by Bill Clegg
The sound of burning paper and tobacco crackled in Lupita’s ear as Dana lit another cigarette. A quick blast of smoke momentarily stunk the air before dissipating behind her as she pressed her foot harder on the gas pedal.
Look, Dana said with artificial dismay, I thought I’d do you a favor back there but if it’s too much to carry on a conversation let alone a simple thank you, never mind.
Thank you, Lupita said mechanically, imagining what Floyd was doing at that moment, what or who had startled him as she was leaving less than an hour ago. She wondered what Dana knew of him. She figured Jackie would have surely gushed nonstop to her. As if reading her mind Dana said, I saw you with Floyd last night. Lupita’s heart seized and she could feel the steering wheel in her hands dampen under her palms. She chose not to reply. Pretty gutsy to creep behind an outbuilding with him in front of the entire town. Her legs, even in cotton shorts, got hot, and she felt her feet become slick in her sandals. I know some fast girls in New York, but they can’t put anything past you. Tell me, was Floyd the reason you stole my car this morning? I can’t imagine any other reason why a racy girl who just the night before was seen sleazing in the shadows with someone else’s boyfriend would steal a car. If there was any choice in the matter remaining, Dana eliminated it by putting all of her cards on the table. Spill it. Or I’ll tell Jackie what I saw last night and what I imagined must have happened this morning. And then I’ll tell your father.
By the time they returned to Edgeweather, Lupita had told her everything from seeing Floyd for the first time in the parking lot at Trotta’s, to driving away from the green barn that morning. She didn’t mean to disclose so much, but once she started to describe how they met and what happened after, Dana became ravenous for every detail. With her leverage, she clearly felt emboldened to probe with abandon. Was your bra off or on? Who touched whom first? Did he take off his belt? Did he touch you below the waist? She was especially curious if he ever mentioned Jackie. Even though Lupita had answered no the first time she asked, Dana couldn’t let it go. At every turn or knuckle in the story she’d inject some version of And what did he have to say about Jackie?
Lupita was exhausted by the time they got home. She’d undergone a pitiless and mortifying interrogation while still trying to focus on driving, doing things with the car she’d never done before—using her turn signal, heeding traffic lights, turning left at a four-way intersection in Goshen.
Once the car was parked in front of the garage, but before they’d exited, Dana’s voice softened. Lupita, your secrets are safe with me. Including this morning. Just stick to our story. I’d asked you to take the car for a spin to test the brakes. I know it sounds ridiculous and when you look in the mirror in a few minutes you’ll wonder how on earth they will ever believe you, but if I back it up what can they possibly do? Just don’t complicate it. Keep it simple and nothing will happen, I promise.
Dana paused to pull a pack of Benson & Hedges and a silver lighter from the glove compartment. Lupita watched her closely as she located each item, eager for any clue that would begin to explain what was motivating her. But Dana’s face and movements revealed nothing as she poised her cigarette before the flame. After a short silence, she spoke again, but defensively, as if Lupita had challenged her.
Can’t I simply help out a friend? We’ve known each other most of our lives, haven’t we? And besides, it’s not my place to tell Jackie what her boyfriend has been up to—it would destroy her. And given what you’ve told me, it sounds like he is well on his way to greener pastures. As far as I’m concerned, she never needs to know any of this.
Lupita knew Dana was not being straight with her, but had no idea what she wanted. She was just as unknowable to her as she had been when they were kids. As politely as she could, she said, Thank you, Dana, and exited the car and turned to ascend the stairs where she knew her parents would be waiting. She could feel Dana’s eyes on her as she reached the door to the apartment, but she didn’t turn around. She had her father to face now, a more urgent and formidable authority than the spoiled, meddling rich girl sitting in the driveway behind her. Still, she was glad to have her ludicrous but unchallengeable story of testing the brakes in her back pocket as she opened the door. One thing she was sure her father would not do was question a Goss, even the youngest of them. The only authority higher than God was the person who not only had sponsored his family’s green cards and their citizenship but who signed his paycheck in a tight, tiny black ink row of letters all held in the somewhat flamboyant looping lasso of the first letter of his last name, George P. Goss. He would never, under any circumstances, threaten his standing with him.
