by Ann Tracy
“Hello there, Mr. Fisher,” he called cheerfully.
“Hello, Dwight. What did you think of the game?” said my father.
“Good game, Mr. Fisher.”
Dad went in. Dwight and I looked at each other. He seemed to have something on his mind.
“Good game!” I babbled. Was it contagious? Was this how birds felt, with nothing but “chickadeedeedee” to cover all ranges of courtship and emotion? Would we sing “goodgame” all night? Did I care? I’d sing it forever if this fool would just kiss me.
There was a silence. Dwight took my hands again, both of them. “Well,” he said softly, “I guess I’d better go.” The wind dropped and the stars were very still. He lifted my hands, a little uncertainly, to his shoulders, and I clasped them behind his neck.
“You might not believe this,” he said, “but I’m really kind of bashful.”
I nodded mutely. I felt I’d been given a solemn gift that I didn’t know how to acknowledge. There seemed to be no way to take that line of conversation further.
“Oh well,” he said. “I guess we all have our faults.”
“It’s not a fault!” I cried, feeling that I’d failed him. I needed to be older and wiser.
The world hung quiet on its axis for a moment while he put his arms around me and touched my lips with his. Their pressure was dry, warm, reassuring, a different thing altogether from being kissed by random, randy walkers-home. A civil convergence in love, not the Invasion of the Sucky Tongue that Slimed Chicago. I was shaken by a new and happier response. Perhaps I should count this as my first real kiss.
“Well, good night,” he said, unclasping me.
“Good night,” I whispered.
I knew, as I watched his retreating form, that I wasn’t going to write about this, or if I did I wasn’t going to hype it up, throw in flowers and butterflies and witty conversation. Real life, right here at the back door beside the trash can, here in the scouring drifts, here with nervous chattering of basketball, was enough. The gods visited even people like me.
I floated through the back door, not sure whether I didn’t feel the floor because I was walking on air or because my feet were numb. I wasn’t eager to talk, but I was too high to be cranky.
“Good game?” my mother asked, grinning.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Know who won?”
I wanted to crow “I did” and she’d have loved that, but I couldn’t, it was too private.
“I guess the other guys did,” I said, remembering not the game but Dwight’s conversation. She smiled yet more broadly.
“I was going to bring you an extra muffler pretty soon,” she said. How did a straight kid like me get such a wise-ass mother?
As soon as I could, I went up to my room. No need to steel-wool my teeth this time. I’d never forget the date, but I wanted to write it down and look at it. January 10, 1958. I sat and smiled to myself and knew then what I wished I’d said to Dwight. I wished I’d said, “You certainly are bashful; I thought you’d never kiss me!”
Did that mean that already I was older and wiser?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Dwight’s amazing kiss did not lead to any further revelations in the week of anxiety that followed. Indeed, he had never seemed farther from me. By the light of that one kiss I tried to penetrate the murk of subsequent goings on and make sense of them. Dwight seemed almost to be avoiding me, to find reasons to leave a room when I came in.
Was he sorry he’d opened up as much as he had?
Was I, myself, a crummy kisser?
Had I failed him by having no reply to his admission of shyness?
Was this odd week a further manifestation of that shyness?
Had he turned to somebody else?
Had I done something wrong—(1) been too forward? (2) been too backward?
Worst, there was a kind of superstition current among us that a boy could tell how you felt about him from kissing you. If he had really found that out, my intensity might have scared him away. Conversely, not knowing the secret language of the lips, I might have sent some misleading signal—perhaps my tissues had told his that I did not love him. How could I tell? It was beyond me, the whole complicated thing, and I couldn’t see a thing to do but be as nice as I could and wait.
I spent the week in misgivings and daydreamings, hair-triggered to give Dwight pieces of my notebook paper for his assignments, pass in his essays, snatch his dropped pencils from the floor. But I had some hope for Friday, for once again there was a basketball game and perhaps, given the same circumstances, the magic would repeat itself. Maybe he had just been preoccupied with getting ads for the yearbook. We’d see.
