Miss Gacy’s insight also sets your scalp aprickle. For the first time this year (perhaps ever), you fear for your prospects. Before, you assumed you’d skate through high school like Lecia—the underachiever who won’t play the game but still pulls off A’s, her flippance endured for the sake of the shimmering promise she embodies. But flippance in one so unaccomplished grates, and promise loses its sheen if it goes undelivered long enough.
Plus the pharmaceuticals just trickling into some student bodies will hit flood capacity by fall, and this will strike such horror in administrators who’ve only toyed with suspending you so far that their tactics for suspected druggies will get more radical and involve civil authorities.
But even this fleeting shiver of helplessness won’t edge you one millimeter from your plotted course with LeBump.
Outside his office, the line of chairs holds the usual boys who list and study their feet—one saying Hey, another You again. My peer group, you think, with no small parcel of chagrin. Two of these are large boys with mysterious scars and inked icons on their forearms, boys you and Lecia used to swim and steal watermelons with in the summers. Within the week, they’ll be arrested for robbing liquor stores with sawed off shotguns, the paper claiming they called themselves Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. First felony arrest. State pen. Double-digit sentence.
In LeBump’s office, he says, Miss Karr, you’ve failed to come equipped with the proper undergarments.
You ask him, sir, to repeat the charge. You’re secretly picturing the college you’ll soon vanish into—some leafy place with broad playing fields and girls in plaid skirts and cheerful Irish groundsmen cheerfully snipping at hedges saying, top of the morning to you, little miss.
You’re distracting the boys, Miss Karr. Proper undergarments are required.
You inventory yourself for what you’ve done wrong. Skirt and Capricorn T-shirt and sandals that neither flip nor flop.
I’m sorry, sir, I’m not following.
He leaves his desk and comes back with Miss Smith from the guidance office across the hall. Mr. LeBump closes the door. He says, You tell her, then starts staring out the window like some jail guard turning the volume down on the torture session before it kicks in.
A brassiere, Mary, she says. You have to come to school wearing a proper bra.
It’s distracting the boys, he says.
You ponder what can be said that’s enough of a fuck you. (The problem with fuck you’s in this sort of place is that you habituate them; they lose their potency, and ergo must increase in outrageousness.) Finally you say, What makes you think I’m not wearing a bra, Mr. LeBump?
In algebra next day, Miss Gacy sits gray-faced behind her steel desk. She doesn’t look up from the quizzes she’s sorting when you pass by, nor when you wedge yourself noisily into the desk, drop your book a little too hard on the floor. Dale Badgett pokes you with a pencil, saying, Got the proper underwear on today, Miss Karr?
You’ve always had a weird little crush on him. You turn around to mouth asshole just as Miss Gacy floats by, laying the previous day’s test on his desk with its typical 100 percent, on which you draw a smiley face. He suddenly reaches up across his desk to grab your bra strap through your blouse, draw it back, and let it pop between your shoulder blades. Just checking, he whispers over your shoulder. The urge to swing around with your arm outstretched like a sideways piling is barely quelled.
Suddenly you realize Miss Gacy’s returning yesterday’s major section test, 20 percent of the final grade, the one you got suspended from taking. The one you missed just for having tits, you think. And no makeups allowed for dress-code convicts.
She starts around the room a second time, handing out a dittoed worksheet, its odor of fresh-baked rolls and solvent wafting toward you while you study her face for some hint of the humanity she showed yesterday. But she won’t even meet your eyes when she lays the still damp worksheet on your desk. Well fuck her. Fuck polynomials and factoring and college altogether. Your bitterness is a numbing iceberg you plan to cling to.
Imagine the letdown when you find paper-clipped to the worksheet your own blank copy of yesterday’s test, the one you should’ve gotten a zero on. It’s another blind act of kindness that denies you the martyr status you long for. You could have whined about that zero for a week. Instead, Miss Gacy’s meticulously printed Do in class in the high right corner.
