by Ann Tracy
What Do Cowboys Like?
Ann B. Tracy
New York
CHAPTER ONE
I don’t want you to think that I’d never been in love before. It was just that this time it all seemed so much more possible.
My last attack of love (a year and a half earlier, when I was fifteen) had clocked an 8 on the Richter scale but only about an 0.2 on the Possibility scale. However, what being in love with Ray Bradeen, who was too old to notice me much and was dating my senior friend Jillian besides, lacked in possibilities, it made up for in obsession. Mainly I was fixated on his name and spent the spring of 1956 stealthily covering up words and pieces of words—the “Bradbury” on a Ray Bradbury book jacket, the “O-Vac” on my Ray-O-Vac flashlight—to produce tiny declarations all over the house, little hurrays for love. The only other thing I did about this non-affair was paint a picture of a skinny brunette girl, me, Louisa Fisher, in a bedroom walled with books, drooping melancholy on the windowsill while a couple who look a lot like Ray and Jillian walk past, hand in hand. (“Hello,” the girl is calling silently; “Turn your gorgeous face to my window and rescue me from Dickens and Charlotte Brontë and the Book-of-the-Month Club. I could be a princess!”)
The organdy curtains were the most technically impressive feature of the painting, I thought; you could see right through them. My mother, who could usually see right through me, did not hesitate to point out other resemblances to real life. “Nice picture of Ray and Jillian,” she said, smirking. “And I suppose that’s meant to be you?” I left the room.
I don’t remember how I slid into that obsession with Ray, but my more possible love just sort of dawned on me all at once, as though it had perhaps been getting ready for a while and I hadn’t noticed it. Maybe it had been, because Dwight Brown and I had been friends for three years (he was a boarder, I a day student), ran with the same crowd, and plain out liked each other. I thought that was all. Maybe he hadn’t registered as romantic because he was only my own age, or only my own height (short), or somewhat less suave than Rhett Butler (I’d read Gone With the Wind more than once), though quite a lot nicer. His being a boarder lent him a certain glamour, though. In a little town like ours, anyone or anything from AWAY was valuable for its assurance that the world really reached beyond what we could see: one general store, two churches, a restaurant, fifty million trees, and a big sky—not enough to satisfy the spirit of adventure. The names of other students’ towns, no matter that they might be as wanting as our own, had a kind of music. Stetson, Stillwater, Sedgwick, Easton, Solon, Winslow, Ilseboro, Jackman. Sweet elsewhere.
So there I was, walking down the sidewalk past the school on a Saturday morning, watching the leaves zag down, and sucking up the cold Maine air, and there before me was Dwight, nailing a football rally sign to a telephone pole. All of a sudden I was so glad to see him that I wanted to yell and sing and chase the leaves over the rooftops. I compacted this new and alarming impulse into one subtle hop that I figured he wouldn’t notice.
“Hi, Dwight,” I said, staring straight into those cerulean blue eyes, glad my slacks were pressed. Original stuff.
“Hi. Fish,” he said. “I’m nailing up this poster.”
“It’s a nice one,” I said, stunned by love, basking in his smile. “Did you make it yourself?”
“Oh well, thanks,” he said, blushing a little, “but you’re the real artist.”
“Aw,” I said, more eloquent by the minute.
How could we both be so shuffle-footed and tongue-tied when my heart seemed to be trying flips and barrel rolls with its new wings? Life and literature were parting company fast. I could imagine it, my golden moment, preserved in a ballad:
There was a maiden loved a lad
Was nailing up a poster;
“Young man,” quoth she, “did you
make it yourself?”
Shuffle, Blush, Shuffle,
“It’s a very nice one!”
Hey nonny, terrific.
But of course it really was terrific, though I joked about it, one of life’s milestone mornings.
