Overexcitement, he said. Very serious…not cause for despair yet.
More cold baths and a Borax solution to be applied weekly. She was to be kept away from spices, bright colors, quick-tempoed music, anything lively or stimulating. Before bed, she was to be given a spoonful of syrup from an amber bottle that sent her into a bottomless sleep. Some mornings she thought she detected the faint smell of tobacco on her pillow, but she remembered nothing.
The day she woke, twelve years old, terrified in bloody sheets, her mother told her that she would not die but the blood would come every month as a reminder to be always on her guard against, yes, again, always: wickedness.
Around then, two other events: First, she noticed she had not smelled tobacco on her pillow for some time, and, second, she was sent away to school. The sunny chatter of the other girls, their books and bedtime prayers and homesickness and letters to their mothers, the cheerful dances they practiced with one another, their fussing over their hair and pinching of their cheeks for color—all of it made her feel like a small dark spider scuttling among their merry shoes. In a rush of fury, she understood she knew nothing of the world. She had been kept from it.
How to remedy her appalling ignorance?
Be attentive. Eavesdrop. Sift and strain for clues. Choose books at random from the library, steal more books from other girls, especially the forbidden ones they have kept hidden. Read Wuthering Heights and Treasure Island and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Moonstone. Read Dracula and have nightmares about the zoophagous madman in the asylum, Renfield, who feeds flies to spiders and spiders to birds and eats the birds and wishes to consume as many lives as possible. Steal The Awakening and dream about walking into the sea, though you have never been in any water but the bathtub. （Even at school, her baths are cold.） From these books, gradually piece together jumbled theories about how other notions of shame and wickedness exist besides your mother’s. Intuit that some women wish to be touched by men. （The girls sighed over certain books, lying back on their pillows. So romantic, they remarked, though not to Annabel, whom they found strange.） When she was sure everyone else was asleep, she returned to touching what she no longer thought of as her cabbage but as her thing, not greenly inert but alive and animal. The sensation became sharper, a piquant fishhook that snagged on her nerves as though on a net, pulling her along. She found a flickering and thrumming, a pulse and flash.
Once a week a young man came to the school to instruct the girls in piano. He leaned over Annabel while she sat on the bench and with his long fingers sounded low, tolling notes. He was almost as blond as she, with arched, surprised eyebrows and comb marks in his hair. She took his hand one day and put it on her dress, over her thing. The terror in his face baffled her.
In disgrace, she was sent to another, lesser school, but within a month she was called home because her mother was dead. Her father treated her with distant, bewildered politeness, seemed not to remember that once he had wanted to be warm with her. Nanny was gone, and, when she asked, her father said Annabel was too big for a nanny, wasn’t she? Annabel took a bath so hot she emerged looking cooked.
（Only later, overhearing gossip at the funeral, did she learn her mother had drunk a whole bottle of sleeping draught.）
A third school, the one with the maple trees, the ice storm. Her history teacher was older than the piano tutor and not afraid of her. He found reasons to summon her to his office. “Like a fish to water,” he said after he had relieved her of her virginity on a sagging sofa. “I could see it in you. I could see you would be this way.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s in your gaze. Didn’t you mean to seduce me?”
“I suppose so,” she said, though she had not quite known what she meant to do. She had simply returned his glances, allowed him to proceed, felt a dull, sawing pressure while both of them remained mostly clothed. Afterward, as she crossed the school green, the sadness that seemed to be the aftermath of any human contact settled on her, but the experience had not been unpleasant, and she returned to his office willingly when he next summoned her. He turned away and fumbled with himself beforehand, which he said had to do with avoiding a child. With practice, she could draw the flickering and thrumming from his ministrations, occasionally even the pulse and flash, though the sadness afterward remained.
“Let’s run away together,” he said, and she had gazed at him from the sofa, confused he would think there was anywhere they could go.
She was not expelled from that school but graduated at sixteen and returned to New York. As best she could, she adopted a life of outward respectability as spinster consort to her father, his companion to dinners and parties and on his travels. She tried to be good, to ward off her wicked need. But she could no sooner chase it away than she could chop off her own head and continue living. She found lovers. Their discretion varied.