Chapter Fifteen
BY SUMMER YOU’RE BACK IN PHIL’S two-tone Ford, parked at the seawall with the black satin sky and its myriad pinpricks glued across all the car windows. He’s repledged his love and recanted the previously unspoken fuck-or-walk ultimatum that broke you up in the first place.
You’d decided in advance of this particular night to up the ante on rolling around by taking your shirt off, yet you have to get drunk on cheap apple wine to justify doing so. You have to sneak Phil into your parents’ dozing house and light a listing candle in a Chianti jug before you start to peel yourself bare. It’s a sad perversion that you only know how to display your own desire by evoking his. (Only years hence do you guess that his desire was so great he was doomed not to express it.) In fact, you possess neither the sexual generosity nor the unbridled instinct to unbutton his shirt or to search his body for the nether-pale square inches neither you nor sunlight has ever touched. You determine to raise up your shirt and set out doing so with a heretofore unknown modesty, an awkward shyness the night seems steeped in. Which also highlights the so-called respect Phil shows by not rushing to fumble under your shirt.
Phil waits on the sofa with openly beguiled attention, and you kneel beside him to lift your T-shirt slow as a rising curtain to show him your new breasts. His hands tremble to cup first one, then the other, and you feel the new expanse of your nipples contract in that touch. (A phrase overheard somewhere: nipples like pencil erasers.)
He doesn’t even dare lower his mouth to a breast, nor do you think to ask for such a thing. There is no asking yet for you, and there’s a loneliness in the warped truth that though you hold a cyclone of desire in your body, you abandon it by pandering to his.
On another such evening, you unbuckle his belt and the one silver button atop his jeans and don’t unzip him or reach deep but only let your fingers slip just into the elastic of his jockey shorts to touch the head of his rigid cock, and when it leaps at your light touch, it seems more intelligent and less bluntly dumb than you’d expected and the fluid that issues from the tip is so much like what you feel soaking your panties that the gesture furthers the myth of how similar you two are, how ideally matched. What rare luck to have found each other so young when the whole carpet of your lives stretches before you.
You tell Meredith about this adventure in some detail, and she acknowledges how serious this is without the characteristic bemusement she usually brings to your Phil-based confidences. Her earnest tone is the first blessing she’s bestowed on your union, though she still lapses into teasing. When you explain how his dick leapt at your touch like a living thing, she accuses you of being an animist.
Meaning what, o Merlin. Dictionary me.
You know. In animism they think if it moves it’s alive, has intelligence. Like the trees are alive, rivers and clouds. Meredith picks at the crew collar of her T-shirt. Because she’s heavy, she suffers in the heat.
Like gimme a for instance, you say.
Like if you lived in Bali, you might leave some mangoes or rice at the temple of the penis god. So it’d jump at your whim. That kind of deal.
How do you know this kind of obscure shit?
Innate genius.
No I mean it, you say. Everything I read falls right out of my head. Mind like a sieve.
You’ve got yards of poetry up there.
Yeah and I don’t know what half of it means. I’m like one of those ponies they train at the fair. Pound the ground with my hoof to count. But how’d you know that about the penis god?
I made up the penis-god part. So you’d get the paral
lel.
Okay then, about clouds moving and all that?
I can’t remember. Michael was real into Tarzan in junior high. I seem to remember he had a lot of pygmy books. Or Ray took an anthro course.
See, Mother took a course like that, and all I remember about the pygmies is how the guys tied their dicks up around their waists, so it looked like they had hard-ons when they went into battle. And how the women’s breasts got all long and tubular.
Pendulous, she says.
I guess I’ve heard about animus before—
Mist. Ani-mist. Like you spray from a can. Animus is ill-will. Meanwhile, you think his penis actually has big ideas?
Say dick, just say it one time. Or boner at least. Say, big old hard-on.
My mouth is pure. I’ll say, le serpent.
You could French-fry a dirty joke.
