Affection (10 page)

Her name was Jenny; we met for recess and lunch and the other kids circled but no one actually threatened us, and I was surprised. There was no confrontation. We survived the first day intact and when we parted company at the front gate I knew that she was just as surprised as I was that we had escaped without the anticipated abuse.

“I might get through the rest of high school without getting my head beaten in,” she said. “Imagine surviving till university without thug-inflicted brain damage.”

I told Emily about John. I sat next to him; we both played clarinet in the band and there were his beautiful, delicate fingers on the keys. His clarinet case was always neat and perfectly ordered. I threw my reeds in, split and stained with chips knocked out of the finely shaved wood. He cleaned his metal keys until they shone. I hid the crusty verdigris under sweaty fingers. I was a mess.

We sat in class and listened and I could see him following the rise and swell of the music with that intensity that still moves me in a lover. The kind of monofocus that obliterates the real world for the duration. There was also his shy humor, the delicate arrogance of youth. And then there was the weight of my virginity.

I'm not sure when my daydreaming tripped over from the thought of him leaning across my shoulders to help me with my fingering, to the
thought of him naked, prizing my virgin panties down over my thighs. This was the pre-sex kind of sexual tension, ripe with possibilities that can never eventuate in any physical beginning. I stopped sleeping. Refused to eat. I lost four dress sizes in six months. Sex rumbled in my belly like a tapeworm and I knew myself, at sixteen, to be capable of obsession. By the time I asked him and he turned me down there was barely anything left of me at all.

 

 

In the meantime I told Emily about him and she told me about the roadhouse where she worked and the truckers who stopped there and how sometimes she met them after work and the things they did. She was younger than me. I counted back the years and realized that I would have been assembling the plastic model of the Millennium Falcon when she was climbing into trucks with people's fathers. She talked about muscle and hair and, in the way she told it, these attributes became desirable. She talked about sweat and the smell of diesel and about men, real men, not the kind of clarinet-playing, Dungeons & Dragons boys that I liked.

Every day when Emily climbed onto the bus I would shuffle over and we would lean into each other and there would be my stories of longing and her stories of consummation. She was brave and bold and adventurous. I was all dreaming. When she placed her hand on my knee the heat of her palm burned up and into my groin.

I invited her to my house. I would never be allowed to visit hers.
She had a father and a brother and my family would not let me stay in a house where there would be men. Strange men that could not be trusted. But she was welcome to visit, to sleep over. She brought some videotapes and we dragged a mattress into the lounge room and shuffled across to let the dogs curl around our feet. She had taped
Video Hits
off the television and I watched and listened. At first I didn't like the music, which was poppy and jangly and brash, but when Emily sang along, the songs gained a kind of exuberant energy. We pressed rewind and I learned how to sing the choruses and we stood up on the mattress and danced and she held my hand.

We lounged back against the pillows and I whispered about my longing for John the clarinet player, but with her beside me the longing seemed less directional, more general. She commiserated with me. She touched my hand and I relaxed into the joy of this new kind of sharing.

She slipped another video into the player; a musical. I had my own musicals to watch, I liked
Singing in the Rain
, but I watched
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
more. I sometimes practiced being Marilyn in front of the mirror, holding her pose, enjoying the generous curves of my body in the way Marilyn might have done, posing, moving, leaning, blowing myself a kiss.

Emily's musical was
The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
It took Marilyn's primping and preening and amplified it. I watched under the covers in the dark and there was the heat of Emily's body so close
to mine and sometimes she reached out to me and held me by the shoulders and mouthed the words of a song, a love song, a sex song, and it was all I could do not to touch her in return.

At some point she stopped the tape and made me stand and taught me the dance steps to a particular song and it was all about hips and tits and a slow pelvic grinding. Perhaps I didn't care about the clarinet boy. Perhaps I didn't need to suffer from an unrequited longing.

When the film was over, she slipped in her
Video Hits
tape and turned the volume down so the pop songs became lullabies. We lay side by side and she edged closer to me.

“If I were gay I wouldn't be ashamed of it. I would be out and proud.”

“Yes,” I told her. “If I liked women I would kiss them in public.”

“Hold hands at school.”

“I'd tell my family without any angst.”

“Maybe I wouldn't tell my brother,” she said, “but I'd go live with the girl I loved. And I'd have a wedding. I'd have a
Rocky Horror
wedding and everyone would wear fishnet stockings.”

We laughed and we settled more comfortably onto the mattress and I heard her breathing soften into tiredness, and I forced my breath to keep pace with hers. Her hand was between our bodies and I could feel the heat of her fingers almost touching my thigh. I shifted my leg slightly and there was the brush of her fingertips. I imagined that she must be awake, too. I could feel the thud of my heart and the
thunder of it should be rocking the mattress. It was certainly shaking my body. My leg would be trembling to the rhythm of it. She would feel it through the tip of her fingers. I reached out the palm of my hand till I could feel the heat off her chest, not close enough to touch her, but close enough to hold her body heat. I clamped my thighs together as my stomach succumbed to that wonderful weightless surge that I associate with desire.

