Alice left the kitchen and went up the stairs. Lately it had become easier to push down hard on her right knee as she went up the stairs. It seemed to help the dull weary pain in knee and hip. She realized she still held the greasy spatula in her right hand. She felt more tired than usual. There had been a lot of work getting the house ready to leave for two weeks. And all the packing. And last night she had stayed awake until almost three waiting for Suzie to come in. Soon, though, they’d be on their way and she could just sit while Bert drove. She wished she could just stay home and let the three of them go off on this early vacation. Just sit at home and do some sewing and watch the television. That would be restful.
But Bert had it all planned. They would make three hundred miles a day, and see many points of interest and get the car covered with stickers. They would spend too much money. Bert said it was “good for the girls.” The girls would snap and whine at each other and Bert would curse the traffic, the service in restaurants, the prices, the car. It was all marked out on the maps. At least she would be able to just sit.
As she reached the top of the stairs she heard the throaty gurgle as the last of the bath water ran out of the tub. The hallway floor creaked as she walked down to the bathroom door. It was open a few inches. Alice Scholl pushed it open the rest of the way and looked at Suzie, her seventeen-year-old daughter.
Suzie had gotten out of the tub and stood with one foot on the side of it drying between her toes. The small bathroom was steamy. Suzie’s coarse mane of red-gold hair fell forward, obscuring her face. Alice Scholl remembered seeing a picture somewhere of a girl in that same position, only the girl wore a short frilly skirt and she was tying a shoe.
“Your father’s getting mad on account of you taking all this time,” Alice said.
“I heard him way up here,” Suzie said, her voice sulky and sleepy. “I don’t want to go anyhow.”
Alice looked at her daughter with exasperation. Her daughter’s naked body was the body of a stranger, a grown woman. Her skin was still golden with the afterglow of last summer’s deep all-over tan. The slanting morning light in the single window emphasized the pale silky down on her body. Along the knuckles of her spine it grew more heavily. The young buttocks were round golden fruit, and the legs were long and round and slightly heavy. Alice could see one firm large breast, water droplets standing on the unblemished skin. Suzie took her foot down and put the other on the rim of the tub.
“You got in awful late last night.”
“Did I?”
She had been a merry child, thin, active, laughing. But in the last two years the body had slowed and ripened, and she had become sulky, distant, difficult. There was no way to reach her. Alice had heard hints about her in the neighborhood. The girl had been out very late last night. It had been a warm evening. Alice saw the way it had been, the car blanket and the faceless man, and the ripeness of her daughter. She felt her face grow hot and she was aware of the sagging tiredness of her own used body.
Alice Scholl, with no conscious thought, took a half-step forward. She raised the spatula and whipped it against the taut buttock, using all the stringy muscles of her arm, using the springiness of the handle. The crack was like the sound of a circus whip. Suzie seemed to go right up into the air to land with her back to the window, eyes wide, both hands behind her.
“Hell!” she said in a thin high voice. “Damn it, Mom!”
“I told you to hurry.”
Alice saw her daughter’s shocked eyes fill with tears. She said, “I… I’m sorry. Your father got on my nerves. And you weren’t hurrying. I… I didn’t mean to hit you like that.”
Suzie blinked her eyes rapidly. “That really hurt!” She turned and stood with her back to the mirror, standing on tiptoe, looking back over her right shoulder. “Hey, look at that mark!”
Alice inspected the damage. The flat end of the spatula with its pattern of holes was embossed in dead white, the holes bright red, the edge outlined in red. “It will go away,” she said uncertainly.
“It stings like anything.”
“You got her out of the bathroom yet?” Bert yelled up the stairs.
“She’s leaving right now,” Alice called back.
“What’s the big rush anyhow?” Suzie asked sullenly. The bones of her face were heavy and prominent. Her mouth was wide, the lips heavy.
“You’ll hurry, won’t you, dear?”
Suzie sighed heavily. “Sure. I’ll hurry. A big rush to go no place.”
“It’s your father’s vacation. He’s been planning on it. Let’s try not to spoil it for him. And… I’m sorry I hit you.”
“It’s okay,” Suzie said.
Alice went down the stairs. Connie came bounding up, taking two stairs at a time. She was a thin child and she whined more than Suzie had at that age. Alice ate hurriedly with Suzie while Bert and Connie packed the last-minute things in the Chrysler. Alice noticed that Suzie sat down at the table a bit gingerly. Suzie wore a pale yellow sweater with the sleeves shoved up, a white skirt that fitted her slim waist snugly and flared over the heavy hips.
“You look nice, dear,” she said.
Suzie smiled crookedly. “All dressed up and no place to go.”
“Don’t be like that! You can try to have a good time.”
Bert blared on the horn. Alice said, helplessly, “Well, we’ll just have to leave these in the sink. Check the back door again, dear. Is your bedroom window shut?”
They locked the front door and went out to the car with coats and purses. Alice got in front beside Bert and Suzie got in the back with her sister and the suitcases that wouldn’t fit in the trunk.
Bert raced the motor and looked at his watch. “A half-hour late,” he said.
“You said I could sit by the window, Daddy!” Connie said indignantly. “Now she’s sitting there.”
