A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (8 page)

“Ha ha ha!” He laughed sordidly, kissing me again. “You want to see what I look like naked?”

“I already saw my brother naked,” I said, a nervous edge beginning to strain my voice.

“That’s not the same. Look.”

His thing was pale and curved upward like an index finger crooked in a beckoning gesture. He grabbed my wrist and brought my hand toward it. The back of my hand grazed its mushroomlike head as I tugged to free myself. I screamed and kicked at his shins, snatching my shirt and skirt with my free hand. He tried to seize my clothes but my grasp was firm and I threw myself out of the tree house rather than let him have them. I managed to grip a few rungs of the ladder on my way down, which broke my fall. The earth below the tree was soft but my knees and palms were nevertheless badly scraped and bruised. I tore through the brambles and thickets in my bare skin, still gripping my clothes, crying so hard I could barely see.

It took me awhile to find the red handkerchief, but the boy did not follow. I dressed quickly on my side of the fence and ran all the way to Candida, who was sitting in the kitchen snapping green beans. Candida took one look at me and blanched. Her olive-colored skin took on a greenish hue, which terrified me more and made me howl. She could do nothing to quiet me.

“Didi, Didi, Didi!” I cried.

“
Bébé, mon bébé
, what es happened to jou? What happened to jou?” She sat me on the table. Her sharp nose and small brown eyes were inches from my face.

“I fell out of a tree,” I sobbed. Candida got the Band-Aids and mercurochrome out of the pantry closet.

“Ay, ay, ay, Channa, why ara jou climbing trees by jourself?” She washed my knees and arms with a clean, warm and soapy rag. “Jou es crazy.”

Whenever I cried, Candida’s eyes filled with tears as well. And when she cried because she missed her mother and the dusty farm in Portugal, I cried as though it were my mother and my farm. At that moment I couldn’t take her tears and cried all the harder, and Candida cried harder too, and we hugged each other, rocking from side to side. I wept because I was not telling her the truth and never could. Candida was scared to death of men, she often told me that all men wanted only one thing from a nice girl, and if she gave it to them, that made her a bad girl and then they wouldn’t like her anymore.

“
God
.” It was nasty Mary-Ellen standing in the doorway. “What do we have
here
? Can I join the party?”

Candida could not have understood what Mary-Ellen said, but the look of utter mockery on her face said it all.

“
Sors d’ici tout da suita!
” Candida yelled. “Get out ofa here des minute!” Candida did not take mockery from anyone but me. None of the Smith girls had ever heard Candida raise her voice. She had a real fishwife’s voice when she wanted, and Mary-Ellen fled, horrified.

“My poor littel girl,” she said to me. “Whatta dida we do to get sucha bad girls des summer?”

Everyone was excessively nice to me that evening. My father tucked me into bed with Christmas Bear and told me that nothing was broken and I would be all right. I could have told my father what happened because my father always talked about Sex as a natural and good thing. But my father was a maniac when it came to protecting Billy and me, and I knew that he would have gone straight to the boy’s house and beaten him up and probably his father as well. Once when I was two, a five-year-old boy who was visiting with his parents kicked me in the face when the grown-ups left us alone in the playroom. My father found me lying on the floor, staring up unblinkingly while my assailant’s foot continued to bash into my bloody head. My father kicked the boy into a wall right in front of his protesting parents.

My father, I knew, would blame Stephane and not me because Stephane was much older and stronger. For some strange reason I did not want Stephane to get into trouble because of me. I did not want the thing to become a big scandal that the Smith girls would be privy to, or for my father to make it so final that I could never, ever see the boy or his tree house again. So I cried instead as my father tucked me in, and kept my mouth shut.

“He’s bad, Billy,” I told my brother the next day. “He’s really bad.”

“He’s not that bad,” Billy said, looking away impatiently.

“I’m not playing in the woods anymore,” I said with finality.

“I am,” Billy said, heading off on the great green lawn with a new handkerchief in his back pocket.

“BILLY, DON’T!” I yelled after him. “PLEASE DON’T!” But he would not stop to listen to me.

I waited awhile, feeling both ashamed and betrayed. The Smith girls were haw haw hawing on the lawn, as usual. After a few minutes I followed Billy into the woods. I wandered around aimlessly, talking to the Elves, and suddenly found myself in front of the hole in the fence.

I followed the sound of their boyish voices, apprehension filling my heart. Before I could see the tree house I heard them laughing. They did not notice me and I watched from behind a thicket as Stephane flung stones at the squirrels in the next tree. Then he handed the slingshot to Billy and Billy paused for a moment, his face wrinkled into a thoughtful frown. I waited, hoping he would put the slingshot down. He raised it, pulled back the thongs, closed one eye, and fired.

“Billy!” I shouted, scrambling out of the underbrush.

He dropped the slingshot on the floor of the tree house and lowered his eyes guiltily.

Stephane picked up the slingshot, put in a new stone, and aimed it at me.

“Girls aren’t allowed in here!” he said. “Go away.”

