She said nothing, and I said nothing. I took her hand and quickly led her out of the room, through the halls, and back to our small bedroom.
“Chris, that book.”
“Don’t think about it,” I said. “Go take your bath.”
She checked on the twins and then went into the bathroom. I sat there, my body still trembling from seeing those vivid and explicit sex pictures. I was unaware of how much variety there was to what I thought was the simple act of intercourse, and those women, with their firm and large breasts, the curves in their waists, and what my father used to call “butts,” quickened my heartbeat. I felt myself getting more and more aroused, and when Cathy finally emerged, looking soft, lithe, and graceful, her robe opened just enough for me to see most of her breasts, I quickly turned away and tried counting and multiplying numbers. Then I rose quickly and went into the bathroom to take my bath, but I couldn’t help it. I had to relieve myself first. I was afraid I would appear again with my erection still firm, and Cathy would see. Now that she had seen those pictures, she would know exactly what was happening. She was still brushing her hair when I came out. I avoided looking at her until we were both in our beds. She was staring at me strangely. My mind was reeling with images and thoughts. I could simply slip in beside her, just to feel her against me. Maybe . . .
I was arousing myself again.
“Good night,” I said quickly. She said good night, and we turned away from each other. Sleep couldn’t come fast enough for me this night, I thought.
“Should I tell you how often this has happened to me since we started going together?” Kane asked, pausing.
“No,” I said quickly. “Don’t talk about it. Just read,” I ordered, and he laughed.
“Yes, boss,” he said. He stared at me a moment and then opened the diary again.
I had tried to look angry and bossy to keep him from seeing how riled up inside I was, too. Aside from my friend Suzette, who I always believed was the most promiscuous of all of us, none of us openly admitted to being sexually aroused at what we would all consider the most innocent occasions, like simply standing in the hall talking and watching some boys horse around with each other. One might grab at the other’s crotch. She would openly admit to having orgasms at that sight and even having them when she went to try on jeans and they were too tight in her crotch. Most of us stared at her with amusement when she said things like this, half believing, but some of us, especially me, wondered if we were missing something by not being as sexually sensitive as she was. I almost asked my aunt Barbara about it, but I hesitated in the end.
Suzette swore that she had overheard her mother and a few of her friends talking about all this, confessing to having orgasms just looking at pictures of male models or something. Kyra told me Suzette’s mother was “a bit trampy,” but I had never seen her do or heard her say anything I’d consider off-color. As far as I could tell, she was critical of Suzette’s loose ways, the sexy clothes she wore, and the late hours she kept whenever she did go out on a date. I told Kyra that, and she just shook her head, confident she was right, and said, “It takes one to know one. Her mother is one.”
“But by that logic, you’d be one, too,” I told her, and she got mad at me.
When I first began to read the diary by myself, I anticipated discovering secrets about the Foxworth family and what was true and what wasn’t about the legend of children being locked in a house attic for years and years, but I had no idea, of course, that it would come to these intense sexual revelations. Surely, no one could know what went on between Christopher Jr. and his sister. Their mother and especially their grandmother would never reveal any of that later on. The truth was that it would be only in this diary that those discoveries would be made.
Boys loved to label girls who were considered more uninhibited, like Suzette, as being nymphomaniacs. Once you had that reputation, it wasn’t easy getting washed of it. It would stain you and last throughout your high school life. I knew of girls who had that reputation and then left either for college or some job, and I could only imagine how difficult it was for them to return to live here, especially if they married someone not from here and then returned. Boys from school who had never left and knew of their reputation would surely smirk and whisper behind a new husband’s back. “Who hadn’t had your wife when she was in school here?” they might say, and cause terrible fights, even divorces.
How unfair it was for girls. Boys were looked up to, respected, admired, and envied if they achieved the reputation of being good and experienced lovers. They could strut and smile, throw out their chests, and tease young girls, promising to give them the time of their lives and teach them things about sex no one else might, and that would be all right, just perfect, even expected, but if a girl would even suggest such a thing—there went her reputation, maybe for life if she remained here.
Tack onto all that a mere suggestion of something “dirty” happening between a brother and a sister, and both, but especially the sister, had better go pretty far away, maybe even change their names. Now I recalled an occasion once when I was with my father in Charley’s, and one of the construction workers was telling jokes about redneck hillbillies. I was only ten and didn’t really understand why my father got so upset with him telling the joke in front of me, but now I understood why. The joke was about a hillbilly introducing his wife to someone new. “I’d like you to meet my wife and my sister.”
Ha, ha. Lots of laughter followed, but my father had turned on him.
“I have my daughter here,” he said. I rarely saw him get that angry. The man slinked away like some rodent and sat in a booth mumbling under his breath. We went home pretty quickly after that, and when I asked my father what had happened, he said, “Someone undressed his stupidity in public,” which I didn’t quite understand then, either.
“Are you going to listen?” Kane asked, because I was obviously in such deep thought that I looked far away.
“Yes, go ahead,” I said petulantly. “Don’t worry. I’m listening.”
A few days later, I was suddenly taken sick, vomiting and feeling generally weak and nauseated. I knew I couldn’t go out and safely sneak around the house to rummage for money, but we desperately needed to get as much as we could as quickly as we could. I didn’t like what was happening with the twins now. They were lethargic, sleeping too much, uninterested in everything, with their attention spans even short
er than they were, and they were just not growing the way they should. I told Cathy she had to go alone. She was very worried about me, but I assured her I would be all right. I was going to study up on my symptoms while she was out there. I warned her about not being discovered. Reluctantly, she left without me, but when she returned, I saw immediately that something had disturbed her.
“How much did you find?” I asked.
“Nothing, not a penny,” she said.
Something wasn’t right, but I was too tired to pursue her with more questions. She wanted to stay beside me, holding me, more than usual, but I warned her that our grandmother could just pop in on us, so she returned to her bed.
Time went by slowly, and our thoughts about escape were suffering, because our hunt for money wasn’t producing enough yet. We had to be careful not to take too much when we did find some, or else we would arouse suspicions. That’s all our grandmother would have to find out, I explained. Forget about her whipping us. She would do something much worse, I was sure. Summer was here again, and Cathy pointed out that we were entering our third year. The twins were getting worse. I was very concerned about their bouts of nausea, their listlessness, their loss of appetite, and the stunting of their growth.
“Look,” Kane said suddenly, turning the diary so I could see it. “There’s a page blank right here. Weird.”
“Maybe he just turned it too quickly. What could he do once he began writing, that’s all.”
Kane shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “Christopher is too much of a perfectionist.”
“So what do you think happened?”