“Count me out,” Hayward said. “I’m sick of fried clams.”
“You heard your mother,” Forrest said to him. “It’s still light enough the three of you can ride your bikes.”
The children and I headed out the French doors toward the rack where we kept our bicycles. Jilly, holding her Molly doll, ran ahead.
“You know why they said that, right?” Hayward said to me.
I looked at him. I didn’t, actually.
“Hanky-panky,” he whispered, grinning. “Every now and then my mom lets him fool around with her. It doesn’t happen very often,” hetold me. “Maybe they watched a sexy video or something last night.Hubba-hubba.”
Though it was early in the summer, I’d already learned the best way to deal with Hayward’s remarks: Ignore them whenever possible. He wasn’t finished, though.
“They sleep in different rooms,” Hayward said. “But on special occasions she visits him. You’ll probably hear them one of these nights.”
He made an odd movement, like a man working a drill—up and down, up and down. He made a series of noises then. Grunting, panting, a small, high scream.
“Don’t look so surprised,” he said to me. “Don’t you know about sex? It makes people go crazy.”
Did I know about sex? I wanted to know. I thought about it every day—with horror and fascination, both at once. I wrote about it in my journal at night, as well as a person could who’d never actually experienced it. But as with nearly every other aspect in life, this one left me feeling, once again, like an outsider.
It was as if there were this great party going on to which everyone had been invited—even Regina, evidently. Everyone but me. I stood on the sidelines, wanting to catch a glimpse of what was happening and trying to make sense of things.
More and more over that last year, thoughts about sex kept popping up in my brain like the weirdest kind of public service announcement ever.We interrupt this program with a special bulletin ...I’d catch sight of the pale, bland face of the weather person on TV, and the thought would come to me: When was the last time she had sex? And when she did, what happened, exactly? What was it people actually did when they had sex with each other? I knew the basics, but I longed to understand what it felt like—more so, what it meant, and why people cared about it so much.
I considered the sex question about almost everyone I encountered. It could be a woman at MacDougall’s when I stopped in to pick up suntan lotion, or the school secretary, or the man who delivered our mail,the bank teller to whom I’d handed my passbook when I’d deposited my most recent stash of babysitting money. Nancy Reagan. Barbara Walters. My social studies teacher. A woman who’d shown up at our apartment wanting my dad to fix her toaster.
It started a year or so before this, but since I’d come to Wonderland, I seemed to be on fire. All of a sudden sex was everywhere. Everywhere I looked, I saw it. The possibility of sex, anyway. And its effects on people. Either because it was going on in their lives or, for some of them, because it wasn’t. Until that night when Forrest and Regina sent us off to the Caboose, I had believed they were in the no-sex category, but Hayward’s remarks had revealed a new layer to the mystery. Even Regina had sex. Not very often, maybe. But she did.
I figured I must be a freak. Was I the only person who thought about these things? What was happening to me?
Stop it,I told myself.
Only I never could.
And now came a realization that might have been comforting, only it wasn’t. I was not the only person who thought about sex. So did Hayward Emerson, the biggest loser boy, ever, which probably made me the biggest loser girl.
14
I See You
Other than worrying I’d never need to open the box of Tampax in the bottom of my top drawer, life felt less stressful than I could ever remember. I felt no pang of homesickness for my parents or my life back home. I didn’t miss the sound of the vodka bottle hitting the trash bin in the night, or my mother’s silent death-ray looks when she found it there in the morning. In the days since I’d been at Wonderland, my parents hadn’t called. This was good news.
When I woke up in my little bed under the skylight to the sound of Forrest down in the kitchen mixing the batter for pancakes, or the smell of French toast on the griddle, I couldn’t believe how lucky I was just being in this place. Every night, after I did my sit-ups and practiced my pretend tennis serve in the mirror with the stolen Wilson Number Three ball, I said it all over again in my journal.
June was going by fast. Eighty-one days remained in my Wonderland summer. Eighty-one more days I got to spend in the company of Forrest Emerson.
“Earth to Frances,” Forrest said. We had finished our breakfast. The two of us had gone over our typewritten instructions for theday from Regina. We were just sitting there—Forrest filling the day-of-the-week compartments of Regina’s pillbox, me off in that other world I went to sometimes, the one in my head. It was an odd thing, but at random moments, I’d find myself thinking about tennis, picturing myself out on the court, with Forrest on the other side of the net.
I could hear the sound of Jilly’s Teddy Ruxpin upstairs, reciting the line that emanated from his furry stomach if you pushed the button and the batteries hadn’t given out yet: “Can you be my special friend?”
Forrest snapped the pillbox shut. Mission accomplished. Soon enough Regina would have more jobs for him. “Where are you?” Forrest said to me.
“I was thinking about something,” I said. I didn’t add, thinking about him.
Of the two of them, Regina and Forrest, the one who mattered to me was always Forrest—he, the one who saw me for the girl I was; he, the one who offered attention, affection, tenderness, and what felt to me like the first real love anyone had ever shown me. In my nighttime life, it was Forrest who occupied my brain.
But in the daylight hours, with the exception of those breakfasts Forrest and I shared, it was Regina who kept an eye out for me.
