Peyton Place

by Grace Metalious

  “It's good and cold. Icy cold.”

  “Better than Meadow Pond. That's always warm on hot days.”

  “Can you still touch bottom?”

  “Yes. You?”

  “Yes. This is far enough.”

  “I don't believe this place is dangerous, except in the spring, maybe.”

  “My foot just scraped against a rock.”

  “Can you float?”

  “Yes. I learned how at camp two years ago.”

  They stayed in the water until they were chilled, and when they stood on the shore again, water clung to them in little rainbow-colored drops. Allison, who swam without a bathing cap, began to towel her hair, and Norman sat down on the quilt to examine his scraped foot. The sun was welcome now, beating down on their cold skins and warming them. Allison sat down next to Norman.

  “Do you want to eat?”

  “O.K. I'll see if the Coke is cooled off any.”

  “It should be. That water is like ice.”

  They munched sandwiches and looked, squinty eyed, across the water where the sun reflected itself as if in a mirror.

  “I don't know why it should,” said Norman, “but it always gives me a funny feeling to look across the river and think that it's Vermont over there.”

  “It's like riding in a car and crossing a town line,” said Allison. “One minute you're in Peyton Place and the next you're somewhere else. I always say it to myself. Now I'm in Peyton Place—and now I'm not. It always makes me feel funny, just the way sitting here and looking at Vermont does.”

  “Are there any more egg sandwiches left, or only ham?”

  “I brought four of each. You can have one of mine, if you want. I'd just as soon have ham.”

  “I should have brought some potato chips.”

  “They're always so greasy in the summertime.”

  “I know it.”

  “Have a pickle.”

  “Do you want to swim again?”

  “Not until the sun begins to feel hot.”

  “Are you going to get married when you're old?” asked Norman.

  “No. I'm going to have affairs instead.”

  “What shall we do with all this waxed paper? We can't just leave it here.”

  “Put it back in the hamper. I'll throw it away when we get back.”

  “That's not a very good idea, you know,” said Norman. “I read that affairs are very conducive to maladjustment. Besides, people who have affairs don't have children.”

  “Where did you read that?”

  “In a book on sex that I sent away for,” he said.

  “I never read a book that was exclusively about sex. Where did you send to for it?”

  “New York. I saw an ad for it in a magazine. It cost a dollar ninety-eight.”

  “Did your mother see it?”

  “I guess not! I went to the post office every day for the mail for two weeks, waiting for that book to come. My mother'd kill me if she ever thought I was interested in such stuff.”

  “What else did it say?” asked Allison.

  “Oh, it was all about how a man has to have a technique when he makes love to a woman. That's so she'll like it and not be frigid.”

  “What's frigid?”

  “Women who don't like to make love. A lot of women are like that, this book says. It makes for maladjustment in marriage.”

  “Does it tell what to do?” she asked.

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Shall we read for a while?”

  “Okay. Shall I, or do you want to?”

  “You go ahead. Pick something by Swinburne. I like him the best.”

  As Norman read aloud from the book, Important English Poets, Allison picked up the sandwich scraps and repacked the hamper. Then she turned over on her stomach and lay stretched out on the quilt. Norman propped himself up on his elbows, put on his sunglasses and continued to read for a while longer. Soon, they both slept.

  When they awoke, some of the heat had left the sun and it was four o'clock. Their bodies were damp with sweat, and they yawned and decided to swim again. When they had cooled off in the water, they lay side by side on the cotton quilt.

  “I feel good,” said Allison, looking at Norman through half-closed eyes.

  “So do I.”

  They rested their sun-warmed, water-cooled, relaxed and wellfed bodies on the cotton quilt and squinted up at the cloud patterns in the blue, July sky.

  “Someday,” said Allison, “I'll write a very famous book. As famous as Anthony Adverse, and then I'll be a celebrity.”

  “Not me. I'm going to write thin, slim volumes of poetry. Not many people will know me, but the few who will will say that I am a young genius.”

