By Stephen Windwalker
Editor of Kindle Nation Daily
Kindle Nation continues to make distinctive fiction and nonfiction available to our readers through our ongoing program of Free Kindle Nation Shorts, and this weekend it's my pleasure to share several chapters of Girl on Fire, a rather steamy recently published novel by Rena Diane Walmsley.
I've mentioned this novel previously in Kindle Nation because I think that it is a pretty stunning and highly imaginative debut novel. The author has a gift for language and description, even if, as she told a reporter recently, some of that language and description might have gotten her thrown out of the Miss America pageant in which she represented her home state of Massachusetts when she was not much older than the protagonist of her novel.
So, let me be clear here that this particular novel is not for everyone, and certainly not for children. I've noticed from the Kindle Store bestseller lists that large numbers of Kindle owners enjoy their erotica, so I am comfortable in sharing this excerpt and recommending this book to you. But I also have to share my belief that, as I progressed through the four parts of the book, I felt increasingly that it went beyond erotica to something far more interesting as literary fiction. This was particularly true in the book's final chapters when the narrator, looking back on the events that she lived through a couple of decades earlier, speaks from her later perspective as, of all things, a Unitarian minister.
Editor of Kindle Nation Daily
Kindle Nation continues to make distinctive fiction and nonfiction available to our readers through our ongoing program of Free Kindle Nation Shorts, and this weekend it's my pleasure to share several chapters of Girl on Fire, a rather steamy recently published novel by Rena Diane Walmsley.
I've mentioned this novel previously in Kindle Nation because I think that it is a pretty stunning and highly imaginative debut novel. The author has a gift for language and description, even if, as she told a reporter recently, some of that language and description might have gotten her thrown out of the Miss America pageant in which she represented her home state of Massachusetts when she was not much older than the protagonist of her novel.
So, let me be clear here that this particular novel is not for everyone, and certainly not for children. I've noticed from the Kindle Store bestseller lists that large numbers of Kindle owners enjoy their erotica, so I am comfortable in sharing this excerpt and recommending this book to you. But I also have to share my belief that, as I progressed through the four parts of the book, I felt increasingly that it went beyond erotica to something far more interesting as literary fiction. This was particularly true in the book's final chapters when the narrator, looking back on the events that she lived through a couple of decades earlier, speaks from her later perspective as, of all things, a Unitarian minister.
Scroll down to start reading the Free Kindle Nation Short excerpt
Here's the back cover copy from the paperback edition:Looking for love in all the right places? Not Alicia Wentworth, the enchantingly frisky teenaged heiress at the heart of Rena Diane Walmsley's debut memoir-as-novel. Alicia escapes from her privileged, sheltered life at an elite Concord, Massachusetts boarding school and pulls a "visiting room switch" to break in to a nearby state prison so she can rendezvous with Teddy Lake, an exquisitely chiseled 21-year-old Native American convict for whom she has fallen hard while volunteering in a creative writing class for inmates. But Alicia is left alone and vulnerable when Teddy is hauled off to solitary, and she must reach deep within herself to concoct a gritty and initially degrading scheme to blackmail the prison system into freeing them both.
This deliciously literate debut is framed by Alicia's present-day perspective as "a respectable thirty-something Unitarian minister" in a suburb west of Boston: while she is cognizant of the scars she wears from her early experiences, she is also engaged by a sense of something sacred therein that informs her daily life years later.
Not all coming-of-age novels are alike, and not every thirty-something narrator is able to cast an unflinching eye on the choices she made and the chances she took at the cusp of adulthood. But Walmsley's unique novel-as-memoir never blinks, and her stunning sexual description breaks new narrative ground on age-old but ever-engaging terrain. Women and men alike will be enchanted and enriched by their journeys through her ultimately cautionary web of words.
About the Author
Rena Diane Walmsley lives with her family in Massachusetts, the state that she represented in the Miss America pageant when she was nineteen. Girl on Fire is her first novel.
This deliciously literate debut is framed by Alicia's present-day perspective as "a respectable thirty-something Unitarian minister" in a suburb west of Boston: while she is cognizant of the scars she wears from her early experiences, she is also engaged by a sense of something sacred therein that informs her daily life years later.
Not all coming-of-age novels are alike, and not every thirty-something narrator is able to cast an unflinching eye on the choices she made and the chances she took at the cusp of adulthood. But Walmsley's unique novel-as-memoir never blinks, and her stunning sexual description breaks new narrative ground on age-old but ever-engaging terrain. Women and men alike will be enchanted and enriched by their journeys through her ultimately cautionary web of words.
About the Author
Rena Diane Walmsley lives with her family in Massachusetts, the state that she represented in the Miss America pageant when she was nineteen. Girl on Fire is her first novel.
Girl on Fire: A Novelby Rena Diane Walmsley
Kindle Price: $0.99 Buy Now to Read on Your Kindle, Kindle for PC, Kindle for Mac, Kindle for BlackBerry, or Kindle for iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch
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Recent Amazon Customer Reviews:
A Must Read!,
Great first work
"So I started this book hesitantly because my wife loved it so I figured it was a chick book, but it was a page-turner nonetheless. Great reading on the Kindle and you will have trouble putting it down. Kudos to Walmsley for a great debut! "
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Originally posted March 28, 2010 to Kindle Nation Daily ©Kindle Nation Daily 2010
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Copyright © 2010 Rena Diane Walmsley and reprinted here with her permissionAn Excerpt from
Girl on Fire by Rena Diane Walmsley
Chapter 1
On the campus of Cabot Academy, which likes to refer to itself as "an elite all girls' boarding and preparatory school set in bucolic Concord, Massachusetts," Mr. Carter Cobb was a god. A frequently published poet and short story writer who for some vague number of years had been teaching only half the usual load of classes so as to leave him time to work on a novel, he had an avuncular and caring manner, sparkling bespectacled olive green eyes, and a dry wit that, taken together and in spite of his diminutive stature and usually rumpled physical presence, somehow made him seem the nearest thing we Cabot girls could envision to "sexy," at least on the Cabot faculty.
"CC," as we called him, taught only two classes, and the distinction I had attained in achieving acceptance in both of these tiny seminars in my senior year at Cabot was every bit as much a reason for envy among my peers as if my parents had shipped out my favorite Arabian pony, and wired the funds for the school's annual stable fee, from our home in Deerfield, Illinois. As it was, my mother and father had done these things, and I am well aware that I will betray a certain tendency toward complacent entitlement by saying here that I had been no more surprised by this fact than I was to learn that I was accepted in CC's Creative Writing and AP English Fiction seminars for the coming fall.
But if it is true that I had been raised to expect privilege and distinction, let me make clear that I never wanted these things. Au contraire! I wanted to rebel against these and all the trappings of my father's obscene wealth, but where was a girl to start? Probably not at Cabot Academy, where a young lady was considered almost a revolutionary if she, say, so much as joined in the annual Walk for Hunger. So I bided my time.
"Ali, you know CC is going to marry you," gushed my girl Nic Beaudry as I rode up to the outdoor bulletin board in front of the English Department building on my roan pony, Milky Way, who I had named, as a little girl, after my favorite candy bar. "You'll be sitting in class with him twice as much as anyone else and he won't be able to resist you."
Nicole stood with a few other rising seniors who were checking out the newly posted acceptance lists for various of that fall's more coveted course offerings. It was the last day of the spring term. Nicole had not been accepted for either of CC's seminars, but she was on an even shorter acceptance list for AP Physics: an acceptance that probably would have driven me to swallow a bottle of sleeping pills. As it was, the AP English Fiction class was going to require me to read a novel a week all summer in preparation. I did not mind. I loved to read, and it pleased me to no end that CC was going to be selecting my reading list.
"Sure, he's going to marry Alicia," chimed in our roommate Bébé Dodd. "Just as soon as he switches his sexual orientation and decides that he prefers boys instead of girls."
"Not that there's anything wrong with that," I adlibbed a bit tartly. I preferred to change the subject with my TV sitcom reference rather than to go further into a depressing discussion of my boyish, decidedly late-blooming body. Probably because I had so many things in my life that were the envy of "my girls," as I called Nicole and Bébé, they were always ready to zing me with these little barbs, and my waif-like body gave them plenty of ammunition. I had always been athletic, which may have been the reason I had not started my first period until just a few months before. Even now, my cycle had its own quirky, irregular schedule rather than showing up every twenty-eight days like it did for most other girls.
My hips and legs were straight and angular. There was not the usual pleasing fat on my butt, and my poor breasts! Even to use the word "breasts" was to stretch the definition of the word. I would study them in my mirror each night before bed, willing them to grow, but to no avail. Alas, they seemed to be all nipple, although in their defense I should add that they were lovely nipples indeed: prominent, pert, and a soft shade of pastel pink.
