Valley of the Moon (15 page)

“How do you know that?” asked my mother.

“I asked him.”

“Dash?” I said.

“Of course, Dash. We've had quite a few conversations. He's a fine young man. I encouraged him to think about college. I'm sure he could get into URI or PC.”

“What if he just wants to be a painter?” I asked.

“Nobody just wants to be a painter, Lux. He's twenty. It's time for him to get serious about his life.”

I skipped school that day. I sat on a bench near Trinity Church and waited for my mother's Plymouth to drive by, then I went back home. Dash was already there, sitting on the back stoop.

I walked across the grass and sat in his lap, straddling him. “You lied to me.”

“About what?”

“You're twenty.”

“Who told you that?”

“My father.”

“The dean. That guy asks a lot of questions.”

“That's because he likes you. God, you're five years older than me!” I'd captured the attention of a man half a decade older. I was too young to realize this was a cliché.

“Two years,” he said.

Time for me to confess. “Actually five. I'm fifteen.”

His mouth dropped open. “You told me you were seventeen. You lied to me?”

“What's the difference? Fifteen? Seventeen?”

“I thought you were going on eighteen. There's a big difference.” He pushed me off his lap. “We have to stop this. We have to stop.”

“I can't believe you're saying that.”

“I'm sorry, Lux, but I have a life. I have work. I can't afford…I mean, you're fucking fifteen!”

I stared at him, my pulse raggedy and thin. “But—I love you.”

“Christ,” he said.

I started crying.

“Don't do that. Don't cry. Aw, damn. Come here.”

After a while I let him take me in his arms. He held me until my shuddering stopped.

“Look, this is my last day. I start a new job in Middletown on Monday. What did you think would happen? How would we see each other?”

What
did
I think would happen? I thought I'd drop out of school. I thought I'd move in with him. I thought I'd make dinner for him every night and I'd bleach his white painter pants and I'd grow dahlias in the backyard. I was fifteen. That's what I thought.

“When's your mother coming home?”

“You had coffee breaks with her every day?”

He laughed. “What was I supposed to do? She gave me Fig Newtons. She's a nice lady.”

“She won't be back until supper.”

“The dean?”

“Same.”

And so we played house.

I made him eggs and toast. I sat at the table and watched him eat. The radio played songs it seemed were curated just for that moment. After breakfast we went to my bedroom. He undressed me. He took in each part of my body as if he'd never see it again, naming it as he touched it. Clavicle. Rib cage. Pelvis.

Sound abandoned the room.

The bedsprings groaning. Dash panting. The slap of our bodies separating and coming together. Somebody walking up the stairs. I heard none of it. I was gone.

When I opened my eyes, I saw my father framed in the doorway. His face was ashen. He stared at us, trying to make sense of what he was encountering.

“Dad!” I cried out, but it was too late.

He roared and flew at Dash, ripping him off me. Dash was no match for my father, who boxed three nights a week. In a matter of seconds, Dash's face was bloodied, an egg-size lump on his left cheekbone.

Dash scrambled around trying to find his jeans and shirt.

“Did he hurt you? Did he hurt you?” my father yelled. Before I could answer, he went at Dash again, a flurry of punches to the chest and abdomen.

I squeezed my eyes shut. “Stop, stop, stop!” I begged. When I opened my eyes, Dash was gone.

“Are you all right?” my father asked.

I drew the comforter over my head and hid. I'd swum out too far. I was caught in a rip tide. Being pulled out to sea.

“Honey. You have to talk to me.” He started pacing. “Damn it. I'm phoning your mother.”

His “honey” made tears come to my eyes. After last summer, we'd grown even further apart. He'd been perfectly cordial to me at school, but at home it was different. We stayed in our separate corners now. I didn't watch
Jackie Gleason
with him anymore. He didn't bring me books from the library, and on Saturday mornings he didn't invite me to walk to the doughnut store, our ritual for as long as I could remember.

Once I'd overheard my mother asking him why I wasn't going with him.

“Oh, she's not interested,” he'd said.

“She told you that?” asked my mother.

“Yes.”

“She said that. She didn't want to go get doughnuts with you?”

“She's got better things to do, apparently,” he'd said.

“No, please don't call Mom,” I said. “Please don't.”

“Lux, you're going to have to talk to one of us. We need to get our facts straight before we go to the police.”

“The police! Why are we going to the police?”

“Don't be scared. You've done nothing wrong. You're a victim here. It's not your fault.”

And just like that he offered me a way back to my old life. To him. To the way we used to be. All I had to do was lie. I thought about it for a split second. Dash didn't love me, that was clear. Maybe he
had
used me. Maybe he
had
taken advantage of me. He'd lied about his age. But I'd lied about mine, too.

I couldn't do it. “I'm not a victim.”

“What do you mean? I saw him on top of you. I
saw
him!”

I looked into my father's wild eyes, knowing I was about to break his heart. “I wanted it. I wanted him.”

He backed out of the room. A minute later, I heard the sound of his car driving away.

