The Knockout Queen Read online

  “Oh.”

  “Where were you going to go?” I asked.

  “To the beach.”

  “By yourself?”

  She nodded. “You know, I could put a chair out here for you. Like a camp chair.”

  “That’s all right,” I said.

  She put her hands on her hips then, and twisted her torso with such strength that I could hear every vertebrae in her spine crack. She was perhaps five inches taller than me. “Do you want to come in?” she asked.

  “To your house?”

  She took off her helmet. “No one’s home.” There was a babyish quality to Bunny’s voice, perhaps because it seemed too small for the size of her body, and she spoke as though her nose was always a little stuffed. Of course, I wanted desperately to see inside her house up close, and so I put out my cigarette and hid it in the Altoids tin that I also kept behind the plywood, and she watched as I spritzed myself with Febreze, and then we let ourselves out the back gate and into her yard.

  “This is our yard,” she said. “There’s a pool.”

  I said, “Oh wow,” though I had swum in her pool several times when she and her father had been on vacation. I had climbed the fence from my aunt’s yard and dropped down into hers, which was dark, since no one was home and the outside lights seemed to be on a timer, and the pool, instead of being a lit rectangle of blue, was a black mass of reflected stars, and, shaking, I had taken off my clothes and slipped naked into the warm water and swum until I felt erased.

  She opened one of the French doors that led onto the patio, and we entered the hushed cathedral of her living room. She closed the door behind us, as though it could never be left open. The outside, with its scent of grass and sway of water, its gauzy light and chafing winds, would destroy the interior, the careful, expensive furniture, a pretend world that had to be exactingly maintained.

  She gave me a tour of the house, showing me her father’s office, with its many bookshelves filled with leather-bound books I doubted he had ever read, and the marble kitchen. She offered me a Pop-Tart, which I declined. She opened one of the crinkly metallic packages for herself, and then, to my horror, spread the two Pop-Tarts with butter and slicked them together as a sandwich.

  She led me upstairs, taking bites of her Pop-Tart sandwich along the way, and showed me the spare room, decorated in an Oriental style with a disturbing red satin bedspread embroidered with cranes, and the connected bathroom, which had a shiny black vanity and sink, a black toilet, and black floors. They were ready for Madame Butterfly to commit suicide in there at any time. While the house was uncluttered, I noticed that it was also not exactly clean. Gray trails marked the highest traffic routes on the white carpet, and the sink in the all-black bathroom was spangled with little explosions of white toothpaste.

  She gestured at a closed door and said, “That’s my dad’s room,” and then took me into her own bedroom, which was done up, as I already well knew, like a much younger girl’s bedroom, with a white canopy bed and a white dresser that had been plastered with My Little Pony stickers. There was a small white mirrored dressing table with a pink brocade bench. Where there should have been makeup and bottles of fancy perfume, Bunny had arranged her schoolbooks and papers. There was a bookshelf that contained not books but trophies and medals and ribbons, all so cheap and garish and crammed together that it looked more like installation art than a proper display. On one wall, there was a bulletin board that I had not been able to see before as it was on the same wall as the window. At first, it appeared to be a Hydra of female body parts, but as I looked closer I could see that they were all women playing volleyball, and then, as I looked yet closer, I could see that they were all the same woman playing volleyball, carefully trimmed from newspapers and magazines.

  “That’s my Misty May-Treanor altar,” she said. “She’s a volleyball player.”

  “Not creepy at all,” I said. I would have asked her why she had invited me in, or why she had shown me around with the thoroughness of a realtor, except that I already knew, for her loneliness was so palpable as to be a taste in the air. I had been many places in my life. Apartment buildings where babies free-ranged, waddling down the halls with dirty hair and diapers needing to be changed; houses like my aunt’s, where everything was stained and reaching between the couch cushions to find the remote left your fingers sticky. Bus stations, and prison waiting rooms, and foster-care homes, and men’s cars, and men’s houses or apartments where there was sometimes only a mattress on the floor, and none of them had scared me quite as much as being in Bunny’s silent, beautiful house.