Friday morning I woke up filled with a kind of tentative good cheer, and I dressed with particular care in my straight gray-and-brown plaid skirt (my parents said it looked like a horse blanket, but it was fashionable) and a light gray crewneck sweater. I planned to be ready if fortune favored me. The sky was wearing gray as well, but I ignored it. Dwight’s kiss still gave me hope. The school paper was coming out and I’d done the cover (giant snowflakes), and surely, surely, that basketball game would prove lucky.
By the end of morning chapel, when we sang “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” I felt in love not only with Dwight but with the entire student body and the faculty as well. I could probably have flown upstairs under my own power, but I didn’t like to be different. “Thee,” I’m afraid, had stopped being God and started being Dwight, ambling upstairs in his new Pendleton shirt. How could a somewhat melancholy song so contribute to my happiness? “When this feeble life is o’er/Time for me will be no more.…” But this feeble life was prospering, thank you, and for now I had time, lots of it. Time to straighten things out with Dwight, time to fill my hope chest, time to grow and change and learn.
Love attacks have their disadvantages. I spent most of the day fighting down impulses. The impulse to kiss Dwight’s tired-looking eyes in Solid Geometry. The impulse to turn around and study him in study hall. The impulse to tell the truth in my French essay about what I hoped to accomplish by the age of thirty years. I was saved from that indiscretion only by not being able to remember whether the verb for marrying was reflexive. I distracted myself for a while by memorizing “Stone Walls do Not a Prison Make” for future consolation when things got trappy at home. I also spent some time writing Dwight’s name on a secret page in my notebook that had previously been devoted to writing variations of “Louisa Fisher PH.D., Dr. L. Fisher.” It was not one of your faster days.
After school I stopped by the dorm to pick up the senior picture that Sabra had for me and retired to the privacy of my room to read what she’d written on it. If you really liked a person, you wrote on the back of the photo real pledges of gratitude and affection, not just the casual “It’s been good going to school with you, A.F.A. Clyde” that you got on the open folder. Sabra’s remarks were gratifying in the extreme, and I lingered to pop her photo into a new frame, so the edges wouldn’t curl. Out my east window I saw Dwight and three other boys come out of the restaurant and climb into a waiting car. He was wearing a leather jacket and eating a hamburger, and I thanked God briefly that he had these pleasures, as well as adding a petition that he be back in time for the basketball game. I did not ask for any particular developments. If my religion was slightly offhanded in this period of intense worldly distractions, at least I knew the etiquette.
And speaking of God, I had promised my mother to help set up tables for a church supper that night, so I rode down with her and began to sort out plates—a pile with clovers, a pile with wheat, a plain pile, a pile of odds and ends. The church was freezing cold, the dankness of my bedroom with an exponent of 100, and the cheap silverware numbed my fingers. The china was better handled with gloves. Unless the furnace picked up more swiftly than I expected, this would be like eating Jello salad in a tomb. Not that I expected to eat much, what with nervousness about the basketball game and Dwight. After a while my mother asked if I
’d mind walking home and getting her a sweater, and I was glad of the chance to get out. I didn’t hurry much.
I noticed as I walked home that last week’s snow was gone except for a few grubby patches beside the road. The road itself looked slick, and ice was beginning to skin over the puddles. But there, to my joy, was Viv, coming out of the restaurant.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, delighted.
“What are you doing yourself?” she snapped.
“I live here,” I said, not at all out of humor. “Can’t your father come, or what?”
“He’s going to be pretty late,” she said. “Bad roads.”
“You might as well keep me company at the church supper, then,” I said, “and we can go to the basketball game afterwards.”
When she agreed, my spirits went up about fifty degrees. Dinner would be tolerable after all, and I thought it lucky to repeat as many circumstances as possible of last week’s game. Viv had been beside me at that.
Of course I was impatient through dinner anyway, but Viv’s companionship made it possible to slip out early. We got a ride with the principal’s son Jimmy, whom we liked. His car slid back and forth across the street.
