I wrote this short story in May 2003 and have just recently taken it out to polish up again.
Pinball
By Megan Shank
You first met her here, by the pinball machine. She wore slouch socks, Keds sneakers and ooh-baby shorts that showed off her softball thighs. She shoved her hips into the machine, bit her lip and took vicious sips of her Slurpee in-between quarters. Under a poof of mean bangs, her eyes dared any of the half dozen kids inside the 7-11 to ask for a turn. The ball madly rocketed from one paddle to the next. It bounced and whirred and gurgled through tunnels. At the time, you were buying a piece of beef jerky and seeing if anyone had a cigarette you could bum. You didn’t really inhale but sat out back with the other boys, by the dumpster, and held smoke in your mouth until you couldn’t stand it. The smoke lazily floated out like a dream or a half-formed thought.
You knew she had cigarettes, but you didn’t dare ask her for one. That would mean you would have to look her in the eyes, and, at the time, looking a girl like her in the eyes was suicide. For the most part, you didn’t look anyone in the eyes. Not even your mother anymore – especially when she yelled at you to take off your shoes before you walked up the steps to the porch.
I’m tired of you tracking in mud, she would say.
Yes, you wouldn’t look at her, but you would take off your shoes.
It was midsummer then, and you had just turned 14. There was a water watch across the Midwest and the yards browned in the sunshine like the way your long scrawny forearms did. You didn’t understand why your mother was so afraid of the mud that didn’t exist that summer. The days were dusty, long and hot. Locust songs rinsed the nights into the mornings. That summer was the first time in your life that you stayed up all night with your thoughts. It was, in fact, the first time you thought about YOUR LIFE because you had only just begun to understand you had one, all of your own. On these nights, you started writing poetry about the changes you were only beginning to understand— high school, which would you would attend that fall, the heroic taste of cigarettes and stolen beer and the ideas about sex that you were able to glean from the magazines you found in your uncle’s garage the previous summer. Sometimes you would crawl out of your window onto the roof where you would jerk off under the moon’s cleavage, staring back at the stars that seemed to coldly watch you with wonder. In the afternoons, you would walk to the park and watch the girls play softball through the chain link fence.
She was always there. She pitched. Because she wore heavy black eyeliner, by the end of the game it appeared as though she had been crying hot black tears. Win or lose, her mouth would anxiously pucker up as her team went through their high fives with the other team at the end of the game, as if she expected someone to still be hitting something she had thrown out.
Sometimes she noticed you through the gate – usually when she was deep into the batting order and bored on the bench. She never said anything to you then. She just stared at you with those black-rimmed eyes. One day, however, she looked at you and licked her teeth. Then she laughed loudly, and several people in the bleachers looked away from the game to see just what was so funny in the batting box. But she had already looked away from you. Her laughter seemingly bounced off every tooth twice before it ceded and fell dumb on her fat pink tongue. Maybe she was the first person who was ever cruel to you. It is hard to remember such a thing after these many years have passed.
No. Now you have grown up. You have a job. Your life is altogether apparent, but perhaps not as well lived as it was over a decade ago when you didn’t have a reign or a leash or a plan for it. Now you have a girlfriend with clear eyes. Occasionally, she spins the globe on your desk, letting her fingers skim the surface of the world’s oceans and bump, bump, bump over the Himalayan mountains.
She says, “I would like to go there” and “I would love to travel here” and “I want to live there.”
She is smart and beautiful and confident and when she speaks of these things, she always uses first person singular conditional future tense. You know this only because she has reminded you of many grammar aspects in your year living with her – especially tense and voice, it seems. She claimed, at your first meeting with her, she sloshed on three dry martinis and a beer with the label torn off, you with one unfinished Perrier and a neat napkin in front of you, that you were a first person, singular, past tense type. She used to have great dreams of being a famous writer, but now she copy edits for uninteresting companies with up and coming CEO peons who offer her travel options to quiet getaway cabins in New England for a little extra work. Before you became aware of these offers, you thought they had only existed in old black and white films.
When the black-eyed girl pushed herself against the pinball machine, you could see the outline of her bra and the pinch of flesh that spilled out of the elastic and pressed against the back of her T-shirt. For a moment, you stood there watching her. The stick of beef jerky hung loosely in one hand and any mission to find a cigarette to pseudo smoke had been put on the back burner, roger that. The ball drained down the side — one of those impossible over-calculations on the lever. She shook the machine. She shoved both her brown hands, with the nails chewed into the shape of scraggly new moons, in her pockets and fussed for some change. She pulled out the insides of her shorts after much effort wedging her meaty hands into the tight pockets. A bit of lint, a half smoked cigarette and a crushed daisy fell to the floor, along with a piece of paper. Without thinking, you rushed to pick it all up for her, including the lint. But she had already turned and was walking out into the sunshine. You followed after her, silent, with these tokens in an outstretched hand. By the time you made it out of the swinging door, out of the synthetic cool and into the swallow of mid-Summer heat, she was out of sight. Instead, your buddies were there, tossing back their Cokes, lighting up their smokes, laughing as if nothing had passed them by.
