Age of Consent (30 page)

Easily, she'd thought. Because they weren't in love with her. That was Dan. She could feel it coming from him, that big heart of his enveloping her all the time. She had no idea what she'd done to deserve it. If he loved her, he was mistaken to do so. A simple error in judgment he was bound one day to correct.

She told him it was better this way. She liked how private it was between them. And all the little compromises they made for each other, and what they did in bed together, acts that would never have been enough for Craig but which they attended to with a level of arousal she'd never before experienced and which she could not put into words, though she had tried. She began,
You know when you…
and then she described as much as she could muster.
And when you…
she said, but found it difficult to finish.

He listened. He added to what she said. It was as open a conversation as she'd ever have about sex, about her feelings about sex, about what two people could do together. Often, later in her life, she would recall how easy it had been with Dan and wonder what kind of crazy trajectory her life was on that the person with whom she'd been most open was her first love, when she was still a girl.

Later that first night, the storm keeping them awake, they sat up in bed. She leaned back into his chest and they watched the power lines sway in the wind.

“In the summer, my parents rent a house at the beach,” he said. “Come with us. We'll swim in the ocean every day. At night, we'll lie on the sand and look up at the stars. No time limits. They would love you. And they'd be happy to see me doing something other than reading a book.”

“I won't be here this summer,” she said. She hadn't thought of this ahead of time, but as she spoke the words she knew them to be true. She told him that she would be leaving. Not forever, not running away in the sense people understood it, but just until her mother got rid of Craig.

“I think this is what it will take,” Bobbie said. “I'm going to write her a letter after I'm well away and tell her to make up her mind: Craig or me. I'm not going to live with him. I think he'll leave anyway once I'm gone. I swear he only stays in our house to torment me. So perhaps the whole thing will be easier than I think.”

It sounded like a plan that she'd been considering for some time, that she'd thought through, but in fact it had come to her almost as she had spoken it. A part of her wanted to call out,
Don't believe what I'm saying.
I am making this up!
But she heard herself speak, heard how convincing she sounded. She would give her mother an ultimatum; Craig would leave and only then would she return.

“After he goes we can be, you know,
normal
,” she said. “You and me. You can call me on the phone. That would be something. You can even come over to my house, imagine that!” She sounded confident. She sounded plausible.

“Just give him the money,” Dan said. “Please. He says that's what he wants. Give him the money and then maybe he will get out of your life. You can have my car money. Give that to him.”

The car he'd been saving for. “No way,” she said.

“You pay him a thousand dollars and he'll go—isn't that what he said? So give it to him. What's stopping you? It's a bargain if it means you can live a normal life, surely.”

“The money—” she began. How could she explain? Craig would only pocket it. He'd take it and then extract from her more of everything else that she valued. He'd touch her, too. Now that she was with Dan, she could not tolerate that.

But did she
know
, know for sure, that Dan was wrong? She didn't know anything, but she felt it. Craig was like a colossal grinding machine. He'd eat her piece by piece if she tried to outsmart him or buy him off. He'd take her whole and alive.

“Please don't go,” Dan said. “You can't. I'm happy, Bobbie. I've never been so happy. If you go, you'll take it all away.”

It was too much for her to hear. She knew what he meant. She'd grown to depend on him. Dan was a tonic that made the days bearable. She turned to him, whispered in his ear, then placed her tongue upon the hollow at the back of his neck and bit down gently. She wanted to soak up all of this finally discovered feeling, take in the salt and skin of him, push into the envelopes of his body, and she wanted to remember what it felt like, too, every second of it, because the plan, so haplessly imagined only minutes before, was taking hold of her now. She was leaving. She saw how she'd been leaving for some time, ever since Craig, ever since the invisible surround of his desire had removed her from her own life. First from her mother, then the other kids at school, from everything she would call childhood and would call home, and finally from Dan.

She wanted to tell Dan that the only home she knew now was his body, his voice, the weight of his leg bent over hers, his fingers entwined with hers. That she'd never realized how easy it could be—sex, love, desire. He gave her the comfort she'd once felt lying in her bed in the little house she'd grown up in, in the little patch of the woods where you could look into the trees at night and see a possum, or listen to owls calling to each other, or spy the ragged backside of a raccoon.

