I don’t get it,” ventures Ann, a while into the conversation. “Wouldn’t that kind of hurt?”
The others regard her, her tentative squint, her cloddish blue feet sticking way out on the coffee table like an unusual centerpiece. Hannah Stolarik sprawls in the easy chair, her combat boots on what Ann has come to think of as Esker’s ottoman. Denise Escobar sits cross-legged at the other end of the red couch, leaning forward so her dangly earrings swing, working on a Slim Jim. Saturday afternoon, and the meanest specks of snow are blowing about in brilliant sunlight beyond the French doors.
The older girls, both seniors, look at her. They are having one of their marathon sex talks, and Denise has been relating information from some cable talk show, on which the expert recommended that one practice going down on a banana.
“Well,” Denise enunciates in a way that manages to be not unkind while making perfectly clear her incredulity at sharing the same planet with someone on this level of dimwittedness, “you peel it first.”
The clouds do not lift from Ann’s face. Her lip curls. “Okay . . . wouldn’t that be a little messy?”
Denise squints back, equally uncomprehending. “What?” She looks to Hannah for help.
Hannah is large, with white skin and dyed jet hair and garnet-painted lips: all white and black and red, hard. She looks tough on the street, with her size and her boots and her sardonic jaw and stare, but this all masks the surprising heart of a judge: dispassionate, protective, fair. Now she inclines her head toward the ceiling, so when she looks at Ann it’s through her heavily blackened lashes. “You know you don’t actually blow . . . ?”
“What are you talking about?”
“A blow job.”
“Going down on a man is a blow job?”
“What did you think it was?”
The couch shakes with Ann’s laughter, and her answer gets gasped out between what could pass for sobs. “Going down on a man—what it sounds like—you know, the woman lowering herself down onto the guy—like not missionary position.”
There is nothing girlish about their laughter. It’s cacophonous—ice in a blender, pig in the mud, rusty bellows on a windy day—and as one dies down the others swell anew, so that even after the big laughter is spent smaller waves of sound continue to lap and overlap at finally greater and greater intervals, and then they float in the after-silence for a while, their bodies still transformed by all that extra oxygen. Ann basks in the glow of her ignorance, her cherished little-sister status that affords so much amusement to the others and provides such an island of safety to herself.
“Shit,” Denise sighs on a residual breath of mirth, and she rests her well-gnawed Slim Jim on the coffee table. When she sits up, it’s with renewed energy: a remembered scrap of news. “Speaking of which—”
“Speaking of shit?” queries Hannah.
“Hardy-har-har. No, speaking of not the missionary position, guess who asked for your number?” To Ann.
“Malcolm Choy,” she says, to be funny.
Denise gives her Saturday-morning-cartoon grin and nods.
“Get the fuck out.” Ann can’t catch her breath.
“No, I swear to God.”
“What did he say?”
“He said, Do you have Ann’s number?”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah.”
Hannah looks mysterious, but only smiles.
“Oh my god.” Ann does some yoga-breathing. There are her big blue air casts in front of her. “I can’t believe I still have these fucking things on.”
It is sweet to curse with her friends. The shits and fucks tumble from their mouths like pastel sugared almonds, as perfect and frivolous. They wear their expletives like body glitter, a cheerful and audacious accouterment of adolescent femininity. Ann is the only one of the three who’s never had sex. Denise, in what Ann believes has to be the most wholesome loss-of-virginity story ever, had sex at age thirteen after a big snowball fight with her boyfriend in Prospect Park, after which they went back to her apartment, where her unsuspecting mother made them hot chocolate. For her part, Hannah reeks of experience: for the first half of last year, she had a boyfriend from Bronx Science, and for the second half a girlfriend from Cooper Union.
Ann is neither jealous nor intimidated by her friends’ comparatively extensive activities. It’s somehow reassuring to know actual people, peers, who have sex and emerge without wounds and scary secrets and broken hearts, with their senses of humor supremely intact. It is a wholly different possibility than what she has garnered from movies and books, and one in which she still does not really believe.
The only movie she ever saw that endorsed the strangely, implausibly weightless version of sex that Denise and Hannah seem to practice was a porno film, or actually a string of porno shorts, rented and viewed in a fit of curiosity one night when the three of them were house-sitting Hannah’s half-sister’s apartment. For once, Ann was not the only one for whom the experience was new, and they were each shocked and offended: Hannah politically, by the simultaneous penetration of a woman by two men; Denise aesthetically, by the meager, stubby bands of pubic hair on the women (“If you’re going to shave that much, why not the whole thing?” she’d wanted to know; as it was, she pointed out, they all looked like Hitler); and Ann personally, and most profoundly, by the absence of plot.