It took most of the night for me to move my finger in slow increments toward her pajama top, and when it was within reach, I touched it. Not hard enough to feel the body beneath, but I could feel the fabric, and the sensation energized me. I was high with it, wakeful. I opened my eyes occasionally, imagining that sooner or later I would find that her eyes were open, too. I played out the scene, a sustained stare, a leaning into each other, a kiss. A fumbling under each other's pajama tops.

“If I were gay I would slip my finger inside you,” I would say, slipping my finger inside her.

“If I were gay I would lick your breast.” Licking my breast.

The scenario was played out in every possible way and ended each time with us lying in each other's arms, covered in sweat, fingers entwined.

The morning found us at arm's length. Her fingers still barely grazing my thigh, my fingers almost touching her breast. I was stiff and sore and exhausted from such a wakeful night. She opened her
eyes and stretched and turned and I felt a surge of regret. When she stood and asked if there was coffee I felt the cold morning air slide in under the blankets.

“Yes. Coffee would be good,” I said.

My sister was a stranger by then.

She had worked for a while in the corner store but she returned home and shut her door and stayed there with the curtains drawn and Pink Floyd turned up loud. Sometimes when I passed her in the corridor she glared at me with such hatred that I began to wonder if she would be likely to kill me in my sleep. I imagined waking up with a pillow over my face and no chance to shout for help.

On better days she would venture out and sit in front of a video and perhaps even speak to me. I was careful with my conversations because she was prone to sudden rages. She would shriek and throw things and then, as if a switch had been thrown, she would suddenly power down. All signs of life gone. She would sit in complete silence,
her eyes shut or open, and I would tiptoe around her, worried, but cautious as well, in case I somehow reactivated her.

Her friend from school made the long trip up north to visit and for a while I could see my sister again. The smart playful girl who was fond of setting challenges and forcing you to participate.

When he left I saw the life draining out of her. She took her paints into her bedroom and concentrated on making intricate dark pictures of buff knights and vampire women. Sex oozing out of the images. She would have to leave. I knew she would have to leave.

She applied for university without telling anyone.

I emerged from a restless Christmas break, thin from a regime of starvation, tanned from days of walking back and forth along the access road, and when I glanced into my sister's room I noticed the difference immediately. She was packed and ready to leave us.

The idea of leaving home was complicated. My aunt never had left home. My mother, in the brief time that she had tried to venture away from the nest, had barely settled. She'd spent most evenings at my grandmother's, walking between houses with her children in tow. My grandmother exerted an incredible pull, like some vast astrological body, dragging everything in the universe toward her. My mother was sucked back into her orbit but once there she was kept at arm's length, punished for her small foray out into the world, never again to be accepted back into the idea of home.

Karen would go, and then she would be gone. My mother spent
her evenings in tears. She knew the price you had to pay for leaving home. Maybe Karen could do her degree through distance education; she could send her assignments by mail. These were the options that could save her from the ultimate sin of leaving.

My sister used the glamour of a university degree to slip away. My mother had graduated from teachers' college. My aunt went to tech. Karen would be the first person in the family to be awarded a Bachelor of Arts.

 

 

I went back to school. I sat on the bus with Emily and spent my days mooning over the boy with the clarinet. I was voted school captain and I knew that I was a compromise. The teachers liked me because I was pleasant, honest, and compliant. The students chose me because I didn't really care. They could smoke in the toilets and I wouldn't report them. No one really hated me, but they didn't like me either. I auditioned for the school musical and won the starring role. And then, one day, my sister left.

I could have her room if I wanted it. It was larger than mine and painted a dark and moody purple. There were black sheets. She had left her collection of fantasy novels and I could read them, but I didn't really want to. I wrote to her once but she didn't reply. She called home dutifully but there was a distance in the conversations. Her answers were monosyllabic. I wondered how it would be to leave. I knew I would never be brave enough, but maybe I would.

I stood on the stage and sang about love and kissed the leading boy and it was my first kiss. Out there in public, in front of an audience of several hundred, I reached up for his neck and he bent down to my height. He was six foot six, I was five foot one. It was a kind of visual comedy but for me it was real and powerful and I opened my mouth there on the stage. There was an exchange of tongues and when I pulled away I said my line, which was “I love you,” and he said “I love you, too.” We were performing, but we would repeat the kiss in private at the after-party. I would know that even then, without the audience, we were performing an act, but it was an act that I was excited by. I kissed my leading man and I went home singing with the force of the kiss and told my mother that I had been asked on a date—even though, in reality, I had asked him.