Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Wisconsin

2022; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 130; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sew.2022.0019

1934-421X

Lisa Taddeo,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

Wisconsin Lisa Taddeo (bio) Nina drove for fourteen hours, stopping only to pee and eat a hot dog at a roadhouse. All her life she thought the middle of the country had moose and blue trucks and men with tall hats. But it turned out to be limestone and crippled people with no jobs. On the road she felt the desire to have sex clearer than ever. A virgin, Nina couldn't determine the locus of the need. But when she found herself behind a truck carrying sections of gas pipe, she became transfixed by the bright, aggressive cylinders. She'd been fingered, of course, by Ryan S., who had sustained the same pimple since freshman year. In his basement, with the Schlitz sign and the colored Christmas lights and the mom on the phone upstairs. He had this terrified look on his face the whole time, like he was waiting for her to blast off into space. —Okay, that's enough, said Nina, after two quiet minutes. She imagined a black and blue inside of her. A week later, by the time she felt untouched enough to masturbate again, it was the same [End Page 218] day she got the news at school. Principal Field walked into her A.P. Spanish class. He had a green-hued face and looked like the Incredible Mr. Limpet. —Nina, he'd said. Out in the hall he told her there'd been a car accident. A seafood truck. No turn signal. It was her mother who had no turn signal. It seemed important for the principal to inform Nina it was her mother's fault that she was dead. She was eighteen in one month and would go to college in four. Her mother, a widow with no close friends, had guilted her into staying close to home, so Nina had enrolled at Rutgers. She'd share a dorm room with a girl named Elizabeth. On the phone, Elizabeth sounded like a nerd who'd never suffered, or eaten lobster. Nina inherited $47,000 plus the house to sell or rent. She was a virgin queen. Proprietor of flat sheets and a garlic press. The idea that she could have gone to Tulane, Pepperdine, McGill. Nights she sat in her Volkswagen in the parking lot of 7-Eleven and watched kids her age, washed in the fluorescent light of 11:00 p.m., emerge with Slurpees and frozen Snickers. Days she packed up the house. Aunts and cousins came to help. Some pilfered silver candlesticks and cigarette cases. One outright asked for the gold leopard ring with the emerald eyes and the tennis bracelet from Macy's that Nina helped her father pick out. Her father was dead, too. But his death suddenly seemed like a tornado in a far-off state. Now it was her mother's handwriting in the margins of cookbooks that sent Nina to puke in the bathroom. She'd saved the nightstand for last because it had been her mother's private zone. There was no lock, and Nina didn't remember having been explicitly forbidden to open the drawers as a child, yet it was the most prohibited space. For all its intrigue, there might have been her mother's vagina inside—metabolized via death into a velvet change purse. [End Page 219] ________ Two days ago, she'd opened all the secret drawers and emptied them. Then she shut them because open drawers were the mark of entitled slovenliness. She sat on the Persian rug. It was cream and sapphire, like jewels in sandy countries. She pulled at its tufts. The carpet was her mother's prized possession. Nina could drop on it anything she wanted now. Pear nectar, nail polish. The death of one's parents tendered an unholy freedom. But suddenly the rug belonged to her, and it was worth a lot. So the freedom was shortlived. She petted the tufts down and read all the emails. There weren't so many, but it took her a long time to absorb each one. It seemed likely they'd been in the nightstand like this even when her father was alive. The audacity was...