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Thatcherby
How did it work?
Nina somehow met him. I
don’t remember. At a concert or something and he started writing to her and
then she showed me one of his letters – I think that’s how it went – and
he was in college and he was poetic and angry and his writing was so small and
snarly that I thought he was like a Kerouac – some kind of arty guy – so I
started writing to him, too, and he to me.
It was in the spring.
It was in the spring of 1968. We
were all sixteen. I had been away
from home enough to know I could go away. Working
in the McCarthy campaign. Short-haired
and ruthless. I hadn’t had sex
yet but I had begun to feel the power and pull of sex.
To recognize its place in life which seemed, because of the spring and
because we were all sixteen, to be at the very center.
I had started getting stoned.
I had this beautiful dress. It
was from Lord & Taylor’s though it might have been from Garfinkle’s or
Hecht’s. It was short – all of
our dresses were short then, very short. Or
if they weren’t, if they were our school uniform skirts which we weren’t
allowed to hem halfway up our thighs, then we would roll them up at the waist.
You had to show the mid-part of the thigh, where it goes in before it
goes out again, gets wider, moving toward the hips.
That curve. That had to
show. It was sad with fat girls, fat girls with fat legs.
Cute with skinny girls like Lil who had giraffe legs with knobby knees.
Adorable that look, like Twiggy. I
wanted that but I was stuck with what I was stuck with.
We all were, but we didn’t know that yet.
We seemed to think that if we went far enough away from our safe homes;
if we smoked enough pot, lit candles, wore Indian dresses and odd shoes we could
escape our destinies. Could become
some other. Maybe that was so.
The dress was pale ivory with tiny little pink flowers on it. Two layers. The
underneath layer was creamy, some sort of slip-like material, not the nylon
slippery kind, something more substantial and more forties.
Then over it a gauzy layer and a scoopy neck with ivory colored lace
around it, and long sleeves all gauzy and full with long cuffs.
That was the sort of thing we wore back then – the full sleeves with
the long, tight cuffs. The best
part was that the cuffs were buttoned with a row of pearls.
Round pearls, not just pearl buttons.
Pearls that you might wear in a necklace.
And there were pearls to do it up in back and it was short and light and
floaty and in it I felt floaty. A
new look for me. I hadn’t ever
been floaty, except in water.
I thought of myself as solid. No,
that’s not quite right. I thought
the world thought of me as solid. Stolid.
Brown hair, brown eyes and long, sad Jewish face.
Thick bodied. Tall and
sturdy. I thought that’s how the world viewed me.
But in my heart inside I was a fairy.
I was light and magical. I
was as floaty as this floaty dress. The
grass helped. And the dress itself, and that spring I’d been slowly
starving, not on purpose really, not on a diet which would have been too
embarrassing and fat, but slowly slowly starving.
Unable to eat. A result, I
suppose, of drug use and excitement, unquenchable lust, desire, and that sort of
sparkly sparked excitement you have when you are all sixteen.
So that was the dress.
I would put it on in my room and then walk barefoot into my mother’s
room and look at myself in her wide mirror.
My short shorn hair. My
beautiful floaty dress. My two new
breasts light and indistinct under the floaty fabric.
I loved the line of my neck. The
place where my thighs went in again above the knees.
I knew that soon I would be thin and different: stoned and wonderful and
odd and arty.
I
went to a party one night in June at some house in Georgetown where a rich boy
lived. There was a bunch of us in
someone’s car. There was always a
bunch of us. We were always in
someone’s car going someplace. The
house was one of those stern looking Georgetown houses that look completely
different on the inside than outside. That
have the dark serious bricks and the white wood trim and are tall and look
Republican and rich or like something from one of those restored places you
visit with your parents on your spring vacation: Mt. Vernon, Campobello,
Williamsburg. But inside the house
might turn out to be Democratic, rich and careless, left of the Kennedy years,
full of odd knobby art and rich teenagers with messy hair and tons of drugs and
many rings and bracelets.
It was June and warm in Washington.
The air had that quality it gets in summertime – as thick as cream and
smooth and soft against the skin and wonderfully buoyant.
You felt as if you could lean into it.
It would be so cushiony. You
would never fall.
I was barefoot. I had on the
dress. We had been at one party and
then another party and now we were here. It
was simple. Across the street was
Dumbarton Oaks, its dark tall iron fence like something from a fairy tale or
myth. The silent graveyard.
The tall shadows and the distant hills, the gardens.
You could smell the flowers all the way from here. We’d
been in the house but it was fancy and not Democratic after all, and I had a
feeling of imminent disaster, as if the whole formal living room were one tall
vase perched precariously on a shiny wooden table.
Might tip and smash. The
celery-green chairs, the pale couches, the antique banisters.
The drapes. This was
Republican. The house was full of
rich prep school teenagers. Boys
from St. Albans with their perfect Scott Fitzgerald features and their laughing
girls. Their accents.
