“Yeah,” said Andrea, “I think I can.”
I opened my mouth to continue, but then she said the opposite of what I thought she was thinking.
“Any mature, boundaried adult would have seen a fully clothed girl with two naked men and said, ‘One, why is she here? And two, why are you not wearing clothes?’”
I was in my fifth decade of life when my friend said this to me. Her construction alone was boggling: the accused you would have been them. And I got to be simply she.
It had never once occurred to me that Mr. Belden, storming in and flipping on those dentist-office lights, might not have blamed me.
Why?
So here’s what I don’t want to write about.
In between driving sessions, my family hosted the Lane family for a weekend “in the country,” meaning our suburban town. I’d forgotten the promise that Jed Lane had made a year before to fly to New Hampshire and see me; deep in my new world at St. Paul’s, I’d forgotten about the Lanes entirely. They drove up from the city with gifts and a bottle of wine. Mr. and Mrs. Lane were given the guest room that was next to my parents’ room, at the end of the upstairs hall. Morgan, their little boy, was billeted in my brother’s room, and Lilibet, younger than I was by several years, shared my room at the top of the stairs. My family had never had guests like this before, and our house was as festive as Christmas. The dogs swirled around Mrs. Lane’s feet. Jed—Mr. Lane—cut back and forth across our kitchen, mixing drinks. Their children had inherited his grin. They were bold, adored. The locusts were loud in the oaks and my mother’s roses were in bloom. She opened the French doors. Everything my parents wanted for me, for us, was on the hoof.
That night, though, I couldn’t sleep. As a fifteen-year-old I found sleep cagey, receding when it was intended and swamping me in the day. I woke up too hot in my sheets, everything all wrong. I’d go downstairs in my nightgown to watch television. We had an old set in my dad’s office, where the bookshelves were, and down there, nobody in the sleeping house would be awakened by the sound. This was the first year we had cable. I flipped idly through the stations: nothing, something, nothing. I was sitting on the floor, right up close to the set, so I could keep the volume low.
Was it eleven or eleven-thirty or twelve when Mr. Lane appeared in the doorway?
I turned. His grin first, Cheshire cat, as my eyes adjusted to the hallway where he stood. He was in boxer shorts and a white undershirt, and he held a silver flask in his hand.
I hopped up, conscious of my knee-length nightgown, conscious of not having a bra on underneath it.
He said, “Can’t sleep?”
“I was just going to bed,” I said. “Just now.”
But this meant switching off the set, which would leave us in darkness, and getting past him to get to the stairs. I looked directly at him to keep his eyes off my body.
“If you say so,” said Mr. Lane.
He had a little tummy under his shirt. I hated its softness. I’d have hated a well-built body, too, though differently.
He turned and retreated into the hall.
Prickling with nerves, I waited a few long minutes, and then, when I heard nothing, I scooted down the hall to the bottom of the stairs.
He was there, a few steps up. The grin again.
“I’m just going up,” I said.
“Not without giving me a good-night kiss.”
“No.”
“You have to give me a good-night kiss.”
The kitchen on one side was dark, the hall on the other side was dark. Our only light fell through the hall window, from the street lamp at the foot of the driveway. I took a step up onto the staircase. Jed Lane was two stairs above me, where there was a slight curve and the steps narrowed.
“Come on. Just right here.” He pointed to his cheek.
I darted into the air alongside his face, pantomiming his silly European air-kiss, and he reached his hand behind my head and caught me. He smashed his mouth on mine and stuck his tongue inside. Liquor.
I remember being disgusted but not alarmed. I pushed him off and ducked under his arm up the stairs to my room directly at the top. I closed the door quietly and then leaned against it, half in case he tried the knob and half because that seemed like what you should do in a situation like this, when you were fleeing up the stairs at night. I was playing snippets of other lives, other dramas, in my head because I did not want to think about what had happened just now.
His little girl was asleep in my room, honey hair on the pillow. I couldn’t get to my parents at the end of the hall without encountering him again, so I pulled on shorts and a T-shirt and sneakers and climbed out my window. From there it was an easy gutter-hang to the driveway. I was careful to latch the screen behind me so Lilibet wouldn’t wake up alone in a strange house and be in danger of climbing out too.
I ran to my grade-school friend Casey’s house half a mile or so east and threw stones at his window, but he didn’t appear. So I continued east to the beach and sat in the sand until the sun rose over Lake Michigan.
Was I sad? I remember being frightened, though not of Mr. Lane. I was frightened that some other man might find me there at the public beach, in the park, and take me. I didn’t imagine what he’d do next, but I kept remembering Jed Lane’s hand on the back
