I felt so terrible having brought all this trouble to their home, and so soon after I had arrived. I thought I would start crying again, but that quickly made me feel melancholy and alone. Memories stirred as if they were nudged out of hibernation.
A long time ago, Noble and I sat by the front window in the living room and looked out at a moonlit night not much different from this one. He had just finished reading me a beautiful story about a caterpillar who fell in love with a butterfly, and promised her that as soon as he turned into a butterfly, they would fly off together. The butterfly stayed beside him and waited and waited. The strength of his love for her finally sped up his metamorphosis, and at the end of the story, he had beautiful new wings and they flew away together, carried along by a warm breeze.
"Where did they go?" I wanted to know.
"To a place where they would always be together and always beautiful," he said.
Where was this place? I wondered.
Was he looking for it now when he gazed so hard out of our window at the dark forest across the way? Was there a beautiful butterfly waiting for him, and did that mean he would leave me forever and ever?
He saw the worry in my face and smiled.
"What?" he asked me.
"You're going to go away, too," I told him. It was just before if all happened, and he did go away.
"No, I won't."
"Yes," I insisted. "You will."
He stopped smiling. He always paid attention to the things I said. I remember that. He made me feel important. Mother would, too. Now, when I thought about it, I realized I didn't really know why I said some of the things I said. They seemed to know more about that than I did. How strange!
The day he left, I thought about the butterfly story. He'd always known in his heart he would go, I thought. He'd lied to me.
Maybe that was why I was so angry then.
It was another betrayal in the long line of many to trail behind me for the rest of my life.
All I wanted to do in the days that followed was turn into a butterfly, wave my wings, and fly away to wherever Noble had gone, to that magical place.
I'll spend my whole life looking for it, I thought as I closed my eyes.
In minutes, I was asleep, dreaming of apple blossoms rising slowly to return to their branches, until I realized that they were all white and red butterflies, stirred by something.
What was it? What stirred them up?
Somewhere just outside the door, the answer hovered, just as Mrs. Cukor hovered in the shadows of this strangely beautiful house with walls woven in mysteries better left untouched--but mysteries that would touch me.
I knew that as well as I knew my own name.
I could almost feel them swirling about my bed, drawing closer and closer until. . .
I woke with a scream, a desperate cry for Noble. Always, for Noble.
True to her promise, the next day after breakfast, Ami asked me to go out with her and sit in the gazebo near the pool for her so-called sisterly heart-to-heart, which I thought would simply be one of her long lectures about the evils of men, especially after last night. She surprised me, however, with her decision instead to reveal the second biggest secret of her life. She had already revealed the first by telling me she was currently in therapy.
She actually didn't come down to breakfast, but had Mrs. McAlister bring something up to her instead. Wade, reading in my face that I thought she was sick over what had happened the night before, urged me not to be upset.
"She often has breakfast in bed on Sundays," he said; "she's come down recently only because you're living with us now. She says I have my face buried in the newspaper, especially on Sundays, and she'd rather watch television than the back of the business section," he added, shrugging.
What struck me about Wade was his utter lack of rationalization or attempt to excuse and justify himself. He was who he was, and he couldn't deny it or change. He was basically telling me he didn't blame her for remaining in bed to have breakfast. She was right. He ignored her.
He left earlier than he had before to join his business associates at their club, but told me to tell And he would gladly take us to dinner if she wanted to do that. Despite appearances, he was concerned about her happiness.
Mrs. McAlister returned from Ami's bedroom to tell me Ami wanted me to know she would be down shortly to speak with me, and I should wait for her.
When she did come down, she was still in her robe and fluffy pink silk slippers. She looked like she had slept even less than I had, but she was determined we have our talk, and she wanted us to go outside. I thought she would be cold dressed as she was, but that didn't seem to concern her. She looked like she was in some sort of daze, as if she was still in the midst of some dream. She moved like a sleepwalker over the tiled pathway through the lawn, with me following close behind. My head down, I felt like a child about to be reprimanded.
