The Unwelcomed Child (17 page)

I was about to admit it when the pebbles hit the window again.

“Oh, jeez.” She looked out again. “What is it, Mason?”

“She has only an hour more!” he yelled.

“All right. All right. We’re coming down. Calm your gonads. Look,” she said, turning back to me. “We’ll have to spend some real girlie time without him looking over our shoulders. In the meantime, I’m going to pack up all the clothes that make you look good.”

“I can’t take them, Claudine. Thank you, but my grandmother . . .”

“Doesn’t have to know. You’ll figure a way to sneak them into your house. They’ll buy you some sort of bag for your books or something and you’ll hide what you want to wear in that, just like I do. If you keep acting like a lamb, she’ll always be a wolf. Be a little adventurous. Take some chances, Elle.”

“I want to,” I said. “I’m taking a big chance coming here,” I pointed out.

“Oh, jeez. She might catch you talking to a girl about your age. Pardon me if I don’t go ga-ga. I’m talking about real chances. All right,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Go on down. I’ll pack it up,” she insisted. “I’ll be right down.”

I started out.

“Elle.”

I turned back to her.

“You didn’t really tell me a number ten secret, but I’ll tell you one just so you know you can trust me. I was with Mason when he had his first orgasm.”

She laughed and turned back to the clothes. I hurried out and down the stairs, rummaging in my memory for all the scientific facts I knew about the word. I was sure I didn’t know enough. I knew the word came from the Greek
orgasmos
and was described as a sudden discharge of built-up sexual tension, but as soon as I had read those words, I shut the dictionary as if I accidentally had looked at something forbidden. I remembered growing hot with fear and looking quickly at my opened doorway to see if my grandmother happened to be peering in at me. My heart was racing, not only because that worried me but also because I had already experienced what was described. I wanted to get on my knees in front of the picture of the baby Jesus and promise never to feel it again, but if my grandmother caught me kneeling in prayer, she would surely suspect I had a reason to ask for forgiveness, and the cross-examination would begin. I just looked at the picture and whispered a prayer and then went on to other vocabulary words.

Now Claudine had resurrected all that in a brief, almost offhanded way, suggesting that it wasn’t anywhere as important or dangerous as I first thought. Nevertheless, I fled from her and out of the house.

Mason looked up, smiling. “Thank goodness. I was about to finish your picture myself,” he joked. Then he looked at me and stopped smiling. “What’s wrong? Did Claudine say something to upset you?”

“No, no,” I said.

He looked up at the window. “I told her to go slowly,” he said, raising his voice. He handed me my pencil. “You want to work on this some more, right? You still have time.” He sounded as if he was afraid I was going to cut my visit short.

“Yes.”

“Good. Get back to work.”

I returned to the picture. I could feel his eyes on me more now. I wasn’t as conscious of his gaze the other times, but after what Claudine had told me, I felt I should not be so indifferent or unaware. I didn’t want to be a ten-year-old at fifteen. It made me angry to think that I was.

“So, did she find clothes for you?”

“Yes, but I don’t know how I can take them, Mason. My grandparents would be very angry if they knew, and they would certainly forbid me to wear any of it. I can imagine my grandmother setting fire to it all in a garbage can.”

“Really? It’s that bad?”

I nodded.

“Well, just take them to make Claudine happy, and then bury them in the woods or something.”

“I wouldn’t do that. They’re very pretty things. I’m sure they’re expensive.”

“Probably, but don’t worry about it. She didn’t give you anything she would miss or couldn’t replace. You’ll figure it out,” he said.

He watched me for a while and then sat at my feet. “I like watching you work. You have such concentration. It’s as if you can see just where you’re going with your drawing. Can you?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“That’s important for an artist.”

“I’m not an artist yet,” I said.

“If it’s in you to be one, you are one. Was your mother artistic?”

“I don’t know. I mean, my grandparents said she dabbled in it.”

“I’ll bet either she or your father is. Stuff like that is often inherited.”

Grandmother Myra talked only about one thing we inherit, sin, but I’d rather think the way Mason was thinking.

