Bittersweet Dreams Read online

  My father brightened in a way I hadn’t seen since I was very young. He didn’t say it in front of Julie, but when he saw me later, he told me that for a moment he had thought my mother had returned when I had stepped into the house after my makeover.

  “You have all her wonderful qualities, Mayfair. Julie’s done a good job of bringing them out.”

  What he said made me feel good but surprisingly brought tears to my eyes. Was this physical change unchaining emotions I hadn’t seen or felt for years?

  I was very nervous about going to school now. Never, no matter what I did or how I was treated, was I uneasy about walking into the building. I could be indifferent to anyone and anything. But when I returned to school that Monday, I did feel quite different. Not only was my hair cut and styled, but I was dressed like a girl my age dressed, and the makeup I wore, as Julie had said, highlighted the most attractive features of my face. Those girls in my class who were jealous of my good looks to start with were absolutely beside themselves with envy now. That was easy to see and also quite pleasing. Before this, there wasn’t a girl who felt threatened by me. In their opinion, my looks weren’t enough to overcome the way I was viewed by boys and by other girls. Now things might be different.

  I couldn’t help being nervous and doubting the wisdom of what I had done. To calm myself, I told myself that it was just another sociological experiment, and I tried to analyze it that way, but as soon as I began to get second looks from boys in the corridors and classroom, the scientific, analytical approach died, and I was suddenly and finally a teenage girl whose heart began to pitter-patter with every smile tossed in her direction.

  Ironically, however, it wasn’t one of the high-school boys who made me feel sexy and attractive; it was one of the younger teachers, Allison’s English teacher, Mr. Taylor, or Alan, as he would want me to call him later on.

  He was standing in his classroom doorway when I entered the building and started for my homeroom. He knew who I was. Faculty members gossiped about their students, and I was confident that I was frequently the topic of their conversations. Whenever he had looked at me before, there was little or no excitement in his face. Like most of the teachers, he wasn’t interested in having much of a conversation with me. Few wanted to know what I was researching or reading, and if any did ask, he or she would nod and smile, clearly revealing that I was into areas beyond them, reading books they didn’t even read in college, but that wasn’t true today for Mr. Taylor.

  At six feet two inches tall, with thick, rich light brown hair and cerulean blue eyes, Alan Taylor was the most attractive male teacher in the school. He was only twenty-five and still a bachelor. All the unmarried female teachers were vying for his attention, but as far as I knew, none had won his interest. He had one of those movie-star perfect faces that hovered between handsome and pretty because of his high cheekbones and perfectly shaped nose and mouth. His good looks were complemented by his tennis-pro figure and confident posture. Just like I knew I was brilliant, he knew he was physically striking. The high-school girls who swooned over him all wondered why he was “just a teacher” and not at least on television.

  “Hey there,” he called to me as I started past his room.

  I paused, a little surprised. “Yes?”

  “What did you do with your hair?”

  “I donated it,” I said.

  “What?”

  “They use it to make wigs for women who suffer baldness during chemotherapy.”

  He stared a moment and then laughed.

  I didn’t, but that didn’t discourage him. He stepped toward me, looking me over even more closely. I felt more self-conscious and had the surprising urge to bring my arms up and around my breasts as if I were topless, but I resisted. His smile now made my heart do flip-flops. I fought to hold it back, but I could feel the heat go up my neck and into my face. He took so long to speak, seeming to enjoy just looking at me, that I had to say, “What?”

  He laughed again. “I don’t mean the hair you had cut off. I mean you’ve changed your appearance.”

  “There’s a little chameleon in all of us,” I said. “You know, blend with your surroundings to survive?”

  He widened his smile. I knew he was struggling to think of a response. I didn’t wait. I saw no reason to linger, so I walked on to homeroom.

  But I knew he was watching me all the way, and it was a different feeling knowing a man was looking at me not as a phenomenon but as a woman. I was more conscious of my body, the way I moved, even how I turned toward the classroom.

  I looked back and saw that he was still looking my way and smiling. There were still feelings traveling through my body that I had longed for. I tried to contain them, but they were like wild horses that had seen an opening. My breath quickened. He nodded at me, holding his smile as if he knew I would imprint it on my memory and recall it whenever I wanted.

  The moment I entered my first class, I noted the way the others were looking at me and chattering. Gossip about me already had gone through the hallways and into every homeroom. I didn’t think anyone looked at me all morning without taking a second look. My history teacher, Mr. Leshman, actually called on me twice and didn’t seem to mind when I went on to elaborate on the answer and get into another topic. It actually interested him, and he and I were almost alone in the room for the remainder of the period.

  When lunch started and I went to the cafeteria, I quickly realized that I wasn’t going to be sitting alone. Carlton James, one of the better-looking senior boys, broke away from his friends and started toward me the moment I sat at a table. From the way the others were smiling after him, I imagined some sort of a bet had been made or some sort of a challenge, and Carlton had accepted it.

  “Are you a new student?” he asked.

  When I had fantasized using the pictures in the sex manual, I had seen myself with him in some of the illustrations, but I would never admit to myself that I had a crush on him or anything that juvenile. And I certainly had never done anything to give him reason to think so.