  “I'm going to write about the castle for my first article in the paper.”

  “How can you write about the castle? You've never been up there.”

  “I'll make something up.”

  “You can't make up things to go into a historical article. It has to be fact, all pure, true fact,” said Norman.

  “Baloney. Anthony Adverse is a historical novel, and I suppose you think that isn't made up.”

  “It's different with a novel. Novels are always made-up stories.”

  “So are poems.”

  “Is that when you'll start having affairs? After you write a famous book and become a celebrity?” asked Norman.

  “Yes. I'll have a new affair every week.”

  “You'll be maladjusted if you do.”

  “I don't care. Men will be dying for my favors, but I'll be very, very particular.”

  “Aren't you ever going to have any children?”

  “No. I won't have time,” replied Allison.

  “That book I was telling you about said that the natural function of the female body is the bearing of children,” said Norman.

  “What else did it say?”

  “Well, it showed pictures about how women are made. It showed how a woman has breasts to hold milk, and how she is put together inside to hold a baby for nine months.”

  “I wouldn't spend a dollar ninety-eight just to learn that. I knew all that when I was thirteen. What did it tell about how men are supposed to make love to women?”

  Norman put his arms up behind his head and crossed his legs. He began to speak as if he were explaining a troublesome problem in algebra to someone who had no inclination toward mathematics.

  “Well,” he began, “this book says how all women have certain areas of their bodies which are known as erotic areas.”

  “Are they the same for all women?” asked Allison, with the exact tone she would have used if she had been the dull math student whom Norman was trying to help.

  “Certain ones, yes,” said Norman. “But not all. For instance, all women have erotic areas around their breasts and also around their bodily orifices.”

  “Orifices?”

  “Openings.”

  “Like what?”

  Norman half turned onto his side and ran the tip of his little finger around the opening in Allison's ear. Immediately her skin broke out in duck bumps and she sat up with a jerk.

  “Like that,” said Norman.

  “I see,” said Allison, rubbing her left arm with her right hand. She lay down again next to Norman.

  “The area around the opening of the mouth is, of course, the most highly sensitized of all,” said Norman, “except for one other, and that is a woman's vaginal opening. As I understand it–”

  Norman's voice went on, but Allison was no longer listening. She wanted him to run his finger around the opening in her ear again, and she wanted him to kiss her the way he had done in the woods at Road's End the previous Saturday. She was getting angrier and angrier as he went on talking in his cool, academic voice.

  “ —And kissing, of course, is the first, or one of the first, overtures that a good lover makes to a woman.”

  “Oh, shut up!” cried Allison and jumped to her feet. “Talk, talk, talk. That's all you know how to do!”r />
  Norman looked up at her, shocked, “But, Allison,” he said, “you asked me, didn't you?”

  “I didn't ask you to quote the whole damned book, word for word, did I?”

  “You don't have to swear at me, do you? You asked me and I was telling you. There's no reason in the world for swearing, is there?”

  “Oh, shut up,” said Allison. “Some boys I know,” she lied, “don't have to explain to a girl what wonderful lovers they are. They show her.”

  “What boys?” demanded Norman, thereby calling her bluff.

  “I don't have to tell you anything, Norman Page. Not a single thing-

  He reached out and grasped her ankle. “What boys?” he asked.

  Allison sat down and Norman sat up. “Oh, forget it,” she said. “Nobody you know, anyway.”

  “Tell me,” he said. “I'd like to know who some of these wonderful lovers of yours are.”

  “I won't tell.”

  “You can't, that's why. You don't know any. You're a liar.”

  Allison whirled toward him and slapped him. “Don't you dare call me a liar,” she shouted.

  He grasped her two wrists and forced her down on the blanket. “You're a liar,” he said, looking her straight in the face. “You're a liar, and because you slapped me, I'm not going to let you up until you admit it.”

