Lullaby for the Rain Girl (16 page)

“I saw that movie. With Boris Karloff?”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “It’s pretty cool. But I like
Bride of Frankenstein
better.”

“I haven’t seen that one.” She held up her own book. “Mine’s
Rebecca,”
she said.

“There was a movie of that. An old one. Kind of good. It was on TV.”

“I know. I saw it. That’s why I got the book from the library.”

We were silent for a long moment. I tried not to notice how pretty she seemed: her shining hair, her freckles, the sunlight on her forearms. After a moment, and without any goodbye, she turned and skipped away, disappearing behind the side of her house.

It was weeks before we spoke again.

In fact, it was in the fall, when school had started up again. In middle school there was a practice that hadn’t existed in the earlier grades: occasional Friday-afternoon dances. I suppose the idea was to help socialize the nervous twelve-year-olds who were beginning to notice members of the opposite sex; I no longer remember how often they happened, but I do recall being herded into the school’s gymnasium the first time and finding the lights turned down shockingly low (they’d just switched off a couple of the more glaring fluorescents, that’s all, but it was darker than I’d ever seen it) and rainbow-hued streamers hanging everywhere, with chairs in a circle around the basketball-court-turned-dance-floor. A teacher, the young, slim, and ultra-hip Mr. Reeves (one of the only black residents of Stone’s End, surely) served as D.J., blasting “Hot Fun in the Summertime” and “Will It Go Round in Circles” and “Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me” at our unsuspecting ears. The more socially adept kids were quick to join in; I watched boys walking up to girls, speaking to them for a moment, then walking out onto the dance floor and gyrating together. It was an odd sight, yet not an unpleasing one. What’s more, the girls didn’t seem to be shy about asking the boys, either. I watched as Melody Wannamaker stepped up to a boy named John Hubbard and they moved off to the dance floor together.

I sat listening as any number of songs went by, until, as “Your Mama Don’t Dance” began, I realized that Sherry was standing next to me. She was wearing blue jeans and a powder-blue T-shirt with a big yellow smiley face on it.

“Do you want to?” she said.

I think I said yes. I know I stood, anyway; and there we were, Sherry O’Shea and Ben Fall, dancing together. Neither of us had the slightest idea how to dance, but we twisted and rocked as well as anybody else, I suppose. What we didn’t do was touch. In fact, I don’t think we even made eye contact. And yet it was fun, and when the next song, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” began, we never sat down. Without asking or even really acknowledging each other, we just kept dancing. We danced through “School’s Out” and “Harper Valley P.T.A.” and “Bang a Gong (Get It On).” We danced so much that I finally noticed other kids looking at us and grinning. My heart was charging, and only partly, I think, because of the exercise. I was intensely aware, even if I only furtively glanced her way now and then, of Sherry, of her body, her
girlness.

Then Mr. Reeves threw everyone a curve. The Carpenters: “We’ve Only Just Begun.”

A
slow
song.

Most of the kids scurried to the sidelines. Only two brave couples remained where they were, looking perplexedly at each other. One of those couples was Melody Wannamaker and John Hubbard. The other was Sherry and me.

Well, it happened; I don’t remember how, but somehow my arms were around her, her hands were on my back, and we were slowly swaying to a song I’d always hated, but at that moment didn’t mind at all. I learned what a girl’s hair smells like, and what it feels like—she was wearing it long then—touching your cheek and nose. I learned what it’s like for a girl’s breasts to press against your chest, through clothes, at least. I was practically drunk with these sensations. I was heartbroken when the song ended. I was also in love.

I normally walked home from school by myself, or sometimes in the company of another boy or two. But that day, as I gathered my books and sweater, I saw that Sherry was standing nearby, books against her chest, looking at me. She seemed nervous and expectant both.

“Are you—going home?” she asked.

I nodded and, without another word, we walked out of the gymnasium together, at long last the couple everyone had always thought we were.

