Soul Catcher (7 page)

‘Do you think he’d join your group?’

‘I don’t think he uses drugs. He’s high on life, you know?’

I laughed.

‘But I bet Troy and Janice would, and maybe John. Come on.’

We marched over and enlisted them into Patrick’s Drug Group. They liked Patrick, thought he was cool because he was an addict, a
junkie.
They were dead-end kids and admired defeat.

Activities sign-up was on the second floor of the school building, in a classroom across from Silvera’s office. Pieces of green paper, one for every activity, were taped onto the blackboard. Already seven people had signed up for Drug Group! Gwen’s was the first name; she’d promised to enroll the minute I told her John was joining too. I felt left out, having to choose a different activity for myself. I read the sheets over and over, and couldn’t decide.

‘How about Stained Glass? Louise is teaching it,’ Patrick said.

‘Nan. I still can’t throw a pot on the wheel.’

‘How about — ‘Patrick was saying, when Silvera barged in. He walked back and forth, studying the green sheets, then stopped to write something on one of them.

‘There you go,’ he said. His face didn’t budge; he just looked at me for a moment, then made a bee-line back to his office across the hall.

Patrick read the sheet Silvera had just signed, and laughed.

‘What?’

‘Come look.’

I went up to the blackboard and saw my name scribbled under Eddie’s.

‘I mean, I haven’t even —’

‘Go ask him why.’

‘He’s just trying to humiliate me!’

‘Go ask him.’

‘I will.’

I walked across the hall and rapped on the open door. Silvera was sitting in his rocking chair. A big smile forced his cheeks out and his face looked even fatter than usual.

‘Why did you sign me up for that activity?’

‘What activity?’

‘Sex
Group.’

Silvera shrugged. ‘Why not?’

So, I found myself in Sex Group, angry at Silvera, and unwilling to contribute to the group in any way. The group leader was Ted, one of my dorm parents, and that made it even worse. Was I supposed to reveal my feelings about carnal knowledge, and my personal experiences (of which I had none) to a group of kids I hardly knew, and also to a man who saw me walking around in my nightgown with pimple medicine dotted on my face? My reticence was interpreted by the six-member group as hostility. I was only fifteen, but everyone assumed Patrick and I had slept
together. When they badgered me into talking to them, during the fourth session, I came right out and told them I was a virgin.

‘Bullshit!’ Eddie said.

Because Eddie was Patrick’s roommate, everyone believed him.

‘I am!’ I told them.

Ted crooked an eyebrow. He was small and chubby and cute, with curly brown hair and a frizzy beard. He reminded me of a koala bear. ‘Why don’t you tell us how you
feel
about that?’

‘That would make her eligible to marry royalty,’ said Rawlene, the tiny Be Here Butterfly.

‘Yes,’ Ted said gently, ‘I suppose it would. But what we want to know here is how she feels about her virginity.’

I admitted that, despite peer pressure, I felt just fine about my innocence. Again, I was not believed.

I gave Gwen detailed reports of Sex Group. She thought that anyone who would sign up for one had to be too hung-up to believe sex or sexlessness could be that simple for someone else. She told me that in Drug Group, everyone had enough experience to know the lingo and they got into exciting, slang-ridden debates. I imagined Gwen often led them.

As the days passed, Patrick became noticeably happier. He said that Drug Group had been a good idea, that it was helping him. He would roll up his sleeves and show me his fading tracks. There were thousands of them, or at least that was how it seemed to me. Standing under the lamp at the end of the Boys Dorm fence, we counted. There were thirty-seven tracks on one arm, twenty-four on the other, thirteen behind one knee and nineteen behind the other. That made ninety-three. But Patrick said we might as well round it off to a hundred: he’d stuck needles under his fingernails a few times, too. One hundred ups! (One hundred downs!) We watched the red pinpricks blend gradually into his skin. One night — I don’t know what took
hold of me — I knelt down and kissed the insides of both his arms. He whispered, ‘It’s beautiful, you’re poetry,’ and lifted me up and hugged me. He tilted his hips slightly forward, and for the first time I felt his erection, hard and long, pushing at me through both our jeans.

