After Silence

I didn’t turn to her and show her an expressionless calm face which, if she could have seen it in the dark, would have told her I knew already. Instead, her confessor, I spoke quietly toward the ceiling. “What would kill you?”

She sat up suddenly. The movement made a small breeze that swept the smell of sexy funk and her cologne past me. “A crime. I committed one of the worst crimes on earth. Me, Lily Aaron. I ca

“When you were a kid, was there one thing you wanted more than anything in the world? I mean, so much that your hunger for it tore you apart?”

“I guess being a cartoonist came closest. I wanted that pretty bad.”

“I wanted a baby. I wanted to be a mother. My earliest memories are of playing with dolls. But I never saw them as adults, as other girls do. I never had tea parties for them or talked to them like I was a woman and we were all grownups. The only kind of dolls I wanted were babies. If someone gave me an adult doll or even a Barbie, I’d throw it in the back of the closet. I could never understand why someone would want Barbie. A teenager? Who would want to play with a teenage doll? I wanted babies. I wanted my own.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It was always in my blood from the begi

“When I was twelve, my mother allowed me to babysit in our neighborhood. I used the mimeograph machine in my father’s office, printed up an advertisement for myself and stuck it up on every telephone pole on our block. The younger the child, the better. You know how most sitters watch TV or talk on the telephone to their friends once the parents have gone out? I never did. I’d play with the kid till it was dead tired, give it a bath whether it needed one or not, then put it in bed and watch till it fell asleep. Lots of times I’d bring my homework into their bedroom and do it by the crib while they slept. I was your ultimate dream babysitter; totally trustworthy and in love with every kid I sat for.

“This is boring, isn’t it? I’m boring you, but believe me, it’s all important. Anyway, it’s time to undo my first lies. My family name isn’t Margolin, it’s Vincent. And I come from Glenside, Pe

“Why did you tell me those other things?”

“Because I’ve been Lily Aaron from Cleveland for almost ten years. I became her so well that now I have to remind myself of the name Vincent. It’s not me anymore, I’m the Lily you know.”

“Sounds like I don’t know Lily.”

“Yes, you do! You know me better than anyone. You just don’t know this part because no one has ever known it. No one ever could. Please let me go on and don’t interrupt. I’m afraid if I don’t tell it all to you now, I’ll start lying again and I don’t want that. It’s taken me this long to get up the courage to do it, and the more I’ve grown to love you, the more difficult it’s become. I guess it’s like having a baby—once it starts coming, you just want to get it out.” As she spoke the last part of the sentence, she began crying again and this time it went on and on. I asked if there was anything I could do but she said no, just stay here, don’t go away.

I was so calm I was… interested. Interested to hear the details of her story and how she would phrase saying she had stolen her son. Weeks before, I would have been sweating and shaking too at this point in her tale, waiting for her to admit her secret sin. Then I probably would’ve grabbed and shaken her, screamed I know it! I know you did that! Not now.

The weeping ended and she tried to speak through those gasping hitches of breath that come after you’ve cried hard and your body is trying to bring itself back from the brink.

“But wh-wh-when I got to be a teenager it all changed. I-I-I didn’t ca-care about kids anymore. I lost all interest i-in them. There were boys now, and being popular in school was so important. All my interests changed. I hung around with girls who thought if you died and went to heaven, you got to be a cheerleader and had your own Princess telephone.

“And sex. Before, that wasn’t really co

“I wasn’t noticed at first because I wasn’t beautiful like Alexa Harrison or Kim Marcus, but I was adventurous and willing to try things other girls wouldn’t. I was the first in our crowd to French-kiss and word got around fast about that. I liked it from the very begi

“Did that bother you?”

“Not as much as you might think. It wasn’t true and I knew it. If someone believed I was a slut, they weren’t my friends anyway. The people who mattered knew the truth; they knew who I was.

“So I did as I pleased and didn’t lose my virginity till I was eighteen. A senior in high school, which was pretty old in those days.

“The tricky part began in college. I didn’t go to Kenyon, as I told you. I went to NYU. I’d always wanted to live in New York, and at the time, I wanted to be an actress. But it didn’t work out that way. My sophomore year, I met a guy named Bryce who hung around with the most interesting bunch of people I had ever met. Students mostly, but there were some writers and musicians, and actors sprinkled in there too. One of them had even been in an Andy Warhol film. You can imagine how I fell for them. Miss Glenside, Pe

“Right before summer vacation that year, I started bleeding badly and having terrible cramps. I’m very regular and this scared the hell out of me because I had never had any kind of trouble down there. I had an IUD by then, so I thought it had something to do with that. I went to the university hospital and they kept giving me tests. At the end they told me I had something called pelvic inflammatory disease, PID, and it had dangerously infected all through my insides—the spleen, uterus, liver… They didn’t know whether it came from one of the men I’d slept with or the IUD itself. It was a horrendous experience. I was in the hospital three weeks. When it was over, my tubes were so badly scarred that it left me infertile.”