The Unwelcomed Child (16 page)

She led me up the stairs to her room and immediately began sifting through the clothes in her closet, tossing one skirt and blouse after another onto her very comfortable-looking king-size bed. Even Grandmother Myra and Grandfather Prescott didn’t have a king-size bed. Theirs was a queen. I knew all about mattresses, thanks to him. I pressed down on Claudine’s to see how soft or hard it was.

“Try it,” she said. “It’s all right.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

I sprawled out on it and slowly laid my head back on her oversize marshmallow pillows. The delicious scent of lavender swirled around me.

“What sort of bed do you have?” she asked.

“Oh. It’s a single bed with a very firm mattress.”
More like a board,
I wanted to say, but didn’t.

“I have trouble sleeping on anything smaller when we go on trips and vacations. I have the same bed at home in New York. Do you have a nice room, at least?”

I couldn’t lie about it. “No. My room’s not very nice, Claudine. It’s about half the size of this.”

“I’d suffocate.”

Yes, you would,
I thought. “Sometimes that is the way I feel,” I confessed.

She looked at me and nodded. “Start trying some of this on,” she said, indicating the clothing she had chosen.

“Really, I don’t know how I’m going to wear any of these things.”

“Stop worrying. Once you’re in school a while and you set your eyes on some boy, you’ll want to look more enticing, Elle. Once I’m finished with you, they’ll be fighting over you.”

“It won’t matter,” I said, and she turned around, a mixture of frustration and anger twisting her mouth and igniting her eyes.

“Why not?” She paused a moment, thinking. “You don’t think you’re gay, do you?”

“No, it’s not that. I won’t be able to go out on a date,” I said. “My grandmother won’t approve.”

The comment froze her. Then she nodded and sat on her bed. “Can you tell me why they treat you like this? Did you once do something? I mean, I’m no angel. I’ve been grounded lots of times, even for a month once, but they let me come up for air after I promised to behave, which I broke, of course. As Mason says,” she added, smiling, “promises are like balloons, full of air and easily punctured. So?” She continued when I didn’t say anything, “We’ll do it like a game. I’ve done this with other girlfriends who were a little shy.”

“What kind of game?”

“I’ll tell you a secret, and you’ll tell me one. Secrets are from one to ten, ten being the most secret. You want to start with number one or number ten or in between?”

“I don’t have that many secrets,” I said.

She looked at me askance with a half-smile, more of a smirk. “No young man has ever sneaked over to see you before Mason did, for example?”

“Oh, no. We don’t have close-by neighbors, and where would I meet him anyway?”

She looked disappointed. “You have to have something wrong with you, Elle. I’m not a complete idiot. Why have your grandparents kept you hooked to a ball and chain until now?”

“They’re afraid for me,” I said.

“You mean they really are just two nutty paranoids?”

“Yes, something like that.”

She stared, her eyes narrowing with her suspicions. “Talk about your parents. How old was your mother when she became pregnant with you?”

“I’m not sure.”

“What?”

“I mean, she was in college at the time, but I’m not sure if she was eighteen or nineteen.”

“Well, when is her birthday?” she asked. I didn’t answer. “You know your own mother’s birthday, don’t you?”

“I’m not . . .”

“Sure. I get it. So your grandparents were so angry at her that they threw her out and forbid any mention of her. Is that the truth?”

“Sorta.”

“Sorta? I think I’m getting my dental degree here,” she said.

“What?”

“It feels like I’m pulling teeth. You told us your mother gave birth to you and then deserted you. Did she desert you or run away from your grandparents or what?”

“No, she didn’t want to be a mother.”

“I can’t blame her for that. I’m not crazy about the idea. Maybe later. Much later,” she said.

I was hoping that would be the end of it and she would stop asking questions, but I could see she wasn’t satisfied yet.

“Your mother must have told them who made her pregnant. Was it a local guy?”

I shook my head.

“But you really do know who your father is, right? Your grandparents must have known and mentioned it. C’mon, do you really know?”

“No.”

“Bummer.” She thought a moment. “I think I understand. Your grandparents made your mother have you because they’re religious, right?”

“Yes.”

“But now they think you’ll be just like her or something?”

“It wasn’t all her fault,” I said.

“No, but you’ve got to memorize how to say no,” Claudine said. “The thing parents and teachers don’t get or don’t want to get is that we have to be educated.”

“What do you mean? That’s why we go to school.”

“There’s education, and there’s education. We have to know what can happen, and you can’t just get that out of books and lectures. You have to be in battle to know what war’s really like. Your grandparents are making a big mistake keeping you from experiencing things. Not everyone gets pregnant.”

She stood up and began to pace, like someone giving a lecture, not looking directly at me.

“I’m not saying they have to buy you birth-control pills or anything, but they’re making a mistake putting you out there unaware of the traps. I saw the way you reacted when Mason touched your breast yesterday. You didn’t know what to do. I’m not saying it was bad for him to do it. Far from that, but someone else, someone not as thoughtful as Mason, could easily take advantage of you, and whose fault would that be? I’ll tell you. Your uptight grandparents’. That’s whose,” she said angrily. Then she smiled again.

“What?”

“When you got undressed down to your bra and panties and went into the water, you looked like a little girl unaware of anything. I could see it in your face. You didn’t see how you affected Mason. He was dying.”

“Dying?”

“In actual pain. You couldn’t see because he was standing up to his waist.” She waited a moment. “You understand what I’m saying, don’t you?” She waited a moment. “It’s different when he looks at me. We were brought up practically in the same crib, took baths together, and got used to each other. There was never any mystery about what was different.”

She waited, but I didn’t know what to say or what she meant.

