Forget Monday morning. Martin was certain to call immediately after the board meeting. Deirdre was surprised he hadn’t called yet, but then, that was like Frances to maintain protocol and pull Martin aside once the meeting was over. That would be—Deirdre looked back again at the kitchen clock—in another hour, maybe a little more. She brought her glass of Scotch into the kitchen and picked up the phone again. She dialed without having to think of the numbers.
“Bradley Public Library.”
“Florence? Hey, it’s Deirdre . . .” Trying not to cry, taking a deep breath. “Is SJ . . . Did SJ leave yet?”
“An hour ago. Actually, more than that. She left around four.”
Breathing, breathing.
“Deirdre, is everything okay? Are you all right?”
“No . . . yes . . . yeah, I’m fine. Thanks, Florence.” Hanging up.
A swig of warm Scotch burned her throat. Deirdre swallowed. She wanted to feel her insides burn. She wanted to purge herself—of what? What had she done that was wrong? What was she guilty of? She needed to calm down.
She lifted the receiver again. Looked up Forest’s number in the Brandywine faculty directory. She should have it memorized by now, but she didn’t.
“Yeah?”
“That’s a nice way to answer the phone . . .”
“Deird?”
“It’s me.” She finished her Scotch. “Yuk, nothing like warm Scotch . . .” Her throat burned.
“Are you drunk?”
“Forest, I think I just got fired.” Tears now. Real tears. “Can you come over? Do you have any beer?”
“You got fired?”
“Well, I will.” Pause for nose-blowing. “I need to talk.”
“What happened? What . . .” Forest, alert now, his voice sharp and edgy.
“Can you come over?”
“Yeah, sure, I guess so. Give me a couple minutes to put something on. Deird, you got fired?”
“Hey, let’s meet at Tony’s. Can you meet me at Tony’s?”
“The one near the rink?”
Yeah. I’m leaving now, okay? You’ll come, right?”
“Be careful, Deird. I’ll be right there.”
* * *
From the outside, Tony’s looked seedy, run-down, but inside it was a neighborhood bar. On red leather stools, older men, the same three or four as always, sat grouped around one corner of the bar—retired guys in blue Baracuta jackets, one in a faded blue cap, another one balding, his nose a bulbous red mass. Also at the bar, a couple of women, hair frosted and teased a little too much, cheeks polished, eyes lined in thick black mascara, smoking Pall Malls, their legs crossed, still in nylons and pumps, part of the after-work crowd. A small TV, sound off, flashed scenes from the local news. Deirdre chose a small table alongside the wall behind a youngish couple eating pepperoni pizza, drinking draft beers. Pizza was the only decent thing to eat at Tony’s.
“A Guinness,” she told the waiter, an oldish white-haired guy.
The waiter placed down a white square napkin with a flourish and produced a basket of popcorn. Deirdre scooped up a few pieces, chewed on them, tasteless, butterless. She ate a few more. Chewing helped her think. This was all Anna’s doing. Deirdre couldn’t have known that Anna had forged Frances’s signature. In the van, Deirdre had only been comforting Anna—thank God she had suggested Anna call her mother. Didn’t that show responsibility? Clear thinking?
The waiter brought over Deirdre’s Guinness. She nodded her thanks and took a long sip. But what bothered her the most—what continued to pull at her brain, to flash like a warning—was the thought that she had liked being in that van with Anna. She liked being needed so much. Maybe she had willed all this to happen. She had a vague memory of SJ telling her to be careful. Isn’t that what SJ had said the other night, during dinner?
“Hey.” Forest shrugged off his jean jacket and pulled out the chair opposite Deirdre. He looked like he’d been sleeping—hair tousled, flannel shirt misbuttoned. Forest motioned to the bartender to bring a Guinness for himself. “So, what’s going on?”
Deirdre didn’t know where to begin. “I’m in deep shit,” she said. And she launched in. About how Anna wasn’t going to go on the field trip and then showed up at the last minute with the signed permission slip. How she pleaded with Deirdre to ride in the front seat of the van. “You know how those girls are? The way they all want to be the special one?” Deirdre stopped to eat a handful of popcorn, then pointed at Forest. “Like Kelly and Gretchen? The way they always fight over who gets to take your attendance?”
