Rosethorn (25 page)

August 18, 1986

I turned seventeen yesterday.

Alex has not called me since the day he left. I’ve been forgotten even more quickly than I feared.

August 23, 1986

I am sick, sick with longing, sick of myself. He hasn't called or written. I was nothing, truly nothing, to him. I swing from cold pride to deep regret that I never gave him anything. Even drama class gives me little joy. I'm a stupid child.

Daniel sickens me as well. But I don’t break it off with him. He's my only tie to Alex now. He told me the other day that Alex had to have stitches from being elbowed in water polo. I wondered immediately if he would scar and the thought excited me---a flaw, a wound, an imperfection on this man who could have posed for Michelangelo. I imagined his face with a jagged, dangerous scar and imagined running my finger down its length...

But of course he won’t scar. People like him don’t scar. I’d like to ask him though, how it felt to think that he might possibly not look perfect anymore.

It adds substance to your face, I would say, to have been ugly once, however briefly.

I see fragments of you, your hair, your shoulders, your grin, your eyes, everywhere, but not the whole of you to be found anywhere.

August 30, 1986

I looked at my face today, really looked. I wondered what it said about me. My eyes looked ravenous, dark and slanted, and my lips loomed predatory.

As gently as I could, I told Daniel that we would be better off as friends. But I love you, Stella, he said, crying in my arms. I'd do anything for you. I held him and told him I loved him too, but only as a friend. I won’t write of everything he said to me that day—I’ve already demeaned him enough by playing this charade so long. He asked me if there was someone else and I could honestly tell him there was no one. I promised him we would still talk and hang out sometimes.

Drama promises to be even better than last year. Mrs.
 O’Connell has given us several options for our winter performance with really meaty parts.  

I talked to Mama about college. She told me that Papa might (stressing might) let me go to school in New York if I took regular classes and majored in something other than drama. I didn't hide my frustration from her. She just told me to think about it, saying that this is the most I'll get from them, that going to school in New York will be very expensive. They still aren’t taking my ambition seriously.

But on the plus side, I would be in New York. Once there, I would have a couple of years to change their minds. It could be worse, I suppose. They could force me to go to a college here.

This is my one true and steadfast love. Everything else is a distraction and unworthy of my attention.

Summer was just a strange dream I had.

September 5, 1986

Esme, Kay, and I went to the movies Saturday night. It felt good to be doing something normal. Esme didn’t irritate me as much as she usually does and Kay, finally, after three months, has stopped crying over Ted. We met some guys from San Anselmo at the ice cream store and flirted outrageously with them. Esme and Kay were already smitten with them, but they just seemed like boys to me, clumsy and utterly predictable. They invited us to a hike up Mount Tam tomorrow. I said maybe. Driving home afterwards, Esme and Kay tried convincing me to go, saying how one of the guys seemed really into me.

Still sad over Daniel? They asked. They knew nothing of course.

I headed home after I dropped them off and I suppose I was trying to convince myself too until driving round the bend I see Alex’s car parked on the street a block from my house. I stopped to see if it was really him and it was.

The engine still running on idle, I jump out to run to him as he is coming out to meet me. With everything I have, I slap him, rage exploding out of me in fists and hot tears that he could have been gone so long without a word and he's taking my blows, not even shocked or angry, a stubborn and lost look on his face as he tries to hold me down. My rage not even close to spent, we then kiss as if we want to hurt each other.

He tells me I’m poison even as he devours me.

And when he tells me that we'll spend the whole day tomorrow, there's no pretending that I'll be
elsewhere and I don’t pull away to say that there's a boy from San Anselmo who’ll be waiting for me just to see how jealous he'd be. There is no pretending any longer that anything could keep us apart.  

September 7, 1986

You're gone again. I am bereft again. I can’t concentrate on anything. I relive our one day together until all traces of the present reality dissolve. In my classes, walking along in school, at night in my bed, I drug myself with you and fool my senses into another reality. I touch myself the way you touched me and my body responds, aching, fevered, to the point where it would be better to be smothered with nothingness rather than spend another moment on fire.

September 20, 1986

I tire of this constant longing that follows me as night follows day, unceasing. Will it ever end, I wonder?

I think I was speaking across the cafeteria to Esme or Kay, fork in hand, attention firmly rooted in the moment when I smelled you and then I lost all thought. I looked around and you weren’t there, of course, why would you be.

Then during English, the boy behind me whispered something in my ear, saying one word that sounded so much like you that I melted as if it were you and not him behind me, whispering in my ear.

You do that to me lately. You just show up all of a sudden in someone’s nonchalant reply, some stranger’s smile, a face in the crowd with blue eyes.

September 26, 1986

I am reckless and wild and I don’t care. Alex calls me and tells me to meet him in Santa Cruz, that his team has a game there. He hasn't told his family so we can spend a few hours together alone before he has to head back to L.A. So I drive three hours, telling my parents that I'll spend the whole day with Esme and Kay.

I wear a dress I’ve been saving up for him, a short dress of white that clings to me with a white floppy hat and wedges that makes my legs look longer than they are. I arrive just before the game has started and note with some satisfaction that everyone’s eyes are on me as I walk by the pool to the bleachers. People whisper, wondering who I am with my hat and big sunglasses. I sit by myself and watch the game counting down the minutes when it will at last be over and we can be together.