Phil and Meredith have entered the détente stage of their relationship, each still giving the other wide berth as if suspicious, or as if protecting you somehow by keeping distance from the other (though maybe that’s untrue, and only reflects your narcissistic desire to serve as locus for all thought and action). Phil relishes the role of seductive older man that’s worn very lightly by truly seductive older men and not at all well by the average teenager. That he’s smarter than everybody also makes him arrogant in a way Meredith likes to deflate.
Somewhere in the course of several weeks before he leaves for college, you decide, in a phrase, to give it up to Phil—pussy being the only wolf bane you can imagine draping over him to ward off the smart college coeds he’ll doubtless bump into. You book your official deflowering for a Friday night at Meredith’s house, when Mrs. Bright’s working overtime or at Aunt Willy’s using the good sewing machine to jazz up Meredith’s wardrobe.
Meredith has invited your new friend Stacy to play chess with her in the living room while you and Phil “do the deed.” (Stacey had lived invisibly in your midst for years till Meredith discovered she knew more about T. S. Eliot than either of you.) She’s a terrific poet, a budding photographer, and a strapping state champion volleyballer (whose announcement in college that she’s a lesbian will only prompt a no kidding from everybody). Before going back to Michael’s white bed, you and Phil stand in the living room with your arms around each other’s waists as Meredith and Stacy align chess figures, and suddenly you can just as easily imagine not being defiled this particular night, just saying to hell with it and piling in Phil’s car to go out for chocolate dip cones at the soft-serve joint. But the girls are assembled here as for a fiesta, and through the fabric of Phil’s T-shirt, you can feel his rib cage tremble from internal percussion.
Once the last black rook is in place on its board square, everyone seems to wait edgily for you to do something. Here I go, you finally say without moving.
You’ve done this before, right? Meredith asks Phil through a maternal grin.
Not as much as I’d like, but enough. (Something he later tells you is a lie, and then after that says is true, so you in fact never know if you jumped over that broom alone or not.)
I wish I brought my camera, Stacy says. This seems like a moment for the family album.
Maybe a before-and-after shot, Meredith says. Flowered and deflowered.
What would the caption be? you say, only halfway kidding, because you’re looking for some tag line to label the event with.
How about, something from Eliot: I should be glad of another death, Stacy says.
We use Thomas Stearnes for everything, Meredith says.
Well, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, you say.
Which seems to set everybody gawking at his or her own individual piece of floorboard. Nobody says a word. You wish there were a mantle clock to tick loudly. Or that Meredith was absentmindedly playing that ravishing Chopin prelude you learned back in junior high. The stepping-stone melody would make a funereal deflowering march to carry you back to the bedroom. Or you wish some military attaché would enter bearing the license that sanctioned this. There should be more ceremony, you think. You want momentum.
Stacy is starting to pick at the sofa nap, and you can feel Phil staring down at the top of your head from his gentle height.
Here I go, you say again, and as he steers you off, Meredith says bon voyage at your backs.
Of the actual episode, only the oddest details will remain. He’s under the sheet with the entire expanse of his nakedness while you undress matter-of-factly, explaining all the while that the hole in the wall plaster is where Dr. Boudreaux’s x-ray machine used to fit. You’re not scared of the physical act, for Phil has been kind. But you have one raging horror of looking like you don’t know what to do (you don’t), and another horror of looking like a slut, and so don’t tell him that you’re on the pill, hoping the rubber he winds up using will numb his smart dick from knowing that some brute stole your cherry. (How odd, you’ll later think, that you embarked on your first love affair—meant as an intimacy—with such a large sexual secret in tow.)
The lustrous warmth of him along your body is like taking a long drink of something you’ve wanted all your life. But his kisses seem to come from some boy you never knew. He’s trying to be slow, to wait for your okay, but this urgency emanates from him. In your eagerness to please, you stand aside for his passion, let it dwarf your small wants till you feel somewhat beside the point. You’ve brought a whole bunch of towels from home to lay under you, and you keep spreading their edges so the sheets won’t mess up. Also, Phil read somewhere that a pillow under the woman’s hips puts her at a helpful angle, and there are towels over two of those until you feel raised up on some pyramid of wadded towel and pillow like a Mayan sacrifice.