At first we weren’t really all that different with each other than we’d ever been. When our families got together we still watched TV or played Yahtzee, but now we actually talked. And we did start meeting outside the family gatherings. I quickly learned that I was better in English than she was, and she was better in Math than I was; since we were in the same classes, it made perfect sense that we would elect to study together. I can remember what seemed like long hours—they probably weren’t—sitting in her family’s living room with her, or, later, in my bedroom, with the door open, helping her revise an essay about elephants or trying to follow what she was telling me about long division while the smell of her skin, her hair,
her,
slowly drove me mad.

“Ben?” she said one rainy afternoon. We were on my bedroom floor, papers in front of us.

“Yeah?”

“You’re not listening.”

“What? I’m sorry. I guess I’m not.”

“What’s wrong?”

I was sitting cross-legged; she was on her stomach before me, scribbling math figures on a sheet of paper. My hand desperately wanted to reach out and touch the small of her back, the curve of which was preoccupying me.

“I—nothing.”

She stopped writing and looked up at me. I imagined my fingers touching every freckle on her cheeks. Finally she sat up and faced me, cross-legged as I was. We listened to the rain pelt the window. Otherwise it was quiet. My sister was home, but downstairs with her boyfriend somewhere. It felt as if we were completely alone in the world.

“Do you want to hold hands?” she said.

“Yeah.”

We held hands. Both hands. I could feel sweat on her palms. I knew my own hands were cold. We sat there for a long time, getting the sense of it. Other than my sister, I had never touched a girl’s hand. I found myself nervous and yet somehow peaceful too, as if this were simply natural,
right.

“So...have you ever kissed a girl?” she said finally, in a flat, matter-of-fact tone.

“No.” I thought about it. “Have you? I mean, a boy?”

“No. Only my cousin Simon. He doesn’t count. He’s nine.”

We leaned to each other. It was not an awkward kiss. In fact, our lips seemed to interlock perfectly from the very first time. I was surprised at the warmth and the wetness of her mouth. God Almighty, I never wanted it to end.

Well, it went on like that: study sessions, hand holding, kissing. There was no shortage of teasing from our classmates, even though we still never interacted directly at school—I remained with my guy friends, she still hung out with the girls. But we walked home together almost every day.

Alice professed to find it all “cute,” and Dad had little to say, except once, when he came home very late and very drunk. Alice was helping him into a chair as he muttered, “Shit, goddamn bullshit, it’s all goddamn bullshit,” and she was soothing him, as she always did: “Shh, Dad, be quiet, Daddy, I’ll get you some coffee, okay?” He sagged in the chair as she moved off to the kitchen. I stood there stupidly, appalled at him as I always was, unable to move or speak. His eyes met mine and he scowled.

“Just don’t get that little girl next door knocked up, Shithead, you hear me?”

I ran from the room.

But in an odd way I think my dad had a better understanding of what was happening between Sherry and me than anyone else did. Sherry’s parents were pleasant about the whole thing, blithe: they always smiled when I came over, offered me cookies and soda. Maybe it was a more innocent time. Still, she and I were twelve, not nine: yet it didn’t seem possible to any of the grown-ups that she and I might form a serious attachment involving anything beyond study sessions and TV watching. After all, we’d known each other our whole lives, and nothing had ever happened; we hardly even seemed to notice one another. And so, without the benefit of much serious adult supervision, things moved along between us as one might expect they would. Soon the afternoon study sessions were really just afternoon make-out sessions: we learned from each other how to kiss, how to touch and caress. Yet oddly—even humorously, as I think of it today—we didn’t try French kissing for ages. For all of our pawing each other, we were chaste, too.

This went on for months.

When I was with Sherry I didn’t want to be with anyone else—not Alice, not Dad (certainly not Dad), not my friends. I only wanted to be reading if we were reading together, which we often did. I remember the first time, on the floor of my bedroom, both of us with our books, when she patted her leg and said, “Put your head here,” and I did—a girl’s lap, certainly the best pillow ever invented.