You passed by them and ran to the park. Strangely enough, your heart was in your throat. In your palm you clasped her things. You felt compelled to catch her. You wanted to give her a few quarters for the machine and look in her eyes. You felt like you had something to prove, though you couldn’t say what. Your heart dashed with nameless possibility in the same way it did when you felt compelled to write your secret poems. You ran until your knees melted and withered like a garden hose left too long in the sun. You crashed to the curb and unfolded your sweaty fist. The lint had stretched and flattened like unleavened bread in your palm. The cigarette butt bent like a question mark. The daisy had lost all of its petals. The paper unfolded easily with one index finger and a thumb. It was as if it had meant to open all along. You read the contents. Three lines. Again and again. It was the first true secret you had ever known, and you knew you would keep it, as much for her as you would for yourself. For the great joy of KNOWING A SECRET.
In time, you would come to find secrets less fascinating. You wouldn’t seek to know others’ secrets as much as you would seek to shelter your own. It took your girlfriend some time to get used to your idea on these things. In the beginning, she had tried to extrapolate from you your every fear, your every wish, your every insecurity, your every hope. She sought to tie down EXACTLY how you felt, EXACTLY where you stood, EXACTLY what you wanted – and, in all truth, some of these things were secret even to yourself. In the beginning, she failed to trust you because of these secrets. She always told you of her back-up plans in life; her caution and insecurity with your secrets compelled her to keep extra artillery in each pocket. Another man. A distant land. A tight hand on your leg at the bar. Yet, each secret you revealed to her made you feel like you were walking her through a land mine. You knew the way. You knew how to step. You knew what was benign and what was to be avoided altogether. But she reacted as if every stretch of it was life-threatening to your relationship. To your FUTURE.
That day in the park, you learned a secret, but you had no idea how it would affect the FUTURE. You didn’t necessarily connect the two things. You still wonder if secrets and futures have any correlation other than the fact that they are both hidden and uncertain. One day, you awoke to take your shower to discover your girlfriend had put a post-it note on the bathroom mirror: “The only certainty in life is uncertainty.” You couldn’t understand why such things weren’t apparent to her, but you didn’t say anything.
She had had a tough time with love, she said. Everyone has a tough time with love, she said.
She read a study. She read lots of these.
There were two groups of rats, she said. One group of rats was held underwater and only allowed up by the researcher’s hand. One group of rats was never held under the water. Eventually, they put both groups of rats in ice water together. The group of rats that had been held down never swam up, she said. The group of rats that had never been held down swam up, she said.
You told her you didn’t understand.
Love is like that, I guess, she said. Love needs to be allowed to survive on its own. I don’t want to drown this, she said.
You thought maybe she should stop talking about it then.
You told her. It was naturally easier to love than not to love. It was easier to trust than not to trust.
Maybe you loved her. Maybe you trusted her. Maybe you would share a future. But you kept all these things secret too.
It was hot there under the sun, and you had to take a piss. The black-eyed girl was nowhere in sight. There was a bathroom right next to the empty softball field. As soon as you entered the bathroom, a tall man wearing a baseball jersey came in. He had a trace of a moustache on his lip. He pulled out his penis and rocked his head to the back of his neck and leaned into it. You couldn’t help but look at his cock. It was long and fat and straight and steady with the strong flow of urine. His balls were heavy and purplish grey. All around, dark, curly hair twisted like an untended garden. You were shocked by how potent it was. A twinge of what you now recognize as jealousy struck you in the back of the throat. Already now, you had a tiny patch of hairs of your own. Already now, your balls were making your old underwear tighter. His hips, pale, pointed angles, came down and he shook it as he turned his head to notice your gaze. His eyes made menacing, green slits as he quickly tucked it all away in his shorts.
What’s the big fuckin’ idea, he asked you.
You didn’t say anything. You were frozen with a dead daisy and a girl’s secret in your pocket.
C’mere, you little shit. You little sicko, he said.
And he pulled you by the hair out of the dark skanky bathroom into the sunshine.
Are you a little faggot, he asked.
He pushed you hard. Against your shoulders.
You a little sissy boy, half-man, faggot.
He accused rather than asked.
Come on, you little queer. I’ll put it in your little fuckin’ mouth and make you suck it.
