by Susan Isaacs
“But I’m scared. What if Bobby—?”
“What if he what?”
“Tries something.”
“Tell him no.”
“How?”
“Just push his hand away and shake your finger at him and say ‘Uh-uh, Bobby Spurgeon. No way.’”
“I can’t say that. That’s what you would say. It’s cute. I stopped being cute seven inches ago.” She sighed and rubbed her palms together under the heat that poured from beneath the dashboard. Within seconds she was wringing her hands.
“Stop it! You always anticipate the worst. How many boys have you had crushes on? Come on! You keep liking this one and that one, but you’re always afraid to even smile. Live it up. Take a chance. It’s going to be fine, and by midnight tomorrow Bobby Spurgeon will be madly in love with you.”
One night, the week before Noble Hearts had been cast, she’d slept over at Lynn’s and had tried to tell her. She’d begun with a question across the darkened bedroom. “Did your father—I know he’s not strict, but—did he ever hit you or anything?”
“Oh, my God, did he ever! One night, after some big dance. I forget which one—maybe the Presidential Ball. Anyway, that’s when I was going with Chuckie Nudelman and we went to Frisch’s after and then Chuckie and I parked but I swear to God we were just talking and all of a sudden it was four thirty and—”
“But he doesn’t—”
“Does your father hit you? I can’t imagine him. Dorothy, yes, with a cato’-nine-tails, but your father is such a nice—”
“Oh, he is. It was just a couple of times when I was a kid.”
“Anyway, let me tell you what happened. I was absolutely terror-stricken and so was Chuckie, but he walked me to the door and…”
Jane shut her eyes. The spankings had stopped two years earlier, but Richard recently had made two ominous midnight visits to her room. There was no one she could tell about them.
“Jane,” Miss Bell breathed. “Why won’t you?”
“Because I want to go to University of Cincinnati.”
“But you can go to any college in the country. The world is yours for the taking.”
“UC’s a good school.” White pages of applications and bright-colored college catalogs splattered all over the shelves and spilled onto the floor of the guidance counselor’s office. The black filing cabinets were so crammed with transcripts their drawers hung open, defeated. Jane sat on the edge of the wooden chair, smiling at Miss Bell, her heart racing so fast her chest hurt from the pounding.
“Of course it’s a good school. But is it the school for Jane Heissenhuber?”
Jane kept smiling and shrugged. “I think so.” She was dizzy. She hooked her feet around the front legs of the chair and grabbed the sides of the seat as if the chair were trying to buck her off. Her breathing was deep and conscious, but she could not get enough air. “I like it here,” she whispered. A trickle of sweat ran from behind her ear down her neck.
“Jane, are you afraid to go out of town?”
“No.”
“Some students are—well, intimidated by the very colleges they belong in. ‘Oh, not Vassar, or not Smith. Not me at those schools.’ Is that a factor, Jane?”
“No, Miss Bell. Really.” She knew her lungs were expanding, but something was clogging them and they didn’t seem to be able to absorb the oxygen in the air. Miss Bell had a wen on the end of her nose, and for a second Jane had a terrifying compulsion to reach over, squeeze it, and see if it exploded.
“I wish you would give yourself a chance, Jane. You deserve it.”
“Please, Miss Bell.” She could not stand feeling this way, and she knew if she went east, to one of the colleges with all the New York and New England girls in their camel-haired perfection, the girls in Glamour’s college issue, she would never feel right. She couldn’t go. Having to sit in a classroom and not understand the witticisms of the professor who had all the other girls choking with laughter and being the only girl left in the dorm on Saturday nights—there was one every year, and that year even the fat girl would be pinned to a senior. Or the humiliation when the boys from Harvard and Princeton sneaked out the back door of the dormitory when they saw she was their blind date. Eating her meals alone, or carrying her tray to a tableful of girls in flawless pageboys and saying “Mind if I join you?” and having them give each other funny looks before saying “Oh, do.”
“Jane, take the risk.”
“Please?” She’d been concentrating on breathing, deep in, deep out, deep in.
