Down by the river

There is a part of her - a small part of her - that knows exactly
what he thinks: she is a dumb fourteen-year old girl who should know
better but doesn't.

There is a part of that knows she is a dumb fourteen-year old. And yet,
at the same time, she is a girl like any other.

Prising her way through the bitter tangle of vines and bare trees down
by the river, feeling the cold on her bare legs the way the trees no
doubt felt it, losing their leaves.

All of it is clear.

She is aware of the world she pushes against (her fingers holding the
branches back as she ducks her head into what space she can make, her
hair, her skirt, her Moles t-shirt, the sound of the water up
ahead).

At the same time, she is aware of this moment as if it exists
independently of her. She is already imagining the telling of this
story, tonight to her friends and later, to her husband, to her
children, when she has children, her daughter. She will tell this story
to her daughter, and by then the story will be a warning. Tonight the
story will be a score but twenty years from now she will do everything
in her power to stop her daughter pushing through the bare trees by the
river on her way to stop being a girl.

I mean, the girls - the girls she will see tonight at Ronnie's house -
know about Tate. They know she likes Tate. They know she thinks she
shouldn't like Tate, that Tate will hurt her, and they also know that
for whatever reason, Tate just rings a loud bell in her head.

They know all about everything. They just don't know the most recent
development. They don't know about last night. Not that there is all
that much to tell about last night. All there was, was Tate picked her
up. She was walking home from Kate's house and his junked up car pulled
alongside her and his window was already rolled down and out of nowhere
- even though she had spent the night studying, and hard too - she felt
dumb. Out of nowhere it occurred to her that the only sound she would
be able to make if addressed would be the letter B over and over, but
not B like the insect, buh like the stuttered start of a word, buh like
a kid would say.

Tate, you should know, is twenty five and the kind of guy some mothers
warn their daughters to steer clear of. He works out at Shaftmans,
driving a forklift of boxes from A to B and sometimes he plays drums
for six or eight different bands in town. He was always fighting and
losing his job and getting arrested for being drunk and disordered and
Patty knew of three girls - not women, either, girls under twenty -
he'd knocked up and left holding babies roundabout here. All of which
would lead you to believe that he was a kind of dump truck lazily
piling into whatever got in his way but that wasn't so. Or at least he
said that it wasn't so.

He told her, in the car only last night, how he was always trying to
stop things going wrong only somehow circumstances always conspired
against him. In the car last night, he said those words: circumstances
conspire against me. She was surprised he even knew words like that and
she thought, yes, well, people get things wrong. Some people get things
wrong and here she was in a car with Tate and she wasn't frightened and
they were talking and he seemed like a nice guy.

It wasn't like he tried to cover anything up either. Yes, there were
three girls who had children by him. What could he say? He fell in
love, they made out, the girls got pregnant. He tried, with each of
them, to get them to see sense and get rid of the baby and when they
wouldn't do that he said: okay, we'll get hitched. Only the parents of
each of the three girls freaked out and stopped him ever coming around
again. He wanted what other people had. He wanted a girl and a family.
He wanted to stop making mistakes. All he could seem to do well was
make mistakes.

They were at her house, parked in the shadow by the stoop.

She could see the front room light. Inside, her father would be asleep
in his lazyboy with the television on, her mother would be reading,
glancing up at the bottom of each page, her gaze resting on the
television, the window, her husband, and the clock in that order.

Tate has a place - no more than a shed, he says, really - where he goes
sometimes to think and watch the river. He looks out of the car window
and along the trees that line the street, looking but looking somewhere
else (looking as if to give the impression he is looking somewhere
else, a voice in her head told her).

He asked her if she wanted to meet him the next day, just to you know
hang out, and she said yes (yes and not yeah, she usually answered
questions with yeah but on this occasion she made sure to pronounce the
s).

Yes, I'd like that.

Tate wondered if she wanted picking up, and she said no. Tell me where
I should be and I'll be there, she said, firmly, as if she knew her own
mind. He said okay, smiling.

And she was aware of the smile, just as she was aware of everything.
She knew precisely what was going through his mind because a version
was running through her own mind. And yet, she recognised Tate's
meanness, saw it in his smile, saw it in his failure to conceal his
wants and his needs, saw it in the way his hands fidgeted with his
cigarette as he gave her directions. She was fourteen and she knew she
wouldn't ever leave this town, knew she wouldn't go to college, knew
she would live and work and marry in this town, knew she wasn't clever
enough to do anything else (knew she was dumb); she was fourteen and
she knew this man and - by extension - knew men and still that didn't
stop her.

Later that night, lying in bed (beneath the pink and yellow Barbie
duvet she has had since she was eleven years old), she closes her eyes
and imagines him fucking her tomorrow by the river. They both stand in
the lake, their feet and ankles submerged in warm wet marshy mud. She
can only see herself. Tate is behind her, and even though Tate towers
over her, in her head, he is obscured. She watches herself. Her legs
are bare. She was wearing a skirt but that is rucked up, caught in the
hand of the man behind her. Her face is contorted, anxious. Tate is
having sex with her in the river, taking her from behind. She can both
see and almost feel the anxious rhythm of his moving in and out of her,
can see from her expression that this is not pleasure, that this is
something to somehow be gotten through.

She can even imagine later, getting dressed, cleaning herself up so
that people can't see what she's been up to. She can see herself, sat
by the lake, staring at the muddy boots her feet have become. She can
feel the sticky mud between her toes, drying in the sun on her ankles,
and the sticky mud between her legs.

Because Tate wouldn't love her and she was not kidding herself that
that would be so. Tate would want sex from her, pure and simple, and -
as difficult to understand as it was, given that she at least felt
herself to have a rudimentary grasp of this man despite his
protestations to the contrary - she was willing (she was happy) to have
sex with him.

So she moves now, following his simple directions, knowing that she is
a dumb girl (knowing her parents would break their hearts, knowing that
the world would think her dim and lost, knowing herself that the man
she was seeking out was broken and ill-formed in some way and knowing -
compounding this knowing - the fact that the man she sought out shared,
in some important way, the feeling that each was committing some grave
mistake and none of it mattering).

Something - a twig, some stone - scratches her calf and she says shit
and then smiles, at herself, this girl who says shit aloud and arranges
to have sex with a man.