My Dark Vanessa. Kate Russell Elizabeth
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