“Just thinking,” I said, and was saved by Mitch coming down the street from the opposite direction, his bad leg stuttering behind his good one. He was singing “It’s All Over Now.” Mitch was a Stones freak; he played “Satisfaction” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” on the jukebox at The Starlight Lounge about twenty times a night. He was carrying a paper bag from Eddy’s.
“Hiya, handsome,” Liz said, and we all waved and whistled.
Mitch laughed out loud. “Hey, little foxes,” he said, grinning broadly. He twirled his cane outward with a flourish and bowed from the waist, almost falling over but saving himself just in time. He blew us a kiss and kept walking down Comanche Street, singing.
“Man, what a waste of skin,” Liz said when he was past us.
“Guy loses his leg in Nam, gets the Purple Heart, you call him a waste of skin?” Nanny always got emotional about the war; her cousin, Sean, died in Vietnam just last year, and another cousin, Quinn, was in the army but so far hadn’t been out of Fort Worth, Texas.
“I’m not talking about his leg,” Liz said. “Please, what do you take me for? His leg I can deal with. But he’s, like, three sheets to the wind and it’s not even noon yet.”
“Which makes him so different from everyone else around here,” I said.
“Yeah, but we’re still young, we’ll outgrow it,” Liz said. “Mitch is, what, pushing thirty? That’s old to still be drinking your breakfast. But he’s so sexy, right? He reminds me of Clint Eastwood in that movie we saw last year, what was the name of it? Where he plays a Yankee soldier whose leg gets amputated—”
“The Beguiled,” I said.
“Yeah! That’s the one,” Liz said. “You don’t think he looks like Clint? A Clint who’s fucked up most of the time? Those eyes, and he has the sexiest wrists—”
“‘Wrists?’” Nanny rolled her eyes. “What, are you three sheets to the wind?”
“I noticed it one night when I was standing next to him at the bar,” Liz said. “He was lighting a cigarette, and I swear, if I wasn’t so into Cory—”
Nanny and I looked at each other. Cory McGill was Liz’s big love, but how he felt about her was another story.
I was glad that Mitch had come along, though, so I didn’t have to tell them I was thinking about Luke. Even my best friends didn’t know how I felt; I didn’t want it all over the earth before anything happened. His brother, Conor, said that Luke was not himself, that he stayed in his room all day and then went out late at night and must have walked the beach because the floor of his room was covered with sand. He slept most of the time, or gazed out the window, smoking. One night, Conor came home and found Luke sitting by the window. When he asked if something was wrong, Luke said, “Nothing, man, just happy to be home,” and told Conor to go to sleep. The windowsill had been filled with cigarette butts. His bags were still stacked by the closet door, waiting to be opened. “My brother’s messed up for sure, man,” Conor said worriedly. But I wasn’t overly concerned. Luke had just come back from a war, which was bound to make anyone act weird. Besides, real summer hadn’t started yet; it wasn’t even the end of June, and he had to come out sometime. At night, smoking my last cigarette in front of the mirror, I’d practice the things I would say when I saw him. Words that would make him take notice, wonder where I’d been all these years.
Then I thought about Maggie, of how peaceful she looked, sitting there on the steps, as though she didn’t want for anything in the world. I wondered how it would be to carry Luke’s baby inside me, to have that weight against my skin, beneath my heart.
• • •
God, can you believe it, we’re finally getting out of this dump?” Nanny said.
“Really,” I said, though walking the halls of Elephant Beach High School made me feel like crying. I hadn’t loved school since I graduated from sixth grade, but every morning when my alarm clock went off at seven, at least I knew what to expect.
“I can already hear my mother, when they give out the awards and all that shit,” Liz said. “‘Look, Dick, none of Liz’s friends won the Regents scholarship. None of Liz’s friends were named Athlete of the Year.’”
We arrived at the main office and walked underneath the banner that stretched across the doorway and read “Best of Luck, Class of ’72.” Mrs. Cathaway was handing out boxes and crossing names off a sheet of yellow lined paper. “Here you go,” she said, handing Nanny the box that held her cap and gown. She ran a red pencil through Nanny’s name with a flourish.
