Look At Me_ A Novel Part 1

Look at Me_ A Novel.

by Jennifer Egan.

In Memory D.E.E.

W.D.K.

We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.-ULYSSES, JAMES JOYCE

Part One

Double Life

Chapter One.

After the accident, I became less visible. I don't mean in the obvious sense that I went to fewer parties and retreated from general view. Or not just that. I mean that after the accident, I became more difficult to see.

In my memory, the accident has acquired a harsh, dazzling beauty: white sunlight, a slow loop through s.p.a.ce like being on the Tilt-A-Whirl (always a favorite of mine), feeling my body move faster than, and counter to, the vehicle containing it. Then a bright, splintering crack as I burst through the winds.h.i.+eld into the open air, b.l.o.o.d.y and frightened and uncomprehending.

The truth is that I don't remember anything. The accident happened at night during an August downpour on a deserted stretch of highway through corn and soybean fields, a few miles outside Rockford, Illinois, my hometown. I hit the brakes and my face collided with the winds.h.i.+eld, knocking me out instantly. Thus I was spared the adventure of my car veering off the tollway into a cornfield, rolling several times, bursting into flame and ultimately exploding. The air bags didn't inflate; I could sue, of course, but since I wasn't wearing my seatbelt, it's probably a good thing they didn't inflate, or I might have been decapitated, adding injury to insult, you might say. The shatterproof winds.h.i.+eld did indeed hold fast upon its impact with my head, so although I broke virtually every bone in my face, I have almost no visible scars.

I owe my life to what is known as a "Good Samaritan," someone who pulled me out of the flaming wreck so promptly that only my hair was burned, someone who laid me gently on the perimeter of the cornfield, called an ambulance, described my location with some precision and then, with a self-effacement that strikes me as perverse, not to mention un-American, chose to slink away anonymously rather than take credit for these sterling deeds. A pa.s.sing motorist in a hurry, that sort of thing.

The ambulance took me to Rockford Memorial Hospital, where I fell into the hands of one Dr. Hans Fabermann, reconstructive surgeon extraordinaire. When I emerged from unconsciousness fourteen hours later, it was Dr. Fabermann who sat beside me, an elderly man with a broad, muscular jaw and tufts of white hair in both ears, though most of this I didn't see that night-I could hardly see at all. Calmly Dr. Fabermann explained that I was lucky; I'd broken ribs, arm and leg, but had no internal injuries to speak of. My face was in the midst of what he called a "golden time," before the "grotesque swelling" would set in. If he operated immediately, he could get a jump on my "gross asymmetry"-namely, the disconnection of my cheekbones from my upper skull and of my lower jaw from my "midface." I had no idea where I was, or what had happened to me. My face was numb, I saw with slurry double vision and had an odd sensation around my mouth as if my upper and lower teeth were out of whack. I felt a hand on mine, and realized then that my sister, Grace, was at my bedside. I sensed the vibration of her terror, and it induced in me a familiar desire to calm her, Grace curled against me in bed during a thunderstorm, the smell of cedar, wet leaves.... It's fine, I wanted to say. It's a golden time.

"If we don't operate now, we'll have to wait five or six days for the swelling to go down," Dr. Fabermann said.

I tried to speak, to acquiesce, but no moving parts of my head would move. I produced one of those aerated gurgles made by movie characters expiring from war wounds. Then I closed my eyes. But apparently Dr. Fabermann understood, because he operated that night.

After twelve hours of surgery, during which eighty t.i.tanium screws were implanted in the crushed bones of my face to connect and hold them together; after I'd been sliced from ear to ear over the crown of my head so Dr. Fabermann could peel down the skin from my forehead and reattach my cheekbones to my upper skull; after incisions were made inside my mouth so that he could connect my lower and upper jaws; after eleven days during which my sister fluttered by my hospital bed like a squeamish angel while her husband, Frank Jones, whom I loathed and who loathed me, stayed home with my two nieces and nephew-I was discharged from the hospital.

