Obsession: Tales of Irresistible Desire

by Paula Guran

  “Well, for heavens sake, Kath, who’s going to tell them? Not me, you can bet the farm on that. I’m sick of how the Shangri-Las never take my advice anyway.”

  She started to smile again at that but she forced herself not to. ”Okay. That’s the way I want it.”

  “Well, okay,” I said.

  And then her bus came, for once ahead of mine, and I watched her bustle out and join the small group waiting in front of the bus door. She almost looked over her shoulder at me, except the scarf on her head was tucked into her coat collar and she couldn’t quite manage it.

  It wasn’t actually my business—I mean, I was curious, and in those days, you tended to feel like you deserved a full explanation for any weirdness that might crop up in a friend. Usually, you’d get it. But I never did. I’d ask her from time to time, broaching the subject carefully. Most times, she just ignored any questions—everything was too personal. Or she wouldn’t even hear me. Frustration? I’ll tell the world.

  I also wanted to tell the world about Kathy’s voice. Well, I wanted to tell somebody. Someone important, someone who would count, who could do something, give her the reward she deserved for having such a talent. I wanted somebody to put a smile on her pale face; I wanted that so bad I could taste it.

  Actually, I wanted it to be me so bad I could taste it. That’s how it is when you want to rescue someone, rush into whatever bad shit is going on in their lives and be the big hero. Of course, you want to do that in your own way, because it’s someone else you’re rescuing but it’s yourself that you’re gratifying.

  I thought about that one so much afterwards that I don’t have to think about it anymore. It’s in me the way oxygen’s in the atmosphere.

  Anyway, I discovered that there was someone who could put a smile on her face. He went to the boys’ branch of the school, which was a block away from the girls’ building. They kept us separated and penned up, so that by the time we went off to any of the coed high schools, the hormones were virtually audible.

  Eddie Gibbs was the name on Kathy’s smile. I could see why. He was cute but nice, too, not stuck-up like a lot of the more popular boys. We all got to see each other briefly during the daily lunch hour—our school let us out for lunch in those days—but for much longer and more substantially every Friday evening, when most of us would go to Miss Fran’s School of Ballroom Dancing where, to our wicked, sinful delight, the girls and boys could even touch each other.

  Miss Fran’s was a rite of puberty. Not to enroll was tantamount to checking the yes box for Have you ever been hospitalized for mental illness? on an employment application; you were marked permanently as odd, and nobody wanted that. So everyone signed up and went fox-trotting and box-waltzing and cha-cha-ing on Friday nights, even the oddest kids, the class outcasts and misfits, future doctors and future ex-cons, even me. Everyone, except Kathy.

  Now, somehow, all those years of hanging out with me hadn’t done anything to diminish her stature among our classmates, or with our teachers. She was Kathy, after all, Kathy who lived on Summer Street, and I guess they all figured that someday she’d outgrow her silly attachment to me. Sometimes one of the popular girls would take it into her head that she should Talk To Kathy About Her Friend. I guessed they were afraid that someday they’d look out the front window of their sorority house and see me following Kathy up the walk to the pledge party. Kathy would tell me about it sometimes, and one girl actually did say she would be pledging her mother’s sorority in college, and Kathy could, too, but I couldn’t. Can’t tell you how crushed I was.

  Anyway, what her association with me couldn’t do, her absence from Miss Fran’s did. It was more than odd, it was shocking and unnatural, and it wasn’t because of me. Suddenly, they were Talking To Me About Kathy.

  I don’t know what I would have told them if I’d known the truth. What I could say, in all honesty, was that I didn’t know. I didn’t know why she wasn’t there, I really didn’t. I asked her a couple of times, but she would just shake her head and look miserable. She was all pulled into herself, closed off; even her posture was like that, she was walking around with her chest all caved in. She looked thinner than ever, too. Everybody was talking, but to give them credit (something I don’t do too easily), all the talk was still pretty kind. Maybe she was sick, maybe someone she knew was sick, maybe her parents were fighting. That last could have meant anything from chronic arguing to having the police at your house every Saturday night, telling your father to sober the hell up (and your mother to shut the hell up).

