He said: “Linda.”
If he hadn’t said anything, if he had just continued to do what he had started to do she would have been powerless to stop him and her virginity would have become a memory in the back seat of the blue Pontiac. But his voice murmuring her name came like a knife to slash her into awareness. In one motion she pushed him away and rolled over on her side, away from him.
“Linda! You can’t stop now!”
But now she could stop. It was easy now for her to stop, very easy, and all his arguments wouldn’t change her mind. Finally, at his request, she touched him the way he showed her to touch him and did the things with her hands that he wanted her to do while he lay with his hands on her thighs and his face buried in the gully between her breasts. She held him and touched him and squirmed under his touch until it happened for him and he lay all weak and limp and flaccid in her arms. She wished that his hands on her had brought her the relief that she had given him, but she was still tense and unfulfilled, restless and unsatisfied. She held him in her arms and gradually her own body ceased trembling. They lay in each other’s arms for several minutes; then he sat up and they dressed and drove home in silence.
It was never the same again for them. She knew that if he had known more about sex, if he had known what to do, he would have taken her and possessed her without giving her the opportunity of refusing him. And he knew that he had done something wrong, something clumsy, and that her refusal was something which could have been avoided if he had known what he was doing.
They continued to see each other. But when he left to work at the Canadian summer camp they parted with a feeling of mutual ease. They said the things that high school lovers always said—they would meet again at vacation time, she would come up to M.I.T. for a weekend—all the phrases that were said automatically and forgotten just as automatically. Something valuable had existed for them but they were too young to take advantage of it.
And now it was gone.
The memory of that night was enough to set her off. Her hands began to tremble of their own accord and it took her a moment or two to still them. Desire welled up in her, desire not for Chuck Connor but for a man, a real man, a man who would make a woman of her.
Because she had already decided that she was not going to stay a virgin forever. That may have been the best course back in the dark ages, but nowadays a woman had the right to be a woman, the right to seek love and take it where she found it.
And she was going to do just that.
At high school it was wrong. At Corry Senior High School a good girl didn’t let a boy make love to her. But at Clifton College things would be different. She would meet a man, a man she wanted and a man who wanted her.
And they would make love.
It was as simple as that. She wasn’t going to force herself to wait, not for a wedding ring on her finger or for a declaration of eternal love. She had waited long enough, and now even the law recognized her right to use her body as she saw fit.
The next man. The next man whom she wanted would be the man to whom she would give herself. He would take her and he would love her, and he would know just what to do and how to do it, and he would make her body sing with the joy of being alive.
The next man …
She closed her eyes, thinking of the man, the man who would make love to her. She tried to picture him in her mind, tried to imagine what he would look like. Her mind conjured up pictures and her head swam with the idea of it all.
She dozed, half asleep and half awake, half thinking and half dreaming. Then the conductor shouted “Springfield!” and the train pulled into a grimy little city and finally pulled to a jerky stop at the terminal.
She practically jumped out of her seat. Her trunk was being shipped Railway Express, but she had a suitcase with her and she had a tough time hauling it down from the overhead rack. A middle-aged man helped her with it and then she was off, suitcase in hand, waiting at the platform before the train came to a stop. Her heart was beating wildly and she couldn’t wait for the train to stop so that she could hurry off to Clifton.
The train stopped. She let the brakeman help her off the train and waved away the porter who offered to carry her suitcase for her. There were half a dozen cabs parked by the side of the terminal and she hopped into the first one in line, saying “Greyhoundterminal” and making it sound like one single word.
“Where yuh headed, Miss?”
She told him she was going to Clifton College.
“Don’t take the bus, Miss. Won’t be one headed there for another four, five hours. You don’t wanta wait that long, do you?”
“How else can I get there?”
“Shucks,” he said, “it’s only nine miles. The rate by cab is only three and a half dollars. Why don’t you let me run you out there?”
“Well—”
“Listen,” he said, “I’ll make it three. The flat rate’s three-and-a-half, but this way I can stop off in Hustead for a cup of coffee with my wife. I live out there, you see.”
“All right,” she said, thinking that she would have paid the three-fifty anyway if he had waited a minute more. She settled back into the seat and closed her eyes as the taxi made its way down High Street to Route 68. The driver turned left at 68 and headed out toward Clifton, and she took a deep breath and held it, thinking about the man, the man she was waiting for, the man who would make love to her.
CHAPTER TWO
RUTH HARDY HAD HAIR AS BLACK as midnight, short black hair clipped into an Italian style haircut that bore a remarkable resemblance to the posterior of a duck. Ruth Hardy was five feet five inches tall, an inch or so shorter than Linda. She was slender, with lean but well-formed legs and taut buttocks. Her breasts were small but perfectly formed, little girl’s breasts that were rounded and firm and eminently touchable.
Ruth Hardy’s face was pretty, with a small red mouth and sharp blue eyes that looked straight at a person. Her gaze never wandered and she rarely blinked. She looked at people as she did everything else—neatly and precisely with no waste motion.
