Anywhere But Here (58 page)

I heard her settle into bed. “Well, at least it was a good dinner,” she said through the wall. “And he’ll take us out to breakfast on Sunday.”

The weekend they went to Solvang, my mother seemed very grown up. She snapped the buckles of her suitcase shut when she heard his car in the alley. She seemed older. She wore a suit, with her hair pinned up neatly in a bun.

“Here,” she said, pressing a twenty-dollar bill in my hand and closing my fingers around it. “That’s for food. Call Leslie and go out.” When she opened the sliding glass door and Jack was there, we both felt disappointed. He stood, hands at his sides, wearing a plaid jacket and a white turtleneck sweater. Every time, we couldn’t imagine beforehand how ugly he really was.

“All set,” he said, clicking his heels together.

“I’ll try to get you a present,” she whispered. When she hugged me good-bye, for some reason I didn’t know, I started crying. I wetted my mother’s collar.

“Sshhh,” she said, kissing me next to the eye. “I’ll be back on Sunday.”

They both looked slow and proper getting into the car. He lifted the trunk and put in the suitcase and opened her door first. She sat in the passenger seat and folded her hands. I threw myself on the couch and pulled up the mohair blanket. And it was me who usually never cried.

The next morning, Saturday, Peter Keller called me on the telephone from the front house. “I want to kiss your lips,” he said.

Peter Keller was a year younger and we rode to school in the same carpool. He wasn’t the kissing type.

“What for?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, not if you can’t think of a better reason than that,” I said and hung up.

An hour later, he called back.

“I thought of another reason. I’m wild about your warm lips and I want to squeeze you tight.” I heard pages moving, but it didn’t sound like a joke.

“Yeah?” I was eating a carton of ice cream from the freezer. My mother had stocked up before she left.

“I want to part your lips with my tongue.”

“Yeah?” I dragged the phone to the couch and lay down. “And then what?”

“Can I come over now?”

“Sure,” I said. I didn’t even think of changing my T-shirt, which was spattered with chocolate ice cream. When I came home from school every day, I took my good jeans off and hung them up in the closet. Peter was one of the kids I played with in my old clothes. If another friend of mine called on the telephone, I’d get rid of him fast. I didn’t feel bad about it. He was a grade lower.

When he came to our sliding glass doors, he looked the same as always, his hair capping his face. But he squinted and his hands were opening and closing at his sides.

“So?” I said.

“Maybe we should go out some night?”

“Go out some night? What about what you were saying on the phone? Where did you learn that?”

“From a book,” he admitted.

“No,” I said. “We’re not going to go out some night. Come in. Lie down over there and undress.”

I hadn’t planned anything, I was making it up as I went along. I felt taller and powerful, like a teacher, reaching up to the top of a clean blackboard.

“All right,” he said. He untied a sneaker and held it in his hand. “Don’t you want to talk first? It’s not even dark out,” he said, looking at the doors.

I shook my head. It was a spring day. The wind moved in the tops of the palm trees outside. No one was around. Peter undressed, holding his shirt and pants balled up in his hands, as if he were afraid I was going to take them. His arms hung pitifully at his sides.

“Aren’t you going to take yours off, too?”

His underwear looked white and new as a child’s. One of the things that amazed us when we’d cleaned the big house was the Kellers’ surplus. They all kept drawers of new underwear, some in the packages, unopened. In the bathroom closets, there were rows of soaps and shampoo, more than one of everything.

“You first,” I said.

He sat down on the old blue and red striped couch and pulled off his underwear. Guys are so shy, I was thinking.

“Okay,” he said, looking up at me. He took in a breath and held it. He seemed scared, as if I would hurt him. He was very thin and almost hairless. He seemed frightened, like a woman.

I kicked my tennis shoes off with my heels.

“Lie down,” I said.

I sat next to him on the couch. “Okay, you can kiss me, but
not my face.” He fumbled, trying to take my shirt off, so I stood up and pulled it over my head. I unzipped my jeans and dropped them on the floor. Then I sat on top of him.

He closed his eyes but I didn’t. I looked around, out the sliding glass doors, while the veins in his neck rose up like a map. The pinball machine sparkled, metal and glass.

“Have you ever done this before?” he asked.

