Club Storyville (5 page)

“Are you all right, Elizabeth?” she asked, her hands on my shoulders pressing me down next to the tray, and I couldn’t answer her, because I wasn’t at all all right. I was anything but all right, and if she knew what I was thinking as her hands slid up my arms to push my hair back, she would never touch me so freely again.

“Elizabeth?” Nan said, and I forced a smile as I met her worried gaze over Ariel’s shoulder, knowing it was important not to worry her.

“She’s fine,” Ariel assured Nan when I couldn’t. “It’s just the heat.”

Grasping at the excuse, I nodded, wishing desperately it justified what I was feeling.

“It’s only eighty degrees,” I heard myself utter quietly to Ariel.

“But it’s been so cool up until now,” she returned, and I could feel her fingertips on my jaw as they pushed the tendrils of wet hair away as if they were under my skin.

That was all my fault too, I realized. I had done it to myself. I wanted it when I didn’t know what it was I was wanting, for her to touch me, but it was better when she didn’t. Maybe that was why she never would, why she had always been hesitant with me. Maybe she could sense it, the aberration inside me that made her touch so shamefully gratifying.

“You’re not used to this kind of heat,” Ariel murmured, her voice stroking each of those places I shouldn’t have felt. “It can be overwhelming when your body isn’t expecting it.”

It wasn’t just overwhelming, though. Her hands moving over my face and shoulders, I wanted them so much in the places I shouldn’t, it was almost obsession.

“Here, drink this,” Ariel held a glass up to me, and I realized she didn’t know. She believed what she was saying, truly thought I was weakened by the weather, the sudden change outside, instead of inside of me. “It will help.”

Though I knew lemonade wasn’t nearly strong enough of a potion to fight the sins in my head, heart, or in my body, I did as she told me, and, as Ariel’s hand smoothed over my hair in sympathy, I realized I had lied to Scott.

When he asked if I was unwell, I told him I was fine.

I didn’t know at the time how sick I truly was.

D
ay after day, I waited for the feelings to recede, to absorb enough sunlight through my skin to chase the dark thoughts from my mind, but they didn’t let up, not without good cause, and Ariel was nothing but lovely to me. When she saw me, she still smiled. She still cast those amused glances my way when she got Nan really going about something. She still asked me to the garden.

They weren’t unceasing, but, after the first one, my impure thoughts about Ariel just became part of my days. At least, they felt impure. For the most part, they were actually quite chaste. When she wasn’t looking directly at me, my eyes would fall to Ariel’s lips and I would feel the ghost sensation of them touching mine, or, when we sat on the bench or the swing, I would imagine sliding closer and feeling her arm around me.

It was only at night, in the privacy of my bedroom, when the thoughts made me do what I knew was sinful, but felt so good in the moment I could only care when the sun came up again, and it was only one time, when Ariel and I ran physically into each other in the hallway as she was coming out of Nan’s room, that I longed for something less gentle with her and could imagine the feel of the wall at my back as her body pressed against me.

Trained as she was, I was sure Ariel would see what was happening to me, would start to notice the sickness, but she never did, so I was left to try to stop the feelings all on my own.

I started to punish myself when I thought about Ariel in a way no friend should think of a friend. I wouldn’t allow myself dessert. I would scrub the tea pan that had never been without a stain from its first day of use until my fingers were raw. I wouldn’t go to the garden.

In no time at all, I was paler and thinner, and that, Ariel couldn’t help but notice.

“Why must you listen to your mother?” Nan could see the changes in me too, and she was convinced Mama’s incessant nagging to be more of a lady, to be thinner, more alabaster, to keep my knees closer together, had to be the reason I was turning down sweets and refusing to come into the sun with them.

“I’m not,” I insisted, channeling all my power to keep my gaze from following Ariel as she moved around the room, not quite eavesdropping, but tilting her head every so often at our conversation.

“You do try to please her, Elizabeth,” Nan said, and her next breath was terribly labored, her chest blowing up like a balloon and then caving in so deeply as she pushed the air out again, it was almost gruesome. “You try to please all of us, but we are all so different. You have to be more careful, or you will tear yourself in two, trying to be everything everybody wants you to be.”

