My Dark Vanessa

by Kate Elizabeth Russell

  “We’re born, we live, we die,” he says, “and the choices we make in the middle, all those things we agonize over day after day, none of those matter in the end.”

  No one says anything to counter his argument, not even Hannah Levesque, who is super Catholic and presumably believes that the choices we make actually matter quite a bit in the end. She only stares at him with her lips slightly parted, dumbstruck.

  Mr. Strane passes out copies of another Frost poem, “Putting in the Seed,” and tells us to read this one silently to ourselves, and after we finish doing that, he tells us to do it again. “But this time, as you read it,” he says, “I want you to think about sex.”

  It takes a second to sink in, for furrowed brows to give way to flushed cheeks, but once it does Mr. Strane surveys the palpable embarrassment with a smile.

  Only I’m not embarrassed. The mention of sex smacks me across the face and makes my body run hot. Maybe this is about me. Maybe this is his next move.

  “Are you saying this poem is about sex?” Jenny asks.

  “I’m saying that it deserves to be read closely and with an open mind,” Mr. Strane says. “And let’s be honest here, I’m not asking any of you to think about something you don’t already spend a significant amount of time contemplating. Now get to it.” He claps his hands to signal we should start.

  On the second read through the poem, with sex at the forefront of my mind, I do notice things I didn’t before: the details of white soft petals, smooth bean and wrinkled pea, the final image of an arched body. Even the phrase “putting in the seed” is obviously suggestive.

  “What do you think of it now?” Mr. Strane stands with his back to the chalkboard, one foot crossed over the other. We say nothing, but our silence only proves him right, that the poem is about sex after all.

  He waits and his eyes travel the room, seem to look at every student except for me. Tom takes a breath, about to speak, but the bell rings and Mr. Strane shakes his head at us as though disappointed.

  “You’re all puritans,” he says, waving his hand in dismissal.

  As we leave the classroom and start down the hallway, Tom says, “What the hell was that?” and with a brisk authority that makes me seethe, Jenny says, “He’s a huge misogynist. My sister warned me.”

  Later, Jesse doesn’t show at creative writing club and the classroom feels enormous with just me and Mr. Strane. I sit at the seminar table and he behind his desk, each of us staring at the other across a vast continent.

  “There isn’t much for you to do today,” he says. “The lit journal is in good shape. We can start copyediting when Jesse’s here to help.”

  “Should I go?”

  “Not if you want to stay.”

  Of course I want to stay. I take my notebook from my backpack and open it to the poem I drafted the night before.

  “What did you think of class today?” he asks. The low sun cuts through the now-skeletal red maple tree and into the classroom. Behind his desk, Mr. Strane is a shadow.

  Before I can answer, he adds, “I ask because I saw your face. You looked like a startled little fawn. I expected the rest of them to be scandalized, but not you.”

  So he was looking at me. Scandalized. I think of Jenny calling him a misogynist, how narrow-minded and ordinary she sounded. I’m not like that. I don’t ever want to be that.

  “I wasn’t. I liked the class.” I shield my eyes so I can make out his features, his tender-condescending smile. I haven’t seen that smile in weeks.

  “I’m relieved,” he says. “I was starting to wonder if I’d been wrong about you.”

  My breath catches at the thought of being so close to a serious misstep. One wrong reaction on my part could wreck this whole thing.

  He reaches down then and opens his bottom desk drawer, pulls out a book, and my ears prick like a dog’s. Pavlovian—we learned about that in my psychology elective last spring.

  “Is that for me?” I ask.

  He makes a face, like he isn’t sure. “If I lend you this, you have to promise me not to let anyone know it was me who gave it to you.”

  I crane my neck, try to read the book’s title. “Is it illegal or something?”

  He laughs—really laughs, like when I called Sylvia Plath self-absorbed. “Vanessa, how do you always manage to have the perfect response even to things you don’t understand?”

  I scowl at that. I don’t like the idea of him thinking there are things I don’t understand. “What’s the book?”

