My cousin goes inside the house real quick. She’ll be right back.
She leaves me on the porch steps with Leonard from the house around the corner since Grama doesn’t let her male friends come in. They can wait outside, it’s nice out.
She and her friends laughed at me because I hit Leonard when he annoyed me. When he was being stupid. When whatever. They teased me, said I must like him then. I said I didn’t. They were all older kids, in middle school and high school, so they didn’t believe me. I didn’t know if I liked him. I didn’t think so. I never had liked anyone yet.
He teases me too when she’s gone. I say stop. He doesn’t, so I get mad and I hit him. Then I feel stupid for doing it, like I proved them all right. He teases me more. Says that’s not what you’re supposed to do when you like someone. He touches me, on the lower leg. Not a hit, like mine were to his shoulder, but a soft, slow caress from the knee down. This has never happened to me. I don’t know what to do. I hit him, hard, and I stand up and move farther away, clutching the railing. He tries again. I kick him and run up the steps and inside the house. My cousin is happy I don’t go with them when they leave. I never tell anyone. Not even his little sister.
It is the fourth of July before we start high school. We are all going to the fireworks at the community center. Me and Sarah and our friends, and our friends’ friends and those friends’ friends. I am already at my grama’s house so it will be easy to just walk to Sarah’s later and go with her. For the time being though, I am bored. Just Grama and t.v. So when I see Mr. Meyer’s dog on the lawn next door I go out to play with it.
It’s little and brown and cute and tied by the leash to Mr. Meyer’s lawn chair. I am afraid of dogs, even little ones, but not ones tied to chairs. Mr Meyer is very old and very fat, so he won’t go anywhere and neither will the little dog. He waves at me and we chat while I pet his dog and ask him questions. Is it a boy or a girl? What’s her name? Nice day isn’t it?
He watches me. He tells me to come here a minute sweetheart. I do. I do when my grama tells me. I do when his wife tells me, when she and Grama drink iced tea in the kitchen or on the porch, or when one needs the other’s garden hose. He tells me sweetly, hungrily, to let him kiss my hand. Kiss my hand? I am suspicious. He keeps trying to convince me, says it will be quick. I don’t know what to do. No one else is outside. He is old and fat and sitting down. At church the nice old men shake my hand all the time during fellowship. Call me baby, honey, sweetheart; call my mama and my aunties the same. I stick out my hand hesitantly.
He grabs it with more force than I anticipate and gently kisses my right hand, over and over, in the same spot. I want to get away but I don’t move. He thanks me. It’s over. Then he looks from right to left and back at me. You won’t tell anybody right? I just want to leave. No.
I tell my cousin and Sarah and our friends to stay away from him. They ask why. I say he’s a nasty old man. Why? He just is.
The most my neighbors ever did was leave nasty unsigned notes telling us to pick up the trash around the curb that we didn’t throw there because it was a corner house, and everyone tosses their coney island hot dog holders and cigarettes and not cigarettes on the corner house curb, and lets their dogs poop without dog poop bags on the corner house lawn. The most they ever did was have us order girl scout cookies or school drive chocolates and never reimburse our money with cookies or chocolates. The most they ever did was knock on our door late at night to say that their daughter had just killed herself and that they needed help, which came in the form of a ride to the bus depot and ten dollars. Do they think the lighter you are, the more gullible? I wanted to wait and see if she would actually walk inside, but I was too young to see over the top of the bottom of the window, even in the car seat, so I don’t know where her feet went. I didn’t think my mother should have given her ten dollars, I never got that much from her or the tooth-fairy or Santa, but she said God told her to do it. All they did was shoo stray German shepherds and pit bulls off our porch with plastic baseball bat threats. And have dog fights in their backyards, which I could see through the black bars on my window since you could shoot a bullet through my house and find it at the other end of the block if everybody’s shades or blinds were raised that day. All they did was curse loudly to themselves because an institution had just been closed around the block and they had nowhere else to go and no one else to talk to. All they did was crash into our wooden fence, no more hiding now, just big see-us-gardening-and-collecting-pine-cones-and-old-cheese-sandwiches-someone-heaped-over-the-corner-house-fence metal squares. All they did was steal the lawnmower and the garbage can. Who steals garbage cans? And ask to come into our house when we didn’t know them, and knock down stop signs for fun or show up in 4s or 5s at night in the middle of the street. But that was only once or twice. All they ever did was let us stay a few hours in their hoarder-junky t.v. room, while the locksmith got us back into our house that we locked ourselves out of, and eat popcorn and be fat and light blue in the glow of the television screen since no other light was turned on in the house. All they did was throw the ball back if it got in their yard or let us come get it if we weren’t afraid of their dog, and grow white daisies not as pretty as our yellow daffodils and blue flower bush. And knock on the door on Sundays asking us to come to God while we hid beneath the windows and didn’t make a sound. All they did was ditch class in the car parked on our dirty curb, or tell me to shut up when I sang on the lawn or Mom to shut up when she stopped the car in front of their house to tell them they drive like idiots. All they did was be plump and rude to our guests who rang the wrong doorbell, and then get cancer, get skinny and get nicer to them when they ring the wrong doorbell again. All they did was shoot at each other a few months to a year after we moved. Some of them.
They were never like my grama’s neighbors.
THE RAPE DIARIES 