Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (11 page)

Was there a plug back there? Nora was an intrepid explorer. She pulled the not-so-very-heavy bureau farther away from the wall, and we saw what looked like a very small door in the wall.

If we hadn’t discovered that door, maybe my life would have unfolded in a different order. If a piece of paper blows against your leg in the street and you pause just long enough to reach for it, and a car smacks into you while it’s backing up, everything instantly changes. That’s what this was like. What we discovered was profound. My first thoughts had to do with feeling exposed: Nora was seeing this. What if there were family treasures hidden there with certain notes or instructions? Or very, very private things? Then I imagined fairy tale small people who might fit through this door, for it was fit for a gnome or a troll, an elf or a witch. Rumpelstiltskin or one of his cohorts could turn the darkness that we faced into gold. Darkness to gold. Yes. I had to think fearlessly. Nora didn’t know the geography of the house, therefore it wasn’t a surprise to her. She was just waiting for me to explain my shock. I told her that it was the first time I had ever seen this little door. I guessed that it could have been a closet that I never knew was there. Maybe it was a closet for Ronny to put his guns in. It could fit guns. We peered into the closet as if anything was possible. There was no light coming from anywhere, and the space turned left at a forty-five-degree angle, leading to—Where? My mother’s bathroom?

It was then I heard a sound, which I guessed was a human being or an animal about to attack us. Nora was staying safely behind me. I looked back at her for a comfort that wasn’t going to be given. The room was darker, or was it my imagination? It wasn’t that late in the afternoon. Maybe three or four. But it felt as if it were much later. I looked out the window above the double bed, and the sky looked dark, too. The trees were blowing, and so I knew a storm was coming.

“Maybe we should close the door and push the bureau back against the wall.” Scary movies filled my mind.

“You’ve never seen this door before?”

Then, all of a sudden, someone was very close.

“What are you girls doing?” It was Ronny. He wasn’t angry, but he didn’t seem like himself.

“What are you doing up here?” he asked again.

“I just noticed the bureau was stuck out from the wall and wanted to push it back.” I didn’t breathe and I didn’t look at him, though I could feel him. Ronny was very tan. Even tanner than when he had gotten back from the war. I knew he and Mommy had been at Jones Beach. They went there a lot, sometimes with Peter, the Beach Beard. Ronny looked like Rock Hudson, darker than the dark room, and if you want to be polite and scary at the same time, ask him how he did it.

There was a thunder strike. I looked down at my feet, and without any excuses, I moved toward the stairs. Nora followed me out of the room. The two of us were like secret agents whose cover has just been compromised. We deliberately didn’t run down the stairs, but held on to the banister tightly, hurrying down the steep steps. Nora was right behind me, and soon we were in my room flopping on the bed, exhaling as if we had been holding our breath since Ronny first caught us. I couldn’t believe we had said nothing at all. No excuses, no little screams.

It was now raining. I didn’t know what to say. We couldn’t go out. I felt constrained to my room, as if some revelation was going on beyond my range of hearing. I imagined Mommy would soon barge into my room in her German-tank mode. When she wasn’t sure of herself, she used her eyes, which were narrow and went light instead of darker when she squinted. They could terrify me. But she didn’t come in.

We settled down, and I suggested we write letters, since I had four or five to answer. I had some extra postcards of the fishing boats that lined the Menemsha harbor from our time on the Vineyard. We started to write, but neither of us could get it out of our minds that there might be some punishment coming. I also thought of the little door, the dark hole of the nightmare. What was all that about? Did I expect an explanation, or would I be preempted by an explosion from the grown-ups? Instead, an hour passed, and the rain came and got harder and disappeared completely, and then came back again.

*   *   *

Around six thirty, Mother, trying to arrange her attitude, came in my room. I could read the discomfort on her face. I was already into the letter I was writing to my friend Jessie, telling her how annoyed I was that Nora was there, using a code name for Nora, of course. Another little lie. I wanted to erase the whole impression of what had happened in the last four hours. Then my mother said, “Dinner in five minutes! Mac and cheese!” as if everything was normal.

