“Me too.”
“We shouldn’t.”
“We have to.”
“I can’t help it.”
“I know.”
He gasps for breath. I reach for the zipper on his jeans.
Now came the place where I set down my pen.
Writing my journal entries, as they had evolved to become, proved surprisingly easy, with one exception. The problem was that even in my fantasy world, there remained a single image I could not summon. I knew what the face of my fantasy lover looked like. It belonged to Forrest Emerson. I knew his arms and his chest, his strong calves, his rough hands, which were so gentle when they touched me. But one part of him caused me to draw a blank.
I didn’t know how to describe a man’s naked genitals because I’d never seen any. I could write about Pretend Forrest unbuttoning theshirt of Pretend Frances. But when I got to the part where he pulled down his zipper and stepped out of his shorts, I had no pictures for what came next. In the little movie theater I had constructed in my brain, this was where the screen went dark. All I knew was the deepest form of longing to be touched.
I knew about feelings. Not bodies.
Say the word,I told myself.Write the word down.
The story always stopped there.
21
It Makes You Want to Get Naked
Do you think Brenda Barnett would still look good without makeup?” Regina asked me. It was a couple of days after the Barnetts’ visit—Forrest was off training for the triathlon. Her question caught me off guard.
“I don’t know,” I told her. “I didn’t pay that much attention.” Regina had brought down her nail kit. On her list for me this morning, she’d typed,Get a pedicure!Now she was giving me one. She had suggested I might benefit from tweezing my eyebrows too.
“That woman’s got the kind of face that won’t age well,” Regina said, jabbing a metal stick under my nail bed while I kept an eye on Jilly and her friend Emma, playing in the water. Hayward lay on a towel with a comic book.
“If you ask me, without eyeliner and blush and lipstick, nobody would look at her twice,” Regina continued. She was not finished with the topic of Brenda Barnett, evidently. “Great hair, of course. I’ll grant Brenda that much.”
“She probably uses some really expensive shampoo,” I offered.
Regina said nothing more for several minutes. She was focused on my toenails. But I got the feeling she had more to say on the topic of Brenda Barnett.
“I can’t really blame Forrest for taking an interest in her,” Regina went on. “My husband’s a man with a significant appetite. I know I can’t fulfill all his needs.” She dabbed the color on my big toenail and drew the brush slowly over the surface like a professional.
I thought she’d leave it there, but she didn’t. “I’m referring to sex,” she said.
I didn’t look up. She was on to my third toenail now. With one whole foot still to go. At the rate we were going, I’d hear Forrest and Regina’s whole story before we were finished with my pedicure.
“You’re too young to understand, but a man has his needs,” Regina said. “Women do too, of course, only I’m just so tired all the time.
“You wouldn’t know it to look at me now, but in our early days we were all over each other like a couple of puppies,” she told me. “Sometimes we made love three times in a day. In all kinds of places too. The boat, of course. The gazebo. One time Prudence walked in on the two of us when we were having sex on the kitchen floor. I was setting things up to make pancakes and he came up from behind and started kissing me and rubbing my back. I left the mixer on. Batter was flying all over the place.”
I tried not to show my surprise, but the scene she described was hard to imagine.
I said, “Wow.” All I could think of.
“Prudence was shocked, but we didn’t care. We were just so in love. But not just that. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other.”
This was a feeling I didn’t know about. When I thought about sex, I—not yet fifteen years old—thought about someone paying attention to me. When I thought about actual touching, I didn’t get further than imagining a man’s arms around me—one man’s in particular, his hands stroking my skin. I pictured him looking at me. That was as far as I could go.
“You know the island out there where Forrest likes to take the boat?” she asked me. “My parents own it. There’s this place we used to go to that nobody knows about. You’ve got to hike in a ways fromwhere you dock your boat, but once you’re there, it’s like you’re in the Garden of Eden. In all the years I’ve been coming here—long before I met Forrest, even—I never ran into anybody there. It was our secret spot. Forrest’s and mine.”
