He took off his khaki shorts but left on his boxers, which were green and printed with the Krispy Kreme logo. I could see the outline of his penis through them and for some reason, at that moment, I thought, That’s why it’s called a hard-on. Because it’s so hard.
I lay back and he climbed on top of me. When he pressed his body against mine I could feel his penis pushing into my underwear and I must have looked startled or confused because he said again, “It’s okay, honey. This is as far as we are going to go. I just want to feel close to you, okay? We’re both going to keep on our underwear.”
I admit that at first it felt good to have him rub himself against me. It did. It felt so good that it made me want to kiss him again, and I raised my head so we could do so, but he didn’t seem to notice. He was looking past me, his eyes fixed on the wall. He started moving back and forth real fast, bumping against my underwear. And then his face changed so that he looked like he was in pain and he was moving even faster against me and it wasn’t that it hurt, it didn’t, but it sure didn’t feel good and all I could think about was Mrs. Persons’s little dog, who always tried to hump my leg whenever I went over there with Mama.
“Dwayne,” I said but he said, “Shh, shh, hold on a minute, just a minute,” and then he started moving so fast it was like he was shaking, shaking like the washing machine at the end of the spin cycle and he was grunting and chanting to God and I felt a drop of sweat from his face fall on me and then I felt something warm and wet soaking through my underwear and after that Dwayne collapsed on top of me, still.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Two Letters, One Sent
(Louise, Fall 2004)
November 15, 2004
Dear Caroline,
Now you know that I want to do everything within my power to make your wedding a beautiful and romantic event, and you know that neither your father nor I want you to worry one bit about details like how much the wedding is going to cost. We are going to take care of all that, and we are going to make sure that the champagne and flowers are plentiful and in exquisite taste. With so many guests coming from out of town, you must know that I see it as my duty to show your (soon to be!) California in-laws that Atlanta has all of the sophistication of San Francisco.
But of course, this letter is not about champagne or flowers or any of those things. No, darling, I’m writing in response to the request that you made of Davis’s mother and Nanny Rose and me. Since you explicitly asked for our engagement stories in writing, I can only assume that you plan to use the written version for some part of your wedding ceremony. Or maybe you will read aloud from them at the bridesmaids’ lunch. Perhaps you’ll put together a scrapbook for the mothers. I’m sure that whatever you have planned will be just lovely.
Here is the problem. What you want and what I have to offer are two different things. You want the cute stories, the ring in the glass of champagne, the nervous gibberish of a man minutes before he pops the question. You want a story like Tiny has, that she saw Anders for the first time at a Chi O crush party, pointed him out to me, and declared, “I’m going to marry that boy.” And of course she did because Tiny was too powerful a force to be denied.
The real story of your father’s and my engagement isn’t cute. The story that I have always told you about how he proposed—well, it wasn’t exactly a lie but I omitted a lot of details. And stole a few from Tiny.
I was not, as I have led you to believe, sassy when your father broke up with me. I did not toss my hair in the wind and say “Sounds like a plan” when he suggested—in the fall of our senior year—that we date other people. That’s something Tiny did. I cried and implored John Henry to change his mind. We were sitting on the edge of his bed in the apartment he shared with some of his fraternity brothers. He stood up to usher me out after he delivered his news and I grabbed him around the waist, literally trying to hold on to him. Begging him not to leave me.
I don’t much like to think about that afternoon.
It won’t come as too much of a surprise that he and I were sleeping together, will it? I wouldn’t have done it had I thought he would even consider breaking up with me. I thought, in fact, that our sleeping together guaranteed his intentions. So when he announced that he wanted to be a free man his senior year, well, you can imagine how I felt. Used. Discarded. Utterly bereft.
You have to remember, Caroline, that even though it was 1975 when I was a senior, I was not what was called a “liberated woman.” Feminism might have arrived at Chapel Hill, but it sure didn’t come to the Chi Omega house. Nor to the apartment I shared with Tiny either. Good Lord, Tiny and I were so innocent that we shared a double bed our senior year of college. You once thought that was hilarious. Way back before you became an engaged woman, during your rebel years, you asked if Tiny and I had ever “hooked up.”
I laughed when you asked me that, not because I was making fun of lesbians—as you seemed to think—but because the idea that Tiny and I would have even thought of such a thing was absurd. Tiny? The girl who taught me how to use a tampon, the girl whose underwear I borrowed for four years straight during college? She was like a sister—not a boyfriend—to me.
Anyway. My relationship with Tiny is not why I am writing this letter. You want to hear about your father and me. I don’t know why I never told you the real story of the breakup. Maybe I was embarrassed, embarrassed because you, even as a teenager, always had such drive and purpose and I was so woefully unprepared for the world. You were more prepared for the world at sixteen than I was at twenty. You seemed to know it too. As a teenager you seemed to hold a certain contempt for me.
