Gram’s Story

You know, my dear, you’ve been keeping me company here in this quiet cabin for nearly ten days now. And you’ve been very good company too. But, I understand that since you’re nearly fifteen now, you’re bound to be restless. And I know also that things were getting a little rough between you and your Mom and Dad even though they’ve told me nothing about it really. Perhaps they made you come, but that doesn’t matter. You’re being here with me has caused me to think quite a good bit about my life when I was fifteen, and if you’re not too bored to hear about it, I’m going to tell you some secrets that I doubt even your mother knows. I know hearing about old people’s lives rarely feels so interesting to younger people, but I think you might find some of what I’m going to confide to you a bit surprising. So, since it’s raining, let’s make some tea and bake some cookies and we’ll see whether I can keep your interest for a while.

I was actually only two days short of turning fifteen myself when my life changed more completely than I could have imagined possible. Of course, my mother’s death half my life before had affected me very deeply and had changed everything also. I suppose that event will always be the most important thing which ever happened to me. But what I want to describe to you now was different because it was not precisely something which happened to me; it was really something which happened within me. I’m telling you this story, my dear, because I suppose I wish I’d had someone to tell me this story or one like it was I was as young as you are now. Honestly, though, I don’t really know whether it would have changed anything; I’m not quite certain that we need to change things much as our lives unfold. Life will buffet you around no matter what you do or how carefully you plan, and I imagine all that buffeting is usually not such a bad thing, even when we think it is. Nevertheless, grandmothers worry about their granddaughters, so I’m telling you very frankly, my dear, some things which might surprise you about your Gram, and most of all I hope these things will keep you from feeling quite so alone as I sometimes felt as a young woman. I hope you’ll always be able to think, “I think Gram was here too,” or, “I think this was what Gram was talking about.”

The truth is, I didn’t recognize any of this for many years and it is only now, as a rather old woman that I’m able to tell you this story. Old people always wish that the gifts of their experience, and perhaps their wisdom can be given to the young people they love. We love you more deeply than you can understand because our love now wants nothing in return. This is unlike so much of the fools’ gold you are surrounded by now. A lot of what you imagine could be love now is someone looking for something for themselves.

Well, whether I could have listened to an old woman when I was your age, I don’t know, but there was no old woman able to tell me what I’d needed to know anyway, so I had to learn some other way. As I go about trying to tell you my story, please try to imagine that I too was once a girl exactly as you are today. It seems nearly impossible, even to me, when I look at these drooping cheeks and breasts, and my watery eyes and wrinkles, but she was here as breathlessly alive as you are now. And, I don’t say this to frighten you, but only to remind you of the hardest truth to absorb as a girl: this old woman is within you too; just as the young girl is still within me now. That’s critical to the story I’ll tell you because you can try to care for her now if you wish, or not. But she is there and it is only you, even at your young age, only you who can truly care for her. If you hate and revile her, then she will suffer and her suffering will be your suffering.

Well then, let me begin. As you know, my situation in the world was generally quite fortunate. My father was a wonderful, warm and greatly admired man. In a way, I could say that was his only flaw, if it is one at all. He was so much admired and respected that he grew busier and was more in demand every year of my life. Although he was kind enough to stay quite close to home during the year or two after mother died, he then got very very busy when the new administration in Washington began to make intense demands on him. He married Suzanne about two years after my mother died. So he had a new wife and I had a new stepmother. She shared Daddy’s intense political interests and was certainly much more invested in that side of him than in our family life. I never hated her as many children seem to hate stepmothers, but I can’t say I ever felt love for her, or from her either. But what I knew I didn’t like was having someone between me and Daddy. I needed him awfully. She and his work were, at least in a way, my enemies.

