by M. E. Kerr
I found my grandfather sitting in his bedroom, sipping coffee. Janice was on his lap.
“She’s scared of all the people,” he said while he petted her.
“Billie Kay’s told everyone who she is.”
“I heard.”
“I guess she won’t give me away though,” I said. I sat down on the bed. I couldn’t help wishing that Billie Kay would give me away. It had something to do with Ty Hardin’s cracks about our glasses and the tree; Brenda Belle’s fussing over him; and Dr. Cutler’s abrupt manner on the telephone. I remembered a report one of the schools once sent to my father concerning my progress, or lack of it. Adam is too self-conscious of the fact he is your son. This is a major detriment to his own personality development.
My grandfather said, “Go back and join the party, A.J. You don’t have to keep me company.”
“Maybe I want your company,” I said.
“I’m not much company without a glass in my hand. I don’t have much to say.”
“I don’t, either,” I said. “Do you think I have much personality, Grandpa?”
“You’re doing fine, A.J. You haven’t been here a month, and you have a girlfriend already.”
“I don’t know that she’s really interested in me,” I said.
“Are you that interested in her?” he said.
“I just don’t know,” I sighed. I couldn’t bring myself to mention Christine Cutler. If she’d been anyone but a Cutler, I would have liked to discuss her with my grandfather. I said, “Brenda Belle is a nice girl, but I don’t know if we should be going steady. It sort of limits us. It’s very important to her to go steady, because of her mother.”
“It’s tough for a girl like Brenda Belle,” said my grandfather. “She lives with those two old-maid types, no man around the place. Her mother was old-fashioned even in her own time. She should have lived back when Christmas was banned in New England—those times suit her better.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry for Brenda Belle.”
“I told you once before, don’t make that mistake,” said my grandfather. “When you pity someone, sometimes all that means is you wish someone would pity you.”
Suddenly there was a lot of noise from the other room. People were blowing the horns Billie Kay had bought, and beginning to count down from ten.
“Get back to the party, A.J.!” my grandfather said. “It’s almost midnight!”
“Happy New Year, Grandpa!”
“Same to you, A.J.!”
I ran toward the living room so I wouldn’t disappoint Brenda Belle on the stroke of midnight.
Marlon Fredenberg, the football hero, was taking pictures with his new Polaroid.
“Three . . . Two . . .” Billie Kay was counting.
“Where’s Brenda Belle?” I asked Marlon.
“One! . . . Happy New Year!” Billie Kay shouted.
Marlon glanced down at me with this lopsided grin. “They’re gone,” he said. “They took off in Ty’s car.”
Someone began a chorus of “Auld Lang Syne.”
Notes for a Novel by B.B.B.
When Ty Hardin said, “Let’s get out of here!” I was glad to go. It wasn’t particularly because I wanted to be alone with Tyrone Hardin—the idea of me being alone with someone like Tyrone Hardin wasn’t even real to me. What was real was overhearing Adam calling Christine Cutler in the kitchen when I’d gone back there to get him prepared for our midnight kiss. He’d seemed mad at me over something, and I’d headed back to get it straightened out before the New Year was rung in. I was practically in tears after I heard him ask for Christine. It seemed like a fantastic stroke of luck to suddenly have the alternative of sweeping out the door with Christine’s steady boyfriend.
The reality of my situation didn’t begin to sink in until we were headed along Ski Tow Avenue in Ty’s father’s white Cougar. He snapped on the car radio, and as “Auld Lang Syne” was playing, he put his arm around me and drew me close to him.
“Happy New Year,” he said, kissing my cheek.
“Be careful,” I said. “I didn’t plan to die this year.”
He turned up the radio and stepped down on the gas pedal. I thought to myself maybe death was preferable to trying to think of the right thing to say to someone like Tyrone Hardin. What was I even doing with Tyrone Hardin?
I studied his profile to see if there was any drastic change in his facial expression, any winces or sudden tics. Outwardly he didn’t seem to be affected by the fact he had Brenda Belle Blossom with him, when he could have had just about any girl in Storm.
