Valley of the Moon (14 page)

“Does my father know you're here?” I asked.

It was the spring of 1965. I was fifteen and bursting from my girl seams; I had been ever since that last summer at Lapis Lake. I'd returned home not with a sunburn or poison ivy, but a fatal case of restlessness that now threatened to subsume me.

Dash Karras stood at the base of the ladder, a scraper in his hands.

“I sure hope so,” he said.

He wore beat-up work boots, paint-splattered overalls, and a blue shirt; his hair was curly and blondish brown. He looked me up and down and it wasn't the gaze of a high school boy. This was the bold stare of a man. He'd parked his black truck in the driveway,
KARRAS & SONS PAINTING
in block lettering on the side.

“I'm the sons,” he said.

My father hadn't mentioned anything about getting the house painted.

“George hired you?” I asked skeptically. I wanted him to think I was the kind of girl who called her father by his first name.

“Well, he hired my father, but he got me.”

Dash scrambled onto the ladder. Halfway up he lost his balance and teetered on one foot. I gasped and he easily righted himself. He peered down at me. “Don't worry, I've done this once or twice before.” He grinned the grin of somebody who was putting on a show.

I'd been caught. He knew I'd been staring at him. I marched into the house, my face aflame. I made cinnamon toast and spied on him through the kitchen window. Well, I spied on the ladder—that's all I could see. I turned on the radio, spinning the dial impatiently past Herman's Hermits, Bob Dylan, and Patty Duke until I found the Kinks. “All Day and All of the Night.”

It was three-thirty in the afternoon and I had the place to myself. My father was holding an open house for prospective parents and wouldn't be home until after eight. My mother was working at Goodwill, likely sorting through another bin of used clothes.

I started in on my English homework and was soon lost in
The
Great Gatsby
. It was my second time reading it—well, really my first: my father and I had only gotten through a few chapters at the lake. A half hour later there was a banging on the back door. Dash stood on the stoop wiping his hands on a rag.

“Yes?” I sounded just like my mother.

“Sorry to bother you, but may I use your bathroom? I won't track in dirt, don't worry.” He lifted his foot and showed me the sole of his boot.

I stepped aside and let him in. “It's right there.” I pointed to the bathroom door.

I didn't know what to do with myself. Should I go upstairs and give him some privacy? Or should I just sit there and be cool? Pretend it was a normal thing for me to have a man (other than my father) use the toilet a few feet away from me?

I froze when I heard the loud, ropy stream of his piss. It was so intimate. I half stood and I half sat. That's how he found me when he came out of the bathroom.

He smirked. “Please, don't make yourself uncomfortable on my behalf, George's daughter.”

I sat down. “My name is Lux,” I said huffily.

“Nice. Never met a girl named Lux before. The professor come up with that? You named after some literary character?”

“My father's not a professor, he's a dean.”

“Professor, dean, what's the difference?” He patted his pocket and pulled out a pack of Marlboros. “Okay if I smoke?”

My parents had quit smoking. We didn't even own an ashtray anymore.

“Well, maybe—”

He opened the back door and stepped out on the stoop. “No problem.”

He lit up. He was one of those serious inhalers, sucking the smoke way back into his throat, his eyes half closed with pleasure.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Seventeen,” I said without hesitation. “Almost eighteen.”

He took another drag. “You look older than that. If you weren't wearing that uniform, I'd have thought twenty, twenty-one.”

I pulled up my knee socks nervously. I could pass for twenty-one?

A few weeks ago I'd dreamed of Crawford Saltonstall, the captain of the St. Paul's football team. In real life he'd never given me a second look, but in my dream he sat on a blanket with me in the middle of a field. Inexplicably (we were nowhere near the water), I wore my one-piece pink bathing suit. We didn't speak. We didn't even look at each other. I may have, in fact, been looking away as he pulled the straps off my shoulders and peeled my suit down to the waist, exposing my breasts to the air.

In my dream he moaned, “God.”

