Virgin and Other Stories

by April Ayers Lawson

  They’d gone through a third of the lesson time and Wesley had not yet appeared. And how could Gretchen possibly go after him, now that Miss Grant knew?

  Outside the yard looked hot and still. Nothing moved, not even the Easter eggs, the strings of which you couldn’t see, so that in quick glances they looked like colors strung from the air. Clouds shifted. The yard went gray with shadow. Bright and then gray again.

  Wesley. Wesley. Wesley. She tried to summon him with her thoughts. She brushed a hand against the silken hem of her dress.

  “Do your parents know about this?”

  Gretchen started. Her heart raced violently.

  “I mean, you’re obviously not taking your workbook seriously. I didn’t say anything before because I thought the notes were enough. Obviously they’re not.”

  V

  The day Miss Grant’s brother had fallen in love with her—the day after school let out for the summer—Gretchen had found a note on Miss Grant’s door. It said that she’d had “a minor emergency” and misplaced their number, and went on and on about how “very very sorry” she was for their “inconvenience.” Because her mother usually lingered in the driveway until she stepped inside, Gretchen shoved the note in her pocket and tried the door. It was unlocked. She waved to her mother and her mother waved back, the car already moving in reverse. She stepped inside.

  The house was dim and silent with Miss Grant’s absence, the blinds in the kitchen and piano room left closed. Gretchen had shaved her legs that morning and the silk of her dress rustled soft and cool and fresh against her legs as she walked. It was the first time she’d worn it—a new dress her mother had bought her for church, its silk printed with overlapping circles of milky rose, turquoise, ginger, and gold. Her mother had said it looked “too dressy” to wear to lessons, but she had waited until the last minute to change into it because she knew that her mother would not send her back to her room for fear of being late. Wearing the dress for him made her feel formal, especially feminine, as if in it she accepted a new code of behavior, and she paused at his door, wondering if she should knock this time. But what if he didn’t answer?

  She slowly turned the knob and let herself in.

  He lay on his bed reading a thick black hardcover. He had his arm propped up on the comforter, which had been half rolled, half scrunched up, and the sheets were twisted away from the bed, so that some of the mattress showed. He did not seem so much surprised as amused to see her standing in his doorway. The room smelled a mix of sourness and tomato soup. The blinds were drawn; light came only from the two small lamps placed at either side of the bed. In the corner of the room she could see a case of trophies, the silver and gold of the trophy figures faintly limned. “She got called in. Didn’t she leave you a note?” he said.

  “Called in by who?”

  “By whom.” He carefully folded down the top right corner of the page he was on and closed the book. Last time his face had looked happy and silly, but now it looked disarmingly serious, so that he looked more like a real sick person. “She’s just not here, all right?”

  “My mom’s already driven away.”

  “Well you’re going to have to call her.”

  “She’s out shopping. It’s too far to go back home. And I don’t know which stores,” she said, anticipating what might follow. To prove that she was there to stay, she pulled the wooden chair from the desk in the corner and turned it to face the bed, then sat. After watching her for a minute he sat up. He sighed, reopened the book, shut it, and with a flick of his bony wrist flung it just past the trophy case. It was a heavy book and Gretchen started at the sound of it smacking the wall. “I hate that book,” he said, laughing, like it had been a joke. For a minute she was afraid. But then he smiled sweetly and turned toward her. “May says you have a natural touch, but that you don’t practice much. She says you could be very good though.”

  “I hate playing piano,” Gretchen said. What she meant to say, to clarify, was that she wasn’t at all like Miss Grant.

  “Don’t tell May that. She’ll die. She loves the piano. She lives for the piano, I think.” He said this in a confusing way, contempt in his voice, but his eyes showing something softer.

  Gretchen snickered, liking the sudden intimacy brought about by criticizing her teacher with him. “She loves the piano like … like you’d love a person.”