"I gave all this a great deal of thought last night, Celeste, and I made some very serious and important decisions," she began. "I hesitated to tell you everything about my own youth," she continued, "because I really didn't want to give you the impression that everything I've told you and tried to teach you about male-female relationships stems from any one horrendous experience. I would have had these insights to offer you no matter what. These were all things I had learned before I was . . . before my traumatic experiences occurred. I hope you believe me." She took a deep breath.
We were beside each other on the built-in bench, looking out at the pool, which was now covered to pre-vent it from being filled with the crisp orange, red, and brown leaves of autumn rushing over the property on the backs of northern winds. It was far from freezing yet, but the air had begun to take on that underbelly of coolness that warned us winter was not far behind. It hovered anxiously and eagerly under the ever-lessening weight of time, casting days and weeks off its shoulders as it closed in around us.
I could remember first snows in upstate New York falling as early as mid-October. The flakes would cast a thin white blanket over everything, but in the morning they would be gone under the warm breath of sunlight. When I was little, it seemed quite magical, a "Now you see it, now you don't" trick Nature pulled. It reinforced my belief that the world outside my windows was a world full of illusions, which of course made the possibility of spirits hovering around us even more credible.
"I know you're sitting there now and thinking about the things I told you the other night at the restaurant about my therapy and reasons for it. I know you're probably thinking I'm about to tell you I was raped or I went too far with a boy when I was younger and I got pregnant and had to have an abortion, or even gave birth and gave the baby up for adoption. Those stories are typical, and far too common. I know they happen often, too often, but that's not what happened to me," she said. "That's not why I've been in and out of therapy so often and why I am involved with a new doctor right now."
She looked down, and when she looked up, I saw her eyes were filled with tears. They looked like two tiny glass balls under water, and she had her lips pulled so tightly, they lost all color. Her chin quivered.
"Ami, you don't have to tell me anything," I said quickly. "I don't want to hurt you or see you suffer. I'm sorry for what happened last night. I won't let it happen again. Please, don't put yourself through any more pain on my account," I pleaded. Her face was bringing tears to my own eyes.
"No, no, I've got to do it," she insisted. "I have to tell you everything so you don't think I'm just some ogre who doesn't want you to have fun and enjoy your youth. You must believe that I am sincere when I tell you I want you to be aware of every minefield out there, and believe me, there are many.
"Parents," she said, suddenly filled with anger, the word seeming to be spit out of her lips instead of spoken, "for one stupid reason or another, let their children go forward in this world without warning them of the dangers looming or in waiting. They are either too embarrassed themselves or simply Pollyanna. They expect or hope that nothing terrible will happen to their children. They bury their heads in the sand and pretend that none of the evil exists, and certainly none of it will touch or affect their children.
"It's what happened to me," she added in a softer tone. "My mother was quite unsophisticated actually, despite the airs she put on in front of others. She was protected and spoiled most of her life, and my father behaved as though sex was something married people had only once, and just to make children. He never ever brought up anything remotely close to the subject with me, and neither did my mother. And if I asked him anything that remotely suggested male-female relations, he would always answer with the same words:
" Ami, remember, sex is just a trick to bring people together, just Nature's trick. Don't make anything more of it and you'll always be fine.'
"That was his advice. Those were my parents. Why, my mother didn't even prepare me for the advent of my first period. When I had it, she looked as shocked and surprised as I was. It was almost as if she had forgotten I was a girl.
"'Oh dear,' I remember her saying, 'we'll have to get you properly equipped right away.'
"Properly equipped? I remember thinking. What was I doing, preparing for a mountain climb or a hike? What about the cramps, the reasons for it? Are we just to go by those words in Genesis my
grandmother liked to quote: 'I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children'? We were being punished forever because Eve gave Adam the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil? Was that the only explanation for the blood and pain and the sick feeling? And were we simply to accept it as that and grit our teeth?