  Kathy wouldn’t say, but she stopped inviting me over, and she stopped coming over to my place. I thought maybe she was mad at me, maybe one of those future sorority sisters had told her I’d cut her up, trying to break up our friendship. All I finally got out of her was that she was being punished. I didn’t ask her what for. Having to tell all in confession was humiliating enough; nobody wanted to have to tell anything sensitive to someone who wasn’t bound by the secrecy of the confessional.

  I’d have let it go even with Kathy getting sadder and thinner all the time, except that Eddie Gibbs came to me about her.

  I didn’t realize it was about her at first. I thought Eddie had a crush on me. It wasn’t so impossible. Ron Robillard had had a crush on me for a while early in the school year, and he was the most popular boy. Of course, he hated having a crush on me, and I always had to be careful to stay out of his way at Miss Fran’s because he’d stomp on my foot or pinch my arm or whisper something mean. It made me glad he wasn’t in love with me for real.

  Eddie was different, though. Eddie was kind, a real nice guy. Where Ron was your basic crew-cut blond all-American athlete and wife-beater-in-training, Eddie was slender and dark. My mother saw him once and said he was Mediterranean. He was a Smart Kid, too, and it only took a tiny little bit of extra attention from him to hook me, choosing me to dance with at Miss Fran’s, even sitting in the same pew at church one Sunday. And as we walked out together after Mass was over, he asked me why Kathy didn’t come to Miss Fran’s.

  I felt pretty dumb, but that lasted all of about a minute. Well, of course, Kathy. Why not Kathy? I couldn’t even be jealous about it, not really. I didn’t fit into that scheme, but Kathy did.

  Still, I felt pretty good that Eddie Gibbs had come to me, rather than one of the accepted girls. To me, it meant that I had his respect if not his heart, and knowing that gave me a bigger charge than him having a crush on me ever could have. That was why I did what I did.

  Actually, I didn’t do so much in the beginning. I promised Eddie three things: one, I would find out why she didn’t go to Miss Fran’s (well, I would try); two, I would show him how to get to her house. And then three, I would talk to her about him, find out if she liked him, too. Then they could officially be going out. This didn’t mean they were going anywhere together, just that they were boyfriend and girlfriend. Thirteen used to be too young to date.

  The easiest thing was, of course, showing him where Kathy lived. The Summer Street address didn’t even make him blink. He managed to contrive all kinds of excuses to pass by it. Sometimes he’d even ask me to go with him and I would. I thought maybe if Kathy’s family saw me with Eddie, they’d think he was my boyfriend instead of hers, and she wouldn’t get into trouble.

  I’m not sure what put that thought in my head, that Kathy’s family would object to her having a boyfriend. And hell, Eddie wasn’t her boyfriend, not formally. I wasn’t sure she even knew his name. Maybe it was just that they wouldn’t let her go to Miss Fran’s. Everybody knows a few kids with families like that, who over-protect them so much that they can’t wait to go to college and go nuts. Except I was pretty sure that Kathy wouldn’t, unless her folks stayed unreasonable after she got to high school.

  But the summer before high school, her father caught us, and she almost didn’t get there at all.

  Saying her father caught us makes it sound a lot more than it was, and yet, that doesn’t begin to tell it. A whole lot of pe
ople saw it; nobody saw it. All that showed on that sunny afternoon in early July was Eddie and I on the sidewalk in front of Kathy’s house, and Kathy sitting on the porch. Kathy’s father came out, looked at us, and then looked at her; she got up from her chair and went inside and we walked away.

  But that’s not what happened.

  What happened was, Eddie had talked me into walking over the Fifth Street bridge and down Hayward to Summer so he could check out Kathy’s, maybe see her outside and get a chance to talk to her. At that point, I couldn’t tell if Eddie really had it that bad for her, or whether he was dying of curiosity as to how any girl could be so resistant to his good looks and hot status. I wasn’t resisting him—even though he never made like he was interested in me in that way, even though I knew he wouldn’t have bothered even making friends with me if I hadn’t been a way to get next to Kathy, I went along with whatever he wanted. God knows, in this life the only reason anyone ever bothers with anyone else is for purposes of usefulness. In this life, or any other.

