by Robin Talley
Marriage is being a good wife. Being there to support your husband. Having dinner on the table when he comes home from work. Raising respectful children. Keeping a pleasant home.
It’s what Mama does. When one of us has a problem, Mama always has the answer. When Daddy gets frustrated with work or with the government, Mama’s there to calm him down.
That’s what marriage is. Being responsible. Always knowing what to do.
I never know what to do anymore. I don’t think I ever will.
Marriage means other things, too. Kissing. And other things that come after kissing.
Ennis is a nice boy. I like it when he smiles at me. But the idea of kissing him doesn’t make my heart race in my chest, the way the magazines and novels say is supposed to happen.
And to think about other—things—I—
I don’t want to think about things with Ennis.
I close my eyes, trying to steady myself. Before I realize it, I’m thinking about her. I’m thinking about the slope of her neck above her blouse collar. I’m thinking about the way her hips swing when she walks. I’m thinking about the way she looked at me that day right before I—
Maybe I don’t have to marry Ennis. Maybe I don’t have to marry anyone. Maybe I’ll just—
What? What future is there without a husband and children?
Nothing. There’s nothing.
Normal girls don’t think this way. Normal girls hold their dates’ hands and smile back at them and—
Her face floats before my eyes again.
I bolt out of my seat.
Ennis stands up, too. Behind us someone whispers, “Out of the way!”
“I’ll be right back,” I whisper to Ennis, willing my voice not to tremble along with the rest of me. He nods and sits back down, laughing at something Marilyn Monroe said.
I edge out of the row. I need to be away from these cramped seats. And I need to go to the bathroom, thanks to all that Coke.
As I’m closing the door to the theater behind me I hear one of the men on-screen saying, “Now and then Mother Nature throws somebody a dirty curve. Something goes wrong inside.” Everyone laughs.
I wonder if that’s what happened to me.
Mama and Daddy don’t like us to use colored bathrooms. They say we should come home and use the bathroom there instead, but it’s not as if I can run home in the middle of a date.
I push open the door to the colored women’s room. The first thing I notice is the smell. No one has cleaned this bathroom in a long time. The trash can is overflowing. And when I get into a stall, the toilet paper is the same rough kind we had at my old school. I hadn’t even realized I’d gotten used to the softer stuff.
When I come out to wash my hands I watch the other women lined up in front of the mirror, fixing their hair and talking to their friends. Gossiping, like the girls outside.
I wonder what it is about me that makes me care about things like having a dirty bathroom or sitting in those hard wooden balcony seats. None of these women by the sink seem to care much. They’re busy. Thinking about their families. Their jobs. Their real lives.
They all look a lot happier than I feel right now.
Why do I think I deserve anything different than anyone else? What am I doing going to Jefferson, getting yelled at in the halls, having to worry about my little sister’s safety all day long?
What’s the point of it all?
I envy these women. I bet none of them ever doubted whether they should get married. I’m sure none of them ever had any unnatural feelings.
For the rest of the movie I sit with my arms folded tightly across my chest. When Ennis offers me his popcorn I shake my head without looking at him.
Even the movie seems determined to make me feel worse. At the very end one of the men kisses Marilyn Monroe in front of everyone while he’s still dressed as a woman. Everyone in the movie gasps and screams, and everyone in the theater gasps and screams and laughs harder than ever. I bite my thumbnail so hard I nearly rip it off.
Gasping. Screaming. Laughing. That’s how you’re supposed to react to things like that.
“Did you like the movie?” Ennis asks as we’re waiting to leave the theater.
“I thought it was ridiculous,” I say. “As if anyone would let two men go around dressed like that. It’s not right. They should’ve thrown them both in jail.”
Ennis raises his eyebrows. “I think it was meant to be a joke.”
“It’s not a very good joke, then.”
He shakes his head. “All right. Next time we’ll see a Western.”
I nod, and Ennis laughs again.
I should be glad he’s not angry at me for disagreeing with him. I should be happy he’s mentioned going on another date.
I can’t feel any of the things I’m supposed to feel.
Ennis asks if I’m hungry. I say yes because boys only ask you that if they’re hungry. He drives us to Stud’s Diner in Davis Heights.
We all used to go to Stud’s every day after school, but I haven’t been there since school started this year.
Walking in the door feels like stepping back in time. Before we’ve made it three feet, there are people all around us. Ennis smiles and says hello and shakes the boys’ hands.
I gaze around. Cookie isn’t here, thank the Lord, but I still recognize every face I see. They’re all from another world.
Frances, my best friend from Johns, is here with Bucky Robinson. She’s wearing his class ring. I didn’t know they were going steady.
I wanted to stay in touch with my old friends. I really did. But Cookie’s right. I haven’t done much more than say hello in the church hallways. After my first week at Jefferson I tried to call Frances and some of the others a few times. I even went over to Frances’s house once with some other girls to listen to records after school.
But it was nothing like last year. They only wanted to ask me what Jefferson was like. And I didn’t want to tell them. My friends were nice about it, but I didn’t want to relive it all again just to satisfy their curiosity.
