by Nathan Hill
The town knows about them, of course. The town knows about everyone. And they approve. They wink at Faye and ask her questions about weddings. “Won’t be long now,” they say. It seems obvious they would prefer she marry than go to college.
Henry is kind, quiet, well-mannered. His family’s farm is large and well-run, respectable. A good Lutheran, a hard worker, his body is built like cement. She feels his muscles tense when she touches him, that nervous boy voltage that gathers up and breaks him. She doesn’t love him, or rather she doesn’t know if she loves him, or maybe she loves him but she’s not in love with him. She hates these distinctions, these tiny matters of vocabulary that, unfortunately, matter so much. “Let’s go for a walk,” Henry says. His farm is bordered on one side by the nitrogen plant, on the other by the Mississippi River. They walk in that direction, to the riverbank. He does not seem surprised to see her. He takes her hand.
“Have you been watching the news?” he says.
“Yes.”
His hand is rough and calloused, especially on the palm, above each knuckle, where Henry’s body connects with the various implements important to farm labor: shovel, spade, hoe, broom, the long and finicky stick shift of the John Deere tractor. Even a baseball bat would cause such marks, if it were used as he uses it, to kill the abundant sparrows that nest in the corn crib. It’s too small in there for buckshot, he explained to her once. It could ricochet. You could lose an eye. So you have to go in with a baseball bat and take the birds out of the air. She asked him never to tell that story again.
“Are you still going to Chicago?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” she says.
The ground grows spongier the closer they are to the river. She can hear the whoosh of each small wave. Behind them the lighthouse burns a bright azure blue, like a splinter of daytime that got stuck here through the night.
“I don’t want you to go,” Henry says.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
When they’re holding hands, he’ll often rub his fingers on the soft skin between her thumb and index finger, or on the even softer skin of her wrist. Faye wonders if he does it because otherwise he can’t feel anything. Not beneath so many layers of thick, dead skin. It’s the friction that tells him his fingers are where he thinks they are, and Faye worries what will happen when he begins reaching for other things, for new things. She’s waiting for it—it’s inescapable—waiting for him to make a move beneath her clothes. Will they hurt, those hard, impenetrable hands of his?
“If you go to Chicago,” Henry says, “I don’t know what I’ll do.”
“You’ll be fine.”
“I won’t,” he says, and he squeezes her hand hard and stops walking and turns to her, theatrically—seriously and profoundly—like there’s something of great weight he must tell her. Henry always has had a bit of the melodramatic in him. Teenage boys are like that sometimes, the emotions they feel blown so tremendously out of proportion.
“Faye,” he says, “I’ve made a decision.”
“Okay.”
“I have decided”—and here he pauses, makes sure she’s listening with appropriate attentiveness, feels assured that she is and so continues—“if you go to Chicago, I’m joining the army.”
And here she laughs—a little bark she tries to hold back but cannot.
“I’m serious!” he says.
“Henry, please.”
“I’ve decided.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“The army is honorable,” he says. “That’s an honorable thing.”
“But why on earth would you do that?”
“I’ll be lonely if I don’t. It’s the only way I could forget you.”
“Forget me? Henry, it’s college. I’m not dying. I’ll come back.”
“You’ll be so far away.”
“You could visit.”
“And you’ll meet other boys.”
“Other boys. Is that what this is about?”
“If you go to Chicago, I’m joining the army.”
“But I don’t want you to join the army.”
“And I don’t want you to go to Chicago.” He crosses his arms. “My mind is made up.”
“They could send you to Vietnam.”
“Yeah.”
“Henry, you could die.”
“If I did, I guess it’d be your fault.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Stay here and be with me,” he says.
“That is not fair.”
“Stay here where it’s safe.”
She feels the injustice of this, and she’s angry about it, but she also feels, strangely, relief. The riots, the looting, all the horrible things on television tonight, and her mother, and the town: If she stays here with Henry, they need no longer terrorize her. Things would be so much easier if she stayed, so much cleaner.
