Secrets in the Attic

  "How can that change from when you were young?"

  "Wouldn't we all like to know," she said. "Anyway, Zipporah, these hormonal changes that are taking place in your body and Karen's have emotional effects, too. You have feelings that you don't understand, feelings that even disturb you and can cause all sorts of reactions, headaches included. Don't you find yourself confused by your feelings?"

  I shook my head, but reluctantly. It was as if I were confessing to a failure.

  "You will," she said. "My guess is Karen already is. I know you spend a lot of time with each other. Does she bring up sexual things?"

  "No!" I said. What an embarrassing question to ask me. Of course, we had some conversations about it, but I didn't want to describe that to my mother.

  She smiled. She knew I wasn't telling the truth.

  "I'm sure you two talk about boys. Don't worry about that. It's nominal."

  "She doesn't like anyone at school, and neither do I," I said sharply, hoping that might end it, even though it didn't mean we refrained from talking about boys.

  "You will," she said, with that adult confidence I despised because I didn't yet have it. "Some boy will suddenly look . . . interesting. Maybe it will be in his smile or in his voice or just the way he walks. You'll find yourself vying for his attention, blushing when you least expect it, and hoping he sees you as special, too." She smiled at me. "Are you sure that hasn't happened yet?"

  "Yes, I'm sure. Why does all that have to, happen now, anyway?" I asked. "Maybe I'm different."

  "I hope not!" she said, laughing "Girls who are that different when it comes to boys are persona non grata."

  I had only a vague idea of what she meant. Back then, we were ages away from openly confronting homosexuality, especially in our small community. I had really heard about it only in reference to boys, anyway, who were derided as fairies, which made no sense to me, because fairies were magical.

  "Maybe it won't happen to me for a much, much longer time," I suggested, only because I was telling the truth. It really hadn't yet, and I was afraid it never would.

  "Not much longer," she said. "You're sculpturing," she added.

  "Huh?"

  "Your body is changing, Zipporah. We're not so unlike caterpillars and butterflies. You're emerging."

  Was I? Was I finally emerging? Maybe she could see more than I could because she was a trained nurse, I thought.

  "I've been watching Karen, and I can tell you she's becoming a beautiful young woman. Don't be disappointed if she suddenly pushes you aside or ignores you to spend more time with a boy. The same thing will happen to you, and you'll grow closer when you two can share that, but until then, she might be more secretive, more withdrawn. She's developing desire. When that happens to our daughters, we mothers can only hope we've given them enough common sense to protect themselves from getting into bad trouble."

  "You mean getting pregnant, don't you?"

  "I do. I don't want you to become the Ice Queen, but I do want you to think about the consequences of every action. Promise me you'll do that."

  "Mama, I don't even have a boyfriend!" I protested.

  "I told you, you will, and sooner than you think. You know," she continued, "that there are times of the month when a woman is more likely to get pregnant if she doesn't take precautions."

  "Yes, I know," I said. "We learned all about that in biology class."

  "There are things you just can't learn in a formal classroom setting, Zipporah. All this can happen so fast your head spins. A boy attracts your attention. You can't help wanting to be with him. You just naturally explore, push yourself toward your limits. Sometimes it all happens literally overnight."

  I sat back. Was she right? Would it all just happen one day as she said, unexpected, sudden, like a bolt of lightning? Is that what had happened to Karen, and because it happened just out of the blue, I didn't notice? Who could she be with or care about without my knowing?

  I thought back to my conversation with Alice Bucci in the boys' room when she took me in to see what had been written about Karen on the stalls. "You don't live with her," she had said. "Lots of people do lots of things secretly. Even their parents don't know."

  Didn't I have to admit that I had secret thoughts I had never shared with Karen? Why couldn't the same be true for her?

  "I hope Karen's mother has had a conversation like this with her," my mother said. "Has she?"

  What if she hadn't? I thought. Was she in danger? Did I dare ask?

