Of adult nudity I knew nothing at first hand. At my grandparents’ house, I had studied, very carefully, the nude photographs of May Castle that I had found in a desk drawer in the bedroom that had once been my father’s. I had seen, briefly, usually looking over another boy’s shoulder, in a book that sometimes materialized in the boys’ room, photographs of nude men and women with black rectangles over their eyes, but these photographs were more puzzling than revealing. The people were always facing not quite the right way, or the photographs had been cropped just a fraction of an inch before the point at which they would have provided the curious viewer with some real information. The pictures implied a great deal, but without the experience that would have helped me to interpret them, with only my imagination to complete a curve, extend a line, illuminate a shadow, or sharpen the fuzzy focus, the possibilities multiplied so quickly and assumed such grotesque forms and enormous proportions that my head began to reel.
The second floor of Veronica’s house was an attic, expanded and made suitable for bedrooms by dormers that ran the length of the house at the front and rear. The stairs led to a small landing, off which there were two doors. One led to Veronica’s parents’ bedroom. The other led to Veronica’s bedroom. Under the eaves, there was space for storage. This arrangement was typical of the houses built in Babbington during the postwar population boom. My house, and the houses of most of the other boys and girls I knew, at least in Babbington Heights, resembled Veronica’s, differing only in rotation and scale.
Access to the storage space under the eaves was provided by sliding doors crudely constructed of thin sheets of pressed wood fibers that were sold under the trade name Masonite, with a simple finger hole drilled through each door to allow one to get a grip on it and slide it in its track to one side.
Slowly and silently, Veronica slid the door in her room open enough so that we could squeeze through. She got down on her hands and knees and crawled in. I followed her.
The floor of the storage area was simply a few pine boards nailed to the joists. To our left as we crawled along, there was no floor at all; the joists were exposed, and below them was the plasterboard of the ceiling below. I knew this because as soon as I put my hand out in the darkness of this tunnel, I missed the boards and felt my hand slip into dark nothingness, but then my hand struck the plasterboard, and I recognized it for what it was from familiarity with the attic at home, where I slept.
Very slowly, Veronica crawled along toward the light that we could see ahead of us, coming from the finger holes in the doors to the eaves storage in Veronica’s parents’ bedroom, from which the voices of Jack and Mrs. McCall came now in low rhythmical waves, sometimes resembling the involuntary grunting sounds one makes when one has been rowing a boat for quite a while and has to put a strong effort into each stroke, at other times more like the startled exclamation one makes when one is taken by surprise by some physical contact, at first frightened and then relieved, as when one feels the impact of a Ping-Pong ball on the back of one’s neck and realizes an instant later that it was only a Ping-Pong ball, nothing more.
After what seemed a very long time, Veronica stopped behind the door, where she could see into her parents’ bedroom through the finger hole. Light fell on her face through the hole. She wore a rapt, curious expression, but there was also in it a trace of anger—no, more than anger. It was a trace, apparent in a certain steadiness in her eyes, a twist in her upper lip, of hatred.
A car door, muffled but unmistakably a car door. The front door. No doubt about it, the front door. “Hello-wo! Hey, where’s my honey?” It was Mr. McCall.
“Oh, my God,” said Mrs. McCall, quite softly, and apparently quite calmly.
“Jesus H. Christ!” said Jack, and I could tell that he said it through clenched teeth.
Veronica turned toward me. I couldn’t see her face at all, but the light behind her lit her dark hair with a thin, golden aureole.
“Quick! Grab your clothes,” said Mrs. McCall. “You hide under the eaves. I’ll get him out of the house, and you slip away.”
I backed up as quickly as I could, and Veronica scrambled toward me. We had barely managed to crouch behind a cardboard carton marked ORNAMENTS, when the door at the other end of the closet slid open, and Jack crawled in, carrying his shoes and socks and pants.
Mrs. McCall called out, “Hi, Honey. I was taking a nap. I’ll be right there.” A couple of minutes later she went downstairs. We heard muffled voices from downstairs, then the front door opened and closed, and the car started and drove off.
Jack slid the door open. Light flooded into the closet. Veronica and I shrank behind the carton and waited. He closed the door. We heard his footsteps on the stairs, rapid footsteps. We heard him open and close the front door. We waited for a minute or so and then slid the door open and crawled out into Veronica’s bedroom.
“I’d better get home,” I said. I started for the door at once. Veronica didn’t say a thing. When I reached the front door, I turned and looked back upstairs. Veronica was standing at the door to her parents’ bedroom, looking in. She turned toward me.
“Come on back, Peter,” she said.
“I really better get home, Veronica,” I said.
“They’re probably not going to be back for a while,” she said.
“I can’t, Veronica,” I said. I was trying not to whine, trying to keep myself from saying, in whatever way, “I’m still a little boy, Veronica.” I said, “I have to go home and study for the social studies test.”
I ran all the way home. In my mind was a burning question, and it was probably the same burning question that was in Jack’s mind while he hid under the eaves: “How am I going to get out of this?”
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