  “Why? Are you the official greeter?”

  “I can be,” he said, and slipped into the chair across from me.

  Despite how much I wanted to like him, his youthful male arrogance put me off. I felt like tossing my container of juice at his wry smile. I simply didn’t like being in the company of someone who had more self-confidence than I did. Perhaps that was a compromise I would have to make if I were to get into any relationship successfully. He nodded at his friends, who were still looking our way and grinning like idiots.

  “What, did you draw the short straw?” I asked.

  “Huh? What short straw?”

  “You never heard that expression?”

  He shook his head. His smile weakened.

  “It was one of my grandmother’s expressions.” I smiled, thinking about her.

  “What’s it mean?” he asked, regaining his composure, obviously hoping it meant something that would please him. He couldn’t imagine my saying anything otherwise, especially with the warm smile on my face.

  “When a group of people decide that one of them has to do something unpleasant, they draw straws, and the one who gets the shortest straw does it.”

  “Oh, well, I’m not doing anything unpleasant,” he said, widening his smile again. “Why would you think coming over here to talk to you was something unpleasant anyway?”

  “I was born with a suspicious nature. So you’re here. What do you want to talk about?” I asked.

  “Just . . .”

  “What?”

  His smile began to fade. “Just saying hello. You know.”

  “Hello,” I said. “Now what?”

  He lost his smile completely. “What are you, gay?”

  “Why do you ask that?” I was really curious, especially since I had done so much to make myself attractive to boys, or at least I thought I had.

  “Because, well . . . you’re, like, not interested,” he said, obviously feeling good ab
out coming up with the word and the idea. “Am I right?”

  “You haven’t done or said anything interesting yet,” I told him. “Maybe you’re just relying on your good looks. That will take you just so far in this world.”

  “Huh?”

  “No one’s ever told you that?”

  He smirked, looked back at his friends, and then leaned toward me. “You’re a big brain, right?”

  “The size of your brain isn’t what makes you intelligent.” I looked around the cafeteria. “There are some very big heads in here on very stupid people.”

  He laughed. “Okay, how do I get you to help me with my intermediate algebra?”

  “Is that why you came over here?” I asked, feeling disappointed.

  “No, but I thought it might be a good start.”

  I smiled. That was clever, I thought, more clever than I would have thought him capable of being. “No, that doesn’t work. You have to ask something you really care about, talk about something you want to talk about, not something that might just get you by.”

  “You sound like a dating instructor. You know, like one of those websites that’s supposed to help you find someone compatible.”

  “You use them?”

  “Absolutely not,” he said, a little insulted. He straightened up. “Do I look like someone who needs to use them?”

  “Looks deceive,” I said. He stared at me. “Okay, you don’t.”

  He smiled again. Then he raked the room with his eyes to be sure he was the center of attention before turning back to me. “Okay. Here’s something I really want to say. What are you doing after school today?”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe you can come home with me and give me some pointers about how to talk properly or something. I’m open to improvements,” he said. He looked back at his friends again.

  I nodded at them. “What do you win if I say yes?”

  He laughed again. Then he gave me his best sexy smile. “I won’t know until I get you over, right?”

  That made me smile. Maybe he wasn’t as dull as I had expected him to be. Yet I hesitated. I had never, ever been alone with any boy, let alone in his home. I thought about some of the conversations I had overheard in the girls’ locker room. Would I have similar experiences if I went with him? I felt like a schizophrenic person arguing with herself. The feminine part of me was urging me to say yes, but that part of me that made me feel older, more mature, and far superior was telling me to say no.

  I was tired of listening to that part of me.

  “Where do you live?”

  My not saying no immediately pleased him so much that I couldn’t help but widen my smile. He looked more like a little boy to me now, a harmless, excited little boy. I was obviously making his day, and that did make me feel good. I was a big enough prize.

  “On Camden,” he said. “Ten, fifteen minutes at the most. And I’ll take you home whenever you want,” he quickly added. “I drive a BMW 335 hardtop convertible. You probably saw it out there in the lot.”

  “BMW? What’s that stand for, Big Man’s Wheels?”

  He laughed. “I like that. You’re pretty clever. I had a feeling you might be fun to talk to. Those idiots back there thought we’d have nothing to say to each other.”

  “Because they have nothing to say to each other? Nothing meaningful?”

  “Yeah, I guess. No, I mean . . . I don’t know what I mean. I just knew you would be interesting.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Do you have to always ask questions?”

  “That’s a question.”

  He looked frustrated again. “I just knew, okay?”

  “I’m impressed. Do you even know my name?” I asked him.

  “Sure. Mayfair, like the boat that brought the Pilgrims, right?”

  “No.” I shook my head, not hiding my disappointment. “You’re right that my name is Mayfair, but you’re thinking of the Mayflower. The ship, not the boat, that brought over the English separatists from Plymouth, England, was the Mayflower. It docked in Plymouth. You must have been asleep during that history lesson.”

  “I’m asleep during most history lessons,” he said. “Sorry. Mayfair’s just as nice. You’re not named after another ship, too, are you?”

