by Lisa Alther
While the raft bobbed, the water began to flow faster and faster. She and Molly rolled toward each other and fitted their bodies together, interlocking their thighs and enfolding each other in their arms. As they were swept along down the river, their mouths met. They began to caress each other’s lips with their tongues.
The current raced more and more swiftly, as though about to carry them over a waterfall. The rutted red banks rushed past on either side. And then a towering wall of water rolled down the river and raised the raft high up toward the sky, swirling it into the air like an autumn leaf on a whirlwind. And Jude felt a sweet, haunting pain pulsing through her body, as though she were being stung to death by a swarm of bees injecting her veins with honey.
And then the whole world burst apart like fireworks. Bits of Molly’s and her flesh flew off into the churning river and roiling sky. And they were no longer Molly or Jude. They were each other and everything. The mountains and the trees and the birds singing in the swaying branches. The river and the pastures and the cows grazing on the lush grasses. They all formed a whole. They always had and they always would, but she had lacked until now the eyes to see it.
Waking up in the scarlet rays of the rising sun, Jude discovered that she and Molly were completely wrapped up in each other’s arms and legs in the middle of the bed, breasts pressed together. Molly’s eyes fluttered open and she stared blankly into Jude’s, only inches away, as though unable to remember who she was or who Jude was. Slowly, the blankness faded and was replaced by consternation. Hurriedly, she untangled her limbs and scooted to the far side of the bed.
Glancing around bemusedly, Jude discovered that their giant curlers had been yanked out and hurled around the room and that their hairdos for that day were in ruins.
At school, Jude sat through her classes in a daze, constantly reviewing what had happened between Molly and herself. It comforted her to know that Molly was sitting in study hall at the junior high school just then, also trying to figure out what it meant.
She watched a gray squirrel on a branch of the oak tree outside her classroom window. It sat on its haunches munching an apple core retrieved from the trash basket. Its fluffy, twitching tail was draped along its spine like a Mohawk haircut. As she watched, Jude thought maybe she finally understood what her father had always tried to explain to her. Beneath their different appearances, she and that squirrel were animated by the same force. It was the force that had joined Molly and her together last night. The Cherokees called it the Great Spirit, and Clementine called it graveyard love.
JUDE CRAWLED ACROSS THE LAWN to Molly’s house, trying to pretend that she was an orphan raised by wolves who had just emerged from the forest. She was actually nothing more than a common Peeping Tom. But Aunt Audrey and her father were at the hospital having their baby, so no one would miss her. She lay in the shrubbery, looking through a basement window. Molly was dancing with Ace to “The Twelfth of Never.” Ace had her arm twisted behind his back in a reverse hammerlock. Molly’s hair was teased into dark cascades around her face. Eyes closed, she rested her cheek against his thick neck. Jude realized that Molly actually had the hips they’d been encouraged to sway at Charm Class.
Then there was a power failure and the lights went out. But the song continued: “Hold me close. Never let me go….” So apparently it wasn’t a power failure.
Yet the lights stayed out until Jude heard Mrs. Elkins’s voice on the steps: “…and I insist that these lights stay on, Molly. If I have to tell you one more time, there’ll be no more parties in this basement, young lady.”
When the lights came back on, Jude could see Molly standing apart from Ace, who was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Molly’s lips looked swollen. But how could she be kissing Ace Kilgore tonight after what had gone on between them last night on the raft?
Sidney came sniffing up to Jude’s prostrate body. Whimpering, he lay down beside her, resting his chin on her shoulder. Jude draped her arm across his back. They watched Molly knead Ace’s muscled shoulder with one hand while they resumed dancing, and Jude tried to figure out how to switch the lights off so that Mrs. Elkins would ban future parties. Closing her eyes, she willed the whole scene to vanish by the time she opened them.
Her mother was riding a puffy white cloud, a large picture hat clamped to her head with one hand. Smiling, she waved with the fingers of her free hand. Jude watched, worried to see her again after so many years, because her mother usually appeared whenever Jude was in for a bad time.