Milky Way and I cantered off in a minor huff, preferring to enjoy a good last run around campus before she was trucked back to Deerfield for the summer, rather than to endure any more of Bébé's smart mouth. I may have been a late bloomer physically but my flesh burned just as much as that of any girl of seventeen for the attention and warm touch that would make me feel at peace, at one, in love. I knew this from the way my breathing changed sometimes in the presence of certain boys, from the occasional effects of a romantic slow dance with one of the more industrious older boys from Middlesex or the Belmont Hill School at one of our Saturday night travesties, but most of all I knew it from my nipples. They sent wild signals up and down my entire body at the slightest, most accidental brushing contact with any male.
I had become used to the delays in my development. I was even able to handle most of the jokes. Not very many months before I had been shy even to undress in front of girlfriends or my Cabot teammates on the cross-country and lacrosse teams. I was so afraid they would tease me and call me a boy for the lack of the full curves that they were developing. I longed for their perky, full, upturned breasts and the womanly flaring of their hips and their otherwise flat bellies.
My belly was not "otherwise flat." It was just plain flat. Even the signature adornment -- that precious womanly tuft where it was most desired -- was all but denied me. Below my belly button I had nothing but the thinnest bit of peach fuzz, and I worried constantly that I would stay innocent forever, that neither boy nor man would ever want to sample the peach itself.
Chapter 2
As it turned out, I was not on the road to marrying Carter Cobb. I discovered feminism, of a sort, mostly while volunteering at a battered women's shelter on the South Side of Chicago that summer, and I returned to Cabot Academy in September with a healthy disdain for the notion of marrying anyone, ever! I dreamed of doing great things in the world and did not want to find myself burdened with any kind of bondage, neither the claims of my family's manufacturing empire and emotional entanglements, nor the expectations of some self-absorbed preppy husband-to-be who had been raised to believe he could simply select me like a set of shiny cufflinks to accessorize his life of privilege and power. Nor was I in any danger of being enchained in this latter fashion. I was still just seventeen.
I returned to the Cabot campus under a full head of steam and somehow persuaded CC to allow me to substitute Mary Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Sarah Orne Jewett and Kate Chopin for Hardy and Lawrence and Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who I told CC were just a bunch of "shopworn white bread male novelists." (I am sure that must have made CC wonder what I would make of his novel if and when he ever finished it! How I wish someone had at least introduced me to Sue Miller, Toni Morrison, and Louise Erdrich, and saved me from some of the lethal boredom I inflicted on myself.)
For CC's creative writing class I wrote many poems and short stories about oppressed women and triumphant women, but I never succeeded so much that I created anyone close to what I would now call a real woman.... I couldn't help thinking what a trial teaching writing and poetry must be for somebody as gifted as Carter Cobb, always trying to strike the right balance between indulging and educating the overwrought sensibilities of these seventeen-year-old Sylvia Plath wannabes!
But there were benefits for him, no doubt. Even with the occasional pleasures that I am sure he must have felt as a dedicated lifelong teacher leading my classmates and me into moments of revelation, heightened creative consciousness and imaginative frenzy, there was still an underlying, unspoken feeling of admiration and respect that this seventeen-year-old felt for a 40-something master of literature and the writer's craft.
I may have thought at the time that he was a bit too discreet, overly respectful, and too serious. He would never take me anywhere that I did not want to go. Our warm student-teacher relationship never took a turn into the ugly, the actual, or the explicit, so there is no need for any rationalization here, but CC was a man who appreciated females, perhaps regardless of our ages, and it was quite clear to me in all our time together, that he found me wholly and wholesomely enchanting, as I did him.
Whether the private uses to which he put my charms were equally wholesome, I cannot hazard any guess, since that is entirely his private business. I should volunteer if I am to be wholly honest, that on more than one occasion during my senior year I invited myself to sample privately, and I should say in solitary, my imaginings of CC's reciprocal charms, and I found them equal to every imaginary test.
It was, after all, an extraordinary year of self-exploration. Our headmistress, Miss Hillary Sharp, had welcomed the seniors back that September with a lovely and very well-intentioned talk that unfortunately was subjected to frequent parodies in the weeks that followed.
As I recall she began by telling us that in their senior years, Cabot girls had always been known to explore the world beyond our lovely little campus and to secure for themselves, primarily through the college admissions process of course, excellent perches from which to later access their fitting places in the worlds of imagination and the intellect, of business and government and spiritual leadership, and of community service. This introduction was perhaps too replete with the matriculation histories of recent graduating classes, but who can blame Miss Sharp for being as obsessed with metrics and benchmarks and measurables as any other headmistress, after all. In any case, she was talking about our futures, so she held our rapt attention.
It was only then, as she tried to divert our attention from our places in the world at large to a more introspective focus, that she perhaps missed the mark. I had started out that morning a little exhausted after flying into Boston's Logan Airport the night before and staying up all night catching up with my friends after the summer's separation. I drifted to the edge of waking and sleeping, a place that can be quite cozy and pleasurable lying in a hammock or floating on a raft at our summer cottage on Lake Michigan or in my bed at night, but a little risky if one is sitting in a public place, in the school chapel no less with several dozen classmates and teachers.
"But as we explore together the great wide world that beckons us all beyond the the Cabot campus." continued Miss Sharp, "let us also never forget or give short shrift to the delicious pleasures of self-exploration."
On either side of me, Nicole and Bébé barely stifled their explosions of laughter so as not to bring on some form of discipline. I enjoyed the moment myself, a little sleepily and a little less consciously than my friends. My dimly formed impression was that, all up and down the pews girls were winking at each other or raising eyebrows or gesturing knowingly, if also in some cases a bit lewdly. Were we a bit cruel? Were we a bit inclined to naughty turns of mind? Should good breeding and its accompanying call to repression have kept us from ever noticing Miss Sharp's unwitting double entendre? Possibly so, but we were just seventeen, as I think I have mentioned, and we could not be held responsible, could we?
"Let your intellects serve as the lubricant for your young imaginations," Miss Sharp exhorted us, and my well-lubricated young imagination began to wander deliciously, quite in spite of every bit of practical sense that I possessed. My eyes fluttered and I was soon transported to a scene of total fantasy, borrowing much from the chapel scene where I began my imaginative transit that morning, yet wildly different....
* * *
I gasped and arched my back and then it was starting to happen for me, right there in the real chapel, but when Nicole gave me a swift, sharp elbow in the ribs and I caught my breath and closed my legs and smoothed my skirt and sat up straight in the pew.
"Geesh, Ali, who are you thinking about?" she whispered.
Later, I protested that I had fallen "asleep" and had been "dreaming," and had my friends never heard of the notion that people could not be held morally responsible for the content of their dreams?
Nicole and Bébé eventually assured me, after having a great deal of fun at my expense, that my reveries had seemed to last only a few seconds, no matter how long they seemed to go on for me as the dreamer. I suppose their hearts went out to me a bit because at first I was truly worried that I had ruined my reputation forever if the entire senior class had seen me pleasuring myself in the chapel, but Nicole took pains to let me know that nothing of the sort had occurred that morning, and besides, she added generously, if any of the other girls had seen me and could figure out exactly what I was doing, well, I would probably soon be a heroine to at least half of them for helping them to find keys to unlock the doors to the only real sexual pleasure they were likely to experience at in their final year at Cabot Academy.
Nicole's point, in which Bébé and I were quick to concur, was that, whatever the percentages for early sexual experience might be in the world at large, and whatever experiences we might be able to enjoy (or not) during summer or Christmas or spring vacations, there simply was not much chance for such pastimes -- except the most solitary of them -- on the Cabot campus during the academic year. Our little dances with the boys from Middlesex or Belmont Hill School were heavily chaperoned, so you could have a little fun grinding a preppy or two into submission on the dance floor, but where did that leave you? High and dry?
"Or low and wet," quipped Bébé. We both turned and looked at her with the mock look of disdain that we'd expect from our mothers if we said something very vulgar or, say, confessed that we were dating Catholic boys.
We had heard of a few girls who had experimented with each other, but it all seemed so entangling. Who wanted to worry about whether you would be respected in the morning by your own roommate? We all just knew each other too well.
There was, theoretically at least, the possibility of an affair with CC, or some other faculty member, but that would take a level of idiocy on the part of both parties that hardly seemed likely absent extreme desperation. People got caught. They got fired or bounced out of school. Lives got ruined.
