That Night

by Alice McDermott

  His joke told, his status among them confirmed, Rick would step back to where she leaned against his car and once again pull her under his arm. She would hold his belt, and the homely boys, or those simply less lucky in love, the virgins, the chronic masturbators, would have to remind themselves that Sheryl was not really all that great-looking, lest they weep with envy. When the hour came for the two of them to drive off alone together, the boys would nod coolly, say, “See ya.” They would turn to the remaining girls with new interest. Turn especially and with the greatest charm to those known as the tramps among them.

  Alone, Sheryl and Rick would simply drive for a while, Sheryl sitting close to him in the wide front seat, her hand on his thigh. Rick with his arm around her. Slowly, she would begin to tell him things, about his friends or his family, about the meaning of the songs that came on the radio, speaking with that same assurance she had shown me, the assurance that she had been through more than any of them, that she knew more.

  “Larry really likes that girl he’s dating,” she might tell him. “He just won’t admit it because she’s so heavy. He’s afraid you guys will make fun of him.”

  “No,” Rick would say. “He’s using her. He’s just getting laid. He told me himself.”

  Sheryl would nod. “Just wait and see. See what he gives her for Christmas.”

  He would learn to depend on her and the way she looked at things. He would begin to believe she knew more than anyone.

  During that summer when they first met, through the fall they spent together, again in the spring as soon as the ground had begun to dry and that part of the summer they had before she went away, they would end their nights in the park on the other side of town. It was a long, narrow piece of land fronting on the busy, brightly lit boulevard but surrounded on its farthest end by dim streets lined with small homes. On the boulevard side there were swings and slides, basketball courts, and in summer a concrete wading pool, but the back half was given over to a baseball diamond, a picnic area and, on a hill that marked the end of the property, a sparse approximation of a wood.

  Seven or eight years later, when I was Sheryl’s age, this was the place to buy and use drugs, to drink sweet apple wine or sangria from leather wineskins, pretending you were at Woodstock, but then, when the park still closed at dusk, it was a place where only the most serious couples went to make love.

  The trick in Sheryl’s day was to find an inconspicuous spot to leave your car, somewhere along one of the side streets, far enough from the park itself to avoid suspicion but not so far that you could be seen by too many people as you walked, with a brown paper bag filled with Cokes and a bottle of rum, toward the lowest part of the fence.

  Once over the fence, you would only have to choose your niche among the trees. A police cruiser would pass through each night at about twelve or one, but it would never leave the road that circled the baseball diamond and so it was easy enough to avoid its headlights.

  Sheryl and Rick would sit down together on a sloping bit of dirt and grass. Rick would open the bottles of Coke, pour out half, open the flask bottle of rum. In the semidarkness (there were two or three tall night lights in the park, some small bit of light from the surrounding streets), he would match the lips of the two bottles carefully, pour the rum with a precise and steady hand. (“This is what my old man does for a living,” he told her. “Pours piss and blood from one bottle to another.”) They would sit shoulder to shoulder, their knees raised, the bottles in their hands.

  She might tell him then: “I used to think it was stupid that people you really loved could just die …”

  Moving her hand across the dirt and the grass, she might say, “If one of us died.”

  He would tell her about the car accident he had been in before he met her. An older friend had been driving. They had cut school and smoked some reefer. They had been drinking all day. At about nine o’clock that night, in a town not far away—his friend had been looking for the house of some girl he knew—they turned a corner and hit a parked car. Neither of them knew how or why. They both might have been asleep. They were laughing when they crawled out, one through a window, one through a back door. The engine was nearly in the front seat. Rick’s father said that if they’d hit a tree or a pole, something that couldn’t have rolled with the impact as the car did, they both would have been killed. His father had said it would have served them right.

  Sheryl would whisper, “Before me, you would have been forgotten.”

  Or perhaps by then she would no longer have to say it. By then, he would understand it himself, even as he told her the story, as he remembered his father’s tired, angry voice, his mother’s dazed indifference. If he had died then, before he met her, who would have loved him enough to make his disappearance from the earth illogical?

  Perhaps by then he understood only that when she spoke of dying he should turn to her, loosen the scarf at her throat or her waist, gently push her back onto the grass.

  He lay beside her, his cheek to the cool ground, his arm across her waist. She studied the sky, speaking softly and with that same sure tone. Beyond her were the two empty Coke bottles, his wallet, opened flat, the ripped silver paper from the condom, the circle of her scarf. He watched the line of her profile, the shadowy movement of her dark lashes as she whispered to him, her face to the sky. The police headlights passed through the trees, but they hardly made her pause; she was afraid of nothing in that world that seemed only, even superfluously, to begin at the end of these woods. Speaking softly but with that same assurance, she would name for him all the things that didn’t matter to them, that didn’t have to matter to them, and it seemed to him that she started at the foot of those woods and worked outward, dismissing, obliterating, the entire world: not friends, she told him, not family, not school, not getting older or getting married or finding a job. Not car accidents or hospitals, not any kind of luck, good or bad, not dying.