WHEN JUDE ENTERED MOLLY’S back door the next morning, Molly was sitting at the kitchen table eating a bowl of Cheerios. She had purple circles under her eyes, and so did Jude. Jude had lain awake all night trying to decide what to do about Molly’s betrayal.
Plopping down in the chair beside her, Jude asked, “So how was your party?”
“Fine, thank you,” said Molly without looking up. She tilted her bowl to spoon out the remaining milk.
“Was it any fun?”
“Yes, thank you.” Still Molly wouldn’t look her at her. And she seemed annoyed. Could she have seen Jude spying on her? Jude had believed that Molly should be free to do as she wanted, but that was at a time when she thought that what Molly wanted was to be with her.
Pulling herself together, Jude asked, “So do you want to go riding this morning, or what?”
“I’m afraid I can’t.” Molly leaned back in her chair, balancing on the rear legs like a circus tumbler. “It’s one of Those Days.”
“Which days?”
“I have cramps.”
“Did you eat too fast?”
“No, I mean I have The Curse.” Molly tossed her wavy black hair off her forehead with the back of one hand.
“The what?”
“My period. You know, like we read about in that pink book my mother gave us last year.”
“You’re kidding?”
“No.”
“Since when?”
“Since yesterday.”
“So you can have babies now?”
“Yes, I guess so,” said Molly. She sounded vaguely pleased.
“Molly, for God’s sake, be careful.” Jude grabbed her forearm. “Babies can kill you.”
“Your Aunt Audrey just had one, and she’s still alive.”
“She was just lucky.”
“Honestly, Jude,” said Molly, irritably wrenching her arm out of Jude’s grip. “Grow up.”
Jude looked at her angrily. “Fine,” she snapped. “Have a baby. Die in childbirth. Get buried in the cemetery with all the other dead mothers. That’s where you’ll end up anyway if you get involved with Ace Kilgore.”
Molly glanced at her guiltily. “What does Ace have to do with this?”
Jude said nothing for a long time, trying to decide whether to confess to what she’d witnessed through the basement window. “Noreen told me you have a crush on him,” she finally murmured.
“What business is it of yours?”
Jude was stunned by Molly’s contemptuous tone of voice, stunned that she didn’t deny the crush, and stunned that she could even ask such a question. “How could it not be my business?” she asked in a low voice.
“What do you mean?” asked Molly, averting her eyes.
“After the other night…You know…”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Molly returned her chair legs to the floor, stood up, and carried her bowl to the sink.
Jude watched her in disbelief, feeling desperately lonely. The most important experience of her life to date had been just a dream. And the indestructible bond it had established between Molly and herself existed only in her own imagination.
CHAPTER
7
“SO IF YOU KEEP your knees together tight, girls, and smile up at your date while you swing your legs under the dashboard, you can get into any sports car, no matter how small, without displaying all your worldly treasures.” Miss Melrose was demonstrating her technique in her desk chair as
she talked. The Charm Class was assiduously copying her movements, even though none of the boys they knew could drive.
As Jude secured her worldly treasures beneath her imaginary dashboard, she noticed that Molly had painted her fingernails pink. Now that Jude was in junior high, she, too, shaved her armpits as well as her legs. And she put on lipstick, eyeliner, and mascara every morning. Thanks to Miss Melrose, she knew never to wear white shoes before Easter or after Labor Day and not to make chicken salad with dark meat. But Molly was always one step ahead.
Except in the classroom. Despite her efforts to score poorly on the placement exams, Jude had been assigned to a special seminar, along with the nerds who played slide-rule games in the lunchroom while all the cool kids did the Dirty Shag in the gymnasium to raise money for cerebral palsy. Jude had also been elected seventh-grade representative to the student council, which was dominated by classmates who were Episcopalian and Presbyterian and who lived in the big, fancy houses of the Yankee mill executives along Poplar Bluff.
