by Nancy Thayer
“When does this happen? At night? Or in a particular class?”
“Anytime. No one special time. I can just be walking along talking to people. Or in the shower. Sometimes when I first wake up in the morning.”
“What do you do?”
“Well, to start with, I’m just aware of it. It’s like I realize, ohmygod, I can’t get my breath. Sometimes it just goes away. Sometimes I have to curl up in a ball and cover my ears and eyes.” She was embarrassed. “And sort of sing to myself.”
“Jesus, Julia, that sounds like a panic attack.”
His alarm frightened her. She didn’t want to scare him off. “What do I have to be panicked about?” she asked teasingly, flirting, trying to lower the tension level.
“I don’t know, Julia. I can’t imagine. You know I love you. You’re beautiful and intelligent and popular and clever. You’ve got lots of friends.”
“I wish I hadn’t mentioned it. God, Sam, if you saw the rest of the girls in my dorm you’d know how sane I am. Everyone else is purging and starving or doing drugs or freaking out about college.”
“What are you thinking about college these days?”
“Oh, I just hate it,” Julia groaned and, pulling up a blade of grass, began to shred the stem.
“Hate what?” Sam asked. Gently he put his hand on her back.
“All this college application shit. All the competition! Sam, I’m not even sure I want to go to college. Four more years of books and exams? I don’t know if I can handle it.”
“Sure you can.”
“All right, I can. But do I want to? I don’t think I do. I’m tired of this kind of life. I hate it.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Guess.” Julia tossed the grass into the water.
“Travel. Wander through Europe.”
“Nope.” She put her hand on Sam’s thigh.
“Work. Start piling up money.”
“Wrong again.” She nuzzled against his neck.
“Teach retarded children, feed the starving masses! Come on, Julia, I can’t read your mind.” Tired of the game, Sam pushed up from the ground in one lithe movement. “I’m hungry. Let’s go get something to eat.”
“Okay. Help me up.” Julia held out her hand, and Sam pulled her to her feet, kissed her absentmindedly, then led her back to the path. She let the subject of her future drop; her mother, her Aunt Susan, her friends had all told her that men were dense. She’d just have to approach him another time, in another way. Or perhaps she should get pregnant.
As they crawled into the old brown Volvo Sam’s parents had given him, he said suddenly, “But you can’t ignore this breathing business, Julia. I think you should see a doctor about it.”
“All right,” Julia agreed. “I will.” But she was lying. She knew she didn’t need a doctor. She only needed Sam.
All last week she’d fretted about that conversation at Walden Pond. She was afraid she’d scared Sam off with her fears, or bored him. When he called on Friday to say he couldn’t come see her this weekend, she hadn’t been surprised. He said he had to study for an exam, but she feared the worst, that Sam had stopped loving her, that she had driven him away.
She’d tried to enjoy just hanging out with her friends, and she’d gotten through Saturday well enough. But on Saturday night she wasn’t able to sleep, and by Sunday morning she was exhausted and hyped up, frantic to the point of weeping. She found a half-full bottle of Tylenol in Sonja’s things and took them all, then escaped into a blissful sleep that lasted all Sunday afternoon and night.
But Monday her fears were still there, and then she had her counseling session with Mrs. Derek and felt her hopelessness return. No matter what she told anyone, the adults in her life would pat her on the head and expect her to stay in line.
She had to do something drastic.
She called Sam at lunchtime Monday. Luckily, he was in his dorm.
“I have to see you,” she told him. “You have to come up here today.”
After a long pause, he replied in a tight, troubled voice, “All right. I’ll leave right away.”
“Sam—” she pleaded, but he’d hung up the phone on her. Hugging herself, she bent over, trying to get her breath. What if he was really mad at her? What if he broke up with her because he couldn’t stand the way she was acting?
During the painfully long hour and a half of waiting, Julia paced her room between her unmade bed and her desk piled with textbooks and papers. Muttering to herself, she rehearsed various speeches, trying to find the perfect words to convince him to take her back with him, to live with her, to marry her.
