Victoria Lancelotta
The Guide
Listen: here is a love story.
We filed to the altar in doll-sized veils and patent shoes, heads bowed,
hands folded and held chest-high, and before kneeling to receive the wafer from
the priest approached the marble statue, genuflected, crossed ourselves in
penance for the sins we would commit, and kissed the cold stone foot of Christ.
The first man besides my father that I had ever kissed: the pristine foot,
worn smooth by lips like mine, me on my knees on the floor before it, and the
other girls behind me waiting for their turns. We knelt at the altar in our
white dresses, a row of us on our knees, small cannibals, veiled heads thrown
back, throats taut, tongues out, waiting for the priest to place the wafers in
our mouths.
We were not to bite them, the nuns had told us that. They were placed on the
tongue and allowed to melt there, to dissolve. And if we had bitten them,
splintered the wafers between our small teeth, chewed them as we chewed
everything else: I imagined they would explode in blood, fill our mouths with
it, with the taste I knew from pulling out a loosened tooth, from sucking at a
skinned knee; my body's betrayal of me.
After, my mother boxed the dress and shoes. I'll keep these for you, she
said, for when you have a daughter of your own. You'll want them for your own
little girl.
_____
I am not a mother, I have never wanted that. My lover is a blind man who I
watched for days, for weeks, sitting at the bus stop bench outside my window, or
else in the small park at the end of my block. I watched him from my bedroom
window: from there, I could see everything--the sidewalk, the corner store, the
rowhouses across the street, and the bench on which he sat. He sat neatly: knees
and feet together, heavy shoes laced tight, his stick against his thigh. I
watched him first from my window and then from the front steps, coming closer
every week until I sat some few feet away from him at the far edge of his bench.
He heard me sit, turned to me and smiled. He reached his soft hand out and
spoke.
He is older than he looks, that I know. His face is smooth, unlined; his hair
is the black of crow's feathers. His eyes are blue and cloudy, they roll behind
the glasses, drifting in slow orbits. I had never seen blind eyes before. That
first day I walked him down the street, slowly, more slowly than he was used to
walking, I think. I navigated curbs for him, the cracked and ruined sidewalk,
blown trash in his steps. I watched the people watch us. They smiled at me,
thinking me kind, generous, but that was not the truth, not then, not now. There
is nothing generous in me, I am greedy for him, I am gluttonous in my want of
him: I would fill myself with him, blind myself with him. They smile because I
hold his arm, because I guide him through the crowds--if they could see the
rest.
When we get home I bathe him. I take the clothes he peels off, I run his
water hot. I kneel on the tile and soap the smooth unscarred expanse of him. He
is mine to claim, to own; the soft whiteness of his flesh about to go to fat
from the food I cook and serve him. I have no need of children.
When we are through I dry him off and lead him to my bed.
He likes best to make love to me in the daylight. He tells me to snap up the
blinds. My windows face to other windows. He sits up in my bed, the glasses off,
his eyes like spinning marbles.
Strip for me, he says. I want to watch you strip. He smiles at
me, at where I stand, and I can see his gleaming teeth, his lips.
Move in front of the window, strip there, he says. I want everyone
to see you.
He smiles like a dog, mouth stretched wide, his fingers spread out on the
sheets to either side of him. His eyes won't stop their drifting.
There is no sound, now, no sound in the room at all, only the noise of
traffic from the street. He is listening and hearing only this, and the beating
of my heart is loud. My dress is damp from his bath and I have nothing on
beneath it. I pull it over my head and toss it at his feet.
Come here, he says, leaning up and reaching for the dress, hooking it
with his clawed fingers, crumpling the fabric.
He cannot see what he has done to me: my thighs, my hips, are bruised and
bitten until the blood rushes up beneath the skin, purple then yellow and gray,
as though I have taken to myself with a hairbrush, blotched and welted, nothing
like the marks of the ruler, the neat swift rap across knuckles that left a
narrow reddened stripe.
