Story 2: Deirdre, in Xeriscape: Tundra Trail

Three CU freshwomen got into a car one Saturday in October because of Josh.

Becky and Natalie and I were making our way out of government class yesterday, having survived another slurred discussion of the Articles of Confederation by our lush of a teacher, when we bumped into Josh. That is, I bumped into him, chest first. Then we stopped in the hall and talked while hungry students flowed around us on their way to lunch.

“Do you want to come to lunch?” I asked him, feeling hungry too.

“Can’t,” he said, in that abbreviated way of his. “I’m taking my Mom up to Rocky Mountain National Park to hear the elks bugle.”

“I haven’t done that for years,” I told him.

“Well, come along then,” he said. Josh is a human magnet. He collects people as he saunters through life. He met Natalie while they were standing in line near the University Memorial Center on the first day of orientation and invited her to a BBQ at his house in Lafayette. While they were talking, my best friend Jodi walked by, and Josh had to meet her too. (I know why: in profile, her face is perfect, set off by thick black hair.) Jodi, of course, invited me to the BBQ. Now it was a month later, and I thought I might, for once in my life, be one of a group of friends.

“I have two more classes today,” I said, feeling deeply disappointed. I would love to spend an afternoon with Josh. And his Mom, though maybe we could lose her in the woods and find a nice flat make-out rock to lie on.

“Well, I have to go,” he said. I watched him walk down the hall.

Becky, whom I had forgotten was even there, mentioned how dark blue his eyes were, and then Natalie added, “Yes, we’re all a little bit in love with Josh.” Becky just smiled at me. She doesn’t miss much.

“Why don’t we go up to the park tomorrow?” she asked. “I can drive.”

So there we were at 11 a.m. on Saturday, all ready for an afternoon of wildlife and driving—to the park, around the park, and home. I was sitting in the passenger seat, and Natalie was asleep in the back seat. She said she had stayed out until 3 this morning. She even brought a pillow, but I worried that when she saw all the stuff I brought, she’d make fun of me for being so prepared. I overpacked, as usual: my backpack was full of apples and a guide or two and binoculars and cheese and crackers. Mountains and gouda—they go together.

Becky was driving an older dark blue Honda, which chugged up the red hills between Lyons and Estes Park at 48 miles per hour. I checked without her noticing. Trucks passed us when the road widened and then fell in just behind when it narrowed. I asked her what classes she was taking.

“Government, intro to journalism, political theory, Spanish, and biology.”

“So you’re going to major in government?”

“Probably, or maybe journalism,” Becky said. “I haven’t decided.”

“You could major in government and then go to the journalism school at CU,” I suggested.

“Yes, but I’d rather be writing, even at some small-town paper, than spend more time studying it,” she said. “I want to finish school and get a job as soon as possible.”

That’s an attitude you don’t hear much from college freshwomen. I admired it, but I didn’t share it. I asked her, “What do you want to write about?”

“Black people in the West,” she said, so quickly I thought she’d rehearsed it. She kept her eyes on the road. “There are so few of us, we’re practically invisible.”

“Are you going to write about the buffalo soldiers?” Natalie piped up from the back seat.

Becky smiled briefly. She was wearing eye shadow, blush, and lip gloss, and her hair looked styled, which struck me as a bit much for hiking in the mountains. My hair was in a ponytail, and I wasn’t wearing any makeup. Natalie wasn’t either, and from the way her reddish hair stuck out on one side, she must not have washed it. I wondered how bad she’d smell at the end of the day.

Becky said, “Yes, for my journalism class portfolio. There was one woman, Cathay Williams, who posed as a man and joined the 38th U.S. Infantry. My family is distantly related to her.”

“Cool,” Natalie said. “They never found out?”

“Found out what?” Becky asked.

“That she was a woman.”

“Not until after she left the army,” Becky said. “Where did you hear about buffalo soldiers?”

“From my Dad,” Natalie said, leaning her head against my headrest, if you please. She smelled a little dusty, but not bad. “He teaches politics at CU.”

“Professor Fisher is your father?” Becky asked, sounding surprised.

“Yeah. Why? Did you meet him?”

“No, but somebody told me to take his class.”

“I don’t need to,” Natalie sighed. “I hear it every day.”

We laughed at that. Maybe Natalie was more aware than I had thought. We’re still in that introductory stage, talking about classes and parents and what we wanted in life, as if we knew at age eighteen. I knew what I didn’t want—to be a doctor like both my parents and never have any time. If I could be a doctor and have a forty-hour workweek, I might consider it. But that was impossible. And think of all those people complaining and racing into the emergency room or being wheeled from ICU to a private room on a gurney! I’d much rather plant a garden. Most plants stay put, unless moles dig them up, and they don't communicate in words.

“A deer,” Natalie said, pointing between us at the right side of the road. It was grazing, half-hidden among reddish bushes.

