Secrets in the Attic

  "It has character," my father said. He saw the house as masculine, aging but distinguished with wisdom in its cladding and its walls, as if it had absorbed the most important things about the world and on quiet nights would transfer it all to us while we slept. After all, it stood boldly on a small knoll just off the road, making it seem as if whoever lived in it lorded over all around it. My father even liked the cracked macadam driveway, because the lines were "like character lines in an old man's face." He vowed he would never pave it over.

  My mother saw the house as feminine, full of charm, the eclectic Queen Anne architecture reminding her of a woman who flitted from one style or fashion to another, wanting a little of this and a little of that. To her, the shutters over the panel windows resembled "eyebrows," and she swore she had seen the windows "wink" at her when the sun slipped behind the heavy leafed oak, hickory, and maple trees that bordered the property on three sides. She fell instantly in love with the sitting room, because it was distinguished from the living room. She said it was a place where the various mistresses of the house had come to rock and crochet while their friends visited to weave gossip through one another's heads.

  "Think of all the wonderful chatter these walls heard," she told me. The way she said it gave me the feeling she believed she could somehow hear the whispered echoes of the tittle-tattle late at night. She vowed to make it so feminine that my father or my brother would feel he had stepped into the woman's powder room if either dared enter.

  My mother saw all sorts of possibilities in renovations, despite having no background in decorating, design, or architecture. That didn't discourage her from going full throttle at new window treatments, flooring, and wallpaper. I always admired her for her self- confidence and courage. I hoped I would take after her. She was a registered nurse, specializing in cardiac care before most hospitals had specific cardiac care units. She never had a problem getting a job.

  My mother took great pains to effect our move to Sandburg in time for me to get set up in a new school. It was one of the conditions she threw down like a gauntlet when my father told her about his opportunity in a growing law firm in the Catskills resort area and his desire for us to pull up anchor and settle in Sandburg because the real estate was so reasonable. Disrupting her and their social and professional lives was one thing, but tinkering with my education was another. She didn't have to worry about Jesse, since he was on his way, but she was very concerned about me.

  My father anticipated her reaction. It was his way to pretend he didn't think of those things and then quickly acquiesce. That was a game they played with each other, a sort of loving sparring over everything from a new appliance to clothes to a new automobile to visiting family. My mother presented her arguments, and he put up his token resistance, only later to reveal that he had already taken steps to do just what she wanted. He knew her that well, and I think she knew him, too, but was smart enough to permit him the facade of having made the decision.

  None of this was really deception or conniving. It was all done out of a deep love and respect that they had for each other. I was aware of it but not as appreciative of it as Karen was when she observed them and contrasted them with her own parents. My parents were affectionate, always ending an argument or a spirited discussion with a kiss to reassure *each other and, if Jesse or I were there, to reassure us that all was well.

  "I wish I were your sister," Karen told me more than once. "I wish your parents were mine "

  In the early days of our relationship, I would say, "So do I," even though I really would rather have her as a friend. Sisters get compared too much, and I didn't think I matched up to her in looks. To me, my eyes were too far apart, my nose was too large, and my lips were a little crooked. Of course, my mother thought I was just a nutty teenager when I

  complained.

  "You're as cute as a button," she would tell me.

  Karen was the sort of girl who was as cute as a button until she was fourteen or fifteen and then suddenly began to blossom into a beautiful young woman, her body obediently following the commands of our sex seemingly overnight. Her jeans became tighter around her rear, and her bosom filled out, became rounder. I will always remember that afternoon at school just before the Thanksgiving holidays when she slowed down as she passed me in the hallway to whisper, "Guess what I noticed this morning?"

  "What?" I asked. We both continued to walk. I smiled to myself but kept my eyes fixed ahead of me. We passed words between us the way good relay racers passed the baton.

  "My cleavage. I have a distinctly deeper cleavage," she said, and sped up.

  I remember feeling lighter instantly. It was as if I were filling with helium and about to rise to the ceiling. She walked on ahead of me, her head slightly down, but I hesitated to catch up, because I didn't know what to say.

  Congratulations? That's nice?

  Or lucky you? When would I see more of a distinctly deeper cleavage, if ever?

  I didn't want to sound envious, even though that was exactly what I was. Just recently we had been talking more about our bodies and our looks. I was terrified of fading into the background like someone in the chorus while Karen moved downstage and became the star spotlighted in every boy's eyes. It was already happening as far as I was concerned.

  She turned into our classroom, paused, and smiled back at me, drawing her shoulders toward each other to flash that cleavage. Some of the senior boys noticed and popped their eyes.

  "Venez, mon animal de compagnie," she called to me, which meant, "Come, my pet."

  We were both taking French as our language elective. It all came much easier to her than it did to me. In those days, the public schools still offered language study and we could choose between Spanish and French. It was, in fact, a requirement for graduation. Jesse had taken French and could read it well, and whenever he was home, he practiced with Karen, the two of them speaking so quickly I felt like a foreigner. Eventually, the schools dropped the requirement and cut back on their language teachers to trim budgets when we discovered that everyone in the world, even the French, wanted to learn English, so we didn't have to bother. At least, that's what my father says.