Once or twice a week we rode the commuter rail train into Harvard Square and naturally there were girls who fantasized regularly about finding true love with a Harvard boy. Perhaps there were even some who tried to pull it off. But the disappointing truth was that Harvard boys had just too damned many choices, sexually speaking, and consequently had no need to fool around with nice little plaid-skirted girls who had to be signed in back in our dormitory rooms at Cabot Academy most evenings by 10 o'clock, no matter how cute we might be. One of us could have paraded across Harvard Yard clad only in her little plaid skirt, holding a sign that said
HONEST!
I AM NOT JAILBAIT!
TRY ME!
without attracting so much as a turned head.So it began, under Miss Sharp's mandate, as a year of delicious self-exploration. All three of us were still virgins, although each of us -- according to the perhaps slightly embellished reports we brought back to Concord at the end of the summer -- had expanded her experience and developed certain advanced ancillary skills with older boys that summer, myself amid the toney suburbs of Chicago, Nicole in and around Grosse Pointe Farms, and Bébé on the Upper East Side and the environs of her family's summer cottage at Saratoga Springs. They had all been nice enough boys, and they had respected our prim and proper limits, all the more so as we developed and demonstrated other skills at bringing things to a conclusion as aptly as if we had each been born wearing kneepads. And here we were back at Cabot Academy, each with a mental treasure trove of vivid memories to fuel our delicious self-explorations. Without ever intending such a thing, Miss Sharp had freed a good number of the girls in the senior class to overcome their inhibitions and make the taboo of "masturbation" a topic of open and candid conversation, one I might add that held our attention for months. Some of us had never tried it, some had been trained in their cabins at summer camp and had been practicing it ever since as if it had been ballet or gymnastics, and one girl had learned it and tried it mutually with a college boy (who just happen to be her cousin) the previous summer on the Vineyard. We discussed fantasies and techniques and even the possibilities of semi-public self-pleasuring. So, I will say again, that for many of my senior sisters, it was a year of delicious self-exploration. And so also for me, until one lovely, crisp afternoon that November, when Carter Cobb stopped me as I crossed the school green and offered me a proposition that I simply could not refuse.
Chapter 3
"In all my years at Cabot," Carter Cobb was saying to me in his most grave and quiet tone, "I have never known any girl possessed of your wonderful combination of intense love of the written word, a gift for self-expression, and such an engaged and obvious caring and unselfish concern for your fellow human beings. I have thought about this long, and hard, Alicia, and I've reached the conclusion that it would simply be unfair of me to prohibit you any longer from participating as a kind of helper and perhaps even a partner in a special project of mine."Of course, I did not tape record this conversation. I did not write it down immediately afterward. It is possible that I have set down a word or two out of place, but I am trying to convey very honestly that I was getting the full Carter Cobb treatment, and I didn't stand a chance of saying no thank you, and turning to leave. As he spoke to me he did something quite remarkable, for him at least: he reached out with his right hand and touched lightly the downy flesh of my upper arm, almost as if encouraging me to take seriously the appeal that I was about to hear. Certainly, no such entreaty was necessary. I felt a sudden, exquisite shiver from his gentle touch, and became aware for the first time of what a very small man CC was; almost tiny, somehow fastidious even while he was always a bit rumpled. He managed to have or possess a presence that got scale and size from his remarkable control of his body, just as the soft stillness of his most quiet speaking voice always had a greater impact upon me that if it had been the deepest basso profundo booming across campus through a hundred well-amplified speakers.Still I feared what was going to come next. I was already quite busy enough with all my classes and burning the candle at both ends, really. Then there were my athletic endeavors, the final sprint of preparation of my college application essays, and my friends, and any project for CC was inherently bound to demand the very willing perfectionist in me. I do not know if I gave him any response. I felt as quiet as a mouse. "Once a week, Alicia, I teach another Creative Writing class, off campus. I suppose my students could not be more different from the teenage girls I teach here and yet in some way I find them and the classes I teach there every bit as rewarding. It would be most helpful to me if I had an assistant in this other class, and I have decided that you could bring a great deal to that position.""Who are your students?" I finally asked, secretly hoping that he was about to tell me he taught a part-time writing class for Harvard boys. The deprivations of life at an all girls' boarding school, after all, were never far from my mind. "I teach a class for the guys at MCI Concord." he answered, with no apparent change in tone. "A few miles from here.""Oh? I'm sorry, I've never even heard of it," I admitted. "Is it an all boys' school, or co-ed?""Well, it's all boys, I guess you could say," volunteered CC. "Men, really. It's a Massachusetts state prison."
Chapter 4
The following Saturday morning a little before eight o'clock, CC and I stepped from his well-preserved Volvo station wagon in the MCI Concord parking lot and walked into a screening area for visitors. We were separated briefly and "patted down" by a couple of rude and unattractive corrections officers whose ill-fitting blue uniforms did little to alter one's general impression that they were piggish, overgrown slobs.CC had seemed almost embarrassed a day or two before, to have to give me a hand-out specifying what type of clothing and even what kind of underclothing I should and should not wear for such a visit. I was frankly relieved to be in full and complete compliance with these prison rules and regulations for visitors so that I did not have to prolong the indignity of being patted down, leered at, and spoken to by these disastrous accidents of evolution. (My apologies, dear reader, for being coy: I should probably come right out and say that I did not like these men.)When we finally cleared this gauntlet we were given little yellow visitors badges and CC led me out of the building and across a maze of sidewalks toward a two-story, red-brick building that he referred to as "H-Building."Along the way, I had my first glimpse of a real, live state prison inmate.I have no idea where everyone else was, but there was one solitary prisoner making his way along the sidewalk headed toward us. He was just a boy I thought, not yet a man, although I could see a certain hardened swagger that seemed an intentional audition of his toughness in the face of any type of confrontation. His face was clear and clean and his eyes bright, and as he walked toward us he watched me and suddenly broke into a shy and tentative grin, not quite a smile, but almost so I returned one in kind. His slight, slim body was no bigger than my own. I guessed he was perhaps a year or two older than I was or he should not have been in a prison for adults, but you could never tell by his appearance that he was a day older than I was. I tried hard to steel myself with a posture of a little more toughness than was my customer for this first visit, but any small bit of toughness I managed "for show" was gone in an instant when he flashed that grin at me ever so briefly, and my heartstrings were pulled taut as I wondered what such a fresh, sweet-looking boy could have done to earn himself a place in here. He probably did not weigh much more than my own 112 pounds, but he was being heavily guarded, watched by half a dozen of the blue-suited guards as if he were some kind of threat either to me or to the peace and order of the surrounding communities. The boy and I nodded almost imperceptibly at each other at the exact instant of our passing. I am sure that I would have remembered this boy should I ever see him again, either at the writing class that morning or on one of my subsequent visits to MCI Concord, but the fact is that we did not happen to cross paths again for a number of weeks after that first Saturday morning and by the time we did I had almost forgotten all about him. But I am starting to get ahead of my story a bit now, and I am sorely aware that my modest narrative skills are being taxed enough by the mere attempt at this factual re-telling of my extreme experiences that came as a result of that fateful trip to MCI Concord with CC that morning. My only chance of staying in the moment, and not skipping ahead to the end of the story depends most desperately on my sticking to the telling itself, as if I were sitting across from Sergeant Joe Friday at a table and he were prompting me time and again for "Just the facts, ma'am, just the facts."I suppose if I had aspirations to be Jane Austen here I'd feel that it was my duty and responsibility now to undertake a series of very elaborate descriptions of the inmates who enrolled in CC's class, the ways we interacted, and the fascinating creative discussions that transpired in that small classroom at MCI Concord during the weeks that began that morning.Fortunately, for you, my dear reader, as well as for me, we will b e burdened with no such aspirations. I am Alicia Wentworth, no more, no less, and my only goal here is a simple, selfish, and limited one, that of telling you my own story. I think it will suffice.A couple of minutes after 9 a.m. a young man, a boy, walked into the classroom. I found out later that morning his name was Teddy. I fell in love with him. A few people walked in before him, and a couple after him, but my breath caught in my throat immediately when he entered my line of sight and he became the sole object of my attention and focus. I simply do not remember any of the other inmates in the room that day. I know that some were young, some were older, some short, some tall, some black, some Latino, some white, but Teddy was the only one there for me that morning and every morning thereafter.For the rest of that class I could not breathe evenly or properly. I could not find any appropriate place to rest my eyes. I seemed to possess neither intellect nor social competence, at least none that I could have later described. I felt light-headed, almost intoxicated, and dizzy. I looked at this man-boy's deeply tanned, chiseled face and jet black hair that fell in a single braid half-way down his back, at the sadness and playfulness that somehow danced together in his dark brown eyes, and at his beautiful long-fingered hands that moved like birds between us when he spoke, sometimes eloquent in wringing greater meaning from his words, sometimes almost mute with frustration that they were forced to provide a visual arrangement for words or music that he was not yet ready to bring forward from his brain to his lips. I looked, and I looked, and I looked some more. I was stunned. Until that morning, no man or boy had ever thrown me for such a total loop, and I could not understand it at all. I did not realize then how devastatingly simple it was.Each time Teddy spoke in class that morning I drank in not only his words but the tones and the cadences of his speech. When he sat quietly, I studied his body and wanted desperately to touch his skin, his face, his hair, his mind, to think his thoughts, to dream his dreams, and to imagine his imaginings. I wanted to find a way to attune myself to the rhythms of his body so that I could experience the hard and ready lust that surged in him as he gazed back at me.I was stunned, when CC urged him to read from a simple but elegant story he had written, a story that seemed less like his own creation but more like a vein of folklore into which he had tapped. Yet as much as I was in strange and unfamiliar territory that morning, there was also much that I knew, as if magically I were able to draw on my own sources of folklore. I knew also that Teddy and probably most of the other men as well were locked physically into the pleasures they imagined enjoying with me that morning. There was no surprise in that. It was nothing I had not anticipated. It was not anything to take pride in. After all, I was a seventeen-year-old girl. I smelled like a seventeen-year-old girl. I looked like a seventeen-year-old girl. I moved like a seventeen-year-old girl. And in all the places where, in their imaginations at least, those men including Teddy were touching and probing me as we sat there that morning speaking of literature, I felt or would have felt as they wanted me to feel, as a seventeen year old girl would feel, rising to their touch, stiffening between their fingers, grinding back against their rude and lovely pressure.Where they wanted me to be smooth and cool with the most innocent down I felt exactly that way to them. But it was only in my imagining of Teddy's touches and advances that I opened myself in true invitation. I wanted to feel his touch, and in that desire I was flooded with warm waves that gave the lie to any pose of innocence.
