There was a giant tree behind our house.
I could see the tree from my bedroom.
It was not our tree, but the neighbors’.
There was a tree house in the tree.
There were rungs one could climb and a tiny door.
I was not supposed to be in the tree house.
But the neighbors’ kids had grown and gone.
And there were bird sounds I liked and there were leaves.
There was the sky getting darker, the sky getting dark.
There was my father calling my name and again.
And the birds calling louder than that.
Our father and mother, before she left, fought brutally.
My mother would stand outside his study screaming.
And I would slam my door, scream, Stop.
And my brother, as well, would scream, Stop.
But my brother’s stop was directed at my slamming my door and not at my mother and father’s fighting.
Then my slamming my door was directed at my brother’s screaming, Stop.
Then my mother’s screaming was directed at me and my brother.
I did not mean to push as hard, at the dinner, as I did.
But I leaned over the table, took hold of his arm.
Everyone laughed as I wrote my name across his wrist.
Looking back, I have no answer for why I did.
I blame, in part, my drunkenness.
I blame, in part, his wrist.
But these things, of course, weren’t really to blame.
Not when you think of what it is to pin blame.
Not when you think of what it is to point at the face of the thing you truly blame.
I liked amateur better than professional.
Amateur had those things you shouldn’t see, like broken nails, like messy hair, like fat.
It had people who looked like the ugly couple next door fucking or your parents’ ugly friends fucking or your parents.
I liked it because of something having to do with desperation.
The amateurs’ desperation becoming mine.
Their rush to get off becoming my rush to get off.
And that fucked-up feeling like the universe was controlled by my wretched gut.
Yesterday, I was standing in line in a store.
There was a woman ahead of me in the line.
The woman was buying a carton of milk.
This has nothing to do with anything.
But the carton of milk was all rung up.
And the woman’s money was not in her purse.
And her money was not in her coat.
She said, Hold on, and a man in line behind me sighed.
I could tell what he was thinking.
He was thinking something about this woman.
I was thinking something about her too.
Something about her aloneness.
Something about her desperation, as she dug deeper into her purse.
The man behind me sighed again, and in that moment I hated all men.
I wanted to save this woman from them.
And it occurred to me I had a choice to make, and so I made a choice.
I mean it occurred to me I could buy this woman the carton of milk.
And so I did this very kind thing.
I was in this bed that was someone else’s bed.
I wasn’t exactly proud to be in it.
I mean I wasn’t proud that a part of me was proud.
I felt so proud in certain parts.
And not in the parts literally being fucked.
But more in the parts metaphorically being fucked.
There was this one video we watched the most.
In it the woman’s tits were incredibly big.
The guys who fucked her were incredibly big.
The video was so poor quality, it was mostly big parts up close and sound.
The bed had the worst-looking headboard you have ever seen.
It had the worst-looking headboard banging against the worst-looking wall you have ever seen.
It had the girl licking different parts of the guys in a terrible up-and-down way.
And the guys biting down on their lower lips.
The guys squeezing shut their eyes.
The lines they said were just too ugly.
And we laughed our asses off.
One of my brother’s friends and I were hooking up as kids.
My brother didn’t know about me and his friend.
That I would follow him out when he left.
That we would climb up to the tree house.
That I did whatever he wanted.
Because whatever he wanted was easy.
Because I had a technique that was surefire.
This technique I had took seconds.
It was easy to pretend I was into it.
It was easy to pretend I wasn’t pretending.
I bought the woman the carton of milk.
And everyone in the store in that moment was happy.
Everyone in the store in that moment was happy because I had done this very kind thing.
And the woman whose milk I bought squeezed my hand with her terrible-feeling hand.
And as our hands went up and down and up again I thought of how kind a human I was.
I mean I thought of how I had done something kind, some thing that would somehow advance humankind in its being kind.
And I knew in that moment of no kinder human.
I mean I knew of no human who in that moment would have bought this woman the carton of milk.
And I wanted the clock to stick there forever, to stick in a time where I was kind.
For God to see is what I wanted.
After my brother left the house, my father would call out my name.
It always meant he needed something.
Like something to eat or drink.
And sometimes I would come down from the tree house.
I would make him whatever he needed.
I would leave it outside his study.
But most times I pretended not to hear him.
I could hear only birds, I pretended.
It was just like amateur porn.
Because of his soft body pressing mine into the bed.
Because of the sounds of the bed and his ugly sounds.
He said, What do you want, into my hair.
There were a lot of things I wanted.
Like I wanted to be a kinder person.
And I wanted to know how to do this.
But I said, Nothing.
I said, God.
His girlfriend’s things were all over the room.
Her lipstick on the dresser.
Her shirt that looked like a shirt I would like across the back of a chair.
Before she left, we heard our mother screaming late at night.
We heard her banging on my father’s study door.
And I would slam my door, scream, Stop.
And my brother would slam his too.
It was unbearable, our limitations.
Unbearable, how we couldn’t help.
How we couldn’t make her stop.
It could have been love with my brother’s friend.
There was something about the tree-house floor.
Something about the sky through trees and the sounds of birds.
I didn’t want my brother to know.
Because it said some things about me.
It said I was not the girl his girlfriend was.
His girlfriend would be saved in the rapture.
Her body would float upward into the air.
But it wasn’t exactly the body that floated upward.
My brother said it was the soul.
And did I even believe in the soul.
I said, What do you want.
And he said, I want to fuck you.
But he was already fucking me.
So I said, What else do you want.
And he said, Shut up.
He said, Shut the fuck up.
Just fuck me, he said.
My brother’s friends wanted me bent like this.
They wanted me spread like this.
They wanted me split like this.
I would say, Take a picture, when they looked at me.
I would say, Fuck you, when they looked too hard.
But they kept on looking.