The Road Taken, page 18
She had also heard, since there was an abundance of gossip here, mostly sexual, that people used Saran Wrap to make condoms, but of course she didn’t mention it. She had only the vaguest idea of how you would keep such a contraption on. At home every unmarried girl was a virgin or pretended to be, and a pregnancy without a husband to make you respectable was every girl’s worst fear. “This place certainly doesn’t sound like home,” Ginger said.
“Not the home I know.”
They looked at each other.
“No rules,” he said.
“Hooray for no rules,” she said lightly. “Sometimes I think I’m dreaming.
A few months ago she wouldn’t have believed she could be talking about sex like this with a boy, particularly one she had just met; but somehow here, and now, with this boy, it seemed right, safe, accepted. Like every girl she knew, Ginger believed in love at first sight. She had been fantasizing about the unknown lover for years, but she thought how amazing it was that just when she thought her romantic life was over before it had begun, she should have met this devastatingly attractive boy, here of all places.
Their hands inched together along the tabletop and then their fingers touched. I really do love him, she thought. He’s gorgeous, he’s perceptive, he’s easy to talk to, he likes what I like, he wants to be a doctor too, and he’ll always understand about being different.
“Do you know why they let us do what we want?” he said.
“Why?”
“They want us to feel normal. It’s their way of getting us back into the mainstream. But being here is really a kind of vacation, Ginger. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
His smile faded. “What we all know is that when we get out of here and go home we’re going to be freaks.”
There, he had said it. Freaks: what Ginger had always thought, had always known. The world she had left behind for this brief time was too conformist; everyone had to be complete. “I won’t leave,” she said. “I’ll stay here forever, I’ll work here. I’ll learn physical therapy.”
“We’re sixteen. We have to go home.”
His hand, when he took hers, was strong and comforting, as she had known it would be. For the first time since all of this had happened to her, Ginger began to cry. The few people in the coffee shop ignored her and let her have her moment. She was shaking with sobs, and Christopher put his arm around her.
“I wish you lived on my street,” she said. “I wish we went to school together. I wish you were my best friend.”
“I could still be your best friend,” Christopher Riley said.
“It’s so unfair. Just this, just us, just everything.”
When her grief subsided he pulled a handful of tissues out of his pocket and dabbed gently at her tears. “Will you be my girlfriend?”
“Where? In what stupid, perfect world?”
“Well, we’re here. Could we start with here?”
“Yes,” Ginger said.
They wheeled out of the coffee shop side by side, as if they were taking a walk—by themselves, without calling the push boys to help them—and they went to a secluded place they both knew about and he kissed her under the stars. The breeze rustled the pine trees and carried the scent to her with the sound. She had never been kissed like that; she felt it running through her body like electricity. His lips were full and soft and firm, and not wet like the boys she had known, even when he opened his mouth. He must have been practicing kissing for years, Ginger thought, and then she stopped thinking.
Their chairs impeded them and it was awkward, but they were able to hug and to feel one another. When he put his hands under her blouse Ginger did not stop him. When he touched her nipples she felt it clear down between her legs and could hardly catch her breath. When he tugged at the elastic of her panties she helped him. His fingers were caressing her then, inside and out, and she pressed against his hand, feeling waves of pleasure that were a revelation. She was an innocent girl of her time, despite everything, despite what her mother thought, and she had never masturbated. It was what the husband was supposed to do to you. To do it to yourself was embarrassing. She did not want Christopher Riley ever to stop.
He unzipped his pants with his other hand and took out his long, hard penis, white in the moonlight, and put her hand on it. Just holding it was enough; he was a boy, after all, and he ejaculated right away. He had more tissues for that. In a little while they did it all over again, and that time he showed her how to rub.
She couldn’t believe she was doing something like this. For years, it seemed, she had been warned about getting “carried away,” and she had thought it was parental propaganda. But all she wanted was to be with him, to be with him forever. “Carried away” was sex and it was love.
After that night they met as often as possible, and everyone was aware they were a couple. Since Ginger was determined that carried away would not be allowed to be the same as “going all the way,” they did everything with their lips and hands. He taught her things she had never read about, and she told him to do the things she had discovered she liked. Despite the virtual absence of rules, you couldn’t bring a person of the opposite sex into your bedroom, so everything she did with Christopher Riley happened out of doors, even when it got too cold. Once they tried the stop-the-elevator trick, just to see how it would be, but it made her nervous. They were Romeo and Juliet, they were fated for tragedy, and they were insatiable.
It comforted Ginger to remember that her sister Peggy had been only seventeen when she got married, a year older than she was. But Ed had been older, a veteran, a man. Chris was a high school kid, and a long way from making any real money or living on his own. Ginger didn’t know what kind of promises you could make or extract, and Chris got upset when she tried to talk about the future. They would call each other, of course, even write, and because Boston wasn’t so far from New York they hoped to visit. But in the back of her mind Ginger suspected that things would get in the way of a happy ending, that life itself would be on their fragile romance like a pack of wild dogs and tear it to pieces.