  "Bonjour, mon jolie," Karen would say every morning when we greeted each other on the school bus.

  "Bonjour, Mademoiselle Amerique," I would respond, which meant, "Good morning, Miss America."

  The others riding the bus would think us mad because of how we giggled afterward or how we strutted like peacocks down the aisle to exit, practicing some new French phrase. Wherever we were, we performed a duet.

  Right from the beginning, Karen and I gravitated to each other like two birds of a feather uncomfortable with the variety of flocks gathering in our school and community. I noticed rather quickly that she wasn't a favorite among the girls at school. That puzzled me, because she seemed perfect to me. Certainly, no one appreciated her as much as I did. She had some acquaintances here and there but no close heart-to-heart relationships, the sort that made some pairs of girls look like conjoined twins, laughing at the same things, hating the same things and people, and falling in love with the same boy from week to week, depending, as Karen would say, "on the phase of the moon." We were almost like that, but there was always something different about us, and as Karen was fond of saying,

  "Vive la difference."

  I guess we were both a little weird, leaning just enough toward the unexpected and unusual for our peers to distrust us. It was important for us to be original. Karen came up with the idea of our being two parts of the same person.

  "What we'll do is share things in ways other girls would never think of sharing," she told me.

  "Like what?"

  "Like earrings, for example. Here," she said, taking off one of hers. "You wear this one on your right ear. I'll wear this one on my left."

  It seemed amusing to do, but no one really noticed, so she came up with sharing shoes, since we had the same size. I'd wear her left shoe, and she'd wear my left shoe. We
traded every morning on the bus. That caught everyone's attention, and when we were asked about it, Karen would say, "We are becoming spiritual sisters, two bodies, one heart."

  There were lots of puzzled expressions punctuated with "Huh?" or "What?" and then the shaking of heads.

  Every other day, Karen would come up with a new idea to illustrate what she was telling them. We shared the tops and bottoms of skirt-and-blouse outfits, socks, halves of sandwiches, anything, in fact, that we could divide in two. We even practiced finishing each other's answers in class. I'd start, stop, and look at her and if she winked, I would smile, and she would deliver the remaining part of the response. Some of our teachers were annoyed, but most thought it was amusing. They didn't take our antics half as seriously as our fellow students.

  "Maybe these two will start a new fad," Mrs. Cohen remarked in math class one day, when we came to school with her right eye made up and my left and everyone was making fun of us.

  Of course, I felt everyone should be more tolerant about our being different, especially in relation to me. I was insecure about myself, still trapped in that place between unisex, even boyishness, and emerging femininity. My menarche came late. I was like a runner who had missed the sound of the starting gun and had to run harder to catch up to the pack. I would stay up at night waiting for the girl in me to emerge, almost like a creature hovering under my skin. I willed it. Closing my eyes, I would chant, "Grow a bigger bosom. Lose all the baby fat. Soften and get more curvy." In my eyes, I wasn't enough of a woman yet but certainly no longer just a girl. What was I? When would I know it, feel it as confidently as Karen did?

  I was actually envious of the girls Karen despised, because they seemed so secure about who they were.

  I did my best to keep that from her. She would have none of their world and quickly picked up on the French phrase petite bourgeoise, which meant a petty woman belonging to the middle class, the middle class being something undesirable.

  She wouldn't gossip and giggle or betray someone's confidence. She wouldn't agree with a group condemnation of another girl just to be one of the girls. She never shared her lipstick or admitted to a crush on any boy, at least to anyone else but me. Consequently, she wasn't invited to parties or group dates for movies and pizza. So it was just natural for us to pal around together, and I wasn't invited to most of these things, either.

  "Don't worry about it," Karen would tell me before I could utter a complaint or regret about our social isolation. "You're known more by the enemies you make than the friends you keep. The truth is, they all envy us. They wish they were half as creative and had half as much fun. They're eating their hearts out with jealousy."

  Were they? I wondered. In my mind, it was certainly true that Karen was growing more and more beautiful by the hour, and she was bright and funny, but did any of the other girls really want to be her, to trade places with her, to have her life?

  Karen's real father had suffered a massive heart attack and died in his early thirties and had left her and her mother with insufficient life insurance and income. Unlike my mother, her mother had not attended college. She had worked as a secretary for a lumber company, where she had met Karen's father, Dave Stoker. He was working at building his own construction company, but at the time, he was a contracted laborer and didn't even have a regular job. He never put away enough money or built enough of a reputation to realize his goal. Karen was only ten at the time of his death. For two years afterward, her mother and she struggled with their finances. Finally, her mother took a job working in Pearson's Pharmacy and a year later married Harry Pearson, Aaron Pearson's son, who had graduated from Fordham University as a pharmacist and had taken over his father's drugstore after his father died.

  Karen told me, "All the ducks quacked and quacked in a line, because my mother was almost seven years older than Harry. They all thought she plotted and planned to trap him. In fact, his mother went into a deep depression that was like quicksand. She never pulled herself out of it and died two years later from a stroke. Everyone blamed my mother. Even Harry blamed her."

