by Laurie Fox
It was the Boys’ expectations that I found so unfair, the way they presumed certain things about my character (like bravery, strength, coordination). One could chalk this up to naïveté. Isolated from the civilized world, the Boys were clueless on so many levels. They had no information whatsoever on the subject of females, unless you count fairies and mermaids as exemplars of my sex. To the Boys I was an anomaly: I neither flitted around and whined like a fairy nor splashed about like a siren, fixated on my physical appearance. I wasn’t a good swimmer and I only tolerated flying with myself at the controls.
Before me, no truly bookish girls had ever made the journey to the island, and that includes my Darling forebears, who appear to have demonstrated more aptitude than I in several aspects of island life—save for sweeping. My incompetence in all other domestic arts has been well established. Likewise I was a washout at tree climbing, cliff diving, pole shimmying, darts. The social disgrace was worse than that at Camp Nirvana, the all-denominations summer camp in Marin County, where I couldn’t tie a knot to save a life.
No, in The Neverland my saving grace was my ability to make up stuff. A gift for storytelling was my lone inheritance, and I went into action whenever the Boys were exhausted by their mischief and gymnastics. In the center of a lopsided circle of logs upon which the Boys slouched and stood, I’d sit on a stump and march out my hedgehogs, my weasels, a couple of chickens, a polar bear—all residents of children’s stories I’d begun telling myself as early as six years old in an effort to order the universe. True, some of these animals bore a close resemblance to the men in Mummy’s books, but my characters were wholly contemporary. Hip to the Beatles and the Stones, they had political awareness, they had credit cards. And most had a conscience. All fared badly.
I admit I had trouble ending my tales, for to do so seemed cruel, too sad for words. Whenever my rambling plots tested the patience of my listeners, I’d add a gruesome touch—a swift beheading, a zombie curse. This always bought me more time with my audience. Emboldened, I’d add a drippy eye, a rabid bat. Without fail, the Boys would get overheated and begin snapping each other with river-dampened cloths—like schoolboys in a locker room. My focus, then, would falter and my audience dwindle until there was only one boy left, the one named Pan. He was the only youth who never tired of a yarn, no matter how psychologically disturbing. And so, to answer conclusively the question every therapist has posed, Peter became the only boy I entertained.
It would make scores of doctors happy if I conceded that my first love was a figment, as illusory as a teen idol on a poster. Well, he felt solid to me—bone-solid, flesh-solid. He even had a pulse. And so I must conclude that what I experienced was not simply make-believe. Nothing about it was simple. For one thing, the heart can’t be fooled that easily. Neither can lips, cheeks, fingers. If love is a fiction, I told myself, it wouldn’t hurt like hell; it couldn’t be sustained like an epic tale. It would end with a bang or a whimper. But it would, without exception, end.
I say I had a “love” and yet you must remember that I was an inexperienced thirteen-year-old and any sort of touch felt like bliss on a stick. Plus the stick I’m referring to was a real one, with which Peter scratched my back in heavenly circles. Three times I caught him writing his name, lightly sweeping the stick over my skin, drafting letters. Far superior to getting pinned or going to the prom, I was engraved with Peter’s autograph, an endorsement of affinity most girls never get. Now, to me, this was sex, in the sense that it was the essence of kindness. To this day kindness remains the ultimate turn-on, the swiftest route to awakening my body. I concede that this is strange.
The first time Peter and I found ourselves alone on the island, I was wrapping up “The Panda and the Chickens,” a seemingly inexhaustible parable about being out of one’s element. As the tale wound down—the panda finding himself in a chicken coop in the Deep South, confused and sweating profusely—I signaled for Peter to stop. I was ready to move on to something else.
“Hold your horses,” he objected. “We can’t leave the panda in that kind of heat.”
“Of course we can. I just did.”
