Her parents deeply approved of her reading, especially her father.
Her father had grown full and hale during the Action years. He presented himself with his chest pushed out, his eyes vibrant with outgoing energy that allowed nothing in. He came into rooms and clapped his hard little hands together and said, “Well!” His silences were imperious excretions that nobly enshrouded him as he read The New York Times. When they went to eat at restaurants, he gave loud speeches at the table. When they rented a cottage in the Upper Peninsula, he stood calf-deep in the waters of Lake Michigan in his bathing trunks and pretended he was conducting an orchestra while his wife and daughter lolled on the beach. Justine watched him jerking his arms above the waves and wondered why he didn’t look ridiculous.
He took the entire summer as a vacation before beginning his new position, and Justine spent a lot of time with him and her mother. In Action an entire summer of this would’ve been unbearable, but in a new environment where no one was there to see, it was different. In the afternoon she went with her father on long car trips, during which they viewed the new neighborhood and discussed politics and art. He always wanted to know what she was reading and what she thought of it, what were “the main themes.” He would listen intently, vigorously nodding his head. “All art should be about the world,” he would say. “It isn’t just some pretty story about what’s going on in the artist’s mind. It’s about the universal truths, the social truths, the struggle toward decency and equality.” The words awed her so, she didn’t even notice that they were in distinct contradiction to what she read for. The stately lawns, delicate trees, and winding concrete walks of Deere Parke sailed past as though unfolding from her father’s words, a splendid physical manifestation of his orderly sentiments.
At night she sat in the living room with her parents and watched newscasters tell stories illustrated by dramatic film clips of men being led away in handcuffs, men talking behind desks, men giving speeches, men angrily shaking their fingers, and, at the end, smiling women serving muffins to old people or playing with children. Her father praised her for taking an interest in the world. She liked to hear him praise her, but she vaguely knew that she didn’t watch the news for the reasons her father thought she watched it. It simply relaxed her to watch the parade of events organized by newscasters who appeared in orderly sequence desk after desk. The nodding, smiling faces of posing politicians especially relaxed her. It was great to see these smooth-voiced gray images confirm that there existed an apparatus run by men in suits that on the surface had nothing to do with her life and yet supported everything around her—grocery stores, malls, schools—acting as a deep terra firma for her to run around on.
In mid-August the Shades joined the Glade of Dreams country club, and Justine briefly encountered her peers. They were older than she and tall, with round, buttery muscles, modulated voices, and oval nails with neat cuticles. They had none of the raw toughness of her friends from Action, and Justine, while not afraid of them, did not quite know how to approach them. She stalked around the pool in her tiny black two-piece, gloating when older men looked at her. The men were fat creatures mostly, baked pink and bearded, their self-satisfaction and arrogance expressed in their saggy-bottomed hips and their wide-legged stance as they stood staring, their thick pink lips smiling at thirteen-year-old Justine, as if they could know every single thing about her merely by looking at her in her swimsuit while they, on the contrary, remained sweating, lotion-oily sphinxes, about whom she could comprehend nothing, revelling in their complex ugly humanity. She looked at them with dumb, shielded eyes, an imitation of wide-eyed young girlhood she had seen in magazines. They were from the world of the evening news, like her father, part of the apparatus controlling even the little lapping lakes. They were hideous, she wanted nothing to do with them, yet she was happy to intersect with them in that way, playing a magazine girl, a creature they viewed with pleasure and relief. “You flirt well, Justine,” remarked her mother.
On the first day of school Justine was scared. She stared at the mirror again and again trying to decide whether she was ugly or cute, applying another layer of white lipstick, then taking it off. She was confident as a result of her social success in Action, but deeper than that confidence was the fear that had also accompanied her on the first day of school in Illinois.
At first it looked as though her fear would be confirmed: after ten minutes of home room, she could tell that the kids here were different from the old Action crowd. She was too young to think in terms of economic class, but she saw that skirts were longer and modestly looser, makeup lighter, shoes cleatless. Only a few girls with dandruff and submissive eyes ratted their hair. Everyone seemed to be wearing huge sweaters with soft fuzzy hairs protruding from them. She sat sweating, waiting to be made fun of.
