Beautiful Kate (15 page)

“I’m here!” I cried. “I’m here! I can’t help it—but I’m still here!”

7

Somehow I managed to get through the weeks of exams and graduation without advertising the fact that I had become a mental case. When I was alone and thus free to brood on what had happened between Kate and me, I often became so tense that my hands would shake. Sometimes I could not eat and at other times I would feast ravenously, only to throw it all up later. I dutifully went to every senior beer party and swim party I could, both because I knew Kate would not be there and because it afforded me a good excuse to get drunk. Girls who had been valiantly defending their cherries against me for years were suddenly confronted with this morosely inebriated eunuch, and I am not sure which they felt more keenly: disappointment or relief.

Because I had asked one of them to the prom a month earlier, I stood by the commitment and double-dated with her and Cliff, who had been invited by the elder Tit Sister, over the years probably his most dogged admirer. I was politely civil to my date and in the car later I did not touch her at all, which was such heretical behavior for me that Cliff kept asking if I was sick, which of course I was—sick of thinking of Kate, who had turned down the three seniors foolhardy enough to have invited her to the dance. Her rejection of them was only a matter of habit, though, not of any new melancholia brought about by what we had done. If anything, she seemed happier and more carefree than she had for years. Every now and then I would hear her singing in her room or in the kitchen as she helped Mother with the dishes. Once I saw her skipping like a nine-year-old out to the barn, there to saddle up her colt for a sunny canter over our fields. She began to spend a lot of time on her hair and she even went so far as to wear dresses to school, which caused a number of our classmates to turn and look at her as if they were seeing her for the first time. She also began to smile more often, often without the taint of that old superiority, that air which said she was privy to things that you were not.

Despite all this cosmetology, though, at heart she was the same Kate as before, just as willful as always. She even took it upon herself to refuse to give the valedictory despite her having the highest grade average in our graduating class. Shrugging off cries of outrage from Jason as well as from the school administrators, she went her own singular way.

“I don’t believe in all that upbeat patriotic junk,” she said at dinner. “And if I told them what I did believe, they’d hang me.”

Jason was apoplectic. “And just what beliefs are those, young lady?”

“Well, let me think,” she said, with a show frown. “How about this? The race is to the swift. And the rest might as well not even bother.”

“Oh, that’s so cynical,” Mother remonstrated.

But Jason thought it worse. “Cynical? It’s downright disgusting, that’s what it is! And from a girl like you, Kate. You ought to be ashamed.”

She smiled sweetly. “You see why I don’t want to give the speech? Think how ashamed I’d make you all.”

She gave me a look of private amusement, stopping just short of a wink, and I looked away in stunned confusion. I still could not believe her reaction to what had happened between us, that she could accept it all so easily, as if it were nothing unusual or wrong. One would have thought the two of us accidentally had seen each other naked, something no more serious than that.

“Maybe I could let Greg give the speech for me,” she said. “He made a B average without trying and we all know what a paragon of virtue he is.”

The family got a good laugh out of that, even though the real joke was meant only for me. I had the feeling that Cliff, sitting next to us, sensed the current of cryptic irony flowing at the table. But he said nothing, perhaps out of fear of Kate, who had continued all through this period to shower him with her usual gifts of reckless invective.

In any case, she did not give the valedictory and by the second week in June the two of us were high school graduates still living at home, with nothing much ahead except the long hot summer and the dreary prospect of matriculating at Woodglen Junior College in the fall. I had not been able to find a summer job and had no real alternative except to slip into the routine of helping Stinking Joe around the farm. As for Kate, she never even looked for summer work, evidently feeling that she was contributing enough to the family finances by not going on to a legitimate college or university, which realistically should have been her lot, considering her splendid scholastic record.

