After that, Rachel, alone among her friends, left her face bare.
At fourteen, just when Rachel was becoming accustomed to her alarming breasts and the messy, painful periods that some of her friends celebrated and others cursed, she discovered that although they were all tied together in these physical ways, they were also taking the first steps along separate courses that could keep them squarely apart, maybe even for life.
“Have you ever been finger-fucked?” The flashlight in her face made Rachel blink, which hid some of her shock, gave her a moment to decide whether to tell the truth or take the dare.
She was surrounded by a half dozen girls in sleeping bags. They looked, to Rachel, like giant, moulting insects. To admit to them not only that she had never been finger-fucked but that she did not even know what this meant was too much. So she smiled and said, “I’ll take the dare.” Try as she might, she would never be able to forget having to stand in front of her companions and lift her nightgown, ease her underpants to her knees, and show them the shadow of hair that had begun to grow. They had giggled. One or two had actually joined her. To compare, they said.
When she learned that another sleepover party was to be held in the loft of a barn and that boys had been told, Rachel said, Sure. Of course she would go. But a few hours beforehand she went into the bathroom and stuck her fingers down her throat.
“You missed a great party,” Estelle said. “Stupid time to get sick.”
“Figures,” Rachel said, shrugging. But in the years to come she learned other tricks that saw her through all kinds of tight spots: how to drink slowly and by sips; how to kiss a boy without granting him further license; how to blow smoke through her nose without inhaling; how to lie to her parents without argument or repercussion.
As she came of age, Rachel watched her friends closely, as if they were birds. She was careful not to stare or to interrogate, but she was always aware of how they conducted themselves and how they chose their words. This was how Rachel looked at the world: she kept vigils, spied, tempered her instincts with all kinds of reasonable reactions to what she saw.
She came to realize, by comparison with schoolmates and by scrutinizing the way people treated her, that she preferred to be as she was, a peacemaker and a good daughter. In the struggle to define herself, to name the things that made her unique without relinquishing her ties to those around her, Rachel isolated this facet of her character, held it up to the light, and pronounced it beautiful. With great deliberation, she practiced diplomacy, tact, and kindness. A strange curriculum for a girl her age, but one she relished. It was hard work to avoid trouble, but it made her feel good. And that was enough.
Having convinced herself that her life was the best anyone could hope for, Rachel became convinced, too, in terms that she herself could not articulate, that to doubt her blessings in any way was to risk them, and certainly to dishonor them.
It did not occur to her that counting herself as a daughter first and a separate and independent person second had so colored her view of the world that she could not see herself clearly in it.
Rachel was content with her choices. She might even have been truly happy if her behavior had been less deliberate. If she had been more herself and less the way she thought she ought to be. If she had only had a guitar.
That was all Rachel wanted for Christmas the year she turned fifteen. Nothing but a guitar. She had long since investigated the cost of a piano and found it too high. Something she simply could not ask for. Something she would have to do without. But a guitar was different. Expensive, too, but not out of her grasp. Not entirely.
It was only a week past Thanksgiving, but Maple Street was already rigged with ropes of tinsel and colored lights, there were plastic reindeer in several front yards, and all the mannequins in the Sears window display wore red velvet elf caps on their sculpted heads.
“What do you think I ought to get Dad for Christmas?” Rachel whispered. She and her mother were sitting at the kitchen table after supper, paring apples. Her father was watching a Steelers game. The radio in the kitchen, turned on low, played Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas.”
“A bottle of cornhuskers lotion and a pound of dried apricots, same as always.”
“Yeah, but what else? Something different. Something that I actually go out and buy for him.” She sliced the last bit of skin from her apple, halved it, quartered it, cored it, sliced the quarters into an enormous bowl.
“Why don’t you make him something? He loves everything you’ve ever made him.”
Rachel picked up another apple. “Like what?”
“How about you embroider a couple of hankies for him?”
“I already did that.”
“Knit him a scarf.”
“I could do that.” Rachel rested her forearms on the table. Her wrists were getting sore. They needed enough apples for seven pies. Her mother had orders for fourteen apple, two pecan, two coconut-cream, three pumpkin, and one banana-cream. For tomorrow, noon. The cream pies and half of the apple were cooling on the counter.
“Or maybe just give him a head rub every night Christmas week and clean up his bike. I don’t know a single thing he’d like more than that.”
That sounded good to Rachel, something she did well. Something her father would love.
“What about you?” She looked across the table at her mother and picked up a fresh apple. “Not something you need. Something you want.”
Rachel had expected protests, reluctant talk of hand cream and