  She turned to him and even in the darkness he saw that same brightness in her eyes, a hard, challenging gleam. Only they mattered. They loved each other. It would not be logical for love to bring them to anything else. And later, when she sat up, laughing, draping her scarf over her bare shoulders like a shawl, he reminded himself that she knew things no one else seemed to know.

  In a town not far from ours, there was a school run by the Salvation Army or the Baptists and called, blatantly enough, the Wayside School. For troubled girls, my mother would tell me as we drove past, for girls in trouble. (The irony of it was never lost upon her: all her prayers and all her formulas for pregnancy coming to nothing while mere children were conceiving, casually, inadvertently, in parking lots and playgrounds.) It was surrounded by a high stockade fence so that only its green and silver sign was visible from the road, and the driveway that led into it was blocked by an iron gate. I never saw the school buildings themselves, never knew anyone who went there, but each Christmas one of the classes in our own school would draw Wayside as its place to send Christmas packages. Draw it from a field that included the children’s ward at the nearby mental hospital, a city prison, a Catholic orphanage and innumerable nursing homes. The girls at Wayside, the class would be told each year, would appreciate perfume, hand cream, small stuffed animals and dusting powder. Each year the class was asked not to enclose notes, names or addresses with their gifts.

  In college, I met a girl who had grown up just a few blocks from the school. She told me about the occasional incident when one of the “students” tried to bolt, running wild and confused (and sometimes, too appropriately, barefoot) through their neighborhood or down the main street. Once, she and some of her girlfriends—they couldn’t have been more than nine or ten at the time—took a ladder from a set of bunk beds and carried it through the backyard of a neighbor and across a gully to some obscure part of the school’s high fence. It had been about dusk on a summer evening and they had taken turns climbing up. They stood on tiptoe, on the top rung, gripping the points of the fence’s wooden stakes,
but what they saw made the effort worthwhile: a half dozen teenage girls, most of them pregnant, listlessly tossing a beach ball across a lush green lawn.

  Eventually, one of the teenagers noticed the children, or perhaps one of the children grew brave enough to call out, and the entire group moved toward the fence. At first they exchanged information politely, with some of the cautious fascination of Martian to Earthling. “Hello!” they said. “Where did you come from?” The unwed mothers, with their hands on their hips and their bangs in their eyes, laughed each time one of the children stepped down and another head appeared. It must have been a kind of puppet show for them. “And what’s your name?” they’d ask each new face. “And what kind of house do you live in?” The children themselves turning to look down—“What? What?”—taking instructions from the invisible chorus below.

  When some kind of rapport had been established, the teenagers asked for cigarettes. Of course the children had none, but yes, they had parents who smoked. Their parents would never miss one pack, the pregnant girls assured them. (And here our school officials should be commended for their foresight. What might have happened to my own classmates had they included their names and addresses when they wrapped their two cans of hairspray and card of bobby pins in Christmas paper? What requests might they have received from the Wayside girls in return: Go into your parents’ room while they are sleeping. Remove the following from your father’s handkerchief drawer …)

  Two of the children said, almost immediately, “I’ll be right back.” The others said, “We’ll bring you some tomorrow.” And magazines, the girls said, good magazines like Modern Romance, 16, True. Could they ever get them magazines? The children conferred. One climbed the ladder to say her sister read 16 and Teen Screen. She was forced down by the breathless return of the others, who carried packs of Camels and Pall Malls.

  And makeup, the unwed mothers asked. Could they maybe bring them some makeup? But suddenly one of them said, “Beat it,” and the teenagers scrambled. The children crouched at the foot of the fence, mouthing to each other, “Someone’s coming.”

  When they climbed the ladder again, after night had fallen, they saw only the yellow lights of the distant dormitory windows and the bloated shadows of the girls who passed behind them.

  The next morning, deprived of their ladder by an irate mother, the children heaved three issues of Teen Screen over the fence and were startled to hear the voice of some woman—a teacher or warden or nurse—warn them that she would call the police if they tried that again.

  I could draw on my own experience to imagine how Sheryl felt in the months before that night, draw detail and scene from what I remember of my own brief pregnancy and from all the awkward and untimely pregnancies of my friends, but I fear something would be lost. Unwed mothers at that time, at the time Sheryl joined their ranks, were a specific group; they fell somewhere between criminals and patients and, like criminals and patients, they were prescribed an exact and fortifying treatment: They were made to disappear.

  So I would have to add to my own memories of my own troublesome pregnancy not merely some sense of shame and a bit more drama but also a different kind of fear: when her period didn’t come (this would have been late spring, not very long after she had stopped to talk to me), when she found herself dizzy with nausea every morning, unable to eat her cereal (she would get up before her mother and grandmother, pour a bit of milk and a few crumbs of corn flakes into a bowl and leave it unwashed in the kitchen sink), when she had to keep herself from imagining the taste and the smell of the eggs, the frozen green beans, the jars of peanut butter she rang up on her register and packed into brown paper bags.

  I would have to add to my own experience a kind of fear that another fifteen years would make obsolete: the fear of a criminal with the police at the windows and doors, of a patient trapped in some unrelenting illness.