“Shut up, both of you,” Bert said. He drove down the street. Alice turned around for a last look at their house. The yard would be a mess when they got back. She hoped the ants wouldn’t find the dishes in the sink. She wondered if Bert had remembered to turn off the hot water heater. She decided not to ask him. They drove through the city and on out to the by-pass light. Bert kept gunning the motor while they waited for the light. When it changed the Chrysler leaped forward, tires squealing as they turned left, turned east.
Alice settled herself more comfortably in the seat. The road maps were between them. She smoothed her skirt over her knees and folded her hands. It would be nice to just sit.
Connie said, in a small voice, “I think I got to go.”
Bert swore softly.
After they had stopped at the gas station Suzie let Connie sit next to the window. She thought about the cute boy at the gas station. He’d had nice shoulders. And when she’d looked right at him he’d blushed. She liked it when they blushed. The ones who blushed were nicer than the ones who didn’t.
Her father mumbled something and she looked at the back of his sandy head. His bald spot was bigger than the last time she had noticed it. It was bigger than a silver dollar. He sat hunched forward over the wheel, his chin out. He thought he was such a wonder at handling a car. He ought to take lessons from Barney.
She felt a little quiver of remembered excitement about the time Barney had run the Crescent Road light and the prowl car took off after them, red light swinging back and forth and the siren screaming at them. Barney had just put it right down to the floor. His Merc had dual carbs, shaved heads, shortened stroke and it was all relieved. He walked right away from the prowl, but he was afraid they’d radio ahead, so after he made the Mill River bend he jammed on the brakes and cut into a farm yard and turned out the lights. They sat there in the darkness and the stupid prowl roared on by. Then Barney backed out, never turning a hair, and they drove back to town at a legal speed, laughing all the way.
Barney liked driving and he talked about it a lot. He had taught her to drive the Merc. So she knew all the things her father did wrong. Like trying to f
ight all the other cars. The way he passed, even. Riding right on their bumper until he could swing out, and always taking chances, sometimes making the oncoming car slow right down to give him time to get back in. And if anybody wanted to pass him, he’d speed right up. He drove like it was a war all the time between him and the other drivers, cursing them and getting mad every little while.
She looked at the back of his head and it seemed incredible to her that there had been years when the high spot of her day was the time when he came home. Then she would run out to the garage and wait and he would grab her and swing her way up in the air and kiss her and carry her into the house, calling her Soupy Sue and things like that to make her laugh.
What a dopey kid! He was fine as long as you let him know every three minutes he was king of the hill, but when you had a mind of your own all he wanted to do was lean on you and tear you down. The only break in this whole thing was getting out of school for a while. It was funny to look at your own father and see what he really was. Just a pint-sized mill hand with a bad temper. And she had used to wonder if God looked like him. He had seemed so big.
Suzie looked at the gray hair of her mother’s head. It certainly wasn’t much of a life for her, tiptoeing around the little tyrant all the time. Maybe Mom had figured, in the beginning, that it was a big deal. So what had she gotten? Only thirty-eight years old and bags under her eyes and a figure like a sack of sand. That’s what it could do to you when you figured wrong. She was lots younger than Ava Gardner and way, way younger than Lana Turner, but look at her. Just no spirit left at all any more. Except taking a whack with that spatula. Suzie clenched her left buttock and felt the soreness. It stung like a burn.
“Want to play horse?” Connie asked eagerly.
“No,” Suzie said flatly.
“And I don’t want no kids yelling horse in my ear,” Bert said.
Connie sighed. “I’ll play by myself and whisper then,” she said.
“We got to really push to get as far as we figured on,” Bert said.
“Don’t take chances, dear,” Alice said.
“I’m doing the driving.”
Suzie leaned her head back and blocked out the whole world, the swaying car, the traffic sounds. This was going to mean two weeks away from Barney and she had told herself that she would use this time to decide whether to stop going with him. Yet she sensed that she had already made the decision.
In the beginning he had seemed so cool and sophisticated. He had made her feel like a dumb kid. In the beginning, when he had gotten fresh and she had stopped him, he had always laughed and that had made her feel even dumber. They were going steady and he kept telling her that she was afraid of being alive, afraid to be a woman. He would finish high school this June, and she would finish her junior year. Most of her friends went steady. And a lot of them were frank about saying that they did it. So she had said that she and Barney did it, too. She didn’t want to sound like a dumb kid. They said it was all right if you were going steady.
Then after they believed that she was giving herself to Barney, it seemed pointless not to do it. But she had been afraid and she hadn’t for a long time. She had done it that time of the New Year’s Eve party, after the wine. It had hurt and it had scared her sober. She hadn’t wanted ever to yield again. But Barney had wanted her so much and he said it didn’t make any difference as long as they had done it once. So she let him. Then she had given herself to him again and it had been like going out of her mind and she had been shocked and surprised by her own eagerness.
So after that they had made love frequently. And their relationship had changed. She wasn’t a dumb kid any more. In some funny way Barney had become the dumb kid. He didn’t seem cool and sophisticated any more. He seemed like a little dog, begging. And she learned that she could make him do almost anything by telling him they wouldn’t make love any more. She had learned that it was a power you could use.
