Late at night, creeping through the darkness without waking up her parents, pretending that she was a monster or perhaps Princess or maybe even an angel, Karen thought she might be happy. And why not be more kinds of herself than one? One might compare her to Natalie Wood, who was “Woman of the Year” at ten and “Child of the Year” at eleven.
10
Just think how God feels, said the nun. He’s our best parent. He loves and provides for us. Then we reject Him. And even then He goes on offering His love! He wants us to be sorry and return to Him so that He can embrace us and forgive us. He waits and waits for that to happen. Sometimes He waits all our lives. And then do you know what happens?
We go to hell, the girl whispered.
That’s right. And, Karen, it’s very appropriate, the way you whispered such a bad word. Now, why do you suppose we go to that place?
Because . . . because it’s too late.
Good girl.
Sister Mary, if He wanted to, couldn’t He forgive us even then?
Of course He could. And He feels sorry for us when we sin. But once we die, our souls can’t change anymore. So if we die rejecting Him, we’re trapped in rejecting Him forever and ever. What would heaven be like, if He allowed those people to stay there? What if you had a birthday party, and one boy was really mean, and kept hitting all the girls? Maybe your father would ask him to apologize and behave. If he didn’t, what kind of father would he be, to let him keep hitting you and your friends, so that your birthday party was ruined? Do you see now?
Yes, Sister Mary.
Do you love your father?
Yes, I—
And you love your mother, don’t you?
11
Her father found another job. He took her out for ice cream, after which for a half-hour he inhabited her room with her, correcting his expense accounts while she did her homework. Now he was sitting on her bed with the cat watching him from atop the dresser, while she worked at her desk. They were happy together. Then he had to go. An hour later he came in to wish her goodnight, and there was a vomit smell. He murmured into his wife’s ear, asking what they should do. The wife stormed into the girl’s room. She was one of those who disguised her alarm as anger; as for him, he sat listening to the girl’s denials, literally worried sick.
The doctor explained that Karen’s potassium levels were alarmingly low. Confronted by both parents, she whispered that she had been sick to her stomach two or three days before; that was all. Her mother sent her outside to throw away the plastic bag of evidence.
12
Shortly after a vacation with her parents, who in spite of one or two long quarrels in restaurants both considered the week a success, and finally even went on the town without their daughter, who preferred to stay in at the hotel, the girl began to lose weight. For years her mother had been telling her she was too fat. Dazzled by their own miseries, the parents failed to notice the disappearance of her first ten pounds. She must have weighed about a hundred and thirty by then. A month later her father seemed to see, not without vague pride, that she was looking glamorous, svelte. His best friend said: Something’s going on with Karen. I didn’t recognize her when I saw her.—The father finally began to pay attention. The mother, so she said, was losing sleep. She told the father: I don’t know what to do. She eats and eats, but she’s losing weight.
The father took another business trip. On his return he felt alarmed. His daughter’s shoulder blades stuck out. When she came to sit on his lap, she was far too light.
He was proud that he and Karen kept a perfect understanding. They always had. Entering her room, he stood over her, asking whether anything might be wrong. She said no, not really. He asked her point blank if she was making herself throw up. She promised that she wasn’t. He informed her that he was worried about her weight, and she said surprised: You are?
Much relieved that his daughter had not endangered herself, he told her mother: I believe her.—Her mother kept worrying, so he said what any American man would: Do something about it. Weigh her every day, then write it down.
Day after day, the girl weighed exactly a hundred pounds.
She was eating ice cream and cookies with her father. One night she came to hug him and his heart began to pound with dread because her breath smelled like vomit, but then he realized that it was just the sugar in those cookies which had ketoned in her mouth.
The next day her mother screamed in rageful panic. She had caught the girl trying to smuggle a bucket of vomit into the back yard. The mother was shouting: There are shadows under your eyes!
The father hunted for his child. She was neither in her room, nor in the kitchen, nor in the car where her mother was waiting. She lay pallid on the living room sofa with her eyes closed, and the television singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” As gently as he could, the father said: Sweetheart, I’m not angry about your lie; I’m worried.
I wish you were angry, the girl whispered. You should be angry.
The father said: Try and think about why you’re doing this. I won’t ask you to tell me, since now it’s clear that I can’t help you. Mama can’t help you. I’m going away on a business trip. If your weight’s not up by next Saturday, I think we should take you to the doctor.
Karen nodded compliantly.
13
Pouring himself a triple slug of bourbon to relax his nerves, he thought back on the time not long ago when he got three sobbing messages on his office answering machine, two of them at midnight, the girl crying and crying because her mother was shouting at her and shaking her, so the girl weepingly claimed; she had finally pushed her mother out of the bedroom and stood there holding the bedroom door but her mother got back in, then grabbed her and slapped and yelled at her, said the girl.
