Obsession: Tales of Irresistible Desire (20 page)

“Because I can’t miss her if she won’t go away,” she snapped. It should have been funny, but Kathy really wasn’t much for humor. There’s only one joke she ever told me, so long ago, two lifetimes ago, but I still remember it. Because it was not the sort of joke I’d have expected her to tell me and I didn’t get it at the time. It went like this:

Kathy: Do you know how to use the word “pagoda” in a sentence? Me: There’s a pagoda in Japan?

Kathy: My father said, “Kathy, go to your room” and I said, “Pagoda hell.”

I’d get it now. A lot of people would. But in 1960, at the beginning of the first American Catholic administration, nobody got it.

“Does anybody else know you can sing?” It took me two days to get up the nerve to ask that question because I had the feeling she was pretty sensitive about her singing. Now that I had, it sounded so damned vapid.

Kathy only twisted her shoulders in an awkward shrug. “Anyone like who? Sister Mary Aloysius? Mrs. What’s-Her-Name, the choir director? Dick Clark? My father?”

She looked away. We were standing just inside the doors of the public library protected from the raw pre-Christmas wind (though not the damp, which was creeping up my ankles from my toes), watching the bus stop for our respective buses home. I took the Putnam Park Via Water Street; Kathy rode the less frequent Lunenburg Via John Bell Hwy. It was getting dark fast, earlier every day. I’d always hated the darkening descent to the Christmas season. Even though the days started getting longer just before Christmas Day, it never felt that way to me. I found winter depressing; so did Kathy, as far as I could tell.

“Did you ever think of—you know, doing something with your, um, music?”

“You mean, singing in front of people?” She turned to look at me, and I thought she’d be irritated with me—she’d sounded irritated—but the expression on her face was more frightened than anything else. “How? Where? And for who?”

“The Glee Club? Or the choir?” Her eyes might have been boring two holes through me, “The Shangri-Las?”

That made her smile, but it was a small one, sad and fleeting. “I don’t want them to know.”

I waited for her to say something else, to say she thought that kind of thing was a big waste of time, that she didn’t want to sing moldy old show tunes and hymns, but she just kept staring at me, chewing on the inside of her lower lip. Waiting, I realized, for reassurance from me.

“Well, for heavens sake, Kath, who’s going to tell them? Not me, you can bet the farm on that. I’m sick of how the Shangri-Las never take my advice anyway.”

She started to smile again at that but she forced herself not to. ”Okay. That’s the way I want it.”

“Well, okay,” I said.

And then her bus came, for once ahead of mine, and I watched her bustle out and join the small group waiting in front of the bus door. She almost looked over her shoulder at me, except the scarf on her head was tucked into her coat collar and she couldn’t quite manage it.

It wasn’t actually my business—I mean, I was curious, and in those days, you tended to feel like you deserved a full explanation for any weirdness that might crop up in a friend. Usually, you’d get it. But I never did. I’d ask her from time to time, broaching the subject carefully. Most times, she just ignored any questions—everything was too personal. Or she wouldn’t even hear me. Frustration? I’ll tell the world.

I also wanted to tell the world about Kathy’s voice. Well, I wanted to tell somebody. Someone important, someone who would count, who could do something, give her the reward she deserved for having such a talent. I wanted somebody to put a smile on her pale face; I wanted that so bad I could taste it.

Actually, I wanted it to be me so bad I could taste it. That’s how it is when you want to rescue someone, rush into whatever bad shit is going on in their lives and be the big hero. Of course, you want to do that in your own way, because it’s someone else you’re rescuing but it’s yourself that you’re gratifying.

I thought about that one so much afterwards that I don’t have to think about it anymore. It’s in me the way oxygen’s in the atmosphere.

Anyway, I discovered that there was someone who could put a smile on her face. He went to the boys’ branch of the school, which was a block away from the girls’ building. They kept us separated and penned up, so that by the time we went off to any of the coed high schools, the hormones were virtually audible.

Eddie Gibbs was the name on Kathy’s smile. I could see why. He was cute but nice, too, not stuck-up like a lot of the more popular boys. We all got to see each other briefly during the daily lunch hour—our school let us out for lunch in those days—but for much longer and more substantially every Friday evening, when most of us would go to Miss Fran’s School of Ballroom Dancing where, to our wicked, sinful delight, the girls and boys could even touch each other.