She was Linda’s roommate. They shared a little cubicle in Evans Hall, a tiny unprepossessing room with a double-decker bed, two desks, two dressers, a closet that was not quite large enough for two people and a sink that dripped, its bowl stained from the dripping of the hard water. The water, with a high iron content typical of the region, managed to do two things—it stained the sink a sickish red-brown and it forced a girl to spend twice as much time as usual washing her hair.
Linda had just finished washing her hair. First she had showered, and in this respect the hard water was good. It left her feeling cleaner, without the slippery feeling of a softwater shower. But her hair! God, she had had to lather it a good half-dozen times before she was done. Now it hung down her back, wet and limp, as she sat in a chair in the room.
Ruth was sprawled on her bed. She had the top bunk, and both the girls were quite satisfied with the arrangement.
“I’m a sound sleeper,” Ruth had explained. “This way you can give me a good kick when the alarm goes off.”
They became friends quite readily. Linda decided that she liked this girl, this sharp, fast-talking little thing from New York City. And, she reflected, it was good that they had taken to each other as readily as they did. There were no fraternities or sororities at Clifton, since social groups of that nature were hardly needed on a campus of 1500. She and Ruth would be stuck with each other for the semester at least and probably for the year; it would be a lot easier to take if they liked each other.
Their conversation rambled the way conversation does between two persons suddenly thrust into a close relationship. Ruth told her that she was from New York and that she had come to Clifton largely to get away from a family with which she didn’t get along well at all. She planned to major in either psychology or sociology and possibly to do graduate work after finishing up at Clifton. Linda answered that she would major in English, that she doubted that she would do
graduate work in anything, since it was highly doubtful that she would graduate.
“How come?”
“I’ll probably be married by then.”
“That why you came to college?”
Linda hesitated. “Partly, I guess. Oh, I suppose I want to get an education, whatever that means. But I’m not the scholar type or the career type. I guess I’m looking for a man.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have much trouble finding a man here, not the way you look. You’ll probably have to beat them off with a club.”
Linda felt herself blushing.
“I mean it,” Ruth went on. “All that blonde hair and a shape like yours—the guys won’t let you alone. You know much about this school?”
“Just what it says in the catalogue.”
Ruth laughed. “It doesn’t say much in the catalogue. I know one girl who goes here, a sophomore gal named Sheila Ashley. She told me they call the catalogue The Big Lie. But the one big selling point they left out is that there are three men for every gal at Clifton College, Citadel of Higher Learning.”
“Oh.”
“Oh is right. It’s a damn nice ratio.”
Linda nodded.
“Of course,” Ruth continued, “there’s a difference between finding a man and finding a husband. Men are nice to have around, but most of them are interested in just one thing. Know what the thing is?”
Linda felt herself beginning to blush again and fought to suppress it. Why did Ruth have that effect on her? Maybe it was the hard, cool stare in the girl’s blue eyes, the casual self-assurance that made Linda feel inexperienced and naive in comparison.
“How much experience have you had, Linda?”
Linda hesitated.
“You’re a virgin, aren’t you?”
She hesitated again for a moment. Then she nodded, feeling almost as though her virginity was something to be embarrassed about.
“Don’t be ashamed of it. For one thing, you probably won’t last that way long, not if what I hear about this place is true. And for another thing it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Sometimes I wish I was a virgin myself.”
“You mean—”
“I mean I’m not, obviously. New York’s a pretty fast-moving town, Linda.”
For a moment Linda didn’t say anything. Then, slowly, she asked: “What’s … what’s it like?”
Ruth laughed, but her laughter was cool and pleasant and it didn’t make Linda ashamed of her question. “That’s something I can’t tell you,” she said. “Something you’ll have to find out for yourself. I haven’t been around that much to be an authority on the subject, anyhow. But from what I know about it, you don’t have to rush into it. It’s not as great as it’s cracked up to be, anyway. It’s just one of the things that happens.”
They talked some more, grabbed dinner at the school cafeteria and went back to their room to talk on into the night. From time to time other girls in the same hall would drop in to talk, but Linda was too wrapped up in herself to pay much attention to them. She told Ruth about Chuck and about the night of the senior prom when she almost let him make love to her, and she told the girl about her decision to sleep with the next man who wanted her and whom she wanted. They talked and talked, and finally it was after midnight and time to get some sleep. They undressed and washed up and climbed into bed, Ruth in the top bunk and Linda in the one below it, and then, of course, they went on talking.
“We better knock it off,” Ruth said finally. “Tomorrow’s registration and it’ll be a rough day.”
“Good-night,” Linda said. She rolled over on her side and closed her eyes, her mind swimming with all the new experience of the day and the immensity of all that lay before her. She decided that she wasn’t really tired. Since she had to get to sleep she tried counting.
She was more tired than she thought. She was sound asleep before the fifth mental man jumped over the mental fence.
