Gift of the Golden Mountain (20 page)

The kind of silence that cannot be broken began to grow between them; Karin could not talk.

     The lethargy set in on Tuesday. Karin had work to do but she could not bring herself to begin. She went to a lecture on Hieronymus Bosch and the fifteenth-century Dutch painters but she might as well not have, for all that she heard. On Wednesday she could scarcely get out of bed, and when she did she stood looking at the pile of clothes on the floor, trying to decide what to put on.

     May found her there. "I can't believe this." She tried to hide her alarm by joking, "Miss Neat has finally succumbed to filing her clothes on the floor like the rest of us." When Karin did not
answer, May said, gently, "K, it's obvious you are both distressed and depressed. I think it has to do with whatever happened last Sunday night, with Hayes's brother. Can we talk about it?"

     "I can't," Karin said in a small, miserable voice.

     That week May did what work she could do at home to be close to Karin. Sam had made himself scarce. He mowed the lawn and mended a fence on Wednesday, but made no move to come into the house. On Thursday he came to the door to tell her he would be in San Francisco for a few days. "Photographing hippies," he said, "around the Haight-Ashbury." May was relieved.

"My mother made me a dress out of material like this," Karin said, fingering the yellow and orange flowered voile in her lap.

     May had been lying on her stomach on the living room floor, reading, but now she turned on her side and looked at Karin, sitting primly on the sofa. "Are you going to make that dress today after all?" she asked carefully.

     Karin went on, as if she had not heard, "Mother used to starch it very stiff, and iron it just right so that I could wear it to Sunday school. It had a ribbon for a belt, a green ribbon that matched the leaves on the flowers." She ran her fingers over the material as she talked, and May saw that her nails were bitten below the quick and had been bleeding.

     "There was some material left over," Karin went on, "and she made a little collar for herself, to go on one of the brown dresses she always wore. Housedresses, they called them. Cotton and starched, too. But he wouldn't let her wear it, he said it was too frivolous for a grown woman, so she had to take the collar off."

     May looked searchingly at Karin. Finally she said, "That's the most you've ever told me about your mother and father."

     Karin looked at her, and her eyes were filled with hurt.

     May sat up, feeling a need to be upright.

     Tears began to slip down Karin's face. She used a knotted tissue to wipe her nose. May rose on her knees to reach for a box from the end table and handed her a fresh tissue.

     Karin sighed and shifted; her eyes were red now, but the stunned look of the preceding days had given way to a kind of panic. She choked out the next words: "My father said I was a whore, and sometimes I think he is right."

     May moved closer and wrapped her arms around Karin's legs, as if to hold her up. Then May took a deep breath and asked, "Why would he say that, K?"

     Karin shook her head violently; she was sobbing now, soft wet sobs that shook her body and caused her voice to come out in short swallowed gulps.

     "Tell me, K, please."

     "Oh God," Karin started, gathering momentum, "oh God," and it came tumbling out then, in no order at all: "I was just a little girl, but I developed early—breasts, pubic hair, hips. And men started looking at me—the way Andy did at Sam's, their eyes running all over me, at the store and at church. We'd come home and be in the parlor, the three of us, and my father would be reading the Bible, and the message was always the same. I was tempting those men with my wantonness, I was causing them to lust after me. From the time I was twelve, I had to sit in our parlor and listen to my Father ask forgiveness for my sins. I didn't know what they were—I was never allowed to go out, not even to school parties. They were very strict with me. They knew where I was every minute of the day, my mother knew I couldn't be doing anything wrong . . . but he was convinced that I would if I could. The prayers got longer and more violent, and more unforgiving until one day I left. I ran away. I went to the only person who had been kind to me, a teacher in our high school. A sweet, ineffectual little man . . . he had lived with his mother all his life, in a little house on Barton Street. She died the year before this happened. He may have been gay, I don't know—I don't remember him ever being close to anyone except his mother.
Anyway, I asked if I could stay with him and as soon as I said it, I could see he was scared to death. I felt so sorry for him, and I knew I had made a big mistake. I mean, he was a good man but he just wasn't able to help me."

     She paused and blew her nose. "So I went back home, and of course this time Father had actually caught me . . . I mean, I had run away and he was certain I had been with a man. He said I had become an offense in the sight of God, that I flaunted myself. And then he demanded to know who I had been with."

     She stopped to take a deep breath. "I wouldn't tell him, of course. But it wasn't hard to figure out. I didn't have any friends, the only person who paid any attention to me was this teacher. So my father confronted the poor guy, who admitted I'd come to his house and asked to stay with him. That was all my father needed. He went straight to the school board and said my teacher was a sexual deviate, a seducer of young girls, and demanded the man be fired. And they did, they fired him. It was a terrific scandal . . . and my father caused it.

     "I went to our principal and tried to talk to him but he wouldn't listen, he wouldn't even look at me. Nobody would listen to me, nobody wanted to hear what had really happened. Of course everybody in town was talking about it, just not to me. For me, a wall of silence went up and stayed until I left home."

     Karin sat, lost in thought.

     "Your mother," May finally said, "what did she do?"

     Karin sighed. "I used to blame her, at the time I blamed her more than him, really. Because I hated him, but I loved her."