Miss Fran’s was a rite of puberty. Not to enroll was tantamount to checking the yes box for Have you ever been hospitalized for mental illness? on an employment application; you were marked permanently as odd, and nobody wanted that. So everyone signed up and went fox-trotting and box-waltzing and cha-cha-ing on Friday nights, even the oddest kids, the class outcasts and misfits, future doctors and future ex-cons, even me. Everyone, except Kathy.

Now, somehow, all those years of hanging out with me hadn’t done anything to diminish her stature among our classmates, or with our teachers. She was Kathy, after all, Kathy who lived on Summer Street, and I guess they all figured that someday she’d outgrow her silly attachment to me. Sometimes one of the popular girls would take it into her head that she should Talk To Kathy About Her Friend. I guessed they were afraid that someday they’d look out the front window of their sorority house and see me following Kathy up the walk to the pledge party. Kathy would tell me about it sometimes, and one girl actually did say she would be pledging her mother’s sorority in college, and Kathy could, too, but I couldn’t. Can’t tell you how crushed I was.

Anyway, what her association with me couldn’t do, her absence from Miss Fran’s did. It was more than odd, it was shocking and unnatural, and it wasn’t because of me. Suddenly, they were Talking To Me About Kathy.

I don’t know what I would have told them if I’d known the truth. What I could say, in all honesty, was that I didn’t know. I didn’t know why she wasn’t there, I really didn’t. I asked her a couple of times, but she would just shake her head and look miserable. She was all pulled into herself, closed off; even her posture was like that, she was walking around with her chest all caved in. She looked thinner than ever, too. Everybody was talking, but to give them credit (something I don’t do too easily), all the talk was still pretty kind. Maybe she was sick, maybe someone she knew was sick, maybe her parents were fighting. That last could have meant anything from chronic arguing to having the police at your house every Saturday night, telling your father to sober the hell up (and your mother to shut the hell up).

Kathy wouldn’t say, but she stopped inviting me over, and she stopped coming over to my place. I thought maybe she was mad at me, maybe one of those future sorority sisters had told her I’d cut her up, trying to break up our friendship. All I finally got out of her was that she was being punished. I didn’t ask her what for. Having to tell all in confession was humiliating enough; nobody wanted to have to tell anything sensitive to someone who wasn’t bound by the secrecy of the confessional.

I’d have let it go even with Kathy getting sadder and thinner all the time, except that Eddie Gibbs came to me about her.

I didn’t realize it was about her at first. I thought Eddie had a crush on me. It wasn’t so impossible. Ron Robillard had had a crush on me for a while early in the school year, and he was the most popular boy. Of course, he hated having a crush on me, and I always had to be careful to stay out of his way at Miss Fran’s because he’d stomp on my foot or pinch my arm or whisper something mean. It made me glad he wasn’t in love with me for real.

Eddie was different, though. Eddie was kind, a real nice guy. Where Ron was your basic crew-cut blond all-American athlete and wife-beater-in-training, Eddie was slender and dark. My mother saw him once and said he was Mediterranean. He was a Smart Kid, too, and it only took a tiny little bit of extra attention from him to hook me, choosing me to dance with at Miss Fran’s, even sitting in the same pew at church one Sunday. And as we walked out together after Mass was over, he asked me why Kathy didn’t come to Miss Fran’s.

I felt pretty dumb, but that lasted all of about a minute. Well, of course, Kathy. Why not Kathy? I couldn’t even be jealous about it, not really. I didn’t fit into that scheme, but Kathy did.

Still, I felt pretty good that Eddie Gibbs had come to me, rather than one of the accepted girls. To me, it meant that I had his respect if not his heart, and knowing that gave me a bigger charge than him having a crush on me ever could have. That was why I did what I did.

Actually, I didn’t do so much in the beginning. I promised Eddie three things: one, I would find out why she didn’t go to Miss Fran’s (well, I would try); two, I would show him how to get to her house. And then three, I would talk to her about him, find out if she liked him, too. Then they could officially be going out. This didn’t mean they were going anywhere together, just that they were boyfriend and girlfriend. Thirteen used to be too young to date.

