Precious (7 page)

She always dressed up, and sometimes he found himself wanting her to want him. He began to fantasize that she was, as he’d often heard the boys in class say,
that girl who didn’t wear underwear, that girl who would do anything on a dare. You can fill her up like a car,
they’d say,
in and out.
All the teachers had heard the rumors. Mrs. Stiley would talk about Eva over doughnuts and coffee in the lounge, saying she was worried that a girl like that was a bad influence on the entire female student body. “One takes a turn for the worse, they all do,” Mrs. Stiley said, snippily “Have you met her mother? She’s a real piece of work.”

“I met her father,” Peter said, recalling a parent-teacher night that had taken place in spring. Eva’s father had waited in the back of the room, letting all the women who had gathered around Peter’s desk go first, listening as they asked questions about next year’s curriculum and their children’s progress. When the mothers finally shuffled out to other
rooms, Frank Kisch sat down at one of the desks in the front. “I have to get back to work by eight,” he said, and it was clear he felt awkward, lumped up in the chair the way he was. “Eight-fifteen at the latest. I took a long break.”

“That’s fine. It shouldn’t take long.”

“I’m Eva’s dad. Frank Kisch.”

Peter looked over a sheet of paper. “Usually your wife comes, doesn’t she?”

It was innocuous on his part, but Peter remembered how Eva’s father had shifted uncomfortably. He couldn’t judge if Frank Kisch was irritated or was simply made uneasy by his question; he imagined that the gruff man in front of him wasn’t used to such conferences and perhaps had come as a favor to his wife. What he hadn’t thought was that there were problems at home, or that Natalia Kisch had left the house entirely. There were too many students to keep track of, too many reasons to not press the moment beyond the peculiar lapse in dialogue. “Well, then,” he said.

“Eva,” Frank said. “Does she seem okay to you? Is she doing a good job in school?”

“She’s fine,” he assured him. “A’s and B’s and an occasional C. The normal stuff.”

In the teachers’ lounge, after discussing his interaction with Eva’s father, which he also deemed normal enough, Peter thought to add, “Eva’s probably just going through a stage. I wouldn’t believe all the things the football team says. They’re not exactly credible sources.”

Mrs. Stiley tsked him, and he thought of the name students had given her—Old Ironsides. “Four sources on the football team,” she said, “seems credible enough to me.”

After school ended, Peter and Eva continued to meet when Amy would visit her parents, who had recently relocated to be closer to the baby. When summer classes started, he’d see Eva on his way home, sometimes meeting her at an out-of-the-way park or the usually vacant lot behind the grocery store off Main. Once, wanting to see where she lived and perhaps wanting to imagine her there, waiting for him, he
picked her up from her home, though soon afterward he regretted this action. He didn’t remember who had first suggested meeting after school ended. He might have said, “We could still meet if you want,” knowing what would happen, but when he thought back, he preferred to remember Eva making this request. He preferred to think he was obliging her in some small way.

“I want to,” she said one day, kissing him suddenly. She stepped back, waiting, and it was as if something were about to burst in her.

“Want to what?”

“You know.”

“Here?” he asked. They were in his van.

“No,” she said. “A bed. I’d like to have a bed.”

He rented a room at a motel on the other side of town. He paid in cash to the clerk, a woman with dull blond hair who asked if he wanted an hourly rate. Although he wanted it to be perfect for Eva, the bed sagged and the room smelled of smoke. He felt an abject guilt come over him, a sense that he was beyond absolution. “We can go someplace else,” he said. “Someplace nicer.”

“It’s fine,” she told him, but then she sat on the bed for twenty minutes, deciding.

These days they usually meet in Peter’s van, peace stickers half scraped from the back, feathers dangling from the mirror. The shag mobile, Eva sometimes calls it, referring to the carpet that lines the floor, walls, and star-shaped windows in the back. “You’re hiding me,” she told him once, after their first few romps there. He responded, “You require hiding, don’t you think?”