  “Yes. That’s it exactly. There’s nothing more disgusting than misplaced affection. Especially regarding pianos. Eew.” He grimaced in an exaggerated way that made her smile. He smiled back. “You’re a mean girl. Pardon, a mean young woman. How old are you anyway? No … wait,” he said, before she could answer. “I’ll guess.”

  “What do you guess?”

  “I’m keeping it to myself.” He crossed his legs at the ankles and folded his arms. “Don’t know what we’re going to do until your mother gets here.”

  But apparently he did. Because he reached into the drawer of his bedside table and brought out what Jamie would’ve referred to as a “dime bag.” (She had never smoked pot with Jamie, but he’d described it and bragged about having it at parties.) Also from the drawer, he took a thin sheet of paper. He tore it, dropped some of the leaf bits on it, rolled it up and then ran his tongue across the edge of the roll. “Your dress reminds me of carnival grass,” he said. “The colors. Have you ever been to Venice?”

  “No.”

  “Well what about the flea market? I think they sell something like it there.”

  “Never been.”

  “Well where have you been, Miss … I don’t even know your name.”

  She told him her name.

  “Gretchen. Gretchen.” Each time he pronounced it slowly and carefully, as if the name were unique. The sound of it caused gooseflesh to creep over her arms and legs. She babbled about visiting the Smithsonian in D.C. with school, and then about the condo her parents owned on Pawleys Island. In the dimness of the room his eyes looked more bourbon than mint, and the lamps carved out smooth hollows beneath his cheekbones. A layer of fuzz now masked the part of his head that had been shaved before. You could hardly see the part where it dipped and swelled, and she both hoped and feared he was better. If he was well, she did not have to worry about his dying. But if he was no longer sick, she could not imagine him here, in his room. Here with her.

  “The beach, hmm? So tell me, Gretchen, are you a one-piece or a two-piece girl?” He put the cigarette to his mouth, which was wide and narrow like Miss Grant’s, but curvier around the edges. By the time she realized he was talking about bathing suits and opened her mouth to answer, he said, “Wait. Don’t. I’ll just guess.”

  “Are you keeping it to yourself again?”

  He half laughed, half choked on an exhalation of smoke. Gretchen asked if she could have some of the pot, not because she wanted it so much as she wanted to climb up on the bed beside him. He shrugged his shoulders and she took this as a yes. She crawled onto the bed. She sat so that her shoulder touched his upper arm, which felt smaller than it should be, even under the thick cotton. He moved an inch away, so that they were no longer touching, and passed her the cigarette. “You have to hold it in for a minute,” he said as she inhaled. Before she had fully breathed it in she choked a little. Her eyes watered but she smiled to show him she was okay. She wanted to say she knew more than he thought she knew. She knew about what to do. But he kept talking.

  “It’s all about a lack of imagination. Lack of the need for it. See, with the two-piece, especially of the thong variety, you can see almost everything. Nothing left to the imagination. You know everyone looks basically the same under their clothes but you don’t know. And now you do. That’s how it is now.” He took another drag from the cigarette and passed it back to her. Their fingers momentarily brushed. She inhaled again, this time without choking, and held it in as he’d told her. Her eyes fixed on his bare knee, exposed by the part in the robe. She could not look away. Its down was almost the same color as his skin, its contour
sharply curving, and it seemed secretly beautiful. “Another example,” he went on, now gesturing elaborately with his other hand so that he appeared to be drawing in the air. “I’ve seen the inside of my head. It’s just an organ, like a kidney, and you expect that but you don’t. You’ve seen pictures at school, haven’t you?” She nodded. “I wish I hadn’t seen it. I’d have imagined it as light. Colors. At least colorful. I’d like to think the inside of my head looks like your dress.”

  She fingered the hem of the silk, the part that fell across the middle of her shin. He leaned toward her, just a little, so that his arm rubbed against her shoulder.

  “I wore it for you.”