One day in Sex Group, Ted had us draw our feelings about sex on the blackboard. Rawlene drew a wedding cake over in the corner. Laura drew a young girl standing alone in outer space, with her hair falling over her whole face except for her chin, which bore a large squirting zit. Alan from Upper Boys sketched the Pentagon in winter: two rotund snowmen guarding either side. Ted drew a pair of holding hands. Eddie made a drawing of a naked couple copulating right in the middle of the board. I drew outlines of hearts in all the free spaces. Suzie Zuckerman just scribbled.

When we were through, we sat in a circle on the floor.

Eddie said, ‘I want to ask Kate what all those fucking stupid little outlines of hearts are supposed to mean. Like, I was wondering if she has some kind of problem or something, you know?’

I rolled my eyes. What
a jerk.

Rawlene stuck her chin out and spat, ‘What are you, some kind o’asshole, Edward?’

Ted shook his head. ‘Eddie, I’d like to understand your feelings about Kate’s drawings. But I’d also like to point out that what you just said was not only a value judgement, but unkind.’

Eddie shrugged. ‘So?’

From Laura’s usually silent spot in the group came a sob. Rivulets of mascara ran down her pale face. ‘I wish everyone would leave Kate alone!’ she said. ‘She has enough problems!’

‘Bitch,’ Eddie said.

‘I hate you, Eddie!’ Laura said.

Ted observed the exchange with interest, but didn’t say a word.

Finally Eddie just came out and said what was on his
mind. ‘Patrick wouldn’t be so frustrated if Kate wasn’t such a prig.’

I was furious. Eddie was a slanderer; he didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. ‘Patrick never pressures me!’ I said. ‘He’s never even asked me to sleep with him!’

Eddie’s chubby face pinched up like a nasty prune. ‘He shouldn’t have to ask,’ he said.

That’s enough,’ Ted said. ‘Kate, how do you feel right now?’

I felt lousy. I was dying to curse Eddie out, but then I would have gotten into trouble. So I said, ‘I guess Patrick is a little horny.’

‘Has he expressed it to you?’

I nodded.

‘How?’

My eyes went to Eddie, who gloated mercilessly. My mind ran through possible answers, ranging from truth to diplomacy to lies.

I said, ‘I could just feel it.’ Literally, the truth.

Another truth: I didn’t want to have sex — I wasn’t ready — but it didn’t take long for my innocence to shame me. I should have been proud of it — I could have, were it not for Grove. The place said NO while the kids said YES and my insides whirled I DON’T KNOW I DON’T KNOW I DON’T KNOW. I must have been the only virgin in the whole school. Pressure was on from every corner: Silvera, Eddie, Patrick, Gwen. To them, talk of sex was routine; to me, it was baffling and threatening and I would have preferred the safest sex available, which, as they now say, is no sex at all. But I couldn’t avoid it anymore; they wouldn’t let me.

I
t was all around me. In Gwen’s rain boot, in Eddie’s dreams, in Patrick’s memory, in Dad’s new life. When Thanksgiving rolled around, I had to face it.

Sex.

Dad had a girl — not me, but a young woman who was his lover. They lived together, shared a bed;
she
was making the turkey this year. I didn’t want to go, but they said I had to. The deal was Thanksgiving with Dad and Christmas with Mom. Mom’s was the more important holiday — Christmas and Hannukah and New Year’s Eve rolled into one — and I wanted to spend it with her. I had to give Dad something.

I invited Patrick to come with me for Thanksgiving, to guard and teach me. I had to grow up fast now, to learn about worlds I was entering without plan or warning, conquer the rules, defend myself.

Gwen was going to an aunt’s in northern New Jersey. ‘They call it The Other Switzerland,’ she said. ‘Lots of hills and lakes and stuff. It’s real pretty. Plus, they’ve got cute guys and bars.’

‘You’re under age,’ I said. ‘You couldn’t get in.’

‘Sure I could. One of my cousins makes fake ID’s.’

‘You should be careful.’ I was standing over my open
suitcase. I had packed a couple pairs of jeans and a few shirts and couldn’t think of what else I’d need.

‘Don’t you know how to have fun?’ she said. ‘You better bring a dress or something in case they take you out. I mean
really.’

‘I don’t want to go out with them.’

‘You’ll regret it. I love eating in restaurants.’ She rushed to the closet and got her high heels.

‘Remind me to take my hairbrush and toothbrush,’ I said.

‘I hope Patrick’s bringing some rubbers. I mean, he’s coming home with you, right?
Coming.’
She grinned.

