Wiving by Caitlin Myer

Wiving by Caitlin Myer

Author:Caitlin Myer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781950691593
Publisher: Arcade
Published: 2020-07-15T16:00:00+00:00


It’s worth it, it’s all worth it. My aunt and uncle are on their way to Israel. They leave before I’ve been there a week. They’ll return, then go to New York, return, leave, leave. No parents no jailers nobody waiting up to catch me out.

I am cast in a local dinner theater production of South Pacific. I will take home leftovers from the buffet after each performance, enough to keep me well fed.

For the first read-through, we sit in a circle. David, one of the seamen, looks brightly across at me. He’s brown-skinned and keeps the whole cast laughing, his jokes will become our collective in-jokes. After the second read-through he asks me to his apartment. He kisses me as we undress and fall into his messy bachelor bed. I sleep all night spooned inside the curve of his body. In the morning I find my purse where his dog dragged it, the strap chewed right through.

She’s jealous, she wants all the attention, says David.

I am shining from his attention all day at my new job. I face the shelves at a health food store, shift jars of organic peanut butter, make vegetarian sandwiches at the deli counter, and I’m thinking of David, his body wrapped around mine as we slept. We go back to his apartment twice more. I put my purse in his dresser drawer and he fucks me where I stand, bent over his dresser. It’s over quick, then he pulls me into bed next to him.

By the time we’re in dress rehearsals, he’s stopped calling me. At the cast party we all knock out several boxes of cheap wine and his high-wattage smile is back, he puts an arm around my shoulders and breathes on my neck. My body floods with relief, he still wants me. Drunk he drives us to his place, drunk he undresses me, drunk he passes out. I don’t know yet that drunk attention is a lie. I don’t know yet that I’m as bored with him as he is with me. In the morning we’re rumpled and smelling of bed, he’s chatty as he drives me home, and we never see each other again. The play is over and so are we.

Alan in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is white and unhandsome but he has an aura of authority and nobody challenges it. He’s married, has a daughter my age, a younger son. He takes me to dinner at a white-tablecloth restaurant. I get steak and he orders wine for both of us; I look older than sixteen and anyway nobody questions him. When his wife is away he brings me into the shower with him, washes me like I’m his child. His washcloth misses nothing: behind my ears, in the folds between my legs, between my buttocks. He writes a sonnet comparing me to a diamond.

I turn seventeen and the cast presents me with a chocolate cupcake, a single candle to blow out. They all applaud. I have a rush of feeling, I belong with these people.



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