The Silencer by Marina Seaward
“I pushed aside the attachments and pulled out the vibrator”
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I wasn’t sure what my mother meant when she said, “You came out of the womb hot to trot.” We were driving to South Salem High, like normal, her Phil Collins tape playing, like normal, not talking, like normal. I clutched my baby-pink Esprit book bag and tested the comment for fighting potential. I was fourteen, and although I had lost my virginity the previous summer, I was still innocent enough to think perhaps she meant I could run really, really fast.
I had no idea she had found my vibrator the night before while I was in the shower. She had been searching for a progress report I had more cleverly hidden in my set of Encyclopedia Britannica that was so old, it was missing two World Wars, the Great Depression, and eleven constitutional amendments. Hindsight tells me I should have cut out the paper until the vibrator could have nestled between pages of a hinky history.
The vibrator had come about three months previous when my boyfriend, a college junior, had picked me up after school in his flaming orange Volkswagen Rabbit. I was more than familiar with the pebbly black vinyl seats. I could maneuver my body around the stick shift with unbridled grace. I had memorized the water stain on the headliner that looked like an outline of Portugal. When he was on top, he had to be careful to edge his way around the jagged hole in the floor he had created by thrusting too hard against a rust spot.
That day, though, rather than reach across me and shift my seat back, he handed me a brown paper bag.
“I got you a present,” he said.
I opened the bag and pulled out the box. It had a clear plastic cover and boasted a cream-colored vibrator, with six different attachments. There were spike attachments, nub attachments, length attachments, and one that had eight-inch vinyl tassels that appeared designed to whip vaginas into a frothy, heady mixture. The neon-purple star-shaped sticker proclaimed: “Make your girl Jizz…with the Lady Whiz!”
We put in the cheap C-batteries, and beneath the Center Street Bridge, I attached the vinyl tassels and pushed them into myself while my boyfriend watched, beating off in time to the traffic rumbling overhead.
After the disappointing results of that day, the vibrator sat undisturbed under my bed for a few weeks until I finally pulled it out and examined it. I had heard there was more to sex. I’d read me some Judy Blume. But that wanton feeling from way down deep that was such a hit with her characters never bloomed in me, no matter how hard my boyfriend thrust. I was determined to comprehend the mystery of what my body could do.
I pushed aside the attachments and pulled out the vibrator. I flipped the small plastic switch to the on setting, and a buzz-saw blast sounded in my bedroom. It scuttled from my hand and I pushed it under my pillow, terrified. I turned it off, held my breath, and waited to be discovered. When no sounds emitted from the living room, I slid the batteries out of the body, using careful caution. I wrapped two layers of Kleenex around them, then slid them back into the cheap plastic body. I switched in on, and the hum was hardly discernable. I had created my first silencer. With a fresh alacrity, I began a new life of going to bed early and stealing a steady supply of C-batteries from the Safeway I worked at as a courtesy clerk.
My mother stopped talking to me and made me take the bus to school. I wasn’t sure why until she threw a bachelorette party for a friend of hers at our house on a Saturday night. There were ten ancient women in our living room, all of them pushing forty. They were drinking cocktails made of vodka and whiskey out of fancy bottles, but I knew my mother filled them up with the cheap stuff. They invited me in and I watched as the bride-to-be opened up her gifts: edible body creams, crotchless Vegas-ready underwear, peacock feathers. I giggled along with them, thrilled to be included. My mother crumpled giftwrap into smaller and smaller wads, twining ribbon as tight as she could. Her eyes were glazed with what I thought was happiness.
“I should have gotten you a vibrator like my daughter’s,” she said to the bride-to-be. She turned and smiled at me, then patted me on the knee too hard. “Tell them, Marina. Tell them how you don’t even clean it after you use it.” She turned back to her friends, who had gone quiet and awkward. “That would have been a good gift.”
The silence throbbed in me and I launched myself out of the room, out of the house.
I know now she was drunk. I know now she’s only had sex with two men in her life. But then, then, I lit up with shame. A well of filth I was unaware existed inside me sprung open and spilled and spilled and spilled.
Years later, after I had moved out, my mother loaned me a book. Inside were pictures she had taken from a recent trip to Lisbon. At first there were pictures of monasteries, narrow, cobbled streets, and rose-colored rooftops baking in the afternoon sun. As I perused further, I realized they had been left there on accident. I recognized her friend Mira’s daughter, Anica, who was a few years older than me. Anica was asleep and in repose, she was quiet and beautiful, her straight blonde hair rumpled, several strands easing into her mouth. She wore small blue boxer shorts that bunched in the crotch and a pink tank top that exposed the delicate loll of her breasts. Her arm tucked behind her head and one foot pushed down her covers. My mother had worked the f-stops in her camera to such an extent, she caught the faint glow of fuzz the coated Anica’s body. The light looked like dawn, the time I knew my mother awoke. Anica was clearly unaware she was being photographed, but I noticed that in some of the photos, Anica’s hair wasn’t in her mouth anymore, and I thought of my mother, across the globe, reaching a terrified hand out to push the strands aside to better capture a desire she would never allow herself to own. The photos revealed an anxious desperation. I wondered how many mornings she had watched, how many it had taken before she couldn’t deny herself this one moment, alone in a bedroom with a woman she desired so entirely she couldn’t bear to touch.
I should have been a better person, but I’m not. I scheduled a lunch with her at a café we both liked, and over coffee, I returned the book. Her eyes lit up, so innocent she almost charmed me into forgetting my purpose.
“Did you like it?” she asked.
“I didn’t read it,” I said. I slid the pictures of Anica across the table, one by one, each movement a jabbed hyphen. Her shock was instantaneous, and the meanest part of me, the part she nursed to health, chortled. The waiter came to take our order.
“What would you like?” I asked my mother, mean and sneering. “A salad? Something girl-ish?”
“I need more time,” my mother said. She pitched forward, then back. The waiter scampered away. Any sense of vindication left with him as my mother turned pale, then puce, her silence sick with apprehension.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said. I slid a brown paper bag across the table to her. “I have a present for you.”
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Header image courtesy of Steven Hartman. To view a gallery of his collage, go here.
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Marina Seaward recently graduated with a Masters in Creative Fiction, and since then has immersed herself in the glory of non. Her work has appeared in The Gravity of the Thing, Winged: New Writing on Bees, and in countless Pulitzer-prize winning novels, all of which still reside in her brain. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her amazing boyfriend and their two ungrateful bastard cats.
