It's funny how, even though Robyn and I are so different, there are similarities in our stories.
You touch my heart, Robyn.
February, 1969 - June 1969...
At the end of February, I came home from school on a dreary, blustery day, feeling bloated and cramped. I’d been on the bus when I’d realized that my period had started, and I was desperate to get home. I was still in the bathroom, still wearing my school uniform, when I heard Dad coming up the stairs.
“Erin?” he called.
“In the bathroom, Dad,” I said.
“Well, you’d better come out. You’re sitting on a time bomb.”
I rolled my eyes at his overly dramatic way of talking, something I’d noticed in him a lot in the past few months. I made sure my napkin was in place and got dressed. When I came out of the bathroom, Dad was in the kitchen, with a large paper bag in his arms.
He proceeded to spin a tale that was utterly crazy, that he had learned something about explosives, had rigged the house with an explosive device. Once set, it would explode if anyone tried to enter the house, front door or back, before 7:00 that night. It sounded just crazy enough to be true.
“And what’s the point of all of this?” I asked. For the first time in my life, I hated him. It was bad enough he had risked my life driving drunk the previous summer; now this.
“I’m going to finally do the job right,” he replied, gesturing toward the gas stove. “I’ve got my comfort, here,” he added, pulling a gallon bottle of cheap wine out of the paper bag.
“So,” I said, “You have to put other people’s lives at risk?”
“No one will get hurt as long as they don’t try to enter the house,” he said.
“And of course, everyone knows that!”
He ignored me, picked up the phone and called Mom at work, telling her what he had just told me. He listened to her for a moment, and then handed the receiver over to me.
“I’m calling the police,” she said to me. “I need you to stall as long as you can, but don’t take any chances. The bomb story is probably nonsense, but I don’t want you to take a chance. All right?”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry you wound up in the middle of this, honey.”
I made a few attempts to engage him in conversation, but he was already drinking the wine. I tried to get him angry, but he just looked up at me pathetically.
“Erin,” he said softly. “Get out.”
“But…”
“Get out, now.”
I left. Not knowing where to go, I started walking up the block, but then several police cars were speeding up the street.
They were already in the front door of the house when I got there. No explosion. I was almost disappointed – even this was a sham.
Tony came out of the downstairs apartment, and he and I ran up the stairs together, behind three policemen. They pounded on the door to the apartment, which Dad had locked. Tony called Dad’s name, but there was no answer.
“Back stairs,” Tony said, and he led us downstairs, around to the back of the house, and up the rickety staircase leading up to the back door in our kitchen. Dad was bent over, his head resting on his crossed arms. He didn’t respond to the banging and shouting, and one fireman broke the window, then opened the door.
A policeman turned off the gas and Tony opened a few windows. In a few minutes, the smell of gas was dissipating, and a fireman was reviving Dad. When he realized what had happened, he looked disgusted.
Mom came right home, and Uncle Jack, Dad’s brother, came over that night. The police had told Dad that as an attempted suicide, he was required to submit to a psychiatric examination. They’d have taken him that afternoon, but he promised to go that night, a promise he made a weak attempt to break, until Mom and Uncle Jack took him.
After a few days, he was transferred from the psychiatric unit of a general hospital to a state mental hospital. We were told it would be a long haul. Mom went to visit, but discouraged me from going.
That first weekend, I canceled my date with Jeff. Not surprisingly, I was having a particularly brutal cycle. Jeff didn’t understand, at first.
“Jeff,” I said at last. “I…I have my period, and it’s a really bad month. Lots of cramps and things. I just don’t feel up to it.”
I was embarrassed, because I had never said anything like this to a boy in my life. But he was a boy who loved me, and whom I realized I loved, and I thought if I couldn’t tell him, I couldn’t tell anyone.
Of course, I called the girls throughout the weekend, and they were their usual great supportive selves. All three offered the usual sleepover, but I explained I wasn’t up to it, and they understood. But still, they kept me company and kept me somewhat distracted.
By Monday, I was feeling a lot better as my period began to ease. The initial shock of what had happened on Friday had passed, and I was able to talk to the girls about it in school. As the day ground on, I found that one of them was always with me.
We had just sat down at our usual table in the cafeteria. I was half-heartedly poking at a plate of rather dry tuna salad on a bed of lettuce that wasn’t nearly as green as I would have liked it to be when a question yanked me out of my fog.
“What did Jeff say?” Laura asked. I looked at her in shock.
“Huh?” I gasped.
“When you told him,” she said. “Surely he must have said something comforting.”
“I haven’t told him about this!” I said. Laura stared at me strangely, and I realized how loudly I had said it. I got up and walked out of the cafeteria, and Terri followed me, catching up to me in the hall.
“Erin! Wait!”
I turned and faced my oldest and dearest friend. I was already crying.
“I’m not telling him!” I said. “I’m not!”
“But, Erin, he’s your boyfriend, the love of your life. He’s exactly the one you should tell.”
“No!!”
By now, Laura and Cookie had caught up to me.
“Now, you listen to me!” I said in a low growl. “This is the most wonderful guy I’ve ever met. It’s a miracle that we are so close! My father has ruined so much of my life, and I am not going to let him ruin this!
“Do you think for one minute his family would want to have anything to do with me if they knew my father was in a mental institution, an alcoholic and a failed suicide?! His mother would never allow me in that house again!!”
I ran into the girls bathroom and I started to sob. Terri was right behind me, and took me in her arms.
“He’s not going to ruin this!” I gasped between sobs. “He’s not! He’s not!!”
Jeff called that night to see how I was feeling, and I told him better but not great. He made sympathetic noises and cracked some corny jokes, and I laughed even though they were terrible – I felt I owed it to him.
“Hey,” he said softly. “Are you sure you’re okay? You don’t sound so good.”
I explained that it was just my…you know. It sometimes affected my moods and made me really down. I hated lying to him – I mean, I wasn’t exactly lying, because sometimes my periods really were awful and made me a basket case, but I knew that wasn’t the case this time. Or at least I thought I knew.
“Well,” he said, “You can’t scare me off that easily. I’m here for you. Just remember that.”
“I will,” I said. I could feel myself getting teary-eyed, and I was afraid he’d hear it.
“I love you,” he added, softly.
“I love you, too,” I said in a whisper. After we hung up, I uttered a silent prayer: Dear God, do whatever you want to me, but please, please, don’t let me lose Jeff!
Home started to feel the way it had when Dad had been away last fall. We had no expectation of him returning in a particular time frame. We fell back into a routine.
I apologized to the girls for having lost it, and they told me to forget it. We hugged and hugged some more. Terri looked like she might reopen the subject of Jeff, but then thought better of it.
Schoolwork was hard. Geometry and French seemed to overwhelm me at times; in lit class, I plowed through “The Scarlet Letter” and hated it intensely; Religion was being taught “by the book” and sounded as dry and hollow as Catechism had in grade school. I didn’t need rules or platitudes, I needed to know I was going to get from one end of the school year to the other, that there would be some kind of balance and redress that would allow my father to regain control of his life, and that the young and painful love I had stumbled upon was going to be allowed to grow and blossom.
But if that was what I prayed for, I had the sense that God might not be saying “yes”. One evening, Uncle Jack showed up with Dad. He had left the hospital, which was out in Suffolk County, and somehow made his way to Uncle Jack’s house in Westbury.
Dad stared vacantly, slack-jawed, heavily sedated, and I wondered how he could have done it. He offered no resistance going back. I didn’t go with Mom and Uncle Jack when they took him back; I couldn’t bear to see him that way.
Instead, I clung to Jeff, all the while making certain I didn’t let on about what was happening with Dad. I worried that he would ask about him when he came to pick me up for dates, but he never did. Instead, he was simply pleasant and polite with Mom, and wonderfully affectionate with me.
He was becoming a little more emboldened when we became affectionate, and it wasn’t long before I felt his loving touch inside my blouse, inside my bra, on my thigh, up under my skirt. And I felt a burning desire building within me. When he one night brushed against me through the pantyhose, I whimpered and felt my legs fall further apart; I began to understand what real desire was.
Dad came home a second time, again arriving in the evening, this time brought home by Uncle Jack’s wife, Aunt Peggy. Again, they took him back, and I didn’t go. As it happened, Jeff called that night, and I thought about telling him, but I didn’t dare risk it.
The following weekend, he had a virus and had to cancel our date. I offered to come over and nurse him back to health.
“I wouldn’t want you to risk catching what I’ve got,” he said with a weak laugh. I laughed, too, and then wondered why he hadn’t invited me back to his house since that one time in January.
My doubts evaporated a few days later, when he was again waiting for me as I came out of school. He drove me home, and, not wanting to be seen making out in his car, I suggested the hallway.
He wrapped me in his arms, kissing and caressing me. I told him we couldn’t do much here. I was afraid Tony might walk in on us.
He gazed into my eyes for a moment, and I had a sudden thought: why not invite him up? He could leave in plenty of time before Mom got home, and it would be so wonderful to just be alone with him. Of course, if Tony caught on, I’d be busted in no time, and it was that thought that pulled me up short.
That bond between Mom and me had grown even stronger, and no matter what, I couldn’t risk hurting her. She’d been adamant ever since she had gone back to work – no one was allowed in the apartment if neither she nor Dad were home. If she knew I’d had Jeff in the apartment, even if we didn’t do anything, she’d never trust me again, and she’d never trust Jeff; it was too much to risk.
He held me there in the vestibule and decided to finish with one grand kiss, and we were thus engaged when the door popped open, and Aunt Peggy walked in my little cousin, Patty, and with Dad, who was looking more drugged out than ever.
“Oops!” Aunt Peggy said with a smile. “Sorry. Just had to get your dad home.”
They trooped upstairs. Jeff stared wide-eyed after my father, and I felt my world fall apart. My entire being revolted.
“Erin,” he said, shocked. “Your dad looked so…so…”
“Psycho?” I asked derisively. “Whack-o? Crazy?! Well, he is. And once again, he has busted out of the loony bin, and now they have to take him back!”
“But what…?”
“He’s an alcoholic! A month ago, he tried to kill himself! Threatened to blow up the whole house! The cops came! Now, he’s nutty as a fruitcake! Anything else you’d like to know, so you can report back to your mother?!”
“Hey, wait a second. You’re the one who was dishonest with me…”
“Yep, that’s me. Lie like a rug, I do!”
By now I was yelling.
It went downhill from there. We yelled awful things at each other, hurtful things that could never be taken back. Finally, I yanked his class ring from my finger, still swathed in tape, and threw it at him.
For two weeks, I wouldn’t even allow anyone to mention his name to me. Whenever the phone rang, I braced myself, knowing I would have to tell Mom I didn’t want to talk to him. But he didn’t call.
The hospital called, though. Dad had fallen and dislocated his shoulder; the details were a little fuzzy. Mom decided to go out and visit him, and this time I decided to go with her. Tony drove us.
The atmosphere in that place was oppressive. Everything was painted white, but the walls were dirty, smudged, scratched and in some places the paint was peeling off in large chunks. The doors were heavy sliding metal, giving it the aura of a prison, and I wondered absently how anyone could ever get better in such a place.
They did not take us to his room. Instead, three chairs had been set up in the middle of a large hallway, and Dad was already sitting in one, his left arm in a sling. We both kissed him hello, and he gave a sort of half smile.
His eyes were glazed, as they had been that day in the vestibule. I was afraid he was going to ask about Jeff, but he didn’t; in fact, he didn’t ask anything or initiate any conversation at all. That fell to us, and his answers were mostly monosyllabic.
It was a painful visit, and demoralizing. Never before had I had such a sense of hopelessness. Were the drugs to wean him off his addiction to alcohol, to deal with his inner demons (which by now I realized were legion), or for some other purpose?
We stayed about twenty minutes. As we turned to go back down the hall, I was seized by an almost animal instinct to run as fast as I could and get the hell out of there. I also thought I should stop, go back, and tell him I really did love him, and I really believed he was going to beat this thing at last.
I would have been lying, but at least I would have felt like I was helping in some small way, giving him a little bit of emotional support and encouragement. But the animal instinct won, hands down, and while I didn’t run, I walked fast enough to be aware of the pace. And I never saw Dad again.
A few days after our visit, Mom got another call from the hospital. Dad had fallen down a flight of stairs and broken his hip. They had operated, but he was in very poor physical shape.
“Please keep us posted, Doctor,” Mom said. “Even if you have good news.”
“He’s not going to make it, is he?” I asked after she’d hung up.
“No, honey, I don’t think he is,” Mom said softly. And we hugged and cried and hugged some more.
That was Sunday. Monday and Tuesday were a blur in school, and I came home each night, did my homework, and listened to music until I went to sleep. I vaguely hoped Jeff might call, but knew in my heart he would not; some wounds are too deep to heal, and I drifted to sleep Tuesday night wondering where my life would drift to next.
The next thing I knew, I was being shaken awake by Rosa.
“Come on, Erin,” she was saying, “You have to get up.”
“Huh? Wha…what time is it?”
“You have to get up,” she said again. My clock said 12:25. It was dark in my room.
I followed her down the hall into the living room, where Tony and Janice were sitting on the couch with Mom, who was crying. There was a telegram on the coffee table.
“It’s Dad,” she said. “He died.”
I tried to cry but couldn’t. Maybe the last month had just drained me. Maybe it had been more than that. What I felt was anger – anger at Dad for being too weak to fight his demons, anger at stores that sold the alcohol with which he destroyed his life, anger at the Gloria Maitlands of the world who looked down on anyone weaker than they were.
The next day was a blur. The hospital wouldn’t release the body right away, and by the time they did, they wouldn’t be able to have his wake until Friday. Mom and Uncle Jack decided on one day for the wake and then the funeral on Saturday.
Aunt Peggy took me out to shop for clothes. Mom had already decided that I wasn’t going to wear black; in fact, she was adamant. Aunt Peggy and I chose a navy blue dress, kind of plain, not too short, and a pair of matching pumps with a moderately high heel.
The ordeal began on Friday at 2:00, with just the six of us at the funeral home – Mom, Aunt Peggy, Uncle Jack, Dad’s mother, Mom’s mother and me; Mom and Uncle Jack had decided on a closed casket, which I regarded as a relief, all things considered. As the afternoon wore on, we had a small but steady stream of visitors, including Laura and Cookie, as well as a few other kids I’d known in my year at OLV. Charlie, Steve and Bob came, too, which was nice.
“What you need,” Bob said, seriously, “Is a good jam session.”
“We will, Bob,” I said. “I promise.”
We went to dinner around five, and when we came back the place was empty. But not for long. Uncle Rob came with everyone other than Maureen who, it turned out, had a real problem with funerals and wakes.
Terri and her mom came, and that was the only time I broke down and cried a little. They were the first people I had ever talked to about Dad’s drinking, and I felt like a journey had ended. I hugged Terri and held on as if for dear life, and then I hugged her mom just as much.
Lots of family turned up, including cousins I didn’t know I had. I was grateful for that, and for things like Kyle’s and Brian’s irreverent humor. Over the years, I would learn that was their major coping device in the face of death.
But the best was the onslaught of friends – not just Terri, Cookie and Laura, but dozens of girls from school, including Gina Delmonico. There were also several nuns and teachers from school, and one of them, Sr. Agnes, took me aside and said, “We always talk about how our school is more than just a school, it’s a community. Well, now you know what we mean. There’s great strength in these girls, Erin, and you must always remember that.”
Of all the things that were said to me that day and the next, that was the most important. I would never forget it.
I would also never forget Saturday, the funeral mass. Threatening clouds were hanging over us as we entered the church. It was crowded, much more so than I’d expected, and I saw a lot of the same friends I’d seen the night before. Later, after the mass, I saw Kyle talking to Cookie, which gave me my first real laugh in several days.
During the mass, specifically the Consecration, it started to rain hard – harder than I had ever seen it come down. There were several flashes of lightning and cracks of thunder, and I had to struggle not to cry. Later, Terri said what I had been thinking: “Heaven was opening up for him.”
Afterward, lots of family came back to our apartment. Several of Dad’s cousins were drinking to drown their sorrows, but my cousins kept me company and tried to keep me laughing, and I decided I liked their way a lot better. Laura and Cookie came over, and Kyle renewed his advances, which also made me smile.
Mom asked me if I wanted to stay home from school again on Monday, but I was desperate to get back to some kind of normalcy. Everyone was nice when I got on the bus, asking me if I was okay and telling me they were sorry about my dad. In school, it was the same, and Sr. Agnes actually met me as I was going into Homeroom to make sure I was all right.
In the afternoon, as we were changing classes – I was on my way into French class – I was stopped in the hall by Susan Morrow, a junior I knew from the Music Club. I didn’t actually know her all that well, but we were friendly, and now she was fervently expressing sympathy for me and offered me help with anything I needed.
It was sweet of her, and I thanked her, but at that point it felt like she was holding me back, keeping me grieving when I needed to move on. But I hugged her all the same and assured her that I would ask if I needed anything. One thing I had learned from this was that sometimes, people needed to console, to feel like they were helping, more than the grieving needed the consolation, and that acceptance of the consolation was, in itself, an act of kindness.
Once again, Mom and I settled back into a routine. The school year played out, and I somehow did okay on my regents exams. My grades were a bit lower than usual, but I guess that was to be expected.
In June, I turned 16. Grandma had us over for dinner to celebrate, and she brought out a homemade cake with candles and she and Mom sang “Happy Birthday”. As I blew out the candles, Grandma smiled and said, “Sweet sixteen and never been kissed”. Then she went back into the kitchen for the coffee pot.
“Not recently, anyway,” I sighed.
Over desert and coffee, Grandma asked me how I’d feel about us moving in with her. Mom had already told me they had discussed it; it only made sense, since she was alone with Grandpa gone, and Mom and I didn’t need six rooms; so I knew it was going to happen, but it was nice of her to ask.
It gave us something else to celebrate, and besides, I was glad of being able to make a physical move to give a sense of a new start. When we got home, I took a shower and put on a summer nighty – it was already getting warm. I went back into my bedroom, and soon Mom knocked on the door and came in.
“You okay?” she asked. Somehow, I knew she was thinking of my crack at Grandma’s. I said I was.
“You never told me what happened with Jeff,” she said softly.
“We broke up,” I said with a shrug, not looking her in the eye.
“I know. It just seemed so…sudden.”
I turned away. I could feel my throat beginning to tighten and I didn’t want to cry. Mom put her hand on my head and softly stroked my hair.
“Talk to me, honey. Please tell me what happened.”
“I don’t want to talk about it. We broke up the day Aunt Peggy brought Dad home that last time. Jeff and I were…downstairs, and they came in. The shock of seeing Dad in that condition must have been too much…”
“I would have thought you would have avoided necking in the vestibule,” she said with a hint of humor.
“We weren’t, really. He had just driven me home from school, and we were just saying goodbye.”
“Well, even so, Dad was sick. Surely he understood that.”
“I don’t know what he understood. Besides, there were other things, too. His mother didn’t like me, I could tell the time I went there for dinner; it was like everything I did was wrong.”
She turned me around to face her, and we both sat on the side of my bed.
“Sweetie, what would that matter? Jeff obviously didn’t care. You might not want to go there for dinner again, but why would that affect your dating him?”
I turned away.
“You thought of this as much more than just dating, didn’t you?” she asked softly. I nodded, and the tears started streaming in earnest. “You were in love with him?” she asked, and I nodded. She enveloped me in her arms.
“Oh, honey,” she sighed. “I was afraid of that. It would have been so much better if you’d both been a few years older when you met. Young love is sweet and wonderful, but it is very fragile, because you’re still growing, and still have so many mistakes to make.”
“Like this one?” I asked, and she smiled and nodded.
“But it’s not too late,” she said.
“Yes, it is. He hasn’t called, and he isn’t going to.”
“You could call him. Or even write him a letter.”
I explained that I couldn’t, that he had said things that still hurt, and I had done the same. He could apologize for them, but he couldn’t take them back; they’d always be there. And then there was the matter of his mother’s hostility; they were a close family, and he was going to be affected by his parents’ opinions.
“If he’d called me, that would be one thing. But he hasn’t, because he doesn’t want to.”
“Honey, maybe he just can’t find the words. Maybe he’s suffering as much as you are.”
“No,” I said with finality. “I’m sure he’s having a great time with whoever replaced me as his prom date.”
We left it there. Jeff was over. I hated it, but the truth was that it was never going to work with us, no matter how much we liked each other.
Our "Girl Autobiographies"
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Robyn Katie
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Robyn Katie
- Miss Platinum Goddess
- Posts: 380
- Joined: Thu Oct 02, 2008 5:02 pm
Spring: the mockery of life renewing. The mown grass scent like green wine in my head, birds caroling wild hope, trees bursting with leaf, everything fat and sweet just so it can say to me, Too bad, Robyn, no nice chances for you.
They put me in track. Track and field, that is. Growing up in farm country where nobody plays any sports makes you useless at team play, and besides, they won’t let me go out for baseball. I pleaded with them, brought my mitt to school, told them, “Come on, just try me out, let me shag a few flies, run the bases—I’m fast! I can do a hook slide!—let me take batting practice—”
No use. “Sorry, Robyn, but as I'm sure you're aware, baseball is a boy’s sport.”
I just can't accept that it's impossible. The more impossible, the harder I plead. “I could make the team! I play better than half those people you’ve got playing pepper out there—”
“Very sorry, but. We have a policy. Why don’t you have a try at track?”
So with a few other gangly inepts I hang around the big cinder oval, bored to tears, waiting my turn to jump or run. I knock over a hurdle and go flying, so that lets me out of that. I scamper for the broad jump, but this broad (as the boys flippantly call us) can’t jump. Beginning to feel useless!
I run fast, though, so they set me to doing wind sprints. I expect I will be tops at the 100-yard dash but funny thing, just about every other girl here can beat me. (Their legs are three feet long, and from my parents I inherited ones that are merely normal.) So I get on the girls’ cross-country squad running miles. I do fair at this, but my breasts bother me, leaping and jerking with every stride. Finally they hurt. Coach tells me go get an excuse from the dean.
“Wait! I can do this, I just need to cram them somehow so they don’t jump around—you know, a little less irresistible force, a little more immovable object—”
“Just do it, would you?”
So. Nice try, but. I’m out of Spring Sports.
For weeks there's nothing but studying, meals, showers, deadly routine. Doggedly I grind on. I can't believe life is nothing but this, but everyone else seems to think it is, and doesn't even see anything wrong with that.
Just before Finals Karl notices me again. Am I delirious with ecstasy? Gee, wonder why not. In a flash of enlightenment (that I will forget a moment later) I realize something: it never was him I was missing, it was Love. Right, it wasn’t him I loved; I loved Love. Maybe that’s all right anyway?
We talk. I’m dying of happiness, or think I ought to be. Actually my mood is cynical, harsh. I will get whatever I can out of this. Can it be that I’m relieved? I still love him, sure—there’s not an ounce of it I don’t feel just as before. The difference is I don’t take it seriously.
Or maybe I really don’t have any feeling for him at all?
“Come on, let’s go to the woods.”
(The woods? Anything but the woods. Anything?) “All right.”
The woods aren’t far away at all. Just down past the other boys’ dormitory the asphalt ends and there’s a dwindling path I’d barely taken notice of. It leads down to a small stream, a world of mud and fallen trees, the water placidly stirring past. All right, I’m here with him, trust him or not, doesn’t matter. What matters is I haven’t had Love in so long, and I’m grim to get it.
Or is it that I'm simply dumb enough to go, thinking he really does want to get back with me?
He takes my blouse off at once and makes me lie down on the grass of the stream bank where he thrusts a hand into the taut crevice of my breasts; honestly there isn’t any room in there, I’m outgrowing this bra and the slip too. We settle into a tableau, lying face to face, sweltering, uncomfortable, squirming. Finally I’m desperate to get away from his hands, from him, from here, from this, from everything. Okay, fine if I have to spend my life running away. I might want something, but this isn’t it.
