She learned that lips were mobile things, and she learned about the soft inner cushion of those lips, and she learned the secret of a slightly parted mouth. She learned remarkably well, and, considering the fact that her education was all at the hands of male tutors, it was something of a miracle that she did not learn more than she’d bargained for.
She left Taka-Manna amid a welter of crushed hearts. She did not go back to camp again.
The next summer, fresh out of high school, aglow with the idea of college in the fall, aglow with the idea of wanting to help her father pay her way, an idea which had been born and nurtured the summer before, she took a job as a waitress in a Borscht Belt mountain resort.
Rainbow Hill was a dump.
For Cara Knowles, it was exciting and gay. The hennaed women rocking their chairs on the pine-shaded front porch, the shouts and cries from the swimming pool, the horses trotting off into the mountains, the cool nights with crisp stars overhead, the crystal clear days, the sudden thunderstorms ripping themselves from the jagged mountain ridges, bristling with electric fury, the dancing in the casino, the hikes, the stolen kisses, the given kisses, the kisses begged for and the kisses poutingly offered, and the kisses wholeheartedly delivered, the kisses…
The touch of a hand on her full breast.
A tentative inquisitive touch, the warmth of spread fingers, the sudden anger, and then a questioning of the anger, a secret hidden questioning, unspoken, sharp and searching, why am I angry? All at once the unbidden stiffening of her nipples, as if a cold wind had passed over her breast, and then a strange awareness, and the fingers gently caressing, the pressure on her breast warm and wonderfully soothing, and then a quiet, pleased, unashamed, warm, contented, lazy withdrawal, a small feminine shaking of her dark head and a whispered “No, please don’t,” but a slight smile on her full lips, her eyes alight with a new discovery, dancing and mischievously knowing in the darkness, and the beginning of a greater awareness.
The awareness did not reach full flower that summer. Oh, there were numerous attempts to complete the education of Cara Knowles, but Cara was not ready for her degree. The attempts started with Bud, the boy who had first touched her. But when he tried to initiate her into the more complex and universally secret society of the enlightened, he was greeted with a frosty, horrified refusal. The attempts came hard and fast after that. The bus boys, the boys in the band, the kitchen help, the guests, all tried their hand, but Cara refused to become enlightened.
She was not afraid, and she did not think of herself as being particularly moral.
She simply was not ready.
She did not become ready until her junior year at the University of Wisconsin. She became ready on a starlit April night in the back seat of an automobile owned by a senior named David Brooks. She became suddenly and uncontrollably ready, and Brooks was somewhat amazed if delighted by the fiery passion of the woman who had suddenly sprung to life under his caresses.
Curiously, she was not in love with Brooks, nor was her heart broken when he was graduated that June. After that first time in his car she had remained casually aloof, treating him with cold disdain.
Cara left Wisconsin in the first semester of her senior year. She told herself she was fed up with the useless senility of a Liberal Arts education. Actually, she was bewildered by the rapidity with which she made her body available to other boys after her first sortie with Brooks. She was bewildered and dismayed, because her lovemaking was a strangely loveless thing which gave her little satisfaction. She was plagued, too, with a gnawing knowledge that time was hurriedly passing and she was no longer a starry-eyed adolescent. Other girls were already married or engaged, other girls had been in love. Seeking love desperately, not knowing why, she used her body as a divining rod, cutting each affair short in its infancy, unwilling to settle for a tiny burst of pleasure when the full glory of a real love might be lurking right around the corner.
She arrived home for the Thanksgiving holidays and casually announced she was not returning to school, much to her parents’ bewildered dismay. She moped around the house until January, doing a lot of reading. She read books about women mostly, Gone with the Wind and Forever Amber and Saratoga Trunk and Rebecca and Wuthering Heights. She was a rapid reader, but the books did not tell her what she wanted to know, and in truth she really didn’t know what she wanted to know. In January, she enrolled at a secretarial school. Cara was a smart girl and the rigors of the stenographic course were duck soup to her. When she completed the course, the school placed her with an architectural firm.
She met a young architect named Fred Ransom there. For a while, she thought she was in love with Ransom. He was a big man with fiery red hair and sparkling blue eyes, an impudent smile on his mouth. He owned a tastefully furnished apartment in Tudor City, and she spent a weekend with him in that air-conditioned fortress, telling her parents she was spending the time with an old college chum in Pennsylvania. She discovered she was not in love with the young architect. She grew bored with his red hair and blue eyes, annoyed by his impudent smile and callow face, and then frantic to the point of tears by his curiously detached way of toying with her breasts.
She left him on Sunday afternoon. There was a deep sadness within her, and when she went home she took a cleansing hot shower, the water scalding and purifying. She tried to read a little then, wondering what was becoming of her, wondering what was happening to her, answering stupid questions from her mother about whether or not her girl friend had been happy to see her, and whether or not she had met any nice boys on the trip.
She was well aware of her parents’ anxieties concerning her state of spinsterhood. Sometimes, in her impotent fury, she wanted to unleash the whole sequence of her amours on her unsuspecting mother, but she knew the knowledge would kill her, and she still held a somewhat grudging respect for the symbol of purity her mother represented.
She quit the architectural firm the next week.
She took a job at Macy’s as secretary to the stationery buyer. The stationery buyer was a married man, but he intrigued her until the revulsion of what she was doing struck her. She pulled out of the romance and out of Macy’s, taking a job with a law outfit, and then a job with an importer-exporter, the pattern always repeating itself, pattern upon pattern, as endless as her search. And always the patiently entreating eyes of her mother, wondering if her daughter would die a dried-up virgin. The notion would have been amusing, were it not for the harsh kernel of truth beneath it. The will-o’-the wisp Cara chased was not even a real thing in her own mind. She had no preconceived notion of what her man would look like. And in her desperate search for him, she remained a mental virgin, outraged by the liberties her body took. She sometimes stared at herself in the full-length mirror of her closet door, stared at her naked body, the globes of her breasts, the flatness of her abdomen. Even naked, she looked virginal, darkly secretive, wide-eyed in innocence. The contradiction of her physical appearance was sadly amusing. She knew that everyone on the Grand Concourse considered her a “good girl,” but she wondered how long it would take for her cloak of respectability to wear shabby and thin. The idea frightened her a little.
When she took the job with Julien Kahn, Inc., she took it with a new, steadfast determination. There would be no affair this time. This time, this time…