by Lynne Hugo
When I think about it, I start crying again. That judge is such an idiot. Grandma told me what he said. Maybe it was like on TV and Alex paid him off. How else could he do this? It’s my life. He didn’t even ask me what I wanted.
When the lawyer said what happened, all I could do was cry. Last night Grandma lay on my bed with me, but I didn’t mind. I think she was crying, too. I don’t want to leave my grandma. She says we’ll fight in court, and she thinks we can win, but I don’t trust anything anymore. Who would have thought Mom would die? You can’t believe anything will work out right, that’s just stupid, anyone can see that most of the time everything’s all wrong. Stuff is backward, not the way it should be at all, like God has dyslexia or gets high by making people suffer. Or maybe He’s just so involved with important things like poking black holes in the universe that He just doesn’t notice what’s actually going on. Anyway, what’s His point, if He has one at all?
I don’t even think there is a God anyway. I’ve got to figure out what to do.
In World History, the teacher wrote Beware the Ides of March on the blackboard and went on about Julius Caesar and Cassius and Brutus and all that. Caesar thought he was so great and then, bam, they got him back. Tiffany said they were evil and wanted his power, but I thought old Jules deserved it. I don’t care if I’m evil. I went into Mom’s room tonight while Grandma talked on the phone. She yells at me for talking to Tim too much, then she spends an hour talking to Rebecca or Jolene or someone. I know she was talking about me because she was whispering. Like I’m stupid or something. I don’t care. I went into Mom’s room and just sat there for a while. I put on one of her sweaters and looked at the picture. It sounds stupid, but I started talking to it, because it made me feel better. I told her everything, what happened at court, and about Alex and even about Rebecca stealing her stuff. I don’t know if that last part would upset her, but it just came out so now she knows anyway, and I guess there’s nothing I can do about it. The weird thing is that after I cried, I talked to her and then I cried a little more and then I said—What should I do, Mom? It’s not like I expected her to answer or something, but it was almost like I heard her voice saying I’ll help you. I looked at her picture, but it wasn’t changed at all. It was freezing in there because Grandma turned the heat off, but I sat on her bed and tried to figure out how she was going to help me, but I didn’t know. Then for some reason, I decided to look at her stuff in the closet. It took me maybe twenty minutes just to get all her notebooks out and figure out how they should go. I looked at the first page of every one and put them in order from the dates. She crossed a lot of stuff out, and she kind of wrote messy, like me. I’m going to read them. Grandma probably doesn’t want me to, but I’m not going to tell her. In the first place, I don’t want to upset her. And in the second place, she thinks the lawyer can help us, but like I said, I have no faith because things just don’t turn out the way they should. Unless you make them, somehow.
Beware the Ides of March, Alex. I’m going to get you. One way or another, I’ll get you back.
1972
nine
THE FIRST TIME Christine Laster laid eyes on Alexander O’Gara, they didn’t much linger there. In the first place, he was too short. She liked bigger guys, more like Bobby Miller whose pale hair and blue eyes were at the top of a body that looked tall and mountain-solid to her. Alex was built like the afterthought of a litter of puppies, runty and meatless. His black hair stood out, and his dramatically fringed tobacco eyes, but his skin was sallow. “That’s his father’s side,” Christine’s father told her in what was, for him, a lengthy speech. “Black Irish. Except his father had high color in his cheeks, you know. I remember Michael from school. Didn’t he pass on a while back? Heart attack or something? Graduated a year ahead of your mother and me, I think. Maybe two. Trouble. He was trouble. Likely as not the son is, too. Not the best stock.”
That’s how it was in Darrville, the town next to Early Sun on Highway 40, and the only place to go anyway, since all the schools were there. Everybody into everybody else’s business. A teenage girl couldn’t sneeze without some school chum of her mother handing her a tissue and telling her she’d best get to bed early to ward off that cold. Gossip was handed out like the straws that came with fountain sodas at the drugstore counter. Even as the town had grown, with the Redpath farm implement building, the expansion of Washington Supply Company, and the new Thriftway, it wasn’t an area that exactly imported citizens. Kids grew up, married each other early, had kids that grew up to have kids faster than the old people died, and thus Darrville grew. Early Sun seemed, in contrast, stagnant, even shrinking, like one of its ponds in a dry high summer.
