by Marge Piercy
All her life she had tried to keep little things to herself, often unsuccessfully, the way she had hidden away her diary, the way she hid things like a cobalt blue bottle about four inches high she found in a cabinet in the governor’s mansion and quietly appropriated; like a special red rock she had come upon hiking in Vermont with her aunt Karen. Like a blue jay feather that had floated down on the lawn. Silly treasures. If she had something of her own, she was real, she was protected from others’ scorn, others’ judgments. This afternoon with Blake was such a secret, a treasure all her own. No matter if it was singular and accidental, it was hers to take home, mull over, relive.
“Today you seem happy, full of life,” he said, as if he could read her mind, or perhaps her face.
“I am. Thanks for asking me to come with you.”
He smiled slightly. “It wasn’t a favor. It was an opportunity.”
“What do you mean?” She had a moment of apprehension. But he couldn’t be a mugger, a rapist, something bad. He was a fellow student.
“Why are you usually so down? I’m right about that, aren’t I?”
She shrugged, embarrassed. “I’m less depressed here at college than I usually am at home, that’s for sure.”
“Escaping?”
“In a way. But escaping to my own life. Me. Not them.”
“Them is your family.”
“My parents, mostly. My younger brother, Billy, he’s okay. He’s a charming fuck-up. We’ve always been close.”
“But you aren’t close to your mother?”
“Rosemary? She doesn’t bother much with me, unless I do something she thinks is bad—mostly in the sense that it could reflect poorly on my father. I mess up in any way, and she goes, ‘Oh, what will your father say?’ or more often, ‘What will people say?’” She felt embarrassed talking so much about herself. “What about your parents? Are you close to them?”
“I never knew them. I’m adopted.”
“Yeah, I remember you said that. But don’t you know who your mother was?”
He shook his head. “It’s a blank. A mystery.”
“I used to have fantasies I was adopted,” she said softly, afraid he would laugh at her.
“Why?” He lay down on the blanket, staring up into the sky. “Believe me, you wouldn’t want to be.”
“So I wouldn’t belong to them. I’d have real parents who would swoop down someday and carry me off and love me the way I am. Just for being me.”
“That’s what we all want, isn’t it? To be loved for being just ourselves. Not for being smart or winning scholarships or playing some stupid game well—just for being us.”
“Exactly,” she said. “But how well do you get on with your adoptive parents?”
“I respect them,” he said. “They’ve been good to me, and they’re good people. But we’re different. I’m different from everyone else.”
“I always felt that way too.”
“Why? You know who you are. You’re white, you’re affluent, your daddy is important.”
“But that isn’t me. And it’s like I don’t really belong in the same family with my older sister, Merilee, and my older brother, Rich. They do everything right. I never did, I never will.”
“Doesn’t that depend on who’s looking? Who’s judging? What’s right for you may be all wrong for them.”
“Yes!” She found herself laughing and didn’t know why. He hadn’t said anything funny. Maybe she was laughing with pleasure, because she loved talking with him. “I really like being with you. You’re easy for me to talk to. Talk with, I mean.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Isn’t that a shocker. Because it’s the same with me. I can talk with you. You’re not with anybody, are you? Or is there someone at home?”
“Not anyone real. Just guys.” She decided to be bold. “I thought you had a girlfriend.”
“Been checking me out? There’s a girl I was seeing last summer. She came up from Philly one weekend. It’s nothing special. Not what I really want.”
“What do you really want?” There was a kind of tension now between them that made it almost hard for her to breathe. She must be imagining this gathering sexual tension, she must be projecting it. She tried to rein herself in. Stop imagining silly things. He’s just chatting you up.
“I don’t know. It could be you, couldn’t it?” He was grinning as he rolled on his elbow to face her where she sat cross-legged on the blanket. “Want to find out?”
Her breath caught in her chest and she could not speak. He was staring intensely into her eyes, his dark, almost black, and burning. How he stared. She felt dizzy. He had not touched her, and yet she knew she was more excited than she had ever been with the boys she had fumbled with, sucked off, Jonah, who had taken her cherry. Her skin was almost crawling with the desire to be touched. She tried to make herself breathe normally so he would not guess how he affected her.
He put up a lazy hand to stroke her cheek. Tangle in her hair. Caress her neck, gently, barely touching her. Then the hand tightened on her nape and he pulled her down to him. She fell into him, and it was she who first kissed him, crushing her mouth against his. Then he rolled on top of her. His hands were on her breasts. They were grinding together. She had imagined passion but she had never experienced it. Sex was something she did because boys wanted it, because the dating game required it when you reached a certain stage. Desire was new, a pain furrowing her body. She could feel him hard against her and his hands burned into her wherever he could reach under her clothing. She was not even surprised when almost immediately he pulled at her panties and thrust into her. They were locked together madly pounding at each other. They were someplace else, some hidden intense place of fierce sensations. Her eyes were clenched shut, her nails dug into him and she strained against him. The pleasure that swept through her almost hurt. She heard herself moaning and her eyes burned and a tear leaked out. When he had come, he spoke against her ear softly. “I’m only taking what’s mine.”
