by Bev Marshall
“Trust me. He didn’t expect me to last more than a few innings. They’re not the major league, you know.”
Roland led me over to his red Mustang, and within minutes, I was sitting in the front seat beside him. I kept my eyes on his knuckles resting on the floor shift and the muscles in his forearm as he shifted gears. The black fabric seats held a faint scent of chlorine that mingled with the rich smell of the mud and spilled Coke on my clothes, but now I liked the tangy bouquet. Roland drove fast and too soon we were on my street. I spotted Wallace’s car parked on the driveway, and said, “Go on down the block a little way.”
He lifted his foot off the accelerator. “Why?”
“My step, Wallace, is home. I don’t want him to see me. Just park down there.” I pointed to the Masters’ house three down from ours. “I’ll go around back, and if you’ll boost me, I can climb through my window.”
“You’re something else, Layla Jay,” Roland said as he pulled over. “You sure he won’t hear us?”
“Not a chance. He never comes in my room, and I keep the door closed when I’m out. And when I’m not.”
Roland helped me pull out the screen on my bedroom window and lift the glass far enough for me to wiggle through. I changed into pink shorts with a matching ruffled top with lightning speed, stuffed my muddy clothes under the bed, and slipped on my pool thongs before jumping out into Roland’s arms. “I’m going to start calling you Speedy Gonzales,” Roland said, taking my hand as we ran across the grass to the car. “I never knew a girl who could get dressed that fast.”
“Practice,” I said as we reached the car. I ran my fingers through my hair, trying to untangle it. “I wish I’d brought my purse with a mirror and a brush,” I said.
Roland leaned across the seat and opened the glove compartment. “You can use my comb.”
“Thanks, but I still can’t see what I look like.”
When he said, “Got a solution for that,” I thought he was going to turn the rearview mirror toward me, but he took the comb from me and began to work the tangles out of my hair, holding his left hand on the top of my head as he raked the comb down my hair to my shoulders.
Nothing had ever felt so good. My scalp tingled and goose bumps rose up on my arms. “Mmm,” I said.“That feels so good.” I laid my head back and my hair swept across my shoulders. The lights were on in the Masters’ house and I could see the flicker of the TV screen through the sheer curtains on their living room windows. It was dark and cozy in the car, and as Roland turned my head toward him, combing the tendrils of hair around my face, I closed my eyes with contentment.
He kissed me, and just as it had been with Jehu, I wasn’t ready.When I opened my mouth to say sorry, his tongue touched mine and slid along the roof of my mouth. “Let’s go somewhere,” he said, moving away and turning the ignition key. He cocked his head toward me. “Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, unsure of what I was agreeing to.
We drove to the gravel pit just outside of town. As soon as we rolled to a stop and he turned off the engine, Roland got out of the Mustang and opened my door. A flicker of fear rose up in me. I knew lots of kids parked here but I had never been here at night. And I really didn’t know Roland all that well, did I? I thought of Jehu. He would be wondering what happened to me. Looking up at Roland who stood smiling down at me, I eased out of the car, shut the door, and leaned back against it. “Maybe we should get back to the game,” I said. “It’s probably nearly over.”
“I’ll take you if that’s what you really want,” Roland said, moving forward, pressing his body against me. The hard metal of the car against my back contrasted with the softness of his lips on mine, his chest pressing against mine, his hands running down the sides of my hips. Suddenly, I didn’t want this to happen. I thought of June saying she wasn’t going to get me pregnant. Roland could though, and I wasn’t dumb enough to not know where he was headed.
When I felt him sliding down the zipper of my shorts, I pushed him away. “I’ve never. I’m not.” I didn’t know how to say what I wanted him to know.
“Your first time?” he asked. “I thought from the way you kissed and all ...”
I don’t know what made me ask, “Have you done it before?”
He smiled, his white teeth flashing bright against his dark tanned skin. “Yeah, I’ve known a few girls before now.” He held my face between his hands. “If you say no, we’ll go.”
I bit my lip. I wanted to say no, go back to the lighted ball field and be a fourteen-year-old fan again, but I also didn’t want the feelings I was having to go away. And I wanted to know for sure that I wasn’t a lesbianism. “Kiss me again,” I said. “I don’t know what I want just yet.”
