by Sue Miller
These were the things that appealed to me about Sonny: he was older than I was—eighteen to my just-turned sixteen. His hands were perpetually grimed with oil, because his father ran a garage at the end of town, and Sonny helped him there in the afternoon and on weekends. He smelled of Old Spice, which I found almost unbearably attractive. He walked with a kind of sashay. He was beautiful. He smoked. He wanted me. It was all I needed.
He began to drive me home after school, though home is not where we went. Mostly we’d drive the winding two-lane or one-lane roads, the trees a rush of deep green around us, the air cooling rapidly as the afternoon grew longer. I sat in the middle of the wide front seat and, when he took curves, felt the thrill of leaning for a moment against him.
For a while it was easy enough to hide our relationship from my grandparents. It took place mostly at school, after all, or in his car. It was a matter of talk, of teasing each other, of standing or sitting next to each other, close enough for our hips or our arms to be touching.
But then we wanted to date, to go out, and I needed their consent.
To my surprise, my grandfather was the one who objected. What, exactly, he wanted to know, would we be doing?
A movie.
What time would it be over?
Nine-thirty.
So, he could expect me home by, perhaps, ten-thirty at the latest?
Well, we might drive around or get something to eat.
Drive around.
Yes, the way Lawrence and I had last summer.
Ah, well, as it happened, he knew Lawrence rather better than he knew Mr. Gill. And, as it also happened, Lawrence was my brother.
“John,” my grandmother said.
He turned and smiled a frosty smile at her. “I’m all ears,” he said.
“It’s time she went out with someone besides Lawrence.” So that was that.
But that was also the nature of their postures toward Sonny that year—toward the notion of him and me together. It startled me, to the degree that anything outside my relationship with Sonny registered on me at all. I had always understood my grandfather to be the easygoing one, the one who took what there was to take in his stride, and my grandmother to be the more careful, the more noticing.
He picked on small things. He thought Sonny should get a shorter haircut—he didn’t like his curls. He didn’t like Sonny’s father. “The man’s a buffoon,” he said vehemently.
“That doesn’t mean the son is,” my grandmother said.
He didn’t like his name. “What’s his real name?” he’d ask over and over, pretending an unwillingness to believe someone could actually be named Sonny. He was offended by the noise that Sonny’s car made. That kind of thing. It seemed odd, uncharacteristic, to me.
I slept with Sonny, of course. The first time just after Christmas. I’d gone to my father’s in Oak Park for the holiday. I called Sonny the evening I got back, and he picked me up. His grandmother was staying at his house for the holidays, and he drove me three towns over, to her empty place. He knew where the key was, and we let ourselves in. The heat was turned down, and the air was damp and cold inside. Cats meowed and stirred around us, and their smell was overwhelming. We went into her bedroom and shut the door. We lay down together, grabbing and unbuttoning and unzipping all at once. It hurt, but I didn’t mind, because Sonny seemed so powerless. So in my power, really. Afterward, shivering, dressing quickly again, I was astonished, as young women often are, that I felt no different, that I hadn’t been transformed somehow.
But that night marked a change for both of us. From then on, that was what he wanted, more and more, and what I began to want less and less. I was still thrilled by my power over him, by how much he desired me. But I wasn’t thrilled by doing it. Doing it began to seem actually boring to me.
And then, slowly, Sonny himself began to seem boring. I began to notice the ways in which he wasn’t bright—the jokes he didn’t get, the small circuit of his interests. When I learned that Lawrence was coming to Vermont for his spring break, I realized I didn’t want him to, because I didn’t want him to meet Sonny. I imagined Sonny through his eyes, clearly, and felt ashamed.
I lied to Sonny. I said we were all going to take a trip together. And when afterward he said he’d driven by my grandparents’ house and seen that we were there, I lied again and said my grandmother had gotten sick so we stayed home. It seemed impossible in the face of our diverging feelings to tell the truth to him—about anything. I was always trying to evade him now, to find reasons not to go out, not to make love.
He claimed to be more in love with me than before. He wanted us to marry after I’d graduated—he’d wait a whole year, he said, because he loved me so much. How could I say, Well, as a matter of fact, I’ve stopped loving you? As a matter of fact, I probably never did. As a matter of fact, I’d like to be able never to see you again.
In late May, he began speaking of a plan he had for the night of his senior prom. A lot of the kids were going to an all-night party afterward, arranged by the Lions Club at a lakeside retreat. If I could get permission to go, we could leave the party early and spend the night together at a motel. The whole night. We’d wake in the morning next to each other. We could make love again, in the light. To hear him say these words, make love, revolted me. When he proposed it—in his closed-up car in my grandparents’ driveway, excited and eager and smelling of cigarettes—I could feel a kind of sick breathlessness overtake me. But as he went on, I began to relax. I listened and nodded and outlined slow circles on the fog of the passenger window. What I was realizing was that this was something my grandparents would never approve of. I could afford enthusiasm, I could escape the need for truth once again, because they would say no. They would rescue me.
I almost didn’t ask them. I thought I might just tell Sonny that they’d refused without bothering to go through the whole charade. But I was scared that it might come up between them—he did sometimes come in and exchange a few awkward words with them when he picked me up—so I broached it one evening.
