The Romance Reader's Guide to Life

Jenna Louise

Lilly got her first job at Mr. Case’s corner store. Elly the counter woman had to quit because she couldn’t commute from her farm on their rationed three gallons a week anymore, and Lilly happened to be looking over some mascara wands when Elly gave her notice. Lilly stepped right up to offer her services. We lived within walking distance. Gas was no problem. Along with household needs, candy, personal hygiene products, and a lunch counter, Mr. Case’s spa had the largest selection of cosmetics in town.

Lilly didn’t know anything about cleaning products, and she hated the penny-candy customers, but she could sell a tired farm wife or a baggy-socked secretary twice the Lash-O-Lizer the woman could afford then get thanked for taking her money. Her makeup aisle was a kind of tropical oasis of romance blooming in a desert of cleaning products and nail clippers. Every woman in town found some reason to drop by that spa and ask if she thought they were using too bold a lipstick color. They never were. Most of them left with a little package under their arms and higher hopes for themselves than what they’d had when they came in. Maybe they hadn’t put red meat or a frosted cake on their tables for a month, but that didn’t stop them from leaving with a new Lash-O-Lizer wand.

One of Lilly’s best customers was Jenna Louise Bowles. Jenna Louise was in Lilly’s class, one year ahead of me. Lilly thought that girl was a genius. Jenna Louise knew how to get an eyeliner pencil line up the back of her leg perfectly straight, an invaluable skill when all the silk stockings in the world had sacrificed themselves for the war effort and become parachutes. Jenna Louise knew more about eyebrow pluckers and strategic placement of folded Kleenex than anybody in the senior class. Boys got stupid around her. Mr. Dextin in the science department once walked directly into a door after she’d breezed by in her cashmere pink sweater. She wore Chanel No. 5, a grown woman’s scent.

Lilly probably remembered Jenna Louise for her beauty expertise, but Jenna called up something else in me, something scaly and dark—the kind of feeling Lilly would say I shouldn’t bother myself about. If Lilly Terhune had paid a little more attention to the scaly dark things, she might still be alive.

One day I was at my locker, invisible in my saggy bobby socks and white cotton shirt. Jenna Louise walked by, unfurling herself as she blew past the football-team members who were clustered across the hall. Every boy’s head rotated around to follow her. The team captain made the sound first. It sounded hissy to me, but I knew it was a real word and not a hiss. He was a fat sixteen-year-old with pimples on his nose and a peanut-butter sandwich in his hand, team captain only because his father donated the money for the uniforms. He said it whispery but with sharp edges. The word was cunt. The boys’ eyes had been glassy and their feet were jiggling, and then I heard a soft b sound and then the scratchy twist at the “itch” before they saw me standing there and then all the energy just went cold. They drifted off in different directions. I looked on past them to Jenna Louise, who was just reaching the end of the hallway, that seam line running up the leg and vanishing at the skirt hem, the pretty little tip-and-roll that her high heels gave to her hips as she walked. Her skirt snugged in just below her butt to show her figure to best advantage. I went to history class.

I tried to describe the way it made me feel uneasy and clammy to Lilly, who told me to ignore a bunch of stupid little boys showing off for one another in a high school hallway. But I couldn’t. That night after dinner I found myself holding The Pirate Lover. I opened it at random and the book fell open to Judge Henri Le Cherche, coolly assessing Electra’s breasts. I snapped the book shut.

In the spring of her senior year, Jenna Louise disappeared after a school fair. At first the girls in our class whispered that she had run off with an older boy, maybe the mechanic from Peabody who somebody told somebody that she might have been dating. I’d read the newspaper account and put the paper down because the words describing the body that was found in a swamp behind the school had words in it that felt like they’d been made of razor blades: violated, burned, bound, nude. I’d never seen the word “nude” in print before in my life. At school the word “rape” was passed along the hallways like a dead snake. Then some of the bobby-socked girls said that she had brought it on herself, those skirts and the sweaters and the Chanel. Her own fault. Fast girl. Whore—that word was used too.

The words seemed to protect them from what happened to Jenna, like an incantation that had to be said before they were able to move on to talk about algebra or hair spray. It seemed to work for them; it didn’t work for me.





THE PIRATE LOVER


Runaway

Electra Gates fled the marriage that would destroy her. If a curving waist, a glittering jewel at the ears, and a dance all had worked to draw the repellent Henri Le Cherche’s attention to her, then better she were hideous, better to be poor and invisible! What was beauty to the one who was beautiful if she could not control its effects? No doubt her clear dependence upon her undependable mother had also drawn him to her. The Marais dress, the physical pleasures of dancing—she had experienced them as a source of power, but they too had betrayed her by attracting this monster.

She hurried, panting, toward the sea in the darkness of a moonless night. At the quays she would find a boat that was just about to slip its anchor. She would put the sea itself between her and the monster Le Cherche.

Two loiterers pointed her to a handsome black vessel with a new suit of sails a half mile out in the harbor. That one, they said, is the only ship in the harbor with its water and victuals already on board and a Blue Peter flying to signal its imminent departure. A British crew, for the most part, they said. She’ll be off at the next tide, they told her. Perhaps the captain would take a passenger. Who knew? But she must hurry if she wanted to let her destiny take this turn. For a fee, a very small fee, they would be willing to row her out this very minute.

Her eyes swept the harbor, the deep-green water and then the disk of the horizon arcing so far away. No carriages or coaches leaving the city were safe. Henri Le Cherche could stop any of them. But the sea—there was freedom. Yes, she said. Yes, take me.

So they did, taking from her first the few coins she offered and calling up when they reached the ship’s high tumbledown. “Hello, the Cat! Hello, the boat! Young person seeking passage asking to come aboard. Handsome piece too, mates!” The speaker turned to a blushing Electra. “Pardon the language, miss. No offense meant.”

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