“I feel like I’m talking to some extraterrestrial!” she exclaimed. “Elle, the whole time Mason was teaching you to swim, he had an erection.”

I felt my heart stop and start. Grandmother Myra didn’t know how much about human reproduction I had learned from the science book I had to read, or if she did, she didn’t want to mention it. She never questioned me about any of it to see whether I understood it all.

“We’ve got a lot to talk about,” Claudine said after taking a deep breath. “Mason might teach you how to swim in the lake, but I’m going to teach you how to swim in the world. Try this on,” she said, throwing one of her skirts at me. “And stop looking so worried. You won’t end up like your mother.

“At least, not because of me.”

I heard the pebbles hit the window.

I had tried on six skirts, three dresses, and four blouses. Everything I put on looked wonderful to me. I could only dream of wearing clothes like this, skirts this short, blouses this tight with deep V-neck collars, and dresses that clung to my hips and bosom with thin, soft material that Grandmother Myra would call “tissue-paper clothes.”

“You look better, sexier, in some of these than I do,” Claudine said.

Sexier? Being sexy was akin to being totally naked in Grandmother Myra’s way of thinking. I recalled her lecture about it recently.

“Why does a woman want to be sexy-looking? How many men does she want lusting after her? How can it be harmless to stir up erotic desire in a man? And don’t tell me these women are shocked to discover they’re doing just that when something unexpected happens, missy. They know exactly what they’re doing. I fault them as much as, if not more than, the men who cross the line of decency,” she said, and I wondered how much of that applied to my mother.

“Don’t the teachers and administrators get angry when you wear sexy things?” I asked Claudine.

“Of course not. You can’t expose yourself or anything, but they can’t punish you for looking beautiful. There’s nothing I’m showing you that is forbidden in my school. Of course, if you attend one of those parochial schools, you might have to wear a uniform that makes it hard to tell if you’re male or female,” she said, “but you’re going to attend a public school, right?”

“Yes. There are no parochial schools nearby, or that might be where they’d send me.”

“Lucky you. Now, let’s see.”

Claudine decided which ones complemented my figure the best and even gave me a bracelet and a necklace to go with one outfit. How was I to tell her that this was the first jewelry I had ever tried on, let alone hoped to wear?

“How can you give me this?” I asked, turning my wrist every which way to catch the light on the bracelet.

“It’s only costume jewelry. I have tons of it.”

The pebbles hit the window again.

“What’s that?”

She went to the window and looked. “Two guesses.” She threw the window open. “What?” she called down.

“I’m getting bored.”

“We’re almost done. Hold your water!” she shouted. Then she smiled at me. “I don’t think five minutes went by last night without him mentioning you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you, Miss Virginal Forest Nymph. Don’t tell me you’re surprised. I saw him kiss you yesterday and today when he picked you up. You didn’t look exactly offended.”

I felt the heat rise into my face.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t like it,” she said.

I said nothing. It wasn’t easy to tell someone, especially someone who was still somewhat of a stranger, what it was I felt and didn’t feel. I had grown up tightly guarding my inner thoughts and feelings, often thinking that my face was turning into a stoic mask. Grandmother Myra was just too good at picking up on a movement of my eyes, a dip in the corners of my mouth, or even a quickened breath. She immediately pounced: “What are you thinking?” I was always terrified that she would see I was lying when I replied, “Nothing, Grandmother.”

“It’s all right to like it, Elle. Mason is a very good-looking guy. I can’t tell you how many girls at school kiss up to me to get a better shot at him.”

“Kiss up?”

“You know, try to make me feel good about them by giving me compliments, doing things for me, stuff like that. I let them do it, but I don’t push anyone in front of Mason. First, he likes to make up his mind himself about any girl, and I’m not recommending someone and then getting blamed for it later. We kid each other, but we don’t really interfere in each other’s little romances. In your case, maybe, I’d make an exception. There’s nothing dishonest about you. I like that.”

She stared at me a moment and then smiled.

“You look terrified. Are you?”

“No,” I said, but I was frightened. She was talking so fast and making me think about things that had always been so private and deep down inside me. Yes, Mason had kissed me. Both times, it had happened so quickly and seemed so casual, so easy, that I didn’t want to make a big deal of it. Of course, his first kiss excited me, but I did all I could to avoid thinking about it, especially when I was in Grandmother Myra’s presence. I had come to believe that she could sniff out sexual thoughts.

The truth was that Claudine didn’t know how right she was. I was more than a little frightened. I was terrified that I was opening a forbidden door, and everything my grandmother feared and even predicted was going to happen. How do you grow up thinking that of all the people you should distrust, there was no one you should distrust more than yourself?

Claudine tilted her head and smiled again. “You’re fifteen but really more like a ten-year-old, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. I wasn’t trying to avoid the truth. I sincerely didn’t know how to measure myself against other girls.

“Sure you are.” She sat on her bed again. “Tell me how you felt when you saw Mason naked that day. I’m really interested. Were you shocked? Did you cover your eyes because you were afraid you might burst into flames or something? What?”

“I was surprised,” I said, hoping that would be enough of an answer for her. It wasn’t.

“And? C’mon. Tell me what you really felt inside.” She held her hand over her breast. “Did it thrill you, stir you up? What? I can keep secrets from him. I assure you of that. Not that there are many brothers and sisters like us. There’s little we don’t know about each other. I’ll tell you more about that when I feel I can trust you more, Elle. To get me to trust you more, you have to be honest with me. Understand?”

I nodded, but I didn’t add anything to my answer. I saw how that frustrated her.

“You’re not telling me everything about your mother,” she said sharply and quickly. She pointed at me. “You’re not lying. You’re just leaving things out. Am I right? Well? Am I?”