  So there we were, Eddie and I, walking along like we really were good buddies, even talking about this and that. Eddie had this surprisingly high political awareness—he was the only kid I knew who could actually discuss HUAC and Senator Joseph McCarthy. Well, the only kid besides Kathy, of course. Kathy seemed to know about a lot of things.

  The front of Kathy’s house was visible from the corner of Summer and Hayward, and we could see her on the porch as soon as we crossed the intersection. Eddie started to walk faster, and some impulse made me tug on his shirt and tell him to slow down. “You don’t want to stampede her, do you?” I said, only half-joking.

  He looked puzzled; why would any girl object to the sight of the great Eddie Gibbs coming toward her as fast as possible? Well, maybe that’s not fair, but it’s not totally unfair, either. In any case, Eddie slowed up, and we finally got to the middle of the block where Kathy’s house was without him exploding with frustration or hormones.

  I made Eddie stand there on the sidewalk until I could get Kathy’s attention. I was thinking we had to do this fast, say hello, get her to come with us, and be gone before someone else in the family saw the three of us together.

  Looking back on it, I think that she must have seen us all along and she was trying to ignore us into going away. But discouraging Eddie Gibbs wasn’t that easy. I felt envious; I couldn’t imagine that any handsome guy was ever going to chase me so persistently, and I couldn’t figure out why Kathy wasn’t thrilled, or at least flattered.

  She sat there for a long time paging through the Sears catalog, of all things, and not looking up. The neighbors on either side of her were out in their gardens and doing some lawn work and they’d noticed us. Not in any big way, they just waved at me and I waved back. Eddie went from baffled to annoyed. “Kathy?” he asked.

  It wasn’t that his voice was so loud as that it just carried well, through all those outdoor sounds to the porch. Kathy finally looked up, and my first thought on seeing her face was, Who died?

  That moment became one of those mental snapshots you can never lose, no matter how much changes afterwards. I could see that the white posts were going to need painting before the summer was out, that some of the boards were a little bit warped, that someone had put out some geraniums to be planted. There was a transistor radio sitting on a small wicker table to Kathy’s right. She was wearing what I thought of as a school blouse, with a softly rounded collar, a silver crucifix, and one of her good skirts. I wondered if she were going somewhere.

  Then I realized it wasn’t sadness on Kathy’s face but rage. The last thing she could have wished for was to have someone like Eddie Gibbs standing in front of her house, looking at her. I thought I saw her make a move to get up, and I don’t know whether she meant to come down the walk to us or go inside to get away from us, because before she could do anything at all, her father came out onto the porch.

  He wasn’t a big man, Kathy’s father, neither exceptionally ugly nor handsome nor anything else. My impression was that I could stare at him all day and forget what he looked like as soon as I turned away. He gazed at me and Eddie as if he suspected we’d come to steal the silver. After some unmeasurable span of time, he turned to Kathy.

  Pagoda hell. It might as well have been painted on her forehead. This was bad, I thought; this was really, really bad, whatever was going on between them. But even that wasn’t so remarkable. Lots of people our age were at war with one or both parents; it was the way things went. I kept thinking that was all it was, one of those generation gap problems, as, in response to some cue I hadn’t caught, Kathy got up without a word and went into the house.

  Eddie and I looked at each other. An airplane droned overhead, and when I looked back to Kathy’s house, the porch was empty. I turned back to Eddie and shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Me, either,” Eddie replied, and we went back the way we had come. I was sort of hoping that Eddie would ask me to be his girlfriend, since Kathy’s rejection had been unmistakable, but Eddie seemed to be lost in thought. Probably needed some time, I decided as our paths diverged at the corner of Hayward and Fifth.

  Two days later, I called Kathy, thinking I’d sound her out about Eddie—was she interested or not? His interest in her had lasted longer than the usual crush, and I wasn’t sure whether to be worried by Eddie’s attention span or just impressed.

