So I had no fear as we watched the commercial for the Helping Hand Center, only a low-grade buzz of annoyance. It was like his pill diets, or that time he ordered a box of ginseng online and he sipped it in tea for six weeks straight, or when he hung that weight off it for an hour every night (that he learned about from some show on ancient African tribes on the National Geographic channel). It was an idea that would flit and float around his brain like a bird until the season changed, and it was time to head somewhere new. I was the only thing that had ever stuck with him, and that was the way I liked it.
And then a week later his father died on the front porch of his house, sitting and watching the sun set with his dog sitting next to him. Alone in death, just him and his dog. (He had chased Thomas’s mother away years before; she lived in Iowa City with a new husband and a Guatemalan baby girl they had adopted our senior year of high school.) His father had an aneurysm. The doctor said there had been all this pressure building up in his brain for a while, maybe even for a year, and that could have been why he had been more difficult than usual. It was one of those things you can’t track or test, it just swells up like a balloon. Then it is like someone took a little pin and stuck it in your head and it explodes.
Three days after the funeral there was a call from the lawyer. Thomas’s dad had left him everything, the entire farm, and all of the money he had been stashing away for years. He had not been spending it on anything but building a bigger farm, a bigger legacy for his son. Here Thomas was thinking he could escape it, but there it was, more money than we could have ever dreamed of, and land, acres and acres for the taking. It was like we had won the lottery or something, only someone died. It was more money than we should have had. It was more money than we deserved. It was where our problems began.
“AND NOW,” I said to Valka, as she cradled my head in her lap, “I want it to end.”
We were curled up on the bed. My eyelids were swollen tight and I could only see a sliver of the room. My voice was raw. I had screamed too much. I had not stopped talking for an hour straight. Valka stroked my hair, all the way to the end, all the way down me, head to waist.
“We can make it end,” she said. “We can make anything happen.”
I almost believed her.
10.
What did I know about sex anyway? What does anyone know about it? I was only ever with the same person my entire life, so what we made together was what I knew as right. I read the magazines. There was too much detail in some of them, outright lies in others. Be aggressive toward your man. Be a pleaser. Nibble. Grip tight. Tickle. Or: wait for him. Let him lead the way. But I ask you, what did he know either?
I watched the movies, too. Movies made just for girls who lived nowhere near Nebraska. Saucy language, bold women. Inside jokes I got only half the time, two minutes later than I was supposed to. Those girls had a different life than mine. They were busy looking in the mirror, changing into another outfit. They were waiting for their man to say something witty, or trying to beat him to the punch. They did not know about being turned on by the smell of earth and hard work on their husband at the end of the day.
I watched the movies Thomas liked, too, the dirty ones. From standing to screwing in no time flat. I hated the high-pitched squeals from those girls with the ginormous fake breasts, bouncing up so high I wanted to yell, “Duck!” at the screen. Thomas loved those movies. Thomas, who never wanted me to wear makeup. Thomas, who said I should keep my hair long, and never change the color. “Keep it real,” he would tell me. Thomas watched those movies sometimes when I was not around. All I could wonder was, why am I not enough for him?
There were the other girls from town—I guess I could have talked to them about sex. It seemed like that was all they wanted to talk about when I was growing up. There was a slumber party I went to in high school, a few months after Thomas and I did it for the first time. We played a game of “I never” that I ended up losing, or winning, depending on how you looked at it. (Rim jobs? Oh dear Lord, I almost passed out.) Then Margaret kept talking about how big her boyfriend’s penis was, calling it practically every name in the world but that. I think she had even made a few up. “I love sex,” she said. “Call me a slut, but I love his big ol’ ding-dong.” She made all the other girls spread their index fingers apart to show how big their boyfriends’ penises were, then offered her opinion. “Five inches, that’s average, that’s what they say,” she would say and nod. I froze, then lied and said I was still a virgin. Everything they were talking about, the way it felt inside of them, the length, the girth, none of that was familiar to me. I was hoping some of them were lying, too. I locked myself in the bathroom later and cried and then pretended I had puked when they started knocking on the door. I never went to another slumber party again.