But she wasn’t. All those hours spent running with mobs, tormenting other children, and having sex in bathrooms had created an aura of sensuality and mystique that she radiated without effort. Besides, she was pretty, even in her blobby eyeliner and subtly ratted hair.
In history class she sat next to an intriguing girl in the back of the room, separated from the distant teacher by rows of heads and a lazy cloud of whispers and note-passing. The girl’s dress was a lowcut wisp of baleful black with a cinched waist, short flared skirt, and elaborate sleeves of lace and chiffon rolling off her shoulders in histrionic puffs. Her face was pale and intelligent, she had honey brown hair, an elegantly crooked nose, and wide, full lips. All of her features were larger and more adult than the pettishly powdered faces around her. She wore no makeup other than a set of obviously false eyelashes. She sat with her body twisted dramatically sideways, her long black-stockinged legs crossed once at the knee and again at the ankle, a Chinese puzzle of tension and beauty, while her torso leaned over the desk with exaggerated indifference. She was sketching in a sketch pad. Was she an artist? Justine noticed a huge book open in her lap, for the moment ignored. She was an intellectual! Her strange, temperate gray eyes met Justine’s. “Hi,” she said.
Within a week Justine was walking home from school with Watley Goode. Watley’s house was decorated in lime green, yellow, and cream—except for Watley’s room which was primary blue, red, and white. Watley’s mother was a fashionable woman who wore checked pant suits and high heels, who made complicated three-tier cookies, watercolor paintings, and shellacked découpage lunch boxes plastered with images cut from magazines. She was a clinically diagnosed schizophrenic who had to take special brain medicine and who would sometimes go nuts anyway and suddenly start yelling things like “Penis!” or “Vagina!” in public. Justine was very impressed; it was the first time she’d met a mother as glamorous as her own.
Watley herself was more glamorous than anyone Justine had ever known. Instead of pictures of TV stars taped to her walls, she had glass-covered museum-size posters of an art deco peacock, a vase of flowers, a woman with large breasts. The antique four-poster bed frame, the satin sheets, the down comforters, the vase of lilies, the full-length gilt-edge mirror, an imitation twenties-style phone—all these things bespoke a level of elegance Justine had never encountered in a girl her own age. Part of her wanted to hold herself aloof and sneer at Watley—as she had heard some girls doing while she was sitting on a toilet—but she was simply too seduced to do so.
Watley didn’t seem to care if she was being talked about; she simply did things and got away with it. She never made fun of the people everyone else scorned but instead reserved her considerable sarcasm for the set of girls she called the “vanilla wafers” who were as popular and formidable as Justine’s little Action gang but without the swagger and sensual style.
She talked about sex as often as the girls in Action but differently. Among the D girls, sex was dirty and mean, like throwing a rock at an old lady; you did it for fun and to prove how tough you were. With Watley it was an act of high style, sophistication, and emotion. While Justine bragged about her experiences to her new friend, she cannil
y changed the settings from rec rooms and toilets to moon-drenched beaches, rugs before roaring fires, canopied beds. Watley nodded, obviously impressed. Her own experiences had all taken place in her rattling four-poster where she had, with much drama, finally allowed her boyfriend of the moment to take off her bra and then, with many expressions of adoration, put his hand down her underpants. Justine was spellbound; she’d never thought of it that way before. She had grown accustomed to dividing girls into two categories: thin-lipped bores who read books and had conversations, and cruel, lolling beauties with heat seeping from their pores. But Watley was neither, or both. She liked to talk about important subjects like racism, hippies, and presidential elections. She got A’s on papers; she wanted to be a lawyer. She wanted to go out with a boy with whom she could discuss politics, not the greaseballs who tried to look down her low necklines and leered about her “advanced development.”
This was perhaps the reason she had no boyfriend for her entire freshman year. Justine didn’t have one either, and they spent most of their spare time together in Watley’s room, measuring their breasts and talking about imaginary boyfriends.
