“It’s your life. I just don’t feel like listening to your advice.”
Her mother set down the pencil. “It’s not advice. If you want to go to Europe with Tanner, it’s a requirement. In fact, I think you should see a doctor right away. Will you let me make you an appointment?”
“I can make my own appointment.”
“Whatever you prefer.”
“I’ll go do it right now. Do you want to listen on Dad’s phone? Make sure I get my appointment?”
“Becky—”
There were three doors to slam on the way to her bedroom, and she slammed all three. The world seemed upside down to her. Premarital sex was supposed to be wrong, but Tanner had already had it with someone else, her friends expected her to have it, Clem expected her to have it, even her mother expected her to have it. Probably Judson, too, if anyone had asked him!
She wasn’t a prude. She liked necking and petting and—coming. There had been moments when she was carried away into wanting Tanner inside her, moments when sex seemed like a blessing that God intended her to crave. What had saved her, each time, was Tanner’s own hesitation. By firmly defining her limits from the outset, she’d made her virginity a thing for which the two of them shared responsibility, a jewel they participated equally in guarding, so that, when she forgot herself, Tanner was there to catch her. If this wasn’t how real love worked, she didn’t know what real love was.
Resentfully, as though forced to do chores while her friends were at the swimming pool, she went to her mother’s gynecologist and submitted to being “fitted” for a diaphragm and tested on her ability to properly insert it. She was given a tube of jelly like the one that Laura Dobrinsky had once thrown at her face. The gear she brought home reduced love to something medical. It connected her, sordidly, to all the other girls in New Prospect with similar gear in their drawers.
And yet: wasn’t it wrong to feel superior to those girls? Despite much prayer and reading of the Gospels, she had yet to recapture the spiritual ecstasy she’d experienced after smoking pot, the bodily yearning to be Christ’s servant, but the essence of her revelation had stayed with her: she was sinfully proud and needed to repent. Ever since that revelation, and beginning with the sharing of her inheritance, she’d endeavored to be a good Christian, but the paradox of doing good was that she felt even prouder of herself. It was as if, although the terms had changed, she was still pursuing superiority. In the Gospels, Jesus paid more attention to the poor and the sick, to the iniquitous and the despised, than to the righteous and the privileged. Now that she’d taken the step of obtaining contraception, she wondered if withholding herself from the man she loved might constitute, in itself, a kind of vanity. Hadn’t God revealed Himself to her precisely at her lowest moment? Might it not paradoxically be more Christian to humble herself, accept that she was one of those girls, and yield up her jewel?
As soon as she had the thought, she knew what she wanted. She wanted to fall, and by falling to deepen her relationship with Tanner and Jesus. And she knew exactly how it would happen.
Her fervor for Crossroads had cooled when her father returned to the group, and she’d been too busy with Tanner to earn the “hours” she needed to be eligible for Arizona. Kim Perkins and David Goya had pressured her to do some marathon last-minute hours-earning, so she could join them in Kitsillie, but when the trip roster for Kitsillie was posted she saw the name not only of her father but of Frances Cottrell. Kim and David still expected Becky to come along with them, but now she had a better plan for Easter vacation. She wouldn’t give herself to Tanner in his van. She would do it with proper ceremony, in the privacy of her otherwise empty house.
Her only misgivings were related to her family. She was disgusted with her father, because she had reason to believe that he was trespassing against her mother, committing adultery with Mrs. Cottrell. Although Becky wouldn’t trespass against anyone by giving herself to Tanner, she would still, in a sense, be sinking to her father’s level. Worse yet, she’d be sinking to Clem’s, and she was very sorry to give him that satisfaction.
She hadn’t missed Clem at Christmas, not one bit. His insult of Tanner, his uttering of the word passive, continued to rankle in her heart, and she was sure he would ridicule her discovery of God as well. The mere sight of his empty bedroom, the reminder of the many late nights when she’d lain down on his bed and confided in him, was upsetting to her, vaguely sickening. Her aversion was so strong that it extended to Tanner’s room at his parents’ house. When Tanner showed it to her, during Christmas vacation, she gave it a once-over from the doorway without going in. The room reeked of Laura, who’d been a kind of foster sister to him, a sister he had sex with, and Becky wanted nothing to do with it.