So that was the first thing I lied about, my own feelings about the breakup. I was devastated, in part because I was in love with John Henry (how could I have sex with someone I didn’t love?) but also because losing him meant losing my future. We had been dating exclusively since our sophomore year at Chapel Hill. I just assumed we would marry the summer after graduation. I would get a job—tutoring or waiting tables or selling Avon—until he finished law school and his career took off and then we would have a baby and I would become a full-time mother.
I had no idea that there was any other option for me besides marriage and motherhood. The grooves for that track were worn deep. So if I didn’t marry John Henry, what would happen to me? I certainly couldn’t move back to Atlanta and live with Mother and Daddy. Mother had no feelings for me. It wasn’t that she was mean; she was simply neutral. Half of the time she was at “her spa” (as we so graciously put it). Daddy, who adored me as a little girl, became more and more distant as I grew up. It was as if he could no longer love me once I looked like a woman.
I couldn’t move back in with them; I would go as crazy as Mother.
And while I had been ready to get a little job during John Henry’s time in law school, I had no concept of having a career. What on earth would I have done? Teach school like my old-maid aunt Clare?
What made it even worse was that Tiny and Anders were already engaged, their wedding set for June 10th after graduation, my salmon pink maid of honor dress already picked out. And it wasn’t just Tiny who was getting married. Most of the girls from my pledge class were engaged. Night after night I was called to the Chi O house to take part in yet another “candle ceremony” where we stood in a circle and passed around a lighted candle until one of us—the engaged one—blew it out.
I had been looking forward to my candle ceremony. I was well aware that there were only a handful of us left who didn’t have engagement rings. Up to that point I had always been one of the insiders. I was popular in high school; I had my pick of sororities at Chapel Hill; I was dating one of the cutest boys on campus, and not only that but a boy from one of the most distinguished families in Atlanta. When John Henry broke up with me, I had my first taste of what it felt like to be an outsider. I thought about my mother’s sister, whom Mother always referred to as “poor Clare.” Even as a little girl I could sense that Clare laughed too hard when Daddy told
a joke, almost as if she wanted Daddy to fall in love with her. Probably she was just flirting by proxy. (And she wasn’t a lesbian, Caroline. I know that’s usually your first guess about these things but trust me on this one.)
I did not want to become Clare. I did not want to be left behind as Tiny and all of the other girls I knew became women. That was the trick: to be a woman you had to marry a man. Otherwise you were a girl forever.
I cried for days. Not straight through, of course. And not during the few dates that Tiny set me up to go on. But when I was home, at my apartment, I would cry and cry until I was all worn out and then I would be okay for a few hours and then I would start crying again. I cried every time I took a shower, the hot water washing the tears off my face. Tiny would rub my back each night and even though I had usually stopped crying by then I would wake up in the morning with red, puffy eyes.
Caroline, I never told you what a mess I was. Maybe I should have. Maybe I should have told you so that you wouldn’t have felt like such a mess yourself during the hard times in your life. Instead I tried to make you so presentable that no one would ever turn you away. I wiped the dirt off your chin, yanked the hair out of your mouth, scolded you for getting a grass stain on your new white dress.
When I told you the story of John Henry’s and my temporary breakup, I made it sound as if I was made beautiful by grief. As if my cheeks glowed pink and my lashes grew long and shiny, nourished by all the tears I had cried. The first time I told that story to you was when you were fifteen, a sophomore in high school, devastated because some sorry boy you liked didn’t want you as his girlfriend.
Do you remember that afternoon? It was the first hot day of spring and we were in the pool, floating on those clear plastic rafts with the silver base that reflected the sun. You had covered yourself in baby oil and I resisted telling you to put on sunscreen. We were getting along that afternoon and I did not want to disturb the peace.
And maybe because I didn’t, maybe because I just floated along on my raft enjoying the day, you confided in me about Hugh Strokes, who was a senior at Coventry and had asked you on several dates before telling you that he wasn’t looking to get involved with anyone because he would be leaving soon for college. He had broken your heart, which struck me as a real waste considering I had known Hugh’s daddy, Hugh Senior, for a long time. He was a grossly obese man who owned a chain of carpet stores. I had met him when I was in college, on a trip with John Henry to visit Wallace at UGA. He had been in Wallace’s pledge class. He was fat even then, throwing lawn chairs for sport in front of the Chi Psi house.
I knew you could do better, so I told you to brush it off, to be blasé, to date other people. “Your going out with other boys will only make him want you more,” I told you. But what I was thinking was that once you dated other boys you would no longer want Hugh Jr.
“Shrug him off,” I said. “Like I did with your daddy.”
And then I proceeded to tell you Tiny’s story as if it were my own.
I’M NOT SURE if I should tell you this next part. It hardly seems relevant anymore, except that it’s a piece of my history. In your letter you said that it was your wish to know me as a woman, and not just as your mother.
So here it is, your granted wish: I did not shrug off your father’s rejection, but I did stop grieving it. The reason was that I fell in love with another man.