“No,” he insisted. He rolled his log over to my tree stump and sat down with a princely air of entitlement. “I need more story! You got to get the panda out of the South. How about this: And the bear clawed his way out of the chicken coop and didn’t look back until he was safely home in China, his tummy full of tasty, headless chickens. The End, by Peter Pan.” Peter flashed a killer smile, then melted backwards over the log, his long, freckled arms stretching to the ground.
“Peter! That’s not the end at all. You know that.”
“Then let’s get the panda to the National Zoo, where he can have his very own iceberg.”
“Wow, you know your geography,” I marveled. “Listen, I’m tired. Can we, you know, rest somewhere? The two of us?”
At this he cocked his head, just like Lassie, in the direction of something he called the guest house—there was a guest house?—and gestured for me to follow him into the woods. Eschewing the beaten path, we immediately found ourselves looping backward, ending up farther from our destination with every well-intentioned step. While Peter couldn’t disguise his pleasure about our lack of progress, I could barely keep my own feelings to myself—about my growing fatigue, my blurry sense of history.
“Peter, I don’t get it,” I announced as we rounded a familiar-looking bend. “Why am I here? Why me? Why did you choose me?”
He stopped dramatically and faced the wind. “I told you. Because of the stories. It’s as simple as that.”
“Nothing’s that simple. There are scores of better storytellers. There’s got to be something else. Something deeper.”
“Believe you me, I don’t know, on account of I’m not deep myself. I’m brave and nimble and legendary! For deep, you got to look elsewhere.” He kicked at a stone that, embarrassingly enough for him, refused to move.
In the mounting silence, my lips fell into a pout and my eyelids grew heavy. Peter produced an herbal cigarette from a back pocket, then drew a match across the stubborn stone.
“Crikey, Wendybird,” he said, by and by, blowing clove-scented smoke in my eyes. “I s’pose I fancy you because . . . well, for one, you’re squidgy and you smell good. For two, I don’t know. It’s not something I put a lot of thought into. For three, you accept all this on face value.” He motioned from east to west over the tree-swollen horizon. “You don’t torture yourself about whether it’s all rock-solid or just a friggin’ sham. Neverland’s a slam dunk with you.”
“Yeah, I suppose,” I said, measuring my words. I tore a wild plum off a tree, and I could swear the plum squealed.
“So why can’t you be happy with that?” he asked. “Why does stuff have to mean more than it does?”
“Everything means more than it does!” I cried, and tossed the plum into a ditch.
“Prove it,” he said.
On tiptoe I kissed him on the nape, making certain to leave a mark with my ice-pink lip gloss. “There. What does that mean?”
“Disaster,” he said, rubbing the spot dry. “Absolute doom and defeat.” He tightened the rounded-off Peter Pan (!) collar of his heavy corduroy jacket; it looked like he’d taken a scissors to it. “I suppose I chose you because . . . well, you don’t think I’m the mutt’s nuts—not like me other mates. Because you aren’t quite convinced of my greatness.”
“And that appeals to you?” I said, incredulous.
“It’s a challenge,” he said with a shrug.
“So it’s me who’s not the slam dunk.”
“You could put it that way,” he answered slyly, stamping out the butt of his cigarette. “What you can’t say is why you chose me.”
“But I didn’t,” I protested.
“Are you dead sure, luv?” Here, he blocked the path in front of me, allowing his height to make a point.
“What are you getting at?” I said, squinting up at him as if he were the sun.
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“You’re the one who made the trip. It’s your thoughts that brung you here.”
“Brought me here,” I corrected.
“Yeah, luv, whatever you say.” He bounded a few yards down the path; boredom would be setting in any second, I knew.
“Are you saying that I chose this place?” I asked, catching up to him. “That you had no hand in it?”
Peter spun around to face me. “Well, you took the getaway car, you found the escape hatch, you fell down the rabbit hole. I didn’t put a gun to your back. You fancy me something rotten. That’s right: you chose me.”
Like an arrogant genie, he crossed his arms and stamped the dirt with his cowboy boots, the leather so scuffed it had been rubbed clear white. Then, to mark his territory, he drew a line in the soil with the heel of one boot, a line that circled clear around an oak tree. Peter rested his back against the tree’s great trunk, taking care that his feet did not cross the line. From his deep right jacket pocket, he pulled a Superman comic and dove into its pages.
