Age of Consent (12 page)

She busies herself with a spray she uses on the glass countertops. Bending down, she rubs like mad the clear surface, all the while telling herself to do something to help the woman, do something
now
. Her husband has been accused of a sexual offense; she has planted stolen eyeliner on his lawyer. The woman will be arrested and she is doing nothing about it. Not one thing.

Finally, because she can bear it no longer, she gathers up her courage and opens her mouth to shout out to the security guard. But just as she is about to speak, she realizes he is no longer there. He has vanished. She searches the store and sees him finally off in a corner, checking his watch. She looks for the bald woman and finds her at last, moving through the exit doors, leaving the store. Nothing has happened. The guard is now waiting for his lunch break. The woman is on her way out with the bag.

June stares at the woman, at her insouciance, at her confidence. Nobody was ever going to stop her. And this woman has never been afraid of one damned thing, while June has been afraid all her life, it seems. Looking at her now, June sees the sunglasses that she'd imagined as a means of camouflage are not on the woman's nose. They are not hiding the bare eyes, the brow bone without eyebrows. She has placed them high on her forehead to adorn the skull, concealing nothing.

June had forgotten, or possibly she had never understood, that there are people in the world who are this confident, this sure of things, and who drift through life in a regal fashion, winning at everything. She sees at once the power of this woman, and the fact that if Craig aligns himself with her, chances are that he will come to no harm.

Suddenly, June rushes from her station at the makeup counter, walking, then running out of the store after the woman, who has disappeared through the glass doors.

The stabbing afternoon heat meets her abruptly as she exits the store, her throat feeling full as she shuffles across the parking lot. She catches up with the woman just as she is settling into the driver's seat of her sports car.

“Yes?” the woman says, surprised.

June leans against the car, but the metal is hot and she lurches back from the stinging burn, still trying to get her breath. “Tell me what the charges are again,” she says.

The woman sighs. “Inappropriate sexual contact with a girl under fifteen.”

The girl's age glides into June like splintering glass. She looks around to see if anyone is within hearing distance. But the parking lot is nearly empty, its white grid of divided bays like a giant fish skeleton baking in the inordinate sunshine. “I can't believe that,” she says. “Craig would never—”

The woman hesitates, then adds, “Mrs. Kirtz, this is your daughter we are talking about.”

“My daughter? My daughter is forty-five years old!”

“In the state of Maryland there is no statutory limit to child sex crimes.”

“What does that mean, statutory limit?”

“It means that alleged crimes from even years back can be tried as though they happened today. If your daughter convinces a judge that she was the victim of a sexual crime when she was under the age of consent, it will be as if that crime took place today. Well, almost. I'm giving you a very general account and…”

The lawyer is still talking but June can make no sense of what she says. Why is she speaking of her Bobbie? She has not seen Bobbie for thirty years. What would she have to do with any of this?

“We can only hope there isn't enough evidence that your daughter—”

“Bobbie hasn't lived with us since she was a teenager! She hasn't even visited. And I have no idea where she lives—”

“I think that is the point, Mrs. Kirtz,” the woman says evenly. “She
was
a teenager—”

“No.”

“If it happened at all.”

“It didn't!”

“She claims that she left home for this reason—”

“That is ridiculous!” June can't hear one more word.

The woman gets out of the car. She stands in front of June, almost a foot taller, looking at her with her large eyes. “I'm sorry. I hate being the one to tell you this. I did try to call you but the phone was never answered.”

“Craig doesn't like the phone. He worries fans will find him at home so we don't answer it. And there has been such a lot of trouble since the last crazy girl accused him—”

“I need to ask you about something. It could really help us. Your daughter says—”

“You've been talking with my daughter?”

“She gave a statement. She claims she was in a car accident in September 1978 in which Craig was driving. Do you know about this?”

“About the accident, yes. Of course I do. He lost his eye.”

“And your daughter was with him? She'd have been fifteen.”

That was impossible. How could Bobbie say such a thing? How could she expect to be believed?

“My daughter would be dead if she'd been in that car!” June says. “So that is a lie.”

She notices how the woman looks at her, how she seems suddenly to question her judgment, perhaps because she has just called her own daughter a liar.

