by Tom McNeal
In a moment she and her father would again be walking, and they would again hear the clean squeak of their boots, but now, stopped in the center of Main Street, it was deeply quiet, and for that long moment Judith had the sensation of standing within an unshaken snow globe. For the rest of her life, whenever in some thrift shop or somebody’s home she would come upon a broken snow globe, one where the snowflakes no longer swirled, she would be reminded of these moments standing in the stillness, staring at the thrift shop, and holding her father’s hand. For it was true: she hardly knew when she had taken it, but she was holding her father’s hand.
The weeks passed. In February, for her sixteenth birthday, Judith’s father drove her to the National Guard Armory to take her driving test, which, because of her summer’s practice on county roads, she passed without difficulty. He also gave her an electric blanket, which she pretended to like even though she was sure the looping white cords would ruin the look of her bed. Her mother sent her a beautiful suede miniskirt that Judith liked but wasn’t about to wear to school. (She couldn’t bear the idea of kneeling in front of the assistant principal to see whether it would touch the floor, as required.) Judith knew how much she ought to miss her mother and was sometimes able to create a mood from which letters persuasive in this regard could be written, but as the year wore on, communication between her and her mother became less frequent, and letters to Patrick Guest had stopped altogether. (After the misbegotten visit, she sent several bland letters, and the last one had been returned stamped Addressee Moved No Forwarding Address.)
Judith’s favorite night of the week remained Wednesday, when she and her father still went to the movies, her father leaving the theater without comment after What’s Up, Doc? and The Hot Rock, but saying after The Last Picture Show or Fat City that their “admissions hadn’t been wasted.”
“I get it now,” Judith said when her father declared himself a satisfied customer after viewing McCabe & Mrs. Miller. “If we come out of a movie feeling good, we’ve been hoodwinked, but if we come out feeling like shooting ourselves, we got our money’s worth.”
Her father issued one of his puffing laughs and said that probably wasn’t a bad rule of thumb. It was March, dark and steely cold. Judith had hated the movie’s ending—Warren Beatty nattily dressed in black, dying in the snow, while Julie Christie lay dreamy-eyed in an opium den—but that little muddy godforsaken town with its frozen rain and gray skies and buildings of raw lumber had made a captive of her, and stepping from the theater into the bitter cold of her own world offered no particular relief. Her head throbbed, and as she and her father walked the five blocks home with their collars turned up and chins tucked into their scarves, she took real comfort in the fact that, before leaving for the movie, she’d remembered to go downstairs to her maple bed and dial her new electric blanket to its warmest setting.
In late April winter finally abated, and in mid-May school recessed for the summer holiday. Since February, Judith had planned to spend the first two weeks of vacation with her mother in Vermont, but a few days before she was to depart, her mother telephoned. “I need to talk to you about something,” she said.
Judith felt herself settle into the cold metal chair of distrust. “About what?”
“Something tricky.”
Judith was sure she heard her mother taking a deep breath.
“Okay,” her mother said, “here’s the thing. I was doing something a few minutes ago that made me ashamed of myself and then I thought, No, I’m not going to do this. I’m going to call Judith and be out in the open.”
Judith said nothing.
Her mother said, “I don’t know why this is so hard, I really don’t.” She paused. “It’s just the kind of thing that comes up all the time at my CR classes, how through our own complicity we strengthen the chains that bind us.”
Judith didn’t know what CR classes were, and wasn’t about to ask. She said, “Mom, if you don’t say what you called to say, I’m going to scream.”
“Okay, okay.” Another audible sigh. “The thing is, with you gone, I needed someone to help me with the cooking and cleaning and expenses and things, so I asked a friend to come live here.” This last, critical information came out quickly, without much volume.
Cruelly Judith said, “So this girlfriend is using my room now, is that it?”
“Well, that’s the thing, sweetie. It’s not a girlfriend. It’s a friend who is a man.”
Later in life, Judith and her mother would recount this conversation with amusement, in particular the friend-who-is-a-man line, but within its living moment, Judith stiffened into a cold rigidity. “Is this that Jonathan guy?”