But Molly never even congratulated her on her student council victory. And if Jude tried to explain some of the ideas she was learning about in the seminar, Molly would just shrug and say, “Afraid you’ve lost me again, brainchild.”
Some afternoons after school now, instead of racing Flame through the Wildwoods, Jude sat with Sandy in his upstairs bedroom discussing the big bang theory and natural selection and relativity. Out the window, they watched Noreen coaching Molly in Noreen’s backyard for the upcoming cheerleader try outs. Sometimes their lyrics reached Jude and Sandy through the open windows:
“Well, down my leg and up my spine!
We’ve got a team that’s mighty fine!”
She and Sandy would pause in their discussion of Hegel’s dialectic to giggle. Then Jude would frown at herself, feeling disloyal.
As they strolled home from Charm Class through the twilight, allowing their kilted hips to sway with every step, Jude said, “My dad said he’d teach us to drive the jeep down that hill behind the cemetery on Saturday afternoon.”
“Oh, Jude, I’m afraid I can’t.”
“But it would be really neat to be able to drive, wouldn’t it?”
“I’m afraid I’m tied up on Saturday afternoon.”
“Doing what?”
“Jude, I’m not your slave. You don’t need to know my every move.”
“Sorry.”
They walked in silence past yards full of tulips. Ever since Jude had realized that her experience on the raft with Molly had been just a dream, she hadn’t known how to behave with her. It seemed impossible to recapture the unselfconscious accord of their childhood, but no guidelines for their distressing new separateness had emerged. So they often experienced awkward silences or irritated outbursts, followed by frantic attempts to backpedal to the harmony they used to take so effortlessly for granted.
“I like the white tulips best, don’t you?” Molly finally said.
“Me, too,” said Jude, accepting the apology.
“Actually, I’m going to the lake with Ace Saturday afternoon. To ride in his father’s motorboat.” She was trying to sound casual.
Jude glanced at her. Molly and Ace often danced together at the noontime sock hops. And although Molly never admitted it, Jude suspected that they talked on the phone a lot at night. Occasionally, the three of them sat together on the bleachers at lunch to watch intramural basketball. Ace and Molly weren’t going steady, and they never went out on dates, but Jude could tell that Molly was sometimes preoccupied with him.
“But why Ace?” she finally asked, genuinely curious. “I just don’t get it. Have you forgotten how mean he was to us?”
“There’s a really sweet side to him that you’ve never seen, Jude. He may act tough, but inside he’s just a sad, scared little boy.” She was smiling fondly, as though describing the antics of her dog.
“Please spare me the details.”
“Besides, there are reasons why he was so mean.”
“Such as?”
“His father isn’t a nice man.”
“His father is the best lawyer in town. My dad says he was a big hero in the war.”
“I can’t say any more.”
Jude studied her from the corner of her eye. “We’ve never had secrets, Molly.” They were passing more tulips. Jude decided she hated them, especially the white ones.
“I promised Ace.”
“So Ace is more important to you now than I am?”
“No, of course not, Jude. But he needs me. I think I can help him.”
Reaching the crack in the sidewalk marking the boundary between their yards, they turned to face each other. Molly’s shirt collar was peeping out from beneath her sweater. On it, Jude spotted a tiny dagger made from a straight pin, a piece of red plastic cord, and some multicolored beads the size of BBs. Noreen had started this fad, which had swept the halls of the junior high school. She and the other cheerleaders made sets consisting of a miniature dagger and sword. The boys bought them, and the cheerleaders donated the money to muscular dystrophy. The boys wore them crossed on their collars until they wanted to go steady, at which point they gave their girlfriends their daggers.
“What’s that?” asked Jude, pointing at Molly’s dagger as though at a scorpion.
Molly started, then looked quickly away. “Ace asked me to wear it today.”
Jude said nothing for a long time. She was losing this battle, but she was damned if she’d make it easy for either of them. “What about me?
“But Jude, you’re a girl,” said Molly gently. “You’re my best friend, but Ace is my boyfriend. Why don’t you get a boyfriend, too? Then we can double-date to the movies. What about Jerry Crawford? Ace says he really likes you.”
