She shakes her head. She hasn’t spent her life with any man.
He says, “When we were kids, I thought to myself that as long as we were together, nothing that had happened to you before mattered. That sounds selfish because, of course, it mattered. It mattered to you. But in my naïve way, in my colossal ignorance, I convinced myself that because we loved each other whatever occurred with another man wouldn’t have an impact. I’m not saying I ever imagined that I could erase what happened to you, but I thought—I don’t know—I thought that I might obscure it with my own feelings for you. Then you left. One day, you weren’t on the phone. I couldn’t find you. I was a dumb, besotted, teenage boy. I went to your school to look for you. I went to your house and there he was—”
She’d had no idea Dan had shown up at the house. She imagines him there in the doorway with Craig staring down at him. Look, you little shit, what you’re after isn’t here.
“But you did make it better,” she says. “You made it so much better.”
“Even if I had made it better,” he says, and now she sees it, the source of his discomfort around her, “you still left.”
“He was in my house,” she says. “I couldn’t live like that.”
He holds up his hands, as though in surrender. “I know that now. But don’t forget that I was also young. I didn’t understand anything back then.”
“He was in our home and in my mother’s bed,” she says. “And he was angling for me all the while. It was impossible.”
Dan’s shoulders slump forward. He puts his elbows on the table, rests his chin in his hands. “But I should have done something.”
“What could you have done? You didn’t even know where I was.”
“I mean, kill him,” Dan says.
“Oh that.” She laughs. “I almost did kill him, you’ll recall, but apparently he’s indestructible.” She takes a long swallow of wine, reaches across the table, and puts her hand on Dan’s arm. He takes her hand, turns it over, kisses her palm. “Do you remember the first time we were together? Every year, when the pumpkins come out, I think of you.”
“Of course, I do.”
“And do you remember that last time?”
She does.
THE LAST TIME
1978
She rode buses to the McDonald’s where Dan worked. In a window seat way in the back, she memorized the periodic table for a chemistry test. Hydrogen. Helium. Lithium. She felt gusts of wind flapping through the windows, looked outside and realized all at once it was Halloween. She could see crowds of trick-or-treaters sweeping through the soft spray of lamplight in their costumes. In the distance, colors of light from firecrackers pierced the sky.
She arrived at the McDonald’s as a group of teenagers too old to go house to house came out of the restaurant through the glass doors with burgers in takeout bags. One wore green face paint to look like a corpse. Another wore a rubber mask with blood all down the side. They were shouting to each other, tossing the bag of burgers like it was a football. Meanwhile, a girl in a cat costume balanced drinks in a cardboard holder. Bobbie ducked to the side as they passed, entering the restaurant. She sat in the corner until the other customers were gone, catching glimpses of Dan as he worked behind the counter. It was late; he was closing. The tables had been wiped clean and she could almost hear the emptiness of the machines as one by one they were turned off.
She went up to the counter and called into the back for a cup of coffee. She heard his footsteps, then caught a glimpse of his brown uniform. He had a dishcloth over his shoulder, a set of keys on his belt. He was sweating with the steam of the machines. His hair was a tangle of black curls.
“Can I help you?” he asked, before looking up and seeing it was her. Now his face registered surprise. She heard her name on his lips, heard his laughter. He swept off the uniform cap and wiped the dampness from his brow, then flew over the steel countertop, landing beside her in an instant, his face gleaming. “It’s so good to see you! I worry about you in that crazy house.”
“It’s only crazy half the time now. He’s going to work at night.”
“But I can’t even call you after school!” She could feel the heat coming off him. He wiped his hand across the front of his shirt, then said, “What kind of regime is the guy running that means you can’t take phone calls?”
They could hear police sirens outside. A red-and-blue light flashed by the great plates of glass that made up the restaurant’s walls, sending blocks of colored light across the floor.
“He’ll go, eventually,” she said. “Forget about him.”
“Wait here. I just have to throw everything into the walk-in.”
They headed for his house on foot, him in his brown polyester McDonald’s uniform, her wearing his army-issue jacket because she hadn’t brought her own. The air was heavy and damp; it smelled of bonfires and flash powder. They saw a bunch of costumed ghosts pile into a car driven by a zombie in a green wig. They heard bottle caps outside a 7-Eleven and thought at first they were pistol shots. As midnight came, the wind churned up, tearing strips of orange crepe paper from decorated porches. Cardboard witches came loose from doorways. Pumpkin candles sputtered their last. They passed flying candy wrappers, torn-off spider legs, a discarded witch hat. The lights inside houses clicked off one by one. It felt as though they were in the afterlife, out among the weary ghosts.
“What if you stay over?” Dan asked. In fact, they hadn’t much choice now. She’d arrived on a night bus but she had no intention of going back on one.
“My room is on the ground floor,” he said. “My parents are all the way upstairs.”
They felt nervous. Nervous they’d get caught in his bedroom. And nervous, too, at having a whole night before them.
His house was as she’d imagined it, one of the yellow mock-Victorians on the hill. His mother had set out a giant basket of pumpkins and squash for Halloween and it was pretty in the moonlight. They skirted around the side and she heard water trickling in the dark and realized there was a pond in the back with a pump that operated a small fountain.