"In my school we didn't have health-education classes to do for the young girls what their parents failed to do. Everyone had to learn everything on her own.
"Decent young women didn't talk about those things, you see. That was how my mother was brought up, and how she was bringing me up. Do you know that never once in all the time I was living with my parents did I ever hear my mother say the word 'bathroom,' much less 'toilet'? It was always 'the powder room.' When I was little, I used to look for the powder. What powder? I wondered.
"Until I was bathroom trained, we had a nanny. My mother never once changed a diaper. Can you imagine that? If I ever said I have to pee, she would correct me instantly with, 'No, say you have to go to the powder room, or just say I have to powder my nose.' You can't imagine how girls and boys my age would laugh at me when I did say that. Every other girl would raise her hand in elementary school and ask if she could go to the bathroom. I would ask to go to the powder room. Finally I stopped, but I never let my mother know."
She smiled.
"Once I got very angry at her and stood there reciting the forbidden words: 'urine, toilet, penis, vagina . . She had my mouth washed out with soap.
"Anyway," she said, waving her hand, "I seem to be getting off the track. I'm not. I'm just trying to get you to understand how young people your age are left on their own to handle the experiences and traumas they will confront. No wonder so many get into trouble.
"We are," she continued after another deep breath, "comprised of all sorts of contradictions. That's why so often we will do things that will even surprise ourselves. There are depths and depths of contradictory emotion in us all, in you, Celeste, and definitely in me.
"Oh, dear," she said, biting her lower lip. "I just realized you might be so turned off by what I'm about to tell you that you and I will never be able to be close."
"Ann, don't--" I began, but she put up her hand and shook her head vigorously.
"I can't be concerned about that now. I can't be selfish. If that's what results from all this, then so be it. At least I would feel I had given you everything I could, everything my own mother didn't give me."
She pulled herself up again and took another deep breath. My heart was thumping. Around us, birds were chirping, and somewhere on the far end of the property, the grounds people were beginning to mow grass and trim bushes. The monotonous hum of their engines sounded like hives of bees.
"I was very close with a girl in my class, Gail Browne. She was practically my only close friend. Almost from birth, she had poor eyesight, and she was wearing glasses by the age of two. I was far prettier than she was. Almost any girl was, even some of the boys. It wasn't even a contest when it came to our facial features, even though, as I told you, I was a somewhat late developer myself.
"Unfortunately for Gail, she took after her father, who was a big man with a thick nose, iron jaw, and heavy lips. She wasn't that bad, of course, but her features made her look plain, actually masculine. And under those glasses, her eyes were always teary and red. However, she did have beautiful hair, which other girls thought was a complete waste framing a face like Gail's. She didn't even take as good care of her hair as most of the other girls did, much less do anything about her rough complexion.
"She knew nothing about cosmetics, in fact, and her mother did little to instruct her. She looked uncomfortable wearing lipstick and always chose a shade that did little for her. She was messy about it, too, always going too far in the corners and even smudging her chin.
"I became friends with her because she was such a good student, and I enjoyed the way she followed me about in school like some puppy dog. I was her celebrity friend in her eyes, I suppose, and it made me feel good to have someone look up to me. I could depend on her to help me with my homework, and whenever we did study together, I got better grades on tests. Nothing distracted her from the work like so much distracted me.
"Anyway, not until the last half of our junior year in high school did she develop any sort of womanly figure, and when she did, it literally seemed to happen overnight. At least mine came along gradually and sensibly. You can imagine what it was like for a girl like her who was flat-chested to suddenly have a much bigger and better-shaped bust than most of the other girls, and her rear end puffed out so that all her pants and shorts became impossible to wear. I remember her mother telling my mother how much she was costing them in new clothes all of a sudden.
