Fresh Girls & Other Stories Read Online Free Page B

would come away wet, not with the pleasant sweat of sexual exertion, but with something different. Something that would smell like a hospital, a hospital without disinfectant to mask the smells underneath.
    And when he pushed my face against his thigh, it was oddly comforting, though it was the same thigh that belonged to the body that was reaching out to hit me. I breathed in the soft, soapy smell of his skin as his hand stung my back — the same hand that comforted crying patients, that wrote notes on their therapeutic progress, that had shaken with shyness when it first touched me. The sound of the slaps was amplified in the candlelit room. Nothing had ever sounded so loud, so singular in its purpose. I had never felt so far away from myself, not even with his pills.
    I am far away and his thigh is sandy as a beach against my cheek. The sounds melt like gold, like slow Sunday afternoons. I think of cats and the baby grand piano in the foyer of my father’s house. I think of the rain that gushes down the drainpipes outside my father’s bathroom late at night when things begin to happen. I think of the queerly elegant black notes on sheets of piano music. The light is flooding generously through the windows and I am a little girl with a pink ribbon in my hair and a ruffled dress.
    I seat myself on the piano bench and begin to play, my fingertips softening to the long ivory, the shorter ebony keys. I look down at my feet and see them bound in pink ballerina slippers, pressing intermittently on the pedals. Always Daddy’s girl, I perform according to his instruction.
    When it was over he stroked the fear that bathed my hands in cold sweat. He said that when we fought my face had filled with hatred and a dead coldness. He said that he had cured himself of his obsession with me during the beating, he had stripped me of my mystery. Slapped me human. He said my fear had turned him on. He was thirsty for the sweat that dampened my palms and willing to do anything to elicit more of that moisture so he could lick it and quench his tongue’s thirst.
    I understood that when I did not bleed at the first blow, his love turned into hatred. I saw that if I was indeed precious and fragile I would have broken, I would have burst open like a thin shell and discharged the rich sweet stain of roses.
    Before he left he pressed his lips to mine. His eyes were open when he said that if I told anyone, he would have no other choice but to kill me.
    Now that he is gone, I look between my breasts and see another flower growing: a rash of raspberry dots, like seeds. I wonder if this is how fear discharges itself when we leave our bodies in moments of pain.
    The psychiatrist, when he first came, promised me a rose garden and in the mirror tomorrow morning I will see the results for the first time on my own body. I will tend his bouquets before he comes again, his eyes misty with fear and lust. Then I will listen to the liquid notes that are pleasing in the sunlit foyer and smile because somewhere, off in the distance, my father is clapping.

PLEASURE
              T he blindfold hugged her cheekbones. The window was open, the night air blew across her body. She licked her lips, tasting Scotch and her own lipstick, the flavor of raspberries. She couldn’t tell if it was raining or not; it sounded like rain outside, but sometimes traffic could sound like rain. She wasn’t sure. She felt confused, cold without her clothes, and the skin itched where her hair brushed against her shoulder blades. She flexed the muscles in her face, trying to shift the blindfold, to let in some thin horizon of light.
    But everything was dark.
    A breeze blew over her breasts, her stomach. She shivered when his fingers closed on her wrist, tracing lightlythe veins in her forearm. She started breathing hard when he took her arm and did that, running his thumb along the artery like it was a blade he was testing. For a wild moment she thought of bolting while she still