Ladybug Hunter
Fiction by Mallory Moore
On our first date, he told me my eyes looked like Lake Michigan. We were sitting right by the water, our legs dangling over the concrete barricade. I vaguely recall an environmentalist group advocating for a natural seawall to be built, but that summer, those deep, dark stumbling blocks were the only barrier. The color of the concrete grows even darker when the wind blows, splashing water against the rocks. In Chicago, this happens often.
Unlike other lakes with their watery green scum, Lake Michigan is a searing, brilliant blue. My eyes are brilliant blue, he said, while I sucked on a strawberry milkshake. I think of first dates as free calories. I remember that the paper straw got squashed inside my mouth and made a weird noise. We laughed, and he told me the sound reminded him of blowing on grass as a child. He was a musician, woodwind. Now, I can’t think of anything less sexy than an oboe, a wet piece of reed vibrating as someone’s unshaven mustache twitches above.
We sat in the same park where I had fallen asleep every August afternoon the year before, falling into a state of depression so deep I didn’t dream. When I did, my dreams were soundless. In my mind, those months can be summed up by the view of the skyline sunken under a summer haze, the Sears tower poking into the clouds.
On our second date, we went to the Art Institute, and I stared at a photography series of a young, white woman asleep in different public places. The woman in the photos was the subject and the artist. The plaque on the wall told me that she wanted to know if where you slept influenced your dreams. She also wanted to challenge conceptions that sleeping in public is taboo. I’m not sure it ever was taboo for a woman like her.
Reading the plaque reminded me of one day when I got up early and took a walk through the park outside my building. There was a crumple of clothes on the grass and then I walked closer, and it was a person with their buttocks exposed to the sky. I kept walking and wondered if there was someone I should call. I did not want to wake them, and I did not want them to be dead. I told my date all of this when we were in bed, where we ended up immediately after the art exhibit. I told him because he wanted to know why I had stopped at those paintings of the sleeping woman for so long. Photographs, I said.
When I was depressed, I always slept on my back so I could watch the leaves and pretend to fall into the swimming pool of sky. I shouldn’t say when. I am depressed. On our first date, he didn’t know that.
On our first date, the waves sounded like sails flapping in the wind. My milkshake was so sweet I almost wanted to vomit. Instead, I kissed him. I told him I had always wanted to read To the Lighthouse right here on the bluff. Someone rode by with a speaker on their bike playing reggae. I was happy because I could hear the music.
On our seventh date, we went to the used bookstore on 57th Street and he took me over to the Virginia Woolf section. He had come earlier in the day, inscribed the book with a cheap ballpoint pen. I felt petty for noticing this detail, and I feel petty writing about it now. I like being in your stream of consciousness, his cheap ballpoint words read. I smiled. I’m sure of it. He had a bottle of wine and a picnic blanket, and we brought the book out to the water to read aloud. I felt dizzy and happy with a fat, dry tongue. My head rested on his lap. I’m not sure we even made it halfway through.
I read an article about Woolf recently, a statue they’re erecting in her memory. It is controversial because the statue woman gazes out at the River Thames and the real Woolf filled her pockets with stones, drowning herself when she was done with life. That is how I think of suicide. Being done with life. It is the feeling I get when I walk down the street and want to just lie down on the sidewalk and not get up. Sometimes when I’m on the bus, I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to find the will to press the bell and get off at my stop. Doing life has so many, many steps. My therapist says we can work on that. Which part, I want to ask her.
The more time passes, the more details I remember from that summer fling. That first date, a ladybug landed on me. They’re the only bugs that don’t scare me because my grandparents’ house had so many. They fell from the skylight over the stairs and onto the baby blue carpet. Their wings looked like black lace. The ladybug that landed on me that day had three dots on each side, symmetric, so it was good luck. Make a wish, I told him, holding it out on the bud of my finger. I felt his breath.
Aren’t you gonna ask me what I wished for, he asked and I said no. I still don’t understand people who feel like they have to know everything. I also didn’t want him to say anything that would ruin the moment, something generic like I wished for our first kiss, even though his saying so would have made me smile. I prefer moments that are unpredictable yet somehow still perfectly choreographed. First dates are all about this specific precarity. It’s like you’re standing at the top of the stairs ready to smash your nose in.
A few minutes later, right when he started talking about being a musician, another ladybug appeared. It landed between us on the concrete with a fat smack. He knew I liked them now, and he looked up at me with excitement. I counted the spots. Three on one side, four on the other. I squashed the ladybug under my thumb, swiftly crushing the exoskeleton. No use, odd number. I remember how his face changed, and I could tell that he would fall in love with me. The greatest secret is that people love cruelty. They love mystery.
When I broke up with him a month or so later, my lips tasted like Moscato. I had no reason except that I wanted to. I think I said something about us being in different chapters of life and being ready for different things, speaking as if life followed some innate temporal logic though, in my experience, development never tracks in a linear fashion. If every story followed the perfect narrative arc, it would be so boring.