“I told you he was a wild driver,” I said to Viv.
Jimmy grinned, flattered.
“There’s Marc,” said Viv. “I thought he was out sick today. I guess there’s no cure like 3:15.”
We laughed at this.
We were to stop by Viv’s room first, and afterwards we’d go to my house so I could get ready—brush my hair, put on fresh lipstick, change to my newer, darker gray sweater. In the dorm, a freshman girl was crying on the first floor landing.
“What ails her?” I whispered to Viv when we were past her.
“She and her roommate were going to split up; I guess they’ve done it,” she said.
I sat on Sabra’s bed while Viv brushed her hair. Someone else ran past the room in tears.
“My gosh,” I said, “it sure is wet here tonight.”
“I think she’s been fighting with her boyfriend,” said Viv.
When the third girl we saw was also crying, Viv and I began to giggle. We couldn’t help it. But the third girl was a friend, so we felt obliged to follow her and ask what was wrong.
Her reply jerked us around a major corner in our lives and left us gasping on the other side: “Spence and them were in an accident, and Dwight Brown was killed.”
I found that I had sat down rather suddenly on the corner of her bed. I wasn’t sure what had happened to Viv, though I remembered her crying out and putting her hands over her face; I was sucked into darkness like quicksand and fighting for air. I have since heard others speak of the shortness of breath that accompanies, like a foreshadowing of your own end, the first news that some beloved contemporary has died. I felt that, and the hot, heavy hand that seems to press you down—Atropos, Nemesis, Pluto. Somewhere something is jeering: you thought you were immune? And you lie, “No no, I didn’t, let me up!” It’s a lie because you never really knew. Some time passed.
“Come on, Fish, we’ll go downstairs,” Viv said. She sounded about fifty years old. We two were dry and despairing amid the showers of tears around us. We sat on the couch in the girls’ lounge, and people came in and out and some stayed, but nobody turned on the lights. When we had heard the news repeated too often, seen too many girls collapse into corners or up against walls, sobbing, stared too long at the black window, we went outdoors.
It was not better there, only colder and windier. We met some boys who knew details; details were not comforting. Dwight had died while we sat at that dull supper, planning for things that wouldn’t happen. Who would have guessed that people broke so easily? Viv was comforting, though. She was as stalwart and tactful and patient as if I’d ever confessed to her how I felt. Too bad I didn’t know what I wanted or where I wanted to go, for Viv would have managed it somehow, but all things were alike indifferent. We looked at our watches. It was seven-thirty. Only seven-thirty! That meant we had a lot of night to get through, as well as a lot of life left to be endured. There was one desolate moment when Mrs. Judson came into the dorm to get a candy bar for her youngest child, who was upset and couldn’t sleep; we saw too clearly the ineffectiveness of a candy bar ever to fix the states of mind we’d grown into now.
We spotted Marc in the restaurant, on one of our prowls past. “Do you want to go in?” Viv asked.
“Okay,” I said, “I don’t care.” And we found ourselves with Marc in the booth where only weeks ago we’d sat with Dwight and Sabra and Jewell. Marc’s face, never expressive, had gone blank as stone. I watched his long fingers play with his coffee cup. After a while some younger kids came in. “Who’s got change for a quarter?” one girl kept yelling. I thought, “If she plays ‘Special Angel’ that’s it, I’ll die. So much for the stiff upper lip,” but nobody, not even the owner, gave her change. We left right after that.
“I really had change,” I said.
“So did I,” said Viv and Marc.
We walked up and down that empty street in that empty town and thought about the empty world. We said things like, “It doesn’t seem possible” and “It’s so hard to believe” and “Dwight of all people!” I guess mourners have said things like that for a thousand years—“Dwyght, of alle peple”—and it’s probably never helped. Certainly it didn’t help us.
“It will be bad Monday,” said Marc at last.
“And Tuesday,” I added dismally.
