Bittersweet Dreams Read online

  I hurried to dress myself now.

  “How are you doing?” he asked.

  “All right,” I said.

  “You surprised me. I really thought you were a virgin.”

  “I am. I was,” I said. “I’ve never been with anyone like this. Do you want me to describe the female anatomy and why I didn’t bleed?”

  “No, no,” he said, smiling and shaking his head. “That’s a little too much information right now. Why don’t you get refreshed in the bathroom while I clean up out here, and then I’ll take you home. Curfew or no curfew, I’m sure you’ve got them wondering by now.”

  I didn’t say anything. I went into the bathroom and looked at my flushed face. I brushed my hair, ran a cold washcloth over my forehead and cheeks, and then finished fixing my clothes. I still felt a little dazed. He was waiting anxiously when I stepped out of the bathroom.

  Because this was the first time I had been with any man, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Would he start a review of our lovemaking to tell me how wonderful it had been? Would he offer some sort of apology, perhaps for moving too quickly? Would he ask me to be sure to keep this a secret? Would he say or do something to make absolutely sure I was all right with what had happened between us?

  All these thoughts seemed very reasonable to me, but he acted on none of them. Instead, he began talking about the apartment, how long he had been in it, what the other tenants were like, and where he would really like to live. In his car, he went on and on about the commute to school and how it took him nearly twenty more minutes on some days.

  I had to keep reminding myself that we had just made very passionate love. Was this normal? Was I making too much of it? Was that a sign of immaturity?

  “One thing you can never anticipate in Los Angeles is the traffic. There’s no rational way of figuring it out. Why Tuesdays are busier than some Mondays drives me nuts. You have your license yet?” he asked.

  “No. I’m getting it this year,” I said.

  “You’ll see what it’s like. I know teenagers can’t wait to drive, to have their own cars, but it’s not long before you realize you were better off having someone drive you places.”

  Suddenly, I’m back to being a teenager, I thought. How could he turn it on and off so easily? I certainly didn’t think of him as one of our school’s teachers, not anymore.

  “You have to give me directions. I have a vague idea where you live, but . . .”

  “Turn up here,” I said. “It’s a faster way.”

  “Right. You okay?”

  Finally, something that referred to what we had done, I thought.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Maybe just a little tired.”

  “I bet. You’ve had one helluva day.”

  I looked at him. One helluva day? It was almost as if we had not gone for the ride to the beach, had the pizza and made love in his apartment, almost as if we were back at the strip mall and he was taking me directly home.

  Does sex linger longer in the mind of a female than in that of a male? Perhaps that was it.

  I knew what “wham, bam, thank you, ma’am” meant. Males satisfied themselves and then, as if that was all there was, left the scene. That wasn’t lovemaking. That was love taking. In my way of thinking, it was as if they had mailed a letter with no address. They just wanted to put an envelope into a slot and leave. Whether it had any purpose or meaning wasn’t important.

  “What are you going to tell your parents?” he asked when I showed him our driveway. Although he tried to disguise it, I knew he was worried.

  “I don’t have to tell them anything.”

  He looked at me skeptically. “Come on. You didn’t go home after school. Look at the time,” he said.

  “My father will just assume I went to the city library, and Julie won’t even ask. I’ve done that before, or I’ve gone to museums without telling them ahead of time. If anything, Julie might be upset that I came home at all, especially after today. I’m sure she’s been going on and on about how much of a strain it’s been on her.”

  “What about dinner? Surely they’ll be wondering about that.”

  “I told you. I’ve done it before and had something to eat nearby.”

  He nodded. I saw the way he was keeping his head tilted when he pulled up in front of the house. “Well, if they see that I brought you home, you can tell them I just bumped into you accidentally and offered you a lift.”

  “That’s exactly what you did do,” I said. I gathered my books.

  “Well, I hope I helped you forget the bad time you had in school.”

  “What bad time?” I said, and he laughed.

  “Take care of yourself, Mayfair,” he said. It sounded like we would never see each other again.

  I thought that was what you were doing, taking care of me, I wanted to say, but I didn’t.

  I just closed the car door and started for the front entrance of my house. I turned to watch him drive off, and then I took a deep breath and went inside.

  Despite all I had told him and the brave face I had worn, I had no idea what really awaited me.

  11

  “Where were you?” my father demanded the moment I entered. He popped out of the living room, with Julie trailing behind him like a puppy. I looked at her first. If she was in any way concerned about how my father would react to what had been decided at school, it didn’t show in her face. She was putting on an act, wearing the expression of a mother who had been wringing her hands with worry about a child.

  “Your father has been beside himself,” she said when I didn’t answer immediately.

  “I would have thought he would be beside you,” I said.

  “Don’t get smart, Mayfair, and don’t give me a lecture on the word smart, either. Where were you, damn it? After what happened today, you would think you would have come directly home.”

  “After what happened today, anyone would expect me never to come home. Daddy, didn’t she tell you what she let them do to me?” I asked, practically shouting at him.