  “I’ve never had a boy in my bedroom before,” she said, a little apologetically, and she sat on the bed, as though she expected that I would fuck her right there on her white eyelet duvet.

  “I’m gay,” I said, my affect as flat and casual as I could manage. I had never spoken those words to anyone before, not in that way.

  “Well, I’ve never had a gay boy in my bedroom either,” she said, and flopped backward, finishing the last of her Pop-Tart sandwich, licking the butter off her fingers. She contemplated the ceiling and I began to wonder if I could simply leave. I was fascinated by Bunny and I liked her, but I was beginning to realize I liked her more from a distance than I did close up. It was too much, being in her room, smelling her smells, hearing her breathe.

  “You probably think my room is stupid,” she said, still staring up at the ceiling, her legs, in their athletic shorts, agape on her bed in such a casual way that it was almost lewd, even though technically nothing was showing.

  “It’s a room,” I said. “I’m not the room judge sent to adjudicate your decor or whatever.”

  “It is stupid,” she said. “My dad keeps saying we should redo it. But I like it. I like it just like this.”

  “Well, thank you for showing me around,” I said, trying to indicate that I would like to leave, when we both heard a door slam downstairs. Bunny sat upright on the bed, and I froze as we listened to the thumping of feet on the carpeted stairs. And then there he was, a man I had only ever seen in photographs, his giant head wedged between her door and the wall. “You’re home!” Ray Lampert cried, giddy. “And you have a friend! I thought we could get Chinese—do you feel like Chinese?”

  “Ugh, I’m starved,” Bunny said. I, who by fifteen was already a neurotic counter of calories, almost gasped at this statement, having witnessed the 700-calorie Pop-Tart sandwich.

  “And you’ll join us, obviously,” Ray Lampert said, turning to me. He was substantially fatter than in his picture, and while there were dark puffy bags under his eyes, the rest of his skin tone was so peculiarly even that I could have sworn he was wearing makeup. His blue dress shirt was unbuttoned a scandalous three buttons, and he was wearing a ratty red baseball cap. It occurred to me that I had probably seen him dozens of times and had just never realized that it was the same man as in the photograph.

  “This is Michael,” she said. “Were you thinking Bamboo Forest?”

  “No, I want good, really good, egg drop soup. Bamboo Forest is so watery.” He turned to me. “Don’t you think it’s watery?”

  What I thought was that I didn’t know anyone was such a connoisseur of egg drop soup. To me it just came, like napkins and forks. “I should probably get home,” I said.

  “You don’t really have to go, do you?” Bunny said with sudden, cloying desperation. “Say you’ll come with us!”

  Ray reached out and squeezed my shoulder. “He’s got nothing better to do, right, son? Don’t tell me you’re one of these overscheduled kids that’s got back-to-back tutoring and chess club right before you off yourself because you didn’t get into Harvard.”

  He had found me unattended in his daughter’s bedroom; I stank of cigarettes and was wearing a Nirvana T-shirt and eyeliner, and I had a septum piercing. My hair was loose and went halfway down my back. It was unclear to
me if his remarks were meant ironically or if he was actually blind. “Let’s make it a party!” he said, slapped me on the back, and headed downstairs, shouting that he would meet us at the car.

  Bunny turned to me and said in a low voice, “My dad’s kind of weird, but I promise it will be fun.”

  And I thought: If Ray Lampert was one of the men I met on Craigslist, I would be too scared to ever get in his car, because he was the kind who would lock you in a closet or put a gun in your mouth and then cry about his ex-wife. Bunny took my hand and twined her fingers through my own. And she looked at me with eyes so hopeful that I nodded.

  Honestly, I probably would have let her take me anywhere.

