I reached for my glasses. “Your turn,” I said.
“What?”
“I want to look at you.”
“Your parents.”
“You weren’t worried about them when you asked me. Scared?” I dared him. Though I held my breath for a moment, alert for any stirring from my sleeping family.
He walked into the patch of light and shed his clothes. I had stroked him to climax, but always with my hand in his trousers, and I stared first, greedily, at the mystery of his penis—which dangled limply, because he was nervous. What excited me most, I discovered, was what I already knew, the body so familiar to me from beach outings that I could have sketched it from memory: the torso and limbs sculpted by weight lifting and toughened by his job. The firm jaw and spill of black hair over one eye.
Naked in the moonlight, Danny was so beautiful that tears filled my eyes.
I waited until he scrambled back into his clothes, then went over and kissed him lightly. He pressed against me, but I said no. The moment was so perfect, I wanted to preserve it forever.
I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine, I read in “Song of Songs,” one of the poems I devoured. And I wrote poems; sitting under the fig tree in the yard or riding the streetcar to and from work, the words spilled out of me. I was poetry, able to be myself, nothing hidden, and be loved. I even sang when no one was around, “Bei Mir Bist du Schön” and “Over the Rainbow” (The Wizard of Oz had just come out).
Had anyone ever been as shiny and full of promise as I was in the summer of 1939? Things I had yearned for all my life were no longer vague dreams but what I woke to every morning. I was going to college. The boy I had loved from the moment I saw him loved me. I was so dazzled by my own happiness that any concerns I had about Barbara were mere flickers next to the delirious glow that enveloped me.
Then one night in August, something made me jerk awake. It was the sound of Barbara weeping. She lay on her stomach, her face mashed into the pillow, but she was crying too hard to muffle the sound.
“Barbara, what is it?” Sitting beside her, I rubbed her back through the scratchy sequins of her costume. She wasn’t supposed to wear the costumes home. “Did something happen at work?”
She said something, but her words were lost in choking sobs.
“Do you want some water?”
She nodded.
I ran into the kitchen and filled a glass, and she sat up and gulped it like a thirsty child. Then she leaped to her feet. “Get me out of this thing! Now!” She turned, and I unzipped her costume, essentially a tight sequined bathing suit. She shed it as if she were fighting to brush cobwebs from her skin, then grabbed her nightgown and slipped it on.
“Cigarette?” I said.
She grimaced. “I breathe so much cigarette and cigar smoke every night, I have smoke in my lungs instead of oxygen. Glamour job, huh?”
“Is that what’s wrong? The job?”
“Uh … yeah, the job. Sore feet, sore back, and every night I’ve gotta fight off these pigs who …” Her cool cynicism crumbled. “Pigs who …”
“Barbara, what is it?” I put my arm around her. “Did someone hurt you?”
“Oh.” She buried her face in my shoulder and sobbed.
“Did someone hurt you?” I said again, when her tears had quieted.
“You can’t tell anyone.”
“I won’t.”
“Promise! Not Mama or Papa. And not Danny.”
“I promise.”
She took a deep breath. “Guy sends me a note at the club—he’s a producer, and I should come see him in his office at Warner Brothers. I’m a big girl, I know—if he wants to kiss me, cop a little feel, I don’t care as long as he puts me in a picture.… I’m shocking you, aren’t I?”
“No.” Yes.
“He … he … Shit, I’m so stupid! I’m so …” Under my arm, I felt her shudder. “I knew just to tease him, okay, not to let him lay a finger on me unless he promised me a part. But he did promise. He showed me a contract with my name on it! He signed it, and he had me come to his side of the desk to sign my name. And then he unzipped his pants. He made me … he … in my mouth …” Then she shrugged away from me, and her