Dwight’s nail was nailed. I stood there a minute longer, staring hard at the poster, trying to nail the moment too. Dwight shuffled a little longer and then he left. I didn’t mind being alone, though, because I wanted to get acquainted with my new state. “Dwight, Dwight, Dwight,” my acrobatic heart caroled as I danced to the post office, blessing the unmailed letters without which this amazing revelation might never have happened. “How strange,” I said to myself over and over, “that suddenly after three years you should be in love with Dwight Brown, but how perfectly right.”
Dwight, of course, was still gone when I came back, but his poster was there and I memorized every line he’d drawn (a Canterbury Academy knight sinking, with his lance, a battleship full of the other football team), straining to discover the hieroglyphics of love. Even the sight of the telephone pole had a certain sentimental impact. I touched its splintery gray surface with a furtive and loving hand. Sun warmed, it seemed to arch its back under my touch. I leaned against it and pretended to shake a pebble out of my loafer. I would have liked to linger on that spot, but at sixteen you never hear the last of a pole fetish.
Bound for my room now, I sailed past my father, who was raking and offered to share the fun (“Thanks, Dad, but I wouldn’t want to horn in”), past my mother, who forgave me for forgetting her stamped postcards but looked at me with too much speculation (“No, honestly, Mom, nobody special”), past my little brother Herbie, who was making poison crystals in a saucepan (“We cook food in that, Lamebrain”). All three were bathed in the spillover of love and looked unusually huggable, but I wanted solitude, with nobody looking into my eyes to surprise my secret. The peace of my own place began to touch me as soon as I started up the front stairs into the quiet, sunny landing that led to the front of the house.
As always, my room was as soothing as Noxema on a sunburn, a thick, cool, second skin that kept me safe. There if I wasted time dreaming, as I often did, nobody noticed. There if I sketched, no kindly interest looked over my shoulder. There if I wept, nobody saw my face. I didn’t know how people with no private space survived the vulnerability of adolescence; perhaps they used other kinds of walls. One friend told me that her diabolical parents, instead of sending her to her room, forbade her to go to it, forced her to stand all unshelled in the fire of a family quarrel.
My room told me, if I was in danger of forgetting, who I was or wanted to be. The walls were papered with birch trees on a white background (“Hall paper, but suit yourself,” my mother had said) and the woodwork was not white, as it was everywhere else in the house, but pale green. These aberrations proved that I had elbowed myself some space, had an impact on environment. My chenille bedspread was cherry red, a bold stroke with the green and white. Objects were carefully, though perhaps not tidily, arranged to make a statement. Some of the statement was not altogether true. For instance, there was a tennis racket and a can of balls in the corner, though I rarely played tennis, and then not well. But I had not yet gotten past thinking of myself as someone who did. And I had them ready for what I can only describe as the invisible Life Inspector, that unknown observer who might suddenly pop up and interview me for Time or make notes towards a biography, and look favorably upon the well-roundedness of a tennis racket. I really did use the box of oil paints under the window, and the bookcase was, except for the bed, the most important object in the room.
A lot of the books were my own, an odd assortment bought with hoarded allowances—Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, A Time to Love and a Time to Die, Peyton Place. Other favorites had been abducted from the family collection. On top of the bookcase, pictures of my friends sat
like icons, telling the Life Inspector and me what I loved most. Viv and Sabra, my dearest and best. Jillian, who’d graduated and now wrote scrawly, thought-provoking letters from the University of Maine. Bonnie, whose parents had carried her away to Kansas.
I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling fixture. Dwight. I invited the thought of him into my sanctuary and reviewed past kindnesses. That night in our freshman spring when the trees were green as glass outside the window and I was wearing my black skirt with the gondolas on it; we were practicing for public speaking and he’d bought me a popsicle from the study hall vendor. The French II test when I’d panicked and cried, “I can’t remember the word for lost” and he’d said out loud, “It’s the name of a university, Fish,” and started singing the Purdue song and taken his scolding. And how he had lingered, how we both had lingered, over the embraces required of our characters in the Junior play. Why hadn’t I known then that I loved him? It had all been building up like the iceberg that took the unsinkable Titanic. And though I was not willing to ski downhill or take my feet off the bottom of the lake to swim, I planned to yield myself to the glittering iceberg force of love and plunge below the surface to see the marvels of the deep. Though of course it hadn’t worked out too well for the Titanic. Perhaps a different image.