Throughout that period I wanted desperately not to be alone with her, but everyone seemed joined in a conspiracy against me. Cliff was almost always at the Eskimo; Mother took the kids to Daily Vacation Bible School, where she taught a class; Stinking Joe could usually be found bogged down in some minor job conveniently located in the shade somewhere; and Jason of course confined himself to his library more and more as the days grew hotter. So I felt I had no choice except to make myself just as scarce as everyone else was doing. When Cliff got up early to go to work, I often got up too and had breakfast with him. Then I would rush through the farm chores and take the pickup into town for a long day of time-killing at the municipal swimming pool and at Ellie’s Billiards as well as at the Eskimo, where I began what was to become a lifelong addiction to strong black coffee, over a dozen cups a day, probably because that was the only kind of freebie that my straight-arrow brother would allow me.

In the evenings I would go out drinking beer with Tim Regan or the Camelli brothers, hoping to find in oblivion a workable substitute for a clean conscience. And on more than one occasion during those weeks I stayed in the truck and slept it off rather than try to negotiate the tricky doors and stairways of our house. My problem, you see, was not only what I had done, but what I
wanted
. I don’t think a full minute passed during those days that I didn’t think of Kate and the last time she had come to my room. I kept seeing the tears in her eyes and her slight rueful helpless smile. Over and over I saw her breasts, her high firm beautiful breasts, as she opened her robe and let it slip from her. I remembered the feel of her body, the long silken hardness of her legs and trunk pressed against mine as my hands timidly brushed over her back and buttocks. And above all, I remembered the feel of her hand on me, as if it were not made of flesh and bone like mine but of something altogether different and altogether wondrous.

Even though I avoided her like the plague, hers seemed to be the only face I saw. Her hair and eyes, her lips and the white blaze of her teeth—they were all somehow new to me and beautiful beyond description. The fact that this creature had been mine, that she had lain naked in my bed and made if not love to me then something dazzlingly similar to love—I found it almost impossible to believe, let alone understand.

The one thing I did understand, however, was that it was morally wrong, all of it, not only what had happened but what I secretly longed to have happen over and over again. It is a terrible admission, I know, and one I never wanted to make. Yet in my heart I knew it to be the truth, and it was a truth that condemned me to even deeper feelings of guilt and responsibility. I was convinced that it was
my
duty, not Kate’s, to make sure that the thing never happened again. So I felt I had every reason to stay away from home, and I thought I had reason to drink too.

Mornings when I was too hung over to get up with Cliff, I would manage to get out of bed and lock the door to the bathroom so she could not repeat her performance. And on one occasion she did tap on the door and ask me to unlock it.

“All I want to do is talk,” she whispered. “What are you afraid of?”

I growled something about still being asleep when in fact I was wide awake, lying there in my sweat and anguish.

Later that same day she came upon Stinking Joe and me replacing fence posts in the south pasture. Joe promptly opined that a girl could do what he was doing—essentially just handing me tools—and that since he had more pressing work waiting for him in the implement shed, he would be generous and let Kate take his place. As he walked off, carrying his lunch bucket, she shook her head in mock admiration.

“Don’t you just love him?” she said. “Isn’t he just too cute for words?”

“That’s our Joe, all right.”

In the distance, the old man had turned to wave, and Kate now waved back at him. “Bye, you old mountebank!” she called.

I laughed with her, trying hard not to let on how uneasy I was at being alone with her again, even out there in the sweltering sun. To cover my anxiety, I worked furiously, stamping the ground in rock-hard around the three new posts we had sunk. Kate meanwhile crimped the loose barbed wire tight and I finished by stapling (“steepling,” Joe called it) the wire to the posts. Finished, we picked up the tools and started back. For fifty yards or so the silence between us grew. Then Kate broke it.

“How come you didn’t let me in this morning?”

“You know why.”

“No, I don’t. That’s why I’m asking. I just wanted to talk.”

“About what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Nothing in particular. Just talk. Like always.”

I took a deep breath and somehow choked out the words. “That one night, Kate—that night you came to my room—aren’t we ever gonna talk about
that
?”

“What is there to say?”

I looked at her in disbelief. “For God’s sake! You think it’s normal, what we did? You think it’s natural?”

