Bittersweet Dreams (21 page)

“Let's see it,” I said in a tired voice. I wasn't exaggerating. I was really feeling exhausted.

“Thanks!” she cried, and led me to the desk in her room.

Julie had spared no expense in setting up Allison's room, from its four-poster canopy bed with a headboard of embossed cherubs to the recently installed vanity table with a mirror straight out of a
Snow White
illustration. I half expected to hear
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?
automatically recited every time she stood or sat in front of it. She had a computer table and a desk and a walk-in closet that was twice the size of mine. We had similar en suite bathrooms, all marble, with whirlpool tubs and large stall showers. Of course, Allison, like me, had her own telephone, the difference being that she used hers. Mine was almost a table decoration. Most of the time, it rang only when my father called me, and lately, he hadn't done much of that.

I looked at her assignment. To me, it was the equivalent of one plus one equals two.

“This only asks you to find the fourth angle of a quadrilateral, Allison. It's basic addition and subtraction. It's far from brutal.”

“I wasn't paying attention today,” she confessed. “I don't remember what a quadrilateral is.”

I sighed. I could never be a good teacher, I thought. It took too much patience. “A quadrilateral is a polygon with four sides or edges and four vertices or corners.”

She grimaced as if I had just fed her a bitter herb. “What's a polygon?”

“Didn't you listen to anything?”

She shrugged. “Mr. Bissel talks too fast. He teaches to the kids who are really smart and forgets the rest of us.”

I nodded. She was probably right. Most of the teachers I had were the same way. They looked for the easiest way to get through their classes, and ignoring the students who didn't grasp concepts and ideas quickly enough was the most convenient method.

“A polygon is simply a plane figure bounded by a closed path or circuit. It's two-dimensional, length and width. So, here, this rectangle is a polygon,” I said, drawing one. “This problem tells you that the sum of the four corners is three hundred sixty degrees, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“So, just add up these three corners, which equals two hundred seventy, and subtract that from . . . ?”

“The three hundred sixty?”

“Exactly. What's the answer?”

“Ninety.”

“That's it. You do the same thing with the other five problems, Allison.”

“And the last one?”

“That just asks you to find the area of a square. Didn't he show you this, at least? You just multiply the base times itself.”

She shrugged again. I couldn't believe any teacher would be that lackadaisical.

“What were you doing in class today?”

Her face flushed with guilt.
Today.
I should have known. Why wouldn't it all have filtered down to the junior high? The school had a total population, grades seven to twelve, of just more than nine hundred students. And everyone was in the same building.

“Someone was talking about me?” I asked.

She nodded. “I didn't encourage them,” she said quickly, “but they kept passing notes to me, asking me stupid questions.”

“Like what?”

I saw how reluctant she was to answer. Instead, she went to her book bag, opened it, and took out three slips of paper to hand to me.

One read,
Does she watch you take showers or baths?

Another asked,
Does she want you to help her masturbate?

The last one simply asked,
Does she kiss you on the lips?

“Well,” I said. “It looks like you've become quite popular. Everyone will want to be your friend to be the first to learn some gossip.”

“I didn't tell them anything. I told them they were all stupid.”

“Did you tell your mother about this?”

Again, she looked guilty. “I didn't show them to her. I just told her a little,” she confessed.

“What did she say?”

“She said she wanted me to do my best to ignore them, but . . .”

“But what?”

“But to tell her if anything like
that
ever happened.”

“Do you think it would?”

“No. You're just very smart. You're not like that. Right?”

I nearly laughed at her uncertainty. “Right, Allison.” I gave her back the notes. “Save these. We might need them as evidence someday.”

“For what?”

“A lawsuit.”

“Really?”

“Really,” I said. I started to leave.

“Mr. Taylor said something like that to me today, too.”

I turned back. “Mr. Taylor?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What? What did he say?”

“He saw that I was upset. I sit right up front. He's always looking at me to see if I understand things or if I'm unhappy. He gives me special attention.”

“Does he? So what did he say, Allison?” I asked more firmly.

“When the bell rang, he told me to stay behind a moment, and then he said he'd heard some nasty rumors were being spread about you and that I shouldn't pay them any attention. He said those spreading them would get themselves in big trouble. He's the nicest teacher in the school, and the best-looking. I know he likes me a lot,” she added.

Something about the way she said that sounded an alarm. “Likes you? What do you mean?”

“He likes me,” she said. “He's always looking at me and smiling and stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“Just stuff,” she said, and sat at her desk. “Thanks for helping me, Mayfair. My friends think you do my homework all the time, especially when I get a high grade. That's why I try not to ask you too much.”

“Forget your friends. If you don't understand something, you ask me. They're just jealous.”

“That's what I thought.”

I hesitated a moment as she worked on the remainder of the math problems.

“Right?” she asked, showing me her answers.

“That's it. Look, Allison, I want you to tell me what else Mr. Taylor says to you, especially over the next few days, okay?”

“Why?”

“I'd just like that. I help you with your homework, don't I? You can do that for me, can't you?”

“Okay,” she said.

I started out again.

“Mayfair?”

“What?”

“You're not really like they're saying you are, right?”

Look how easily someone's reputation can be ruined
, I thought. Often, just being accused of something made you guilty. Most people weren't going to be bothered with proof. Here was my stepsister, who had lived with me for years, already thinking it was possible.

“I already told you no, but stop looking so worried. Even if I were, it's not anyone else's business, and people who are like that are still good people.”

I thought of something that I knew would bug her.

“Why? Are you feeling that way about yourself?”

“No!” She grimaced and shook her head vehemently.