  I did not often leave the narrow cove of North Shore, as my aunt Deedee possessed neither the material means nor the disposition to take us out to dinner anywhere, and since my mother had been released from prison and my little sister had returned to living with her, my continued presence at my aunt’s house depended almost entirely on my being around as seldom as possible. My aunt was a difficult woman to know because her personality was almost entirely eclipsed by exhaustion. She worked at the Starbucks inside the Target and at the animal shelter, and between those two jobs she was still barely able to pay our ever-increasing rent. For her, the mansions that encroached daily were a constant reminder that her life was untenable, and that, as she rapidly approached fifty, she had nothing to show for her labors and would soon be forced to move to a less nice (read: less white) part of the city. She was holding on as long as possible, determined to get her son through high school in the good, rich town before collapsing.

  I shared a bedroom with her son, Jason, an effortlessly masculine and unreflective sort, who was neither bad nor particularly good, and who often farted in answer to questions addressed to him. How he always had a fart ready to go was a mystery to me, but I knew that if I became annoying enough to him, he would complain to his mother so persistently that it would leave her little choice but to evict me.

  When my mother had been released from prison for good behavior after serving only two years of her sentence, my sister moved back in with her while I had remained with Aunt Deedee under the pretext that my mother could not “handle” both of us, though whether on a financial or an emotional level was always vague. It was easy for her and my sister to share a queen-size futon in her tiny studio apartment, but where would they put me, with my adolescent male body? It was as if they were afraid that when they opened a cupboard my secret erections would all come tumbling out.

  There was a further bizarre line of reasoning that because I was the same age as Jason, but slightly smaller of build, I could wear his hand-me-downs, thus making my upkeep “practically free.” It “just made sense.” It was “easier for everyone.” While I did nurse this rejection by my mother and sister as a core psychic wound upon which my entire personality was founded, I also breathed a sigh of relief. As much as I wanted my mother to want me to live with her, I didn’t want to actually live in that tiny, airless studio apartment, and I think I even told Aunt Deedee as much.

  Really, I suspected there was another reason I remained with my aunt, and it was because almost immediately upon her release my mother had taken up with a new boyfriend who was so exactly like our father it was comical, and Aunt Deedee and I both knew without having to ask or look for clues (the first time I met him he was wearing a shirt that said CONQUER YOUR INNER BITCH; who needed to know more?) that he was probably homophobic. While I had never come out to my aunt, one day in ninth grade, when I had been struggling in the bathroom, she came in and said, “If you are going to wear eyeliner, let me at least teach you how to put it on so you don’t look like a sad clown.” And she had taken the cheap black pencil I had purchased at Rite Aid, explained to me that it was useless, and opened her own makeup bag to me, showing me all of its wonders: tiny arched brushes and tubes and palettes of colors and primers and luminizing sticks and other products I had never heard of. “Go to a MAC store,” she told me. “They’ll love you in there, sweetie.”

  Her sympathy did not extend to my septum piercing, which she said made me look like a cow. “A bull,” I pointed out. “At least it’s a boy cow!” But she tolerated it and me, though I did not want to test this tolerance, which I intuitively felt was jerry-rigged from moment to moment, a rope tossed casually to me as she rushed from one shift to another, yelling over her shoulder, “I think there might be tater tots, make something.”

  But whenever I went over to see my mother and Gabby, Aunt Deedee would examine me, inspect me. She would make me turn in a circle. Sometimes she would suggest I change my shirt. If I had dared to wear eyeliner, she would tell me to take it off. She requested that I put my hair back in a gross ponytail that made me look like I bred iguanas. But it made me look less gay. And that’s what she was doing. De-gaying me before I went over there. We never talked about it, she never said those words. But that’s what she was doing, and I suspected it was part of why she let me stay. She was protecting me, shielding me in North Shore. When my mother and Gabby moved into a two-bedroom with her new boyfriend, no one even asked if I wanted to go with them. By that time I was in high school, and it was such a good high school, it would have been a shame not to let me finish. Or that was what was said out loud, anyway.

  Meanwhile, the older Gabby got, the more pensive and chubby she became. She was, and I say this with love, a total Pokémon-loving, nerdy Trapper Keeper–clutching sad sack. Mopey in a most unsympathetic way. Not only was she not making jokes, she wasn’t laughing at the jokes of others. To me at the time, this was a heinous offense, a grievous wrong. What else were you supposed to do with pain but polish it until it became something pointy and pretty?