Afterward, you feel somewhat deflated and can’t wait to get up and dress. This urgency to re-create your public self after a private dismantling must be innate to your age and expectation, but it’s disappointing somehow. In truth, you’d hoped this physical act would magically yield up emotional intimacy. (But for a long time sex would merely replace the closeness you longed for, almost usurp it.)
You bust out the door in your underpants and announce to Meredith and Stacy that you had an orgasm (astonishing lie). Meredith says that must be from all the practice alone at home you do. Then on the porch Phil declares his undying love and handles you with immense tenderness, but you feel remote. The myth of absolute like-mindedness, cathexis, soul-deep entwinement that you cooked up inside those infinite kisses has been banished. You could have wallowed forever in the silky infinity of those nights, whereas for him, those wordless conversations were doubtless arrows aimed at this night, precursors to it, erotic cheese and crackers.
Henceforth, your power over him seems increased. But you feel exiled from the sexual pleasure he seems to drown in. That’s how trying to open the door to libidinal adventure closes it, and how trying to seal your closeness to Phil makes you eager to get away, to run.
Chapter Sixteen
BY FALL, YOU ARRIVE AT SCHOOL A WHOLE NEW CREATURE.
The drill team, for one thing. Your desire to stand on the football field and kick over your head with a line of other girls also wearing outfits (or getups, as your daddy would call them) covered in what can best be described as a kind of matted silver fur—this once-desperate desire has evaporated like so much flash paper.
Back in August, when other drill team members were lowering their hot roller sets into various train cases for sleep-away camp, you’d (a) stopped shaving your legs and armpits, (b) learned how to clean pot and roll a joint, (c) made a trip to Austin, Texas on the very day 40,000 screaming hippies protesting the Kent State murders would be teargassed by National Guardsmen (one of whom would, in a few years, become your brother-in-law, the Rice Baron), (d) been sleeping with Phil.
As a result of all these events, you’ve (e) stopped going to drill team practice unless you come stoned out of your gourd. While the other girls wear their beaded headbands underneath their teased flips so the band is just a stripe across their forehe
ads (a kind of cerebral band-aid, you often joke to Meredith), yours is tied over your long straight hair like a hippie trying to keep her head (so called) together.
So while the boys you fancy leave for their various far-flung colleges, you wow them with the dramatic move of quitting drill team at the start of your junior year. Which fires up a minor scandal. No one’s ever quit before, Miss Stanley says in her office, without being in a family way. Either she has a bad cold that day, or she actually tears up once you’ve told her. Are you expecting? she asks, and when you say no, the answer seems to flummox her. Like she’d had a whole speech ready, and you left her sliding her thumb down this year’s roll book looking for the last time you’d said regular to announce your period during roll call.
In LeBump’s office, he eyes you wearing the expression animals get smelling something. But by then you’re unflappable. Without flap, whatever that means. Scenes like this have begun to unfold with an air of unreality. You can’t help thinking as he pontificates and gets up and paces behind his football-field-size desk like a coach in a locker room pep talk that he resembles those square-headed cops from Big Ass Comix.
He says, It’s clear to me, Miss Karr, that somebody once told you that you were clever. Well clever doesn’t compensate for bad citizenship. Not here. You’ve thrown aside great opportunities, honors other girls would have killed to enjoy, but you have chosen to slam shut those doors. You’ve bolted and latched them. Those paths are not for you. And we get the message in this office. It’s been delivered loud and clear. Be forewarned that henceforth these walls have eyes, and you will be under scrutiny, Miss Karr. And we’ll not put up with one inappropriate action.
At this, he walks around the front of his desk to sit atop it and peer down at you to deliver this insult: Neither are we a home for unwed mothers, he says.
This is particularly comical because if they were to expel every girl with a so-called bun in the oven, a good chunk of the senior class would just vanish.