The thing about being with someone like Ty is that you immediately think about how you look, and if you’ve always been bugged about how you look, you become twice as bugged. I doubt that this happens to males in the same way it happens to females. In the movies there are always instances of not-so-great-looking males involved with fantastic-looking females, but it is hard to recall a movie where a not-so-great-looking female is being pursued by a fantastic-looking male. Maybe that’s because males make the movies, I don’t know.
I do know that I rode along beside him thinking: “He is beautiful!” and everything I’d learned about male/female relationships at my mother’s knee told me there was something wrong about that. The male is supposed to be thinking that; the female is supposed to be thinking: I’m glad I am so beautiful that he wants to be with me. At least that’s the way it appeared to me, in all my vast, unliberated knowledge of the sexes.
Every part of my body was locked in tight except my mouth. I could always depend on my mouth. It had a life of its own, and it was determined to live it.
“Where are we heading at such a snail’s pace?” I said, holding on as we squealed around a turn.
“I thought I was taking you home.”
“There’s no one there.”
“That’s why I thought we were going there.”
“Help! Police! Rape!” I shouted.
Ty laughed. “Is that what you’re planning?”
“If you’ll hold still long enough,” my mouth said, but I wasn’t laughing. I was sitting there shivering and wondering what my mouth was getting me into.
“Listen to this song,” Ty said. “I like this song.”
I listened long enough to hear the words and take in the fact it was a very sentimental song. I tried to picture Christine Cutler in my place, and to fathom what she’d answer. What? Beautiful, Ty, in her most moving dulcet tones. Oh, Ty, how very lovely.
“Kiss, bliss, miss,” I said. “Isn’t it nice that everything rhymes?”
“Don’t you like that song, Brenda B.?” he said.
“Last night, held me tight, see the light,” I said. “How veddy veddy original.”
Before I knew it, Ty had stopped the car. He hadn’t pulled over to the side of the road, or said anything; he had simply braked, slipped into neutral, and stopped.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
I got a fast look at his face, just long enough to see that he wasn’t smiling. Then I felt a beard along my cheeks, and his lips pressed against mine, and his arms around me. I remember I began by thinking: He has a beard (!), because he was so fair-haired I hadn’t noticed that about him; and then I thought: His hair tickles, because it was almost as long as my hair. . . . Then I didn’t think, or I don’t remember what I thought, because I began to feel something completely unfamiliar, this floating sensation, this nice limbo.
The next thing I knew he was just looking at me while he took a cigarette from his coat pocket and lighted it, all of this with the same hand. His other arm was around my shoulder. His eyes were trying to fix on mine, but I just stared at his necktie.
My mouth finally surfaced for breath and asserted itself. “Warning,” it said with great effort. “The Surgeon General has determined that cigarette smoking is dangerous to your health.”
I had never heard my poor mouth sound so beaten down.
Ty sensed the difference, smiled, and chucked me und
er the chin.
Then he started the car going again. He said, “You’re right at the top of the hill, aren’t you?”
“Yes. We live there,” I managed.
“Want a cigarette?” he said, offering me the pack.
I took one, although I didn’t smoke. “Why let the Surgeon General run your affairs?” I said, wishing I hadn’t chosen the word “affair.”
Ty snapped his lighter and I leaned forward to light my cigarette.
I drew in and coughed.
“Do you think you’re going to enjoy smoking?” he said.
“Nobody lives forever,” I answered. My hands were shaking. I sat on the left one, and kept the right one, with the cigarette between my fingers, close to me.
Ty parked out in front, but he didn’t get out of the car after he stopped it. He turned to me again and I drifted into him and we stayed in the front seat for quite a long time.
“Do you want to go inside?” he finally said, lighting another cigarette for me.