Her parents were waiting at the kitchen table when she entered the kitchen. Is it true? Miss Dana asked you to drive her car? When she answered her mother by nodding, she saw in her mother’s face that she knew she was lying. Her father put his hands out but would not look his daughter in the eye. Lupita handed him the key. Next time you tell me, he muttered as he slipped the ring on the hook by the phone and trudged out the door, which he closed meekly behind him. Watching her father constricted by the slapdash fabrication of his employer’s daughter was worse than whatever punishment his fists could deliver. For all that had happened that day, but mainly this, she began to sob.
When her mother crossed the room, Lupita mistook her intention and for the first time in a long while, she relaxed her shoulders to accept her comforting arms. What she received instead was a hard slap across the face. Because she had been so ill-prepared for it she lost her balance and fell back on the kitchen floor. Her mother left her there, cradling her stinging cheek with both hands. When she went to inspect it later she saw in the bathroom mirror what Dana and both her parents would have all seen but she had not. Not the red cheek, swollen and angry from her mother’s slap, but the grotesque arrangement of six red and purple welts, roughly the size of a nickel each, staining her neck in a slow swoop from below her right ear, down her neck, across her clavicle and above the top of her right breast. She had seen them before on older girls—the boys at Catholic school called them bad girl badges—but never up close like this. They must have been below her sight line in the rearview mirror of Dana’s car.
She could not fathom what her parents now believed about her. She didn’t care what Dana believed, but how could she have interrogated her over the last few hours and not mention what would have been apparent from fifty feet away? Not a word about it until moments ago, when you look in the mirror in a few minutes you’ll wonder how on earth they will ever believe you. The humiliation and treachery were too much to comprehend and so she looked in the mirror at each bruise, each place where Floyd’s mouth sucked her skin so hard the blood vessels broke and splintered into welts. She remembered his lips, his devotion in those perfect minutes together, his unbreakable focus on her. She pictured him turning away, disappearing behind the barn. And then her father’s face, her mother’s bruised hip, her own shoulder, which bloomed in purple and red only a month ago when he punched her after dropping and smashing a box of light bulbs outside the hardware store. Her father and Floyd could not be more different, she thought at first, and then as she opened her eyes and traced the hickeys lightly with her pointer finger, she thought again. Whatever their differences might be, they were alike in one, now obvious way: they were both men who left her bruised.
It would be ten months before she saw Floyd again—at a distance, and briefly—after a late season baseball game at Housatonic, where he’d graduated from high school the year before. Lupita had agreed to go with a friend from St. Margaret’s who had a crush on one of the players. After the game, Judy vanished with the boy promising she’d be right back, but by the time the bleachers had emptied out and most everyone had driven home, she still hadn’t returned. Lupita saw an open door to the school and decided to wander the halls and see the place she would have gone to high school if her parents hadn’t insisted on St. Margaret’s. She wondered, and not for the first time, if goi
ng to the public high school would have changed things between her and Floyd. She indulged the fantasy of going steady, which she knew was ridiculous, but she couldn’t help but imagine him waiting for her to get out of class to go to lunch together, holding hands as they entered the cafeteria. She passed through a long hall lined on either side with gray metal lockers and wondered which one had been his. She roamed until she began to worry that Judy might return to the bleachers by the baseball field and assume she’d taken a ride home with someone else. She turned back to retrace her steps. And there, crossing directly in front of where she was standing, carrying a stack of rough wooden boards in his arms, was Floyd. Behind him another boy carried two pitchforks and a shovel.
Hi Lupita, the bored nasal voice came from her right side and in her peripheral vision she instantly recognized Hannah.
What are you doing here?
She’d only turned her head an inch before returning her gaze to where Floyd had been, but he and the other boy had already disappeared down the hall. Lupita could have choked the life right from Hannah. Baseball game, she managed, I came with my friend who’s dating someone here.