Forest nodded, ate some popcorn, smiled thinly.
Deirdre described the trip, the way Anna had been sulking, then ignoring Deirdre altogether after Deirdre reprimanded her. “I should’ve seen it coming, but I didn’t.”
“Seen what? What happened?”
“She kissed me.”
“She—what?”
“Kissed me. On the lips.” Pointing.
Forest laughed. “Do you know how many guys would kill to kiss Anna Worthington?”
“This isn’t funny.”
The woman behind Forest got up and pushed her chair into his. “Sorry,” she said, and glanced briefly over at Deirdre. The woman was pretty—frail-looking, with dark, dark eyes. Her boyfriend tossed money on the table between the empty pizza plates, and they walked out, the boyfriend with his hand on the woman’s shoulder, guiding her, or keeping her steady.
“Wait, do guy teachers think about that stuff? Kissing their girl students?”
The waiter brought Forest’s beer. “No—not really. I mean, yeah, sure, but not like we’d do it or something. Anna’s hot—what guy’s not going to think about kissing her?” He took a long sip.
“She’s fifteen. She isn’t hot.”
“Oh, so you never thought about it?” Forest narrowed his eyes and gave Deirdre his cut-the-bullshit look. He wiped the Guinness mustache from his lip. “Thinking about something isn’t a crime, you know. We all think about it.”
“No, Forest. We don’t all think about it.” This conversation was not going at all the way Deirdre had hoped. She didn’t need to get mad at Forest right now. She needed his help. She picked through the popcorn kernels.
“Anyway,” Forest said, “you think Anna’s going to tell anybody she kissed you?”
Deirdre looked up. “She doesn’t need to tell. Frances saw us.” She watched Forest’s reaction. “Yeah, now tell me I’m not in big trouble. Frances Worthington, chair of the board at Brandywine Academy, caught me—her least favorite teacher in the first place—kissing her daughter.” Deirdre finished off her Guinness and immediately looked around for the waiter.
“Deird, where were you guys? You weren’t alone with her, were you?”
“Oh great. Let’s just blame the victim here. Miss Murphy, can you tell the jury why you were wearing a short skirt on the night you were raped? That’s just great, Forest.” She wanted to throw the rest of the popcorn kernels at him.
“You think Martin’s not going to ask you that? Come on. It’s a fair question.”
“It’s bullshit and you know it.” Deirdre fought the tears. “I don’t think about kissing Anna Worthington, but you do, but you would never be alone with her, is that it? So it would never happen to you?” One of the women with frosted hair kept glancing over her shoulder. Deirdre lowered her voice. “Fuck you.” She blew her nose on her damp bar napkin. “I need another.”
Forest took his out from underneath his Guinness and handed it to her. “I’m just trying to help here.”
“You’re not helping at all.” She balled up the napkins and shoved them in her pocket. “I’m going to get fired! I’m going to lose my job!”
“Are you sure Frances saw you?”
“She opened the van door—”
“You were in the van? Alone with Anna?”
“We were coming home from the field trip . . .” And Deirdre told him again about Anna forging the permission slip, about Anna want
ing Deirdre to take her home and what the girl had said about her mother.
“I should’ve seen it coming. I mean, somewhere deep down, I knew Anna was gay . . .”
“What?”
“Come on. I mean, I don’t think—well, I didn’t think she realized it yet, but she must have and that’s what this whole thing is about. And of course, according to Frances it’ll be my fault that Anna’s gay.” She laughed hollowly. “Like, you know, I talked her into it or something. Recruited her for the club!” She laughed harder now, made eye contact with the waiter, motioned for two more beers.
On the small television above the bar, Leo Rivera’s face appeared. Still a news item, his killer still at large.
“That poor, poor child,” said one of the women with frosted hair. Her friend shook out another cigarette from the Pall Mall pack lying on the bar.
“They ought to fry the guy did that to him,” one of the bald men said, not looking away from the TV.
