Songs without Words (5 page)

“I’ll trade boobs with you any day,” Harper said, glancing at the soft curve of Peggy’s breast under her shirt. “That’s why the boys like you.”

Harper was convinced that Peggy’s pronounced bustline, not her personality or her lovely clear skin and dimples, was the reason boys hovered around her. She was never flirtatious, nor did she go out on many dates. She was admirably selective.

“Boys, what do they know?” Peggy said, dismissively. She reached out to Harper’s chest, cupping her left breast loosely, as if weighing it. “Your tits look very...winsome to me,” she said, her eyes glazed. “Winsome, that’s the word I’ll use for them. They are tantalizingly winsome.” Harper laughed nervously, knocking Peggy’s hand away. “Shut up!”

Peggy’s eyes were trained on Harper’s chest, avoiding her eyes. “Winsome,” Peggy said again, taking both of Harper’s breasts in her hands, caressing her through the shirt, her thumbs finding and bringing the nipples to attention.

Stop her
, Harper told herself, but it felt really nice, the friction of the cotton against her skin, and so she waited. She would tell Peggy to stop in a minute. Peggy was just teasing her anyway, just playing around, trying to make her feel better about her body. She would stop herself.

But she didn’t stop. Instead, she leaned closer, slipping a hand under the shirt and kneading a bare breast with her fingers and then pushing Harper flat on the bed with her body. She lifted the shirt up, exposing Harper’s chest to the pale light from the bedroom window. She then replaced her hand with her mouth, sucking the nipples, each in turn. That felt even better, and Harper let her continue, telling herself that it was just innocent petting, that it was okay because they were both drunk. Her priest and her mother had warned her frequently about sex, about boys and their insinuating penises, but nobody had ever told her not to let a girl suck her boobs. So this wasn’t sex. This wasn’t what they were talking about. And Harper had already rationalized that anything short of a penis inside her was okay anyway, because this wasn’t the first time someone had touched her this way. It was, however, the first time a girl had.

As Peggy fondled and sucked her breasts, Harper became more and more excited. Peggy reached one hand down across her stomach and between her legs, feeling her through the fabric of her panties. No one had ever touched her there before. Not that they hadn’t tried, but she had always deflected them at this point. She didn’t deflect Peggy and didn’t really think about why. The sensation was divine. Harper heard herself moan softly, and her body moved under the rhythm of Peggy’s touch, fingers stroking lightly through nylon. Peggy rested her head on Harper’s shoulder. “I’ve wanted to touch you like this for so long,” she whispered.

This was a surprise. Her best friend since the age of sixteen, Peggy had never done anything before to alert Harper to this possibility.

As Peggy slipped her hand under the elastic encircling her hips, Harper made a little cry of alarm. She twisted sideways in an unsuccessful attempt to free herself, an automatic response to such an intimate move. In a brief scramble of arms and legs, Peggy grabbed hold of her, one arm firmly around her waist, holding her fast from behind. Harper quit struggling, feeling the roundness of Peggy’s breasts against her back. She liked the way it felt, she decided, liked the feeling of being held so commandingly.

“I love you, Harper,” Peggy said urgently, and again she slid her hand under the elastic. Harper didn’t resist this time. What Peggy was doing to her felt delightful. She felt like she would go crazy with delirious pleasure. She let her body move without restraint. She held back the cries trying to burst from her throat, however, because she knew that the boy sleeping on the other side of the wall might be a light sleeper or even still awake.

As Harper’s body strained harder, Peggy’s grip around her waist got tighter. She climaxed almost silently. Peggy relaxed the arm around Harper’s waist and slipped her other hand away, then kissed the back of her neck tenderly.

Harper felt her body slowly cool as Peggy fell asleep beside her.

In the morning, she woke to find herself alone, an already hot sun shining through the bedroom window. Her mouth was dry and, predictably, her head felt like it was going to split open. She gradually remembered the previous evening, the swimming, the drinking, the music—and the sexual encounter with her best friend. She lay in bed for a while thinking about that. She could hear movement in the house, the clatter of dishes and sonorous male laughter.
Will Peggy remember?
she wondered.
Maybe not.
What should she do? Keep quiet about it? Pretend she didn’t remember either? Or just dismiss it as a silly side effect of too much drinking? There were a lot of ways to sweep this under the rug.

She dressed and arrived in the kitchen barely in time for breakfast. Nate was cooking. Peggy was putting dishes in the dishwasher. She was a sort of mystery now, Harper thought. Her best friend, that sweet, funny girl she adored, was someone she didn’t really know. In high school they had been inseparable. When Peggy, intent on getting as far away from her family as possible, announced that she was applying to colleges in California, Harper had been distraught. Peggy told her she had to come along, insisted that they had to stay together. “Can you imagine us being four thousand miles apart?” Peggy had asked.

Harper couldn’t. She had never been to California, had never even considered going there, but she had applied to all the same schools Peggy had. When they both managed to get accepted at Santa Cruz, that settled it.

“Good morning,” Peggy said, holding her hand briefly. The affectionate smile on her face told Harper that she hadn’t forgotten. “Nate, give our troubadour a couple of those flapjacks.”

Peggy gave Harper a glass of orange juice and set a place at the kitchen table. Through the sliding glass door, Harper could see the backyard. Eliot was out there, sitting on the edge of the pool, his feet in the water, his bare back to the house. Peggy put a plate of pancakes in front of her.

“Okay,” Nate said with finality, putting his pan in the sink. “Kitchen’s closed.”