Her mother hesitated. “I know Jonathan didn’t make a good first impression on you, but—”
“And he’s using my room, is that it?” Judith said, though she knew he wasn’t, not when he could… But she didn’t want to complete the thought.
Judith’s mother slid away from the question. “I’d decided he would have to leave during your visit, and I was cleaning out his clothes and things in order to pretend he isn’t living here, and I suddenly decided it wasn’t fair to him and it wasn’t really fair to me or to you either, and that’s when I picked up the phone and called you.”
“Why wouldn’t it be fair to me?”
Her mother faltered. “Well, for you to be here sensing that something is wrong without knowing quite what.”
Suddenly Judith didn’t feel like arguing. Her feelings were bruised. There was a reordering going on here, and she’d just been bumped down a notch. She fell silent, and so did her mother, but not, Judith knew, because she was badly hurt. She was just waiting on the formality of a verdict, which was forgone. The visit was spoiled. This, after all, was the point of the phone call, wasn’t it? To spoil the visit, to call it off? If Buffalo Bill was in the house with them, Judith’s only pleasure would be in turning the two weeks sour; and if he wasn’t there, his absence would be a fact her mother would begrudge in spite of better intentions. Either way, they’d both be counting the days until Judith returned to Nebraska, so why go to begin with?
“Maybe I’ll come at Christmas instead,” Judith said, and her mother rattled off a long sentence that began with “Oh, sweetie, I wish you’d reconsider,” and ended with “so I don’t know, maybe you’re right, Christmas might be better.”
Judith found her father in his little backyard garden, pulling weeds among a line of inch-high plants she thought might be cucumbers. He was wearing boots, denim pants, and a faded long-sleeved blue cotton shirt, a getup that might’ve had its dashing dad aspect except for the conical straw hat he wore on his head. Judith called it his coolie hat.
“Mom’s shacking up with some hippie buffoon,” she announced when she drew near. Her father didn’t respond, so she said, “Did you know that?”
He tipped the conical hat slightly back to look at Judith. “I knew she had a male friend living with her, yes. She called to ask what to do with my clothes because she wanted to clear out half the closet.”
“He’ll need more than half,” Judith said.
Her father chortled at this, but didn’t comment.
Judith said, “The worst of it is, he’s such a buffoon he doesn’t even know he’s a buffoon.”
Her father let this pass, and she said, “Does this mean you and Mom are getting a divorce?”
A tired look crossed her father’s face. “I don’t know, peapod. Maybe. I suspect it’ll be more your mother’s decision than mine. I myself wouldn’t rush into anything. I told her that if permitted, marriage can be a surprisingly elastic institution.”
“What did she say?”
He made a soft unhappy laugh. “She said that sounded like something a polygamist would say.”
Judith didn’t laugh, or even smile. He was always using a wry remark for a magic wand, waving away something important, but not this time; she wouldn’t let him. She stood and waited and made him feel her eyes on him. He took a deep breath
and looked away. Finally—he still wasn’t looking at her—he said, “What you should understand is that this isn’t your mother’s fault, Judith. I made every attempt to—” He suddenly stopped. It was as if he had just heard himself: I made every attempt. He turned and let his eyes fall on her. “Look, Judith, I tried to be the husband your mother needed, but… I just wasn’t very good at it.” He seemed on the verge of saying more, but didn’t. He tugged his hat forward so his eyes were again shaded. He returned to his gardening.
Judith stood where she was, but she felt small and defeated. Her father was weeding his garden. Her mother was living with a fool. And Vermont, the Vermont that Judith had once believed indestructible and then at least mendable, well, it was gone now, and as much as she wanted to blame the loss on some moron named Jonathan, she knew it was something murkier than that.
She watched her father pull a snail from a leaf, roll it onto the grass, and step on it. She expected a crunch, but so soft was the shell and the ground that there was no sound at all.