In a calmer moment, the girl had asked her father to please delete those messages without listening to them; anyhow he had not yet heard them, having been away on business; one thing the girl had said was that she wished he were around more.
He asked Karen how he could help her. Neither of them could think of anything. Feeling noble, he said: Go as far away from your parents as you can.
14
He called a ladyfriend of his, an elegant fortyish black woman, who after saying she was sorry about Karen remarked: We don’t usually admit this, but I learned how to do that in high school. And even now, if I’m out having a big dinner with some girlfriends and then I have to go to a party and my dress feels tight, I just go into the bathroom and make myself throw up. There’s nothing to it.
15
A few days before her mother caught her carrying out the bucket of vomit, the girl got into a car accident in a parking lot. It was her fault. A woman accused her of trying to run away but the girl wept to her parents that she had only been parking. Her father believed her, of course; her mother didn’t.
The mother insisted that Karen pay for the damage herself. The next day the father tried to slip the girl two hundred-dollar bills (all the cash he had), saying: This is too much for a teenager to pay.
The girl refused to take the money. She insisted on not taking it. She hugged her father, who was very touched.
16
She longed to please her mother, who was never satisfied with her. She did not like her mother to touch her, but even that she would have borne for the sake of her mother’s love. However, just then her mother would not touch her.
Had she been a good girl like you or me, she would have felt fulfilled by her mother’s love. But since she kept disappointing her mother so terribly, what on earth could she expect?
As for her father, no matter how tenderly she loved him, that disgraced and timid nonentity was hardly the sort to whom anyone ought to turn.
Innocently she strolled into the bathroom at the end of every meal. The door locked, the toilet seat clicked up, the sink began running until the toilet
flushed, and then she came out with sour-bitter breath to wash the dishes. The grieving father, caressing his skeletal daughter, wondered how soon she would be lost to him.
17
After her parents divorced, her father kept calling her mother to say: I wish I could see you; I wish I could please you again; but her mother never wanted that.
As for the daughter, presently there was an older girl who taught her what gifts she possessed: true beauty, and the ability to make others love her.
Her mother was snoring, with a bottle of gin and a bottle of heart-shaped red pills beside her. The girl tiptoed up and down the hall, telling herself long secret stories in which she utterly believed. Then she met E-beth. She entered into motion. Across her heart’s silver medallion, a golden chariot, driven by a golden-winged, high-breasted, gilt-robed Victory whose silver face smiled across the rearing horses, now halted, and the girl’s life-pulse froze.
Victory would have been beautiful enough—but beside her, shaded by a silver devotee’s golden parasol, stood divine Cybele, facing sideways, gazing straight out of the scene, into the third dimension . . . and if she could only have turned Cybele’s head, causing the goddess to love her, she would have won everything—and Cybele’s head did turn, and Cybele chose her, so that the girl became a lesbian.
When an Innocent Girl Abandons Herself
When an innocent girl abandons herself to the voluptuous lovemaking of a promiscuous lesbian, she gives little if any thought to the consequences. The same girl very often becomes adept at seducing others . . . It is this kind of cycle or chain of seduction that accounts for the increasing incidence of lesbianism in our midst.
FRANK S. CAPRIO, M.D., 1954
Nobody ever taught me what to do on a stage.
JUDY GARLAND, 1951
1
Of course the girl could have now developed in any number of ways, none of them conventionally “good,” not that convention retained much shaping power over her inner nature; she had been altered, and the change must remain secret. Had anybody wise and decent (she knew no such people yet) read the secret right through her clothes, then asked why it could never come out, she would have answered (had she replied at all: an impossibility) that nothing harmful had been done to her, so why raise trouble?—and if that nonexistent decent seer convinced her (another impossibility) that she had in fact been permanently injured by her mother’s actions—which perhaps wasn’t so—then she would have fallen back to her inner line of defense, which was: I’ll never hurt my mother!—And the girl remained proud of this. Why not? A good daughter is praiseworthy beyond all the emeralds of this dying world. In that sense she was conventional indeed—all the more so if we admit to consideration the masochistic pieties of love, sexual and otherwise; of beauty as the rest of us defined it; most of all, of craving to please, the pleasure being localized behind curtains and walls on that front lawn of perfect rectangles mown almost down to the white sidewalk. The direction in which most child stars developed entailed the discovery that pleasing, whether pleasant or not to them, could enlarge them into future power.—Karen, unfortunately, never learned to be selfish.
I grant that from the outside she resembled most any other goddess: The face of a glowing young movie star wears an infantile neutrality. The capability that it possesses (of being cared for) appeared inexplicably, and very recently; now it seems inexhaustible. And so the star gazes on our world serenely, from afar. We are all new to her. She perceives us in catlike fashion—which is to say, not without, but beyond understanding us. (Stare into a cat’s eyes, and what consciousness stares back?) And Karen, once she came into her mirror-eyed prime, would presently regard us with just such haunting awareness. We grew divided as to whether her gaze was babylike, seductive, omniscient, dreamy, or contemplative.