I turned my head to the right. Through my eastern windows, from which I could see the horizon covered now with trees like flame, I was accustomed to look with longing, thinking of the Atlantic washing up against the coast a hundred miles away, and beyond that Paris, Venice, the stuff of dreams. Today the horizon was enough. Just try to get me out of town.
Outside the third window, behind my head, the road ran south to Portland, Boston, New York, to art museums and bookstores and things happening. I yearned for the wonders of Harvard’s university museum, which my mother had told me about, its glass flowers and bottled babies. I wanted to drop my quarters in the slots of a New York Automat. I dreamed of a season in Greenwich Village. In summer, when all Canterbury’s boarding students had gone, the aching for experience could drive me night after night to pace and stare out the screen door south into the blackness. Not even the stars looked as far away as New York. The school blocked the horizon in that direction, but today the school was as far as I cared to look, for tonight the focus of all longing would lie there under those stars on his school cot.
I sighed with pleasure and fingered my dreams. What did I want? What could I get? Dwight had moved to the top of the list: I wanted him to love me back, and I wanted to know it for sure. I had liked the looks of his embarrassment, but that was not hard evidence. This fulfillment seemed possible, for loving him was already as sweet and soothing as a cashmere sweater. (A theoretical analogy—I didn’t have one.) I wanted, nay planned, to be valedictorian of my class, and to write a best-selling novel before I was twenty, while the reviewers would still call me a prodigy. I saw no problem there. My most cankering, though intermittent, desire was for freedom. I knew that I had a good life—a home that smelled of flowers and baking, new clothes twice a year, hardly any housework and only one sibling. But, oh, my parents hemmed me in with their very love, their interest. My father’s rules, my mother’s friendly curiosity. I wanted to be grown up and never again ask permission or hide my mail or dodge a question or guard new passion with averted eyes. I wanted out from under the good life. In that fall of my senior year, escape seemed not possible at all.
CHAPTER TWO
Of course I went to the rally that night. If Dwight’s poster, sentimental as I felt about it, had announced a picnic in hell I’d have been making sandwiches without mayonnaise so they wouldn’t spoil in the heat. More important, I figured I’d see him there, and then anything could happen. The stars were out. Everybody knows that romantic things happen in starlight, right? And to be honest, I would have gone to the rally anyway, because I was trying hard to be a passably normal teenager, and teenagers are known to like rallies. My friends seemed to like them well enough. I hadn’t so far gotten the hang of them, though. Maybe this one. The fact is, I was embarrassed by all the jumping and hollering, and doubly embarrassed because I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I deplored that release of animal spirits; I would, by preference, have sloughed my body like a snakeskin and walked as pure spirit. And yet there was no denying that I felt a social outcast because I couldn’t unlock my mouth and let out a partisan bellow. Life could be most unsatisfactory.
What’s worse, I really did love that school. It was the only thing of any importance in our town, and I’d waited all my life to be old enough to go to it. I would gladly have genuflected to it or sacrificed a heifer to it or maybe tattooed its initials on my forehead, but I just couldn’t holler about it, and that made me feel disloyal on top of everything else. However, guilt was one more push rallywards.
I didn’t rush over, though. I’d think of Dwight and itch to start, but then I’d think of the screaming crowd and read one more page of the Saturday Evening Post. When I finally slid into my jacket and headed out the side door, my mother winked at me. “Good hunting,” she said. Evidently I hadn’t gotten my face past her fast enough that afternoon. Brooding on the horrible accuracy of her perceptions, I skulked over the fallen leaves and frosty grass, willing myself invisible, sneaking up on the bonfire from the back, even my hands gone shy and hiding in my jacket pockets.