  Allison capitulated at once. “I made it up,” she said, not looking at him. “You're the only boy who ever kissed me, except for Rodney Harrington, and that was so long ago that it doesn't count. I'm sorry I slapped you.”

  Norman released her wrists, but continued to lean over her, his hands resting on the quilt on either side of her body.

  “Would you like me to kiss you again?” he asked.

  Allison felt her face redden. “Yes,” she said. “Except that I don't like for you to ask me, Norman. For anything.”

  He kissed her gently, and Allison wanted to burst into tears of frustration. That wasn't the way she wanted to be kissed at all.

  “It's getting late,” said Norman. “We ought to be starting back.”

  “I suppose so,” replied Allison.

  Later, as they were pedaling slowly down the highway toward Peyton Place, a convertible, with the top down, passed them.

  “Get a horse!” yelled the voice of Rodney Harrington from the speeding car.

  “Smart guy,” said Norman.

  “I suppose so,” said Allison, but she was thinking, resentfully, that at thirteen Rodney had known more about kissing than Norman knew at fifteen.

  ♦ 12 ♦

  Rodney Harrington laughed out loud as he caught a last glimpse of Allison MacKenzie and Norman Page in his rear-vision mirror. The two of them were pedaling for all they were worth, worried, perhaps, about being late for supper. It was too bad that they were riding bikes instead of walking. If they had been on foot Rodney would have offered them a lift in his car. It made him feel good to drive other kids around in his car. None of them ever said anything, but Rodney knew that every last one of them sat in his leather-upholstered seats and wished that they had cars exactly like his. Rodney laughed out loud and wondered what Allison and Norman had been doing so far away from home. Maybe they had stopped off in the woods for a private party. At that thought, Rodney laughed so hard that he almost hit the ditch with his new car.

  “I feel good!” he exclaimed to the world at large, and sounded his automobile horn in the classic da-da-da-dada, dum, dum.

  Why shouldn't he feel good? he asked himself. He had just been to the mill to hit the old man up for ten bucks, he had a swell car, and he was on his way to meet Betty Anderson. Who the hell wouldn't feel good?

  “Don't spend it all in one place,” Leslie Harrington had told his son, handing him the ten dollars and giving him a broad wink. “There's not a one of ’em worth over two dollars.”

  Rodney had laughed with his father. “You're telling me?” he had replied.

  His father had clapped him on the back and told him to go on and have fun.

  Rodney smiled to himself as he drove his car down Elm Street, doing forty in a twenty-five-mile zone. All the crap people dished out about motherless boys was a laugh, as far as he was concerned. He hadn't even a vague memory of his mother. All he knew of her was what he could see in a blurry photograph which his father kept on his bureau. She had been a rather pale and thin-looking character, with a lot of brown hair done up high on her head. Her mouth looked straight and tight, in the picture, and Rodney had never been able to imagine her as married to his father. All he knew about her, and all he cared to know, was that her name had been Elizabeth, and that she had died giving birth to her son at the age of thirty. Rodney had never missed his mother. He and the old man got along swell. They understood each other. They bached it very successfully, in the big house on Chestnut Street, with the help of Mrs. Pratte, who served as cook and general housekeeper. That crap that people put in books, about motherless boys, was just that. Crap. He, for one, was extremely grateful that he had no mother to put up with, always nagging him about something. He had heard too many fellows complain about their own mothers not to be grateful that his own was safely buried. He liked that status quo. Him and the old man, and old Pratte handy whenever either of the Harringtons wanted anything.