I button my blouse, head ducked. “Don’t follow me back right away, someone might see.”
Next year he will be gone, transferred to another school. This is the last look at each other he and I will have in our lives.
Last day of school. Alison and I bid a teary goodbye and, on impulse, share a hasty hug. We have agreed we’ll be rooming together again next year.
Last to say goodbye to me before school is closed and I’m collected bag and baggage by my parents is pretty, sunny-faced Connie Archer. She’s such a good person, I bet she never let any boy mess her life up like I have.
“Have a really good summer.”
“Thank you! And you! What will you be doing?”
“Helping out at a mental hospital. It’s a place where I really think I can make a difference, you see.”
“Gee, that’s—admirable.”
“Oh no,” she says self-deprecatingly, “it’s not special or interesting—just something I do.”
I hold her hands, mulling. Even if she went to bed with a boy, it would all be like a nature calendar, sunbeams and mountains, trees and sparkling streams and calm certitude that this is Right. How does a person do that? Can it be learned, or is it innate?
And then there’s me.
No dairy work for pennies an hour this year, thank goodness. But unfortunately as I’m only fourteen I can’t legally work at anything real. So I’m volunteering as a candy striper in the Dolestown Hospital. That’s not good in one way, because I don’t earn any money. But as my parents feel this is a good thing for me to be doing, and things are temporarily a little more flush at home, they’re increasing my tiny allowance, which will partly compensate.
Candy striping though is a pain. Turns out it’s not just arranging pillows, bringing people flowers and presents -- I also have to mop up vomit and clean bedpans. How some people do this I don’t know; it makes me retch. I’ve noticed I have a very low tolerance for bad smells. Anyway I don’t stick at it long.
So now, in July, here I am back working in the dairy, telephoning, handling orders, the money is rotten (Pearl says I’m still not worth more than 25c an hour, I think this is going to mark me for life) but at least I’m putting something in my savings account.
In haying season everybody turns out to help bale, haul and stack, and that includes me. So into the endless afternoons I ride in hot tree-enclosed fields without a breath of air, swaying on the hay wagon, snatching at bales, snugging them in neatly and tightly so they won’t topple off when the wagon tips, as happened last year while I was backing the Farmall up the barn bridge. It’s rough work, I sweat till my T-shirt is transparent.
That attracts Johnny’s interest. It only takes one jouncing drive back along the main road to the farm, under his sidelong stare, to make me remember to wear a bra from now on, despite the heat and discomfort. After that, I glare when his eyes come near me, and it doesn’t happen again.
I help Mom with the grocery shopping regularly now. I know as well as she does (if not better) which brand we use and how much it costs. We go up one shelf and down the next, me carrying the cardboard box and snatching items while she frowns at the list.
“It will help you a great deal as you go on, knowing how to manage money,” she says.
Merely hearing those words makes my mind congeal into an ugly mess. Money is the dirty word in our house, the one that gets everyone’s teeth on edge and makes us sullen, argumentative, uncooperative. My parents went through the Depression and they’ll never let anybody forget it. As a result they pinch every penny till Lincoln says ouch, and I cannot spend one cent in heedless pleasure because they will be down on me like a falling piano, making me account for it, reminding me it’s one penny less for the necessary things, nagging at me to be sure it’s wisely spent. I have made a solemn vow that when I get out on my own, however poor I may be, I well never ever allow money to murder my mind as it does theirs.
Needing relief, I go exploring. I don’t think I will be going very far, so I don’t bother to change out of my pretty plaid dress. A mistake as it turns out, due to the undergrowth, but I love this dress, it’s so summery light and swirls about my legs as I walk in a way that no other dress does, I wear it whenever I can.
My objective is the dense hillside acre of white pines beyond the creek. Those white pines are just my age, for my parents got them as seedlings from the Agricultural Extension and Mom helped Daddy plant them the summer she was pregnant with me. To me they are my real sisters, the part of the family that doesn’t pick on me. All my life I have resorted to them as a haven when things were hard, making myself vanish in their green depths, or hanging on their branches to brood at our house away beyond the rise. It’s been so long since I visited them!
But maybe I’ll only go as far as the edge of the stream; summer’s lassitude has me. So I don’t bother to change my flats either, figuring I can mince across the stream on the higher, dryer stones without mishap. But yes I do cross, and the stones are slippery. Woops! into the water goes my stupid foot, my shoe soaked, I hope not ruined. That makes me mad. But as I’m trying to be better about temper, I struggle to rise above it.
The sloping rise between here and the pines, once kept clear with brush hooks by me and Daddy (with Alice mostly hindering), is now grown up in head-high thicket. I forge on through the tangle, trying not to tear my dress, and at last win to the edge of the pines. Safe in their cool silence of I linger, a little jarred to feel myself as lonesome as ever. Nothing like a trip to my personal pines to make that uncomfortably clear!
Not daring to hang on the limbs as I used to because I don’t want to get pine sap on my dress, I edge past the needle clusters, startled and daunted with the sudden realization of all everyone is expecting of me now that I’m a grown girl, even though I feel no less a child than I ever did.
Hot July has thickened and nested itself among my pine sisters that have grown so much taller than me (thirty feet versus five-four). I’m perspiring so, I take off my dress, then my bra (it will never dry on me). Wearing only my panties and shoes, I venture on through the pines, emerging into the little gully that runs upslope, and here, startled at my own nakedness, my heart almost fails me. But there’s no one to see. I lie down among the dry tussocks, sunshine washing my bare body, fearing the earth will stain my panties but a little too happy to mind.
Yes I’m happy now, bare in the sun like this. My pines and my pleasure are so magic! if only temporarily. By the time I’ve shrugged the dress back over my head and wandered back to the house, some sort of fountain of bliss is reestablished inside me, and I can endure Mom’s bickering, Daddy’s lowering innuendoes, and carry on a saucy conversation that hardly touches me at all.
This same thin cotton plaid dress goes with me to the square dances at Phillips Mill, a dance hall away down on the banks of the Delaware. As a special treat I am driven there and left to get a ride home with the Welch kids. The girls dance, but Johnny spends most of his time hanging around with a bunch of other fifteen-year-old boys in the shadows outside the big door, there’s always one that brings a flask, and they drink booze. Sort of gives me the shudders. Sure I’ve tasted it, but it makes my stomach sick, maybe I am allergic, or maybe it’s only my system reacting to what booze has done to Daddy and Mom and all their friends. Wine makes me even sicker. All I can drink is beer, and that not very often, but I do like the taste.
Tonight, though, I’m not thinking about all that, for I’m paired with this awful boy and, I don’t even know how to say this, I’m forced to put up with what he’s doing to me in front of everyone— Oblivious, the caller keeps yelling, “Next couple off to the left …
Singing Oh, Solomon Levi, tra la la, la la la la,
Poor Solomon Levi, tra la la, la la la la,”
and the boy, instead of gripping my waist every time we promenade, grips my right breast, right in front of everyone! I’m so mad! I flash a glare at him: Stop. Stop! but he ignores me. Does he want somebody to notice? I stare wildly around at the other dancers. How can they not notice he’s got my breast in his hand? But the dance swirls uncontrollably on … and I’m trapped in this square. As long as the music lasts I can’t get away!
That’s all there is, there ain’t no more,
Take your lady off the floor,”
and finally, finally! it’s over. I flee to the shadows at the far side of the room, sending dark looks across the worn plank floor at that boy as I huddle for safety with Joan and Ricki.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing.” I’d give anything to mutter to them exactly what he did. But given their history they’d probably only laugh and tell me, “Go on, let him, don’t be afraid.”
“Sure, go out there like a big brave girl.”
“Jump in the back seat of his car with him.”
“Yeah, time you found out what it’s all about.”
Most desperately I do not want to find out what it’s all about. I don’t want to find out what anything is about. I already know a lot more than I ever wanted to. So I hold my tongue and swallow my fury. I feel like I’ve spent a lifetime holding my tongue and swallowing my fury. Will I ever be able to just speak?
Kennebunk Beach is a washout as far as I’m concerned. Nobody pays any attention to me, which is just as well, because I don’t even want them to. I’m so morose I just sit on the sand with my face bowed on my knees and (since in my family visible tears are taken to be a sign of self-indulgence and only get you snapped at) lengthily, dismally cry inside.
(The following year I’ll be very surprised to see, on sale at the little shop a block from the water, a bright color postcard of the beach in which, front and center, seen from behind and to the right, there I am, a skinny girl in a two-piece, head on knees, broken in grief, the sand around me, the blue sea beyond, and I’ll wonder in amazement: what on earth were they thinking of, to choose that picture? Or isn’t my heartbreak visible to anyone but me?)
In the latter days of August at Georgetown Island, renting the house on the point across from Wrens’, we go through a lashing, crashing hurricane. Sprawled on my bed upstairs, heedless of Mom yelling, “Come down here, dear, it’s too dangerous up there!” I stare out at the gray lashing waves, spray flying all the way up here, the sky black with fury. The winds slam about the eaves, rain blasting the windows (none of which, anticlimactically, break). The surf in the usually painfully quiet estuary rises up high and pointy, like mad fingers.
Hope I'm not the reason Heaven is kicking the world around.
Sophomore year. I’m boarding on East Main like last year, but not in my same room. Actually Alison and I’re in a much nicer room.
It came about this way. In midsummer, out of the blue, the phone rang and who was it but my roomie calling from New York to say the corner room next to ours had opened up, and did I think we ought to put in for it.
“Julia isn’t coming back,” she explained, “and Connie Glozel says she’s going to room with someone else.”
“What about Pauline though?”
“She doesn’t want to stay in it and take a chance on two new people. So she and Gudi Kessel are going to room together on West Main Three, you know Gudi was in there alone after April left.”
“That’s so odd, do you think Pauline really ever did feel quite at home on our floor?”
“I did wonder about that.”
“Though she was always nice enough to us,” I murmur, thinking how she’d defended me to Julia when she didn’t have to.
“Anyway, want to put in for the corner room?”
“God yes—it’s bigger!”
“More daylight too, thanks to having a window on two sides (amazing).”
We never really expected to get it, but surprise! we did. One hitch (but it’s not really a drawback as it turns out). The room being a triple, a new roommate has joined us. Her name is Lainey Bonnard, she’s transferred in from Peldon.
She’s sort of funny looking in a nice way. Let's see, what do I mean by that? Not sure. Wide jaw, wide mouth, straight chin-length straw-blonde hair that never stays put. She will never be a beauty but she is wondrous to look at. She cracks jokes, speaks without thinking, anything at all is likely to come out of her mouth.
I can see she’ll be something to get used to! But though she’s extremely talkative, louder than Alison and I are used to (we’re sort of quiet), and can fly off the handle at times, she is nice, you know, heart of gold, seems to like us regardless how odd we are. She livens up the room. On the whole I think we’re lucky to have her, compared to Julia for instance, who was always finding fault.
Maybe she’ll help with my state of mind. Even though Alison’s such a good friend, I can’t seem to get over being lonely. Ever since Karl, I just … I don’t know, I feel broken. I suppose by this time Lainey has overheard me masturbating, or guessed. Alison just puts up with it, I hope she will too. Neither of them says anything, they just pretend not to know. Goodness knows what they think of me, some kind of ape-girl that can’t let herself alone.
Okay yes, I am a sex-obsessed person, well I can’t help it. Anyway what else is there to get excited about? It’s the only thing that drives away the loneliness; friendship can’t do that. Better me fluttering my butter (as I heard some girl in the locker room refer to it) than end up on a mental ward somewhere crying endlessly and making goony noises.
Seriously, I do worry about the snake pit more than I like to admit. Most of the time I can laugh it off—what, me go crazy?—I’m the sanest person I know, it’s everybody else that’s a nutcake—but when I find myself at three a.m. flopped on the septic concrete floor with four showers raining on me fixedly watching water circle the drain, it’s hard not to get scared thinking:
—Nobody else does this. Nobody else wanders around with bad thoughts about knives. Nobody else lies in bed listening to herself silently screaming and not, truly not, having the least idea why. Nobody else is in danger of being hauled out of here one night by the men in the white coats—
Nobody else sits here with her one or two incessant sickening thoughts doggedly chasing themselves around her brain: I’m nothing, I’m nobody, horrid, alone, I don’t feel good, is it normal to be this dismal and draggy like I’m filled with hot sick sand?
Only rarely can I surface to wonder about why or what can be causing this. Can’t be red sails in the sunset, it’s too early. Granted female is a desperate thing to be, granted it’s embarrassing and difficult and I’m still pretty new to menstruation, only been saddled with it twelve or thirteen times as yet, but really it’s mild, I’ve no right to complain compared to Alison’s that leave her in ruins for days and even mess up her ability to study or do labs properly. For me it’s a minor inconvenience, for her it’s like fighting a complete civil war in less than a week. Yet she’s not the one sitting here with four showers beating on her head, I am.
I pass the time. I kill it with classwork. Or with trying to make myself desperately pretty helps pass the time I can’t kill with classwork. I flatter myself I can come closer to it than some might predict.
For instance, do you like my hair this way? I got it cut to shoulder length by Cecile Grissom, whose mother is a hairdresser and she wants to be one too. She really knows her stuff. She says she’ll keep trimming it for me if I want, as it’s good practice.
But what do you think? Should I keep asking her to cut it just this way? It falls nicely, I shake my head and it settles right back. Held by a couple of barrettes, it scarcely even needs hairpins. Do you think it gives me a sort of gadabout princess look? Call me conceited if you want, but I’m very fond of it.
Not that I’m some raving beauty like Alice Parzini or Mary Lib Koeler. But I’m not quite the incompetent hick I used to be. My wardrobe is improving, don't you think? Between my pink with white trim, my greengray sensible, my skyblue thing, and this black with yellow centered daisies I’m wearing today, I can most always manage to look pretty nice if I do say so myself. As long as I remember to keep my lipstick touched up and not put the mascara on with a trowel, I can look good enough to suit, at least. But does it make me happier to be cuter on the outside? No. It’s my inside that can’t be helped.
Look at our new roommate Lainey for instance. She’s so animated and clever, when her face lights up, oh how she makes me smile. There’s more true beauty in one swift glance from those grey eyes than Alice Parzini can manage in a month.
Lainey sleeps in the bed in the corner opposite Alison's and my double-decker bunk. In spite of her raffish talk and unpredictable ways there is something so innocent and sweet about her. She draws my eyes so. From the lower bunk I gaze helplessly at her when she can’t tell I’m looking. What makes me so drawn to her, why can I hardly take my eyes off her? …
Did I say she would never be a beauty? How wrong I was. That too-wide mouth has the loveliest smile, those too-jumpy eyes yank my heart right out of my chest. That haphazard blonde hair, how come I didn’t adore it the minute I saw her? Never be a beauty? But that’s exactly what she is, I just didn’t see it on first glance.
Her beauty. Stuns me. Blazing like sunbeams …
Lainey, O Lainey. I scarcely dare look in your direction. It’s almost too dangerous being your roommate, constantly exposed to you when you’re, well, exposed. How am I supposed to not look?
Lainey tucking her blouse in at the waist, dissatisfied before the mirror. “Do my boobs show too much?”
“Oh gosh no. They look fine.”
“You sure?”
“Definitely.”
She’s self-conscious about them, why? She needn’t be. Can I ever get up enough courage to tell her, Yours are the prettiest breasts that ever were. I don’t think you even realize how perfect they are. So kissable—
Couldn’t, of course, it’d scare her. She'd hate me. But she draws me like a magnet ...
Now stop it, Robyn. Behave yourself. You swore you were not going to think such thoughts about girls any more.
She scents her pillow with lavender, the little minx. I have sniffed it when she wasn’t here.
Lying in bed at night beneath Alison’s soft breathing in the upper bunk (asleep, I’m positive) my yearning to tiptoe over to Lainey’s bed and kiss her tempting lips becomes so powerful it shakes me to my core. Scolding myself doesn’t work any more. I simply have to keep sternly ordering myself: Don’t.
Don’t.
Don’t get out of bed and tiptoe over there and ever so softly kiss her …
Robyn? Think of something else.
Water needles splashing, hot enough to steam my hair. I do actually take normal showers at normal times too! Shampoo. Scrubbing my hair makes my breasts jump. I am such a water spaniel, water takes care of me when no one else will.
Not a soul around, though it’s just after eight in the evening. The few girls who don’t shower in the morning invariably squeeze it in before supper. So I’ve got the place to myself, which is nice. Sometimes I don’t like myself terribly well, but one of the times when I do like myself is when I’m all soapy and sleek and sweet, and there’s nothing but me to think of or worry about.
Under the water the irritations of the day, girls’ bickering, teachers’ jabs, getting collided with and knocked down on the track by that behemoth Marilyn Gumm, not to mention Geometry, French, English, Social Studies, an annoying letter from my parents, and the nausea and tummy cramp that makes me wonder if I have an ulcer, all diminish and fade. Even the dreary typing course I have to take (because no matter how phenomenally educated a girl is, realistically at some point she’s probably going to wind up being somebody’s secretary) washes away nicely when it’s just water and me.
Through my soaked head, deep under the hot drizzle, the thoughts parade lawlessly on. In Biology today we learned that each human ovary contains around forty thousand immature eggs. Imagine me having forty thousand babies, like a frog spawning. But Mr. Fenster said maybe only four hundred of those will mature during a girl’s life (my life, in other words).
“Of those, maybe only two, or three, or four will be fertilized,” he said cheerfully, “guaranteeing continuance of the species—a good idea, don’t you think?—as well as yielding each of you boys and girls a bouncing big happy family, when at last you decide to indulge yourselves in matrimony—and not before, I devoutly hope.” Getting a titter from the class.
Family? An ice dagger went through me. I can’t have a family! I can’t even manage myself. The mere thought of myself pregnant left me gasping and desperate. Having a baby? God I hope I never have to have a baby.
My thoughts do a slow whirl under the hot, hot water. So embarrassed about this afternoon on the bus coming back from our J.V. hockey game against the Lawrenceville girls! Bruised, sweaty, too tired to be self-conscious, I dropped off to sleep. When I woke up up again the girls in the back of the bus were just reaching
Twenty-three bottles of beer on the waaaallll,
Twenty-three bottles of beer ...
Long hair (not mine) was tickling my nose. My head was resting comfortably on something soft. Opening my eyes I figured out I’d been snoozing with my head on Nancy Longridge’s shoulder!
“Yikes, sorry!” I snatched myself upright.
Smile. “It’s all right, I didn’t mind. It’s just a shoulder …”
But it was not, of course, just any shoulder! It was the shoulder of someone so dauntingly pretty and popular, the senior boys are all over each other trying to date her. Trust me to put my foot in it in the worst way!
All the rest of the trip back to school I daredn’t so much as look at her. (I’m such a mouse.)
But why do I go so cuckoo over girls? Why am I forever toppling into secret unadmitted romances with them, hoping against hope they’ll think it’s nothing more than normal girl friendship, and then go crazy keeping myself from trespassing …
It’s boys every girl is supposed to want. I should march out there under the trees during lunch and stand shifting from foot to foot "fussing" with them, like Janet Harms and Nancy and the others. But I’m no good with boys. When I try to strike up a conversation with one, my heart’s not in it. How can it be, when boys aren’t what I want! I try my darnedest to work up a pash over them, but it’s hard, ‘cause really all they seem is boring, plus dangerous. At this point I can’t imagine how I ever dated Karl …
At least a girl couldn’t get me pregnant.
What if I were to just let go and have sex, real sex, with another girl?
They'd throw me out of school. I'd be blackened for life. Maybe even stuck in a padded cell ...
Yet what if I just couldn't keep myself from trying it? With (for instance) Lainie?
Oh Robyn, shush, for heaven's sake.
But if I did?
Mom would kill me of course. She has such hopes for me! I’m to be a lady in kid gloves, poised, sought after, loved by men and women alike. The kind of woman there are in the movies, so poised, sought after, loved by men and women alike? Not the kind they whisper about behind their hands, the kind who’s hated, ignored, reviled …
But love with a girl …
This body, sleek with streaming water. This body that sex upset so much ... Now how am I to exist in this dorm, how am I to pretend any longer? I can’t have this body and always deny it what it's asking for. It’s disobedient, it wants certain things, it doesn’t see why it can’t have them. When you come right down to it, why shouldn’t it?
Robyn, stop. It’s just a body. Tell it No!
Easier said than done.
Boys are after it, this body, though what exactly they see in it isn’t always clear to me. Would a girl desire it? Well, as girls aren’t supposed to, I guess it never occurs to them …
Yet I’ve seen girls’ eyes swivel, turn, follow the lines of a classmate, the little frown of concentration before, caught staring, they abruptly look away and pretend they were thinking of something else. My yearning brown eyes turn and swivel too on seeing the breasts and graces of other girls. Do they feel what I feel? (Or am I the only sick person in the world? Are there, or are there not other people this sick? I don’t know which worries me worse.)
Bath oil. Yes, down there too … I imagine it’s another girl in here this moment with me under the water, a girl wanting terribly to touch me, overcoming her shyness, making herself do it … Being a girl herself, she would know exactly what would feel nicest (boys don’t), and by the same token I’d know exactly what she’d best like me to do to her. … She touching me like so …
In march Ida, Sarah and Phyllis. But I’m very good at this by now, and all they see is a girl soaping herself, rinsing off, winding herself in a big white towel.
Nights are a great strain. Instead of plunking my head on the pillow and dreaming sweet dreams I’m stuck stubbornly awake, eyeing Lainey’s outline in the bed cattycorner to mine and Alison’s. I’m imagining myself walking the seven steps over there … lifting the covers of Lainey’s bed … getting in with her—
But I’d never dare try that … not really. She’d be horrified! perhaps never speak to me again. I couldn’t bear her to be offended with me. Not to mention if she were to scream. My heart sinks at the thought—everyone comes running—I cower, they thunder, I'm dragged away to detention or worse ...
One evening before lights out I’m at my desk doing battle with some geometry theore when a hand gently lifts the hair at my nape and a warm mouth plants a soft kiss there. Puzzled, I turn.
“Lainey?”
Her face is contorted with pain. “You’re going to hate me.”
“For what? I’d never ever hate you. Hey, Lainey. What’s wrong?” Of themselves my arms slip about her waist. I look up at her, genuinely scared. “What is it?”
She shakes her head, doesn’t speak. Her fingers press the back of my head. My face gets lost in her blouse, warm breast shapes moving against my cheeks with her every breath. This is so unexpected. It might be happiness, I don’t know. I can’t think. I don’t dare say anything more lest it break the illusion.
“But," she whispers, "you mustn’t let me do this to you.”
“Why not?”
“It’s wrong, I know that. Besides, you can’t be liking this, not really and truly. Obviously you’re just tolerating it to be polite, which is really sweet of you, but—”
I blink. “Is that what you think?”
“Why else would you?”
I take a tiny little breath. “You don't think I can be liking this? But I *am* liking this … No matter what you say …”
She is utter astonishment. “You don’t mean to imply … no, you couldn’t.”
“Couldn’t what.”
“Really and truly like it.”
“Is it so bad if I do?” My mutinous little voice comes from under my hair, eyes not daring to look up at her. “What if it’s exactly what I’d …” Not daring to say any more.
Her voice, shaky, disbelieving. “Robyn …?” Her finger lifting my chin. “Look at me.”
Up come my tear-bright eyes. We’re kissing.
A moment later, though, she shakes her head vigorously and pulls free, words coming pellmell. “I’m sorry, truly I am, it was just a moment’s impulse, you just looked so much like … I don’t know who. Please don’t hate me, I couldn’t bear it.”