Their boyfriends had shoulder-length hair, high foreheads, mustaches, muscles and mouths, tortured pasts, complicated feelings, swords of flesh, and souls of silk. They were as feverishly perfect as Mrs. Goode’s découpage lunch boxes, festooned with gold unicorns, pink-faced harp-wielding girls, ladies with wigs and monocles, flying cherubs, rainbows, and wads of flowers, image after frozen image, cut with the tiniest of scissors so that no white edges showed.
They viewed their group-huddling peers with increasing scorn as the year went on. Justine occasionally received a flowered, coyly folded letter from one of her fading Action friends, tattooed with slogans like “Hippies are cool, greasers are fools.” She answered one or two and then thew the rest away after reading them with quick disbelief, no longer able to connect herself with the world she had belonged to so completely less than a year ago. She did talk to Watley about Emotional and, to a much lesser extent, Rose Loris, but without telling her of the conflicted pain these people had caused her. They became unpleasant, minor incidents, having little to do with her. It would be years before she would realize these incidents were lodged in her heart like gristle, ready to pop up into her throat at any sudden slap on the back—and there were lots of those later on.
Her father was away from the house often; he was home most on the weekends when he slept his numb ten-hour sleep and then rose to pace the house with his chest puffed out, telling stories about what had happened at the hospital, how he’d been called in for an emergency consultation during an operation and had knocked down a nurse while running through the hall. The patient was saved; Dr. Shade swam a vigorous six laps in the hospital pool and bought a milkshake on the way back to the office. Sometimes a patient would die, and he would pace around flailing his arms. “You know when this happens, what do you do, Lorraine? You are so close to it, that space where death and life come together for an instant and then, suddenly, there is nothing.” His hard eyes would shine with fierce opacity.
“He is so upset when a patient dies,” said Justine’s mother. “He cares so deeply.”
And Justine would feel the way she did when there was a dying dog scene on TV; on one hand she could barely control her tears, on the other she felt like being really snotty.
She felt like being snotty almost all the time to her mother, who didn’t have a retard center to work at and was thus at home a lot. Her mother suddenly wanted to be snotty to her, too. After ignoring the tight clothing and white lipstick worn by her daughter in Action, Mrs. Shade began to be obsessed with Justine’s clothing, about which they fought on the stairway and in the driveway almost every morning before school. “Really, Justine, you look like a cow,” her mother would snap as she regarded her daughter’s slight, optimally revealed bustline. “What kind of attention are you trying to attract?” One morning, the dog-walking Mrs. Kybosh next door was treated to the sight of Justine’s mother trying to pull Justine back into the house by her hair and skirt while obscenity-shrieking Justine beat her about the head and shoulders with her purse.
Her mother also censored the clothes she bought, leaning spitefully in the direction of sweaters and long plaid skirts—this when Justine was walking around with a girl like Watley! Justine was forced to shoplift chic ensembles, smuggle them to school in her big leather handbag, and change in the bathroom, stuffing her ugly plaids in her locker.
Once she adopted this strategy, there were no more morning battles, and the criticism shifted to Justine’s laziness and poor posture. The connection between mother and daughter stiffened and frayed down to a wire sharp enough to cut your hand on; it was through a long dark tunnel that Justine viewed her parents as they moved about the house.
The connection between her parents had further frayed as well. Although unaware of it at the time, in retrospect she could see it clearly. As a young child she had watched her parents create constructions of concrete and steel with words that swung triumphantly upward; now they dug circuitous tunnels around each other, one every now and then setting up a cul-de-sac for the other to stumble around in while he or she ran off in the opposite direction. Her father would tell a story about something that had happened at the hospital, emphasizing a particular part with his voice. Her mother would respond to some other part, and he would continue as if he hadn’t heard her. She would respond again to that part of his story he neglected, and relate it to some story of her own about, say, a neighbor. He would discount her story by stating, “Mrs. Kybosh is a stupid woman,” and then disappear behind his wall of important concerns. They seemed to want to create these mazes of crosspurpose and misunderstanding, and to need each other to do it, possibly because they needed the dry rasp of contact that occurred when they collided on their way to their separate destinations.