“I will miss you awfully. But I will come back,” she said. She believed she would come back. A few months would be all it would take, maybe only a few weeks, for surely her mother would choose her over Craig. “I promise.”

“Oh,” he said, and she felt his sadness in the sigh of that word, then a wave of sorrow. It was as though she had laid the one thing she loved down into a narrow boat, and sent it floating.

“So then,” he said. “Well.”

2008

O
ne floor up in a hotel in Arlington, light from the streetlamps outside filtering through the curtained window, Dan tells her he is going to do a fingertip search to find all the familiar places of her body, the freckles and moles she'd had as a teenager. She leans back on the bed and laughs as he moves down her torso in the dim light of the motel room.

His touch is at once familiar and completely new to her, though how he lingers, and pauses, and talks every so often is the same. He says, “Here, this. I remember,” and traces an appendectomy scar. He finds a mole on her calf and says, “Gotcha!” He holds her feet in his hands, kisses her toes then all the way up. “Here, I am not sure,” he says. He licks the crease of her thigh, then inward. “I don't recall exactly—”

She laughs, and he rolls her on top of him, his hands coming to a rest on her thighs. “Why can't this be a very long, slow night?” he says. He has to return to his girls in a couple of hours. “I'm too old to make love quickly.”

She laughs. “You were always slow, if I remember. It's a quality I've come to appreciate.”

She likes how he wears his hair, the front pushed up and away from his brow. She likes that she can see his smile, even in the dark room.

He lifts her up higher on his chest. “I used to hate watching you slither away through my window because it meant a whole week would pass before I saw you again. And here we are in the same situation—well, almost.”

They are quiet now, moving quietly, too. The headlights of passing cars throw blocks of shifting light across the ceiling. The air-conditioning in the little room clicks on. For some time, longer than planned, they engage in the splendid peaceable process of making love, still with the curious stop-start manner that she remembers, and with a graceful quality as though in a dream.

Afterward, still entwined, he asks her how come she never called him after she left, why she did not contact him again.

“I'd have done anything for you,” he says, speaking into her hair.

“I was in a horrible place,” she says. “Not physically horrible, though yes. I mean, I was just a mess. You didn't want to be near someone like me.”

“But that's
all
I wanted.”

She can feel him right up next to her, the fold of his body cocooning her. It is a loss she cannot think too much about: that she might have had this man near her all these years but has not. That his teenage daughters might just as easily have been theirs. “You had better things to do, important things—”

“I might have been able to help you.”

“I wanted you to live your life. I didn't want you to worry about me.”

“That's exactly what I did. I worried.”

“Don't be cross.”

He draws back from her, taking in her shape, her breasts, the neat line of hair low on her belly. “Look at you,” he says.

She remembers the early years after she left home. She'd been lonely, that was true, but remarkably calm about her circumstances. Her worst winter was when she worked in a canning factory and all her clothes smelled like fish. One summer in Delaware, working in a camper van that had been converted to a mobile restaurant selling fried clams, clam bellies, and whole lobsters, she got a bracelet of burn marks on her wrist from the fry oil. She missed school more than anything, and the sorts of kids you meet who are still in school. For a brief, intolerable time she stopped believing her life would ever get better.

“I imagined you were really happy and that was why you didn't come back,” Dan says.

She almost laughs. “Once in a while I thought of killing myself but only in the mildest, most comforting of manners, a kind of get-out clause I never intended to exercise.”

“Oh Jesus.”

“It wasn't the way you are thinking.”

She heard him take in a breath. Then he said, “Yes, it was.”

How can she explain to him that thoughts of suicide had not required desperate sadness as much as it had a condition of non-feeling, no emotion at all? Killing herself would have been like walking into a swamp, deeper and deeper into the sucking mud, until there was no returning. It had not been something she wanted or didn't want. She'd had no idea how much trouble she was in until later.

“Would you ever live in Maryland again?” he says. “If I gave you a very good reason.”

It occurs to her to ask about his estranged wife, but it wouldn't make any difference in her answer, so she says, “I can't. It would be impossible for me to live here again.”

She hears his sigh, solid and audible in the darkness. She can feel his despair in all his loose muscles and sense his thoughts racing toward some other conclusion than the obvious one, that they will disappear back into their own lives.