“I think the court will agree with you that it is unlikely she was in the car, which would perhaps discredit her. If there isn't enough evidence, the judge may not even hear the case in the first place. Just to be clear. You don't remember her being involved in any sort of accident?”

“Absolutely not.”

“She wasn't in the car?”

“I know she wasn't.”

The attorney raises her eyebrows. “How do you
know
? This is important.”

“Because I was at the hospital hours after the accident. Craig was brought in and no other person was in the car or at the scene. The police were very thorough. It was—what do you call it?—a pivotal moment in my life. I'll never forget.”

The lawyer gives June her dazzling smile. “Like I said, if we can discredit her on the car crash, we can discredit her altogether. She was at home at the time of the crash?”

“Yes, she was.”

“You can testify she had no injuries? That she was home at the time?”

June nods.

“There's a date, September seventh. And you say you remember where you were on that date?”

“I do. I remember everything! It was hotter than Hades, just like today. I was driving home. Bobbie was waiting for me. She wasn't with Craig at all.”

“Normally, a wife does not have to testify, but what you are saying could help him.”

She shakes her head. It feels as though she is saving Craig. Saving him from drowning. “Then I'll testify.”

“Good,” the lawyer says. “You may just win his case for him.”

1978

I
t was the hottest day of the year, no rain for weeks, the tail end of a scorching season. These health-and-beauty trade shows used to excite June, back in the days when staying at a hotel, even a Howard Johnson's, felt special. But now shows were little more than long, solid days on her feet and a lot of extra hours. She wanted to go home, take a bath, sleep in her own bed. She had planned to start driving earlier, she didn't like leaving Bobbie at home on her own, but her car had no air-conditioning and the heat sat heavily on the whole of the East Coast, so that the dust and humidity found her even in the shade, the forecast declaring record temperatures. Due to an engine fault she was reliant on movement to keep the car's fan in operation, and she worried what would happen if she was stuck in traffic. She'd be stranded on four lanes of concrete, cooking.

By three o'clock, the heat had risen further. The radio reported schools, newly opened for the academic year, canceling their afternoon sports activities. Local TV stations chattered about the importance of hydration, symptoms of heat stroke, risks to the elderly. She'd already checked out of the hotel; she wanted to go home. But when she reached her car, its sauna interior unchanged even with the doors open, she turned on the radio and heard that there was a pileup on the parkway. She realized now she could hear ambulance sirens, the noise seeming to mix with the broiling sun.

The waiting and the heat and the sirens made her anxious, so she went back to the hotel and bought cupcakes from the little gift shop inside, fooling herself into believing she was buying them for Bobbie. Some minutes later, she discovered that the turnpike also had major problems and now there was no choice but to remain in the cramped hotel lobby—her room key long returned to the desk, her car motionless in the parking lot amid shivering rises of heat—for God knows how many hours.

The cupcakes were in a pretty box with a ribbon. She reached for them, then diverted herself by arranging the collection of magazines on the square glass table into a concertina. She managed a few more minutes, thumbing through the pages of the hotel's travel magazine, the cupcakes untouched, until at last she gave in and plucked the colorful ribbon from the smooth white box. There they were, six perfectly shaped cakes, all different flavors, all laden with creamy frosting and sparkling sugar sprinkles. It was the anxiety and boredom that caused the cupcakes to disappear as, one by one, she plunged her tongue into their whipped frosting. The calories, she knew, were astronomical, and she despaired once more that everything good in life came at so high a price.

At last, the big orange sun lowered itself in the sky and the traffic report brightened. She pressed through the springy automatic doors of the hotel, meeting at once a wall of fuzzy warmth and a cloud of insects that might have been waiting for her all these hours. She looked across the parking lot and saw she'd left her passenger-side door wide open. She trotted in her heels across the asphalt, hoping there was still charge in the battery.

The seats were no longer red hot as they had been hours earlier but warm like wet towels, even inviting. She hoped that she'd be home by midnight. If all went well, Bobbie might still be awake. She would set up a fan beside her daughter's bed, and another next to her own, curl up in the cool sheets, and get the sleep she now longed for and which would come, she knew, as soon as she closed her eyes.