  She kept playing with the hem of her dress while he watched. You’d have thought she was performing magic, the way he watched. She wanted him to kiss her. (Jamie had always started by kissing her shoulder, or her ear, before her lips.) Finally, he pressed his palm to the side of the lower part of her back and said that her kidney was there, in case she hadn’t known. His breath smelled smoky and stale, but there was that other scent, the scent of his skin suffusing the air around them. With his own long wiry fingers, perhaps the part of him that most resembled Miss Grant, he trapped Gretchen’s hand and the silk it held. He pressed his face into her hair, murmuring, God, but I love her, as if announcing his feelings for Gretchen to a third party. And pressed his dry lips to her temple.

  Suddenly he pulled away. In a different, more authoritative tone he announced that her mother would soon arrive. He said she should go to the bathroom in the hall and find the mouthwash. Then, he said, she should spray her clothes and hair with air freshener.

  She sat for a minute, dumbly staring at his handsome face.

  “Leave, I said.” He sounded angry now and she rose too quickly. Dizzy, with splotches of blackness clouding her vision, she climbed off the bed and gently shut the door behind her. When she cracked the door and looked back, he lay on his side, facing away from her. He was curled up into himself, quiet but breathing funny.

  She had gone back only to see if he was all right.

  But he had pulled her down into his smell, against his protruding ribs and the pale down of his chest. He had guided her hand between the folds of the robe and with the other hand she had touched the ruined part of his scalp. Beneath the robe his sex was surprisingly soft, and after a moment she knew that what he wanted her to make happen with her hand would not. And that was when Miss Grant came in. Her mouth dropped open so that Gretchen expected her to scream, but no sound came out.

  Gretchen did not hear her yelling until she was almost out of the house. The voice, which she’d never really heard raised, sounded shrill and broken, almost like crying. She wanted to stop and listen. Wanted to see Miss Grant’s face twisted with a feeling that didn’t come from the piano. Wanted Wesley to declare his love for Gretchen to another human being. But for fear that Miss Grant might suddenly decide to come after her, she ran down to the foot of the drive, to hide behind the trees until she saw her mother’s car.

  VI

  “It’s correct, but you’re not playing it like you could play it.”

  Gretchen again began the piece. Her fingers moved clumsily over the keys because she was also looking out the window. The weather changed so quickly. A moment ago it had been hot and still, and now the wind had picked up. The sky cast the yard a grayer shade of green, and the chartreuse of the weeds faded. The plastic Easter eggs batted violently, erratically, the cord of the purple tangling with the cord of the orange.

  The lesson was almost over and he had not appeared. She had thought of him all week. His laughter and kiss and scent. The way he said her name.

  Thunder boomed in the distance and in mimicry she hit the B, C, and D at once. Miss Grant sighed. “Ignore the weather. Focus,” she said. Her lips looked a brighter red, her skin a brighter white without the sun streaming through the window—Snow White with a long beaked nose and kohled eyes. The rain began with one, two isolated drops against the windowpane, and then poured down in heavy sheets. Less than a minute later, hail rattled across the roof. Gretchen stopped playing and both of them stared out the window now, hypnotized.

  The phone rang, and Miss Grant went into the kitchen. Yes, yes, of course that would be all right. “Your father says they’re stuck halfway across town and the traffic is barely moving,” she called to Gretchen.

  “Would you like to get a head start on the new one?” she said, strolling back into the piano room.

  Gretchen said she had a headache and briskly gathered together the sheets of her music. She hoped that Miss Grant would leave her alone. Then she would be able to go to Wesley’s room.

  “You can sit there, then.” Miss Grant gestured to the peach sofa. Gretchen collected her books, moved toward the sofa. She glanced back to see that Miss Grant was not going anywhere; she had slid onto the piano stool. Defeated, a little panicked by the mix of his nearness and unavailability, Gretchen dropped onto the lumpy cushions of the sofa.