Since then I’ve only talked to Frances a couple of times. After my first few weeks at Jefferson I just couldn’t bear the thought of picking up the phone and facing a million questions from my friends. After another few weeks had gone by, they stopped calling me, too.
Frances smiles and says hello. I say hello back. I can barely hear myself over the noise in my head.
“Hi there, Sarah,” a boy says. I blink in surprise. It’s Alvin, my old boyfriend, smiling up at me. I murmur hello.
Frances pulls me to one side. “You’re going with Ennis now? That’s wonderful. He’s a doll.”
I shake my head. “This is our first date.”
“Well, good luck. You know he went out with Rose Marie for two months last year and never asked her to go steady. You’ve got to be careful.”
Frances and Bucky lead Ennis and me to a group of tables at the back. Everyone’s in couples. There are no groups of girls sitting together, the way we used to do when we were juniors. Everything is so much more serious now.
I wonder if Frances will marry Bucky Robinson. Isn’t that what going steady is for? That’s what all this is about, isn’t it?
A few years from now everyone sitting here will be married. The girls will have babies they’ll push around in carriages. The boys will wear neckties or work shirts every day and grill hot dogs every summer.
That’s how it’s always been. It’s what I’ve always wanted. Until this week it never occurred to me to question it.
Ennis and I sit down at the only empty table and order milk shakes. Then we look at each other, each of us biting our lips in turn. Ennis coughs and pulls a paper napkin out of the dispenser, crumpling it into a ball.
It’s funny. A
t school Ennis and I talk every day, but now I have no idea what to say to him.
I never used to have this problem with her. We always had plenty to say, even if we were shouting it. Even when she was wrong, there was a certain pleasure in correcting her. In seeing the way her face creased when she tried to think of how to answer me.
Talking to her came naturally. Like breathing.
Except nothing about my time with her was natural. Besides, I shouldn’t be thinking about it now. I should be focusing on Ennis. I have to make sure he really likes me. I should talk about things he’s interested in.
“Have you seen a lot of movies with Tony Curtis?” I ask him.
Ennis smiles and drops his napkin ball. “A few. The Defiant Ones was my favorite. Have you seen it?”
I shake my head, and Ennis launches into the story of the movie. His face gets more animated the longer he goes on.
I could love him. I think.
“Who are these two strangers?” another familiar voice says.
“Paulie!” I jump out of my seat. It’s only been a day since I saw him last, but it feels like years. Ennis gets up, too. “How are you liking it back at Johns?”
“It’s great.” Paulie is smiling bigger than I’ve seen him smile all year. “It’s really, really great.”
“It’s as if he never left,” says the junior girl with him, Shirley Battle. “Except all anyone talks about anymore is what a hero he is, for all of us.”
Paulie grins and drops his head.
Cookie and her friends didn’t seem to think I was any sort of hero.
“I wish Chuck were here, too,” I say. “Then it would be a real reunion.”
Paulie catches Ennis’s eye and snickers. Ennis starts to smile, then bites his cheek. I hate it when boys have private jokes.
“I don’t think we’ll be seeing Chuck,” Ennis says. “He doesn’t come to Stud’s on Saturday nights much anymore.”
“Not when he’s got something better to do,” Paulie says, chuckling. “With somebody he can’t bring down to old Stud’s.”
Ennis smacks Paulie’s arm, but he’s laughing, too. I roll my eyes and sip my milk shake.
Ennis notices I’m bored and changes the subject. “Have tryouts started?” he asks Paulie.
“Next week,” Paulie says. “We’ll miss you this year. With you gone, everybody’s saying Alvin will wind up pitching.”
Ennis grits his teeth. Alvin was the relief pitcher last year. Every time he went in for Ennis we could count on the other team scoring at least two runs.
Jefferson’s baseball tryouts were last week. Bo Nash is the pitcher again this year. None of the Negro boys tried out. They didn’t want a beating.
Paulie and Shirley say goodbye and go to sit with Frances and Bucky. Ennis keeps talking about movies, but he doesn’t seem to care as much as he did before Paulie came around.
Ennis walks me to my door at the end of the night. I’m so nervous I have to clasp my hands together to keep them from shaking.
This is it. This is when I should let him kiss me.
But when we get to that top step, I know inside it’s already over.
I can’t do it. Not because of the no-kissing-on-the-first-date rule—that’s silly, like Ruth said—but because it’s just not right.
Ennis is a nice boy, but I’m not a nice girl.
I can’t let him get mixed up with someone like me. Not until I’ve fixed this.
So I stand as far away from him as I can and say, in my best church voice, “Thank you for the evening. I had a lovely time.”
Ennis takes a step back. “You’re welcome. So did I.”
I swallow. “I do hope you have a safe drive home.”
“Thank you.” He swallows, too.
This is when he’ll ask me for a second date. If he wants to.
“Do you, ah—” He stops, looking at me.
I look back at him with my best church smile.