  "I don't know."

  "I want you to feel that you can come to me with any questions, any problems, Zipporah, anytime, okay?"

  I nodded.

  "Your grandmother was not as forthcoming. We never had talks like this. She was old school, embarrassed by any references to sex or her own body. How she and her generation expected us to learn everything properly is a mystery. They simply had blind faith, which we know does not work. There have already been four teenage pregnancies in our township," she said, and my eyes nearly popped.

  "Four? In our school?"

  "I can't tell you any more about it than that. It's privileged medical information."

  "How can they keep it a secret?"

  "Some women don't show until their fourth or fifth month. I didn't show with you until almost my sixth. Unless you're a bad girl, you don't have to think about it, the symptoms, I mean. There are other problems, however, like sexually transmitted diseases. I don't want to make it all sound unpleasant. It's not, but it only takes a little carelessness to make it so. Understand?"

  "Yes," I said. I was still uncomfortable talking about it. I hadn't even been out on a formal date. I felt as if I were being inoculated against a disease that didn't exist.

  "Don't bury your head in the sand, Zipporah," she warned. "That's the way you get into trouble."

  "I'm not! I said I understand!"

  "Okay, okay." She thought a moment and then leaned toward me. "There's no chance Karen's already been with a boy like that, is there, Zipporah? No chance she's done something she now regrets, is there?"

  "No," I said, but not with enough confidence to satisfy myself, much less her.

  "All right. If you need anything, let me know," she said. I knew she meant if Karen needed anything.

  I nodded, and she smiled and rose.

  "I love my sitting room," she said, looking around. "It feels cozy, doesn't it?"

  "Yes."

  "We all need our special places," she said, running her hand over my hair. "You're going to be a pretty young woman. Don't you worry. They'll be taking numbers at the door just like at the bakery."

  "Oh, Mama," I said.

  She laughed and returned to the kitchen to prepare dinner. I ran upstairs to my room to think about everything she had told me. I was okay with it for myself, but she really put the worries in me when it came to Karen. I was the one who had the mother who was a nurse. I had an obligation to share my good fortune, I thought. Surely, she would appreciate it.

  And it would be a good way to get her to tell me what was bothering her and what secret things had happened.

  It was early enough for me to get on my bike, ride into town, see Karen, and come home before dinner. I was bursting with the need to tell her some of this, to warn her. I charged down the stairs.

  "I'll be back in a while," I called out, and before my mother could object, I was out the door.

  Karen and her mother had moved into Karen's stepfather's house soon after the wedding. She had told me how her stepfather's mother resented them so much she would keep herself in her own little apartment at the rear of the house and wouldn't take meals with them. She did practically nothing with them as a family.

  "We really didn't see much of a change after she had her stroke and died," Karen had told me. "It was as if she wasn't there before, anyway. Harry still hasn't gotten rid of all her things. My mother tells him to give them to the Angel View Thrift Store that sells stuff for charity. He says he will, but he hasn't. H
e hasn't done much with the apartment, either, even though he said he would fix it up and rent it out someday."

  The Pearson house was one of the few brickfronted homes in Sandburg. It had a pretty lawn with waist- high hedges and a sidewalk that curved up to the stone steps in front and the veranda. Druggists, it seemed, were only a few levels down from doctors when it came to making money. Pearson's Pharmacy was the only drugstore in the village, and people who lived in the outlying areas came to it rather than travel another five miles or so to another drugstore. They also sold toys, candy, and ice cream, but they didn't have as big a fountain as George's, and the ice cream was prepackaged and not nearly as good.

  Like me, Karen had her own room upstairs. From the way she talked, once she got home, if she didn't have any chores to do, she went to her room and remained there. Unlike me, she didn't spend much time with her mother and stepfather watching television or even just talking, and she had no brother or sister to talk to or write to. She was alone much more than I was or would ever be, I thought.

