When We Were Animals(19)

“How come you trust me so much? None of the other parents trust their kids so much.”

He smiled again, gently. And again there was something in it I didn’t care for. Was it condescension?

“Well,” he said, “you’ve never disappointed me yet. Never once. Such a perfect record earns you plenty of trust. Besides, you’re fifteen.”

I wasn’t entirely sure what the fact of my age had to do with anything, but I had an impression—and he turned to the sink immediately after he’d said it, as though embarrassed.

He made spaghetti and meatballs for dinner, and Peter and I were responsible for the garlic toast. Peter made a big production of spreading the garlic butter on the bread, and I topped it with the ocher-colored seasoned salt.

We listened to music during dinner—as we often did during the moons. That night it was the opera Turandot.

“The opera’s about a princess,” I explained, because I had read the libretto the previous year. “She refuses to marry any man unless he answers three riddles first. If he answers any of them incorrectly, he’s put to death.”

“I guess she has her reasons,” Peter said, and I couldn’t tell if he was joking.

“She’s a princess of death,” I said with great seriousness. “It’s her nature.”

After dinner Peter and I watched TV in the den upstairs, sitting side by side on the couch that had been made up as his bed. We turned the TV loud so we wouldn’t hear anything from outside. After a while we fell to kissing again.

It surprised me how quickly the whole thing became mechanical. I found myself too aware of the way our lips met, mapping out the movements of his tongue in my mouth. First he would kiss me square on the mouth, then take my lower lip between his two lips and leave a cold wet spot on my chin that I wanted to wipe off. Then he would turn his head sideways a little, as though passion were all about angles. (If we had been able to kiss with one of our faces turned completely upside down, I suppose that would have been truly making love.) Then he would leave a trail of ticklish kisses from the corner of my mouth up the side of my face to my ear, the lobe of which he took in his mouth. Then a bite or two on the neck, which I didn’t know what to do with. Then the whole thing started over again.

The problem was that I was thinking about it as it was happening, picturing it in my mind as though I were a disembodied viewer standing off to the side—and from that perspective the whole thing looked ludicrous. I kept thinking about my father, who trusted me implicitly, and what he would have seen had he come into the room during that mess. Not disappointment, not exactly. But it would have given him reason to remind me again that I was fifteen years old—which was a repellent thought. Had he come in at that moment, he would have seen his daughter succumbing sloppily to teenagehood—whatever preposterous versions of love or curiosity or risk such a state implied.

Then Peter’s right hand slid down from my neck to my chest and rested itself on the embarrassing nodule that was still in the process of becoming my left breast.

He froze suddenly. At first I thought it was because he was disappointed with what he’d found there. He lifted himself a few inches from me, his hand still on my chest, and gave me an intent, querulous look.

That’s when I realized he was waiting for me to stop him.

I had been so studious and removed from the whole situation that I had forgotten the role I was supposed to be playing. I was the good girl. The girl being groped and salivated upon in the den of her own home was the good girl. You were safe with her, because she didn’t allow anything to get out of control.

“I guess we should stop,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “Sorry.”

But he didn’t seem sorry. He seemed relieved.

He levered himself off me, then we sat and watched TV for a while longer. It was half an hour before midnight when I told him I was going to bed. He said okay and leaned over to kiss me good night.

“I’m glad we went to the attic,” he said.

It was a sweet thing to say, and the way he phrased it made me think funny thoughts—as though “going to the attic” were some kind of accepted rite of passage. Passage to the attic. I thought then that I knew something about rites, but I was wrong.

There are so many things about the world that might keep you laughing to yourself in the dark when you can’t seem to fall asleep. Then again, alone in my bedroom with a hallway between us, the idea of Peter Meechum once again thrilled all my senses. I put my hand on my breast the way he had done it before, and it gave me little shivers all over.

I wondered why romance was a thing I felt in a truly visceral way only when I was alone. Maybe the cold, logical part of my mind closed doors to real people. Maybe I needed to be taught how to open those doors. And I thought that Peter Meechum very well could be the one to teach me.

We’ve all of us got an inward brain and an outward brain, don’t we? When we are by ourselves in our rooms at night, unselfconscious and free, we are entirely different. That’s when you might learn the most about instinct.

But the moon made its exceptions in our town. Here’s another song from my childhood that I sing as a lullaby to my son.

Gather, young lovers,

In wind and in rain.

Cleave to the sky fires

That know not your name.

Unravel the day-screws

That tangle your brain.