Bittersweet Dreams Read online

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Jamie Baron says that when you are in love, you can’t think of much else, and sometimes you look dopey.”

  “Jamie Baron sounds dopey.”

  “You never fell in love, right?”

  “No.”

  She looked disappointed.

  “Why is that important, Allison? You’re who you are, and I’m who I am. We don’t have to have the same feelings and thoughts about everything. In fact, you don’t have to have the same feelings and thoughts as your friends do, either. You’ll end up being a clone if you’re not careful.”

  “What’s a clone?”

  “An exact replica with no independent thought. In short, a nobody.” I wanted to add “like your mother and her friends,” but I thought I had gone far enough.

  She shrugged. “I just thought that if you fell in love, you’d know more so you could tell me for sure. I trust you. I mean, you know so much that I would believe what you said.”

  “Well, I don’t have to be in love to tell you that it has to be something that lasts longer than a week.”

  She nodded. “This has lasted all year, practically,” she said as if she was in a confessional booth.

  “You mean for you?”

  “Yes.”

  “It also helps if the person you fall in love with falls in love with you.”

  “And wants to be with you a lot?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And likes to touch you?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And smiles and looks bright every time he sees you . . .”

  “Now you sound as if you could write an advice to the lovelorn column,” I said. “You going to see this boy at the party Friday?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “No? Why not?” I grimaced. “I get it. He’s not what your mother calls popular or acceptable. Is that it? He wasn’t invited.”

  She pressed her lips together.

  “Well?” I pursued. “Which is it?”

  “None of that. He wouldn’t come to a kids’ party.”

  I sat back. “Wouldn’t come to a kids’ party? Who is this mysterious lover of yours?”

  She pressed her lips together again. She certainly could look just like her mother at times. “I can’t tell you,” she said, and slipped off the bed. “It’s a very big secret, the biggest secret of my life.”

  “That’s more reason to tell me. Something that big could mean big mistakes, too. Who is it?”

  “Allison?” we heard.

  “My mother’s calling. I’ll see you later,” she said, and hurried out.

  Why was I wasting time listening to an adolescent’s fantasy? I asked myself and returned to my research on the internet.

  The following day, I could see that Julie’s new approach toward me was going to be simply to ignore me. She didn’t mention a thing about my conversation with Dr. Burns, nor would she talk to me or look at me unless it was absolutely necessary. Maybe she thought that if she acted like this, I’d break down and apologize to her. I knew she was hoping for some reaction, because after a while, the silent treatment was ricocheting back on her. It was too uncomfortable in the car and at the dinner table. However, she was too proud to play the victim. She was more comfortable on the attack, and she was at least smart enough to know where I was most vulnerable.

  The day after that, she finally turned to me in the car and said, “You have no idea how much you’ve hurt your father, Mayfair.”

  I didn’t respond, but she had launched her attack, and every chance she had, she repeated it and other accusations.

  I was an unnatural child.

  I didn’t appreciate anything she and my father were doing for me.

  I had never given her a chance.

  I was resentful from the beginning, and actually, despite my high intelligence, I was very immature.

  The best one was “Everyone has hardships to bear. You have to be more considerate of that.”

  I didn’t have to ask her to elaborate. She was off and running.

  She had a horrible first marriage and had to provide all the parenting for her daughter. Allison might not be a quarter as intelligent as I was, but she was a decent, good girl. They had a wonderful, trusting relationship compared to what I had, and what I had or didn’t have was my own fault.

  My ability to turn her off the way I used to seemed diminished. Something had weakened me in that regard. I felt like putting my hands over my ears. It seemed to be the only way, either that or shout back at her until she stopped.

  Over the next few days, there was no doubt that my father was more upset with me than he had ever been. He acted like someone defeated and devoted more and more of his time to his work. I knew he was trying to find ways to avoid me, avoid the tension in the house.

  In school, I had completely stopped trying to catch Alan Taylor’s attention. I no longer even glanced his way, and I avoided passing his doorway. What had happened between us seemed so much like a dream now that I began to wonder if I had fantasized it all.

  Finally, after another week had passed, I was going to the library just after his free period had begun, and I had to pass his room. Just as I drew close, he stepped out.

  We were alone in the hallway. There was no way to avoid each other.

  “How are you doing?” he asked.

  “Are you talking to me?”

  He smiled. “Listen, I know how it must seem to you, but I thought it all over that night. We both crossed a line, and it’s better if we pretend nothing happened.”

  “Better for whom?”

  “Both of us.” He hesitated and then added, “Probably more so for me. I’m thinking of getting engaged, by the way.”

  “I thought you didn’t have a serious girlfriend.”

  “I didn’t think it was as serious as she did—does—and after a while, I realized she was the right one for me. You’ll be all right,” he added. He flashed a smile and walked away.

  I’ll be all right? What, was he comparing what happened between us to a common cold or something?