“Hate you? I *love* you.” Then I hear what I just said. With an “Ulp!” my fingers fly to my lips.
Her gaze is trained on me like someone listening to the moon.
“Do I dare tell you something?” I falter.
“Tell me anything. What.”
“How beautiful I think you are.”
“Me? Don’t be silly, I look like a goon. This face …”
It fills my eyes, that face. “Beautiful,” I insist.
Then there are noises outside our door. Alison is returning from the library! I hear her fumbling her bookbag into the other hand to get her fingers free for the knob.
Thank goodness for that second of reprieve! Lainey and I spring apart. As the door opens we’re decorously distant from one another, though we haven’t had time to find anything innocent-looking to do.
Even Alison notices. “What’s up with you two?”
“We were just talking about her theorem,” says Lainey brightly.
“Yes, you know how terrible I am at geometry.”
Alison gives us each one puzzled glance, then goes to our double-decker bunk, carefully sets her book bag at the foot, and strips off her sweater. “Hot in here.”
It sounds like an accusation.
They put me in track. Track and field, that is. Growing up in farm country where nobody plays any sports makes you useless at team play, and besides, they won’t let me go out for baseball. I pleaded with them, brought my mitt to school, told them, “Come on, just try me out, let me shag a few flies, run the bases—I’m fast! I can do a hook slide!—let me take batting practice—”
No use. “Sorry, Robyn, but as I'm sure you're aware, baseball is a boy’s sport.”
I just can't accept that it's impossible. The more impossible, the harder I plead. “I could make the team! I play better than half those people you’ve got playing pepper out there—”
“Very sorry, but. We have a policy. Why don’t you have a try at track?”
So with a few other gangly inepts I hang around the big cinder oval, bored to tears, waiting my turn to jump or run. I knock over a hurdle and go flying, so that lets me out of that. I scamper for the broad jump, but this broad (as the boys flippantly call us) can’t jump. Beginning to feel useless!
I run fast, though, so they set me to doing wind sprints. I expect I will be tops at the 100-yard dash but funny thing, just about every other girl here can beat me. (Their legs are three feet long, and from my parents I inherited ones that are merely normal.) So I get on the girls’ cross-country squad running miles. I do fair at this, but my breasts bother me, leaping and jerking with every stride. Finally they hurt. Coach tells me go get an excuse from the dean.
“Wait! I can do this, I just need to cram them somehow so they don’t jump around—you know, a little less irresistible force, a little more immovable object—”
“Just do it, would you?”
So. Nice try, but. I’m out of Spring Sports.
For weeks there's nothing but studying, meals, showers, deadly routine. Doggedly I grind on. I can't believe life is nothing but this, but everyone else seems to think it is, and doesn't even see anything wrong with that.
Just before Finals Karl notices me again. Am I delirious with ecstasy? Gee, wonder why not. In a flash of enlightenment (that I will forget a moment later) I realize something: it never was him I was missing, it was Love. Right, it wasn’t him I loved; I loved Love. Maybe that’s all right anyway?
We talk. I’m dying of happiness, or think I ought to be. Actually my mood is cynical, harsh. I will get whatever I can out of this. Can it be that I’m relieved? I still love him, sure—there’s not an ounce of it I don’t feel just as before. The difference is I don’t take it seriously.
Or maybe I really don’t have any feeling for him at all?
“Come on, let’s go to the woods.”
(The woods? Anything but the woods. Anything?) “All right.”
The woods aren’t far away at all. Just down past the other boys’ dormitory the asphalt ends and there’s a dwindling path I’d barely taken notice of. It leads down to a small stream, a world of mud and fallen trees, the water placidly stirring past. All right, I’m here with him, trust him or not, doesn’t matter. What matters is I haven’t had Love in so long, and I’m grim to get it.
Or is it that I'm simply dumb enough to go, thinking he really does want to get back with me?
He takes my blouse off at once and makes me lie down on the grass of the stream bank where he thrusts a hand into the taut crevice of my breasts; honestly there isn’t any room in there, I’m outgrowing this bra and the slip too. We settle into a tableau, lying face to face, sweltering, uncomfortable, squirming. Finally I’m desperate to get away from his hands, from him, from here, from this, from everything. Okay, fine if I have to spend my life running away. I might want something, but this isn’t it.
I button my blouse, head ducked. “Don’t follow me back right away, someone might see.”
Next year he will be gone, transferred to another school. This is the last look at each other he and I will have in our lives.
Last day of school. Alison and I bid a teary goodbye and, on impulse, share a hasty hug. We have agreed we’ll be rooming together again next year.
Last to say goodbye to me before school is closed and I’m collected bag and baggage by my parents is pretty, sunny-faced Connie Archer. She’s such a good person, I bet she never let any boy mess her life up like I have.
“Have a really good summer.”
“Thank you! And you! What will you be doing?”
“Helping out at a mental hospital. It’s a place where I really think I can make a difference, you see.”
“Gee, that’s—admirable.”
“Oh no,” she says self-deprecatingly, “it’s not special or interesting—just something I do.”
I hold her hands, mulling. Even if she went to bed with a boy, it would all be like a nature calendar, sunbeams and mountains, trees and sparkling streams and calm certitude that this is Right. How does a person do that? Can it be learned, or is it innate?
And then there’s me.
No dairy work for pennies an hour this year, thank goodness. But unfortunately as I’m only fourteen I can’t legally work at anything real. So I’m volunteering as a candy striper in the Dolestown Hospital. That’s not good in one way, because I don’t earn any money. But as my parents feel this is a good thing for me to be doing, and things are temporarily a little more flush at home, they’re increasing my tiny allowance, which will partly compensate.
Candy striping though is a pain. Turns out it’s not just arranging pillows, bringing people flowers and presents -- I also have to mop up vomit and clean bedpans. How some people do this I don’t know; it makes me retch. I’ve noticed I have a very low tolerance for bad smells. Anyway I don’t stick at it long.
So now, in July, here I am back working in the dairy, telephoning, handling orders, the money is rotten (Pearl says I’m still not worth more than 25c an hour, I think this is going to mark me for life) but at least I’m putting something in my savings account.
In haying season everybody turns out to help bale, haul and stack, and that includes me. So into the endless afternoons I ride in hot tree-enclosed fields without a breath of air, swaying on the hay wagon, snatching at bales, snugging them in neatly and tightly so they won’t topple off when the wagon tips, as happened last year while I was backing the Farmall up the barn bridge. It’s rough work, I sweat till my T-shirt is transparent.
That attracts Johnny’s interest. It only takes one jouncing drive back along the main road to the farm, under his sidelong stare, to make me remember to wear a bra from now on, despite the heat and discomfort. After that, I glare when his eyes come near me, and it doesn’t happen again.
I help Mom with the grocery shopping regularly now. I know as well as she does (if not better) which brand we use and how much it costs. We go up one shelf and down the next, me carrying the cardboard box and snatching items while she frowns at the list.
“It will help you a great deal as you go on, knowing how to manage money,” she says.
Merely hearing those words makes my mind congeal into an ugly mess. Money is the dirty word in our house, the one that gets everyone’s teeth on edge and makes us sullen, argumentative, uncooperative. My parents went through the Depression and they’ll never let anybody forget it. As a result they pinch every penny till Lincoln says ouch, and I cannot spend one cent in heedless pleasure because they will be down on me like a falling piano, making me account for it, reminding me it’s one penny less for the necessary things, nagging at me to be sure it’s wisely spent. I have made a solemn vow that when I get out on my own, however poor I may be, I well never ever allow money to murder my mind as it does theirs.
Needing relief, I go exploring. I don’t think I will be going very far, so I don’t bother to change out of my pretty plaid dress. A mistake as it turns out, due to the undergrowth, but I love this dress, it’s so summery light and swirls about my legs as I walk in a way that no other dress does, I wear it whenever I can.
My objective is the dense hillside acre of white pines beyond the creek. Those white pines are just my age, for my parents got them as seedlings from the Agricultural Extension and Mom helped Daddy plant them the summer she was pregnant with me. To me they are my real sisters, the part of the family that doesn’t pick on me. All my life I have resorted to them as a haven when things were hard, making myself vanish in their green depths, or hanging on their branches to brood at our house away beyond the rise. It’s been so long since I visited them!
But maybe I’ll only go as far as the edge of the stream; summer’s lassitude has me. So I don’t bother to change my flats either, figuring I can mince across the stream on the higher, dryer stones without mishap. But yes I do cross, and the stones are slippery. Woops! into the water goes my stupid foot, my shoe soaked, I hope not ruined. That makes me mad. But as I’m trying to be better about temper, I struggle to rise above it.
The sloping rise between here and the pines, once kept clear with brush hooks by me and Daddy (with Alice mostly hindering), is now grown up in head-high thicket. I forge on through the tangle, trying not to tear my dress, and at last win to the edge of the pines. Safe in their cool silence of I linger, a little jarred to feel myself as lonesome as ever. Nothing like a trip to my personal pines to make that uncomfortably clear!
Not daring to hang on the limbs as I used to because I don’t want to get pine sap on my dress, I edge past the needle clusters, startled and daunted with the sudden realization of all everyone is expecting of me now that I’m a grown girl, even though I feel no less a child than I ever did.
Hot July has thickened and nested itself among my pine sisters that have grown so much taller than me (thirty feet versus five-four). I’m perspiring so, I take off my dress, then my bra (it will never dry on me). Wearing only my panties and shoes, I venture on through the pines, emerging into the little gully that runs upslope, and here, startled at my own nakedness, my heart almost fails me. But there’s no one to see. I lie down among the dry tussocks, sunshine washing my bare body, fearing the earth will stain my panties but a little too happy to mind.
Yes I’m happy now, bare in the sun like this. My pines and my pleasure are so magic! if only temporarily. By the time I’ve shrugged the dress back over my head and wandered back to the house, some sort of fountain of bliss is reestablished inside me, and I can endure Mom’s bickering, Daddy’s lowering innuendoes, and carry on a saucy conversation that hardly touches me at all.
This same thin cotton plaid dress goes with me to the square dances at Phillips Mill, a dance hall away down on the banks of the Delaware. As a special treat I am driven there and left to get a ride home with the Welch kids. The girls dance, but Johnny spends most of his time hanging around with a bunch of other fifteen-year-old boys in the shadows outside the big door, there’s always one that brings a flask, and they drink booze. Sort of gives me the shudders. Sure I’ve tasted it, but it makes my stomach sick, maybe I am allergic, or maybe it’s only my system reacting to what booze has done to Daddy and Mom and all their friends. Wine makes me even sicker. All I can drink is beer, and that not very often, but I do like the taste.
Tonight, though, I’m not thinking about all that, for I’m paired with this awful boy and, I don’t even know how to say this, I’m forced to put up with what he’s doing to me in front of everyone— Oblivious, the caller keeps yelling, “Next couple off to the left …
Singing Oh, Solomon Levi, tra la la, la la la la,
Poor Solomon Levi, tra la la, la la la la,”
and the boy, instead of gripping my waist every time we promenade, grips my right breast, right in front of everyone! I’m so mad! I flash a glare at him: Stop. Stop! but he ignores me. Does he want somebody to notice? I stare wildly around at the other dancers. How can they not notice he’s got my breast in his hand? But the dance swirls uncontrollably on … and I’m trapped in this square. As long as the music lasts I can’t get away!
That’s all there is, there ain’t no more,
Take your lady off the floor,”
and finally, finally! it’s over. I flee to the shadows at the far side of the room, sending dark looks across the worn plank floor at that boy as I huddle for safety with Joan and Ricki.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing.” I’d give anything to mutter to them exactly what he did. But given their history they’d probably only laugh and tell me, “Go on, let him, don’t be afraid.”
“Sure, go out there like a big brave girl.”
“Jump in the back seat of his car with him.”
“Yeah, time you found out what it’s all about.”
Most desperately I do not want to find out what it’s all about. I don’t want to find out what anything is about. I already know a lot more than I ever wanted to. So I hold my tongue and swallow my fury. I feel like I’ve spent a lifetime holding my tongue and swallowing my fury. Will I ever be able to just speak?
Kennebunk Beach is a washout as far as I’m concerned. Nobody pays any attention to me, which is just as well, because I don’t even want them to. I’m so morose I just sit on the sand with my face bowed on my knees and (since in my family visible tears are taken to be a sign of self-indulgence and only get you snapped at) lengthily, dismally cry inside.
(The following year I’ll be very surprised to see, on sale at the little shop a block from the water, a bright color postcard of the beach in which, front and center, seen from behind and to the right, there I am, a skinny girl in a two-piece, head on knees, broken in grief, the sand around me, the blue sea beyond, and I’ll wonder in amazement: what on earth were they thinking of, to choose that picture? Or isn’t my heartbreak visible to anyone but me?)
In the latter days of August at Georgetown Island, renting the house on the point across from Wrens’, we go through a lashing, crashing hurricane. Sprawled on my bed upstairs, heedless of Mom yelling, “Come down here, dear, it’s too dangerous up there!” I stare out at the gray lashing waves, spray flying all the way up here, the sky black with fury. The winds slam about the eaves, rain blasting the windows (none of which, anticlimactically, break). The surf in the usually painfully quiet estuary rises up high and pointy, like mad fingers.
Hope I'm not the reason Heaven is kicking the world around.
Sophomore year. I’m boarding on East Main like last year, but not in my same room. Actually Alison and I’re in a much nicer room.
It came about this way. In midsummer, out of the blue, the phone rang and who was it but my roomie calling from New York to say the corner room next to ours had opened up, and did I think we ought to put in for it.
“Julia isn’t coming back,” she explained, “and Connie Glozel says she’s going to room with someone else.”
“What about Pauline though?”
“She doesn’t want to stay in it and take a chance on two new people. So she and Gudi Kessel are going to room together on West Main Three, you know Gudi was in there alone after April left.”
“That’s so odd, do you think Pauline really ever did feel quite at home on our floor?”
“I did wonder about that.”
“Though she was always nice enough to us,” I murmur, thinking how she’d defended me to Julia when she didn’t have to.
“Anyway, want to put in for the corner room?”
“God yes—it’s bigger!”
“More daylight too, thanks to having a window on two sides (amazing).”
We never really expected to get it, but surprise! we did. One hitch (but it’s not really a drawback as it turns out). The room being a triple, a new roommate has joined us. Her name is Lainey Bonnard, she’s transferred in from Peldon.
She’s sort of funny looking in a nice way. Let's see, what do I mean by that? Not sure. Wide jaw, wide mouth, straight chin-length straw-blonde hair that never stays put. She will never be a beauty but she is wondrous to look at. She cracks jokes, speaks without thinking, anything at all is likely to come out of her mouth.
I can see she’ll be something to get used to! But though she’s extremely talkative, louder than Alison and I are used to (we’re sort of quiet), and can fly off the handle at times, she is nice, you know, heart of gold, seems to like us regardless how odd we are. She livens up the room. On the whole I think we’re lucky to have her, compared to Julia for instance, who was always finding fault.
Maybe she’ll help with my state of mind. Even though Alison’s such a good friend, I can’t seem to get over being lonely. Ever since Karl, I just … I don’t know, I feel broken. I suppose by this time Lainey has overheard me masturbating, or guessed. Alison just puts up with it, I hope she will too. Neither of them says anything, they just pretend not to know. Goodness knows what they think of me, some kind of ape-girl that can’t let herself alone.
Okay yes, I am a sex-obsessed person, well I can’t help it. Anyway what else is there to get excited about? It’s the only thing that drives away the loneliness; friendship can’t do that. Better me fluttering my butter (as I heard some girl in the locker room refer to it) than end up on a mental ward somewhere crying endlessly and making goony noises.
Seriously, I do worry about the snake pit more than I like to admit. Most of the time I can laugh it off—what, me go crazy?—I’m the sanest person I know, it’s everybody else that’s a nutcake—but when I find myself at three a.m. flopped on the septic concrete floor with four showers raining on me fixedly watching water circle the drain, it’s hard not to get scared thinking:
—Nobody else does this. Nobody else wanders around with bad thoughts about knives. Nobody else lies in bed listening to herself silently screaming and not, truly not, having the least idea why. Nobody else is in danger of being hauled out of here one night by the men in the white coats—
Nobody else sits here with her one or two incessant sickening thoughts doggedly chasing themselves around her brain: I’m nothing, I’m nobody, horrid, alone, I don’t feel good, is it normal to be this dismal and draggy like I’m filled with hot sick sand?
Only rarely can I surface to wonder about why or what can be causing this. Can’t be red sails in the sunset, it’s too early. Granted female is a desperate thing to be, granted it’s embarrassing and difficult and I’m still pretty new to menstruation, only been saddled with it twelve or thirteen times as yet, but really it’s mild, I’ve no right to complain compared to Alison’s that leave her in ruins for days and even mess up her ability to study or do labs properly. For me it’s a minor inconvenience, for her it’s like fighting a complete civil war in less than a week. Yet she’s not the one sitting here with four showers beating on her head, I am.
I pass the time. I kill it with classwork. Or with trying to make myself desperately pretty helps pass the time I can’t kill with classwork. I flatter myself I can come closer to it than some might predict.
For instance, do you like my hair this way? I got it cut to shoulder length by Cecile Grissom, whose mother is a hairdresser and she wants to be one too. She really knows her stuff. She says she’ll keep trimming it for me if I want, as it’s good practice.
But what do you think? Should I keep asking her to cut it just this way? It falls nicely, I shake my head and it settles right back. Held by a couple of barrettes, it scarcely even needs hairpins. Do you think it gives me a sort of gadabout princess look? Call me conceited if you want, but I’m very fond of it.
Not that I’m some raving beauty like Alice Parzini or Mary Lib Koeler. But I’m not quite the incompetent hick I used to be. My wardrobe is improving, don't you think? Between my pink with white trim, my greengray sensible, my skyblue thing, and this black with yellow centered daisies I’m wearing today, I can most always manage to look pretty nice if I do say so myself. As long as I remember to keep my lipstick touched up and not put the mascara on with a trowel, I can look good enough to suit, at least. But does it make me happier to be cuter on the outside? No. It’s my inside that can’t be helped.
Look at our new roommate Lainey for instance. She’s so animated and clever, when her face lights up, oh how she makes me smile. There’s more true beauty in one swift glance from those grey eyes than Alice Parzini can manage in a month.
Lainey sleeps in the bed in the corner opposite Alison's and my double-decker bunk. In spite of her raffish talk and unpredictable ways there is something so innocent and sweet about her. She draws my eyes so. From the lower bunk I gaze helplessly at her when she can’t tell I’m looking. What makes me so drawn to her, why can I hardly take my eyes off her? …
Did I say she would never be a beauty? How wrong I was. That too-wide mouth has the loveliest smile, those too-jumpy eyes yank my heart right out of my chest. That haphazard blonde hair, how come I didn’t adore it the minute I saw her? Never be a beauty? But that’s exactly what she is, I just didn’t see it on first glance.
Her beauty. Stuns me. Blazing like sunbeams …
Lainey, O Lainey. I scarcely dare look in your direction. It’s almost too dangerous being your roommate, constantly exposed to you when you’re, well, exposed. How am I supposed to not look?
Lainey tucking her blouse in at the waist, dissatisfied before the mirror. “Do my boobs show too much?”
“Oh gosh no. They look fine.”
“You sure?”
“Definitely.”
She’s self-conscious about them, why? She needn’t be. Can I ever get up enough courage to tell her, Yours are the prettiest breasts that ever were. I don’t think you even realize how perfect they are. So kissable—
Couldn’t, of course, it’d scare her. She'd hate me. But she draws me like a magnet ...
Now stop it, Robyn. Behave yourself. You swore you were not going to think such thoughts about girls any more.
She scents her pillow with lavender, the little minx. I have sniffed it when she wasn’t here.
Lying in bed at night beneath Alison’s soft breathing in the upper bunk (asleep, I’m positive) my yearning to tiptoe over to Lainey’s bed and kiss her tempting lips becomes so powerful it shakes me to my core. Scolding myself doesn’t work any more. I simply have to keep sternly ordering myself: Don’t.
Don’t.
Don’t get out of bed and tiptoe over there and ever so softly kiss her …
Robyn? Think of something else.
Water needles splashing, hot enough to steam my hair. I do actually take normal showers at normal times too! Shampoo. Scrubbing my hair makes my breasts jump. I am such a water spaniel, water takes care of me when no one else will.
Not a soul around, though it’s just after eight in the evening. The few girls who don’t shower in the morning invariably squeeze it in before supper. So I’ve got the place to myself, which is nice. Sometimes I don’t like myself terribly well, but one of the times when I do like myself is when I’m all soapy and sleek and sweet, and there’s nothing but me to think of or worry about.
Under the water the irritations of the day, girls’ bickering, teachers’ jabs, getting collided with and knocked down on the track by that behemoth Marilyn Gumm, not to mention Geometry, French, English, Social Studies, an annoying letter from my parents, and the nausea and tummy cramp that makes me wonder if I have an ulcer, all diminish and fade. Even the dreary typing course I have to take (because no matter how phenomenally educated a girl is, realistically at some point she’s probably going to wind up being somebody’s secretary) washes away nicely when it’s just water and me.
Through my soaked head, deep under the hot drizzle, the thoughts parade lawlessly on. In Biology today we learned that each human ovary contains around forty thousand immature eggs. Imagine me having forty thousand babies, like a frog spawning. But Mr. Fenster said maybe only four hundred of those will mature during a girl’s life (my life, in other words).
“Of those, maybe only two, or three, or four will be fertilized,” he said cheerfully, “guaranteeing continuance of the species—a good idea, don’t you think?—as well as yielding each of you boys and girls a bouncing big happy family, when at last you decide to indulge yourselves in matrimony—and not before, I devoutly hope.” Getting a titter from the class.
Family? An ice dagger went through me. I can’t have a family! I can’t even manage myself. The mere thought of myself pregnant left me gasping and desperate. Having a baby? God I hope I never have to have a baby.
My thoughts do a slow whirl under the hot, hot water. So embarrassed about this afternoon on the bus coming back from our J.V. hockey game against the Lawrenceville girls! Bruised, sweaty, too tired to be self-conscious, I dropped off to sleep. When I woke up up again the girls in the back of the bus were just reaching
Twenty-three bottles of beer on the waaaallll,
Twenty-three bottles of beer ...
Long hair (not mine) was tickling my nose. My head was resting comfortably on something soft. Opening my eyes I figured out I’d been snoozing with my head on Nancy Longridge’s shoulder!
“Yikes, sorry!” I snatched myself upright.
Smile. “It’s all right, I didn’t mind. It’s just a shoulder …”
But it was not, of course, just any shoulder! It was the shoulder of someone so dauntingly pretty and popular, the senior boys are all over each other trying to date her. Trust me to put my foot in it in the worst way!
All the rest of the trip back to school I daredn’t so much as look at her. (I’m such a mouse.)
But why do I go so cuckoo over girls? Why am I forever toppling into secret unadmitted romances with them, hoping against hope they’ll think it’s nothing more than normal girl friendship, and then go crazy keeping myself from trespassing …
It’s boys every girl is supposed to want. I should march out there under the trees during lunch and stand shifting from foot to foot "fussing" with them, like Janet Harms and Nancy and the others. But I’m no good with boys. When I try to strike up a conversation with one, my heart’s not in it. How can it be, when boys aren’t what I want! I try my darnedest to work up a pash over them, but it’s hard, ‘cause really all they seem is boring, plus dangerous. At this point I can’t imagine how I ever dated Karl …
At least a girl couldn’t get me pregnant.
What if I were to just let go and have sex, real sex, with another girl?
They'd throw me out of school. I'd be blackened for life. Maybe even stuck in a padded cell ...
Yet what if I just couldn't keep myself from trying it? With (for instance) Lainie?