  The piece was silly, a simple, playful waltz that Miss Grant played lazily, as if she were half asleep. While she was playing, Fiona Xiu came in with her bag. Miss Grant, under the spell of the music, did not acknowledge her. Fiona looked from Gretchen to Miss Grant, to Gretchen again, and the girls exchanged a smirk. Fiona sat by Gretchen on the couch. She sat close and let her shoulder fall into Gretchen’s, as if they were good friends, and on another day, this kind of closeness might have been enough. Her and Fiona sinking into friendship as they sank into the cushions, staying up late to watch movies and disdaining one another’s parents, trying on each other’s clothes and wandering around the mall to get eyed by clusters of guys. But Gretchen felt beyond all this now, and for some reason—but why? maybe because of the slight air of cunning, the shoes, her lazy grace—she suspected Fiona beyond it too. And so Gretchen wanted to tell Fiona all about her love for Miss Grant’s brother, but held back due to her sense of Fiona’s physical superiority; the animal sense of knowing that the girl beside you could take what you had. This drew a wall between them.

  The music had changed now. It sounded slow but certain, like flowing water, becoming gradually faster, complicated, rushing, now erupting, so that Miss Grant’s fingers seemed to flit over the entire keyboard in wild staccato. She played passively, a showy, indifferent clatter that mimicked the sound of hail on the roof. Did Gretchen slide away from Fiona, or Fiona from Gretchen? Because they now had a space between them. The space was also the music. The music, lovely and terrible and brutal, sounded like none she had heard. It sounded like Miss Grant’s fingers digging into Gretchen’s shoulders, sounded like the intensity in her eyes. Her lips murmured unintelligible sounds in the way Gretchen, before she knew better, had once imagined her father’s lips moving in his sleep. This is the way you must play always.

  When the electricity went out, Miss Grant continued to play. In the blue dimness, she saw Miss Grant’s dark figure swaying over the keys. Now the song slowed, and Miss Grant bent over the keys, as if trying to get closer to the song. Closer, closer, Gretchen felt herself drawing closer too.

  But it was gross, the angle of Miss Grant’s bent back, and when Gretchen thought of this the music released her. Quietly, she rose from the couch. Miss Grant did not look away from the keys.

  * * *

  The hall looked as it might have looked at night, dark and blank, with a thicker stale-sweet smell. The pounding of the hail had slowed to a light patter. When she opened the door, she saw that the bed had been carefully made. The room was empty. It smelled of Lysol. The electricity had switched back on, and the light from the hall illuminated the pale bedspread, reflected in the glass of the trophy case. She knew that he had died. He had died, and the thing between them would be like a dream now. The room grew hazy. She sank down to the floor and propped her back against the side of the bed frame.

  She did not know how long she’d been sitting there when Miss Grant walked in.

  “He’s gone to stay somewhere else, Gr
etchen.”

  “Gone where?”

  Sometime between now and the time she’d entered the room, the hail had stopped and the purple sky had turned a dingy blue. She saw this in the slits of the blinds as she rose to stand. Miss Grant did not step all of the way in. She leaned against the doorframe and played with the brass doorknob. “It’s best for him to stay somewhere else.” She cleared her throat. “What he did to you was … I would be happy to talk to your parents if…” She looked down and let her messy dyed hair hide her face.

  Then Gretchen was crying with Miss Grant’s arm around her. The nape of Gretchen’s neck touched the damp armpit of Miss Grant’s silk shirt and they moved out of the room in this way, down the hall. In the piano room, Fiona Xiu still sat on the peach sofa with her books. Her eyes widened, and her arched brows shot up. She studied both of them curiously. Gretchen jerked away from Miss Grant and ran into the kitchen, out the back door.

  Outside, her father’s car had just begun to pull up the long curving drive. She could see her parents’ faces blurred by the fogged-over windshield. She wiped her face with the side of her arm. She forced a calm over herself. Behind her the screen creaked, and Fiona appeared.

  “You left them on the couch.”

  Gretchen accepted the books. She felt Fiona watching as she opened the car door and settled in the seat. Fiona watched still as they backed down the drive. The rain had stopped but ran off from the roof and fell like a clear, shiny curtain before Fiona’s curious face.