The next morning she registered for her courses. Her hall advisers, two upper class students named Paula Greene and Jeanne Randall who lived in the hall and served in an advisory capacity, helped her make out her program. She signed up for the required freshman English course, Spanish I, Western Civilization, Introduction to Sociology and Basic Biology.
The rest of the day was filled up with a hall meeting and more random conversations and bull sessions with Ruth and other members of the hall. Ruth was going to be in her sociology class and was a good deal more enthusiastic about it than she was. As far as Linda was concerned, classes were going to be a bore, a necessary evil like paying tuition. If classes were the important thing she might as well have stayed in Cleveland.
She bought her books at the college store, a batch of heavy textbooks that set her back over twenty dollars. Carting the books back to her room, she wondered how in the world they could be worth that much money to her. In all probability she would hardly so much as open them until the night before exams. That was the way she went through high school, never studying and never working and depending upon her brains to pull her through, brains and common sense. And she never got a mark below ninety in high school.
Of course, college was supposed to be a lot more difficult. You had to study and you had to do your assignments. But a smart gal ought to be able to get through on brains if she had them.
There was a dance that night in the gymnasium, a freshman mixer designed to get all the entering students into the swing of things. A group of freshmen had decorated the gym in a vain attempt to make it look like something other than a gym, but they had failed rather pathetically. A huge weird blue tarpaulin was suspended from the ceiling in an effort to lower the ceiling somewhat, but the basketball backboards and baskets were visible at either end of the room and black and red lines were painted on the hardwood floor.
And, inevitable, the place smelled like a gym. Linda wrinkled her nose when she entered the place, marveling at the way all gymnasiums the world over looked and smelled the same. When you stepped into a gym, any gym from the one at Clifton to the one at Corry Senior High School, the same smell hit you between the eyes. That good old locker room smell, but it didn’t really smell so bad when you came right down to it. Sort of a man-smell, the way Chuck smelled except with the after-shave lotion left out.
There were chairs lined up on both sides of the gym and she picked one out and sat down in it. She was alone; Ruth hadn’t come to the dance and there were no other girls in the hall who interested her enough so that she bothered to seek out their company.
At the far end of the gym a small combo tried to play modern jazz and didn’t quite make it. About a dozen couples were dancing in the middle of the dance floor and a few dozen more pairs of boys and girls were sitting on the sidelines talking. Boys and girls in groups were making conversation too, and Linda felt slightly left out and alone in the midst of all that activity.
She looked around the room, automatically watching the men. Right here in this room might be the man who would be her first lover, the man who would change her from girl to woman. The man might be here, but still she sat alone by herself, no one talking to her, no one asking her to dance.
Across the room a tall, dark-haired boy was sitting by himself. He was wearing a pair of dark grey flannel slacks and a blue blazer with brass buttons. His tie was a thin red-and-green foulard and his shoes were white bucks in approved college fashion. He was good-looking in a quiet sort of a way but she might not have noticed him at all if she hadn’t looked up and caught his eyes. He was looking at her, and when she returned the glance he looked away, as if he was guilty of peeping at her.
She continued to look at him. After a moment or so he looked at her again, and this time he did not avert his gaze. Instead he stood up and began to walk toward her. She flashed him a smile, a quick, hesitant smile that gleamed on her face for a moment and then vanished.
When he was just a few feet away from her he said: “My name’s Joe Gunsway. Mind if I sit down?”
The chairs on either s
ide of her were empty. She rather wanted him to join her and said that she didn’t mind at all. He took a seat next to her and they looked at each other, knowing that it was time to get a conversation started but neither of them quite sure where to begin.
“I’m Linda Shepard,” she said finally. And then, although it didn’t really fit in, she added: “I’m from Cleveland.”
“Freshman?”
She nodded.
“I’m a sophomore,” he said. “From Champaign.”
“Where’s that?”
“Illinois.”
“What are you majoring in?”
“Biology,” he said. “Pre-med. How about you?”
“English.”
They made conversation—the useless but necessary conversation of new acquaintances on a college campus, the patter that served to get two people talking to each other when they actually didn’t have much of anything to talk about. The stock questions and answers: What courses are you taking? What professors do you have? Who are you rooming with? What dorm are you living in? And, finally, they ran out of the perfunctory questions and answers. The band was playing Laura and the tenor saxophonist was working out a slow, languorous melody line that pulsed and throbbed with rhythm and melody, with the drummer using brushes and the pianist laying down soft but solid chords behind the tenor solo.
He asked her to dance.
She stood up and he took her in his arms, holding her comfortably close but not too close. He danced easily but not particularly well, gliding naturally into the familiar foxtrot steps without ever showing any particular bursts of imagination.
She relaxed into the rhythm of the dance, thinking that this was the main reason that dancing had been invented, so that two people who didn’t know each other at all could be at ease in the performance of a social convention, close to each other and restful with each other, moving in time to the music and not bothering with words or gestures.
He was a good four inches taller than she was and she was glad of that. Her mouth was level with his shoulder, and if she turned her head slightly she could kiss his neck. She didn’t, of course, but the idea came into her head and she smiled softly to herself.
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