“What about our cabin?” Jude asked doggedly. She didn’t want Jerry Crawford. She wanted Molly.
“What cabin?”
“The cabin we were going to build on the ridge above the cave. With the paddock for Flame and Pal.”
“But we were just kids then, Jude. It was like playing house.” She was gazing at Jude with loving concern.
Jude felt the bottom drop out of her stomach, like a trapdoor to hell. She had known she was losing, but she hadn’t realized that she’d already lost.
“Please don’t do this, Molly.”
Molly laughed weakly. “But I’m not doing anything.”
As Jude walked up her sidewalk, she reflected that if she had one of those weird things growing between her legs, like Molly’s father or the boys behind the furnace, she’d be able to slow-dance with Molly and go steady with her and all the things she had started wanting since entering junior high. Jude had no choice but to build their cabin alone, without Molly, who would be living somewhere else with Ace Kilgore and their mutant babies.
Aunt Audrey was upstairs talking to her new baby, Daniel junior, who was cooing and gurgling. Jude went into the kitchen and cut herself a piece of Mrs. Starnes’s latest cake—chocolate fudge with buttercream frosting. Carrying her plate into the living room, she sat down in the brown leather chair whose arms she and Molly used to ride, lassoing Sidney with Clementine’s clothesline. Reaching over to the end table, she opened the drawer and extracted the framed photo of her mother in the wine bottle, setting it up on the table. Her father always put it in the drawer now, explaining that it upset Aunt Audrey. And Jude always removed it, not explaining that it upset her to have Aunt Audrey sleeping in the very bed in which her father gave her mother the baby that had killed her.
Yet the birth of Aunt Audrey’s two babies hadn’t killed her, so Jude was having to reexamine her assumptions. And she had to confess that she adored her little half brothers, with their toothless grins and tiny twitching digits and intense navy-blue gazes. Munching her cake, she stared at the photo of her beautiful mother, trapped in a bottle like an exotic flower. She wondered whether her mother had felt the same fierce devotion for her that Aunt Audrey seemed to feel for her babies. She thought probably so,
judging by the look on her face as she held Jude’s cheek to her own in the photo by Jude’s bedside.
IN A TENT LIKE the circus big top, pitched in the middle of the county fairground on the outskirts of town, a visiting evangelist with a vanilla pompadour and a smile that wouldn’t quit was enjoining the Baptist Youth from throughout the area to swear forever to forgo dancing, drinking, card playing, swearing, and the “illicit pleasures of the flesh.” Jude watched from her folding chair beside Jerry Crawford as Molly and Ace joined the throng moving down the center aisle toward the front platform to be born again. She was appalled by the ease with which Molly was making a vow she’d never keep, loving Over the Moon as she did. Ace was evidently turning her into a liar. She’d been behaving very oddly since becoming pinned to him. Her blue eyes had lost their luster, and she walked like a robot, as though hypnotized by an evil wizard.
The new recruits for salvation gathered behind the glad-handing preacher, facing the audience. Meeting Molly’s eyes, Jude gestured in wolfspeak, What the hell are you doing?
Molly looked away, smiling proudly up at Ace. The perpetually grinning agent of the Lord extended his arms as though walking a tightrope and invoked the Lord’s blessing on “these the future leaders of our great Chrush-chen nation,” who had pledged henceforth to lead new lives “swept clean by the push broom of Christ!”
Afterward, the Baptist Youth from Jude’s church piled into their hay-filled delivery truck. As it rumbled down the road toward town, someone began singing “Jacob’s Ladder.”
Jerry leaned down, searching for Jude’s lips in the dark. His Dentyne-fresh breath was warm on her cheek. Jude turned her head aside and feigned a deep commitment to getting the alto harmony just right on “If you love Him, why not serve Him?” Jerry sighed and rummaged through the hay for her hand, which he pinned beneath his own like copulating starfish.