Demensions - The Quiet One - Part Three: The Mark

     On the weekends, back when my mother was alive, my older brothers used to meet their friends at the abandoned cabins by the river, where they could raise hell and drink until they were sick and no one would call the law. They would sit around a cable-spool table they had lifted from a construction site and play drinking games, each with a laughing girl in Daisy Dukes perched on his knee, all enjoying a respite from their hard, messy work, catfish farming with my father.
     The year I turned thirteen, they started letting me tag along occasionally. I would hide in a corner with the same plastic cup of beer in my hand all night and watch the goings-on, wishing I had a knee to sit on, a young man to banter with. But the young men tended to keep well clear of me.
     I had been born with a deep-red, ugly birthmark on my face. Although the mark, which had covered my whole left cheek, had faded to brown by the time I was ten and left me completely the year I turned twelve, people considered me, and I considered myself, permanently marked, like a cut of meat at a meat-packing plant that hadn't passed the USDA inspection. Unsatisfactory. Tainted. So I never really had much fun at those parties.
     Then my mother had died, drunk and passed out at the wheel of her car when it struck a tree at about sixty miles per hour. I was fourteen, and Emily and Mary three. The three of us stood together at the funeral, huddled against the cool fall air, I constantly wiping Emily's nose because she had the sniffles. My brothers were there, looking stiff and sober in their rented suits, too grown up to stand with the rest of us. Soon after the funeral, they all three moved out to scout out an apartment in Routon somewhere, all the way on the other side of the state. They hardly ever visited us after that.
     I shook my head to rid myself of these thoughts. That was a long time ago, and this would be a perfect time to work on not being so afraid of people. So I shimmied into the short dress I had just made, put on some sandals and went out to the living room to go out with my brothers.
     My Dad balked. "You're not wearing that, are you?"
     "Yes," I said.
     "It's okay, Dad, all the girls are wearing them now," Nathan said.
     Dad wouldn't let me go until I had put on some leggings and a jacket against the cold. So I did, but the night had turned warm and muggy and I stripped them off as soon as I got out to the car and I put them in the trunk.
     John was driving, Jacob was sitting in the front sea; me, and my oldest brother Nathan were in the back. We made another stop and I found I had to sit in Nathan's lap to make room for another guy, Ben, and one more girl.
     Ben had always been rotten to me. When we were in grade school, no amount of beatings from my brothers could deter him from his chosen path, which was to make me miserable. He'd poked fun at me whenever he could, in the most public ways possible, and anyone who was cool did the same to maintain their cool stature. I didn't like Ben. But he hadn't made a nuisance of himself in a long time, so I was willing to be polite.
     The girl with him was Heather, who had gone to the Catholic high school and didn't know me very well. She kept looking at me funny, and then she dug around in her bag and brought out a lipstick and a penlight and held them up next to my mouth. Then she uncapped the lipstick and reached for my face, and I pulled away.
     "What are you doing?" I said.
     "I think you should try this lipstick." She had a thick New Jersey accent. "I wore it a lot when I was dyeing my hair blond, but I don't use it now on account of my hair's brown now. So try it on!"
     The whole car was silent, waiting to see what I would do.
     I took the lipstick tube from her and smeared some on my mouth. The guys gave a roar of amazement and a round of applause, as if I had swallowed a goldfish or something. It was no big deal. I had just never worn lipstick before.
     We stopped again and picked up George, another friend, and then Heather had to sit in Ben's lap.
     We went to the cabins by way of a liquor store. John and Ben and George went in and picked up whiskey and vodka and gin and tequila. Heather held the box in her lap the whole way to the river, and I couldn't help staring with awe and a little fear at the glass bottles inside.
     There were three cabins in a row, about fifty feet apart, along one bank of the river, with a rotted-out little wooden dock that led out to the water. It had all been part of one piece of property once, in the sixties; there was a story about a rich old guy and a murder which I am sure to this day was made up by a bored ten-year-old. But no one had bought the cabins since then, for many reasons; the cabins were so close together that neighbors would have been too close for comfort, the entire piece of land with all three cabins on it would have been very expensive, the property was a mess, hadn't been maintained for years, smelled like a swamp, and was probably slithering with copperheads and water moccasins. No one wanted it.
     My brothers were thrilled to be back. They ran around shouting about things that were still there after all those years; the cable spool, the graffiti, the hurricane lamps, the Christmas tree.
     The hurricane lamps were lit, the liquor was brought out, and we all started drinking. Even me. There was a lot of applause on my account because I had my first swig of vodka ever and I didn't choke on it.
     We talked and laughed and drank and joked for a while. My brothers and their friends, who had learned over the years to handle their liquor, half-emptied the four bottles we'd bought in a little over four hours. Ben produced a packet of purple kool-aid from one hip pocket and, amid cheers from my brothers and their friends, poured the remaining liquor into the plugged bathroom sink and added the kool-aid. This had been a favorite party recipe among the teenage population when my brothers were teenagers. They called it Purple Jesus.
     Another bunch of guys showed up at about midnight, bearing a boom box and some loud music, lots of memories and nostalgia, and, more importantly, a full keg of beer and a bunch more girls. The keg was well-received by all, and my brothers easily forgot about me when faced with the prospect of possibly getting laid. I had had a second swig of vodka, a gulp of tequila, a mouthful of gin, a swallow of whiskey, and a full cup of Purple Jesus. So I was in no shape to argue when Ben pressed a plastic cup of beer in my hand and steered me into the back bedroom.
     I had a headache and was tired, and I wanted to go home. Ben had me cornered and was talking to me, but I wasn't really listening to him. I felt dizzy. I would set my beer down and Ben would pick it up and hand it to me again, and occasionally I would drink from it out of impulse. And when it was empty he took it from me and set it down and kept on talking and I noticed his hand was on my upper arm and I didn't like the way it was pressing against my breast. I suddenly felt very naked in that short, thin blue cotton dress. I tried to wriggle free and Ben, who was probably as drunk as I was or more so, grabbed me and pinned me firmly against the wall, pressing me to the cheap, crumbling plaster with his body. His fingers groped my breast and pinched my nipple painfully, and I could feel his other hand creeping up my inner thigh, up my skirt. He whispered in my ear with his hot alcohol breath that he was awful sorry for the bad things he'd done to me in school.
     A drunken thought passed through my head, that I was a psychic, I could make myself invisible. I could make him not see me. I pushed Ben away from me and dropped to a crouching position and covered my head with my hands.
     Peeking up through my fingers, I could see Ben looking around, befuddled. "Where the hell'd you go...?" he said, looking right at me at one point and not seeing me.
     I'm doing it, I thought, oh, God, I'm really doing it. I can really do it! Please let it keep working. Please don't let it wear off.
     Ben kept looking around, peeking under the rickety bed that was left in the room, looking in the closet, and finally stumbling out in a haze, calling my name.
     My brothers found me later; it could have been an hour later or ten minutes later, I didn't know. But they pulled me to my feet and asked me what was wrong, why I was on the floor.
     "I'm invisible," I said. "Don't let Ben see me."
     "What?" Nathan said.
     "I'm sick," I said.
     "Too much to drink," Jacob said. It was like hearing him through a tunnel. I saw him through a tunnel, too. My eyes were heavy.

The Quiet One

Part Three: The Mark

© 2001 Eula Thompson