“Sick bastard,” said the man in the cap.
Deirdre looked away from Leo’s ten-year-old face, smiling, in his gray and blue baseball uniform. “Like I’m going to recruit someone to go through this crap? That’s a laugh.” She waved the empty popcorn basket at the waiter. “What do people think? That we like being the butt of jokes? If I could help it, do you think I’d choose to be gay?”
Forest looked straight at Deirdre. “I don’t know,” he said.
The waiter put two more Guinnesses on the table and a full basket of popcorn. “Anything else?” he asked, and removed the empty beer glasses and popcorn basket. Deirdre shook her head.
“Because sometimes—” Forest stopped to clear his throat. “Sometimes I think you do like it, you know, being the oppressed one. You enjoy being different, the underdog.” He twisted his beer glass around between the tips of his fingers.
Silence.
“I cannot believe you just said that.”
Forest removed his hands from his glass and gestured as he spoke. “Come on. Don’t tell me it isn’t really a choice. Don’t tell me that the right guy . . .” Deirdre pushed her chair back from the table, but he grabbed her arm. “Look, I don’t give a goddamn, you know that, but hell, you don’t even seem . . . gay. So what if you do like being part of the oppressed? What’s it to me? I’m just saying that, hell . . . I don’t know what I’m saying, but maybe it is a choice and maybe you made that choice and maybe you should think about that.”
Deirdre watched Forest gulp down his Guinness. Her own was untouched. She sat stuck to her chair, afraid of what might happen if she moved. Anything seemed possible—she might hurl her mug full of beer against the wall, her fingers might fly off, she herself might be propelled into Forest, so great was her rage and her desire to pummel him. She felt like a character in a Stephen King novel, no longer fully human, her body invaded by a foreign demon with a mind and will of its own.
“Fuck you,” she said under her breath. And then she got up, dug a few bills from her pocket, threw them on the table, and walked out.
Chapter Eight
Deirdre left Tony’s and drove in a blind rage. Scary how much she trusted the car and herself to drive it. Her mind raced. Where the hell was SJ? And what had just happened?
Forest. Her only friend at Brandywine. Friendships were hard enough to come by in the adult world, not like kids who just started playing together, who, because they were climbing the jungle gym side by side, started talking to each other, because they sat next to each other in homeroom became besties, because their parents were friends became friends too. Adult friendships seemed so much more complicated, fraught as they were now, for Deirdre, with possible sexual tension in addition to the regular friendship worries.
Not that those tensions were anything new.
When Deirdre was ten, she had her first memorable crush. Of course, back then, in Sister Theresa’s fifth grade room when Deirdre and Lizzie O’Connor teamed up to make their diorama of Popsicle-stick log cabins for the unit on the Westward Movement, Deirdre didn’t call it a crush. Instead, she told her mother that fall that she had made a new best friend. Though technically Maria Da Silva was still Deirdre’s best friend, they no longer had any of the same classes together. Maria had already started wearing blue eye shadow and talking about boys she thought were cute. So she barely noticed when Deirdre started spending all her time with Lizzie.
When Lizzie’s family moved away at the beginning of seventh grade, Deirdre and Lizzie promised each other they would always keep in touch. They would go to college together, share an apartment, be each other’s maid of honor, a godmother to each other’s children. Deirdre started seventh grade at St. Peter’s bereft. She wrote in her diary—long, painful entries about what it felt like to be the only seventh-grader without a best friend. She wrote about missing her Friday walks with Lizzie to Brigham’s for chunks of break-up milk chocolate or small vanilla ice cream cones with jimmies, though she easily could have asked Paul or any number of others to go with her—Maria Da Silva, for instance, when she wasn’t busy making out with boys behind the Woolworths.
She imagined that Lizzie, listening to her Best of Bread album, thought about Deirdre the way Deirdre thought about her, in that longing, almost desperate kind of way. She knew that Lizzie must be sad to be without her, that starting a new school without a best friend was even harder than what Deirdre was going through. It was difficult to picture Lizzie with new friends, so Deirdre imagined instead the way Lizzie might look when she saw her again—the exuberant smile, her brown hair pulled into a bouncing ponytail, how happy they both would be, how exactly right it would feel to be together again.
