When I came back in through the back door, Mom was making coffee. The Lanes were not down yet, but I heard feet thumping around upstairs.
“Where were you?” she asked.
“Out on a run.”
“Okay. Where were you?”
“I just had to go for a walk.”
“Why are you not telling me the truth?”
I held her eyes to show her I was lying but not hiding.
“I just had to get out.”
She watched me, and I saw her shoulders rise and fall. She dropped her eyes to the cabinets, blankly, and then raised them again. She had a dish towel in her hand and she balled it up before speaking, like she was packing a snowball. “Lacy.” Her voice was low. “Did something happen with Jed last night?”
That she somehow already knew struck me as no more or less shocking than the thing he had done. I gathered that I was newly arrived to where my mother was, in this world of downstairs men at night, where I supposed all women lived. I didn’t like it, but she wasn’t surprised to find me here, so what choice did I have but to be here too? Jed Lane’s name was on my father’s business cards and frosted on the executive glass in his skyscraper door.
I nodded.
Mom exhaled hard. “Okay. Tell me everything.”
Her hand on her coffee mug was as white as the ceramic as I talked.
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
“He tried nothing more?”
“Nothing.”
She ran her finger around the top of her mug while she thought. I had no idea where she would come down, where her intention would drop. Finally, she said, “Oh, man, this would create a big stink.”
Around town, she meant. I didn’t disagree. Everyone knew the Lanes; at least, everyone who mattered to my parents did. “It’s okay,” I said. The gossip would have been horrible. Already my memory of what he’d done felt intrusive and embarrassing. I watched Mom calculating. My father came down, said, “Good morning, Say-see,” which is what I had called myself when I was small. “You’re up early. How’d you sleep?”
I looked to Mom. She was still unsure. Dad unfolded the papers, poured OJ, headed back out for something else.
“Is it okay if I tell your father?”
“Yes,” I said.
She nodded. “Later.”
I agreed. The Lanes would be with us all day. We’d drive to the country club for lunch on the patio, overlooking the greens. I’d offer to take his children to the pool. The trick would be to get into the water without being seen in my swimsuit, to stay submerged until he left for another Scotch and soda.
At some point Mom talked to Dad. I wasn’t there when she did. It was decided that nothing should be done about Jed Lane’s little bit of droit du seigneur, and the less said, the better. We’d just not have them stay the night anymore. And no more lunches downtown. This stuff happens. It’s infuriating, said Dad, but it does.
So that was that.
I turned it over and over. I was proud to have passed muster. I’d met an upheaval with nonchalance (my father’s daughter). I’d escaped my home without disturbing the honored guests (my mother’s daughter). In the churn of my thoughts I had the sense of both ascending and descending, as in the cartoon of two escalators crossing and the principals, heading in opposite directions, meeting in the middle. That July, that August, I was both rising to an adult comprehension of the fallibility of appearances and sinking toward an awareness of the ugly contortions of discretion. Maturity: people lie, or at least deny, and you must too. Maturity: this means you can do things you are not supposed to do.
It seemed fitting that it all went down on a staircase at night. Staircases are for lovers and getaway artists, the in-between of floors and ages. I replayed the scene in my head and tried to imagine what I should have done. Mr. Lane had never been interesting to me as a person—just an adult man, opaque and mustachioed, whose jokes I did not understand and whose desires were not my concern, so he was not a character worth wasting time on. When I imagined alternate outcomes of that night, I never animated him. I imagined myself bigger, bolder, cleverer. In my mind I’d humiliate him, or punch out his gleaming teeth, or trip him down the stairs so his flask spilled all over our floor. In my mind I wasn’t a girl in a nightgown, so I could do these things.
I understood my parents’ silence to be protective. They were right: the story of what happened would have attached to me, the high school sophomore out of bed in the small hours.
Even there—do I write the story of what happened or the story of what he did?
Trying again: the story of what he did would have attached to me, the high school sophomore out of bed in the small hours, like a cursed baton he’d passed to me on the stairs while my parents and his wife and his children and my brother slept.
Why invite all of that? I imagined my family’s concern and understood it, and I took it in stride.
But this is not the whole of what I’m afraid of writing about. It is the easier part, the bit that came first, when I was vulnerable.
Jed Lane smash-mouthed a lot of girls. His hands went up and down the backs of daughters at holiday balls, his shoulders blocked doorways all over. We young women worked this out in our twenties, as we met one another either for the first time or finally in a position to talk. We sighed and shook our heads and laughed a bit. The man was a fender bender, a rite of passage. Eventually, his marriage fell apart. He left town.
But later that summer,