We continued to keep the relationship private—no interaction at school, ever—yet everyone knew that we were a couple. Some wag started referring to “Ben and Sherry” as “George and Mary,” from the old movie everybody had seen on TV,
It’s a Wonderful Life.
I professed to hate such teasing, of course, but, of course, there was a part of me that liked it.

And the comparison was apposite. I marveled at everything about her. Visiting her house, her bedroom (always with the door open: her parents had begun to sense that things were somehow changing between us—they weren’t
completely
dumb), I was amazed at her clothes, how neatly she folded them in their drawers, how nicely her shoes were lined up in her closet. The posters on the wall, mostly horses and Bobby Sherman, fascinated me: she had
chosen
these, I realized. She had gone into a store somewhere, probably with her mom, and looked through lots of different posters and picked these, decided that she liked them better than the others. 

I find this hard to explain. But, as with most kids, I think that other people were not yet entirely
real
to me. They existed—my teachers, Dad, Alice—only in relation to myself; for all I knew they blinked completely out of existence when I left them. But Sherry had a life outside mine, I understood. She wasn’t just there as a supporting character in my movie; she had a movie of her own—as if
It’s a Wonderful Life
were to be retold from Mary’s point of view. Sherry had her own background, experiences, memories, likes and dislikes, her own joys and sorrows, many of which I knew nothing about, just as there were things about me (my frantic nighttime sexual fantasies, my haunting if shimmeringly vague memories of my mother) she knew nothing about. In short, she was a
person.
Though I couldn’t have articulated it then—I hardly can now—this was a revelation to me.

I thought about sex with her all the time, of course, but for a long while we did nothing more than the kiss-and-fumble sessions I’ve described. Yet even those bonded us together, gave us a secret life with one another of which others knew nothing.

But it was childhood, and we did childhood things. We read. We wrote stories together—ghost stories in which characters with the names of kids we didn’t like came to ghastly deaths. We climbed trees. We played catch with softball and mitts. We rode our bikes all over town. We ate ice cream in the local drug store. We discovered music together, too: not just the current Top 40, which we used to listen to on the Casey Kasem show on Sunday mornings, but the old classical LPs my mother had loved and which my father had relegated to a box in the basement. Beethoven, Debussy, Handel, Mozart: we would play them quietly in my room, on my little record player, our hands gently entwined. Sherry and I never discussed my mother at all, the way that kids don’t. I had virtually no memory of her, in any event. But the music seemed to connect me to her, and to Sherry. When the records played it somehow felt as if the three of us were together, all there, listening.

Since our bedrooms happened to face each other across the fence and expanse of green lawn, we used two cleaned-out Campbell’s soup cans with a hole poked in the bottom of each along with a ball of strong twine to create, in those pre-cell phone days, a tin-can telephone. We talked for hours this way, sometimes deep into the night, when the rest of both our households were long asleep; but what we talked about is lost to my memory. Probably nothing of any importance, really. But I can still hear in my mind the hollow, metallic sound of her voice as it traveled over the string through the can to my ear. The first time Sherry ever said “I love you” to me was through that can, late one quiet night.

Well, in time we outgrew those things. Middle school ended. On the night of graduation our families had a cookout in the O’Sheas’ backyard and after partaking of steaks and hamburgers Sherry and I excused ourselves to go for a walk around the neighborhood in the early dark. She took my hand boldly, in a gesture that would become habitual with her. It the first time we’d done this in public, even though there was no one around to see.

At the edge of the neighborhood, where the houses ended, was a wild field atop a hill overlooking, distantly, the cemetery. We wandered around in the tall grass for a while, listening to what sounded like a million crickets all around us. It felt exciting and dangerous, being out alone in the darkness. No one was anywhere near. A bright half-moon provided a blue-white sheen to our skins. We sat down under a massive, gnarled oak tree, our backs leaning against it.