This time, though, Christine had actually asked her daddy if he knew the O’Gara bunch. Alex had been looking at her blatantly, suggestively, rolling his eyes from her head down to her chest, and after laying them there long enough to make her squirm, palpable as a warm hand, let them rove on down to her hips and the length of her bare legs. He’d been around, she guessed, as long as she had, but she’d taken no notice of him until lately, when he’d taken notice of her, though he never spoke. That, as much as anything, made him irresistible.
When Alex finally asked her out maybe two weeks later, Christine was intrigued enough to lie her way out of a date with Bobby himself despite her father’s oblique advice. What intrigued her most was that she was attracted to him in spite of the fact he wasn’t her type. He had a strange, startling laugh—like a clogged tuba—not that he laughed often. Something about his manner, alternately high-strung and lazily insolent made him seem like the apple dangling from the end of a high thin branch, the one she had to have.
They began dating, though only Christine called it that. She knew exactly what her parents would think of him. Once a month or so, Alex would casually drop that he’d be at Red Dog—a pizza place in Darrville with pinball games and a pool table in the basement—that night, and maybe he’d see her there. Christine would tell Marvin and Cora that she and Summer Milliner or Jessie Bolander were going to meet at the mall and then she’d spend the evening watching Alex shoot pool with his friends. He’d lean over, a cigarette stuck impossibly on the edge of his narrow bottom lip, while he lined up the stick and balls. One night after he won, he kissed her hard on the mouth, his hand low on her hips, and she felt his tongue graze her lips. She’d been taken by surprise, and he’d covered her closed mouth with his open one.
It went on like that, furtive, like a bud opening in the secret night of Christine’s mind, for the last month of the school year, all summer, and right on through into senior year. Cora had a sense of Christine sliding out of her cupped hands like so much water going to waste. Her grades went down, though under Cora’s pressure she applied to the Indiana University branch at Richmont, where someone could go all the way to a two-year degree. She was accepted. “What are your plans?” Cora would ask when her daughter went out, but Christine didn’t tell her anything anymore, only shrugged.
“I don’t know. Hang out. See people.” Her hands, beautiful as if they’d been sculptured with their oval nails and narrow wrists, fluttered like nervous birds around her long, straight brown hair. By then, Alex was calling the house.
“Kin I tawk to Chris,” he’d mumble, a statement instead of the polite question ending with please that Cora had been taught and taught her children. But Christine didn’t talk about seeing Alex; didn’t even mention who’d called unless her mother asked her directly. Jolene had given Christine a blank book diary for Christmas, and Cora thought about looking for writing in it, but when she halfheartedly began searching in Christine’s dresser drawers, she felt soiled and resolutely closed the drawer and then the door to Christine’s room.
Cora drew the line finally when Christine admitted she was meeting Alex at the McDonald’s in Darrville one Friday night in April. She’d first said she and Jessie were going out, but Cora had become suspicious and pressed when Christine frantically insisted she had to driv
e, though Jessie had her own car and could always pick Christine up. Marvin had Cora’s car up on blocks, and Christine wasn’t allowed to take her father’s truck.
“This doesn’t sound like he has much respect for you,” Cora fussed, even though she was trying not to drive her older daughter right into the boy’s arms by openly disapproving. “Wouldn’t a decent young man have the good manners to come get you properly? And come in to meet your parents? You know we have rules. No meeting him anywhere. If he wants to see you, we’ll have to meet him first.”
By then, Christine was mired in the layers of the desire and confusion a woman of any age is apt to name love. Alex, masterful at holding himself just out of reach, was persuaded to pick Christine up and shamble in to meet Cora and Marvin. “Hey,” he said, jerking his head to shift the hanging black forelock out of his eyes.