I felt as though I’d been punched by feathers or socked with some invisible force which rocked my psyche but left the rest of me intact. I could move, anyway; I could go through the motions: walk, talk. “Come on in,” I said. I opened the car door and felt a wave of cold air hit my face. It revived my mouth. “I’ll show you my etchings,” I said. For some reason, I began to walk ahead of him, very fast, as though it was a matter of life and death that I get to the front door before he did. I opened the door and walked in, left the door open and didn’t wait for him to catch up. I called over my shoulder, “Momento while I drink a bottle of iodine in the bathroom.”
I headed upstairs, into the hall bathroom, with my coat still on and the burning cigarette still held between my fingers like it was in a vise.
I shut the door, and leaned against it for strength, and looked at my reflection across the way in the mirror of the medicine cabinet.
“Well, dearie,” I said to it, “what in the hell is happening here?”
Then I tossed my cigarette into the toilet, flushed, and tried to work my coat buttons like any normal person.
My mother always leaves the overhead light on in the living room when we’re not home evenings. (We’re not home evenings about three evenings a year.) She does this on the theory that burglars expect lamps to be on, but not overhead lights. Our house has never been burgled: I can’t recall ever hearing of a thief entering anyone’s house in Storm. Furthermore, my mother never locks the doors, but that is beside the point.
The point is that when I came back downstairs, the overhead light was off, and a small table lamp was on. Ty was sitting on the couch, dropping his cigarette ashes into a Kleenex.
“Do you have an ashtray?” he said.
“I’ll get a saucer from the kitchen,” I said. “Do you want a Coke?”
“On New Year’s Eve?” he laughed.
“There’s nothing here,” I said, “but some sweet sherry my aunt takes for her arthritis.”
“Then we’ll just have to make do,” Ty said. “Sherry it is.”
“If you hear my mother drive up,” I said, “hide the glass. If you don’t hear her drive up, and she drives up, prepare to die.”
I went into the kitchen for the saucer and a tumbler of sherry. I opened a Coke for myself. I’d already had two glasses of punch.
After I poured Ty’s drink, the sherry bottle was almost empty. I diluted what was left with water and put it back in place on the cupboard, behind the box of shredded wheat.
In the living room our radio was playing, and Ty was sitting sideways on the couch, with one arm drawn over the back of it.
I handed him the tumbler of sherry, ignored the fact that he patted the cushion next to him as a gesture for me to sit down there, and crossed the room to the armchair.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
“Nothing is,” I said, but something was the matter with carrying on, the way we had in the car, there in the very living room where my mother and aunt spent nearly every evening of their lives.
“I suppose you miss Adam,” he said.
“Adam who?” my mouth took over.
“Do you let Adam kiss you the way I kissed you?”
“Do you let Christine kiss you the way I kissed you?” There was something radically wrong with that answer, or unfeminine, as my mother would say . . . something not right; but I had to take things as they came, since protocol wasn’t exactly dominating the ambiance.
“Christine and I have broken up,” he said. “Sit over here.”
“Why?” I said.
“I don’t like you to be far away.”
“I mean why have you broken up?”
“Why aren’t you with Adam?” he said. “You’re supposed to be going steady.”
“No comment,” I said, “under advice of my lawyers.”
“What do you know about him?” he said, taking a swig of the sherry. He winced. “This is really sweet!”
“Sweets for the sweet,” I said. “I know things about him that nobody knows.” But I had no intention of telling Ty that Adam had been kicked out of private school for cheating.
“Is he a joker?” Ty asked.
“He’s very serious.”
“Christine says he’s not a joker, either.”
“What does Christine Cutler know about Adam?” I said angrily.
“She just said he wasn’t the type to send this postcard to her father,” Ty said. “Her father got this strange postcard in the mail, something about leaving someone behind him.”
“He must have left someone behind him,” I said, playing it very cool. “What would Adam send a postcard like that to Dr. Cutler for?”
“Search me,” Ty said, “but Dr. Cutler’s got it in his head that Adam might have done it.”
“Ridic!” I said. “Ridic and prepost! Adam doesn’t even know him.”