  I stood there watching him and wondered why he had to be my first experience. Why couldn’t I have been with some intelligent, good-looking college boy, at least, the sort of boy the bitches suspected I might have been seeing? Even if that had ended disastrously, I wouldn’t feel as much like a victim as I did right now.

  When I glanced at myself in the glass of a trophy cabinet, I cringed at the expression on my face.

  “Stop feeling sorry for yourself, damn it,” I told my image.

  As Suzie Bubble Brain loved to say, “Cry me a river. Build a bridge and get over it.”

  I started to walk on but stopped with surprise when I saw Allison standing in the girls’ room doorway, which was just across the hall from Alan Taylor’s classroom.

  “Hey,” I said. “Why are you just standing there like that?”

  “I was watching you talk to Mr. Taylor.”

  “So?”

  She shot away and walked quickly toward her classroom.

  “Allison?”

  I hurried to catch up with her when she paused. When she turned back to me, I saw she had tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I heard what he said to you.”

  A chill ran through me. “What did you hear him say?”

  “He said he was getting engaged,” she replied, and turned to walk away a little faster, flicking the tears off her cheeks as she did so.

  He thought he was getting engaged? Why was that so devastating to her? What was I missing here?

  I walked slowly to the library, thinking about her and Alan Taylor, and when I entered the library and set my books on a desk, it hit me. I didn’t realize I was laughing out loud until Mr. Monk called out to me sharply. The other students all looked up, surprised.

  “Sorry,” I said, and sank into my seat, wondering just how far along and how deep Allison’s fantasy went.

  That little discussion we
had about love in my room the other night now made more sense. This was why the love of her life wouldn’t attend her girlfriend’s birthday party. If Julie knew what sort of fantasies her precious, perfect daughter had, she surely would have heart failure. Maybe she’d even agree to send Allison to see Dr. Burns.

  Again I laughed, but this time to myself.

  I turned on the computer and took out my notebook. I was still doing research on the transplanted human brain cells and some of the statistical results that were being posted. How ironic, I thought, that scientists not only in England but here and in most industrialized and technologically sophisticated countries were doing research in an attempt to improve and increase intelligence in animals instead of all these human airheads. One of these days, I might get a call and be asked to donate some of my own brain cells.

  That, too, brought a smile.

  But something was nagging at me about Allison and her fantasy. She was so overly dramatic. I knew girls her age often were, but there was something different about her, something more. I paused and recalled the exact conversation we had, and then I felt my eyes widen.

  How did that conversation go?

  “It also helps if the person you fall in love with falls in love with you,” I had told her.

  “And wants to be with you a lot?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And likes to touch you?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And smiles and looks bright every time he sees you.”

  Likes to touch you? She did say that. How much of this was fantasy? I wondered.

  I was at a disadvantage. Unlike most girls who went through puberty, I never had a crush on a teacher. I never idolized a rock star or a movie star. I never swooned over anyone. What were you supposed to feel and think? How far was this to go before it became ridiculous, even dangerous? I’d seen other girls break out crying for no apparent reason and then discovered it was because some boy or some teacher looked at them the wrong way or didn’t return a smile as warmly. I never paid much attention to it, but this was different. At least, it felt different. Maybe, just maybe, I wanted it to be different.

  I watched the clock and left the library about a minute before the bell to end the period would ring. I waited just outside the door of Allison’s classroom. She came out talking with some of her girlfriends, but she still looked despondent. When she saw me, she stopped and said something to the other girls. Normally, I rarely spoke a single word to her during the school day after we had arrived, and sometimes I said nothing to her all the way home.

  “Are you waiting for me?” she asked.

  “Yes. I’ll walk with you to your next class. Hang back, so the ones with big ears aren’t so close to us.”

  “What? Why are you waiting? What do you want to talk about that’s so important?”

  “When you were in my bedroom and we were talking about love, you meant Mr. Taylor, right?”

  She kept walking until I grabbed her arm.

  “You meant Mr. Taylor, right?”

  She looked around to be sure no one was close enough to overhear us. “Yes,” she said. “Are you going to tell my mother?”

  “What for? Besides, she wouldn’t believe anything I said now, anyway. Stop worrying like a child, Allison. You’re having grown-up thoughts. You’re maturing, developing. You’d better act grown-up now and catch up with your body. Girls who don’t are usually the ones who get themselves into trouble.”

  She looked at me, impressed, and nodded.

  “I’m really the only one who’s close to you who understands these things. You know that, right?” I asked.

  “I guess,” she said.

  “Don’t guess. Know it. I gave you the right things to read and always will.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re right to be worried about your mother hearing about this. She’d have a nervous breakdown, and it would be your fault. When you were in my room, you said he likes to touch you. Were you making that up?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Allison. I’ll find out,” I said, grabbing her arm at the elbow and stopping her. She couldn’t look me directly in the face. “You made all of it up, didn’t you? You just told me those things to seem older, more sophisticated, right?”

  “I am more sophisticated,” she said with defiance. “He thinks so, too.”

