Only Friend in the World
It was raining, so we weren’t going to the club.
The children had gone over to the Olivers’ house to work on a presentation they were putting on at the club the next week, a skit commemorating Bastille Day, featuring one of the older kids—Olivia, in a fancy dress and wig—playing the role of Marie Antoinette.
At the Lake Catherine Country Club, they were always celebrating something or other.
So I was off duty. I was lying on the couch, starting in on a new book.
My attempts at keeping my calorie intake low over the summer had failed miserably, due to a combination of my daily visit to the Caboose with the kids, the presence of an irresistible assortment of great snacks in the pantry at Wonderland, and Prudence’s fried chicken.
In spite of this, I’d trimmed down noticeably, thanks to bike riding, and the fact that I was playing tennis almost daily now.
Studying my body as I did, up in my attic room at night—my legs, my chest—I no longer experienced the level of self-hatred that had plagued me in recent years. I often thought about Regina’s words to me that someday I’d look beautiful. This was still hard to believe.
My lack of breasts was a continued disappointment.
Sometimes, sitting across from him at the table, I’d see Hayward studying my chest, but with a bemused expression, like a sailor onboard ship, looking out to the horizon in search of an approaching vessel and finding nothing but fog.
Even more unnerving was the smile he gave me on these occasions. More precisely, a smirk.
I wore my training bra when I could, but not when I had tennis lessons, and I was having tennis lessons almost daily now.
The first time Jonathan had worked with me on my serve, I’d worried that one of the balled-up pieces of toilet paper I’d stuffed inside my bra would fall out.
After that I’d abandoned my efforts to fill out my appearance.
I decided that developing a serve mattered more.
I opened my book. Other than Forrest—Forrest as he was until recent days—Stephen King had become my best company over the course of my Wonderland summer.
Regina had been resting. Or so I thought. Then there she was, settling herself into the lounge chair next to me. She held on to the sides of the chair as she lowered herself. I got the feeling that without the support, she might keel over.
“You probably wonder what’s the matter with me,” she said. This was Regina for you. She felt no need to enter into a conversation with the usual pleasantries. She got right down to things.
“Nobody says anything, but I know everyone thinks I’m this pathetic, screwed-up nutjob.”
“Not really,” I said. Though they did, of course.
I reached for my Diet Sprite. I was still holding my book, not sure if it was OK to get back to my reading, though I wanted to. It seemed that Regina felt a need to talk.
“That’s a scary one,” she said, pointing to my book. “I can’t read his books. If you ask me, real life is terrifying enough.”
I took a sip from my drink, trying to think of a good response, but Regina had more to say.
“My husband loves me,” she said. “Just in a different way from how some people do it. And I adore him, of course. Who wouldn’t fall in love with Forrest? That’s the problem.”
I didn’t know what to say. I knew plenty about husbands and wives not getting along, of course, though nothing in Forrest’s and Regina’s behavior toward each other reminded me of what went on, or didn’t go on, between my parents.
Other than his disturbing attentiveness to Brenda Barnett that night, it seemed that Forrest remained unfailingly kind to Regina.
She brushed him aside like a bug sometimes, but that was about as far as she took it. They never had fights.
A lot of the time Regina gave the impression that she didn’t seem to care all that much about anything.
Now, though, her voice sounded uncharacteristically emphatic.
She seemed to be speaking from someplace very deep in her chest. I got the feeling she’d been preparing for this moment and worked out her speech to me.
“Marriage is . . . difficult,” she said. “And then there’s sex. Oh god. Sex.”
I couldn’t look at her. I kept my eyes on a page of my book. But I listened hard. As much time as I spent thinking about sex, nobody had ever talked to me about it.
“People act like sex is so great,” she said.
“But you know the truth? It’s crazy what sex does to people.
When you think about it, sex is pretty dangerous, isn’t it?
Opening yourself up to another person that way.
Giving them all that power over you. Letting yourself love someone.
Knowing if something goes wrong it could ruin your life? ”
What could I say? For all my nighttime thoughts, I knew nothing about what sex would actually be like.
I had all kinds of ideas, pictures I dreamed up, but none of them were real.
Now here was this woman I’d known all my life, though not really, talking about sex to me as if I were her girlfriend or therapist. Regina wasn’t talking about sex the way your gym teacher would, or the school nurse.
She spoke about it the way a person might speak about a flesh-eating virus or a tsunami. As something dark and terrifying.
“I’m just trying to protect you,” she said, though nothing in the way Regina was looking at me left me feeling safe. “Nobody ever told me these things. I learned the hard way.”
Most of the times Regina spoke to me, she looked away, almost as if she weren’t speaking to me at all. This time she looked directly into my eyes. Hers had taken on a wild look. The thought came to me: I could see how it was they’d put her in a hospital that time.
“We go through our lives pretending nothing’s going on,” she said. “Pick up the dry cleaning. Go to the supermarket. But you always know that under the surface people are doing all these crazy things. They just never talk about it.”
I doubted Regina Emerson ever went to the supermarket. But I got her point.
“You think the only place to find horror is in one of those books?” She pointed to the novel in my hands, then ripped it out of my hands and waved it over her head.
“Sex can be”—she hesitated—“a catastrophe.”
I had no idea what she was talking about now. I wondered whether later, when I was older, her words might make more sense to me, but I doubted it.
“Sex can destroy a person,” she said. “When you think about it, it’s not so different from murder.”
As quickly as it had flared up, the intensity in her voice disappeared then—replaced by Regina’s usual low and whispery air of resignation. Now came the words I sensed she’d been waiting to deliver.
“You understand what’s happening between Forrest and Brenda, I assume?” she said, her voice cool, almost matter-of-fact.
I nodded.
“Forrest’s tradition of summer affairs has been going on for a long time,” she said. “The women change, but the pattern stays the same. Every summer a new person. I’m used to it, almost.”
What could I possibly have to contribute on this subject? It didn’t matter, actually. She was talking to herself again. I just happened to be there.
“You could call it Forrest’s summer tradition,” she said. “Playing around with somebody’s wife at the lake. It usually starts around Fourth of July, and by Labor Day everything’s over. We get back to our life. Until the next year.”
It seemed important to respond to this. As inadequate as it was likely to be. “That must be hard,” I offered.
“This year we were slightly ahead of schedule,” she said. “But it’s not as big a deal as you might think.
“There’s no point taking it seriously. It won’t amount to anything. I just thought you should know. You should understand: Nobody’s going to break the two of us up. It isn’t real. It means nothing.”
I guessed this was supposed to be good news, though it didn’t feel that way.
“But one thing about my husband: The minute he starts fucking some new woman, the whole rest of the world disappears. It’s like he’s drunk. He can’t think of anything else. I thought I should prepare you.”
She used the word fucking. Though my mother often used the phrase “fuck you” when fighting with my father, this was the first time anyone had ever used that word when speaking with me, in an actual conversation. The fact that Regina did this now unnerved me.
“Maybe you should talk to somebody,” I said. Maybe she’d forgotten I was just fourteen years old.
She laughed. It came out as little more than a low growl. “But I am talking to someone, aren’t I?” she said. “I’m talking to you.”
She reached out her long, thin arm then. Her thin hand touched my hair. She stroked it. Maybe nobody, ever, had done such a thing.
“You know the crazy thing?” she said. “You may be my only friend in the world.”