But when Sam actually walked into the room, his beautiful face strained with confusion and alarm, all reason fled.
“What’s going on?” he asked immediately, not even hugging or kissing her first.
He was wearing old jeans, a plaid flannel shirt, and work boots, and he looked so handsome, so sexual, so desirable that even as he stood in her room he seemed unattainable. Julia felt wild with need.
“Oh, Sam!” Her voice was barely above a whisper.
Sam crossed the room and took her in his arms. “Calm down, Julia. It’s all right.”
Together they sat down on her bed. After a few moments Julia caught her breath.
“Sam, I need to get out of here. I hate it here. I want to be with you.”
“Come on, Julia. Get real. That’s just not possible right now.” Sam suddenly stood up and stalked across the room.
Julia blinked. Was he going to leave already? “Sam. You don’t understand. I—”
“Julia, I can’t believe you got me up here to talk about this. I thought you were in trouble or something.”
“I am in trouble, Sam. What do I have to do to prove it to you?”
“Julia, look—”
She heard exasperation tinge his voice as he stood far across the room from her, near the door. “No, you look!” she cried and grabbed a pair of nail scissors lying on the desk. She pressed the tip into her wrist. “I’m tired of hinting, Sam. I’m tired of waiting. If you don’t take me away from here right now, I’ll kill myself.”
“Oh, Julia, don’t be so stupid!” Sam exploded.
So Julia dug the scissors quickly into one wrist and then the other. They watched as the fine lines of blood widened, then streaked down Julia’s arms. So bright, so fluid, so red.
“Go, then,” Julia ordered. “Just go. If I can’t be with you, I don’t want to live. Go on! Go!”
“Julia, Julia, what are you doing?” he cried, rattled, scared. He rushed across the room to get her, but she raced away from him and out the other door into the large girls’ bathroom. Drops of her blood dripped brilliantly on the white floor tiles.
She fended him off with outstretched hands, blood running down her arms.
“All right, Julia.” Sam surrendered. “All right! I’ll take you with me.”
“Oh, God!” Sonja entered the bathroom.
“It’s all right,” Julia said. “Sam’s going to take me with him.”
Then she fainted.
When she came to she found herself on the bathroom floor, her head cradled in Sam’s arms.
“You’re okay, Julia,” Sam whispered. He was smoothing her hair away from her face.
“I need to be with you, Sam.”
“I know. I’ll take you with me.”
“You promise?”
“Promise.”
He helped Julia stand. After a momentary dizziness, she was steady. Sonja found some Scotch tape with which she bound bits of paper towels around Julia’s wrists. Then while Julia threw clothes into a duffel bag, Sonja and Sam wiped up the bathroom floor.
“Okay, let’s go,” Julia said.
“You’re going to be in big trouble,” Sonja warned Julia.
“I don’t care.”
“What am I going to tell the dorm parents? The headmaster?”
Julia smiled. “Tell them I’ve run away to marry Sam.”
<
br /> “Oh, God, Julia. That will make them crazy,” Sam protested, but Julia was running down the stairs.
She reached his car before he did. She threw herself into the front seat and locked the door.
Sam tossed her duffel bag into the backseat, then sat down behind the steering wheel.
“I would really like to take you to a hospital,” he said. “To check your wrists.”
“They’re fine, Sam. Really. Let’s go to Howard Johnson’s.”
“Will you talk to me there? I mean talk sensibly?”
“Yes. I promise. Just get me away from here.”
Checking into Howard Johnson’s was like returning to their own home. “All right,” Sam said, shutting the door. “What’s this all about?”
Julia sat against the headboard of one of the double beds. She was fully clothed, but chilled even so. She yanked the covers up to her chin.
“I just couldn’t be there anymore,” she said. “I had an appointment with Mrs. Derek this morning. This getting into college business. It’s such a crock. I couldn’t stand it anymore.”