“I have a practice here,” he says, as though this is the worst, most onerous piece of news he could deliver. “And an NIH post.”

“Surely these are good things?”

“If they are good, then why do I feel so dug-in? Tell me that. Why do I feel so stuck?”

She thinks about this, lying in his arms. Then she says, “Because you've never had any real trouble. You're just bored. Boredom is easy to fix with any imagination.” It comes out quickly and sounds critical. “Sorry,” she says.

“Don't be sorry. I think you might be right. Tell me, though, how does that feel?”

“You mean real trouble?”

“Yes.”

“Like you are an animal that is being hunted,” she says. “Like you've been run to ground.”

He nods in the darkness, considering this. “Like someone is going to kill you?”

“Killing is one possibility. There are others.”

“Did you ever worry he would kill you?”

“No.”

“Did you think he might hurt you?”

“No,” she says, lying.

1978

E
arly on, when Craig first came to live with them, she wondered whether he was having sex with her mother. She said nothing about this—not to Dan, not to anyone. She chased away the thought but it came back, parking itself inside her head.

June was plump and motherly. These were traits that she'd heard Craig speak against many times. He'd once told Bobbie that being a mother ruined a woman's vagina for sex, that it was too stretched to be of much use. This had disturbed her because she could not imagine a happy marriage between a man with his perfectly intact body and a woman whose weary sexual parts could no longer satisfy him after their firstborn, but now she hoped it meant he'd leave her mother alone.

June was also overweight and Craig insisted upon women with slender torsos and long legs. Svelte, nubile. He spoke these words as though they lent sophistication to his observations, pronouncing the word
nubile
in a lurid way. He felt himself to be a better judge of the female form than others. He talked about the shape of a woman's ass in the same manner that a wine connoisseur might speak of bouquet or finish. There were heart-shaped butts (good) and beetle butts (bad). He had
standards
. He had
minimum conditions
.

What Bobbie discovered eventually was that Craig's conditions were difficult to meet if a woman were even halfway through her teenage years. Craig held in high esteem the shape she'd had as a thirteen-year-old.
That was perfect
, he'd told her, remembering the year he'd met her, before they'd begun having sex.
Though you are still good now
, he'd admitted, sitting on the mattress and turning her around slowly, judging her from all sides. He wanted her hips to be confined and neat. They could not be so big that they were
breeder's hips
. He needed the stomach to be taut and smooth,
like the inside of the arm
. Hair needed to have gloss and be long (always long) and straight and flowing; the face should be bland and simple, the cookie-cutter face of a doll. She'd worried about this, believing she only had a few good years before becoming tainted by her condition, that of being female, of being somehow reduced because she could no longer look like a child and have the shape of a child.

For all her fretting over these past matters—Craig's requirements, his carping and exactitude regarding which women were fuckable and which were unfuckable—she was not able to feel any comfort from her mother's failure to come up to Craig's “standards.” Despite everything he'd said about women with round figures and wobbly bellies and character-filled faces no longer wrapped in the pleasant vanilla beauty of youth, he was doing something with her mother she could not bring herself to imagine. At night, in the house now decorated with Thanksgiving colors, as the year came closer to an end, she'd hear the noises—not those from her mother but those from him. He would groan and call out and she knew that he did this on purpose, not out of pleasure but to show her that he had won. Her mother was his, as she was his.

SHE PREPARED HER
escape. She folded two pairs of jeans into a duffel bag, added a week's worth of underwear, several shirts and sweaters. She tucked into her bag a little porcelain set of bears her mother had once given her, a father bear, mother bear, and baby bear glued onto a piece of gold cardboard and protected by clear plastic. It seemed too large a decision and not really her own to make—whether she would leave on this day or that—so she prepared almost daily for what she knew would happen soon. She put in one thing—a book, a bracelet, a bathing suit—then took out another, changed her mind about a sweater, added heavy socks. She removed the bears (in case they became broken during transit), then put them back (in case they became lost over time in the house). Thought about which hairbrush, what shoes.