Why did she come here? She regrets it now. She regrets summoning Henry under the pale blue flame of the lighthouse. She hasn’t told him, but there’s another reason she calls that thing a lighthouse. It’s because a lighthouse is two-faced, and this is how she feels each time she visits. A lighthouse is both an invitation and a warning. A lighthouse says Welcome home. But next to that, right after that, it also says Danger.
2
IT’S A SATURDAY NIGHT late in April 1968—the night of Faye’s senior prom. Henry picks her up at six o’clock with a rose and a corsage. His hands fumble as he pins the flowers to her gown. He pulls on the fabric near her chest as if he were pantomiming, right there before her parents, all the awkward gestures of teenage groping. Yet her mother takes photographs, says Smile. And Faye guesses this corsage business was invented by parents—very protective parents wanting to ensure that their daughters’ suitors were not too familiar with the garments and breasts of women. Clumsiness is probably the best thing here—it signals little danger of bastard children. And Henry is a man inept with flowers. He cannot get the corsage pinned correctly. He grazes the needle across her skin and leaves a thin red line on her breastbone. It reminds her of the horizontal bar in the letter A.
“It’s my scarlet letter!” she says, laughing.
“What?” Henry says.
“My scarlet dash, actually.”
Everything is easier when they dance. She takes to the floor and does the Twist. She does the Madison. She does the Mashed Potato and the Jerk and the Watusi. Faye’s teenage years have been consistently buoyed by new dance crazes that appear every few weeks on the Top 40. The Monkey. The Dog. The Locomotion. Songs and dances that enact a perfect circle—the song tells you everything you need to know about the dance, and the dance gives reason for the song. When Marvin Gaye sang “Hitch Hike,” she knew exactly what to do. When Jackie Lee sang “The Duck,” Faye could do it even before she saw it on TV.
So here she is, staring at the floor, doing the Duck in a blue charmeuse prom dress—lift the left leg, then the right leg, then flap your arms, then repeat. That’s what goes for dancing these days. Every prom and homecoming and Valentine’s Day dance is like this, the deejay playing a song that tells you precisely what to do. The big new thing this year is Archie Bell and the Drells singing “Tighten Up”—shuffle to your left, then shuffle to your right. “Tighten it up now, everything will be outta sight.” Somewhere nearby Henry is dancing too, but Faye doesn’t notice. These are dances meant to be done alone. When you do the Freddie, the Chicken, the Twist, even on a crowded dance floor, you do them by yourself. They aren’t allowed to touch each other and so they dance alone. They perform the dances that fit exactly what their chaperones want of them. They are told how to dance and they respond like proper bureaucrats, is what Faye thinks now as she watches all her classmates. They are happy, satisfied, soon-to-be-graduates, pro-authoritarian, their parents support the war, they have color televisions. When Chubby Checker says, “Take me by my little hand and go like this,” he is telling her generation how to respond to what is happening to them—the war, the draft,
the sexual prohibitions—he is telling them to obey.
But then at the end of the night, the deejay announces he has time for one more song—“This one’s very special,” he says—and so Faye and Henry and the other students move slowly back to the dance floor, feet tired from all the shuffling and twisting, and the deejay puts on a new record and Faye hears the needle catch, the scratch before it falls into the groove, the static, and then comes this song.
It doesn’t even sound like music at first; more like some crude primeval screeching, the dense noise of strings all playing dissonant and muddy—a violin maybe, and some freakish guitar repeatedly striking the same chord—the slow, monotonous beat of a bass drum, the insistent reverb, the singer not actually singing but chanting. Faye can’t make out the words, can’t identify a chorus, can find no beat to dance to. A dreadful sexy moaning, that’s what it is. A phrase pops out: “Whiplash girlchild in the dark.” What does that even mean? Around her, the students move with the music, move as sluggishly and languidly as the music itself: They stagger toward each other, touch each other, grab each other by the waist and squeeze their bodies together. It is the slowest dance Faye has ever seen. She looks at Henry, who stands there worried and helpless while around him dancers wiggle like giant worms. How do they know what to do? The song gives no instructions. Faye loves it. She grabs Henry by the back of the neck and pulls him into her. Their bodies slap together. He stands there bewildered as Faye lifts her arms over her head and closes her eyes and turns her face to the ceiling and sways.
