The Unwelcomed Child Read online

  As soon as I finished cleaning up after our lunch, I gathered my new art materials and made for the back door.

  “You’re to be back here by four,” Grandmother Myra called from the living room.

  “It’s almost two-thirty, Grandmother. Can’t I have until five?”

  I heard my grandfather mumbling, and then she said, “Okay, five, and don’t get wet again.”

  “I won’t,” I said, and hurried out before she could issue another warning or change her mind. I hadn’t taken the paints. I would do a sketch first and then begin mixing and painting tomorrow. There wasn’t time to do much more.

  The weather had held up nicely, with a nearly cloudless cobalt-blue sky. The small clouds looked like lost children who had broken off from their parents. It was the way I felt most of the time, drifting alone. As usual, the birds began to flutter and grow noisier, as if they had been waiting for my appearance. A soft breeze lifted leaves, making it seem they were greeting me as I tracked through what was now my personal pathway. The easel was light, and I had no trouble carrying it with my new large pad and pencils.

  When I arrived at the place on the lake that offered the view of Mason and Claudine’s home and dock, I put everything down and unfolded the easel. Mason appeared on the dock instantly. He had been waiting for any sign of me. I saw that he was in a bathing suit and barefoot. He waved, and I waved back, and then he got into his rowboat quickly and started toward me.

  “Don’t you look professional now,” he said as he turned the boat in. “I love you in that beret. I guess this means your grandmother has approved of your attending public school.”

  “Yes,” I said. “For now.”

  “I think you should set up your easel on our lawn, where we have that full view of the lake. I’ll help you with it all,” he said, stepping into the water.

  “I can’t get even a little wet today,” I told him.

  “Don’t worry about it. You won’t.” He picked up my pad and pencils. “Okay?”

  “I must be back home by five,” I said.

  “What, do they eat early-bird specials even at home?”

  “I’m afraid so,” I said.

  “Okay, okay. I’ll make sure you’re back by five.”

  He put my things in the boat and then took the easel carefully and set it down over the middle bench seat. After that, I took off my shoes and socks. He put them in, and then, when I started into the water, he scooped me into his arms.

  “No sense taking any chances,” he said. He punctuated that with a kiss on the tip of my nose and gently set me in the boat.

  Before we started out, I saw that Claudine had walked onto the dock, too. She was wearing a pair of very short shorts and a blue T-shirt with something written on it. When we were closer, I saw that it read, “Free love is too expensive.”

  “What does her shirt mean?”

  “Don’t ask me. She prints them herself. My father bought her a machine that does it.”

  We docked, and he began to hand up my art materials to her.

  “We’ll set her up just outside the basement patio doors,” he told her. “She has to be back by five.”

  “Are you going to do me?” she asked.

  “No, I thought . . . a lake scene.” I showed her what I had drawn quickly yesterday. “I want to make it bigger on my new pad and then begin painting it tomorrow.”

  “Nice, but I’m more of a challenge,” she said.

  “Later, Claudine,” he advised. “She’s definitely going to public school.”

  “If my grandmother doesn’t change her mind,” I added.

  “Why would she?”

  “She won’t,” Mason insisted. “Stop worrying.”

  “What sort of clothes did she buy you?” Claudine asked.

  I described everything as we walked to the house.

  “Ugh,” she said. “Tell you what. I’ll give you some of my things. We’re just about the same size. You can go to school in your Amish clothes and then go into the bathroom and change into what I give you.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Of course you can. I do it all the time. My mother forbids me to wear something, and I stuff it into my book bag and change at school. Lots of girls do it.”

  “Lots of girls she knows, she means,” Mason said.

  “Other girls aren’t worth knowing,” she countered, and he laughed.

  He set up my easel, and I put the pad on it and opened my small pad again. The two of them sat at my feet, folding their legs and looking up at me.

  “We don’t make you nervous, do we?” Mason asked.

  “No. Well, maybe a little.”

  “Good,” Claudine said. “You should always be a little nervous about anything you do. That way, you’ll be more cautious, especially when it comes to boys. Always begin with the belief that they can’t be trusted. That way, you won’t be disappointed, and if they are trustworthy, you’ll feel like you’ve struck gold.”

  “She’s the cynical one in the family,” Mason said.

  “And therefore the happiest, because I’m never disappointed.”

  “Please, what about Willy Landers?”

  “That was an anomaly. You know what that means, Elle?”

  I nodded. If I was going to be truthful, I’d have to admit my grandmother had given me an education up to this point that was as good as, if not better than, the one girls and boys my age were getting at the public school. The intensity of my work and her high standards gave me the confidence.

  “Something irregular, abnormal.”

  “Check,” Mason said. “I told you, Claudine. You’re underestimating her.”

  “Maybe with school subjects, but your life is about to begin, Elle. You’ll find yourself spending more of your attention and time on other things.”

  I nodded and kept drawing. Claudine put her head on Mason’s lap and sprawled out.

  “Our parents will be back tonight,” she said.

  “Right. I’ll finally get some decent dinners.”