“Does Dad have an event tonight?” I asked. It was nearly eight and my father hadn't come home yet.

My mother cut a tomato into neat slices and spread them across the plate. “He went to McGillicutty's. He should be back anytime.”

I felt sick with dread. The plate I was holding slipped through my fingers and crashed to the floor.

“Don't move,” my mother said.

She got on her hands and knees and started picking up pieces of the shattered plate. The sight of her hunched-over back made me want to weep. Suddenly the door opened and my father walked into the kitchen carrying his briefcase in one hand, his gym bag in the other. He was freshly showered, his hair wet. He glanced at my mother.

“What's going on here?”

“I dropped a plate,” said my mother, standing. “Stupid. It just slipped right out of my fingers.”

I wasn't sure why she was covering for me. Instinct, I guess.

He put his bags on the floor. His right hand was bandaged with gauze and tape.

“What happened to your hand?” asked my mother.

“Bruised it.”

“How?”

“Sparring.”

“You weren't wearing your gloves?”

No, he wasn't wearing his gloves when he laid into Dash, punching him over and over again.

“Of course I was wearing my gloves. Sometimes gloves aren't enough.”

“Let me see it. I'll wrap it again, better. You should probably ice it, too.”

“I'm fine, Miriam,” he growled. He got a tumbler out of the cupboard.

“Daddy,” I said, desperate. “Can I make you a drink?”

“Vodka tonic.” He held out the glass like I was some waitress.

I made him the drink and my father took his vodka tonic into the living room.

Karras & Sons did not get the St. Paul's contract. In fact, I never saw Dash again.

For a while I tried to make my way back into my father's good graces. I joined him on the couch after dinner to watch the evening news. I asked him to help me with my trigonometry. I bought him a new pair of boxing gloves for his birthday. He acknowledged my presence, solved the equations, and thanked me for the gift, but continued to keep his distance. I felt ashamed for a long time, and then my shame slowly turned to defiance.

My last two years of high school, I lost all interest in academics. My class rank went from being in the top ten percent to somewhere around the fiftieth. I quit my clubs: French Club, Key Club, and Drama. I smoked openly in the courtyard. I flirted with any boy who would flirt back with me, and I slept with several of them. In the tennis shed. In the pool house. Once in the men's locker room. Promiscuity was an escape, a route out, a way to take my power back. I read Simone de Beauvoir, I inhaled
The Feminine Mystique
. There was something,
somebody
that lived in the country between victim and whore. I was awakening to this.

In the fall of my senior year, my father called in some favors and managed to get me into Newton College of the Sacred Heart, an all-women's school outside of Boston. I think at that point he couldn't wait to be rid of me.

My parents dropped me off at college on August 29, 1968. It was a cool, humidity-free day—fall was in the air. I could smell the Charles River as I watched the Plymouth drive away from my dorm window. When it was out of sight, I went downstairs and hailed myself a taxi.

“The Greyhound bus terminal,” I said.

Three days later, I was in San Francisco.

“It's a long story,” I said.

“I have time. The jambalaya has to cook for another two hours,” said Rhonda.

“I don't want to talk about it. It's in the past and what matters is now. What he's doing now. My father came around without me—I'm not a part of this. He's not reaching out to me.”

“He's reaching out to Benno; ergo, he's reaching out to you.”

“No, he's cheating. He's trying to skip the vegetable and go straight to dessert.”

Rhonda ran a bunch of fresh parsley under the tap and shook it, sending droplets of water flying into the air. “You're the vegetable, I take it.”

“Yes, and Benno is the dessert. Who doesn't want dessert? It's sweet and creamy and just slides down your throat. Of course my father adores Benno—he's easy to adore.”

Rhonda threw the parsley on the cutting board and chopped it vigorously. “Well, at least it's something. It's a beginning. He's trying.”

I sat down on a stool. “Jesus.”

“Lux, he didn't go to the lake—the trip he's taken every summer for years—because he wanted to spend time with Benno. And he's offering to pay for your son to go to a fancy private school in Newport. That's amazingly generous.”

“He works there; he gets a discount on tuition. And it's not that simple. There's way more to it than that—he's sending me a message. It's his way of saying I'm not taking care of my son properly. Do you want me to peel the shrimp?” I asked, hoping to change the subject.

“Sure.” Rhonda handed me a bowl for the shells.

We worked in silence for a few minutes. The kitchen smelled delicious, buttery and savory.

“Benno would be better off in Newport with my parents, wouldn't he? That's what you're trying to tell me,” I cried. “Admit it, that's what you think.”

“No,” said Rhonda carefully. “And it doesn't matter what I or your parents think. What matters is what you think. What do you think, Lux?”

“I don't know. What should I think?”

She smiled gently at me. “You're a great mother no matter what you do for a living or how much money you have in the bank. That's what you should think.”

I wanted to hate Ginger Signorelli (he was stealing my best friend away), but damn, I loved him.

He was funny, guileless, and smart. He was the kind of person who made you feel endlessly interesting. The kind of person who nudged other people into the spotlight.