Elizabeth's Masquerade



  Elizabeth’s Masquerade

  (Masked Desire - Book 1)

  by

  Rebecca Milton

  ***

  Copyright © 2014 Rebecca Milton - All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and locations portrayed in this book and the names herein are fictitious. Any similarity to or identification with the locations, names, characters or history of any person, product or entity is entirely coincidental and unintentional. - From a Declaration of Principles jointly adopted by a Committee of the American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and Associations. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. No responsibility or liability is assumed by the Publisher for any injury, damage or financial loss sustained to persons or property from the use of this information, personal or otherwise, either directly or indirectly. While every effort has been made to ensure reliability and accuracy of the information within, all liability, negligence or otherwise, from any use, misuse or abuse of the operation of any methods, strategies, instructions or ideas contained in the material herein, is the sole responsibility of the reader. Any copyrights not held by publisher are owned by their respective authors. All information is generalized, presented for informational purposes only and presented "as is" without warranty or guarantee of any kind. All trademarks and brands referred to in this book are for illustrative purposes only, are the property of their respective owners and not affiliated with this publication in any way. Any trademarks are being used without permission, and the publication of the trademark is not authorized by, associated with or sponsored by the trademark owner.

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  Elizabeth’s Masquerade

  As a young girl, I didn’t play with Barbie dolls. It wasn’t a political choice. I wasn’t offended by the supposed socio-sexual demands the tiny-waisted, big-boobed, doll put on women. It was a doll. Like other dolls. Dolls are perfect, dolls are ideals. No one plays with dolls to delve deeply into reality. Ask Disney, they couldn’t sell a Quasimodo doll to save their Mickey lovin’ lives. Why? Because he was an ugly hunchback. Sure, he could sing but what little girl wants to tote around a hideous doll?

  Dolls are not for reality. Dolls are for fantasy. The perfect baby dolls that gurgle and poop in sweet smelling jellies that your mom concocts for you in the kitchen. That shit is edible. Does anyone ever complain about the mind-warping insanity we’re pushing on little girls by allowing them to believe the semi-fluid that squirts out a human anus is ever sweet smelling or edible? Nope, but let’s pillory Barbie because she’s an easy target.

  Anyway, I didn’t play with Barbie. I didn’t play with dolls. I read comic books. Yes, comic books. From a very young age, I could be found sitting at the picnic table in the backyard or, laying on the floor in my bedroom, paging slowly through any comic book I could get my hands on. They belonged to my brother. He had and, in fact, still has, an incredible collection of comic books. I do not. I do not collect them. I do not go to comic conventions. I do not have action figurines in pristine collections, in a special room, on hermetically sealed shelves, with track lighting and a personal sound design. Just for the record, neither does my brother. He just has a fine collection of comic books. He will leave them to his son, and his son will sell them and make a billion dollars and all will be right with the world.

  Darren, my brother, like most boys, was very protective of his comic books and he, like most boys, didn’t want his little sister touching them. Messing with them. He told me to buzz off, go play with Barbie. Part of me felt bad for Barbie, she seemed like being with her was meant for punishment only. I eventually wore my brother down. When he finally allowed me to read one of his comic books, under his supervision, and he saw how careful I was with it, he slowly leaked more of them to me. We had to hide it first because my mother didn’t want me reading that kind of mindless trash.

  “Don’t you want to play with Barbie’s, like your other friends,” she said to me. “Wouldn’t that be more fun than reading those awful, mindless comic books?” I wished I had the sense to say something like; yes, mother I would rather play with a plastic, excessively sexualized, mindless, doll than look at the artwork in these books. I didn’t because I was too young, and I didn’t actually feel that way about Barbie. I told her I liked the books, and she sighed, the usual long-suffering sigh of a mother whose daughter was past her control, even at a very young age.

  Darren and I never talked about the comic books the way he did with his guy friends. Sometimes he’d ask what I thought of a new title or a particular character. I would say they were cool or interesting. Something non-committal, something that wouldn’t get us into a deep discussion and he would be satisfied. I was careful with his books. Clean hands when I pulled them from the plastic sleeve. Never bent the pages back, never licked a finger to turn a page. Back into the plastic sleeve and then, back into the box, in order, title page facing the front of the box. Numerically correct order. This was the only way I would be allowed to read his comic books. I followed the rules, and all was right with the world.

  I never bought a comic book of my own. I read his. I was introduced to new characters, new titles by him. I never went to comic book stores. I didn’t have any interest in seeing the movies that were made from comic books. I didn’t have a favorite character. I didn’t dress like Wonder Woman or Batgirl, or Supergirl for Halloween. I didn’t like bad guys over good guys.

  I liked masks.

  From an early age, I was fascinated by masks. The ones that the comic book characters wore, but also the ones regular people wore. Reading those books taught me that, not just in the pages of colorful, artful, books did people wear masks, but in everyday life, people donned masks and fought desperately to keep those masks safe. My parents wore masks. My brother wore masks. I wore masks.