Chapter 5
"Does he have any brothers?" "Does CC need another assistant to help him teach his classes?" I was back in the dining hall at Cabot Academy and, of course, my girls Nic and Bébé were pelting me with several questions about my first trip "to prison" - liberally spiced with their own lewd commentary, of course. "You'd better stock up on KY Jelly, girl," offered Bébé. "KY Jelly?" Nic and I asked in unison. "Yep," Bébé answered, confident as ever in her expertise. "The only way one of those prison guys is going to be interested in you is if you'll be his Back Door Mama!"I must have let a tinge of fear flicker across my face."But look on the bright side," added Nicole. "At least that way you'll still be a virgin.""Technically, anyway," added Bébé. CC and I arrived back on campus just in time for lunch, and I suppose I must have had a dreamy look on my face as I set my tray down in the cafeteria, because they both pounced on me immediately for the scoop. "What?""Come on, girl. You aren't hiding a thing! Did they line up and take numbers?" "It was nothing like that. It was just like any other creative writing class at an all men's prison.""With a nubile seventeen-year-old teacher's assistant, anyway." "Well, I guess it's fair to say a few of them may have noticed me." "Of course. You are the closest thing they've seen to a female in years." "I am a female." Silence, from both of them."Anyway. There was this one guy." They finally shut up and listened."His name is Teddy. Teddy Lake. I think he is Indian.""Like Gandhi Indian?" "No. Like Geronimo Indian." "How could you tell?" "Well. He's very sort of reddish brown, and he has this beautiful long black hair that he wears all pulled back, in a braid.""M'mm." said Nicole. "Very convincing." "M'mm," said Bébé. "White Girl wants some."It was at that point when Bébé shared her enchanting little insight about the KY Jelly."Then there was a story that he read aloud in class. He called it, 'The Circle in the Forest.'"And he's the next J.D. Salinger?" "Well, I wouldn't say that. But it was very touching. Very simple. Very Indian.""Geronimo Indian.""And oh, his voice. I can still close my eyes and hear his voice." "We want to hear it." "Well, you will have to settle for mine, but I will read it to you if you would like. We discussed the story in class and then CC just hands me a copy and tells me I have to make some written comments on it and then I have to have a one-on-one conference with Teddy next Saturday to help him bring out the particularity in it." "CC. Jeesh." "But we'll help you," offered Nicole. "Yes, when do we get to hear it?" * * *
Chapter 7
On Wednesday afternoon I had to run in my team's cross-country meet against Buckingham Brown and Nichols in Cambridge, and it was difficult to focus on the task at hand. I was the captain of my team, and I had always found it natural and easy to give encouragement and support to my teammates, to realize that what we did in a meet or in the New England championships or even in an ordinary weekday practice run was all about us, and never just about me. It was in my nature to work hard individually at everything I did, and thereby to excel more often than not individually, but the community that I had found in running ever since my first year at Cabot had provided me with a nice counterpoint to all the individual stuff. And in the process our team had become very successful, with a midget of a sophomore named Josie Wilkins and I taking turns leading the way.But in this Wednesday's meet on a course that mostly looped around Fresh Pond in Cambridge, I was in another world. I had managed to get a decent night's sleep the night before by imagining Teddy. I consciously conjured up this boy whom I had seen for only an hour in my life, and I imagined him bending over me as I lay on my stomach, twirling his fingers in my hair and nuzzling my neck so sweetly, giving me the most feathery of soothing backrubs, whispering to me to "hush, hush," and to just lie there and listen to the call of one solitary loon in the Great Meadows sanctuary not far off, and leading me into a contented sleep. In the moments on the edge of waking and sleeping when my brain wanted to hold on and somehow make a plan for victory in the next day's meet, Teddy appeared reddish brown and smooth-skinned before me and spoke to me ever so playfully in a sing-song whisper:"No, no, no Let it go, let it goI'll be there with youTomorrow-o"And he was there, soon after the race began. I faithfully went through my little idiosyncracies and routines before the race, folding over and rolling down my socks just so, stepping out in my usual number of near-sprint stride-outs to loosen and psyche myself up, and exchanging hugs and whoops and shouts with my teammates but that was all by rote, and as I walked to the starting line I felt as if I had turned my individual will over to something I had never experienced before, an utterly different and new zone of consciousness that made me alert to the present moment without even having to think about it.Then almost as soon as the race began I found out that this zone of consciousness had a name, and its name was Teddy. I saw him clear as life running beside me as we sprinted out together into a starting lead, and in that picture he looked over to me with a grin of recognition that said to me, "Good, good. You've caught the wind." And it was as if I had. I could not speak to my imagined friend, and he did not trouble to make any particular sense for me of what he was doing there with me, but his presence was my spirit guide for the next few miles or so. He became my scout, bravely leading my way through the woods. I set my pace to his pace and let my mind be freed of any thought of time or tactics by the most simple-minded liturgy of whispered words that I breathed in from him at odd intervals: "Like the breeze ... Through the leaves ... Through the trees ... Breeze ..."My usual style or mode of racing was conservative, tucking behind Josie and the best runner from the other team early in a race and then just holding on, drafting off of them until the final quarter of a mile when I would let it all hang out with a finishing kick that I hoped would be sufficient either to produce a first-place finish for myself or to inspire one from Josie.It usually worked quite well enough, but a little over half way through the race I looked up and realized, a little shocked, that I'd never let Josie or any of the top BB&N girls catch up to me. If a flicker of alarm showed on my face then in contemplation of my having entered the uncharted territory of having run with the lead for the entire race up to that point, it did not last long. Teddy was there again, beside me with his singsong whisper:"No, noLet it go, let it goWinds will blowNot so slow, Time to goTime to go!"And then, with a good half a mile left to run, I amazed myself by picking it up with a gathering surge, not by any means a sprint or a finishing kick, but gathering, stepping out, building speed yet somehow feeling stronger as I went, as I let my imaginary spirit scout set the pace.From a hundred yards or so behind me I could hear a cautionary cry from little Josie: "Careful, Ali!" but beside me my Teddy would have none of it, grinning and seducing me into feeling my strength with his whispered words: "Trust your body." And I did, and just when I came to the final quarter-mile even though I knew I was well ahead already I was able to find another gear, a strong kick, the next-to-last gear before the all-out sprinting triumph of the last hundred yards. Teddy left me as I broke the tape with arms raised and set a course record, and I walked back the course a bit to cheer on Josie to a second-place finish ahead of the top BB&N runner. Our middle-of the pack runners also did well so that the meet was ours, and as I shook hands and exchanged hugs and congratulations I found myself standing there with a goofy, whimsical expression on my face wishing Teddy, my imaginary playmate, had at least said goodbye.But it was okay. I would see him Saturday morning.