Too soon I came to the edge of the firelight, where I stood and peered at the savage forms leaping around the flames. Who would imagine that they had ever sat in rows and solved quadratic equations? I was sorry that Viv and Sabra were, as usual, away for the weekend. If they were with me they’d either yank me into the crowd or ease my loneliness by staying out of it themselves. They’d know how much hollering was enough and how to do it without looking like fools.
Finally I saw Dwight on the other side of the fire. He was throwing some broken boards onto the flames with a glad cry as the sparks went up. Dwight too could be normal without being silly. He hadn’t seen me yet. I was almost ready to sneak away again and forget it, but I still wanted him to know that I’d responded to the poster in some fashion, that I’d come because he urged it. I began to edge around the perimeter of the firelight, just casual drifting, one foot accidentally coming down a little farther to the right each time I moved it. Hiya, Dwight, here I come. I gabbled a little poetry to myself to steady my nerves and confirm my skill at something—“Ah distinctly I reMEMber it was in the bleak DeCEMber and each separate dying EMber wrought its ghost upon the floor. VAINLY I had sought to borrow from my books surcease of sorrow …”
“Hey, Fish,” Dwight’s voice said beside me. I jumped, beamed, felt a sense of safe harbor.
“Hey, Dwight,” I said, and dropped anchor.
“I didn’t see you here,” he said. (Aha, had he been looking?) “I thought maybe you hadn’t come.”
“Of course I came,” I said, “after that nice poster. I saw you. You were throwing some boards on.”
“Yeah?” he said. Was he wondering if I’d been looking for him too? He leaned companionably against my right shoulder. “It’s a pretty good fire,” he added, “if I do say so.”
“An excellent fire,” I agreed, thinking many thoughts and trying to express passion with the outer muscles of my upper arm alone.
We stood there for some tongue-tied and blissful moments, while the bloodthirsty shouts of our peers seemed to grow more harmonious. But that kind of in-between state can’t last. Either you have to talk or you have to fall into one another’s arms in earnest. Dwight straightened up. “What time is it?” he said. “I have to meet Spence at nine.” And with a quick one-armed shoulder hug he was off again into the darkness. Soon after that I went home, not because I minded the rally any longer, but because I’d had more or less what I’d come for. There was no point in staying.
My mother looked up when I came in. “Rally over already?” she asked.
“Pretty much,” I said, “and I got chilly.”
“Go take a hot bath and
rub your chest with Vicks,” she said. So I did. It was easier to do it than to argue.
I was more eager than ever for Monday, though that may sound perverse. I hadn’t seen Dwight again that weekend, except for a glimpse of him at church, where he sat on the far side of somebody bigger. But Mondays always brought my world back together, for they gave me the context I was good at, and better yet, they brought my sweet friends back safe from their weekends, their other lives.
Let me pause for a moment to tell you about Viv and Sabra, how cool and soft and clean they were, how able to rise to any occasion, how confident. Their sweaters and skirts never wrinkled, their hair was always shiny, their skins never broke out. They had romance covered. Viv had been dating the same boy for three years and was going to marry him. Sabra had dated dozens, and one summer had successfully gone steady with two boys at once, switching rings and pictures as one left and the other arrived. Viv was practical, blunt, cheeky, down-to-earth, but vulnerable. Sabra was unflappable, haloed with luck—obstacles melted from her path as she approached. “Butterfly,” “Honeycomb”—all the songs were about Sabra.
Viv and Sabra seemed to know, in those home-ridden 1950s, all about how to manage the households that they would surely have, for they had taken Home Economics along with their academic subjects, as I had not. It was at their suggestion that we three chose our silver patterns and gave one another spoons or forks or knives for Christmas and birthdays. (My hope chest so far contained two forks, a beach towel, and a Japanese nut bowl. I had never dared to ask about theirs.) Now and then they would grill me on domestic topics.
“Okay,” Sabra would say without preamble, “you just got married and had chicken for dinner. What will you make with the leftovers on the second night?”
In my eagerness to prove myself, it would never occur to me until afterwards how unlikely I was to cook on my wedding night. “Salad!” I’d say, “I’d give him chicken salad! Or maybe soup!”