“So . . .” he said after another few quiet minutes, “what did my kooky sister tell you? Did she tell you anything about me?”

“Stop cross-examining her, Mason,” we heard as Claudine appeared, carrying a cloth bag in which she had put the clothes. “What I told her is none of your business. Girls are supposed to have secrets.”

“I knew I’d be outnumbered quickly,” he said, acting hurt. Then he laughed. “Okay. I’ll keep my own secrets, many about you.”

“Wow. I’m shaking with fear,” Claudine said. She put her arm around my shoulders and then, out of nowhere, it seemed, kissed me on the cheek before setting the bag of clothes down at my feet. “Your bracelet, earrings, and necklace are in here, too. You’ll knock them dead in these.”

“She ought to know,” Mason said, nodding at her. “The school corridors are lined with brokenhearted boys whom she tortured and teased to death.”

“I don’t want to do that,” I said. “I don’t think it’s right to do something like that.” I recalled Grandmother Myra’s lecture about sexy clothing.

“Thanks,” Claudine told him, her face reddening. “Thanks for making me out to be a hard-ass in front of Elle.”

“If the rear end fits . . .”

“Excuse me. I’m famous for breaking hearts? Shall I remind you of a girl named Shelly Stone?”

“Shut up,” he said sharply.

I stopped drawing. This time, he looked very angry.

“She was an idiot offing herself over a boy.”

“Offing herself?” I asked.

Mason grew more crimson than Claudine had. “I said shut up, Claudine.”

She turned away. “I think I’m going for a walk,” she said. “Tomorrow I’ll show you how to put on makeup,” she told me. “And I’ll give you other things you can hide and use only when you’re at school.” She glared angrily once more at Mason and walked around the corner of the house.

“I hope I didn’t start an argument.”

“You didn’t. Don’t pay any attention to her. She’ll get over it. She can be very moody sometimes,” he said, raising his voice and looking in the direction she had taken. I looked, too, to see if she would return, but she didn’t. He looked at me and shook his head. “And you don’t need any makeup, Elle. You’re very pretty as you are.” He looked after Claudine again and really raised his voice this time. “She’s got a big mouth sometimes.”

“I think I had better start back,” I said.

“Okay. I’ll help you with everything. You did a good job of transferring your picture to the bigger paper,” he added. “You’re a natural artist. It comes easy to you. Don’t stop.”

“Thank you,” I said.

He picked up the bag of clothes and helped me carry everything back to the rowboat. I looked for Claudine to say good-bye, but she still hadn’t come back. He started to row us away.

“Think you might get out here a little earlier tomorrow? My parents will be here, but don’t worry about them. They’re great when it comes to our bringing friends around.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s the day we air out things like rugs and take down curtains to wash. My grandmother even gets my grandfather to put out the small sofa on the front porch. I have to help him with that.”

“Air out a sofa?”

I nodded.

“What does she do, wear a surgical mask around everyone?”

“No,” I said, laughing and imagining that. Then, as if it was just something triggered inside me, I recited, “Cleanliness is next to godliness.”

“Well, thanks for telling me. If I ever meet her, I’d better be sure I wash behind my ears first.”

I dared not think of him ever meeting my grandmother, even though I had dreamed of just that after I had seen him in the restaurant. Could that ever happen? Was there any way I could reveal that I knew him and eventually invite him to the house? And if I did, would they like him? Or would that end even talk of my attending public school in the fall?

“Don’t worry,” he said, seeing the look on my face. “I won’t just pop over one day and say, here I am, your granddaughter’s secret boyfriend.”

Boyfriend? Did he think he was that? Did I dare hope it was true?

I didn’t say anything. My silence said enough. He carried me to the shore when we arrived, and I sat and put on my shoes and socks while he brought everything else off the rowboat.

“Can I walk part of the way back with you?” he asked. “I won’t get too close to your grandparents’ house. I understand that might not go over too well just yet.”

“Okay,” I said. He took the easel and the bag of clothes. “I meant it back there, Mason. I can’t take that into the house. Very little gets by my grandmother.”

“She sounds like she has eyes in the back of her head.”

“And the sides,” I said. “You might as well leave it in the boat and take it all back.”