And when it is, I walk over to him and watch as his eyes consume me, not caring that when he wraps me tightly in his arms, my dress gets wet. His teammates make smart remarks but he doesn’t bother to shower and change, telling them over his shoulder that he’ll meet them back after lunch. We barely had two hours with each other, just parked under a shady spot far away from everything.

Shouldn’t we have lunch, I asked him. Aren’t you hungry?

Yes, I’m hungry, he replies before his hands have found me, his lips against my skin. I want you so much, he says. He touches me, and I'm undone. It can't ever be enough. And when our two hours are up, I can’t let go and tell him that it’s too hard to be apart. It kills me, he says, to have to leave you. He has no other games in the area and the next holiday he can come home is not until November. He tells me he wants to take me away with him, that he can’t wait until he graduates and I’m eighteen.

Nothing else matters but this. Nothing else exists but he and I together.

September 27, 1986

Papa has grounded me and taken away my car. He checked the odometer and knew that I had gone somewhere far away and back. He and Mama have demanded I tell them where and with whom.

Is it Daniel? They ask me fearfully, Did the two of you go somewhere?  They suspect the worst.

Perhaps to them and their immigrant, provincial ways, were they to know what I have done, again and again, is wicked and sinful. Perhaps if I was still a child I would believe that too. But I tell them nothing. The secret stays within me. It nourishes me and fuels the fire.

What is happening to you, Mama asks me with fear in her eyes.

I think they want to be lied to, they want to think that I am content with dreams of make believe, their little girl playing dress up and singing and dancing and playing the piano. I wish I could lie to them, put on an act, but I don’t. I'm consumed with Alex and it is out of my control.

October 10, 1986

He came for me last night. I couldn’t wait, he said. And so once they went to sleep I snuck out and ran all the way to his arms in the dark.

This is too much, he tells me. You are too much for me. I can’t function when I’m away from you and when I’m with you, I feel like I’m drowning. I’m exhausted from loving you.

Alex, Alex, Alex.

In the morning, I left his arms and went back to my cold bed and he, back to Los Angeles.

October 24, 1986

He tells me last night that he can’t do this anymore. He can’t take driving such long distances back and forth in secrecy, being in darkness, forever in darkness with me and feeling ill as soon as he leaves to go back. I’m no good, he says. He looks lost and his eyes are pleading as he tries to disentangle himself from me. This isn’t right, he says. People aren’t supposed to feel this way.

I take him back in my arms gently and he closes his tired eyes. He falls into my embrace, where he belongs, and he gives himself over to me. I tell him a sweet lullaby to make him rest a little before he has to go. I spin my favorite tale of us being together next year, in New York.

I'll sing and dance for the whole world, I tell him, and come home to you, in our little apartment in Manhattan. We'll have a ridiculously big bed for two where we’ll stay whether it’s night or day—no more parking in cars like thieves in the dark, stealing a few hours here, a few hours there. We’ll walk up and down Manhattan in beautiful clothes and everyone will wonder, who are those people and what exciting lives they must lead.

This is true love, Alex, I whisper to him. Don’t be afraid of it.

November 1, 1986

Papa has given me back the car. I’ve been the model of the sweet and quiet daughter this past month. I appear chastened but I am far from. I don’t need the car. I don’t need anything else so long as Alex comes for me at night every other week or so. And in between those night time hours are long stretches of days that run into each other without variation.

I play this part and that off stage and on but I’m separate from it all. My real life is with Alex.

November 28, 1986

He’s a coward. A boy just pretending to be a man. He’s weak and frightened of the feelings he can’t control.

When I first saw him two nights ago, I felt that something was different. I could feel a distance from him that I’ve never sensed before, a coldness. Still hungry for me, still unable to keep his hands off me, tearing my underwear in his haste, but afterwards he said he had to get back to his parents' house. I think he expected me to cling to him, draw him back, beg for more time. I could almost see all the excuses formed and ready to jump out of his mouth. But I didn’t.

Alright, I said. And got dressed, leaving my torn underwear behind in his car. Let him clean up his
mess.

And then last night for once we meet in a restaurant in Marinwood, some busy dive, crowded and noisy. I suppose he chose this out of the way hole in the wall to break it off with me, thinking I wouldn’t create a scene in such a public place. But I know him better than he knows himself and I saw his eyes when I got out of my car. I wore a red dress with these red velvet boots I found in the city-he hadn’t seen me in red since the wedding. A man who looks at me like that is lying when he says
it’s over.

How many times has he given this speech, I wondered as I sat listening him to say how long-distance relationships don’t work, how he’s too old for me and that I should enjoy my senior year with boys my age, such disappointingly ordinary things that have no truth to them.

Did I look and act as matter of fact as I sound here or could he even detect the fury building up inside me? I surprised myself by not throwing everything within my reach at him and screaming at the top of my lungs what an asshole he is.

With my calmest voice, however, I say that he’s right. He can’t keep the surprise out of his face, then looks at me, almost frightened, as if waiting for me to blow up. He pays the bill in silence and I look at him, not really believing what he has just done.

So I guess this is it, he says, with relief.

I reach and put my hand on top of his, the words out of my mouth before I could think—Then we should have a goodbye fuck and nod my head towards the hallway to the bathroom.