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I held on as his body got tiny and iron, he grunted and sweated but his sweat had turned cold. Aaron was licking me, kissing and biting my neck as he fell out of me, saying, ‘Oh fucking, man, Myra. Thank you so much.’
I scissored up off him. His penis was a dot.
I thought about Lee, I thought about my mother. I didn’t want to be in some silent game of female mistrust.
§
I started my essay with the line You could be raped a thousand times and you could still be a virgin.
This was also my thesis, the force behind every word about the freedom of slaves.
It occurred to me that my mother was reading that book on the comfort women of Korea because she’d been planning to go there for a while. The comfort women in the Second World War are grandmothers now and they are asking the Korean and the Japanese governments, ‘Is it right to ignore me like this as if they did nothing to me? Were the soldiers justified in trampling an innocent and fragile teenage girl and making her suffer for the rest of her life?’ The Korean comfort women have stopped covering their faces at their public gatherings. They have realized, forty years later, that they were not dirty, that they had done nothing wrong.
§
When I knocked on their door I was not a virgin anymore. Gayl answered in a tight pink dress with embroidery on it, a spiral, fuchsia, over her chest.
‘Where in the hell did you go for so long?’
‘What do you mean?’
Gayl ushered me in. ‘See? He wants to be with you. Look at that sorry dog.’
‘Fuff! Fuff fuff!’ Elijah was in bed. He barked under the sheets.
‘It’s not fuff, it’s ruff,’ I said, kind of surprised. ‘Like: RUFFF RUFF RUFFF!’
Elijah and Gayl laughed at my impression.
‘We got a wildebeest there.’ Elijah crawled out of the sheets.
‘Yeah, yeah, a dangerous one.’
‘De bitch of de north.’
‘All newly laid.’
I stared at Gayl. She winked. She knew. How the fuck did she know? Gayl took me by the hand. Her hand was warm. She seemed all better and strong. Adnexitis happened after miscarriage, I’d read. It caused infertility. It was a violation of sexual function.
Gayl turned on the TV to the country-music station. There was a skinny blond woman on there singing in a headdress. Gayl swung me around the room in a square dance or something. Her arms were so strong that I was lifting off the floor. Elijah clapped along to the beat.
‘Make your mountains higher, make ’em higher each day,’ the woman sang on TV. ‘Make it so your sunshine is brighter than a ray.’
Then the blonde took a bow and her headdress fell off. Elijah clapped. Gayl gave me a hard little quick little hug.
‘Seriously, why’d you leave us alone here? We don’t really know this town and you make him feel so much better. Look at him. See how he feels better?’
Elijah was naked. His cock was straight up. He was holding it at the bottom with two hands, like a shovel. It was pointing at me. I was breathing hard.
‘Don’t leave us anymore, Myra. You understand?’
It felt good to hear her say my name. I was buzzing from my feet to my hair. I felt like Gayl was going to be my friend. She supported my union with Elijah, not Lee.
GAYL: See? You see how I got her converted?
LEE: Your tactics are suspect. I don’t like that at all.
GAYL: She’s the wormy little suspect, your friend. I’ll give her back when I’m finished. Natch.
