that low-cut, she ought not bend over.” Mother agreed. I pictured the turquoise blouse Jeanette had worn that day. The neckline was only an inch below her collarbone, but it was loose-fitting, and I imagined that if she bent it would give a full view. As I thought this I felt anxious, because although a tighter blouse would have made Jeanette’s bending more modest, the tightness itself would have been less modest. Righteous women do not wear tight clothing. Other women do that.
I was trying to figure out exactly how much tightness would be the right amount when Dad said, “Jeanette waited to bend for that hymnal until I was looking. She wanted me to see.” Mother made a disapproving tsk sound with her teeth, then quartered a potato.
This speech would stay with me in a way that a hundred of its precursors had not. I would remember the words very often in the years that followed, and the more I considered them, the more I worried that I might be growing into the wrong sort of woman. Sometimes I could scarcely move through a room, I was so preoccupied with not walking or bending or crouching like them. But no one had ever taught me the modest way to bend over, so I knew I was probably doing it the bad way.
* * *
—
SHAWN AND I AUDITIONED for a melodrama at Worm Creek. I saw Charles at the first rehearsal and spent half the evening working up the courage to talk to him. When I did, finally, he confided in me that he was in love with Sadie. This wasn’t ideal, but it did give us something to talk about.
Shawn and I drove home together. He sat behind the wheel, glaring at the road as if it had wronged him.
“I saw you talking to Charles,” he said. “You don’t want people thinking you’re that kind of girl.”
“The kind that talks?”
“You know what I mean,” he said.
The next night, Shawn came into my room unexpectedly and found me smudging my eyelashes with Audrey’s old mascara.
“You wear makeup now?” he said.
“I guess.”
He spun around to leave but paused in the doorframe. “I thought you were better,” he said. “But you’re just like the rest.”
He stopped calling me Siddle Lister. “Let’s go, Fish Eyes!” he shouted from across the theater one night. Charles looked around curiously. Shawn began to explain the name, so I started laughing—loud enough, I hoped, to drown him out. I laughed as if I loved the name.
The first time I wore lip gloss, Shawn said I was a whore. I was in my bedroom, standing in front of my mirror, trying it out, when Shawn appeared in the doorway. He said it like a joke but I wiped the color from my lips anyway. Later that night, at the theater, when I noticed Charles staring at Sadie, I reapplied it and saw Shawn’s expression twist. The drive home that night was tense. The temperature outside had fallen well below zero. I said I was cold and Shawn moved to turn up the heat. Then he paused, laughed to himself, and rolled all the windows down. The January wind hit me like a bucket of ice. I tried to roll up my window, but he’d put on the child lock. I asked him to roll it up. “I’m cold,” I kept saying, “I’m really, really cold.” He just laughed. He drove all twelve miles like that, cackling as if it were a game, as if we were both in on it, as if my teeth weren’t clattering.
I thought things would get better when Shawn dumped Sadie—I suppose I’d convinced myself that it was her fault, the things he did, and that without her he would be different. After Sadie, he took up with an old girlfriend, Erin. She was older, less willing to play his games, and at first it seemed I was right, that he was doing better.
Then Charles asked Sadie to dinner, Sadie said yes, and Shawn heard about it. I was working late at Randy’s that night when Shawn turned up, frothing at the mouth. I left with him, thinking I could calm him, but I couldn’t. He drove around town for two hours, searching for Charles’s Jeep, cursing and swearing that when he found that bastard he was “gonna give him a new face.” I sat in the passenger seat of his truck, listening to the engine rev as it guzzled diesel, watching the yellow