_____
Who taught you how to eat? the nuns said to me at lunchtime. If
you're going to eat like that it's better not to eat at all, they said, and
swooped down on me like birds to carrion, taking my food away. Come with us, they
said, and took me to stand over one of the other girls, a girl with a napkin in
her lap and her sandwich cut in triangles. She ate the corners first, her face
working like a rabbit.
She would be caught one day in headlights and crushed, I thought, flattened,
bloodied, her unborn children dying with her.
There, the nuns said, leading me back to my chair, that is how you
eat.
_____
I remember the things they taught me: the ways to eat, to walk, to kneel and
pray. Humility, they said, modesty, and the move from that to
shame. I remember my hands clasped in my lap and my knees pressed tight
together. Cover yourself, they said, that body is not yours to give,
that flesh is weak and stupid. Not mine? I thought. Then whose? This is all
I have.
The nuns were safe, I knew that then, their faces small pale moons, their
bodies only memories, shrouded early for the grave. They had no need of penance,
but I remember mine: the hot box of the confessional, the mimicked crucifixion,
the words that stuck in my throat like bones: I have done this, and this.
I knelt on scabbed knees and prayed not to cry.
The nuns told me of their pilgrimages to Fatima and Lourdes. They said they
crawled across rocks and cobblestones until they bled, praying for the sick to
be healed. My falls from bikes and swings, my scrapes and bruises, my paper
cuts--those are your gifts to God, they said, your little crosses. It
is good for you to bleed.
Then I had no choice; these were lessons I learned well. I learned how not to
speak, how not to ask for what I should not have. I kept my prayers short, and I
kept my secrets, rooted in my throat, blooming there, choking me with a rank and
tangled garden of wishes: to not be thankful for my bruises and cuts, to not be
on my knees, to be, please God, nothing like them, those women who were the
walking dead.
I had imagined that I would forget these things, and sometimes, I do. I have
become neat, scrupulous in my organization. My lover knows the placement of my
furniture, it did not take him long, and he moves through rooms easily, with
more grace than I have ever had. But all this depends on me: if I leave a coat,
a shoe, some newspaper on the floor after I've read to him, his balance would be
thrown, and he would fall.
_____
The corner store is where I go for food. I pull my dress back on and leave my
lover in the bedroom. I move a chair for him to the window where he likes to sit
and leave him. From the street I can see his face--from this distance, his
glasses off, he looks like anyone else.
In the store, I move through the narrow aisles, brushing up against displays,
knocking into stacks of cans. I always pick up what I drop. If something breaks
I stop--I would never just walk past, pretending it wasn't me, or push a mess
I've made beneath the ledge of the bottom shelf. I have learned to be honest.
The man at the counter undercharges me and I am quick to point this out. Don't
worry, he says to me, smiling, I have enough of your money. He
watches me leave with my bags and though I say that I am honest there is still
one thing--he doesn't know, couldn't know, that I wear nothing underneath my
dress but the crescents of dried blood a blind man's nails have gouged,
moon-shaped on my thighs.
I could drop my bags in the doorway of the store and lift my skirt. Look at
me, I could say, look at what he's done to me, at what I have let him do.
Do you have a daughter, I could say, can you imagine this on her?
If I opened my mouth to speak these things my throat would fill with the dirt
of years and spill out of me, clots of it from between my lips.
My honesty has its limits.
No one sees these marks but me, and no one sees the things I do for him. I
comb his hair, I clip his nails: his fingers wide and grasping, fat antennae, I
would not be surprised to see eyes bloom at the tips. His toes, blunt stubs, as
though they had been sawed off and sanded down, white in the heavy black shoes,
and me with the clippers, pruning tiny shards of him. Not too short, he
says, remember.
When I leave the grocery he is still at the window, his head slowly moving,
left to right, dipping at the sounds of horns and shouting children, swiveling
and stopping short. There is no mistaking him now for someone fine.
He sits at the table while I prepare the food. Although he does not use his
stick inside he has it now, and as I move from stove to sink he taps it across
the floor, catching my ankles as I walk, or running it up my leg and under the
skirt of my dress, rubbing between my thighs.