“Why do you say that?” Sam sat on the end of the bed, not quite in reach.
“Okay, maybe it’s great for some people. You got through it. But I’m tired of it. I’m tired of the tests, the pressure, the expectations—”
“So you don’t want to go to college?”
“Not at all. I’m sick of teachers. I’m sick of rules.”
“So what do you want to do?”
“Really? I’d like to work in a restaurant.” Julia waited for his reaction, and when he only looked at her calmly, she continued. “I’d like to work in a restaurant and marry you and put you through school and live with you.”
Sam got up. He walked across the room. He pulled the drapery cord so that the curtains opened to let in a hazy light. He pulled the cord and the curtains shut.
“It’s not so impossible,” Julia said. “You’re twenty-two. I’m eighteen. Those are reasonable ages to get married.”
“Your parents would kill you.”
“My parents are going to kill me anyway for what I just did.”
“Gressex will probably expel you.”
“I don’t care! I hate it there. I want to be with you, Sam.”
Sam walked over to Julia’s bed. He sat down close to her and took her hands in his. His face was earnest. “I just don’t know what to say, Julia.”
“We’re right for each other. I know it. I’ve always known it.”
Sam didn’t reply.
“You know it, too, Sam,” Julia said. She leaned over and grabbed his face with both her hands. She turned his face toward hers and, looking in his eyes, she saw what she needed to see. He did love her.
But Sam pulled away. “Just because we’re right for each other doesn’t mean we should get married.”
Julia put her hand lightly on his arm. “Will you at least think about it?”
Sam slid his arm up and turned it so that his palm touched hers, and he closed his hand upward, lacing his fingers through hers. His touch was warm and steady. “Yeah, okay,” Sam said softly.
“ ‘Yeah, okay,’ ” she echoed solemnly. They sat together for a while, silent, intensely in love, until Julia broke the mood. “Oh, Sam, I love you!” She laughed, throwing herself at him, smothering him with kisses. Then she stood up, briskly straightening her clothes. “I’m starving!” she declared.
They went out for a pizza, which they brought back to the room and ate in bed as they watched Wayne’s World on the pay TV. Julia felt her anxiety level drop and float away. But when the movie was finished, Sam looked at her and said, “I wonder if the school has called your parents.”
“Probably. I don’t care.” Julia went into the bathroom to wash the pizza sauce off her hands. The paper towels on her wrists had dried to a crusty red. She decided not to mess with them tonight. She threw herself back onto the mussed bed.
“Julia. Your parents will be worried.”
“They’ll know I’m with you.”
Sam sat on the bed again. Once more they went over it all, Julia’s desire, her need, Sam’s hesitancy, his common sense.
Finally Julia said, “Okay. Just do this. Take me with you to Middletown. I’ll find an apartment. I’ll find a job. I need to be near you.”
“Your parents—”
“This is my life.”
“They’ll never forgive me.”
“Would you stop thinking about my parents!” Half angry, half laughing, Julia pushed Sam, toppling him over backward on the bed.
He wrestled her around until she was under him. Holding her arms down but carefully avoiding her wrists, he studied her, seriously. “You are the strongest-willed person I’ve ever met.”
“Well, I know what I want,” Julia replied, looking steadily into his eyes.
Sam kissed her forehead, then slid down until he was lying alongside her. “And I know what I want,” he whispered. He gathered her against him, kissing her face slowly and holding her very close, pressing her against him, smoothing her hair.
“What do you want, Sam?”
They were wrapped around each other, legs entwined. “I want you to be safe,” Sam said. “I want you to be happy.”
Julia held her breath, closed her eyes, and made a wish, and Sam continued, as if in answer to her wish, “I want you to be with me. We’ll work this out.”