  We didn’t all wear the same ones all the time; we changed them out. I wore a mask when I talked to my mother. I wore another mask when I wanted something from my father. I wore a mask when I interacted with my brother. When my mother found me out, when she called me on it one day, I was crushed. She had said no to me spending the weekend with a friend of mine at her parent’s cabin. Her parents wouldn’t be there and, the truth of it was, we wanted to have a party, invite boys and just... be bad. When she said no, my first impulse was, of course, to go and work my father. To put on my Daddy’s Little Girl mask, pout, say Mom was being mean and play on his heart strings. Well, that day, my mother said no and then, she crushed me.

  “And don’t think that you can go and manipulate your father,” she said, her hands working in a bowl of cookie dough, her eyes sharp, noting my reaction, which was absolute horror. I had no idea I was that transparent.

  “That’s right, little missy,” she went on. “Believe me, I know that Daddy’s Little Girl routine, that face, I us
ed it myself when I was your age.” I tried to fake indignant shock, but she saw through that too.

  “Oh, stop,” she said, laughing. “Your father knows it too. Trust me, we’re both smarter than you give us credit for, and we can see through your little mask.”

  There it was. Spoken. In the kitchen. The sweet smell of chocolate chip cookie dough, the red and white checkered table cloth, the sink of dishes and my mother, an ordinary woman, speaking the word... mask. A woman who didn’t read comic books. Didn’t follow the heroes and villains that donned cover, assumed other personalities. A mom. A cookie baker. A dinner maker. A rule dictator. She knew about masks.

  After I had stomped and pouted and groaned that everybody was going, that I would be a social outcast, that my life was over and that my mother didn’t understand me and what it was like to be my age, I hid in my room for several hours. My mother came to see me with a plate of hot cookies and a glass of cold milk, a combination that we never seem to outgrow. I apologized for being so terrible, she accepted, apologized for making me a social outcast and then, we talked about masks. She gave me a good piece of advice. She told me the Daddy’s Little Girl act wasn’t going to work forever, not on Daddy.

  “Just because a mask doesn’t work that well any longer, doesn’t mean it’s broken,” she said. “It just means it needs to be reworked a little.”

  She winked at me and the following evening at dinner, when she wanted to see a French film that night and my father wanted nothing to do with it at all, I watched as she donned the revamped, adult version of the Daddy’s Little Girl mask and it worked. When my father left the table to go up and change, my mother said simply, “You see?” I certainly did. But, I didn’t quite understand.

  ***

  As I went through high school and then, into college, I kept playing with, experimenting with masks. We all did. All the girls I grew up with. The bad girl mask, the brainy girl mask, the cheerleader mask, the vestal virgin mask. We all had ones we wore with more comfort than the others, our default mask.

  My friends found their defaults quickly right around the middle of freshman year. They all discovered the mask that fit best, gave them the most ease and the most reward and that was the mask they held on to, four years in high school and, I can only assume, into college and life after. I wasn’t the same. I couldn’t find my default mask. Or, rather, I didn’t want to find my default mask. I felt that the fun, the freedom of the mask was being able to use them interchangeably. Use many masks with many people. I wasn’t sure how to do this.

  I stumbled from mask to mask during the first three years of high school. I was a cheerleader and a drama club kid, and those guys had no idea about masks at all. You’d think, being actors, wearing masks all the time, they’d be experts, but no way. They hung it all out; they wanted everyone to know the real thing. Maybe that was a mask itself. A deep, twisted mask that even I couldn’t crack. I don’t know.

  Anyway, I was a drama kid, a jock, a band geek. I tried on all kinds of masks, and they all fit sort of well, but none of them felt like the mask I wanted to spend the rest of my days in. None of them gave me the kind of satisfaction I was looking for. So, I moved, rather quickly, from mask to mask. I was getting a reputation as the girl who joined clubs and then, quit as soon as she got bored. That became an imposed mask, the girl who was bored easily. I didn’t like that particular mask, but I also couldn’t deny there was some truth to it.

  I was spending so much time trying on masks, feeling them unfit, that I wasn’t really paying any attention to the actual activities. I wasn’t a good actor. I was OK on the track team, but I never paid enough attention to the activities to really be good at any of them. I didn’t care. I wasn’t really looking to be an actor or a track star. I was simply trying on the masks.

  ***

  The summer between my junior and senior years, my parents sent me away to an equestrian camp. It was a four-week camp, where you rode horses, groomed them, and learned everything about them. The camp was for girls only, and I was excited to go. I loved and still love horses. The first few days were fine. The counselors were great fun, and the horses were so beautiful.

