What Do Cowboys Like?

by Ann Tracy

  Her heart dancing a mazurka against her white silk dress, she bowed her head in unaccustomed submission. His hands burned into her skin. “He is a part of me,” she thought.

  “It’s a circle now,” he said. “Circles mean perfection, and they never end, like our love. Never in this world or the next. We’ll haunt each other.”

  “I hope so,” Lucilla said.

  CHAPTER NINE

  When Christmas vacation came, it was a wrench to be separated from all the people who mattered most to me right then, but the emotional rest was not altogether unwelcome. Of course, there are limits to how much rest a person wants. With the school shut, my home town was a bleak and empty place. Public Christmas decorations consisted of one string of colored lights from the post office to the phone pole across the street. It swung and lashed in the snow-laden wind, and now and then a bulb broke. One year the town had a small, lighted tree on the roof of the post office porch, but it blew down so often that they never tried it again. Funny, I hadn’t noticed the wind and snow and bleakness so much when the other kids were around.

  As you might imagine, the post office was the focus not only of town decorations but also of my hopes and longings. The mail came twice a day, around eight in the morning and four in the afternoon. That meant that my folks had already brought home the earlier lot, along with the newspaper, when I got up, and my first act was to scan the kitchen table for envelopes addressed to me. I usually volunteered to go for the afternoon mail, an experience so intense that sometimes I still dream I’m standing there, peering into our box. Usually so little mail came in the afternoon that my mother said it wasn’t worth crossing the street for, but she wasn’t seventeen (which I was now, almost). I watched for Christmas cards from my special friends the way I used to watch for ones with glitter when I was little. Every year I saved the most emotionally crucial half dozen in an envelope in my bottom bureau drawer.

  This year I got one from Dwight, a new experience despite our several years of friendship. Holly, candles—your generic Christmas card, except that inside there was his dear, distinctive signature, “Dwight Brown.” Not “Love, Dwight,” but then, I’d sent him a card and I hadn’t signed it “Love, Fish” either. I spent some time in fruitless speculation about whether he’d had my card before he sent his, whether he was just responding or would have sent one anyway. There was no way to know. Never mind, I had it.

  Christmas was one time I didn’t really itch to leave home, though still the vision persisted of shapelier trees than ours, city lights, silver bells, and Dickensian geese and plum puddings. But we were all of us pursuing a halting version of the same vision, I suppose, and we had our traditions.

  A week or two before Christmas we’d put up our tree, and local custom decreed its coming down on the 26th; that usually happened before I was out of bed, and I’d wake up to find Christmas gone. It was a clean end. One year the Judsons actually got a tree shaped like the ones on the cards and I was astounded; I guess I’d thought they were some kind of trick photography. Ours were often oddly shaped—we suspected Dad of cutting down the first tree he came to—and once, but once only, we had a tree larger at the top than the bottom, very disorienting. But they smelled good, and the decorations were all old friends—the pink ball painted with water lilies that had been on my mother’s first tree, the fuzzy candy cane given to me one surprising day by the town hooker, Santa’s head made out of an egg by an artistic family friend, the plain balls and the striped ones, the bubble lights (we all liked the purple one best), the mangy strings of tinsel. Our icicles went on in clumps, for we usually forgot to buy them, had to drive to the next town when we remembered, and at last got bored and threw them. Mom and Herbie and I trimmed the tree. Dad sat in his chair and watched. He’d done his bit.

  Over the years Herbie and I had reached a truce with our incompatible Christmas personalities. When I was little I was up every half hour all night, wanting to know if Santa had come. Herbie wanted to put on his shoes and have his oatmeal before he looked in his stocking. He must have been easier, but his was a minority attitude. One year when he was very young he’d stopped in the middle of his presents and said he guessed he’d save the rest. “You open!” we all snarled at him. He sighed and went on.

  I had some good memories of loving gestures. Once my father took his boot and made a big sooty Santa Claus footprint on the hearth. Once during the war, before Herbie was born, when sugar was rationed and you couldn’t buy candy canes, my mother and grandmother had made them for me, or tried to; I can still see that candy cane, pale pink and white, wilting over the side of the stocking.