But you do need to understand how wonderful my father could be, even when he upset me. Once he had been gone for nearly three weeks on some mission somewhere, I think maybe it was about the stupid Israeli’s and Palestinians, but it doesn’t matter now and it certainly didn’t matter to me then. I hated all the foolish fighting men everywhere in the world seemed to do. They only made terrible trouble for everyone, and they took my father for themselves when I needed him with me. He got home around two in the morning from this particular trip. I remember he came into my room and woke me up. I was eleven I think, and I so loved seeing him, it was as though magic was happening right there in my bedroom in the middle of the night. Seeing him like that, right out of a deep sleep was even more special than seeing him coming home in the afternoon or something more ordinary. I remember jumping into his arms with tears all over my face and he hugged me back in the most lovely, precious, unhurried way. Finally we broke apart and I said, “Daddy, I so happy you’re home! I’ve missed you so much!” And I saw there were tears in his eyes also, and he said to me, “Alyssa, you cannot imagine how glad I am to see you,too. You are more precious to me than anything else in this world. I am so sorry I have to be away so much.” I hugged him again because I believed him. I really believed he was an important man who was trying to do something good in this world, and that he didn’t want me ever to be unhappy. There were many adults I didn’t really quite believe, but I believed utterly in Daddy. I felt then as though he had placed a jewel deep within me. My confidence in him, in that jewel, helped me to endure nearly anything later on. I think it saved me in the end, but there was also a time I forgot it was there, and in a way this nearly cost me everything. This is what I’m going to tell you about. Perhaps you will not forget so much of what matters as I did.

So now I will really begin my story as I was about to. Remember I was telling you about that day only two days before my fifteenth birthday, seven years after my mother had died. It was a Friday. May fourth, because my birthday was on May sixth. Suzanne, my father’s new wife, was going to be away for that weekend, so she had given me a gift ahead of time and I opened it that morning. It was a cream colored silk shirt, very light and loose and open quite deep in front. Without a camisole, pretty much all of me was exposed, especially if I were to lean forward a bit. I was not especially big breasted, but I had a nice lean figure. I loved my body then. I’d always been very active and was still playing soccer and tennis on school teams. Up until that morning, my body had been what I did things in. It was my home, my nest, but it was not to me something that was for looking at.

Suzanne’s gift was a woman’s shirt. It was beautiful and sexy, something to be seen and something to be seen in. I don’t know if I can explain to you how new this was to me that morning? I stood there looking at myself in the mirror. I knew I looked pretty. I felt pleased certainly, but also I also felt frightened as though at that very moment I discovered I was no longer a girl; I was a young woman. People would look at me and I was supposed to want them to.

Suzanne was a very beautiful woman, a woman who I felt knew most everything there was to know about being a woman. She was glamorous and dressed in magnificent clothes always and always had perfect makeup on. She was witty and seemed comfortable talking with anyone. I admired all this, but in a distant, uninterested way. It had never occurred to me to think of being like her, no more than it would have occurred to me to be a banker or a polo player. But this gift was as though she had given me a helmet and mallet and told me to mount up and enter the game. Can you imagine why my heart was beating so hard as I stood in front of my mirror that morning? I didn’t feel prepared for this but it struck me just as I put that shirt on, that what I was prepared for didn’t matter. Perhaps I was already in this game and hadn’t really understood. I think that notion may have been there too.

There was something else much more ominous as well. It’s nothing, of course, I could have told you at that moment, but something was very surely present just the same. That notion revolved around the idea that this new world, this new phase of my life was really a game of some sort. There were rules, few of which I knew. There were skills, none of which I possessed. Scores were kept by mysterious formulas I didn’t understand. My life to that point, even with its trials, had felt direct and relatively simple. Now, really at the very moment before my own mirror in my new blouse and in complete privacy, I could feel my life lurch into a new and intimidating phase with a sudden tectonic jolt.

What I have told you so far is everything and nothing. It is everything because now I am able to gaze backwards and see how that moment set the stage. It is nothing because my real story is like any story; it has action and there was much action to follow. It actually began at once. I did not wear Suzanne’s gift to school that morning. I wore my usual oxford cloth buttoned except for the top button, the kilt which was our school uniform, but for the first time I did not simply pull my hair back into a pony tail as I had done, as we had all done, for years, but instead wore it in the French braid I’d learned a couple of months earlier. I felt brazen, almost as though I’d decided to leave home that morning with no shirt at all! Naturally, it was not so brazen at all, but I think I felt so self-conscious, as if my thoughts, no, not my thoughts, but my inner being itself, was on display and just as readable as that news crawl in Times Square.

I don’t doubt now that I was different beyond my hair that day. In the late morning as we were all dismissed for lunch, which always precipitated a great noisy rush to the door like a flock of startled starlings bursting from a tree, I delayed. I did not rush off with the rest of them. Mr. Christian was my favorite teacher and he taught literature. He was young and fit and coached the younger boys in soccer every afternoon and I’d see him running gracefully amongst the boys. I think he played on a club team himself and had been an accomplished college player. David Christian was his name. He was one of those teachers who come to a school for a few years following their college years before going on to greater things, so he did not really belong to that more staid and worn group who had long recognized they would be teaching for life.