“There’s a herd of deer that comes down by my parents’ house to graze every morning in the winter,” I said. “I can see them from my window.”

“Where do your parents live?” Becky asked.

“In Evergreen.”

“Yeah, we get deer sometimes near our house,” Natalie added. “They like to eat our neighbor’s plants.”

“Do you ever see fawns?” I asked her.

“I’ve seen one once.”

“I love them. I give them names, but then when they get older I can’t tell them apart. And just outside our fence, I planted a big patch of side-oats grama and blue grama—”

“Grama?” Natalie interrupted. “Like your grandmother?”

“It means grass,” I explained, blushing at how much xeriscape excited me. Then I finished what I had been saying: “I’ve seen deer over there eating, but my neighbor hasn’t said anything yet.”

“Wow,” Natalie said softly near my ear, “isn’t that plant vandalism?”

I twisted around and looked at her. She was smiling sleepily, her green eyes half-closed. I’ve always loved that color of eyes, like cottonwood leaves. The one time I met her parents, for about five seconds, I noticed her mother’s eyes were the same color.

“The deer are there anyway,” I said. “If they eat the plants I put out, then they won’t eat other ones. I don’t see that it hurts anyone.”

“I guess not,” Natalie said. We were silent for a while, and then Becky’s overtaxed car picked up speed on the long hill down to Estes Lake. We went sailing by the water, hooting and hanging out the window. At least, Natalie hung out the window, and I hooted a little. Becky said she was too busy driving. The traffic through downtown Estes Park moved sluggishly, as usual, and Natalie suggested that one of us could jump out, race into the nearest ice cream store and pick up a pint, and get back before it was our turn to go through the light. When we reached the visitors center at the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park, we remembered that the cafeteria was at the Alpine Visitors Center, not this one. We stood outside the entrance and debated whether to drive up Trail Ridge Road. It was almost one o’clock, and I was already feeling hungry.

“I wouldn’t mind going up there because I like to look at the wildflowers,” I said, pulling Alpine Wildflowers of the Rocky Mountains from my pocket. Natalie gently took it from my hands and looked at the pictures.

“Pretty flowers,” she said.

“They bloom in the summer,” I told her quickly. “But I like to see if I can identify them by their leaves.”

“You know a lot about plants,” she said. “Will you show me some?”

“Sure,” I said, feeling pleased. Very few people care about alpine plants—they look like a weird kind of lawn, so people walk right over them. Even Jodi only humored me when I talked about tundra. Natalie returned the book, and we joined Becky in front of a sign. She had her arms folded and looked cold in her denim shirt.

“Let’s drive up Trail Ridge and get some lunch,” I said. “The elk are probably all down in Moraine Park, but we can go there later.” We got back in the car again, and I cut off chunks of gouda with a pocketknife and arranged them on the back of my book. Even Becky seemed impressed. The car drove even more slowly here than on the highway to Estes Park, and soon we were leading a line of cars and RVs. I had forgotten the crowds the park attracts, especially people who want to snag a site at Moraine Park campground before it fills up. You’d think people would have other things to do in October than go out in the woods and shiver all night in a tent, but still they come.

“Pull off up here, Becky, and let these cars pass,” I told her, and she did, skidding a little on the gravel pullout but managing to stop in time. She didn’t seem to mind being told what to do.

“My trusty Honda,” she said, patting the dashboard. “It’s just not made for mountain driving.”

We drove that way for the next hour. The higher the altitude on this road, the more scenic views there are for tourists. As Becky guided the car around hairpin turns toward the visitor’s center, we had plenty of opportunities to pull off and listen to the pica shriek. Toward the top, there were places where the land sloped down sharply from the road, and in those places the tourists slowed way down. Maybe they were afraid they were going to roll right down to the bottom of the valley. I asked Becky to stop twice near the top. A view of a river shining far below is a sight I can't resist. My heart expands to fill all that space.

The Alpine Visitors Center was a zoo. Today, everyone in Colorado must have woken up and panicked, “Trail Ridge Road is about to close for the winter!” Then they fixed their hair and converged on the park. I had never seen so much big hair in my life. This time of year, the parking lot was always in slow motion: people went in and out doors, hung over the concrete walls around the center to look for elk in the valley, and climbed up the Alpine Ridge Trail. We went inside to eat first, weaving through the clothes and jewelry and veering left to the cafeteria. Becky and Natalie had half-sandwiches and salads, but I had a hot open-faced turkey sandwich with mashed potatoes. They laughed at me for eating so much after we’d just had cheese and crackers, so I said that I must have Thanksgiving on the brain.

Natalie perked up then. “My boyfriend will be back in town then!” After such a display of excitement, of course we had to discuss him. Natalie began to list his high points.

“Wavy brown hair, brown eyes, a little thin…” She paused.

