by Sue Miller
And a gene for popularity. Suddenly I began to be asked to parties because, certain girls told me, certain boys wanted me there. The parties were all the same. We would dance in somebody’s rec room, the linoleum floor gleaming, the lights too bright, the record player nasally spewing out “In the Still of the Night,” or “Tears on My Pillow.” After the first awkward and tentative approaches by the boys, we paired off and stood in grappling couples. The trick in dancing, I discovered, was to let the boy grind into you without responding, to seem utterly innocent of what was going on. In corners, in the bathrooms at school, the girls would giggle about how hot you could get the boys, about hard-ons, blue balls, wet dreams. But with the boys, they maintained an air of stupefying naïveté. This was easy for me, this willed passivity. I felt finally that something was being asked of me socially for which I had a gift. Their hands slid down towards my ass, slid forward towards the sides of my breasts; they breathed irregularly in my ears and pushed their still slightly miniature erections against my thighs. I chattered about other things or sang along obliviously with the music. I was careful never to arch my back, never to push my body forward against theirs—that would be cheap, like being a make-out—and when the dance ended, I, like the other girls, broke brightly away from their humid embraces.
But when the rules changed, I wasn’t ready. We were at Karen Needleman’s house—her parents were somewhere upstairs—and we had the living room. It was harder to dance in than the basement rooms we were used to because there was thick carpeting on the floor; and slowly the milling, nervous group dissolved into couples sitting on the sofas, or on the floor with the walls as a backrest. Someone turned out all the lights except the one by the record player. When one record stopped and before the next one dropped, the room was full of the multiple rhythms of heavy breathing and an occasional, almost always female, laugh.
I was with Bill Nestor. He was a diver on the swim team. His eyes were chronically bloodshot, and he always smelled damp and slightly chlorinated when we danced. I didn’t like him because I remembered too clearly the bulge in his trunks when he stood balanced on the end of the diving board waiting for the impulse to spring. He chewed gum and cracked it. Occasionally he would offer a piece to someone he was dancing with, which panicked the other girls. “Smell,” they’d say, and breathe into a friend’s face, something I could never have done. “Do I have bad breath? Bill Nestor offered me chewing gum.”
We were leaned against the wall, our legs out in front of us. Bill’s upper body and hips were turned towards me, and I could feel the steady pressure of his knotted sex against my left hip. His big hands were making the usual rounds, from the waist up to the sides of the breasts, back to the waist. His jaw rocked steadily in time to the music, even when his breathing grew irregular. I was almost relaxed. Though this was a variation, the theme was familiar. “Sho do, sho be do,” sang the Five Satins over and over.
His hand moved in on my breast, cupped it. He seemed to wait a moment for me to protest, and then his hand began a possessive massage. I was frozen. If I didn’t want this, I had to say no. I had to say no out loud. I had to acknowledge what he was doing, and tell him to stop, or move his hand, or laugh and slap him as I had heard several other girls do around the room.
I did nothing. His hand kneaded my breast over and over. His breathing speeded up and he stopped chewing gum. The knob of his erection pushed against me again and again. I felt caught in a vise, but a living, pulsing one. I stared straight ahead of me. Bill’s rhythm changed, he moaned slightly in my ear and pushed against me in a slower, twisting way; and then was still. After a few moments, his hand loosened on my breast, and I heard his gum crack damply again in my ear. “Hey, Anna,” he said. “You’re all right.” Then he began to croon along with the Fleetwoods. In a few minutes, he excused himself and disappeared.
Word got around quickly, though not so quickly to the girls, I think. The boys would only dance once or twice with me before they wanted to push me into darkened corners, into other rooms, even into closets. Making out grew more popular generally as an activity, but I knew from what the other girls said that they felt as in charge of it all as they did when they danced; whereas I didn’t know what to do, and so did nothing while a whole series of boys ground groaning against me, their eyes shut against seeing me, their hands on my breasts, and finally in my blouse, up my skirt.
I felt nothing, less than nothing. I’d thank the parents who appeared at the door at the end of the party, and slide into the front seat with my mother, who waited outside in the row of cars as she had waited outside at grammar school; and who had almost the same questions to ask me as then: Did you have a nice time? Who else was there? What did you do?
I answered her almost too eagerly because I was afraid she might guess something like the truth; and I could see as she responded to my seeming openness that she thought we’d reached some new stage of intimacy in our lives. Her gratitude, her softness to me, bruised my guilty spirit, and I came to hate her even more.
Now there was nowhere in my life I felt at home. I felt completely false to myself, that there wasn’t any center to me, that there was no situation in which I told the truth or acted on the truth with anyone. Sometimes when I saw the stacks of music sitting on the unused piano in the living room, I felt a yearning for the time they represented; for the purity of my old life of practice and loneliness. I remember leaning towards my mirror in my bedroom and staring deeply into my own blank, false face. It seemed grotesque to me, the hideous freckled eyelids with their strawlike lashes. I blinked and thought of a frog. Then I raised my hand to my cheek, fitted the palm along its slight curve and rested it there. Tears began to cluster above the rim of my lower lids. Suddenly they too disgusted me, seemed melodramatic and false. I quickly lifted my hand from my face and slapped myself as hard as I could. Then the other cheek. “Liar,” I whispered. “Liar.”
