6.
It is important when I learned the word “rape.”
In the school year before the crime, Randy and I were sitting on his kitchen floor. It was a wide and open space with yellow linoleum tiles. We sat with our backs to the refrigerator and faced the wall some twenty feet away. We had caches of action figures in those days, primarily G.I. Joes and Star Wars characters, and I lugged mine around in large plastic tackle boxes my father had left at our house, while Randy kept his in see-through Tupperware containers. On that day, we’d spread the characters out on the floor before us; Boba Fett, Cobra Commander, and the like.
We were thirteen years old, and the only people who knew we still played with these toys were each other.
We shared many secrets like this.
For example, Randy’s parents, sweet-hearted people, never got the courage to tell him about Santa Claus, and so his fantasy lasted well past the norm. When my oldest sister, Hannah, told me, I was around nine, and I rushed over to Randy’s house to commiserate. It was the week before Christmas and, when I got there, Randy was lounging on a swing outside, chewing the end of a pencil and working on his list. The document was three pages long, complete with simple sketches of the most coveted items, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. So I spent years like this, changing the subject every time he brought it up. It was no easy task. Randy eventually gathered the facts on his own, of course, and one day in high school, when we had become very different people yet found ourselves together at a classmate’s house party, he drunkenly asked me why I’d let him carry on like that.
“I don’t know,” I told him. “I guess I just didn’t want to spoil it.”
Randy shook his head and smiled. He put his arm around my shoulders.
“There’s just one thing I don’t get,” he said. “All those letters I sent to the North Pole. Where the hell did they go?”
“That’s a great question,” I said. “I have no idea.”
But Randy also had the goods on me.
The night my father left us, I snuck over to his house and cried like a baby. We were both ten years old then, up in the middle of the night during a school week and, I thought, the only two people awake in the world. I can’t recall what I blubbered to him. I only remember lying facedown on his bed, my head sopping up the pillow, and hearing a short knock on the door. I scrambled around to hide, thinking we’d been caught, and crawled underneath his bed. Randy opened the door and rubbed his eyes, pretending to have been asleep. On the floor outside his room was a plate of warm cookies. Two cups of milk. We heard footsteps going back down the stairs.
We were friends.
We had decided enough was enough with our toys, however, and so that day in the kitchen we made a game out of slinging them violently across the floor to crash against the opposite wall. Points were scored if you broke a head or a limb off the figure, and we kept tally by drawing in erasable pen on the fridge. The toys made red and blue marks along the baseboards, I remember, and his dog, Ruby, swallowed the decapitated heads.
After several rounds of this, Randy’s older sister, Alexi, came in.
In college but living at home, Alexi was thin, blond, and followed constantly by boys. One particular boy I remember was named Robert, and he slunk around Randy’s house for a year. He looked perpetually wrinkled, as if he had slept in his clothes, and wore baseball caps even at night. He worked as a short-order cook in a restaurant near campus, where he and Alexi had met, and always smelled to us like fried onion rings.
When Alexi saw the mess we’d made she said, “What are you two idiots doing?” but didn’t wait around for an answer. She told Robert to make her a glass of lemonade, so he did. Then she walked directly to the telephone, attached to a wall near the den, and dialed a number. “Jenn,” Alexi said into the phone, “what’s this bullshit I hear about you not coming to Robert’s party?”
Robert stood over us and grabbed ice cubes out of the freezer.
He asked Randy, “Did you know your sister’s insane?”
“You don’t have to tell me,” Randy said.
We liked Robert, as he described nearly everything he saw as “insane” and made us wonder what type of revelations awaited us in college. We followed him outside to the patio while Alexi talked on the phone. We watched him smoke cigarettes and ash into a Dr Pepper bottle. Their dog, Ruby, then came outside through the dog door and trotted onto the lawn, where she vomited up the brightly colored heads of our action figures. Robert said, “That dog is insane.”
We laughed and slapped at the mosquitoes biting our ankles.
Robert then asked Randy a number of questions about his sister, like what type of flowers she liked, what her favorite place to eat was, and if she had ever dated any fraternity guys. Randy, of course, had no idea. After a few minutes, Alexi stepped outside, holding the telephone at her neck, still attached by its cord.
“Robert,” she said. “Jenn wants to know what the score was.”
The subject was LSU football, as it often is in Baton Rouge, and this was a time of depression. “It was forty-four to three,” Robert told her. “We got raped.”
So there it was, burning for me.
There have been other words like this in my lifetime, words so mysterious that I had to possess them, even if I didn’t understand their meaning. Diaphragm. Prophylactic. Swoon. I remember a day in the sixth grade when a boy named Chuck Beard, a redheaded kid, called me a dildo at recess. We had been playing Four Square along the brick walkways of Perkins and I’d sent him out of the competition with a lob that careened off the boundary line. He was furious. After school that day, my mother picked me up in the parking lot. She asked me how I had done on a project I had turned in to my teacher, Mrs. Williams, a woman who wore massive amounts of blue eye shadow. “I got a B,” I told her. “I think Mrs. Williams might be a dildo.”
My mother pulled to the side of the road.
“What did you say?” she asked me. “Do you even know what that means?”
She was beautiful and still young, my mother. She had a new haircut since the divorce.
“Of course I do,” I told her. “That lady is a pain in my butt.”
Cars passed as she composed herself.