“I suppose I’ll see you on Monday,” he says instead.
My heart flips with relief. Disappointment. Fear.
What if I never get another chance like this? What if I spend years looking back on this moment, wishing I’d fixed everything the one time I could?
I can’t let that time with her be the last time I ever kiss someone.
I can’t let her win.
But Ennis is already turning back toward the street.
“Wait!” I say.
He turns back.
“I, ah—”
I don’t know how to get a boy to kiss me. I try to think of how it goes in the romance stories I steal off Ruth’s bookshelf, but I can’t remember any of them now. Ennis looks at me queerly, as if I have food on my nose.
So I stand up as high as I can on my tiptoes, and I kiss him.
It’s wrong. It’s all wrong. It’s not how things are supposed to go.
Girls don’t kiss boys.
But that’s not why this doesn’t feel right.
Ennis is as shocked as I am. He stumbles on the step before he bends down to kiss me back. For a moment we just stand there with our lips pressed together. My neck hurts from straining up so far.
Aside from that, I don’t feel...anything.
It didn’t work.
I’m still thinking about her.
I’m not fixable.
I step back, putting a full foot of space between us. I want to wipe my mouth off.
“Next Friday,” Ennis says in a rush. “Do you want to go out next Friday?”
“Yes!” I say.
I can’t believe he hasn’t noticed I’m not normal yet. It might as well be written all over my face in bright red paint.
“All right.” He pinches the bridge of his nose. “That’s good. I’ll, ah, see you at school.”
He walks back down the steps, shaking his head as though he’s dizzy.
I squeeze my eyes shut to keep from crying.
I can try harder. I can spend the rest of my life trying.
I’ll only be fooling myself.
I’ll never be able to do this right.
Lie #18
REVEREND TILLMAN TALKS a lot about Hell.
He says Hell is a prison of endless misery. Universal damnation. Hissing, burning torment that never ends, where infidels and sinners suffer for all eternity.
He says the wickedest sinners go into the deepest belly of Hell, to a lake of fire and brimstone. Just standing on the rim of that lake, looking down on the burning and the screaming and the torment, would be enough to drive a sane man to madness.
He says none of us on Earth can fathom the true torments of Hell.
I don’t know as much about Hell as Reverend Tillman, but I know Reverend Tillman has never been inside Jefferson High School.
Because surely Hell must be worse than this. Something has to be.
It’s been nearly four months since we first came to Jefferson. Still, every day, when I walk out of that school building, my heart pounds and my hands tremble. Every day, there’s a roaring in my ears no voice can penetrate.
Maybe God placed me at Jefferson to show me the wages of my sin. But that doesn’t explain why the others are here, too.
Ruth doesn’t deserve to be here. She hates it all as much as I do, but she’s better at pretending. When we step into the parking lot each morning and wait for that first round of shouts, Ruth smiles her broadest smile at the white people, daring them to make her stop. She keeps smiling until we get inside. Then she links arms with Yvonne and sets off for their Homeroom, strutting down the hall in their matching cardigans, pleated skirts and knee socks, just like the matched sets all the popular white girls wear. They ignore the shouts of “nigger” that follow everywhere they go.
Ruth begged and begged me to stop following her around all day, and I finally gave in. None of us has actually been hurt since Paulie left, but the name-calling is still as bad as ever, and I still look over my shoulder constantly to see who’s following me.
The problem is, looking over my shoulder makes me that much more likely to catch her eye by accident.
It’s been five weeks since that afternoon. Sometimes I’ll go hours at a stretch without thinking about what happened. One Saturday I almost went the whole afternoon before her face popped into my mind.
Nighttime is always the worst. Because she’s there when I dream.
Sitting on a crate in the back room at Bailey’s. Tossing her hair in French class. Bending over a book, her lip twitching as she thinks of something funny. In the dreams there’s always a light beaming down that makes her hair shine, her cheeks glow, her eyes twinkle.
The worst part—the part that makes me want to cry from the shame—is that in my sleep, when I see her, I’m happy.
When I first start to wake up, in that strange in-between place where I’m still half dreaming, she’ll still be there, smiling at me.
And I’ll be smiling back at her.
Then I shake myself awake and remember that she doesn’t make me happy. She’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.
I can’t smile at her. Even when I’m dreaming.
Then I get out of bed, go out into the world and play the part of a normal girl. Even though sooner or later, someone is bound to see me for the imposter I really am.
I can make all this go away. I just need to try harder.
So on our second date I let Ennis kiss me again. We did it in the car that time, so we wouldn’t have to worry about my parents seeing through the window.
It was all right, I guess. It didn’t feel all swooshy-stomach, fancy-music, swirly-backdrop, like when the boy and the girl kiss at the end of the movie. It felt awkward, and a little boring. I couldn’t tell how long we ought to sit there with our lips pressed together, so after a minute I pulled away and said I had to go inside. He didn’t look especially disappointed, so maybe that’s how kissing between boys and girls is supposed to go. If that’s so, then I don’t see what all the fuss is about.