When the dismissal bell rings, Eva waits until all the students exit and then slips into the classroom. She closes the door, flicks off the lights, and turns. She bites her lip. She walks over to where Peter stands, by his desk, threads her arms around him, and buries her head in his chest. “Finally,” she says. “I’ve been
waiting forever.”

His body tenses as he eases away from her. “You shouldn’t be here,” he says.

“I wanted to surprise you. You’re not surprised?”

He hears the hurt exasperation of a child, the disappointment. Although a part of him would like to soothe her, the larger part of him sees this as a dramatic entrance, a girl’s naïveté. He rubs his neck. “I am surprised,” he says disapprovingly. “But we could get in a lot of trouble. That’s the point; I’m not supposed to be surprised, and you’re not supposed to be here. We plan these things, remember? I call, say I’m a boy from school if anyone else answers but you.”

“I
know
the drill. I thought it would be good to change things up a bit. I thought you’d be happy to see me. You come over. My sister’s seen you. It’s not like you’re invisible or anything.”

“I shouldn’t have done that,” Peter says.

“And besides, I thought—”

Peter walks away from her. He stacks the free-writes on Donne and then sits down and folds his hands on top of the desk. He might ask what she really expected. He pulls at his shirt and thinks, irritably, that she’s going to get him fired. Or worse, she will further disrupt the already frail condition of his marriage. “Thought what?”

“That you cared. That you wanted to see me.”

“It’s not that simple. You know that.”

“No one noticed,” she says. “I’ll make it up to you if you’re angry. What do you want?” She swings her hips a little, then leans on the desk. She traces her finger over the grain in the wood.

“This isn’t a game.”

She walks over to the blackboard and takes a piece of chalk. “Fine,” she says. “I’ll leave.” On the board she writes, “I will not be seen at school anymore.”

“Don’t be difficult,” he tells her. “Don’t make things so complicated by acting like a kid.”

She writes again, “I will not be seen …”

“Fine,” he says. He throws a pencil onto his desk, gets up, and
walks around. He leans back, crosses his arms. “A hundred times, then,” he says. “Don’t stop until you’re exhausted. How’s that? You want to act like a kid, I’ll treat you like one.”

She looks over at him, plainly hurt. Something in her face grows smaller. He isn’t sure if, on Eva, that means she’s remorseful or only planning an insurrection, as if she might throw the chalk at him and walk out the door, leaving him to wonder about her for weeks.

“Keep going. Don’t stop.” The tone in his voice unsettles him and reminds him of his own father when, as a child, Peter would do something wrong.

Eva pauses.

“I didn’t say to stop.” Such stern formality might be a cruel thing
— possibly it is sadistic, like Ted Bundy,
he thinks—but he is feeling cruel, he is feeling sadistic, and he is angry not only with Amy, but now with Eva as well, for coming here. He watches the movement of her skirt as she writes. Her hand presses down harder on the board, causing the chalk to shed copious amounts of dust. She postures, one leg bent, her skirt now quaking with each loop she makes. After several minutes, his anger wanes. No one has come through the door asking questions. Eva is correct—no one has noticed at all. Her handwriting is loopy, childish, and it scrawls downward on the board. Her outstretched arm holds his attention— honey-colored, the smooth layering of dark hair, small wrists, fingernails painted the color of amber. She will not condescend to turn now, nor will she speak to him, and when she ignores him so completely, he feels a boyish longing return. That day they talked in the library, didn’t he feel the same way as she turned to go? Didn’t he suddenly want to give Eva what a girl like her so desperately wants—to see herself through another’s eyes and to find that she is precisely as she wishes but never quite believes— beautiful, full of possibility? Didn’t he want, even then, to go down on her? And that day, and days after it, didn’t she make him feel differently than he normally does—less cynical, more vibrant, his senses blissfully alive?

Finally, he says, “Stop.”

“I’m doing what you want me to,” she says. “A hundred times, until my hand gets tired.”