Oh Robyn, shush, for heaven's sake.
But if I did?
Mom would kill me of course. She has such hopes for me! I’m to be a lady in kid gloves, poised, sought after, loved by men and women alike. The kind of woman there are in the movies, so poised, sought after, loved by men and women alike? Not the kind they whisper about behind their hands, the kind who’s hated, ignored, reviled …
But love with a girl …
This body, sleek with streaming water. This body that sex upset so much ... Now how am I to exist in this dorm, how am I to pretend any longer? I can’t have this body and always deny it what it's asking for. It’s disobedient, it wants certain things, it doesn’t see why it can’t have them. When you come right down to it, why shouldn’t it?
Robyn, stop. It’s just a body. Tell it No!
Easier said than done.
Boys are after it, this body, though what exactly they see in it isn’t always clear to me. Would a girl desire it? Well, as girls aren’t supposed to, I guess it never occurs to them …
Yet I’ve seen girls’ eyes swivel, turn, follow the lines of a classmate, the little frown of concentration before, caught staring, they abruptly look away and pretend they were thinking of something else. My yearning brown eyes turn and swivel too on seeing the breasts and graces of other girls. Do they feel what I feel? (Or am I the only sick person in the world? Are there, or are there not other people this sick? I don’t know which worries me worse.)
Bath oil. Yes, down there too … I imagine it’s another girl in here this moment with me under the water, a girl wanting terribly to touch me, overcoming her shyness, making herself do it … Being a girl herself, she would know exactly what would feel nicest (boys don’t), and by the same token I’d know exactly what she’d best like me to do to her. … She touching me like so …
In march Ida, Sarah and Phyllis. But I’m very good at this by now, and all they see is a girl soaping herself, rinsing off, winding herself in a big white towel.
Nights are a great strain. Instead of plunking my head on the pillow and dreaming sweet dreams I’m stuck stubbornly awake, eyeing Lainey’s outline in the bed cattycorner to mine and Alison’s. I’m imagining myself walking the seven steps over there … lifting the covers of Lainey’s bed … getting in with her—
But I’d never dare try that … not really. She’d be horrified! perhaps never speak to me again. I couldn’t bear her to be offended with me. Not to mention if she were to scream. My heart sinks at the thought—everyone comes running—I cower, they thunder, I'm dragged away to detention or worse ...
One evening before lights out I’m at my desk doing battle with some geometry theore when a hand gently lifts the hair at my nape and a warm mouth plants a soft kiss there. Puzzled, I turn.
“Lainey?”
Her face is contorted with pain. “You’re going to hate me.”
“For what? I’d never ever hate you. Hey, Lainey. What’s wrong?” Of themselves my arms slip about her waist. I look up at her, genuinely scared. “What is it?”
She shakes her head, doesn’t speak. Her fingers press the back of my head. My face gets lost in her blouse, warm breast shapes moving against my cheeks with her every breath. This is so unexpected. It might be happiness, I don’t know. I can’t think. I don’t dare say anything more lest it break the illusion.
“But," she whispers, "you mustn’t let me do this to you.”
“Why not?”
“It’s wrong, I know that. Besides, you can’t be liking this, not really and truly. Obviously you’re just tolerating it to be polite, which is really sweet of you, but—”
I blink. “Is that what you think?”
“Why else would you?”
I take a tiny little breath. “You don't think I can be liking this? But I *am* liking this … No matter what you say …”
She is utter astonishment. “You don’t mean to imply … no, you couldn’t.”
“Couldn’t what.”
“Really and truly like it.”
“Is it so bad if I do?” My mutinous little voice comes from under my hair, eyes not daring to look up at her. “What if it’s exactly what I’d …” Not daring to say any more.
Her voice, shaky, disbelieving. “Robyn …?” Her finger lifting my chin. “Look at me.”
Up come my tear-bright eyes. We’re kissing.
A moment later, though, she shakes her head vigorously and pulls free, words coming pellmell. “I’m sorry, truly I am, it was just a moment’s impulse, you just looked so much like … I don’t know who. Please don’t hate me, I couldn’t bear it.”
“Hate you? I *love* you.” Then I hear what I just said. With an “Ulp!” my fingers fly to my lips.
Her gaze is trained on me like someone listening to the moon.
“Do I dare tell you something?” I falter.
“Tell me anything. What.”
“How beautiful I think you are.”
“Me? Don’t be silly, I look like a goon. This face …”
It fills my eyes, that face. “Beautiful,” I insist.
Then there are noises outside our door. Alison is returning from the library! I hear her fumbling her bookbag into the other hand to get her fingers free for the knob.
Thank goodness for that second of reprieve! Lainey and I spring apart. As the door opens we’re decorously distant from one another, though we haven’t had time to find anything innocent-looking to do.
Even Alison notices. “What’s up with you two?”
“We were just talking about her theorem,” says Lainey brightly.
“Yes, you know how terrible I am at geometry.”
Alison gives us each one puzzled glance, then goes to our double-decker bunk, carefully sets her book bag at the foot, and strips off her sweater. “Hot in here.”
It sounds like an accusation.
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Absaroka
- Miss Diamond Goddess
- Posts: 3344
- Joined: Fri Feb 04, 2005 8:30 am
Nice writing. Lots of ring of truth to parts, like the one were money is a dirty word. Erin the writing about dad being hospitalized and then dying brought back a lot of stuff, even if my father survived all that. I didn't have much reluctance to talk about it though- I took revenge on him by airing all his dirty laundry. Of course my friends families were even more disturbed.
Great writing.
Absaroka
Great writing.
Absaroka
everything under the sun is in tune
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
-
Absaroka
- Miss Diamond Goddess
- Posts: 3344
- Joined: Fri Feb 04, 2005 8:30 am
Okay here goes. This is the beginning of something I wrote a couple of years ago. It started out as a story about 1 person, a child, who is really 2 people, one male and one female, but it got too strange too fast so I made some changes. The male character, Andy, is a pretty good description of me throughout, and of my parents in their better days. The female character, Vickie, is more of a fantasy of who I wished I could be. Another female character to be introduced later fills the same role-I had a busy fantasy life. Both girls are extremes and larger than life, and both are drawn to some extent on people I knew in real life who proved to be far more breakable than my two ladies in the story.
Dark Pastoral
It seemed like Vickie and Andy had been friends forever, although they hadn’t really. They had however known each other since they were little kids, a very long time ago. Children don’t think in terms of soul mates and falling in love but when they would later remember it that was what it seemed had happened to them. Sometimes they felt like they were the two halves of one person, or later each a third of a full person. This was a thought that they sometimes discussed among themselves but it was apparent to no one else but them and a very, very few people who had gotten to know them well enough over the years to understand this.
They had very similar personalities and would in time grow to think alike as well, but somehow different situations had brought out two outwardly very different people. Andy was a good kid. All the teachers said so, his parents said so, the parents of his friends said so, and it was true. He believed what the adults told him because as far as he knew they had been telling him the truth. His parents were uncomplicated people. They loved him and his siblings, loved life. God had been good to them and they expressed their gratitude in kindness.
Vickie was known as a bad kid from a bad family. Her parents were somehow still together, probably because they were too drunk most of the time to be able to figure out how to escape from each other. While Andy’s trust in the world revealed itself in a basic honesty about himself, Vickie viewed the truth as a sort of doomsday weapon of last resort, one that was best not used unless she was angry enough to be willing to endure the consequences of using it. She had two older brothers and an older sister and collected abuse from all of them. It had made her tough and defiant at an early age; she had learned that standing up to her siblings, and even her parents at times, although it might result in temporary catastrophe, was the only chance she had. She had a defiance that she carried with her that at an very early age had already made her siblings wary of her, at least on the rare occaisions when they were thinking clearly. Although her family did have brief periods of faint resemblance to a place where children could be nurtured, it was for the most part some neighbors down the street who had cared for her since she had been very young, sheltering her from the worst of what she might have experienced in the house where she purportedly lived. It was probably from them that she had learned respect and compassion for other human beings, but unfortunately the neighbors had moved away and Vickie’s public performance as herself had been deteriorating ever since.
She was smart enough to do well in school when the mood struck her, realizing it did make life easier for her if the teachers weren’t pissed off at her all the time. Their approval meant something to her also, at least on a good day. Most importantly she had a strong, stubborn sense of honor. The quiet kids, the little fearful kids; they were all pretty safe from her. It was the loudmouths and bullies who had the most to fear. More than a few times she had come raging to the defense of some younger child being victimized, but no one could tell if she felt compassion for them or just liked a fight. Absolutely no one could figure out what it was with her and Andy, and neither could either of them explain it if asked. It just was a kind of rapport that had appeared seemingly from nowhere one day.
They had known of each other, been aware of each other in a peripheral way, since kindergarten. Andy had been entertained by her antics in class and had seen her as a secret sort of hero; standing up to the people that he was intimidated by and seemingly uncowed even by the teachers. But unspoken rules were still rules and by time the first year of school was half over he had figured out that he belonged with the quiet kids. She seemed to him to belong by herself although everyone else seemed to accept the niche that she was finding herself in among the other children who seemed destined even then to slip through the cracks as quickly as possible. The others were all boys from her neighborhood, Dennis and David and Alan, boys that Andy had been afraid of ever since the third day of school. They seemed to belong in different parallel worlds, occupying the same physical space but sharing very little else and rarely deigning to even acknowledge the existence of people as unimportant to them as Andy and his friends.
She had an excitement and life to her that few of the other children had that he found appealing and he would toy with the idea of talking to her sometime, but it hadn’t happened yet and probably wasn’t going to. As far as she was concerned he was relegated to the world of everybody else, a collection that included just about everyone except the little quartet that seemed to take up the majority of the teacher’s energy.
The tiny event that would come to have such an impact on them both came after he had spent several years wondering what it would be like to actually talk to Vickie sometime for longer than the occasional hello they exchanged. It was a beautiful autumn morning and Vickie was quietly sitting at her desk daydreaming of all the things she could do instead of sitting in the boring classroom figuring out how to subtly torment the teacher. In contrast to previous years, this years teacher didn't like her at all and Vickie thought this was proof of something, she wasn't sure what. They were to choose partners for a science project. Dennis had been suspended for a week and with Alan and David paired up Vickie had no partner. Usually at times like this the teacher would pair her with one of the more social girls which she and the other girl both invariably hated. Today however the teacher asked for volunteers. Vickie had annoyed her considerably ever since she had suspended Dennis and she was ashamed of the thought that she had; that no one would want anything to do with Vickie and perhaps it would teach the little brat a lesson.
There was silence in the classroom and while the class fidgeted an idea nibbled at Andy’s mind. He wondered if he was ready to do something that had occurred to him a while ago. It was an idea that had come to him from nowhere one day, an idea that had at first frightened him and then slowly grown on him. He stared into space for a moment as he considered things. The sun was flowing past the birch trees in front of the classroom and through the open windows, carrying a scent on it that screamed of longing, of life, and of possibilities to him. After a long moment of incredulous indecision he found himself raising his hand and in his quietness heard himself saying that he would be her partner. He hadn’t planned on sounding gleeful about it; he had told himself he was just being kind. But a note of excitement had crept into his voice that took Vickie by surprise. It was that quiet skinny boy with the glasses and brown hair that he didn’t seem to know what to do with. The one who seemed to leave himself out of most of the games at recess, instead sitting quietly and watching everyone else or reading some stupid science fiction book. This was decidedly odd; it was usually only her three friends that seemed at all happy to have anything to do with her. He was a brain too. Not the sort of kid she involved herself with if she could help it but maybe with his help she would surprise the stupid teacher and do well.
She didn’t see any reason to be unpleasant to Andy since he had always been distantly nice to her and he had been excited that his little gamble was working out. They had gotten along well which was a big surprise to the teacher who had expected Andy to give up within minutes. He left school that day recounting every word they had spoken to each other that day and thinking that she was awfully nice when she wasn’t mad at someone which unfortunately seemed to be most of the time. He got another little test on the way home when as he rode his bike out of the school yard she waved at him and jokingly asked if he would give her a ride home on his bike. He hadn’t known what to say; his parents were always saying how two on a bike was unsafe and he didn’t know where she lived and was supposed to come straight home from school, and besides he really was afraid of her. But yes seemed like a safer answer than no, especially since he had already made the overture of offering to do the science project with her. He wouldn’t want to undo that. It had not been the answer she had expected and she thought it almost sounded like a challenge so of course she had climbed onto the back seat and as he stood to pedal she gave him directions.
Vickie kept up a chatter with him as he wondered how far her house was and she wondered when he would think of an excuse to tell her to get off the bike. It was a couple of miles to her home and she normally took the bus. Today when she missed it she had simply planned on walking and every bit closer was less to walk, although she didn’t really mind walking home. There was never any reason to actually want to get home and the day seemed to be holding a little more promise of something than usual. There was no sense in ending it sooner than necessary.
She didn’t think that Andy would like where she lived and wasn’t sure of the reception he might get if he brought her all the way home anyway. When he showed no sign of trying to get rid of her she repaid him by having him let her off a few blocks from her street and gave him explicit directions about how to get back to the school. He rode back to the school and then home, taking several detours just so that the ride wouldn’t be over. He told his mother that he had been out enjoying the foliage and then went outside to watch a neighbor across the street burn a big pile of leaves that he had raked up. The bright colors of the leaves and the glow of the flames seemed to blend seamlessly with the joy he felt. He thought about how much he enjoyed the smell and feel of autumn and hoped that he and Vickie were somehow going to become friends. If not, he thought, a beautiful autumn day like today would probably never be quite the same. But he decided not to think about that; on a day like today anything seemed possible. Just to be nice to his parents he started to rake up his front yard without being asked, imagining that she was here helping him and then jumping into the pile he had raked up, imagining that she was there too, hiding in the pile, pretending to be invisible to all but him.
They had worked together the next day on their project and she decided that he really was okay. His enthusiasm for the science project baffled her and he wasn’t terribly smart at anything but school but he was still okay. It wasn’t just the admiration that he seemed to have for her although that was certainly nice. There was just something about him, something she had no comprehension of, but something that was already beginning to seem a bit like a pair of warm socks on a cold day. As they left the school he asked her did she want another ride and she wondered again if he was trying to play a trick on her. But no, she had a real good sense of these things and something in her had been hoping that this would happen.
He must not know any better she thought, and felt something unpleasant. A sadness, the same feeling she usually dealt with by hitting someone or breaking something. He would figure it all out soon enough and that would be it for the one friend she might have that wasn’t always in trouble. But there was that other feeling too, the strange comfortable feeling. Somewhere where she didn’t consciously think about these things she decided not to break anything just yet.
He had two real friends at school, Danny and Steven, unobtrusive children like himself. As quiet and un outspoken as they were, they were still eager to explain his folly to him. This was Vickie, didn’t he understand? Things happened around her. Things happened to her, to her friends, to anything she touched, and they happened all the time. What was wrong with him? He was left with the feeble argument that she hadn’t done anything to him. The other argument, that already he thought that she was really very nice and that he had a dozen new plans to try to continue the friendship when the project was finished, was not one to be advanced to anyone, he kept that to himself.
Their project was a success. The teacher had been amazed at how it had worked out and wondered a bit if she might have been wrong about something. The day it was presented Alan was sick and David had joined Dennis in suspension and at lunch when Andy was sitting by himself she had joined him. They had talked a bit when she had an idea. He was smart, maybe he could help her. When she asked him to explain the new science lesson he had been happy to find something he was comfortable talking about and when he had finished with that they had talked for the rest of lunch. He had given her another ride home and this time the conversation on the way had been easy in a way that neither of them was at all used to.
Dark Pastoral
It seemed like Vickie and Andy had been friends forever, although they hadn’t really. They had however known each other since they were little kids, a very long time ago. Children don’t think in terms of soul mates and falling in love but when they would later remember it that was what it seemed had happened to them. Sometimes they felt like they were the two halves of one person, or later each a third of a full person. This was a thought that they sometimes discussed among themselves but it was apparent to no one else but them and a very, very few people who had gotten to know them well enough over the years to understand this.
They had very similar personalities and would in time grow to think alike as well, but somehow different situations had brought out two outwardly very different people. Andy was a good kid. All the teachers said so, his parents said so, the parents of his friends said so, and it was true. He believed what the adults told him because as far as he knew they had been telling him the truth. His parents were uncomplicated people. They loved him and his siblings, loved life. God had been good to them and they expressed their gratitude in kindness.
Vickie was known as a bad kid from a bad family. Her parents were somehow still together, probably because they were too drunk most of the time to be able to figure out how to escape from each other. While Andy’s trust in the world revealed itself in a basic honesty about himself, Vickie viewed the truth as a sort of doomsday weapon of last resort, one that was best not used unless she was angry enough to be willing to endure the consequences of using it. She had two older brothers and an older sister and collected abuse from all of them. It had made her tough and defiant at an early age; she had learned that standing up to her siblings, and even her parents at times, although it might result in temporary catastrophe, was the only chance she had. She had a defiance that she carried with her that at an very early age had already made her siblings wary of her, at least on the rare occaisions when they were thinking clearly. Although her family did have brief periods of faint resemblance to a place where children could be nurtured, it was for the most part some neighbors down the street who had cared for her since she had been very young, sheltering her from the worst of what she might have experienced in the house where she purportedly lived. It was probably from them that she had learned respect and compassion for other human beings, but unfortunately the neighbors had moved away and Vickie’s public performance as herself had been deteriorating ever since.
She was smart enough to do well in school when the mood struck her, realizing it did make life easier for her if the teachers weren’t pissed off at her all the time. Their approval meant something to her also, at least on a good day. Most importantly she had a strong, stubborn sense of honor. The quiet kids, the little fearful kids; they were all pretty safe from her. It was the loudmouths and bullies who had the most to fear. More than a few times she had come raging to the defense of some younger child being victimized, but no one could tell if she felt compassion for them or just liked a fight. Absolutely no one could figure out what it was with her and Andy, and neither could either of them explain it if asked. It just was a kind of rapport that had appeared seemingly from nowhere one day.
They had known of each other, been aware of each other in a peripheral way, since kindergarten. Andy had been entertained by her antics in class and had seen her as a secret sort of hero; standing up to the people that he was intimidated by and seemingly uncowed even by the teachers. But unspoken rules were still rules and by time the first year of school was half over he had figured out that he belonged with the quiet kids. She seemed to him to belong by herself although everyone else seemed to accept the niche that she was finding herself in among the other children who seemed destined even then to slip through the cracks as quickly as possible. The others were all boys from her neighborhood, Dennis and David and Alan, boys that Andy had been afraid of ever since the third day of school. They seemed to belong in different parallel worlds, occupying the same physical space but sharing very little else and rarely deigning to even acknowledge the existence of people as unimportant to them as Andy and his friends.
She had an excitement and life to her that few of the other children had that he found appealing and he would toy with the idea of talking to her sometime, but it hadn’t happened yet and probably wasn’t going to. As far as she was concerned he was relegated to the world of everybody else, a collection that included just about everyone except the little quartet that seemed to take up the majority of the teacher’s energy.
The tiny event that would come to have such an impact on them both came after he had spent several years wondering what it would be like to actually talk to Vickie sometime for longer than the occasional hello they exchanged. It was a beautiful autumn morning and Vickie was quietly sitting at her desk daydreaming of all the things she could do instead of sitting in the boring classroom figuring out how to subtly torment the teacher. In contrast to previous years, this years teacher didn't like her at all and Vickie thought this was proof of something, she wasn't sure what. They were to choose partners for a science project. Dennis had been suspended for a week and with Alan and David paired up Vickie had no partner. Usually at times like this the teacher would pair her with one of the more social girls which she and the other girl both invariably hated. Today however the teacher asked for volunteers. Vickie had annoyed her considerably ever since she had suspended Dennis and she was ashamed of the thought that she had; that no one would want anything to do with Vickie and perhaps it would teach the little brat a lesson.
There was silence in the classroom and while the class fidgeted an idea nibbled at Andy’s mind. He wondered if he was ready to do something that had occurred to him a while ago. It was an idea that had come to him from nowhere one day, an idea that had at first frightened him and then slowly grown on him. He stared into space for a moment as he considered things. The sun was flowing past the birch trees in front of the classroom and through the open windows, carrying a scent on it that screamed of longing, of life, and of possibilities to him. After a long moment of incredulous indecision he found himself raising his hand and in his quietness heard himself saying that he would be her partner. He hadn’t planned on sounding gleeful about it; he had told himself he was just being kind. But a note of excitement had crept into his voice that took Vickie by surprise. It was that quiet skinny boy with the glasses and brown hair that he didn’t seem to know what to do with. The one who seemed to leave himself out of most of the games at recess, instead sitting quietly and watching everyone else or reading some stupid science fiction book. This was decidedly odd; it was usually only her three friends that seemed at all happy to have anything to do with her. He was a brain too. Not the sort of kid she involved herself with if she could help it but maybe with his help she would surprise the stupid teacher and do well.
She didn’t see any reason to be unpleasant to Andy since he had always been distantly nice to her and he had been excited that his little gamble was working out. They had gotten along well which was a big surprise to the teacher who had expected Andy to give up within minutes. He left school that day recounting every word they had spoken to each other that day and thinking that she was awfully nice when she wasn’t mad at someone which unfortunately seemed to be most of the time. He got another little test on the way home when as he rode his bike out of the school yard she waved at him and jokingly asked if he would give her a ride home on his bike. He hadn’t known what to say; his parents were always saying how two on a bike was unsafe and he didn’t know where she lived and was supposed to come straight home from school, and besides he really was afraid of her. But yes seemed like a safer answer than no, especially since he had already made the overture of offering to do the science project with her. He wouldn’t want to undo that. It had not been the answer she had expected and she thought it almost sounded like a challenge so of course she had climbed onto the back seat and as he stood to pedal she gave him directions.
Vickie kept up a chatter with him as he wondered how far her house was and she wondered when he would think of an excuse to tell her to get off the bike. It was a couple of miles to her home and she normally took the bus. Today when she missed it she had simply planned on walking and every bit closer was less to walk, although she didn’t really mind walking home. There was never any reason to actually want to get home and the day seemed to be holding a little more promise of something than usual. There was no sense in ending it sooner than necessary.
She didn’t think that Andy would like where she lived and wasn’t sure of the reception he might get if he brought her all the way home anyway. When he showed no sign of trying to get rid of her she repaid him by having him let her off a few blocks from her street and gave him explicit directions about how to get back to the school. He rode back to the school and then home, taking several detours just so that the ride wouldn’t be over. He told his mother that he had been out enjoying the foliage and then went outside to watch a neighbor across the street burn a big pile of leaves that he had raked up. The bright colors of the leaves and the glow of the flames seemed to blend seamlessly with the joy he felt. He thought about how much he enjoyed the smell and feel of autumn and hoped that he and Vickie were somehow going to become friends. If not, he thought, a beautiful autumn day like today would probably never be quite the same. But he decided not to think about that; on a day like today anything seemed possible. Just to be nice to his parents he started to rake up his front yard without being asked, imagining that she was here helping him and then jumping into the pile he had raked up, imagining that she was there too, hiding in the pile, pretending to be invisible to all but him.
They had worked together the next day on their project and she decided that he really was okay. His enthusiasm for the science project baffled her and he wasn’t terribly smart at anything but school but he was still okay. It wasn’t just the admiration that he seemed to have for her although that was certainly nice. There was just something about him, something she had no comprehension of, but something that was already beginning to seem a bit like a pair of warm socks on a cold day. As they left the school he asked her did she want another ride and she wondered again if he was trying to play a trick on her. But no, she had a real good sense of these things and something in her had been hoping that this would happen.