Nora and I changed out of our Bermuda shorts and put on skirts with matching tops. She wore a red-and-white plaid short-sleeved shirt, and probably a bra under that. The dress rules were flexible on nights when it was just family. This was an in-between night. Nora was a guest, but not one who required formality. She took a lipstick out of her suitcase, which was inside its own little pouch. She opened it up and it was fire-engine red, like her shirt. She went to the mirror over the dresser and carefully applied it to her ridiculously Cupid’s-bow-shaped lips. I say ridiculously because I had never seen lips like that in person, only in movie magazines. I too put on lipstick, and we both—though we could have spent hours on the details of our burgeoning beauty—quickly fixed our hair. I put mine into a ponytail. Nora turned upside down from the waist and brushed her long, shiny, chestnut brown hair, which had the unique ability to shape itself into a perfect wedge when she turned upright. We generated the kind of energy that adolescent girls have a premium on.

Mommy, Ronny, Nora, and I sat around the dining room table, which was not set. It was what Mother called “buffet.” The cooks had made dinner before they left, but there were no place settings, just a stack of plates for us to help ourselves. Those were the most fun and casual of times. Music was always playing from the living room. That night
Carousel
was on. I hadn’t seen the Broadway play yet, but all bodies in the house (as Mommy called us) were going around singing and harmonizing to “What’s the Use of Wond’rin’?” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Ronny was singing in his most self-conscious baritone:
Walk on through the wind, walk on through the rain, though your dreams be tossed and blown, walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart …
He stopped just before the climax of the highest part—well, not really stopped, but carefully dipped down to a harmony a third below. Then I joined in on the repeat: “You’ll never walk … alone.” Mommy clapped, and in walked Peter and Jackie with yo-yos and freshly dirty hands.

Nora and I served ourselves. The volume of the music was often a contest of wills. Daddy liked it very soft. Mommy liked it quite loud. If it was Elvis or Sinatra, I liked it loud.

Mommy said, “Your dad is staying in the city tonight.” I could have told her that just by the volume of the music. And the fact that Ronny was singing at the top of his quite well-trained but thoroughly irritating voice. There was competition coming from the storm outside as well. It was the kind of sonic hysteria that contemporary rock ’n’ roll bands hope to achieve. So, dinner was quite noisy, with half of us singing while we were eating. Nora looked at me sideways. She was hearing me sing for the first time. I was pretty good at singing, but it was more for the love of the act. It was so freeing and fun to sing when I was beyond stuttering. Nora thought maybe she should sing, but my mother laughed and put her hand on Nora’s head and said, “Darling, don’t let us Simons bother you, this is just something we always do.”

Later that night, we watched a TV movie about someone with a drinking problem, probably with Jack Lemmon or Susan Hayward. When it was over we went upstairs and played “Magical Hand” with Peter and Jackie. It’s a game where we scared the hell out of the boys by entering their darkened room just a jot, holding a flashlight over our hand positioned to look like a claw. They’d scream, we’d scream, and we’d enter their room and tickle their bellies until they laughed with a combination of terror and merriment. Then we’d go out of the door, turn off the flashlight, and wait for them to be really quiet to begin again. We wore them out, and after an hour of fun and games, we closed the door to Peter’s room. It was just across the hall from Joey’s and my room. What Mommy and Ronny were doing was anybody’s guess. I think there was a soundtrack of something playing. Probably
Guys and Dolls
or
Kiss Me, Kate
. Between the pulses of rain, I could hear the music swelling and dropping from above, on the third floor.

The storm was rearranging itself between the twigs and among the branches. Acorns were snapping against the screens and the glass-paned windows and the sides of the house. It was the Indian summer dance of the sycamores, oaks, maples, and the big tall elm right outside the window by my bed. I hoped Daddy was all right. It was unusual for him not to come home. Probably because of the storm. I put “Moonglow” on the turntable of my portable phonograph and as I got undressed into my nightie, Nora was in the bathroom with the door closed. I turned on the music and danced in front of the full-length mirror, appreciating how pretty I looked. I rocked. I turned up the volume so the music could be heard over the storm outside. I rocked some more and put the 78 on again. The toilet flushed and Nora came out of the bathroom. She was wearing a loose, shimmery white pair of shorty pajamas. She saw me in front of the mirror, so I toned my dancing down so it looked less like a performance and more casual, just as Mommy had said about singing at dinner,
it’s just something we do here
.

