The Locked Door
It came to me, as I made my way down to breakfast, that there were lots of secrets in this house. Every day when I came down the stairs, I passed the padlocked door at the end of the hall and the forbidden room behind it. I knew that this was not a topic to bring up.
I kept thinking about the look on Prudence’s face when I’d asked her about the room and she’d told me—with unprecedented sharpness—that I should leave that one alone, the same warning Hayward had delivered that first night I’d arrived, when I reached for the doorknob on the mystery room.
There were all those pills, and the care with which Forrest oversaw their use.
The look on Regina’s face when, during the Barnetts’ visit, Forrest had brought up a time Regina used to play doubles tennis down at the club.
The look on Forrest’s face after he said this.
This was a forbidden topic evidently. One of many.
I had my own secrets too, of course—all the things I wrote down in my journal that never exactly happened.
I just wished they had. My secret feelings for Forrest, which went beyond the affection a girl feels for an old family friend.
And the unopened box of tampons lying in my drawer.
What would happen to me if I never became a woman? What would happen to me if I did?
Then there was Forrest’s story, and in some ways, this one felt the most mysterious of them all.
The man I had known and loved for as long as I’d been alive, the one with whom I’d always been able to talk about almost anything, had seemed to me like the most loving husband a woman could ask for, devoted to his family, and in particular, to his wife.
Then I’d seen what happened to him when Brenda Barnett walked in the house—the way he’d looked at her on the patio, the way his eyes had followed her out the door.
I’d seen the way Forrest charmed women at the country club, but this was different.
That had felt like a game, a dance. What I’d witnessed, watching Forrest’s behavior when he was with Brenda, felt totally different.
As if an unprotected electrical wire dangled down from the ceiling, giving off sparks.
I was up in my room at Wonderland now—eyes fixed on the milkmaid wallpaper, my bluebird rug, my small blue desk.
My capacity for constructing stories had been unleashed, and I let myself go to another place.
If I couldn’t uncover the secrets in this house, I could make up stories whose resolutions I’d invent.
I pictured myself grown up. Eighteen at least. Possibly twenty. Beautiful at last—slim, but not scrawny like Regina. It would be summertime. No longer a mother’s helper, I was back at Wonderland.
In the story I constructed, Jilly and Hayward were away someplace—boarding school probably, or (this being summer) camp. Prudence was absent. No need for her now.
It was just Forrest and me alone together. Just the two of us on the boat, motoring off toward the sunset, pulling up to the island he’d pointed out to me—the one owned by Regina’s family—only this time, we’d dock the boat and step off onto the land, lay a blanket down for the two of us.
I had a new picture to add to the story I dreamed up now.
I imagined the two of us playing tennis.
Forrest, tanned and golden. Me in a white tennis outfit, returning every shot he hit.
And after our game (unclear who won), the two of us would share some kind of fancy drink together at the clubhouse.
Paper umbrellas in the glass. His arm over my shoulders.
You were amazing out there, he’d tell me.
I never knew it could be like this, I’d tell him.
(Like what? I didn’t know, actually. As much interest as I possessed in what happened between women and men, when they fell in love with each other, or simply got into bed, I understood just about nothing of what it was they actually did about that.)
Now Forrest is unbuttoning my shirt, I wrote.
I could see him doing this. He would undo the buttons one at a time, slowly and reverently, looking into my eyes as he did so.
He takes his time.
Rewind. I liked the scene better another way.
He rips off my shirt. He can’t keep his hands off me.
“Do you have any idea how long I’ve been waiting for this moment?” he asks me.
“Me too.”
“We shouldn’t.”
“We have to.”
“I can’t help it.”
“I know.”
He gasps for breath. I reach for the zipper on his jeans.
Now came the place where I set down my pen.
Writing my journal entries, as they had evolved to become, proved surprisingly easy, with one exception.
The problem was that even in my fantasy world, there remained a single image I could not summon.
I knew what the face of my fantasy lover looked like.
It belonged to Forrest Emerson. I knew his arms and his chest, his strong calves, his rough hands, which were so gentle when they touched me.
But one part of him caused me to draw a blank.
I didn’t know how to describe a man’s naked genitals because I’d never seen any.
I could write about Pretend Forrest unbuttoning the shirt of Pretend Frances.
But when I got to the part where he pulled down his zipper and stepped out of his shorts, I had no pictures for what came next.
In the little movie theater I had constructed in my brain, this was where the screen went dark.
All I knew was the deepest form of longing to be touched.
I knew about feelings. Not bodies.
Say the word, I told myself. Write the word down.
The story always stopped there.