Spring came reluctantly to Chicago. The grimy ice melted and froze again and again on the foot-pocked dirt outside the high school. The skies stayed leaden, a heavy, portentous sullen gray which seemed to derive energy from the lake. The air, even on days when the temperature rose into the fifties, was rimmed with the chill of winter. Still there were the parties, the moaning, oblivious boys, the gummy hands, the embarrassed abrupt abandonment. When my mother picked me up from parties or appointments, the heater gently blew on my chapped legs. “This weather!” she’d say. “Here it is April. Back home the lilacs would be starting.”
Timidly, I began to experiment with self-mortification. After one party where two different boys had pushed me into the darkest corner of the room to rub up against me, I swallowed twelve aspirin. I held lighted matches to the skin of my forearm. Nothing was sufficient to restore to me my forgotten sense of self. And I knew, even as I went through these motions, that I wasn’t doing any real damage. My lack of courage disgusted me further. I began to yearn for the end of the school year, for summer, although the thought of going to my grandparents’, where I had been innocent and ambitious, disturbed me. It was at about this time, too, that I asked my mother about Babe’s pregnancy. Her reply confused me. I was too naïve to understand what had happened to Babe. In fact, I didn’t understand it fully until years later when, drunk after a family party, she told me about her lonely labor in a Geneva hospital, about the one glimpse she’d had of the baby before the nurse carried him out of the room. All I knew as an adolescent was that somehow whatever had happened to Babe made me feel a sharp sense of distaste and distance from the world my mother’s family occupied.
So when my father, in what seemed the first clear assertion of the change that had taken place between him and my mother since the move, announced that he thought it was time I spend part of the summer with his parents, I was ready.
“But what will she do there?” my mother asked.
“What do you mean?” We were still at the dinner table, my parents drinking coffee—Sanka actually—and I waiting to be excused to do my
homework. I played with the few grains of rice left in my pudding dish. They often talked of me this way, as though I weren’t there.
“Well, they’re so isolated there,” my mother said. We’d been to visit my father’s parents several times for short periods, when I was much younger. Not even my father saw them very much anymore. They lived in Colorado. My grandfather had been a farmer, and my father had grown up helping him. But at about the time my father went away to college, my grandfather had the first of a series of heart attacks. During his recuperation, my grandmother started teaching school part-time, and after his second attack, he sold off most of the land, and she supported them.
They were isolated. The nearest town was Alamosa, about thirty miles away. But what isolated them most was their silence. My other grandmother (to me, my real grandmother) was silent also, but the swelling energy of her children and my cousins around her, the stern, articulate precision of my grandfather, made up for that. My father’s parents were both uncommunicative, and my father was an only child. At lunch or dinner at their house, my mother had chattered helplessly about recipes, clothing, the weather; and everyone else silently ate the large bland meals my grandmother prepared. The only spiced dishes were the three or four kinds of pickles piled in plastic bowls on the table.
The last time we drove away from their house, my mother began to weep in frustration. My father pulled the car off the road in a swirl of dust, and tried to console her, while I stared relentlessly at the prairie dogs popping up and down in their complicated world a few feet away, and wished I were anywhere else.
“I just never know what to say,” my mother had blubbered.
“They don’t expect you to say anything,” my father reassured her. He rubbed her bare freckled shoulder where it stuck out from her pink sundress. I could see his fingers slip under the fabric of the dress.
“But that’s just it!” she wailed. “How can you talk to someone who doesn’t care?”
There was a long silence. Then he said, “They care, honey. They just have a different way of expressing it from your folks.”
“I’ll never understand them,” she had said, with a vehemence that sounded angry. “Never.”
Now it was my father’s turn to be angry. He set his coffee cup down noisily in his saucer. “They’re just as isolated at your parents’ place,” he said. I could feel the tension in the air. My mother’s clothes rustled as she pulled herself up straight. She didn’t look at my father, but her voice was tight, offended. Clearly she was shocked that he didn’t understand there was no comparison to be made between her parents and his.
“But in Maine she has cousins at any rate. Other young people. Plus my sisters.” Orrie, as usual, was left out.
He looked at her a moment. His voice, when he spoke, was conciliatory. “Look, Bunny, all this is beside the point. This doesn’t have to be an either/or arrangement. She can do both, after all. All I’m saying is maybe it’s time she visited my parents, after all these years of just visiting yours.”
I said, “I’d like to go.”
Startled, they both stared at me. My father grinned abruptly. “Well, that’s that,” he said, and pushed his chair back from the table. “I’ll drop them a line sometime soon and see what they’ve got to say about it.” His relief, his need to retreat from the tension with my mother was palpable. He went into the living room where he usually sat in the evenings to read the paper and watch TV. We could hear the bright music of a commercial start up.
