Soon we were painting our nails and listening to Bob Dylan records with my bedroom door open. I liked the Beatles, but Rebecca said the Beatles were for little girls, which we weren’t anymore. Before long, it wasn’t even my room Rebecca was spending time in. My brother was fifteen, Rebecca thirteen, the first time he called her his girlfriend. Yet still the two of us didn’t stop until we were made to stop.
I can no longer remember whose idea it was, but when we reached high school, we started meeting at the old clergy house after school. We’d talk for a few minutes about our day, which teacher was hassling us, and then one of us would lie back and pull down her wool tights, let her legs fall open for the other. We coached each other through it, in an uninhibited and plainspoken manner, as though reading the steps to a recipe—knuckles first, softly, then the thumb, firmer, then firmer still, now with the heel of the hand. We kept time. Whoever went second got as long as the one who went first. We were fair like that.
Dr. Burnet called what we did exploring, something all children did, and something that, due to our respective emotional difficulties, the two of us had simply failed to grow out of.
It’s a comforting ritual left over from childhood, Dr. Burnet was always telling me. Like sucking your thumb or sleeping with a stuffed animal. When I would nod with half-hearted agreement, he would remind me that Rebecca and I never once kissed. Lesbians kiss, Ruth.
Rebecca and I had an unspoken agreement that we wouldn’t meet during the spring, which was when my father held class outside on the lawn, teaching the unit about the clergy house’s role in the Underground Railroad. It was a warm afternoon in October when my father walked in and found us. He didn’t look surprised, which was how I knew he’d always known.
When he came upon us, Rebecca was the one lying back with her skirt pulled up. This mattered because he saw what I was doing to her, that I was the aggressor and Rebecca my witless victim. My father shielded his eyes and, in a muted voice, told me to meet him at the car. The drive home was brittle with silence, and when I looked over at him, trying to figure out what I might say to break it, I saw that he had big fat tears dripping off his chin.
I went straight to my room when we got home. I unpacked my books and started on my homework, knowing I would be called downstairs once my father told my mother what he’d found out about me. It was a last gasp at absolution. Here I am, I hoped my studiousness telegraphed, memorizing algebraic variations, being a good girl.
The volume of my parents’ voices downstairs was terrifying and confusing, much too quiet for the severity of my transgressions. My mother yelled when she was angry. She slammed cabinet drawers and pummeled the door with her fist, growling at you to get your butt downstairs or else. This ferocious hush between the two of them seemed to suggest that I’d committed an offense so perverse that their larynxes had to produce a whole new set of sound waves and vibrations. Though at one point, inexplicably, it was my father’s voice that pierced the bubble, delivering an anguished apology to my mother: How many times can I say I’m sorry?
I waited and waited to be summoned downstairs, but the call never came. The resentful whispering ceased when my brother came home. Dinnertime came and went. The television went on and off. I was too petrified to leave my room, and I went to bed without brushing my teeth, dying for a glass of water, my stomach performing somersaults for food.
In the morning, I rose before the sun was up. I showered, dressed in my school uniform, went downstairs, and downed a glass of water. I was scrambling eggs when my mother came in and asked with a malicious laugh what the hell I thought I was doing.
“You’re not going to school today,” she informed me.
I pushed the eggs around in the pan. My father and I liked them wet, but we cooked them on high heat when my mother or brother wanted some. They both thought wet eggs were disgusting, even though, during the brief period when my father filled in as the home ec teacher, he’d said that was the true chef’s way of cooking them.
“We’ll talk about it later,” my mother said, not that I had asked.
After school, my father came home with the young priest who taught gym class at Issaquah Catholic. He was grossly out of his depth on our couch, boxed in on one side by my erect and formidable mother and the other by my hangdog father. My mother spoke at a pitch so low I had to hold my body completely still to make out what she was saying. There was a place where I was going to receive psychiatric treatment. Father Grady was nice enough to pull some strings to get me in. I was not to talk about where I was going and why—not even to my brother. Especially not to my brother, who would be disgusted to learn what I’d done to his poor innocent girlfriend. Did I understand?