them in my pillows to pore over at night. I felt lucky to have found a firsthand source of information in Heather, to peep in on real lives that matched the drama on the pages I was queasily drunk on. Carrie was performing the tease, just as Cathy Dollanganger had done to her mother’s second husband in Petals on the Wind. Just like the big-breasted actress had done to the famous nightclub singer in Valley of the Dolls. But the plot arcs of the novels left no question about what these characters had wanted in exchange for the sex they advertised and then withheld. I wasn’t sure of Carrie’s aim. She had from Raymond all she could get from him; she’d given what she had. And there she stood dangling a rubber. Laughing in her underwear. In front of two boys. One with his dick out. The scene Heather had drawn hovered before me, more vivid than the sagging asbestos-sided homes that lined the sidewalk beneath our feet, but just out of reach.
As we walked on those afternoons, our instruments would bump against our knees, the oft-gray sky would darken further. Most weeks Heather could offer a new installment of her sex life. After Raymond broke the rubber two times, he started doubling up. One week Tommy decided that instead of letting her toke from the joint herself, Heather could only inhale what he delivered shotgun style. Listening, I would consciously savor the cream dollop in the center of my second Ding Dong. At home, sweets were counted out parsimoniously—five M&Ms at a time, one half of an off-brand pastry snack—and having a twin pack of Hostess to myself was decadent.
Heather, doing most of the talking, didn’t have time to eat. She would begin to pant softly about halfway up the steep incline. She regularly voiced a worry that her parents would smell the cum on her.
“You can smell it?” I asked. “What’s it smell like?”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “It just does.”
MY VIOLIN TEACHER was a man with a dramatic forelock and intense brown eyes who seemed to loathe accepting my check—we paid fifteen dollars for thirty minutes. It was three dollars more than the last instructor charged before he escaped to greener pastures, and my mother complained about the increase, hesitated each week with furrowed brow over her signature. I was working on the theme from Ravel’s Bolero that winter, and the instructor and I were twinned in our humiliation: mine over having my parents pay someone to listen to me struggle with the notes; his, presumably, over the paltry price for which he sold his trained and refined ear to an unexceptional school girl. One day, he grabbed my violin from me and brought it alive, leaning into the mounting tune, filling the room with its demands.
“That,” he said, swooping my revered instrument back to me as if it were nothing but a stick, “is how it should sound. Feel what you’re playing.”
I felt it. Oh, I felt it. I glared at him before tucking the violin back under my chin. I scraped the bow across the strings and fought back tears of shame and anger.
I HAD BEEN DRAWN TO MUSIC even before I had been drawn to whispers of masturbation, menstruation, and brassieres. There was the overheard, the glittery confetti of “Dancing Queen” at the ice rink, the slicked-up wail of Styx on a school bus eight-track. And there was my parents’ record collection, folk and folk pop, and the corner nook between the couch and the love seat where the stereo lived and the albums were stacked and I could just fit, crouched or cross legged, flipping through the covers—the lady with whipped cream for a dress; Peter, Paul and Mary against a brick wall—while listening, listening. Airborne particles from the disintegrating cardboard sleeves singed like incense and made my nostrils burn. When in fifth grade a fiddle teacher had come to my school and played a tune, my chest creaked and billowed with the same majestic thwang as it did to the opening bars of my favorite Gordon Lightfoot song. I took up violin immediately, practiced assiduously, and made the all-city orchestra in short order.
But this passion of mine didn’t last long. I had three teachers in four years, and something about the making of music was altered for me with that last one, squashed under his withering condescension, suffocated by the gendered gloomy sex vibe. Was the sex projected onto me or did I project it, clunking down the long music department hallway to his door each week with my hormones raging, my ears full of Heather’s stories of dick and cum?
The question unfolds for me now: projected onto or projected by me? In its wake is the quiet as the needle pulls back from the record, lifts, retreats. Another album drops down. The skid of vinyl on vinyl. Judy Collins plays. Hers was among my favorites of my parents’ LPs, and the song that most captured my imagination was her cover of “Suzanne.” I loved it when the switch occurred, when finally she touched his perfect body with her mind.
I didn’t share my parents’ music with my friends. At school, it was Michael Jackson and AC/DC. I introduced Heather to the girls I knew. Her social circle expanded. Still, after many weeks of only listening, I felt like I had to contribute something to our conversations. Or maybe I felt I had to prove something, prove I was older than I looked, more mature than my behavior at my first make-out party suggested, where I’d opted to run races with the boys instead of neck in the woods with the one I’d been assigned. One evening, while Heather and I stood in the vestibule waiting for one of our mothers to drive us home, she was whispering on about penises and maybe I just grew tired of the dirty talk, of my nose being pressed to its glass, and I wanted to shut her up. Or maybe the dirty talk is what dredged up the memory, sunken in my mind, its features still muddy but suddenly recognizable. Suddenly nameable.
“The only hard penis I’ve ever seen is my cousin’s, when he molested me,” I said. “He used to come into my room at night when I was little.”
Maybe I just wanted to see what would happen if I said it.
My eyes slid off Heather as I spoke. I looked out the safety glass of the vestibule door, which was crisscrossed with thin wire. Soft clumps of lamp-lit snow were falling from the black sky. There was a beat of silence. Then Heather asked in a low, solemn voice whether I’d told my parents.
I hadn’t, and I flinched at the implication that I was a child, that I needed guidance and protection. Whatever I’d wanted to accomplish with my disclosure, it wasn’t that. What did my parents have to do with anything? Had she told her parents that she whiled away her Saturday afternoons fucking? Had Cathy Dollanganger told her mother that her brother had raped her (but only because he loved her so much)?
Of course, the difference was that I’d been so young. I’d said so explicitly. What I hadn’t said was that in some ways the teenage encounters I was now reading and hearing about didn’t seem all that different from what had happened to me. My sixteen-year-old cousin had started out wheedling and whispering, silently fumbling, asking awkward questions about what felt good—like any teenage boy might, in the basement with a girl. Then he abandoned persuasion and courtship on the day—I’d recently turned five—he finally took his penis out. Except for my very young age, that part of the story seemed common, too—an overpowering male, a female’s will ignored. The memory of it was like breath under covers, too close. Heat was blasting from the vestibule’s vent and inside my coat my armpits were sweating, but my feet were still cold. A gulf opened between Heather and me; while her confessions had brought us intimacy, now the boat on which I sat was moving farther from her shore.
It seemed to me then that the onset of womanhood—or more to the point, of sexy teenaged girlhood, of thrill—was all about externalization: boobs popping, menstrual blood flowing. None of this had happened to me yet, but something had. It had. It had. These other things were taking forever, but I’d been carrying this for so long, wondering what it was, waiting for it become clear. Now, finally, someone was talking about penises! Didn’t offering one up make me a teenager? Perhaps not, said Heather’s pause.
I stole a look at her. She resembled her mother—same auburn hair, full bust, round face, and ruddy cheeks—and never more so than now. She’d squared her jaw at my
