Bright Young Women

CJ and I started sneaking around after we kissed at my brother’s wedding. At first it was only letters and trinket gifts, addressed to me at Eastern State, where I’d returned the day after the ceremony. No matter that CJ was married to another woman—Dr. Burnet was as proud as a father giving away his own daughter at the altar. Here was proof that I’d never been a lesbian to begin with, that I’d only been acting out my anger at my father for failing to protect me from my overbearing mother. Textbook, Dr. Burnet declared.

With Dr. Burnet’s blessing, I was discharged a few months shy of my eighteenth birthday. I was too embarrassed to return to school, to spend the year I’d missed lying about where I’d been. Instead, I got a job as a cashier at a pharmacy, and on my lunch breaks, CJ would come by in his Grand Prix and make drugged-sounding promises to me in the back seat before ejaculating. He was going to leave his mess of a wife as soon as I turned eighteen, and then we would start a family and be together forever. CJ and the wife were barely speaking at that point, sleeping in separate rooms on the nights she didn’t pass out drunk in the driveway, but he was concerned about what his parents would think, what his wife’s parents would think, if he initiated a divorce to be with a seventeen-year-old girl. Neither of us worried about my family. My mother was acting like she’d had a biopsy and the result had come back benign. Relieved. Grateful. She had a whole new lease on life.

I was in no rush for CJ to leave his wife. The idea of it left me ridden with anxiety about the future. Would he propose right away? Did I really want to say yes? To CJ? We’d known each other since we were kids, and I cared about him like a brother, maybe even more than my own brother, who had betrayed me without thinking twice about it. I found the sex thrilling at first. The way CJ gripped my chin in his hand and forced me to look at him, the way my name trembled on his lips—like he was checking to make sure I was still beneath him. I wanted to do it again and again, to bask in his uncertainty that he could really have me. In my family, everything revolved around the emotional temperature of my mother. No one had ever treated me like I was the silver ball of mercury in the thermometer’s glass chamber.

So why, then, did I start awake in the middle of the night, heart flapping in the trap of my chest, at the thought of marrying this man who adored me so much? I didn’t need a psychiatrist to tell me it was because of Rebecca.

Growing up, Rebecca was my best friend, a skinned-kneed, scraggly-haired runt of a girl. But sometime around the fifth grade, we were playing two-hand tag with my brother and a bunch of the neighborhood kids when I noticed that she had spawned breasts. Heavy ones that bounced around in her sweater when she ran. The same boys who used to charge us with no mercy, who used to laugh when we climbed to our feet, chewing dirt, suddenly started going easy on her, handling her with the gentle hands Rebecca would later remind me to use while holding her newborn. More and more, Rebecca emerged from the game the last one standing, the boys too smitten to touch her.

My brother, who for so long wanted nothing to do with the two of us when we were in the house, started finding excuses to drop by my bedroom when Rebecca was over, and Rebecca, in turn, stopped wanting to play with the door locked. We were getting too old to play like that anyway, she told me. It was babyish; unhygienic.

Soon we were painting our nails and listening to Bob Dylan records with my bedroom door open. I liked the Beatles, but Rebecca said the Beatles were for little girls, which we weren’t anymore. Before long, it wasn’t even my room Rebecca was spending time in. My brother was fifteen, Rebecca thirteen, the first time he called her his girlfriend. Yet still the two of us didn’t stop until we were made to stop.

I can no longer remember whose idea it was, but when we reached high school, we started meeting at the old clergy house after school. We’d talk for a few minutes about our day, which teacher was hassling us, and then one of us would lie back and pull down her wool tights, let her legs fall open for the other. We coached each other through it, in an uninhibited and plainspoken manner, as though reading the steps to a recipe—knuckles first, softly, then the thumb, firmer, then firmer still, now with the heel of the hand. We kept time. Whoever went second got as long as the one who went first. We were fair like that.

Dr. Burnet called what we did exploring, something all children did, and something that, due to our respective emotional difficulties, the two of us had simply failed to grow out of.

It’s a comforting ritual left over from childhood, Dr. Burnet was always telling me. Like sucking your thumb or sleeping with a stuffed animal. When I would nod with half-hearted agreement, he would remind me that Rebecca and I never once kissed. Lesbians kiss, Ruth.

Rebecca and I had an unspoken agreement that we wouldn’t meet during the spring, which was when my father held class outside on the lawn, teaching the unit about the clergy house’s role in the Underground Railroad. It was a warm afternoon in October when my father walked in and found us. He didn’t look surprised, which was how I knew he’d always known.

When he came upon us, Rebecca was the one lying back with her skirt pulled up. This mattered because he saw what I was doing to her, that I was the aggressor and Rebecca my witless victim. My father shielded his eyes and, in a muted voice, told me to meet him at the car. The drive home was brittle with silence, and when I looked over at him, trying to figure out what I might say to break it, I saw that he had big fat tears dripping off his chin.

I went straight to my room when we got home. I unpacked my books and started on my homework, knowing I would be called downstairs once my father told my mother what he’d found out about me. It was a last gasp at absolution. Here I am, I hoped my studiousness telegraphed, memorizing algebraic variations, being a good girl.

The volume of my parents’ voices downstairs was terrifying and confusing, much too quiet for the severity of my transgressions. My mother yelled when she was angry. She slammed cabinet drawers and pummeled the door with her fist, growling at you to get your butt downstairs or else. This ferocious hush between the two of them seemed to suggest that I’d committed an offense so perverse that their larynxes had to produce a whole new set of sound waves and vibrations. Though at one point, inexplicably, it was my father’s voice that pierced the bubble, delivering an anguished apology to my mother: How many times can I say I’m sorry?

I waited and waited to be summoned downstairs, but the call never came. The resentful whispering ceased when my brother came home. Dinnertime came and went. The television went on and off. I was too petrified to leave my room, and I went to bed without brushing my teeth, dying for a glass of water, my stomach performing somersaults for food.

In the morning, I rose before the sun was up. I showered, dressed in my school uniform, went downstairs, and downed a glass of water. I was scrambling eggs when my mother came in and asked with a malicious laugh what the hell I thought I was doing.

“You’re not going to school today,” she informed me.

I pushed the eggs around in the pan. My father and I liked them wet, but we cooked them on high heat when my mother or brother wanted some. They both thought wet eggs were disgusting, even though, during the brief period when my father filled in as the home ec teacher, he’d said that was the true chef’s way of cooking them.

“We’ll talk about it later,” my mother said, not that I had asked.

After school, my father came home with the young priest who taught gym class at Issaquah Catholic. He was grossly out of his depth on our couch, boxed in on one side by my erect and formidable mother and the other by my hangdog father. My mother spoke at a pitch so low I had to hold my body completely still to make out what she was saying. There was a place where I was going to receive psychiatric treatment. Father Grady was nice enough to pull some strings to get me in. I was not to talk about where I was going and why—not even to my brother. Especially not to my brother, who would be disgusted to learn what I’d done to his poor innocent girlfriend. Did I understand?

I nodded tearfully. “When do I go?”

“Tomorrow,” my mother said.