He must not know any better she thought, and felt something unpleasant. A sadness, the same feeling she usually dealt with by hitting someone or breaking something. He would figure it all out soon enough and that would be it for the one friend she might have that wasn’t always in trouble. But there was that other feeling too, the strange comfortable feeling. Somewhere where she didn’t consciously think about these things she decided not to break anything just yet.
He had two real friends at school, Danny and Steven, unobtrusive children like himself. As quiet and un outspoken as they were, they were still eager to explain his folly to him. This was Vickie, didn’t he understand? Things happened around her. Things happened to her, to her friends, to anything she touched, and they happened all the time. What was wrong with him? He was left with the feeble argument that she hadn’t done anything to him. The other argument, that already he thought that she was really very nice and that he had a dozen new plans to try to continue the friendship when the project was finished, was not one to be advanced to anyone, he kept that to himself.
Their project was a success. The teacher had been amazed at how it had worked out and wondered a bit if she might have been wrong about something. The day it was presented Alan was sick and David had joined Dennis in suspension and at lunch when Andy was sitting by himself she had joined him. They had talked a bit when she had an idea. He was smart, maybe he could help her. When she asked him to explain the new science lesson he had been happy to find something he was comfortable talking about and when he had finished with that they had talked for the rest of lunch. He had given her another ride home and this time the conversation on the way had been easy in a way that neither of them was at all used to.
everything under the sun is in tune
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
-
Erin L
- Miss Emerald Goddess
- Posts: 244
- Joined: Thu Oct 30, 2008 11:38 am
- Location: Queens, NY
Absaroka, I'm so glad you've joined the fray! The more the merrier! And your prose is nicely different from both Robyn's and mine. It reads more like a novel, whereas I think of mine as reading like a biography and Robyn's as reading like a diary.
Robyn, I must say I giggled out loud at your phrase "pinched a penny till Lincoln said ouch".
More to come from all, I hope!
Hugs,
Erin
Robyn, I must say I giggled out loud at your phrase "pinched a penny till Lincoln said ouch".
More to come from all, I hope!
Hugs,
Erin
I'm not that kind of girl.
-
Robyn Katie
- Miss Platinum Goddess
- Posts: 380
- Joined: Thu Oct 02, 2008 5:02 pm
Hi Absaroka,
What a good surprise it was to find your post! It's immediately involving and well described. I feel as if I am each of your people in turn.
Erin's right, our approaches are different, yet complementary. She nailed it: her biography, my diary, your novel ...
What's interesting is how I feel myself strongly reflected in both her account and yours. And that drunken, abusive, terrifying fathers feature in all three.
Your tale of dawning closeness has got me guessing. I can't wait to read what happens next ...
Love, Robyn Katie
What a good surprise it was to find your post! It's immediately involving and well described. I feel as if I am each of your people in turn.
Erin's right, our approaches are different, yet complementary. She nailed it: her biography, my diary, your novel ...
What's interesting is how I feel myself strongly reflected in both her account and yours. And that drunken, abusive, terrifying fathers feature in all three.
Your tale of dawning closeness has got me guessing. I can't wait to read what happens next ...
Love, Robyn Katie
-
Robyn Katie
- Miss Platinum Goddess
- Posts: 380
- Joined: Thu Oct 02, 2008 5:02 pm
Hi sisters,
I haven't said this since earlier in the thread, but I've hoped since it began that more people would join in with their own imaginings of the girl they might have been.
Let me renew my invitation to all: I'd be delighted if more of you who are reading this now would decide to contribute their "girl lives" in whatever form feels best. As fragmentary (or not) as you like. Don't be shy!
Or if you're shy—and few could be shyer than me; I have to conquer it every time I post here—try to overcome it and join us. As Erin said, the more the merrier.
Love, Robyn Katie
I haven't said this since earlier in the thread, but I've hoped since it began that more people would join in with their own imaginings of the girl they might have been.
Let me renew my invitation to all: I'd be delighted if more of you who are reading this now would decide to contribute their "girl lives" in whatever form feels best. As fragmentary (or not) as you like. Don't be shy!
Or if you're shy—and few could be shyer than me; I have to conquer it every time I post here—try to overcome it and join us. As Erin said, the more the merrier.
Love, Robyn Katie
-
Absaroka
- Miss Diamond Goddess
- Posts: 3344
- Joined: Fri Feb 04, 2005 8:30 am
Gee thanks everyone. Here's the next installment. Dennis is modeled on a man I was quite close to later in life. He will become very important. Danny is drawn on a childhood friend and Steven on the son of current friends. The bridge and the river existed and were a favorite play spot, the cemetery and railroad were elsewhere.
I remember clearly the discovery in jr high that some of the "bad kids" could be very pleasant if I explained what was going on in class to them. It was a big surprise to me and I had similar experiences in high school.
The next day Vickie graced Andy with a perfunctionary hello and little else. Unable to think of anything to say to her he spent the day heartbroken. But the day after that Dennis was had returned from his suspension with orders to do well in something at school for a change from his father. A beating was sure to follow the next bad report and he confided to Vickie that he had no idea what they were talking about in class. She decided that the answer to this problem might be very simple. Andy usually sat with Danny and Steven at lunch. To their horror, today Vickie and Dennis sat with them.
They did their best to try to move away without being noticed. They failed completely to conceal their retreat but neither Vickie or Dennis cared or thought it worthy of comment. The rest of the lunch period found Vickie and Dennis both sitting with Andy and Andy feeling relieved that all Dennis wanted was some explanations about what the teacher had been talking about.
To the consternation of Danny and Steven it turned into a semi regular thing and it wasn‘t long before they stopped sitting with Andy. It seemed to them that Andy had become a sort of a mascot for Vickie's little gang, but when he wasn’t tutoring his new friends they were trying to return the favor by teaching him to stand up for himself and trying to convince him that the whole idea of school was some sort of a con. He liked the idea of not being so fearful and shy all the time but they made their defiance of virtually everyone seem so easy. He was at a loss to understand how to carry this off himself. And as for the subject of school he had begun arguing with them. School wasn’t really that bad he would tell them as they laughed unbelievingly at him.
Maybe their lessons were paying off, at least he spoke his mind to them, which was not something very many other students dared to do and certainly not when outnumbered. In later life however he would remember these discussions as his first inkling that there were in fact two separate classrooms with two widely disparate lessons being taught with the same words and in the same physical space and how difficult it was to go from one to the other, and in fact how unaware anyone, even the teacher, was about the existence of these two parallel existences.
For the first time summer seemed to come too soon and Andy thought that it had been the most fun that he had ever had in school. Terrified at his actions, he had asked Vickie if she could come over during the summer sometime. With nothing else to do she had stolen a bicycle for the purpose of getting around and had appeared at his house the third day of vacation, to his elation and much to the concern of his parents. It was one thing having their son play tutor to her in school. They were in reality rather pleased with that and took great pride in the fact that at the end of the year the teacher had attributed a significant amount of Vickie’s success to their son. He had even been a bit of a good influence on her little gang of four, she said, as she cautioned them that she was also concerned about their influence on Andy and that he had become more argumentative with the other students and occasionally even her. Not really a problem yet, but still a disturbing trend. Unsaid, even in thought, was the fact that Andy had begun to sense the parallel experience of the two classrooms and was failing to ignore it’s reality. But that was too much for anyone, Andy, the teacher, the other students, or even his usually perceptive parents to grasp, let alone acknowledge. And now it was summer, there was no school, and they were as doubtful as they had ever been about anything since they had become parents. They glared at this girl with sparkling eyes and feline grace who managed to make even the scars on her face and arms look pretty and wondered what to say but before they could come up with an idea about how to respond the two of them had quickly disappeared into the woods behind his house and then to the river not too far away in the woods where Andy liked to go to sit and daydream.
It was a place of serene mystery for him, with an ancient unvisited cemetery near the river and a railroad bridge next to the cemetery. The bridge abutments seemed to have shaped the currents to create a pleasant swimming hole and Vickie thought that this must be the most peaceful place she had ever been. No one to tell them what to do, no rules, no anything. For one of the few times in her short life she couldn’t think of something to do that would be wrong. For some reason that she really didn’t understand she decided to try to break some sort of rule anyway and without any warning she pushed Andy into the river with what she hoped was an unpleasant laugh. But she just couldn’t put the force into it that she had planned on and the laugh emerged from her mouth as a friendly giggle. He got up and gave her a somewhat puzzled smile before chasing her in an effort to return the favor. Andy was too slow to catch her but she decided to let him save some face and ran into the river herself with him in pursuit and then he pushed her further and then they were just swimming and playing and her moment of temptation to ruin something else had passed. Much, much later Andy would tell her that to him it had seemed that she had been angry with him and that he had just been following her friends suggestions when he took off after her hoping this was what he was supposed to do, but that had all escaped her at the time.
I remember clearly the discovery in jr high that some of the "bad kids" could be very pleasant if I explained what was going on in class to them. It was a big surprise to me and I had similar experiences in high school.
The next day Vickie graced Andy with a perfunctionary hello and little else. Unable to think of anything to say to her he spent the day heartbroken. But the day after that Dennis was had returned from his suspension with orders to do well in something at school for a change from his father. A beating was sure to follow the next bad report and he confided to Vickie that he had no idea what they were talking about in class. She decided that the answer to this problem might be very simple. Andy usually sat with Danny and Steven at lunch. To their horror, today Vickie and Dennis sat with them.
They did their best to try to move away without being noticed. They failed completely to conceal their retreat but neither Vickie or Dennis cared or thought it worthy of comment. The rest of the lunch period found Vickie and Dennis both sitting with Andy and Andy feeling relieved that all Dennis wanted was some explanations about what the teacher had been talking about.
To the consternation of Danny and Steven it turned into a semi regular thing and it wasn‘t long before they stopped sitting with Andy. It seemed to them that Andy had become a sort of a mascot for Vickie's little gang, but when he wasn’t tutoring his new friends they were trying to return the favor by teaching him to stand up for himself and trying to convince him that the whole idea of school was some sort of a con. He liked the idea of not being so fearful and shy all the time but they made their defiance of virtually everyone seem so easy. He was at a loss to understand how to carry this off himself. And as for the subject of school he had begun arguing with them. School wasn’t really that bad he would tell them as they laughed unbelievingly at him.
Maybe their lessons were paying off, at least he spoke his mind to them, which was not something very many other students dared to do and certainly not when outnumbered. In later life however he would remember these discussions as his first inkling that there were in fact two separate classrooms with two widely disparate lessons being taught with the same words and in the same physical space and how difficult it was to go from one to the other, and in fact how unaware anyone, even the teacher, was about the existence of these two parallel existences.
For the first time summer seemed to come too soon and Andy thought that it had been the most fun that he had ever had in school. Terrified at his actions, he had asked Vickie if she could come over during the summer sometime. With nothing else to do she had stolen a bicycle for the purpose of getting around and had appeared at his house the third day of vacation, to his elation and much to the concern of his parents. It was one thing having their son play tutor to her in school. They were in reality rather pleased with that and took great pride in the fact that at the end of the year the teacher had attributed a significant amount of Vickie’s success to their son. He had even been a bit of a good influence on her little gang of four, she said, as she cautioned them that she was also concerned about their influence on Andy and that he had become more argumentative with the other students and occasionally even her. Not really a problem yet, but still a disturbing trend. Unsaid, even in thought, was the fact that Andy had begun to sense the parallel experience of the two classrooms and was failing to ignore it’s reality. But that was too much for anyone, Andy, the teacher, the other students, or even his usually perceptive parents to grasp, let alone acknowledge. And now it was summer, there was no school, and they were as doubtful as they had ever been about anything since they had become parents. They glared at this girl with sparkling eyes and feline grace who managed to make even the scars on her face and arms look pretty and wondered what to say but before they could come up with an idea about how to respond the two of them had quickly disappeared into the woods behind his house and then to the river not too far away in the woods where Andy liked to go to sit and daydream.
It was a place of serene mystery for him, with an ancient unvisited cemetery near the river and a railroad bridge next to the cemetery. The bridge abutments seemed to have shaped the currents to create a pleasant swimming hole and Vickie thought that this must be the most peaceful place she had ever been. No one to tell them what to do, no rules, no anything. For one of the few times in her short life she couldn’t think of something to do that would be wrong. For some reason that she really didn’t understand she decided to try to break some sort of rule anyway and without any warning she pushed Andy into the river with what she hoped was an unpleasant laugh. But she just couldn’t put the force into it that she had planned on and the laugh emerged from her mouth as a friendly giggle. He got up and gave her a somewhat puzzled smile before chasing her in an effort to return the favor. Andy was too slow to catch her but she decided to let him save some face and ran into the river herself with him in pursuit and then he pushed her further and then they were just swimming and playing and her moment of temptation to ruin something else had passed. Much, much later Andy would tell her that to him it had seemed that she had been angry with him and that he had just been following her friends suggestions when he took off after her hoping this was what he was supposed to do, but that had all escaped her at the time.
everything under the sun is in tune
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
-
Robyn Katie
- Miss Platinum Goddess
- Posts: 380
- Joined: Thu Oct 02, 2008 5:02 pm
Hi sisters,
Here's your next piece of weekend reading, as Robyn risks all on something she always wanted, but never dared hope for: a secret girlfriend. Will she get away with it?
One explanation: as some of you probably know, "KOBs" are intricately folded "kindness of bearer" notes passed from person to person between lovers during class. Opening them is complicated, making it easier for the intermediaries to be on their honor not to pry.
Enjoy,
Love, Robyn Katie
***
Midnight in our room. Alison, as far as I can tell, has been asleep now for over a half hour. Lainey breathes softly in the opposite bed. I yearn. At last I gather all my courage, get up in my nightie and tiptoe across the room. Is she asleep? I drop to my knees beside her bed, longing.
Can't help it, I kiss her hair. Then her brow. Her lips. She wakes, partly. "What are you *doing?*"
Need I answer?
More kisses. At first she’s so sleepy she hardly knows how to kiss me back. Then she is grinning, incredulous. We kiss and kiss. I try to crawl in bed with her but she won’t let me. Then, whispering heated doubts in my ear, she lets me.
Oh my god I'm in bed with Lainey. Her arms are around me. We kiss for such a long time I lose all track.
Finally “Don't you think,” she says gently, in the nicest possible way, with kisses, “it’s time you ought to go back and get in your own bed and out of mine?”
I blink yearningly.
“Before Alison wakes up and catches us dead to rights?”
Raggedy sad breath. This is so beautiful I want to cry at having to leave it. Reluctantly I make myself move out of her arms.
Her face is pale and set in the dim light from the night sky. “We mustn’t do this again, Robyn, understand? Once was nice, twice would be—well, not acceptable.”
But we do.
Deep in the winter, the warm of the dorm is the only barrier between us all and the ice and snow. We're shivering in class the first hour because the heat hasn’t gotten everything warm yet.
This morning the geography teacher is late and the conversation has gotten raunchy. You should hear how vulgar some of the girls are.
“Confucius say, Girl who fly upside down have crack up!” carols Carol good-naturedly.
“Where did you get that from, your boyfriend?”
“Nn-nn. My brother. He tells dozens of them. “Confucius say, WAC who slide down banister—” Halting. “No, I can’t say that one. It’s too dirty.”
“Oh come on, now you’ve got my curiosity up! What happens when the WAC slides down the banister? What does Confucius say?”
Giggles. Whispers.
“What? Can’t hear you.”
“—Makes *monkey shine*, I said, do you want me to shout it to the housetops?”
“That’s not so bad, why are you acting so embarrassed?”
“Well, you're looking at probably the only girl who actually was dumb enough to try it."
"Go on."
"No, truly, after he told me that I thought, why don’t I? So I—” Dissolving in giggles, the two huddle in the back of the classroom. Guess I’ll never find out what happened. Just as well, because just then in walks, guess who, the teacher.
I don’t think I ever noticed the vulgarity of some of the girls, though, as much as I do now. That Chrissie Miller up on Three! I overheard her talking with Sally and Diane in her room and here’s what I’d like to know, is there anything she hasn’t done? And the barnyard words! She calls everything by its dirtiest possible name. Well, I won’t repeat most of the words she used. She does quite freely talk about rubbin' her little nubbin, or “clitoris”— Aha, I thought, when I heard that. So that’s what my little rosebud is called! I didn’t know it had a name of its own.
For, you see, we all (but Chrissie) seem steeped the most abysmal ignorance about the Facts of Life. No one is willing to tell us anything. Sex education in class is so abstract it’s only confusing. So for what really goes on between a boy and a girl (or a girl and a girl, for that matter) we’ve all had to depend on sly innuendo and dirty jokes. I pride myself I know by this time what’s involved in sexual intercourse, in a theoretical way at least (it sounds so impossibly mechanical, how does it ever work?), but for all I really know about it I might as well live on the Moon.
Though that’s beginning to change, now that Lainey and I—
Well. We are being terribly circumspect, but in the nights we snuggle in bed, and kiss, and touch each other (as much as we dare). I tell her I’m in love with her. She refuses to admit she’s in love, but I’m in hopes … I think … I truly believe she is, she just can’t bring herself to say it.
Of course I want to shout our love to the whole world, but we can’t. Around others we are terribly well behaved, only seldom sharing a touch of the fingers or a glance that speaks volumes. Bold chattering Lainey is suddenly a shy violet around me, especially where public displays of affection are concerned. She shushes me in annoyance if I so much as whisper “I love you” when others are yards distant and couldn’t possibly hear.
God forbid I go so far as to swing hands with her behind the building where no one could possibly catch sight of us. “What’re you doing?” She snatches hers free, big startled eyes, angrily accusing. Then I get a lecture about what it would mean if the school ever, ever found out about us.
But our nights make up for it.
Kisses galore. Hands wandering. At last, nighties pulled up to our eager chins, we share … oh, such delicious things. Utmost care at every moment, of course, not to make a sound! For if given any excuse, the cot springs will creak. It’s up to us not to allow that to happen. Still it does. One ping and we freeze in perfect stillness, terrified to bits. At long last resuming ...
All the precautions we have to take! You’d think we were Mata Haris, both of us. For instance, we never take off our nighties in case we’re interrupted, for instance if Alison wakes up and we suddenly have to jump apart. We have a carefully worked out plan on the hair trigger. If the lights go on, if the door opens, anything, Lainey will flip herself suddenly upright, nightie back in place, and sit calmly on her bed pretending she’s lost her pen by her desk—it’s right at her bedside. My part is to scoot onto my knees (nightie also back down) helping her look with the flashlight that’s always in the cubby within reach of our sticky damp hands.
We restrict ourselves to three bed-to-bed visits a week (not oftener, so as not to rouse Alison’s suspicion), Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays usually. We allow ourselves until one a.m. (two a.m. on Saturday nights) and then I have to sneak back into my bed, ears peeled for the slightest hint Alison might stir.
Daytimes we go about so innocently! Oh, what a lovely secret Lainey and I cherish!
My life, the whirl. Classes, homework, meals, co-op work in the kitchen, girls’ wrestling because I wasn’t either tall enough or good enough to make the basketball squad.
You would think I would love girls’ wrestling for the opportunity to squooze up to girls, but in fact? No. The old mats are stinky with sweat and the girls are mostly overweight and besides, I belong to my beloved Lainey now. So I hold my nose and take the position and more often than not get pinned while I wait for it to be over. A shower is a positive relief.
Yes we are kept busy. Gerrold School believes in keeping you so preoccupied with tasks to do from dawn till lights out that you won’t have time to think about, oh, for instance, smooching your roommate. How then, you ask, does the heroic Robyn Katie accomplish it all, and yet return in splendor and a shower of rose petals to give her all to her darling Lainey? Simple. I just invent the forty-eight-hour day. Amazing, all that extra time!
Of course I’m not sleeping much.
Lainey writes poetry. She showed me some. I was overwhelmed, she’s really good. “I don’t see how you even thought of all this,” I say, eyes drinking her lines (both kinds).
“You like it? Really?”
My heart bounces. I can’t kiss her ‘cause Alison is at the other desk. “Yes. A great deal,” I say, in public talk so different from our private kind. “I am amazed at you, really. That line ‘The tendril tugs the tree in my heart …’”
“You don’t think that’s trite?”
“I’m quite sure not,” I reply loftily, as one who frequents Mount Parnassus or whatever that place is. “If it was, I would know.”
She has a little section of poets in her bookshelf, Walt Whitman, Andrew Marvell, somebody called Hart Crane whose words are so dislocated I don’t know why I like them so much, as they are like something a drunk would think, or dream.
I try scribbling poetry too. A bird in the eaves of my hair in the wind where the sound of the sea steals lone over me … I show it to Lainey. She blinks and criticizes. It hurts! I thought she would be just as uncritically sweet about my poetry as I am about hers, but she explains.
“It’s no service to a poet to praise something that’s less than the best.”
“You consider yourself a poet, too?” For I didn’t think merely writing poetry qualified you as a poet.
“If something you tell me helps me make my poem better,” she says with a kiss on my ear, “then you’ve done a beautiful thing for me.”
“So you really do want me to find fault with your poems?”
“Sure.” But, it turns out, when I do, she gets angry with me, and thinks I’m picking on her. So in the end I don’t. We just write poems to each other, nature poems, love poems too, and nobody criticizes anybody—that seems to be the best way.
Lainey’s funny in some ways. She’s scandalized by the “dirty” dancing the boys and girls do Saturday nights in the gym. Given what we do secretly in the nights, I can’t see why she’s so upset. She especially singles out this girl Fuff Doran, all wiry hair, over-lipsticked lips and smirks, who clings to the boys and rubs herself lasciviously on them from the minute the music starts.
“You really let that bother you?”
“Well, to be so shameless—doesn’t it seem so to you?”
"Oh Lainey, you awful prude."
"I don't care, I think it's unaesthetic."
“Personally I don’t pay her that much attention.”
Lainey and I go to the dances sometimes, separately of course. It’s like being a little girl again, standing there like an idiot among the wallflowers. A boy named Rick asks me to dance and then drops me back at the wall like before. Several boys dance with Lainey. Hating every last one of them, I wait for chances when we can dance together. As there are extra girls, girls do dance in couples. She is self-conscious about us doing this, but as I tell her it’s perfectly right and normal, she mostly gives in. She takes the boy’s part; she’s very good at leading, which I am not. But the high spot of the evening is when the jitterbug music starts. Almost none of the boys can jitterbug, so no one can make the least objection to me and Lainey taking the floor together.
Panting, face to face. “You are good.”
“Thank you, lovie—you taught me,” finger touches escaping unseen in the gloom between the dance lights.
“Don’t call me 'lovie' here, someone might be listening—”
“Pooh, no one even notices we exist.” Lips shaping I love you, wishing I could kiss her right here, right now, in front of everybody.
"You had better hope not."
February 23rd is Lainey’s birthday. We celebrate in the dark after lights out. Alison gives her a multicolored kerchief. I have saved up, gone without, and finally got the money to go into Naventown and buy her a watch. The one she has is ugly and furthermore doesn’t work.
Once Alison is asleep I get out the muffin I stole from supper, stick a candle in it, and light it. Our eyes lock over the light.
“Blow it out. Make a wish.”
She does. I want her to tell me what she wishes for, but she whispers laughingly, “No! Wishes don’t come true if they’re not secret!”
We carefully cut the muffin apart, and each take half.
Friday afternoon I am so sad. Lainey got a weekend pass and went home for a whole two days and nights. Agony of solitude. How am I supposed to go that long without so much as laying my loving eyes on her!
Sitting and suffering, I can’t wait for Sunday. At breakfast I abstain from the iced buns, not wanting my darling to see one extra pudgy ounce on me.
Carefully I fix my hair, do my nails, put on my prettiest dress for her. She said they would be bringing her back at about 4.30, so here I am standing shivering just inside the double door looking out on the big semicircular porch of Main, February’s frozen snow traces on the railing.