But the journey was a disaster, the roads a mess, and her stomach rumbled beneath her flowery blouse from all the sugar with which she'd poisoned herself. Yes, she admitted, poisoned herself, wrecking yet another diet day, this time with the unconquerable cupcakes—six of them in total—not because she'd been that hungry but because they came in a box of six. She was ready to check herself into a fat farm, chain a leg to a vegetable patch, eat only what she could hoe. It was past time for a change, she told herself. Way past time.

She thought about men, about the way they looked with their shirts off, their chest hair, long torsos, the way they felt and smelled. It had been a long while since she'd been with a man and she couldn't see how she would attract one if she stayed at this weight, which she saw as the great drawback to her life, the reason for everything being amiss. But she had been here before, having this same little talk with herself, and in some ways she was at home with such desperation.

She pawed at her stomach, untucking her blouse, creased and in need of laundering, then hiked her skirt above her knees to make driving easier. It was too tight, the skirt, and she recalled the days when it had hung comfortably, wondering what had happened between then and now. Cupcakes, that's what had happened, and all their irresistible cousins: brownies, doughnuts, baked goods in general. She thumbed loose the skirt's button, then notched down the zipper a few inches. There was no law against undressing while driving, none that she knew of anyway, and while truckers might see a little too much leg from their high vantage points, it was unlikely they'd look at her leg, which had its own defense mechanism against voyeurism, being round as a Labrador and a shade of bluish white normally associated with recovered bodies.

She tried not to think about this, nor the condition of her Plymouth sedan, and especially not the new Dorothy Hamill haircut that she felt made her round face rounder and had done nothing whatsoever to lengthen her neck, despite promises by the stylist at the salon. The haircut mistake happened, she knew, because it took no effort to change hair, while bodies took longer, possibly forever. If she'd been in any doubt of this, some unkind bastard at her weekly weigh-in had reminded her of the fact a few weeks earlier by saying that shoes and hair were the only thing fat women could control, which is why they did it.

Did what?
she'd asked. She'd been standing by the buffet table, wearing a freshly ironed dress and new patent leather pumps. She'd curled her hair and polished her earrings before clipping them on. It had all been part of a new image she was trying to cultivate, to look more stylish, sophisticated.

Fuss with the hair. Buy every damned shoe
, the man had said.

The weekly meeting took place in a church. On the wall above his head was a crucifix and posters of Scripture. Vases of carnations left over from Sunday wilted on tables. She ought to have said something sharp to the man, something cruel, but instead she'd asked him whether he'd ever stooped so low in his pursuit of a thinner self that he'd found himself actually envying Christ's trim figure on the cross.

As she said this, she noticed the man widen his eyes at her. She took this as a sign of interest. She continued, explaining that she'd occasionally looked up at the image of Jesus on the cross, ignoring the bleeding feet, the pierced palms, the bloodied brow, and instead admired only his leanness. It made her think she was more desperate than others, and she wondered if it was a common thought, and whether, indeed, he'd ever felt the same.

Jesus
, he'd said.

Yes. He's always portrayed as very thin.

I meant, Jesus what a crazy thing to say.

He stared at her as though she was foul. He was not a handsome man, not someone who would normally intimidate her. He had the swollen belly of a drunk, a hernia sticking out under his shirt like the stem of a pumpkin, a pink can of Tab in his stout hand. The first time June had noticed him there—one of the few men who attended the weekly weigh-ins—she'd imagined him to be a warm, avuncular member of the group, but she been wildly mistaken.

I was only being honest
, June said. She wanted him to change tone, to tell her he was sorry and he hadn't meant it that way.
I was being honest about how I feel
, she continued. She smiled broadly at him. She'd taken to wearing red lipstick—true red and not pink—as part of her effort to appear more chic. The smile ought to have softened him, but it had the opposite effect.

I bet you have a whole closet of shoes
, he'd said coldly.

She couldn't think of a reasonable retort. She kept imagining that a man like him, whose back was round with fat, whose neck had long disappeared into his shoulders, whose stomach would make it awkward to drive a car, let alone to walk a mile, was only so vicious because he, himself, was wounded.

Actually, I don't have a lot of shoes
, she said gently.

He looked at her directly, licking his upper lip, then his bottom lip, as though sharpening a pair of knives.
I don't believe you
, he said, like he'd been in her closet already and taken an inventory, knew exactly how many slingbacks and ankle boots and clogs and open-toed sandals and mules; every color—yes, she did keep them in order by color—and the succession of long boots that her calves had outgrown, extra wide, and then extra extra wide, and the heels she could no longer balance in.