Last night they had done it because she was going to be away for two weeks and afterward he had said they should get married. After he graduated in June he was going in with his uncle, in the wholesale grocery business. He said there wasn’t any reason why she should have to finish high school. What did you learn in the last year anyway? He had it all figured out. His cousin had built an upstairs apartment and he would rent it cheap. It was pretty well furnished. Then they could live there and be married and be alone every night.
At first it had given her a flutter of excitement, the thought of having a place all her own, to fix up and so forth. But it wouldn’t be all her own. It would be Barney’s too. And he would be there every night. And she knew he wouldn’t want to go out because it always bothered him a little to spend money. It would be more of a trap than anything, and she would have to share it with the little dog begging.
Barney didn’t seem the way he had at first. Now she could sort of back away and look at him. His shoulders looked good until he took off his coat and then they kind of slumped down. He was only nineteen, but his hair was beginning to go back in one of those widow’s peaks. When he was nervous his stomach got upset, and when it got upset his breath got bad, so that sometimes she had to hold her breath when he kissed her.
She wondered if it had happened like this with her mother, and if her mother had wanted to have a place of her own so much that she hadn’t seen how it would be afterward. Barney was sort of cute, but he wasn’t going to amount to much of anything. Not with just high school. And he was awfully jealous. He didn’t like other boys to even look at her. But she knew they liked to look. She wished she wasn’t so heavy in the hips and legs, but they didn’t seem to mind it. At least they kept looking. A girl had to make up her mind whether she was going to get married young and be sort of trapped, or wait and do a lot with herself and get somebody who was important. You might not love him so much, but life would be nicer, and it wouldn’t all be sort of down a drain before anything exciting ever happened.
Then you had to remember that Barney was religious and his religion said to have babies. She guessed she would have babies pretty often. She felt as if that was the way her body was. Babies were nice, and she felt warm when she thought of them, but they could be an awful lot of work. They could drag you down and ruin your figure in no time.
She decided she would think it over for the whole two weeks of the vacation, just to be fair to Barney, but she was certain that when she got back she would tell him that she didn’t love him and didn’t want to go out with him any more. He would act like a crazy man, but that couldn’t be helped. There were lots of boys who wanted to take her out. Maybe some of them had the wrong idea, on account of Barney, but she would straighten them out fast. They’d find out she was no tramp.
No, sir. It would be a lot harder to be good, knowing how it was, but it was going to be worth it because somewhere, somehow, someday, there would be a man. A sort of George Hamilton type. He would be fun and sometimes he’d act like a little boy, but he could become stern. Not a temper like Daddy’s. Just stern and she’d have to do what he said. He’d have a lot of money and a good education. He’d take her lots of places. He’d never get an upset stomach. He’d always…
“White horse!” Connie yelled. “Over there. Oh, I forgot.”
“I’ll play,” Suzie said. “We’ll both whisper. You can start with five for that one if you want.”
“Okay!” Connie said, delighted.
“Keep the racket down,” Bert said.
“Let them have fun, dear,” Alice said.
“We got to make time,” Bert said.
They stopped for lunch at a drive-in and had hamburgs and milk shakes. Bert Scholl felt better when he checked his mileage against the time. “We’re doing okay,” he said. “Now we’re on the divided highway, we can really rack up the miles.”
He ate his hamburg quickly and felt it settle into a solid lump in his middle. Meals on trips always seemed to give him indigestion. He put his glass back on the metal tray and watched Suzie walking to
ward the women’s room, her white skirt whirling around her sturdy legs, her gold-red hair alive in the sun. She was certainly a good-looking dish. If you looked at her as if she wasn’t your daughter, you felt like whistling to get her to turn around.
He wondered suddenly if any of those high school punks had tried anything with her. He clenched a heavy muscular fist. He knew he would enjoy killing anybody who tried to touch her. But they were pretty wild in the high schools these days. You couldn’t tell what went on. All the kids acted sulky. They wouldn’t tell you anything, or ask your advice. They looked at you as if you were some kind of dumb servant.
Before Suzie had returned he started blowing the horn for the girl to come and take the tray. He leaned on the horn in a long blast. The girl came out, insolently slow.
“You’re supposed to blink your lights, mister,” she said.
“Now you’re finally here, just unhook the tray, sister. The money is exact. You’re too slow to tip.”
She showed her teeth. “My life is ruint. It would have been a whole dime, I bet.”
Bert backed away angrily and swung out onto the highway recklessly, ignoring the angry blast of an oncoming truck. The truck swung around him and cut in so sharply that Bert had to apply his brakes. He put the pedal down to the floor and took off after the truck, arms tense, jaw jutted forward, pale eyes narrow. The big truck was making time. Bert got the speedometer up to eighty before the truck seemed to stop moving away.
“Please be careful!” Alice said.
“I’m driving,” he growled. He swung into the far left lane. He overhauled the truck and passed it. He maintained his speed for a time to put the big truck far in the rear. He saw it dwindle as he glanced from time to time in the rear vision mirror. “Showed that joker,” he said.
Cry Hard, Cry Fast Page 2