Gift Horse

Heather Fowler

“I’m going to touch you there now. Is that okay?” Victor moved his hand to land it on Evaline’s warm crotch, which was covered with a light green summer dress and below that the striped cotton panties her mother had bought her the week before at the local discount store. Her small square face gave away nothing of her feelings, yet his system of continuous updates as events progressed had begun to get on her nerves. “I’m going to kiss your lips now,” he’d said first. Then, “I’m going to touch your breasts.”
…..He kissed just like a fish eating algae from another fish’s lips; light, nibbling, and wet.   Her lips were getting chapped already and he had eaten off her gloss. She looked at him, his eyes so focused on her lower-half, his hand cupping her through her clothes. He looked up into her eyes, as if to reassure her, before saying, “I’m going to stick my fingers in your panties now”–this met by her loud exhale.
…..“Well, holy hell, Victor!” she had wanted to say. “Why dont’cha just throw yourself a party?” She wasn’t interested in his penis, wasn’t interested in his soft adoring smiles or the worshipful expression of his glinting blue eyes that seemed always on the verge of tears, wasn’t interested, even, in anything he had to say, so would have preferred one of her PopTart magazines to glance at if she knew she didn’t need to at least appear interested. “So pigeon, here pigeon,” she thought. “Will you get the fuck on with it?” This was an expression she had lifted from her father, one he used when annoyed, usually just before banging his fist into the side of the Plymouth when repairs weren’t going right. But she was trying to be demure.
…..She was laid flat on the football field behind the school, her thin arms and legs flung wide. Everything was dark, but even in the dark, she could feel the cool oddity of his fat finger moving into the outer envelope of her privates like she’d put a baby weenie dog right between her cleft. And then he pressed down and started rubbing. “You ever done this before?” she asked.
…..His hand drew away real fast. “Did I hurt you? I’m going to kiss you again.” He leaned over and pressed another sloppy swish on her lips.
…..“Put your tongue in my mouth,” she said when he came up for air, which was often and almost immediately. He wore a thick wool vest and a t-shirt underneath. His pants had that prep-school pleat in them, and when the two had decided they would do this together, he had presented her the condom to prove he had it, but this was just before they entered the chain-link gate that wrapped the perimeter. Now it was in his back pocket.
…..“We gonna do it?” he had said when she called him that afternoon. “You mean it this time?”
…..She knew she had tempted him and thrown him off before. Probably why he was so careful. He didn’t go to her school either, which was one good reason she called, and yes, she had agreed, they were going to do it, if only so that she could stop his imperfect sweaty groping that had been going on for months and was all supposed to lead up to an act she was never quite interested in with him. His dimples didn’t appeal to her–nor his dull white face framed by thin brown curls.
…..This time, though, she had a date. Some man was going to pick her up after work at the five and dime. He had a hot-red Camaro and he said he would take her to the movies next Friday. So she got back in touch with Victor in a hurry. She had to lose it before then.
…..“Let’s do it,” she remembered she had said on the phone.
…..Victor had started to ask her questions, was she sure, and all that, but she simply said to him, “Would I ask if I wasn’t?” and she must have had a cold tone in her voice because he began apologizing immediately. “It’s not that I don’t think you’d want to, or that I don’t want to.  You know I want to,” he said. “I sent you fifty letters last year and you never replied. Hardly ever. And then last month you stopped talking to me. So now I’m just surprised is all.”
…..“I replied to one out of every ten of them,” she said. “Besides, didn’t anyone ever tell you not to look a gift horse in the mouth? I said I’m ready. Do you want me, or not?”
…..He would, she knew, brag to his geeky friends afterward; maybe then he’d feel accomplished with the ladies. He’d definitely be able to tell them, “I had a girl before,” which would make him stand out at sixteen because not all geeky boys had.
…..“You can’t tell them my name if you tell them,” she said later. That was her only requirement. She would even, if he wanted her to, give him the panties she had on as a keepsake. That’s why she squirted perfume on them before she left for the assignation. But now, as he kissed her again, again delicately groping her chest, she got rather tired of it, tired of his sweaty palms and weird pinching, and was ready for it to be over. “Get on me, Victor,” she said, hoping this might improve things. “Put your whole body on me!”
…..“You’re being kind of bossy,” he said. “It doesn’t like that.”
…..“And now I’m supposed to care what your dick thinks?” She threw her head back and stared at the stars, rolling her eyes. “Besides, my mom expects I’ll be back from the library in half an hour. At this rate, you won’t even get it out.” Her short black hair was tangled already.  She combed through it with her fingers, wanting a lollipop she had left in her backpack but too certain it would distract him if she started digging.
…..“You want me to get it out?” he asked.
…..She lifted her head to meet his eyes. “Sure. Get your penis out. Let me see it.”
…..“You can’t see it,” he said. “It’s dark.”
….“Your penis is dark?”
…..“No, the sky,” he said. He straddled her so that his large ass was on her hips. He unzipped his pants. “It’s not ready,” he said. “Can you do something sexy? I’ll get the condom ready.”
…..What he wanted her to do was to touch it, put it in her mouth, but “I’m not doing that,” she said.