“It’ll be bad for a long time and we’d just better get used to it,” said Viv.
Forever, I thought. Bad forever.
All evening we wandered and grouped and regrouped and separated again, blundering together for comfort, not finding much. But we couldn’t think of anything better. We looked at each other’s sad eyes and straight faces and found nothing there but a blank grief to match our own. In the end we went back to the restaurant.
“Fish,” said Viv, “I think you should go home. You have to go sometime.”
“I don’t want to,” I said. “My mother will say something.” Not even I knew what I meant by “something,” but my wound was raw and private and I couldn’t bear for a kind adult word to touch it. Our shock would be old news to them. This was not their affair.
“Want me to go talk to her?” she said. I nodded and she did.
Dear Viv, I’ve never known what she said, but my mother, when I came home, never made a sign that this wasn’t an ordinary night, except that she didn’t joke.
I felt then that a piece of me had left home already. And I knew, further, that some day I’d really go away. Because everyone does.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Dwight’s death brought a hundred new experiences, mostly horrible, in its train. For instance, getting up the next morning, putting my feet on the icy floor and standing up to face a day empty of possibility. Downstairs there would be sneaky glances of concern, the newspaper headlines, announcements on the morning news, the unthinkable effort of eating a piece of toast so I’d qualify as healthy and be permitted to go out, out, to walk the road. It was a different world from the one I’d waked up to yesterday.
At the end of my driveway, at mid morning, I found Willard Jewell, who had hitchhiked back to school as soon as he’d heard. He had on a pair of dress shoes that I’d never seen on him before, and a topcoat. His feet had blistered on the way. He had no jokes to make, and if Viv had sounded fifty, he looked about sixty-five with his white face and red eyes. He poked at a pile of dirty snow with the toe of his black shoe.
“Well,” he said finally, “Dwight’s gone and there’s nothing we can say will bring him back.”
I nodded. Jewell and I, both in our own ways addicted to language, had run out of puns and metaphors.
What can be said about such a day? It was long, it hurt, and as we had done the night before, those of us left in town paced and sought comfort in odd places. For a while I went to the dorm and helped some other girls paint
the faculty lounge, but I couldn’t keep my mind on it. The teachers sang and danced up and down the corridor, a bizarre and touching effort to cheer us up, but who could get interested? Once after dark I walked past the restaurant and saw Dwight, clear as day, standing and playing the pinball machine, wearing his Pendleton shirt. Nobody had told me I’d hallucinate. But yes, by all means, better a mirage than nothing, though it was too keen a reminder of what I’d never really see. And as Jewell remarked later, there was nothing we could talk about that didn’t remind us of Dwight, who had been part of everything.
I was desperate to go to the funeral, to see the last moment of the last bit of Dwight, and rather to my dulled surprise my father agreed to drive me down to it, seventy-five miles away in a little town on the coast. I would have preferred to go with my friends, but I was in no position to argue.
The coast doesn’t get as much snow as the rest of the state, but in winter it’s gray and frozen and windy. It doesn’t look like a place where resurrection is possible. I didn’t say much on the way down, I guess, just stared into the black-and-white lap of my best Jonathan Logan dress, thankful I hadn’t bought red. I’d even cut the bow off the neck to make it plainer. All the same I couldn’t help taking some interest in where Dwight had come from, a place made sacred by his retroactive presence. And I would get a peep at his family, perhaps. I stared at every cemetery we passed. Was that the one where Dwight would lie? Was it good enough for him? Could I, older and mobile, find it again and bring flowers?
The church was almost full when we got there. This episode of pain had nearly started without me. My father sat in the back and let me go down front to find a space beside friends, but there was no room with Viv and Sabra, so I sat beside some other people I knew and stared at the bank of flowers. And yes, briefly at Dwight, who lay there like a grotesque centerpiece: the open coffin had been draped with pink gauze to soften the stitched-together puzzle of his face, but all it blurred was his identity. He looked very flat and serious. His sparkle had gone to wherever sparkles go.