“Claudine will drive me nuts if I do that and blame it on what I said back there. We’ll have a bigger argument. We’ll find a place to hide it for now,” he told me, and we started walking.

“Who was Shelly Stone?” I asked, then quickly added, “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

He was silent so long that I thought he wasn’t going to tell me, but then he paused, and I stopped walking, too. He looked down for a few moments, and when he raised his head, I saw how difficult it was for him to tell me. I wished I hadn’t asked.

“She was a girl who had a ridiculously mad crush on me. I wasn’t at all interested in her, but she didn’t stop coming at me and eventually making up things about me.”

“What sort of things?”

“Telling girls things I did with her, to her. She made them all up. It got so bad that I had to confront her at school in front of other students.”

“Did that stop it?”

“No. She went into a deep depression and told some of the girls that I had turned her away because she wouldn’t do . . . do some kinky things with me.”

“Kinky?”

“Disgusting sexual things, Elle. Of course, I would never do them. I continued to ignore her. I had dates with other girls, and then, one morning, when Claudine and I had arrived at school, we saw there was something serious going on. There were kids in a crowd talking, and when they saw us, they stopped talking.”

“What happened?”

“Shelly had sliced her wrists and gone into a bath so she would bleed to death. Her parents weren’t exactly on the case, either. They weren’t even home when she did it, and they didn’t discover her until late that night, long after it was too late. She left a note saying she couldn’t live without me . . . something dramatic like that.”

“Oh, how terrible.”

“Hell, we were only in the ninth grade!” he cried, holding his arms up. “How could anyone get so serious? Counselors were brought into the school to talk to the other students, and my parents sent me to a therapist to be sure I didn’t carry too much guilt or something. I felt sorry for her, but it wasn’t my fault. Honest. I didn’t do anything to lead her to believe the things she believed about me. It was all in her crazy imagination. My therapist said that with a girl in her state of mind, if it wasn’t me, it would have been some other guy.”

I didn’t say anything, but I was thinking about the power of imagination, the good and the bad of it. So much of my life was spent in the world of my imagination. Could I do something terrible to myself, too? Was I destined to be another Shelly Stone?

“That was really mean of Claudine to bring Shelly up. We haven’t mentioned her name for almost two years. My sister can be cruel sometimes, especially if she’s angry or annoyed. I was just teasing her. I hope you’re not upset with me.”

“No,” I said. “But it’s a sad story.”

“It is, and despite what I just said, I do feel guilty sometimes. I often wonder if there was something I could have done, maybe reported her to someone who could have helped or something. But let’s not talk about it anymore. You have your own problems, and I want us to continue to be friends, close friends.”

“Okay,” I said, smiling.

He leaned forward and gave me a soft but quick kiss on the lips.

“You’re very special, Elle. I see that. Don’t think you’re not, no matter what your grandparents tell you. And believe me, they’re not going to be able to hold you back. You’ll be spectacular.”

I smiled and started walking again.

“There,” he said, stopping about five hundred yards from the end of the forest and the beginning of our backyard. “We can put this satchel under those flat rocks. See the small dip in the ground? We’ll put some more around it to protect it. You can visit it whenever you think you can and take what you want, if you want.”

I watched him move the rocks a little and then put the sack of clothes under them, move the rocks back, and add a half dozen more.

“Should be fine there,” he said.

“I can’t imagine ever taking anything with me to school and doing what Claudine said, Mason.”

“You never know,” he said. “Claudine’s right about your wearing something better. Despite how angry I am at her, I won’t deny she’s pretty clever when it comes to fashion. She was on the cover of a teenage fashion magazine once.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. She knows how to help you with all that. Of course, I’m not encouraging you to go out and find a boyfriend just yet. Not while I’m here,” he said, taking my hand.

For a few moments, he just looked at me. I wanted him to kiss me now. I didn’t want it to be a surprise. I wanted to welcome it with my own kiss back. He must have seen that in my face, because he moved slowly toward me, and then we kissed and held each other for a few moments before he released me a little, but then he kissed me on the neck. I felt myself weakening in his arms.