“Thin is good,” Becky said. I looked down at my sandwich, which couldn’t be described as “thin food.” Thank god for baggy jeans.

Natalie grinned. “He loves the modernists. I can’t wait to take that course on Joyce so we can talk about it.”

Obviously she had big plans for their relationship, or she wanted us to think so. The course on Joyce, Eliot, and Pound was an upper-level course. I always feel that girls describing their boyfriends are hamming it up, but maybe I am spiteful. I’d never had a boyfriend, not that I admitted it when she asked. I muttered, “No one special right now,” and mopped up the turkey gravy with the corners of the bread. Just in case there was any self-pity in my tone, I asked Becky about the guy who met her outside government class one day.

“That’s Mike,” she said, beaming almost as much as Natalie. “I met him at church. We’ve been together for a year.”

After a few minutes of silence, I ask Natalie if she wanted to walk up the trail and look at some plants. If I were alone here, I would sit down on the side of the trail, careful to keep my feet on the steps and off the tundra, and look at the leaves of alpine plants until I could identify them. But I didn’t suppose Natalie and Becky wanted to watch me stare at leaves. For these two, I found a patch of alpine forget-me-not. According to my book, it bloomed in June and July, so we were well past flower season, but it was my favorite because of its woolly leaves.

I told them its name and then said, “Feel it.” They ran their hands over its leaves.

“It’s hairy,” Becky said. “It feels nice.”

“That’s its winter coat,” I told them. Natalie was watching me and smiling a little. I looked around. There was no one nearby; must have been a lull in the human traffic after lunch. Quickly I pulled off a couple of leaves and handed them to them.

“Taste these,” I said, trying not to grin.

Natalie spat hers out after a second. “That’s nasty!”

Becky actually chewed a few times and swallowed hers. Pretty tough. Even I wouldn’t eat an entire leaf from that plant. “Alpine forget-me-nots are in the borage family,” I told them. “Borage is an herb with the prettiest blue flowers, like dangling stars. You can put it in your garden, and it will reseed itself and attract bees all summer long. But it tastes bitter because it has alkaloids in it, like morphine.”

“Maybe after you graduate you can open a plant store and pharmacy,” Natalie said, laughing. She took a drink of her apple juice to wash away the taste. “You know more about plants than some of the professors at CU.”

I laughed with her then, but later that afternoon, I had a silent anxiety attack. We were parked by the side of the road, listening to the male elks, which sound like your next-door neighbor learning to play the trumpet. Once again, I thought suddenly, I’ve been labeled a “brain.” Natalie didn’t dislike me for it—yet. But other people had been impressed by what I knew and then had come to resent it. If that happened, I wouldn’t be able to show all of myself to her. And Becky had her own life—she didn’t live in the dorm—so how much of a friend could she become? I hate these moments of panic; they're just like noticing a mosquito after it bites me. To calm myself, I pretended we were old friends from college who’d met again after many years.

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Story 1: Afraid to Say

[Note: Parts of this story used to be in screenplay format. Now they're all flush left.]

Toward the end of my junior year at Boulder High School, I bought a stern dining room chair that barely rested on all four legs. Its last owner had painted it soothingly blue, I suppose to give it an air of comfort. I kept it pushed into a corner, piled high with books, and partially covered by a coat.

One night I pulled that chair into the center of the room, pushed everything off, sat down on my bed facing it, and began to talk. I didn’t leave any possibility out.

I said, “What becomes of the absence of a question?”

That’s the question I wanted my chair to answer, but it didn’t tell me, of course. As my high school counselor used to say, my chairs were just devices to trick me into opening up. The ones I bought didn’t cost much, and nobody but me knew why they were there or what I said to them.

This is how it began. Three weeks into our relationship, in the fall semester of my junior year in high school, we began to fool around. It was like fencing: one of us advancing, the other deflecting. I suppose I should tell you his name, but I’d like him to remain anonymous, as if that would secure my control of the situation. Does a man’s name really matter? The two men I’ve had inside me have wildly different personalities, but they were both seducers. Sometimes I think I could go indefinitely without the full length of another body alongside mine. Now that I’ve had more than one boyfriend, I don’t always want someone so close to me.

OK. His name was Ben. Flug. The first time we talked about him since it happened, Debbie made a joke out of his name, trying to get me to dismiss him.

“A fluke, you know?” I smiled, weakly, and then corrected her.

“A fluke is a stroke of luck, Debbie.”

She paused, trying to recover her momentum. “Forget that.” Then she had a brainstorm, “Forget him!”

“He was the first one, though. He’s hard to forget.”

Debbie put her hand on my shoulder, tried the sympathetic-but-tough friend routine. “The more men you put between him and yourself,” she advised me, her brown eyes narrowing thoughtfully, “the easier it will be to forget. Just wait a few years.”