I found myself at a strange crossroads. I had spent my youth awaiting the chance to bolt from Rockford, Illinois, and had done so the moment I was able. I'd visited rarely, to the chagrin of my parents and sister, and what visits I made were impetuous, cranky and short. In my real life, as I thought of it, I had actively concealed my connection to Rockford, telling people I was from Chicago, if I told even that. But much as I longed to return to New York after the accident, to pad barefoot on the fluffy white carpeting of my twenty-fifth floor apartment overlooking the East River, the fact that I lived alone made this impossible. My right leg and left arm were sheathed in plaster. My face was just entering the "angry healing phase": black bruises extending down to my chest, the whites of my eyes a monstrous red; a swollen, basketball-sized head with st.i.tches across the crown (an improvement over the staples they'd used initially). My head was partly shaved, and what hair remained was singed, rank smelling and falling out in bunches. Pain, mercifully, wasn't a problem; nerve damage had left me mostly numb, particularly from my eyes down, though I did have excruciating headaches. I wanted to stay near Dr. Fabermann, though he insisted, with cla.s.sic midwestern self-deprecation, that I would find his surgical equal, or superior, in New York. But New York was for the strong, and I was weak-so weak! I slept nearly all the time. It seemed fitting that I nurse my weakness in a place I had always a.s.sociated with the meek, the lame, and the useless.

And so, to the bewilderment of my friends and colleagues at home, to the pain of my sister, whose husband refused to have me under his roof (not that I could have borne it), she arranged for me to move into the home of an old friend of our parents', Mary Cunningham, who lived just east of the Rock River on Ridgewood Road, near the house where we grew up. My parents had long since moved to Arizona, where my father's lungs were slowly dissolving from emphysema, and where my mother had come to believe in the power of certain oddly shaped stones, which she arranged on his gasping chest at night while he slept. "Please let me come," my mother pleaded with me over the phone, having a.s.sembled healing pouches full of herbs and feathers and teeth. But no, I said, please. Stay with Dad. "I'll be fine," I told her, "Grace will take care of me," and even through my croaking stranger's voice I heard a resolve that was familiar to me-and no doubt to my mother. I would take care of myself. I always had.

Mrs. Cunningham had become an old woman since I knew her as the lady who used a broom to chase away neighborhood kids trying to scoop the billowing goldfish from her murky backyard pond. The fish, or their descendants, were still there, visible in flashes of gold-speckled white among a snarl of moss and lily pads. The house smelled of dust and dead flowers, the closets were full of old hats. The lives of Mrs. Cunningham's dead husband and her children who lived far away were still in that house, asleep in the cedar-filled attic, which is doubtless why she, an old woman with a b.u.m hip, was still living there, struggling up that flight of stairs when most of her widowed, bridge-playing friends had decamped long ago to spiffy apartments. She tucked me into bed in one of her daughters' rooms and seemed to enjoy a renaissance of second motherhood, bringing me tea and juice which I drank from a baby cup, slipping knitted booties on my feet and feeding me Gerber apricot puree, which I lapped down l.u.s.tily. She had the lawn boy carry the TV up to my room, and in the evenings would recline on the twin bed beside mine, her waxen, veiny calves exposed beneath the hem of her padded bathrobe. Together we watched the local news, where I learned that even in Rockford, drug gangs had come to rule the streets, and drive-by shootings were the norm.

"When I think what this town used to be," Mrs. Cunningham would mutter as she watched, alluding to the postwar years when she and her husband, Ralph, had chosen Rockford above all American cities as the ideal place to make their home. "The most prosperous community in the nation," some erstwhile pundit named Roger Babson had apparently anointed it; Mary Cunningham went so far as to heft a musty tome onto my bed and jab her bent, trembling finger at the very quotation. I sensed her bitterness, her disgust at the grave miscalculation that left her now, in her solitude, obliged by memory and experience to love a place she had come to despise.

