Alisson Wood - Being Lolita

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To my grandmother,
who would be so scandalized,
and so proud;

to my mother,
who says she will never read this;

and to seventeen-year-old Alisson,
who needed this book most of all.

A word after a word

after a word is power

margaret
atwood

The first time he kissed me, it wasnt on the mouth. I hadnt read the book yet. He told me it was a beautiful story about love.

We would meet in the next town over, a diner off the highway, open all night. I would know what time to meet him in our booth in the back corner because, in the middle of his class, in front of everyone, he would look at me, look into my eyes, and write a number on the blackboard8 or 9 or 10and then wipe it away with his other hand. He was an English teacher in my high school. His shirtsleeves were always chalk kissed with white. He was twenty-six. The first time he saw me, I was seventeen.

I would tell my parents I was going to a friends house or studying somewhere. But, really, I would be sitting across from him for hours, the pastel painting depicting Greek ruins on the wall above him, while he would grade his students essays and I would sometimes do my Latin conjugations. Mostly I would write to him, in front of him, and he would bring it home or sometimes read it there under the twenty-four-hour fluorescents and then write backall over napkins, the paper place mats, scraps from school. We probably covered hundreds of pieces with cursive, but I have only the handful that I hid from him, kept close and stolen away. Before we would leave hed take the papers and napkins and rip them up, put them into our water glasses, and I would watch them lose their shape and the ink bleed. I wasnt allowed to keep things. I wasnt supposed to call him Mr. when we were alone, only his first name. But I could never call him that in school. No phone calls, no emails, no touching. He made the rules.

The rules were broken at that diner, in our booth. It was May, summer was almost there, and graduation hung in every classroom, crepe paper and glue-glitter banners filling the halls. A countdown everywhere. You couldnt escape it.

He was trying to teach me about great literature, to prepare me for what I would face as a freshman in college just a few months in the future.

You should definitely be an English major, he told me, leaning back into the booth, his arms stretched out on top of the bench, taking up so much space across from me. It was the pose that if we were on a date, unseen in a dark theater, would be the transition movement before he put his arm around me. He wouldnt bother with a fake cough, hed just go for it. I was sure.

He would read me the greats at our table of beige Formica and dull silver: Poe, Dickens, Hawthorne, Carroll. Hed get into it, doing voices when he read Alices Adventures in Wonderland, laughing at literary jokes that I was surely supposed to understand, so I laughed too. I lapped it up, knowing how lucky I was to have this kind of private instruction.

That night he was reading Lolita to me, from the beginning of things. He spoke to me in Nabokovs opening lines, languidly: light of my life, fire of my loins. I thought it was the most romantic thing ever. But I was ruining itI had a bug bite and I kept pushing my ankles together, trying to quell the tinge of itch. A child who couldnt sit still.

He began rubbing the edges of the pages with his thumb, harder and harder as his voice grew louder, creating tiny rips in the paper as he stroked them.

Finally, he asked, A mosquito bite?

Yes, I said, an invisible ruler against my spine.

Dont you have any calamine lotion?

Not on me, I said.

You know, he said, saliva can stop the itch.

He looked at me. He had green eyes. My flip-flopped feet were on the cracked red leather next to him on the booth, my legs under the table bridging the gap between our benches. Not touching, just beside him. I followed the rules.

He leaned down to my foot next to him and put his lips on my pink, swollen ankle. I felt his breath on my skin.

And it was like every locker in the halls of my high school swung open at once, metal kissing cinder-block walls. It felt just like that.