  We still hung stockings, even though I was old for it—red skating socks. They lent a pleasant taste of festivity while Dad went to get my grandparents. When they came, we had our presents. It was a time in my life when I was getting clothes, jewelry, coveted books, occasionally an animal for my bed, and I was so attuned to all those things that I could almost taste them. Herbie and I each had a card table that we could put our things on, a ploy devised when we were younger, I guess, to keep them off the floor.

  Under the tree I had silverware-shaped boxes from Viv and Sabra, gift-wrapped in the distinctive style of the best jewelry shop in fifty miles. Their thick polished paper and dense little pre-fab bows always made Christmas more glamorous. My freshman year I’d had a box from there with a really good bracelet, a gold chain with half a dozen semiprecious polished stones hanging from it: lapis lazuli, goldstone, malachite, and so on. A pretty thing, and I had secretly studied it and chosen a stone for each of the people I loved that year, so that I carried them with me on my wrist and could count them. I would have made a good Victorian, all covered with hair brooches.

  I had excellent presents this year, a dark gray crewneck sweater, a Ouija board, two hard-cover volumes of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poems. My grandmother had bought me the most alluring thing I’d ever had to sleep in, yellow nylon baby-doll pajamas, the short top and panties ruffly and transparent and shiny, the height of frivolous fashion, and the kind of thing my mother and even the sales clerks had said I could have when I got married. Why should she wait, my grandmother said. Ha ha, Mom. There were other things, a Roget’s Thesaurus, more clothes, a fun bracelet with a strip of mink wound through the links. I remember being happy.

  Being happy at home, I should add, didn’t have any serious effect on my long-term longing to be out of there. The two feelings just existed side by side in my head. I don’t think it was entirely clear to me that I’d have to leave one happiness to have the other. I couldn’t imagine me not at home, though I could readily imagine me bopping down the streets of Manhattan, two simultaneous lives.

  After Christmas I tried to make some progress on my novel. This was beginning to be difficult because of the cold. Our upstairs wasn’t heated. Most local second stories weren’t, partly at least because the homeowners had grown up with clammy bedrooms and preferred them. There was one furnace vent in the hall, a sensuous pleasure to stand over on the way back from the bathroom, letting the hot air blow up inside one’s flannel nightgown. Sometimes, if we were feeling frail, we took hot water bottles to bed, touching our feet to the boiling-hot rubber and snatching them off again, but chilly, slightly damp-feeling sheets were the norm. If I wanted privacy with a friend, we just left our jackets on and went up and sat on the bed and talked.

  But authors who compose in freezing garrets do not occupy garrets over their mothers’ houses, for mothers seem to worry about people who want to sit in the cold and the damp by themselves. “If you’re working on something, bring it on down,” she’d advise. Sensible advice, but not possible. I found out I could stay up there about half an hour at a time before she began to worry about my health. Obviously night health and day health had different rules.

  So I alternated scenes of passion with thank-you notes, fine for writing at the kitchen table, and I read and sampled and got stylistic ideas. Sabra and Viv were only about forty miles away, but none of us
had our own cars and there was no public transport. I had two letters from Sabra, written in brown ink in reply to my green ink. Viv was no letter writer. I’d get about one note a summer in her square, lucid writing. I could hear her voice in my mind—“Well, my lord, Fish, if I had anything I needed to say I could call you, couldn’t I?”

  I could have been two hundred, five hundred miles away from them, once the school closed and my world shut down. When I looked out at the girls’ dorm, its windows were black. Dwight was on hold. I was saving my gray sweater for school, my yellow pajamas for summer. The Millay I read and fairly wallowed in, longing for the Greenwich Village of my dreams, but not with the sharp-edged restlessness of my summers.

  Of course the love poems were potent—“Women have loved before as I love now”—though an awful lot of them seemed to involve going to bed with people, even lots of people. I picked and chose. But in any case, Millay’s poems about sex weren’t gross. She kept talking about people’s arms. I could relate to arms. “When treacherous queens, with death upon the tread,/Heedless and wilful, took their knights to bed” was a far cry from “Get it up cowboys.”