  “You eat everything I make and then some,” Claudine told him.

  He shrugged. “Beggars can’t be choosers.”

  “Poor you. What about you, Elle? Can you cook?”

  “I can make anything my grandmother makes. I’ve watched her prepare often enough. Nothing you would call gourmet, I’m sure,” I added.

  “Our mother fancies herself a gourmet cook. She takes expensive lessons from very well-known chefs and then experiments on us.”

  “No one complains,” Mason said.

  “You’ll have to come to our house for dinner one night,” Claudine said.

  I stopped drawing. Didn’t she understand that I was sneaking out to meet them?

  I saw the expression change on her face.

  “You still haven’t told your grandparents about meeting us, have you?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Why not?”

  I didn’t know what to say, how to put it. My grandmother would never approve of my knowing a girl who swam naked and especially not a boy who did.

  “How are you going to make any friends when you go to school? She expects you’ll do that, right?”

  I shrugged. She still didn’t understand how new all of this was for me.

  “As I told you, she’d have to know who they were first,” I said.

  “Inspect and examine them to be sure they were wholesome, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are we wholesome, Mason?”

  “Not if you can help it,” he said, and she laughed.

  “Then we’d be forbidden,” she concluded, but then she brightened. “We’ll remain forbidden. I’ve never been considered forbidden. I think I like it.”

  “I don’t think your mother would like it,” Mason said.

  “Then let’s be sure not to say anything,” she warned him. “Don’t worry, Elle. We’ll handle it all. Why don’t you take five?”

  “Take five?”

  �
�A break. I want to see how some of my clothes fit you and get a little female talk in without you-know-who eavesdropping.”

  “I’ll die of loneliness,” Mason said.

  “Don’t worry. We’ll figure out how to resurrect you,” Claudine told him, and stood. “C’mon,” she urged, taking the pencil out of my hand and putting it on the easel. Then she took my hand and practically dragged me into the house.

  She led me up the stairs to her room and immediately began sifting through the clothes in her closet, tossing one skirt and blouse after another onto her very comfortable-looking king-size bed. Even Grandmother Myra and Grandfather Prescott didn’t have a king-size bed. Theirs was a queen. I knew all about mattresses, thanks to him. I pressed down on Claudine’s to see how soft or hard it was.

  “Try it,” she said. “It’s all right.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  I sprawled out on it and slowly laid my head back on her oversize marshmallow pillows. The delicious scent of lavender swirled around me.

  “What sort of bed do you have?” she asked.

  “Oh. It’s a single bed with a very firm mattress.” More like a board, I wanted to say, but didn’t.

  “I have trouble sleeping on anything smaller when we go on trips and vacations. I have the same bed at home in New York. Do you have a nice room, at least?”

  I couldn’t lie about it. “No. My room’s not very nice, Claudine. It’s about half the size of this.”

  “I’d suffocate.”

  Yes, you would, I thought. “Sometimes that is the way I feel,” I confessed.

  She looked at me and nodded. “Start trying some of this on,” she said, indicating the clothing she had chosen.

  “Really, I don’t know how I’m going to wear any of these things.”

  “Stop worrying. Once you’re in school a while and you set your eyes on some boy, you’ll want to look more enticing, Elle. Once I’m finished with you, they’ll be fighting over you.”

  “It won’t matter,” I said, and she turned around, a mixture of frustration and anger twisting her mouth and igniting her eyes.

  “Why not?” She paused a moment, thinking. “You don’t think you’re gay, do you?”

  “No, it’s not that. I won’t be able to go out on a date,” I said. “My grandmother won’t approve.”

  The comment froze her. Then she nodded and sat on her bed. “Can you tell me why they treat you like this? Did you once do something? I mean, I’m no angel. I’ve been grounded lots of times, even for a month once, but they let me come up for air after I promised to behave, which I broke, of course. As Mason says,” she added, smiling, “promises are like balloons, full of air and easily punctured. So?” She continued when I didn’t say anything, “We’ll do it like a game. I’ve done this with other girlfriends who were a little shy.”

  “What kind of game?”

  “I’ll tell you a secret, and you’ll tell me one. Secrets are from one to ten, ten being the most secret. You want to start with number one or number ten or in between?”

  “I don’t have that many secrets,” I said.

  She looked at me askance with a half-smile, more of a smirk. “No young man has ever sneaked over to see you before Mason did, for example?”

  “Oh, no. We don’t have close-by neighbors, and where would I meet him anyway?”

  She looked disappointed. “You have to have something wrong with you, Elle. I’m not a complete idiot. Why have your grandparents kept you hooked to a ball and chain until now?”

  “They’re afraid for me,” I said.

  “You mean they really are just two nutty paranoids?”

  “Yes, something like that.”

  She stared, her eyes narrowing with her suspicions. “Talk about your parents. How old was your mother when she became pregnant with you?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What?”

  “I mean, she was in college at the time, but I’m not sure if she was eighteen or nineteen.”

  “Well, when is her birthday?” she asked. I didn’t answer. “You know your own mother’s birthday, don’t you?”

