the force of my temptation. Late morning found us walking aimlessly, then, with an unspoken but unerring sense of direction, toward the Motherwells’. First we went and sat in the rain under the dripping overhang of the high school’s auditorium, a separate structure from the school itself, round and windowless like a grain silo. Then we stood for a few minutes on the hill, looking toward their house. I could see a light on in the upper bedroom, a cozy yellow glow in the dark gray. A car drove by packed with a bunch of kids from school, speeding on the wet road. “They should be more careful,” Cherry said, turning her face away as we approached the Motherwells’ house, but I perceived a measure of wistfulness in her disapproval. I think she might have liked to be in that car.
“GOSH, YOU KNOW, GIRLS, it’s really lucky that you decided to come over again today, because if you hadn’t I would have gone completely insane, sitting here all alone in this downpour.”
This was believable. Up in the bedroom, under the roof, we might have been under a taut black umbrella. Theo was out somewhere. Raquel didn’t volunteer any details. I had to be at the café at three. It had been raining since early that morning; outside the grass glowed in the mud and I had a delicious, sleepy, encapsulated feeling in the warm chamber.
“I drive myself crazy, when I’m alone. Of course, being with others can be just as intolerable . . . but I may have found a happy medium. I was just writing in my diary.” Raquel held up a small, leather-bound, gilt-edged book with a clasp, about the size of a box of animal crackers. “Isn’t it priceless? Did you ever have one like this, with the little lock and key? You could contain an entire girlhood between these pages. I keep it here”—she pointed to the top drawer of her dresser—“with my underwear, and I keep the key separately, hidden, as any proper girl would, in this little dish.” She seemed to be inviting us, erstwhile intruders, into her privacy. The white dish sat on top of the dresser and appeared to contain, besides the key, a jumble of earrings, none of which I would ever see her wear. Her lobes were always bare.
I had kept a diary a long time before, when I was eleven. It was given to me by my parents, on the advice of a grief counselor. The diary was pre-dated, and on every page I wrote something pristinely impersonal. The day’s weather, homework assignments, entries in the long list of every book I had ever finished, including author, title, and date begun. I did include a note the day my first period arrived, the bloody “guest,” as my mother called it, on the last day of summer vacation when I was twelve. And that was where it ended, the journal of my mourning.
Cherry, I knew, made a habit of slavishly recording in a little notebook each interaction that occurred (in the halls at school, at the riverbank, on Main Street) between her and whichever boy she was obsessed with at that particular moment. She had five completed volumes in a shoebox under her bed, and was at work on her sixth. But she didn’t seem interested in the subject of diaries.
“Tell us about how you and Theo first met?” This was something Cherry could get enthusiastic about.
“What? And further darken the mood of this dreary day with a sordid tale?”
I looked at Cherry and thought we must be thinking the same thought: this was the perfect day to be told such a story. There could be nothing more delightful than to be filled to the brim with an account of a foreign experience when outside the day was damp and chilly and packed to its brim with familiarity. A good story is second only to a poignant reverie.
“Well, I suppose it’s really kind of charming. We met fairly recently, you know, so I haven’t had a chance to tell it much.” She shifted her weight on the bed and crossed her legs, settling in. I thought she looked beautiful, there in the yellow light of the little
“GOSH, YOU KNOW, GIRLS, it’s really lucky that you decided to come over again today, because if you hadn’t I would have gone completely insane, sitting here all alone in this downpour.”
This was believable. Up in the bedroom, under the roof, we might have been under a taut black umbrella. Theo was out somewhere. Raquel didn’t volunteer any details. I had to be at the café at three. It had been raining since early that morning; outside the grass glowed in the mud and I had a delicious, sleepy, encapsulated feeling in the warm chamber.
“I drive myself crazy, when I’m alone. Of course, being with others can be just as intolerable . . . but I may have found a happy medium. I was just writing in my diary.” Raquel held up a small, leather-bound, gilt-edged book with a clasp, about the size of a box of animal crackers. “Isn’t it priceless? Did you ever have one like this, with the little lock and key? You could contain an entire girlhood between these pages. I keep it here”—she pointed to the top drawer of her dresser—“with my underwear, and I keep the key separately, hidden, as any proper girl would, in this little dish.” She seemed to be inviting us, erstwhile intruders, into her privacy. The white dish sat on top of the dresser and appeared to contain, besides the key, a jumble of earrings, none of which I would ever see her wear. Her lobes were always bare.
I had kept a diary a long time before, when I was eleven. It was given to me by my parents, on the advice of a grief counselor. The diary was pre-dated, and on every page I wrote something pristinely impersonal. The day’s weather, homework assignments, entries in the long list of every book I had ever finished, including author, title, and date begun. I did include a note the day my first period arrived, the bloody “guest,” as my mother called it, on the last day of summer vacation when I was twelve. And that was where it ended, the journal of my mourning.
Cherry, I knew, made a habit of slavishly recording in a little notebook each interaction that occurred (in the halls at school, at the riverbank, on Main Street) between her and whichever boy she was obsessed with at that particular moment. She had five completed volumes in a shoebox under her bed, and was at work on her sixth. But she didn’t seem interested in the subject of diaries.
“Tell us about how you and Theo first met?” This was something Cherry could get enthusiastic about.
“What? And further darken the mood of this dreary day with a sordid tale?”
I looked at Cherry and thought we must be thinking the same thought: this was the perfect day to be told such a story. There could be nothing more delightful than to be filled to the brim with an account of a foreign experience when outside the day was damp and chilly and packed to its brim with familiarity. A good story is second only to a poignant reverie.
“Well, I suppose it’s really kind of charming. We met fairly recently, you know, so I haven’t had a chance to tell it much.” She shifted her weight on the bed and crossed her legs, settling in. I thought she looked beautiful, there in the yellow light of the little
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