“We should apply to the same college,” she told him.
“Yes. We’ll go together.”
“And then the same medical school.”
“Yes.”
And what were the chances of their both getting in? Easier for him, he was a male, but she was a female and medical schools accepted one girl for every ten boys. She would have to go to college and probably medical school near home, so she could live with her family, where she knew they would fix everything she had to use so it would be accessible for the handicapped. And she needed a school with elevators, and wide doors, and no steep curbs, as did he. Maybe by the time they were actually going to medical school things would have changed; they could get an apartment together with everything the right height, and safety bars, and get engaged. . . . Even if they couldn’t afford to get married for a long time they could break the rules because they were already “different” to begin with.
How crazy; she had only recently learned how to give herself a bath, and already she was planning on living with a man. First things first. It was easier not to think about it.
“Have you made nice friends?” her mother kept asking her during their phone calls.
“Yes,” Ginger said. And finally, “I’m going with a boy.”
“A patient?”
“Same as I am.”
“I’m glad you’re having a social life, dear. But be sure it doesn’t get in the way of your studies. When you come home I want you to be able to graduate with your old friends.”
It was clear that no one would take her love affair seriously. But it didn’t matter. Ginger took it seriously. Chris had put her ruptured world together again, and sometimes, despite her misgivings, she thought that she would make it work, that she wasn’t going to lose him, that somehow, some time, somewhere, they would have a life with one another. You couldn’t want something that desperately and not have a chance.
Chapter Twenty-One
Seven months after she went away to Warm Springs, Ginger came home. There was nothing more they could do for her. It was deep winter in New York, with a cutting wind, and snow. The city streets were icy and the whole family wondered how and even if Ginger would be able to navigate herself. Ben wheeled her down the ramp into her room, Hugh’s room, now hers for good because it was on the ground floor. Safety bars had been installed in her bathroom. There was a low rack in the closet so she could reach her clothes. Her crutches were propped against the bedroom wall. Ginger could walk with them, but at a painstaking, crablike crawl, and she was more comfortable with her wheelchair. Rose and Ben had already investigated getting a motorized wheelchair for her, and one was on order, the best, the newest technology.
They were doing whatever they could, but of course there were some things all the good will in the world could not accomplish. Rose knew this was a fact because of all the things that had happened to her in her life, but she pretended it was not so, that everything you did mattered. It made no sense, but she was a mother.
Everyone came to visit Ginger when she came back—as if they were coming to look at a new baby, which in a way she was, or as if they were coming to pay a condolence call, which in a way they were. Maude came down from Bristol, as did Daisy, and even Harriette from Washington, D.C. They had no idea how to deal with what had happened. Daisy brought her a lacy bed jacket, as if she were sick in bed.
Celia popped in every day now, but she was more cheerful and realistic. She brought presents too, but Celia liked to give gifts, so it was not all that significant. One of Celia’s hobbies was shopping, but then she got tired of what she had bought and gave it away to the grandchildren. She presented Ginger with a tiny diamond and ruby ring she had found at an antique shop. “For luck,” she said slyly. “To bring you a boyfriend.”
“I have one,” Ginger replied as slyly, and put the ring on the third finger of her left hand.
Ginger had her own phone in her room, the phone that had been Hugh’s, and the very first thing she had done when she came home was call Boston to speak to Christopher. He had been released too, she said, and she had promised to let him know how she was. Rose left her to her privacy.
Ginger called him every night, and he called her too, but not as often. Girls didn’t telephone boys; they played hard to get, they waited, but Ginger would have none of that. She kept saying that she and Christopher Riley were different from other people, and although Rose suspected that was what everyone in love thought, she pleasantly agreed. The conversation she would have normally had with her daughter, her objection that this boy was a Roman Catholic and would want Ginger to convert, or at the least bring up their children in his faith, was not one Rose was prepared to have at this time. The fact that Ginger needed a husband who was able-bodied and could take care of her was another conversation Rose put off. She felt Ginger’s crush was a Band-Aid on a larger wound, and whatever it was, if it helped for now then that was fine.
Because at least Ginger had a crush, Rose thought, something to make her feel like other girls her age. Only one of her friends had come by since she had been home, her best friend, Nancy, but she would see the rest of them when she went back to high school next week, and Rose thought hopefully that as soon as they saw Ginger was the same girl they had all liked so much before she went away, her friends would rally round and things would be as they had been before. They were teenagers, they were self-conscious, they didn’t know how to handle things. Ginger’s condition scared them. But when Ginger and Nancy went into her room and shut the door, Rose soon could hear music and giggles and shrieks emanating and knew everything would be all right.
Yet, every day it seemed there was something to remind you that everything was different whether you liked it or not. The people at the hospital where Ginger used to do her volunteer work had sent her flowers, but then when she called to thank them they told her she couldn’t have her job back. It would be too difficult, they said, she couldn’t wheel the children, she couldn’t carry them, or dress them. . . . She could read to them, she said, and hug them, and play board games with the ones who were capable of it. They answered that they would see.
