What followed was something she tried afterward to repress, and she had no clear recollection of it, the natural sequence of events, but of only an incoherent kaleidoscope of ugly and terrifying scenes. She found herself trapped inside a hard perimeter of danger, a circle of cold faces set in lines of revulsion — her father’s, her mother’s, her brother Carl’s. Beyond them, in the darkness beyond the perimeter, were all the vicariously aggrieved and violated, and she knew for the first time in her life the loneliness and terror of the one who was different in a way that was unacceptable, the person apart. Her isolation, for a while, was actually physical. In her room, quarantined, she watched from her window the assumption of spring by earth, the progress of green growth and the early rain and the assaults of gusty wind, and she thought of Alison and wanted Alison and wondered when, if ever, she would see Alison again.
In time, of course, she was restored to the forms of normalcy, to the associations and relative freedom of school, but she was now disturbed and uncertain in relationships she had formerly sustained with ease, and though she was aware that the secret of her transgression was guarded by a few, she could not lose her sense of separation, of acceptance irrevocably repudiated, and she felt rejection in every contact. This feeling did not begin and end at the door of her home. She felt it most of all in her own family, in inverse ratio to their stiff efforts to conceal it, and after a while she actually began to pity them in their confusion and shock, their utter inability to understand or accept what had happened. Not so much to her, really, as to them. The terrible threat to their respectability.
She saw Alison, and there was nothing altered, in spite of disaster and disgrace, in the way she felt about the other girl, or in the degree of her longing. She wanted to speak to her and to touch her and to receive the assuring commitment of the small smile, but this was now impossible. She wondered if Alison had suffered and was unhappy and above all if she was angry because of the note. She could not bear the thought of Alison’s being angry. Of the multitude of threats in the strange and transformed world, this was the one that caused her, when she considered it, the greatest despair. Looking to Alison for reassurance, for the slightest sign in passing, she received nothing, no smile, no gesture, no word dropped softly. The truth was, Alison seemed entirely unaware of her, as if there had never been between them a discovery or a dedication or any feeling whatever.
The year aged and spring passed and school closed, and after the closing of school, with even the brief sight of Alison in passing now denied her, Lisa could bear the separation no longer. She began to walk by herself, when she could get away, along the streets near Alison’s home, and once she saw the other girl with her father, and several times with her mother, and at last, as she had been hoping, alone. They were on opposite sides of the street at the time, and Lisa, crossing over, felt in the space of the crossing a mounting and hurting happiness that reduced to insignificance all that had happened because of Alison or might ever happen because of her later. “Alison,” she said.
Alison stopped and turned. It was not the small smile she displayed, however, but the antithetic scowl. “What do you want?-”
“I just want to talk with you, Alison. I’ve been so lonely for you.”
“Have you? Well, you’d better get used to it, I guess, because you’ll be lonely for me for a long time as far as I’m concerned.”
“Haven’t you missed me? Aren’t you glad to see me?”
“No. I wish I wasn’t seeing you now, and I hope I never see you again.”
“Why? Why, Alison?”
“Because you’re a fool, that’s why.”
“Because of the note?”
“Yes, because of the note. Only a fool would have been so careless.”
“I’m sorry. I admit it was careless.”
“Well, I should think sol You damn near ruined me.”
“I said I was sorry, Alison. Please don’t be angry.”
“Of course I’m angry. Do you understand what I’ve been through? Do you think I like being looked at as if I were filthy or something? Do you think I enjoy being watched all the time and hardly ever allowed to go anywhere alone? If I were even seen talking with you, I’d be in trouble all over again.”
“Does it matter so much? It doesn’t to me. I’d be in trouble too, but it doesn’t matter at all if only you won’t be angry and we can be friends again.”
“Are you crazy? It’s impossible.”
“Please, Alison. It’s all been so terrible, and no one understands anything about it. How it really was, I mean. I’ll kill myself if you won’t be friends.”
“Oh, don’t be so stupid.”
“I will. I swear I will.”
“Well, go ahead and kill yourself, then. I’m sure I’d be better off if you did.”
“Don’t talk like that. Please don’t.”
In the urgency of her supplication, Lisa moved forward and lifted a hand, and Alison backed away. Lisa’s intensity frightened her a little, and she wondered uneasily if the crazy little fool were actually capable of killing herself after all. She hadn’t really thought so, and that’s why she had spoken so brutally, but she wouldn’t actually want anything like that to happen, because she would surely be implicated herself, under the circumstances, and would have to suffer for it one way or another.
“Don’t touch me,” she said.
“I won’t hurt you, Alison. I only want you to be kind to me again.”
“Go away.”
“Please, Alison.”
“Go away, I tell you. If you don’t go away and leave me alone, I’ll tell my father that you molested me. Then you’ll really be in trouble.”
Turning abruptly, Alison walked back the way she hid come, the long legs that had been strong and brown in the late summer sun carrying her away swiftly. For a moment Lisa was on the point of running after her, but the desperate moment passed and was gone, the moment and Alison gone together and for good, and she stood there fixed and trembling, the incredibly beautiful name dying in her throat with an ugly strangled sound.
So it ended. So it died on a sidewalk with a whimper. Lisa carried the corpse of it home inside her and sat over it in her room. She considered dying herself, how it might best be done, but what she wanted was merely to die and not to kill herself, which are different things, and so she continued to live and entered a long armistice, precariously balanced between this way to go and that way, the way before Alison and the way Alison had shown her, and it could have been in that time, depending upon circumstances, either of the ways.
Then there was one summer, a short while one summer, when she was at a certain lake resort on vacation with her family, and there was a girl there she had come to know, and something had started and grown between them and had eventually ended in the way things end that are a part of a summer and are not expected to survive it. Afterward it had not been thought of much or remembered long, except as an infrequent associate of some subsequent incident, and even yet, even after the second overt time, there was still the other way available, though it had become, because of the summer at the lake, just so much less likely.
Depression became an uncontrollable factor in her life. Whereas it had previously come infrequently with a discernible logic, the specific result of causes that could be isolated and examined, it now came without apparent reason, just came and remained for longer and longer periods, was often just there waiting for her when she awoke in the morning, or came to her in the middle of the night, or while she was going about her affairs in the course of the day. Because of this, she deliberately took an overdose of barbiturates when she was twenty-one, but she did not die and was sent by her frightened parents to a psychiatrist who learned a great deal about her but did very little for her. This happened in her third year in Midland City College, and in her fourth and last year there was an associate professor in the Department of Foreign Languages. The associate professor was a young woman named Jeanne Marot who spoke with a French accent and had actually been born and educated in France. She was quite attractive in a sleek, angular way, like a clothes model in an expensive fashion magazine, and she was, besides, as it developed, quite aggressive when she was reasonably certain of the response to her aggression, and it seemed for a while that she was the answer to everything, but of course she was not. This was perfectly apparent after a few months, and, anyhow, the affair had become by then extremely precarious and threatening.