I should have taken this as a lesson for my teenage years but of course did not. I thought Stephane was crazy, that boys never behaved this way. It was a sad lesson when years later I realized that he had not been the exception but a small taste of things to come.

“You promised me,” I said to Stephane, hissing at him.

“Fuck off,” he said. Billy sat motionless, looking down at his feet.

In English, I asked my brother to please come back with me. Stephane, understanding the gist of it, said that my brother was a coward and a fag if he listened to me.

My brother stayed where he was, gazing at his feet.

I turned away and went back to the fence, feeling a rage and a hatred against the world that I had not known possible. I could not even cry I was so enraged. I went to find solace with Candida in the kitchen, but Candida, having no idea, only made me feel worse with her gentle words of affection.

When Billy came in an hour or so later, I stared at him from the table where I sat while he poured himself a glass of milk from the fridge. He gingerly approached the table, trying to decide whether or not to sit down. He smiled at me in a shy, guilty blush and fiddled with the back of the chair.

“You are not my brother,” I said in English so that Candida would not understand, slowly, with more conviction and more vehemence than I had ever said anything in my life. “You are not my brother, you’re a Frog and you will never be my brother. You’re adopted and you’re not their son. From now on I’m going to pretend you don’t exist.”

Billy continued to stare at his feet, his face drained of color. We heard a gasp then, and both turned to find Mary-Ellen standing in the doorway. Billy’s face went from white to red in a second; very slowly, back erect, he walked past Mary-Ellen and out the door.

“Whatta you say, Channa?” Candida said, her dark eyes shifting from Mary-Ellen to me and back again. “Whatta you say to him?”

“I’m going to tell on you,” Mary-Ellen said slowly, in a voice very much like the one I had just used on my brother. “You’re not supposed to say things like that, I know, ‘cause my parents told me all about it.”

“I don’t care,” I said, mustering up the last drop of courage I had left. “I hate you too. You’re fat and mean.”

I walked past her, feeling her eyes digging into my back, and went to look for Billy.

I went up to his room, which was next to mine, at the end of one of the halls on the second floor. The door was closed. I knocked lightly on the door, afraid to disturb the fathers.

“Billy,” I whispered. “Billy! Can I come in?” There was no response. They had taken the keys away from our doors because they were afraid we’d lock ourselves in, so I turned the knob and walked into his darkened room. He’d closed the shutters and slats of sunlight lay on top of him on the bed. He was lying facedown in the pillow, sobbing without a sound. I could see his shoulders shaking.

I sat down at his side and put a flat hand on his shoulder. He did not shrug me off as he usually did when I touched him.

“Billy,” I said. “Billy, I didn’t mean it, I swear it. You
are
my brother. You’re the only brother I have and I’m so glad you’re here, Billy, because you’re good and nice and those girls are terrible.”

He continued to sob into the pillow without a sound.

“That boy did something very bad to me yesterday while you were at the doctor’s,” I said. “He made me take my clothes off and then he took out his thing that didn’t look like yours at all. At all.”

His shoulders stopped shaking beneath my hand. He said something into the pillow I could not understand.

“What?” I said, thrilled that he had deigned to say anything to me.

“What did it look like?” he said sniffling, turning his head to the side, away from me.

“Like a finger,” I said.

“Like a finger?”

“Yes. I was so scared, Billy, I jumped out of the tree house and ran home. That’s how come I was mad. I wanted you to stick up for me like you do with those stupid girls.”

“It’s not fair,” he said and let out a long and terrible sigh. “It’s not fair that you can say things like that.”

“I know,” I said, and began to cry.

“You’re just scared you’re going to get into trouble with Daddy,” Billy said.

“I’ll go tell him right now, before Mary-Ellen does. I’ll go tell him what I said so he can punish me.”

“No, don’t,” Billy said. “She won’t probably say anything anyway. Just go away, all right? Just leave me alone.”

I went to my room and curled up with Christmas Bear. Sobs ripped from my chest into his furry body and I thought I was going to choke.

Everything seemed almost normalized by dinnertime. I had knocked on Billy’s door and asked him to come downstairs with me to eat. The five of us children and our two nannies were sitting at the round table in the kitchen eating in silence when our fathers came in looking like two horrific thunder-clouds.

“Channe,” my father said evenly, “I heard something really terrible today.”

Billy looked up from his plate, stopped chewing although his mouth was still full, and stared at me with horror in his big blue eyes. Candida got up and went to the stove. She always backed off when my father made such an entrance.

I glanced at Mary-Ellen. She was very erect, very pleased with herself as she daintily sliced a piece of meat with a bent wrist.

“Did Channe say something terrible to you today, Billy?” my father asked. “I’m not asking you what she said. But did she say something she’s not supposed to say?”

Billy looked at me with those eyes and my own filled with tears, out of terror for myself, shame toward him, and hatred for Mary-Ellen. Billy looked quickly at Mary-Ellen, quickly at me, and then at the fathers standing by the doorway. He swallowed his unchewed food with a loud gulp and then said, “No,” as though he were thinking hard to remember. He made a completely flat, innocent face, a face he’d probably learned from watching Gillis charm the parents.