  My father rarely saw me lose my temper. I had always relied more on sarcasm and good arguments. I had always believed that letting your emotions get control of you put you in a weaker place, but right now, I couldn’t help myself. The events of the last few hours had confused me and twisted me up inside. I was feeling so many different emotions at once. It was a kaleidoscope of feelings. I had gone from anger to depression to elation. Now I had returned to anger. Julie’s feigned face of concern put me over the top. I could barely contain myself. I felt like charging at her and slapping her and wiping that mask of false concern off her.

  My father relaxed his shoulders and lost some of his aggressiveness and outrage. “As I understand it, it was a sensible compromise avoiding any more unpleasantness for you.”

  “Avoiding unpleasantness for me? The only one who avoided any unpleasantness was Julie. Exactly how do you think those bitches are going to describe this to their friends in school? Are they going to tell them that I got the best of them because I don’t have to take PE but I still get credit for it? Or are they going to make a big point of the fact that I was ripped out of the girls’ locker room because I’m most likely gay? You’re a big-shot advertising man, Daddy, how would you present this situation to the eagerly awaiting public?”

  I continued, “Imagine a billboard with me on it being dragged by my hair out of the locker room and the bitches laughing. Got that image in your head? Thank Julie for it, and then consider what it was and will be like for me in that school.” I headed for the stairway.

  “But we thought . . . I mean, I thought you’d be happier not having to deal with those girls every time you had PE, Mayfair,” he said.

  “Happier?” I turned to look at them. My father looked concerned, even a little sorry. Julie looked worried. Perhaps he wouldn’t like her solution after all. I took a deep breath and continued to look wounded. I could put on a performance, too, even better than hers, I thought, if that was what it took to w
in back my father.

  “Maybe it is my fault,” I said. “It’s been so long since I’ve been happy about anything. I probably don’t recognize the feeling anymore. Besides, I wasn’t afraid of dealing with them. What are they but vapid, self-absorbed Barbie dolls who spend most of their time agonizing over their choice of lipstick?” I looked so directly at Julie that someone would have to be blind not to see the connection I was making. “No, happy is not what I feel, Daddy. What I feel is betrayed, betrayed by the people who should have my best interests at heart and not their own.”

  I paused. I saw that my father was feeling worse every second, but I wanted him to feel that way. I wanted him to feel absolutely terrible.

  “If you had been there, it might have turned out differently,” I said in a softer tone. “You used to always be there for me, Daddy. I needed you today. I needed someone to defend me. My mother would have been there.”

  He looked up at me with as much sadness in his eyes as I had seen there since my mother’s death. I started to feel sorrier for him than I did for myself. The truth was, I really didn’t care what the bitches from Macbeth thought and said. I was angrier with Julie than I was with them. And I was angry with my father for giving her so much control over what happened to me.

  But there was nothing more I could do about it right now. And I didn’t want to dwell on the bad and the ugly. I wanted to think about Alan Taylor. I wanted to relive my time with him. It was still so fresh.

  “Just forget about it, Daddy,” I said. “It’s not too important in the scheme of things. I’ll live, and all the precious reputations have been saved.”

  “Did you have dinner?”

  “I grabbed something.”

  “Where were you?”

  “City library,” I said.

  Normally, I wouldn’t lie to him. I had never done anything I didn’t feel I could justify or defend, but this was quite different. If I began to analyze it, I was sure I would have trouble justifying and defending it to myself.

  He nodded.

  “I’m going to take a bath and read,” I said, and continued up the stairway.

  As soon as I turned down the hallway, Allison burst out of her room. Her shiny new braces glittered in the hall light. Girls her age weren’t as upset about their braces as girls used to be, because every six weeks, when they went in to have them tightened, they could change the color. When that was mentioned at dinner one night, I had told my father that good advertising could make a root canal desirable, and he had laughed. That was one of our happier moments, the kind of moments that seemed rare now.

  Allison wore an oversize nightshirt with a print of her astrological sign, Virgo, spread over her budding breasts and belly. Her birthday was August 24. The English translation of Virgo is “virgin,” and for a moment, having that astrological sign in my face seemed like poetic irony.

  “I’m glad you’re home,” she said. Those weren’t words I heard her utter often.

  “What do you want?” was my natural question. I wasn’t disappointed. She was happy to see me because she needed something, but in this house now, that wasn’t unusual behavior.

  “I need help with this math assignment. It’s brutal.”

  “Brutal?”

  I had to smile at the hyperboles she and other girls her age often used. They were so dramatic, so over-the-top. Everything that happened to them, whether it was a pimple or a dead iPod battery, was tragic, practically fatal. I couldn’t recall ever being like that. Although I mocked them, at times I envied them. They seemed to be able to sidestep every really important task or decision. Moaning and groaning, throwing up their hands, and bursting into a downpour of tears, they fed on adult sympathy and usually got their way. Maybe I could learn something from them after all.