But in those years of old knucklebones and lovely greenish round gamepieces she remained merely Karen, the unprimed one who minimized her exposure to mirrors, for shame at her own ugliness. How could she realize that she would become like no one else, the loveliest ever? At school she never received excellent or unacceptable grades. Sitting on the flagpole’s plinth, staring out at the two well-kept palms, too shy to make friends, but in her final days of unobjectionability, she rarely drew down upon herself the other pupils’ cruelty. She continued going to church. She used to kneel down and pray to be more loving and grateful to her mother.
Then came the time when she had to admit to herself that another girl was watching her. It always happened in the interval between classes. Karen lacked time even to visit her locker and switch out textbooks, there being only five minutes. But this other girl was never in a hurry. She stood outside the door of Karen’s biology class, and looked her in the face. Sometimes she smiled, and once she waved.
Karen came home, and her mother grabbed her and gave her a slobbering kiss.
2
She returned to school, and there was that girl again, her face as carefully perfect as if some master mosaicist had made it out of a galaxy of shining tiles, each one uniquely cut and painted for its purpose. She was short and thin, with crewcut hair like a lush silver fox pelt. She wore three black studs in each ear, black nail polish, coveralls and many-laced and -grommeted boots that reached her knees.
She said: Your name’s Karen, isn’t it? I’m E-beth. Are you a sophomore?
The girl flushed and nodded.
I’ll save you a seat at lunch. Look for me by the snack machine—
And Karen felt as happy as little Judy Garland had been when she received a cream-colored makeup kit from Norma Shearer!
Even then she could not have explained why the one for her was E-beth. I who am cynical because I outlived her offer this for a reason: She was ready, and E-beth came along. Of course to Karen there appeared to be something about the other girl which could not be imitated. Whatever she said, even if others had said it before, had never been said that way. But when two women go dancing, and one takes the other into her arms, whence came the once upon a time?
So she met E-beth in the cafeteria. They ate lunch together every day. Hardly able to believe it, looking discreetly straight ahead, she followed instructions, slipped her hand beneath the table, and when E-beth took it answered: Yes.
3
I’m not really a senior, said E-beth.
Oh, said Karen.
I’m actually a bit older. Since I don’t look my age, I can get away with wandering the halls. I know when each period begins and ends.
So you . . . Why?
To catch pretty girls like you! whispered E-beth, licking the inside of Karen’s ear. And do you know what?
I—
Don’t take the bus today. I’ll drive you home. My apartment’s around the corner.
4
At first it was not so different from when her mother came into the department store’s fitting room, making sure that each prospective high school blouse fit just right around the breast. But within a few moments it grew evident that E-beth, rather than dominating, adored her, longed to please, and knew just how. That first time was wonderful only for being the first time. In retrospect, when she was alone in her bedroom and could remember it over and over, it grew perfect.
As she unzipped her skirt she was looking into the mirror, not at herself but at E-beth undressing. She felt terrified, nauseated, excited. And suddenly, shockingly, there was E-beth, tanned except for her bikini line and goggling breasts. The light went out. E-beth touched her. She almost threw up. E-beth was holding her, and she insisted to herself that she needed to love this. E-beth was on top of her, lustfully panting, riding and rubbing her. Even though she truly did love it, Karen could not help being anxious until it was over. Then she could treasure it. She had closed her bedroom door and was happily masturbating, thinking of E-beth, when the knob turned and her mother came in, saying: Karen, honey, I heard something. Is everything all ri
ght?
5
Her mother watched her going in and out. Something was going on, for a fact. The girl looked happy and expectant when she departed, and came in appearing satisfied. The mother said: Karen, sometimes I think that you don’t care about me.
6
. . . And without a word she followed E-beth into the bedroom, then as usual stood in the doorway not knowing what to do, until her lover stalked toward her with that triumphant smile. The girl felt like prey—how she wanted to be eaten!—as indeed she would be.
E-beth’s mouth burned against hers, E-beth’s nipples were hard, E-beth’s cunt drenched with excitement, and E-beth was screaming and screaming as she rubbed her clitoris against the other girl’s—until finally, suddenly and for the first time, she, Karen, achieved relief in another person’s arms.
Now she was ecstatic, because she would be loved forever. She was in bliss, like a little child empowered to eat every last marshmallow. (We wisely sour old love addicts could do the same, but our palates are too sophisticated.) The best part (she told E-beth) was that her mother had no idea. Already accomplished at hiding her emotions from herself, the girl now made what she supposed to be ever more successful forays at concealing her actions. It was easier than she had nervously imagined, because as long as her mother kept getting what she wanted, she didn’t care what her daughter did—bad grades or unpleasant rumors aside.
The Lucky Star Page 5