  The poems about nature and longing and death made sense to me. Nature always took me out of myself, and I knew about longing for sure. As for death, didn’t I worry about it every time my friends went home on a stormy day? But for me the best poems were the New York ones, the poems about a free and bohemian life. “We were very tired, we were very merry—/We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.” Can you grasp it? Nobody was making those people pack it in for the night. Nobody was asking them why for goodness’ sake they wanted to go back and forth all night on the ferry, or whether they needed their sweaters, or how they thought they were going to stay awake the next day. They just rode and giggled all night until the sun came up, and there they were, those friends, still together. I could taste freedom, reading it. I must have read that poem about fifty times. One snowy night the Staten Island Ferry got mixed up in my dreams with Dwight’s father’s lobstering boat, and Dwight and I rode back and forth in the canals of Venice, holding hands. I think he was going to kiss me just as I woke up.

  That vacation was a time of peace and pleasantness, watching “The Honeymooners” and “I Love Lucy,” playing cribbage at the kitchen table with my father, tormenting Herbie, sleeping late in my body-warmed sheets and waking to the smell of my mother’s molasses cookies. But I must admit that when, on the night before classes began, the dorm windows began to light up, when I could see Viv and Sabra’s silhouettes behind their drawn shades, back safe and sound, I was one happy person. I couldn’t know about Dwight yet, of course, but it seemed reasonable to assume that he too was back in one piece. Every time a window lighted up, a little candle inside me lighted with joy, and when I went to sleep in full blaze it felt like Christmas Eve all over again.

  CHAPTER TEN

  In all these weeks I’d been in love with Dwight, we hadn’t touched each other much. A few quick, comradely hugs, a little leaning together, a hand-squeeze or two—that was it. While there was no certainty that Dwight loved me, he did seem fond of me; and then, I hadn’t told him how I felt either, had I? Up to a point I appreciated this restraint and admired it, but, as I said of restfulness over vacation, there’s a limit to how much non-activity a person wants. The fact is, I was beginning to feel painfully unkissed, though I was far from being an across-the-board kissing enthusiast.

  You can talk about young love all you want, but if you’re honest you’ll admit that high school is not peak time for skilled kissing. And what teenage Casanovas lack in finesse they try to make up in vigor. I had been walked home by a number of boys and had some basis for generalization. Oh, those wrestlings at the back door, me holding my breath and shutting my eyes until the kiss was over and whoever-it-was had reeled his endless, wet tongue back into his own mouth. And yet those sticky, salivary sessions on the doorstep seemed an unavoidable part of life, one of the things a girl had to accept gracefully, like menstrual cramps and panty girdles; the fifties were a big time for female acceptance.

  “You’ve got to climb right back on the horse after you’ve been thrown,” I’d tell myself as I walked up the drive with somebody else, knowing what would probably happen and remembering the last time. I meant to be a good sport. A year or two earlier I hadn’t even been able to wait to get in the house before I wiped off my tongue. As soon as the boy was gone down the driveway I’d duck around the corner and try to spit away the sensation of being gagged with a wet dishcloth, hoping all the same that somebody or other would walk me home next time. Wet dishcloth doesn’t quite capture the sensation, it’s not slippery enough, but it’s symbolically appropriate, because girls who took to these things too smoothly were likely to find themselves chained to a dishpan for the next fifty years.

  That was another thing I had some misgivings about: marriage. It seemed to be full of things I didn’t like to do. Domestic things, I mean.

  “I hate ironing,” I’d say.

  “Get used to it. You’ll have to iron day and night when you’re married.” That’s my mother, or a neighbor, or any woman a generation or two older than I.

  “Then I don’t want to get married,” I’d say.

  “Why of course you want to get married!” the woman would say, shocked. “You’ll love it!”