  At sixteen, Rodney Harrington had not changed substantially from the boy he had been at fourteen. He was an inch or so taller, which made him five feet eight now, and he had filled out a bit with the result that he looked more than ever like his father. Other than that, Rodney was unchanged. His hair, which he wore just a trifle too long, was still black and curly, and his heavy mouth still showed a lack of discipline and self-control. There were a few people in Peyton Place who said that it was too late for Rodney Harrington. He would always be just what he had always been— the indulged only child of a rich widowered father. They cited his expulsion from the New Hampton School for Boys as proof of what they said. New Hampton, which had attempted to teach Rodney, had ended by expelling him for laziness and insubordination after two years of trying. New Hampton had a good reputation, and had succeeded in the past, where other schools had failed with other problem youngsters, but it had been unable to leave its mark on Rodney Harrington. Apparently, the only thing that Rodney had learned while away at school was that all boys of good family had had sexual intercourse with girls before reaching prep school age, and those who had not were either fairies or material for the priesthood. Rodney had learned quickly, and by the time he had been at New Hampton for less than a year he could outtalk the best of them. According to Rodney, he had deflowered no less than nine maidens in his own home town before reaching the age of fifteen, and he had almost been shot twice by the irate husband with whose wife he had carried on a passionate affair for six months.

  Rodney had the sensual good looks, the money and the glib tongue to make himself believed. He had been considered quite a man among men by the time he was kicked out of New Hampton. Even his own father believed him, although he made his stories much weaker for Leslie, and named fictitious girls from White River as the heroines of his tales. Rodney had told his stories of successful seduction so often, to so many different people, that most of the time he could believe them himself. Actually he had never had a sexual experience in his life, and at times when the truth smote him, he felt as if someone had flung a glass of cold water in his face for no reason. The frightening thought that he would not know how to go about completing the act, if he ever once had the chance to get started, affected him like the sun going behind a cloud on a hot day. It left him chilled, and lent a dreary aspect to his otherwise cheerful world. What horrified him the most about the truth was not the possible personal humiliation to himself, but that the girl with whom he failed might talk. Whenever Rodney thought of what his many friends would say if they ever discovered that he had been spinning fantasies, and that he was, in reality, as inexperienced as a seven-year-old, he turned cold with horror.

  He was thinking along this depressing
line now, as he swung his car into Ash Street which was a narrow, tumble-down street in the neighborhood where the mill hands lived. He pulled up smartly in front of the Anderson house and sounded his horn with a bravado he was far from feeling. Determinedly, he made the effort to shrug off his fears, and for Rodney Harrington the shaking off of depression or fear had never been a difficulty.

  What the hell? he thought, and the sun came back out from behind its dark cloud. What the hell? He had money to spend, a car to get around in, and a pint of rye whisky in the glove compartment. What the hell? He'd know what to do if he ever got old Betty to take her pants off. He'd heard it described enough times, hadn't he? He'd described it enough times himself, hadn't he? What the hell? He had not only talked and heard about it, he had read books about it and seen pictures of it. What the hell was he worried about?

  Betty strolled down the short walk in front of her house, undulating her hips fully, as she had seen a musical comedy queen do in a movie the week before. She moved slowly toward Rodney's car.

  “Hi, kid,” she said.

  She was exactly one year and fourteen days younger than he, but she unfailingly called him kid. Tonight she wore a pair of tight green shorts and a small yellow halter. As always, whenever he looked at her, Rodney felt his speech thicken in his throat. The only way he could explain his reaction to Betty was to say that it was just like the way it had been when he was small and old Pratte had let him watch her make pudding. One minute, there was the liquid in the pan, so thin and runny that you thought it would never be any other way, and in the very next minute the stuff turned thick and syrupy, so that old Pratte really had to work to get a spoon through the mess. That was the way he was about Betty. Like pudding. Until he saw her, his mind was clear and cool and liquid, but the minute she leaned over the car door and said, “Hi, kid,” his speech thickened, his eyes grew heavy lidded, and he struggled to pull breath through the syrupy mass in his chest.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “It's too hot to get all dressed up to go somewhere,” said Betty. “I just want to go for a ride and stop at a drive-in to eat.”

  Rodney was wearing a shirt and sports jacket because he had planned to take her to a restaurant and then somewhere to dance, but he capitulated without a murmur.