Bittersweet Dreams Read online

  “Good. Good luck.”

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Are you sure there’s nothing going on? Are those girls annoying you? Did someone say something to you, Carlton James or anyone?”

  “No, and if they did, it wouldn’t bother me at all. You should know that, Joy.”

  “I know. That’s why I really thought it might be something else.”

  “There’s nothing you can help me with, Joy.”

  “Oh. So there is something bothering you, but it’s something I can’t help you with?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  I was surprised that she hung on to my exact wording. Maybe I was rubbing off on her. “Don’t be a nag,” I said, and she laughed. I thought about her for a moment. She was such a lost soul. She was trying desperately to have a friend, to be needed, and to contribute something of value. I didn’t have to be so hard on her right now just because I was hoping for Alan Taylor to be calling. “Thanks anyway for offering,” I added, which I knew made her happy.

  “If you ever need a friend for anything,” she said, “please choose me.”

  “Okay, Joy.”

  “I mean it. Promise?”

  “Yes, I promise. Look, I’ve got to go,” I said. “I left a physics problem on the stove.”

  “What?”

  “I’m just kidding, but I do have some reading I want to do tonight. Thanks again for calling.”

  “Okay,” she said. “See you tomorrow. ’Night.”

  I hung up.

  I couldn’t imagine how she could help me with anything, especially Alan Taylor, but I had to admit to myself that it was nice hearing her offer, nice knowing someone was caring enough about me for whatever reason to sense that something wasn’t right with me. I wondered what she would do if I really did confide in her. She probably wouldn’t tell anyone at school, but she might tell her mother. Why take the chance? What would I gain? She certainly didn’t have the experience to offer me any sensible suggestions. Besides, it required too much trust. As sad as it seemed, I doubted I would ever meet anyone in whom I could invest such confidence. Even my father had fallen into the realm of doubt.

  Nothing was very different during the remainder of the school week and the beginning of the next. The bitches of Macbeth finally seemed to be bored with me and my apparent lack of interest in them. I imagined that everything surrounding the episode in the locker room discouraged them. I wasn’t acting destroyed by it. There wasn’t enough excitement in it anymore. Little did they know that my silence and further withdrawal from everything in the school had less to do with them and more to do with Alan Taylor, but there was no doubt in my mind about what they would do if they knew about that.

  Alan continued to ignore me, to do everything he could to avoid looking directly at me, and he didn’t say a word to me, even though there were a few opportunities for him to do so. I couldn’t get myself to approach him and force him to acknowledge me. It felt too much like begging for attention, and besides, Joy was practically attached to me whenever she could be. It was like I had given birth to a second shadow. She had begun to see a therapist and was making some progress. I didn’t want to do anything to detract from that. I knew my interest in her, albeit more scientific than emotional, was an important reason for her effort to recuperate. She wanted my approval. Right now, she was the only one who wanted that.

  I thought about waiting around for Alan after school a few times but decided not to do it. I even wondered if he was waiting for me to do what I had done the first time and not go home with Julie and Allison but instead walk down to the strip mall and wait for him, where he had first picked me up. One day, I actually did that. He never followed me. In fact, I was sure I saw him drive right by, not even looking my way or, if he did see me, quickly turning away. In the end, I had to call a taxi.

  My reaction to all this surprised me. I thought I could be more mature about it. After all, he had treated me like a mature, sophisticated woman and probably expected that I would behave accordingly. I could shake off the disappointment and go on as if nothing had happened if I put my mind to it, couldn’t I? I certainly wouldn’t become some lovesick teenager ready to toss herself off a bridge. But despite the confidence I had in myself, I felt myself sinking deeper and deeper into what I recognized as a serious depression. I no longer wore any makeup, didn’t do much with my hair, and returned to wearing the clothes I had been wearing before Julie added to my wardrobe. Maybe I was punishing myself for being so naive and vulnerable, but I hated to come to that conclusion and think of myself as the kind of foolish, innocent young girl I often accused my classmates of being. If Julie got wind of this tryst between Alan Taylor and me and my reaction afterward, she would surely gloat.

  I could see her now, lecturing my father, telling him how she could easily have predicted that something like this would happen to me. “The girl wouldn’t listen to anything I said. She was always too high-and-mighty to take my advice. Oh, no, what does someone like me have to offer? What does someone like me know? Of course you should be proud of her academic achievements, Roger, but you’ve even said it yourself: a person has to have more than a high IQ to be a complete person, and Mayfair is far from a complete person. The fact is, she’s socially immature, otherwise how could a thing like this have happened? How could a young girl living in our home be so . . . so . . . inadequate when it comes to relationships and permit herself to be taken advantage of like this?”

  My father would just sit there soaking up her criticism and feeling like a total failure as a parent. Julie’s hold over him and over me, for that matter, would grow tenfold, and who was really to blame for it?

  Me, that’s who.

  It didn’t matter that a teacher was involved and would take the brunt of the blame in the legal sense. He was an adult, and my chronological age made me a minor, but victims weren’t given a pass all the time, even minors and especially females when it came to male abuse or exploitation. In some countries, women who were raped were punished, too.