4:30 comes and goes. I’m in despair, it’s getting dark. About ten to five their car drives up—I memorized it as it swept her away on Friday, a Buick sedan, green. From its depths steps the girl of my dreams. I wander out as if I just happened to be there.
“Oh, hi! Did you enjoy your weekend?”
Happily, circumspectly we greet. Her father cries through the open window, “Say, Robyn, Elaine has been telling us about you. We thought you might like to go out to dinner tonight, if you have nothing else on?”
Nothing on, indeed. Not in this weather, thanks. “Oh! Gosh, yes, thank you!” I’m horribly excited, it’s as if they’ve, all unknowing, recognized us as indissolubly joined.
Lainey interrupts. “Do I have time to get pretty?”
Cordially they agree. Dashing upstairs with her, I laugh in delight. “Missed you awful.”
“Me too.”
“So glad you’re back.” Changing her dress, she does her makeup while I brush and pin her hair, and we dash down.
Our dinner takes place in the warm glow of candlelight at the Old Forge Inn in Dolington, a few miles from school. Relaxed over their drinks, her folks seem nicer than I had thought at first, her father gruffly pleasant when he sets himself out to be, her mother very gracious. Daunting, though, to see her amid her family, so secure in the bosom of it. It’s jarring, when all I ever saw of her was her, to realize there’s so much more of her I never guessed at. It makes me feel lonely and excluded somehow.
Rescuing my heart, my dearest sits anxious beside me, our ankles intertwined under the table, as they make much of us, “showing an interest” as my parents would put it.
“Friendship is so vital to girls your age, don’t you feel?”
“Yes, isn't it nice our girl has someone she can have heart-to-hearts with.”
“Tell us, Robyn dear, do you have any career plans yet?”
Please don’t mind if I draw a discreet curtain over my dimwitted answers to that and all their other well-meant questions. But oh! I treasure what Lainey said over dessert: “She’s my very most special friend in the world, aren’t you, Robyn.”
Mixed feelings about her family though.
Alison gets the flu. She has to go to the infirmary. The gods smile! … Well, no, not on Alison, but on Lainey and me. Can it be that the chains are at last cast off us? No one in the other bed? No one in the room to see or hear what we do? Paradise: Eve and Eve? Could we be that lucky?
All through dinner I am in a panic of expectation until at last here we are, the two of us, standing in the middle of our suddenly very private room.
“Well,” she whispers, all anxiety.
“Well yourself.” Can’t help it, I bestow a kiss on her wonderful lips.
“This is our, er, night of nights, I guess, huh? So we might as well make the most of it, you would say?”
“Yes, yes I would, certainly … say … that.”
She raises an admonitory finger. “But we have to be extra careful, even more careful, ‘cause—”
“I know.”
“In spite of this, we’ll need to remember to restrain ourselves.”
“I know.”
“Not make huge noises, or—”
“I know.”
“We mustn’t start till lights out, promise? Because if we were to turn the lights off beforehand, and someone were to come in—”
“Uh huh, I know that too.”
“So don’t—Robyn! that’s what I mean! Don’t kiss me yet. We have to study, we have to do everything ultra-normal until lights out.”
So like good little citizens we make ourselves do our homework, every bit. Then sit and read, and write poetry and so on, to kill time until—
Lights out.
A moment’s dash, and bump, we crash into each other (lightly enough not to jar) in the middle of the room. Her fingers cling to mine, we stand holding hands, as if not knowing what else to do. Now she kisses me.
Her hands come to my nightie, open it. I fumble at hers, our four hands getting in each other’s way. Somehow the nighties are on the floor and we are naked, embracing each other with a hunger that threatens to burst me. My arm about her waist, I turn outward with a whisper and a glad rush of love. “Bed?”
“Okay.” In answer her arm clasps itself about me.
“Yours?”
Her headshake. “Your bed this time? To share our blessings, so that both our beds will be equally baptized in love?”
I grin through our kiss. “Okay.”
Tenderly she lays me down on my pillow, kneels beside me, head dipping like a little bobbing bird to give me pecks that swiftly turn to devouring kisses. For an eternity we can’t get enough of each other’s mouths. Then comes the next eternity, discovering each other’s bodies …
Neither of us quite know how to do the ultimate thing. Despite our stolen moments in bed up till now we barely have any idea. Yet by the time we have covered each other head to toe with kisses, our clever bodies seem to know what to do next, and after that, and so on … We spend the whole night making love and don’t get a wink of sleep. At last there is time for everything. Everything.
In the morning we are heavy-lidded and guilty, barely capable of looking at each other, knowing every shred of what has just passed between us.
Brushing our teeth (no one else in the john at the moment), Lainey takes the opportunity to begin laying down strict rules.
“I’ve been meaning to say this for a while now,” she says. “We have to behave ourselves better in public. More important than ever now.”
“But we already do, I thought.”
“Not carefully enough. You mustn’t act so engaged with me in front of other people?”
“What if buy each other engagement rings?” I tease, “would that make it okay for us to be so engaged?”
“Be serious, can’t you?”
Drawing myself up to examine my mirror image—that Robyn in the mirror looks like she has been slept in—I mutter, “I have no idea what you mean. I think I’m being extremely careful—”
“Like fun you are. You are all eyes for me every minute, and you touch me every chance you get.”
“Listen, if I touched you every chance I get, I’d be covering you like a warm lovey blanket all day long.”
“But that’s exactly how you do act, Robyn darling, like a hot steamy blanket that wants to throw itself over me every minute of the day. That’s what you have to not do. Please?”
“I don’t know how to pretend I don’t love you to pieces.”
“Just don’t let everybody else in on it, could you? Just at least behave until we get behind closed doors? Please?”
“Can we at least be normal?” I blurt. “Glad to see each other, after all!—I mean—why wouldn’t we act friendly to each other, we’re roommates after all …”
“Please just stop making eyes at me in front of everyone.”
“All right I’ll try.”
“And no more secret touching!”
"What about here in the room?”
“That’s different … I guess. And Robyn, no more passing me KOBs in English class, is that clear?”
My mischievous eyes. “What if I just can’t restrain myself, and I have to write you a love note—”
“No joking. I mean this. You have to develop a sense of appropriateness.”
Gee, that’s true, I realize. I haven’t got a sense of appropriateness. I just love Lainey and if it shows all over me, it does. “You don’t give me enough credit. I’m extra careful …”
“About what? Not about me, you’re not.”
I have all I can do to get her to share a soft hurried kiss before going to breakfast.
***
NEXT TIME: It's All Over School, and ...
Here's your next piece of weekend reading, as Robyn risks all on something she always wanted, but never dared hope for: a secret girlfriend. Will she get away with it?
One explanation: as some of you probably know, "KOBs" are intricately folded "kindness of bearer" notes passed from person to person between lovers during class. Opening them is complicated, making it easier for the intermediaries to be on their honor not to pry.
Enjoy,
Love, Robyn Katie
***
Midnight in our room. Alison, as far as I can tell, has been asleep now for over a half hour. Lainey breathes softly in the opposite bed. I yearn. At last I gather all my courage, get up in my nightie and tiptoe across the room. Is she asleep? I drop to my knees beside her bed, longing.
Can't help it, I kiss her hair. Then her brow. Her lips. She wakes, partly. "What are you *doing?*"
Need I answer?
More kisses. At first she’s so sleepy she hardly knows how to kiss me back. Then she is grinning, incredulous. We kiss and kiss. I try to crawl in bed with her but she won’t let me. Then, whispering heated doubts in my ear, she lets me.
Oh my god I'm in bed with Lainey. Her arms are around me. We kiss for such a long time I lose all track.
Finally “Don't you think,” she says gently, in the nicest possible way, with kisses, “it’s time you ought to go back and get in your own bed and out of mine?”
I blink yearningly.
“Before Alison wakes up and catches us dead to rights?”
Raggedy sad breath. This is so beautiful I want to cry at having to leave it. Reluctantly I make myself move out of her arms.
Her face is pale and set in the dim light from the night sky. “We mustn’t do this again, Robyn, understand? Once was nice, twice would be—well, not acceptable.”
But we do.
Deep in the winter, the warm of the dorm is the only barrier between us all and the ice and snow. We're shivering in class the first hour because the heat hasn’t gotten everything warm yet.
This morning the geography teacher is late and the conversation has gotten raunchy. You should hear how vulgar some of the girls are.
“Confucius say, Girl who fly upside down have crack up!” carols Carol good-naturedly.
“Where did you get that from, your boyfriend?”
“Nn-nn. My brother. He tells dozens of them. “Confucius say, WAC who slide down banister—” Halting. “No, I can’t say that one. It’s too dirty.”
“Oh come on, now you’ve got my curiosity up! What happens when the WAC slides down the banister? What does Confucius say?”
Giggles. Whispers.
“What? Can’t hear you.”
“—Makes *monkey shine*, I said, do you want me to shout it to the housetops?”
“That’s not so bad, why are you acting so embarrassed?”
“Well, you're looking at probably the only girl who actually was dumb enough to try it."
"Go on."
"No, truly, after he told me that I thought, why don’t I? So I—” Dissolving in giggles, the two huddle in the back of the classroom. Guess I’ll never find out what happened. Just as well, because just then in walks, guess who, the teacher.
I don’t think I ever noticed the vulgarity of some of the girls, though, as much as I do now. That Chrissie Miller up on Three! I overheard her talking with Sally and Diane in her room and here’s what I’d like to know, is there anything she hasn’t done? And the barnyard words! She calls everything by its dirtiest possible name. Well, I won’t repeat most of the words she used. She does quite freely talk about rubbin' her little nubbin, or “clitoris”— Aha, I thought, when I heard that. So that’s what my little rosebud is called! I didn’t know it had a name of its own.
For, you see, we all (but Chrissie) seem steeped the most abysmal ignorance about the Facts of Life. No one is willing to tell us anything. Sex education in class is so abstract it’s only confusing. So for what really goes on between a boy and a girl (or a girl and a girl, for that matter) we’ve all had to depend on sly innuendo and dirty jokes. I pride myself I know by this time what’s involved in sexual intercourse, in a theoretical way at least (it sounds so impossibly mechanical, how does it ever work?), but for all I really know about it I might as well live on the Moon.
Though that’s beginning to change, now that Lainey and I—
Well. We are being terribly circumspect, but in the nights we snuggle in bed, and kiss, and touch each other (as much as we dare). I tell her I’m in love with her. She refuses to admit she’s in love, but I’m in hopes … I think … I truly believe she is, she just can’t bring herself to say it.
Of course I want to shout our love to the whole world, but we can’t. Around others we are terribly well behaved, only seldom sharing a touch of the fingers or a glance that speaks volumes. Bold chattering Lainey is suddenly a shy violet around me, especially where public displays of affection are concerned. She shushes me in annoyance if I so much as whisper “I love you” when others are yards distant and couldn’t possibly hear.
God forbid I go so far as to swing hands with her behind the building where no one could possibly catch sight of us. “What’re you doing?” She snatches hers free, big startled eyes, angrily accusing. Then I get a lecture about what it would mean if the school ever, ever found out about us.
But our nights make up for it.
Kisses galore. Hands wandering. At last, nighties pulled up to our eager chins, we share … oh, such delicious things. Utmost care at every moment, of course, not to make a sound! For if given any excuse, the cot springs will creak. It’s up to us not to allow that to happen. Still it does. One ping and we freeze in perfect stillness, terrified to bits. At long last resuming ...
All the precautions we have to take! You’d think we were Mata Haris, both of us. For instance, we never take off our nighties in case we’re interrupted, for instance if Alison wakes up and we suddenly have to jump apart. We have a carefully worked out plan on the hair trigger. If the lights go on, if the door opens, anything, Lainey will flip herself suddenly upright, nightie back in place, and sit calmly on her bed pretending she’s lost her pen by her desk—it’s right at her bedside. My part is to scoot onto my knees (nightie also back down) helping her look with the flashlight that’s always in the cubby within reach of our sticky damp hands.
We restrict ourselves to three bed-to-bed visits a week (not oftener, so as not to rouse Alison’s suspicion), Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays usually. We allow ourselves until one a.m. (two a.m. on Saturday nights) and then I have to sneak back into my bed, ears peeled for the slightest hint Alison might stir.
Daytimes we go about so innocently! Oh, what a lovely secret Lainey and I cherish!
My life, the whirl. Classes, homework, meals, co-op work in the kitchen, girls’ wrestling because I wasn’t either tall enough or good enough to make the basketball squad.
You would think I would love girls’ wrestling for the opportunity to squooze up to girls, but in fact? No. The old mats are stinky with sweat and the girls are mostly overweight and besides, I belong to my beloved Lainey now. So I hold my nose and take the position and more often than not get pinned while I wait for it to be over. A shower is a positive relief.
Yes we are kept busy. Gerrold School believes in keeping you so preoccupied with tasks to do from dawn till lights out that you won’t have time to think about, oh, for instance, smooching your roommate. How then, you ask, does the heroic Robyn Katie accomplish it all, and yet return in splendor and a shower of rose petals to give her all to her darling Lainey? Simple. I just invent the forty-eight-hour day. Amazing, all that extra time!
Of course I’m not sleeping much.
Lainey writes poetry. She showed me some. I was overwhelmed, she’s really good. “I don’t see how you even thought of all this,” I say, eyes drinking her lines (both kinds).
“You like it? Really?”
My heart bounces. I can’t kiss her ‘cause Alison is at the other desk. “Yes. A great deal,” I say, in public talk so different from our private kind. “I am amazed at you, really. That line ‘The tendril tugs the tree in my heart …’”
“You don’t think that’s trite?”
“I’m quite sure not,” I reply loftily, as one who frequents Mount Parnassus or whatever that place is. “If it was, I would know.”
She has a little section of poets in her bookshelf, Walt Whitman, Andrew Marvell, somebody called Hart Crane whose words are so dislocated I don’t know why I like them so much, as they are like something a drunk would think, or dream.
I try scribbling poetry too. A bird in the eaves of my hair in the wind where the sound of the sea steals lone over me … I show it to Lainey. She blinks and criticizes. It hurts! I thought she would be just as uncritically sweet about my poetry as I am about hers, but she explains.
“It’s no service to a poet to praise something that’s less than the best.”
“You consider yourself a poet, too?” For I didn’t think merely writing poetry qualified you as a poet.
“If something you tell me helps me make my poem better,” she says with a kiss on my ear, “then you’ve done a beautiful thing for me.”
“So you really do want me to find fault with your poems?”
“Sure.” But, it turns out, when I do, she gets angry with me, and thinks I’m picking on her. So in the end I don’t. We just write poems to each other, nature poems, love poems too, and nobody criticizes anybody—that seems to be the best way.
Lainey’s funny in some ways. She’s scandalized by the “dirty” dancing the boys and girls do Saturday nights in the gym. Given what we do secretly in the nights, I can’t see why she’s so upset. She especially singles out this girl Fuff Doran, all wiry hair, over-lipsticked lips and smirks, who clings to the boys and rubs herself lasciviously on them from the minute the music starts.
“You really let that bother you?”
“Well, to be so shameless—doesn’t it seem so to you?”
"Oh Lainey, you awful prude."
"I don't care, I think it's unaesthetic."
“Personally I don’t pay her that much attention.”
Lainey and I go to the dances sometimes, separately of course. It’s like being a little girl again, standing there like an idiot among the wallflowers. A boy named Rick asks me to dance and then drops me back at the wall like before. Several boys dance with Lainey. Hating every last one of them, I wait for chances when we can dance together. As there are extra girls, girls do dance in couples. She is self-conscious about us doing this, but as I tell her it’s perfectly right and normal, she mostly gives in. She takes the boy’s part; she’s very good at leading, which I am not. But the high spot of the evening is when the jitterbug music starts. Almost none of the boys can jitterbug, so no one can make the least objection to me and Lainey taking the floor together.
Panting, face to face. “You are good.”
“Thank you, lovie—you taught me,” finger touches escaping unseen in the gloom between the dance lights.
“Don’t call me 'lovie' here, someone might be listening—”
“Pooh, no one even notices we exist.” Lips shaping I love you, wishing I could kiss her right here, right now, in front of everybody.
"You had better hope not."
February 23rd is Lainey’s birthday. We celebrate in the dark after lights out. Alison gives her a multicolored kerchief. I have saved up, gone without, and finally got the money to go into Naventown and buy her a watch. The one she has is ugly and furthermore doesn’t work.
Once Alison is asleep I get out the muffin I stole from supper, stick a candle in it, and light it. Our eyes lock over the light.
“Blow it out. Make a wish.”
She does. I want her to tell me what she wishes for, but she whispers laughingly, “No! Wishes don’t come true if they’re not secret!”
We carefully cut the muffin apart, and each take half.
Friday afternoon I am so sad. Lainey got a weekend pass and went home for a whole two days and nights. Agony of solitude. How am I supposed to go that long without so much as laying my loving eyes on her!
Sitting and suffering, I can’t wait for Sunday. At breakfast I abstain from the iced buns, not wanting my darling to see one extra pudgy ounce on me.
Carefully I fix my hair, do my nails, put on my prettiest dress for her. She said they would be bringing her back at about 4.30, so here I am standing shivering just inside the double door looking out on the big semicircular porch of Main, February’s frozen snow traces on the railing.
4:30 comes and goes. I’m in despair, it’s getting dark. About ten to five their car drives up—I memorized it as it swept her away on Friday, a Buick sedan, green. From its depths steps the girl of my dreams. I wander out as if I just happened to be there.
“Oh, hi! Did you enjoy your weekend?”
Happily, circumspectly we greet. Her father cries through the open window, “Say, Robyn, Elaine has been telling us about you. We thought you might like to go out to dinner tonight, if you have nothing else on?”
Nothing on, indeed. Not in this weather, thanks. “Oh! Gosh, yes, thank you!” I’m horribly excited, it’s as if they’ve, all unknowing, recognized us as indissolubly joined.
Lainey interrupts. “Do I have time to get pretty?”
Cordially they agree. Dashing upstairs with her, I laugh in delight. “Missed you awful.”
“Me too.”
“So glad you’re back.” Changing her dress, she does her makeup while I brush and pin her hair, and we dash down.
Our dinner takes place in the warm glow of candlelight at the Old Forge Inn in Dolington, a few miles from school. Relaxed over their drinks, her folks seem nicer than I had thought at first, her father gruffly pleasant when he sets himself out to be, her mother very gracious. Daunting, though, to see her amid her family, so secure in the bosom of it. It’s jarring, when all I ever saw of her was her, to realize there’s so much more of her I never guessed at. It makes me feel lonely and excluded somehow.
Rescuing my heart, my dearest sits anxious beside me, our ankles intertwined under the table, as they make much of us, “showing an interest” as my parents would put it.
“Friendship is so vital to girls your age, don’t you feel?”
“Yes, isn't it nice our girl has someone she can have heart-to-hearts with.”
“Tell us, Robyn dear, do you have any career plans yet?”
Please don’t mind if I draw a discreet curtain over my dimwitted answers to that and all their other well-meant questions. But oh! I treasure what Lainey said over dessert: “She’s my very most special friend in the world, aren’t you, Robyn.”
Mixed feelings about her family though.
Alison gets the flu. She has to go to the infirmary. The gods smile! … Well, no, not on Alison, but on Lainey and me. Can it be that the chains are at last cast off us? No one in the other bed? No one in the room to see or hear what we do? Paradise: Eve and Eve? Could we be that lucky?
All through dinner I am in a panic of expectation until at last here we are, the two of us, standing in the middle of our suddenly very private room.
“Well,” she whispers, all anxiety.
“Well yourself.” Can’t help it, I bestow a kiss on her wonderful lips.
“This is our, er, night of nights, I guess, huh? So we might as well make the most of it, you would say?”
“Yes, yes I would, certainly … say … that.”
She raises an admonitory finger. “But we have to be extra careful, even more careful, ‘cause—”
“I know.”
“In spite of this, we’ll need to remember to restrain ourselves.”
“I know.”
“Not make huge noises, or—”
“I know.”
“We mustn’t start till lights out, promise? Because if we were to turn the lights off beforehand, and someone were to come in—”
“Uh huh, I know that too.”
“So don’t—Robyn! that’s what I mean! Don’t kiss me yet. We have to study, we have to do everything ultra-normal until lights out.”
So like good little citizens we make ourselves do our homework, every bit. Then sit and read, and write poetry and so on, to kill time until—
Lights out.
A moment’s dash, and bump, we crash into each other (lightly enough not to jar) in the middle of the room. Her fingers cling to mine, we stand holding hands, as if not knowing what else to do. Now she kisses me.
Her hands come to my nightie, open it. I fumble at hers, our four hands getting in each other’s way. Somehow the nighties are on the floor and we are naked, embracing each other with a hunger that threatens to burst me. My arm about her waist, I turn outward with a whisper and a glad rush of love. “Bed?”
“Okay.” In answer her arm clasps itself about me.
“Yours?”
Her headshake. “Your bed this time? To share our blessings, so that both our beds will be equally baptized in love?”
I grin through our kiss. “Okay.”
Tenderly she lays me down on my pillow, kneels beside me, head dipping like a little bobbing bird to give me pecks that swiftly turn to devouring kisses. For an eternity we can’t get enough of each other’s mouths. Then comes the next eternity, discovering each other’s bodies …
Neither of us quite know how to do the ultimate thing. Despite our stolen moments in bed up till now we barely have any idea. Yet by the time we have covered each other head to toe with kisses, our clever bodies seem to know what to do next, and after that, and so on … We spend the whole night making love and don’t get a wink of sleep. At last there is time for everything. Everything.
In the morning we are heavy-lidded and guilty, barely capable of looking at each other, knowing every shred of what has just passed between us.
Brushing our teeth (no one else in the john at the moment), Lainey takes the opportunity to begin laying down strict rules.
“I’ve been meaning to say this for a while now,” she says. “We have to behave ourselves better in public. More important than ever now.”
“But we already do, I thought.”
“Not carefully enough. You mustn’t act so engaged with me in front of other people?”
“What if buy each other engagement rings?” I tease, “would that make it okay for us to be so engaged?”
“Be serious, can’t you?”
Drawing myself up to examine my mirror image—that Robyn in the mirror looks like she has been slept in—I mutter, “I have no idea what you mean. I think I’m being extremely careful—”
“Like fun you are. You are all eyes for me every minute, and you touch me every chance you get.”
“Listen, if I touched you every chance I get, I’d be covering you like a warm lovey blanket all day long.”
“But that’s exactly how you do act, Robyn darling, like a hot steamy blanket that wants to throw itself over me every minute of the day. That’s what you have to not do. Please?”
“I don’t know how to pretend I don’t love you to pieces.”
“Just don’t let everybody else in on it, could you? Just at least behave until we get behind closed doors? Please?”
“Can we at least be normal?” I blurt. “Glad to see each other, after all!—I mean—why wouldn’t we act friendly to each other, we’re roommates after all …”
“Please just stop making eyes at me in front of everyone.”
“All right I’ll try.”
“And no more secret touching!”
"What about here in the room?”
“That’s different … I guess. And Robyn, no more passing me KOBs in English class, is that clear?”
My mischievous eyes. “What if I just can’t restrain myself, and I have to write you a love note—”
“No joking. I mean this. You have to develop a sense of appropriateness.”
Gee, that’s true, I realize. I haven’t got a sense of appropriateness. I just love Lainey and if it shows all over me, it does. “You don’t give me enough credit. I’m extra careful …”
“About what? Not about me, you’re not.”
I have all I can do to get her to share a soft hurried kiss before going to breakfast.
***
NEXT TIME: It's All Over School, and ...
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Absaroka
- Miss Diamond Goddess
- Posts: 3344
- Joined: Fri Feb 04, 2005 8:30 am
Excellent Robyn. You did a great job of capturing the whole gay no one can know thing, especially Laineys instructions to be less attentive in public.
