Learning to Play Dead by Blake Bell

Blake Bell

Blake Bell is a writer and educator from South Louisiana.

Learning to Play Dead

“You are one tough cookie.” The dental hygienist marvels at my ability to remain calm as her

metal tools dig into my infected gums. “Most people couldn't take this without anesthesia.”

Little does she know, I learned to play dead long ago.

#

Ten years old. Our suburban driveway. The vinyl seat sticks to my bare legs in the summer heat. My step-dad is a big man. I seem to always remember him like this now: drunk and sweaty. The smell of bourbon and Marlboro Reds hangs between us like a curtain.

He passes me an unlit cigar. “Want to try it?”

“No.”

He holds it in front of my face. The wrapper crackles like dried leaves. “Bite it.”

The tobacco smells foreign, earthy and bitter. “Do I have to?”

“Yes.”

I bite down. Bitterness floods my mouth. It tastes like dirt and secrets I never wanted.

#

Thirteen. The cute neighborhood boy with the swooshiest hair you ever saw invites me over. I

walk on my toes through the gate connecting our backyards. This is it. My first kiss.

His brown leather couch creaks under our weight. No parents anywhere. His mouth is

cold and hard. He doesn’t ask me anything. His tongue too far down my throat, his hand too far down my jeans. I leave quickly, wordlessly fleeing through the wrought iron gate.

By Monday, everyone knows. The word slut follows me down my school’s fluorescent

hallways.

#

Freshman year. Mackenzie’s garage apartment, converted by her parents as some misguided

gesture toward teenage privacy. Two older boys sneak in. I've been drinking vodka that burns like antiseptic. Everyone already says I've lost it anyway, so I think: Let's just get it over with. There's not much to say about the actual sex. I don't remember feeling anything. I always wondered if it really went in all the way. I'm still skeptical.

#

The same year. Choir practice. I'm supposed to sing my first solo at the school concert. My voice is shaky but determined as I practice on stage in my PE uniform shorts, wearing no underwear. I don't remember why I'm not wearing them, but I'll forever remember that I'm not.

A senior boy pulls down my shorts. Him and his buddies make up a new cover of Tom

Petty's “Free Fallin'” where they sing “free balling” instead. They and everyone else think they're hilarious.

“She liked the attention,” he tells anyone who’ll listen, which turns out, is most people.

“After all, she wasn't wearing any underwear.”

A week later, two songs before my solo, I stand behind the curtain and look out into all

those empty faces waiting and back slowly away. My choir director's head shakes in

disappointment. The senior boy pats my back, as if we're the friends I've made myself believe we

are.

#

Twenty years old. The restaurant manager asks if I want to play video games with him and a

friend.

“It's a rite of passage,” he says, as his friend slips into the next room and his hands slide

under my skirt.

I feel incredibly stupid. I should have known. But I also feel almost in a trance, like I'm

performing a ritual I'll perform time and time again until it loses all meaning.

I begin to see my sexuality as a weapon used by and against me. I’m surviving between

ownership and absolute disembodiment. The way men look at me, the things they say to me. I wonder what belongs to me and what does not.

#

“I'm almost through, just the back section left, and you'll be free.” The hygienist really is a nice woman, and I can't help but be glad she's a woman. I feel slightly less invaded by her hands.

For so long, I told myself I was dead inside. My vagina was simply a receptacle and

dispensary: a hole in my body things came into and went out of. Sex didn't matter. Love didn't matter.

Then I fell in love, unexpectedly, with a man who made me cum harder than any of the

piddling fools before him. It seemed like a good match. Want to see old flames come out of the woodwork? Get engaged. Men from years ago spewed out the cracks of my history like water from a sputtering hose.

I became Mrs. Blake Bell on April 12, 2014. It felt good to only have to worry about

having sex with one man. I relaxed into the flow of married life, focused on school.

#

Now. As a supposedly adult woman, I see men everywhere. I can't get away from them. Leering at me in line at the store. Looking at me through truck windows at red lights. At my work, in my house. I have no idea how much their presence is on me or on them, how much is real or imagined, but it strangles me. Sometimes I want it to. Sometimes I ask my partner to put his hands around my neck.

If I am a sexual person, does it show? Do I constantly wear a look on my face, sending

out pheromones? Can I enjoy sex without having sexuality suffocate me?

My youngest sister is twenty-one now. She's an absolute beauty, as all women are. When we go out together, I want to pluck out the eyes of the men who threaten her future sanity. I hope she hasn't had similar experiences to mine. I hope she won't feel like I do when she's older. I fear she has, and I fear she will.

#

The hygienist finishes and removes her hands from my mouth for the first time in over an hour. I'm shaking. She thinks it's the temperature and passes me a blanket for my legs. My cheeks feel like puffed-up marshmallows. She puts me on oxygen, sadly clearing the nitrous from my lungs and my brain.

As usual, she bids me wait for the dentist. He comes in wearing a stupid grin: teeth

blindingly white and unnaturally straight, pointed nose and glasses.

“How are we doing?”

We are not doing anything. I am doing awful because I just had metal scrape the insides of my gums for an hour while I ranted in my head about all the other times I've had things in my mouth I didn't want. At this point. I'm even annoyed at the things I did want.

While looking down at his notes, he makes comments on what the hygienist has already

said, smiles extra wide: “Well, until next time!”

He sticks his hand out toward me.

Does this sound familiar?

Bile churns in my gut. I fail to mask the contempt on my upturned face at this smiling

man, hand outstretched. His smile is unwavering. I realize I've taken out years of bitterness on this stranger trying to do his strange job.

I spent over a decade trying my hardest to be numb. I pushed away my experiences

partially for fear of where the fault lies—with me, my naivety, my impulsivity, my vices—or

with them, those men who linger in my mind after all these years.

The dentist looks at me expectantly. He still wears that plastered smile that makes me

want to knock the glasses off that crook in his nose.

I shake his hand and realize I'm pretty angry for a dead girl.