When Saturday finally arrived and CC and I walked the security gauntlet to our little classroom at MCI Concord for the second time, I frankly expected that I would be spending an hour on virtual tenterhooks, trying not to gaze too obviously or meaningfully at Teddy while I awaited our 30-minute one-on-one conference at the end of the hour. But thanks to the creative efforts of a young African-American man named Todd, the hour itself was genuinely engaging. Todd had written a one act play or "television script," as he called it, and we spent most of the hour giving it a first take at a dramatic reading with Teddy, Todd, and myself in the three major roles. The main character in the play -- as with almost every piece of creative work ever submitted to CC's class -- was a troubled young man. His name was JOVAN and he was played by Teddy. The other main characters were both female: a wealthy, 40-something suburban white woman named TRISH, played by me, and JOVAN's mother FELAYSHA, for whom CC made the interesting casting choice of Todd. The basic plot line is set up a couple of minutes into the play, after it is established that FELAYSHA is a junkie and a single mother, when, as one of the younger men in the class exclaimed as soon as he figured it out, "Shit, man, the bitch be pimpin' her own son." Enter TRISH, eventually, driving a silver Cadillac Seville at a very slow cruising speed in the neighborhood of the old Greyhound bus station located near the Boston Public Gardens, and of course picking up JOVAN when he flashes her a stunning and inviting smile as he stands at the corner of Arlington and St. James Streets. TRISH turns out not only to be lonely and full of lust, attributes for which I did not need to dig too deeply in my reading, but a do-gooder of sorts, albeit a selfish do-gooder. Inevitably she falls in love with JOVAN, and she wants to save him from having to sell his body to feed his mother's habit, although her means of saving him seems indistinguishable from making him her own kept man (or boy, since JOVAN's character is only fifteen.) JOVAN's loyalty to his own mother, if that's what it is, is strong enough even after all this that he directs TRISH to his mother to seal the deal, and at the end of the play, which is called Meat, the two women are negotiating over JOVAN like he is, exactly, a piece of meat.In our reading, I suppose it was Teddy's voice and boyish charm that held it together for me, along with the brilliant bedroom smile he flashed across the classroom at me as my character was supposed to be cruising him. I would have picked him up, without hesitation, and given him all my money. I would have opened myself to him in every possible way, and loved him with all my heart and all my body. I would have done everything in my power to save him from the streets, from the chicken-hawking to finance his mother's drug addiction, and from the men who were probably far more likely to be cruising the bus station's perimeter than bored matrons from Lincoln. At the risk of sounding like Bébé, I would have wanted his fine, sweet young ass all to myself, I would have wanted to drink him up until there was no more, but probably to everyone but Teddy, and perhaps CC, I hope that it seemed only that I had some talent at acting or, at least, at dramatic reading.
When the class had ended, CC took Todd into an adjacent classroom for their one-to-one session, and I was left in that bare, sunlit room with twelve wooden desks, and Teddy. He quickly pulled a desk across the floor so that he could sit face-to-face with me. I sat down a little abruptly, my back close to the corner, and tried to remember things I wanted to say to him about his story, "The Circle in the Forest." My mind was blank. "If I sit here facing you like this will you watch my back?" he asked. It struck me as a strange enough thing to say, but I knew instinctively what he was talking about. Already I had noticed that the first four seats taken by the other inmates each Saturday morning were the four seats nearest the four corners of the room, backs to the wall. I nodded. I smiled. He smiled back. "What should I watch for?" I asked.He didn't answer right away, just looked into my eyes, a little sadness in his face, and maybe a little fear too, although it was not fear of me. "I don't know, I'm just conditioned, I guess. I watch out for myself. Probably too much. But you learn, in here.""What do you learn?"He waited, watching me, filtering the different possibilities that occurred to him as answers to my question."You learn not to trust," he said finally."Anyone?""Anyone in here."I shifted myself a little in my seat, trying to get comfortable, but even though I wanted to look down at my notebook to find the page where I had made some notes on Teddy's story, I could not peel my eyes away from his. His eyes were fixed, too, gently on mine, more sadness still than any meanness in the words he had just spoken.We both sat silently for a moment, and then he made an effort to change the subject, maybe even to lighten things up a bit. Our desks were only a few inches apart."It was nice reading that with you this morning," he said, nodding over his left shoulder as if to the whole classroom that now stood empty and quiet behind him. "It was," I said."I felt--" "So did I," I interrupted, and as I said it I crossed a line from which I knew there was no going back. I lightly placed my hand over his where it lay on the desk next to his manuscript. It constituted a simple admission of the kind that girls have been making to boys and boys to girls for centuries: that whatever else was going on there, there was also a fundamental interaction of flesh and flirtation, of romance and expectation, of boy and girl, and sooner or later it was that connection that would illuminate or obliterate everything else in our interactions, unless, mind over matter, it was explicitly rejected by one or both of us.Of course I quickly tried to backtrack: my social training had been too complete and my loyalty to CC was simply too great to do otherwise. All of a sudden I remembered all my questions and notes on Teddy's story. "So, tell me what you want to do with this story," I asked him. One of the things I had learned in the process of submitting my own sometimes brittle ego to CC's teaching style was that it seldom hurt for the teacher to be generous in the framing of one's questions, more generous than corrective, to give a fledgling writer ample opportunity to be expansive in laying out the terrain on which she hoped to breathe life into her story and her characters. I had realized, in observing the way such questions sometimes opened me up to a conscious exploration of my purposes and the writer's devices available to me as I developed a story, that there was a method in CC's kind and avuncular manner, and while I was not a teacher myself, I knew that I could do worse than to borrow from a master. "I want to send the story to my son," was Teddy''s only answer, on a simple plane of honesty for which I had not prepared myself. I had already pulled my hand away from his to let it rest on my desk, but now unconsciously I pulled back another few inches and, I now imagine as I try to recall the exact physical particulars of that moment, I straightened a bit in my chair. "You have a son."I had no choice but to drop any pretense at a teacher-student relationship. I had to follow my curiosity."His name is Runner. He's three, and he is a beautiful boy." I imagined a little three-year-old version of Teddy Lake, black hair falling in a braid down his back."Where are they now?""They?""Runner and your--" I did not want to say the word, but according to the sheltered and orderly way I'd been raised to see the world, it seemed unavoidable. "Wife.""Oh yeah," Teddy said. "They. He does live with his mother. And her husband. Sometimes on Cape Cod, sometimes in New York City. She's not my wife. It's a long story.""Does it have anything to do with why you're in here?" He tilted his head to one side and looked right at me. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't be asking you such personal questions.""There's no harm in asking, but it might be more than you want to hear." I let my hand brush lightly against his again, sympathetically, just for an instant."No. It isn't. Tell me," I whispered and he began....