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It was four weeks before I left the house to do anything more than herd my various limbs into Grace's car for visits to Dr. Fabermann and his a.s.sociate, Dr. Pine, who was tending to my broken bones. When he implanted a walking plug in my leg cast, I ventured outside for the very first time in zebra-striped sungla.s.ses Mary Cunningham had worn in the sixties, Mary herself at my side, to walk gingerly through my old neighborhood. I hadn't returned to this part of town since Grace had left for college, at which point my parents had bought a smaller place on a bit of land east of town, near the interstate, and a horse, Daffodil, whom my father rode until he was too short of breath.

By now it was late September; I had tracked the pa.s.sing days in the obsessive belief that if I measured the time, it wouldn't really be lost. We stepped through a warm breeze toward the house on Brownwood Drive where I had lain in bed for several thousand nights, staring into a cat's cradle of Elm trees that were slowly expiring from Dutch elm disease, where I'd listened to Supertramp alb.u.ms in a bas.e.m.e.nt with orange indoor-outdoor carpeting laid over the concrete, where I'd stood before a mirror in a prom dress, my mother plucking at its petals of rayon-and yet, for all that, a house I'd thought of hardly ever since I'd left. And there it was: flat, ranch-style, covered with yellow bricks that must have been pasted on from outside, a square of crisp green lawn tucked like a napkin under its chin. So indistinguishable was this house from tens of thousands of others in Rockford that I turned to Mary Cunningham and asked, "Are you sure this is it?"

She looked puzzled, then laughed, no doubt reminding herself that my vision was worse than hers at the moment, that I was doped up on painkillers.

And yet, as we were turning to go, I had what I guess was a memory: this house against a dawn sky as I jogged toward it from my best friend Ellen Metcalf's house, where I'd spent the night. The feeling of seeing it there-my house, with everything I knew inside it. The experience of that memory was like being hit, or kissed, unexpectedly. I blinked to recover from it.

The next week, I made my way on crutches to the Rock River, where a park and jogging path meandered along the water's eastern edge. I gazed hungrily at the path, longing to visit the rose garden and duck pond farther north along it, but knowing I didn't have the strength. Instead, I used a pay phone in the parking lot beside the YMCA to call my answering machine; Mrs. Cunningham's phones were all rotaries.

It had now been seven weeks since the accident, and the outgoing message I'd instructed my sister to leave on my machine explaining my plight while not revealing that I'd left my apartment-lest it get robbed, which would really have finished me-had provoked a rash of messages from worried friends that Grace had been dutifully collecting. But there were a couple she hadn't retrieved yet. One from Oscar, my booker, who yelled through a polyphony of ringing phones that seemed otherworldly to me now, "Just checking in, sweet. Call when you've regained the gift of speech." He'd been calling every day, my sister said. Oscar adored me, though it had been years since I'd earned my agency, Femme, any serious money.

The second call was from someone named Anthony Halliday, who identified himself as a private detective. Grace had taken two messages from him already. Having never spoken with a private detective before, I dialed his number out of curiosity.

"Anthony Halliday's office." A wobbly, almost childish female voice. Not a professional, I thought; someone filling in. "He's not here right now," she told me. "Can I take a message?"

I wasn't giving out Mary Cunningham's phone number, in part because she was a kind old woman, not my secretary, and because there was something perverse and incompatible in the notion of New York and its inhabitants storming the mausoleum of her house. "I'd rather call him," I said. "What's a good time?"

She hesitated. "There's no way he can call you?"

"Look," I said. "If he wants to reach-"

"He's, ah ... in the hospital," she said quickly.

I laughed-my first real laugh since the accident. It made my throat ache. "Tell him that makes two of us," I cackled. "Too bad we're not in the same hospital, we could just meet in the hallway."

She laughed uneasily. "I think I wasn't supposed to say that, about the hospital."

"There's no shame in hospitalization," I a.s.sured her heartily, "as long as it's not a mental hospital ..."

Dead silence. Anthony Halliday, a private detective with whom I'd never spoken, was in a mental hospital.

"Maybe next week?" she said timidly.

"I'll call next week."

But even as I began my halting journey back toward Mary Cunningham's, I felt the notion slip from my mind like those lists you make as you're falling asleep.