We laughed at the images that came up: a line with me at one end and my true love/husband at the other, a dogpile, a Natalie sandwich. Maybe she was right. But using men as a buffer—how cynical is that?

“No, no, no!” she said. “Just find some neutral man, somebody who’ll make you feel good.”

“How?” After a few failed romances her freshman and sophomore years of high school, Debbie gave up on arranging romance her way. It kept her, she said, from offering her heart to the next football player who came around. I told her she needed parents like mine, who didn’t let me date until I was sixteen. Then she rolled her eyes but kept on talking.

“Don’t put too much weight on it; that’s how. Just go out and pick one of the first guys who looks appealing and give him the right signals.”

“Just let me be, Debbie,” I told her. “It’ll all work itself out in time.”

“When?” she wanted to know, exasperated by my stubbornness.

Signals, now. That was another sore subject that we hadn’t really touched on, and another reason why I liked talking to chairs—no need to interpret body language or tone or look in the eyes. Fabric and plastic may wear with time, but they don’t require analysis. What had my signals said to Ben, exactly? What had his said to me? Were there signals neither of us understood?

To return to the fooling around: It began as furtive touching in between our friends running out of their bedrooms to get something. Occasionally Debbie had caught the two of us kissing, our hands in those odd places you move them to so you’ll seem innocent. She was never fooled, but she didn’t lecture me, either. She thought Ben was good for me because he was steady, following what he wanted with the patience of a hunter. My approach to men, in contrast, resembled that of a house cat: give chase until they wear out and stop, then play with them. Inevitably, I was bored after a few dates. Debbie said I was getting a reputation as a tease.

“So what are you saying, that I should just go all the way and then become the school slut? Get my name and phone number in the boys’ bathroom?”

“I’m told they’re already there, Natalie,” she said, grinning. Moderation was her mantra. She had rules for everything, which made her life disgustingly orderly compared to mine. Debbie was a human closet organizer: let her into your life, and within weeks, all your deepest problems would be rooted out and properly labeled. With me, she had her work cut out for her.

“So you’ll never go beyond second base?”

Debbie shrugged. She was wrestling with the same problem of how far to go, but she planned everything out in advance. This week she’d decided she’d let her boyfriend take off her panties, though not until Friday or Saturday. For her, sex was strictly a weekend activity.

“And then what?”

She smiled. “I want to see if all his years of piano playing have paid off.” This from the girl who denied she’d ever masturbated.

“What if they haven’t?”

“I’ll have to teach him.”

“And how will you do that? Since you claim never to have touched yourself.”

When I made remarks like that, she always stood up and found something to occupy herself while she blushed. I drifted off, thinking about Ben’s hands. He hadn’t ever played any instruments, as far as I knew, but the way he touched me could go from gentle to insistent, even stinging, when I least expected it. He knew I liked that about him, giving him an incentive to push me into more and more intimacy, even though I told myself when I was alone that what he had just gotten from me was the limit. He’d even asked me to the February dance, although his friends told him I’d never stay with him that long. They turned out to be right, although not for the reasons they expected.

In the process of putting myself into Ben’s hands (literally), I became public property. All of Boulder High School wondered about the results, especially the day I came to school with a hickey at the base of my neck, toward the back. I was blissfully unaware of it until one of the popular girls sidled up to me in the bathroom and said, in that tone of wonder and snottiness that popular people use for the rest of us, “What is that?” She pointed to my neck. Every head in the bathroom swiveled over to me. I blushed furiously and stammered, “Do you have any cover-up?” She did. She stuck around while I plastered makeup on the back of my neck, asking me, “So what were you doing, exactly?”

“Just…watching TV.”

“You’ve gone out with a lot of guys, haven’t you?”

I wasn’t sure where this line of questioning was going, but since she was saying something other than “hello” to me, I played along. “A few guys. Nobody serious.”

“That’s what I’ve heard,” she said. “Here, let me help you.” The bell rang, but instead of rushing to class, I examined my neck in the mirror and smoothed out a place where the coverup still showed.


FADE IN

INT. BOULDER HIGH SCHOOL GYM—NIGHT

The room is decorated for homecoming: streamers, balloons, a large banner. Round tables covered with white cloths take up the back half of the room, and in the front boys in suits and girls in long dresses crowd together at the stage. There are three couples on stage.

EMCEE

And the homecoming queen is … Natalie Fisher!

NATALIE screams and throws up her arms as she walks onstage.

FADE OUT


Entertaining the rest of my high school class became part of the program with Ben, the reason, no doubt, we sneaked into the Boulder reservoir that Friday night and soon enough found ourselves completely naked, Ben insisting that I take off two pieces of clothing for each one of his. “Girls have more clothes,” he explained. The temperature had reached 70 that day, even though it was November, so the friction of our hands on each other’s bodies kept us reasonably warm.