  The conclusion was almost the same everywhere. Somehow, for some reason, we always shared the blame, or to some people, we were solely responsible. We did something to tempt the male, and besides, we were spoiled now, damaged property. It was a lose-lose situation.

  You’d practically have to go into the federal witness protection program to get a new start, to be innocent, pure, and fresh again in everyone’s eyes.

  Besides, if there was any girl who was supposed to be smart enough to avoid such a trap, it surely was me, the girl whose IQ was so far above anyone else’s that it floated close to the Pearly Gates.

  I had no intention of permitting this sort of criticism and ridicule to happen to me. I wasn’t going to break down and cry about how a teacher seduced me, go running to Dr. Richards or Mr. Martin about it. What a field day the three bitches from Macbeth would have with that. They would tell every boy in school, and every one of them would approach me with some nasty suggestion. Life would be more of a living hell than it was now.

  No, swallow it all back and plod on, I told myself. Just try to keep yourself as busy as possible. That way, you’ll worry about it less and less and stop pitying yourself. Eventually, it will all dissipate like smoke. Of course, that was easier said than done.

  How many times did I stop reading to think about what was happening? How often did I simply sit there staring into space before I realized what I was doing?

  Nothing seemed to be important anymore. I was experiencing all the symptoms of deep depression. I knew it, too, but like someone sitting in a car without brakes careening down a mountainside, I couldn’t prevent what was happening to me. I could only sit there and wait for the crash.

  Thinking about all this made the world seem even darker and darker.

  I felt like someone in quicksand who knew she was sinking but couldn’t reach out for help from any of these adults and so-called professionals.


  However, because I had so little contact with my teachers and fellow students, ironically no one but Joy took any particular notice of my depression. The others must have thought my silence, my self-imposed solitude, and my unhappy face were normal for me. My invisibility had grown too effective. I could collapse on the hall floor, and the other students rushing to class would step over me. Maybe they would even step on me without noticing.

  Joy never stopped asking what was bothering me. She called often, and although she pretended to be calling about herself, with some question about her condition, she always brought the conversation back to me. It almost made me laugh aloud to think that someone so out of the mainstream was so observant, so sensitive to me, that she could see the subtle differences. It finally occurred to me that she really did care about me and wasn’t simply trying to give herself some meaning and importance. Ironically, I was the sister she had never had. She had tuned herself in to the frequency over which my moods and feelings flowed, just like a real sister might.

  Finally, I admitted to her that I was disappointed in someone.

  “Who?” she asked instantly.

  “I think it’s better that I don’t mention his name.”

  “Oh, so it’s one of the boys at school,” she concluded. “Well, he has to be blind and stupid.”

  “I’ll get over it,” I told her. “It would help, though, if you would stop asking. It keeps me thinking about it. Understand?”

  She nodded quickly, grateful for the tidbit. Confiding that much in her didn’t change my behavior in school at all. If anything, it made me think I had to be more careful, even a little more withdrawn.

  I knew that Julie was quite satisfied with my further withdrawal. I didn’t criticize or oppose anything she did or said in the house, any changes she got my father to make. As soon as I was home from school, I went into my room and stayed there until dinner. My father was particularly busy at this time. There was one crisis after another at the company because of some bad economic news involving two of the pharmaceutical companies he represented. He was occupied with trying to pick up new business and was traveling more than usual for meetings in the Midwest and on the East Coast. We simply weren’t talking to each other as often as usual.

  The first hint anyone else at school had of my new mental state was my failure to turn in any required work and my not putting down a single answer on any test. I’d hand in the papers untouched. At first, some of the teachers thought they had given out too many tests and I had an extra copy or that I had lost my homework. They couldn’t conceive of my not handing something in when it was due.

  However, when they asked me about it, I simply said I didn’t hand it in.

  “Why not?” they asked.

  “Sorry, I haven’t done it,” I said, without a note of regret.

  The expressions on their faces ran the whole gamut of reactions from indifference to surprise and finally to a reprimand and a lecture telling me not to underestimate the importance of their classes.

  It amused me how some of my teachers took my refusal to do any work so personally. I realized they saw it as a result of my arrogance. They believed I never thought of them as important enough to add anything to my education. I could see it in their eyes. How dare I belittle them and their subject matter and embarrass them in front of the other students by failing or ignoring their assignments and tests?

  Whatever any of them said to me in these lectures went in one ear and out the other. I saw the expressions of glee on the faces of other students who overheard us. Sometimes I nodded and looked like I understood and might even get back to the way I was. They could take credit for saving me or something. But more often than not, I simply walked away without speaking and without changing expression.

  Finally, one afternoon, Mr. Martin called me to his office to ask me what was going on. He had five different referrals now and probably had ignored them as long as he possibly could, hoping I would get back on track and make them all superfluous. Ever since my confrontation with the girls in the locker room and the subsequent meeting in Dr. Richards’s office, Mr. Martin looked uncomfortable in my presence. He barely nodded at me in the hallway and rarely took time to speak to me the way he often had before the locker-room incident. It was as if he had been enclosed in ice.