Peggy sat beside Harper at the table while Nate joined Eliot by the pool. Harper cut a bite-sized triangle out of a pancake and put it in her mouth.

“Do you remember what we did last night?” Peggy asked quietly.

Harper nodded and swallowed, wondering why Peggy was talking about it. That was the absolute wrong thing to do.

“Well,” Peggy persisted, “what do you think?”Her expression was hopeful.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, did you like it? Do you think we could do it again?”

“I don’t think we should do it again,” Harper said. “We wouldn’t have done it at all if we hadn’t been drunk.”

Peggy looked disappointed. “It wasn’t because I was drunk.”

Harper remembered that Peggy had said she’d wanted to do it for a long time. She had even mentioned love. So she was serious. She had these kinds of feelings for Harper.

“Well, that’s why I did it,” Harper said. “And I don’t want to do it again.”

She was uncomfortable, even frightened. “I never want to do it again,” she said more firmly. “And you shouldn’t either.”

Peggy sat back in her chair and lowered her gaze, staring at her hands in her lap. Harper ate her pancakes without tasting them, feeling the awkward silence in the room. She knew she’d hurt Peggy’s feelings, but she didn’t see any alternative. If only Peggy had been quiet about it, if only she had acted like nothing had happened, then they could have gone on like before.

Eventually, Harper said, “You know, that Eliot is sort of cute.” Through the glass door, she saw Eliot shove Nate into the pool. “I think I might like him.”

Chapter 5

JUNE 11

Harper put her black symphony slacks on a hanger and hung them in the closet beside a black blouse, one of three such outfits she used as performance costumes. She had one jacket, also black, with a velvet collar, velvet cuffs and velvet placket down the front. They were all cleaned, pressed and ready to go in the fall. Likewise, she filed away her sheet music and programs and notes from the last season. The small bedroom she used as a music room was tidy, occupied by her guitar, cello, instrument cases, music chair and music stands.

As she put the last of the programs in a drawer, the yellow cover of a slim photo album caught her eye. She lifted the cover without removing the album from the drawer, not really wanting to see the photos but unable not to look. There was no need to, though, because she had looked at them so often over the last two years that she had memorized everything about them. On the inside cover of the album she had written “Chelsea” and nothing more. The picture on the first page was one of Harper’s favorites, taken the day they were hiking near Pacific Grove and monarch butterflies had swarmed around them in a cloud of orange. One had lighted on Chelsea’s hair. That’s when Harper had snapped the photo. Chelsea looked surprised and delighted with that butterfly perched on her head. So happy. She’d been looking at Harper, of course, taking the photo.
It wasn’t just the butterfly that gave her such a joyful expression, was it?

She closed the album and shut the drawer. She didn’t want to look at those today. It was a kind of self-torture anyway, and she was done torturing herself with memories of Chelsea.

Harper felt restless. Chelsea had symbolized a huge turning point in her life, she had thought. Yes, she had broken off permanently with Eliot, but nothing else had really changed, not even the house. Her environment had remained static, like a museum display. She lived among relics.

That was going to change, though. Her intended summer projects included some serious redecorating, starting with the front room. She would repaint and get new furniture, replacing the worn brown sofa and the leather recliner that she and Eliot had picked out the summer she bought this house.

She observed the one bookcase in the room. It wasn’t used for books, of course. She saw no reason to have books in her house; she worked in a library. She brought home one book at a time, whatever she was reading. She kept a dictionary and a couple of volumes of poetry on hand, but very little else. Instead the shelves displayed photos, family pictures and a few memorable vacation scenes. Among these was the photo Wilona had taken of her wielding a hammer on that Habitat for Humanity house ten years ago. Dressed in khaki shorts and a paint-stained T-shirt, she looked like she knew how to swing a hammer. Of course, Wilona had taken at least a dozen shots. It was possible that she didn’t look quite so competent in any of the others.

At the very least, she thought, she should update the photos of her niece and nephews. The images were now four years out of date, freezing the children in time at ages twelve, five and one. Beside them were mementos from Harper’s travels, global and spiritual, including the netsuke Hotei, Buddhist god of happiness, rendered in ivory-colored polymer.
I should get rid of that
, she thought, smiling at the laughing fat man who didn’t look so much happy as dyspeptic.

The walls of Harper’s house were mostly bare, decorated with only a handful of framed prints, a couple of which she had decided to replace this summer. She didn’t like putting art on the walls just for the sake of covering up the space. She didn’t mind a bare wall here and there, especially since the house was so small. Too many things would merely create clutter. In addition to the prints, though, the walls in the front room were home to her medieval musical instruments. On the wall across from the sofa hung a lute and a lyre. Above the sofa was a mandolin. She wouldn’t change those. They were permanent fixtures. The latest addition to this collection of instruments, a handsome maple psaltery, hung in the bedroom. It had been a gift from Chelsea, presented with a quotation from Chaucer, pronouns altered:

She kiste her sweete and taketh her sawtrie, And pleyeth faste, and maketh melodie.

Harper remembered playing the psaltery, or trying to anyway, on the occasion of that gift, her birthday two years ago. Though the attempt had been awkward, Chelsea had been delighted with a reasonably recognizable rendition of “Greensleeves.” They had sat here in Harper’s living room while she played and sang that beautiful old song. And now, like so many things, that song had taken on a new, bittersweet edge through its association with Chelsea. Harper could now only sing it with a wistfulness just marginally removed from sadness.