Coveted Until Conquered
No matter how it happens, it leaves an impression that cannot be undone.
Hi, readers!
Here’s a few updates:
I’ll be pausing Sunday Drive for the next few weeks while I work on compiling my portfolio and finishing my (first!) semester of grad school.
If you want a rad newsletter to read in the meantime and thereafter, you can sign up to Verve Letter for fresh, feminist takes on modern life, pop culture, and more.
That’s it for now.
Enjoy!
Greg parked his semi truck in the middle of our driveway, where the chrome bumper gleamed in the starlight like carnivorous teeth.
Since he was still a stranger to us then and my parents weren’t home, my older sister kept the door locked and spoke to him through the screen of the half-open window, refusing to let him inside.
He sat in the white rocking chair on the porch, sucking Marlboros and watching the sheath of night pull itself into the hills, waiting for my parents, his old friends, to come home.
From then on his presence was perpetual: Much like a stray without a home, he’d show up just in time for dinner.
Eventually he became like another uncle, equally kind and annoying, complimenting my success in school and slipping my sister and me twenty dollar bills when we got high grades on our report cards.
Greg lived in a trailer he rented from my Dad. It was on a few acres of land just down the road from our house, and I’d spend hours in the woods there, riding four-wheelers with my siblings and Greg’s only daughter, Sam, who came by some weekends.
Much like Greg and the rest of our neighbors on that old country road, she’d appear at the door, uninvited, whenever she felt like it.
“Let me drive the four-wheeler!” she pleaded one warm Autumn day.
“Fine,” I said.
She was ten, two years younger than me. I knew a ride with her thumb on the throttle was a death sentence.
Still, I always felt bad that her parents were divorced, and that her Dad was a guy like Greg, who was missing his two front teeth and used a steak knife to cut corn off the cob in long sheaths, which flaked onto his plate like snake skins.
Sam and I hadn’t even made it onto the trail when she got the four-wheeler stuck. There was a stream that marked the entrance to the forest trail, and over it was a culvert bridge made out of tractor trailer wheels and topped with dirt. She went too fast over the makeshift passageway, sending both our left side wheels and half of my body into the ditch. In an instant, my left leg was pinned between the wheel and the mud.
“Stop! Please, stop!” I yelled, but the engine was too loud and the helmet muffled her hearing.
She gunned the gas over and over. The spiked tread of the wheel grated into my calf, shredding the skin and grinding sulfury mud into my flesh. Finally I shook her and she eased off the gas, allowing me to break my body free.
When I stood up I couldn’t feel my body. The hot pinpricks of adrenaline made me feel dizzy, and blood oozed from my leg.
I knew Greg was in his trailer at the time, so I ran and knocked on the hollow door.
“Help!” I cried. My voice sounded scared, like it wasn’t mine.
I heard shuffling inside.
“Hiya,” Greg said, wearing a casual Saturday T-shirt and jeans.
“My leg, I’m hurt,” I yelped.
He took a look down at my leg, opened the door wide to let me in, then ran back into the bathroom. When he left I was given a full view of the television, which he’d been watching alone.
At first, I didn’t know what I was looking at.
I saw bare skin. A woman’s mouth. A blonde head, bobbing back and forth.
Then, to my great horror, I realized: Is that, a penis?
Aside from changing my baby brother’s diaper, I’d never seen one before. Not in that way, at least. My cheeks burned and I forgot about the pain in my leg.
When Greg returned with a damp washcloth and a first aid kit, he knelt down with his back to the TV and began scraping the washcloth across my wound. He was trying to clean out the dirt and rocks, I knew, but his hands weren’t gentle and I was livid at Sam and I was seeing a blow job for the very first time.
The embarrassment inside me was effervescent, and it bubbled up and spilled out as tears, which dripped down onto the back of Greg’s grease-stained shirt.
The woman on the TV moaned louder.
“Ope, oh no,” he said, finally noticing his error in the chaos.
He sped over to flick it off. “Uh...sorry about that.”
All I could do was cry.
***
Most women, I imagine, remember the first time they saw porn.
Maybe they walked into the basement where a friend’s older brother was watching it. Or, instead, they found dirty magazines in the back seat of uncle’s pickup truck. Perhaps they even tuned in intentionally, fueling a natural curiosity.
No matter how it happens, it leaves an impression that cannot be undone.
Because this is the moment young girls learn their bodies are less like vessels housing a precious soul and more like objects, coveted only until they are conquered.
***
It had made me feel filthy, like I did something wrong. What was even worse, and what I remember most about that day, was that I knew for sure he (and all the other men in my life) knew what I, and all the women in the world, looked like naked.
Could there possibly be anything worse?
It changed everything about the way I saw myself. When men looked at me in the grocery store or I passed boys in the hallway at school, I felt like they could see right through my clothes.
Suddenly, I didn’t trust the postmaster when he smiled at my Mom. I couldn’t believe that my bus driver, who’d known me since kindergarten, didn’t think dirty thoughts looking in the rearview mirror at the high school girls in low-cut shirts. Every time I talked to a boy in town, and their eyes lingered on my lips as I spoke, I wondered if they imagined my mouth wrapped around them, bobbing up and down like the blonde girl on Greg’s TV.
I couldn’t help but look at myself the way a man would. I could no longer move through the world feeling like my body was my own.