‘You know Patrick and I don’t do that.’

‘Maybe you should, is all I’m saying.’ She fished her black negligee out of her rainboot in the closet. ‘You never know,’ she said, tossing it at me in a silky flutter. I tossed it back.

But somehow, I would discover, she managed to slip it into my bag. I didn’t
take
the negligee, as Silvera would later claim. I didn’t plan any of it. It just happened, step by step, innocently, like most anti-events that twisted minds distort into scandal. Nothing happened over Thanksgiving vacation. We met Dad’s girlfriend, ate the usual turkey, and — okay — I slipped into the first sex-skin of my life, and it was black, and it
was
Gwen’s negligee. But that was all; it was nobody’s business what happened between Patrick and me. We loved each other. What we did or didn’t do together was private, or should have been.

Dad leaned against the wall opposite our gate at the bus terminal, waiting. Even after he spotted me, he just stood there and watched us. He smiled. I stared at him. He was wearing jeans and a translucent yellow Indian shirt over a black turtleneck. His hair was long. He looked silly, like an old man trying to be young. I liked him much better in his suit and tie.

‘You must be Patrick,’ he said.

Patrick thrust his hand nervously into Dad’s, and they shook. ‘Nice to meet you, Sir.’

Dad liked that. Sir.

‘His name’s Max,’ I said.

Patrick glanced at me, then said to Dad, ‘I really appreciate the invitation.’

‘We’re glad to have you.’

There he went with the
we.
The sound of it squeezed my stomach; I felt sick just thinking about it. We. Her.

‘Well,’ Dad said. ‘Shall we?’

Patrick nodded and looked at me.

I said, ‘Shall we what?’

‘Go home,’ Dad said.

‘Home? Oh, right.’

Patrick shot me an
oh Kate
look, a look that said
can it, willya, and give the guy a chance.

‘Yeah, okay.’ I sighed. And Patrick shook his head at me. But Dad only smiled.

Dad was even more scared than I was! He was no dope; he knew what he’d done to our family. It must have embarrassed him to do such a stereotypical thing as to run off with a younger woman. Not that he ran very far: they were living in the city, in an old Upper West Side apartment. He was trying to differentiate himself, to jazz it all up with Indian clothes and long hair, to turn it into some kind of romantic adventure. He had his arm around Patrick’s shoulders and I knew Dad was really confused. He was trying too hard. He couldn’t afford
not
to like Patrick, and that was to be our barter system: the more points he scored by me — giving me things, liking my friends, allowing me freedoms — the more tolerance I owed him. Already, with Patrick, he was setting me up with a debt of generosity, trying to earn my acceptance of
her.

Her name was Lisa. Their apartment had one bedroom, a kitchen and a living room which led into a kind of turret that housed her piano. The turret was lined with small windows of old thick glass through which twilight poured magnificently. Maybe because it was
her
piano, because
she
was the one who played it, I hated that turret. It was simple and
beautiful, unencumbered, bright in the morning and richly colorful in the evening. It was hers, my father’s mistress, the destroyer of our family.

In describing Lisa, Mom had exaggerated in the negative. Lisa was a woman, not a girl. She supported herself as a secretary, but was also an accomplished pianist. She was a little shorter than average and plump in a voluptuous kind of way. She had wavy blond hair and pale blue eyes. I would catch Dad looking at her as if he wanted to touch her, which he never did in front of me. I was glad. I had no desire to play the generous, understanding daughter. It was bad enough seeing their quaint little set-up, their home. Blatant affection would have only twisted the knife in the wound.

I didn’t like Lisa for what she represented in my life, and she clearly didn’t like me, maybe for what I represented in Dad’s life. She treated me with an insidious hostility which only I could detect. That was smart of her. To Dad, she was the kind sort-of-stepmother to his daughter. To me, she was the plunderer of rights. It was as if I were the intruder, not her. I was tempted to tell her, straight out, that she had it backwards. Gwen would have told her. But not Patrick. He didn’t see it as clearly as I. He thought I was exaggerating when I tried to tell him how unwelcome she was making me. He couldn’t taste the poison in her onslaught of gourmet cooking. She must have believed that old cliche that the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, because she had both of them, Dad and Patrick, enthralled.

She had all the meals worked out in advance. There were flowers everywhere. She had marked all the good movies listed on t.v. through Sunday. But she wouldn’t look me in the eye.