  He brings it over, the cover still hidden. I grab it as soon as he sets it down. Flipping the paperback over, I see a pair of skinny legs in ankle socks and saddle shoes, a pleated skirt ending above two knobby knees. In big white letters across the legs: Lolita. I’ve heard the term somewhere before—an article about Fiona Apple, I think, a description of her as “Lolita-esque,” meaning sexy and too young. I now understand why he laughed when I asked if the book was illegal.

  “It’s not poetry,” he says, “but poetic prose. You’ll appreciate the language, if nothing else.”

  I feel him watching me as I turn the novel over and skim the description. This is obviously another test.

  “Looks interesting.” I drop the book into my backpack and turn to my notebook. “Thanks.”

  “Let me know what you think of it.”

  “I will.”

  “And if anyone catches you with it, you didn’t get it from me.”

  Rolling my eyes, I say, “I know how to keep a secret.” That isn’t necessarily true—before him, I hadn’t ever had a real secret—but I know what he needs to hear. It’s like he said, I always have the perfect response.

  * * *

  Thanksgiving break. Five days of showers that last until the hot water runs out, of scrutinizing myself in front of the full-length mirror on the back of my bedroom door, plucking my eyebrows until Mom hides the tweezers, of trying to get the puppy to love me as much as Dad. I go for hikes every day, wearing a blaze-orange vest as I trek up the granite bluff that looms over the lake. Caves pock the face of it, crevices in the rock big enough for hawks to nest in and animals to hide.

  Inside the biggest cave is an army-style cot. It’s been there as long as I can remember, left behind by some long-ago rock climber. I stare at the cot’s metal frame and rotten canvas bed and think of the first day of class when Mr. Strane said he knew Whalesback Lake, how he’d been here before. I imagine him finding me now, all alone and deep in the woods. He’d be free to do whatever he wanted with me, no chance of getting caught.

  In the evenings I read Lolita in bed, mindlessly eating my way through a sleeve of saltines and propping up a pillow to hide the cover in case my parents open my bedroom door. While wind rattles the windowpane, I turn the pages and feel a slow burn within me, hot coals, deep red embers. It isn’t only the plot, its story of a seemingly ordinary girl who is really a deadly demon in disguise and the man who loves her. It’s that he gave it to me. There’s now a whole new context to what we’re doing, new insight into what he might want from me. What conclusion is there to draw besides the obvious? He is Humbert, and I am Dolores.

  For Thanksgiving we go to my grandparents’ house in Millinocket. It’s unchanged from 1975, with its shag carpet and sunburst clocks, the smell of cigarettes and coffee brandy hanging in the air even with a turkey in the oven. My grandfather gives me a roll of Necco Wafers and a five-dollar bill; my grandmother asks if I’ve gained weight. We eat root vegetables and dinner rolls from the store, lemon meringue pie with browned peaks that Dad picks off when nobody’s looking.

  On the drive home the car lurches over frost heaves and through potholes, an endless wall of pitch-black woods on either side. The radio plays hits from the seventies and eighties, Dad tapping the steering wheel along to “My Sharona” while Mom sleeps, her head leaning against the window. “Such a dirty mind / I always get it up for the touch of the younger kind.” I watch his fingers tap to the beat as the chorus comes around again. Does he even
hear what the song is about, what he’s humming along to? “Get it up for the touch of the younger kind.” It’s enough to make me crazy, seeing these things that no one else ever seems to notice.

  The first night back after Thanksgiving break, I eat dinner at the empty end of a table, Lucy and Deanna gossiping a few seats away about some popular girl, a senior, who supposedly went to the Halloween dance on drugs. Aubrey Dana asks what kind of drugs.

  Deanna hesitates, then answers, “Coke.”

  Aubrey shakes her head. “No one has coke here,” she says.

  Deanna doesn’t argue; Aubrey is from New York, which makes her an authority.

