Harvesting the Heart (19 page)

We
discovered sex on a rainy Saturday when we were in seventh grade. I
was at Priscilla's, lying on my back on her lollipop bedspread and
watching lightning freeze the street outside into still-life photos.
Priscilla was thumbing through a
Playboy
that
we'd stolen from her brother's room. We had had the magazine for
several months and had already memorized the pictures and read all
the letters to the "Advisor," looking up the words we
didn't understand. Even Priscilla was bored by the same old thing.
She stood up and moved to the window. For a moment a trick of
lightning darkened her eyes and created shadows that made her look
drained and disillusioned, as if she had been staring at the street
below for ages rather than seconds. When she turned to me, arms
crossed, I barely recognized her. "Paige," she said
casually, "have you ever kissed an actual boy?"

I
hadn't, but I wasn't about to let her know that. "Sure," I
said. "Haven't you?"

Priscilla
tossed her hair and took a step forward. "Prove it," she
said.

I
couldn't; and this very topic, in fact, had been one of my biggest
worries. I had spent entire nights awake, practicing kissing with my
pillow, but I couldn't figure out the finer points, like where my
nose should go and when I was supposed to take a breath. "How am
I supposed to prove it?" I said. "Unless there's a guy in
here that I can't see."

Priscilla
walked toward me, thin and almost see-through in the purple
afternoon. She leaned over me so that her hair made a quiet tent.
"Pretend," she said,
"I'm
the
guy."

I
knew that Priscilla knew I had been lying; just as well as I knew
that I wasn't going to admit it. So I leaned forward and put my hands
on her shoulders and pressed my lips against hers. "You see,"
I said, dismissing her with a wave of my hand.

"No,"
she said, "it's like this." And she turned her head and
kissed me back. Her lips moved as much as mine hadn't, molding me
beneath her until my mouth was doing the same thing. My eyes were
wide open, still watching the lightning. In that instant I knew that
every rumor told about Priscilla Divine in school, every nun's
warning and every altar boy's sideways glance, was justified. Her
tongue slipped over my lips, and I jumped back. Priscilla's hair
clung to my shoulders and my face like a web, that's the kind of
electricity we had generated.

We
spent time after that getting kissing down to a science. We'd borrow
Priscilla's mother's red lipstick and make out with the bathroom
mirror, watching our own faces fog up as we learned to love
ourselves. We went to the public library and hid in the stacks with
adult romance novels, skimming the pages until we came to the sex
scenes, and then we'd whisper them out loud. Occasionally we kissed
each other, taking turns playing the boy. Whoever was the girl got to
swoon and to lower her eyelashes and to whisper breathlessly like the
women in those forbidden books. Whoever was the boy had to stand
still and straight, to accept.

One
day after school Priscilla showed up at my front door, out of breath.
"Paige," she said, "you've got to come
now."
She
knew I was supposed to stay at home alone until my father returned
from the office where he worked as a computer programmer to
supplement his income from inventions. She knew that I never broke
promises to my father. "Paige," she insisted, "this is
important."

I
went to Priscilla's that day and hid with her inside the hot dark
closet in her brother's room, which smelled of gym shorts and bologna
and Canoe. We watched the room settle, split through the closet
door's slats. "Don't move," Priscilla whispered. "Don't
even breathe."

Priscilla's
brother, Steven, was a junior in high school and was the source of
most of her information about sex. We knew he had done it, because he
kept condoms hidden in his nightstand, as many as twelve at a time.
Once, we had stolen one and opened its silver wrapper. I had unrolled
the pale tube over Priscilla's arm, marveling as it stretched and
grew like a second skin. I had watched my fingers slip over and over
as if I were stroking velvet.

Minutes
after we had settled ourselves in the closet, Steven came into his
room with a girl. She was not someone from Pope Pius but probably a
public-school girl from downtown. She had short brown hair and wore
pink nail polish, and her white jeans rode low on her hips. Steven
pulled her onto his bed with a groan and began to unbutton her
shirt. She kicked off her shoes and wiggled off her pants, and before
I knew what had happened they were both naked. I could not see much
of Steven, which was good, because how would I ever have faced him?
But there were the smooth circles of his bottom and the pink heels of
his feet, and tangled across his back were the legs of this girl.
Steven squeezed the breast of the girl with one hand, revealing a
nipple like a strawberry, while he rummaged in his night-stand drawer
for a condom. And then he began to move on her, rocking her back and
forth like those playground animals on thick wiry springs. Her legs
climbed higher, her toes crossed on Steven's shoulders, and they both
started to moan. The sound rose around them like yellow steam,
punctuated by the scrape of the bed on the hardwood floor. I was not
sure what I was seeing, sliced as it was by the closet into strips,
but it seemed a machine, or a mythical beast that shrieked as it fed
on itself.

Priscilla's
crazy aunt from Boise sent her a Ouija board for her fifteenth
birthday, and the first question we asked it was who would be the May
Queen. May was Mary's month, or so we'd been told at Our Lady, and
every year there was a parade on the first Monday night in May. The
students would march in a procession from the school to Saint
Christopher's, preceded by the discord and oompahs of the school
band. At the end of the parade came the May Queen, chosen by Father
Draher himself, and her court of attendants. The prettiest girl in
the eighth grade was always the May Queen, and everyone assumed that
this year it would be Priscilla, so when we asked the Ouija board I
gave a subtle push toward
P,
knowing
it would have gone that way no matter what.