“Was it so bad?”

“Jesus Christ!” I turned away from her, shaking my head and looking to the blazing sky for commiseration or at least comprehension. My twin was lost. We were both lost.

And as if to prove we were, she laughed at me. “Oh come on now, Greg, don’t be so damned dramatic. It wasn’t that big a thing. I don’t know why it happened—it just did, that’s all. I guess sometimes I’m like a sleepwalker. Like someone in a trance. I guess I don’t always know what I’m doing.”

“Don’t give me that, Kate. Come on, we’ve got to face this thing. We’ve got to overcome it.”

“Overcome what?” She shook her head. “Boy, I sure don’t know what the big deal is. We’re both still in one piece, you know. Nothing really happened.”

“Nothing?!”

“Nothing to speak of. And even that won’t happen again—I can promise you that.”

She turned away from me and started to walk on, but I quickly caught her by the arm and roughly spun her around, so filled with rage and anguish I could barely speak.

“Jesus, Kate—don’t you think I’ve got feelings? Do you think you can just—” But I could not finish.

“Can just what? What did I do?”

By then I was looking at her through tears, and I still could not believe her attitude of blithe innocence. I shoved her away from me so forcefully that she tripped and fell.

“Get away from me,” I got out. “Get away and stay away.”

She scrambled to her feet with a very different expression now, shock and anger taking the place of that maddening insouciance. Then she turned and ran off through the field toward the house in the distance. I watched as her figure grew smaller and finally disappeared beyond the barn. Then I sat down in the long buzzing grass and cried, helplessly, like the child I still was.

In the days after that I became something of a “case” both at home and in Woodglen. No longer caring enough even to do chores on the farm, each morning I went straight into town as fast as I could to begin a long day of drinking and fighting and getting into whatever other trouble I could find. When Jason confiscated the keys to the pickup, I either hitchhiked or went over to Tim Regan’s and drove in with him. Never much of a friend in high school, he became my inseparable buddy, mostly because we now shared the same passions for indolence, pugnacity, and alcohol. When we could not afford the hard stuff, which was most of the time, we settled for beer and spent endless hours at Ellie’s Billiards or at any bars that would let us in. We terrorized the high schoolers at the swimming pool and tried to get into at least one good fight a day, a regimen that finally not only got us kicked out of Ellie’s but also landed us in jail overnight, for resisting the efforts of three middle-aged steelworkers to run us out of an eastside bar. The result was that old screenwriter’s staple: broken chairs and bottles and windows as well as a few fearsome bruises. At the police station a friend of Cliff’s had the good sense to call him instead of Jason, which meant that on the way home I had to endure only earnest concern and advice instead of moral outrage.

“I just don’t know what the devil’s going on anymore,” Cliff lamented. “First, Kate changes into somebody I don’t even know. And now you suddenly become some kind of half-assed town drunk. I just don’t get it. We’re all going to hell in a handbasket.”

“What other way is there? You gotta take the old handbasket.”

“This isn’t funny, Greg.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“So get ahold of yourself, okay? You got your whole life ahead of you. If you have to fall apart sometime, why not do it in your forties? You got a lot of time.”

“Okay, I’ll try to wait.”

But I did not. The next day I was back at the same stand, borrowing money for beer from friends and sweet-talking ancient Ellie into letting Tim and me back into her estimable establishment. And by twelve or one that night I once again made it home, stumbling out of Tim’s pickup with an offhand wave and weaving my way on up the drive, deciding as I went that it was not sleep I needed but a good cold swim. So I went on past the barn and down the path to the pond, where I did a little jig on the swimming dock, trying to get out of my clothes. Making it finally, I dove into the water and swam slowly through the dark silence to the center of the pool before coming up. And I was amazed at the racket I suddenly heard, the frogs and crickets and cicadas all joining in a mighty chorus of disquiet. For I some reason, it irritated me, all that noise, and I dove again and again to get away from it, staying longer each time in that black and soundless haven until I finally had no choice except to come up or drown.