I hadn’t. I hadn’t even thought of it. Not even with Daniel Swan, whom I loved. We tickled the backs of each other’s arms and I thought of wearing a soft white sweater and Daniel kissing me once on each eye. But I wasn’t going to tell Peter Keller.

With Peter, it was different. Touching him was like touching myself. I never thought about him. It was broad daylight.

He sat up, facing me, and took my hand. He looked at me as if this were something big in both of our lives. “Lie back down,” I said, pushing his shoulders. It was amazing the way he sunk back. You don’t think you can do that to another person.

The air didn’t move. I made a ring of my first finger and thumb and took him in my hand. It felt soft, the softest skin I ever touched. I watched. His hands fluttered by his sides. In the slits of his eyes, all I could see was white. He had no anger in him.

I don’t know how I knew what to do but I did.

I put him inside me. His eyebrows pushed together as if he was working hard. A sound escaped from him. His face looked pure as something new. I felt it, he felt it. Then he started to move, lifting his hands to my waist.

“Lie still,” I said. “I’ll do it.” Peter’s dog rattled the metal garbage cans against the wall outside. I looked down; my own leg, the way it tilted, seemed different, separate from my body.

So this is what it is, I thought, not much. I pulled up to my knees for a second. There was a spit of blood on my leg. At the sight of it, I stopped.

“What’s wrong?” Peter asked. “Did it hurt?” His fingers fluttered near my face.

“No,” I said, crushing his ten fingers in my two hands and starting again. “No.”

His face seemed limp on his neck. It would be so easy to kill
another person, I was thinking. You’d just reach down. People just walk up and give themselves away to you.

All of a sudden I started moving and I was going faster and faster and I closed my eyes and then, I wasn’t doing it anymore, he was holding my waist and I was afraid, so I tried to be still. I hung on to his shoulders like the edge of something and clung to one word, trying to keep it, quiet. Then, just as sudden, it was still again. And slow. I opened my eyes. My feet flickered the way fishtails sometimes beat a few last moments after they’re dead. It was like falling. My arches and my knees ached and I felt light and tired, but I didn’t want Peter to know anything.

Then I got up and ran outside to the pool. “Hey,” he yelled and started to laugh. “Hey.” And then he was next to me in the pool, his arms around me underwater.

“I love you, Ann,” he said.

He looked at me, waiting. Flat brown leaves floated on the surface of the pool, beginning to disintegrate. The water below felt thick and filmy. I lifted an arm up to the air and it was shiny, as if in a sheer rubber glove.

“I’m taking a shower,” I said. All of a sudden, I climbed out and ran into the backhouse. I latched the flimsy lock on the sliding glass doors. A minute later, when he knocked, I wouldn’t answer. I thought of him watching me as I ran, naked, my breasts and thighs jiggling, him seeing that and it making him smile.

But he was naked, too. He must have run through his own yard and somehow snuck back into the big house.

My mother came home that same night. A door slammed, she ran in and flipped the light on in my room. She unlatched her suitcase and started unpacking right there, on my floor.

“I just couldn’t do it.” She stared at her open suitcase, shaking her head. “I couldn’t touch him. I let him kiss me and he swished his tongue around in my mouth and I just couldn’t. I practically gagged.” She walked to my bed and looked down at me. “I’m sorry, Honey. Even for you, I couldn’t do it. We slept in the same bed last night and he’d reach over and touch my side and I’d just cringe. I can’t stand that man.”

She walked to the bathroom and brushed her teeth. Then, she lifted a purple sundress from her suitcase with two fingers. “Well, here. I brought you a present. I went through a lot to get you this so you better like it. Here. Try it on.”

I was thinking of the weak, pale folds of skin, like rippled batter, under Jack Irwin’s belly. I thought of his mouth, rolling r’s against her ear.

“I don’t like it,” I said. “I don’t want it.” I really didn’t. It had a low back and frills. I looked at the dress and hated it.

My mother examined the hem herself. After all she’d said, she seemed surprised and hurt that I didn’t like the dress. “I picked it out. I think it’s adorable. Try it on. You’ll see how cute it hangs.”

I grabbed it and went in the bathroom to change. When I came out, she touched my bare back, inside the long U of the dress.