Hurry, he says, I'm hungry.
My lover eats with precision, with the exacting elegance of the blind. I set
his plate before him and call for him the times of his food: meat at four
o'clock, greens at eight, potatoes square on twelve. He keeps the fork in his
left hand, knife in his right, rarely switching, never dropping: his quick
neatness is astonishing. He cuts like a surgeon.
Across from him, my legs are spread, my skirt bunched, the skin of my thighs
sticking to the seat of my chair. My elbows are on the table, the trashcan is at
my side, almost full: sodden newspapers, crusts of bread, coffee grinds and
ashes. I lift the meat with my fingers and gnaw around the bone, grease smeared
across my face. The bits of fat and gristle I spit back out, directly into the
trashcan. They raise little clouds of ash.
The blind man sits, still cutting. His hands are deadly accurate.
I lower my face to the plate in front of me, smear it in the food: he could
lick me clean.
Who taught you how to eat? I would ask him, but I know better than that.
He serves himself carefully from the bowls at the center of the table, and I
watch him, mime him. My plate is covered with food that I don't want, a wreck of
it, dripping over the edges of the china.
It was good, he says, and pushes back his chair, reaches for his
stick. He moves off to the bedroom. I scrape the food into the trash, drop the
silverware on top of it, the plates, the serving bowls. I wipe my face on my
skirt and my hands on my legs and go into the bedroom.
He lies in the near-dark, his shoulders propped by pillows. I stand at the
foot of the bed and strip, invisible, and wonder how he dreams of me, in what
strange language of flesh and scent and voice. He has never seen my face, or the
color of my hair, but he tells me he loves my body and to him I am only that,
skin and muscle and strong bone. When I wind myself around him his hands grope
and search for the things he cannot see, and he tells me that I am a secret to
everyone but him.
Where are you, he says, what are you doing? and I stand
motionless by the bed.I have no violence in me, I would never take his stick and
hide it. I would not strike him, mark him with the print of my hand; I would not
take his food away or run a bath too hot.
Listen, I say to him, can you hear me? and I begin to move, to
dance, naked in front of him, and he cannot see what there is for him to take.
My legs are long and slicked with grease, my hair is damp with sweat. No man has
seen me stripped, no one has seen me move like this, and I have nothing to
confess.
Dance with me, I say, get up, and reach my hand out for him,
moving it just beyond his reach each time he leans to take it. I know more games
than he does, I know them better. I dance around the bed, spinning, moving
backwards, scuffing my bare feet on the carpet, a noise that he can follow--I am
fair if nothing else.
He moves from the bed, hands outstretched, and lunges for me but he is too
slow, too heavy, his foot tangled in the sheet, and I watch him fall.
Dance with me, I say again, leaning naked over him, a spill of
sightless flesh on my bedroom floor. My hair brushes his face and he grabs for
that but I am too quick for him.
I have never felt so light, my body has never worked so well as this. The
blind man is on his hands and knees, he is crawling towards my voice. I crook a
finger he cannot see, I cock a hip, I pose.
A little more, a little farther, I say, a little to the left.
Over here.
I step first on my toes and then my heels, I feint, I dip, I back around a
chair, holding it between us. I think: there is no end to the things we do, the
care we take.
That will be your job, the nuns said, when you have children of
your own. You will teach them to be meek, to suffer things in silence.
But there is no meekness left in me, I have spit it out: I am empty, clean,
waiting to be filled. The feel of my own skin is soft, softer than I knew, and
my balance is perfect--my feet, my legs, the rocking of my hips, the swaying of
my breasts.
I move around the chair, I prod my lover's chin with my foot.
Look at me, I say, prodding, amazed at the reach of my leg. I tilt his
face up to me and he rises to his knees, unsteady, his mouth working, mouthing
words I can't make out: the stupid chant of litany, of prayers long unanswered
for things he cannot have. What could a blind man pray for, what thing that he
would get?
But oh right now, there is nothing more I want.
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