  The moment I entered his office, I could see how nervous and uncomfortable he was. “Mayfair,” he said, holding the five referrals up like a poker hand. “What is all this? What’s happening here?”

  “I don’t know what’s happening here, Mr. Martin. I wonder who does.”

  “What kind of an answer is that, Mayfair, especially from you?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “Most of my life is spent answering questions these days.”

  For a moment, he just stared at me. I could almost hear the wheels turning in his mind. I was normally a big challenge for him, but something like this involving me of all people threw him completely off kilter. I was sure he had told the principal and others that he wasn’t trained to deal with a student like me as it was, because of all my special problems. Who here was?

  “Is it what some of your teachers think? You think the work’s too insignificant now and not worthy of your attention and efforts?”

  “I suppose it’s significant enough for most of the students,” I said. “Although teaching intermediate algebra and calculus to some of them is like driving around with no place to go. How long can you do it before running out of gas?”

  “You’re not making any sense to me, Mayfair, and you’re worrying a number of people here who are really concerned about you. You might not believe it, but there are many people here who think you are someone very special, someone we should do our best to satisfy and prepare for the world out there.”

  “The world out there?”

  He looked at the referrals again and then back at me. “Aren’t you feeling well? Is there something you should tell the nurse, maybe?”

  I nearly laughed. “I don’t have female problems, Mr. Martin, and I’m not pregnant.”

  Mr. Martin was a fair-complexioned man to start with. He had light brown hair and freckles that looked like spots of carrot juice on his cheeks. When he blushed, his face became so red he looked like he had a terrible sunburn. It made his green eyes practically luminous. “I didn’t mean that,” he said. “Is there anything, anything at all, you want to tell me?” He sounded desperate, actually interested. It was tempting.

  Where would I begin? I wondered. Should I start with my need to be more accepted, surrendering to the female in me, and going to Julie for assistance, something that took away all my self-pride? Or should I begin by explaining how easily I was taken in by the school’s most eligible and desirable bachelor? Maybe compare myself to the story of the fox and the hen? Despite how the parable turned out, who could fault the fox, and who didn’t laugh at the naive hen? How could I do that? And besides, even if I was ready to tell someone, was he the person I should talk to, especially after he had sat in that office with Dr. Richards when the mothers of the bitches from Macbeth complained and then let what happened to me happen?

  I realized just how much I missed my mother. For any girl, there were certain problems and subjects she felt more comfortable discussing with her mother and not her father or a best friend or anyone else. After my mother died, I did depend on my father more than most girls depended on theirs, but most of my life, I was able to analyze and solve my own issues and not bother him. Maybe that was arrogant, but I couldn’t help thinking that no matter what, I could take care of myself better than anyone could take care of me, now and forever. But I really did need my mother. I needed to be cuddled and petted and told everything would be all right. When parents did it, you believed it.

  Why did death have to be so damn final?

  Why couldn’t I at least pick up the telephone and call my mother in the great beyond and ask her advice?

  Did I even believe in the great beyond?

  I’m
getting childish, I thought. I’m losing my famous self-control. Next thing I knew, I’d be sleeping again with my old stuffed teddy bear, the earliest gift I remembered my mother and father buying me. It was in a box, a symbolic coffin, in my closet. I put it there the day my mother died. I even dreamed of going to her grave, digging down to her coffin, and putting the bear in with her so she wouldn’t be lonely.

  I really was a child once. When my mother died, I became my father’s little girl, at least for a short while. And I couldn’t say I did that only for him. I needed his affection almost as much as he needed mine. I felt a little like that now, maybe more than a little. I battled not to burst into tears in Mr. Martin’s office. I swallowed them back and balled my hands into fists so tight my nails cut into my palms and my knuckles turned bloodred.

  I will not cry, I chanted to myself. I will not cry. None of these people will ever get the satisfaction of seeing me cry.

  “No,” I told him. “There’s nothing I want to tell you.”

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with your other problem, does it?”

  “What other problem? I thought Dr. Richards brought that to a complete and satisfactory end. Both of you had it all under such control, remember?”

  He nodded. I could see it in his face. He was thinking, So this is the game you’re playing with me? “Okay, Mayfair. I’m going to have to discuss this with your parents.”

  “I don’t have parents. I have only a father,” I said.

  “You may return to class,” he said, “but please, feel free to come here to talk to me anytime you want.”

  He said that so often, probably at the end of every conversation with every student, that I wondered if it wasn’t a recording inserted in his brain by some hypnotist.

  Of course, when he called my house, Julie took the message and then embellished it when she called my father. I was sure it had given her the most pleasure anything had given her all day. The administration of the school actually calling to complain about my scholastic work? They were desperate for help, and therefore they verified her view of me. If they, educational professionals trained to handle and help young students, had so much trouble understanding me at school, what she and others considered my world, how could she be blamed for failing me at home?