They made love then, with a sudden shyness sprung from this new, unspoken commitment. At first Sam was very gentle, watching Julia as he undressed and caressed and kissed her, and she let him see her need. He entered her, and she clutched him to her with her arms and legs and clung to him with all her might. They never stopped looking into each other’s eyes. Tenderness, mingled with lust, made Sam’s face seem somehow naked, and vulnerable. Her own eyes filled with tears; she knew her face was glowing and flushed. The sweet tension between them grew so intense it became almost unbearable, and finally Sam groaned and, abandoning his gentleness, thrust himself into Julia so forcefully that she bit her lip in pain. He drove himself against her with an urgent, possessive passion that rocked through her.
When it was over and she could speak, trembling and weeping and laughing, she said, “You see, Sam? You see? You can’t ever leave me.”
“I know. I see. I’ll never leave you, Julia. I promise,” Sam whispered in return. “Oh, God, I never want to be without you.”
Almost at once they fell asleep, sated, exhausted, and—at last—calm.
Yet when Sam woke up Tuesday morning, he looked at Julia in consternation. “Oh, God. I can’t believe we’re here.”
“Well, let’s leave,” Julia teased, then sobered: “Take me to Middletown.”
“Will you call your parents?”
“Okay. Once we get there.”
Sam just looked at her. He went into the bathroom. When he came out, he was dressed.
“All right,” he said. “Dad always says to sleep on a problem, and I did. Listen to me, Julia. I’ll take you to Middletown with me, and we can even consider living together for a while. On one condition. Don’t you ever pull that wrist-slashing business on me again. Understand? That’s not fair. It scared me. You do that ever again, I don’t care if we’re married, I’ll leave you for good.”
Julia’s voice was meek. “I’m sorry, Sam.” Her heart was flipping around in her chest with hope. “I’ll never do that again. I promise. I was just—trying to make my point.”
“Well, you made it,” Sam said flatly. “All right. Let’s go.”
They listened to soft rock on the radio during the ride. When they approached the outskirts of the college town, Julia said, “Let’s just try it. I’ll get a place. I’ll get a job. You can come be with me when you’re not in class. We’ll have fun.”
“It would be nice to be with you every day,” Sam conceded.
Julia bit back a triumphant smile.
Once in town, they went directly to a drugstore down the hill from the college. Th
ere was a board where cards advertising jobs and rooms were posted.
They copied down four addresses, then set out in the car. All the places were within walking distance of Wesleyan. None was in an especially attractive neighborhood. But at the third one, Julia cried out, “Stop! This one looks good!”
Sam rolled his eyes. Like the first two, the apartment house was an old Victorian frame building that had seen better days. It needed paint, a new roof; it needed everything. But yellow and orange chrysanthemums had been carefully nurtured in front of the house, and in the backyard was a long clothesline hung with fresh laundry flapping gaily in the sun.
Dutifully, Sam parked the car and went up to the door with Julia, who quickly checked to be sure her wrists were covered by her shirtsleeves. Her knock was answered by a grandmotherly woman of gigantic proportions who introduced herself as Edith Overtoom. She led Julia and Sam through the hallway to a bedroom at the back of the house, providing a running commentary as they went.
“It’s a nice bedroom. Large and sunny. And it’s on the first floor. I know I should move my bedroom down to the first floor and let you youngsters climb the stairs, but habits are hard to break. You’ll have your own bathroom. Across the hall.”
The air of the room was slightly fusty. The bed was lumpy and the furniture was chipped, but the sheets were clean. And the bed was a double bed.
“Would I be able to use your clothesline?” Julia asked.
Mrs. Overtoom barked out a laugh of surprise. “Well, I don’t know why not. No one’s ever asked about that before. Usually they prefer to do their laundry at the Laundromat down the street. You can have kitchen privileges, providing you clean up after yourself and don’t get into my food.”
“Great. I’d like to take it.”
“You up at the college?”
“Sam is. We’re going to get married pretty soon. I’m going to get a job and save money.”
“Well, I’ll need two weeks’ rent in advance. No loud music after midnight. You have to wash your own linen and keep your bedroom and bathroom clean. Do you smoke?”