“You didn’t use anything,” she said a few minutes later, as they lay slack, spent, side by side, still entangled.
“You aren’t on the pill?”
“I didn’t have any reason to be.”
He was silent for a moment. “There’s a morning-after pill. Go to health services.”
“Okay,” she said. “Does it work?”
“I’m told it does. And get them to put you on the pill.”
She nodded against his shoulder. Did that mean he wanted to see her again? That this wasn’t an aberration? She remembered after she had finally done it with Jonah, he had climbed out of their common bed in the ski lodge, lit a cigarette and turned on a bowl game. She had gone into the bathroom and briefly cried, but she could not even work up a real regret. It felt too insignificant. This had been something else, a completely different act. She did not want him to turn away and yawn.
“I…I feel confused,” she said finally.
“About what?” He pulled her head down on his shoulder. “Whether I was just scoring?”
“Yes.”
“And the answer is no. Things happen sometimes between people. Explosions. Coming together. I accept it. So should you.”
“Okay,” she said very softly, liking the way it felt to lie with her head in the crook of his shoulder. It felt safe. She worried about what it would be like when they had to stand up, for she could feel the air growing cooler. She worried about what she had done with him, but she did not regret it. She could not regret it, for it felt too strong. It felt as hard and real as the red rock she had picked up so many years ago on the mountain behind her grandpa’s farm and hidden away in her dresser drawer. This afternoon was hers.
• CHAPTER FIVE •
For the first time since she had come to Wesleyan, Melissa was not overjoyed to have Emily’s company. Emily went with her to health services but would not stop saying that Melissa had gone stark raving crazy.
“Here you are, you kept your cherry till senior ye
ar, and this dude doesn’t even use a condom. What got into you—besides the obvious.”
“It was different, Em, completely different.”
“Must have been. Like did he give you something to drink?”
“It wasn’t that way. I felt so close to him. He could see right into me. We could just communicate, like I do with you, the way it used to be with Billy.”
They were walking back to the dorm. Melissa had the morning-after pill and a supply of birth control pills. “Did they give you a hard time?” Emily asked, finally easing up.
Melissa shook her head. She still felt light-headed. “They’re glad if you come in, instead of getting pregnant. They know everybody fucks.” She took Emily’s arm. It always startled her, how tiny and fragile Emily was: bird bones.
“Did you, like, feel you had to? You think the guy won’t look at you if you don’t do him. Besides, sometimes it just breaks the ice. Sometimes it makes it worse.” Emily squeezed her arm back in a gesture of affection. “Are you going to keep going out with him? I mean, your parents really will have shit fits.”
“I don’t know, Em. But I’m not the least bit sorry. I mean, I had a real orgasm. I used to wonder what the fuss was about.” She still viewed it as something monumental, a divide in her life with a before and after.
“It just means that he’s not a complete klutz like Jonah. Really!”
“I don’t know. It’s like fate. The wheel stopped spinning and there he was.”
“Duh. I think you’re in for a big letdown.”
She remembered him saying, while he was still inside her, “I’m only taking what’s mine.” She had no idea what he meant, but it resonated. It had felt like fate to her right then. She wasn’t about to tell that to Emily. It was too private.
Besides, she’d have to admit she hadn’t the foggiest notion what he meant. “Don’t tell Ronnie, okay? Nothing will come of it, probably. I don’t want her teasing me about Blake or being nosy.”
“Did you tell Fern?”
“I will if anything comes of it.”
IT RAINED for two days, so it was not until Saturday that he took her back to their clearing. The evening before, they had supper together, Italian in town. She felt a great relief. They were to go on seeing each other. It was real. With both of them living in dormitories, it wasn’t too easy to grab privacy to make love. She thought that after a couple more weeks, maybe she could ask Fern to go study at the library for an hour and give them the room.
They made love in a slower, more sensual way. She felt she had in some way grown up, because suddenly she could enjoy sex. She had always thought of it as a guy thing. Women put out and put up with it. But now she wanted it too. His skin was sleek and warm and almost hairless, like flesh formed of warm honey, of amber, except for his wiry pubic hair. They kissed until she had to draw back to catch her breath, and then they kissed again. He coiled against her, partly around her, lean and supple, rocking against her. She felt her skin, her flesh, her breasts and belly awaken wherever he caressed, wherever her skin brushed his, catching desire from him and burning, liquefying under his touch. She felt as if her body had changed its substance into something radiant. If she could see them, her body would glow from within like a lantern. This was so much more than what she had known previously as sex—those hurried, fumbled encounters, poking through clothing, awkward collisions of bone on bone—that it should have a different name. Maybe it did. Maybe this was love. Again she had an orgasm. It was magical. She felt as if she belonged with him. This was what she had always dreamed of without being able to define it, a man who would really hold her, who would want to please her, who would have the skill and knowledge to touch her and bring her all the way alive.