  Every time I saw Gabby on one of our forced monthly family dates, which usually took place in a Denny’s that was right next door to a Goodwill on Hawthorne Boulevard, at which, over the years, I purchased many a natty men’s shirt, she seemed less alive, more grayed out. Once I cornered her in the hallway outside the bathroom of the Denny’s and asked if Mom’s new boyfriend was molesting her, but this seemed not to be the case. She became so offended she refused to speak to me for months and would sit through our meals silent and bored as my mom gave me the latest gossip from the hair salon where she had gotten a job. The new boyfriend had sent her to cosmetology school. Fancy fancy.

  When I brought up to Aunt Deedee the possibility that all was not right in that house, that Gabby was officially failing to thrive, Deedee swatted the air in front of her face as though there were gnats, and said, “Some things you just have to accept.” I did not know if she meant that my little sister should accept my mother’s craving for love alloyed with violence, or if she meant that I should accept that my sister and I were now on separate trains on diverging tracks, experiencing different childhoods that would lead us to different adulthoods, and were helpless to do anything other than wave through the window as we passed each other. “Gabby wanted to move in with her. Viv’s her mother. Can’t do anything about that.”

  Latent in this observation was the fact that my mother had a legal right to my sister and was exercising it in a way she had chosen not to exercise it over me. Whatever conversations my aunt had had with my mother I had not been privy to, so I did not know if my aunt had begged for me to stay with her, or if my mother had begged her to keep me.

  Regardless, my time in North Shore had not included many excursions to the neighboring towns, and I had rarely been to Manhattan Beach, even though it was only five minutes by car, and I was shocked that a place could be even more visibly affluent than North Shore. The main drag was crowded with boutiques and gastropubs, every house was built up two or three stories, every square inch of the lot covered, and the only cars on the road were BMWs, Mercedes-Benzes, Bentleys, Maseratis. Everything glittered. Mr. Lampert’s car smelled of leather and stale french fries as we glided through the dusk. Bunny and I both sat in the back as tho
ugh he were our chauffeur, but mainly because the front passenger seat was covered in trash, papers, and fast-food containers, and maybe as many as thirty empty Muscle Milk bottles.

  Ray kept up a steady patter, talking to Bunny about his business dealings, and asking me questions about myself that I found alarming. In interactions with my own parents and aunt, I had perfected a series of what I thought of as “prey behaviors” that included careful lack of eye contact, silence, and unobtrusiveness bordering on invisibility, but none of this deterred Ray Lampert, who had questions about my shirt (Did I know that he had actually been to a Nirvana concert back in the day?), whether I played sports (You should, everyone should, even if they weren’t good at it, because it taught you about life), my eyeliner (Young people were so much more free these days, and wasn’t that a good thing? He, for one, supported my wearing eyeliner if I chose to).

  Bunny did not react to any of this as though it were unusual and looked placidly out her window at the lighted facades of glamorous homes flashing by, though she did reach her hand out again and lace her fingers through mine. While this gesture was unquestionably overly intimate, my little sister had also been a hand-holder, and so I squeezed Bunny’s hand in little pulses as I had Gabby’s, and she squeezed mine back, though otherwise we did not address each other but spoke only to her father as he quizzed us about our teenage lives.

  The Chinese restaurant, casual and merrily chintzy in a way I found deeply reassuring, was almost empty, and we took the largest corner wraparound booth, even though we were only a party of three. I did not know what to order and felt anxious about pronouncing things correctly, but Ray Lampert was the kind of man who loved to order without consulting others, and he gave the waitress a long list of dishes, ordered a Tom Collins for himself and two Shirley Temples for Bunny and me. I had never had a Shirley Temple before, though as a child I had coveted them, and, while it was so syrupy it made my teeth itch, to possess one now caused my stomach to continually rise within my torso like a helium balloon bumping along the ceiling.