When Lizzie finally did visit right at the end of seventh grade, Deirdre skipped an end-of-year beach party because it coincided with her friend’s arrival.
“You could take Lizzie,” Deirdre’s mother suggested. “I’m sure she would enjoy meeting your other friends.”
But Deirdre didn’t want to share Lizzie with anybody. In fact, Deirdre didn’t even tell her friends Lizzie was visiting. She and Lizzie stayed up all night the first night in Deirdre’s room talking about books and new albums. They had pushed Deirdre’s two twin beds together, moved the nightstand out of the way. There, they painted each other’s toenails. Listened to Carole King over and over again. But every time Deirdre tried to get Lizzie to reminisce about the things they had done together, every time she brought up one of their silly private jokes, Lizzie would say, “Deirdre,” and roll her eyes. Then she would launch into a story about one of her new friends and one of the coolest things she and her new friends had done together and then, finally, about Evan, a cute blond guy who sat in front of her in science class, a guy she had been meaning to write Deirdre about.
“He’s wicked cute,” Lizzie said, “his hair’s kind of long,” and she sat up in the twin bed, motioned to her shoulders with her hands.
“Yeah?” Deirdre felt a sickening thunk in her stomach. She lay on her side under the covers, her thighs sweating, and gripped the blanket.
“We’re going out, sort of.”
“What do you mean, sort of?” Deirdre sucked on the satiny ribbon edge of her blanket.
“He kissed me . . .”
Silence.
“So, I think that means we’re going out.” Lizzie had flounced back beneath the covers on her own side. And when Deirdre didn’t say anything, she continued, “I would’ve written you right away, but it just happened, I swear.” She made an X on her chest with her finger. “I swear. You’re the first non–Emerson Junior High person I’ve told! My parents don’t even know.”
Deirdre knew she was supposed to feel grateful, but she didn’t. She felt sick and miserable and irritated. She didn’t have words for why she was feeling this way, and she might have even laughed if anyone had suggested that what she was experiencing was her first major breakup.
After Lizzie, new friendships were hard. And it would be years before Deirdre would figure out why. She spent her teens alwa
ys half in love, longing for her new girlfriends the way they pined after boys. There were the girls on the cross-country team. And Lois in the drama club. Deirdre’s senior year, there had been the young student teacher in her French class, Mademoiselle LaPointe—Agnès. Ahn-yes, she told the class, so much more beautiful and elegant than the English version. It was this possibility—that you could be Ahn-yes in French and Agnes in English—that produced in Deirdre the desire to learn French, to see who she might be in another language.
It was Agnès who suggested that Deirdre might think of studying French in college. “You should,” Agnès told her in her Parisian accent. “There is great need for Americans to know such a beautiful culture, yes? You will visit me one day in Paris and I will show you my city. There, you will fall in love.”
Of course, Deirdre was already in love.
She did major in French in college and worked hard, so that she might impress Agnès the next time she saw her. Deirdre imagined how Agnès would react to seeing her when she arrived for her junior year abroad—how much older and closer in age to Agnès Deirdre seemed now that she was out of high school and almost out of college, how much more sophisticated she had become, how really good her French was. For two years before Deirdre’s junior year abroad, she and Agnès kept in touch via postcards and letters, Deirdre reporting about her decision to major in French, and after that with regular updates on her progress. Agnès wrote brief letters back or sent cheerful cards congratulating Deirdre on her studies. One day, Agnès started replying only in French, “because, ma chère, your French is now that good.”
In Paris, because of Agnès, Deirdre felt at home more quickly than her fellow exchange students. Agnès helped her find a room to rent in a safe neighborhood. She invited Deirdre to dinner parties in her small apartment, introduced Deirdre to her friends. There were frequent Monday-night films, when movies were half price. And there was the night out at a lesbian bar—a small, dark place tucked away in the third arrondissement—where men and women sat in the front but only women were allowed in the back. Deirdre had been fascinated.
The Year of Needy Girls Page 7