Chapter twenty four

Relics

With a wide variety of accessories, a doll hospital and a hair salon with personal stylists,they are by far most luxurious toys ever invented. Seven hours ,the state vacuum of the airport, the late afternoon flight;the asphyxiating incense of the rental , a car freshener fir bouncing about the rearview mirror, mocking us. When we arrived in that flat town in Georgia l, our big lungs swallowed the clean fresh air. I could forgive the heat. Begonia parked by the mailbox to not wake her antie with the headlights glare.

"She does know we are staying here? right? "

Begonia was busy unlocking the gate to the gravel that led to her childhood home. Her brow remained furrowed until the lock finally caught.

She didn't even answer. I decided that I didn't even want her to know. Her posture slumed under the weight of both of our suitcases which she insisted on carrying.Head bowed her bangps caught in her eyelashes,she blew them away . The rest of her hair became tangled in the bag's handles. As we approached the clapboard house with the partial second story, I realized that our path was lined with dozens upon dozens of little pants , some with violet flowers some not at all bearing furry flowers :begonians. She wasn't the only one.we weren't the only ones.The last time I truly felt alone with her was in new York. During her semester in campus when we shared that night of obsolute pleasure and orgasms.

"Come with me" she whined as she took me in her mouth completely ,kneeling before me .

back bowed terrifically, a skinny cellar cat of a woman.Whenever she had me like that,I imagined her mouth at my nipple .Whenever she suckled at my bereast,I envisioned her below. Four hands , four breasts , two wet clefts , two mouths . There never seemed to be enough of us ; Our fucking was never without a joyful dissatisfaction.While I too fantasized about sghared tremours ,I couldn’t actually do what she wanted .I was never able to make love like a asynchronised swimmer . I became too engrossed in the other’s undoing to experiebce my own at the same time.But I could try .The room was pitch-black ;there was only one outlet near her bed,Herbeloved KORG and a floor lamp, the lone source of lighting in the basement apartment’s room . often found over it.That night, the keyboard won.

I leaned forward and found her opening , appreciating the trob obove.

‘’No , Cacey,;; She whimpered moving my hand to her thigh .’’I mean, come with me to Valdosta’’

‘’Whats in Voldosta?’’I managed.

‘’A wedding .But if I tell you that there’s more of this inValdosta, will you join me?’’Her tongue teased , nudging folds away, hiding and unveiling me until I wastoo swollen to be concealed .’’I want to lap you up in a thousand states.’’

‘’But we’ve only got fifty’’

‘’Fourty-nine now to go. Technically.’’

The comforter became the drenched. The streets were tugged away from the mattress by the rhythm she encouraged. I don’t remember when, but I agreed to accompany her. Tagging along to watch her dear old friend hitched was nothing .If she wanted to rob a bank ,I would’ve held its door open for her with curtsy.

The front door opened creaklessly .She veered to her left , leading me by the hand.

‘’I don’t want to lose you’’She said with a whisper and a wink.

I felt the shape of the carpeted stairs beneath my feet .They grumbled under the weight of our bodies and luggage .I preyed theat this primitive alarm system , relied upon heavily by the parents of starry eyesd adolescents , dodnt apply to …

When she reached the top,She pressed the weight of her body into the door, Opening it. Anitricate stained glass lamp sat a top a small nightstand , illuminating the room all by its lonesome . I realized that we were in her bedroom This was where she grew larger .I imagined her, young and sinless, gazing through that tiny windi=ow each night as the sun set over the thicket of poplars.But looking arpund ,I was forced to stifle a agiggle .The nightstand was covered with Minnie Mouse stickers .The twin bed’s surface was monopolized by decorative throw pillows ,Her old room was in a heightened state of feminine conflict , as though its invisible boarder, trapped between girlhood play and wamanly opulence , decided she simply must have both .

Her auntie ,She explained wasn’t really her auntie but had taken her in when she was still quite young .Her auntie was a busy woman, caught between clerk of court duties and odd jobs that she never fully understood .Unlike most pparents with an epty nest, her auntie had never found time to empty the room of its juvenile trappings or =exchange its twin bed for something more age-appropriate. Unable to find time to subtract, the woman added .she purchased the lamp, miscellaneous accents, and new sheets from Belk .High-thread-count Egyptioan cotton –for achild bed.

My jaw went slack at the sight of three dolls in hoop –skirts , clearly not made for playing with , ata least during this century , staring blankly at us fri=om a decorative shelf, their ceramic faces impossibly white, Their hair was long , reaching all the way down their backs to their tiny doll bottoms.

‘’Auntie…her tastes…I’m sure she thought I’d appreciate their hair , but…’’

‘’is your auntie responsible for that welcome sigh hanging at the city limits too?’’I laughed.

‘’Southeren charm, not Gone With the Wind.’’

‘’I’m soryry you had to see these,’’She sighed , turning each doll 180 degrees so her blancjed ceramic nose was pressed against the wall.

‘’Thy’re so pale .You’d think the southern belle was subjected to cruel experiments in phlebotomy.’’