We never made it back to the game. I heard that the Gabriel team beat the Firestone team 6–5, and in the last inning when Jehu Albright came up to bat with the bases loaded, he struck out.
Chapter 15
JUNE HAD BEEN CALLING ME DAILY BEFORE SHE LEFT FOR CAMP up in Tennessee, but I always made up an excuse to get off the phone, and when she came over one Saturday, I didn’t answer the door. The week after the baseball game, Roland, who didn’t call at all, left for summer school at Tulane in New Orleans. So I went back to the pool where I made friends with Jeanie Rawls and Faye Porter after I sat beside them and offered to save their chairs.
Lyn and Jehu were going steady again. Jehu’s initial ring glistened in the sun on its chain around Lyn’s neck, and when I bumped into them at the snack bar, they looked right through me like I was one of the elementary school kids all of us teenagers ignored.
On the morning after the game, I had wanted to call Jehu and apologize for leaving with Roland. I had practiced the lie that I was going to tell him: “When I went home to change,Wallace wouldn’t let me go back out.” But each time I reached for the phone, my hand shook and I knew he would hear the lie in my voice. I hadn’t had to lie to Wallace or Mama.They’d been asleep when Roland brought me home for the second time that night, and I’d tiptoed to my room without waking them. They were sleeping soundly, Wallace thinking I was playing games at June’s house, and Mama believing I was with Jehu and Red Pittman.
I had still been asleep when Wallace left for New Hope the next morning, and for the first time, Mama had gone with him. She was getting around without her walker now, and felt stronger with each step she took.Wallace left me a note on the kitchen table beneath the salt shaker. “Layla Jay, Frieda is feeling well enough to attend services this morning. She wouldn’t let me wake you, so while we’re gone do the laundry and start on lunch. Pork chops are thawing in the sink. Dad.”
I stared at the signature. What had caused Wallace to suddenly declare himself “Dad”? He’d never be that to me.
I would have done the laundry anyway to hide my muddy clothes and my panties with rusty red stains on them, visible proof that I was no longer a virgin. I threw them in the washing machine without looking. I wanted no reminders of what had happened in the backseat of Roland’s Mustang.
After I turned on the washing machine, I went out into our shady backyard and sat in the green metal lawn chair with my knees against my chest, my bare feet curled over the edge of the seat. I thumbed through Lolita to the middle section where the word “lesbian,” not “lesbianism,” leapt out at me. I read “she had been coached at an early age by a little Lesbian.” I read on to the part where Humbert asked Lolita, his Lo, to tell him about her first time, to what Humbert referred to as her being debauched. Lolita and I had begun similarly: she with this Elizabeth Talbot, and me with June. But there we parted, at least in thought. Lolita “held Charlie’s mind and manners in the greatest contempt.” I, on the other hand, knew that my opinion of Roland went beyond the word “contempt.” I hated him.
I closed my eyes, remembering lying on the backseat of Roland’s Mustang with my head resting on his bunched jeans. His hands traveled over me, criss
crossing the country of my body from North to South from East to West.Through the open windows I listened to the incessant croaking of a bullfrog as the peculiar scent of the gravel pit wafted into the car. When Roland eased my shorts and panties down my legs, the night air cooled my skin and I thought of the cold rain hitting my breasts as I knelt in front of June’s window. I didn’t want to think of her, of what I had done with her. “Roland, I love you,” I said, and I knew that I did not. Shouldn’t I love the person I was about to give myself to? What was I doing here? How had this happened?
This was wrong wrong wrong. “No,” I finally managed to say. “I don’t think ... I want to go home.”
Roland raised his head from my breast. “No, you don’t,” he said.“It’s too late to stop now.You know you want this,” he said.“I promise you’ll like it. I won’t hurt you. Doesn’t it feel good?” he asked.