The chaperones, meanwhile, are wary. They don’t know what is happening but they are sure it’s wrong. They force the deejay to stop the song and the dancers groan. They walk back to their tables.
“What were you doing out there?” Henry asks.
“Dancing,” Faye says.
“What dance is it? What’s it called?”
“Nothing. It’s not called anything. It’s just, you know, it’s just dancing.”
Afterward, Henry takes her to the park, a quiet neighborhood park near her house, unlit, private, one of the few places in this small town to be alone. She expects this. Henry is a boy who believes in romantic gestures. He pays for candlelit dinners and buys candy in heart-shaped boxes. He shows up at her house smiling like a jack-o’-lantern handing her fat bunches of lilies and irises. He leaves roses in her car. (That the roses shrivel in the heat and die, she never tells him.) Henry doesn’t know the meaning of the flowers, the differences between red roses and white, between a lily and an iris. This is a language he does not speak. He does not know how to love Faye creatively, and so he does what everyone else in high school does: candles and chocolates and flowers. He treats love like a balloon, like it is all a very simple matter of accumulation, just adding more air. And so the flowers keep coming. And the dinners. And the love poems that appear in her locker from time to time, typewritten, unsigned—
I love you with all my love
more than the stars above
“Did you get my poem?” he’ll ask, and she’ll say “Yes, thank you,” and smile and look at the ground and cross her feet and hope he doesn’t ask if she liked it. Because she never likes it. How could she like it when in her free time she’s reading Walt Whitman and Robert Frost and Allen Ginsberg? How ugly Henry seems compared to Allen Ginsberg! How simple and stupid, how quaint and provincial. She knows Henry wants to impress her and woo her, but the more of these poems she reads, the more she feels tranquilized, like her mind is sinking slowly into sand.
When you are away
I have the worst day
Because I can’t hold you
I feel real sad too
She can’t bring herself to criticize him. She’ll only nod and say, “I got the poem. Thank you,” and Henry will make that face—that grinning self-satisfied face, that triumphant face, that big stupid muffin face—which makes her so angry she wants to tell him cruel things:
That it would be a better poem if he wrote it in meter.
Or if he owned a dictionary.
Or if he knew more multisyllabic words.
(And how awful of her to even think that!)
No, he is a nice enough boy, a good enough boy. Good-hearted, bighearted. He is kind. Gentle. Everyone says she should marry him.
“Faye,” he says as they sit on the merry-go-round, “I think we’ve come a long way, you know, in our relationship.” And she nods but does not know exactly what he means. He has certainly given her lots of flowers and poems and dinners and chocolates, but he’s never told her a secret. She feels she knows nothing about him, nothing more than what everyone else knows: Henry, whose family owns the farm by the nitrogen plant, who wants to be a veterinarian, the football team’s mediocre tight end, the baseball team’s backup third baseman, the basketball team’s third-string forward, who on weekends fishes on the Mississippi and plays with his dogs, who sits quiet in class and needs her tutoring for algebra—Faye knows his résumé but not his secrets. He never tells her anything important. He never explains why, for example, when he kisses her he doesn’t act like a boy should, doesn’t try the things boys are supposed to try. She’s heard the stories—famous in high school—of boys who will do anything if you let them. Who will go all the way if you let them. And anywhere! In the backseats of cars or on the baseball field at night, in dirt or grass or mud or whatever cheap and lucky spot they find themselves when they find a girl who doesn’t say no. And the girls who let them, who invite it, who aren’t going steady, their reputations are massacred with that one whispered syllable: slut. The fastest word in the language. It moves through school like a plague. One has to be careful.