So I risked getting an inferior seat at lunch to speak with Mr. Christian after class. I’d spoken to him before, probably many times. I’d always felt comfortable talking with my teachers. My father had so strongly encouraged me to seek them out whenever I was confused or had any question that it had been easy for me. This time everything felt different though. I’d been at my desk and had asked him to look at something I’d written. He’d bent down to see, his right hand on my left shoulder. I think he may have done the same thing before, but this time, his hand seemed to leave a flaming mark on my shoulder. I was so aware of his physical presence I felt like a rabbit beneath the paw of a lion, but a benign kingly lion, a lion whose paw I preferred to nestle under.

I went on to lunch that day, my body ignited by an energy I’d never felt before. I remember entering our always raucous cafeteria without a thought for food and seeing the nosiest boys who always landed together. They suddenly seemed so young and foolish to me. A couple of them called out to me which was not unusual, but I reacted as though they were speaking in a foreign language and it did not occur to me to respond. But, for the fist time in my life, I could also feel them gazing at me. Perhaps it had happened before and I hadn’t noticed, but on that day I could feel their eyes, their appetite, and their fear and because of it, I felt power. It was power in a realm I hardly had any awareness of hours earlier. This was, my dear one, the threshold, the moment which appeared so very small and insubstantial at the time, but when I blithely crossed over that threshold, unknowingly I entered most dangerous period of my life.

I found my friends that day, squealing together at our usual spot. Ordinarily I would have been anxious to find my seat at the crowded and excited table, but this interest had dimmed that day. I did sit down with them, but my excitement and usual interest weren’t really there and my closest friend, Julie McGloghlin, noticed. She asked me whether I was okay. Of course I said sure, I was fine, but my mind was in some new state, one it had never occupied before; distracted and preoccupied. Had you asked me in the very most private place, in the most intimate of circumstances, I’m certain I could have no more told you what was in there than I could have seen in the dark. But, now looking back, I can tell you I was a different girl from that morning and afterwards.

I’m going to skip on ahead now, not so far, but only to what followed from all these changes in me. Nothing particular happened over that summer that I can recall. I went to the riding camp I’d been going to for many years and then we all came up here, to this cabin in these Adirondacks where we’d gone every August I could remember, and then back home and back to school where I began my sophomore year. Very soon after starting back, I tried out for the choir because I loved singing and this year I got in. For some reason, I felt beautiful singing. By beautiful I mean something that doesn’t require other people. It had more in common with the way I felt beautiful running down a wing playing soccer. I don’t think I had an exceptional voice, but I had a good enough voice and I had lots of enthusiasm and could really throw myself into it. I never felt self conscious singing and that is always a big help. Early on, I ended up standing next to Andy who was a senior I hadn’t known before. I noticed he was often looking over at me during the practice, and I became worried I was off key or making an idiot of myself somehow, but at the end of practice one day, he looked right at me and said, “you sounded really good. What’s your name anyhow?” That was the first time in my life that a boy asked my name. I knew right then, standing on that choir riser with the huge windows behind me looking out on that graveyard with the enormous old oaks between the ancient stones, that this was a different sort of question than I’d ever been asked before. I told him and he said “Oh. Alyssa. Yeah. I like that name,” and I felt like I might fall over. He smiled and I smiled back and I couldn’t eat lunch afterwards. Andy was fairly tall, maybe six feet I think, and athletic looking. I found out quite a while later that he was a very good tennis player and had played on our varsity tennis team for three years. He had a really nice tenor voice and beautiful blue eyes. They reminded me of Paul Newman’s eyes, and in those days dear, Paul Newman’s eyes were the gold standard of male eyes. They were like sapphires god had put in his head for the world to admire, clear and deep as a lake, and I’d already begun swimming in them. Every feeling I had during this time was new. I guess that each one of them sort of confused me. I began to really pay attention to what I looked like. I started wearing makeup which I’d always scorned before. I started to wear that shirt Suzanne had given me and got other clothes which were much sexier than any I’d worn the year before. Andy talked to me a few more times at choir, then asked if I’d go out with him which I did. He was a sweet guy and the first time he kissed me, he asked me if it was all right with me! To think of that today still touches me because I don’t think any man has asked me something so sweet or considerate since then, certainly not so far as sex is concerned anyway. Naturally I said…well, I really don’t remember what I said, probably something like “OK,” but I do remember kissing him. I confess I’d been practicing by kissing my mirror at home and in some other ways, but I knew I didn’t really precisely get it, but Andy sure did. Oh my dear girl, the things that went through me sitting that night in the front seat of his car! I’m sure I couldn’t describe them to you. My body filled up with heat and with an energy which made me squirmy and strong, as though I wanted to wrap myself around him like a snake right there. Of course, I didn’t. I kissed him a little I think and then said I had to go in. I went into my house scarcely sure I still could walk.