“I don’t want to have sex yet,” I told him at some point.

“No problem,” he said. “I can wait.”

When Debbie and I discussed that exchange in detail the next evening, she nodded wisely. “He has plans for you,” she said, which gave me the creeps.

“You make him sound like a serial killer.”

“No. I mean he wants to be with you. This is the perfect guy to get it over with.”

“Not everyone wants to plan everything, Debbie,” I pointed out. “I’m just…just…”

She laughed and said, “Feeling your way?” That made me laugh along with her.

She went into the bathroom to heat up her new curling iron. We were going out for pizza later.

“But seriously, Debbie…” I said to her back.

“Yeah?”

“Don’t you think he’s a little pushy?”

“He’s a guy.” Drawers opened and shut. “Where is my lip gloss?”

“I’ve got it in my purse.” She came out and rummaged until she found it, then put everything back in its place. I never had to worry about her borrowing my clothes and ruining them or forgetting some important detail. In fact, most times I wished she would forget more. She was a little too good at reminding me of things. But I could tell this conversation was turning serious by her slight frown.

“Do you know where you want this to go?”

I adjusted the chair with my foot. “No.”

“Well, he seems to know what he wants. The question is, do you want to go there with him?”

The reservoir. It was a favorite high school spot for a sleazy rendezvous, despite the bugs, which promptly began biting my breasts. Ben got down on his hands and knees on top of me and kissed me. He proceeded quietly down my body, finally rubbing himself between my legs and distracting both of us from the bugs. Sometimes I wonder why he didn’t do it then. It felt like the friction between us might burn me, and I told him so.

He looked down at me and smiled. He still had braces. “You’re just excited.” He pushed me into an orgasm, the first one I’d had with a guy.

“I knew you were close,” he told me afterward, “so I didn’t stop when you said I was rubbing too hard. Things get really intense beforehand.”

Right then, when we were pulling on clothes to escape the increasing chill, a flashlight shined on my face. Both of us turned to stare at the cop, terrified or mortified, we couldn’t decide.

“Put your clothes on,” he ordered us.

Debbie didn’t believe this part. “He didn’t even take a look?” she asked incredulously.

“You’re such a pervert! I probably reminded him of his daughter.”

After quizzing Ben for a while, he let us go. Ben convinced him we’d been together for six months. I was trying to decide how my body felt, good or bad or neutral. Had I wanted him to be the first for this? Why did I always ask these questions afterward? And why didn’t the cop ask me anything? Despite being naked, I had felt nearly invisible.

“The first time you come is more important than anything else,” Ben assured me on the way home, as I was pulling grass off my clothes and out of my hair. No doubt dreams of immortality were filling his head.

Anyway, it made a good story at school; I think I told more people than Ben, girls, of course. After Ben talked with his friends, as he did every morning, they glanced across the hallway at me with a little smile. Later I would understand that all these statements, these stories, these looks, were signals. But at the time, I didn’t know exactly what they meant. After all, I did say “yet,” and he did say, “I can wait.” That’s pretty clear, as Debbie told me. But why did everyone discount the “I don’t want” part of my statement? Shouldn’t three words have more weight than one? Maybe it’s the timing: you remember what you heard last. So the word “yet” filled Ben’s head, and “wait” filled mine. In the end, I was left with weight, just another kind.

Ben did last more than a month. That incident at the reservoir, although good for a laugh, unnerved both of us: Ben because our relationship had become public property, and me because I already had a dominant male in my life and wasn’t sure I wanted two. My father intimidated all my friends at first, even Ben. I could tell my father was equally startled by Ben’s confidence, so he launched into the five questions: grades, jobs, sports, parents, and previous girlfriends. Ben answered every question but the last directly. To that one, he replied, “I haven’t dated as many people as your daughter, sir.”

It amused me to watch the two of them sparring, especially when Ben calmly turned aside my father’s most provocative remarks. My father had big opinions about everything: this week, he thought Carter wasn’t going far enough in pressing countries on their human rights records, but last month he’d complained that Carter thought he was smarter than anyone else. When he was teaching his upperclass seminar on the United States and the Third World, you couldn’t make a statement about the weather without triggering an argument. From January to May, he would talk for hours about the dangers of American arrogance. Once he got into a very loud argument at a restaurant in Nederland when a knee-jerk patriot accused my father of being a commie sympathizer because he hated Pinochet. Oh yes, I knew all about Pinochet. That explained my popularity.

Two weeks went by before Ben and I were alone again. I’d spent plenty of nights thinking about the pleasure he’d given me and discussing it with Debbie, who seemed to think it a good thing that he wanted to please me. But as I tried to tell her, it felt more like control, as if he wanted to make my body respond a certain way. And he always undressed me completely before we’d even done much, even though I usually wanted to keep some clothes on. In a very dispassionate way, too, staring at me as if I were a shipment he needed to take out of its box.