I was stunned. Wasn’t Peter notorious for being the one who started this business of “choosing” girls? The one who was ultimately responsible? The few books I’d read on the subject had made it clear that the Darlings were pawns, our fates sewn to us like shadows.
What I could never tell him, what I could barely tell myself was why it mattered so much—why he mattered so much. There were clever boys back home, boys with sex appeal and smarts. Guys who were even capable of feeling if given half the chance. So what was the big deal? Why was this one guy capable of doing so much damage over so many years?
He recognized our wildness.
Peter saw that we were capable of doing damage, too. Somehow, he understood that creativity is reckless and untidy and that we could never get enough of it. All the domestic chores were bearable because we were allowed our “maleness,” our freedom to cut up. Liberation coupled with maternal authority—does it get any better than that? The Neverland fulfilled a real dream for us Darlings: the attentions of a charming boy in a place where we held great power. Here, we were an unqualified success.
Too, The Neverland afforded me a laboratory wherein I could experiment and no one got hurt. On balmy afternoons when the heavens displayed a keen sense of humor, the cottony clouds gathering into balloon-animal shapes, I’d take long solo walks in a velvety field shot through with petunias and pansies and poppies, and spin my stories out loud. But these weren’t the gritty yarns I told the Boys or the morality tales I’d publish later in life. These were troubled romances, starring me, and they fed off a steady stream of my sadness. In each I had no kin—I was a family of one—and lived behind the locked gates of Buckingham Palace in a moldering room that was all but forgotten. I made up scores of allegories on this same trope, and never even tried to step back and self-diagnose. Understanding would have ruined the tales for sure and weakened their power over me. The irony of inventing stories while living out a whopper in The Neverland was never far from my thoughts. The truth is, I wasn’t so much greedy for adventure as unceasingly inspired here. Daddy had told me that astronauts don’t stop dreaming while orbiting the Earth; likewise, the Lost Boys and the occasional Lost Girl churned out adventures at an alarming rate. It’s the very least we could do.
Once Peter had digested the Superman comic (did he favor sexy Lana Lang over cerebral Lois Lane? I asked myself), we set off again for the elusive guest house. After an afternoon spent traveling in circles we arrived in a matter of minutes. Theo, the angel-faced Boy, slumped against the door, which for some reason shimmered. As we approached within a few feet, he abandoned his post altogether. Now I could see it was a silk nightgown that fell like a drape over the opening. Was the gown Mummy’s—or did it belong to some nameless girl?
Drawing the garment aside, I discovered a room decked out with the best the island offered: a seaweed-woven hammock, orange daisies stuck in the walls like lollipops, even a wooden stool flown in from the Darling sitting room, circa 1909. With a spring in my step, I crossed through the portal. Where my own quarters had been dank and lackluster, I now found myself in a dry, fragrant space lit by long yellow tapers, the walls hung with cheerful Indian bedspreads.
“Would you like to come in?” I asked, word for word, as my antecedents had.
“Would I,” Peter replied, but failed to stir.
“Is there a problem?” I asked. “I mean, did I forget something crucial? A password, a rhyme.”
“Nope,” he said, businesslike. For the first time he looked anxious, his confidence failing him. “Just got to watch it, you know.”
“Watch it?”
“Well, there’s history. I’ve got history to consider. There’s Jane, don’t forget.”
“Jane?” I peeped, barely audible above the hammering of my heart. “Jane?” I repeated, tearing away at a thumbnail. “Do you . . . know something?”
“I know loads of things!” he exploded. “It’s just, I’m supposed to think about the coincidences. I promised Margaret I would.” Peter dipped his forehead, in a rare display of introspection.
“You mean consequences. Mother warned you about the consequences.”
“Yeah,” he conceded. “That’s it.”