I broached it as though I was sure they’d say no. I was trying to signal them by this that I wouldn’t fight about it, that I wouldn’t be upset at their response.
To my surprise, they—or she, anyway—seemed open to the possibility.
“Are there other girls from the junior class going?” she asked. We were sitting in the back parlor, that earlier version of the back parlor, deep and dark and comforting. It was the first warmish night of late spring. My grandfather had had the radio on to a ball game, and at first, he’d just turned it down. Now it was off. The windows were open. The curtains puffed. We could hear voices yoo-hooing up on Main Street.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Not very many, anyhow.”
“But it’s all organized and supervised.” She looked up from her knitting. “By whom? Teachers, I suppose?”
“Yes. And some parents too, I think.”
“And what do you do all night, I wonder?” A deep line came and went between her eyebrows.
I shrugged. “Dance. Maybe swim. I don’t know. There’s food there. Maybe there are games.”
“I’ve never heard of anything so idiotic,” my grandfather said. He was in shirtsleeves, rolled up to his elbows. He wore striped suspenders.
She looked at him. “Oh, now, perhaps you have,” she answered.
“Few things,” he was saying, but she’d already turned back to me and started another series of questions. Would we be going with anyone else? Was there some other parent she could call, just to get a sense of the whole thing?
No, I said. No, we were going alone. And I didn’t want them to call anyone—please, it would be so embarrassing. “I mean, it’s the Lions Club that sponsors it,” I said. This was going to be my last shot, I told myself. After this, I’d cave in.
My grandfather snorted.
“John,” she said. “The girl would like to go. It’s what they do, apparently.”
“The girl,” he sai
d, “doesn’t necessarily know what’s best for her.”
There was a long silence then, and just the creaking of my grandmother’s rocker filling it. Her chin lifted and the creaking stopped. Her hands were still now. She said, very softly, “Who does, then? You, I suppose.”
I was shocked at the deep, controlled anger in her tone. What was that about? Where was it coming from?
He looked at her, waited for her to look back at him. She didn’t. Wouldn’t.
Finally he said, “You’re right, my dear. I’m sorry.” He turned to me. “I’m very sorry, Cath.”
My grandmother stood up and carefully put her knitting in its basket. She set the basket on top of the piano. Everything she did was tight and tidy and neat. “We’ll speak of this later,” she said, and left the room. After a moment, we could hear her footsteps on the stairs as she ascended.
My grandfather and I sat for perhaps a full minute in deep embarrassment, not knowing what to say to each other.
Then it occurred to me. “I do know what’s best for me,” I said.
He seemed to come back from a great distance. “Do you?” he answered.
“Uh-huh.” I waited a moment. “It would be best if I didn’t go.”
He looked at me sharply. He said, “You mean, it would be best if we said no to you?”
I nodded.
He nodded back. After a few seconds, he smiled. He said, “Well, it’s set then. You may not go. And I don’t want to hear another word about it.” He spoke like a bad actor reading his lines, cheerfully. When I returned his smile after a moment, he reached over and turned the radio back on. It was the eighth inning. The signal was beginning to fade as it usually did at this time of night, and he bent his head in concentration to try to hear the score. The Red Sox were trailing, 3–2. “Damn it to hell,” he said.
After I’d gone to bed, I heard him come upstairs too, and then the murmur of their voices in the bedroom, just the slow back and forth, an old deep rhythm that trailed off, finally, into the silence of the ticking, moaning house.
We never spoke of it again. Sonny was disappointed but not truly surprised, and we went on as before.
I had begun by now to worry about the long summer ahead, the possibility of either having to fend Sonny off or have sex with him two, or three, or four nights a week instead of just on Saturday—the only night we had together now.
The weekend before school let out, my grandfather took me fishing, something we occasionally did together, the pleasure for me being the opportunity to drive the car; I had my license by now. We were going to a lake more than an hour away. I got to choose the radio station because I was at the wheel. Rock V roll, the whole way. He never protested, but then, it was he who’d made the rule: driver chooses.
When we got there, we stood in the clearing that comprised the parking area, swarms of delicate insects dancing in the patches of sunstruck air, and covered all our exposed skin (not much: hands, neck, ears, face) with bug repellent. My grandfather loudly sang, as he always did while we did this, “Shoo fly, don’t bother me.” And then, inspired by his own voice, he continued to sing as we lifted the canoe off the car and lowered it into the water, as we loaded in his equipment and our packed lunch. He sang a song about Mussolini eating spaghetti off his thumbs, about black socks, and how they never got dirty (“the longer you wear them, the stronger they get”), he sang “Clementine,” all the verses. Then, as I paddled out, he started assembling his rod and fell silent in concentration.
I’d brought a book, Ethan Frome. I had to write a final school paper on it. I leaned back and read when he didn’t need me to paddle. But as I would tell Samuel all those years later, I hated Ethan Frome, so I often set it down and just drowsed. I pretended this could go on and on, that I wouldn’t have to go home and wash off the pleasantly strong chemical smell of 6–12 and get dressed to go out with Sonny. The lake was still, the air windless and cool. I leaned over the side of the canoe and let my fingers trail on the cold water.
