Gathering Clouds

  Why were we always trying to win the love and respect of our parents?? I wondered, and still do. Shouldn’t that be given to us at birth? They decided to bring us into this world. They had an obligation to give us all the love they could. We shouldn’t have to earn it.

  And most important of all, I thought, they shouldn’t try to turn us into younger and smaller versions of them.

  We had a right to be ourselves.

  I was more determined about that than Victoria was and of course, years late, when I got into trouble, Mother would remind me.

  “Independence and self-confidence is worthless, a waste if it’s misdirected, Megan. A horse can break out of the pack and go off on his or her own direction, but the key word there is direction, Megan. Just flaring out, being headstrong and wild for its own sake, will always have one result, the same result, disaster.

  “You know what life teaches you, Megan,” she added. Her voice was softer, full of concern, so much so that I perked up to really listen. “It teaches you that you don’t own yourself and your destiny.

  “You own precious little of yourself, actually.”

  “Who owns it then?” I asked, amazed that she would admit to such a lack of control.

  “Everyone whose love and respect you need to survive. That’s the coin, the payment, the cost for it.”

  Now that I think about what I had done, I realize I tossed away that love and respect almost as frivolously as I would toss away a fresh corsage after a disappointing date.

  My ballerina stopped dancing.

  My music box was silent.

  In the shadows, believing he was unseen, my father wept for the lost melody.

  How I cried then.

  How I cried soon after, too.

  TWO

  I was jealous of all my girlfriends who had sisters, especially the ones who had older sisters, but I also coveted the relationships some of them had with younger sisters who obviously idolized them. Of course, everyone complained about her sister. It was expected or almost required. Older sisters treated them as if they were much younger and generally an annoyance. Younger sisters were a bother. You had to worry they would tell your parents about things you did that you didn’t want your parents to know. But whether it was with an older sister or a younger one, some sort of compromise, truce, came out of the strength of their loving relationships, for despite whatever airs they put on, whatever dramatic proclamations they made about disowning them, the truth was loved their sisters very much. Someday, in fact, when they were much older, they would even be closer. In the end there was nothing more important and more binding than family.

  Not true for me and Victoria, I sadly have to say.

  Any other sister would have waited up to hear about her older sister’s first big date, for example. It was the first time my parents let me go out at night alone with a boy who was old enough to drive his own car. Life for a teenage girl was still quite different for me in the world in which we lived. We were what some would call “Old South.” Doing anything remotely disgraceful was almost as serious as committing murder, for our family names practically stretched back to prehistory. I didn’t know anyone who didn’t have a famous ancestor or two. We were brought up thinking our misconduct could reverberate through graveyards and stir bones.

  Victoria and I attended a private school ever since preschool. My mother had been sent to a charm school every summer after she was twelve and on to a preparatory school. She wasn’t a debutante, as such, but she was expected to be as prepared for society as though she were.

  All of our friends were people of our class and status. I should say my friends, because Victoria had so few and so far between, it was almost as if she didn’t have any while she was growing up. The friends she did make were so like her, I avoided them. Socially, they were all classified as losers, which made it embarrassing for me. I knew my friends thought Victoria was a loser. They would often come right out saying things like “Too bad you have her as a sister.”

  I wanted to defend her, but I didn’t. I knew defending her would not sound sincere in the first place, and second, could only lose me friends. It was best to nod or change the subject and pretend she didn’t even exist. She rarely spoke to me at school anyway. She hated the girl with whom I associated, and had only negative and nasty comments to make about each. In her mind they all had peanut butter for brains and giggled too much. None of them said anything worth hearing. She said, “Your friends are merely consumers with lots of discretionary income,” whatever that meant. She was always putting things in financial or business terms, mostly, I thought, to show off for Daddy.

  Still, I couldn’t believe in my heart of hearts that she didn’t wish she could be me, at least when it came to attracting the attention of boys. Sometimes, I would tease her and tell her this boy or that had a crush on her. I saw the flicker of hope in her eyes before she snuffed it out with her skepticism.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t wish Bobby Saks liked you, Victoria,” I would say, or “I don’t believe you never fantasize you’re with Brody Montgomery. I catch the way you glance at him from time to time.”

  “Believe whatever you want. I couldn’t care less,” she would say, but I felt I had nicked her steely skin and run a brush over her lonely heart. When she went to sleep at night, she closed her eyes and fantasized just as I did. She would never confess it to me, but she did. She would rake away the numbers and balance sheet columns and find the softness of her own beating heart.

  One day I really got to her when I told her she reminded me of the fable of “The Fox and the Grapes.”

  “You don’t have any boys interested in you, so you belittle and mock my boyfriends. You’re just like the fox who couldn’t reach the grapes and said they were sour anyway.”

  Usually, she had a very quick comeback, but this time she paused, and I saw the way her eyes shifted away.

  Bull’s-eye, I thought.