  The line was busy, and still busy when I tried again a half hour later. After three hours, I gave up. Maybe someone had knocked the phone off the hook.

  The phone was still beeping busy the following morning, so I figured I’d just walk over and see what the problem was. Without Eddie, this time; considering the expression on Kathy’s father’s face, I didn’t think I should bring anyone with me. No, scratch that—any boy. Some parents got overly nervous. I wouldn’t have thought Kathy’s would he, but there was no telling, really; I just didn’t know them very well.

  This time, Kathy’s mother was sitting on the porch, with the newspaper and a big glass of pink lemonade. Not an uncommon sight in July, but there was something weird about it. Kathy’s mother looked like she was posing for a picture. Or just posing—I kept thinking that the lemonade and the paper were props, but that didn’t make any sense.

  Maybe some of what I was feeling showed on my face; Kathy’s mother got this defensive look, as if she expected me to challenge her right to do this, sit on her own porch with a cold drink. Or maybe she was just worried that I’d ask her for a sip, or even my own glass. Neither of Kathy’s parents had ever been in danger of winning a medal for hospitality.

  I was kind of annoyed, so I just walked right up onto the porch and said, “Hi, Kathy home?”

  She stared straight ahead, newspaper in one hand, lemonade in the other. “No.”

  “Oh.” I waited for a few moments. “Will she be back soon?”

  Now the woman shrugged. Lemonade sloshed over the rim of the glass and spotted her white pants.

  “Okay, then, when would be a good time for me to call her?”

  She didn’t say anything for the longest time. I’d been going to wait her out, and then decided I was tired of her game, whatever it was. No wonder Kathy was so strange, I thought as I stumped down the porch steps. Next to her parents, she was positively normal.

  “Kathy’s in the hospital.”

  I turned around to see Barbara standing just inside the screen door. Her mother gave her a really furious look, but Barbara ignored her, hugging herself. Barbara was built much more solidly, not thin like Kathy.

  “She’s in the hospital with blood poisoning,” Barbara said. “She’s going to be all right, but she can’t have any visitors. Because of germs.”

  That was the last straw for her mother, I guess. She got up in a big hurry, and Barbara fled. Her mother yanked open the screen door with such force that it flew all the way back, banging against the front of the house. I waited, thinking I’d hear some yelling and find out what Kathy’s mother was so upset a
bout, but there wasn’t a sound. Yelling would have been embarrassing, but the silence was downright weird. I went home and phoned Eddie. I figured he should know.

  As it turned out, Eddie’s older sister was a nurse in training at the hospital, so he could find out more than I could. I made him promise to tell me when he did, and he kept assuring me that he would, don’t worry.

  Guys lie. All guys, young and old, boyfriends, fathers, brothers, all of them. They lie and lie and lie. Either that or they don’t pay any attention to what they’re saying while they say it. He found out. He even sneaked in and saw her. And after that he wouldn’t even speak to me.

  Kathy had to be an invalid for the rest of the summer, or so her mother the nurse said. She got hold of a wheelchair—maybe borrowed it from the convalescent home. Kathy sat in it on the porch for the last part of July and all of August, listening to the radio. She couldn’t go anywhere or spend much time with anyone. I only went over when her house would be at its emptiest. And even so, she wouldn’t say much. Not just about how she happened to end up in the hospital, but about anything. Trying to hold a conversation with her was impossible.

  I was pretty mad at Kathy’s mother, and also at Eddie Gibbs for being such a fair-weather boyfriend. I didn’t know what his problem was, except he obviously wasn’t interested in Kathy anymore. Maybe some cheerleader with big breasts had given him a tumble, I thought. Guys were a lot more trouble than they were worth.

  Toward the end of August, Kathy seemed to be getting a lot better, but she was still in that damned wheelchair. “Why does your mother insist on keeping you in that thing?” I asked her finally. “You can walk, can’t you?”

  She shook her head.

  “You can’t walk?” I couldn’t believe it.

  “No, it’s not my mother. My father makes me stay in the chair.”

  “Well, that’s ridiculous,” I said. “How are you supposed to stay healthy—”