She could not stomach the idea of sex devoid of story, and the storyless acts shown in the movie were strangely unsexy, so much senseless, bland, rabbit activity. It was depressing and also boring, and she’d quit after two segments to remove her nail polish and flip through Hannah’s sister’s back issues of Ms. and Elle in the bedroom. But why, she’d wondered, wiping Copper Penny off her nails and alternating between news briefs about women’s rights in Ireland and Zimbabwe and articles on getting along with your boss and the best way to remove facial hair, why does she feel comforted and even protected by Hannah and Denise’s brand of casual wit and affection regarding their own sex lives, when she herself cannot conceive of sex except as something devastating, apocalyptic, and utterly unfunny?
Now Denise pops up from the red couch and her knees crack. “Where are the bananas? I want to try.”
“For real?” asks Ann.
“Spare us,” says Hannah.
“Oh, go wait in the car,” shoots Denise, and Hannah laughs appreciatively. They are on a continual mission to coin new insults.
“Go wax poetic,” suggests Hannah.
Denise comes back with, “Go pee in a cup.” She is the quickest draw, and blows on the tip of her index-finger gun before reholstering it. Now she turns to Ann. “I’m serious. Where, on the counter?”
“If we have any.” As Denise recedes into the kitchen area, Ann turns to Hannah and asks softly, “What were you going to say about Malcolm?” She suspects Hannah of being unusually wise, even prescient, although, like most people, unable to apply her wisdom to herself.
“Nothing.”
“Then what were you thinking?”
Hannah smiles, caught out. “Birds of a feather.”
“Who? Me and Malcolm Choy?”
“Peas in a pod.”
“What are you talking about?”
She shrugs and smiles and cocks her head contemplatively.
“Yo, Confucius. What the hell are you saying?”
“On the other hand, two magnets, both set to repel.”
Ann throws Killycot at Hannah and actually nails her on the cheek. “Oh, go choke on a fortune cookie!”
Hannah raises an eyebrow, holds up an imaginary scorecard. “The Polish judge gives it a six.”
“Oh, go scour the sink.”
New scorecard. “Four and a half.” Then, without warning, Hannah turns serious. “What I think, Anna Panna Banana, is that Malcolm Choy finds you intriguing and that, if you and he managed to get together, you might teach each other a thing or two.” She holds Ann’s gaze as though she knows something, her broad, impassive face all white and black and red, like a deck of cards, every suit at her disposal. Alarm crashes through Ann’s chest. She is again on the bleachers, filled with a volatile, dangerous faith in her own heart, in her ability to sprout wings, defy gravity, exist in midair. She cools her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “You don’t look good,” declares Hannah brightly. “We need to get you out.”
“Yeah, you’ll get scurvy,” says Denise, coming back and flourishing her banana. She has sculpted it into an excellent likeness of a penis.
“You already are scurvy,” Hannah tells her.
“No, that thing sailors get from lack of fresh air.”
This dissolves Ann. “Idiot! They’re in fresh air! Lack of fresh fruit.”
“Oh yeah, citrus.” Denise snaps her fingers. “So why are you saying Ann’ll get scurvy?”
“I didn’t. You did.”
“I did?”
“Yeah. Shut up and go down on a banana. So”—Hannah turns back to Ann—“does your wheelchair fit in the elevator? Seriously, can we take you out? Push you along the promenade?”
Ann glances over her shoulder at the French doors and the balcony. Bits of snow are still flitting in the sharp winter glare. It’s a day out of an adventure story: fake and thrilling. “It fits.”
“Then let’s go meet Malcolm.”
“Now? What, you think he’s just going to be strolling by?”
“There’s this thing called a telephone.”
Ann protests, but without any vehemence. No one knows Malcolm’s father’s name, but Hannah knows he lives on Joralemon, and Denise dials information and gets the number. She starts to write it on one of Ann’s casts. Ann slaps the back of her head. Denise smiles and applies the pen to her own palm instead.
“You’re going to wash that shit off before we see him,” avers Ann, whose heart is meanwhile rattling the bars of its hot, sealed chamber.
Denise extends the phone to her. “Go, girl.” Her felt-tipped palm is flexed to face Ann with the number.
The phone rings. They all jump. Denise emits a shrill of laughter, then claps her hand over her mouth.
“Hello?” A freaked-out tremolo. A pause. “Oh, hello, Alice,” says Ann. The others see her face adjust. It’s like watching a sheet of paper fold crisply in half.