  Parents, especially today’s parents, would do absolutely ridiculous things to placate their teenagers, including driving back miles to school to bring them an AA battery or a cell-phone charger. Later they would complain to other parents about it, but those parents would confess to doing similar things. Sometimes I felt like a modern-day Alexander de Tocqueville, analyzing society the way he analyzed American democracy. I was smart enough to do it, but it left me feeling like an outsider. Where did I belong?

  “Let’s see it,” I said in a tired voice. I wasn’t exaggerating. I was really feeling exhausted.

  “Thanks!” she cried, and led me to the desk in her room.

  Julie had spared no expense in setting up Allison’s room, from its four-poster canopy bed with a headboard of embossed cherubs to the recently installed vanity table with a mirror straight out of a Snow White illustration. I half expected to hear Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? automatically recited every time she stood or sat in front of it. She had a computer table and a desk and a walk-in closet that was twice the size of mine. We had similar en suite bathrooms, all marble, with whirlpool tubs and large stall showers. Of course, Allison, like me, had her own telephone, the difference being that she used hers. Mine was almost a table decoration. Most of the time, it rang only when my father called me, and lately, he hadn’t done much of that.

  I looked at her assignment. To me, it was the equivalent of one plus one equals two.

  “This only asks you to find the fourth angle of a quadrilateral, Allison. It’s basic addition and subtraction. It’s far from brutal.”

  “I wasn’t paying attention today,” she confessed. “I don’t remember what a quadrilateral is.”

  I sighed. I could never be a good teacher, I thought. It took too much patience. “A quadrilateral is a polygon with four sides or edges and four vertices or corners.”

  She grimaced as if I had just fed her a bitter herb. “What’s a polygon?”

  “Didn’t you listen to anything?”

  She shrugged. “Mr. Bissel talks too fast. He teaches to the kids who are really smart and forgets the rest of us.”

  I nodded. She was probably right. Most of the teachers I had were the same way. They looked for the easiest way to get through their classes, and ignoring the students who didn’t grasp concepts and ideas quickly enough was the most convenient method.

  “A polygon is simply a plane figure bounded by a closed path or circuit. It’s two-dimensional, length and width. So, here, this rectangle is a polygon,” I said, drawing one. “This problem tells you that the sum of the four corners is three hundred sixty degrees, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So, just add up these three corners, which equals two hundred seventy, and subtract that from . . . ?”

  “The three hundred sixty?”

  “Exactly. What’s the answer?”

  “Ninety.”

  “That’s it. You do the same thing with the other five problems, Allison.”

  “And the last one?”

  “That just asks you to find the area of a square. Didn’t he show you this, at least? You just multiply the base times itself.”

  She shrugged again. I couldn’t believe any teacher would be that lackadaisical.

  “What were you doing in class today?”

  Her face flushed with guilt. Today. I should have known. Why wouldn’t it all have filtered down to the junior high? The school had a total population, grades seven to twelve, of just more than nine hundred students. And everyone was in the same building.

  “Someone was talking about me?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I didn’t encourage them,” she said quickly, “but they kept passing notes to me, asking me stupid questions.”

  “Like what?”

  I saw how reluctant she was to answer. Instead, she went to her book bag, opened it, and took out three slips of paper to hand to me.

  One read, Does she watch you take showers or baths?

  Another asked, Does she want you to help her masturbate?

  The last one simply asked, Does she kiss you on the lips?

  “Well,” I said. “It looks like you’ve become quite popular. Everyone will w
ant to be your friend to be the first to learn some gossip.”

  “I didn’t tell them anything. I told them they were all stupid.”

  “Did you tell your mother about this?”

  Again, she looked guilty. “I didn’t show them to her. I just told her a little,” she confessed.

  “What did she say?”

  “She said she wanted me to do my best to ignore them, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “But to tell her if anything like that ever happened.”

  “Do you think it would?”

  “No. You’re just very smart. You’re not like that. Right?”

  I nearly laughed at her uncertainty. “Right, Allison.” I gave her back the notes. “Save these. We might need them as evidence someday.”

  “For what?”

  “A lawsuit.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” I said. I started to leave.

  “Mr. Taylor said something like that to me today, too.”

  I turned back. “Mr. Taylor?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What? What did he say?”

  “He saw that I was upset. I sit right up front. He’s always looking at me to see if I understand things or if I’m unhappy. He gives me special attention.”

  “Does he? So what did he say, Allison?” I asked more firmly.

  “When the bell rang, he told me to stay behind a moment, and then he said he’d heard some nasty rumors were being spread about you and that I shouldn’t pay them any attention. He said those spreading them would get themselves in big trouble. He’s the nicest teacher in the school, and the best-looking. I know he likes me a lot,” she added.

  Something about the way she said that sounded an alarm. “Likes you? What do you mean?”

  “He likes me,” she said. “He’s always looking at me and smiling and stuff.”