But there was also something else going on that year, and this is something made everything so much more confusing. I had Mr. Christian again for an English class that year. I won’t tell you it was an accident of scheduling. I won’t pretend it was an accident at all; I’d wanted to be in his class again. I thought he was a good and passionate teacher, but I’d had some sort of crush on him since that moment I’ve described to you. It was during this year, I suppose the most momentous one of my lifetime, that my consciousness began to split into pieces, to break apart like marbles dropped on a hard floor, free to roll in all directions. One, or maybe more than one of those marbles was preoccupied with Mr. Christian. I began to talk to him frequently after class or during other free times, usually with my heart pounding from fear or thrill I could hardly tell. We would have impassioned discussions about literature and he would advise me about things he thought I should read. Sometime in November, a little while before Thanksgiving, I was in his office and was wearing the blouse Suzanne had given me. I was wearing it deliberately and daringly. He was reading a poem I had written, leaning as he had the year before over my left shoulder and this time with his hand resting lightly and seemingly quite naturally on my right shoulder. He read the poem silently, and then aloud which was lovely to me. And then he said “Your poem is beautiful, Alyssa. And so are you, you know. You’re a beautiful young woman.” And at that moment, one marble, one stream of consciousness began rolling furiously in some direction I knew nothing about. I had never really thought much about beauty; about what it was, about where it came from or who decided what it was. But now: I was beautiful! I think I paused internally, not moving, not breathing, not thinking. And then, I began shaking, truly vibrating with some new energy loosened within me. This marble would roll a long way before it slowed again. But there was another also; another quite distinct stream of consciousness which arose and began rolling more quietly in quite another direction. This was another part of myself that was quite detached and watching, as though I were observing the play in which I myself was playing the lead. Inside this stream, I think I thought something like “No,” as though I was disgusted by Mr. Christian’s comment. Can you imagine feeling two entirely different and opposite things at precisely the same time? I was. I know that my respect for him slightly and almost invisibly diminished at that moment. So, did I like him telling me I was beautiful? Did I dislike it? How could I measure? How could I possibly know? I could not.

Well, I went back, and back again and again, so perhaps I have to think I did like his admiration and compliments. As I continued to see him, a feeling of privacy, even of secrecy, arose within me. Of course, I’d had little secrets with girlfriends before, but this was entirely different. This was more a sense of something so private that even I could not quite know about it. It’s as though I didn’t want to know what I was doing and only my willful ignorance permitted me to keep going. My best friend Julie told me years later that she had clearly seen the changes in me, but felt she was not invited to talk to me about it. A few weeks later, not long after Thanksgiving I think, I was again in his office and again having him read a poem I had written, when he touched my breast. He’d been standing behind me like he had before and he let his right hand slide down inside my shirt and over my whole right breast. No, he didn’t “let” his hand slide down inside my shirt, he deliberately moved it down. He didn’t ask. Those marbles were really rolling madly now, in every direction completely beyond my control, and apparently without any connection to one another. I couldn’t breathe or speak and I turned, looking up at him and he kissed me on the mouth and I was filled with thrill, shame, humiliation, excitement, fear, confusion; a wild cacophony of everything you can imagine. In some distant part of my mind I thought, “I’m going to have an affair with Mr. Christian.” I don’t really know whether there was any real emotion at all there. I imagined later it was like what people felt when they knew they were about to die. Sometimes there is simply a powerful curiosity and feeling of surprise. I had had a sensation when I’d been riding in the car with my father when another car went through a stop light. I watched, as though it were taking ten minutes instead of a single second as it plowed into us, and I’d thought, “that car is going to hit us,” just as though I were watching it on tv. Instead of this huge feeling that you would imagine, there is just a sort of detachment. Feeling came later.