Living in the same town I grew up in I sometimes later in life found out all sorts of interesting things, although they usually had more to do with drugs than sex. But the secrets taking place in adolesence take up an incredibly vast amount of space.
Absaroka
Living in the same town I grew up in I sometimes later in life found out all sorts of interesting things, although they usually had more to do with drugs than sex. But the secrets taking place in adolesence take up an incredibly vast amount of space.
Absaroka
everything under the sun is in tune
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
-
Absaroka
- Miss Diamond Goddess
- Posts: 3344
- Joined: Fri Feb 04, 2005 8:30 am
Here's the next part.
They had a lot of fun over the summer. Vickie would appear in the morning and they would be obliged to offer her lunch whereupon she would stay for dinner. Without their planning to do so his family found that they would bring her on the family activities; shopping, swimming at the lake, the movies, and all the everyday activities of a childhood summer. His younger siblings loved her, especially his brother Stu, who’s lasting admiration she earned by her demands that Andy be nicer to his little brother. They began to wonder about some of the terrible things they had been hearing about her-she was generally pleasant around them even if her language was not something they liked to hear around Andy, let alone his younger siblings. He and Vickie spent untold hours in the woods behind his house, playing in the river, or wandering through the countryside and small city on their bikes. And eventually she led him on an exploratory visit to her neighborhood.
Andy loved it. The elderly houses seemed to embrace the world with their porches filled with people and the streets serving as a playground for the neighborhood children. They occasionally went to David's house but seldom ventured past the front porch; the attic apartment his family occupied was almost unbearably hot in the summer. More often they went to Dennis's house; a rambling and confused Victorian structure occupied by a baffling assembly of relatives, grand parents, and great grand mothers. Andy had never met someone with a great grandparent before, and Dennis had two living in his own house. Some of Vickies neighbors also went to school with her and Andy and he got to know some of the other kids in his class who had been a mystery to him as well. There was a sense of something, a sense of life and community, that seemed so lacking in the world he inhabited with Danny and Steven. It seemed that you could never be alone here, even if you wanted to be. But there was another side to all this that thrust itself into his awareness at odd moments.
Somewhere in his young mind was a growing comprehension that being lonely and alone were two different things and he sometimes wondered if he was any more lonely than either Vickie or her friends in their crowded world. He would see people that lived at the very fringes of society wandering around her neighborhood vacantly, in a world or universe of their own. He would hear her neighbors screaming with despair, sometimes in languages he couldn't understand. Sometimes the street in front of Dennis's house seemed more like a boxing ring than a playground. There were things that just weren't talked about and the more he got to know Vickie's neighbors the more things left unspoken there seemed to be. And every now and then the feeling of community started to feel like more like quicksand, leaving him with a sense of discouragement that he didn't like to think about. And even at Dennis's house, complete with it's dizzying array of welcoming relatives and family friends, Vickie seemed somehow reluctant to let Andy get too comfortable.
Vickie would ride past her house with him on their bike's, but she never ever suggested they actually enter it. She'd gone so far as to introduce him to a few family members when it became unavoidable and they had actually spent a few minutes talking with her brother Bobby now and then. He'd promptly christened Andy with the nickname of Little Man, saying he'd heard things about him. But stepping off the sidewalk towards her house was forbidden. She didn't have to tell him this, he knew, even if he didn't know why.
Other times like a spirit in the night Vickie would appear on the second story porch outside Andy’s bedroom after the household was asleep and she and Andy would wander about the neighborhood. Often they would raid the orchard down the road. Vickie enjoyed stealing things even though the owner had made it clear that they could help themselves in reasonable quantities, but she could never talk Andy into stealing anything else. She'd certainly tried hard enough to convince him otherwise, and always he would refuse, his heart longing to be with her as he watched her leave on some larcenous expidtion. And then one day as they sat on Dennis's porch David had tried to humiliate Andy into joining them in their efforts. Vickie had quietly walked over to him and then knocked him over the railing of the porch onto the ground below and then lept off the porch onto him. When Dennis and his older brothers had intervened to separate them she'd demanded an apology and David had given it, one of the few times Andy could remember such a thing happening.
Afterwards she'd never said a word to Andy about his helping her steal anything else. Still he knew. He knew that half of her clothes and any money she happened to have with her had been stolen. He had offered her some of his clothes, which she had accepted in an uncharacteristically quiet way, and his bike also so that she wouldn’t steal anyone else’s in order to get to his house. She had compromised on this last idea by holding onto her latest ill gotten acquisition so that she would not have to steal any more bicycles. He hoped this meant something.
But he didn’t think of their surreptitious visits to the orchard as theft even if Vickie did; the fruit had been offered to them anyway. He came to understand that for her the best part of their raids was the moment when they ran away as fast as they could with their little bag of illicit fruit. Once they had escaped it lost it’s thrill for her. She could sit quietly in the orchard itself and eat close to half a dozen apples secure in the knowledge that she was doing something bad but once they had made their escape and were safe with their loot she would eat only enough to assuage the hunger in her stomach and give the rest to him.
Where it comes from:
Vickies neighborhood is similar to the one I lived in after I moved away from my family. Lovely if decaying architecture with a mixture of some (mostly immigrants) close knit and very hard working poor familes and other families showing appalling self defeat and dysfunction. Her daytime appearances are reminiscent of a yong boy who lived across the street from us when my eldest daughter was 6. As for the stealing, shoplifting was on par with baseball as a sport as far as many of my childhood friends but they did it for thrills and greed. The children in the neighborhood I modeled Vickies after stole out of need-most of them had very little in the way of possesions and some did not have parents worthy of the name either. I still remember one boy who was home on a weekend pass from reform school. I asked him if he was tempted not to return and he told me he couldn't understand why anyone would run away from the reform school what with it having enough to eat and being less violent than his home. On the other hand a lot of the kids in that neighborhood never stole anything.
Absaroka
They had a lot of fun over the summer. Vickie would appear in the morning and they would be obliged to offer her lunch whereupon she would stay for dinner. Without their planning to do so his family found that they would bring her on the family activities; shopping, swimming at the lake, the movies, and all the everyday activities of a childhood summer. His younger siblings loved her, especially his brother Stu, who’s lasting admiration she earned by her demands that Andy be nicer to his little brother. They began to wonder about some of the terrible things they had been hearing about her-she was generally pleasant around them even if her language was not something they liked to hear around Andy, let alone his younger siblings. He and Vickie spent untold hours in the woods behind his house, playing in the river, or wandering through the countryside and small city on their bikes. And eventually she led him on an exploratory visit to her neighborhood.
Andy loved it. The elderly houses seemed to embrace the world with their porches filled with people and the streets serving as a playground for the neighborhood children. They occasionally went to David's house but seldom ventured past the front porch; the attic apartment his family occupied was almost unbearably hot in the summer. More often they went to Dennis's house; a rambling and confused Victorian structure occupied by a baffling assembly of relatives, grand parents, and great grand mothers. Andy had never met someone with a great grandparent before, and Dennis had two living in his own house. Some of Vickies neighbors also went to school with her and Andy and he got to know some of the other kids in his class who had been a mystery to him as well. There was a sense of something, a sense of life and community, that seemed so lacking in the world he inhabited with Danny and Steven. It seemed that you could never be alone here, even if you wanted to be. But there was another side to all this that thrust itself into his awareness at odd moments.
Somewhere in his young mind was a growing comprehension that being lonely and alone were two different things and he sometimes wondered if he was any more lonely than either Vickie or her friends in their crowded world. He would see people that lived at the very fringes of society wandering around her neighborhood vacantly, in a world or universe of their own. He would hear her neighbors screaming with despair, sometimes in languages he couldn't understand. Sometimes the street in front of Dennis's house seemed more like a boxing ring than a playground. There were things that just weren't talked about and the more he got to know Vickie's neighbors the more things left unspoken there seemed to be. And every now and then the feeling of community started to feel like more like quicksand, leaving him with a sense of discouragement that he didn't like to think about. And even at Dennis's house, complete with it's dizzying array of welcoming relatives and family friends, Vickie seemed somehow reluctant to let Andy get too comfortable.
Vickie would ride past her house with him on their bike's, but she never ever suggested they actually enter it. She'd gone so far as to introduce him to a few family members when it became unavoidable and they had actually spent a few minutes talking with her brother Bobby now and then. He'd promptly christened Andy with the nickname of Little Man, saying he'd heard things about him. But stepping off the sidewalk towards her house was forbidden. She didn't have to tell him this, he knew, even if he didn't know why.
Other times like a spirit in the night Vickie would appear on the second story porch outside Andy’s bedroom after the household was asleep and she and Andy would wander about the neighborhood. Often they would raid the orchard down the road. Vickie enjoyed stealing things even though the owner had made it clear that they could help themselves in reasonable quantities, but she could never talk Andy into stealing anything else. She'd certainly tried hard enough to convince him otherwise, and always he would refuse, his heart longing to be with her as he watched her leave on some larcenous expidtion. And then one day as they sat on Dennis's porch David had tried to humiliate Andy into joining them in their efforts. Vickie had quietly walked over to him and then knocked him over the railing of the porch onto the ground below and then lept off the porch onto him. When Dennis and his older brothers had intervened to separate them she'd demanded an apology and David had given it, one of the few times Andy could remember such a thing happening.
Afterwards she'd never said a word to Andy about his helping her steal anything else. Still he knew. He knew that half of her clothes and any money she happened to have with her had been stolen. He had offered her some of his clothes, which she had accepted in an uncharacteristically quiet way, and his bike also so that she wouldn’t steal anyone else’s in order to get to his house. She had compromised on this last idea by holding onto her latest ill gotten acquisition so that she would not have to steal any more bicycles. He hoped this meant something.
But he didn’t think of their surreptitious visits to the orchard as theft even if Vickie did; the fruit had been offered to them anyway. He came to understand that for her the best part of their raids was the moment when they ran away as fast as they could with their little bag of illicit fruit. Once they had escaped it lost it’s thrill for her. She could sit quietly in the orchard itself and eat close to half a dozen apples secure in the knowledge that she was doing something bad but once they had made their escape and were safe with their loot she would eat only enough to assuage the hunger in her stomach and give the rest to him.
Where it comes from:
Vickies neighborhood is similar to the one I lived in after I moved away from my family. Lovely if decaying architecture with a mixture of some (mostly immigrants) close knit and very hard working poor familes and other families showing appalling self defeat and dysfunction. Her daytime appearances are reminiscent of a yong boy who lived across the street from us when my eldest daughter was 6. As for the stealing, shoplifting was on par with baseball as a sport as far as many of my childhood friends but they did it for thrills and greed. The children in the neighborhood I modeled Vickies after stole out of need-most of them had very little in the way of possesions and some did not have parents worthy of the name either. I still remember one boy who was home on a weekend pass from reform school. I asked him if he was tempted not to return and he told me he couldn't understand why anyone would run away from the reform school what with it having enough to eat and being less violent than his home. On the other hand a lot of the kids in that neighborhood never stole anything.
Absaroka
everything under the sun is in tune
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
-
Robyn Katie
- Miss Platinum Goddess
- Posts: 380
- Joined: Thu Oct 02, 2008 5:02 pm
Hi Absaroka,
As you build the picture of Vickie's surroundings you make me feel I am there. I know neighborhoods like that ... have lived in one.
You mentioned the "appalling self defeat." I know the truth of that. In high school I was surrounded by it, and almost gave way to it—despite my advantage of having college-grad parents, I was well on my way to rejecting that advantage before I found out accidentally that knowledge was fun. I also had the great luck to find an intelligent and charming girlfriend who challenged me to think. Without that, I'd probably be low-renting and recapping tires somewhere.
Life's turning points and lucky moments really do bulk large in retrospect.
Fine story.
Love, Robyn Katie
As you build the picture of Vickie's surroundings you make me feel I am there. I know neighborhoods like that ... have lived in one.
You mentioned the "appalling self defeat." I know the truth of that. In high school I was surrounded by it, and almost gave way to it—despite my advantage of having college-grad parents, I was well on my way to rejecting that advantage before I found out accidentally that knowledge was fun. I also had the great luck to find an intelligent and charming girlfriend who challenged me to think. Without that, I'd probably be low-renting and recapping tires somewhere.
Life's turning points and lucky moments really do bulk large in retrospect.
Fine story.
Love, Robyn Katie
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Absaroka
- Miss Diamond Goddess
- Posts: 3344
- Joined: Fri Feb 04, 2005 8:30 am
Thanks Robyn. I'm glad that the story reached you.
The insane lady who makes a passing appearance here lived down the street from me. The man playing the piano was my mother on a good night-she used to practice after we went to bed.
My eldest daughter read this part and said "that's about the picture in your office of a cat crossing the street with her kittens in the middle of the night, isn't it." Yes it was among other things.
This is the first appearance of much dialogue, which was something suggested to me by a writer friend when she read an earlier version. One ommision-every other word out of Vickie's mouth is an obscenity. But I didn't want to write that.
I had a classmate who used to sneak into our school at night to sleep. I imagine he's long dead by now. He had dropped out of school in the 8th grade after being held back a couple of years. He had been slipping through the cracks for much longer than that in spite of a lot of sincere efforts by our teachers.
Here goes:
Off all the things they did together, Andy loved their nocturnal explorations most of all. The thrill of doing something forbidden and secret was just the beginning. Walking like ghosts through the backyards of his neighbors was like listening in on some giant nebulous secret. Occasionally people would still be awake and they would hear the peaceful sounds of a quiet evening through the open windows. It was so different than the constant activity and drama where Vickie lived but in it's silent peace they both found it every bit as exciting. Less often they would hear fights and arguments which Andy really preferred to avoid listening to even if Vickie found them amusing. A woman a few blocks away who was insane would converse with nonexistent people in the night and they would try to figure out what she was talking about, and there was a man a few houses away from her who liked to play the piano softly before he went to bed. He thought that at this late hour no one would hear him and had not an inkling of his happy audience. Other times he would play records late into the night and the two of them would listen to his borrowed sorrow and exhilaration and think that someday they would be old enough to stay up all night playing all their versions of other people’s heart and soul. Vickie in particular seemed enthralled by those nights and often would sing all the songs back to Andy later. How she remembered them so quickly surprised him, but she did and would also point out the wrong notes that the neighbor sometimes played on the piano.
But the real thrill was in just being there, seeing the darkened windows and porch furniture sitting empty after its occupants had retired and knowing that life had gone on here that day but now life itself was quiet as if the very furniture and houses were resting. There were the sounds and sights of another world that few saw at this hour with the silent fireflies and the lullaby of the crickets. Andy sometimes felt like the most enchanting sight in the world was of a cat or possum crossing the street on some unknowable errand with all the nearby windows dark and only the streetlights for illumination. He could sit and watch the silent mysteries of the night unfold forever.
Sometimes he and Vickie would sit on the little hill by their school for hours and just watch, sometimes talking, perhaps idle chatter or perhaps some secret they had been unaware of until speaking of it. Andy was sometimes surprised at how much he could tell her and then other times felt funny about what he couldn’t say. Vickie on the other hand thought that the really nice thing about Andy was that she didn’t have to try to explain herself to him. He always seemed to know what she meant, even if she herself was usually unclear about what she was trying to say, let alone how to say it. There was just something about him. Not just the fact that he so obviously thought she was his best friend but seemed to know better than to say such a thing. There was something else that she couldn’t put into words and didn’t see the point of trying to either.
Other times Vickie with her frenetic energy just wanted to go and they would swoop off on their bikes like ghosts on wheels or run down the street till they were out of breath. Sometimes they would go to the river behind his house and swim. They would enjoy floating on their backs staring up at the moon and the stars but then it would start to get a little too spooky for Andy and he would think that this would really be better in the day time. More fun was to visit the abandoned cemetery by their swimming hole and sometimes they would actually bring old sheets and flit about the cemetery in the middle of the night. They tried to time this for when the passenger train would pass by on the opposite bank of the river, trying to convince themselves that someone was actually looking out a window to witness their performance. Other times they had games like pirate and princess where he would try to capture her or puma and deer where one of them would crouch on a tombstone and pounce on the other as they crept by or they would make up different versions of hide and seek.
More often however they would just sit on the tombstones, talking and watching the occasional train rattle across the bridge and then follow the riverbank into the distance. Andy loved this, he had a layout in his basement and pictures of trains, books about trains, stories about trains. The freights would slowly creak by, the night muting the yellows of the reefers and reds of the boxcars till they seemed like ghosts themselves in the night on their way to their unknown far away destinations. Even in the shadowy night Andy could recognize all the colors of the cars: jade for the New York Central, yellow the Pacific Fruit Express, black and blue for the Boston and Maine, and he thought they were as beautiful in the night as a collection of autumn leaves. He could recognize all the heralds on the sides of the cars as well and his favorite was the little goat standing on a rock found on the vermilion sides of the Great Northern boxcars; it made him think of vacations in the mountains several hours from their house and how they would see goats there once in a great while. Sometimes he would tell Vickie stories about the wondrous vacations he went on with his family and they would plot how to get them to bring her along next time they went. His parents had already said no when he asked them to bring her with them this year. But maybe next year, or maybe the year after. Someday, they promised each other.
Vickie wasn’t as fascinated with the trains as Andy was, probably nobody he knew was. But she did enjoy watching them with him and would chant little songs she made up or beat on the ground to the rhythm of the trains as they passed. When she wasn’t doing that however she also liked to throw rocks at them and this had been one of the few times he had been really angry with her. They had settled on using the open doors of the empty boxcars for target practice and leaving the passenger train alone after he had gotten mad and just left one evening. She had caught up to him and he had explained that if the rock hit a window it could hurt someone and worse still many of the windows were open and what would a rock do to someone’s face? She had honestly said that she hadn’t thought of that which he thought unlikely but he really did want to believe her. After she hadn’t done it again for a while decided that she had been telling him the truth, thinking that with Vickie the truth was often the least believable explanation of all.
Vickie had an uncle who traveled on the local freights now and then. She would talk about just climbing on one some night and getting away from everyone and everything except Andy and her troublesome quartet, somewhere that she could be who she knew she really was rather than who everyone else seemed to think she was, but as appealing as the idea was Andy just knew that if they did it he would never get back before his parents woke up in the morning. They had gotten used to his suddenly sleeping late this summer but even so they wouldn’t wait that long for him to appear in the morning kitchen. They had compromised by climbing into one of the empty boxcars as it rattled by during the daytime and hopping off again at the next town, but that was just youthful adventure, not the flight that Vickie was thinking of. They had bought themselves some ice cream and then begun the long summer walk back along the tracks which took them several hours. It was fun the first time they did it and the next few times as well, watching the dragon flies and feeling the dusty heat as if the summer itself was embracing them as they walked, spending endless hours alone talking on their little journey home as they examined in detail the vistas from the tracks that few people except the rail crews had the opportunity to see, and then jumping into the river under the bridge to cool off at the end of what always became a tiring and sweaty hike. About the time Vickie started saying they should try to extend their trip one town further however Andy began to worry about the fact that it was broad daylight and someone might see them and tell his parents, and so they had stopped those particular forays. It was probably just as well, someone had to keep Vickie from acting on every last one of her impulses. They were after all still children, older than Andy really wanted to be and younger than Vickie seemed to be but still children. Even so, both of them would find that for years to come the first hot day of summer would bring visceral memories of the feel of the ballast beneath their feet and the smell of the creosote on the railroad ties.
The summer washed across them like waves on a beach, sometimes gentle swells, rocking them in the oceanic embrace of a hot July day, and other times rushing them off their feet and smashing into them, burying them in their own excitement and wonder at the power of whatever had just happened till they came up gasping and laughing and holding onto each other to keep from being swept away. Sometimes they fell asleep out on the hill by the school or on the riverbank but Vickie never slept that soundly and would wake an hour later. They would hurry back to the house and climb up onto the porch and sit, sometimes talking or other times just sitting silently. Eventually Andy would go off to his room and Vickie would either disappear or fall asleep on the unused second story porch that his parents never seemed to go out onto or even look at from the hallway door, perhaps to make a show of appearing at their front door later in the morning. Sometimes she would appear for several days or nights in a row.
Other times she would disappear. He'd ridden on his bike to her neighborhood looking for her a few times, sometimes finding her and other times discovering that no one else had any idea where she was either. He came to realize that if Vickie did not want to see him it was better to avoid her altogether. He fought mightily with himself at the times he wanted to search for her, sometimes giving in to his temptation and other times promising himself that she would reappear tomorrow. The days would go by as they inhabited their separate worlds until Vickie would quietly appear at Andy’s home. Often she would appear quite the worse for wear but as soon as they were together everyone and everything else would cease to matter. By the beginning of autumn Andy would become the first person to have any real comprehension of who Vickie was, long before any of the teachers, social workers, cops, or anyone else in any position of authority would, also long before any of their peers or even her little gang of four would understand her. He was the one who saw through all the trouble that seemed to accompany her everywhere to the decent human being that was at the core of who she was. And she was the one who saw that for all his obedience Andy in the end did what he thought was right, not what he was told.
It was in their endless talks that Andy learned of the craziness that seemed to go on continuously in her family; of why he was never invited to her house and why she appeared so often in the middle of the night at his home. Listening to her talk about this was worse than the time they stepped on a yellow jacket nest in the woods, worse than the time he watched her miss the door of the boxcar he was sitting in and realized that the train was going to fast either for her to catch up to him or for him to jump off, worse than the time he broke his arm the year before. It was probably the most painful and frightening thing that happened to him that he could remember. It horrified him how different it was from his own life and family and at first he hadn’t been able to believe her. Finally she had brought him over to her house, inside the forbidden structure to see all there was to be seen, hear all there was to be heard, to absorb exactly what it was she did her best to avoid calling home. The results had been enough to convince him. He had come up with all sorts of plans to fix things, perhaps even to take her away from her family, before he realized that this was exactly what he had been doing anyway.
His journey through the doorway of her house left him with a sudden understanding of her unspoken struggles, most of them concerning either who exactly she was or the exact nature of her family. But seemingly more troubling to her was the question of whether or not she wanted to participate in the increasingly illegal activities of her little quartet. This particular summer seemed to be one of those moments in life where things set themselves on an as yet unknown direction and she was not confident about the future of any of them including herself. Andy hoped she was wrong; he was no longer afraid of her friends and truly liked both Dennis and David. In spite of not wanting to share her pessimism he suspected she was right in her fears however, and when he said his prayers at night the four of them had moved to first place on his list, even ahead of his family. But that was something he wasn’t about to tell his family, Vickie, or anyone else.
She knew almost an equal amount about him. There were so many things he could talk about with her that he told no one else. But perhaps because his fears were so ordinary, so much less impressive than the daily disaster of self destruction that Vickie was forced to live with, he still found the idea of Vickie knowing absolutely all about him to be inexpressibly frightening. It was weird he thought; he knew so much about her but he was afraid to let her know certain things about him, and he hoped desperately that she wouldn’t just figure out what was going on in his mind anyway.
His most important secret, the one that he promised himself never to let anyone know, was just how much he dreamed of being like her, frightening and fearless instead of innocuous and fearful. And how much he envied her the freedom she had. He knew the source of her freedom was not anything at all to be envied and that made it worse, and the idea that he would wish to emulate a girl was further proof of how wrong everything was. But it wasn’t just her. There were any number of people he thought it might be better to be than the person he seemed to be. She was just his favorite example.