“Eva.”

She puts the chalk down and turns.

“Look,” he says. “It’s been a shitty day. It’s not your fault.” He extends his arm and she takes it, pulling back first so that he must lean forward. Then she pulls him toward her hip, as if she has been waiting to take him to herself, to feel bone against bone.

“Me, too,” she says. “You have no idea what it’s like at home.” She places her leg around his, so that he can feel the heat from her skin.

“You always say that.”

“I always mean it.”

He runs his hand over her arm. “Beautiful.”

“These arms?” She looks down. “They’re invisible. I’m not seen at school, so these arms can’t be touched.” She shirks away, but now they’re both playing. She edges closer a second later, takes his hand, and places it under her skirt, on her thigh.

“No,” he says absently. He looks over her shoulder.

“I locked it. I’m not an idiot, you know.”

“I know.”

She pulls at his belt loop. “Anyway,” she says, “I love these jeans. I can’t believe they let you wear these jeans to school, like you’re a student. I bet every girl in class likes to see you in jeans.”

She unbuttons his shirt, slowly. His hand drifts from her thigh upward. He kisses her collarbone. He thinks of telling her he loves her breasts, that her breasts have quite possibly undone him, and he thinks, too, that he is glad there isn’t a baby attached to her breasts, but this thought leaves him displaced, and he stops, thinking of Sophie.

“What did I do wrong now?” she says, pulling back again. Her mind races over her planned conversation, even though a part of her realizes it is futile. Her imagined conversations with people are so rarely called upon in the reality of the day.

“Nothing,” he says.

And it begins like this: Another button undone, a pull at his jeans, a kiss, and him giving in to all of this, his hand threading through her hair, which he has come to think of as a mane, and his finger then traveling under the wire of her bra; and now she props herself up on the desk, and the room seems to close around him, and he is in the process of forgetting—forgetting his anger, forgetting his guilt, forgetting Amy, even forgetting for this moment and for the next several moments Sophie. Eva opens her legs. The smell of her. The cotton fold of her skirt drapes between her thighs, and he sees this and feels this, and for a moment he convinces himself that he has found true passion—and there is, in that, a beauty, and there is, in that, terror that he tries to shed, and there is behind the moment a brief, fleeting thought of Amy and a rush of emotion he chooses not to examine too closely. He tells himself that, Yes, this, here in front of him, is love—he need only grasp it, the moment, and that, Yes, love disappears only to reappear in another face, and it is this thought that both destroys and resurrects him. The saltiness of skin. The coarse hairs under his fingers, the stickiness. He is struck by a moment of possibility, that moment when something unfolds in the world.

His hand moves deeper, and there is this—a rush, a breath. She swells under his fingers.

If someone comes,
he thinks,
if someone should see—

She edges forward. Another button, a zipper. She pulls him, moves her hips slowly, draws from herself. And this is the way it continues until he, inside her now, feels her muscles tighten and release, a spasm. A rush of wetness. And then, a moment later, his own spasm, and his movements slow.

Eva puts her fingers to her lips. Embarrassed, her eyes widen. She slips off the desk, repositions her skirt and adjusts her bra. “That’s never happened before.”

Peter says nothing. There is a cynical thought creeping in already to ruin the moment, but then Eva laughs—a sudden burst that causes him to laugh, too. They fall into a comfortable silence.

“I don’t want to leave,” she tells him, finally. “I don’t want to go home.”

“I know,” he says, zipping up his jeans, “but we can’t stay in this room forever.”

“If we wanted to, we could.”

“Eva,” he says.

“Miss me?”

He hears in her voice something that reminds him of Amy and years ago, something soft, expectant. “I already miss you,” he says.

“It was perfect,” she says. “Perfect timing.” And she supposes it is perfect timing and that the moment continues to advance perfection. There are moments when she is left to bare-boned stillness and moments like these—filled with unexpected laughter—when Eva permits herself to dream. There are moments she eases into joy.