She lay awake at night, every night the same, a sea of worry rising with the moon. She could hear her mother. She could hear Craig. During the day she was distracted, her brain zipping along at so great a speed that none of her thoughts were useful. There were times when the world seemed clouded, as during certain evenings in summer when a combination of hot dust and dying light dulls the atmosphere to a haze. In such a state, she'd taken a math test, suddenly forgetting the formula for the area of a trapezium and what to do with an exponent when dividing. She hadn't even attempted the word problems:
If a train leaves St. Louis at 10:06, traveling at 82 mph…
And when she came out of the exam, pressing her fingers to her temples and holding them there, she'd looked down the long corridor of the school hall and seen her classmates as though from behind a distorting glass. She'd thought then—she really had—that she had to leave, to run away, that tonight might be the night. Because some part of her had already gone.

Who could she tell about the sex and the sounds and the whole preposterous existence? She asked herself this question all the time. She might be able to tell a stranger, but then the stranger would tell someone she knew, and probably tell her mother. So she told no one, not even Dan. She kept the duffel bag hidden behind a board in her bedroom wall. Stuck into the trunk of a tree in her front yard was the money. She had everything ready.

In her night table were biographies she'd borrowed from the library, and she thought she had to return these books before she left. Meanwhile, she read how Helen Keller brushed her fingers over paper and learned to read, how a young Winston Churchill escaped capture by soldiers by climbing a high wall, then crossed the desert with a pistol and a pair of sturdy shoes. What interested her was how you get from here to there, how one moved across the rough and dangerous landscape of life to higher ground. What do you take with you, she wanted to ask, and what do you leave behind? And when—this is what she wanted to know—when do you do the actual leaving?

AND THEN ONE DAY
she had her answer. She came home from school on a stormy afternoon and Craig was waiting for her. As she approached the front step, he pushed the door open and there he was, standing on the oval rug in the hall, leaning on his crutches, his body filling the entrance. She felt for the first time that the house belonged to him and that she was entering his home. He pulled her indoors with a quick jerk, his face alive with anger. She flew forward, dropping her books on the rug.

“You really did fucking lose it, didn't you?” he said. His body arched away. He was standing at his full height, his bad leg angled to the side, balancing his weight against the door and on the crutch beneath his arm.

“I don't know what you're talking about.” She was trying to pick up her notebook without letting all the papers fall loose of the three-ring binder that had opened.

“The money,” he said, his face suddenly inches from her own. “I've torn this place apart and it isn't here! You really did lose it, didn't you?”

“I don't—I don't know what—”

“Where is it? If you haven't lost it, tell me where the hell it is.”

“Don't you remember? I gave it to you! I gave you it all!”

He breathed out a heavy sigh, swung his head toward her like a snake, and said, “Oh Jesus, do I remember! I remember how we tore through the state trying to get the damned money back before my show. I remember having to drive like a stunt man! I remember thinking you were so stupid you'd leave five hundred bucks in a room! I remember all of it, Barbara! You took that money out of the goddamned car and walked off, leaving me for dead! You got the whole grand! You've hidden it somewhere, so where the hell is it?”

The contents of the hall closet were strewn across the wooden floor. Jackets, windbreakers, dusty shoes, a tangle of scarves, a long-outgrown winter coat. She looked into the living room and saw the chaos there, too, evidence of Craig's searching. Drawers hung open, papers her mother kept in a bureau scattered across the floor, books pulled from the shelves, their pages thumbed through in case she'd placed the bills inside.

She could imagine the kitchen, where the contents of the messy cupboards would be in heaps on the countertops, and where every cereal box and coffee can would have been scrutinized. Had he toppled the linen closet, searching for the money inside all their clean sheets? Had he turned over the mattresses? Gone through all her clothes?

“What's the matter, Barbara? Can't you remember where you put it?”

He tapped her head hard with his finger and she suddenly remembered a film he'd had her watch starring Marlon Brando and a bewildered young actress. Brando's character had hit the girl with the heel of a shoe while she was naked in a bath.
I wouldn't do that to you
, Craig had said as she gazed wretchedly at the film. He was making a point about his gentleness.
I wouldn't rap your skull with a shoe.
Years later, she would remember
Last Tango in Paris
all over again, but for different reasons. She would wonder what had been wrong in the 1970s that such a film could have existed, with Maria Schneider being only nineteen in real life. With Brando being deep into his forties. Why did the public not protest such a thing? It had been a terrible time, the '70s. At least a terrible time for girls like her.