The easiest thing was, of course, showing him where Kathy lived. The Summer Street address didn’t even make him blink. He managed to contrive all kinds of excuses to pass by it. Sometimes he’d even ask me to go with him and I would. I thought maybe if Kathy’s family saw me with Eddie, they’d think he was my boyfriend instead of hers, and she wouldn’t get into trouble.

I’m not sure what put that thought in my head, that Kathy’s family would object to her having a boyfriend. And hell, Eddie wasn’t her boyfriend, not formally. I wasn’t sure she even knew his name. Maybe it was just that they wouldn’t let her go to Miss Fran’s. Everybody knows a few kids with families like that, who over-protect them so much that they can’t wait to go to college and go nuts. Except I was pretty sure that Kathy wouldn’t, unless her folks stayed unreasonable after she got to high school.

But the summer before high school, her father caught us, and she almost didn’t get there at all.

Saying her father caught us makes it sound a lot more than it was, and yet, that doesn’t begin to tell it. A whole lot of people saw it; nobody saw it. All that showed on that sunny afternoon in early July was Eddie and I on the sidewalk in front of Kathy’s house, and Kathy sitting on the porch. Kathy’s father came out, looked at us, and then looked at her; she got up from her chair and went inside and we walked away.

But that’s not what happened.

What happened was, Eddie had talked me into walking over the Fifth Street bridge and down Hayward to Summer so he could check out Kathy’s, maybe see her outside and get a chance to talk to her. At that point, I couldn’t tell if Eddie really had it that bad for her, or whether he was dying of curiosity as to how any girl could be so resistant to his good looks and hot status. I wasn’t resisting him—even though he never made like he was interested in me in that way, even though I knew he wouldn’t have bothered even making friends with me if I hadn’t been a way to get next to Kathy, I went along with whatever he wanted. God knows, in this life the only reason anyone ever bothers with anyone else is for purposes of usefulness. In this life, or any other.

So there we were, Eddie and I, walking along like we really were good buddies, even talking about this and that. Eddie had this surprisingly high political awareness—he was the only kid I knew who could actually discuss HUAC and Senator Joseph McCarthy. Well, the only kid besides Kathy, of course. Kathy seemed to know about a lot of things.

The front of Kathy’s house was visible from the corner of Summer and Hayward, and we could see her on the porch as soon as we crossed the intersection. Eddie started to walk faster, and some impulse made me tug on his shirt and tell him to slow down. “You don’t want to stampede her, do you?” I said, only half-joking.

He looked puzzled; why would any girl object to the sight of the great Eddie Gibbs coming toward her as fast as possible? Well, maybe that’s not fair, but it’s not totally unfair, either. In any case, Eddie slowed up, and we finally got to the middle of the block where Kathy’s house was without him exploding with frustration or hormones.

I made Eddie stand there on the sidewalk until I could get Kathy’s attention. I was thinking we had to do this fast, say hello, get her to come with us, and be gone before someone else in the family saw the three of us together.

Looking back on it, I think that she must have seen us all along and she was trying to ignore us into going away. But discouraging Eddie Gibbs wasn’t that easy. I felt envious; I couldn’t imagine that any handsome guy was ever going to chase me so persistently, and I couldn’t figure out why Kathy wasn’t thrilled, or at least flattered.

She sat there for a long time paging through the Sears catalog, of all things, and not looking up. The neighbors on either side of her were out in their gardens and doing some lawn work and they’d noticed us. Not in any big way, they just waved at me and I waved back. Eddie went from baffled to annoyed. “Kathy?” he asked.

It wasn’t that his voice was so loud as that it just carried well, through all those outdoor sounds to the porch. Kathy finally looked up, and my first thought on seeing her face was, Who died?

That moment became one of those mental snapshots you can never lose, no matter how much changes afterwards. I could see that the white posts were going to need painting before the summer was out, that some of the boards were a little bit warped, that someone had put out some geraniums to be planted. There was a transistor radio sitting on a small wicker table to Kathy’s right. She was wearing what I thought of as a school blouse, with a softly rounded collar, a silver crucifix, and one of her good skirts. I wondered if she were going somewhere.