I recalled what an American history professor at the university of Chicago once told our class about such toys , specifically those found in the sound .One woman’s callege, I believe in North Carolina , celebrated each outgoing senior class wuith a custom doll, complete with a unique dress .The first Black woman graduated from the university in the early 1970s,As for the dolls , well….they remained as white as they’d always been . That seemed to be the persisting slogan of the region , one that seeped into the floor of our old bdroom’ as they’d always been.

‘’My stomach hurts’’

She was hanging her lavener bride’smaid dress in the closed between a garaduation gown and a prom shift .She didn’t pauise to look at me, only pointed to a pencil box on her old kneehole desk.

‘’Ther’s something in here that might help you’’

I opened it to find small cotton bullets with shrink-wrapped casings.

‘’You’re so mean .’’I rolled one of the tampons between my fingers. ‘’These have expired , does it?”

‘’I don’t know. Does it?’’I asked , eying her aunt’s doll .I pelted her wit the bullets .We laughed until it became too difficult to breathe again.

As she filled the dress between those of earlier rituals , a wicker basket tumbled from the closet’s hughest shelf and unto the floor, narrowly missing her nape. From it spilled palm-sized spheres , hearts and stars , all made od fcolorful plastic. Some of them burst open like oysters as they hit the floor, unveiling miatured pastel worlds full of staircases and domestic trappings and in some instances , the pearl that was a aminiatured woman who bent at the waist.

She looked at me sheepishly . ‘’Death by polly . A girl could dream.’’

A childhood toy carries as much clout as an old lover, a name that only enters the mind at odd intervals .At separate points in time , bith wrer heartbreakers. Rather than picking up our toys, we made more of a mess , tossing one onaother’s bouses atop bins of wide eyed barbies and our unpacked suitcases , she held me close on that skinny bed , Or sides resting against those linens that felt like a white lie. Because my hurt was for her, not because of her, it was easily relieved.

Her hands found my body before mine could grip hers. With a grade-school bully’s smirk . she pushed her way into me. When I gasped , she covered my mouth with the center of her palm , fingers curling and hooking against my jawbone for support .I liked the threat, the faint possibility of a broken bone .Her hand smelled metallic , like her amplifiers , microphoes, guitar strings. The scent of her apartment in McKinley Park was never far behind her. I can no longer remember where , but in her old bedroom ,I’d spotted a toy upright piano;the tiniest of unspoken origin stories.

My viasion blurred as she fucked me, fingers catcing me on the inside as forcefully as they did my face. All I could see was pink in a hundred shades, from the curtains to the dresses of thise terrible dolls whose gazes had been censored ‘ carnation , puces, carals. My legs began to tremble .I pulled her from me by the wrist and shoved her down into her own back.

A woodedn placard above the old kneehole desk bore her name .That looping her, hand-painted on rosewood. Her name, in her signature color. The one she appropriated during a dirty touch or thought. Like a mouth that supplied its own lipstick. Or the moth ,Anisota stigma, deepening in hue to blend into a abed of leaves.i spread her knees apart, too far for that tiny bed that we risked spilling from, tumbling to the floor with a groan and a thud that would surely wake her auntie below. My rosewood . I loned for the ablity to taste colors ; before trying I pressed my cheek to her rise. Cotton silk…all put to shame by flesh.

Hey, I knew , had been a little girl in that bedroom- she was twelve, fourteen, sixteen .Grown –up sheets , nice though they were, couldn’t disrupt my fantasy by perpetuating adulthood. In looking at her that way, I too felt twelve, fourteen, sixteen ; a girl who’d been living elsewhere in America , also trapped alone in her room with her things .My thoughts possessed the poor tracking of a home movie ;what would it have been like to have rescued her? To tipitoe up that narrow staircase and into her bedroom in the dead of night? To have been young with the young A sensation that had eluded me in my own bespectacled youth,

I sat ontop of her, my ottom moving against her , her –oh, what would her, the unwilling belle on the shelf , have called it then? Her private part? Her pee-pee? Her cherry?

‘’Tell me about the first time you did this to yourself ,’’ I pleaded .’’It was here in this very room , wasn’t it?””

I pictured her years before, the more modest of her two hands caressing her thighs as the other did the devil’s bidding. Was the flesh she gripped nicked by the disposable razor she wa still trying to master?

She noded , lip between her teeth.Her head rolled to the side , toward the Minnie Mouse’d nightstand.’’I’um, used a hairbrush.’’ She reached down tapping the drawer where she’d hidden away that particular love.’’I was eventeen .’’she chuckeled .

‘’Later tan most ,I suppose? I started right before I left .’’She sighed with defeat , as though she couldn’t account for lost opportunity.

I didn’t respond, yes closed, imagining her first curious considerations and the cautious thrusts that followed .I recollected those years when the arousal between my legs was so new that it was startling , as though a aheaving waterfall had developed in that strip of my cotton panties9and maybe one had , wuth no I tent of ever going dry , romantic drughts be damned.).

While I loved her so when we were cunt to cunt and panting ,It was never our bodies ‘physical symmentries that aroused me .I’d been with plenty womwn before her. Women with breasts larger and smaller than my own. Women who, after a lifetime of pained longing , finally had access to a pill that allowed then to develop a sweet rise beneath their own nipples . With her , it was her drip. Never had I been with anyone who wet herself as she did , as I did . The chicken – and –egg of it all ; which came first? Her wetness o r minezz1