  Her mother had continued to work at the drugstore after she married Harry and was gone most of the day. Harry was the only pharmacist, so he had to be there almost all the time. They rarely had dinner together, because Harry always had to stay behind to close up or do inventory or prepare prescriptions for the morning. Because her mother waited for him, Karen usually ate by herself. Sometimes she even ate in her room. I felt sorry for her and wished Harry were more considerate.

  Karen told me he was strict about the hours the store opened and closed. If someone needed a prescription after seven p.m., he or she would have to travel twenty miles. Occasionally, Karen said, the doctors would plead with Harry to go back and prepare a prescription, but he was never happy about it and always made it clear he was doing someone a big favor. That surprised me, because in his drugstore, Mr. Pearson was always quite pleasant and seemingly concerned about the illnesses his customers had. At least to the public, he was a jovial man with a soft round face my mother said looked like a bowl of vanilla pudding with two plums for eyes, a walnut for a nose, and a banana for a mouth. He was stout, with all of his weight going to his upper torso. Karen revealed that his legs were bony and hairy.

  "They look like they had stopped growing years before the rest of him," she told me once after we had left the drugstore together.

  Later, in the attic, when I asked her why her mother had married him, she told me her mother had decided to choose security over romance:

  "Besides," she added, "my mother said she made love only in the dark so she could imagine him to be anyone she wanted."

  "Made love in the dark? Don't you have to see a little to know what you're doing?" I asked, and she laughed, thinking I was joking. I wasn't. Karen knew much more about it all than I did, but I didn't think that was because she had the same sort of conversations with her mother that I had with mine. "Then she didn't fall in love with him?"

  "No. When I asked her about that once, she said we couldn't afford it."

  "Huh? What a funny thing to say."

  "No, it wasn't," Karen said. Almost overnight, she had become so much older and more serious. "When you're younger and you don't have children or responsibilities, you can be carefree and adventurous. You can have twenty dollars in your pocket and elope and worry about everything else later. But my mother had me, a teenager, and she was barely making enough to give us food and shelter. We didn't have health insurance. We had nothing extra that was really important. Harry was a solution, so I don't blame her. I don't!"

  She was contradicting herself.

  She blamed her mother. She would always blame her mother for bringing Harry into their lives.

  I pedaled to her house in record time. After my discussion with my mother, I was driven to delve deeper into Karen's problems, and I was just dying to know whether or not she had fallen in love with a boy in our school without my knowing. Was she pining over him because he had rejected her? Was that why she was crying the other night?

  I dropped my bike on the Pearson lawn and hurried up the steps to ring the doorbell. I waited, but no one came to the door, so I went over to the livingroom window. I saw a small lamp lit by the sofa, but no one was there. I returned to the front door and rang again and waited, the disappointment dripping through me. Where was Karen? Like me, she had no after-school activities. She hadn't mentioned meeting anyone or going anywhere that day. We had come home together on the bus as usual, and she had left saying, "Talk to you later." Had she gone off to have some rendezvous with this mysterious boyfriend I was imagining?

  We spoke to each other on the phone at night, but not that often. She told me her stepfather wouldn't put in another phone line for her and forbade her to tie up their line for longer than two minutes. She said he would actually time it by calling the house periodically to check, and if she violated the rule, he would forbid her ever to use the phone, even for a minute, and would permit no incoming calls for her.

  Discouraged now, I turned and walked slowly back to my bike. Just as I picked it up, however, Karen's mother drove in. She rolled down her car window and called out to me.

  "Hi, Zipporah."

  "Hi," I said, and before she could continue into the garage, I asked, "Where's Karen?"

  "Karen? She should be home," she said. "Why? She didn't answer the door?"

  "No."

  "Just a moment," she said,

  She looked upset, parked, the car, and came out of the garage quickly.

  "She didn't tell me she had anything to do after school. Is she in detention or something like that?" she asked, the fury coming into her eyes in preparation.