  It takes me a minute to realize they’re talking about cocaine and not soda, the sort of thing that normally makes me feel like a yokel, but now their gossip strikes me as sad. Who cares if someone came to a dance on drugs? Don’t they have better things to talk about? I stare down at my peanut butter sandwich and let myself detach, retreat into the ending of Lolita that I just reread, that final scene of Humbert bloodstained and dazed, and still in love with Lo, even after how much she hurt him and how much he hurt her. His feelings for her are endless and out of his control. How can they not be, when the whole world demonizes him for them? If he were able to stop loving her, he would. His life would be so much easier if he left her alone.

  Picking at the crust of my sandwich, I try to see things from Mr. Strane’s perspective. He’s probably scared—no, terrified. I’ve been wrapped up in my own frustration and impatience, never considering all that was on the line for him or how much he’s already risked touching my leg, saying he wanted to kiss me. He hadn’t known what my reaction would be to these things. What if I’d been offended, told on him? Maybe all along he’s been the brave one and I’ve been selfish.

  Because, really, what risk is there for me? If I make a move toward him and he turns me down, I suffer nothing beyond a minor humiliation. Big deal. Life for me goes on uninterrupted. It isn’t fair to expect him to be more vulnerable than he already has been. At the very least, I need to meet him in the middle, show him what I want and that I’m willing to let the world demonize me, too.

  Back in my room, I lie in bed and flip through Lolita until I find the line I’m looking for on page 17. Humbert, describing the qualities of the nymphet hidden among ordinary girls: “she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.”

  I have power. Power to make it happen. Power over him. I was an idiot for not realizing this sooner.

  Before American lit, I stop in the bathroom to check my face. I’m wearing makeup; I piled on every single product I own that morning and parted my hair on the side rather than in the middle. It’s enough of a change that the face in the mirror seems unfamiliar—a girl from a magazine or a music video. Britney Spears tapping her foot against her desk as she waits for the bell to ring. The longer I stare at myself, the more my features fracture. A pair of green eyes drift away from a freckled nose; a pair of sticky pink lips separate and swim in different directions. One blink and everything scrambles back into place.

  I spend so long in the bathroom I’m late to English for the first time ever. As I rush into the classroom, I feel eyes on me and assume they’re Mr. Strane’s, but when I look through my heavy eyelashes, I see it’s Jenny, her pen frozen above her notes as she registers the changes in me, the makeup and hair.

  We’re reading Edgar Allan Poe that day, which is so perfectly appropriate I want to throw my head down on the table and laugh.

  “Didn’t he marry his cousin?” Tom asks.

  “He did,” Mr. Strane says. “Technically.”

  Hannah Levesque scrunches her nose. “Gross.”

  Mr. Strane says nothing about what I know would disgust the rest of them even more, that Virginia Clemm wasn’t just Poe’s cousin; she was thirteen years old. He has each of us read aloud a stanza from “Annabel Lee,” and my voice is unsteady as I say the lines “I was a child and she was a child.” Images of Lolita crowd my head and mix with the memory of Mr. Strane whispering, You and I are the same, as he stroked my knee.

  Toward the end of the period, he tips back his head, closes his eyes, and recites the poem “Alone” from memory, his deep, drawn-out voice making the lines “I could not bring / My passions from a common spring” sound like a song. Listening to him, I want to cry. I see him so clearly now, understand how lonely it must be for him, wanting the wrong thing, the bad thing, while living in a world that would surely villainize him if it knew.

  At the end of class, after everyone else has left, I ask if I can shut the door and don’t wait for him to answer before pulling it closed. It feels like the bravest thing I’ve ever done. He’s at the chalkboard, eraser in hand, shirtsleeves pushed up past his elbows. He looks me up and down.

  “You look a bit different today,” he says.

  I say nothing, just tug at my sweater sleeves and roll my ankles.

  “It’s as though you’ve aged five years over the break,” he adds, setting down the eraser and wiping his hands. He gestures to the paper I’m holding. “Is that for me?”

  I nod. “It’s a poem.”

  When I give it to him, he starts to read it right away, doesn’t lift his eyes even as he walks to his desk and sits down. Without asking, I follow and sit beside him. I finished the poem last night but tweaked the lines throughout the day, making them more like Lolita, more suggestive.