Justine’s own mazes led away from them both, and she minced around their house like an heiress on an ocean liner. She stayed up late at night, crouched near her radio listening to rock music on “underground” stations and fantasizing about the soft-voiced disc jockeys who played it.
She remembers a strange thing she said one night at the dinner table, without knowing why she said it. Her mother asked her how school had been that day, and, recalling a study hall conversation, she answered, “Sally Hinkel is going to fuck Jim Thorn tonight.” Her father’s eyes widened in alarm, her mother’s mouth opened in midbite, and a mallet of incomprehension flattened their previous conversation.
Perhaps it was this remark that prompted her father to ask her about Dr. Norris. She was in the car alone with him on a weekend errand. They were silently progressing on a scenic back road, when without any preamble he said, “Justine I want you to tell me what happened between you and Ed Norris.”
She didn’t say anything.
“There was an incident, wasn’t there?”
“I remember something,” she said.
“What? He touched you somewhere? Where did he touch you?”
Justine felt the full force of his surgical concentration, probing between her legs. His invulnerable eyes remained fixed on the sunny road. She held her breath.
“I want to know what happened, Justine, because I care for you. What exactly did he do?”
She remembered lying over the lap of some forgotten boy who stuck his fingers inside her. She thought of herself crouched over a mirror thinking how ugly her vagina was. Her pelvis became rigid.
“He touched me between the legs. He masturbated me.”
There was a moment of silence. “That is all?”
She said nothing.
“How many times did it happen?”
“I don’t remember.”
“I should kill him,” said her father. “I should find him and I should kill him.”
He sounded like he did when he complained about an incompetent orderly at the hospital. She listened, interested, but he said nothing more. She refrained from
pointing out that it would be ridiculous to kill Ed Norris now, roughly ten years after the fact, if her father actually did mean to kill him, or even yell at him, which she knew he didn’t.
They continued to drive along, her exposed pelvis constricted like an animal in a trap. They went home, and the discussion dropped silently into the deep pool of their three-way life.
Everything was fine until she was caught shoplifting a miniskirt. The store detective took her elbow with such insinuating intimacy that she jerked her arm away from him and gave him an eyeful of the special scorn adolescents reserve for middle-aged mashers before she realized she was staring at a badge.
All at once she was the delinquent kid in the manager’s office, sitting with her legs crossed, staring at a corner and pulling her hair across her mouth. The manager, a thin stylishly suited woman, talked about juvenile correction facilities as she paced the office, adjusting papers and emptying the ashtray. “I could see it if you were some poor inner city kid who didn’t have anything nice to wear,” said the manager. “But for somebody like you to steal, it’s sick.”
Justine had to admit it was true. She felt ashamed, but the idea of being sick had a certain drama—or at least she could pretend that it did. Her mother swept in, Saks Fifth Avenue skirt swishing grandly. “Really, Justine, this is impossible,” she said. Justine shrugged her shoulders and scowled while her mother and the manager agreed on how awful she was. Her mother seemed gratified to hear official confirmation that her daughter was bad.
From there, it was a short step to her mother’s surprise visit to the high school, where Justine was discovered in an illicit outfit. She was summoned to the principal’s office for a confrontation, then walked to her locker by both principal and parent, where the hideous cast-off plaid was disgorged. Before the whole milling between-class student body, she was forced to leave school with her mother, clutching the wadded up woolly jumper to her chest. To her irritation, she encountered Judy Hollis and Becky Tootle, two popular girls she and Watley made fun of and who made fun of them in return. She felt acutely the ridiculousness of her position as they stared at her with greedily mocking eyes that lingered with particular satisfaction on the jumper. She’d already heard herself sneered at for “sneaking in clothes and changing so she can parade around in skirts up to here and necklines down to there,” and now, as she was being marched through the hall in this way, she saw a virulent strain of gossip germinate before her eyes.
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