Hannah’s eyes widened as she pounced with questions, DATING SOMEONE HERE? WHO? WHAT FRIEND? Hannah was not subtle, not as a kid in elementary school and not as a high school junior.
Judy Micetti, she goes to my school, and I can’t remember who. Lupita knew that Judy was at that very moment with Derek Werntz but she was not about to tell Hannah.
Oh. Ok. I gotta go. Floyd and my boyfriend Mark are helping me carry a bunch of stuff from home that we’re going to use to make decorations for prom. The theme this year is town and country and we found a bunch of old tools and barn boards from the farm to represent the country side of things.
She was turning to leave but stopped to convey news she had clearly shared so many times the sentences rolled out like badly acted lines in a school play. Did you hear that Jackie is getting married to my brother? I think she’s pregnant because there’s a big rush to make it official as soon as possible. Can you believe it? What a disaster that’ll be.
Each word was a bullet. And every one made Lupita angrier. She wasn’t sure who she was angriest at, Hannah, Floyd, or Jackie. Jackie. It was Hannah who headed for the exit door outside but it was Jackie she pictured, smug and pregnant. Though they lived next door to each other, in the three years since Lupita started at St. Margaret’s they only occasionally crossed paths, and if they did it was on the weekends at the movies in Millerton or passing each other in cars on Undermountain Road. And since the day at the barn with Floyd she’d successfully avoided Jackie. Lupita didn’t trust that Dana never said anything to her about what had happened the night of the Fourth and the morning after, and she had no interest in finding out. She did not, however, feel guilty. She was devastated that Floyd never came and found her in the weeks following their morning at the barn. The way he touched and held her had made it seem that no one could have mattered more to him. But clearly someone did, and that someone was Jackie. Lupita had started dozens of letters to him, but she didn’t know what to say. I love you? I want you to hold me again? The truth was that she had no idea who he was, just that the time she spent in Dana’s car with him was the most powerful experience of her life and she loved everything about it. As emotionally and physically charged as her attraction was, it did not seem a strong enough case for risking a letter. And besides, her schedule was unforgiving and her father drove her back and forth from school every day so there weren’t many opportunities to rendezvous.
Still, she was gutted by what Hannah had told her. The next few times she sneaked into Edgeweather, she rifled through Dana’s desk and coat pockets for letters from Jackie, notes or a diary of any kind that mentioned Floyd. She never found anything. Just cigarettes, flasks of alcohol, and a birthday card from Jackie that had a flip note scribbled, it appeared, in a hurry. Happy Birthday, Old Pal. Love, Jackie.
The girls at St. Margaret’s did not know Floyd or Jackie, or anyone in Wells. They were from families—many of them Italian and Greek—in the nearby towns over the New York State border. Most of the girls had been at St. Margaret’s together since the fifth grade, so when Lupita arrived in ninth she’d braced for a reprise of the rough treatment she’d received when she’d started at Wells Center School.
On her first day at St. Margaret’s, three girls approached her outside her assigned homeroom and Lupita could feel her body begin to tense the way it had in the third grade. The girls were cousins, Mia, Amanda and Anna, whose family had come from Puerto Rico when they were young and they were eager to meet someone else whose first language was Spanish. It surprised Lupita how proud of their roots they were, and their language. In the first weeks at St. Margaret’s, it made her nervous when they addressed her in Spanish at school, but over time their ease relaxed her and the three of them took her under their wing. Amanda and Mia were both seniors and graduated at the end of Lupita’s freshman year, but Anna was a junior and around one more year before she was gone. By then, Lupita had made friends in her own class, but she missed the easy sistership she had with the Torregrosa girls who each fled to New York City to school and jobs after high school.
Lupita did well at St. Margaret’s and received a full scholarship to Albertus Magnus College for women in New Haven, Connecticut. Her plan, worked out with her parents over many months, was to work at Edgeweather over the summer after graduation, help her mother clean, do laundry, and whatever else was needed, and leave for school in late August. She had originally wanted to go to school in California, to San Francisco in particular, but her father refused. Nothing farther than two hours by car was the rule and it had to be Catholic and it had to be women only. Albertus Magnus was the only school she applied to.