  The funny thing was when she walked away. I didn’t feel so great. I wasn’t as satisfied as I imagined I would be. It made me even angrier. I couldn’t win no matter what. If I argued with her and she enjoyed snapping back at me and didn’t surrender, I felt bad, and when I got her, slipped in under her fortress walls and pinched her soft places, I didn’t feel any victory. I felt like I had merely beaten someone who was already suffering defeat, and I went through a terrible period of remorse, feeling sorrier for her than I did for myself.

  How I wished we could be friends, even more than we could be sisters, but we were too unalike to be friends, and as her sister I was unable to give her what she wanted and sje was unable to take it away from me, Daddy’s love. What sustained her, what kept her strong, was her unwavering hope that someday she would take it from me. It was like living with an enemy in your house, an enemy you knew but refused to admit existed. I did all I could to make her happy. I tried not to make a big show of the gifts and words of affection Daddy gave me in front of her. I tried to share my womanly happiness, permit her to participate at least vicariously in my romantic experiences, but she would accept nothing.

  I was sure she heard me come into the house after my first formal date. Both our bedrooms were upstairs, side by side, both equally as large, with our own bathrooms and windows giving us panoramic views of our estate property and the pond where we had rowboats. It was easy to feel like royalty in such a two-story mansion with its four tall columns holding up a front-gabled roof that made our house look more like a Greek temple than a home.

  My boyfriend at the time, Harrison McAlester, who lived in a house half the size on a far smaller tract of property, shook his head, smiled, and said, “You live in Gone with the Wind.”

  “You can’t live in a book or a movie, Harrison,” I told him.

  “You know what I mean . . . like the house in the movie. It’s my mother’s favorite movie. We see it about five times a year, if we see it once, and this house you live in, Megan, wow. You are richer than I thought.”

  “Not m
e, my parents,” I told him.

  “Same thing,” he said. “Someday most of this, if not all of it, will be yours, won’t it?”

  “Not if my sister Victoria has anything to say about it, and she will. Besides, I don’t want to stay here. I want to go places, travel, live in a big city where there are theaters and parks and exciting things to do. If this was all left to me, I’d probably sell it,” I told him.

  He was seventeen and I was fourteen, closing on fifteen. He was going to be a lawyer like his father and return to work in his father’s firm. When he told me about his plans, I felt like he was placed in a train that traveled on a straight track with no deviations, ever. He would go from point A to point B and then to point C before returning and there was nothing more to say about it.

  He should be taking Victoria out, I thought. They have more in common, but he thought I was pretty and he wanted to be seen with me even though he didn’t approve of my ambitions. I knew I wasn’t the sort of girl he would bring home to his parents one day, wearing her on his arm like some booty won in battle and parading her about for the nods of approval and parental stamps of Good Housekeeping. Oh, no, I was the wild girl, the dangerous girl, the one who could bust into laughter at the most unexpected times, the one who would accept a dare or create one, the one who was so unpredictable neither he nor any boy, for that matter, could relax in the soft, cushiony confidence of their emerging manhood wearing the smile that said, “I’ve got her under my control.” No way, not Megan Hudson.

  Despite all that, the boys who saw him walk into the decorated school gymnasium with me for the annual dance were envious. I could see them thinking that surely he would have a memorable night. Most of them regretted not having had the courage to ask me to the dance before he did. It was written on their faces, revealed in their wry smiles and, “How’s it going, Harrison?”

  The truth was I was trembling. I knew what promises and what expectations I had been transmitting to Harrison all the previous two weeks. “Just ask me out,” I practically said, “and you won’t be disappointed.”

  Already at this point in my life, I had accepted the popular proposition most teenage girls had accepted, maybe since the Middle Ages, namely that there were two kinds of girls, really: the ones who guarded their virginity and believed it was something to surrender only to the one soul mate, and those who saw it as a distraction better to get rid of as soon possible so they could stop worrying about it and ruining their good times.

  Besides, why was it that boys not only had no inhibitions or guilt about it, but considered it a failure to enter marriage a virgin while girls were supposed to make their way through the jungle of romance, courting, crushes, and passion like saints and angels?

  To be sure, I had girlfriends who still considered it not only dangerous but sinful to permit a boy to touch them under their clothes. In our girls’ bathroom, which was really the classroom of reality as far as most of us were concerned, Tamara Ford gave us the benefit of her mother-daughter intimate talks to tell us, “When you let a boy touch your naked breasts and stiffened nipples or let him put his hand between your legs, you are turning over the key for him to unlock your precious treasure.”

  Precious treasure!

  Most of us laughed at her and teased her to death after that, following her in the hallways and calling out questions like, “How’s your precious treasure this morning, Tamara? Anyone get to your precious treasure yet? Have you read Treasure Island lately?”

  Soon, come of the boys picked up on it and she was devastated. She would eventually transfer out of our school and attend a parochial school. I was worried her mother would tell mine that I was part of the group of girls drumming her daughter out, but if she did, my mother never let on or made any reference to it. I was sure she would have seen the retreat as some sort of weakness, anyway, and my mother hated the scent of weakness, much less the sight of it.

