A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (7 page)

“Thierry la Fronde kills bad guys, not squirrels,” I said, horrified.

“Here, watch,” Stephane said. He sat over the edge of the open side of the tree house and aimed his slingshot at an adjoining tree. I could see movements in the leaves, birds and squirrels hopping about out of sight, making chirping sounds. He pulled back on the elastic thongs, pinching a large stone in the leather pad. His lips pulled back, exposing two rows of dangerous-looking teeth. Billy looked on in mute fascination.

“NON! NON!
Don’t do it, please!” I cried out and hid my face in my hands.

I heard the soft
pock
of the stone hitting wood. He’d missed! But a second later he had another stone aimed at the tree. I started to cry.

“Don’t,” my brother said in a quiet, determined voice. “You’re upsetting my sister.”

I couldn’t believe what I’d heard. I wanted to throw my arms around his neck and kiss his juicy red cheek.

“We’d better go home, anyway,” Billy said. “It’s getting late.”

“Well I’m staying here,” Stephane said. “Go ahead and find your way by yourself.” He let out a strange laugh. “You won’t! You’ll be lost for hours in the dark.”

“I don’t think so,” Billy said in his equable voice. “You follow me,” he said, setting out down the ladder. Just as his head disappeared Stephane gripped my wrist in his hard fingers.

“I like you,” he whispered, and kissed me on the corner of the mouth. “You’re so pretty.” I was not able to speak or push him away. My heart was beating too fast and confusing thoughts raced through my head. His stranger’s breath felt sweet on my face, his lips were soft as they touched mine so delicately. As soon as he relaxed his grip I became terrified and scrambled down the ladder, away from him.

“I’ll meet you two tomorrow, by the fence!” he called down after us in the friendliest of tones.

“We don’t have to play with him anymore,” Billy said, trying to reassure me as I ran wide-eyed through the brambles which got caught on my clothes and hair and scratched at my bare arms. He gingerly held back the prickly vines for me as he led the way back to our lawn.

“But it’s too bad ‘cause he sure has a nice tree house,” he added with longing.

“WELLSOMEWHEREINTHEBLACKMOUNTAINSHILL-SOFSOUTHDAKOTATHERELIVEDAYOUNGB OY-NAMEDROCKYRACOOOO-OOOOON!” The three Smith girls were shouting at the top of their lungs at the children’s dinner table in the pale kitchen that looked out onto the sunny green lawn.

“Ay, ay, ay,” our nanny Candida said, covering her ears after she flipped the steaks in the frying pan.

“ANDONEDAYHISWOMANRANOFFWITHANOTHERGUYHITYOUNGROCKYINTHEEEEYE…”

“You sing terrible,” Billy said, gazing uncomfortably at his soup.

“It’s the
Beatles
, you fool.” Cassandra lit a cigarette and pushed her bowl toward the middle of the table. As soon as the parents went out she started smoking in the house.

“I’m bored,” she said. “I’m so boooooored.”

“We can walk down to the boardwalk after dinner and see if those cute guys are there again tonight,” Mary-Ellen said enigmatically. Mary-Ellen was a little fat, her hips were too wide, her face too flat and round. But her eyes were big and had long red lashes, and she had the prettiest hair of anybody, long and golden red. She had a tight little mouth which told you that she disapproved of everything but would never lower herself to speak out.

Mary-Ellen had ignored me since the first day, with a practiced vehemence I found hard to swallow. She snorted every time I spoke and looked at me through her long lashes as though I were a dead bird one of my mother’s cats had dragged in. She hated me more than the other two put together. I could not figure out why.

“She’s jealous of you,” Billy would say as though it were the simplest thing in the world.

Jealous of me? I could not imagine why Mary-Ellen would be jealous of
me.
I could understand if she were jealous of her older sister, who was thin as a willow and very grown-up and always right about everything, and of her younger sister who was adored by everyone. The grown-ups thought Gillis was brilliant because she said such grown-up things. I thought the grown-ups were completely stupid because it only took me three days to realize that Gillis was only parroting her older sisters, that none of the brilliant expressions she spewed out were her own.

I decided after a few weeks that if Mary-Ellen was jealous of me it was because
I
was not the plain one between two gorgeous and supposedly brilliant sisters; I only had a normal brother who was as gentle and nice as could be. And maybe she was a little jealous because I was thin as well and could speak French. I could tell Mary-Ellen was dying to learn French because she practiced words when no one was listening.

“I WANNA COME TO THE BOARDWALK TOO,” Gillis screamed at the dinner table. “I WANNA DRAAG!”

“Here.” Cassandra handed her the cigarette. “Just one drag, now,” she said. The little Princess Child with the long golden hair and cherubic face puffed on the cigarette, turning the coal bright red, and inhaled deeply. She blew smoke rings into the air.

“Ay, ay, ay,” Candida said, muttering in French in her Portuguese accent, “that littla one es only ten jears old!”

“MY GOD, Cassandra, I swear this time I’m telling!” Bethany, their nanny, said in dismay. Bethany’s hair was all frizzed out and she wore too much makeup.