He slapped your face on both sides. Then he grabbed your face hard, in his strong, dusty hand and made your mouth pucker up.
Suddenly, a head poked out from the rusty Cadillac previously unnoticed in the parking lot. The girl, her eyes dark and cloudy, poked her head out of the passenger side window.
Ah, c’mon now, she yelled to the man, he didn’t do nothin’.
Like hell, he didn’t, the man said. He was looking at my dick and shit. He ain’t so he, he’s a little it. A little it faggot.
An it. An it. You remember the way his mouth formed those words. You remember the spit that frothed on the corners of his mouth. Inside your chest your heart beat fast. Inside your heart your blood pumped faster. You could feel your fist in his stomach before you felt yourself clench a fist. Both fists now, falling again and again. Your legs scissor kicking faster than your breath. Your life spread out in that one instant — that you were not an it, but a man. You would do anything humanly possible to preserve that. And now, you on the ground. Your head rocking back and forth with each fresh punch. You had never tasted your own blood before, and soon your ears could no longer hear, but you could taste dust and see the sunshine past the dark shadow of the man throwing fist over fist, like a monkey swinging through the branches of a jungle. A show you had seen recently on television after walking up the porch steps and inside without your shoes on had photographed such monkeys in their natural environs. You hadn’t dirtied your mother’s carpet. In her beautiful rooms, it was unknown where her children had gone that day or what they had done because the carpets told no muddy secrets. Why couldn’t she see that there was no mud that summer? What was she really afraid of?
Mud or no mud, now you had a man who had disreputed your manhood on top of you, beating the shit out of you, when all you wanted was to find the girl and give her back her things and stare her in the eyes and tell her that maybe you loved her. You weren’t sure. But she bounced around in your thoughts there, late at night, on the roof and in your journal. And even now, you could see her, hovering above you, through the sweat and the blood and the tears. Yes, and now, this visage was screaming and black tears were racing down her cheeks. Yes, and now, after seeing the man in the bathroom, after witnessing his physical power, after seeing the girl languidly lean out of the car with her relaxed mouth and melted eyes, you understood the secret of what may go on between a man and a woman.
The next sound you heard was a click and the rumble of a motor and the roar of a dying motor speeding away.
She took off her shirt. She had a swimming suit on underneath so it didn’t matter. She had planned on going to the pool with her boyfriend that day, she said. He was gone now, though. She pressed the shirt to your forehead. Her shirt smelled like apples and body odor. You told her, through your swollen lips, that her shirt smelled like apples. She told you it was a body spray. She said, don’t talk right now, you’re hurt. She said, don’t move, I’ll be right back. You thought people only used lines like that in movies. She came back with a handful of water from the drinking fountain. She put it on your face and wiped off the grime with her shirt. You didn’t tell her you had her secret in your pocket. Lying back on the ground, you closed your eyes. The t-shirt filtered the sun, and the dust was soft beneath your head, and the world smelled like apples and a young girl’s sweat.
After some time, your girlfriend gave up on your secrets. She stopped asking you the incessant questions. She trusted you, or said she did. She didn’t seem to brood as much, didn’t seem like her thoughts were bouncing off one uncertainty to the next. She let her heart roll down the uncertain and inevitable alleyways and stopped pumping quarters into the phone when she was away on business trips. She had learned not to ask anymore the questions she didn’t want answered. So when she asked you one day whether you had ever been beaten up, and you asked her,
What, by someone other than you?
and she bit her lip the way she did when she was annoyed with you, you told her this story. You didn’t tell her that the girl had left you there. You didn’t tell her how you sat up to find yourself alone with the dirty t-shirt. You didn’t tell her about the girl’s secret that remained as such. You did tell her that she was the first to ever hear this story outside of whom it involved. And then:
How long, she asked you, her eyes unfolding like flags.
How long, what?
How long do you think you could love me this way?
How long, you ask, unfolding your arms wide, smiling at her like a child.
How long?
She pouts. Her lower lip sticking out like a bookshelf.
This way?
This way!
Which way?
This, she says. This way.
You sit there for awhile in silence. Then you reach for her, pull her close, under your chin. She never closes her eyes. You can feel her open lashes on your chest. You can feel her heart beat thisway, thisway, howlong, howlong.
You cover both your heads with the sheet and wish for the days when the questions weren’t the assailants. You wonder what happened to the dark eyed girl. You know that the pinball machine was long ago replaced by one of those shoot ‘em up games, but, there, in the bed, you can still hear the clang of the lever, the whir of the ball, the spin of the points and the empty drain of the alleyway.
Your girlfriend shoves her hips into you.
Make love to me, she says. Make love to me.
And with all certainty and no secrets, you do.
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