“Is this how you treat me?” Craig was saying. “Stealing? Does it never occur to you, Barbara, that
you
broke up with
me
. You never had to say it, but I felt it. I felt it here!” He slammed his fist across his chest. “I felt it right here!” he said again, and hit himself harder. “You broke up with me, left me for dead, and now you just sit there and smile!”

“I'm not smiling.”

He grabbed her arm and squeezed. “Get my money and we'll be friends, okay? Sound like a deal? We'll be pals.”

“Let go of me.”

“I'll let go of you all right! You don't mean a thing to me!”

He squeezed her arm harder. Then he suddenly dropped his hold.

She rushed up to her room, praying he wouldn't follow. She began to put away all the clothes strewn on the floor from his searching, and her mattress and sheets and jewelry box and all the things he'd rifled through in her closet. She was shaking, not with fear as much as with adrenaline. She pushed socks into drawers, books into shelves. She thought,
Forget it, I am going.

It was decided. She'd leave all this crap behind and get gone.

And then, there he was again, standing in the doorway. When she turned to look, he came toward her, leaning on his crutches. She noticed once again how tall he was and how much space he took up and how his shirt sleeves never fit, pulling up before meeting his big wrists.

He swung on his crutches, crossing the room. The naked half of his face with its absent eye loomed a foot above her. The expressionless landscape of his face made it difficult for her to read.

“I'm feeling like we need to sort things between us.” He spoke calmly, slowly. “We used to be so close.”

She felt the blood rising to her neck, then her throat, now her face.

“I got a present for you,” he said.

She thought how nobody was home; nobody would be home soon; nobody was outside; nobody would hear.

“What's the matter, don't you want a present? It's a peace gesture.”

She was holding a pair of jeans she'd intended to change into. She stood still, clutching the jeans to her chest. He guided her wrist to one side and lifted them away. She felt a flutter of panic. Behind him, through the open door, was the narrow hall and a flight of steps. She saw that he was looking down the V-neck of her blouse, with its plastic snap buttons and the western design that was in style at her school. She thought she might be able to get out of the bedroom and downstairs. She could rush out the door and from there keep running. She wished she'd hidden the duffel bag she'd so carefully packed somewhere outside under a tarp instead of in her bedroom. She wished she'd left the night before.

She gauged that his newly mended arm could not yet take too much pressure; she judged the angle of his stance and saw he was still favoring his right leg, too. He could not get quickly down the chipped brick steps to the yard, then over the clumpy, wet ground. If she were to run, he would not catch her. But she wouldn't run, and they both knew that.

“Don't you want the present?” he said again. He was breathing near her. The injury to his face had done something to his sinuses. She could hear the air moving through his nostrils and the gentle rumbling inside that reminded her of an animal's slow, deep respiration. Where the eye had been was the dark hole she'd grown used to, loose skin. Nerve damage meant that the entire side of his face had eroded inward a fraction of an inch.

“Open your hands,” he said to her now. “Close your eyes and open your hands.”

She put her hands out, shivering. He stared hard at her breasts and she angled her elbow across her chest.

“Close your eyes,” he said again.

She could tell by the sound of the wind and the sudden drop in the house's temperature that the front door had been left open. She could run straight through, she thought, but she couldn't imagine how to get around him now that he was so close. And so she stood still. Then, finally, she fluttered her eyes closed and wondered if he would touch her breasts and that would be her “present.”

To her surprise, she felt the weight of a little box in her palm. A gust of wind howled through the hall downstairs. She heard Craig make a sound like a grunt and realized he was laughing.

She opened her eyes. The box was an egg carton, split down the middle so it was now a half-dozen box. On the top, Craig had drawn on the cardboard in ballpoint pen a picture of a little ribbon and bow.

“Open it,” he said, as though talking about a jewelry box with a ring inside.

She slid her thumb to the cardboard tab to lift the lid. It seemed to her that there really were eggs inside; she felt the weight of them in the hollows of the box, and she wondered if they were chocolate eggs and how he'd have managed to find chocolate eggs in November.