I knew this for a fact because I spent fifth-grade searching books for their climax with the big fat highlighter given to each student in my class. Climax is conflict, our teacher preached as she sashayed between the desks. She was stunning. Once, I saw her cunt when a gust of wind swept through the playground. It was shockingly human and hairy.
Fifth grade was also the year that my classmates and I marched to HD class once a week. Human development was how we referred to sex education. Much like my parochial school, the adults in my life relied on euphemism. I had never heard of sex before. My teacher projected a graph on the board that contrasted how men and women experience desire. The man’s graph was like those boring story arcs from English class. There was a build-up, a climax, a let-down. The woman’s graph was like a heart monitor. The line of desire was slow, sluggish, and then past a certain peak, it simply undulated again and again. Women can orgasm more times in a row with shorter breaks in between. This sex thing was a revelation.
On my fourth date with the musician, he asked me how I masturbate. I thought about his vibrating oboe lips and hesitated. On my stomach. I hate questions where it feels like there is a right and a wrong. I’m glad he didn’t ask what I thought about while masturbating.
Masturbation was the biggest let-down about sex. After learning in HD that one can orgasm just from masturbating, I began to wonder what the point of relationships with other people was. The second biggest let-down about sex I learned outside the classroom, and it was that men and women don’t necessarily, and in fact rarely, orgasm at the same time. After this revelation, I questioned the point of sex with a man even more.
Sometimes, the point of sex is something you don’t even want. I found that out a few weeks after we broke up. First, I went to CVS and then to Walgreens. It made me feel a little better knowing that pregnancy tests were sold out at the first pharmacy. I wasn’t the only one who was unsure.
I didn’t believe I could produce anything. Living with and through and inside depression, my relationship with the future has always been tenuous. My future is like the Sears tower on a gray day. I am never sure where the soft clouds end and the sharp spikes begin.
I planned my trip to the pharmacy like a covert operation. I did not want to show up when the store was packed with my college classmates nor when it was late and empty and obvious why I was there. I wore a hoodie the way only a white girl can in my neighborhood, my phone slung in the deep front pocket like a stone. I bought two pregnancy tests and a box of ice cream sandwiches. A mechanical voice read the prices aloud. 12.99. 12.99. 5 dollars and 34 cents. Pregnancy in the age of self-checkout is a lonely affair.
I double-bagged my items and paid with cash, feeding the wrinkled notes into the machine. The streetlights were on, so it was too late to walk out to the lake by myself. I didn’t want to go home either. Sometimes my roommates asked what happened to the musician, my sort-of boyfriend, and I didn’t want them to get the wrong impression. There was a sequence to the events of our relationship. I broke up with him first.
Instead of going home, I went to the library, a cold concrete building that looked like an impossible Rubix cube. The bathrooms there had no windows and no cell service. I once overheard someone bragging about how they would take breaks from studying to jerk off in the first-floor restroom. This kind of statement would have been empowering, amusing, and more memorable if the orator was a woman but, of course, it was a man.
As I sat on the toilet, I thought about why there’s not more of a push to ban pregnancy tests in conservative states. If women couldn’t find out whether they’re pregnant, then maybe they wouldn’t know until it was too late to change anything.
The toilet seat was still warm from the last user, and I sat there while waiting for the test to develop. Usually, I didn’t take off my backpack while peeing, but this time, I was grateful I did. Once the results materialized, I wrapped the stick back inside the package like a tampon and put it in the sanitary waste bin. The metal flap made a horrible screeching noise as I pushed it open. Then I washed my hands and walked home.
When I masturbated that night, I tried to touch myself from the inside. The unlubricated pressure hurt a little but not a lot. It felt foreign even though it was my own body. I flipped onto my stomach and pressed my hot cheek into the mattress. I slept soundly.
A few weeks later, the musician sent me a handwritten letter in the mail. His script was in that same blue ballpoint pen. When I saw the envelope, my first thought was this letter is from someone who loved me. In beautiful cursive, he told me I had ruined his life and he didn’t understand why. There was not a single spelling error, so I figured he had a draft of the letter saved somewhere in the back of a library book or in a bedroom drawer for another woman to find someday. I could see from a splotch of ink on the paper that he had hesitated, debating how to close the letter. In the end, he signed off with an em dash and this is when I knew he was going to be fine.
Today, I have neither a baby nor a boyfriend. I have a ladybug tattoo on the inside of my wrist, not that it really matters where. When I go on first dates, it’s always one of the first questions people ask. People will reach for anything at the beginning, any way to start the story. Most days, I like the ladybug sitting with her seven spots on the pale skin of my wrist. She reminds me of music and blue water and all the things I wanted, pretended to want, and knew I didn’t want. Pretend. I still pretend sometimes, and I still do life. There is no climax.
Mallory Moore studies English Literature and Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. Her short fiction has recently appeared in The Foundationalist and her work has been nationally recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. She is an alumna of the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference. You can follow her artistic journey on Instagram @mylooseleaflife.