Debbie’s reaction to all this puzzled me. I believe now that she envied me my very determined lover, one I wasn’t sure I could control. But that’s typical of someone like her who arranges everything for the best possible result. Her life lacked surprises; between my father’s volatility and Ben’s approach to sex, mine offered more than I wanted. Many times I told the chair that Debbie and I should have switched places while I was dating Ben. And the chair always agreed, especially when I sat in it and pretended to be Debbie.

So I found myself alone again with Ben, at his house, his parents gone to a concert, which meant they wouldn’t come back until 10:30 or 11. He looked at my outfit, my gray corduroy pants and striped white-and-gray shirt with the matching tie, and said, “You look so nice, I should take you out.” But he didn’t. We watched TV and then started making out. Sometimes I wonder if we ever really talked about anything. I don’t remember many details of conversations, and I think I enjoyed talking about dating him more than actually going out with him. My response to him began in the part of me that wanted to be interesting and not uptight. There I was, on the floor, letting him touch me and remove my clothes that he liked so much. Despite being naked on one of those loud 1970s shag carpets at the beginning of winter, I felt warm. I liked his body pressed against mine. When we were kissing, I could stretch out my legs completely and still rest my feet on his. He pushed me back a little, gently, and looked at me. We lay there touching each other while he slowly moved on top of me. Then he spread my legs with his knees and shoved it in. I was stunned. I lay there like a mattress he was using for friction, breathing only when I had to and saying nothing. He held my hips and took his time, staring down at me until his eyes closed at the end.

“Are you OK?” he asked as he lay down next to me.

I didn’t remember if I answered, but he seemed concerned.

“The first time is always weird for girls, Natalie. It’ll be better next time.” Awkwardly, he tried to hold me. I could see he believed what he was saying to me. I mumbled, “I have to go home,” got up, put on my clothes, and walked home. I didn’t cry much, and when I took off my underwear at home and checked, there were only a few red spots and the sticky remains of Ben. I felt hollowed out and a little sore. Shouldn’t there have been more pain? I began to dream of police cars and sexual assault nurse-examiners and castration, so I wiped myself with my underwear and stowed them under the bed. Then I sat on the floor, leaning against my bed, and called Debbie.

Usually I talked while Debbie categorized what I was saying and filed it away, but all I managed to say that night was, “Hi. Ben and I had sex.”

“You did?” She paused and added, “You don’t sound good.”

“No,” I said, and then I started to cry again. Luckily, it was only 9:30. Debbie came over immediately and tried to comfort me, but instead she made me angry. I sat there in a shirt and no underwear while she put her arm around my shoulders and made excuses.

“He should have asked first,” I told her, but she tried to present other possibilities. “Maybe” turned out to be her favorite word. Maybe he got too excited. Maybe he’d dated other girls before who said no because they didn’t know exactly how they wanted things to go. Maybe he was used to girls letting him set the pace.

“Shut up!” I yelled finally. “I don’t care what he thought.”

That was the first time I ever shouted at Debbie, very effectively, I might add.

“He did mess you up, didn’t he?” she said quietly. “I’m sorry, Telie. I thought he’d be good for you.”

“Not really.”

She held me for a while, asked me what I wanted to do. I told her about the underwear, and she got me a zip-lock bag to keep them in.

I fell asleep immediately after Debbie left at 11, and when I woke up in the morning the previous night was still taking place by the side of the bed, unfolding like a movie.

**

Ben sat down in the chair. “You want to accuse me, Natalie?”

FADE IN

INT. FISHERS’ KITCHEN—NIGHT

TEDDY and ASHLEY FISHER and DEBBIE HUNTER cluster around NATALIE FISHER as if she is an egg that needs warming. A POLICE OFFICER sits at the head of the table. He opens a notebook and proceeds to fire questions, seldom looking up.

OFFICER

You were at his house? Were his parents there?

NATALIE

They were at a concert.

OFFICER

How long were you there?

NATALIE

About an hour.

OFFICER

Tell me what happened.

NATALIE

We watched TV for a while, I think it was Charlie’s Angels. We started kissing.

Teddy stares at his daughter. She lowers her eyes and speaks to the kitchen table.

NATALIE

Ben … um … likes to take my clothes off, so he did, and then he took off his.

Natalie shrugs miserably. The policeman makes encouraging noises as he writes.

NATALIE

We were lying on the carpet, touching each other.

She stops again. The policeman is silent until she continues.

NATALIE

I was giving him a hand job. He was … doing the same to me.

Teddy blushes and stares into a corner.

NATALIE

And then he was having sex with me.

OFFICER

Did you tell him to stop?

Ashley moves her hands so that they cup Natalie’s shoulders. Natalie starts.

