An Italian Wife (27 page)

P
ENELOPE'S BOARDING SCHOOL WAS ALL GIRLS, SO THEY
had to sneak out of the resident halls, down the beautiful sloping, manicured hills, under the back fence, to the river. That was where they met the boys. They ran, Penelope and the others, sometimes wearing their pajamas, sometimes barefoot, sometimes their hair wet and smelling of Prell shampoo; they ran to the river, across the rocky bank, across the mud, in the dark—no lights here, although the distant lights of the school could still be seen; they ran, long hair flying, arms open wide, breathing hard; they ran until they reached them, the boys, waiting.

This was 1972. The world was shifting. Even as Penelope's world stayed the same—no-show dad, mother obsessed with finding the woman who birthed her and gave her away—the world around her kept tilting, changing, keeping her off balance. It used to be, before Penelope or the others arrived at St. Lucy's, that the girls dressed for dinner, wore skirts to class, kept their hair tied back with ribbons or headbands; it used to be that the boys from Maxwell Academy were kept hidden except for once-a-month Friday-night mixers, or an occasional combined field trip to the Museum of Fine Arts or the Isabel Gardner Museum in Boston. There used to be rules. There still were rules, but no one followed them.

Everything was changing, faster than Mrs. Landon, the headmistress, could keep up with. Faster than even the girls themselves could. Mrs. Landon still wore knee-length wool skirts with pencil pleats. She still wore pearls, cashmere sweaters, nylon stockings. But the girls dressed in camouflage, ripped jeans, gypsy skirts. They snuck cigarettes, beer, Mrs. Landon was afraid to imagine what else. Boys were always discovered, jumping out of resident-hall windows, sneaking into the library basement, lurking around the perimeter of the grounds. Maxwell Academy boys still had to wear gray trousers, white or blue dress shirts, ties. They still wore the navy blazers with the school crest on the left-hand pocket. Their hair could not hang over their collars.

Julie Matthews, the house mother at Figg, made Mrs. Landon nervous. Julie wasn't a St. Lucy's girl; she'd graduated from Rosemary Hall. She had different ideas. Her cat eyes, green and almond-shaped, seemed mysterious, mocking, up to something. Keep an eye on your girls, Mrs. Landon told her every evening. Oh, Julie Matthews said, I do.

The girls waited until ten, lights-out, and then they went down to the river, where the boys waited. Penelope's leg jumped and tapped until ten, a habit she had that drove her mother crazy. In movies and restaurants, her mother would grab Penelope's knee hard, to hold it still. But it wasn't something she did deliberately. Her leg had a mind of its own. At ten, lights-out, she jumped up, slipped out, ran down to the river. Racing along the rocky bank, the mud making thwacking noises against her feet, she would always pause when the boys came into sight. There they sat, smoking joints, waiting. Penelope paused, as if making them wait these few seconds more mattered.

Then she joined the others who had charged ahead. They gave a war cry, a whoop that St. Lucy's girls had perfected for their field hockey games. It was a call to victory. They raised their arms over their heads, and shouted: Here we are!

The girls had rules. No falling in love with any particular boy. No asking the boys about any of the other girls. No telling secrets to the boys. When they arrived, they picked out the boy they would be with that night—never the same one three times in a row. They went and sat by him, to claim him. Then they got stoned. Penelope loved getting stoned, loved the way her body kind of lifted out of itself, her mind hummed, strange shivers of something shot through her. The boys brought the pot. The boys brought the potato chips, the Chips Ahoy!, the M&M's. The girls just brought themselves.

And after they were good and stoned, clumsy with it, thick and cloudy, the girls and boys had sex. Sort of. The rule was: try anything but. Stoned, and lying on the riverbank, the rocks hard beneath her back or legs or knees, looking into the stupidly grinning face of a boy, was the only time Penelope was happy.

Later, the girls told one another about the boys. They compared penis sizes and widths, techniques and lack of techniques, stupid things the boys said when they came. They imitated the sounds the boys made. Use similes! That was another rule: He sounded like a train slowing down, like a teakettle at full boil, like someone trying to go to the bathroom. His penis was like a Slim Jim, a bratwurst, a knitting needle.