I laughed. “See how easy it is to make you sound guilty? Don't grow up with your mother's middle-class prejudices,” I said. “If you can help it, that is.”

She just stared at me. I knew I was taking her too high too quickly.

But as the poet Robert Browning wrote, “A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?”

Arrogant of me, but I thought that if Allison hung around me, enough might rub off to make her at least a decent student, if not a decent person. Julie was worried that I might be a bad influence on her.
I'll be an influence on her, all right. I'll get her eyes open wide enough to see what a hypocrite her mother is.

But I wasn't thinking about Julie now. I was thinking about Alan Taylor. Did he single out Allison because of me? Was he paying too much attention to her? At her age, she was far more vulnerable than I was, and today, I thought, I was most vulnerable.

I ran a bath and soaked in it, not because I felt unclean or spoiled after having been with Alan but because it relaxed me and let me think. What bothered me the most was the idea that I had allowed myself to be a victim today in so many ways. It began in Dr. Richards's office and ended in Alan Taylor's bed. I wanted to blame my troubles in school on those bitchy girls and Julie, but did I let it happen? Could I have been shrewder and more intelligent about how I had handled it all?

Did I throw myself at Alan Taylor willingly, or did I fall into a trap, all the while thinking I knew what I was doing?
I'm smarter than he is. I'm old enough to understand and handle myself
, I had told myself.

Was I suffering from what the Greeks called
hubris
, excessive pride, the fault that would bring tragedy to the arrogant? Had my super intelligence turned me into too much of a snob, a smuggie? Did I deserve what was happening to me after all?

One of my grade-school teachers, Mrs. Schumer, once voiced something to my parents that I thought she regretted immediately afterward. They were talking about my superior intellect, the wonders I had performed in second grade, and Mrs. Schumer said, “I wonder if it's a curse or a blessing.” She looked at my parents' faces. This was something they had heard before from Fish Face, and they didn't like it then.

Mrs. Schumer quickly added, “Of course it's a blessing. Look at what she will be able to do. Why, I imagine someday, I'll be reading about her accomplishments.”

She spoke as quickly as she could to override her previous utterance, but I saw it was too late. It had already taken root in my parents' minds and would flower into more and more doubt as time went by.

It had taken root in me, too. It grew like a wild vine, reaching deeper and wider inside me.

As I lay there in my bathtub filled with soothing bubbles and bath oil, these thoughts, these memories, streamed behind my closed eyelids.

And minutes later, when I opened my eyes and looked at myself in the mirror, I saw that I had been crying. Not realizing that I had been until I looked at myself was more frightening than anything.

It was truly as if there were someone else in me, a second Mayfair, who was always trying to emerge, to pop out of me and cry,
“I'm the real Mayfair Cummings, not you. I want to be normal. I want to have fun, do stupid things, eat the wrong things, make happy mistakes, laugh at dumb jokes, wear silly clothes, flirt with vapid boys, cheer my lungs out at football games, eat popcorn and watch a goofy Simple Simon raunchy movie, and neck and pet in dark corners at house parties where we all drink too much or smoke pot or take other stuff and feel like rotten apples in the morning but laugh about it on telephone calls that go on and on until our parents scream at us to get off and do something worthwhile like clean our rooms and pick up all the clothes scattered everywhere.

I'm the real Mayfair Cummings, not you. I'm putting you back in the box and stamping it “No longer at this address.”

I put my hands over my ears as if I really did hear my second self, and then I took some deep breaths, got out of the tub, and got ready for bed.

There was a knock at my door.

“Not another problem, Allison,” I called.

The door opened. It was my father.

“Oh.”

“Hey, May,” he said when he entered. He hadn't called me that for a long, long time. I couldn't recall when he had first started, but it was his most affectionate greeting. “Hey, May.” Sometimes he would just say it, smile, and go on to do whatever he had to do, but it always made me feel good. Once he composed a little rhyme that he would often sing for me.

Hey, May, what do you say?

Hope you had a very good day.

If not, someone's going to pay.

It made me smile and made my mother laugh. Now it seemed so long ago; it felt more like something I had watched on television or read in a book. Maybe it was just wishful thinking, a little fantasy.

I pulled myself up on my pillow and watched him come to my bed and sit at the foot of it, just the way he used to before he married Julie.

“Sorry about what you went through today. I intend to give that Dr. Richards a piece of my mind tomorrow.”

“Don't bother. It won't help. They're all probably right. I'm better off away from those girls.”

“I would have been there, but there was a major screw-up at the firm, and . . .”

“Don't knock yourself out about it, Daddy. It's over. I didn't expect that Julie would stand up for me, and she lived up to my expectations, that's all.”

He nodded. “She thought she was doing the right thing.”

“Believe what you need to believe,” I said.

“I know it's not easy for you, hasn't been, but . . .”

“Let's just go to sleep, Daddy.”

I lowered myself again. He got up and fixed my blanket. I kept my eyes closed and then felt him kiss me on the forehead. He brushed my hair. For a moment, I was afraid he might notice the change in me, sense that I had been with someone, but that was probably the furthest thing from his mind.

“Good night, May,” he said. He turned off my lamp.

“ 'Night,” I said.

I heard him leave and close the door softly. For a while, I just lay there in the dark. I was worried that I wouldn't fall asleep, that I would stay up all night thinking about this roller-coaster day, but when I finally did close my eyes, it was as if I had fallen into a coma. I didn't dream; I didn't remember getting into bed. The light of morning surprised me the way a spotlight might catch a burglar stalking a target. It took me a few moments to realize that it was another day and I would face even more challenges, more than I, with my super intelligence, could ever imagine.