“Gonna miss us, Mrs. Cathe—Cathaway?” Liz asked sweetly. We smothered our smiles; she’d almost slipped and called her Mrs. Catheter, which everyone called her behind her back. Mrs. Cathaway was the secretary to the principal, Dr. Steadman, and sat sentry outside his office like a guard dog. Whenever she said, “Dr. Steadman will see you now,” it always sounded as though you were getting an audience with God and should consider yourself blessed.
“Good luck, girls,” Mrs. Cathaway told us, then clamped her lips shut tight as a purse.
We left the office and walked down the hall to the South Wing bathroom, where all the Trunk kids hung out. It was in this very bathroom that Liz and I had first become friends. Nanny came later, when Liz started bringing me around and she saw that it was safe for us to be friends. It was back in the fall of our sophomore year, right before third period when Barbara Malone had started pulling the hair right out of my head because she thought her boyfriend had winked at me in study hall. Liz had jumped on Barbara’s back and rode her around the bathroom, threatening to dunk her in the toilet bowl if she didn’t leave me the fuck alone. I was surprised, because Liz and I had only ever spoken in the one class we had together, World History, or to bum cigarettes from each other in the bathroom. I had no idea why she’d plucked me from the shadows to come to my defense. But I was excited when she extended the invitation to come hang out on Comanche Street. The Trunk was an exotic, forbidden place, older and rougher than other neighborhoods in town, where kids stood on street corners doing secret, forbidden things out in the open. Whenever we drove through there on the way back from my grandmother’s house in Brooklyn, I’d watch them from the windows of my parents’ car, wondering at the ease with which they slouched against the walls of the shabby bars and candy stores that lined the dark, narrow streets. I wanted that for myself. I wanted to feel sure of something that no one could take away from me. Besides, it was a lonely time for me; Marcel, my best friend since junior high school, wasn’t around much because of family troubles and I didn’t know where I belonged anymore.
“Shit,” Nanny said, looking at herself in the smeared mirror. The blue graduation gown was billowing around her like a tent. “You could fit two of me in here, it’s so friggin’ big. Ginger could have worn this and no one would’ve ever suspected she was pregnant.”
“She wasn’t going to graduate, baby or no baby,” Liz said, stuffing her gown carelessly back into the box. “She cut out so much in junior year that when she came up to withdraw, they didn’t even have her name on the list, man. They didn’t even know who she was.”
Nanny was tearing the cellophane off a fresh pack of Marlboros. “What do you think?” she asked. “One for the road? I mean, what are they gonna do three days before graduation, suspend us?”
“Suspend us, right,” Liz said, taking out her own pack. “You think they want us back here next year?”
“Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke,” I said, lighting up. I looked around at the puke-green walls and faded green-and-black tiles. Would I miss this? Any of it?
Nanny started to say something, but Liz held up her hand for silence. She closed the door to the bathroom, then turned back to us. “I got something to tell you guys and I don’t want any interruptions,” she said. “And you have to swear on your mother’s life you won’t breathe a word to anyone, ever. No shit.”
Nanny and I nodded, trying
to keep our faces straight. It was Liz who had the big mouth; she couldn’t keep a secret to save her life.
Liz sat back down on the edge of the sink, lit a cigarette. The smoke streamed into the filtered sunlight coming through the window. She smiled in a way I’d never seen her smile before.
“Me and Cory did it last night,” she said.
We looked at her. In the mirror I could see Nanny’s eyes bugging out. Cory McGill was a couple years older than us and worked at Liz’s father’s dealership on Merrick Road, where Liz was working for the summer. They did a lot of wisecracking at work and had made out a couple of times in the parking lot when Liz’s father wasn’t around, but he’d never even asked her out.
“So, you mean, like—”
“Yep,” Liz said, nodding smugly. “That’s exactly what I mean.” She leaned back against the tiles and closed her eyes, smiling.