* * *
Chapter 10
I became very single-minded. After years of splashing about in the children's wading pool that had been my sheltered life both at Cabot and back home in Deerfield, I was now seized by tidal waves of purpose and rebellion. Far too suddenly for me to break them down or to resist them in any way, the powerful electromagnetics of attraction between Teddy and myself gained new force. In some way that was at once simple-minded and intellectually elaborate, I insisted to myself that I had been acting not only on lust and the maudlin urges of adolescent romance, but on far more noble purposes.Teddy told me later that he had not really expected me to agree to a prison visit, that it had been a long shot that he had proposed on a wing and a prayer. But he could not have known then the grand stage that had adorned my simple, everyday actions. That I was breaking through years of class barriers that continued that kept men and woman apart. That I was shaking free from the shackles of hypocrisy that had long proscribed "civilized" behavior and prescribed social deception among men and women. That I was striking a blow for the right of a young woman to choose her own destiny and form her own relationships. That I was rising up to challenge the powerful Leviathan of the Massachusetts state prison system. That I was uniting the will of my mind, the powerful pulls of my psyche, the soaring sentiments of my soul and spirit, and the urges of my unconscious body to break down the Freudian paradigms of repression that had, I was sure, given rise to all that was wrong not only with Western Civilization as a whole, but but with every individual neurosis within. How delightful it was to be seventeen!It helped me no small amount, as I pursued these lofty goals, that I found Teddy as visually compelling as any boy on whom I had ever laid my baby blue eyes. That I had never at that point felt the lean, warm sinews of his hard young body pressed against my dewy, peach-pink skin might have come as a surprise to my own wandering unconscious mind, only because my youthful imagination, at the depths where it worked so marvelously with this material, was both totally vivid in the tactile and fully drawn sensory apprehensions of its travels and remarkably thorough in the detail of the little narratives with which it bombarded me relentlessly. I felt totally powerless over my own feelings, and that imaginary script I had been writing about Teddy went beyond the wildest dreams I had ever experienced.Had I not been so single-minded in my resolve to visit Teddy, inside his prison but outside our little creative writing class, I might have felt I was under attack from somewhere deep within. Instead, my life had already changed course, and this man-boy had become its goal and its obsession in the purest way imaginable. So it had been the petty little life of Cabot Academy and the banality of its hourly claims that created the attack on me.I speak here only to the other girls or young women or precocious girls who may be reading this memoir either openly or on the sly -- for I don't expect any man to understand fully the intoxicating meaning of this simple phrase -- when I say that Teddy was a beautiful, beautiful boy. But it also did not hurt that he seemed already, to me, to possess an intelligence and sensitivity that stunned me in contrast to the stereotyping that I might have brought into that prison with me.It took me several eternities to pass the time from Saturday morning to the dinner hour on Tuesday, when I skipped the dining hall routine and walked a few hundred yards to Concord's village center to catch a taxi. Unlike the previous Saturday's lurid lunch-hour session with Nicole and Bébé, I took my time returning to the dorm so I would miss them when they left for lunch, then grabbed a wrapper full of Ry-Krisp and walked out to a picnic table on the far side of campus where I sat alone munching away by an old horse pond as I contemplated the plans for my prison visit. I decided exactly what I'd wear, what I'd do with my hair, what time I would go for the taxi, and what time I would have to leave to be sure I'd be back in the dorm by ten o'clock on Tuesday evening.Those things were relatively easy. Far more difficult were the little concoctions that would be necessary to feed my girlfriends' insatiable appetite for information, to provide a believable cover story for my four-hour absence from campus on Tuesday evening, and to avoid arousing any doubt or suspicions among the visiting room guards, or prison officials that the nice young student who was helping Mr. Carter Cobb out with the Sunday morning creative writing class might also inexplicably be visiting an inmate, and indeed one of the inmates taking the writing class, in the prison visiting room Thursday evening.Along the way between Saturday and Tuesday it would be important to avoid drawing any special attention to myself on campus, even though I was already beginning to disengage from my starring role as one of the leaders of the senior class, winning athlete, A student, good friend, and general breath of fresh air to all who knew me.I struggled a bit in that afternoon's cross-country meet, which luckily for me was at our home course at Great Meadows so that I did not have to spend hours on a bus with two dozen teammates and our coach. We hosted Thayer Academy and they beat us by a point, but only because I finished third behind my friend Josie, and the lead Thayer girl, which meant that if I had been able to hang with Josie and nip the Thayer runner-up, we would have won. I did try, but had to run without any help from my phantom Teddy, probably because I was so conscious of Teddy that there was no way he could pass into the less conscious part of my mind where he could actually have done me some good in the race.I did not like the result, and it worried me a bit that I was being sabotaged already by my preoccupation with all things Teddy! But these were trivial matters, I told myself, and my time with Teddy (my future with Teddy? my life with Teddy? -- I have to admit that I was trying such phrases on for size) was what life was all about. What made my world go round. What made my life worth living. What gave me a delightful warm and liquid sensation when I returned to my room late that afternoon, cuddled up beneath my down comforter, and allowed my fingers to reach down for a few moments of pleasure -- but not before I moistened them with my tongue, and certainly not before I imagined they were Teddy's.
Chapter 11It had never been very difficult for a Cabot Academy girl to get a taxi. Concord Village was a far cry from mid-town Manhattan, plus we were young, clean, polite, and cute, we smelled good, and above all, we always tipped well. (After all, Miss Sharp had prepped, primed, and schooled us all in even the most trivial details of life in the late 20th century.) If a Cabot girl used a taxicab and did not tip well, Miss Sharp had pointed out, then the next girl who required and hailed a cab might not be able to get one and might then fall prey to all manner of calamities. Although it was true that most of our taxi transportation fell between Concord Center and either Harvard Square, Logan Airport, or South Station, it was certainly within the realm of possibility that a Cabot girl could take a cab to and from some slightly more downscale part of town, since quite a few of us took part in community service programs made possible through an arrangement that had been established with the Phillips Brooks House Association at Harvard. Usually, we traveled together in PBHA vans driven by Harvard boys (Yes, therein lay our real motives for participation), but occasionally cabs had been known to travel from Cabot to distant places like Roxbury then Dorchester, and back.But I felt certain that I was the first Cabot girl ever to hop into the back seat of a taxi and ask the driver to drive me to prison! The cabbie was a nice-looking clean cut man about forty who was actually wearing a crisp white shirt and dark blue tie. How nice, I thought in the fairly simple-minded way that I thought so many things at that point in my life, but suddenly his jaw dropped when I told him my intended destination, as if I were Linda Blair in The Exorcist and I had just spun my head 360 degrees around, made illicit use of a crucifix, and let loose with a string of four letter words.But he finally collected himself and began to drive, and within ten minutes I was paying him -- including a nice tip, of course-- and asking him if he would mind returning to pick me up when the visiting hours were over at 8:30 PM.Teddy and I had two wonderful hours together, even if it was a tiny bit awkward at times. I had to put my backpack in a little locker like the ones they have in bus stations and pass through a metal detector and verify that I was wearing all the required articles of clothing, but I was getting used to the routine. About half an hour after I was seated in the waiting room Teddy walked in and came over to where I sat.We embraced, and it had all the sweetness and warmth of a first time: not just imagining or visualizing, but locking together hungrily with Teddy from head to toe."Thank you for coming to see me," he said, and although I didn't kiss him I rested my half-open lips against the smooth warmth of his neck as our grip on each other strengthened and tightened and I could feel my effect on him as if an electric current had shot suddenly through his body. I arched my back in a kind of offering to him, as if to say, "Here I am for you, Teddy, take whatever you need," and there were a few seconds of delicious and unsubtle grinding that I would gladly have continued for the full two hours, but he whispered hoarsely, "We better sit down while we still can," and I remembered were we were.We sat down in cold metal folding chairs facing each other across a distance of about four feet to limit any chance of touching. This distance was certainly not our choice; the lines painted on the floor set it. I stole a quick glance at the raised desk where the visiting room prison guards sat and I could see that they were leering directly and exclusively at Teddy and me although we were just two of the perhaps three or four dozen people in the visiting room.In sitting, I felt terribly awkward. I wanted to sit as far forward as possible, to open my mouth and drink in his face and probe his neck and his lips and his nipples and his tongue and more with my own exploring tongue, and yet Teddy sat back, looking almost relaxed by comparison with the way I felt, and just looked at me. How could he be relaxed? I smoothed my little plaid skirt on my lap and tried to sit properly but my legs felt like a young colt's and I did not want to sit still. I felt his deep brown eyes on me but they did not move me to modesty. I felt as light as the air and I wanted to flounce my hands through my skirt and show him everything about me that he wanted to see, and then, when I had revealed myself fully to him, to let him feel me against him everywhere and everyplace.And he seemed so amzingly calm to me, but I knew that I had his full attention. I had dressed and groomed myself according to his specifications and I felt all clean and sweet smelling under my crisp white blouse and the plaid skirt that was practically a uniform for Cabot girls. Although I seldom wore a bra around campus -- for what? after all -- I wore one today, or as Nicole and Bébé were obnoxiously fond of telling me, one of my training bras. Like every other girl or boy who ever had a mother I had heard that I should always wear clean white underpants in case I had to go to the hospital, and I wore them today, although my mother had never added a cautionary "or in case you are strip-searched by a prison guard." Fortunately I was not strip-searched on this my first real "prison visit," although the patting down that I received was embarrassingly thorough. I wore a nice pair of black shoes and, instead of tights or panty hose or conventional stockings, a pair of almost sheer black thigh highs. Teddy liked my thigh highs, at least that was how I interpreted the quick little gasp that came from him the moment when I finally got comfortable and crossed my legs at the knee."Did they give you any trouble coming in?" he asked me."Nothing I couldn't handle. I got groped a little. Sort of like riding on the subway." "They're such pigs. If you started making a regular habit of visiting me they'd all be offering money to each other to be the first one to get to pat you down.""I used my special weekend Harvard Square driver's license.""Okay, what's that?""Well, it says I'm twenty-one, so I can drink. No self respecting Cabot senior would be without a fake I.D., but the truth is, this is the first time I ever used it.""Oh," said Teddy. "Do you drink?""Not really," I admitted. "I'm not much of a party girl.""Well you sure showed me something by coming to visit me," he said. "It means the world to me."I looked around the room and noticed a lot of other guys talking to their wives and girlfriends and parents and friends, some of them holding their kids in their laps. A few of the groups just sat and looked at each other as if they were in a state of shock. The people in this room must have gone through a lot of sadness and pain together. I wondered what it would have been like if I'd known Teddy before he had done whatever it was he'd done to get himself into prison. I didn't even know what he had done although I had a feeling it had something to do with the story that he had started to tell me, about his son. I reached across toward him and touched his knee."I want to hear the rest of what you were telling me Saturday," I said. And with that, he began..."The next day I went walking on the beach looking for Lina. I kept going right on to her private beach until I found her. I had hoped Weld wouldn't be there, and he wasn't. First she asked me to sit down with her on her blanket and talk, and we did talk a little, but that didn't last too long. She took me by the hand and led me way down the beach back toward Hyannis where there was almost nobody around and we didn't do too much talking when she found a quiet place for us. She was all over me, and I was not too shy either. 