Later, the girls told one another about the boys. They compared penis sizes and widths, techniques and lack of techniques, stupid things the boys said when they came. They imitated the sounds the boys made. Use similes! That was another rule: He sounded like a train slowing down, like a teakettle at full boil, like someone trying to go to the bathroom. His penis was like a Slim Jim, a bratwurst, a knitting needle.
They did this because everything was changing. Their parents were fucked-up—divorced, unhappy, even dead. There was a war that was never going to end. The government of the United States of America had betrayed them. They were lost. They were confused. They were searching for something that none of them could name. So they ran down to the river and gave boys blow jobs and got stoned and acted like nothing else mattered.
PENELOPE WATCHED HER mother step out of her ridiculous car—a pea-green Citro?n. Her mother was, of course, an embarrassment with her fake British accent and Katherine Hepburn pants and that car. Not as bad as Rainier’s mother; she wore jeans and Army jackets, said fuck all the time, got stoned. Every spring, they showed up, all the mothers, for St. Lucy’s Mother’s Day Tea. It was a misnomer, this tea. There was a full bar where Penelope’s mother got an endless supply of gin and tonics. Mrs. Landon gave a slide show of the girls looking studious, waving field hockey sticks, performing in plays, or making pottery. The freshmen had to serve everyone else, a lavish five-course dinner on china and linens, with crystal and silver.
Rainier showed up in Penelope’s doorway. She opened her palm to reveal a joint.
“I need it to get through this,” she said. “What do you say?”
Penelope’s mother had paused to talk with Samantha’s mother. Samantha’s mother was an artist, with unruly curls and flowing dresses.
Quickly, Penelope pulled Rainier inside, closed the door, rolled up her still-damp bath towel, and stuck it under the door. Rainier had already lit up, and that sweet, sharp, beautiful smell filled the room. While Rainier took a hit, Penelope closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
“Not the best,” Rainier said, “but it’ll take the edge off.”
The girls passed the joint back and forth until they heard high heels in the hallway. Mothers were arriving. Penelope had a nice buzz going.
“Thanks,” she told her friend.
Rainier hesitated at the door.
“What?” Penelope said.
“My mother said she’s going to bring me some acid. She’s been doing a lot of it out at her house in Nantucket. She says she thinks it’ll do me good.”
Penelope shook her head as if it would help her understand better. “LSD?” she managed finally.
Now voices, high and shrill, filled the corridor outside the room.
“Maybe next time we go down to the river we can all do it?” Rainier said, uncertainly.
Penelope didn’t want to seem afraid, although she was. A boy from Maxwell Academy had taken LSD in the fall and jumped off the chapel roof, believing he could fly.
“That boy who died was stupid,” Rainier said. “You never drop acid alone.”
“I even forgot about him,” Penelope lied.
There was a loud knock on the door, and her mother’s stupid voice: “Penny?”
Penelope rolled her eyes. “She knows I hate that name,” she said, and yanked the door opened.
Her mother and Mrs. Woodson were standing there. Penelope saw her mother’s nose twitch and cursed herself for not opening the window.
“Smells sour in here,” Mrs. Woodson said, walking right in and cranking the bank of windows open. “Don’t you girls ever clean?” She had stiff beauty-parlor hair and orange ovals for fingernails.
“Deborah stepped out for a minute,” Penelope said.
Then she giggled. Deborah Woodson had gone into town to a doctor; she thought she might be pregnant. Deborah had not followed the rules. She had done everything, including. She had done it with Jeremy Jackson, whose father was a mucky-muck in the Army, West Point, this and that, now dead.
Her mother looked at her sharply.
“I thought she’d be back by now,” Penelope said, strangling another giggle.
“I saw your mother in the parking lot, Rainier,” Mrs. Woodson said. “Isn’t she exotic? What do you call those shoes she has on?”
“Dr. Scholl’s,” Rainier said.
“I told Deborah I would escort you to the dining hall if she wasn’t back when you came,” Penelope said. It was all so stupid and funny, this tea and Mrs. Woodson in her Chanel suit and her own mother frowning at her. Penelope sat on her bed with its pale-yellow duvet and Marimekko sheets, and hid her face in her hands, laughing.
“Well, I don’t understand,” Mrs. Woodson said.
Rainier started to laugh too.
“Honestly,” Penelope’s mother said. She took her by the arm, roughly, and yanked on her.
Penelope used to dismember her dolls. She loved the way the arms and legs pulled out of the sockets, the way the heads came off with a pop. It seemed her mother was trying to take her apart, the way she pulled on her. Or was that just the pot making her feel all loose and liquidy?
She looked up at her mother, and for an instant Penelope felt bad for her, for all the mothers who paid so much money to send their daughters to a fancy school to learn about sex and drugs.