Well, it's true
, she managed, before having to get away from him, away from the meeting, the other people, including the slim figure of Christ dying. She pushed past the man, rushing outside to her car, where she climbed into the driver's seat, put the key into the ignition, and waited to stop shaking so she could drive home.

She thought about the guy now because, beside her, sitting high up in an eighteen-wheeler, was someone who looked just like him, staring down at her with an expression that may have been intrigue or disgust. She couldn't tell if he disapproved of her driving or he'd figured out that she had unfastened her body from the control-top panty hose and the great harness of a bra that kept her shape. She did not like being so untidy. She
was
precise with her clothes. To be seen as she was now, even by the truck driver, pained her. But she could not afford to distract herself when the traffic was so fierce. No hard shoulder, crazy speeds, radio full of static. For hours, she had been wedged between cars on her left and a metal fence on her right, so close it was within touching distance.

And so she plunged on through the night, through the gritty air that smelled of exhaust fumes. Her eyes itched. Somewhere during the journey, another car had hit a pigeon and feathers exploded all over the road—and now there were tufts of white down stuck on June's windshield, though she'd done everything she could with her wipers. All of this—the cupcakes, the unpleasant man at her weigh-in, the truck driver, the feathers—was what made it so important that she find her radio station as soon as possible. Her favorite radio station, like her own bed and bath, brought her peace. As she drove toward the sphere of its signal, the all-important wave range that would bring the midnight show clearly through the car's speakers, she thumbed the dial, hearing the static lessen with each mile she traveled, and was relieved. She watched the clock for the minute when Craig Kirtz would burst on the air.

He always started the show with a cool hello, as though he'd been waiting in a hotel bar all evening for his listeners to arrive. She tuned in to him most nights, his voice alighting like a nocturnal creature across the night sky. It wasn't the music he played that lured her—sometimes she didn't even like the songs—but the way he spoke, the tenor of his voice. Whenever he introduced a love song, a slow song, a ballad, he made a kind of direct address to the audience, as though he had someone special in mind. He had a deep, velvety voice that floated across the airwaves, and while she imagined there was probably nothing sincere in his seductive murmurings, no live, actual woman to whom he was speaking, and certainly not her (why could she not remember this?), she pretended that it was she who was the object of his longing. She remembered such language of love, of desire, of a special harmony from years ago, before Bobbie's father had died. And while the voice could never take the place of a husband's voice, it felt intimate and thrilling.

Craig Kirtz. She wondered if it was his real name.

She admitted the little crush only to herself, how the sound of his name seemed to separate from all the words that preceded it and all those that followed. Even when she met someone else with that same name, Craig, she was suddenly wrenched into attention, as though the name held a tiny charge that freshly lit all her senses.

Nobody else knew how she felt about him, but she was embarrassed anyway. Craig was many years younger, a disc jockey (was there a sexier profession?), handsome, and tall, probably surrounded by girls. And while she waited nightly for his show to come on, feeling a rising anticipation, she also loathed herself for holding out—she had to admit this—a wincing hope that by some miracle he might one day turn his attention to her. It was not entirely out of the question—not strictly a hundred percent impossible, that is. Because among the unlikely events that defined her life so far, June had in fact made a friend of Craig Kirtz, or near enough a friend. The thing that made Craig special to her, aside from the way he cooed into the microphone in whatever distant room he occupied at the station, was the fact she had seen him in person—several times, in fact—and that he not only knew her name but had even been to her house.

She'd met him the first time as he stood by the radio station's van, giving away bumper stickers. She'd come out of the Safeway with Bobbie and there he was, telling everyone to come over and enter a drawing for a record album, pick up a bumper sticker, maybe win a shirt. She'd allowed Bobbie to enter the raffle and later, incredibly, discovered she'd won the album. To their amazement Craig dropped by the house to bring her the prize. He wore Levi's and boots, a braided leather belt. Handsome, and so very kind to her, sitting in her kitchen. She'd offered him a Coke, then on second thought dug out a couple of Budweisers from the far reaches of her fridge.
How sweet that you made the trip out here yourself,
June had said.

I remembered you and your lovely daughter,
Craig replied.
How could I forget?