  She waves the boats in from the sea.

  One by one, they slide onto the sand-shore

  with a thump that echoes

  through her marrowed-out bones.

  She shivers & shakes

  as the sailors take her,

  then cries through the aftercare,

  the sailors feeding her mouthfuls of salted kelp,

  saying they are sorry,

  so sorry for what they’ve done.

  Mr. Strane sets the poem on his desk and leans back in his chair, almost like he wants to distance himself from it. “You never title these,” he says, his voice sounding far away. “You should title them.” A minute passes and he doesn’t move or speak, only stares down at the poem.

  Sitting there in silence, I’m smacked with the awful feeling that he’s tired of me, wants me to leave him alone. It makes me squeeze my eyes shut from embarrassment—for writing the blatantly sexy poem and thinking I could scheme and don a costume to get what I want, for reading too much into him loaning me a book and saying a few nice things. I saw what I wanted to see, convinced myself my fantasies were real. Sniffling like a little kid, I whisper that I’m sorry.

  “Hey,” he says, suddenly soft. “Hey, why are you sorry?”

  “Because,” I say, sucking in a breath. “Because I’m an idiot.”

  “Why say that?” His arm is around my shoulders, pulling me in. “You’re nothing of the sort.”

  When I was nine, I fell from the last tree I ever tried to climb. Him holding me feels just like that fall—how the earth came up to meet me rather than the other way around, the way the ground seemed to swallow me in the moments after landing. He and I are so close, if I tilt my head a few degrees, my cheek presses against his shoulder. I breathe in the wool of his sweater, the coffee and chalk dust smell of his skin, my mouth mere inches from his neck.

  We stay like that, his arm holding me and my head against his shoulder, while laughter drifts in from the hallway and the downtown church bells mark the half hour. My knees press into his thigh; the back of my hand grazes his pant leg. Breathing shallow breaths into his neck, I will him to do something.

  Then a small motion: his thumb strokes my shoulder.

  I lift my face so my mouth almost touches his neck and I feel him swallow once, twice. It’s how he swallows—like he’s pushing something down within him—that gives me the courage to press my lips against his skin. It’s only a half kiss, but he shudders from it, and the feel of that makes me swell like a wave.

  He kisses the top of my head then, his own half k
iss, and again I press my mouth against his neck. It’s a dialogue of half actions, neither of us fully committed. There’s still a chance to turn away, change our minds. Half kisses can be forgotten but full kisses cannot. His hand squeezes my shoulder, tight and tighter, and something within my own body begins to rise. I struggle to force it down, worried that if I don’t, I might leap forward, grab him by the throat, and ruin the whole thing.

  Then, without warning, he lets go. He draws away from me and then we aren’t touching at all. Behind his glasses, he blinks as though adjusting to new light. “We should talk about this,” he says.

  “Ok.”

  “This is serious.”

  “I know.”

  “We’re breaking a lot of rules.”

  “I know,” I say, annoyed at the idea of him thinking I don’t realize this, that I haven’t already spent hours trying to figure out exactly how serious this is.

  He looks me over, his face bewildered and hard. Under his breath, he mutters, “This is unreal.”

  The second hand on the classroom clock ticks by. It’s still faculty service hour. The door is closed, but technically someone could come in at any moment.

  “So, what is it that you want to do?” he asks.

  It’s too big of a question. What I want depends on what he wants. “I don’t know.”

  He turns toward the windows, crosses his arms over his chest. I don’t know isn’t a good answer. It’s what a child would say, not someone willing and capable of making up her own mind.

  “I like being with you,” I say. He waits for me to offer more, and my eyes move around the classroom as I struggle for the right words. “I also like what we do.”

  “What do you mean, ‘what we do’?” He wants me to say it, but I don’t know what to call it.

  I gesture at the space between our bodies. “This.”

  Smiling faintly, he says, “I like that, too. What about this?” He leans forward and touches the tips of his fingers to my knee. “Do you like this?”