  “Who does?”

  She turned and looked down the hallway. Alan Taylor was standing in his classroom doorway as usual. She didn’t say his name. She simply nodded in his direction for me and kept walking.

  I looked at him, too. He seemed worried.

  I caught up to her again and grabbed her arm, a little harder and tighter than before. She cried out. I pulled her farther away.

  “You hurt me, Mayfair.”

  “That’s nothing. Stop behaving like a child, now.” I looked at Alan Taylor again. “Have you been telling me about Mr. Taylor? Was he the one you said loved you and touched you? Tell me, Allison,” I said, with as determined and angry a face as I could manage.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Yes.” I glanced at him again. He was still standing there watching us. “What are you saying? Have you ever been alone with him?”

  She looked down.

  “Just tell me. It’s very, very important, Allison. Have you been alone with him?”

  “Yes,” she said, pulling her arm away.

  “When?”

  She kept walking.

  “When, Allison?”

  She paused and turned back. “I’ll tell you later, maybe. Or I’ll show it to you.”

  “Show it? What’s that mean? How can you show it?”

  “I wrote it all down,” she said, and kept walking.

  She was walking toward Alan Taylor. He was watching us closely. I stopped her again. “You wrote it all down?” I said under my breath. “Wrote what?” I couldn’t raise my voice. We were too close to him now, and he was obviously very interested in whatever we were saying to each other.

  “Everything,” she replied.

  “Everything?”

  She walked away quickly.

  Alan stepped aside to let her enter the classroom but kept his eyes on me. Maybe he heard what she had said.

  I felt like a dozen firecrackers were going off inside me.

  15

  I couldn’t concentrate on much else for the remainder of the school day. Of course, I couldn’t talk to Allison again about it while Julie was driving us home. I’d had no other opportunities to pull her aside in school, so I had to hide my interest and as usual pretend to be in some deep thought about something too far above Julie to mention.

  “Where did you write those things?” I asked Allison after we arrived home and went upstairs. I couldn’t help lunging at her as soon as I had the opportunity.

  “What things?” she asked, coyly now. Did she think she had something over me because she had something I wanted to know very much? Or did she realize the implications of what she had said and regretted it?

  “You know what I’m talking about, Allison. I’m talking about Mr. Taylor. Don’t try to be your mother and act like you don’t know what’s going on when you do.”

  “My mother doesn’t do that.”

  “Okay, she doesn’t do that. Where did you write the things about Mr. Taylor?”

  “I wrote them in my diary, but I can’t show it to you.”

  “Why not?”

  “No one is allowed to read my diary. Not even my mother. I’m sorry I said anything about it. Leave me alone,” she replied, and went into her room. Before I could respond, she slammed her door closed.

  I should have thought she’d write something like that in her diary. Now she was embarrassed. I had never kept a diary. I did keep a journal when I was her mental age and for a while after, but it was filled with scientific observations of my experiences with insects and animals and very little about my feelings about them or about people.

  When my
father first married Julie, I started a journal about her. I was like an attorney building a court case. I kept track of every unpleasant thing she said or did. When I realized that nothing I wrote would please or perhaps even interest my father, I tore the pages out and burned them.

  Somewhere I read that girls keep diaries because they can express their innermost thoughts without having to worry about anyone’s reaction. Some analysts believe it’s a form of therapy, a cheap form. Maybe I should have kept a diary about myself like Allison’s diary. It’s cathartic. It gives you relief. You get all the inner pain and tension out.

  And I surely had a lot to get out. And I certainly didn’t do it with Dr. Burns.

  I had seen Allison writing in her diary only once and was so uninterested I barely paid any attention, but at least I had a good recollection of what it looked like. It was a leather-bound ruby-red book with a gold clasp. I imagined she kept it in her desk drawer, and I was sure she was writing in it right now, crying her river but building no bridge to get over it. Like most of the overly dramatic teenage girls around me, she wallowed in her own sadness even without an audience. At least she could feel sorry for herself if no one else would.

  However, the depth of Allison’s depression surprised me as much as it did Julie and my father. She was so unhappy at dinner that she barely ate a thing, and no matter how her mother prodded her with questions, Allison would not reveal the cause of her unhappiness. Unfortunately, Allison glanced at me during the questioning, and her mother became even more suspicious.

  After dinner, when Allison had left for her room, Julie pulled me aside. “Did you say anything nasty or unpleasant to her that would make her so unhappy?”

  “What would I say? What are you going to find wrong with me now?”

  “Do you blame your father’s disappointment in you on me? Is that what this is about? Because if it is, you have no right to take it out on poor Allison.”

  My father stood off to the side, looking meek but waiting to see what I would say. Years ago, he would have told her the idea was ridiculous and not to bother me with such a question.

  “No,” I said, glancing at my father. “I blame his disappointment in me on him.”

  My answer took them both by surprise. Julie’s eyes nearly exploded, and he looked like he was in physical pain.