NATALIE

I don’t think I said anything. I just got dressed and came home.

OFFICER

How old is he?

NATALIE

My age. Sixteen.

OFFICER

Too bad. We could have gotten him on statutory.

The policeman finishes taking notes and gets up. Then he turns back to Natalie.

OFFICER

You should go to the hospital, get a rape kit.

FADE OUT

Ben was still in the chair. He spoke softly. “Go to the hospital, Natalie. After all, what other evidence do you have?”

I looked from him to the bathroom door. I wanted to take a shower. Could I get past him?

**

I stayed in my room for most of the weekend, telling my parents I thought I was getting a cold. I lay in bed and reread The Silmarillion. As long as I did, Ben stayed out of the chair. When I put the book down, tried to nap, he would reappear. At first I made him disappear by reaching for the zip-lock bag, but that didn’t work for long.

As Sunday progressed and I refused to take Ben’s calls, my parents watched me more and more closely. I tried to cough occasionally, but I didn’t really feel like faking a cold. I ignored them.

When I woke up Monday morning, I huddled under the covers for a while. I knew I couldn’t stay home without explaining, but if I went to school, I’d have to see Ben. For a few minutes, I held the zip-lock bag. Then I shoved it farther under the bed and got up to take a shower, the first since Saturday night. I smelled bad for someone who had sat around all the previous day. Even though I washed my hair twice, dressed carefully, put on makeup, and curled my hair, that scent lingered all day.

Debbie was waiting for me by the front doors. I hugged her.

“I’ll be your escort today,” she said. “I’ll get to your classes as fast as I can. Just think of some questions to ask your teachers after class, and then you won’t have to go out into the hall by yourself. And we’ll go to Crossroads for lunch.” For once, I was thankful for her tendency to overplan.

Debbie’s strategy worked until chemistry class, the next to last of the day. Ben and I always met outside the door because he had chemistry the period after I did, and my last class was just down the hall. I scooted out the door and sprinted to the women’s bathroom, but Ben casually stepped in front of me, grinning happily. I almost knocked him over.

He grabbed my arms to steady me and then slid his hand down to my wrists, loosely holding them while he looked me over. “You look nice.”

I jerked away. He frowned.

“I called you three times yesterday. Is something wrong?”

I opened my mouth and said, “You …” Then I felt someone behind me and backed into her, thinking it was Debbie. But the citrus perfume identified her as Mrs. Harvey, the school counselor.

“How have you been, Natalie? I haven’t talked to you for awhile,” she said, moving next to me. I stared from one to the other, dumbfounded. Mrs. Harvey frowned, took my arm, and pulled me down the hall into her office. Ben tried to follow, but she shut the door in his face, saying, “I’ll talk to you later, young man.”

I felt frozen. She led me to the chair by her desk and sat down diagonally from me.

“What’s the matter, Natalie?”

I raised my head and saw Ben and Debbie, separated by a good distance, staring at me through the window. The bell rang. Mrs. Harvey angrily waved them away.

“You looked afraid of him. Does he hit you?”

“No!”

To a stranger, Mrs. Harvey appeared soft: sagging cheeks and neck, generous lap, teased brown hair, and a gray dress with black flowers. But when she leaned closer and met my eye, I couldn’t look away—though I couldn’t cry under such a penetrating gaze either. I was grateful for that.

“What did he do?”

“Uh…”

“Are you sexually involved?”

That made me flush and stare at the floor again. I seemed to be doing a lot of that the last few days. I was suddenly furious at the thought of Ben turning me into a mouse-girl who slunk along walls.

“Was that what you wanted?”

Finally I made an honest reply. “I don’t know.”

“But it was what he wanted?” she continued.

I nodded.

“Happens all the time, Natalie. Have you told your parents? Called the police?”

I shook my head. All these suggestions made me feel extremely tired. I asked her, “May I stay here this period?” She nodded, and I took out my chemistry textbook. I looked at the pages but couldn’t focus on the characters. They kept blurring out. For the rest of the period I pretended to read, though, to prevent her from asking me any more questions.

Finally, the bell rang again. Not too long after, Debbie’s face appeared at the office door. Mrs. Harvey left with me, heading down the hall with a determined air. It was only the next afternoon, when Ben confronted me, that I realized what she had been planning. He blocked my path, two of his friends backing him up. All three of them held notebooks at their hips, too casually.

“What did you tell Mrs. Harvey?” he demanded of me.

I said nothing, hoping that someone would come along and rescue me before fear and anger made me attack all three. Avoiding him had been the easy part, I saw now. It had fooled me into believing I mourned less than I truly did.

“Well, what?” He came a little closer.

“She asked me a lot of questions,” I said softly, which was true.

“And what did you say?”

“She did most of the talking.”

