When I looked up, he towered over me. A minute before, he’d been sitting and I’d been kneeling, but he’d gone higher when I went lower. Our eyes met, and I could feel my face contract (it would have been so different with Andrew; I would have wanted to make him feel good, and afterward he’d have held and kissed me). I said, “I know there’s nothing I can do to make it up to you or your parents, but I miss him, too.”
“You don’t think the two of you were in love, do you?” The fury in Pete’s tone told me not to answer. “That he was your boyfriend?”
I did not reply, but I had stopped crying and gone on a kind of bodily alert. I suddenly knew I would be leaving this house very soon, and the likelihood was slim that I would ever come back.
“My brother wasn’t your boyfriend,” Pete said.
I wiped my eyes, I tucked my hair behind my ears. As I stood, I held on to a chair.
“Did you hear me?” Pete said. “He wasn’t your boyfriend.” As I pulled on my coat, it occurred to me that he might try to bar my exit. “What you just did,” he said, “only whores do that, and my brother would never have dated a whore.”
I walked out of the kitchen, down the hall past the living room and front staircase. Pete followed me, but when I reached the door, he stayed over ten feet back. I grasped the doorknob, turning it, and he said, “See, you can’t even defend yourself. That’s what a whore you are.”
That this ugliness had arisen so quickly between us—it could only mean it had been there all along. I looked back at him and said the one thing I knew was true. I said, “I’m sorry it wasn’t me instead of him.”
IT WAS THEN in my life that I entered a twilight in which all I tried to do was move forward. I saw how, with Pete, I’d been trying to fix the situation—I’d been trying in a perverse way, but trying all the same—and now I understood that the situation was unfixable. That, in fact, I’d made it worse. And it wasn’t as if I could take consolation in the idea that I’d been martyring myself: I’d mostly liked it when Pete touched my body, I’d liked the physical aspect (he had been a naked, hairy man five years older than I was, stroking me in ways he ought not to have tried and I ought not to have allowed—of course it had been exciting) and I’d also liked the plot of it, wondering what would happen next, thinking about something that was close to Andrew without having to think about his death. But the end result had turned out to be rancor, rancor on top of tragedy, as well as new and incriminating secrets, misbehaviors that would further hurt the people who knew me if they learned of them. The solution was to retreat, to shut down, and doing so did not require effort. Rather, it was the opposite of effort— capitulation.
I went to school, and I continued to turn in all my work, most of which I completed in study hall; after sophomore year, study hall was optional, and in the past, I’d spent it in the gym with Dena, sitting on the bleachers while boys in penny loafers shot baskets, ducking when the balls came threateningly close. In the evenings, I watched television or played cards with my family just enough so they wouldn’t think I’d stopped watching television or playing cards with them, and at meals, I talked enough so they wouldn’t worry that I was on the brink of doing something rash and destructive, which I wasn’t. I didn’t have the energy.
I tried to read novels, once my most reliable refuge, but even when I was immersed in sixteenth-century Scotland or contemporary Manhattan, I could always feel the dread of my own life at the edge of the page, an incoming tide. Sometimes the dread simply washed right over me, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it. It was worst in the morning, when I first awakened. I’d feel sick, literally nauseated, and occasionally, if I was still, it would pass. But more often I’d have to hurry to the bathroom, where I’d vomit into the toilet bowl and then try not to cry. It would be five-fifteen, five-twenty, and it would seem impossible that the day had gone wrong already.
At night, I’d lie on my bed with the lights on and my eyes shut, and I’d listen to “Lonesome Town,” and I’d feel the song steadying me, cradling me, the way another person can hold you in water when you are nearly weightless. “You can buy a dream or two / To last you all through the years,” Ricky Nelson sang. “And the only price you pay / Is a heart full of tears.” I’d fiddle with the silver necklace I’d been wearing that afternoon outside the library; though a part of me wished I hadn’t given the heart pendant to Andrew’s parents, the fact that I was bothered by its absence seemed a sign that I’d made the right decision.
ONE MORNING IN early November, I emerged from the bathroom after throwing up—it was not yet six o’clock—and found my grandmother standing in the unlit hall, specter-like in her pink satin bathrobe and white slippers. “Were you sick in there?”
“I’m fine,” I said softly. “My stomach hurt, but now I feel better.”
She scrutinized me. “It’s not a way to stay thin, you know. It’s an old trick that lots of girls try, but it’s bad for your teeth and makes your cheeks swell. Before long, you’ll look like a chipmunk.”
“Granny, I didn’t make myself throw up on purpose.”
“If you’re worried about gaining weight, it would be much more ladylike to smoke. Cigarettes curb your appetite at the same time that they burn calories.”
I knew cigarettes were bad for you—Mr. Frisch had told us in biology—but I didn’t want to argue with her.
My grandmother reached out and held her thumb and forefinger around my chin, so I couldn’t look anywhere except at her. Since eighth grade, I’d been taller than she was, but she usually wore heels that eliminated the discrepancy in our heights. Now I was gazing down on her. “Don’t punish yourself,” she said. “It never makes anything better.”
ONCE I WAS at school, amid the noise and all the people hurrying toward obligations that didn’t really matter, I’d often wonder if I wouldn’t have been better off staying home, if I shouldn’t drop out altogether. But home was no better, just bad in a different way. Gradually, I came to understand that I needed to leave Riley, to go to college and not come back. And I needed to enroll somewhere other than Ersine Teachers College in Milwaukee, which had fewer than twelve hundred young women in the whole school. It was too likely, in such a small community, that my story would get out, someone there would know someone from Riley, or one of my high school classmates would also enroll. I suppose it’s a mark of my provincialism at the time that I thought applying to the University of Wisconsin in Madison was a radical move. The school had an undergraduate and graduate population of more than twenty thousand; this, I thought, would surely be enough in which to get lost.
THE SECOND TIME my grandmother caught me vomiting, she didn’t wait in the hall; she sat on my bed paging through the copy of
I stood by the bureau and said nothing.
“We’ll go to Chicago, and we’ll have it taken care of. Next week, likely. I need to make a few calls. You can do