It was a late summer night while they sat in the cemetery watching the trains and the river that she wanted to play truth or dare. It was something they had done an eternity ago in the beginning of the summer, but as they got to know each other they had seemed to run out of questions. This time was different. It was as if Vickie was hoping he would ask her something. He tried to think of what the question might be. There were too many possibilities, too many questions that might make her want to shut up about everything. But there was something that she wanted to say. He decided to wait for another clue about what to ask her. Finally she seemed to be tired of waiting. “Whatever secrets you have is fine with me” she said. “I know what they are when you don’t tell me anyway, you know? But I’ve got some you can’t tell anyone.” They were silent for a while, watching the fireflies and listening to the night noises. The long slow midnight rattler would be crossing the bridge in a few minutes; they could hear it in the distance. The noise would be enough to make it hard to talk. Vickie figured that when the train got there it would be an escape from what she was about to say and waited just a little longer before speaking again, timing it so she could say what she wanted and Andy would have to wait to answer back till the train had passed. She could leave or start a wrestling match or throw him into the river after she spoke. Plan your escape. One of the most valuable lessons she’d learned in her short life.
“You know a lot of times I sleep on your porch and I don’t tell you. Like if I’m too tired or too angry. I split before anyone wakes up. Or I sleep in the shed by the orchard. But I don’t like it there. It’s just sort of creepy. Things live there, you know? Last year I used to be able to sneak into the school at night through the door by the gym but they fixed it so I can’t do that.”
She went on. “I really like that guy who lives down the street from you. I really like him. If I can’t sleep I’ll sit in his yard and listen to him play the piano even when you aren’t there. He's learning a couple of new songs. Last year I would just hang with Den at his house or with Davie and Al but I don’t know about them anymore. Besides, Davie’s mom’s been on a bad run and you know Al had to go away for a while this summer.” A euphemism Andy recognized. “Sometimes I don’t know what I want to do. I don’t know where to go. I don’t know anything.”
The train rattled over the bridge and she thought about running up to it and climbing on and never climbing off. But she didn’t. She stared stonily at the train, daring Andy to speak, daring him to be compassionate. He said nothing and as they sat waiting she thought of something. As the train left them behind it seemed to draw her fury and despair with it into the distance. She looked at Andy as he stared into the distance as if trying to figure out how to say something. “You knew, didn’t you?” she said and tried her best to laugh at the unimportance of everything she had just said. “That’s why stuff gets left out on the porch sometimes. And here I thought I was getting over on you. Well good. You’re the only person I’ve ever felt guilty ripping off. I’m glad you meant it. When it gets cold out leave some warmer blankets. You know? What, I have to tell you everything?”
He’d learned. Over the summer he had learned something that he had dimly understood for a long time about Vickie. He had to say something, and he had to say as little as possible. He described the blankets he had already set aside for the winter. Because she was right; he had known. He thought about how stupid this was. She could sleep in his house, indoors. He’d make his parents understand. They were that sort of people. But there was no way to make Vickie understand, and since he couldn’t, he would have to be the one who understood. He thought of telling her how much he admired her courage and freedom. Freedom and courage to do what? Freedom to sleep on his porch because she was afraid to ask to come in? He knew better than to say that. He knew that she knew that he knew but as much as she liked to talk there was so much that just couldn’t be said.
They sat for a while longer and then he walked over to the river as if to go swimming. The water looked dark and mysterious even though he knew there was a soft sandy bottom beneath the surface. It was the perfect part of the river for swimming but it was night, and it was creepy and scary. She came over and stood next to him and threw more rocks at the railroad bridge. In mid throw he pushed her into the river and this time he really did catch her unaware. She charged out and swung at him but her heart just wasn’t in it and instead they wrestled around and chased each other through the cemetery laughing like the children they had been half an hour ago. Finally the inevitable happened and one of them fell and banged their head on a tombstone, getting blood all over and a huge goose egg and then it was time to go home to Andy’s house and get silently cleaned up, sneak into the kitchen, and then Andy went to sleep in his room and Vickie went to sleep on what Andy already thought of as her room: the porch. Each one of them alone. And each one of them not quite as alone as they had been when they had been together that night.
By the end of the summer there was just something different about everything when they were together. With Andy’s love of science fiction he sometimes thought it was as if they had opened an invisible door to connect the two parallel classrooms they attended, as if they had discovered a secret dimension that only they knew about. Or perhaps a better description would be that they had become each others imaginary friend. There were times when he tried to explain this to Danny and Steven, times when he tried to make them see that Vickie was not the fearsome delinquent that she was so widely considered, but the result was always the same. They had two responses and they alternated between them. One was to tease him about liking a girl. The other was a series of warnings about all the trouble she would no doubt involve him in. And never could they seem to understand what it was that he knew about Vickie. Every time he tried to talk to them about her their teasing increased and their dislike of her seemed to increase as well.
As for Vickie, she contented herself with the idea that in this too she was making her own rules. There was really nothing else to be said about it for her; she would be friends with who she wanted and how she wanted. It was really beyond the ability of either of them to explain to anyone, even each other. In later years they would talk about all of this till they finally arrived at an understanding of how everything had happened. But for now they were still children and understanding was not terribly important. They were facing the world together in their own minds and more and more in their interactions with life outside of the world they were creating for themselves. Yet he remained the same boy who went to church and actually listened, and she the same girl that frightened all the other kids and that the adults in any position of responsibility took a lot of extra time trying to figure out what to do with.
What had finally gotten Andy’s parents attention came during an early snowstorm that November. Vickie had come to the door in the evening soaking wet and shaking uncontrollably, choosing the front door because she was much too cold to spend the night in her hiding place on the porch even with all the blankets that Andy left out there. His parents thought she was shaking from the cold and she was; she was chilled to the point of hypothermia. But Andy knew that wasn’t what had put the wounded animal in her eyes. His parents had no choice but to let her in, and after drying her off and warming her up they had, against the loud protests of both children, called her parents. The general drift of the resulting drunken tirade had been that for all they cared she could freeze to death and it would serve her right for interfering with the nights drinking. Andy’s parents had decided against all better judgment to let her stay on the couch that night on the grounds that it really was a bad snowstorm and it would be best to avoid driving anywhere. Vickie’s parents had thought this was a great idea.
His parents hadn’t known quite what to expect and stayed half awake the whole night. In the morning she had been pleasant and enjoyable company and they decided that their son had perhaps seen something in her that no one else had.
Vickie continued to appear at his house at all hours. They would sneak out of the house for their night time adventures again when the spring came but now there were other times she would quietly fall asleep on the couch, knowing that even though they always objected that his parents would also by now quietly welcome her if she was still there when they awoke.
The insane lady who makes a passing appearance here lived down the street from me. The man playing the piano was my mother on a good night-she used to practice after we went to bed.
My eldest daughter read this part and said "that's about the picture in your office of a cat crossing the street with her kittens in the middle of the night, isn't it." Yes it was among other things.
This is the first appearance of much dialogue, which was something suggested to me by a writer friend when she read an earlier version. One ommision-every other word out of Vickie's mouth is an obscenity. But I didn't want to write that.
I had a classmate who used to sneak into our school at night to sleep. I imagine he's long dead by now. He had dropped out of school in the 8th grade after being held back a couple of years. He had been slipping through the cracks for much longer than that in spite of a lot of sincere efforts by our teachers.
Here goes:
Off all the things they did together, Andy loved their nocturnal explorations most of all. The thrill of doing something forbidden and secret was just the beginning. Walking like ghosts through the backyards of his neighbors was like listening in on some giant nebulous secret. Occasionally people would still be awake and they would hear the peaceful sounds of a quiet evening through the open windows. It was so different than the constant activity and drama where Vickie lived but in it's silent peace they both found it every bit as exciting. Less often they would hear fights and arguments which Andy really preferred to avoid listening to even if Vickie found them amusing. A woman a few blocks away who was insane would converse with nonexistent people in the night and they would try to figure out what she was talking about, and there was a man a few houses away from her who liked to play the piano softly before he went to bed. He thought that at this late hour no one would hear him and had not an inkling of his happy audience. Other times he would play records late into the night and the two of them would listen to his borrowed sorrow and exhilaration and think that someday they would be old enough to stay up all night playing all their versions of other people’s heart and soul. Vickie in particular seemed enthralled by those nights and often would sing all the songs back to Andy later. How she remembered them so quickly surprised him, but she did and would also point out the wrong notes that the neighbor sometimes played on the piano.
But the real thrill was in just being there, seeing the darkened windows and porch furniture sitting empty after its occupants had retired and knowing that life had gone on here that day but now life itself was quiet as if the very furniture and houses were resting. There were the sounds and sights of another world that few saw at this hour with the silent fireflies and the lullaby of the crickets. Andy sometimes felt like the most enchanting sight in the world was of a cat or possum crossing the street on some unknowable errand with all the nearby windows dark and only the streetlights for illumination. He could sit and watch the silent mysteries of the night unfold forever.
Sometimes he and Vickie would sit on the little hill by their school for hours and just watch, sometimes talking, perhaps idle chatter or perhaps some secret they had been unaware of until speaking of it. Andy was sometimes surprised at how much he could tell her and then other times felt funny about what he couldn’t say. Vickie on the other hand thought that the really nice thing about Andy was that she didn’t have to try to explain herself to him. He always seemed to know what she meant, even if she herself was usually unclear about what she was trying to say, let alone how to say it. There was just something about him. Not just the fact that he so obviously thought she was his best friend but seemed to know better than to say such a thing. There was something else that she couldn’t put into words and didn’t see the point of trying to either.
Other times Vickie with her frenetic energy just wanted to go and they would swoop off on their bikes like ghosts on wheels or run down the street till they were out of breath. Sometimes they would go to the river behind his house and swim. They would enjoy floating on their backs staring up at the moon and the stars but then it would start to get a little too spooky for Andy and he would think that this would really be better in the day time. More fun was to visit the abandoned cemetery by their swimming hole and sometimes they would actually bring old sheets and flit about the cemetery in the middle of the night. They tried to time this for when the passenger train would pass by on the opposite bank of the river, trying to convince themselves that someone was actually looking out a window to witness their performance. Other times they had games like pirate and princess where he would try to capture her or puma and deer where one of them would crouch on a tombstone and pounce on the other as they crept by or they would make up different versions of hide and seek.
More often however they would just sit on the tombstones, talking and watching the occasional train rattle across the bridge and then follow the riverbank into the distance. Andy loved this, he had a layout in his basement and pictures of trains, books about trains, stories about trains. The freights would slowly creak by, the night muting the yellows of the reefers and reds of the boxcars till they seemed like ghosts themselves in the night on their way to their unknown far away destinations. Even in the shadowy night Andy could recognize all the colors of the cars: jade for the New York Central, yellow the Pacific Fruit Express, black and blue for the Boston and Maine, and he thought they were as beautiful in the night as a collection of autumn leaves. He could recognize all the heralds on the sides of the cars as well and his favorite was the little goat standing on a rock found on the vermilion sides of the Great Northern boxcars; it made him think of vacations in the mountains several hours from their house and how they would see goats there once in a great while. Sometimes he would tell Vickie stories about the wondrous vacations he went on with his family and they would plot how to get them to bring her along next time they went. His parents had already said no when he asked them to bring her with them this year. But maybe next year, or maybe the year after. Someday, they promised each other.
Vickie wasn’t as fascinated with the trains as Andy was, probably nobody he knew was. But she did enjoy watching them with him and would chant little songs she made up or beat on the ground to the rhythm of the trains as they passed. When she wasn’t doing that however she also liked to throw rocks at them and this had been one of the few times he had been really angry with her. They had settled on using the open doors of the empty boxcars for target practice and leaving the passenger train alone after he had gotten mad and just left one evening. She had caught up to him and he had explained that if the rock hit a window it could hurt someone and worse still many of the windows were open and what would a rock do to someone’s face? She had honestly said that she hadn’t thought of that which he thought unlikely but he really did want to believe her. After she hadn’t done it again for a while decided that she had been telling him the truth, thinking that with Vickie the truth was often the least believable explanation of all.
Vickie had an uncle who traveled on the local freights now and then. She would talk about just climbing on one some night and getting away from everyone and everything except Andy and her troublesome quartet, somewhere that she could be who she knew she really was rather than who everyone else seemed to think she was, but as appealing as the idea was Andy just knew that if they did it he would never get back before his parents woke up in the morning. They had gotten used to his suddenly sleeping late this summer but even so they wouldn’t wait that long for him to appear in the morning kitchen. They had compromised by climbing into one of the empty boxcars as it rattled by during the daytime and hopping off again at the next town, but that was just youthful adventure, not the flight that Vickie was thinking of. They had bought themselves some ice cream and then begun the long summer walk back along the tracks which took them several hours. It was fun the first time they did it and the next few times as well, watching the dragon flies and feeling the dusty heat as if the summer itself was embracing them as they walked, spending endless hours alone talking on their little journey home as they examined in detail the vistas from the tracks that few people except the rail crews had the opportunity to see, and then jumping into the river under the bridge to cool off at the end of what always became a tiring and sweaty hike. About the time Vickie started saying they should try to extend their trip one town further however Andy began to worry about the fact that it was broad daylight and someone might see them and tell his parents, and so they had stopped those particular forays. It was probably just as well, someone had to keep Vickie from acting on every last one of her impulses. They were after all still children, older than Andy really wanted to be and younger than Vickie seemed to be but still children. Even so, both of them would find that for years to come the first hot day of summer would bring visceral memories of the feel of the ballast beneath their feet and the smell of the creosote on the railroad ties.
The summer washed across them like waves on a beach, sometimes gentle swells, rocking them in the oceanic embrace of a hot July day, and other times rushing them off their feet and smashing into them, burying them in their own excitement and wonder at the power of whatever had just happened till they came up gasping and laughing and holding onto each other to keep from being swept away. Sometimes they fell asleep out on the hill by the school or on the riverbank but Vickie never slept that soundly and would wake an hour later. They would hurry back to the house and climb up onto the porch and sit, sometimes talking or other times just sitting silently. Eventually Andy would go off to his room and Vickie would either disappear or fall asleep on the unused second story porch that his parents never seemed to go out onto or even look at from the hallway door, perhaps to make a show of appearing at their front door later in the morning. Sometimes she would appear for several days or nights in a row.
Other times she would disappear. He'd ridden on his bike to her neighborhood looking for her a few times, sometimes finding her and other times discovering that no one else had any idea where she was either. He came to realize that if Vickie did not want to see him it was better to avoid her altogether. He fought mightily with himself at the times he wanted to search for her, sometimes giving in to his temptation and other times promising himself that she would reappear tomorrow. The days would go by as they inhabited their separate worlds until Vickie would quietly appear at Andy’s home. Often she would appear quite the worse for wear but as soon as they were together everyone and everything else would cease to matter. By the beginning of autumn Andy would become the first person to have any real comprehension of who Vickie was, long before any of the teachers, social workers, cops, or anyone else in any position of authority would, also long before any of their peers or even her little gang of four would understand her. He was the one who saw through all the trouble that seemed to accompany her everywhere to the decent human being that was at the core of who she was. And she was the one who saw that for all his obedience Andy in the end did what he thought was right, not what he was told.
It was in their endless talks that Andy learned of the craziness that seemed to go on continuously in her family; of why he was never invited to her house and why she appeared so often in the middle of the night at his home. Listening to her talk about this was worse than the time they stepped on a yellow jacket nest in the woods, worse than the time he watched her miss the door of the boxcar he was sitting in and realized that the train was going to fast either for her to catch up to him or for him to jump off, worse than the time he broke his arm the year before. It was probably the most painful and frightening thing that happened to him that he could remember. It horrified him how different it was from his own life and family and at first he hadn’t been able to believe her. Finally she had brought him over to her house, inside the forbidden structure to see all there was to be seen, hear all there was to be heard, to absorb exactly what it was she did her best to avoid calling home. The results had been enough to convince him. He had come up with all sorts of plans to fix things, perhaps even to take her away from her family, before he realized that this was exactly what he had been doing anyway.
His journey through the doorway of her house left him with a sudden understanding of her unspoken struggles, most of them concerning either who exactly she was or the exact nature of her family. But seemingly more troubling to her was the question of whether or not she wanted to participate in the increasingly illegal activities of her little quartet. This particular summer seemed to be one of those moments in life where things set themselves on an as yet unknown direction and she was not confident about the future of any of them including herself. Andy hoped she was wrong; he was no longer afraid of her friends and truly liked both Dennis and David. In spite of not wanting to share her pessimism he suspected she was right in her fears however, and when he said his prayers at night the four of them had moved to first place on his list, even ahead of his family. But that was something he wasn’t about to tell his family, Vickie, or anyone else.
She knew almost an equal amount about him. There were so many things he could talk about with her that he told no one else. But perhaps because his fears were so ordinary, so much less impressive than the daily disaster of self destruction that Vickie was forced to live with, he still found the idea of Vickie knowing absolutely all about him to be inexpressibly frightening. It was weird he thought; he knew so much about her but he was afraid to let her know certain things about him, and he hoped desperately that she wouldn’t just figure out what was going on in his mind anyway.
His most important secret, the one that he promised himself never to let anyone know, was just how much he dreamed of being like her, frightening and fearless instead of innocuous and fearful. And how much he envied her the freedom she had. He knew the source of her freedom was not anything at all to be envied and that made it worse, and the idea that he would wish to emulate a girl was further proof of how wrong everything was. But it wasn’t just her. There were any number of people he thought it might be better to be than the person he seemed to be. She was just his favorite example.
It was a late summer night while they sat in the cemetery watching the trains and the river that she wanted to play truth or dare. It was something they had done an eternity ago in the beginning of the summer, but as they got to know each other they had seemed to run out of questions. This time was different. It was as if Vickie was hoping he would ask her something. He tried to think of what the question might be. There were too many possibilities, too many questions that might make her want to shut up about everything. But there was something that she wanted to say. He decided to wait for another clue about what to ask her. Finally she seemed to be tired of waiting. “Whatever secrets you have is fine with me” she said. “I know what they are when you don’t tell me anyway, you know? But I’ve got some you can’t tell anyone.” They were silent for a while, watching the fireflies and listening to the night noises. The long slow midnight rattler would be crossing the bridge in a few minutes; they could hear it in the distance. The noise would be enough to make it hard to talk. Vickie figured that when the train got there it would be an escape from what she was about to say and waited just a little longer before speaking again, timing it so she could say what she wanted and Andy would have to wait to answer back till the train had passed. She could leave or start a wrestling match or throw him into the river after she spoke. Plan your escape. One of the most valuable lessons she’d learned in her short life.
“You know a lot of times I sleep on your porch and I don’t tell you. Like if I’m too tired or too angry. I split before anyone wakes up. Or I sleep in the shed by the orchard. But I don’t like it there. It’s just sort of creepy. Things live there, you know? Last year I used to be able to sneak into the school at night through the door by the gym but they fixed it so I can’t do that.”
She went on. “I really like that guy who lives down the street from you. I really like him. If I can’t sleep I’ll sit in his yard and listen to him play the piano even when you aren’t there. He's learning a couple of new songs. Last year I would just hang with Den at his house or with Davie and Al but I don’t know about them anymore. Besides, Davie’s mom’s been on a bad run and you know Al had to go away for a while this summer.” A euphemism Andy recognized. “Sometimes I don’t know what I want to do. I don’t know where to go. I don’t know anything.”
The train rattled over the bridge and she thought about running up to it and climbing on and never climbing off. But she didn’t. She stared stonily at the train, daring Andy to speak, daring him to be compassionate. He said nothing and as they sat waiting she thought of something. As the train left them behind it seemed to draw her fury and despair with it into the distance. She looked at Andy as he stared into the distance as if trying to figure out how to say something. “You knew, didn’t you?” she said and tried her best to laugh at the unimportance of everything she had just said. “That’s why stuff gets left out on the porch sometimes. And here I thought I was getting over on you. Well good. You’re the only person I’ve ever felt guilty ripping off. I’m glad you meant it. When it gets cold out leave some warmer blankets. You know? What, I have to tell you everything?”
He’d learned. Over the summer he had learned something that he had dimly understood for a long time about Vickie. He had to say something, and he had to say as little as possible. He described the blankets he had already set aside for the winter. Because she was right; he had known. He thought about how stupid this was. She could sleep in his house, indoors. He’d make his parents understand. They were that sort of people. But there was no way to make Vickie understand, and since he couldn’t, he would have to be the one who understood. He thought of telling her how much he admired her courage and freedom. Freedom and courage to do what? Freedom to sleep on his porch because she was afraid to ask to come in? He knew better than to say that. He knew that she knew that he knew but as much as she liked to talk there was so much that just couldn’t be said.
They sat for a while longer and then he walked over to the river as if to go swimming. The water looked dark and mysterious even though he knew there was a soft sandy bottom beneath the surface. It was the perfect part of the river for swimming but it was night, and it was creepy and scary. She came over and stood next to him and threw more rocks at the railroad bridge. In mid throw he pushed her into the river and this time he really did catch her unaware. She charged out and swung at him but her heart just wasn’t in it and instead they wrestled around and chased each other through the cemetery laughing like the children they had been half an hour ago. Finally the inevitable happened and one of them fell and banged their head on a tombstone, getting blood all over and a huge goose egg and then it was time to go home to Andy’s house and get silently cleaned up, sneak into the kitchen, and then Andy went to sleep in his room and Vickie went to sleep on what Andy already thought of as her room: the porch. Each one of them alone. And each one of them not quite as alone as they had been when they had been together that night.
By the end of the summer there was just something different about everything when they were together. With Andy’s love of science fiction he sometimes thought it was as if they had opened an invisible door to connect the two parallel classrooms they attended, as if they had discovered a secret dimension that only they knew about. Or perhaps a better description would be that they had become each others imaginary friend. There were times when he tried to explain this to Danny and Steven, times when he tried to make them see that Vickie was not the fearsome delinquent that she was so widely considered, but the result was always the same. They had two responses and they alternated between them. One was to tease him about liking a girl. The other was a series of warnings about all the trouble she would no doubt involve him in. And never could they seem to understand what it was that he knew about Vickie. Every time he tried to talk to them about her their teasing increased and their dislike of her seemed to increase as well.
As for Vickie, she contented herself with the idea that in this too she was making her own rules. There was really nothing else to be said about it for her; she would be friends with who she wanted and how she wanted. It was really beyond the ability of either of them to explain to anyone, even each other. In later years they would talk about all of this till they finally arrived at an understanding of how everything had happened. But for now they were still children and understanding was not terribly important. They were facing the world together in their own minds and more and more in their interactions with life outside of the world they were creating for themselves. Yet he remained the same boy who went to church and actually listened, and she the same girl that frightened all the other kids and that the adults in any position of responsibility took a lot of extra time trying to figure out what to do with.
What had finally gotten Andy’s parents attention came during an early snowstorm that November. Vickie had come to the door in the evening soaking wet and shaking uncontrollably, choosing the front door because she was much too cold to spend the night in her hiding place on the porch even with all the blankets that Andy left out there. His parents thought she was shaking from the cold and she was; she was chilled to the point of hypothermia. But Andy knew that wasn’t what had put the wounded animal in her eyes. His parents had no choice but to let her in, and after drying her off and warming her up they had, against the loud protests of both children, called her parents. The general drift of the resulting drunken tirade had been that for all they cared she could freeze to death and it would serve her right for interfering with the nights drinking. Andy’s parents had decided against all better judgment to let her stay on the couch that night on the grounds that it really was a bad snowstorm and it would be best to avoid driving anywhere. Vickie’s parents had thought this was a great idea.
His parents hadn’t known quite what to expect and stayed half awake the whole night. In the morning she had been pleasant and enjoyable company and they decided that their son had perhaps seen something in her that no one else had.
Vickie continued to appear at his house at all hours. They would sneak out of the house for their night time adventures again when the spring came but now there were other times she would quietly fall asleep on the couch, knowing that even though they always objected that his parents would also by now quietly welcome her if she was still there when they awoke.
everything under the sun is in tune
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon