Secret Lives (22 page)

The whole table seemed to have gone quiet,
everyone looking at me. I lowered my arm. “I have a little poison
ivy,” I said, quietly as I could and working hard at pronouncing my
words the way they did. For an awful minute no one said anything
and I looked over at Kyle. He was frowning at me and I tried to
tell him with my eyes how desperate I was to get out of there but
he turned back to Dr. Latterly and resumed talking again.

Everyone was talking except me and my eyes started filling
up and I pinched my arm harder—I had to—to try to keep the tears
back. Then the maid or whatever she is put a plate in front of me
that had a big slab of bloody red meat on it and that finished me.
My breathing raced up, my heart beat like it was sure to explode. I
reached for my water glass and knocked it over and everyone was
looking at me again and then the tears just spilled all over my
face and I stood up to try to get away from the table. But the
chairs were so close together I couldn't
budge. The freckled boy had to push
his chair out and the girl next to him had to push hers out and I
nearly started to retch. Everyone was staring at me with their
mouths wide open and I heard Kyle excuse himself from the table as
I ran out of the room. I got out the front door before he caught up
to me. He was furious. When he talked, it was through gritted
teeth, and real slow.

“
What…the…hell…is…the…matter with
you?”

“
I'm sorry, Kyle.” I was crying so much
now I could hardly talk. “I'm sick. I can't stay in there. I'll
wait out here for you."

“
You can't wait out here.”

“
I can't go back in there
either.”

“
I should have just let you stay home and
rot in your goddamned room.”

I grabbed his arm. I hate worse than
anything when Kyle's mad at me. “I'm sorry.”

“
Wait here.” His teeth were still gritted
together like someone poured cement in his mouth.

I stood outside the open front door and could hear him
inside talking to Julia, saying he had to leave, he was so sorry
and how ill I was, etcetera. And before he
stepped outside I heard Julia say,
“Tell your sister I hope she feels better,” and he answered, “She's
not actually my sister. Just my cousin.”

It makes me cry all over again to write those words. He
pushed out the front door like a bull looking for something to
charge and he didn't say a word to me, just walked ahead of me the
entire two miles to our townhouse. I had to practically run to keep
up with him and after a while I stopped trying to say I was sorry
because it was obvious he wanted nothing to do with me. Once I
actually did have to stop to vomit and he didn't even slow his
pace. When we got back here he walked into his room and slammed the
door behind him. I came in here
and thought about writing it all down in
my journal but I just didn't have the spirit. I fell asleep missing
Lynch Hollow.

This morning he went on to breakfast and
class without stopping in for me. I can't go to class today. Even
if I could breathe in those classrooms, I can't face the other
students who were at the party last night. So here I am, in my
second cave, longing for my first.

April 8, 1946

It's midnight and I can't sleep, so I'll
write. After dinner tonight Kyle finally came to my room. He
brought me a chicken sandwich he made from some of his food at
dinner. I was sitting on my bed reading our anthropology textbook.
“Are you all right?” he asked me, his first kind words in a
while.

“
Guess that's the last party you're
taking me to,” I said.

“
It's not funny, Kate.” Kyle sat down on
the end of my bed. “Mr. Sims told me you never go to his class
anymore. Then I checked around. Latterly's is the only class you go
to, isn't it?”

I nodded. It's the only class I go to
because it's the only class I have with Kyle, the only one I can
breathe in.

“
I guess I want you to be somebody you're not able to be.
That's not fair of me. I'm sorry.” He moved closer to me then and
lifted my hand. He pushed my shirt sleeve up to my elbow and turned
my arm over so he could look at it. I looked myself. There must be
twenty or thirty little marks, little double crescents from my
nails, some of them just pink, some scabbed over with delicate
little moon-shaped scabs. I felt like I'd never seen them before,
there in the light. It shocked me and I tried to draw my arm away
but Kyle held tight to my hand. Then he lowered his head to my arm
and set his lips on it and it was a minute or
two before he raised his head
up. “You'll have to go back to Lynch Hollow, Kate. It was wrong for
me to talk you into going to school. You knew what was best for you
all along, and this isn't it.”

“
But I like learning,” I said. “I don't
go to class, but I study the books anyway.”

“
When I get back to Lynch Hollow I'll
teach you what I've learned.”

“
I want to stay here,” I said. “I'm fine
in the room. And I can still work.” (That is not quite true. A few
times lately I've had to leave work early, but I wasn't about to
say that just then.)

“
I'm scared for you, Kate. I thought if I
could get you away from home, get you around other people, you'd be
all right.”

“
I am all right,” I said. I wanted him to
stop talking so sadly, like I was dead.

“
It's been torture for you here.”

“
I'm fine in my room,” I said
again.

“
All right,” he said. “Until the end of
the semester.”

I feel like the weight of the world's been lifted from me.
I can stay in the room
all I want, although I do have to work—I will have
to force myself to do that—and in the summer Kyle and I can both
return to Lynch Hollow. Next year he will leave again but we can
cross that bridge later.

May 10, 1946

Kyle brought Julia home with him tonight. We
usually study together in one of our rooms in the evening, him
teaching me what he's learned that day, but tonight he poked his
head in my door to say Julia was here and he would see me in the
morning.

He's been grumpy lately and yesterday he
told me it was because he hasn't made love to anyone in so long.
Hopefully he'll be in a better mood in the morning.

May 21, 1946

I cannot stand the nights Julia is here. She
is a nice person and it doesn't bother me so much that she takes
Kyle's time away from me because I am fine in my room studying by
myself. But once I go to bed, I can hear them. Kyle's bed is
directly on the other side of the wall from mine so I am just a few
feet from them. They laugh, or talk quietly, though it's rare that
I can make out their words. But it's the quiet moments that disturb
me most, when I imagine they are kissing and touching each other,
and there are times I can hear Kyle's bed rocking and I know he is
inside her. I wonder what that feels like, being filled up by a
man? I doubt I'll ever know.

Most times, I am grateful for my good
imagination. Stories pour out of it and it's like I can actually
see everything that happens in them clear as day. But sometimes
it's a curse. Like now, when Kyle is with Julia on the other side
of my wall and I can see in my head his lips on hers, his hands on
her breasts and between her legs. I know this will be one of those
nights when I pull my blankets and pillow onto the floor and sleep
there to try to still my thoughts.

May 25, 1946

Kyle is no longer seeing Julia. They had a
fight and now he is grumpy again. Last night he was so rude while
we were studying that I got mad at him. I told him that I'm grumpy
too, that he's not the only person in the world who needs sex. I am
reading Lady Chatterley's Lover and it is making me crazy. Kyle
doesn't think much of Constance Chatterley. “She's a tramp,” he
says. “She married that poor guy in the wheelchair in sickness and
in health. She should learn to keep her skirt down.” I told him if
she kept her skirt down it wouldn't make much of a book.

Some nights I have to chase him out of my
room early so I can go to bed and put out the fire by myself. He
says I am in “critical need” of a boyfriend and he offered to find
me one, saying it wouldn't be hard because I'm so beautiful. He
actually said that!

“
I'll never have a lover,” I said. I am
resigned to this.

“
You're only eighteen. I wouldn't approve
of you having a lover now anyway.”

“
Julia was only eighteen,” I pointed out.
“And Sara Jane was just seventeen.”

“
Yes,” he said, “but they weren't my
sister.”

May 29, 1946

Yesterday we got an amazing surprise. When I
got home from work, who should be sitting with Kyle on the front
porch of our townhouse but Matt! I was overjoyed to see him and
that shocked me because although I've missed him, I have certainly
not been pining for him. He has not even been much in my thoughts.
But when I saw him sitting there, grinning up a storm at me, my
whole heart seemed to expand with happiness. I hugged him like I
wanted to break him in two.

He is out of school for the summer already,
although Kyle and I have another week left. He's visiting
Washington for a couple of days, staying at the very hotel where I
work! We stayed up late last night talking and catching up on
things. He looks wonderful and has had a few girlfriends this year
but no one serious. Kyle says that Matt's still interested in me,
so I guess I will have to make it clear once again that all I want
is his very good friendship.