As for her high school friends, they continued to be remarkably absent, except for the faithful Nancy. “It’s all right,” Ginger said, when Rose seemed concerned. “Everybody needs only one best friend. The rest are a waste of time.”
She had gotten very good marks at the high school in Warm Springs, and had already decided that she would go to NYU. That is, she added, if Chris wanted to go with her. There were some problems there too. He told her his parents wanted him close to home. There were many colleges and universities for him to choose from in his area, and he wasn’t ruling them out. Ginger was surprised; Rose was not.
“But he promised,” she wailed to Rose. “We discussed it. What will I do?”
Forget him and find somebody else, was the answer Rose would ordinarily have given to a daughter of hers, but she couldn’t get the words out. Who would Ginger find? He would have to be very special, very kind, very loving, and how would she find him? Would she have to spend her life alone? The thought was unbearable, but it had often entered Rose’s mind lately. Her daughter was only sixteen, and already Rose was worrying about how she needed a perceptive man who would appreciate her. Of course she had wanted that for her other daughters: Peggy, who had lucked out so early, and Joan, whose days and nights were a disquieting mystery; but Rose had never worried about Peggy and Joan the way she now did about Ginger. There were things she simply could not do to make her youngest daughter’s emotional life easier, and the thought broke Rose’s heart.
She remembered the fortune-teller she had gone to with Celia as a lark, so many years ago, when she was young. The woman had told her she would be rich and have a surprising life, and when she had married Ben everyone thought the prediction had come true. But money was not riches, and surprises were not necessarily good. She promised me an extraordinary life, Rose realized. I didn’t know what that meant, but I do now. If I can help my daughter fulfill her dreams, then that is what she meant. Ginger will be a doctor. Ginger will be independent. I will do whatever I can to help her, and when she has her dream then I will know what my life was about.
***
Hugh found himself a little short of closet space upstairs in Ginger’s old room. After all, she’d had only dresses, while he had suits and dresses. The rest of fitting in was not so hard. Luckily she’d had white painted walls instead of girlish flowered wallpaper—an eccentric insistence of hers as a child when her mother asked her how she would like her room to be decorated—so there was little he had to do. He had kept his sleigh bed, of course, and his favorite pieces, but the antique shop had benefited from quite a few of them because of this new limited space. Teddy had benefited too, in his bachelor apartment, with a pair of masculine leather chairs, and a mirror-framed Venetian mirror that Hugh had to talk him into accepting because Teddy thought it looked too gay.
What kind of mongrel apartment would we two have if we lived together, Hugh wondered. He also wondered, at this moment in time, having turned fifty, if he shouldn’t get an apartment of his own. He could rent something within walking distance of Teddy’s, and entertain him in his own home at last, as often as he liked, in whatever way he liked. He could dress as Camille in dishabille if he wanted, and when Teddy found it claustrophobic he could go back to his safe bachelor lair.
After all this time Teddy still could not come to grips with his feelings about Hugh in drag. Sometimes he liked it and found it seductive, sometimes it made him uncomfortable. On Halloween Hugh had gone out as Camille with his own friends. Afterward he had met Teddy in an obscure coffee shop far on the West Side, because Teddy didn’t want him to feel rejected. Poor Teddy, Hugh thought. It was one thing for him to accept that he fell in love with a gay man, but that the man was a drag queen was quite another. Still, you love whom you love, and you take everything that comes in the package. You worked out your problems in a relationship by facing them. It was not normal, Hugh thought, for a grown man to continue living with his birth family.
Family . . . The things we chose when we were young and thought were heartwarming and wonderful often lose their luster, Hugh thought sadly. I imagined I would be happy forever with my sister Rose, and with her children, and now I think the ultimate paradise would be to share an apartment with Teddy and have a dog. He wondered when society would change enough for him to have his wish. The two of them would be so old, he mused grumpily, that no one would care that they were living together because two old codgers like that needed to lean on each other.
He started to look at apartments. There were a few he actually liked: one with a terrace overlooking the East River, another with a little garden. But when the real estate agent pressed him for a commitment Hugh delayed, and finally demurred. He wanted to leave his family, as if the new apartment would be a kind of halfway house, and yet a part of him didn’t want to leave, and he wasn’t sure why.
One evening when he came home Ginger was waiting for him in the living room. “Uncle Hugh,” she said, “would you take me up to my old room?”
“Of course.” He lifted her from her wheelchair with comparative ease and carried her up the stairs. People were always surprised that someone as effeminate as he was should be so strong, but then, Ginger was rather light. When they got upstairs he set her on the bed.
“Ahh,” she sighed, looking around. “It’s different, isn’t it.”
“Yes, of course.”
“I had this silly idea that I wanted to say good-bye to my old room,” Ginger said. “At first I was afraid I’d get upset. And now there’s no old room to say good-bye to.”