They did this because everything was changing. Their parents were fucked-up—divorced, unhappy, even dead. There was a war that was never going to end. The government of the United States of America had betrayed them. They were lost. They were confused. They were searching for something that none of them could name. So they ran down to the river and gave boys blow jobs and got stoned and acted like nothing else mattered.

PENELOPE WATCHED HER
mother step out of her ridiculous car—a pea-green Citroën. Her mother was, of course, an embarrassment with her fake British accent and Katherine Hepburn pants and that car. Not as bad as Rainier's mother; she wore jeans and Army jackets, said
fuck
all the time, got stoned. Every spring, they showed up, all the mothers, for St. Lucy's Mother's Day Tea. It was a misnomer, this tea. There was a full bar where Penelope's mother got an endless supply of gin and tonics. Mrs. Landon gave a slide show of the girls looking studious, waving field hockey sticks, performing in plays, or making pottery. The freshmen had to serve everyone else, a lavish five-course dinner on china and linens, with crystal and silver.

Rainier showed up in Penelope's doorway. She opened her palm to reveal a joint.

“I need it to get through this,” she said. “What do you say?”

Penelope's mother had paused to talk with Samantha's mother. Samantha's mother was an artist, with unruly curls and flowing dresses.

Quickly, Penelope pulled Rainier inside, closed the door, rolled up her still-damp bath towel, and stuck it under the door. Rainier had already lit up, and that sweet, sharp, beautiful smell filled the room. While Rainier took a hit, Penelope closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

“Not the best,” Rainier said, “but it'll take the edge off.”

The girls passed the joint back and forth until they heard high heels in the hallway. Mothers were arriving. Penelope had a nice buzz going.

“Thanks,” she told her friend.

Rainier hesitated at the door.

“What?” Penelope said.

“My mother said she's going to bring me some acid. She's been doing a lot of it out at her house in Nantucket. She says she thinks it'll do me good.”

Penelope shook her head as if it would help her understand better. “LSD?” she managed finally.

Now voices, high and shrill, filled the corridor outside the room.

“Maybe next time we go down to the river we can all do it?” Rainier said, uncertainly.

Penelope didn't want to seem afraid, although she was. A boy from Maxwell Academy had taken LSD in the fall and jumped off the chapel roof, believing he could fly.

“That boy who died was stupid,” Rainier said. “You never drop acid alone.”

“I even forgot about him,” Penelope lied.

There was a loud knock on the door, and her mother's stupid voice: “Penny?”

Penelope rolled her eyes. “She knows I hate that name,” she said, and yanked the door opened.

Her mother and Mrs. Woodson were standing there. Penelope saw her mother's nose twitch and cursed herself for not opening the window.

“Smells sour in here,” Mrs. Woodson said, walking right in and cranking the bank of windows open. “Don't you girls ever clean?” She had stiff beauty-parlor hair and orange ovals for fingernails.

“Deborah stepped out for a minute,” Penelope said.

Then she giggled. Deborah Woodson had gone into town to a doctor; she thought she might be pregnant. Deborah had not followed the rules. She had done everything, including. She had done it with Jeremy Jackson, whose father was a mucky-muck in the Army, West Point, this and that, now dead.

Her mother looked at her sharply.

“I thought she'd be back by now,” Penelope said, strangling another giggle.

“I saw your mother in the parking lot, Rainier,” Mrs. Woodson said. “Isn't she exotic? What do you call those shoes she has on?”

“Dr. Scholl's,” Rainier said.

“I told Deborah I would escort you to the dining hall if she wasn't back when you came,” Penelope said. It was all so stupid and funny, this tea and Mrs. Woodson in her Chanel suit and her own mother frowning at her. Penelope sat on her bed with its pale-yellow duvet and Marimekko sheets, and hid her face in her hands, laughing.

“Well, I don't understand,” Mrs. Woodson said.

Rainier started to laugh too.

“Honestly,” Penelope's mother said. She took her by the arm, roughly, and yanked on her.

Penelope used to dismember her dolls. She loved the way the arms and legs pulled out of the sockets, the way the heads came off with a pop. It seemed her mother was trying to take her apart, the way she pulled on her. Or was that just the pot making her feel all loose and liquidy?