My mother sipped at her coffee and avoided looking at me. When she finally did, her eyes were full of fury. My gaze slid back quickly to my own hands on the tablecloth. “Really,” she said coldly, “I had no idea you were so fascinated by Daddy’s parents. When did all this happen?”
I shrugged.
“You might have mentioned earlier that you wanted to visit them. Then I wouldn’t have wasted my breath—and risked offending Daddy—trying to argue against it.”
“I didn’t think of it until Daddy mentioned it.”
I met her eyes again. She looked slightly mollified. “Well, I hope you see what an awkward position you put me in.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “May I be excused?”
“Certainly.” Her voice was cool, efficient as ever. As I went up to my room, I could hear the clink of dishes, her footsteps as she carried the first load to the kitchen.
My Gray grandparents had never sent me a birthday or a Christmas present, had never made the long-distance calls on holidays my mother’s parents had; had never noticed or even known about the milestones in my life—recitals, graduation, school awards—that my mother’s family had fussed over so thoroughly. They received me into their lives in Colorado with the same lack of ceremony. Grandma Dora had two more weeks of school to teach when I arrived in early June, something she hadn’t mentioned to my parents. Every morning I lay in the bright guestroom off the kitchen and listened to her getting ready to go. She had told me just to sleep in as late as I wanted, and I pretended to take her up on it, although I woke early each morning. But I didn’t want to have to talk to my grandfather at breakfast—to sit in silence with him really. So I lay motionless and hot in the room. The only furniture was a maple bureau and the bed, whose mattress was thin and pitted in the center. The maple was of a kind that I knew my mother would have considered cheap. Café curtains hung uselessly at the windows, since the sun poured through the bleached-out print, and there were no neighbors for miles around anyway. There wasn’t a clock in the room, so I could never tell ahead of time how long I lay sweating, propped up in bed. Sometimes I read one of the three or four books I’d brought with me for the train journey, but often I just lay there, listening as my grandmother began her day with the solitary clanking of the few dented pots and pans she used to make breakfast. The sun in my room smelled of dust and the fading dye in the curtains. There was no breeze. My grandmother left a pot of coffee on the stove each day, and, in the top of the double boiler, turning brown and dry around the edges, hot cereal, in spite of the fact that it was already in the high 70s when she got up. After a while, she’d go out of the house, and then I could hear the car starting and driving out of the yard. I could hear the car, actually, for several miles, and I would lie very still and try to discern the moment when I couldn’t hear it anymore, when its dying mutter became silence, became the noises I didn’t hear the rest of the day.
Some time after this, my grandfather would come downstairs, moving more slowly than my grandmother had, and talking softly and steadily to himself. He rarely spoke to anyone else, perhaps only once or twice to me the entire month I spent there, but he kept up a continuous stream of comments to himself. They were mysterious, truncated, elliptical, mere punctuation to whatever was going on in his head. Once as I was walking away from him, he said, “Dave’s girl. Nice enough, I suppose.” To himself he said things like, “So you say, so you say,” or, abruptly, “Not likely!”
It was only after he’d left too, sometimes in the old pickup, sometimes walking towards the creek with fishing rod and creel, sometimes just to the shed where I could hear him hammering and banging as he repaired things, that I’d get up. After the first week I wore dirty clothes because my grandmother didn’t inquire about my laundry and I was afraid to ask. The kitchen clock read eleven-thirty, twelve, occasionally later when I emerged, and often I was dizzy and headachy from lying in bed so long, thinking aimlessly or reading. I’d have my overcooked solitary breakfast and do the dishes. Usually after this I’d sit on the front porch for a while or go for a walk, staying close to the creek so I wouldn’t get lost. By the time I got back, my grandmother was usually home, in the kitchen, starting one of her elaborate, bland suppers.
The isolation was absolute, but after the first three or four panicky horrible days, I began to feed on it. It seemed to me just the kind of purification I’d been seeking with my timid attempts to wound myself. Sometimes, walking through the dry air, wearing the jeans and shirt I’d worn five or
six days in a row, I thought I could feel the moisture being sucked from my lungs. I felt cleaned, like the little dried skeletons of turtles I found along the stream bed. I could sit for hours tracing the flight of the cliff swallows in and out of their nests above the creek, and watching the light shift in the green and gold cottonwood trees.
Even the conversations seemed clear and pure to me, uncomplicated, unhurtful. “Here she is,” my grandmother would say, without looking up as I came in. “Now take the dishrag off that dough and see if it’s time to punch it down.” Or, “Supper’s in half an hour. Roast chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans and bread pudding for dessert.” No one ever asked what I’d done that day, no one ever knocked on my door, no one ever suggested any more productive or useful or ambitious way of spending my time. I was expected to take care of myself, but how I did that was entirely my business.
All three Saturdays I was there we drove into Alamosa for the day and the evening. Each time my grandmother would call me into the kitchen beforehand. She’d open her worn white plastic purse and pull out a man’s billfold. Ceremoniously she’d extract a five-dollar bill. “Now you don’t want to hang around with us,” she’d say. “You go off and have a good time, and we’ll meet you at Pete Rock’s for supper.”