“Did you make all this?” she said, marveling at the rockery with little purple flowers left over from summer still poking out from crevices, and the hebe bushes, lit by tiny bulbs hidden among them. The fountain fed a small pond replete with fish. A wall of rosebushes, their trunks ringed in mulch, separated one part of the garden from another like the walls of a house.
“My mother,” Dan said. “She spends all her time out here.” Bobbie nodded, as if that made perfect sense, though she’d never imagined that tending a garden would be a serious pursuit for a grown woman. She admired the tidy borders, and the zigzag of stone paths that led to other hidden places. There was even a wooden seat by the pond, so you could watch the fountain break the moon’s reflection into a series of concentric circles and listen to the breeze that flowed above in the canopy of an oak. If she hadn’t been so cold and so concerned about being seen, she’d have asked if they could sit here for a while.
“Our place is nothing like this,” Bobbie said. “It’s just trees.”
“Trees are nice.”
“Which, one by one, fall down.”
He laughed at that, and then she saw that it sounded funny and laughed, too.
“That’s my window,” he said. “Wait here and I’ll make sure the coast is clear.” He hugged her briefly and felt her shivering. “I won’t be long.”
When finally she climbed through the window into his bedroom, she was surprised. Not by what she saw but how she felt, peering into his life in so stark a manner. It was a privilege, she understood. He had a nice collection of records, and a turntable neatly tucked into shelves. In a rattan basket were clothes to be washed. The walls were decorated with posters from years back; a set of three track trophies grew dusty on the window ledge above a dozen or more ribbons from field sports. Surrounded by all his things, she felt she’d entered his life fully, and she turned to him with an exclamation on her
lips and then could not think of what to say.
“I guess you can run fast,” she whispered.
He kissed her, then reached back and turned out the light. He put his finger to his lips to indicate they should undress silently. She watched as he unbuttoned his shirt. Through the darkness she made out the long drop of his torso, the weightless shoulders that seemed to point outward like arrows on a compass. She left her T-shirt and underpants on, he his boxer shorts. He came toward her, took her hand, and when she felt the heat of his chest against her own, she sighed aloud. She could hear music from another room upstairs, the soundtrack to a movie his parents were watching in bed. He put his hand on her lower back, drew her closer to him.
“What do we do if they come in?” she whispered.
He touched her hair, then ran his finger over her brow as he had that day in the bus stop when they’d first met properly. “They won’t come in,” he said. “They have no interest in checking up on me. Anyway, I’ve locked the door.”
He was right about his parents. They watched their movie and then Bobbie heard their footsteps on the floorboards, then a sound from somewhere in the plumbing as they turned faucets on and off. She and Dan held each other in the single bed, its covers unable to contain them both, and waited until there was silence from his parents’ room. At last, she felt the weight of sleep upon the house, and the two of them fully awake within it.
She realized what she was about to do now and understood all at once that she didn’t know how. Sex had always been a kind of acquiescence on her part. She had always cooperated what with was asked, but now she was unsure what was being asked. Dan was cautious with her body. He kissed her, then stopped and talked. He nuzzled her neck, put his lips on her breasts, rolled her nipple in his fingers, then glided down the length of her body, laying his cheek against her belly, pausing there for a while as though suddenly struck with a thought.
He was so unhurried she didn’t know what she was supposed to do. Sex with him was not a single act, as she’d always experienced it with Craig, but a series of moments. At one point, she wondered if he was waiting for her to do something, to take the lead, so she set into motion, doing the things as Craig had instructed her and which with Craig had been a kind of heartless routine. It was not so now. With Dan, she wanted to offer the things Craig had always just taken from her. She began to move around him, with her hands, her tongue, her lips. She felt his excitement, his thin muscular frame rigid with attention. She felt him hard against her, his pulse thudding against her cheek. But she sensed, too, that something was wrong, caught herself, and stopped. She was scaring him; she saw this clearly. She hadn’t realized a guy could be scared.
“What’s the matter?” she whispered.
“It’s like you went somewhere else.”
How did he know this?
“Stay here with me,” he whispered, and brought her close to him in what could have been nothing more than a friendly hug. She could feel his heartbeat; she could feel the sweat that rose up like a cloud from them both. He looped his leg around her leg, pressed his shoulder against her shoulder.
“You don’t want to?” she said.
She felt his body sink against her, his teeth gently on the rim of her ear. “Of course I do but—”
“You’re thinking of him, aren’t you?” she said. “Thinking of Craig—”
He sprung back away from her. “No!” he said.
And then she realized it was she who was thinking of Craig, that he was contaminating the room with his gory face, his deep, sarcastic laugh. Laughing at her, at them, at the puny teenager, at the stupid girl.
“You’re fifteen,” Dan said like an apology.
That didn’t seem so very young to her, perhaps because Craig had been complaining for some time about how ratty she was getting now that she was “older.”
“But I’ve already done everything,” she whispered, and then felt her cheeks grow hot.