“How do you do?” Cora said, nodding her brown bob politely while Marvin stuck out his hand for Alex to shake. Alex blinked and removed his hand from his pocket when he got what he was supposed to do.
“I can’t stand those sideburns,” Cora said to Marvin after Christine and Alex were gone in Alex’s dented Mustang. “He looks like a hood. And where do you suppose he learned his manners? Dungarees for a date…and his shirt wasn’t even tucked in. Did you see how he looked at her? It looked like…well, it looked indecent. That…thing of hair in his eyes, too.”
Marvin, whose early-grayed hair had begun to thin five years ago—which hardly seemed fair since his own father had died with a thatch of thick white hair edging the same hairline he’d had since boyhood—grunted, which Cora took as reluctant agreement. That worried her as much as her own assessment.
Normally Marvin didn’t have the patience to just sit and rock on the porch, even on a soft spring evening when the apple trees were in bloom, but that night activity seemed leached out of him. He and Cora sat silently, watching night rise off the grass toward the melon sky while they sipped the lemonade Cora had mixed. Cora didn’t know Marvin had lingered in the kitchen to spike his with the rum Cora kept in the cabinet for her yellow bundt cake recipe, or she would have worried even more. A talker by nature, she usually put her worries into words. The lines around Marvin’s eyes were deeper, like the dry creek beds ready for Cora’s tears.
When Christine came in, forty-eight minutes late for her eleven-thirty curfew, Marvin took over. “You’ll not go out with him again,” he said. In Marvin’s house, as in that of his father, a man’s word was final.
“You can’t pick my friends,” Chris cried hotly. “You can’t stop me. I’m almost eighteen years old.”
“While you’re living under my roof, you’ll do as I say.”
Christine faltered. Her chin quivered. “This is totally unfair. In the first place, I told you, my watch is slow. See?” She jabbed her wrist in the direction of Marvin’s face, but he didn’t lower his eyes toward it by an iota. Under the overhead light in the kitchen, her makeup looked smeary, especially around her lips, swollen and blurry. “I’ve been late for curfew before. You don’t even ground me if I’m late when I’m out with my friends. You just hate Alex. What did he ever do to you? You don’t even know him.”
But the discussion was over. Marvin’s forefinger aimed at Christine’s chest. “I said, you’ll not go out with him again.” He turned his back and headed for his bedroom, leaving Cora with their daughter’s ragged rage. With Cora, Christine reverted to defiance.
“You and Dad can’t tell me who to like.”
“Honey, we’re just worried about you.”
“Why? I didn’t do anything.”
“Alex doesn’t seem like…the right…type. We never know what you’re doing…and you were forty-five minutes late.”
“Thirty minutes! And I told you what happened.”
“More than that.”
“You’re treating me like a baby. I’m the one who’s going out with him, not you. I know what I’m doing. You can’t tell me who to love.”
It was the last sentence that set off clanging alarms in Cora’s head.
“Honey, you’re too young. You hardly know this boy.” Cora’s forehead wrinkled into parallel pleats, and her voice rose, a frenzied pitch in certain words.
Christine had let too much out, but she wasn’t going to back down from her mother. She tried to blunt the effect of what she’d said while defending her right to say it, but it came out like a mess of tangled fishing lines. “It’s none of your business…it’s not like I’m going to marry him or something,” she shouted between Cora’s pleadings, which soon turned to commands.
When Christine shouted, “It’s not like I’m going to marry him or something,” for the third time, Cora paid attention.
“Well, of course not,” she said. “I know that. He’s about to get drafted, for heaven’s sake.”
“He is not,” Christine yelled.