'Teddy, please give me a baby,' she whispered in my ear, and I told her I would."She and her husband picked me up the next day and drove me to their house and we sat, just the three of us drinking coffee and signing legal papers. Weld said he had a present for me. He handed me a really nice expensive leather wallet that contained fifty one hundred dollar bills -- five thousand dollars. "I'd told them that I would take the college deal, and the deal was that I would get the rest of the lump sum as soon as Lina verified that she was pregnant. Then as we were sitting there, a limousine came for Weld and drove him to Hyannis Airport so he could fly back to New York for business. He wasn't out of the door two minutes before Lina moved the china aside and climbed onto the table right in front of me. "'The timing is perfect, Teddy,' she purred as she reached behind her to unclasp her top. 'Let's get busy.'"The next few days Weld stayed in New York on business, and Lina wouldn't let me get out of bed."I kept dozing off and trying to sleep for a few hours when suddenly I'd feel her hand on me and she'd be waking me up that way. After two days, my skin was so raw there that as I tried to sleep the sensation was still in my skin and it felt to me like she was all around me even when we weren't doing anything. Then she would wake me again and ask if I was still sore and she would tell me she had just the thing and she would get out this little blue and white tube of skin cream and start rubbing it on me 'to make it better,' but of course you know where that led. It made it better alright. She was relentless, kind of like she was making up for lost time. "She really pampered me for three or four days. She kept bringing me breakfast regardless of what time of day it was, and she did things that I had never imagined a woman could to for a man. I liked it. I loved it. I became convinced that I was in love with her, because I had never been treated like that and I'd never realized that it could go on for hours and for days and be nothing but this wall to wall physical pleasure. I didn't stand a chance. It had started on Tuesday, and by Friday I was beginning to think that it would never end."Then on Friday she told me that Weld was supposed to come back that evening from New York ad all of a sudden I was like yesterday's trash and she couldn't get me out of there fast enough!"I took the money and left. I got a room for seventy-five dollars a week a couple of blocks from the center of Hyannis. It was upstairs in a small Cape Cod style house owned by a retired teacher from Boston. I bought an old junk car and a few changes of clothes and a typewriter so I could work on my college applications and my term papers. A few days later my final year of high school began and I should have been all set, yet every night I sat there at that typewriter and wrote letters to Lina and threw them all away. It was the first time in my life I felt lonely. Sure, I had been alone plenty before that, but until then I'd always equated being alone with being free."Now suddenly being all alone meant that I had lost someone, and I didn't like that at all. In those few days in the house with Lina, I had allowed myself to imagine all kinds of things - about what life could be like if we could be together. I had had sex before, but it never had come close to that luxuriant feeling where you are totally together with a woman and there is nobody else in the world. In looking back, I guess it was a combination of several things, how beautiful she was how much more she knew than I did, the mansion, how nice it was to be together there with people waiting on us hand and foot. I can't ever remember a woman having so much power over me."I felt I was already breaking the rules that I had signed up for. That was why I couldn't just go to her house, and why I had to throw away all the letters I'd been writing to her. I sure as hell wasn't supposed to be falling in love with her, but of course when I signed the papers I never imagined those first days that we had together. "Then one day I got a letter in the mail. I had to go to the post office and sign for it. The certified letter was from Weld, not Lina. Not even a mention of Lina. My hands shook as I tore it open: "In view of the satisfactory completion of our contract ... come to the house between fourand four-fifteen P.M. on such and such a date and you will receive the next installment of your financial compensation as agreed upon previously.""It instructed me to use the servant's entrance, and, like I said, not even a mention of Lina. "I almost didn't go. But I ended up driving over there just like I was supposed to one afternoon and when I parked my old car in front of their house I got out and stood there and threw up on the street directly in front of the house. Neither Weld nor Lina came to the door, but I'm sure Weld identified me through the window and instructed the servant to give me the cash. No fancy leather wallet this time. I returned home and just sat there in my room looking at the pile of money I'd thrown on my desk. I wondered what Lina was doing and as much as I was hurting, I still imagined and longed to be with her letting my hand rest on her belly and feeling our child growing inside her. I also knew that at some core level of honesty I was the right one to be with Lina and to raise our child with her. In the way I was looking at the world, Weld wasn't even a man. "How could Lina treat me like this after what we had shared together? To act as if I didn't even exist after being so totally connected and naked with each other, not just for an hour but for days! Even though my own mother was no bargain I had always believed that there was something special about women, that the right woman was someone you could trust, that women were not at all like men. I was a pretty sentimental guy, but I guess I was beginning to be educated. I was starting to learn things I didn't want to learn. I just wanted life to be the way I had always thought and imagined it could be, despite all evidence to the contrary."Sometimes I told myself that Lina really, desperately wanted to be in contact with me, but she didn't dare because Weld had her almost like she was locked up, or perhaps she was afraid of hurting me any more. Could it be she was simply waiting for the right moment to get in touch with me? It was like she'd cast a spell on me, but I kept telling myself that I had to try to focus on the plan, stick to it or I would end up screwing up my life royally. I did a decent job of sticking to the plan most of the time. I got good grades in school, ran cross-country that fall and set all kinds of records, and got accepted at several Ivy League colleges. I decided I would take Weld's money and go to Harvard. "Then in early May I saw in the newspaper a birth announcement that said my baby boy was born, and that's when I lost any control that I had left. "All year long, I had been writing letters to Lina and mailing them straight into the trash can. Once or twice maybe I mailed a letter to her when I wasn't thinking straight, even though logically I knew it could mean I might not get the rest of the money. Between money and Lina I wasn't going to choose the money, you know? I never heard a single word back from her. But that night after I learned my son had been born I sat down and wrote a letter to him, like he could actually read a letter, I mean I knew that he couldn't. But I couldn't stop myself, and I mailed it to him anyway. "It was all full of crazy truth about who he really was. The newspaper's birth announcement said the baby's name was Weld Junior, but I told him in the letter that his real name was Runner and he was an Indian like me and I would show him the way to run for his freedom. I was heated. As soon as I had Runner to write to I didn't care any more about Lina, at least in my own mind I thought I didn't care. Really I guess you would have to say that I cared enough to think that I could be her Karma, like I was going to turn the tables on her because of the way she treated me. I got all righteous because no longer was it just something she was doing to me. Now it was a matter of Lina and Weld joining together to deny Runner's right to his real heritage, to his real blood father. "I wrote more than one letter to him, and somewhere in the midst of all this I said to Runner that Weld would not live to raise him because one way or another I would not allow it, and that's got me my ticket here."One day about a week after I mailed that last letter I was at school and four cops walked right into the cafeteria and handcuffed me and told me I was under arrest for threatening to murder Weld Crenshaw. They read me my rights and I swear every kid in the cafeteria could hear every word of the Miranda warning, it was that quiet. Then this one kid who was on the cross-country team with me starts chanting: "Free Teddy, free Teddy, free Teddy," and then in about five seconds there were hundreds of students joining in and chanting the same thing. It might have been this totally cool moment, except for the fact that it was like one of the worst moments of my life. But Weld had some juice. I haven't been free a single day since then."I knew I never should have mailed those letters. It wasn't like I was planning to kill Weld or anything, but I was hurting and I was just trying to get a response out of Lina, anything to let me know where I was. I was so angry as I was writing to Runner that I was crying. I know that is no way to relate to your kid. It never occurred to me that I was breaking any laws. I did think that I was probably screwing up the rest of the money that they were going to pay me for college, but I didn't care about that anymore. I just thought there ought to be a law, some sort of higher law to protect a seventeen-year-old kid from signing away his right to be part of his own son's life. Maybe a lawyer would even have told me that there was a law like that, but I was thinking crazy. I didn't know how to go about things and I was so angry at myself for giving up something so important to me that there was probably some self-destructiveness involved too."The prosecutor was kind of a weasel, and I had an idiot public defender who didn't want to do anything to piss off Weld Crenshaw. These two lawyers had me in a room together and they were like 'good cop-bad cop' with me. I sure didn't feel like there was anyone in the room representing me. The prosecutor was all Johnny-One-Note and he kept saying it didn't even really matter how long a sentence I got because they would figure out a way to rig the conditions of probation so that they could keep me locked up as long as Weld Crenshaw was alive, and that would probably be another forty years."Long story short, they spooked me into pleading guilty and taking a sentence of eight to ten years, so even if I can get a year's worth of good time and early parole I'll still be in my twenty-four when I get out, and I'll be an ex-con without a regular high school diploma.""Can you get a high school diploma and a college degree while you're in here?" I asked."I'm working on it. But it's a hell of a lot different from going to Harvard."The torrent of words in which he had told his story was over, and Teddy sat there quietly, his eyes searching my face for some sign that I would not reject him as being in some way unworthy of me. He seemed smaller to me now, and younger, and instead of the strong young brave with the hard, tanned body and the dancing dark eyes there was something wounded and fearful in his eyes, and breakable in his presence. I leaned forward in my chair and reached for his hand, which he offered to me tentatively."Teddy, I feel like I know something about you," I said, searching for the right words to connect with him, to bring him closer to me. "About what is inside you. It doesn't matter what you accomplish by the time you are seventeen, or twenty, or twenty-five. Life is a lot longer than that. What matters is what you have inside of you. And you have so much."This boy who told me just a few days before that he did not trust anybody kept looking at me and his beautiful brown eyes filled up and then we both stood up and I flew into his arms and we gripped each other with a new kind of desperation, and as I held him I could feel his body quaking, sobbing, shuddering, but he could not manage words. We stood there locked together for a few long moments and then over Teddy's shoulder a prison guard came into view and I could see him smirking, sneering at us, and he said "Your visit is over, inmate. Have a seat." Teddy let go of me and sat down and the guard said, "You are allowed to embrace at the beginning of the visit and at the end of the visit, so your visit must be over."Teddy said, "You better go," and I told him I would be back soon and I walked out of the visiting room. I was sorry to leave so abruptly, but I was also relieved, because as much as I wanted to help him I would not have known what to say next.