By the spring of her senior year in high school Floyd was married, the father of a baby girl, and living in town with Jackie. He existed for Lupita as an idea, a tormenting figment of shape-shifting teenage desire. From the few hastily concluded encounters she’d had with him, she’d built a charged, private hiding place. When she relived these moments she slowed them down, added words that had not been spoken, gestures and actions that had not occurred; she continued on past the point where they’d ended. Occasionally she fully invented scenarios—sexual and otherwise—but the ones she returned to and embellished the most were the ones that had happened.
By the end of her senior year, Lupita hadn’t been in Dana’s bedroom in more than three months. Her opportunities were limited partly by full days at school, part-time jobs on the weekends, and hanging out with friends, but the chief obstacle was her father, who was almost always home. He didn’t have friends, and most of his contact with others was limited to the workmen he hired to do at Edgeweather what he could not—restoring damaged antiques, electrical wiring, pumping the septic system. He was tough on most of them, and occasionally disrespectful. It embarrassed Lupita to witness.
There were no other Mexican families in the area and though her father had never said so, she was certain he strictly limited his interactions to those he employed because these were the only relationships he felt secure in. Unlike Lupita who spoke with no accent or inflection, his accent was pronounced; and though his English had improved since they lived in Florida, it was still choppy. Her mother’s was too, Ada’s far less so, but they had friends in New York. Mexican women they saw in the evenings and on the weekends when they stayed in the city. Lupita did not know these women but had heard her mother and Ada gossip about them and their families.
* * *
The weekend before Memorial Day was the first time since Christmas that Lupita’s mother and Ada were both at Edgeweather. Holidays at Edgeweather, and the weeks leading up to them, were the times Lupita could expect to see Ada. More and more, because the Goss family came less frequently on the weekends, it was becoming the same with her mother. The Gosses went to Palm Beach for Easter every year, and until Memorial Day weekend tended to stay in the city on weekends. The
early weeks of May involved an unusual amount of cleaning as well as her mother driving trunks of warm weather clothes from the city to be hung in closets and folded in drawers. This year, Ada and her mother came up on Friday evening and planned a ham dinner for Sunday after church. Ada had been acting moody and curt since they arrived, but Lupita didn’t pay much attention. For years, she’d responded to her more as she would an eccentric aunt than a sister. They hadn’t lived under the same roof, eaten their daily meals together, or been involved in each other’s lives since they lived in Florida. When Lupita asked Ada how she was, her responses indicated that a sisterly chat was not forthcoming. Nothing new or Same as yesterday was the most she could expect. And occasionally, Ada would pretend she didn’t hear and simply walk away.
On Sunday morning, knowing Edgeweather was empty and her parents and Ada would be attending church together, Lupita told her mother she had a sour stomach and a terrible headache. Lupita rarely complained of being sick, so she knew she’d be believed. Once her family left, she raced out of the garage apartment and across the lawn. She didn’t bother putting clothes on, just pulled her bathrobe on over her pajamas and ran as fast as she could to the big house.
After unlocking the service entrance door, she noticed a quality about the house that felt different. She hesitated in the hall just off the door for a few minutes before going further in. She listened and smelled and waited but there was nothing she could identify, so she proceeded into the kitchen, out through the dining room and into the main foyer of the house. Again, a fleeting sense of something wrong, but she figured it had been so long since she’d been there, and also it was spring, so there would surely be some change reflected in the house. She went straight for Dana’s room. Though she knew no one was around, Lupita still trod gently on the stairs, her boots barely registering a sound as she pressed lightly with each step up the center staircase; at the wide landing where two cantilevered flights rose and turned from each side, she did not stop, just stealthily proceeded up to the left, and into the hall toward Dana’s bedroom. It was the most remote on the second floor, sitting above the ballroom and kitchen and facing out to the river between the fifth and last column. Lupita would be required to help with the beds and laundry this summer so she knew she’d be in and out of this room plenty of times before she left for Albertus Magnus in the fall, but with only five weeks left before graduating from high school and summer officially beginning she sensed this might be the last time she’d be here alone.