  I wasn’t Harrison McAlester’s first conquest. He had dated or been on a few secret rendezvous with girls from the public school, because the son of a client his father defended in a lawsuit brought him around and introduced him to the girls who would go all the way. The story was so well known in our school, it could have been painted on the walls. I think now that I pursued Harrison because I knew about his sexual prowess and exploits. I had made up my mind to get the virginity issue over with and to do so with someone who wouldn’t bungle his way through it and make me regret it.

  We were having a good time at the dance so when he suggested we leave a good hour and a half before it was to be ended, there was little doubt in my mind what he intended. For one moment I had the last chance to retreat, to say, “No, I don’t think that would be right or proper.” I had my chance to be Tamara Ford and lock away my precious treasure, but my heart was racing and had already taken me mentally past the point of no return. I had visions of myself in an astronaut’s uniform preparing to board a rocket ship.

  There some girlfriends of mine who were willing to share their sexual experiences. One girl, Petra Loman, a girl we all called Pete, told me that when she did it, she thought she was having a heart attack.

  “There are cases like that, you know,” she claimed. “Few people ever find out about it because it’s so embarrassing for the family, but there was one family that tried to have the district attorney charge their daughter’s boyfriend with murder!”

  She swore she hear her parents discuss it. Her father was the editor of a large local newspaper.

  So making love not only promised untold excitement, but some danger, too.

  After we left the dance, Harrison revealed he had the use of his parents’ guesthouse. From the way he entered it and showed me to a bedroom, I knew it had been his love nest before, but that didn’t discourage or bother me. It made me feel safe. We had some bourbon disguised in Coke, but I really didn’t need it. I was beyond the point where I needed any special coaxing, but I was curious about every little move he made, every expression. He laid out a blanket of promises and vows of love and affection, an inflatable mattress pumped full of oaths and passion that I knew would deflate soon after we had lain upon it and it all had ended, just as it had with the girl he previously had brought here.

  I suppose many would say I jumped right into the water without first testing it.

  No boy had ever touched me under my clothes.

  No boy had ever seen any private part of me.

  No boy had kissed me below my neck or rubbed himself against me when he was excited.

  And I kept my eyes open throughout it all as if I was not a participant but an observer who didn’t want to miss a thing. My curiosity, excitement, fears, and small hesitations amused Harrison. He said I was the best girl he had ever made love to even though I had been a virgin.

  I only smiled. I didn’t make any exaggerated statements of love. The best I could do was say, “It was nice.”

  Nice?

  The word rattled around in his head and spun his eyes, but the unfortunate truth was I didn’t go off in a rocket ship. I didn’t feel like I would have a heart attack. I wasn’t even sure when it had ended.

  I was dying to tell someone, to talk about it, even to talk to Victoria about it.

  She was doing homework at nearly midnight on Saturday night when I stopped in her doorway.

  Any other sister in the universe would have looked up and asked, “How was the dance, your date?”

  Any other sister would beg to know the smallest details.

  Victoria glanced at me and then turned a page in her math text.

  “We didn’t stay until the end of the dance,” I said. I thought that might just tickle her curiosity.

  “I’m sure it was boring,” she offered.

  “It wasn’t. It was fun. The band was great. Harrison wanted to be alone with me. We went to his parents’ guesthouse.”

  She raised her gaze from the book and finally looked at me.

  “Mother and Father would be upset to know that,” she said.
It had the tone of a threat.

  “Why?” I said full of disappointment and anger now, “we only played a game of Parcheesi.”

  “I’ll bet,” she said and looked at her textbook again. I turned to go to my own room. “Who won?” she asked, not looking up.

  “Neither of us,” I said. “We stopped before it ended.”

  She looked at me again.

  And for a moment, maybe a split second, she looked like she was really interested now and wanted to know, but she snuffed out her own candle of curiosity and returned to her private darkness and I withdrew to mine.

  Mine wasn’t darkness exactly. I went to sleep that night thinking that maybe what the poets said about love and passion was true after all.

  Maybe if they weren’t hand in hand you couldn’t get into that rocket ship and feel like you were almost having a heart attack.

  Yes, I thought, perhaps I had learned a wonderful thing and I had not spent my precious treasure foolishly after all.

  I vowed I would never hand another boy my keys without love.

  THREE

  I had my share of boyfriends throughout my high school life. I went to two proms and many dances and on dates. I was as popular as anyone in my class and was even elected class president in my junior year. On a two-week European trip our school sponsored, I had my most passionate romance. It was with the young French guide Julian Lambert. He was twenty-five, but I didn’t surrender my precious treasure again. We went from France to Italy to Spain and then to London. There were twenty of us, fifteen girls and five boys. I was a senior by then and had done well enough in my schoolwork to satisfy my parents, although my mother never ceased to tell me she thought I was underachieving.

  She seemed finally to surrender it.

  “Maybe you’ll always be an underachiever when it comes to academics, Megan, but you seem wise enough in other ways to do well for yourself.”

  It was the best compliment she had ever given me and I was feeling good about myself by then. I knew I was very pretty. Most pretty girls pretend to be surprised when they’re told about their exceptional looks. They bat their eyelashes and bring on a blush and try to look humble when it’s pretty obvious they’re snobby and arrogant to the core of their bones. They act like they don’t even go to the bathroom.