The Joyce Maynard Collection by Joyce Maynard

thirteen-year-old. Even so, I wanted to see them. I pictured myself wandering into the girls’ locker room by accident and catching sight of a huddle of girls changing there, or opening the door to a bathroom cubicle and seeing Lindsay Bruce squatting over the toilet, her pants gathered around her ankles, patting the secret place between her legs. The characters in my dreams were seldom glamorous or seductive so much as they were pathetic. Nobody more so than myself.
    One recurrent dream featured me, running around a pole in a field somewhere, or maybe it was a tree. I was chasing Rachel McCann, and she was naked. As fast as I ran, I could never catch up with her, and we kept running in circles. I could see her bottom, and the backs of her legs, but never the front of her, never her breasts (small, but interesting to me now) or what lay below, in the nameless place I thought about all the time.
    In this dream, an idea came to me, or you might say it came to the character that was me in my dream. I stopped running suddenly and turned around to face the opposite direction. This way, Rachel McCann would be coming straight toward me. Finally, I’d get to see the front of her. Even dreaming, I registered how smart I was to think of this. What a good idea it had been.
    Only I never got to see her. Every time I got to this part in the dream, I woke up, usually in a bed wet with my own embarrassing secretions, that I concealed from my mother by turning the sheets over, or stuffing them in the bottom of the laundry, or dabbing them with water and laying a towel on the spot until it dried.
    I figured out, finally, why it was Rachel never came around the other side to face me in her nakedness. My brain could not have supplied the necessary images. Breasts I knew, though only (except for that one time, with Marjorie) from pictures. But the other—a blank.
    As much time as I now spent thinking about girls, I had never spoken to a single girl at my school, except to say, Could you pass the paper back? I had no sister, no cousins. I liked the girl on Happy Days, and one of the Charlie’s Angels —not the two most people considered the most beautiful, but the one with the brown hair, who went by the name of Sabrina on the show. I also liked Olivia Newton-John, and one particular Playmate of the Month named Kerri from an old issue of Playboy I found at my father’s house one time and sneaked home in my backpack, though—maddeningly—the actual centerfold had been ripped out. But the only female person in my life I actually knew was my mother. In the end, whatever ideas I might have about how women were came back to her.
    I knew people considered my mother pretty, even beautiful. The time she’d come to my school to see me in the play, a boy I didn’t even know—an eighth grader—had stopped me on the playground and said, Your mom’s hot. I was just feeling proud when he said the next part.
    I bet when you grow up all your friends will want to ball her.
    The fact that she was good-looking, with her dancer’s shape, was only part of the story. I think my mother also gave off a kind of feeling, as strong as if she had a smell, or a sign on the front of her shirt, that told people there was no man around for her. There were other kids with divorced parents at my school, but nobody else like my mother, a person who seemed to have taken herself out of the game, like a woman from some foreign culture or a tribe in Africa I probably heard about one time, or maybe India, where once your original husband dies, or leaves, your own life is over.
    In all the years since my father left, she only went on a date one time that I knew of. This was with a man who fixed our oil burner. He had been over all morning, down in our basement, cleaning the heating ducts. After, when he came up to give my mother the bill, he apologized for all the dust his work must have spread around our house.
    I guess you’re