I said he deliberately put his hand on my breast, that he didn’t let it “fall” onto my breast. It’s funny how much time I’ve spent thinking about that moment. Perhaps it was because of the shirt I’ve told you about which was so loose and exposing at the top. I was not wearing by mistake of course. Perhaps it was because I was quite conscious of wanting to talk to Mr. Christian, of looking for reasons to visit him in his office, of writing poems to show him and listen to him comment on. So maybe it was my own wishes pulling his hand down inside that shirt. Perhaps I was more a participant, or even an instigator than I’d like to think. So there was another marble, more like a wild mouse, furiously careening towards something I knew nothing about at the time. There was a kind of madness propelling me. I say madness because during that time I felt disconnected from any capacity to consider the consequences of what I was doing. Surely it is mad to give no consideration to these future consequences. But perhaps we must be mad in just this way to launch ourselves into the next phase of our lives. Over the long run now, I’ve come to feel a certain peace about the whole thing. Of course, you understand I did go on to have an affair with Mr. Christian. Oddly, even today, I still think of him as “Mr. Christian.” He was actually quite kind and very gentle, and I now can appreciate, quite as mad as I was. At that time, I thought of him as quite old, but now I think of him as very young.

I’ll tell you just how it all happened. Mr. Christian had regularly had gatherings of kids over to his apartment on Friday evenings. There was usually some vague format, like discussing some other book by an author we had read for class. But on one particular evening between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Suzanne dropped me off at his apartment, but this time when I entered, I saw I was the only one there. Suzanne had driven off, promising to pick me up when I called her later. Being alone even for a moment with Mr. Christian gave me a sort of thrill, whether of apprehension or excitement, I’m not quite sure.

“Well, Alyssa,” I remember he said to me, “both Sean and Esther have called to say they won’t be here and Annie was sick today, so we’re it. You’re welcome to stay, or I’ll run you home now if you’d prefer. Would you like to talk a little more about your last poem? I’ve got it right here.”

So all I had to do was say “OK.” I did.

Within two minutes, we were kissing. I was intensely excited even while, at the same time, uneasy. I think I knew this would lead me into a territory I understood poorly. Everything heated up very fast and then Mr. Christian withdrew a little and, looking straight at me, said “You know Alyssa, I want to make love to you.” Imagine listening to that! I was shaking, whether with fear or excitement I couldn’t say. As you can see, many of my feelings then didn’t quite make sense to me.

I think he talked to me about how this would be kind of dangerous for us both and told me I shouldn’t unless I was very sure I wanted to. I realized I’d already decided. At least that’s what I thought.

It may astonish or even horrify you to know all of this happened while I was dating Andy, the first vaguely serious relationship I’d had with a boy. Dreadful things came of all of this. As is nearly always the case, things I believed were so secret, so completely hidden from others, were nothing of the sort. As I’ve told you, Julie, my dear friend, was quite clear that something momentous was going on and seemed to have formulated a pretty good idea of what it was because my “crush” on Mr. Christian was plain enough to her. My father, and even Suzanne, who I’d never thought had much interest in my life, both sensed changes but had little idea what they might be. aI think thought they were simply a part of being an adolescent which now seems to me to be a code for precisely these kinds of life changes anyway. But even Mr. Christian’s capacity to appreciate what we were doing finally seemed to be as naive as my own. Our liaison attracted suspicions and the interest of the school authorities. I imagine some faculty member or jealous student or someone, and there will always be such a someone, told someone something. Anyway, he was fired at the beginning of March, and was, I now suspect, told communicating with me in any way might place him in grave jeopardy because he disappeared like a snuffed candle. I was shocked and stunned and devastated. My father was informed, although I never knew precisely of what. For the first time, I found him somehow inadequate to the task before him. He tried to ask me if I were all right. Did I want to talk things over with him? Would I go to a therapist? All of his tentative and seemingly cautious inquiries only caused me to feel more alone and less understood. Andy simply evaporated from my life. As much as I wished I could talk with Julie, I felt that she too would be incapable of understanding anything about what happened to me that year. I thought I was finding intimacy, but what I really seemed to find was loneliness.

Perhaps, my dear girl, this is the real reason for my wishing to tell you this shocking story. I had slid down the ways into my early adult life and the result was that I was floating alone in a barren sea for quite some time. I can only wish for you that your own launch, however it should come about, will not leave you so alone. Whether I am here to float along next to you, or whether you simply remember, I want you to always know your Gran was here also.