A look came over her. For a moment, I could understand what my father meant when he said Regina had been beautiful once.
“There’s all this moss growing there. It makes you want to take off your shoes to feel it.” She seemed to have forgotten about the nail polish, my toes.
“It makes you want to get naked,” she said. “That’s what we always did. Before the kids.”
I looked out to the water—Jilly, calling out “Marco” in that high, screechy voice of hers. “Polo!” her friend answering back. Of the two of us—Regina and me—I knew I was the one who’d better keep an eye on the children. They were good swimmers, but I understood that if anything happened to one of them, it would be up to me to save them. Regina was off in her own world a lot of the time.
“I think Jilly might be swimming too far out,” I told her. “Maybe we should call the girls in.”
“Oh god,” Regina said. “I’m such a hopeless mother. It’s a wonder my children have survived me this long.”
“You do other things,” I told her. “You’re the one who makes all the lists for us.”
“Oh, those lists,” she sighed. “I could spend my whole night typing up lists for everyone, but what does it matter, really? Most of the things you really need a person to do for you can’t be put on a list. Mostly they’re things you have to do for yourself anyway. Or leave undone.
“The really important things,” she said to me, “are the ones you can’t put on the list. Like ‘find excitement in life again.’ Or ‘be happy.’”
The way she sighed then, it was as if someone had let all the air out of her. More air than was contained in her lungs. Air enough to fill Jilly’s swan float, possibly. So much air leaked out of her, her wholebody seemed almost to deflate as it happened. It was a sigh that went on longer than any sigh I’d ever heard.
Regina turned to look at me, her nail polish brush suspended in midair. “Pills can only do so much,” she said.
I didn’t know how to respond, so I said nothing.
“When you think of it,” she said, “you could wonder how Forrest puts up with me. Why he doesn’t just pack up and go. Only there’s the children, of course. And this place.” She waved her nail brush in front of all we beheld, like an artist.
“Forrest could never think of leaving Wonderland,” she said. “It’s as simple as that. And he will never leave me. Wonderland and the children and me. We’re a package deal.”
22
Thinking of You Tonight
That night up in my room, when I opened my journal, I wrote about Brenda and Forrest.
I did something new in what I wrote there that night. The crossing of another line. This proved surprisingly exciting.
As I wrote, I let myself pretend I was Brenda Barnett. I’d been the one with the cleavage bursting out of my dress that night. I’d been the one in the kitchen with Forrest, clearing away the dishes.
As I was rinsing the dishes, he came up from behind me,I wrote.He pressed his body against mine. I could feel him, pressing hard against me.
What would that feel like? I didn’t know exactly. All I had to go on were boys in my class, times I’d noticed something appeared to be going on with their penis—and how, when it did, they’d grab a notebook or their sweatshirt and hold it over the crotch of their jeans. As difficult and embarrassing as it was being a girl, at least the things that happened to girls—the sexual things—took place under cover. Nobody could see. Where for a boy there was no concealing it.
Take Hayward, for example. As annoying as he was, I could almost feel sorry for him, with his voice in the middle of changing, never knowing when he opened his mouth what sound might come out.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. The picture came to me of him on a recent afternoon at the club when a girl named Jennifer dove off the high board and her top slipped. I had looked at Hayward then to see if he’d noticed, and he had, evidently. It was as if a small animal woke up in his swim trunks.
Was he embarrassed, or proud?
I turned back to the journal page I was writing on. Back to the scene in the kitchen. With myself in the role of Brenda Barnett.
I was trying to wash a glass,I wrote. There were lipstick marks on the rim. He took my hand, which was holding the sponge, and moved it away from the sink. It was as if there were no muscles in my arm. I let him move my hand like it was a part of his body, not mine. Like he owned it.
He turned off the water and set the glass on the counter. Then he guided my hand to his ...
My pen stopped moving. Writing the word, even in my journal, felt scary.
He pressed his mouth against mine. I felt his tongue going deep. And further down, something else, pressing against my body.
His finger made its way down my neck and my chest. Then further down.
