Frankie was in charge. She dreamt up the world and the world complied. I liked it. Frankie was the center of the mandala, turning us around her. She was always holding my hand, letting me let go a little more each time, into a new me. Frankie didn’t name me Lilith because it was who she wanted me to be. She named me Lilith because it was what I wanted to become. I wanted to know what it would be like to carry a bad habit all the way through.
I think Frankie knew it would happen, that my presence would disrupt the daily harmony of their lives in a way that was out of her control. She may not have known when it would happen, but she knew that it could.
Matt and Frankie took me on a ride up to Gold Camp Road in Matt’s brand-new Chevy Malibu. We stopped at a gas station first and grabbed snacks, bottles of Diet Mountain Dew and ropes of beef jerky. I got ranch-favored sunflower seeds even though, after a few dozen, the ranch dust flavor started to taste like vomit. I would eat them until the tip of my tongue split with tiny blisters.
Matt loved his Malibu. Slate gray, leather interior, always vacuumed clean unlike my own trashy car. I found the cars of men to be fascinating. There was so little else they seemed to consume in this way in comparison to women—I collected clothes in big heaps and then grew tired of them, but hung on to them as sort of prize. The same with makeup, some of which I’d had since I was nine years old, some I inherited from my mother, makeup kits with bright pink blushes so old the powders became rocks, hardened with talc. Cars were utilitarian but also revealed something about the person with the keys. How deep and low the engine growled, how nice the rims looked, how smooth the gears shifted from third to fourth or fifth. The Malibu was a subtle expression of Matt’s personality I came to admire, and by extension Frankie’s, since she, too, was associated with the car. We rode around listening to Marilyn Manson on repeat.
Frankie flipped around from the front seat and said, “Do you like this song, Lilith?” playing “Mobscene.” She pressed a button to skip to the next track, “Fight Song.” She asked over and over again, “Do you like this song, Lilith?” and sang all the words. She turned on the dome light, making the dark outside impossible to see, flipping around every time she asked a question so she could look me in the eyes. I felt the aesthetic of the word each time it left her lips, imagined the supple ways her tongue touched the roof of her mouth or the top row of her perfect white teeth: Lilith. How much it carried while being so effortless.
I practiced my trick again, the third-eye spot. Frankie said the name at the end of every sentence: Lilith, Lilith, Lilith. I felt like a foreign reactionary playing spy. I wondered if she’d heard Matt and I talking about Satanism in the living room, if I had overstepped. Maybe she saw that I could get too close to Matt, too close to her family. I could get too close and that was why she named me Lilith. A girl invited from the dirt of Frankie’s private Eden, Frankie whose life was so entwined with Matt’s that she came from the bent rib of her lover. Perhaps Frankie was not devoured by the man of her life the way my mother was; it was that she came from him, saw herself as part of him, was so sturdy in his skeletal embrace that she, at first, saw no threat in opening their tannic hearts to me. Lilith was a separate being. That was what Frankie wanted: to close me out. The sinews of their courtship threaded so tightly together that I was merely present to play harp on the tendons of their singular body.
I didn’t know all the words, but I tried to play along as best I could. Every time she flipped around, all hair and eyes, fingers gripped to her seat, I’d force a smile. I’d crinkle my eyes, squint them just a bit to make it seem real, and put sunflower seeds in my mouth, wishing they were Percocet.
Where I seemed to fit in with them was wherever Frankie put me. Frankie was the one who tied me to the coffee table with Matt’s never-worn ties. Frankie was the one who tied a blindfold over my eyes, who brought me another beer and another, who felt up my thighs with her tiny bird hands. Who whispered to Matt what he should do to me. I mean, I wasn’t getting drunk for nothing. I felt so lonely during that whole process. I didn’t know who I was becoming at that moment, and because of that, I latched onto whoever I could and molded myself into what they wanted. It was the path of least resistance.
I had been having problems with my birth control, which became apparent a couple of months into my relationship with Matt and Frankie. My period would come for twelve or seventeen days in a row, and then it would go away and come back again with no warning whatsoever. I was taking the pill every day, but after bleeding for ten days I decided to quit all together. I told Matt and Frankie about this, and we resorted to using condoms.
I would still bleed at random, most often during sex. Matt did not seem put off by this at all, and neither did Frankie.
At first, I felt unattractive and dirty leaving stains, and the extra step of having to put a towel down was not conducive to my illusion of sex