  “I’m not . . .”

  “Sure. I get it. So your grandparents were so angry at her that they threw her out and forbid any mention of her. Is that the truth?”

  “Sorta.”

  “Sorta? I think I’m getting my dental degree here,” she said.

  “What?”

  “It feels like I’m pulling teeth. You told us your mother gave birth to you and then deserted you. Did she desert you or run away from your grandparents or what?”

  “No, she didn’t want to be a mother.”

  “I can’t blame her for that. I’m not crazy about the idea. Maybe later. Much later,” she said.

  I was hoping that would be the end of it and she would stop asking questions, but I could see she wasn’t satisfied yet.

  “Your mother must have told them who made her pregnant. Was it a local guy?”

  I shook my head.

  “But you really do know who your father is, right? Your grandparents must have known and mentioned it. C’mon, do you really know?”

  “No.”

  “Bummer.” She thought a moment. “I think I understand. Your grandparents made your mother have you because they’re religious, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “But now they think you’ll be just like her or something?”

  “It wasn’t all her fault,” I said.

  “No, but you’ve got to memorize how to say no,” Claudine said. “The thing parents and teachers don’t get or don’t want to get is that we have to be educated.”

  “What do you mean? That’s why we go to school.”

  “There’s education, and there’s education. We have to know what can happen, and you can’t just get that out of books and lectures. You have to be in battle to know what war’s really like. Your grandparents are making a big mistake keeping you from experiencing things. Not everyone gets pregnant.”

  She stood up and began to pace, like someone giving a lecture, not looking directly at me.

  “I’m not saying they have to buy you birth-control pills or anything, but they’re making a mistake putting you out there unaware of the traps. I saw the way you reacted when Mason touched your breast yesterday. You didn’t know what to do. I’m not saying it was bad for him to do it. Far from that, but someone else, someone not as thoughtful as Mason, could easily take advantage of you, and whose fault would that be? I’ll tell you. Your uptight grandparents’. That’s whose,” she said angrily. Then she smiled again.

  “What?”

  “When you got undressed down to your bra and panties and went into the water, you looked like a little girl unaware of anything. I could see it in your face. You didn’t see how you affected Mason. He was dying.”

  “Dying?”

  “In actual pain. You couldn’t see because he was standing up to his waist.” She waited a moment. “You understand what I’m saying, don’t you?” She waited a moment. “It’s different when he looks at me. We were brought up practically in the same crib, took baths together, and got used to each other. There was never any mystery about what was different.”

  She waited, but I didn’t know what to say or what she meant.

  “I feel like I’m talking to some extraterrestrial!” she exclaimed. “Elle, the whole time Mason was teaching you to swim, he had an erection.”

  I felt my heart stop and start. Grandmother Myra didn’t know how much about human reproduction I had learned from the science book I had to read, or if she did, she didn’t want to mention it. She never questioned me about any of it to see whether I understood it all.

  “We’ve got a lot to talk about,” Claudine said after taking a deep breath. “Mason might teach you how to swim in the lake, but I’m going to teach you how to swim in the world. Try this on,” she said, throwing one of her skirts at me. “And stop looking so worried. You won’t end up like your
mother.

  “At least, not because of me.”

  9

  I heard the pebbles hit the window.

  I had tried on six skirts, three dresses, and four blouses. Everything I put on looked wonderful to me. I could only dream of wearing clothes like this, skirts this short, blouses this tight with deep V-neck collars, and dresses that clung to my hips and bosom with thin, soft material that Grandmother Myra would call “tissue-paper clothes.”

  “You look better, sexier, in some of these than I do,” Claudine said.

  Sexier? Being sexy was akin to being totally naked in Grandmother Myra’s way of thinking. I recalled her lecture about it recently.

  “Why does a woman want to be sexy-looking? How many men does she want lusting after her? How can it be harmless to stir up erotic desire in a man? And don’t tell me these women are shocked to discover they’re doing just that when something unexpected happens, missy. They know exactly what they’re doing. I fault them as much as, if not more than, the men who cross the line of decency,” she said, and I wondered how much of that applied to my mother.

  “Don’t the teachers and administrators get angry when you wear sexy things?” I asked Claudine.

  “Of course not. You can’t expose yourself or anything, but they can’t punish you for looking beautiful. There’s nothing I’m showing you that is forbidden in my school. Of course, if you attend one of those parochial schools, you might have to wear a uniform that makes it hard to tell if you’re male or female,” she said, “but you’re going to attend a public school, right?”

  “Yes. There are no parochial schools nearby, or that might be where they’d send me.”

  “Lucky you. Now, let’s see.”

  Claudine decided which ones complemented my figure the best and even gave me a bracelet and a necklace to go with one outfit. How was I to tell her that this was the first jewelry I had ever tried on, let alone hoped to wear?

  “How can you give me this?” I asked, turning my wrist every which way to catch the light on the bracelet.

  “It’s only costume jewelry. I have tons of it.”

  The pebbles hit the window again.

  “What’s that?”