Where did they get those accents? They
weren’t from England, were they? How
come they talked like that? Some of
them still wore their blazers with their ties off and their white shirts open at
the collar. They were all so
handsome, even the ugly ones were handsome with that sheen of the rich. They looked like princes with their perfect profiles and
rippling hair. I knew about boys
like that. I’d seen them on the
bus. I’d been at dances with
them; but the boys I knew all went to public school.
I went to Madeira. A rich
girls school in Virginia, a school for girls who dated boys like this, but I
wasn’t like that. I was from some
territory in between. Mismatched
imperfect. Not of the horsy preppy
rich girl set, but no longer quite part of the startling rabble of Wilson or
Western High. It was confusing.
The night was confusing. We
were all a little stoned. It
wasn’t really fun, but passed for fun: being out at night, good grass, a fancy
house with open liquor bottles, handsome boys, the pretty girls all coming from
some other party in the soft June night.
We didn’t belong there, though, the ones that I was with.
“Let’s go,” Kenny muttered softly.
“I don’t know any of these guys.”
He was the one with the car. The
rest of us came along with him out into the small dark yard in front. The barren sidewalk looked like white cardboard in the
streetlight’s glow.
We were standing in the damp grass.
I was still barefoot. I
didn’t care. Sooner or later
someone would tell me what was supposed to happen next.
To get into the car. To go
across the road and sneak into the gardens.
To go walk through the cemetery reading the names by the light of
cigarette lighters and the pale glow of the moon.
To go home. Not that.
To drive out into the countryside that lay around the city of Washington
like a scene from another time. The
farmlands. The cliffs over the Potomac River. The road out to Great Falls.
All of it elemental and mysterious in the night.
Somebody had their hands in their pockets.
“What do you want to do now?”
Then a new bunch came across the grass toward us.
More of the handsome princes. One
of them, miraculously, came directly to me.
Bowed before me. He was in a tux, the tie off, collar loosened, hair
disheveled and adorable and light.
“You’re beautiful,” he said.
He was drunk.
He was beautiful. He was the
most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life.
He knew nothing about me.
He didn’t know that I was just an imposter, among these rich kids.
I was just a foreigner learning the language, trying to hide my accent,
putting my big lost hands behind my back to hide them.
He was drunk. He was
perfect.
He straightened then, and handed me a rose.
Full blown and open, trembling in the trembling light of the June night.
Fragrant. Perfect and
enormous as the night itself.
I took it wonderingly, the thick hard stem. I
told him, “Thank you,” though I didn't want to speak.
Anything could bruise this moment.
Anything could damage this perfection, would wake me from this dream.
He looked seriously and drunkenly, beautifully into my face.
“I’m in love with you,” he told me.
That was all I wanted.
All.
I stared back at him. Around
us the dark figures on the lawn receded. There
was no one there.
We were in this other place.
He kissed me.
And oh his mouth was wonderful and sweet.
Then one of his friends grabbed him.
“Phil!” he shouted. “Phil!”
And Phil – whoever
he was, my prince my hero everything – was yanked away from me, torn off and
dragged away into the lit rooms of the house.
They were laughing wildly the bunch of them and they had their arms
around each other. They had come from some big famous party in some downtown
Washington hotel and they were drunk and handsome and oblivious and crowding
through the doorway, bursting in among their other friends, and I just stood
there in the dark grass with my rose.
When I woke the next morning I was in my bedroom with the blue patterned
wallpaper. The rose in my
toothbrush glass listed to one side but it didn’t look damaged by all the
terror and excitement later when the glass doors broke, when the police came,
when we all fled down the alleyway and heard the shouts and the dogs barking and
the cars squealing off. We got
away.
Kenny had brought me home late, too late.
My mother met me at the doorway. “Where
are your shoes?” she asked me, as if that were what mattered – my shoes.
“I left them somewhere,” I said, trying to sound the way I would
sound if I weren’t so stoned and so tired.
“I’m tired,” I told her. “I
have to go to bed.”
“I’ll bet you’re tired,” she said, looking at me.
I didn’t know what she meant by that.
I didn't care.
I took the rose upstairs with me. It
was still completely perfect.
I took off my dress in the darkness of my dark room.
It felt light as a breath in my hands as I lifted it off.
I felt different, transformed by the night.
But I was so tired. I didn't
even brush my teeth, or smoke a cigarette leaning out my window into the quiet
night. I just went to bed.
But in the morning I felt perfect. I
was naked. And the light that came
in was exquisite. The way the
slight breeze moved my curtains was magical.
I stretched in the bed like a woman.
I twisted my neck so I could put my own cheek against my own smooth
shoulder and I kissed my arm and felt how smooth my skin was how warm my lips
how young I was and I knew I would remember this moment forever.
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