Grace visited that night, pulling a chair between the twin beds where Mary Cunningham and I were ensconced as usual, watching NYPD Blue. NYPD Blue. When a man was pummeled in a restroom, his face beaten b.l.o.o.d.y, Grace covered her eyes and begged me to change the channel. "You change it," I retorted. "I'm the invalid." When a man was pummeled in a restroom, his face beaten b.l.o.o.d.y, Grace covered her eyes and begged me to change the channel. "You change it," I retorted. "I'm the invalid."

"Sorry," she said, going sheepishly to the TV-apparently one of the last in the world to be controlled manually. "I shouldn't be the one crying."

"You're crying for both of us," I said.

"It just seems bizarre that you would come to Rockford without telling me," she fretted, flipping channels. She'd said this a dozen times, apparently in the belief that, had she but known I was on my way, I would have arrived without incident. And much as I disliked this line of questioning (or any line of questioning, for that matter), I vastly preferred it to the topic Grace didn't dare broach: What would I look like when all this was done? And what would become of me?

"I wanted to surprise you," I said.

"My, and you still don't remember what happened!" Mary Cunningham marveled. "Was it an animal in the road, dear, or were you feeling sleepy? Could you have dropped off at the wheel for a minute?"

"I don't remember. I don't remember," I said. For some reason, I covered my ears.

"Her memory's always been lousy," Grace said.

It was true-my memory was lousy, and Rockford was the place I remembered least. And yet the boredom and stasis of my present circ.u.mstances were driving me to retrospect in the desultory way that a person cooped up in an old house will eventually make her way to the attic and upend a few boxes. In moments, I found myself drenched in early childhood impressions of Rockford: a lush, sensuous world of sticky green lawns and violent thunderstorms, mountains of glittering snow in winter. In early adolescence, I'd done a school report on Rockford's industrial achievements, reading at the public library about a self-tying attachment for grain binders, a knitting machine that made seamless socks, the oil-lubricated "universal joint," whose purpose I've forgotten; the "side by side," a bookcase-and-desk combination; about lathes, reapers and their component parts. I remembered reading in a state of keen antic.i.p.ation, awaiting the moment when Rockford would burst forth in triumph, the envy of the industrial world. I sensed this glory approaching with the invention of cars, for eleven Rockford companies had designed them, and one, the Tarkington Motor Company, built a prototype that was warmly received at an auto show in Chicago in the twenties. But no-the investors backed out, the car was never produced, and with this failure, my excitement began to congeal into something heavier. There was to be no limelight; Rockford remained a city known for its drills, transmissions, joints, saws, watertight seals, adjustable door b.u.mpers, spark plugs, gaskets-"automobile sundries," as such products are known-and for its agricultural tools; in short, for dull, invisible things that no one in the world would ever know or care about.

After two days of reading, I had tottered from the library into the empty husk of "downtown," across the river from our house, nearly all of whose commerce had been leached away by malls far to the east of the river, out by the interstate. My mother beeped her horn from the parking lot across the street. But I held still for a minute, clutching my bookbag, letting the smallness and meagerness of this forgotten place pour in around me. Rockford, I now saw, was a city of losers, a place that had never come close to being famous for anything, despite the fact that again and again it had tried. A place revered among mechanics for its universal joint was not a place where I could remain. This was clear to me at age twelve: my first clear notion of myself. I was not not Rockford-I was its opposite, whatever that might be. I decided this while standing in front of the public library. Then I crossed the street and got in my mother's car. Rockford-I was its opposite, whatever that might be. I decided this while standing in front of the public library. Then I crossed the street and got in my mother's car.

Our father owned a wholesale electrical supply company; he was a man who could push through walls to the hidden circuitry behind, who braided wires between his fingers and made the lights turn on. As a child, I had ascribed magical powers to his work, and arrayed myself in necklaces he made me from bolts and washers and colored wire. But after the library, I began to imagine a perspective from which my father's life-and my mother's, too-were small, earnest, and futile, too deeply touched by this place where they both had spent their lives. I grew up waiting to leave. And Grace grew up cleaving to me, knowing that I would go and she would stay.

