fault he thought it was. Her father was an architect, and he liked theoretical problems, though preferably the geometrical kind. He was willing to talk about anything, however, after dinner, when he’d had a few martinis just before.
“Well, now,” he said, running one bony hand across his hair, which sprang up in a solid hedge as his hand passed, curled like Margy’s, only slightly red. “That would depend on how she got into the car, now, wouldn’t it?” If she had kissed the man and led him on, then it was her fault too. He thought in general women were too quick to speak of rape. Leaning one elbow on the table, he held the other hand out in the air and looked at it.
“When a gal shows up at the precinct and says she’s been raped, they make her hold a hand out, and check to see if it’s trembling. Because if it is, it means she had an orgasm, and it wasn’t rape.”
He glanced at Margy, looked away, fair cheeks flushing clear red.
“Of course, sometimes it is.” He grinned, as if he knew he shouldn’t say what he was going to next. He gave her a bold look. “But when it does happen, when it can’t be stopped. Why not just relax, and enjoy?”
In January of their senior year, Ann was elected queen of the winter festival at a boys’ school across town, by guys she’d mainly never met, and Margy and Elizabeth went with her as her court, flanking her at the hockey match, triple-dating to the ball that night. Ann chose as her escort Gary Slade, who was still the best-looking young man they knew, while Margy (having no one else to ask) went with his little brother, Jason, with whom she’d shared a violin teacher since they were six.
The night of the ball she rode in Gary’s car as if she’d never seen it before. She didn’t have to talk to him, or even much to Jason. She was really there with Elizabeth and Ann, as they were there with her. Gary had to stand for hours by the throne the boys had made for Ann, while she sat silent and expressionless, in a white ball gown and rhinestone crown, bearing the stares of all those eyes. When the ball was over, they asked to be delivered back to Ann’s, where they dismissed their escorts at the curb (Gary trailing after Ann forlornly, saying, “Can I call you soon?”) and went in to drink hot chocolate while Margy pranced in her long skirt from room to room, too excited to sit down.
“Gary should be falling on his sword by now,” Elizabeth noted, smiling down into her mug.
Lifting her lovely head, Ann seemed to consider an object far away. “Gary? Oh, Gary will be fine. He’ll get married and buy a house and have five children and become ‘a sixty-year-old smiling public man.’”
Margy was fidgeting nearby. Suddenly she felt bold.
“‘The women come and go,’” she said. “‘Talking of Michelangelo.’” And then, with special glee, “‘I do not think that they will sing to me.’”
Ann laughed, and kissed her cheek. She put a record on, and they all began to dance, to “Let It Bleed” and “Love in Vain,” and “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime you just might find you get what you need,” until they had calmed down enough to sleep, Elizabeth with Ann in her canopy bed, Margy on a cot down at the foot.
Margy started reading through her father’s library, leatherbound classics hardly touched by anyone, and after sampling here and there she settled on the Sigmund Freuds, which were small and dense and rewarding even in small bites, and therefore suitable for reading in the moments when she wasn’t practicing. She read Dora, Anna O., Civilization and Its Discontents. She took to peppering her talk with Freudian remarks.
“I have cathected to those shoes,” she’d say. “The economics of my libido may require a chili dog.” Or, “Time to get obsessional about that test.”
One week she was excused from classes in the afternoons to rehearse with the Boston Symphony, and as she waited for the T at Arlington, she read that if a woman dreams her daughter is run over by a train, that means she wants to go to bed with the man who once gave her flowers as she got onto a train. She was about to turn the page when she felt a hard stare from a few feet off. Pretending to read on, she tapped out the timing of the Paganini she was going to play against one edge of the book, as if deeply engrossed.
The staring did not stop. Annoyed, she glanced that way and recognized the new girl in her class at Huntington. Rachel had arrived only that year, a tall, dark, awkward girl with huge black eyes who stared at everyone as if she found them very strange, and slightly amusing. Imitating Ann’s most unrevealing expression, Margy gave her a brief nod and returned to her book, the most effective of the small, polite rejections she and Ann and Elizabeth practiced every day on other girls at school.
Rachel moved closer, staring like a baby over its mother’s shoulder. She read the spine on Margy’s book. Her voice squeaked in amazement.
“Are you holding that right side up?”
Margy finished the sentence and looked at her. Rachel’s uniform was entirely disguised by a black leather jacket and beret, her hair whacked off around the earlobes. But her face was fresh and artless as a two-year-old’s.
“Insulting people in train stations is a sign of unresolved dilemmas in the inner life.”
Rachel chuckled, watching her. “And what about the virgin goddess, does she read books too?”
Margy pretended not to know who she could mean, narrowing her eyes at her. “Why aren’t you in school?”
Rachel whipped out a pass and twirled it in the air.
“Legal as milk,” she said, but grinning in a way that made it clear she wasn’t going to the dentist after all. She had a sick friend at B.U., and how could she leave her there alone, pining for a cool hand on her brow?
“Freud used to operate on people’s noses,” Rachel calmly said. “To clear up their sexual hang-ups. He thought if you put your fingers in your purse you were playing with yourself. He was a little bit hung up on cock, and thought the rest of us were too.”
Margy rode with her to Copley, slightly stunned. On the platform, changing trains, she glanced back at the one she had just left, and there was Rachel pressed against the glass, eager as a puppy locked inside a car.
She introduced her to Elizabeth and Ann, and soon Rachel started showing up at lunch, refusing to fade off as other girls had learned to do. She even followed on their private walks, stalking behind them with her long, unhurried gait.
“What about me?” she would actually cry, throwing her arms out wide, as they tried to walk away.
She introduced them to new lore, Simone de Beauvoir and The Story of O and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and gradually to other things. Rachel had lived in Paris and L.A. and Israel, but now her parents had moved to Beacon Hill, a few blocks from the house where Margy’d always lived, and she took to turning up on Sunday afternoons, to listen to her play and go for walks and tell her things that would have made Margy’s mother’s hair stand up. Already Rachel had a lot of friends, older women living on their own, who fed her marvelous meals, peyote buds, and grass, and taught her unimaginable acts in bed. She kept her fingernails cut to the quick so that they could not wound. She said she could do anything a man could do, only better, because she was a girl too.
“There’s nothing nicer than getting ready for bed,” she said, “knowing there’s a girl in there waiting for you.”
