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The First Thing

Posted on December 21, 2006
Filed Under The Stories |

People said the first thing that came to mind around her. She would have been gorgeous if only she’d spared a thought for her appearance instead of wearing the first set of articles she laid hands on each morning. Her fingernails rarely matched her sweaters and her hair rarely received a brush down. Her name was Anna because it was the first name with the first letter of the alphabet that her mother could think of.

She was the first in her class to cross the threshold of puberty and it happened to her during first period in school. She was eleven. She had breasts by the time she was twelve. Not little buds with raisin toppings but full fleshy glands with a magnetic effect on all male eyes at any distance less than fifty feet. She lost her virginity six months later because Billy Holden walked up and told her that he wanted to fuck her. Billy was big on bluster and initiative but not so much in the jockstrap area. As a result her transition into sexual activity was not as painful as that of some of the girls who would venture there after her.

When she met her guidance counselor, the woman who was nicknamed 2D because of how thin and uncurvy she was, took one look at Anna’s full figure and deemed her best suited for construction work. The words were formed out of the older woman’s knee jerk desire to see Anna covered up in unflattering overalls. But the girl took the words seriously and made her way into the city where she found herself seated in the dust-laden office of Sherman Hess, a pot-bellied cigar-chewer with gunmetal grey fingertips. She couldn’t find a way to focus on anything other than the low thrumming sound his fingers made on the Formica top as he considered her request for employment. He had a daughter the same age as Anna who was determined to own every single piece of Britney Spears memorabilia there was in the world and he couldn’t believe how much it cost him each month. He’d read somewhere that twelve-year-old girls and forty-something men with sweaty palms were the blonde singer’s biggest fans. He did not understand how his seventeen-year-old daughter had managed to align herself with the Cult of Britney. He just wished the girl would get a job to support her habit.

Right then he wished his own daughter would be more like this girl before him, who, if his opinion had been requested, he would have agreed looked a lot better than the Euro trashy Lolita pasted on his daughter’s bedroom walls. He expected that she would have trouble from the men in his employ but he had his hands full with trying to care for one girl without becoming responsible for another man’s daughter. So he gave her the job and a terse warning to be careful.

Anna donned the shapeless overalls without complaint and went up to the foreman to understand her duties. The foreman took an entire minute to simply find the off switch on the kaleidoscope of dirty thoughts that raced through the screen in his mind before he managed to tell her to do things that would require her to be around him all day long.

For weeks she took the constant rubbing of his semi-erection against her behind as he found reasons to pass her in narrow corridors. She thought nothing of all the times he found a reason to brush down the front of her overalls and she didn’t complain when he forcibly kissed her one drunken Friday afternoon after the crew had left for the day. His high state of intoxication prevented him from doing anything more than groping down the front of her overalls before he fell asleep under the influence of his lunchtime flask of cheap whiskey. He didn’t even get to see what he been kneading roughly for a few frantic minutes. She left him face down on the cement floor and returned to the little dank room she called home, bare minutes away from the construction site.

As she sat on the creaking bed that squeaked with her every turn in troubled sleep and had gained her the reputation for being the apartment complex nymphomaniac she wondered about how she might occupy herself over the weekend. She enjoyed the silence of the two days she had, away from the sounds of jackhammers and drills and the constant cursing of Curtis Overmaars who seemed to get his fingers as often as he did the heads of the nails they were holding up. She tried to see the sky that had looked so blue as she walked home but it was an impossible task through the nearly opaque layers that stained the tiny window above her bed. She thought about laundry and was about to step out of her overalls to toss them into the basket when another thought struck her and she had to sit down. She had to sit down because it was an alternative to the first thing that had occurred to her and she realized that there would be nothing wrong with her considering that option as something for her to do that night.

For the first time since she’d moved away from her mother’s home, she went to church. She wandered in, and cast a long shadow down the aisle as she paused and took it all in. The giant crucifix that bore an artist’s likeness of Christ with his eyes cast up to the heavens. It wasn’t as peaceful a face as some of the others she’d seen on scapulars and pocket prayer books back home and it occurred to her that in the city, even the religious iconography was a little troubled. She walked slowly down the aisle and stepped into a row close to the middle, sat down and looked around as if she had only just realized that it was okay for her to do so. She looked at the way the light affected the stained glass and she realized that at that moment she was sitting in a pool of yellow light cast from the halo of the baby Jesus. She closed her eyes and cherished the warmth.

One hour later, she left the church, went back to the construction site, met Sherman Hess and complained about the foreman’s repeated sexual advances. Hess had watched Anna’s progress with the eye of a man who could clearly see that the fruit of another’s family tree was far richer than the bad seed he was nourishing in his own garden. He had never really liked the foreman and saw this as an opportunity to help someone who might be more appreciative than the daughter whose off-key singing-along rang in his ears long after he’d left the suburban home that was his prison. He forwarded her complaint to the parent company and hinted that the girl in question was considering legal action.

Nine weeks later, Anna was using Hess’s help to set up her own business with the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars the construction company had agreed to pay if she would leave quietly. Hess cut off his daughter’s Britney money and started making enquiries about raw materials and suppliers for the new enterprise while Anna went to school to learn how to make stained glass. On many days in many ways, she still relies on her first thoughts to guide her. Every once in a while however, she will wait for that second or even third thought, to lead her in a different direction.

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