Now here I was, back in Rockford, fighting with my sister over who should change the TV channel, my head full of t.i.tanium bolts and screws invented here, for all I knew. I found this funny in a dark way, one of life's little ironies.

"The girls are dying to see you," Grace said, reviving our ongoing debate over my nieces. "Please let me bring them."

"They think think they want to see me," I said. they want to see me," I said.

"Charlotte, get over it," she said, and pressed my hand. "They love you so much!"

"Not yet."

It wasn't that I didn't want to see Allison and Pammy. In fact I hungered to snuff their mussed-up hair and feel them b.u.mp against me the way kids do without thinking. But to them, I was Glamorous Aunt Charlotte, the fas.h.i.+on model whom they sometimes found grinning, hand on hip, inside catalogues that arrived on their doorsteps unwanted (for that was the level I'd sunk to) or wandering through the background of a Tam-pax commercial. That was me hawking deodorant on the Coney Island Cyclone ("Now this. Is stress."); that was me in waders, wielding a fis.h.i.+ng rod and declaiming the merits of antifungal foot powder. That pixie-faced brunette sprawled atop a Buick as if she'd fallen from a tree? The one in gla.s.ses, blus.h.i.+ngly recounting the trauma of pa.s.sing gas during a board meeting? Urging fortified granola on her freckled son? Those were me, too. It was far short of the transcendent existence I once had envisioned. But to my young nieces, I embodied a mythical ascension.

I would let them believe in me in peace, I told myself, unenc.u.mbered by my present grotesqueness. I was ashamed to be seen.

One afternoon, I walked to the Cedar Bluffs Cemetery and parked my rear end on a gravestone that was as near as I could recall to the spot where I used to sit with Ellen Metcalf. I lit up a Merit, my first since the accident, thus flouting Dr. Fabermann's warning that smoking impeded the healing of bone. Before dinner and after, too, sometimes, Ellen and I would lean against these stones among the legions of dead Swedes, Olsens, Lofgrens, La.r.s.ens, Swensons like myself, and smoke Kools, which we believed were a cure for the summer heat. We talked about losing our virginity-not losing it, though, with all the haplessness that word implied, but yielding it up in a blaze of ecstasy that would leave us permanently altered.

I tried to recall the sound of Ellen's voice. I couldn't, as if she'd been an imaginary friend, a projected figment of myself. Once, we had walked from East High School all the way to the pharmacy beside the Piggly Wiggly, then stopped before the section of plastic children's toys. Only to find, as we looked at each other inquiringly, that neither one of us knew what we were doing there; we had each been following the other.

After my next doctor's visit, I asked Grace to drive past East High School. A rather grand building, it seemed to me now, large and mustard-tinted, hundreds of canted windows juggling the sunlight. As I stood before its broad, empty steps, I had another jab of memory: seeing Ellen Metcalf for the first time outside that school, an olive-skinned girl with long black hair. Watching her there, exotic, alone, and wanting to become her-the feeling sprang from my fingers to my throat. Later, Ellen said, of spotting me that day, "I could tell you didn't belong here." The highest compliment.

Her father owned a large fertilizer business, and her mother was a quasi-invalid, cloistered in a darkened master bedroom, consumed by some malady whose exact nature no one seemed sure of. They lived in a copious house just a few blocks from my own much smaller one. Ellen existed in a state of lonely hauteur, like the last surviving member of a royal family; her brother, Moose, had departed the previous year for the University of Michigan. I knew about Moose. He was one of those high school boys whose athletic and romantic feats inspire the teenage equivalent of epic poetry, recited longingly in their absence. I had encountered him once, briefly, thrillingly, on a summer afternoon when I was practicing my golf swing on our front lawn and nicked a sprinkler head, sending a geyser of water into a red Mustang convertible that happened to be driving past. The driver got out, shaking water from his longish hair: an older boy, tanned in a spotless white T-s.h.i.+rt, ambling over the gra.s.s like a person who had never hurried in his life. As I stammered my apologies, struggling to tamp the foaming crescendo of water with my foot, he scanned our yard and said, "Handle's where, behind that hedge? Turn it off and I'll take a look."