He was right about the sensations shooting through me, but he didn’t know my heart was breaking, thinking now of Grandma and Mama and Papaw and how they trusted me.With my hands on his chest, I tried to push him away, but suddenly his body was weighing me down, and I tasted the salt of his sweat as he hovered above me. Before I knew what was happening, a sharp pain shot through me and he clamped his mouth on mine.The top of my head hit the window again and again as his hips slapped against mine. I think I said “Stop” aloud, but I may have only been screaming it inside. Crying silently, I stared out the rear window at the moon shaped like the slice of the cantaloupe I had served Mama for breakfast that morning. When it was over, I couldn’t stop shuddering with hatred and fear and shame.“I want to go home,” I whispered. “Take me home.”
After we were dressed and Roland was safely behind the wheel again, I sat in the bucket seat with my head resting on the window and my arms crossed over my chest. I wanted to be as far away from him as I could be in the small car. On the drive home, Roland told me I was making a big deal out of nothing. “You didn’t do anything lots of girls haven’t done. I don’t get what all this crying is about.You wanted to do it, too.You know you did.”
I didn’t bother to answer him. I closed my eyes and prayed all the way to Fourth Street. “Please, God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Help me, help me.”
I kept on praying until June 12, when I got my period and knew that my secret was safe. Mama suspected something was wrong with me because I avoided our usual morning chats and I abandoned my former lazy habits in favor of industry. I defrosted the refrigerator, took down the blinds and scrubbed them with a brush and bleach in the backyard; I scoured the grout in the bathroom with a toothbrush, and each night I fell into bed too exhausted to care about what had happened to me in Roland’s car. Mama tried her best to worm my secret out of me, but now, after her accident, she was easier to fool. Maybe tragedy, instead of making you stronger as I’d always heard, can also make you vulnerable. I was determined to protect Mama from the pain of knowing that her daughter had become what the boys at school called “used goods.”
A voice inside my head repeated the chant,“It wasn’t your fault.You said no.” But I had voluntarily climbed into the backseat of Roland’s car, hadn’t I? And I couldn’t deny that Roland had been right about my wanting to do it.Then I told myself I had the right to change my mind, didn’t I? But it really didn’t matter. It was too late. I was used goods and nothing was going to make me a new product again.
Wallace and I had formed a silent truce. Now that I had done what he accused me of, I felt I deserved his criticism. Once in a while when we were alone in a room, which I tried to avoid as often as possible, I would see him looking at me with the same look I had seen on Roland’s face when he pressed the napkin on my breast at the baseball game. It was the eyes that were alike, focused on my body. I could nearly feel them piercing my skin, cutting through my blouse and bra to expose my bare breasts.
But Wallace and I weren’t often alone, and when we were, Mama was always nearby as she still couldn’t drive. She could walk fairly well, dragging one foot just a little behind the other, and only occasionally losing her balance, which Miss Louise said wouldn’t happen at all in another month or so. Mama was a miracle really. She gave God all the credit for her recovery, but Papaw said it was determination that got her on her feet.
I hadn’t finished Lolita, but I put it back in Mama’s nightstand. I didn’t want to read about Humbert’s and Lolita’s travels, and I thought that June was right.You shouldn’t have to work so hard to read a story. You never had to look up the meaning of a word in Seventeen magazine, and I tried to get interested in the easy reading of the stories and articles in it, but most of them bored me. I didn’t care if blush on my forehead would give me a sun-kissed look.With no help from cosmetics, the sun had kissed every inch of my exposed skin at the city pool, and Papaw had begun calling me “chocolate drop” when he stopped by for a visit. Jeanie and Faye weren’t nearly as dark as me, even though they were using the iodine and baby oil mix I suggested would tan them better. Miss Louise told me I ought to stay out of the sun. “You’ll get more wrinkles when you’re older,” she said. I didn’t care. I didn’t plan on getting all that old. I was sure that I would die young tragically, and Jehu would regret that our star-crossed romance hadn’t worked out.
INDEPENDENCE DAY MARKED yet another life change for Mama,Wallace, and me. Papaw and Miss Louise invited us to join them at Dixie Springs Lake for a Fourth of July picnic some of Miss Louise’s friends were throwing at their house on the lake. I didn’t want to go, thinking it would be boring, until Papaw told me that there would be fireworks and waterskiing behind their speedboat.