"Boys noticed, of course, but because she was so unattractive, their interest was purely prurient, lustful. They made up dirty jokes about her and teased her whenever they could. They called her a double bagger. The only way to make love to her, they said, was to put a bag over her face and then over your own. She was that ugly, they claimed. It was a terribly mean joke. Disgusting and cruel, that's what they were.
"Gail was embarrassed about her voluptuous new body, and because of the way these boys were treating her, she did all sorts of things to detract from it, including wearing bras that were more like straitjackets and oversized one-piece dresses to hide her curves.
"I was going through this great period of doubt about myself about the same time, and I was quite interested in how she dealt with all of this, too. Soon our study sessions became more personal. She wasn't as shy as she appeared to be when it came to talking about intimate things. She revealed to me that she wasn't just putting on a mature body. She was in some inner turmoil with her new feelings.
"She even admitted to having spontaneous orgasms, sometimes, even in school. Since that hadn't happened to me, I was very intrigued, of course, and our discussions grew bolder, more intense.
"One night, when we were supposed to be studying for an upcoming literature exam, she told me about her masturbating. I remember feeling absolutely mesmerized by her description. I told her I had not done that, and she looked at me skeptically. 'You should,' she said. 'It's not as unnatural as you might think.' She went on and on, describing some of the books she had read and the things she had learned.
"Of course, I was rapt. Living with parents like mine, especially a mother like mine, and not being as chummy with the girls at the school as I would have liked, and not yet having any sort of real romance with a boy, I was hanging on Gail's every revelation.
"Finally she put down her notebook and proposed that I do it right then and there. I remember feeling as if I had stepped into a gigantic bowl of hot honey. Just the mere suggestion of doing such a thing made my body tingle and warmed my private places. I felt as though my arms and legs were stuck together.
"'It's just like an experiment,' Gail said, 'with yourself. It's not that big a deal.'
"I started to shake my head, and she said, do it, too.'
"'First,' she said, 'we should undress.'
"I watched her stand up and begin to disrobe, unbutton her blouse and unzip her skirt. She paused and looked at me. 'Well? What are you waiting for, Ami? You're not afraid, are you?' she taunted.
"I was afraid, but I wouldn't admit it, and I hated myself for being afraid. So I began to undress, too. When Gail removed her bra, I was shocked to see how big she really was, but she had a flat stomach and nice hips. In other words, it all did seem to fit together to form a body every girl at the school would desire, even me.
"I won't go into every detail about what followed, but I became so self-conscious and felt so foolish, I stopped. Especially when I saw how she was watching me, looking at me. 'Why are you stopping?' she asked. I told her I felt foolish, and she took on this look of great concern.' 'You've got to get over it,' she said. She was so caught up in being the teacher when it came to these things. It was her way of lording it over me, you see.
"I hated feeling so insecure and so inadequate. Even Gail, the double-bagger, was ahead of me when it came to these things. That's what went through my mind.
"And then. . ." Amy paused. She put her hand on her chest and looked like she was struggling to breathe. She took another deep breath before continuing.
"And then, Gail said she would help me."
I held my own breath, listening to her story. The world truly seemed to grow silent and very still. Even the mowers and trimming machines became mute.
"And I didn't stop her," Ami finally blurted. She paused to see my reaction.
When I said nothing nor changed expression, she thought I didn't understand, but I had already pictured the scene she was describing and anticipated what she was about to tell me. For me that made the actual hearing of the words less traumatic. It had always been this way for me, and most people interpreted my reactions as lack of interest when in fact I was merely thinking ahead.
"I let her touch me, excite me," she confessed. "Afterward, she kept reassuring me, telling me I should think of it as just an experiment, but I couldn't ignore the fact that she enjoyed it as much as I did.
"While she was exciting me, she excited herself! We were, in fact, having sex with each other.
"I didn't sleep that night. I was filled with a mixture of guilt and memories of pleasure. I thought I could never look at Gail again. I even thought I had better stop being her friend.
"But I did look at her, and I didn't stop being her friend, at least, not for a while longer.