By the time I'd returned from that errand, he had removed the sprinkler head and was rattling its rusted parts in his hand like dice. His absorption allowed me to study him; a charmed, confident boy whose appeal was compounded, somehow, by the Neanderthal cast of his head. Twenty minutes later he had repaired the sprinkler, sauntered back to his car and driven away with a wave, and it was only then that an older girl from across the street stampeded over to tell me, breathlessly, in whose rarefied presence I had found myself.

But Moose was gone. Ellen was alone, marooned in a place that felt as bankrupt to her as it did to me. Everything good was gone from this crummy city, this home of reapers and ball bearings, and there was nothing for it but to plunder what few excitements remained. We talked about our l.u.s.t-where exactly it resided within us; our stomachs, we thought, though Ellen said she felt it, too, in the back of her mouth.

By October, Dr. Pine had removed the last vestiges of plaster from my body. As Mary Cunningham raked her yard, I trailed behind her with a tube of green poison whose proboscis I shoved into the eye of each weed I spied, and pumped. Rockford was in the grip of a mania for jack-o'-lantern leaf bags; at least one grinning orange sack squatted on every lawn, fat with leaves. Stalking weeds, I tried to recall each one of my s.e.xual quarries that soph.o.m.ore year with Ellen. Jeff Heinz: a shy and statuesque football-playing senior, the sheer grace of whose movements set him apart from the sludge of players on the field. Jeff and I were in chemistry together, and I managed to insinuate my way into the role of lab partner, standing close, brus.h.i.+ng his wrist as we puzzled over beakers full of colored liquid. Nothing. Meanwhile, Ellen had a boyfriend, Michael Ippen, with whom she expected to do it shortly. So I relinquished Jeff Heinz, who proceeded on to Brown University (an unusual step for a Rockford boy), whence filtered back the electrifying news, a year or two later, that he was a fairy. I would have loved to snicker over that one with Ellen, but by then we were no longer speaking.

Benji Gustafsen: blond, sweet, rippled muscles on his belly, the whole of whose intelligence, it seemed, was compressed into a knack for restoring small antique appliances: can openers, toaster ovens, vacuum cleaners. This was a boon for Benji's friends and neighbors; less so for anyone trying to hold a conversation with him. But conversation wasn't my goal, either, and I lost my virginity to Benji in his squalid bas.e.m.e.nt workroom only two days after Ellen lost hers to Michael Ippen on his older brother's squishy bed.

We brushed snow from our respective gravestones and perched in the early dark, down parkas pulled tight around us, looking west toward the lights of the expressway that snaked alongside the Rock River.

"The bed had a scratchy blanket on it," Ellen remarked.

"There were tons of McDonald's wrappers on the floor," I said. "It smelled like catsup."

"Did it hurt?"

"Killed. Plus I bled."

"With all the catsup around," she said, "he probably didn't notice."

We pa.s.sed our last Kool back and forth. Ellen slipped off the gravestone and lay on her back in the snow.

"Doesn't that freeze your head?" I asked.

"Yeah," she said, "but the stars."

I lay down beside her. She was right, the stars. After I'd done it with Benji, an awful sensation had come open in me-who was this guy, stretching like a dog so his spine cracked? But then I'd thought of Ellen, telling it to her, strategizing, and the feeling had melted into a kind of sweetness.

Marcus Sealander: a tattooed motorcyclist whose menacing black leather vest concealed, of all things, a potbelly. We did it standing up. Marcus had a nasty habit of shoving my shoulders against the wall as if it excited him to think of snapping my spine, so he got no second chance. Meanwhile, Ellen did it twice with Luis Guasto, a strange boy who'd pasted hundreds of beer cans to the walls of his parents' rec room with a glue gun. They did it downstairs, among the cans, and the first time Ellen thought she might almost, just barely feel something, but then Louis rolled off her and moments later was in the bathroom p.i.s.sing loudly, so that was that. The second time was even worse-over in four minutes flat.