In my dream I moaned “God” back to him.

That was it. That was all. The bathing suit. The straps. My boobs. I was an innocent. Having a boy see my breasts was as far as my imagination would take me at that point. I'd been living off that fantasy for days now. It felt so real that when I passed Crawford Saltonstall in the hall at school, I had to look down at the ground, afraid that if he caught my eye he'd know everything.

“How old do you think I am?” asked Dash.

He was working, he had to be done with high school.

“Nineteen?” I guessed.

He nodded and took a few more drags of his cigarette. “Poor Gatsby. He never stood a chance.” He stubbed his butt out on the stoop. “I better get back to it. If your father catches me talking with you—well, I'm sure he won't be too happy about it.”

That night, long after my mother and father were in bed, I sneaked downstairs and retrieved Dash's cigarette butt from the stoop. I put it between my lips, imagining it had just come from his lips. I should have asked him for a drag—that would have been the cool thing to do.

“This is my daughter, Lux,” said my father as I walked into the yard the next afternoon.

He and Dash stood at the truck. I'd heard my father laughing from a block away. He had his foot up on the bumper of the truck, like he was some handyman about to strap on his tool belt and get to work cleaning our gutters. His shiny oxford, thin black sock, and slice of hairy white leg embarrassed me.

“Nice to meet you,” said Dash. He was acting as if we'd never met. As if we had something to hide.

“You as well,” I said, wincing at my ridiculous formality.

Dash fought off a smile.

And so a new routine began. Every day I'd run home after school. When I was a few blocks away, I'd let my hair out of its ponytail, dab on a little lipstick, pull out
Gatsby,
and saunter slowly up the street, pretending to read.

“Afternoon,” Dash would say when I walked into the yard.

I'd nod and go into the house. If my mother wasn't home, he'd come into the kitchen through the back door. He didn't knock anymore. He didn't ask permission to use the bathroom; if he needed it, he went. Most days he'd go to the cupboard, get a glass, and help himself to whatever was in the refrigerator. I'd have my books and notebooks spread out on the table, my skirt shucked high on my thighs.

“What?” I'd say.

“Shhh,” he'd say.

Then he'd lean against the counter and watch me pretend-studying. He'd stay for five, maybe ten minutes, neither of us speaking, and then he'd rinse his glass in the sink and leave. I knew this was some sort of test. Would I say anything to my father? Could I endure his stares?

One afternoon the pattern changed. He didn't come into the kitchen. Instead he called me outside into the backyard. “I need your help.”

“Okay.”

“Are you afraid of heights?”

“No.”

“Good. Climb up on the ladder. Just a few rungs.”

I hesitated.

“Don't worry, I'll hold it.” He grasped the ladder and shook it. “Perfectly safe.”

“I'm not scared,” I said.

“I know you're not.”

So, this was the moment. I'd passed the test.

It was a windy day. I held my skirt tight to my legs while I climbed the first and second rung.

“Let go of it,” he said.

I looked down at him. His voice sounded different, deeper. I let go of my skirt and the wind burrowed beneath it. The pleats poofed out.

“Another rung,” he said.

I climbed.

“Stop.”

I stopped, staring straight ahead at the freshly painted clapboards. His gaze swam up my ankles and calves; pooled at the backs of my thighs.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to come down?”

“Do you want me to come down?”

“Not yet.”

I could see the clock through the kitchen window: 4:05. My mother wouldn't be home for at least another hour.

He put his hand on my ankle. His palm was hot and dry. The breeze carried the scent of paint and bleached rags. I held my breath as he slowly slid his hand up the inside of my leg. When he reached my mid-thigh, I clamped my legs shut because I was embarrassed. I didn't know why, but my underwear was wet. It wasn't pee, but something moist seeped out of me involuntarily. I couldn't stop it. Nor could I stop his insistent fingers. They parted my legs and spidered up to my underwear. When he touched the material, he made an involuntary sound. A sound I'd never heard a man make before. I was the cause of that—I drew that sound out of him.