When she’d signed up for the AP tests in the spring, Mr. Flood, Judith’s school counselor, had advised her to start “beefing up her résumé.” What résumé? Judith had thought, but within a week’s time she’d volunteered as a candy striper at the hospital for the summer, and when the Vermont trip fell through, she reported early. She liked the uniform—a pink-and-white seersucker tunic that tied on each side over white jeans and blouse—but she didn’t get to do anything but sit at a desk in the lobby and tell people which room their sick relative was in and, on rare, seminauseating occasions, deliver transparent bags of deep red blood to the lab.
She also volunteered at the college library shelving books, which was more to her liking. The library was quiet, air-conditioned, and odorless, and with the campus all but deserted, there weren’t many books to shelve. Often she could sit and read or simply daydream. One day, standing in an aisle near a third-story window, she watched a couple of people passing below—a student with a dog trotting beside him, a long-haired girl in a green peasant dress—and then, a moment after spotting someone wearing a conical straw hat just like her father’s, she realized that it was her father, probably on his way to the pool, which gave her a subtle jolt. Last summer they would’ve been walking this path together. He passed beneath a shade tree, then stopped and looked back: the girl in the green peasant dress must’ve called out, because she’d changed course and was now catching up to him. When she drew close, she spoke to him, he listened, then glanced at his watch, said something, and they parted. It was brief—probably he’d referred her to his office hours—but there was something about the self-aware way the girl had stood before him that was disquieting to Judith, and she was glad when they broke off and moved in opposite directions.
If Judith’s first summer in Nebraska had belonged to her and her father, and if the third would belong to her and Willy Blunt, then the second belonged by default to Deena. True, Judith’s father went out of his way to plan outings with her whenever their schedules allowed it—an occasional farm auction, a swim at War Memorial Pool, a drive over to Fort Robinson, where the local troupe staged nightly melodramas—but most of Judith’s unscheduled hours were spent palling around with Deena, talking over the counter at Dairy Queen, walking up to the pool, anchoring themselves in a corner booth at Pizza Hut, where a boy named Calvin Haden heavily discounted their pizza slices and let them, as he put it, gas up for free on Mr. Pibb.
Of this generally languorous summer, there was one occurrence that Judith found especially disquieting. It was mid-August, and the afternoon had turned close and cloudy. Judith had agreed to walk with her father up to War Memorial Pool, but a problem had arisen soon after their arrival. She’d worn her sunflower yellow swimming suit under shorts and a cotton top, but when she took off her outer clothes she noticed a dark spot on the front of the bikini bottoms—not a big spot and not a blood spot, though she feared it might be mistaken for that. She went quickly into the pool in hopes the water or chlorine might help, but when the suit began to dry, the spot seemed if anything more prominent. Judith pulled on her shorts and top and told her father she felt like taking a walk.
He looked up from the book he was annotating in the margins. “Do you want company?” he said, but he wasn’t putting his pencil away—he was putting a point on it with a little dime-store sharpener.
“No, I’m just suddenly hungry.”
He said there was food at the commons if she didn’t want to walk all the way home. Did she need money?
Judith shook her head and set off.
She bought a tuna salad sandwich and a can of V8 from a vending machine at the commons and walked south. It was still hot and close, but the clouds had broken and a breeze had begun to stir, so she kept walking. Beyond the fringes of campus, she veered from the faint path that led to Initial Hill (where small boulders, spray-painted white, formed the letters RS) and found a flat rock in the shade of a pined knoll. She opened her V8 and used it to wash down each bite of the tuna sandwich. She tucked the wrapper into the empty can and felt suddenly, overwhelmingly sleepy. The mild breeze felt cool on her damp skin and made a low flutish sound as it moved through the pines. She rolled her towel onto the ground, stretched herself out, folded her hands on her stomach, closed her eyes, and almost at once felt the first pleasantly hallucinatory yieldings of sleep.
Sometime later she awakened with a start. The angle of the sun had changed—the shadows felt longer. The wind moving through the trees still made its hollow sound, but there was something else. Noises carried from somewhere nearby, human noises, the kind that came from the back of the mouth, where sounds formed from discomfort or struggle, and Judith wondered if someone was sick, or being hurt. She crept toward an outcropping of round gray rocks, then eased forward to peer through them.