Tom Ashlock. Lenny Bergstrom. Arthur Blixt. Stephen Finn. By spring we were s.l.u.ts, sirens, alarming to girls and boys alike as we scoured in vain for someone to satisfy us. When Moose came home at Christmas, Ellen abandoned me for his sacred compa.s.s; a brutal disappointment, since I'd counted on being included. For three lonely weeks I hardly saw her. Moose's departure left her listless, but soon the alchemy of our union was back at work, plotting our rescue from the crus.h.i.+ng ba.n.a.lity that surrounded us like those shrinking rooms full of water from which TV heroes must escape. The streets, the sky, the lousy moon. What was wrong with these boys?

Boys. We rolled onto our sides, staring at each other amidst the gravestones. The snow had melted, exposing a papier-mache of last year's soggy leaves. A revelation was upon us: the problem was boys-too young, too inexperienced to make us feel what we longed and deserved to feel, whereas men, with their years of practice-men would know exactly what to do! And finding men wouldn't be so hard; Mr. Polhill, Ellen's driver's ed teacher, was constantly leaning over her desk and sniffing her hair, and as for me ... how old did he have to be?

"Old," Ellen said. "Thirties."

There was a man I'd caught watching me by the country club pool the summer before. A foreign guy-French, I thought, who'd worn a tight little bathing suit like boys on our swim team wore. I'd found him creepy at the time, but now I revised my opinion: he was French, he was a man, he was perfect.

Mr. Polhill gallantly proffered the use of his personal car when Ellen asked him for extra driving practice after school, then suggested a small detour. That was all she would tell me. There was a blankness about her that I'd never seen before; I waited in the cemetery but she didn't come, and when I chased her down at school she refused to elaborate.

Meanwhile, through a friend of my mother's who knew Mrs. Lafant, the Rockford girl who was married to the Frenchman, I managed to procure a Friday night babysitting job at his house, where two brats drizzled ice cream down the front of the tight, low-cut dress I'd worn for Mr. Lafant's entertainment. Afterward, as he drove me home, I moved close to him in the front seat. He went still, as if in disbelief. "You are a very lovely girl," he breathed carefully, in his marvelous accent. When I moved closer, he stroked my hair and I shut my eyes, opening them only when I noticed that Mr. Lafant had begun driving rather wildly. He screeched to a stop somewhere off Spring Creek Road, killed the engine and turned off the headlights. It took my eyes a few moments to adjust, and when finally they did, I discerned Mr. Lafant's erect p.e.n.i.s groping from his pants like a mole emerging from a tunnel. His hands, which moments before had been delicately stroking my hair, now were guiding my head most a.s.sertively toward it. I was frightened. His obvious hurry made it worse; when I squirmed my resistance, he seized the back of my head and shoved me toward his groin while also (I noticed) glancing at his watch, no doubt calculating how much longer he had before his wife began to wonder. A wave of revulsion roiled through me. "No!" I shrieked, "No, no!" at which point my employer began to panic. "Shut up," he implored, shoving the inquiring p.e.n.i.s out of sight. He drove me home in urgent silence, an angry muscle jumping in his face. I leapt from the car and he roared away without a word, his tires barking on our quiet street.

I would have sprinted straight to Ellen's house, but my mother had heard the car and padded onto the dewy lawn in her slippers and robe. "Well, that wasn't very nice," she remarked. "He could have waited until you went inside."

The next morning, Ellen met me at the back door of her big empty house and led me upstairs with the same indifferent look she'd worn all week. I Love Lucy I Love Lucy was on in the TV room. was on in the TV room.

"So, did you do it?" she asked, her eyes not leaving the set.

"He didn't want to," I said. "He wanted me to suck it."

Ellen turned to me with interest.

"I couldn't," I confessed. "It was just too disgusting." Then I asked, instinctively, "Did Mr. Polhill ... want that?"

Ellen began to cry. I had never seen her cry before, and I hovered near her, on the verge of hugging her as I would hug Grace when she cried, but hesitant. Ellen wasn't like Grace. "Did you do it?" I whispered.

"I tried," she said, "but after about three seconds, he-you know, he-"

"No! No!"