“Don’t withdraw your applications. All right? All right, Jane?” Jane lowered her head. Miss Bell took it for a nod. “Good!” she said. “I’m very pleased with your decision, Jane. Very pleased.”
The cast and crew of Noble Hearts, as well as forty additional members of Woodward’s Senior Drama Club, crowded into the Friedmans’ finished basement. Not precisely crowded, because the huge room extended nearly the full length and width of the house and easily contained the seventy-five high school students. But most of them pressed against the bar, a long affair of dark polished wood, hoisting steins of cola, tossing peanuts into each other’s open mouths, analyzing the great, unexpected laugh at the end of act one, and, in general, behaving as if they were at Sardi’s waiting for the first reviews and not in a finished basement in the Cincinnati suburb of Amberley Village.
Unlike Vicki Luttrell, who was still flitting about in her ingenue costume, a tea gown and trailing hair ribbons, Jane had creamed off her makeup and changed from her lace-collared dowager dress into black slacks and a red sweater, an outfit chosen after a half-hour wardrobe analysis with Lynn at lunch that afternoon. There was no time between play and party to wash, set, and dry her hair, so she’d brushed out as much of the talcum powder as she could backstage, let her bangs flop back over her forehead, and tied her ponytail, which hung halfway down her back, with a red rubber band.
“Why don’t you go right up to him?” Lynn demanded. “I don’t understand you. You look fabulous. Everything is absolutely perfect, including your lipstick which you usually smear, so just do it.”
“I can’t.”
“You can. Now where is he? Oh, at the end of the bar, talking to Teddy Collier and Mike Braun. See?”
“Oh, God, I can’t go up to three boys.” Jane was blushing so hard her scalp felt tight. Bobby’s back was to her. His foot rested on the brass rail that ran along the bottom of the bar; his long legs were in tight jeans. He wore a plaid shirt with rolled-up sleeves and stood with the casual slouch of a rancher. His hair, worn longer than the conventional crew cut or flat top, was pale and straight, and he ran the fingers of his right hand through it from time to time, in comblike strokes. Jane chewed her thumbnail and watched the smoke from the cigarette he held in his left hand curl up and merge with the haze about the bar. “Lynn, look how he holds his cigarette. So masculine.”
“Jane, you cannot stay in a corner all night. Now come on. You have to start sometime.”
“Lynn, I really think I should wait till college. Please—”
“Hey,” Bobby said later, “you are some dancer.” The lights were out and most of the people left at the party were slow-dancing. “You really know how to follow.”
Jane had difficulty swallowing. Bobby had pulled her so near and was holding her so tight she could barely breathe. Her ear pressed against his cheek, which was slightly damp from the heat of the room and the moment, and she was afraid if she pulled back her head to talk the ear would lose suction and make an embarrassing thwack. The elbow of the arm he encircled her with inscribed a small, slow arc on the top of her backside and she could not think of how to stop him because, technically, he wasn’t doing anything wrong.
The hand of the arm with the arcing elbow began to move, squeezing at the hooks of her bra, but it did not slip under her sweater, and she couldn’t think of a way to protest. The singer on the record had a satiny voice, and when he sang “‘You’re my angel girl in whi-ite/Your love lights
up my heart,’” Bobby lifted her hand to his mouth and bit her palm.
“Bobby, please.”
“It’s all right.”
“No. Really.”
“Shhh. Don’t pull away.”
“Bobby, please.” He began bending his knees and then standing straight, so his penis rubbed between her legs. She tried to arch her hips away and said, “Why don’t we go upstairs and get some air?” She’d imagined slow-dancing with him so many times, but then there’d been a soft light, not blackness, and he’d lifted her chin with his index finger and, gently, warmly, kissed first her lower and then her upper lip. And he’d stroked her hair in these imaginings and confessed how he’d had a crush on her since the beginning of junior year. “Bobby!”
“Shhh!” He unhooked her bra and loosened his grip just enough to snake his other hand up the front of her sweater.