She looked up at her mother, and for an instant Penelope felt bad for her, for all the mothers who paid so much money to send their daughters to a fancy school to learn about sex and drugs.

“I'm sorry,” she managed to say.

She got to her feet clumsily. She straightened her shoulders, her head feeling slightly disconnected from the rest of her body.

“Shall we?” she said.

Her mother, that Anglophile, would like that. Penelope glanced over at her, and yes, she was smiling.

AFTER THE DINNER,
bloody roast beef although half the girls and even some of the mothers were vegetarians, Penelope leaned against her mother's car. The sky was purple and black. Her head hurt a little and the taste of the coconut layer cake was making her queasy.

“Well,” her mother said, not looking at Penelope, “I have a good lead. I'm driving to Rhode Island tomorrow.”

“Three hours and seventeen minutes,” Penelope muttered. She had timed how long it would take her mother to bring up yet another lead on the Holy Grail of finding her birth mother.

“What?” her mother said. Her face had gone blank, the way it did when she drank too much. Her eyelids drooped in a way that half an hour ago might have been sexy but now looked kind of sad.

She had been adopted by a rich family in Vermont as a baby, but all of a sudden all she could think of was who her real parents were. Every few weeks, she went off somewhere, chasing some wrong information. At Easter, she'd flown to Colorado, only to learn that the couple who might be her parents had had a boy. It was all so stupid, so long ago. If Penelope's mother had given
her
away at birth, Penelope doubted she'd be wasting her middle age looking for her. She'd say,
Fuck you very much for abandoning me
and move on with her life.

Her mother was telling her about Rhode Island, a Catholic hospital.

“This time I think I've found her for real, Pen, Penny, my Penelope,” she said drunkenly. Her mother had lived in England for a year or something a long time ago, and she used this fake accent that drove Penelope crazy. When she drank too much, her fake English accent got even stronger.

Penelope's leg jumped, up and down, up and down. She wished she'd taken the end of that joint with her so she could sneak into the ladies' room and have a hit or two, just to calm her down. Just to blot out her mother's voice.

Across the parking lot, Penelope watched Rainier and her mother bent together at their Volvo. Her stomach flipped over. Rainier was probably getting the LSD right now, and tonight or tomorrow night Penelope was going to have to take it. She sighed. Why did everything have to get complicated?

“I was thinking you could come with me,” her mother was saying. “We could have a nice drive in the morning after breakfast and check out this lead.”

Penelope chewed her lip. Rainier came skipping across the parking lot. As she passed them, she flashed a peace sign. Or maybe a
V
for Victory?

“I don't like that girl,” her mother said in a low voice. “She always looks like she's up to no good.”

“She's all right,” Penelope said.

She was thinking of that boy again, the one who jumped out that window, and her stomach cramped. She remembered how Rainier had said after they heard, “God! I wonder if I blew him? I hope so. You know, it would be a pity to die without ever doing anything like that.” Penelope had had the same thought, but it had made her sick to think it. Not Rainier. Rainier had laughed.

“So,” her mother said, jingling her keys, impatient to leave, “what do you say?”

Maybe Rainier would wait until tomorrow and if Penelope wasn't here, or got back super late, she could avoid this whole LSD thing. But a whole day, in the car, with her mother. Which was worse?

“Stop jiggling your leg, Penelope,” her mother said, grabbing Penelope's knee and holding on tight. Beneath her mother's hand, Penelope's leg trembled, wanting to move.

“Stop,” her mother said again. Penelope saw that she had a faint smear of lipstick across her two front teeth. Had it been there this whole time?

Rainier had gone inside now and was miming something to Penelope, something too complicated to mime. It could be:
Let's go smoke a joint
. It could be:
Let's go give some lucky boys a blow job they'll never forget.
It could be:
Let's drop this acid now!
Penelope turned her gaze away from Rainier. She felt suddenly very tired.

“Sure,” Penelope told her mother.

“Really?” her mother said, so pathetically pleased that Penelope wished she had said no. “That's great, darling. Shall we have breakfast first?”