…..“Don’t you love me?” he replied, touching the edges of the red foil package without opening it. “Because I want this to be special for you like it is for me.” When she didn’t reply immediately, he leaned down and kissed her again. “I love you,” he confessed in a way that was so open and broken, she couldn’t let it go on, especially as she knew it would go on as he began to pursue the act–and even up until and after he finished.
…..“I just want to lose it, Victor,” she said. “That’s all! I’m tired of the V thing, and I thought you’d want to help.” A tired strain came into her voice. Victor looked deeply in her hazel eyes, and then away from her, out past the asphalt beyond the field and farther past the dirt track and tennis courts.
…..He stood up, zipping his pants. “Get your jacket on and grab your knapsack, Evangeline,” he said. “I’m not doing this.”
…..She stabbed the ground with her fist. “What? You’re not going to do it now? I don’t turn you on? You know it would be enough for plenty of boys just to put their hands on my breasts. In my pants.”
…..“You’re not wearing pants.”
…..“That’s not the point. What? I have to love you or something?”
…..He began to walk away, slowly, with his wide back to her. His voice was gruff. “Please get your jacket on, Evie,” he called back. “I will walk in a circle till you pass me and then walk behind you until you get home so that you don’t get hurt.” But he didn’t speak to her and he didn’t look at her. He looked at the sidewalks and Pardee houses beyond the field in the other direction.
…..Evangeline stood. She walked. Her legs were cold now and the grass had left itchy imprints on them from where she had been laid out flat. She trembled, but whether from shame or refusal, she did not know. She did know he had left the red foil wrapped condom on the field. She knew, too, that he was good to his word and made sure she got home okay, walking about forty paces behind her until he watched her clear her doorway and call out, “I’m home” to her parents.
…..The guy with the red Camaro, she found out the next week, had already gone out with three of the girls at the store. To each, he said he’d take them to the movies, but he took them to make-out park instead. If they put out, he didn’t call them again. If they didn’t put out, he didn’t call them again either. He just came back for a new girl. He had probably cased every joint with under-aged females in town, she decided. He was thirty and had dark black hair.
…..His skin was a touch pocked but he knew his way around a compliment and he was thin in an appealing half-starved way that made his every admission of need or want just a little bit sharper. Evangeline didn’t go on her date. “Naw,” she said to him as he waited for her in his parked car after her shift. “Thanks any way.” She watched him drive away and wondered what the inside of his car smelled like–and whether, for once, he would have actually done what he promised. It was not that he dated other girls, but that the other girls he dated were ugly. He came around more, but each time he did, she darted off to tag the dog food or fix the porcelain displays on the greeting card aisles.
…..She called Victor, thinking maybe she’d give him another chance. There was a spring dance coming up and she had a long blue dress but no date. Victor loved those things, all that kissing and dancing and shit but when she called the phone in his bedroom rang and rang. He sent her a letter a few weeks later. She pictured him lying on his bed, staring up at his ceiling pasted with glow in the dark stars, maybe tooling with his science books.
…..“Sorry I’ve been avoiding your calls,” his letter said. “But I have a new girlfriend now and can’t talk to you.”
…..Now, that was a new one. He had talked to her ever since they were toddlers when she lived next door, before she moved a few blocks down. She walked to his house and knocked on his door. “Mrs. Kominski,” she said. “Is Victor here?” His mother looked older.  Evangeline hadn’t actually been there in a long time.  The “This Blessed Home” sign with dried lavender and painted mauve letters used to be above her. Now, she looked down upon it, or it fell beneath her view; the whole place seemed smaller really.
…..“Oh, hi, honey,” his mother said. “Sure. Come on in.” But Evangeline sat in the chintz covered living room and waited. After a muffled argument that Evangeline partially overheard, mainly the part that went, “No,” and, “No,” and “No,” with murmurs of his mother’s soft voice falling in between, his mother came back.
…..“He says he can’t see you now,” his mother said, pressing her hands into a ball-like shape in front of her. Then his mother fidgeted, running her busy fingers up and down on the front of her lilac slacks. “But he’s sorry.”
…..Evangeline wanted to storm up those stairs and beat him into a pulp. He would take her to that dance if she could just talk to him. But his mother had already opened the front door to let her out and so she went out. She walked home furious. “That fucker. That fat fuck!  I offer him my virginity and this is how he handles it?”
…..And then she thought of the way he was when they were five, how he had this red rider truck and one day she had taken it and filled it with debris from her backyard, just because he spent so long cleaning and shining it and moving it around only on the cement in front of his house.
…..“What, you don’t like my truck?” he said that day.
…..“I hate your truck. It’s a stupid truck!” she said.
…..He hadn’t talked to her for a year; he hadn’t let her near it again. But that was about a toy vehicle, and he had been five. This time, she reasoned, it was his body she had refused, or not even so much that–because she would have taken part of it anyway, but his love for her itself, all naked and weepy as it was: “What, I have to love you now?” she remembered she had asked, just before he stopped talking to her.
…..And then the silence. His walking her home from a distance. His imaginary girlfriend. The way he would not open his room door.  This was all his Victor-like way of saying, “I deserve more,” and “I am a better man than you will ever know,” and “You made a mistake, you girl I must stop loving now,” and “I’m so sorry.” But, it was also his quiet, undemanding way of saying: “Yes.”

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