“I know, I know,” Ty said. “I guess he blames Adam because Adam is new in town.”
“Blames Adam? Didn’t he like the postcard?”
“No, he didn’t. He said some prankster sent it.”
“Adam isn’t the type. Adam lived right next door to Billie Kay Case at one time and he’s very worldly.”
“He doesn’t act it. He had some nerve saying he wouldn’t go to Christine’s party because it’d bore him.” Ty took another swig of sherry. “That really got to Christine. She couldn’t get over it.”
“Christine Cutlers are a dime a dozen to someone like Adam,” I said.
“He’s nothing,” said Ty.
“There is such a thing as Nothing Power,” I said.
Ty gave a snort. “Well, that’s exactly what he’s got: Nothing Power.”
“And Dr. Cutler is a big jackass if he thinks Adam would mail him any kind of postcard.”
“I don’t know how he got that notion into his head, either,” said Ty. “I guess it’s because Adam’s new and Christine’s been talking about him a lot. Also, Doc Cutler hates anyone with the name Blessing.”
I said, “Christine’s been talking about him a lot?” He patted the cushion next to him. “Come on over and see me,” he said.
I said, “Christine Cutler has been talking about Adam Blessing a lot?”
“Enough to make me think she’s had a lobotomy performed,” Ty snickered. “Her wires are crossed.”
“Is that what you fought about?” I said.
“Come over here and sit beside me, Brenda B.,” he said.
“Is that what you fought about?” I said.
“That’s the last thing I’d fight about,” said Ty. “Do you think I’d take someone like him for serious competition?”
“If you insult him, you insult me,” I said. “We’re going steady.”
Ty laughed aloud.
“We are!” I insisted. “We just had a slight lover’s quarrel tonight.”
“If you won’t come to me, I’ll come to you,” Ty said. He stood up and came across the room.
I managed to s
ay, “Is this the way you treat Christine?” before he sat down on the hassock by my feet and pulled me toward him.
“I don’t care about Christine,” he said, while his lips brushed my cheek very lightly. “I care about you.”
I could feel my mouth fading into the background, leaving just me to handle things. Just me is a very weak entity, practically a nonentity.
“I care about you,” Ty said again.
“You do?” I whispered.
“I really do.”
“I’m going steady,” I said.
“I know,” he said.
“This isn’t right,” I said.
“It’s right,” he said. “What feels right is right.”
“Not always,” I said.
“Always,” he said.
“Brenda Belle?” my mother said. “Brenda Belle?”
I jumped to my feet, nearly knocking Ty over. “Mother?” I called back. I whispered to Ty, “The sherry!”
I yelled, “We’re in here, Mother,” and I dashed across and turned on the overhead light. Ty grabbed his overcoat and stuck the half-full tumbler of sherry in his pocket. Then he put the coat carefully over his arm.
“Why did you leave the party?” my mother said as she came into the living room. “Hello, Ty.”
“Hello, Mrs. Blossom,” he said, and then he said, “I’m afraid it’s all my fault Brenda Belle left the party early. You see, I didn’t like the way Adam was treating Brenda Belle.”
My Aunt Faith followed my mother into the living room.
“What do you mean?” said my mother.
“I mean you don’t just ignore a lady, not on New Year’s Eve.”
“Oh, that was Billie Kay’s fault,” my Aunt Faith said. “She was causing a lot of excitement, and I think—”
But my mother didn’t let my aunt finish. Ty had said the magic word: “Lady.”
“That was very considerate of you, Ty,” said my mother. “What happened to Christine tonight?”
“Christine didn’t feel well,” said Ty. “Thank you for asking. I guess I’d better be getting along.”
As he picked up his cigarettes, he managed to wipe up the ring left by the tumbler of sherry. He slipped the piece of Kleenex up his shirt sleeve. My mother and my aunt didn’t notice. They didn’t notice anything strange about the slow way he moved across the room, either, being certain not to disturb the half-full tumbler in his overcoat pocket.