“But when?” I asked. “How did it—”
She opened her eyes and turned toward us, waving her cigarette like a wand. “I went to work yesterday, right, and I looked really hot even though I can’t wear halters and shit because of my father, and I had on my new Maidenform, the off-white one with the cream lace. So we were kidding around, and he kept looking for excuses to get close to me, you know, hanging around the reception desk, the kitchen whenever I went in to make fresh coffee, like that. You know Thursday’s our late night, we close at nine thirty, so he comes up to me, he says, ‘I’m taking the Dodge out for a test run up Sunrise Highway, you wanna come for the ride?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, sure,’ he never asked me to come out on a run before, right? In the Dodge Challenger, forest green, my lucky color. So I’m like, there, man, I’m totally psyched.
“So we barely pull out of the lot and he turns into a friggin’ octopus, he’s like all over me at the red lights, and then all of a sudden he pulls up behind this boarded-up White Castle on Sunrise Highway, and he says, ‘Let’s get in back.’ So now we’re in the backseat, and it’s getting, it’s getting really hot, I mean, like the windows are fogging, and I tell him, I say, ‘Cory, Cory, man, I’m a virgin,’ and he says, ‘Liz, I swear on my mother’s life I’ll handle you with kid gloves. I’ll make it the most beautiful night of your life,’ and then it’s, like, it all happened at once, man. Like, everything.”
“You are blowing my freakin’ mind,” Nanny said.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What about your father? Where was he?”
Liz made a face. “Thursday night’s his poker night, he lets Cory close up,” she said. “Where’d you think he was, man? In the car with us?” She laughed. “Not that it would matter, you know he never pays me any attention.”
“What did it feel like?” Nanny whispered.
Liz leaned forward. “I don’t know where all the hearts and flowers and violins come in,” she whispered back. “All that bullshit they tell you. Because it hurt like hell. I was in brutal, brutal pain, it’s like I got welts and bruises all up and down my back, on my ass.”
“What about—I mean, did you use something? Did he—”
“‘I got rhythm, I got music,’” she started singing.
“Liz, man—”
“You don’t know what it’s like,” she whispered, closing her eyes again. “When I felt him come inside me. It’s like this—this total rush, when you make a guy come.” She started rocking, gently, against the wall behind the sink, that smile playing on her lips. “That was the best part of the whole thing. It’s like—it’s so intense, man, it’s like you’re living and dying, all at once.” A slight shudder went through her body, and then she opened her eyes wide and looked around the bathroom as though she’d never seen it before.
“But Liz,” I said. “I mean, shit—”
“And he said the most romantic thing,” she said, her eyes shining. “After, he said, ‘Baby, if I knew it was going to be your first time, I would have taken out the Cadillac Sedan instead of the Dodge.’”
“Liz—”
Liz leaned over and patted my thigh. “That’s okay,” she said. “You just don’t understand the way passion works. Anyway, it’s safe, my period’s due in a couple days, I can feel it. My tits are killing me, man, it’s like they’re gonna pop off and hit the fucking ceiling any minute.”
Nanny snorted. “That’s what my cousin Maggie thought and look what happened,” she said. “That’s what everyone thinks. I mean, look at Ginger, man. If you’re going to see him again, you should—”
“What do you mean, if I’m going to see him again?” Liz said, staring hard at Nanny. “Guy just took my virginity and I’m not going to see him again?”
“If you’re going to see him again,” Nanny said patiently, “you should think about going on the Pill.”
Liz shook her head. “Uh-uh,” she said. She cupped her breasts in her hands. “No way. I don’t want these babies getting any bigger.”
“Well, what are you going to do?” Nanny asked, exasperated. “You gotta do something.”
“I don’t have to do anything,” Liz said, smiling. “I don’t have to do a fucking thing.”
Nanny and I stayed silent. When Liz got this way over a guy, it was like she was high on angel dust or something, her brain riffing bullshit. “Delusional” didn’t even begin to cover it.
“So when are you going to see him again?” I asked, finally.
