Girls with Insurance

She was almost skipping. His name was Kenny and he was from Jacksonville (or Tucson) and she wasn’t a slut because they had stayed up all night, three condoms, four glasses of water, one time, he called her “babe” and twice, he asked if she needed another pillow.

Halfway down the block, she stumbled on a homeless man’s leg and now the world looked different. Now she was barely able to lift her legs and move on. She was the lowest form of woman, so unlike a flower that e.e. cummings would open petal by petal. She wasn’t thinking about Kenny, whose last name was yet another thing she did not know, which was no surprise, given that she had met him less than twelve hours ago. She thought of her mother and her father. They met when they were eighteen and they had the nerve to be in love, married at twenty-one, still married now. The story of her parents was too fantastic, too charmed. It didn’t matter that her mother fretted sometimes that life had been too easy, that her idyllic childhood had led into an easy transition to womanhood—no acne, no premenstrual aches—and then into a loving marriage. “Sometimes I can’t sleep because I know that all this good has to lead to something bad.” She would pat her mother on the head and tell her that there was nothing to worry about, “Your daughter is a perpetually single fuck up who will probably never marry or procreate.” Her mother would protest. But then she would spring up and start dinner, as if she’d just gotten a shot of B-12. The wind was blowing now. Kenny (or did he prefer Ken) was a stranger and his scent was tangled in her hair, his bite on her neck and her clothes rumpled and nocturnal. Tucson and Jacksonville were not even in the same state and the problems she had were so deep that they were impossible to overcome, they were larger than her and the glaring sun and she had no sunglasses. But then he messaged her: Dinner tomorrow? And she smiled and the clouds played along, meandering over the sun so that she need not squint. Now she saw her mother as an incomplete woman who was good to the heart, but limited, her heart like one of those plastic magnets on the refrigerator with some tacky slug line about food meaning love. She’d only known one man, tragic, confining. Her dad’s simplicity that only moments ago seemed masculine, western and impossible to find in present day America now seemed unappealing and surely Kenny (or Ken) would remark that she seemed so different from her parents when he met them, which he would, now that they were in communication. She cut through the parking lot of a mini-mall. Time to write back. She stood still, her thighs flexed, her head down: Yes, dinner. Your neighborhood has an AIDS clinic AND a bakery. Score!

      She did not even see the car. The driver, who had just minutes earlier been diagnosed with AIDS backed out without looking. The woman who gave it to him was a poet named Lee who lived in Tucson. He didn’t even know her last name. He would soon explain to police that he had not even seen this girl and that he had put his sedan into reverse without looking because what was there to see anymore? The worst day of his life just got worse. Already bad that he was sick, worse that he had slept with Lee only once, after meeting her at a poetry reading in a coffee shop. Why had he gone to that reading? He’d been in Tucson on business. He liked local news. He saw a note in the paper about a poetry reading in a bookstore. The announcement of a reading shrunk the size of his hotel room and suddenly the smell in there was unbearable and the window was broken and he was mulling over his failures as a man. In college, he’d written lots of poems, some of them he’d read. Some he still had in a file cabinet somewhere back home in the basement. A teacher had once told him that he had something to say and the way to say it, that his mind was a hose, his interior water. “Most people don’t have a hose,” she’d said, “Not a good one, anyway. Treasure your hose.” But he had stopped. He couldn’t even say why. At some point, a notebook became a ridiculous thing for a grown man to buy, unless you were the kind of grown man who didn’t wear collared shirts, the kind of dude who went to readings all the time and knew what chakras were. Selling pharmaceuticals had seemed like a great way to see America. So he’d signed on to the job and now he traveled around selling pills to strangers, drugs that would inevitably be found to be dangerous so that newer drugs might win FDA approval and allow the companies to make even more money, more. He liked selling. He’d made a sale that day in Tucson, and he’d been high in his motel room, he’d jerked off, ordered a grilled cheese and opened up the local paper. The news of that poetry reading had smacked him down and he’d opened the mini-bar and wondered why he was so weak. Did other men get so down so suddenly? Did they just plummet for the oddest reasons? You can call someone for a lift if you didn’t make the sale, but he made the sale. He couldn’t call anyone for a lift because he had no rational reason to be down. Lee was the last poet that night, a wiry brunette with chicken legs and an oversized tank top that suggested a history of insecurity, hours in front of the mirror examining, prying and an oversensitivity that was either endearing or deplorable. Was she a narcissist or a wallflower? The tank top looked soft. He’d known he would touch it before night’s end. He just hadn’t expected that he would sleep with her without protection. She’d said she was on the pill. She’d complimented his suit. She’d asked him how he lives with himself poisoning the world. He’d said that she was young. She said she wasn’t; she was in law school. She was a realist, the poet realist who adamantly declared that she would never work for big firms and that she would advocate for women’s rights. He’d told her that she would change her mind when the loans started to pile up. She’d said that she had a benefactor and that she would say no more. In that moment he should have left. He saw her for the creature that she was, too fortunate, too indulgent, that tank top disgustingly soft, wanton. She’d never struggled and he’d wanted to make her struggle, in a carnal way, hold her wrists to the mattress, insert himself into her memory bank, where he’d idle, some guy from out of town who wasn’t using the phone number she wrote down on the newspaper clipping, wasn’t wanting more of her.

      He leaned over the dead girl and saw his face in the mirror her blood made on the tar, shimmying in the red pool like a woman on top. He imagined that she was headed to the clinic where she would be diagnosed HIV positive. It seemed a likely conclusion. Look at her dress. See the bite on her neck. The most recent text in her phone is just a number, not a name. She was the lucky one. She’d never have to sit in a little room and learn that all the blood inside of her had turned slowly yet suddenly and was opening fire, drop by drop.