Elieen

did not say lawyer. She said attorney, and even more often, litigator,

a word I could not have defined precisely. 

It reminded me of alligator. Her father, an alligator.

I didn’t know that from this word grew another she loved: litigious, 

which meant nothing to me, but rhymed with religious.

Even in private, he is very litigious, she said, and I imagined him at prayer.

Eileen believed kneeling was in itself the most powerful gesture. Fall

on your knees, she sang at Christmas time, unaccompanied, always

Stopping before the second half of the line. O hear the angel voices. 

Of course it was sexual. But it was also not insincere. 

When Jane started having sex, she said, It only gets worse—

How much you think about it. We were sixteen, and I didn’t believe it was possible

to think about sex more than I already did. 

Jane said Eileen was a liar, though. No one could really enjoy that. 

And how often she did it—as if it were nothing.

It’s not ike she’s tripping in front of these boys, and landing on her knees. 

Eileen’s father told her he’d chosen her mother

over another woman because he preferred her fellatio. 

It was unthinkable, to me, to hear this from one’s father. 

The word, too. Like fallacious, an SAT word: mistaken, as in a belief.

Eileen believed it was not possible to experience such pleasure

without the complete surrender or seizure of power. 

When Jane talked about it, she said, giving head. 

I thought of Marie Antoinette’s, rolling. Or John the Baptist’s on a platter.

All day at school, I imagined presenting my head to an alligator.

I pictured him devouring it. And Jane said, one day, I would think about this

even more