18 Made-Up Stories
Made-Up Stories
Once I’d mentioned my nonexistent boyfriend to Regina and the children, the floodgates opened.
I could make up any story I wanted. That’s when I started to do it.
As I had done every night since Regina first gave me the journal, I took it out of its place in my drawer, under the T-shirts and the tampon box and an old issue of Town & Country magazine that I found in the living room, and settled onto my bed under the eaves.
I opened it to the page where I’d left off.
This time I didn’t write about what we’d had for dinner, or the boring hour I’d spent with Jilly pretending the American Girl dolls were paying a visit to Disneyland, or the annoying way Hayward had of sticking Cheez Doodles in his nostrils.
So what if Prudence made strawberry rhubarb pie?
Why bother with any of that anymore? I thought about Forrest’s words to me after I first got to Wonderland—that I deserved an amazing life—and it seemed more and more like a waste of my time, occupying my mind with any of this.
If I hadn’t started having my amazing life yet, at least I could pretend I had.
Propped up on the gingham bolsters in my perfect little bed, I considered, briefly, constructing a story about my pretend boyfriend back home.
I could give him a name, a leather jacket, great hair.
I could model him on Bruce Springsteen, maybe, or the boy at the Caboose who scooped our ice cream into our cones.
He’d be older than me—sixteen or seventeen.
Maybe he owned a car. He’d write poetry or play the guitar.
(Really play a guitar. Not simply keep one propped up in his room, like Hayward.)
But the idea of a boyfriend back in New Jersey failed to capture my imagination. I couldn’t summon a picture that moved or excited me.
When I tried to conjure a male figure playing the starring role in my fantasy, a different person came to mind—one who drove a Porsche and a Chris-Craft and performed magic tricks by the bonfire and played the ukulele.
More importantly, he looked into my eyes in a way that let me know he understood me.
He slept in the bedroom directly below mine. Alone. He had called me one of his favorite people and told me I’d be beautiful someday.
Never mind the difference in our ages. We came from the same place. “I’d better break it to you now, Frances,” he’d told me that day. “We’re never letting you go home.”
He’d put his arms around me on the boat. “You’re perfect,” he said.
That night I wrote only a single word in my journal, but I wrote it over and over—in block print letters and cursive, very tiny letters and large ones, underlined, with shading, and a row of exclamation points.
Forrest. Forrest. Forrest!!!!!!
I must have written his name a hundred times before I finally fell asleep.
I crossed the line so easily. After that night, I abandoned my previous practice of offering up tedious accounts of my daily activities in the pages of my journal.
I’d moved from the realm of predictable G-rated autobiography to romance fiction.
The odd thing was that what I wrote now, even though I made it up, felt more true than anything I’d written before.
True to my feelings, anyway. If it wasn’t true to how I lived or who I was at the time, it was true to who I wanted to become.
There’s this way Forrest looks at me across the breakfast table when I’m having my cereal, I wrote. It’s like he’s looking directly into my soul. I’m looking directly into his too!
I found out yesterday how old Forrest is, I wrote. Thirty-seven! That might sound old, but the older I get, the less it’s going to matter. When he’s forty-seven, I’ll be twenty-four. When he’s fifty-five, I’ll be thirty-two. Thirty-two! By then I’ll be old too!
Something happened when he passed me the peas tonight, I wrote. His hand brushed against mine. I felt something like an electric shock. He felt it too, I could tell. Nobody else noticed. But my eyes met his. It was as if everyone in the world disappeared but us.
Back when I first arrived at Wonderland, Forrest had occupied the space of the uncle I never had, or even my dream dad.
Forrest was the husband I wished my mother had married.
Then came the guilty part, but also the source of my secret thrill.
The leap was easier than I might have expected, from one form of fantasy to another, from the longing for a father to the longing for a lover—possibly because I knew so little of what it meant to have a lover, or be one. All I knew was my longing for love.
I was still doing my sit-ups, tossing my tennis ball in the air in front of my mirror, and making regular stops to the library on my yellow bike, working my way through the shelf of Stephen King novels, but what consumed me more and more, as the days passed, had less to do with reading and more to do with writing.
I started looking forward to the end of the day, when I got to climb into bed and make up that night’s journal entry.
Now that I no longer felt constrained by sticking to the ordinary details of my real life, every night’s exercise brought a new level of excitement.
Everything was different then. Everything stayed the same.
Every day I still checked my underpants for a sign of blood. Nothing.
Nights alone in my little room under the eaves, with my shirt off, I studied my reflection in the mirror. A few strands of hair had sprouted in my armpits, and in that other place whose name I could not speak, where I touched myself under the covers on a nightly basis now.
Something was happening inside my body. But no blood came.
Every night I thought about the man who was probably downstairs in the family room at that very moment, having a beer and watching the Red Sox, or giving Regina her final doses of pills for the night.
If it was late, he might even be asleep, in the bed one flight down, in the room directly below mine. Lying awake himself, like me.
Now came my nighttime life—the secret world I entered, alone in my bed at Wonderland. I imagined Forrest Emerson’s scratchy beard rubbing against my skin, his strong back, his arms encircling my body as he did when he picked me up that first day, and that other time, out on the boat.
Sight for sore eyes! he’d said. You’re just my kind of girl.
I unbuttoned my pajama top and climbed into bed.
I opened my journal. I began to write: As we were clearing up the dishes in the kitchen after dinner, he leaned over and whispered in my ear, so nobody else could hear him.
“I wish I could take you out on the lake tonight,” he told me.
“Just the two of us in the moonlight. I think about you all the time.”
This was Pretend Forrest talking. Now came Pretend Frances’s response: “I’d love that too,” I said. “I never stop thinking about you.”
“I want to wrap my arms around you and never let go,” he said.
Leaning up against the headboard of my little single bed under the eaves, I gripped the open covers of my leatherbound journal and scribbled hard.
He pressed his mouth against mine, I wrote. I’m glad I don’t wear braces, like some of the girls down at the club. I could feel his tongue. It was like we were one person.
For over a year now, my mind had been occupied with thoughts about bodies—mine, and those of other people around me, and what people did with each other in their bedrooms, or wherever else sex took place—as much as I could imagine any of this with my own extremely limited understanding of what that might be.
I didn’t just think about it anymore. I wrote it down. I was on the yellow bike, no hands, racing down the steep hill all the way from town. No brakes.
After that, there were no more journal entries about the Emersons and me playing Trivial Pursuit by the firepit, Forrest making up funny songs and pulling quarters out of Hayward’s and Jilly’s ears.
If I wrote about Forrest roasting s’mores now—and I did—the focus of my story had nothing to do with heartwarming family times.
What mattered to me about that event was how Forrest had picked out just the right stick for me to roast my marshmallow on.
Most significant of all was what Forrest had done afterward, the tender way he’d wiped chocolate sauce from the melted Hershey’s bar off my cheek.
In my real life, that part actually happened. In the version I created for my journal, he hadn’t just wiped the chocolate sauce from my face. He’d licked it.
Of course I’d fallen in love with Forrest Emerson. Who wouldn’t?