, too. She was both.”

“What else?” I said, frustrated. “What else do you remember?”

“Well.” I heard a rattling sound on the other end. Pills in a bottle. “This damn thing. What?” she said.

“Vivienne,” I said. “What was she like ?”

“I don’t know. She’s my sister-in-law. She’s— We always got along.”

“That’s not what I’m asking.”

“She could be a bit of a know-it-all.”

“Okay.”

I stared through the glass into the bookstore. It was obviously closed and had been shut down for some time. Overturned cardboard boxes spilled paperbacks across the floor. Still, I tried the handle. It was locked. I turned around.

“Well, so,” I said, “what do you mean?”

In the distance, the man in the crossing guard jacket came into my sights again. He walked into some trees. Where is he going? I wondered.

“Well, she could never be wrong about something,” said my mom. “I remember once she decided to do a sort of project where she splattered paint across a blouse, you know, to get that effect? To wear it that way?”

“I guess.”

“And it looked, predictably, like a disaster.”

“Okay.”

“But she’d made a big deal out of the fact that she was going to do it. So she wore it anyway, as if challenging us to say something. I don’t know why I remember that. It was so long ago.”

“But I mean do you think that’s why? She was never with anyone? Because she was that way?”

“She got really into glassblowing for a while,” said my mom, ignoring me. “It was a real phase.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Well, you asked .”

More pills rattling.

“I know but…”

We were both quiet for a little while.

“I’m asking you why. Why do you think she’s a virgin? If you had to say, if you had to make a guess. I mean, don’t you think it’s strange?”

“Of course I do.”

“Well, so, what’s your theory? There has to be something. Something you secretly think.”

That’s what I wanted. The thing my mother gathered or suspected even if she’d never say. It was like her old friend Joanne, who was always single and really involved in community theater. She would come over with a wooden rattle and be like, “I made this!” and then laugh in a spiky, outrageous way and went to great pains to make sure you knew that she saw the fun in everything, which made it really stressful to be around her, and you got the sense that’s why she was never with anyone, but it’s not like you could tell her that.

My mom sighed. “Well, like I said. She could be quite shy.”

“But shy people are in relationships all the time,” I said.

“I know that,” she said vaguely.

It was going to be one of these things, like the Kennedy assassination, or Amelia Earhart, the earth swallowing up the truth, the last threads of it degraded and eroded by time until there wasn’t even a starting point from where to begin looking. And maybe that’s what it was like with Viv, maybe there was an unidentifiable line she crossed, a wire she tripped, somewhere deep in her life, that caused her to be a virgin, and maybe she’d had a sense of it at the time in some locked-up place but hadn’t acknowledged it, and I would never know what that place was, or what had caused it. I would never know when the switchover came, or what that atmosphere was like to foster it and therefore what to avoid, how to step around it.

A plane flew by overhead. I squinted up.

“It is strange,” said my mom, after a moment. “But so is Niagara Falls and I don’t sit there and twist myself into a pretzel trying to figure out how it got to be that way.”

My first kiss was with a girl, Marianne Wallace. We were ten. She wore red lipstick and seemed to be always tossing her sexuality around, although maybe you can’t call it that at that age. She was always pulling down her underwear for someone’s brother or asking people to hypnotize her. One afternoon I was over at her house and we were looking at one of her dad’s heavy old World Book s, at the same section we always looked at, which were several transparent pages with different parts of human anatomy on them, so that when you laid them on top of one another they would layer, first with the skeleton, then the muscle, then the organs, then the whole naked body. We were flipping back to begin again when she pushed me to the side and shoved her tongue into my mouth. All I could think was that it was like the arm of a starfish.

In high school there was Eddie, and then in college, after I’d quit swimming, there was a guy named Tim Palover. It was senior year and we’d been partnered up for a presentation in our history lab, and so had to meet up at the library several times. He worked for his dad’s moving company and had a thick neck and a sweet, concerned face. He would slowly run his fingers along the books, looking for a specific one, and I liked the way he hovered over everything in a heavy, gentle way. After building up my courage, I asked him out one day, but it turned out that the pleasant, deliberate way we’d had when working together didn’t carry over into conversation very well. We sat at a taco place, looking in different directions. I slurped loudly on my soda to fill the silence.

We still ended up going back to his apartment — he lived off campus — and getting stoned and sitting on his sofa. For lack of anything else to do, we silently watched his roommate play a bass-fishing video game where he flung his arm back and forth, to cast the virtual line, with increasing hysteria, until he threw the controller down on the floor and stomped away.

Tim and I looked at each other. We started making out. I’m here, I thought. I’m doing this. It was the middle of the afternoon. I was high, wonky. Sun filtered through a Tibetan scarf tacked to a window. I could tell he wanted to go all the way, that he would do that, and I hardly had to do any paddling to keep it going. He put his hand down my pants and started a rhythmic motion. I liked how he smelled, and the pleasant sensation of his weight on top of me, but this didn’t feel good. It reminded me of someone sanding the last drop of varnish off a banister. I tried to want it, to align myself with the grid of pain and pleasure you see on people’s faces in porn. His head was now on my chest. He kept doggedly at it. I opened my eyes and looked at the jerking aquamarine waves on the TV, the video game stuck on the menu screen.