Chapter 12
I continued to visit Teddy two or three times a week during the fall, and my heart was his. The physical limitations placed upon our visits kept us from acting on our growing hunger for each other, so our interaction was a more soulful meeting of spirit and psyche than would have otherwise been likely, but it made our courtship all the sweeter. Circumstances made us unattainable for each other; what then could be more desirable? At Thanksgiving, Nicole and Bébé and I traveled to New York to meet our mothers for three days of shopping and shows, and I almost died from boredom and loneliness. While they painted Manhattan red I found excuses to sit alone in our suite at the Plaza; I wrote long letters to Teddy sharing fantasies of our life together when we would both be at last free of our respective prisons. It was almost as if I wanted to persuade him of my solidarity with him by painting a picture of my life at Cabot, the expectations of my family, and my yearning to break loose into some bohemian writer's life that would rise to the same levels as his own deprivations and desperate dreams. We drove each other on, and we seemed to believe in each other's imaginative flights without reservation. In between writing my letters I re-read his, and sometimes turned as well to the prison writings of Jean Genet and Oscar Wilde, exchanging notes with Teddy along the way about their meaning.My college applications remained in an unopened manila folder in the lining of my suitcase and I sat glumly and listened when my friends and their mothers discussed the merits of women's colleges like Smith or Wellesley versus the more plentiful co-ed schools like Stanford or Harvard. The idea of my going to college anywhere without Teddy, of my continuing along the track that everyone had been preparing for me so carefully and elaborately, made me want to gag. To disappear from the face of the earth. To lash out at my oppressors.When we got back to Cabot Academy on Sunday evening Bébé and Nicole lit into me."Enough of this! Why would you want to throw your life away on a boy who has absolutely no future?""You don't understand, Bébé. He's like nobody I've ever imagined." "I do understand, Ali. I understand totally. He's beautiful. He's got beautiful eyes. He's got a beautiful ass. You can't breathe when he's in the room. You want to do unspeakably intimate things with him.""You've never even seen him. How would you know?""I know. I've been to that same place. That's what they do to us. I know. It isn't fair.""There's nobody else on the face of the earth whose eyes I can look into and see his soul the way I can see Teddy's.""I know how that feels, baby. And yes, maybe you really can see his soul.""I can.""Or maybe," said Nicole, "it's your own soul that you see.""Believe me, my own soul wouldn't be this exciting to me.""Maybe there's no way of knowing," said Bébé."I think there has to be a way of knowing," said Nicole. "It's a little trippy, but if you convince yourself that it's true, maybe it is true as long as you stay convinced. Like, believing it is being it."Trippy or not, I didn't like where Nicole was going with this. She was the physicist and suddenly we were discussing planes of reality, content and structure, rather than true love and a boy."Is it that this one guy is the one guy on the face of the earth," asked Nicole, "Or that you make a commitment to the belief, and that's what makes the one guy so special?""Or maybe it doesn't even matter who the guy is," said Nicole. "If what you are really looking at is your own soul reflected in a pair of beautiful blue eyes.""Brown eyes.""What?""Teddy's eyes are brown," I protested. It was a stupid protest, but what was meaningful to me was I wanted to bring it, or myself at least, back to Teddy. Otherwise, it was just words. "I don't want to think that way. It's too easy. And it doesn't lead me anywhere.""But where is this leading you? Don't think we don't know where you are going every time you disappear from campus for three or four hours!" "And if we know, Miss Sharp probably knows too," added Nicole. "You are risking everything, Ali!""Everything? What everything? I'm so sick of being a nice little girly-girl while real life goes on all around me. I feel like I am being trained to be one more hypocrite, relying totally on privilege and good manners and denying everything real inside of me." They got quiet, although I hadn't meant to shut them up. I hadn't intended to call them hypocrites. I hadn't meant to call them liars.But I didn't have any faith in the choices they apparently wanted me to make. What good would it do me to follow the path that had been set out before me, where good breeding would lead me relentlessly away from doing the right thing, from following my own heart and being true to myself? I wanted to be a whole woman with her own sexual yearnings and her own ability to affect the people around her. What would I gain while losing my identity and soul? And perhaps even losing Teddy?Of course I wanted to tell Nicole and Bébé that I would be risking everything if I didn't follow what my heart told me, but if I put it that way it would just sound so dramatic and boring, and I was pretty sure that it wasn't. They acted as if they thought Teddy was just some random guy who was in prison and he had me under some sick crazy spell. But it wasn't like that at all. They started up again and went on and on, and it became clear to me that much of their verbal ammunition had been provided by their mothers and mine and that while I spent much of that long New York weekend sitting alone in our suite writing to Teddy, I had no doubt been the topic of their conversations. It irked me that my own mother, whatever she knew or was able to piece together about my new interest in Teddy, apparently did not have the courage to confront me directly. That was how I saw it then: she was a hypocrite for using Nicole and Bébé as go-betweens to try and influence my behavior where Teddy and I were concerned.But the truth was that I gave her no openings, and quite frankly didn't provide much in the way of opportunities for Nicole and Bébé either. For the most part, I stopped speaking to them about Teddy. I didn't want to have to defend my choices. Of course, the result was that I totally kept quiet and, at some elemental level, I seemed to be leading an almost solitary, insulated life. I still attended all my classes, did my schoolwork, and often ate my meals with them. But I imagine that, to them, I must have seemed to be in a world of my own. As Nicole and Bébé came at me, I was finally reduced to sitting on my bed silently with tears streaming down my face. Beneath my sweet exterior I'd been nurturing a quiet inexplicable rage somewhere deep within myself. That raging heart inside me was trying to make Teddy the object not only of my affection but also my entire world. I suppose that somewhere else inside me there was a tiny vigilant voice telling me that I might be risking everything. Did I once listen to that voice? No, I had spent almost eighteen years trying to please everyone, my parents, my teachers, and all the other adults in my life, and it was not just a simple proposition now to listen to my own heart. It required an elaborate and very difficult self-transformation into some scary uncharted territory.And I had never been one for half measures.
Starting the next morning, I set my mind to try to make the best of my situation. I would continue to visit Teddy as often as he would allow me to. But I would also try to finish the fall semester as strongly and diligently as possible. During the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas break I asked my cross-country coach to write letters to several other college coaches on my behalf and for my solo between-season training runs I jogged around the huge perimeter wall that surrounded the MCI Concord prison and tried to imagine breaking in to prison. Then, on my last visit to see Teddy before Christmas, he happened to point out another inmate to me across the visiting room."That's Michael, my cellie." Teddy said. I had all but forgotten the slight, thin, shy, young-looking boy that I had seen walking toward CC and me on that first Saturday morning when we had come to the prison together. Now that I had seen him again, my imagination really got down to work.
Chapter 13
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