A Fair Maiden Read Online Free PDF Page B

took Katya's breath away. Better when they were being bratty. Spoiled, demanding. Better when Mrs. Engelhardt spoke sharply to her with that knife-blade frown between her penciled eyebrows: Katya! Come here, please. Katya! Do this again, please. Yet here was the nanny's secret: she'd been invited to the home of Marcus Kidder, who was one of the really rich residents of Bayhead Harbor, with a mansion-sized house on the Atlantic Ocean, and the Engelhardts had not. Sneeringly Marcus Kidder had spoken of "mayflies." You could see, it was bred into Mr. Kidder to look down upon others who were his social inferiors, and this looking-down-upon-others was pleasing to Katya, as revenge.
    To a man like Marcus Kidder, the difference between the Engelhardts and the Spivaks wasn't that great, Katya thought. We are all inferior to him, you can see. Katya liked this. If a wealthy man is your friend, you can see his point of view.
    What was disturbing about Marcus Kidder, Katya thought, was that he could see into her heart. Did she dare to lie to Mr. Kidder? Would he laugh at her if she tried? (As children are laughed at when they clumsily lie, for lying is a skill you have to learn!) Katya liked to think that she'd become a skilled and accomplished and at times seductive liar, but she couldn't convince herself that Marcus Kidder would believe her if she tried to lie to him, and so: did Katya dare to return to him? To that house?
    Dear Katya! You know, you don't need to tell anyone. Somehow he'd known that it was the red lace lingerie Katya had been looking at in the store window, and not the demure white nightgown. Don't need to tell anyone was what men said, wanting to share a sex secret with a teenager.
    There'd been adult men in Katya Spivak's life. Older men whose ages Katya could only guess at. One of the mechanics in her uncle Fritzie's garage had smiled at Katya, drawing his tongue slowly across his fat lower lip, had said certain words to her that were near-inaudible and frightening; and Katya had never told anyone, of course. And there was Artie, one of Katya's mother's friends, who'd offered Katya a ride home from school one day when Katya was twelve years old, and something in his face, something in his jovial, drunk-sounding voice— Hey, Katya, c'mon, climb in, don't be shy, sweetheart —warned her: No.
    Never tell Momma her man friend had been looking at Katya in that way.
    And now, had Marcus Kidder looked at Katya in that way? Difficult to know, for Marcus Kidder was wholly unlike any of the Vineland men, of any age. But the red lace lingerie! Katya was not a girl to wear such lingerie and be stared at like one of those exotic dancers on billboards above the Garden State Parkway advertising Atlantic City casinos, and Katya was not a girl to be laughed at as guys like Roy Mraz would laugh at her. Roy Mraz had sucked Katya's lower lip into his mouth (in play? rough play?) and Katya had panicked, for what if Roy had chewed off her lip like a rat, what if crazy Roy, high on crystal meth, had swallowed Katya's lip? He'd enticed Katya into sniffing up into her nostrils and so up into her brain the bitter white chemical-smelling powder, and what she'd inhaled had been fiery and awful and her vision had become blotched and watery and (possibly) she'd blacked out and fallen a long, long distance and so (possibly) certain things were done to her by Roy Mraz which Katya could not think of clearly, still less comprehend, as if she were trying to recall scenes of a TV movie of long ago seen late at night in exhaustion and confused circumstances. Snorting—"snorting ice"—it was something you did, or, somehow, something that was done to you as in appalled fascination you watched yourself at a distance of about ten feet, a limp raggedy-doll figure with a slack, smeared mouth and glazed eyes. This was Katya's secret! Katya's secret, and yet somehow (how?) there came her mother, rushing at her to slap Katya's face and scream, What did I