He said nothing and she squirmed under that silence.
“You’re not much older than I am,” she said.
“No.”
She felt her heart pounding and Craig’s voice in her head, calling her a little slut, calling her a bitch.
“I love you,” Dan said, speaking into her hair. He then whispered into the blind dark all the sensible explanations for why he felt as he did about sex. “I’m not saying no, just we can’t do everything,” he said. She could see his eyes shining; she could see his smile, even in the dark.
“Of course not,” she said, though she’d assumed they would. She had a diaphragm stuffed into the pocket of her jeans, now on the floor.
He said, “This is making love anyway, isn’t it? You and me right now, here. When does sex start and stop?”
It was a remark she would remember and that (she could not know this now) she would repeat to men she had yet to meet in years to come.
“You are right,” she said. She wanted to say another thing. That despite how she longed for him, sex was contaminated. It was mostly divorced of feeling. Her body did as it was asked, but to Bobbie it was a little like watching a sea anemone respond to the pressure of a finger. The only thing that felt genuine was kissing, possibly because she hadn’t done very much kissing with Craig. And so she kissed Dan, kissed him for a long time.
—
THEY SAW EACH other on Thursday nights because on Friday mornings there was a station meeting that Craig stuck around for after his show. This meant that neither Craig nor June was home early Friday morning, so nobody would miss her. From eleven at night right through until homeroom at school, nobody checked on where she was.
It was their great secret, requiring some stealth, but it wasn’t difficult. Dan was the youngest of four children—the others much older than he, now into their twenties—and his parents suffered from what might be called child fatigue. They were relaxed. They didn’t worry about an odd noise from Dan’s room, or whether he looked particularly tired. This was not because they did not care about him but because the three children before him had all somehow miraculously survived to adulthood, Dan explained. They reckoned their last child would do the same without undue supervision.
When she needed the bathroom at Dan’s house they would sneak together down the hallway from his bedroom, Dan being ready to shout out a greeting if his parents were to call out “Dan, is that you?,” which they never had. She insisted on being fully dressed even though this meant taking a lot of time just to traverse eight feet of hallway. Moving silently together, fingers entwined, they listened for footsteps, for squeaking floorboards, for opening doors. When at last they reached the bathroom, Dan would turn his back as she peed. Then they made the careful journey back to his bedroom, remembering always to lock the door.
“What would they say if they found me?” she asked once on a stormy November night. The wind was beating the panes of his windows, the roof sounding as though it might blow off. She always hated wind, having grown up in a house surrounded by trees. She worried one would break and crush the house in the middle of the night. She worried about falling branches, too.
“They’d want to know why I never introduced you to them,” Dan said casually. “I really don’t think they’d care that much if you spent the night. My brothers had girls here sometimes. Why can’t you meet them anyway? I don’t get it.”
“I don’t want anyone to know. It will ruin it.” She didn’t believe this was true, not strictly anyway. It was only that if Dan’s parents knew then soon her mother would know and that meant Craig would know. And Craig would certainly ruin it. He already knew she was seeing someone, but he couldn’t do anything about it. He was still unable to drive and depended on June to get him to work for the midnight shift. One day he would be well and she imagined him tricking her, stalking her in his car, finding out where Dan lived. She could not bear the thought.
“They’d think they you were great,” Dan said. “How could they not fall in love with you?”
Easily, she’
d thought. Because they weren’t in love with her. That was Dan. She could feel it coming from him, that big heart of his enveloping her all the time. She had no idea what she’d done to deserve it. If he loved her, he was mistaken to do so. A simple error in judgment he was bound one day to correct.
She told him it was better this way. She liked how private it was between them. And all the little compromises they made for each other, and what they did in bed together, acts that would never have been enough for Craig but which they attended to with a level of arousal she’d never before experienced and which she could not put into words, though she had tried. She began, You know when you…and then she described as much as she could muster. And when you…she said, but found it difficult to finish.
He listened. He added to what she said. It was as open a conversation as she’d ever have about sex, about her feelings about sex, about what two people could do together. Often, later in her life, she would recall how easy it had been with Dan and wonder what kind of crazy trajectory her life was on that the person with whom she’d been most open was her first love, when she was still a girl.
Later that first night, the storm keeping them awake, they sat up in bed. She leaned back into his chest and they watched the power lines sway in the wind.
“In the summer, my parents rent a house at the beach,” he said. “Come with us. We’ll swim in the ocean every day. At night, we’ll lie on the sand and look up at the stars. No time limits. They would love you. And they’d be happy to see me doing something other than reading a book.”
“I won’t be here this summer,” she said. She hadn’t thought of this ahead of time, but as she spoke the words she knew them to be true. She told him that she would be leaving. Not forever, not running away in the sense people understood it, but just until her mother got rid of Craig.
“I think this is what it will take,” Bobbie said. “I’m going to write her a letter after I’m well away and tell her to make up her mind: Craig or me. I’m not going to live with him. I think he’ll leave anyway once I’m gone. I swear he only stays in our house to torment me. So perhaps the whole thing will be easier than I think.”
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