“No! Stop it.”
“Come on.” He grabbed her breast as if it had a will of its own and might roll away to escape him. “Oooh, wow.”
“Stop it!” It was the closest a whisper can come to a scream. “I don’t want to!”
“Yes, you do.” He squeezed harder. “You started. Rubbing them up against me, Come on, you don’t want everyone to hear you, do you? Just let me. Relax.” He began to twirl her nipple between his thumb and forefinger.
The record, a long-playing one, ended after two more love songs. She just managed to slip her breasts into the cups of her bra before the lights flashed on. “O-kay,” he said, “let’s get out of here. We’ll go for a ride or something. Hey! You don’t just walk off on me.”
“Let go of my hand.”
“Come on. Get back here.”
“No. Stop it. Leave me alone.”
“What do you mean?” His grip crushed her fingers. “You’re the one who came over to me. Come on. I’ll get some three-two beer and we’ll have a real blast. Did you hear me? Come on.” He started to pull her.
Jane did not think; she reacted. She stabbed her nails into the damp flesh of his hand. “Ow!” he yelled. “For chrissake!” A few of the students turned.
“I’m sorry if I hurt you,” Jane whispered. “I just don’t want—”
Bobby Spurgeon lowered his voice to a muted snarl. “Who the hell do you think you are? You’re the one who’s been begging me for it all night.”
“I wasn’t. I’m sorry if you misinterpreted what I—”
“Misinterpreted? You know what you are? A loser. A prick-teasing loser.”
As he stalked across the room, Jane put her hand to her mouth. Her lips were dry. She still had not been kissed.
“Do you know what time it is?” Dorothy demanded, fifteen minutes later. She clutched the front of her bathrobe, a heavy quilted Christmas present of years before, with both hands, even though it was tied tight at the waist. The shiny yellow of the robe’s nylon reflected up into Dorothy’s colorless face, and with the cords of her neck standing out in anger, she looked dead. Jane turned away, for the bottoms of Dorothy’s eyes seemed pulled down by invisible hooks, displaying liquid redness. “You look at me! What time is it?”
“I don’t know. One.”
“It’s one thirty!”
“Okay.” Dorothy glared at her. “You didn’t have to wait up, Mom.”
“Is that all you have to say? Dear God in heaven, just look at you!”
Jane’s answer was almost in a child’s voice, “You said I should be home at a reasonable hour.”
Dorothy moved in close to Jane, her leather slippers flopping against the backs of her heels, until the tips of her toes touched Jane’s saddle shoes. “You don’t even know, do you?” Her breath was damp and sour.
Jane leaned back her head. “Know what? I told you we were having the cast party after the play and the play wasn’t over till ten thirty. Daddy or Rhodes could have told you that, Mom.”
“Mom,” Dorothy repeated. “Well, Daddy and Rhodes went straight to bed when they got home. Now what were you doing for the”—she paused and clutched the bathrobe even tighter, as if Jane might rip it off—“for the three hours since ten thirty? Look at me when I’m talking to you.”
Jane lowered her head and looked at Dorothy. The odor of rancid breath remained in the air. “I was at the party at Lynn’s.”
“And you expect me to believe that? I thought you were supposed to be such an accomplished actress.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. Call the Friedmans. They were there.”
“I’ll bet.”
“What’s wrong? I told you—”
“Did the Friedmans see you half undressed like that? Did they? Hanging.”
Her coat was wide open. Jane inhaled and felt the dangerous freedom of an unhooked bra. “I just opened it up in the car going home. With Sissy Davies. I swear, Mom, it was cutting into me and—”
“Don’t even bother. Do you honestly believe I don’t know what goes on with teenagers? Don’t you think that just by looking at you I can tell what kind of a party you were at? Go. Take a look at yourself. Your hair is a rat’s nest. Your lipstick is completely worn off.”
“I was eating. They had wieners and hamburgers.”
“Don’t you have any respect for my intelligence after all these years?”
“I swear I wasn’t doing anything.”