"I didn't want to enjoy it, and I didn't want to do it or be with her, but I was. It just seemed to happen spontaneously, and of course, every time it did, we did, I went through these deep depressions of guilt, my sleep filled with twisted nightmares. I was convinced something was now seriously wrong with me. And then. . . a terrible thing happened."
"What?" I said when her pause ran too long. I could feel the darkness closing around the images in my mind. I didn't want to hear about it, and yet I couldn't help being drawn to it.
"I wasn't aware of the fact that Gail was friends with another girl like she was friends with me. Actually, they were not exactly friends like she and I were. It was a younger girl, her neighbor, Rhonda Lindsey, the fourteen-year-old sister of a boy at our school, Oliver Lindsey. She had done the same sort of sexual things with her, only Rhonda Lindsey was so disgusted with herself and so frightened about it, she told someone who told someone until it got to Oliver, who confronted Gail in school in front of a crowd of our classmates. It was a terribly ugly scene, and I remember how Gail looked to me to come to her aid and defend her, but I turned and ran away.
"It was a big scandal. Rhonda's parents found out and confronted Gail's. Everyone was talking about it every day at school, and I was terrified that they would learn about me as well. Fortunately, no one knew how often Gail had come to my house, but some of the girls were beginning to ask questions because they knew how she followed me about and idolized me. However, before any of that could go further. . . Gail overdosed on her mother's sleeping pills. Before anyone discovered what she had done, she died. She took the whole bottle, so there was no question that it wasn't an accident. Everyone's attention was on the horror of that. Oliver Lindsey had no remorse, nor did many of the other kids at school feel sorry for her.
"Another example of how men can be so cruel," she muttered. She wiped an errant tear from her cheek and sucked in her breath. "There was to be no mercy, no understanding, just nasty, mean talk. Everyone seemed to have teeth as sharp as vampire teeth, chomping down on the memory of Gail. The Brownes eventually sold their home and moved away."
"I'm sorry," I said. "It must have been hard for you, but I hope you didn't blame yourself."
"I tried not to. I kept it all locked away, but I was haunted by our encounters and by what I had done. I even began to wonder if I wasn't the one who had caused it all, actually caused Gail's suicide by being so willing a partner and thus setting her off and onto another girl."
"But from what you've described, you didn't initiate it. She did."
"I know, but I didn't reject her as I should have. The shame I felt made it more difficult to get into a good relationship with a boy. I was always afraid anyone I did go out with would immediately know what I had done. All you have to do is resist a boy's advances sometimes, and he immediately accuses you of being a lesbian. Don't let any of them try that on you!" she warned. "You can be sure they will.
"Anyway, after time passed, I did start to date, and eventually I met Wade. Before you ask, he knows all of it," she followed, "but of course Basil knows nothing. If he did, he would make something disgusting out of it. He's actually jokingly proposed I make love to a woman. He said he could arrange it as long as I permitted him to watch. He said it when he was drunk, but I don't doubt he'd like that or has done things like that.
"They're so different," she said, shaking her head, "Wade and his father. Sometimes I think it really is possible for a child to be more like a clone than the offspring of two people. Of course, I sense that Basil suspects Wade might not even be his son, even though he laughs at such an idea. He couldn't face the fact that his wife could have had interest in any other man, but he's as much as made that accusation in drunken rages from time to time. It bothers Wade when he does that, of course, but I told him he should be hoping it's true.
"Well," she said, sitting back, "there you have it: all the skeletons in our closet. The point of all this is, I want you to understand how deep and how lasting mistakes in relationships, sexual mistakes, can be." Before taking another breath, she added, "I'd like you to promise me that you will avoid Trevor Foley now.
"Because," she said, leaning forward quickly, her right forefinger up, "make no mistake about what he's going to do next. He's going to try to get you to feel terrible about what happened to him. He's going to get you to feel guilty about it, and then he's going to play on that guilt and seduce you again."