  "No, Mrs. Pearson. We came home on the bus together."

  "You did? Oh. Well, let's see what's going on," she said, and went to the front door, dug the key out of her purse, and opened it.

  I wasn't sure what I should do but decided to put my bike down again and follow her.

  "Karen!" she called from the entryway. "Karen, are you here?"

  She looked back at me and smirked, but then we heard Karen's voice.

  "Yes, I'm here."

  "Well, what are you doing? Zipporah has been ringing the doorbell."

  "I didn't hear it," Karen said, but she didn't come down the stairs to greet me.

  "Well, do you want your friend to go up to see you or not?" her mother asked.

  "Not now," Karen said.

  Mrs. Pearson turned to me and shrugged.

  "You heard her. Sorry. You teenage girls are a different species these days, Zipporah. I can't keep up with the mood changes. Talk to her tomorrow."

  "Thanks, Mrs. Pearson," I said. I tried to get a glimpse of Karen, but she was already back in her room.

  "Say hello to your parents for me," Karen's mother called as I walked back to my bike. I turned and saw her smile and close the door.

  She was a pretty woman, who, despite being older than Mr. Pearson, looked younger.

  "Darlene Pearson is the sort of woman who will never look her age," my mother once told me. I could hear the underlying tone of jealousy. "She doesn't have to do anything but get up in the morning. Her skin will look like the skin of a teenager right into her sixties and seventies, and her hair will be thick and rich no matter what. The genetic pool," she added.

  "What's that?"

  "She inherited everything."

  "Everything but good luck," my father commented. He often would sit and look as if he was reading a brief or a book and suddenly raise his eyes and reveal he was listening closely to everything my mother had been saying. "Don't forget she lost her husband."

  "And don't forget she married a mama's boy with money," my mother countered. "She has him wrapped around her pinky by now, I'm sure."

  Just like that, they were off to play ping-pong with words and arguments.

  "How can that possibly compensate for the loss? She has a daughter without her real father." "She'll spend her way out of unhappiness." "Would you? Could you?"

  "
I am not Darlene Pearson."

  My father turned to me.

  "Your Honor, would you please instruct the witness to answer the question."

  "What?"

  "You're such an idiot, Michael," my mother told my father. He lowered his eyes to his reading.

  But I couldn't forget what she had said about Karen's mother. Every time I looked at her now, I looked at her more closely. Karen had her soft blue eyes and small nose. They both had perfectly shaped full lips. Karen's face was more angular, more like her father's, from the pictures of him I had seen. Both she and her mother had a similar shade of light brown hair. Her mother wore hers short, not quite to the bottoms of her ears. Karen, like me, had hair that reached her shoulders.

  Her mother was what women called a fullfigured woman with long enough legs to be a Rockette dancer at Radio City Music Hall. She didn't dance and was never in show business, but no one had any difficulty figuring out why Harry Pearson would walk over his mother to marry Karen's mother. Most men in the village envied him for that. I could see it in their eyes whenever Karen, her mother, and I were in the drugstore. They stood off to the side, watching and listening and smiling at one another, all probably thinking the same thing: Harry Pearson couldn't satisfy a woman like that, but I could.

  I looked back at the Pearson house and then up at the window I knew to be Karen's. I thought I saw her peering out at me between the curtains, but I couldn't be sure. There was too much of a glare.

  This wasn't like her at all, I thought. She probably did get involved with a boy. Who knows? Maybe he was upstairs with her right this moment. Maybe he had snuck in, and she didn't want her mother to know. All sorts of scenarios and

  explanations stampeded through my brain and bounced about all during my much slower ride home.

  I said nothing to my mother, whom I caught taking secret glances at me from time to time. I guess it was because I was unusually quiet at dinner. Mothers, I was told and now can confirm, have a special sensitivity when it comes to their children, because their children were once part of their bodies. It was always easier to hide my feelings from my father, and I imagined it was easier for Jesse as well.