My Last Innocent Year(75)
“I know you think you did the right thing,” Connelly said. “But life is complicated. It isn’t always so black and white.”
“Sometimes it is.”
He took a step back, pushed his hands deep into his pockets.
“I wanted to ask you something before you go.” He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. It was a page from my story, from “This Youthful Heart.” “A line you wrote that I always wondered about.” He cleared his throat and began to read. “‘We were girls in the bodies of women. We bought condoms with our father’s credit cards, drank sloe gin fizzes, and slept with stuffed animals on our beds. We didn’t know how to fold a fitted sheet.’” He looked at me. “Is that how you see yourself, a girl in the body of a woman?”
I was about to say no, that the character in my story is only seventeen when she says that, but then I thought about my friends—Debra, Kelsey, Whitney, even Ginny, all of us about to be shot out into the world, ready or not. What made a girl a woman? Through what mechanism did we pass from one state to another? Had I become a woman the day my mother got sick or the day she died? When I came to Wilder or when I met Connelly? Did it happen that night in Zev’s room or was it happening right now, in front of Fayerweather Hall as the sun rose higher in the sky? In just a few moments, it would begin its imperceptible descent. I always thought there would be boundaries or milestones, something to mark the transition, but I was beginning to think the process wasn’t binary, that, like consent, it existed somewhere along a vast continuum. The lines were there only until you crossed them. I looked at Connelly. There was a hard set to his mouth. I knew I’d never be able to explain this to him so all I said was “Yes.”
He laughed. “You know what? I think people use youth as an excuse. Who says I have more power than you do? Because I’m older? Married? Because I was your professor? Everyone’s vulnerable, Isabel—the twenty-year-old student, the forty-year-old professor. The question is, who has more to lose?”
“I guess we aren’t all one thing or another.”
“That’s right. But the difference between a child and an adult is an adult knows that what she does has consequences.” He looked across the street at Kelsey and waved. She waved back. “You want to know what I think? I think you knew exactly what you were doing.”
He folded the paper and stuck it in his pocket. Part of me wanted to ask for it back. “Isabel, I wish you luck in New York. I have a feeling you’ll do well there.” He started to walk away, then stopped. “And just remember, later, when you write about all this and say you were the victim, you weren’t. You were never the victim.”
Sidney jumped onto the sofa, walked back and forth across my lap before settling into the curve of my hip. I appreciated the feel of him against me. It felt like the only thing keeping me from floating away. I heard voices outside, someone playing a saxophone. After a while, I reached into my handbag and took Roxanne’s earring out of the zippered pouch where I’d kept it all these years, folded inside my grandmother’s prayer of protection. The amber stone was only slightly dulled after so much time in the darkness. I don’t know why I’d kept it, perhaps to remind me of something I might try to forget. Or maybe to remind myself I’d been lucky, so lucky, given chances I didn’t deserve.
I sat there for a long time, watching the streetlights flicker through the blinds. The saxophone player was still playing, low, aching notes that filled me with melancholy. I closed my eyes and pictured Connelly driving his car into Corness Pond, not far from Joanna and Tom’s house. Was he thinking about them and the part he’d played in their unraveling as the car sank beneath the surface? As it filled with murky water—was there a chance he was thinking about me? For just a moment, I allowed myself to see him, one last time, seat belt fastened around his middle, water rising slowly past his waist, chest, chin, the space above his upper lip, before swallowing him whole. I let the image hang there, pressed on the bruise of it, coaxing out the ancient ache. When I was done, I felt different, not lighter, just hollow, as if someone had scooped out my insides, leaving only a shell. One flick and I would crack.
I dreamed that night of the women I knew and the girls they’d once been and the girls I knew and the women they’d become, a slow gradual morphing of one into the other. In the end, there was only me, standing in sunlight, a girl in dusty sandals and denim shorts, chipped nail polish and cigarette breath. She was alone and a little bit sad, hopeful, the way young girls are. I could see her future spooling out before her, brilliant and terrible and vast. I looked right at her so she would know I saw her. Right before she faded away, I raised my voice and called out to her, that faraway version of a girl who no longer existed, not on this earthly plane anyway. I wanted to tell her something, anything, but for the life of me, I couldn’t think what.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
One of the benefits of writing a novel in your forties is that you’re old enough to know what voices to listen to and which ones to ignore. I have had so many wise and wonderful voices guiding me throughout the writing of this novel, and it is my sincere pleasure to acknowledge them here.
I thank my lucky stars every day to have met Suzanne Kingsbury, whose way of approaching writing and creativity was life changing for me. Without her, there would be no book, full stop. Thanks also to Diana Whitney for introducing me to Suzanne, and to the Gateless Writing community, especially Sheena Cook, Terri Trespicio, and Becky Karush, for years of friendship and inspiration.