“I saw Florette looking at me,” she said. “I guess she doesn’t approve of your going out with me.”
“A lot I do they don’t approve of. I don’t let it get to me. I’m my own man. I walk my own path.”
“But you like a little company?”
“Our path is together. Don’t you know that yet?”
“I hope so,” she said very softly. “But how do you know so fast?”
“I know.” He smiled, that inturned smile that never seemed quite a smile but something else, not like his usual grin or open smile. When he looked that way, she felt as if he knew a secret he wasn’t yet willing to share with her. She did not mind that. She felt important to him, something that had never happened to her before.
He leaned toward her as if sharing a secret. “The truth is, I started hanging out with the brothers because I like some of them. In high school, most of my friends were white. I don’t know what I am.”
“You don’t know the race of your parents?”
“I don’t know anything about my biological parents. My adoptive parents, Si and Nadine Ackerman, never knew. I wasn’t adopted through an agency. He’s a lawyer and he came across an abandoned baby. That was me. I don’t know what my parents were—Indian, Filipino, African-American, Malaysian, Polynesian—I’ll never know.”
“In a way, I almost envy that. Oh, I mean I understand it has to trouble you. Like you have no idea if high blood pressure or diabetes or sickle cell anemia runs in your biological family. You don’t know who you came from, you can’t put faces or names to your mother and your father. But you’re free too.”
“Free to define myself. Yes. You do see.”
“You’re a man of mystery.” She gave a short laugh to indicate she knew what she had just said was too silly.
“To myself, also. But we’re all mysterious. We come out of the void, we sink into the void, and in between half the time we don’t know what we’re doing or why. Events come out of the clouds and knock us off our feet. We’re always rewriting our lives because everything keeps changing. Your life can be rolling along feeling normal, and then lightning strikes. A crack in the world. And after that, nothing is ever the same.”
“I don’t think anything that mattered changed for me until I met you.” Immediately she felt her face growing hot.
“That may well be true,” he said with mock solemnity. “It’s shaped like a thigh, this hill.” He was sitting up, his clothes buttoned loosely, put back together after their lovemaking. He liked to wear earth tones, tans and browns and olives, khaki and beige. He didn’t wear sweats or superbaggy ghetto pants. Other times he affected all black. “We’re on the thigh of a sleeping giant. If we make too much noise, he could wake up.”
“But he wouldn’t hurt us. We make him feel good.”
“That’s his food. Couples making love create vibrations he feeds on.”
“He’s a love giant.” It was pure silliness, reminding her of childhood games with Billy, games in which they were astronauts or aliens or spies. “My younger brother and me, we used to play like this together—I don’t mean sex, I mean pretending things. Making up little worlds.”
“What kind did you like best?”
She frowned, remembering. “I guess when we were spies.”
“What kind of spies?”
“We’d go sneaking around the governor’s mansion into places we weren’t supposed to go and we’d move papers around or read things. We’d pretend to be taking pictures from our tiny wrist cameras of sensitive documents. It felt scary sometimes. Because we really were where we weren’t supposed to be.”
“It sounds as if it would still be fun.” He placed his hand on her belly. “Where do you imagine living, if you could choose anyplace?”
“Not Washington. California, maybe. Seattle. Or London. We all went to England and France and Italy and Spain when Merilee graduated from Penn. Once we went with my father to Tokyo on a trade mission. Have you ever gone out of the country?”
“Sure. I hitched around Europe last summer. I wrote about it for class. You know, an event that made you understand yourself better. A travel piece.”
“You mean, you just went on your own? Your parents let you?”
“Well, I’d been before. And th
ey were in France. My father talks about the death penalty—he’s an opponent—”
“So am I.”
“I’m glad to hear that. Thought I might have to tussle with you about it, being as your daddy is so hot and heavy into executions.”
“It’s sickening. I don’t agree with him.”
“I’m surprised your parents didn’t travel more. Your father comes from money.”
“He comes from old money, but they spent it before he was born. His father lives on a farm up in Vermont and raises cows. Honest.” She wasn’t about to describe Rosemary’s clever investing. Rosemary had her own financial advisor, Stan Wolverton, who had been coaching her for the last fifteen years. Rosemary considered him her real father and doted on him. He was a red-faced man who looked like an ex-athlete, but Melissa had never heard one thing about his past. Yet in the time she had seen him coming to closet himself with Rosemary, he had gone through three wives and was working on number four.
“What about your mother’s family?”
“Just lower middle class. Baptists from Youngstown, Ohio. I like them, actually, much better than my other grandfather, but we hardly see them anymore. They embarrass Rosemary. And I think they’re scared of her.”
“How come?”
“My mother is very smart. Much smarter than my father. They’re both insanely ambitious—you shouldn’t imagine she pushed him into politics or anything. I think he recognized right away that she could really help him.”