Eileen Read Online Free PDF Page B

wore perfume, and I always preferred the scentless soaps and lotions. Nothing calls more attention to one’s odor than a fragrance meant to mask it. At home alone with my father, I was in charge of the laundry, a duty I inherited by default and which I rarely honored. But when I did, the aroma of his soiled garments was so distressing, I often gagged and coughed and dry-heaved when I sniffed them. It was the smell of something like soured milk, sweet and laced so strongly with the perfume of gin, it turns my stomach just to think of it now.
    Randy smelled completely different—tart like the ocean, brawny, warm. He was very attractive. He smelled like an honest man. Mrs. Stephens had told me that the guards were all hired through the employment office of the county correctional facility. So they were all ex-convicts, I suppose. They all had tattoos. Even James had one. A swastika, I believe. Randy’s tattoo was a fuzzy portrait of a girl—his mother, I hoped. One early morning during my first months at Moorehead, when the office ladies were setting up the Easter crèche, I read Randy’s employee file, which included a list of his adolescent offenses—sexual misconduct, breaking and entering. He had been an inmate at Moorehead as a teenager, a fact which only endeared him to me more.
    You know me. I spent many hours wondering who might have been the recipient of Randy’s sexual misconduct. I guessed some young teenage girl who got in trouble with her parents for breaking curfew or getting pregnant. Randy didn’t seem like the violent type to me, but I’d seen him use force in restraining the boys from time to time. He’d have been great in a fistfight, I imagined. One of my favorite daydreams went like this: Randy would wait for my shift to end and ask to escort me to my car. He would offer his arm as I stepped across the black slate of ice in the parking lot, but I would refuse it, and he would feel jilted and abashed. But then I would slip on the ice and be forced, despite my prudence, to take his thick arm in my gloved hands, and he would look deeply into my eyes, and maybe we would kiss. Or instead, he’d take hold of me by the shoulders and steer me up against the Dodge, press my face into the frosted window, reach up my skirt to rip my stockings, my underpants, thenaround my leg to feel my caverns and folds with his fingers as he pushed into me, his breath hot at my ear, saying nothing. In that fantasy, I wore no girdle.
    This is not a love story. But just one last bit about Randy before the real star of my story appears. It’s funny how love can leap from one person to another, like a flea. Until Rebecca showed up a few days later, it was the constant thought of Randy that kept me afloat. I still remember his address, since on weekends I would drive past his apartment one town over and sit low in the Dodge trying to see whether or not he was home, alone, awake. I wanted to know what he was doing, what he was thinking, whether I ever even crossed his mind. A few times, without planning, I’d bumped into him in X-ville just walking down Main Street. Each time, I’d raised my gloved hand, opened my mouth to speak, but he just sauntered past me. My chest nearly caved in on itself. One day he would see me, the real me, and he’d fall in love, I told myself. Until then, I pined and moped and did whatever I could to understand his gestures and habits and expressions, as though a fluency in the language of his body would give me a leg up when it came time to please him. He wouldn’t have to say a word. I thought I’d do anything to make him happy. But I wasn’t a fool. I knew Randy had been with girls sexually. Still, I could not imagine him in the act of copulation, which is what I called it in my head at the time. I couldn’t even begin to picture his bare nether regions, despite having seen a picture of some in one of my father’s pornographic