MAN LOVED DARKNESS RATHER THAN THE LIGHT BECAUSE HIS DEEDS ARE EVIL
I DECIDED TO WALK to the pharmacy. As I walked through the neighborhood, I sized up each house in my mind, their traditional 1950s ranch styling. One story. I tried to remember the home we lived in before my father died, but I only had remnants. A red door. Two steps down from the stoop. I remembered a giant sand pit in the back, a big yellow dog that had died when I was very young. The dog would dig deep holes into the sand pit, and I would crawl inside them, feeling hidden and safe.
The houses were old. An old woman on one side of the street came out from behind the back of her house on a gas-powered lawnmower, riding into her front yard. She waved at me and I smiled back, lifting my arm to shield my eyes from the sun. Another retiree on a lawnmower across the street. Having a lawn seemed like such a waste, but I fantasized about being able to have a garden. I imagined myself with Matt and wondered if he would be the type of person to mow the lawn once a week. If the stability of a lawn-care schedule was exciting or incredibly dull. Maybe, for the right kind of woman, lawn care was a noble act.
The sound of cars along Chelton drifted over the houses, reminding me that this was not a small suburban neighborhood, but part of a larger town of people doing things with their lives, making money. People who had places to be and things to do, unlike myself. I wondered, if I was the right kind of woman, if Matt would have been less concerned about my becoming pregnant. The fear of it began to set in when I considered all of my failures and the freedoms I was not ready to give up. I had nurtured my drug use as if it were a baby and felt an infantile need to protect it. I often forgot to eat or supplemented my caloric intake with beer. I had visions of a child bursting out of my body, me alone in the wet and dark of it, a bleeding baby in a puddle with me. I was unable to nurture even myself, still needed someone to take of me. Child rearing child. My obsessive fears of aging kicked in, and I wondered how much worse I might look after pregnancy, this big unknown, how I relied so intensely on my body to get what I wanted. I saw how disinterested Matt seemed in Frankie. Though he was tender with her, I suspected this was more out of boredom than out of respect, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was the wrong type of woman, the type that did not deserve to be treated with such tenderness but with the full force of sexualized violence, or a violence that men reserved for other men. I enjoyed so much of the choking, the roughness between us, the bending myself to please him, but also considered that I did not like myself. I could not decide if the two situations, my hate for myself and my desire for pain, were related. To be equal with others you have to add or subtract from yourself, and I found myself unable to do either.
Maybe childbirth was the ultimate self-mutilation. If I did end up pregnant and did not end it, I suspected Matt would not be there for me and that I deserved that. Matt did not want to see what my blood looked like if it also contained him.
These were the things I considered as I walked into the Wal-Mart pharmacy at 9 a.m. on a Wednesday. The directions on the box said I should prepare for period-like symptoms, and I was thankful to have something like pain to look forward to. I sat on a curb in the parking lot, debating what to do. Matt had said he wanted to be with me and I wanted to trust it. But the caveat was this pill, a broken condom, a question mark that could complicate things further. He only wanted me if I was hassle-free. I wanted to move out of this town, to pack up a car of belongings and leave with him, the way that he had claimed he wanted. But there was no evidence from his actions that this was anything but fantasy.
Yet, I still wanted to be complaisant. I did not want to complicate things if there was still a chance. I took the pill out of its blister package and chewed it up and swallowed it without water, licking the bitter pith off the backs of my molars.
My phone rang. Matt. I figured he was calling to check in on me.
“Hey,” I said. “I got the stuff.”
“Oh good,” he said. “I was just calling to tell you that you are a filthy whore.” I could hear the shape of the sneer in his mouth when he said this. It took me a few seconds to register that he was even speaking English because it was so unexpected.
“What?”
He didn’t wait for me to speak but instead spoke over me and blurted everything out.
“You’re a fucking whore and a home wrecker, L. You’re disgusting. You will never be like Frankie.”
I realized he was insulting me. Something pierced the very center of me and began to rip wide open.
“Okay, but—”
“This is one home you will never wreck, you fucking cunt.”
There is a way people damage you, a way they’ll change the structure of your DNA, the way your brain is wired. I stared at the concrete barrier ahead of me, landscaped trees, a wooden fence that divided Jenny’s neighborhood from the Wal-Mart. A shaking began inside of me. It