  Anyway, to get back to kissing, I worked hard at mind control and after a while I didn’t have to spit before I went in the house. I could just hold my breath and go straight for my toothbrush. Now that I was a senior, I could quite often say hello to my parents on the way to the bathroom.

  Bearing all this in mind, can you imagine how much I loved Dwight if kissing even entered my imagination as a desirable thing to do? I’d find myself sneaking looks at his lips during math, wondering what it would be like, wanting the contact.

  Then, one night early in the new year, I went to a basketball game. I don’t know now whom we played against, and I hardly knew then, for Viv and Sabra had not gone home for the weekend and the three of us sat on the bleachers behind the boys, and while the rest of the world studied lay-ups and foul shots, I studied the back of Dwight. The darkness of his hair, how it lay, the set of his neck on his shoulders, the tilt of his ears. I’d never had a chance like this before. We all bantered and joked between moments of athletic suspense, and once Dwight leaned back and I had the sweet weight of him against my knees. I put my hands on his shoulders briefly.

  “You have some nice bumps on the back of your head, Dwight,” I said.

  “Don’t look at my head!” he said, blushing.

  “Don’t you know about phrenology?” I asked craftily.

  Practical Viv began to sputter at my foolishness, but Sabra gave her a poke and she caught on. Sabra could always spot a line.

  In fact, I knew very little about phrenology myself. “Well,” I said, “everyone has bumps on his head, and people used to think you could tell personality stuff from it, like the memory section sticks up a lot or a little, or you’re hot-tempered, or sneaky.”

  “I’m sneaky,” Dwight said dreamily, watching the game.

  “Doesn’t look to me like there’s any sneakiness bump,” I said, seizing the excuse I’d been waiting for and running my finger down the back of his head.

  “I’m so sneaky I hide the bump,” he joked, but I was too shaken by touching his hair to banter back. I was used to girls’ hair, I guess, to my own hair, to the far ends of it that I put curlers on. Dwight’s was so close to his head, felt so warm and lived-in, that it seemed to have its own pulse.

  “What’s that bump on your head, Jewell?” said Sabra, pointing to it.

  “Why that’s my mathematical bump,” said Willard. “Coach bashed me there with an algebra book in study hall.”

  We all milled around a bit after the game was over, and I lost sight of Dwight. I didn’t want to leave alone if there was any chance of his walking me home, so I tied and retied my shoes, wound and rewound my scarf, blew
my nose—in short, delayed. Ah, he was talking to one of the players. Would he never stop?

  But at last my diversionary tactics worked and he was at my elbow. “I had to talk to Spence,” he said. “He was feeling bad about that foul shot. I’m glad you waited. I’ll walk you home.”

  See that? He knew what I was doing and it was okay. That’s how comfortable it was to be with Dwight.

  The night was cold and windy, but not so bitter that we had to hurry, and we strolled home over the squeaky snow hand in hand. Lilac season at Kew be damned. Next time I’d find an excuse to take my mitten off. I really began to feel that there might be a next time.

  “The moon is full,” I suggested. But Dwight, being neither romantic nor werewolf, did not fall upon me at the news.

  “Yes, it is,” he agreed in his pure, earnest way.

  We didn’t say much after that. We picked our way through the snow of the driveway, drawing nearer and nearer the back doorstep, where one got kissed or, as the case might be, didn’t. Would he? Would there ever be a better night? I was too tense to speak. Sometimes I climbed up a step to be at kissing level with the boys who walked me home, but Dwight and I were about the same size. At the steps we paused, I with my back to the door, Dwight facing me. He still held my hand.

  “Well, it was a good game,” he said.

  “Yes, it was,” I said. Lying. I hadn’t watched the game. Good phrenological bumps, Dwight.

  “Even if we didn’t win,” he added.

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t know how we’d do, but we played pretty well. It was close.”

  “Close games are more exciting,” I ventured. (Play close games with me, Dwight!)

  “Too bad we lost, though.”

  “Yes. That was too bad.”

  There came my father up the driveway. He’d been at the game too. I dug my gradually freezing toes into the doorstep. I wasn’t going in yet. Dwight dropped my hand.