Alta Plaza Park by Kim Magowan
When I was fifteen, playing field hockey in Alta Plaza Park with my friend Lucy, two men picked us up. When I say “men,” I mean just that: they were years older than us (hours later I was to learn Théo was twenty-six). They were French, visiting America from Normandy. One was much handsomer than the other, and of course Benoit was after Lucy. At least Théo was also French, and I liked the way he pronounced his name: Tay-oh. It sounded like a lilting call, whereas Ben-wah sounded (I told myself) a little dirty.
How it went down was this: the men watched us hit a ball back and forth on the flat plateau of the park. (Lucy and I both went to high schools that mandated team sports. Neither of us was any good). After a few minutes, Benoit approached Lucy and asked if they could borrow our sticks.
“In France, men play this sport,” he told us.
We delighted in imagining these men in the terrible, short skirts that our schools required as team uniforms (mine was black-and-white plaid, Lucy’s maroon), their hairy legs displayed.
So we loaned them our sticks and watched them rally for a while—they were at least as good as we were—then they sat down beside us. They offered us cigarettes, which Lucy declined but I accepted. When Théo asked how old we were, I said, “Nineteen.”
That was implausible—I looked young for my age, which bothered me tremendously, though of course these days I miss looking young. They either believed me or pretended to. Benoit uncorked a bottle of wine with his pocket-knife corkscrew. Lucy had been signaling me with her eyes—disapproving of the cigarette, shocked-amused at my quick and casual lie—but, like me, she drank wine directly out of the bottle.
It was nearly seven by then, though still light out, the stretchy, solstice days of June. Lucy’s life, unlike mine, was still a normal one in which clocks meant something. After a few minutes of sitting at the top of the stone, south-facing steps, she said, “I need to get home for dinner.”
“Home?” repeated Benoit, in a light way.
Lucy and I exchanged glances. Lucy said, “I’m home from college, for summer.”
“I’ll walk you,” he said, standing up, and Lucy looked at me.
“Jane? Are you staying? Or do you need to go?” she said.
In those days, at that age, I had long, complicated conversations with just my eyes. Will you be mad if I stay? my eyes asked, but I couldn’t decode her response. Lucy looked worried, but was she worried for herself, or me? There was nothing serious to be concerned about; we both had our field hockey sticks.
“Staying, if that’s okay,” I said, and she looked at me in that not-quite-decipherable way, then capitulated. She said to Benoit, rather formally, “You can walk me partway.” She lived near the Presidio. Then she bared her teeth, which startled me, until I realized she wanted me to check if they were wine-stained. They weren’t; I gave her a thumbs up.
Benoit said something to Théo in French, which I didn’t understand (I took Spanish), and Théo laughed.
We waved goodbye to Benoit and Lucy. We: it occurred to me that I was currently part of a different “we.” That made me consider all the ways I’d experienced Lucy slipping away and beyond me: she went to a different and better school. Her beauty was a mounting barrier. The prior year she’d had a boyfriend, whereas the only boy I’d even kissed was Rusty DeValpine, shorter than me. We’d slow-danced at the last school dance, his erection pressed against my thigh, and he kissed me in an emphatic way like the violent pat one applied to the head tagged, back in kindergarten, in Duck, Duck, Goose.
All this is to say: I was very inexperienced.
But the big events in my life have tended to take place in an extreme, sudden way. Two months before, I’d come home from school, and seen my father carrying a suitcase down the stairs. There’d been no prior warning that my parents were about to split. Not long before that, Dad had been laid off from work—it was 2001, when dot-coms, which had sprouted in those years like rubbery mushrooms, were all going bust. In two months, I’d gone from being a girl with a normal family in a two-story house to living in a too-small flat with my mother, who paced it like a starving cat. Now there was talk about my needing to switch to public school. The word that kept banging in my ears those days was “afford.”
I thought about that word “afford” later that night (finally dark by then) when Théo thrust into me, and I looked past his shoulder at the black, foggy sky.
It wasn’t rape in any sense, though by the standards of the college I went to a few years later (a progressive college where I took two classes in gender studies), I wasn’t affirmatively consenting. That is, I never said “Yes.” But I didn’t shove Théo off me, even when it hurt, badly—I remember feeling shocked by this, because in the trashy romance novels I devoured when I was fifteen, virgins had orgasms their very first time. I remember looking up into the sky with a kind of urgency, searching for stars. It seemed a bad omen that I couldn’t find one, though in San Francisco, between the light pollution and the fog, one often didn’t see stars.
Enough sad things happened that year that it’s surprising that night lingers as it does. I wonder why? Perhaps I attribute to it a final divergence between Lucy and me—apparently, I’d badly misread her eye-signals. At any rate, nineteen years later, I wake up sweating, thinking of it. The way Théo said to me, afterwards, “You smell like a French girl,” which I repeated breathlessly the next day to Lucy. I thought it was a compliment; I thought French girls smelled like expensive perfume.
Yet I’d felt unsettled when, after walking me most of the way home, he said: “Americans are absurd.” I can’t remember the context for his pronouncement, only that Théo said it in a sneering way that shocked me, as his entering me had shocked me. It was the first time I realized that people in the world disparaged and ridiculed Americans, and it was a moment I would return to, almost suck on, as later events and years confirmed it.
Really, it makes sense why I would wake up with Théo’s sneering breath in my ear, this particular summer morning. When my quarters are as cramped now as then, when I am as weary of my husband and my four-year-old daughter as I was of my unhappy mother, as desperate to escape them; when the world outside seems just as ominous, wild, and dumb.
Kim Magowan’s short story collection Undoing (2018) won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her novel The Light Source (2019) was published by 7.13 Books. Her fiction has been published in Booth, Craft Literary, The Gettysburg Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and many other journals. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is the Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel. www.kimmagowan.com
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