Haunted Houses Read Online Free PDF

attitude, he told her she was sullen and uncooperative. My aptitude is much higher than my performance, she repeated in the coffee shop, to which one of the guys, a senior, responded, Did you ask him about his performance? Her cool face reddened as she drank in their attention with her coffee; later, the senior asked her out. Why not, she answered, as if she were thinking it over, weighing his performance neutrally. “Did you let him kiss you?” Ruth asked. “Sure,” Grace answered. “Where?” her mother asked. “Where do you think?” and Grace slammed out of the house. A gunshot of fear traveled up her mother’s body from her toes to the top of her head where it settled as wounded anger.
    In high school sex was war, a conventional war about the conventions. There were skirmishes at the breast, the line below the pantie, at the thigh, and finally the assault upon the Maginot Line, the vagina. And for these advances there was the creation of an adolescent military strategy that the boys and the girls developed separately, at separate tables, and then enacted with one another, following or not following the codes of war, at parties, in cars, on their absent parents’ beds.
    Just before Grace was fifteen she met a nineteen-year-old dropout who worked in a boutique not far from the coffee shop. He had full lips and slanted eyes and told risqué jokes. He did crazy things, like putting a two-way mirror in the dressing room, and Grace fell hard. He told her she was cute and gave her a lavender shirt that he stole from the store, her first present from a boyfriend. The first time he stood her up, she waited up all night in her room, not really believing that he was doing this to her, that the phone hadn’t rung, the way it hadn’t when she was in the eighth grade, or if it rang, only to torment her. He called a few days later, and made an excuse which she accepted while seeming to have difficulty remembering what the infraction had been, it had been so slight. When she saw him again Grace kissed him with abandon and an open mouth and he pushed her away. You shouldn’t kiss like that, he warned, you’re supposed to be a nice girl. And he came around less often, and when he did he brought his friends, who acted like guards in a recently neutralized corridor, the battle having ended in a stalemate. Severed slowly over time, the attachment weakened and disappeared. She didn’t want to be a nice girl. Grace liked kissing boys with abandon.
    I made my bed, Grace called out as she left for school, in answer to Ruth’s question. But it was not made and Ruth saw red and dumped her daughter’s drawers once more, dumped them in a single movement, and marched out as if there were something blocking her way. She hated being lied to, by Grace, her husband, her son, anyone. She complained to her husband, Grace could make all our beds in the amount of time it takes her to put on eye makeup. Her husband pulled off his pants. He said she was bad, as if Grace’s behavior were beyond his ken, as if he were describing someone from a tribe in Asia whose customs made him sick. Is that all you can say? Ruth asked, rubbing out her cigarette with dissatisfaction. Her husband glanced at her. Something might explain the intensity of her discontent, but not seeing it he turned over on his stomach and waited to fall asleep.
    On the nights that Grace couldn’t sleep, Lady kept her company. When she took a bath Lady hovered by, upset that Grace was wet, and licked her like a puppy. It occurred to Grace that Lady might lick her there, if she directed her dog the way she had once directed her fantasies and Celia. Lady’s tongue was pink, not that rough, but she didn’t teach her to do it because the idea that she needed a dog was humiliating. She remembered that when reading
A Stone for Danny Fisher
she used to put her finger in her vagina and rub it until small pieces of her vagina—or what she thought was her vagina—rolled into balls and