May 30, 1946

Matt just left and I'm trembling as I write
this. We went out to dinner tonight, Kyle, a girl Kyle likes named
Sally, Matt and I. It's rare for me to go out like that, but I felt
safe with Kyle and Matt there, like old times. Afterwards we came
back here and Kyle and Sally went in his room and Matt came in
mine.

We sat on my bed, talking about his school
and his studies. He wants to work for a newspaper when he's done
with school. We talked for an hour or so and then suddenly he said,
“Kate, I want to kiss you, but you're the scariest girl in the
world to kiss.”

“
What do you mean?” I asked.

“
The last time I tried you went running
off on me.”

I said he could kiss me, but that it
wouldn't change things, that we had a friendship and that was all I
wanted. It was a mistake to let him kiss me, I can see that now.
But the truth is, I wanted to do it. I wanted to feel what it was
like, and it was wonderful. Better than I ever imagined. I never
knew how hooked together everything is in my body. When he kissed
my lips, I felt it in my breasts and my stomach. He laid me down so
my head was on my pillow and I just couldn't get enough of his lips
and tongue. I knew I could make love with him and leave it at that,
but he couldn't. He certainly would never settle for friendship
after that.

And then he asked if he could touch my
breast. I said no and he said, “Just through your blouse. Let me
just rest my hand on it.”

My breast was begging me to let him touch
it. “Just set your hand there,” I said. And at first that's all he
did, but then he was kissing me again and his hand started playing
with my breast, squeezing it, pulling at it, and I actually said
for him to touch the other one too. He was groaning, and I might
have been too. I never felt so on fire. Then he reached up my
blouse and around back to undo my brassiere. My head was saying no
and my body was saying yes. I wanted him to touch me everywhere,
but if he did what would it mean? Something different to him than
to me, I was sure of that.

When he touched my naked breasts, I had a sudden crazy need
to tell him I loved him. I managed to stop myself from saying it,
but it was like I lost all sense of where I was and who I was. And
then he said it. “I love you, Kate,” and it
snapped me back. I sat up right quick
and pulled my blouse down, feeling real embarrassed all of a
sudden.

Matt was breathing hard, still trying to
kiss me and I held him away. “Oh, Kate, please.” He was practically
whimpering. I could see the bulge in his trousers trying to break
loose and I looked away from it.

“
Matt,” I said. “Next to Kyle you're my
best friend. You know that, don't you?”

He said he did, and I went on to tell him
how best friends don't make love, how that kind of closeness led to
expectations and changed a relationship forever. I told him I hoped
we already didn't do it damage that couldn't be undone.

I went on that way for a while until finally
he told me to shut up. That's just what he said. “Oh, Kate, shut
up. I've heard this all before from you.”

He was sulky for a while, but then we got
back to talking and laughing and I think we'll be all right. He
left around eleven and said he'd stop in tomorrow before he heads
back home to Coolbrook.

After he left and I thought over all that
had happened I started getting really shaky. I cannot trust this
body of mine. It has a mind all its own.

June 4, 1946

I am nearly packed for the trip back to
Lynch Hollow, and I can hear Kyle next door opening and closing
dresser drawers. I will be so glad to get home. I long to see my
cavern again.

There is a tense silence between Kyle and me
tonight that I hope will pass with a good night's sleep. I know the
cause. I was getting dressed for dinner this afternoon and I was
late. I had put on my skirt but had nothing on up top and I was
standing in front of my dresser mirror, brushing my hair. I was, to
be truthful, admiring myself. My hair is full and sparkly from the
damp air and my breasts are round and white. Suddenly, there was a
knock on my door and I knew it was Kyle coming to get me for
dinner. I don't know why I didn't answer him. I just kept still,
knowing full well that he would open the door. He did and I stood
frozen, facing the mirror with my back to the door, my brush in my
hair. “Kate,” he began and then forgot the rest of whatever he was
going to say as he saw my state of undress. I watched him in the
mirror as he watched me in the mirror. Our eyes locked for the
longest time, neither of us moving or speaking. Finally he took a
step backward into the hall and closed my door quietly after
him.