“What is he, 4F?” It was the only reason any boy from Early Sun or Darrville didn’t go into the military those days, except for the few who went all the way to Bloomington and actually lived in a dormitory on the main campus of Indiana University, or the one every other year who was an eldest son, needed to run a farm for a widowed mother. The war wasn’t a daily topic in homes where there were only daughters, but in those with sons, it was a topic both obsessive and feverish. Enrollment at the two-building Richmont branch of the university had definitely risen, but most boys and their families just accepted their fate, wearing a sash of patriotism on their graduation robes. Darrville High School had taken to announcing what service branch the boys were entering as they were handed their diplomas. Their fathers, Second World War veterans to a man, applauded mightily while mothers dabbed their eyes with lace-edged hankies.
“No, he is not 4F!” Christine shrieked.
“Well, honey, maybe you and Alex have been too busy making kissy face to notice, but there’s a war on and America’s in it.” Cora didn’t resort to sarcasm often, and she regretted the tone immediately. It always inflamed Christine and boomeranged right back at her. It didn’t even occur to her that Alex might be college-bound. A look at him plus his two or three words had weeded that possibility right out of Cora’s mind.
“He’s not going!”
“Well, of course, he might not get ordered to Vietnam right away, but…”
“No! He’s not going at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s none of your business.” Christine’s eyes teared and her lips showed their fight not to form a sob. Seeing that, Cora took a step toward her daughter, opening her arms in an invitation, but Christine grabbed her purse off the kitchen table and ran into the hallway. Cora heard her take the steps upstairs in a rapid, hard beat. She stood in place, finally lowering her arms and deciding not to pursue her daughter. At the sink, she sprinkled scouring powder on the white porcelain. Scuff marks from the cast-iron frypan came off with elbow grease, Cora’s mother’s solution to every blot, but the abrasive sound was too much like an echo, and she cried a little.
CORA ENTERED HER own bedroom on the defensive. Marvin couldn’t stand it when Cora argued with one of the girls. He said she lowered herself to their level, and whenever he said it, Cora felt like a chastised child herself, which made her doubly angry. “I know. Don’t get started on me,” she said, preempting him and knowing she sounded like Christine. Cora knew he’d heard the shouting, but most likely he’d not been able to pick out the words. He usually couldn’t, or didn’t bother to try.
Marvin shook his head back and forth, disgustedly. He was stretched out on their olive-green chenille bedspread with his clothes and shoes still on, which he knew drove Cora right up the wall because it left little fuzzy pills on his pants and shirt that Cora had to pick off by hand before they went into the wash. His hands were between his head and the pillow, his jutting elbows casting shadows on the greenish-yellow wall behind him. Cora wished—as she did nearly every night—that she could have guessed how sickly that paint color would look by lam
plight. Wasn’t that always the way? she thought. You think you know exactly how something will turn out, and then, when you get it, the let-down has the weight of an elephant’s foot. Worse, Marvin hadn’t liked the color to begin with, and she’d told him all his taste was in his mouth.
She began undressing, then, suddenly self-conscious under her husband’s expressionless stare, Cora took her nightgown across the hall into the bathroom and finished changing there. When she climbed into bed, she just said, “Goodnight,” and curled into her sleep position, so Marvin would get the hint. After a while he sighed, got up, and put on his pajamas. He sighed again when he turned out the light, but it wasn’t long before Cora heard the ripple of soft snoring as Marvin relaxed into the first wave of a sea of dreamless sleep while Cora’s large bones lay on a hard raft above it trying to puzzle out what her daughter had said.
In her room, Christine was propped on two pillows, huddled as if the night were cold. “I’m going to marry Alexander O’Gara,” she wrote in her diary. “I’m the only one who knows how good he is, and I can save him. And he loves me, too. I know it.”
ten
“WHERE’VE YOU BEEN?” Cora said to Christine one afternoon in June. Christine’s hair was rumpled, and grass clippings clung to the back of her white blouse when she came home from school at five-thirty, even later than her new habit. It was the day before graduation, six weeks since Marvin had forbidden Christine to see Alex.
“Library.” Christine’s voice was layered, evasion over defiance.
“Christine…”