“Then I’ll tell Mom you smoked pot with Fred in the garage and I caught you,” Cassandra said.

“You’re horrible,” Bethany said.

“Oh, come on. I won’t tell,” Cassandra said coyly. She pulled her chair closer to Bethany’s and started to caress her arm, begging her to let them go down to the boardwalk. Even if Bethany said no the two oldest would go, because the parents never came home until after midnight. Bethany, it seemed, never contradicted the Smith girls because she was as terrified of Mr. Smith as Candida was of our father.

That night, in my darkened room, I watched a tree swaying in the silver moonlight outside the window and thought of the boy in the tree house. A strange shiver crossed my body. My brother had defended me and offered not to play with him anymore, but the thing I wanted most in the world at that moment was to return to the tree house and allow the strange boy to kiss me again. I hugged Christmas Bear to my chest. He was huge, beige, and soft. I’d had to throw a major tantrum and forsake all my other toys to be allowed to bring him in the car from Paris. Christmas Bear knew all my thoughts. He knew I was not thinking of him that night, but of another boy, and I whispered to him to forgive me as I pressed my ear against his furry chest.

The next day my brother had to go to the doctor to have a boil removed from under his arm. I asked if I could go along but my parents thought I might start to cry and frighten Billy. So I stayed home and watched the Smith girls play croquet on the lawn.

Thoughts of the boy kept sending chills down my spine. I wandered off toward the woods involuntarily. It was the same strange urge I’d had when at three I’d walked into the deep end of a pool and almost drowned.

The boy was there, waiting. He was leaning with his arms outstretched against the fence.

“Où est ton frère?”

“He had to go to the doctor’s.”

We stared at each other in silence for a while. Without talking we walked, each on our side of the fence, to the place where the hole was. My brother’s red handkerchief was still there. The boy held the chicken wire up and I passed through to his side. He took my hand in his big rough one and pulled me through the thickets toward his tree house. I watched carefully, feeling like Gretel without Hansel, for a tell-tale tree, a certain flowering vine, so that, in an emergency, I could find my way back to the fence.

“Go ahead, climb up first,” he said.

Today I was wearing a skirt.

I thought about this for a second, feeling quite coy. With only a moment’s hesitation I shimmied up the ladder. I sensed his eyes looking up at me from below and strange, uncomfortable shivers clambered up my spine.

I threw myself into a corner and turned so that I would be facing him. Soon he was beside me, peering at me with wolfish eyes.

“You want to hold my slingshot?”

It seemed slightly hypocritical for me to do so, but I was not planning to aim the thing, much less shoot at any small animals, so with just the right touch of unwillingness, I said, “All right.”

“You see, it works like this.” He held it up and pulled back on the elastic. “My father taught me how to make them.” There was something tough and hard-edged about the way he manipulated the slingshot, and the slightly gruff sound of his voice made me think that this was not the pretend Cowboys and Indians game I played with Billy, this was the real thing.

“I’ll make you one,” he said.

“I don’t want one,” I said quickly.

“Want to see my snails?”

“Your snails?”

“Yes. I collect them.”

“You don’t hurt them, do you?”

“Of course not,” he said as though I were completely stupid. I had never been afraid of snails, I liked them. He brought a box out of another dark corner and placed it between us. It had leaves in it and mosquito netting over the top. He reached inside and soon there were three gray snails with brown and beige shells gliding slowly up his arm, leaving thin wet tracks.

“You want to hold one?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Then take off your shirt.”

“Why?”

“They feel really good on your chest and neck,” he said simply.

Why not allow a snail to crawl along my chest? I lifted my shirt up over my head. He put a snail on my shoulder near my neck and then kissed me on the corner of the mouth. His lips were sweet and wet, like cherries. He had a strange, longing look in his eyes which made my stomach churn uncomfortably.

There I was, bare to the waist, with no breasts for him to touch. I wondered with a certain amount of envy whether he might not like Cassandra or Mary-Ellen better than me, if he ever got a look at them up close. I decided we must never invite him over to play at our house.

“Take off your skirt,” he said slowly. He was pinching the hem in his dirt-stained fingers while he kissed the palm of my hand.

I did not want to take off my skirt. On the beach, I wore no top—no girls my age did in France. But to show him my white cotton panties up close was another story. But I did not want to anger him, either. I agonized over the decision.

“Promise me you’ll never kill any more animals with your slingshot.”

“I promise,” he said flatly.

I convinced myself momentarily that it would not be terribly naughty of me to take off my skirt for a few seconds—it would be my sacrifice for the forest animals—and off came the skirt. There I sat in his dark tree house in my white panties which felt scratchy from the dirt on the floor. As soon as I had removed it I felt completely exposed and my heart ached with dread because now he could hold something over me. After that, the boy and the tree house sank in a brownish haze and remained that way forever in my memory.

“Take them off, too,” he said, nodding toward the panties.

“Non.”

“Take them off, I said.”

“Non.
I’ll tell.”