  "How could he do that?" I asked.

  "Simple," she replied. "He decided maybe the gossips were right. She was a witch at heart, and she had put a spell over him."

  "You don't really mean that. A witch?"

  "Yes, I do. You know why, too," she reminded me. She paused to swallow the stone of sorrow caught in her throat and then added, "He blamed her for everything unpleasant in his life, especially me. Right from the beginning, I told him I was on his mother's side and didn't think he should marry my mother. I didn't say it with her present, but I said it, and he knew it, knew I would never accept him as a father, no matter how hard he tried!'

  Karen had refused to permit him to adopt her, so her name remained Karen Stoker, even though her mother's name had become Darlene Pearson. If a teacher or anyone else made a mistake and called her, Karen Pearson, she would immediately correct him or her with enough vigor to cause them to say, "Well, excuse me for living," or something similar.

  "Some people should be excused for living!" Karen said.

  I agreed. We most always agreed. We had come to that comfortable place where we could drop all our self-defenses and let our souls stand naked without fear or embarrassment. We teased each other, but we never insulted each other, and if we stumbled and did something that upset each other, we usually blathered apology after apology until the other would cry for mercy. At least, that was the way we were before our world turned topsy-turvy.

  The journey that would take us there began with the simplest of gestures and smiles when we were in the same places, be they classrooms, the lunchroom, hallways, or the streets of Sandburg. We would both hear something or see something and then look at each other and shrug, smile, swing our eyes, or simply stare blankly, which made a statement, too.

  It was truly as if we were prodding each other's inner self to see where the similarities and sympathies lay. We needed to know how alike we were and how much of it we would care to admit to each other. Trust came to us through simple ways then. We laughed in chorus, echoed each other's wishful thinking, and mirrored each other's feelings.

  I knew that boys were always suspicious of Karen. I also knew most of them harbored a secret crush on her as well but were afraid to admit it, because she would make them feel so inferior if they approached her at school. They would be wounded in their male egos, perhaps beyond repair. I thought that to compensate, they made up stories about her promiscuity, this one claiming that and another claiming something more. There was always some undertone of gossip running like a sewer under our feet.

  After school one day only a few months after I had arrived, Alice Bucci took me into the boys' room when no one else was around to show me some of the dirty things boys had written about Karen on the walls of the stalls. Her brother was one of the authors.

  "They're all lies," I told her immediately. I tried to hide how shocked I was at the descriptions and claims.

  "How do you know? You haven't been here long enough, and you don't live with her," she countered. "Lots of people do lots of things secretly. Even their parents don't know. You'd better dump her before you get a reputation, too."

  Everyone was always trying to get me to stop being Karen's friend.

  "As long as you're with her, you're nobody," Alice told me.

  "I'd rather be nobody with Karen than somebody with you," I replied.

  "Suit yourself," she said, and reported our conversation to the others.

  "Zipporah Nobody," they labeled me, and then pretended I was invisible by walking into me.

  Ironically, that would all change. I would wake up one morning and find myself the most sought-after girl in school.

  "Tell me about her," they would plead.

  But that wouldn't happen until the sleepy hamlet was jerked awake to face the most startling and shocking scandal in its modern history. Things like this happened only outside the walls of the idyllic community, only to
urban people. It was like living on an island. Why, in our little town in the early sixties, even divorce was a rarity. Adultery was known only through whispers. The worst things teenagers did were still called pranks. A psychiatrist was as rare as an albino. Schools had guidance counselors mainly involved with scheduling classes and suggesting colleges rather than psychological counseling.

  People didn't lock their front doors or their cars. Anyone who tried to make a living owning a home security company was on the verge of bankruptcy. Town policemen often held second jobs. Sophisticated detectives came only from the state. There were no radar traps. We could walk about unafraid on dark streets at night. Kids my age still hitchhiked and took rides with strangers. Smiles and invitations were still largely innocent and true.

  When I tell my grandchildren today about that world, they think I'm fantasizing.

  Maybe I am.

  Maybe that's why we got into so much trouble. We were living in a fantasy and never really understood that we were.

  2 A Minute Lost

  Karen and I and the other kids in Sandburg went to high school on the bus unless we had a friend with a license and a car or unless my parents took us. Karen's stepfather never seemed to be able to do it, and her mother either never volunteered or Karen never wanted her to drive her.

  Where we had lived before, I could walk to school. Riding a bus was new to me, but after the novelty wore off, I wasn't crazy about it. Karen didn't mind riding the bus, even though we had the noisy junior high kids riding along with us to be dropped off after we were. Their building was in a different town within the school district, and ours was the next stop after Sand- burg. The ride from the center of Sandburg took us all of twenty odd minutes, but it always seemed much longer to me.

  "Don't think of it as a bus," Karen told me when I complained. "Consider it our personal limousine. The bus driver is our chauffeur, and we live in Paris."

  When she boarded the bus, she would look at Mr. Tooey, the sixty-year-old baldheaded driver, and say, "Bonjour, Pierre." Mr. Tooey would just shake his head.