Nora was stunning, and something in her was a little too sinful to know what to do with. She said, “Look at this, watch
me
dance. Eric and I danced at the cookout on the beach the last night of camp. We did this fox-trot to the slow dances, but the rumba and samba and the lindy to the faster ones. He picked me up like this.” Nora was smaller than I, but she raised me just slightly off the floor. “Then he let me fall, but his arms were there to catch me and we did this dip. It was so neat. I love him and I’ll bet we’re going to go all the way pretty soon.” I was horrified but didn’t let it show. Even I had my limits!

She started to get into the right rhythm of the song and she pulled away from me, doing a dance she might have learned from Rita Hayworth in
The Lady from Shanghai
. Then she took the scarf that was on the end of the bed and waved it through the air and around my head as though it was a feather. She had been so quiet, and now she had come to life. I followed her lead in what I supposed was a reenactment of her dances with Eric. She was looking directly at me and smiling with a reassuring look I’d never experienced with any boy I had ever danced with. It was heady, and as the song was coming to an end, I imitated Kim Novak’s move with her hips and arms in
Picnic
. Oh, wasn’t it fun to be a movie star? I put my palms together and crisscrossed them, brushing them up and down as the strings soared. My arms partly extended and my neck leaned back, allowing my head to move seductively. Nora watched me and tried to copy me. She and I led each other and, as in a perfect dance, communicated viscerally.

The light went out on a large thunderclap, and the lightning was so close to the thunder that it must have struck the house or maybe the elm, the tallest tree on the property. The music that seemed to have brought the storm on slowed and then stopped, and there was only howling. The storm said:
Come dance with me.
Nora and I bumped into each other, but not by chance. We fell back on the bed. Her hand moved explicitly under my nightie, and she startlingly, with the finesse of an animal but the beauty of a young goddess, put her hand right at the heart of my desire. A hot white wind blew. It came tapping through the andromeda against the side of the house. And then the breathtaking whipping sound of the elm made me open my thighs. Somewhere a door slammed, one of the outside doors, stopping us for a minute, but we were both so otherworldly hot, and anyone coming in the room to check on us would have seen, by candle or flashlight, just a tangle of white sheets and two young girls hiding in each other’s arms from the thunder and lightning. Nora said, “This is how he does it to me.”

The blackness around me held my shyness at bay, and Nora was over my body, kissing my breasts. The hissing of smaller, higher winds into the larger gusts reassured us of our privacy, and we moved to the unpredictable sound-and-light show.

“You touch me now,” Nora whispered.

I knew this was the future. This was the way I would writhe in the future. But for now I passed my hand over her thighs and felt for her. I was boiling for all the future times, not quite able to be in the moment. She hula-hooped her hips in a circle as I touched her. Then another gust of wind as the elm right out my window shook and whipped like someone being spanked. She asked me not to stop. Her hard breathing became a cry of an animal. I was worried that she was hurting, but more worried that Mommy would hear us and come running through the closed but unlocked door. Nora still didn’t know how excited I was. She was the one needing and asking. I was only complying with her requests.

Now the rain slanted so heavily against the glass of the window right next to the bed that I was sure something would break. “This is just what Eric does. Please do it some more.” I smelled the sweetness of her. There was nothing like it ever before. She reached with her head down the length of my torso and her hair was thick with sweat. We got into an awkward position with each other, but I imagined we were like two smaller branches of the elm, twisting and tossing and making room so that they could move against each other without breaking.

I heard footsteps running down the hall right outside the room. Nora and I quickly disentangled our bodies as Peter opened the door.

“Are you scared?” He was so thrilled. “It’s a
hurricane
!”