I'd never felt so powerful.

I don't know how long we stayed like that. His fingers lightly brushing the cotton crotch of my panties. Like a paintbrush. Back and forth. Back and forth. He kept returning to one particular spot and pressing on it. That spot was the nucleus. A wavy, thick feeling began there and radiated out.

There was this reality: his hand was up my skirt. And there was this reality: we were both pretending it wasn't.

“You'd better go,” he finally said.

The next week he ignored me. He didn't greet me when I walked up the path. There was no knock on the kitchen door, no bathroom requests, nothing. He stood on his ladder and played his paint-splattered transistor radio so loudly I had to shut the kitchen window in order to concentrate on my homework. He treated me like a stranger.

I couldn't sleep. I could barely eat. What had happened? Did a neighbor see us on the ladder? Had my
down there
disgusted him?

Finally, in desperation I slipped a note under his windshield.

Did I do something wrong?

A schoolgirl's note. I might as well have written,
Do you like me? Circle “yes” or “no.”
Then I sat in the kitchen and waited like Gatsby's beautiful little fool
,
stricken, unable to do anything
.

He came through the front door this time. I froze as I heard his footsteps in the corridor.

“I'm sorry. I couldn't help it,” I blurted out.

“Help what?”

“My panties—getting wet. I know it's gross. I think there must be something wrong with me.”

He rubbed his forehead. “What? Jesus, Lux. You think that's the issue? Damn. There's nothing wrong with you.”

“There isn't?”

“No. You being wet is a good thing. The fact that you don't know that is the problem.”

“I don't understand!” I cried.

“That's because you're a baby. You're still in high school.”

“I'm not a baby.”

“Your father wouldn't agree with that.”

The hair on his forearms was bleached white by the sun.

“This isn't about my father. It's about what I want. What
you
want.”

“How do you know what I want?”

I remembered the sound he'd made when he touched me on the ladder. “I know what you want,” I whispered.

My whole family fell in love with Dash Karras. Who wouldn't? Ridge-bellied and sun-kissed. Silver-tongued and punctual. A professional. He cleaned up after himself. When he left in the late afternoon, there'd be no sign he'd been there during the day. The ladder would be folded neatly, stored inside the woodshed. Not one drop of paint on the lawn.

He did leave things behind, however. Bruises of lust visible only to me.

“Are you feeling all right?” asked my mother.

I helped myself to another bowl of cereal. I was starving.

“Your cheeks are red. Do you have a fever?” She touched my forehead with the back of her hand.

“I'm fine, Mom.”

“Sunburn? You've been at the beach?”

I picked up the bowl, draining it of milk. I was glowing because I'd been claimed. Every movement I made belonged to Dash. Tipping my head back. The sweet, cold liquid pouring down my throat. My grades were suffering. I'd quit the track team—it just seemed so silly. All I could think of was him.

“I hate it when you do that,” said my mother. “Use a spoon.”

My father walked into the room with the
Times
. “Ali KO'd Liston in the first round.” He tried to hand the paper to my mother.

“Not at breakfast,” said my mother.

I caught a glimpse of the photo, a shocking image. A snarling Muhammad Ali, arms the size of thighs, standing menacingly over a sprawled-out Sonny Liston.

“Two minutes, twelve seconds. People hadn't even found their seats and the fight was over,” he said.

“We need to pay Dash. It's his last day,” said my mother. “Should I write him a check or do you want me to give him cash?”

“Write him a check. I don't have time to go to the bank today.”

“He did a great job,” said my mother. “It was nice having him around. I'll miss our midmorning coffee breaks.”

Dash had midmorning coffee breaks with my mother?

My father popped a piece of bread into the toaster. “I've recommended him to the headmaster. This fall all the buildings at St. Paul's are being repainted. I can't guarantee he'll get the job, but at least he and his father can bid on it. They should hire somebody local, a Newporter. The Karrases have been here for three generations.”