Eleven #2
As it turned out, almost handsome was exactly what Clara wanted.
She was fairly confident that by the limited and admittedly self-absorbed standards of high school, her kind of pretty (better than average) had more currency than Dune’s almost handsome.
She knew she wasn’t a beauty. She’d heard two Spanish teachers in the hallway one day talking about a new freshman and Senora Garcia’d said, “She’s a real beauty, isn’t she?
” and Clara felt a pang of sadness because the girl in question was quite stunning, and Clara knew nobody would call her a real beauty behind her back.
But she also knew she was pretty enough.
She spent the ensuing days thinking about Dune and how best to signal her interest. Though they didn’t hang out the way they used to during the days of hide-and-seek or softball on the block, they still found themselves together at family gatherings.
He lived right across the street. Clara imagined how thrilled—no, how relieved—Dune would be when she made her interest known.
She felt terrific about dating one small step down.
Maybe a half step. It always seemed to her that having someone love you a little more than you loved them was the correct ratio for happiness and, my god, was she already in love?
In love with her old friend Dune Finnegan?
While Clara was congratulating herself for how much she could improve Dune’s life, rock his world, she failed to credit Dune’s understanding of the shifting ground beneath him and his willingness to welcome in all possibilities.
That one possibility would be Greta Crane would never have crossed Clara’s mind because the one thing she and Dune had always laughed about was the lameness of Greta Crane.
Greta came from one of the wealthiest families in town.
The Finnegans were up there and Clara’s family was hardly poor, but Finn Finnegan was a grocer’s son-turned-businessman and the Cranes were old money in Rochester, two different worlds.
Greta’s great-grandfather was a founding member of the oldest and most exclusive country club in town.
Another of Greta’s forebears had been instrumental in starting the Eastman School of Music with George Eastman.
Greta’s father published the local daily newspaper and partially owned Rochester’s AAA minor-league baseball team.
Greta’s family had a house in Myrtle Beach where they went every spring break and one in Cape Cod where they went every summer, never mind the countless family vacations to Paris, Rome, London.
Greta owned a dozen crewneck sweaters in various shades of sherbet, all with her monogram, , embroidered on the front.
She was medium height and had medium-length medium-brown hair and was medium smart.
Because Xavier ended classes a good thirty minutes before Good Counsel, the boys from Xavier who had a car or a friend with a car would already be hanging out in the parking lot when the girls were dismissed.
One brilliant autumn afternoon, as Clara stood with a group of friends planning which movie to see over the weekend, she saw Dune open the door of his beat-up Buick and invite Greta into the passenger seat.
As they pulled away, windows down, the Bee Gees’ “More than a Woman” blaring from the car radio, Clara knew she had to act fast because boys were very dumb.
Greta was cute and bubbly and laughed at everything a boy said even if she didn’t get the joke.
Even if she was the butt of the joke. And she was popular, which would hold sway over Dune.
She was president of the junior class, the ski club, the New Year’s Ball committee, and the girls’ volleyball team.
She volunteered at the local old-age home.
Clara did not underestimate the power of Greta Crane with an agenda.
She instinctively knew she should avoid bad-mouthing Greta. “Did I see you in the parking lot the other day,” she said to Dune one afternoon when they were hanging out after school, “picking up Greta? You guys make a cute couple.”
Dune blushed. “We’re not a couple. I just gave her a ride home.” Clara nodded and lightly changed the subject. “Want to be my partner for Godspell auditions?”
From there, it had been a snap. They rehearsed together a few times a week, always at Dune’s house because Fern was never home, and Bridie was always home and was nosy and annoying.
Clara and Dune could talk for hours. About parents and teachers and college and their friends and who was smart and who was not and who was funny and who was just plain mean.
They exchanged notes in the morning and collected little bits of gossip all day, proffering information like tokens.
One afternoon when they were deciding which Bible parable they should use to improvise around for their audition, she could tell Dune wanted to kiss her.
She looked at her watch and pretended she had to hurry home to help with dinner.
She wanted to make him wait for that kiss.
The next afternoon, the dirty Buick idled in the parking lot for her.
Today, she needed to head across the street and talk Dune into auditioning the way she envisioned.
She pulled The Joy of Sex out from behind her dresser and started paging through when her door swung open.
She shoved the book under the pillow, but it was only Bridie standing there with a board game.
“Wanna play?” she said, holding a weathered version of The Bride Game, which they had played to death years ago but long abandoned.
The game bored Clara because she’d swiftly figured out how to “shuffle” the cards so when her turn came, she got the coveted dress (formal daytime) and the right bouquet (extremely pink) and the three-tiered wedding cake and, most importantly, the desirable groom (formal evening, even if Bridie insisted the groom should be formal daytime, too). Bridie never knew Clara cheated.
“Where did you find that?” Clara asked.
“In the closet.”
“No thanks, always-a-Bridie-never-a-bride.” Bridie’s face fell, and Clara felt sorry for resurrecting the old taunt. “Maybe later. I have to head across the street.”
Bridie skulked away and Clara took the book out from behind the pillow.
Clara knew her mother would soon figure out the book was missing, so she tried to sear most of it into memory, which was quite a feat because she simultaneously couldn’t stop looking at the vivid illustrations in the book and was also repulsed by the vivid illustrations in the book.
The woman in the drawings had a thatch of pubic hair so unruly that Clara kept raising her nightgown in the morning to look at herself in the bathroom mirror and make sure she wasn’t sprouting some kind of wildness down there.
The woman also didn’t shave under her arms, which Clara knew she was supposed to admire but didn’t.
The man was short and squat and in some of the drawings he looked disturbingly like an apostle from one of her childhood Bible stories.
In others he resembled Mr. McGivens, the grammar school gym teacher, who had tufts of hair coming out of every orifice.
Mr. McGivens smelled like BENGAY and cigarettes and compulsively dribbled a basketball.
He encouraged such ruthless behavior in dodgeball that the school fired him after Dominic Bianchi cleared the opposite court with three brutally precise hits on three different fourth graders, resulting in, respectively, a concussion, a broken collarbone, and a sprained wrist.
Some of the sections in The Joy of Sex frightened her (Big toe?) and some gave her a different feeling.
Was this what everyone did at night under the covers?
Or, if this book could be believed, on the floor, on a rug, on a blanket, in a meadow, in front of a mirror, standing freestyle, standing against the wall, standing on the bed?
The bed, in fact, seemed almost an afterthought, a prop—like a potted Ficus or a lamp—that mostly served as support for acrobatic sexual positions.
The single illustration with a bed was in the bondage or “gentle art of tying up your sex partner” section, which, like most things in the book, initially horrified Clara and then intrigued her and then was neatly incorporated into her index of self-pleasuring fantasies.
She and Dune hadn’t had sex yet, but they were getting close.
After the kiss, it was a short trip to allowing Dune to undo her bra.
She hadn’t let his hand venture below her waist, but she was ready.
As for the rest, it was just a matter of time and making sure Dune had a box of condoms. The more she read and the harder she examined the photos, her shock and discomfort waned and it all looked—thrilling.
She was going to get a good part in Godspell.
She’d won the contest for Dune Finnegan—ha!
Greta Crane never had a chance—and thanks, weirdly, to Bridie and this pilfered book, she was going to be very, very good at sex.