First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories Read Free Page A

game, we were usually Sam and Fred. We’d get a call telling us who was murdered, and then we’d go back to the bedroom and examine the corpse and question the suspects. I’d fire questions at an empty chair. Sometimes Edward would get tired of being my sidekick and he’d slip into the chair and be the quaking suspect. Other times, he would prowl around the room on his hands and knees with a magnifying glass while I stormed and shouted at the perpetually shifty suspect: “Where were you, Mrs. Eggnogghead [giggles from Edward], at ten o’clock, when Mr. Eggnogghead [laughter, helpless with pleasure, from Edward] was slain with the cake knife?”
    “Hey, Fred! I found bloodstains. ” Edward’s voice would quiver with a creditable imitation of the excitement of radio detectives.
    “Bloodstains! Where, Sam? Where? This may be the clue that breaks the case.”
    Edward could sustain the commedia dell’ arte for hours if I wanted him to. He was a precocious and delicate little boy, quivering with the malaise of being unloved. When we played, his child’s heart would come into its own, and the troubled world where his vague hungers went unfed and mothers and fathers were dim and far away—too far away ever to reach in and touch the sore place and make it heal—would disappear, along with the world where I was not sufficiently muscled or sufficiently gallant to earn my own regard. (What ever had induced my mother to marry that silly man, who’d been unable to hang on to his money? I could remember when we’d had a larger house and I’d been happy; why had she let it get away?) It angered me that Edward’s mother had so little love for him and so much for her daughter, and that Edward’s father should not appreciate the boy’s intelligence—he thought Edward was a queer duck, and effeminate. I could have taught Edward the manly postures. But his father didn’t think highly of me: I was only a baby-sitter, and a queer duck too. Why, then, should Edward be more highly regarded by his father than I myself was? I wouldn’t love him or explain to him.
    That, of course, was my terrible dilemma. His apartment house, though larger than mine, was made of the same dark-red brick, and I wouldn’t love him. It was shameful for a boy my age to love a child anyway. And who was Edward? He wasn’t as smart as I’d been at his age, or as fierce. At his age, I’d already seen the evil in people’s eyes, and I’d begun the construction of my defenses even then. But Edward’s family was more prosperous, and the cold winds of insecurity (Where will the money come from?) hadn’t shredded the dreamy chrysalis of his childhood. He was still immersed in the dim, wet wonder of the folded wings that might open if someone loved him; he still hoped, probably, in a butterfly’s unthinking way, for spring and warmth. How the wings ache, folded so, waiting; that is, they ache until they atrophy.
    So I was thirteen and Edward was seven and he wanted me to love him, but he was not old enough or strong enough to help me. He could not make his parents share their wealth and comfort with me, or force them to give me a place in their home. He was like most of the people I knew—eager and needful of my love; for I was quite remarkable and made incredible games, which were better than movies or than the heart could hope for. I was a dream come true. I was smart and virtuous (no one knew that I occasionally stole from the dime store) and fairly attractive, maybe even very attractive. I was often funny and always interesting. I had read everything and knew everything and got unbelievable grades. Of course I was someone whose love was desired. Mother, my teachers, my sister, girls at school, other boys—they all wanted me to love them.
    But I wanted them to love me first.
    None of them did. I was fierce and solitary and acrid, marching off the little mile from school, past the post office, all yellow brick and chrome, and my two locust trees