My mother established accounts with our four favorite food places and never made another meal. I didn’t tell her I’d learned to cook. She offered to send me anywhere for the summer — to sail in the Caribbean, to slop pigs and make jewelry in Vermont, to study architecture in Venice. I got a job at the Great Neck Public Library and boxed old magazines and stole old books. Mr. Stone didn’t call me.
In the fall I was in high school. In the middle of October I walked over to the junior high to visit Mr. Stone. I brought Tony DiMusio, who went with me everywhere for two months, until we exhausted ourselves dry-humping and made the mistake of having a conversation. I wanted to bump into Danny or Benjie in town and remind them of what a great babysitter I was, but I never saw them, although I looked in the comic book store and near the parks. Rachel got skinny again and we fell out over Eddie Sachs, who was supposed to be her boyfriend but asked me over to his basement when she was in Bermuda with her parents. I said yes and he told her what we did and she told me she would never forgive me even though it was only one time. When they passed me in the halls, they put their arms around each other and their hands in each other’s pockets and looked through me.
I studied a little, went on hamburger, cottage cheese, and hot water diets so my ribs would show under my leotards, and stole money from my mother. I bought pot from Eddie Sachs’ brother and smoked it under the football bleachers. It made me sleepy and compliant, and I stopped when I woke up in the dusk with my head on a rock and someone’s hand under my shirt. My father moved to Ohio for six months and came back. He said Cleveland was not the West and he was still working on getting out to the wide open spaces. I told him I might not go to college.
He said, “You do what you want to do. If you start school before you’re twenty, I promise you I’ll have enough money. Not after that.” He drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. “I got to have a life, too, Lizzie.”
“I know,” I said.
I made some cross-hatching at the top of my thigh, and it hurt like hell and looked terrible. I didn’t do it again. I drank vodka and Hawaiian Punch with Eddie Sachs’ brother in their basement. I think that’s all I did the first year of high school.
Mr. Stone wrote to me in June, inviting me to make tapes of Treasure Island for his junior high literacy project. I threw out the letter.
“I’m going to be really busy next year,” I said when he called.
“Please. I can’t do it without you.”
“I don’t know.”
“Elizabeth, don’t make me beg,” he said.
Fare Thee Well
I lay on my back in the dark, Max’s head resting on my bare stomach.
He said he was sorry, he meant to wait until I finished high school, but he couldn’t. We always did it that way, me naked, him fully dressed, after the first time, Columbus Day my junior year. Greta and the boys were at a conference for gifted children. Max made me dinner at his house when my mother thought I was with Rachel, and he kissed me on the mouth when I went to put away the salad. The refrigerator door curved out cold behind me, and Max curved in, smelling just like he did when I was in ninth grade. I saw it coming, the hairy, fishlike opening, and I closed my eyes. The feel of his mouth wasn’t terrible — a soft bathing of Scotch from his tongue, his lips two slick bars of pressure.
“If you need to say no, say no,” he said. He was nervous.
I didn’t say anything. What would no get me?
He put his hand on my zipper and waited.
“No?” he said.
All right. “No.”
“Your no is very sexy. You know that.”
That helped. I leaned back to make him come closer, and then I leaned forward to leave. I made him nuts. Pathetic. My body said jump, his said how high. If I said no, the conversation would be over, I’d just be a scared girl. When I looked straight into his blue eyes, with the long lashes, I didn’t see the crumpled skin around them or the way his brow sloped over them or the deep dirty holes in his cheeks.
I lay facedown on his bed, their bed, pretending I was asleep, while he lay on top of me, touching me under my clothes. I pressed my body hard to the mattress, trying to drive my spine to it and keep some space between us. He slid his hand right under me, his fingers wrestling against me, his belly pressing on my back. My eyes kept opening onto one of Greta’s paintings, and I tightened my body until it felt like wood, and finally he said, “All right, go to sleep.” He was so old to me, dark freckles and grey hair on his shoulders and the back of his neck, not tons of it like those gross guys at the pool, but still. Little scoops of flesh pulling down under his arms, and lines creasing his back. And he saw how I looked at him; when I cracked my eyes open, he had his shirt and his pants back on. After that, I kept my eyes closed.
“What’s going to happen?” I asked a week later, thinking that he must know.
He laughed and lifted his head. “What’s going to happen? I’m going to love you as long as you’ll let me, and I’ll teach you a little about literature and about real music, and then you’ll break my heart. That’s the classic denouement.” He sounded cheerful. I thought he was teasing me.
“How am I going to break your heart?”
He kissed my stomach and pulled me up, deep into his lap.
“Like this, baby.” He kissed my cheek lightly. “Like this.” Again. “Very gently, I’m sure.”
“Maybe you’ll break my heart.” Half the time, I felt he had broken my heart, turning what was simple and safe as milk into a pool of black ice, everything familiar sliding sideways and slipping under.
“Ha. You’re seventeen. Never mind the rest. All seventeen-year-olds break the hearts of their elderly lovers. Even the ones who are not half so delicious as you. Honey, I am just the first stop for you.”
I was almost sixteen, and this was my favorite part; I could listen to him talk about my irresistibility all night. “What’s the rest?”
“You’re fishing. That’s not a nice girl thing to do. The rest is your wit and your beauty and your limpid green eyes. And so on. Now behave, I can’t spend all day cataloging your charms.” He kissed his hand and laid it on my cheek, and I put my hand over his. His hands were the part of him I liked to touch.
“Why not?” I loved showing him my worst self because there were no consequences. He couldn’t help how much he loved me. In my real life I had become remarkably trustworthy. People gave me their keys when they went away for the weekend, and returned to find everything as they’d left it, their personal correspondence undisturbed. I babysat for newborns and folded clothes while they napped; I negotiated with the principal to get permission for students in good standing to go off school grounds for lunch. I had become a student in good standing. I still had too much to hide to behave badly in public.
“I have to read these exams, and Danny will be home soon, at which time you’re supposed to take him downtown to the movies. Is it okay, babysitting for us again?”
“It’s fine. Danny’s a nice kid.” I stretched out over his papers.
“Please get dressed. I can’t begin reading with your sweet little breasts staring me in the face. As it were.”
I put on my T-shirt, content. I wondered what it would be like when I was grown. Two years ago he had swept me and my glasses and my pimples and my bumping, changing body into the sheer gold-trimmed gown of Aphrodite and kept me there. Everything that followed, even between us, was bound to be a disappointment.