Before getting into bed, Anna lay beside Lydia in hers. From the kitchen, she could dimly hear her mother and aunt discussing Ann Pennington’s famous dimpled knees over fresh highballs. “. . . dead broke,” she heard her aunt murmur. “Lost everything at the racetrack, poor thing . . .”
“Liddy,” Anna said softly. “I’m going to take you to the beach.”
In the faint illumination that leaked around the window shade, she saw that her sister’s eyes were open. Her lips moved as if to reply.
“We’re going to see the sea,” Anna whispered.
See the sea?the sea the?sea the sea
A vibration seemed to flow from inside Lydia, as if she were a radio tuned to a distant frequency. She knew all of Anna’s secrets; Anna had dropped them into her ears like coins down a well. It was Lydia she’d turned to when their father first stopped bringing her with him on union business. Anna tried to force him to surrender with arguments and threats of misbehavior, but at night she clung to her sister and wept into her hair. She hated being stranded among the neighborhood children, with nowhere special to go anymore. At twelve, there was little of interest to do; the girls gaggled at the sidelines while the boys played stickball or stoopball or football (the “ball” being a block of wood tied inside newspaper). Anna used the excuse of Lydia to absent herself from these dull proceedings and waited for their father to come to his senses—to recognize that she was indispensable. She pretended not to care. And gradually, over months, then a year, she did care less.
Ringolevio—hide-and-go-seek with prisons and teams—was the one game that still united girls and boys on the block, even into high school. In March of her eighth-grade year, Anna was crouching among barrels of fall apples in someone’s cellar when she heard a whisper: “They’ll find you there.”
It came from inside a storage paddock with high wooden sides. The door was sealed with a padlock, but Anna managed to vault from a barrel over one of its sides onto what felt like a pile of logs but was actually—she knew by touch, it was too dark to see—a heap of rolled carpets.
“Shut up. They’re coming.”
It was a boy, she realized then. Peeking through a sliver between planks, Anna made out three members of the opposing team. One was Seamus, Lillian’s older brother, who was sweet on her. He went to the apple barrels where she’d been, then to the paddock where she was now. He felt the planks, looking for a way in. Anna smelled mothballs from his clothing and Juicy Fruit on his breath—and feared he could smell her, too. She lay rigid with alarm at being discovered with a boy in an enclosed space, fodder for merciless teasing. She had just turned fourteen. When the seekers moved to other parts of the cellar, Anna breathed her relief. A thick silence fell. She waited for the boy to engineer their exit as he had their entrance. But the longer she lay still, the less urgent her departure seemed to be. It was rather nice to lie in the warm dark, hearing the distant thrum of the furnace and the boy breathing beside her.
Eventually, he took her hand. Anna waited, not wanting to overreact; then, not having withdrawn it, she thought it awkward to do so. Was she afraid to have her hand held? Obviously not. The boy’s warm grip pulsed around her fingers like a heart. I might not be here, Anna thought as he moved her hand to his trousers, where the fabric strained against the buttons. She could withdraw her hand, of course, but she waited, thinking, This might not be me. A boozy apple smell mingled with a dusty, wheaty scent from the carpets. As the boy moved her hand, Anna’s curiosity about what would happen became knowing what it was and wanting it. Eventually, he convulsed as though he’d touched an electric wire. He curled onto his side and seemed to think that would be the end of it. But there he was wrong, for whatever was at work between them had entered Anna, too. She took his hand and held it against her pleated skirt, moving over his warm fingers until a violent pleasure shuddered through her.
The boy was Leon, she realized then. Perhaps had known all along. “I’ll go out first,” he said.
They rejoined the game separately. He was sixteen. That would be the end of it, Anna thought. But it was not.
Leon worked for his father carving tombstones after school, but business stank, as everywhere, and often he could get away. Occasionally, Anna would notice him missing from a game he’d been playing outside just moments before, and find him waiting in the paddock. Sometimes she would wait in vain or learn that he had. Once inside it, they moved with the stealthy rapacity of burglars—initially, to repeat the raptures of their first encounter. But soon enough, layers of clothing began to yield to the marvel of bare flesh. Leon stole a feather blanket from his mother’s linen chest and spread it over the carpets. After each small advance, Anna promised herself they had done enough; now they would merely repeat. But the greater logic they were yielding to contained an inexorable will to progress. Anna couldn’t picture what they were doing: proof of her innocence. Even as she spent her days aching to renew their dark dream, she felt as if it were happening somewhere else, to a different girl. In the dark paddock, she slipped from her life like a pin dropping between floorboards. I don’t know what you mean, I haven’t done those things, she imagined saying, truthfully, to a faceless accuser. I don’t even know what they are.
There were close calls, inconvenient visits to the cellar by the building landlord; by a washerwoman; by members of the Italian family whose apples were stored in the barrels to make fruit wine. But the very extremity of what they were doing made it relatively easy to conceal; no one would have fathomed it. There had been gropings on the block, kisses stolen and coerced, three boys and two girls in a closet at Michael Fasso’s—an interlude no one stopped talking about for weeks. There were sweethearts monitored by wary parents, not left alone for a minute. But planned assignations over months; lying fully naked in the summer heat? It was unthinkable. Had Anna tried to tell Lillian and Stella, they would have thought she was lying or loony. She told only Lydia.
The day she lost her virginity, Anna brought along a ruler. She knew from Stella, who had it from her married sister, that it hurt like the devil. When the pain began, she fastened the ruler in her mouth like a dog and let her molars cut into the wood. She never made a sound.
He knew to pull out, of course. All boys knew that.
At times her secret clanged inside her so loudly that she wanted to cover her ears and scream. Her father would disown her. Anna sensed him watching her with wary attention and feared he might somehow have guessed. But he couldn’t know. His work consumed him, often taking him away overnight. Occasionally, he tried to talk to Anna in their old way, but she’d lost the habit of talking with her father and no longer wanted to. She felt his disappointment but couldn’t help it. He’d disappointed her first.