Free Lucky Us by Joan Silber Page A

we had that kind of relationship (her friend Dawn liked to call me Daddy-o) but we didn’t. I wasn’t someone who liked scolding or hovering over somebody else. I thought people should
be left to their own devices
. I had always liked that phrase.
    Certainly no one had ever accused me of trying to take over. On the contrary. Judy, whom I once lived with, later blamed me for “letting her” do a number of misguided and ill-advised things while we were together.
    But what kind of man wouldn’t watch over Elisa now? What did she think I was?
    I SUPPOSE THERE had been times before when I was paternal. And she liked it. Once in January she came home from her studio angry and tearful because the place was so drafty and cold that she couldn’t concentrate and she was sniveling and getting sick all the time. I went to the place and looked it over and I rewired the electricity so that she could set up an electric heater without burning out all the lines. The studio was quite cozy when I was done, if you didn’t move too far from the heater.
    Elisa was all tickled and dimpling and pleased. She sat in this ratty paint-smeared vinyl armchair and she lookedup at me, after I turned on the heater for the first time, and she said, “You’ve made it so nice, it’s very nice here.”
    I said, “No big deal,” which was true. I could feel her gazing at my back, as I bent down to adjust the dials, and I was proud of myself, I was. Sometimes with Elisa then, it was so easy to do the right thing.

5

Elisa: A List
    If one more person asked me,
how did it happen?
    1. I was in the tenth grade and I had a crush on Dennis Kotke. But it was Keith Mickleton who liked me. He wasn’t bad either, a smart boy with a tattoo of a dragon on his ankle and a butch-waxed thatch for a haircut. All the same I wanted Dennis. Keith had been eyeing me for a while; I was so young that the heat of anybody’s gaze made me wildly pleased with myself. “Hey, girl,” he said. He came to get me at home after supper and we walked along the suburban streets, with their hilly lawns and leafy smells, to the housing development past the highway.Everybody knew how to break into the model houses after dark. We walked arm in arm—I could hear his breathing, and when we sat on the steps of one of the houses, there was a catch in his throat, like a nervous hiccup. He said, “That’s a nice jacket,” while he was caressing my shoulder. This was sweeter than some of the other boys I had necked with.
    He was a good kisser, for a boy that age, an intelligent kisser. When his hands moved over me, I thought,
oh, my
. I had done most of these things before, but barely, so that each succeeding placement of his hands was a different audacity of feeling. And I had the fever on me, the high sickness of desire. I felt it as a glory of helplessness.
    He carded the lock on the door of the model house with his laminated library card and we went into the living room. He led me to the brown plaid sofa, barely visible in the dark. “Our house,” I said.
    â€œOur mansion,” he said.
    He was as nice as anyone I knew. “Oh, you,” he said, with his eyes closed. When he entered me, I didn’t bleed, but it was all a kind of bleeding, a pointed wound, a cut to the quick. In the midst of my delirium—I was pretty glad about what was happening—I got homesick for Dennis, where was Dennis? The sadness of missing him hit me sharply (not that we’d ever done much), but I likedthe sadness, I liked being cut by everything at once. It seemed suitable to the intensity of what was going on. But I might have been nicer to Keith. Afterward he worried that we hadn’t used a condom.
    â€œDon’t worry
now,
” I said. “What’s the point of
that?
”
    2. I was more seasoned by the time I knew Chris. He had a car, a beat-up Chevy Nova, which served as our bedroom. We’d play the