"P
what?"
Priscilla said, impatiently tapping her fingers on the cursor.

"Don't
tap," I warned her. "It won't work. It's got to feel the
heat."

Priscilla
rubbed her nose with her shoulder and said that the board didn't want
to answer that question, although I wondered if it was because she
was afraid the next letter might not be
R.
"I
know," she said. "Let's ask it who you're going to go out
with."

Since
spying on Steven, Priscilla had been dating a steady stream of boys.
She had let them kiss her and touch her breasts, and she told me that
the next time she might even go to third base. I had listened to her
describe the way Joe Salvatore jammed his tongue in her mouth, and I
wondered why she would keep going back for more. First base, second
base, third base—it reminded me of the Stations of the Cross,
the special services during Lent where you said a prayer for each of
the twelve steps leading up to the Crucifixion. I'd been doing it for
years every Friday during Lent, and it was the same hour-long ordeal
week after week. First Station, Second Station, Third . . . I would
flip ahead in the prayer book to see how much longer I'd have to
suffer. It seemed to me that in a different way, Priscilla was doing
the same thing.

"S-E-T-H,"
Priscilla
pronounced. "You're going to go out with Seth." She took
her fingers off the Ouija cursor and frowned. "Who the hell is
Seth?" she said.

There
was no Seth in our school, no Seth related to Priscilla or to me, no
Seth anywhere in the world that we knew of. "Who cares," I
said, and I meant it.

The
next day in school Father Draher announced that the May Queen that
year would be Paige O'Toole, and I almost died. I turned bright red
and wondered what on earth had made them pick me, when Priscilla was
clearly more beautiful. In fact, I could feel her eyes searing into
my neck from the desk behind me and the cruel jab of her pencil in my
shoulder blade. I also wondered why, for a rite honoring the mother
of God, they'd pick someone who had no mother at all.

Priscilla
was one of the May Queen's attendants, which meant she got off easy.
I had to spend every day after school being fitted for the white lace
gown I would wear during the procession. I spent hours listening to
Sister Felicite and Sister Anata Falla as they pinned up the hem and
adjusted the bustline from last year's queen. As I watched the
setting sun run into the gutters of the wet streets, I wondered if
Priscilla had found another friend.

But
Priscilla did not hold the May Queen appointment against me. She cut
her trig class two days later and stood outside the door of my
English class until I noticed her waving and smiling. I took the
bathroom pass and met her in the hall. "Paige," she said,
"how do you feel about getting violently ill?"

We
planned a way for me to get away from May Queen practice that day: I
would start shaking during lunch and then get severe abdominal
cramps, and although I would be able to troupe it out till the end of
the day, I would tell Sister Felicite that it was that time of the
month, something the sisters seemed to be overly accommodating
about. Then I'd meet Priscilla behind the bleachers and we'd take the
bus uptown. Priscilla said there was something she had to show me,
and it was a surprise.

It
was nearly four o'clock when we arrived at the old car lot, a
blacktop area enclosed with high mesh fencing that someone had rigged
with two netless basketball hoops. A shock of multicolored, sweating
men were running up and down the makeshift court, passing a dirty
ball back and forth. Their muscles flexed, outlined and taut. They
grunted and gasped and whistled, hoarding the air like gold. Of
course I had seen basketball before, but never like this. It was
primal, angry, and wholehearted, played as if the players' souls were
at stake.

"Look
at him, Paige," Priscilla whispered. Her fingers gripped the
chain links so tightly that the joints paled. "He's so
beautiful." She pointed to one of the men. He was tall and lean
and could jump with the grace of a mountain lion. His hands seemed to
cover the basketball. He was black.

"Priscilla,"
I said, "your mother will kill you."

Priscilla
didn't even look at me. "Only if some Goody Two-shoes virgin May
Queen rats on me," she said.

The
game ended, and Priscilla called him over. His name was Calvin. From
the inside of the fence, he pressed his hands against hers and pushed
his lips through one of the little open diamonds to kiss her. He was
not as old as I'd originally thought; probably eighteen or so, a
public high school kid. He smiled at me. "So we goin' out or
what?" he said, talking so fast that I had to blink.

Priscilla
turned to me. "Calvin here wants to double-date," she said.
I stared at her as if she was crazy. We were in the eighth grade. We
couldn't go out in guys' cars; we had weekend curfews. "Just for
dinner," Priscilla said, reading my mind. "Monday night."

"Monday
night?" I said, incredulous. "Monday night's the—"
Priscilla kicked my shin before I said anything about the May parade.

"Paige
is busy until about eight," she said. "But then we can get
away." She kissed Calvin again, hard, through the fence, so that
when she pulled away she had crosses pressed into her cheeks, red as
scars.

On
Monday night, with my father and the neighbors watching, I was the
May Queen. I wore a bride's outfit of white lace and a white veil,
and I carried white silk flowers. Before me went a stream of Catholic
children, and then my attendants in their best dresses. I was last,
their icon, the image of the Blessed Virgin Mother