I was afraid Wallace wasn’t going to allow me to wear my swimsuit and I wouldn’t get to try skiing, but on the morning of the Fourth of July he came into the kitchen where I was making potato salad to bring to the picnic and said,“Frieda said the Mizells have a ski boat and there’ll be swimming in the lake.”
I dropped a spoonful of mayonnaise onto the cooling potatoes. “Papaw told me. He said they might teach me to ski.”
I nearly dropped the mayonnaise jar when Wallace said, “Well, you’d better bring your swimsuit then.”
The Mizells weren’t anything like the people I imagined Mama and Wallace hung around with at New Hope. Mrs. Mizell, who told me to call her Dottie, was about Mama’s age, but her husband was much older. He was a lawyer like Mr. Albright, Jehu’s dad, but I guessed he was a better one.Their stone house was four times the size of the Albrights’.They had three bathrooms, five bedrooms, and a dining room with a glass wall looking out on the lake where at least twelve people could sit and eat dinner off of their gold-rimmed china plates. I was enchanted with everything I saw, including Dottie’s daughter Frances and her boyfriend Joey. Frances was sixteen and Joey was a senior at Zebulon High. He was going to drive the boat and said he’d be glad to help me learn to ski later in the day. A few more high school kids showed up, and two other nurses Miss Louise knew came with their husbands and two little toddlers each.
There were snacks everywhere. Dips and chips, peanuts, little wieners in barbecue sauce, boiled shrimp with a hot red cocktail sauce, olives, pickles, and a ham spread shaped like a porcupine with pretzel sticks for the quills. The drinks were iced down in metal washtubs and there was a bar set up for the adults on the patio. I was reaching for a Coke when I heard Jehu’s voice.When I turned around, I saw Jehu, Lyn, and his parents walking across the yard toward me. I snatched a Coke and ran down to where Joey and Frances were standing in the beautiful blue-and-white speedboat tied up to their pier.“Get your suit on if you want to ski,” Frances said. She had changed into a red bikini top above navy shorts that I assumed covered a matching bikini bottom.
I looked back at the crowd and saw that Jehu and Lyn were sitting on the patio beside the French doors leading into the den, where I had left my beach bag.“Maybe later. I’ll just watch for a while,” I said as Joey backed the boat out onto the lake.“Have fun,” I called as
they roared off with the boat riding low in the back and the bow lifted as it skimmed across the calm water.
It was a beautiful day, and I sat down on the rough wood of the pier admiring the tiny crystals of sunlight dancing on the water, the line of pines on the far shore that shaded the water to a darker navy color. Cat-tails waved beside me on the bank and an occasional egret painted a streak of white in the blue sky overhead. I leaned back onto my elbows and stretched out my tanned legs, wishing I had worn my suit.When the boat circled back, I watched Frances and her friends taking turns skiing behind the boat. Only one girl, I think her name was Kathy, couldn’t get up on the skis. Over and over she fell into the lake, sideways, headfirst, backwards, and her skis came off each time she fell so that Joey had to drive in circles to retrieve them. I was afraid I’d look as foolish as Kathy and decided I didn’t want to try it after all. As they roared past the pier, Joey waved at me, and each time he passed by, I shook my head no.
By two o’clock the temperature had risen to the high nineties and the humid air off the lake was sapping my energy. I lifted my heavy damp hair from my neck, wishing I’d brought a ponytail holder. I longed to take a cooling dip in the lake, and when I saw that Jehu and Lyn were nowhere in sight, I ran back toward the house to change into my suit. I passed by Papaw sitting in a white wooden lawn chair next to Miss Louise. His usual unlit cigar jutted out of his mouth. Everyone was laughing at something he had just said. “Oh, Claude, you don’t need a nurse, you need a team of them,” Miss Louise said, smiling at him from beneath her wide-brimmed red straw hat. I smiled, too, thinking that Papaw must have told them about his latest mishap. He had gotten the fingers on his right hand caught in the door of a phone booth, then, with his left, he grabbed the receiver, jerked it loose from the box, and got hit in the nose with the metal cord. He held up his bandaged fingers and pointed to the Band-Aid on his nose. “Bullshit! I doctored myself without any help from you pill pushers,” he said.