“You can’t even look me straight in the eye, can you? Can you, Jane? And you know why? Because you know what you are.”
“I’ve never stayed out this late before.”
“Staying out’s the least of it, and you know it. But it’s starting now, isn’t it?” Jane averted her head but Dorothy, who rarely touched her, grabbed her chin and held it inches from her face. “You sweet-talk your father into letting you stay out past your curfew, and then you strut in here—”
“I didn’t strut, damn it!”
“Go ahead, curse some more. It’ll all come out in the wash, the way I always knew it would. All that sweetness was as phony as a two-dollar bill. Don’t you think I knew it? You’re your mother’s daughter, all right.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Dorothy shrugged, as though she were repeating the most tired cliché. “A tramp.”
“No! That’s the biggest lie in the world, and I’m not going to listen to you.”
“A tramp.”
“You didn’t even know her!”
“No, I never had the pleasure, but everyone who did knew what she was, and it was only a matter of time before it showed up. I saw it coming. You think I didn’t see you parading around in front of Rhodes in your underwear last August? Do you think I’m blind to what’s going on? Do you? Well, let me tell you something. You’re going to toe the mark for the rest of this year and then you’re on your own. No UC for you, driving around with that spoiled-rotten Friedman girl and her crowd in their convertibles. If you want college, you’ll get yourself a scholarship and go out of town and out of this house, where you can’t ruin Rhodes’s chances of a decent life. Do you think you’re going to parade around in front of the Country Day boys in your slip, tramp? In your brassiere and underpants? Not so long as I have breath in me you won’t.”
After she heard Jane’s bedroom door slam shut, Dorothy counted slowly to one hundred and then walked over to Richard’s bed. He slept on his side, his knees drawn up to his chest. One hand was under the blanket; the other, next to his face, was curled into a limp fist, the knuckle of the thumb resting near his lower lip. His mouth hung open, and while he did not snore, he exhaled and sighed simultaneously. “Richard.”
He did not drift up from sleep, but popped open his eyes and looked wakeful and frightened, as if he had been caught doing something nasty. “What is it?” Dorothy sat on the edge of his bed. He tried to raise himself, but she was sitting on the bulk of the blanket, so he only managed to turn on his back. He lay there, swaddled and immobile, staring up at his wife’s heavy arm, her face unreadable in the nearly dark room. “Dorothy?” She clasped her hands in her lap. He could not understa
nd what she wanted, but it was surely not him. She had allowed him into her bed a few times after their son’s birth, but they had not had sexual relations for more than ten years. “Did someone die?”
“No. No one died. Listen to me. Do you know what time it is?” He could not tell if she saw him shake his head no. “It’s the middle of the night,” she continued, “and your daughter just strutted in a minute or two ago. Richard, listen to me, it was horrible. Her bra was open. Richard, I think she’s done it.”
“Done what?”
“Do I have to spell it out for you? She couldn’t look me in the face.”
“Did she say anything?”
“For pity’s sake, Richard, do you think she’d admit it?”
“No, but—”
“I never told you this, but I caught her lounging against a wall, talking to Rhodes last summer, and she was half naked, with nothing on but her underwear, and you know what she looks like and Rhodes may have only been just a boy, but dear Lord, a boy is a boy and he was staring at her and I will not have that in my house. Not that and not with her staying out until practically daybreak and coming in that way, like a—a streetwalker.” Again Richard tried to sit, but the blanket held him. “You know what she’s going to do, don’t you?”
“What?”
“It’s like cigarettes. One is never enough. It will be more and more and soon she’ll be bringing boys to the back yard, the way Charlene Moffett did, and then they’ll all be driving up and down past the house, honking the horn, sniffing the air for her. Calling on the phone till all hours. Look how the Moffetts can’t hold their heads up since Charlene was caught with that gang of boys. And let me tell you something: you’re not a factory foreman like Bill Moffett. If Mr. Hart gets wind of this, you’ll be finished. Do you think he can afford an employee with a black cloud over his head, with a you-know-what for a daughter?”