“Oh, it’s adorable. Go look at yourself. It couldn’t be cuter, Honey.” She sighed. “Well, at least we’ve got that. And it is cute, Ann, it really is.”

My mother seemed to relax then, as if the dress had been worth it, after all.

That night I couldn’t fall asleep again. I got up, it must have been two or three in the morning, took the dress from my closet, balled it in my hands and crammed it down the garbage can in our back alley. It was scary and peaceful out there, dark, with a low wind, moving the palms, making them spill small hard dates on the pavement. The next morning I felt settled and pleased when I heard the clatter of garbage trucks in my sleep. But it was Sunday. The only sounds I could have heard were church bells.

I’d invited Leslie over because I thought my mother would still be gone. Finally she left to drive to the convalescent home. Leslie had never seen our house. She came to the front; I sat, waiting on the curb, and led her through the gate, past the courts, to the backhouse. I’d thought all morning of how I could make it seem the big house was ours.

I did that whenever people dropped me off. They just dropped me outside the big house and I dallied by the fountain and then
walked around the block. Mrs. Keller asked that I not use the front gate. We were supposed to walk in from the alley.

Inside the backhouse, I’d shut all the doors, so you could only see the big room. We sat on the old red and blue striped couch, sipping Cokes. I looked at the white closed doors. It seemed to me there could have been long hallways, terraces, dens and bedrooms following off behind them in every direction. I hoped that was what Leslie imagined.

She stared at the pinball machine. “Does it work?” she said.

I nodded.

“Is it just you and your mom, here?”

“I have two brothers,” I said. I gestured with my arm up at the closed doors, indicating their rooms, their wings. “But they’re at camp.” It was April, but I didn’t remember that until later.

“Oh,” Leslie said.

We played pinball three or four times. I was anxious for Leslie to go, because I hadn’t told her my mother had come home. I didn’t know how to explain it, and I was afraid she’d walk in and open the doors. Especially now that I’d said that about brothers. Finally, Leslie said, “Since your mom’s not home, you want to eat dinner at my house tonight?”

I shrugged. “Sure.” I liked Leslie’s house. It was pink brick with ivy. Any time of the day, when you walked in, there was a hum of quiet activity somewhere behind doors. Once in the afternoon, while she was changing to tennis clothes, I’d stood and stared at the dining room table, the six chairs.

They were brown wooden chairs. There was something permanent, meant, about their placement, the way the trees had seemed to me, back home. Every day, these chairs waited, absorbing light all afternoon, while in the kitchen, soft clicks and knocks of bowls and the whirring of beaters progressed, the evening meal in preparation. I stared at the back of one chair. It seemed the security of a whole childhood. It stayed there, all day, the wood worn and glossed like a held chestnut.

When Leslie had come down, swinging her racket in the still air, I’d been startled. “I like your chairs,” I said.

She shrugged. “These?” She squinted, as if looking at her dining
room table and chairs for the first time. A bowl of peaches sat in the center of the table. “You always love everything so much,” she said.

That afternoon, I didn’t leave my mother a note or anything. We ran up the alley and through the back gate to Leslie’s house, over her lawn, into the kitchen door, where she shouted, “Rosario, I’m ho-ome and Ann is staying for dinner.”

Later, I remembered: we’d walked around our pool to the alley gate. Leslie had seen our house from the outside, she must have known how small it was.

It got worse with Peter and me. We did it all the time, always sneaking off. I got meaner and meaner. He did everything I told him. Sometimes he just rubbed me. I would turn over on my stomach and he’d rub my legs.

My mother and I were invited to more dinner parties at the Kellers’ and for Easter and Christmas and Thanksgiving. My mother started calling Mr. Keller Bert. After that, she always left the rent check on their hall table by the first of every month.

In the big kitchen, afternoons with Peter, I felt free to eat. I ate and ate and ate. Everything I wanted.

And Peter got money from his father to take me to restaurants. Peter’s father liked me, Nan Keller didn’t. But we rode in taxis to expensive restaurants where I could order anything I wanted. I picked the most expensive thing and two desserts. Peter didn’t like desserts, so it looked as if we were each having one. I ate the cake in front of me first and then we switched plates. I worried more about what the waiter would see than what Peter would think of me.