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People tried on Miriam’s pain in that way, modeled it for her, almost as if they expected her to be flattered by their interest. But they never had any trouble shedding it when the time came. They plucked it off and handed it back to her, continuing with their blessedly uneventful lives.
CHAPTER 18
It had taken a lot of begging and promising and negotiating, but she finally got permission to attend a party. She had argued-well, not argued, a voice raised in anger was considered unacceptable-she had said that it would appear odd, forever saying no to the invitations at school. She was supposed to be a kid like any other, and kids went to parties. Uncle and Auntie, as she had been instructed to call them in public, were keen not to seem odd to others. That made sense to her, given all the secrets they were keeping and all the lies they were telling, but she couldn’t understand how they managed to hide their oddness from themselves. How could they not know how weird they were, how out of step in every way? Outside the house it was 1976, the year of the Bicente
She cared about it now, though. In the library she had found a copy of Time magazine with the photo of the girl crouching by the boy. The girl was a runaway, dislocated, not where she was supposed to be, and she had wandered into history. The photograph became a kind of promise: She could run away. She could find history. And if she found history, if she could do something large and important enough, then maybe she could be forgiven.
But, for now, she was happy to be in a basement party room in a house in town, waiting to see if anyone would call her number for Five Minutes in Heaven. The game had started contentiously, not because some girls didn’t want to play-everyone had been eager to play-but because there was much disagreement on how long couples should stay in the closet. Some said two, citing no less an authority than Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, while others said it should be seven, because that sounded right: Seven Minutes in Heaven. “We’ll split the difference,” decreed the hostess, Kathy. A popular girl but a nice one, she wielded her power with grace. If Kathy said it was okay to play Five Minutes in Heaven, then it was definitely okay.
That was something else that Uncle and Auntie didn’t know about the world right outside their door: Sex was everywhere, even here, even among the very young, especially among the very young. Doctor, Spin the Bottle, now Five Minutes (or Two or Seven) in Heaven. Sex came first, well before drinking and drugs, although drugs were largely disdained here. Too hippie-ish. Her classmates were groping their way into adolescence, literally and figuratively.
She was the only one having full-out intercourse in a feather bed, however. She was pretty sure of that, not that she dared to compare notes. If she told anyone about life at home, they would take her away, and that might actually be worse.
It was hard to think about kissing in daylight, on a Saturday afternoon. Sex was a nighttime activity, grim and silent, in a house where everyone pretended not to hear the squeak of the springs, the way the bedstead swayed, pressing against the wall with a muted thump, like waves lapping a pier. Waves against a pier…She was in A
By day she was a distant cousin, arrived from Ohio, saddled with a name she truly hated, Ruth. So plain, so stark that name. Ruth. If she had to have a new one, why not Cordelia or Geraldine, one of the names that A
One girl, someone who would have been called a spastic back home, although that term didn’t appear to be in use here, asked her about the cigars.
“Cigars?”
“From the burns?”
“Oh. Scars.” She needed to think for only a second. Lying was becoming second nature to her. “They’re where you can’t see them.”
She regretted this, because it got back to the boys from Little Flower and they had been gossiping about who might be the first to see Ruth’s secret scars. Even today, when Five Minutes in Heaven was proposed, she saw Jeffrey point to her and punch Bill in the arm, saying in a hoarse stage whisper, “Maybe you’ll get to see Ruth’s scars.” She knew that Jeffrey liked her, that his teasing was a form of flirtation, but she was too tired to care. If the girls at Little Flower didn’t know what to do with a new girl, the boys did, or thought they did. They liked her, mysterious, forbidden Ruth, with her tragic history that no one was supposed to mention. She worried that they could smell all the sex on her, despite the long showers she took morning and night, earning her harsh lectures about the limits of well water and the cost of natural gas.
“Forty-seven!” Bill called out. That was her number. The other kids whooped, as they did each time. She walked to the closet with as much dignity as possible, knowing that Bill was capering after her, making faces at his buddies behind her back. Again, this was what all the confident boys did, she reminded herself.
The closet was really a pantry, where Kathy’s mom put up her summer ca
“What do you want to do?” Bill asked.
“What do you want to do?” she countered.
He shrugged, as if the situation bored him, as if he’d seen it all and done it all.
“Do you want to kiss me?” she ventured.
“Yeah, I guess.”
His breath tasted of cake and potato chips, which was kind of pleasant. He parted his lips but didn’t try to put his tongue in her mouth. And he kept his hands to his sides, almost as if he were afraid to touch her.
“Nice,” she said, being polite but also meaning it.