Before her lay a shady place even more removed from activity than her own. The sounds were coming both from a girl, whose face Judith could see but didn’t recognize, and a large boy, whose face was turned away. His body was flabby and white—Judith guessed this was what a naked football lineman must look like—and dark hair was visible on his back and buttocks. Judith had never seen anyone having sex before, but it was clear that sex was what these two people were having now, though what it really looked like was a pummeling. The girl’s eyes were squeezed closed and her face was clamped into an expression of endurance or possibly pain. Several times the huge boy withdrew his organ completely before a new thrust into the girl, at which moment he and the girl released their unsettling grunts.
“They weren’t what you’d call quiet,” Judith said to Deena when she told her about it later. They were sitting on a picnic table at a remote end of the city park, secluded enough that Deena could smoke her Tareytons without being seen and Judith could talk about seeing two people having sex without being overheard.
Deena said, “What did you do?”
Judith thought about what she’d done. She’d watched while the huge boy gradually converted his violent thrusting to something gentler, circular in motion, and surprisingly graceful, given the enormity of his buttocks. The girl had begun to murmur and moan, and Judith had become aware again of the flutish wind through the pines. But Judith didn’t know how to talk about any of that. “I ducked behind the rocks,” she said. “Then I called out, ‘Amory, over here, you have to see this!’ like I was talking to somebody, and then the noises stopped and I skedaddled.”
Deena said, “God, Judith.”
The truth was, there was nothing odder about the whole experience than her evolving reaction to it. Initially she’d been revolted, but gradually that impression had given way to something vaguer, less unpleasant, harder to explain. With Deena, she stuck to the first impression because it was easier to make amusing. “It was like those gruesome wrecks they show at safety assemblies,” she said, “the ones that make you think you should never get into a car ever again.”
Deena seemed disappointed. “But weren’t they having fun?
”
“Not as we know it.”
After a second or two, Deena said, “Well, that’s just it. It’s not fun as we know it, because we haven’t done it. It’s like us saying frogs’ legs or mountain oysters are gross without even tasting them.”
Judith said that didn’t seem untrue to her, but it also didn’t seem like much of an argument for trying frogs’ legs or mountain oysters. “Tell you what,” she said. “You try all the weird dishes, and you can fill me in on your research.”
“That a dare?”
Judith laughed. “No, it is not.” Then: “Know in what way I am exactly like a redneck boy?”
Deena said she didn’t, and Judith said, “I’ve got no use for a pregnant girlfriend.”
This drew a snorting laugh from Deena. “Who said anything about getting preggers?” She lighted a fresh cigarette. “So, could you see his thingamajig?”
Judith said it was big and pink and purple and wet.
“Purple?” Deena said.
“Well, purplish.”
“Still and all. God is supposed to be almighty. Why would he go with purplish?”
Judith said there was no reasonable way to answer that question.
Deena expelled a long stream of smoke. “So do you think that’s what love boils down to—a guy getting a girl to the point where she actually wants to let the purplish thingamajig in?”
What Judith thought was that this sentiment was too cynical even for her, who prided herself on her cynicism. She said, “That wouldn’t be much to look forward to, would it?” and Deena, after some seconds and without much conviction, said no, she supposed it wouldn’t.
Two days after the start of her senior year, Judith was called to the office of Mr. Flood, the school counselor, a stout, dapper man with florid cheeks and heavily pomaded red hair. Judith had been in Mr. Flood’s office three times the year before, most recently to talk about “beefing up her résumé.” She couldn’t remember the point of the other two occasions; she’d spent most of the five-minute sessions ignoring the drone of Mr. Flood’s voice while wondering at the height and stiffness of his hair. Today, however, the counselor became animated the instant Judith appeared at his door. Instead of merely nodding at the chair opposite his desk, he rose and pulled it out for her. He said he was delighted to see her. Something was obviously up.