“That had better be true,” he told me. “Because there’s really nothing for you to say.” They headed down the hall, brushing me not too subtly as they went by. I ran to the bathroom and cried through most of the last class, then holed up in Mrs. Harvey’s office again. She steadied me considerably. That day she taught me all about chairs: how to imagine someone in the chair, talk to that person, and imagine what he might say. How to practice.

“This way, Natalie,” she advised me, “you’re prepared if there’s a confrontation like the one in the hall. You’ll know what to say next time.”

I never told her how soon Been took over my chair. I bought a new one and another and another, but no matter how feminine or small they were, he would eventually appear, though one time, to my great satisfaction, he got stuck and broke the chair before he got out. That was hard to explain to my parents, though. They wondered about the noise.

And I didn’t tell Mrs. Harvey the kind of practice that really interested me, all that spring of my junior year.

FADE IN

MONTAGE SEQUENCE

INT. NATALIE’S BEDROOM—NIGHT

Ben sits in the chair across from Natalie, pointing his finger accusingly at her.

BEN

You really should learn to communicate, Natalie.


NATALIE (VOICE OVER)

I had no intention of just talking the “next time.” After so many nights dreaming of my stillness, my silence underneath Ben’s body, I had settled on a new hobby.


EXT. SALVATION ARMY STORE, BOULDER—DAY


Natalie walks into the Salvation Army store.


INT. SALVATION ARMY—DAY

Natalie goes to the housewares section. She buys three small knives.


EXT. BOULDER RESERVOIR—DAY

Natalie throws knives again and again at a dead tree.


NATALIE (VO)

I really do recommend some kind of physical activity as a remedy for depression. Some kind of practice.


INT. BOULDER HIGH SCHOOL—DAY

Ben is lounging against the wall beside a bulletin board that says “German Club.” Inside a nearby classroom, a lovely blonde girl is giving a speech in German.

Natalie walks up behind Ben.

NATALIE

Ben!

He turns around, looks surprised. Wasting no time, Natalie starts slinging knives at him, one by each ear. He pushes himself up against the wall. He has a terrified look on his face. She throws the third knife at his groin. A low choke comes out of his mouth. She walks up to him and retrieves her knives, none too gently.


END MONTAGE SEQUENCE

FADE OUT


For once I felt that I was truly my father’s daughter—and, of course, anger is a more respectable emotion than fear. Ben and his friends did plenty to stoke both feelings. They started harassing me in school, whispering “bitch” or “On the rag again?” to me as I walked by or bumping me into corners. After three weeks of it, right before Christmas break, I turned around in the middle of the hallway and screamed: “Learn to take no for an answer!”

Mrs. Harvey saw all this, of course, and spoke to Ben. It tapered off around Christmas. But what frustrated her most was her inability to get me to tell my parents.

Honestly, I hoped they would force me to tell them. I dropped little hints about how aggressive Ben had been; Debbie and I almost had a conversation about rape right in front of them. And I kept buying chairs—but my parents never asked exactly the right question about my chair collection, never seemed worried enough about me.

Meanwhile, people formed camps at school. Girls sidled up to me all spring semester and told me how aggressive they’d heard Ben could be, and then an hour later they’d be flirting with him outside my next class. Other girls asked me bitchy questions I never could answer: “Did you say anything?” “Did you poke him in the eyes?” And Ben and his friends did everything from calling me a slut to ignoring me to pointedly giving party invitations to everyone in a group but me.

“Back to the middle of the crowd,” I told Debbie resignedly, but we knew it was worse than that. Nobody really wanted to be friends with a rape victim. They wanted it to fade away, or they wanted me to be strong. She wanted to fix it for me. Those seemed to be my only options, so I let it slide until the summer before senior year, the second full summer we spent at Lake Tapawingo. My parents finally sat me down for a talk, prodded by my uncle, the doctor, the caretaker of our whole family, who was surprised by my new meekness. Once I started, I was amazed how quickly the words flowed. After that summer, I rediscovered the courage to go out in groups again, generally of girls only. When I felt lonely, I pulled out the latest chair and talked to it. By the next Thanksgiving, when I had been devirginised a little more than a year and after I had ruined a couple of chairs trying to dislodge him, Ben stopped dominating the chair.

Yet I still couldn’t bring myself to say, “Ben raped me.” In fact, I’ve never said it, though I did tell my parents, “I was raped.” I don’t know whether I’m afraid of people challenging me or of my mind doubting me. Maybe the passive voice is easier because then Ben disappears from my language. Then he can’t remind me anymore of the changefulness of words. There’s another three-word phrase I prefer: “He didn’t ask.” That lets me off the hook. I haven’t exactly been victimized then. It’s merely a slip of the tongue (or some other part); a failure of communication. It could be my fault, in this second version; I could have changed things—I just didn’t. It wasn’t something that was done to me over which I had no control.

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