So she’s been waiting for Henry to try it—paw at her belt, stick his hands somewhere private—so she can protest and defend her chastity and he can try again next time, try harder and better, and she can protest more until finally, after enough protesting, after enough of saying no, she will have demonstrated that she is virtuous and chaste and good, not easy, not a slut. And then finally she can say yes. She is waiting for this, the whole ritual, but instead Henry only kisses her, smashes his face against hers and stops. It goes like this every time. They sit together at night on the riverbank or in the park and listen to the sound of motorcycles on the highway, the squeaks of the swing set, and Faye picks at the rust on the merry-go-round and waits. And nothing has ever happened, not until tonight, this night after the prom, when Henry is so full of ceremony it seems he’s memorized his lines.
“Faye, I think we’ve come a long way. And you’re very important to me and special. And it would make me feel honored and happy and really happy…” He stutters, stops, he is nervous, and she nods and touches his arm lightly with her fingertips.
“I mean,” he says, “it would make me feel honored and happy and really lucky if you, you know, to school, from now on,” and he pauses, gathers his courage, “if you can, please, wear my jacket. And my ring.”
And he exhales greatly, spent from the effort, relieved. He can’t even look at her now. He stares at his feet and twists his shoelaces tightly around his fingers.
She finds him adorable in this moment, in his embarrassment and fear, in how much power she has over him. She says yes. Of course she says yes. And when they stand up to leave, they kiss. And the kiss feels different this time, feels like it is a greater and more powerful thing, a kiss with meaning. They both must know they’ve crossed a boundary: the class ring is a harbinger, everyone knows that. An engagement ring almost always follows, and these symbols make their coupling official and sanctioned and certified and good. Whatever a girl might do in the backseat of a car, she is protected if she wears the boy’s decorations. These things insulate her. They guard her. She is immune from insult. A girl is not a slut if she has a ring.
And Henry must sense it too, that they now have permission to do as they want, because he pulls Faye closer, kisses her harder, presses his body tightly to hers. She feels something then, some blunt and rigid thing pressing int
o her belly. It’s him, of course, Henry. He is pushing up through his thin gray slacks. He is shaking a little and kissing her and he is hard as stone. It surprises her, how solid a boy can be. Like a broom handle! It’s all she can think about. She is aware she is still kissing him but she is doing it automatically—all her attention is on these few square inches, that obscene pressure. She thinks she can feel his pulse through it and she starts sweating, grabbing him tighter to tell him it is all okay. He runs his hands over her back and makes little squeaking sounds; he is jittery, jumpy; he is waiting for her. It is her turn to do something. His was an opening gambit, pressing himself so obviously into her. It is a negotiation. Now it is her move.
She decides to be bold, to do what she’d insinuated during that final dance at the prom. With one hand she pulls on the waistband of his slacks, pulls hard enough that there is enough space for her other hand. Henry twitches then, and his body goes tense, and everything about him stops moving for a split second. Then it all happens so fast. She drives her hand down as he leaps back. Her fingers begin to grasp him—she feels him for the smallest moment, and knows that he is warm and solid but also soft and delicately fleshy—and she has just begun to understand this when he jumps back and turns slightly away from her and yells, “What are you doing?”
“I’m, I don’t know—”
“You can’t do that!”
“I’m sorry, Henry, I’m—”
“God, Faye!” And he turns from her then and adjusts his pants, jams his hands in his pockets and walks away. He paces from one side of the swing set to the other. She watches him. It’s hard to believe that his face can go so cold so quickly.
“Henry?” she says. She wants him to look at her, but he doesn’t. “Henry, I’m sorry.”
“Forget it,” he says. He digs his foot into the sand, wiggles his shoe until it’s buried, then does it again, getting his nice black dress loafers all dirty.