I would have argued the point, lied and said I wasn’t trying to be, or not to be, anything, but Nan didn’t look right, and, watching her eyes roll suddenly back, I pushed to my feet, feeling Nan’s wrist twitch beneath my hand as Ariel rushed to Nan’s bedside.

“What’s happening?” I asked her.

“She’s having a stroke,” Ariel calmly returned.

“A stroke?” I repeated, but, in my mouth, the word sounded foreign, and I couldn’t remember what it meant.

“It’s very minor. It will pass,” Ariel attempted to soothe me with her words as her hand rubbed Nan’s arm, until, at last, Nan’s eyes were right again and she could focus them back on us. “See,” Ariel glanced softly up at me. “All over.”

Dropping my eyes back to Nan, she appeared as she had a few seconds before, but I knew she wasn’t. Just like me. Nothing on the outside had changed, but nothing inside would ever be the same again.

“It’s all right, Elizabeth,” Ariel explained. “She has these. She’ll continue to have them, but everything that can be done is being done.”

“I’m fine,” Nan tried to make me feel better, but her words coming out garbled, they made me feel much worse.

“She really is fine,” Ariel said, and, though I watched as her hand reached across the bed, it didn’t occur to me to try to avoid her touch until her hand touched mine and I felt so much from it, I thought I too might have a fit.

It was wrong, I knew, to let Ariel touch me that way, to let her make me feel how she didn’t know she made me feel, to warp her kindness with my disease, and, pulling my hand from hers, I rushed out of the room, isolated by my shame and my thoughts, which I knew I could never tell another living soul.

While it wasn’t exactly dinnertime discussion, I was well aware of what happened to people stricken by such perversions. Their families put them into institutions, where the cures were as bad as the sicknesses. There were shocks and ice baths and metal picks through the brain that caused people to come out wrong, if they came out at all. Some could no longer speak. Some did nothing but stare into space for the rest of their lives.

If I told anyone the thoughts I was suffering, the sensations Ariel aroused in me, it would be the last of me. I would survive, more than likely, but as something other than myself. That was the punishment for thinking and feeling such things, the destruction of one’s ability to think and feel.

C
oming to a stop in the garden, on the same bench on which I realized what I felt for Ariel went beyond what I should feel, that my body yearned for her in a way it had never yearned for the boys who tried to get beneath my sweater, I decided too much had happened. With the war and Edward and Nan and then Scott. Everyday life needing so much tending, none of us were paying attention to me, and something went wrong. I got broken somehow.

Since there was no one I could ask to fix me, not without telling them the truth, a dangerous truth best kept to myself, I knew I had to find a way to control it. If only I could tell myself to stop. If only the parts of me that turned what I felt for Ariel into something ugly and ungodly would turn them back into something pure. If only my punishments worked, like the flagellants who beat themselves with whips to atone and avoid sin. Maybe I just needed to find something more painful, I thought, something that inflicted greater damage, without leaving marks behind that others would surely see.

When Ariel found me, because I was too dumb to have run far enough away, when she sat down beside me, her hand warm on my back through the fabric of my dress, despite my desperation to make it stop, all I wanted was to turn into her and see how much warmer she felt closer.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” she mistook my personal torment for compassion for Nan. “I know it had to be upsetting.”

“It was,” I said honestly, but it was Ariel’s hand on my back that was most upsetting, because it felt so sinfully good.

“She’s old,” Ariel said, and I wished Nan’s age could be the worst of my problems. As much as losing her frightened me, though, and it did, it was the natural order of things. What I felt as Ariel’s hand stroked my lower back and I willed it to places beneath my clothes that would turn us both into deviants was anything but natural.

When I said nothing, Ariel’s fingers beneath my chin were so gentle, I thought she might have realized I was unwell all on her own, but, as she rotated my face toward her, her concern looked different than I expected. In her eyes, I saw a world of something I couldn’t understand, but that I knew would make everything better, at least for a moment.

Falling forward, I heard Ariel’s gasp in the instant before our lips touched, and, feeling everything I expected to feel and more, I melted into her. Her lips were as soft as the petals of the flowers I used to stop to smell on the way to school. They tasted like peach tea, or nectar, and I knew whatever I had was incurable. In the moment, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be cured.