  If she was pregnant, an unwed mother, she would have to be sent away. In all her theories of love and dying and keeping one another alive, in all her certainty, she could not have anticipated this simple, insurmountable problem: if she was pregnant, she might never see him again.

  Another month passed. Another period failed to begin. Her breasts felt tender, her stomach was no longer quite so taut between the protruding bones of her hips. Leaning with him against his car, listening to them all talk and laugh, watching some of the boys and some of the girls who had not yet become lovers move toward one another, she might have wanted to beg for silence. Please, just everyone be quiet. Her cigarettes were beginning to make her feel sick. She would have to pretend to sip from her can of beer, though the smell alone was enough to send her reeling. Rick, beside her, his arm heavy on her shoulders, would at moments seem a stranger, as the healthy always seem strange and uncaring to those who are ill. She would have to slip her fingers through his belt loop, pull him closer to her, rest her nose and her lips on the arm of his cool leather jacket. Closing her eyes against the dim parking-lot lights and the childish sound of their voices, she would have to breathe him in, the odor of the leather, of his aftershave and, indistinguishable from it, her own perfume, of the summer night, sun-warmed parking lot and litter.

  Later, she held the bag of Coke and rum as he climbed the jingling chain-link fence. She followed him, lowering the bag over the top, pausing at the top herself to remember how her hands, even her legs, had shaken the first time she had made this awkward turn, from the outside of the fence to the inside. Making it easily now, her fingers knowing just how lightly to grip the thin wire, her toes finding just the right spaces even in the dark. Rick touched her legs as soon as he could reach them. Took hold of her hips with both hands.

  At some point she must have considered telling him. She must have imagined their conversation. They would be lying together on their hill or sitting side by side like children, their knees raised, the bottles of Coke in their hands.

  “Rick, what if I got pregnant?”

  “You won’t. We’re careful.”

  “But what if?”

  A shrug, but his eyes would be far away. “We’d get married.”

  “How?”

  “What do you mean, how? I don’t know. You get a license.”

  “And move in with my mother?”

  Another shrug.

  “Or your father?”

  “You could get an abortion.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. I’d have to find out.” Laughing, “I could ask my old man to do it. You’re not going to get pregnant.”

  She would have to whisper, “Not that it would matter. It wouldn’t matter anyway.” But still he would see she had been wrong; it wasn’t just them. There was also family and school, getting a job and getting older. There was all that long life that had become for her since the day her father died a sentence, a burden. There was all that long life, all those years until she would see him again, years of family and friends and school and getting a job and getting older—years that would be double and triple, four, even five, times the years she had already lived—and none of her promises, none of her assurances, could shorten them or lighten their load or, as she had wanted to do, obliterate them completely. They loved each other and they would continue to love each other, as they did on those dark nights when they seemed alone in the world, even after one of them died, but what until then? How would they get through all the years until then?

  She stretched beside him on the damp ground, aware of the tenderness in her breasts, the weeks and days since her last period, a certain tightness at her waist. She began at the edge of the woods and worked outward: not this, not this, nothing else mattered.

  When she went into her mother’s room that morning, she knew what she was setting in motion. Other girls in her school had suddenly disappeared. One, when Sheryl was a freshman, had been banned from the school, actually turned away from her homeroom, because her pregnancy had become too obvious to ignore. She knew what would happen, and only the speed of it all startled
her.

  While her mother rose and immediately went to the phone, Sheryl got up off her knees and sat carefully on the edge of the bed. The nausea made her weak, made her limbs feel thick and sodden. The sound of the children’s voices as they came through the open windows made her want to put her hands to her ears. Her mother spoke into the phone, and Sheryl, in her thin summer pajamas, in the warm blue room, trembled. Trembled once to think that the night before, when he’d said from the bottom of the steps, “I’ll meet you tomorrow after work,” and then turned and walked toward his car, was the last time in her life she would ever see him. Trembled to remember the morning she had come downstairs into the kitchen where her father was taking a final gulp of coffee before he kissed her mother and then patted her just-teased hair to say, “So long, sleepyhead.” The last time in her life she would ever see him.

  I must add to my own memories of my own pregnancy—for mine was fifteen years later and far too early in my marriage to be allowed to come to term—her strange assurance: It would not be forever. It wasn’t possible that people who loved each other could be apart forever.

  In the days that followed the fight, while our fathers moved together to share their wounds and rehearse their triumph, while we children stepped back from the sidewalks and the streets to make way for them—suspending our present, you might say, while they recalled some part of their past—our mothers watched Sheryl’s house as if they knew something. Passing behind their own windows, their own summer screens, they paused, bent a little, glanced out. Each morning they took their coffee to the living room and drank it standing in the shaft of white sunlight that came through their front door. At night they kept vigil in unlit rooms. We would discover them quite by accident when we flipped a light switch: they would be flattened against the wall beside a drawn shade or crouched by a window, one finger still caught in the slat of a blind. Coming upon them, we would jump more than necessary, yell, “Ah!” or “Yikes!” the way startled people did on television. Our mothers would hiss, “Turn it off,” as if they feared someone else might hear.