for my socks, which were white with lace trim. He tugged me upward and flipped me over, and when he said, “No, you have to be on your knees,” it was the first time either of us had spoken in several minutes.
I have never described this to another person, I would never. And in today’s world, where nineteen-year-old girls on reality shows kiss each other for the entertainment of male onlookers, where women on network television climb into hot tubs in string bikinis, the globes of their fake breasts bobbing merrily—in this world, perhaps it wouldn’t seem so shocking. But it was 1963, I was a high school senior, and I had not known this sexual position existed, had never heard the fittingly coarse phrase
We stayed like that, both of us facing the mattress: his head over my left shoulder, beside my head; his chest to my back; his flaccid penis in the split of my buttocks; his legs against my legs. His body was heavy and warm, and my mind was blank, and there was only his welcome weight, like a shield that covered me completely.
Unsurprisingly, it had hurt somewhat, and it had been hasty, and there had not been the physical release for me that there had been for him; I was so naive that I didn’t know there could have been. Also, it had been ill- advised. None of that mattered. Lying on my stomach against the mattress, I could not see his face next to mine, but I could see the fingertips of his hand grazing my shoulder, and I could smell his skin, like sauteed onions and soap. So this was what it was to lie unclothed in the arms of a young man.
Another minute passed before abruptly, Pete rolled off me. When he rose, the entire back of my body was exposed in his bedroom, beside the lamp, at noon on a Sunday, and I instinctively turned over and pulled up the sheet. He stood naked before me, his dark body hair and impassive expression. “My parents will be home,” he said. “You need to leave.”
EVEN BY THE time I was back on De Soto Way, it seemed shocking and inexplicable. I’d had
And yet I felt far lighter than I had driving out. Presumably, I had betrayed people—my parents and grandmother, maybe Andrew—but that wasn’t how I felt. It was more like something had been awry, a phone off the hook, a sink of dirty dishes, and what I’d done was to clean it up and set it right.
At home, I parked the car and entered the house, and when I appeared in the dining room, my mother exclaimed, “There you are!” She was already standing and walking toward me, setting her hands on my shoulders. They were eating Sunday lunch, lamb and green beans and biscuits.
“We were concerned,” my father said. “We didn’t know where you’d gone.”
“I had to run an errand.”
“Next time leave a note,” my father said. “Dorothy, let her sit so she can eat.”
I longed to go upstairs and take a bath, but that would seem suspicious; I’d already showered that morning. Taking my place at the table, I wondered if Pete’s fluid had seeped through my underwear and stained the back of my jeans.
“What was your errand?” my grandmother asked.
There was a long silence. “For school,” I said. Another silence descended—they seemed to do that more often now, or maybe I just noticed them more—and then my mother said, “Alice, the Frick girls sang ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God’ today. Such beautiful voices.” No one responded, and my mother added, “Do you know, Cecile told me the girls hope to perform at the state fair next summer.”
“Fools’ names and fools’ faces often appear in public places,” my father said. Although he repeated this expression frequently—the most recent time had been when Mr. Janaszewski won three rounds of bingo in a row at St. Ann’s, and his photo ran the next day on the front page of
“Well, I don’t think it’s definite,” my mother said.
I knew I should help out—my mother was trying—but I’d been gripped by a paralyzing awareness of a smell coming from inside me, a sour salty odor I had never been exposed to yet recognized immediately.
“I went to school with a girl who had a gorgeous voice,” my grandmother said. “Leona Stromberg.”
My grandmother set her knife and fork side by side on the edge of her plate, though she’d eaten less than half her food. She lit a Pall Mall as she talked. “When she sang, she was so good it gave you goose bumps. One summer, this must have been in ’09 or ’10, the circus came to town. She convinces someone to give her an audition, and what I always heard is they didn’t hire her for her voice as much as her looks, which is a shame. Not that she wasn’t pretty, too, but she had a real gift, and I take it they used her more as a magician’s assistant. In any event, she leaves Milwaukee with the circus—she’s about eighteen—and she travels this way and that, hither and yon. One night the circus is performing in Baltimore, and what happens in the middle of the show but a tiger bites off her nose.”
“Oh my word,” my mother said.
“Is this appropriate for the table?” my father asked.
“We’re all adults.” My grandmother winked at me, something she had not done in a long while. “Now, by this time, I forgot to mention, she’s changed her name. No more Leona Stromberg. Instead, she goes by Mimi Etoile —‘Etoile’ is French for ‘star.’
“That’s a very peculiar story,” my father said.
“Did she keep traveling with the circus?” my mother asked.
“For a little while, but soon he bought her a house in Denver, and he stayed there, too, when the circus didn’t