  As with any social setting, cliques and clots of friends formed quickly, and I found myself on the outside. I didn’t fit in with a lot of the rich girls, the city girls and the girls who went to private schools. I didn’t want to fit in with the girls who were forced to be there by their parents and were rebelling by hiding in the woods and smoking or trying to get the male counselors to have sex with them. They seemed angry, sad, and they were mean to the horses. So, I moved in and among the nondescript girls who had self-esteem issues or simply wanted to ride horses and be left alone. It was fine. I was OK just riding, being at the campfire in the evening and going to bed. I didn’t feel the need to put on a mask like I did at school. Then, one night, something changed.

  “Why do you think people wear masks,” Cassie asked me. She was a year older than me, had just graduated high school, she was going to start college, and the summer camp was a gift from her grandmother. We had gotten to the evening campfire early. The girls in my cabin were a tight group and, they were nice to me, but I just didn’t fit in. I changed quickly and left for the campfire about half an hour before the rest of them. When I got to the campfire, only Cassie was there. We had been on the trail together, side by side a few times and had chatted. She was nice, very smart and really, really pretty, with an unorthodox edge. I gave her a little wave, said hello and sat down. After a moment, she came and sat next to me.

  “I don’t know,” I said, trying to act cool, smooth and not show my excitement about the topic of masks too much. “To hide, I guess.” She thought for a minute and shook her head.

  “I don’t know, Eliza. I mean, sure, I guess you could use them to hide, but seems like such a waste.” The other girls started to arrive, and we broke off our talk there. Later, when the fire ended and we had an hour of free time before lights out, I caught up with her and asked her what she meant. She explained that wearing a mask just to hide seemed like a waste of such a great thing. She thought hiding was so dull so, so inactive.

  “Sure you can hide, but you could also infiltrate, you could use the mask to get something, someone. I just think people don’t use masks to their full potential. Most of these girls,” she said, gesturing to the pods of giggling girls who would swear they would be friends for life and forget that vow as soon as they returned home. “They got here and put on a mask. They put one on to hide, or they put one on to blend in, which, frankly, is just another way of hiding. Seems to me, there are so many more uses for the mask than that.”

  Of course, there were, and I would realize the depth of that statement as I got older, but at the time, it was a revelation. The rest of camp, I stuck with Cassie, and we talked about the possible uses of the mask. I told her about my attempts back at school to wear different masks, and she explained that I was wearing the mask for no reason.

  “You need to wear it with a clear want,” she told me. “Not just to fit in. That’s weak. When you put the mask on, put it on with intent.” I thought about that one for a long time. I thought about my Daddy’s Little Girl mask. I had just done it to get what I wanted, but when my mother put it on, it was a completely different kind of mask. When I told Cassie this, she laughed.

  “Of course, it was,” she told me, “and you know why?” I had no idea why. “Sex,” she told me. It clicked and made sense. Mom had put on the little girl mask but backed it with sex. When I put it on, I was just putting on an empty shell. There was nothing to it, no intent.

  “But,” I said to Cassie one evening as we walked through the woods. We had one more night at camp, and we were allowed freedom. We didn’t have to sit at the campfire, so Cassie and I walked down one of the footpaths to the lake. We were still talking about masks. “What about with girls?” I asked.

  “What do you mean,” she said and we stopped in the woods.

  “Well,” I said, tryi
ng to be clear because this was important to me. “My mom used the Daddy’s Little Girl mask on my father and it worked because of sex, right?”

  “Right.”

  “OK, but what about when you put a mask on with... girls?”

  “Same thing,” she said and I was confused. She started walking, and I had to run to catch up with her. Her statement had struck me dumb.

  “So, everything is about sex?”

  “One way or another,” she said and she stopped again. I stared at her, and it made no sense.

  “But, how can...” I started to say when she stepped to me, pushed me lightly against a tree, took my face in her hands and kissed me. At first, I was a little shocked but then I relaxed. It was a good kiss. Her lips were so soft, and it was delightful. I put my hands around her waist and she moved them down to her firm, round bottom and she pressed me hard into the tree, kissing me, running her fingers over my face and letting them move down my body. I dug my fingers into her behind, and she sighed. It was incredible. She broke the kiss and stepped back.

  “I wanted to do that from the first time I laid eyes on you,” she told me and my heart skipped. I didn’t know what to say. She smiled. “See,” she whispered. “I put the mask on with intent.” I understood. But, I was still confused.

  “But,” I stuttered. “I’m not... you know... a lesbian.”

  “Neither am I,” she said and started walking toward the lake. “I just wanted to kiss you. So, I put on the mask.”

  I kissed Cassie a lot more that night and the following day. I put on the mask, and I understood it.

  ***

  My senior year of high school was great. I understood that a mask donned with intent was so much more powerful than one put on simply to hide or fit in. I also learned that sex was the underscore for everything. Even if you never acted on it, and frankly, it was sometimes better if you didn’t act on it, sex was there.