  “Mayfair comes from the annual fortnight-long May Fair held in London.”

  “No kidding,” he said without any real interest.

  “Do you know what a fortnight is?”

  “A night at a fort?”

  “No,” I said, laughing. “It’s a unit of time equal to fourteen days. It comes from Old English.”

  “You mean, like that Beowulf story we had to read in class?”

  “Yes, exactly, only they don’t have it in Old English in your textbook.”

  “Yeah, Mr. Lofter read some of it in that Old English. Dumb,” he said. “No one knew what the hell he was saying. I don’t know how anyone could talk like that.”

  “Old English was spoken in England and southeastern Scotland between the fifth and twelfth centuries. It’s also known as Anglo-Saxon. It has a Germanic heritage in its vocabulary, sentence structure, and grammar. It can sound quite interesting, almost musical, when it’s read correctly.”

  “Jeez, are you always like this?”

  “Like what?”

  “A teacher,” he said, making it sound like a curse word.

  “Are you always this reluctant to learn anything?”

  He stared at me a moment and then leaned back, turning to look at his friends, who had lost interest in us and were laughing and talking with other girls. They looked lighthearted and relaxed. Then he looked at me again, this time with regret. “I just remembered I have to do something for my father after school today. Maybe some other time, when I’m hungry for knowledge,” he said, getting up.

  Disappointment surged through me and curled under my breasts.

  He paused and leaned toward me with his hands on the table. “But it was nice studying with you,” he muttered, and walked away.

  I watched how his friends greeted him with laughter. He shook his head and spoke, describing our conversation from his perspective, and then they all looked my way and laughed again, especially the girls.

  Yahoos, I thought.

  They surrounded me. If I wasn’t careful, I might catch the disease of ignorance. That’s what I told myself, but deep inside, I did feel a sense of disappointment and defeat.

  Before the bell rang to end the lunch hour, I left for the library. I wasn’t even going to bother to go to math class. My teacher, Mrs. Samuels, would simply check with the librarian later to see if I had gone there. I wanted to go on the computer and see what I could find on the mating habits of primates. I had told my science teacher that I was going to do a paper on the subject, and he’d looked very interested.

  I was almost at the library when Mr. Taylor appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. It was almost as if he were lying in wait for me.

  “Hey,” he said. “How’s your day going?”

  “Like a blur,” I said, and he laughed.

  “Where are you headed?”

  “The library. I’m doing a research paper.”

  “Come into my room for a while. I’ve got a free period,” he said, shifting his shoulder. “C’mon. I’m not going to bite you.”

  “Why?”

  “A little intelligent conversation,” he said. “I’m starving for it. I spend most of my day talking to junior-high students. Don’t you know this is the front line in the big battle called education?”

  “What about the other teachers? Don’t you talk to them?”

  He shrugged and smiled wryly. “I said intelligent conversation.”

  I looked back when the bell rang. The students would be bursting out of the cafeteria like a herd of wildebeests in seconds. Half of them would knock into me. Maybe that, more than my curiosity about Mr. Taylor, made me turn in his direction. Whatever the reason, I did.

  I’d always wonder if it was
n’t something meant to be, not that I believed in fate or fixed destiny. If I did, I couldn’t be much of a scholar, because it was too easy to fall back on that rather than study and do research for an explanation, but I couldn’t help secretly hoping it was fate.

  That way, all that had happened to me, to Allison, and especially to my father wouldn’t have been my fault, not my fault at all. All the blame and guilt would fade, and I would be the object of sympathy, not anger and disappointment. But deep in my heart, I knew that to hope was to dream, and to dream was to deny what was real. Maybe that was all I had ever wanted to do. Maybe I was guilty of everything I had accused most other people of doing.

  I wasn’t profoundly gifted after all.

  I was profoundly dumb.

  7

  Mr. Taylor went behind his desk and put his feet up. I stood just inside his classroom doorway with my books cradled in my arms. I wasn’t about to fool myself. It wasn’t the prospect of having any sort of intelligent conversation that brought me into his room. I had really come in because I was far more interested in how a mature man thought of me than I was in how one of the boys in my class thought and behaved. I already felt a difference in my own reaction. It was more exciting, because his flirting and my responding seemed like something forbidden. After all, he was a teacher, and I was a high-school junior. There were all sorts of news stories about teachers who exploited their young students, even female teachers seducing young boys.

  I did think to myself, however, that if we weren’t who we were, it would be different. Suppose it were a couple of years from now. If I were a woman six or seven years younger than he was, and he were a businessman and not a teacher, no one would think anything of it. People could say a teacher had an unfair advantage over a student. He or she had great powers of influence. Students supposedly looked up to and listened to their teachers. That was certainly true for most.

  But I had gone through almost all of my school years and never really been influenced by a teacher. I didn’t need any teacher to encourage me to study or be responsible about my schoolwork. I didn’t need any teacher to inspire me to have interests in science or math or English or history. If anything, I occasionally found myself inspiring one of them. How many times had I heard one of my teachers say, “You know, Mayfair, you have me thinking like a college student again”?