“Tonight,” she said, smiling her new smile. “I’ll see him tonight at work.”
“I mean,” I said, “I mean, are you going to—did he say anything, like—”
“Oh, grow up,” Liz snapped. “The whole thing just happened, what’s he going to say? I mean, he had to get the car cleaned after, he probably paid for it out of his own pocket. He put his job in jeopardy for me, what more does he have to say?”
I looked at Nanny and shrugged: I give up.
“And besides,” Liz said, sounding suddenly aggrieved, “you guys, you’re like freaking me out, man, all these questions, I mean, you should be happy for me, being with Cory, knowing how I feel about him, after all this time—” She jumped off the sink, started walking toward the door.
“It’s not like we’re not happy for you,” Nanny said.
“It’s just, we don’t want you to get hurt, is all,” I finished lamely.
But Liz wasn’t listening. She had stopped in front of the mirror, staring at her reflection.
“Do I look different?” she asked. “I feel different.” She ran her hands down her breasts, over her stomach. “What if I’m pregnant?” she whispered.
Nanny’s eyes grew huge with alarm. She looked at me. Suddenly I felt depressed and I didn’t know why.
“Is that what you want?” I asked.
Liz just smiled her new smile, her eyes staring at us backward through the mirror. “Wouldn’t that be a trip, man? Walking down the aisle at graduation with Cory’s baby inside me?” She turned sideways, her hands clasped over her womb. “Wouldn’t that just be something else?”
• • •
It seemed as though the car was flying, but we were only doing around sixty, and that was safe on the Meadowbrook Parkway.
“Ginger called me,” Nanny said from the backseat. “I wanted to go with her, but she said the cab was already honking in the street and she had to run.”
“She took a cab? To the hospital? Where was her mother?” I asked.
“Oh, Mrs. Shea, mother of the year?” Nanny said. “She wasn’t around, surprise, surprise. You got that lighter, or should I start rubbing two sticks together?”
Liz cruised into the right lane, cutting off a white Mustang. The driver began honking frantically. “Your horn blows good, how about your mother?” Liz yelled back at him.
“God, it’s so lonely even thinking about taking a cab to have your baby,” I said, passing the lighter back to Nanny. And it must have cost a fortune, since Ginger was goi
ng to County instead of Elephant Beach Hospital. She had to have the baby there because she didn’t have any money or health insurance and she was only seventeen years old.
Liz patted my thigh. “That’s why we’re here, sweetie,” she said. “For moral support. It’s too bad we couldn’t have taken her there ourselves, but—” Liz shrugged. She’d been just getting off work when Nanny called, and she was the only one of us with a car.
“Jesus, what if she had the baby in the cab?” Nanny said. “You think that could have happened? I saw a movie once, the woman was stuck in traffic, right, and her water broke—”
“This isn’t a fucking movie,” Liz said, racing a blue Volkswagen bug to get into the exit lane. “Things like that don’t happen in real life. She’s probably still in labor, won’t have the baby for hours.”
But Ginger’s baby had already been born, so quickly it was like he was sliding down the water chute at Coney Island, out and about in less than an hour after she arrived at the hospital. “That’s the way it always is with your kind,” the nurse told her, before she scooped the baby up and took him away. Now Ginger was sitting up in bed, her breasts hanging over her belly inside the thin cotton smock, looking wiped out. A strange woman was sitting at her bedside, talking in low, serious tones and trying to push some papers into her hand.
“Anyone got a cigarette?” Ginger greeted us. We all started shoving packs at her, and the strange woman said, “You really shouldn’t be smoking so soon afterward.”
“The baby’s born,” Ginger said, her voice weary. “And this cigarette isn’t going to do anything to me the last six thousand haven’t done.”
“If you’d only see your child, I’m sure you’d—”
“Who is she?” Liz asked.
“Who are you again?” Ginger asked the woman.
“My organization represents young girls like yourself, who get in the family way and can’t care for their children,” the woman said, facing Ginger. “We help them to—”
“How long since you gave birth, Ginger?” Liz asked.
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