I didn’t know how long I stayed that way, drinking from the well of Ariel’s lips, but it was too easy to get lost in the feel of her, to believe that it was okay, that what I felt for her was right instead of wrong, that it should make me smile.

As it hit me what I had done, how it made me feel, how much more I wanted to feel, I pulled away at once, and, as Ariel’s eyes slowly opened, she looked positively stunned.

I knew she must hate me, that she must be thinking how she could tell my family, how she had to tell them so they could take care of my problem. Then, Ariel’s hand slid up my arm to my neck, and, instead of shoving me away, she pulled me forward again, her mouth just brushing mine, before her tongue coaxed my lips open to stroke against my own.

No longer did I just feel parts of my body I shouldn’t feel. I felt parts of my body I didn’t know existed, because I had never felt them before.

Straining against her, my breath hitched at the feel of Ariel’s breasts against mine, but the sensation settled lower, accompanied by the far less welcome realization that anyone could walk into the garden and see us, and, if they did, they would know everything I had been feeling.

Jerking away at once, it was the last thing I wanted to do, and the only thing I wanted to do, and I felt cold fall over me, despite the balmy afternoon, as tears pushed quickly to the surface.

“Please,” Ariel sighed. “Don’t cry.” But her words only made them come faster. “It’s all right.”

“It’s not all right,” I sobbed, feeling the tears run rapidly down my face. “I’m afflicted.”

As Ariel laughed in response, it sounded mocking, and I wrapped my arms around myself to escape her cruelty.

“I’m not laughing at you.” Her hand wrapped around my arm, and, though I knew I should be pulling away from her touch, I couldn’t bring myself to do what was right. “I’m laughing at how much this world gets inside people’s heads. You are not afflicted.”

“How can you say that?” I questioned. Going against everything ever said, in church, in science, in civilized society, she still sounded so convinced. “Don’t try to make me feel better. I know it isn’t natural.”

“That’s nonsense,” Ariel released me suddenly to sit straighter on the bench, and, at first, I wasn’t sure what happened. Then, watching the muscles tighten beneath pale skin as she stared off across the garden, I realized it was the first time I had seen her angry, and that was beautiful too.

“But the doctors say -” I began.

“I know what the doctors say,” she wouldn’t let me finish, and I heard the pop as she stretched her neck. “I’ve spent far more time studying in the field than you have. Doctors say a lot about things they know nothing about.”

Confused, I wondered how, if doctors couldn’t know, and the books said what the doctors said, Ariel could possibly know.

When her skin grew tauter against her cheekbones, though, and she still refused to look at me, it occurred to me Ariel wasn’t just offended, the way Nan got when Mama said something about people who were different than us, but wounded, as if my words had struck her personally.

I wasn’t talking about Ariel, though. I was talking about different women, women who had improper thoughts about other women, like the thoughts I’d been having, and didn’t try to control them. Women who looked like men, or dressed like men, or tried to be men. Not once had Ariel tried to lure me into a dark corner, or tempt me, or try to take anything from me, as I’d heard such women would do.

“Wait...” Still, I couldn’t entirely shake the feeling Ariel was telling me something without telling me anything, or the feel of her kiss, which hadn’t been particularly innocent. “Are you one of them?”

“One of what exactly?” Whatever concern Ariel had for me when she walked into the garden evaporated in the veiled look she cast my way. She looked like steel, more unbending and cold than I had ever seen her, as if she was no part of us, no part of me.

“You know, a...” I couldn’t believe I would ask her such a thing, and I couldn’t say the word. I couldn’t accuse her of being such a horrible, immoral person. I was also, secretly, terrified Ariel would laugh in my face for entertaining such a notion, that she would tell me, if I was looking for someone like me, I would have to look someplace else.

Her expression in hiding, it was impossible to tell what she was thinking, just as I used to never know what she was thinking.

“Whatever I am,” she finally returned without an iota of the warmth or affection or friendship that had developed between us. It was as if I was sitting suddenly before a stranger who knew my darkest secret. “Don’t confuse things. You kissed me.”