     "She should have left him rather than let him humiliate you like that," May said fiercely. "That's what a mother is supposed to do, protect you."

     "She did the best she could, May, I know that now. My father was a fanatic, a man of God, remember. They were all afraid of him, I think. So much that they allowed him to destroy a teacher's reputation, his career. That was the real sin."

     "Christ!"

     "Yeah, well, He wasn't around when I needed Him either." Karin tried to laugh, but her voice cracked. "Anyway, it was my mother who got me out. Somehow, she found out about all kinds of scholarships, and she and I filled out the applications and sent them off without his ever knowing about it, so when I got the chance to go to Mount Holyoke he couldn't stop me."

     "Did he want to stop you?"

     "Oh yes," Karin shuddered, "oh yes, he did. But it's all over, and I survived better than they did, out on that poor old farm all alone with their Bibles."

     May stood, stretched and then she sat down next to Karin and said, "But what has this to do with now, and with Andy Diehl?"

     Karin bit her lip. "There are times when I do something that brings it all crashing down on me again . . . when it seems as if he must have been right. . ."

     "Your father?" May asked. "Right about what?"

     Karin only grimaced. "Andy took me to this place called Rosie's, but we didn't stay there very long . . . after that he made the rounds of two or three other places, bars. I had something to eat but he didn't, he was just drinking and laughing and joking with people. At first I thought he knew them, but it turned out he didn't. He just seemed to speed up, as if he had to do everything very fast, and the bars kept getting more and more raucous. He was drinking a lot, but he seemed to be holding it and I guess I thought he could handle it, I don't know . . . then he looked at me and said he wanted me. Just like that. He said I had a neon sign bobbing on my breasts that flashed on and off, and it said, 'Climb on, honey, and come if you can.' He was saying all of this very loud, everyone could hear. People were looking at us, May, and they were laughing, and I felt like . . . I felt like what they all thought I was: a quick lay. A whore. He pulled me out, smiling and laughing at them as if they were an audience, and . . . they applauded. They applauded!"

     She was sobbing now in deep, hard gulps and May could only sit beside her and rub her arm, and make soothing sounds to try to comfort her. Twice Karin tried to continue speaking, but couldn't. "Shh," May said, "give yourself some time, K, take it easy now."

     Finally she was calm enough, and insisted on continuing. "In the parking lot he was pulling me toward a dark area, some trees, a picnic table I think . . . he was laughing and singing, and he had his arms around my waist, pulling . . . I started to cry, I think I must have been hysterical because this is a little hazy . . . But then a car was driving straight at us, its lights on and Andy stopped and stared at it. Hayes got out. I think I screamed because I didn't know what was going to happen, but then he was helping me into his car, and saying I was safe and that he was very sorry about what had happened, and I could tell by his voice that he meant it. He wasn't laughing at me . . ." She took a deep breath, as if she were about finished. "He said he'd take me home but he had to talk to Andy for a minute." She blinked, then she said, "I don't know what he said to him, I couldn't hear. I just know that in about five minutes he came back to the car and drove me home."

     "Did he ask you what had happened?"

     "He asked me if Andy had hurt me. I told him no, not really. He said again that he was really sorry it had taken him so long to find us—I guess he went to every bar he could think of. And he asked if there was anything he could do. That's about all."

     "K," May said carefully, "you know it's not true—what your father said."

     "You mean about my being a whore? Yes, I know it isn't true. But knowing doesn't keep you from feeling, sometimes."

     "Those drunken Neanderthals in the bar—you can't possibly. . ."

     Karin spoke sharply. "What I can't possibly do is erase a painful, horrible memory. That's what I can't do. Of course I know
it was my father's problem, of course I know the kind of people who sit around bars getting blind drunk aren't likely to have any sensibilities. But when it happens to you . . . when people look at you like you're a piece of meat. Yes! And they do sometimes, May, you know they do. Don't you remember at school, when some of the girls in the dorm got mad at us—and somebody pinned up that nasty cartoon with you as a 'Chinese Dragon Lady,' and me as 'The Slut'?"

     "I remember," May said, wincing.

     "Sure you remember," Karin said firmly, "you went tearing into the dean's office, demanding to know who had access to your personal file, because you didn't think anybody but me knew about your Chinese background."

     "I remember," May said, as if she didn't need to be reminded. Then she added, "It's strange, isn't it, how intensely you can feel about something that happened when you were so young? I guess Sam's right . . . about my not wanting to acknowledge that part of me that is Chinese."

     "Your mother didn't acknowledge you, so you won't acknowledge her . . . or that part of you that is her."

     "Psych 100, Introduction to . . ." May said, wryly.

     "Are you ready for confession number two?" Karin asked, trying to manage a smile. "When I've slept with men I've cared about . . . guys I wanted to be with . . . it was never . . . I have never . . . I can't feel anything."

     May stared at her, aghast. "You mean you've never had an orgasm?"

     Karin shook her head.

     "But it shouldn't be that way," May told her. "Sex is something you share . . . I thought you of all people . . . We've talked about it a million times and you always made me think . . ."

     "I faked it," Karin confessed, grinning.