“You’re coming in,” I said. I seized his calloused hands and yanked him through the opening, careful lest he bring down the ivory-silk gown with lace trimming. With a trembling hand I directed him to sit on the stool. How many times, I wondered, had he settled on this same spot, making goo-goo eyes at my beautiful mother? I hated her at that moment; Mummy knew how to play any scene, how to entertain a man. At this point I could do nothing that was sufficiently original, that could make a mark of its own.
The two of us sat facing each other, heavy and silent as dumbbells. I refused to say a word for fear of sounding common, or worse, dull. His attention span at its limit, Peter cleared his throat: “Blimey, this cave’s done up nicely.”
“I guess it’s full of memories,” I said tentatively.
“Memories that would make you blubber.”
“Why would you say that?” I asked him. “I mean, how could I have your memories? If you’d put on your thinking cap, you’d figure that out.”
Peter looked away. “Me thinking cap is on, luv. I’m not famous for having memories. I’m famous for not remembering things—remember?”
I nodded, thinking yes, it’s your forgetting that’s generated nothing but problems. Then my mind went dim. A bucket of memories—strangely not my own—seemed to have dropped on my head. With the clarity of an oracle, I beheld the little house the Boys had built around my great-grandmother as she slowly regained consciousness—her fall from the sky had been the most violent of all the Darlings. I watched as the Boys uprooted a crude arrow from her chest; she’d been a fatality on the island, if only for two minutes. I watched as she plucked from her nightgown the flat ivory button that had saved her life. Many years later, she would fashion it into a pin so I might attach it to the neckline of posh frocks. The brooch was waiting for me back home in the top dresser drawer; Nana, the poor dear, hadn’t anticipated the advent of tee-shirts.
When the fog of history lifted, Peter lorded over me, looking for all the world like a wolf in boys’ clothing. If you must know, the wolf and I engaged in heavy petting. For me he broke the rules! First, Peter took a bite out of my neck, the way vampires in movies seduce pretty girls. Perhaps it was more of a nibble than a bite. I only recall the sound I made—a sound that corresponds to greed or hunger. “Ooh,” I swooned, protesting with my arms. My inner thighs throbbed, my lips ached. I confess that I wanted to be nipped. And to nip back. I slipped a hand under the waistband of his Levi’s and found comfort in the taut, damp skin there. As I did this, Peter took my entire ear in his mouth and sucked on it like a lemon drop. I would have fallen on the floor if I wasn’t already sprawled there. Instead, I groped my way to the stool and clumsily mounted it. From this vantage point, I could look down at the boy who famously refused to grow up
. How evolved he seemed now! How mature beyond his years!
When a couple of forehead curls flopped into his eyes, I took his face in my hands and practically swallowed it. Well, I tried. In response, Peter brushed his hands over the thin flannel masking my breasts, and again my blood rattled about. “So good,” I said, against my better judgment.
“You can never be too careful,” he said apropos of nothing, and smacked his lips. When these same lips received mine, there was no looking down or back, only kissing and more kissing. We were not careful in the least.
To be truthful, the whole business went nowhere. By that I mean I made this part up. I only kissed him twice on the nose—that was it. I did not try to extract meaning from the pleasure. For one suspended moment, Pan repressed his revulsion at being touched and I was deaf to my mother’s warning bells. Great-Nana would be proud, for I did not try to force something permanent from this entanglement. On the precipice of everything to lose, I sacrificed nothing but two kisses for a very dear boy.
I let Peter go, of course, cleaving to a wisdom that had arrived in the nick of time. We’d been nothing but pure and thus purity became our souvenir. For the first time in my life I let go of an ideal, and allowed the mere taste of love to take its place. It would be many more years before I’d get a whole meal.
* *
JASON HOOK, general manager of KRAP, admired me as if contemplating a plate of dessert. In one hand he held a demitasse of espresso, in the other a bowl of raw sugar cubes. Hook waved the cup beneath my nostrils so I might take a whiff of the rich Italian roast. For once he smiled with his mouth closed; then he set the coffee before me like an invitation.