And then I saw something, something deep under the surface. I leaned over the edge of the canoe. “I think there’s buildings down there,” I said, after a few moments.
My grandfather made an assenting noise.
I rose up, kneeling. “I think it’s a town,” I said.
“Well, it is a town, Cath,” he said. “It was, anyway.”
I looked over at him. He was unsurprised. He’d known this. “But what happened?” I asked. “Was there a flood?”
He laughed. “A dam, my dear. They dammed up the river and submerged the whole damned thing.”
I looked down again. It came and went under the moving water, the sense of what was there. There were long moments when I couldn’t quite get it, when it seemed I must have imagined it. But then there it was again, sad and mysterious. Grand, somehow. Grand because it was gone forever but still visible, still imaginable, below us.
“How could they do that, though?” I asked him. “What about the people who lived there?”
“I don’t suppose there were many left by then. And when the dam went in, the ones who were left had to leave.”
“But that’s so terrible, to see your town down there. All the places that were yours, that meant something to you.”
“I imagine it would have been,” he said.
“It’s so … weird.” I leaned over and watched the shifting images. “But it’s kind of magical, really, isn’t it? And sad.”
“Well, of course you’re right. It is. Sad, and beautiful too. As many sad things are.”
I looked for a long time. Behind me I could hear the occasional slow ticking of my grandfather’s reel as he gently pulled the line this way or that. “Think of it, Grandpa,” I said. “Think about the fishes swimming through the places where people used to live.”
“Yes.”
It made me think of my mother somehow—the lostness of the world down there, the otherness of it. It was like being able to look at memory itself. I felt a kind of yearning for everything past, everything already gone in my life.
Behind me my grandfather said, “What would you think about going away on a kind of adventure this summer, Cath?”
I turned and sat up. “An adventure? What do you mean?” I was so absorbed in what I’d been looking at that his words seemed connected with the shimmering buildings, the sense of what was lost. For a moment it was as though he were offering me the equivalent of entering that underwater world, of going somewhere it was almost impossible to go.
He cleared his throat “Well, what I mean is France, actually. I’ve written to your aunt Rue to ask about it. It turns out she has friends who would like an English-speaking sitter for the summer.” He had laid his fishing rod across his lap. “You wouldn’t be an au pair,” he said (at the time I had no idea what this meant, what he was speaking of). “You’d live with Rue. But you’d baby-sit for this friend’s children, and get paid, for about twenty hours a week.”
France. A way out. A new life. I almost couldn’t answer, I was so grateful. After a moment, I said, “I’d love it. I’d absolutely love it. I’d love to go.”
I looked at my grandfather. His eyes were steady on me, and what I felt was that he saw me. Saw me as I was, as a person, even at that confused, unformed age. Saw my life and how I didn’t know what to do with it; saw that I was special. That France, or the equivalent of France, was the only answer for a person like me.
On the way home, I peppered him with questions about France. When I would go, how long I’d stay, whether anyone would speak English, what Paris looked like. He told me a little of his memory of France from the First World War; he’d been billeted with a family in the village where the base hospital was, but he got to Paris once, after the armistice.
“I stayed in an old hotel—well, damn it, every hotel was old. But it was cheap, and I had to get up in the middle of the night and sit in a chair: bedbugs!”
“Ugh!” I said.
“Still, I thought it was the most beautif
ul place I’d ever seen.” And then, as though it were connected, not a change of subject at all, he said, “Did you know I’d been your grandmother’s doctor before I was her husband?”
“No,” I answered.
“I was. When she had TB. And before that I was her mother’s doctor, too. So you see what an old, old man I am.”
I laughed. I was very happy. France! I thought.
“It gave me, I think, too much power in her life.”
I looked over at him then. He seemed tiny to me all of a sudden, hunched over and shrunken. His trembling hands were lying uselessly curled up on his thighs. What was he talking about? The notion of his having power, power of any kind, seemed absurd to me. It made me uncomfortable to hear this. I didn’t know what to say. I turned away quickly, back to the road.
He must have sensed my feelings. I felt him stir and straighten up.
After a moment he said, “What do you think, Cath?”
“About what?”
“Why, about the power one person has over another. Should we resist it?”
I looked at him for a moment, mouth open.
“Should I mind my own business, for instance, and let you decide what to do with your summer? Because it may be, for all we know, that this trip to France will change your life for good or ill. One day perhaps you’ll think, Oh, that damned old man, why couldn’t he just have let me be?’ ”
“Oh, no!” I said. “I’ll never think that.”
“No?” He sounded amused. I looked over. He was smiling.
“No. I want my life to change.”
“Yes,” he said, it seemed to me sadly. “Yes, I know you do.”
The rest of the way into town, we rode silently. I think my grandfather fell asleep.
Eleven
I suppose the truth was that I was sent away. Perhaps my father had indicated that he couldn’t take me for as long that summer as he had the summer before. Perhaps my grandparents felt they needed a rest, some privacy. But certainly, and naturally, they did want to separate me from Sonny. I had as much as asked them to send me away from that situation.