Caroline, please don’t share this at the bridesmaids’ luncheon. It’s a story just for you, a story I should have told you when you were still a girl, so that you would know that a breakup doesn’t signify the end of the world. So you would know that our hearts are resilient and capable of change. Of course it used to seem that you knew that without me having to tell you. I saw the way you put your life back together, first after you moved to San Francisco, and then after Frederick moved to New York. I listened to you tell me about all of the boys you dated out there. You never seemed to worry about finding one man to settle down with. You were so filled by your own ambition, your own energy. If I had been asked to make a prediction, I would have guessed that you would have remained wild and free your whole life.
I would have been wrong. And as a bride-to-be you are naturally in a conservative phase of life. I don’t mean Republican—I know that you are as upset about this last election as I am—I mean traditional. Weddings bring out nostalgia for all things family-oriented and wholesome. Brides start valuing china and children and engraved invitations. (Knowing this I shouldn’t have been surprised when you told me you were going to take Davis’s name. I shouldn’t have been surprised and yet I was. From your senior year of high school all the way until the summer you introduced us to Davis, how many lectures did you give me about the importance of women’s identity, about the importance of not being swallowed up by a man? And now you tell me that Caroline Parker is going to become Mrs. Davis Hamilton? Well—I didn’t expect it. That’s all.)
IT WAS DURING your father’s and my “time off” that I met Ben. Benjamin Ascher. Ben and I were in a music class together, the History of Jazz, otherwise known as “Listening for A’s.” Ben, however, was a musician and took the class seriously. He took all of his classes seriously; he was attending UNC on a Morehead scholarship, having turned down both Yale and Harvard because he didn’t like the cold. Growing up in New Jersey had taught him to hate northeastern winters.
He played piano. He was in two different bands, the UNC jazz quartet and Portnoy, a band he had formed with a group of friends. They were a good enough group that the fraternities used to hire them to play at their parties. I had noticed Ben, way before I ever met him, performing at a Phi Delt mixer. Actually, I might not have noticed him had John Henry not made a joke about Ben’s hair, which grew in tight curls into a sort of halo around his head. You can imagine the sort of joke your father made.
Ben was so skinny I could circle his waist with my hands and my fingers would almost touch end-to-end. He was a serious sort of person in a lot of ways, a double major in art history and philosophy, but he had a whimsical, silly side. You would have loved him. His favorite topic was “the real obscenities.” It wasn’t until years later when I read Armies of the Night (at your urging!) that I realized Ben had borrowed a lot from Norman Mailer. But back then, I had never before heard such ideas and thought that all of his were original. To Ben the bombing of villages in Vietnam was a real obscenity while language, no matter how off-color, was not. Whenever he used the f-word, I would suggest to him that it was possible to be obscene in both big and small ways, that the word fuck wasn’t what ended the war in Vietnam.
“Maybe not,” he said. “But it’s still fun to rattle people’s cages.”
Ben, in fact, was the first person I knew who had taken part in protests against the war. I mean you couldn’t escape the hippies and the activists strewn about campus, but I didn’t know any of them personally. Surely some of the boys in John Henry’s fraternity were opposed to the war, but not John Henry’s friends. They were all quite militaristic even though none of them went over there to serve. As for Tiny and me, the only way the counterculture really influenced us was we wore bell-bottoms and stopped curling our hair.
Sometimes I wonder how different your childhood would have been if Ben had been your father. Genetically speaking, of course, you wouldn’t have been you—but if he and I had gotten married and had a child, she would have had some of your characteristics. Ben would have been a wonderful father. Attentive and supportive and with you every step of the way, even during the scary teenage years. I’m not saying that John Henry was a bad father—he certainly adored his little girl—but I think it’s fair to say that he is a limited man. We both know that. You can’t grow up with Nanny Rose for a mother and Wallace for a brother and not be scarred.
I was walking out of our History of Jazz class when Ben called after me. He liked what I had said in class about the similarity between writing formal poetry and playing jazz standards, that the shape for both was in place but the inside needed
filling. He asked if I wrote poetry and I told him no, that I had just read a lot of it because I was an English major. He wanted me to teach him different forms of poetry: the sonnet, the villanelle, the sestina. I was pretty sure that he knew the sonnet form—back then most people knew those things—but I was flattered that this boy who was clearly the smartest person in the room had noticed what I’d said. Plus, that afternoon I had been feeling particularly overwhelmed by my single status and had been planning to go home and cry. Going to get a cup of coffee sounded like a better idea.
At the Carolina Coffee Shop we ate pancakes and talked about poetry. It soon became obvious that Ben knew more about it than I did, that he read it for pleasure while I simply read whatever my professors assigned. He suggested I read Gwendolyn Brooks, who at the time I’d never heard of. We got to talking about other books, our favorite books, and I told him that mine was All the King’s Men. He paused for a moment with a funny look on his face and then said that was his favorite as well, which surprised me because I thought of it as such a southern book. (My father, in fact, always reminded me of Willie Stark, but I didn’t get into that with Ben. Not that afternoon.)
He asked if I wanted to go on a walk. Eventually we made our way to the arboretum, where John Henry and I had first kissed three years before, on a spring night when the air was so warm it felt like swimming to walk through it.
Ben and I did not kiss that afternoon. We looked at plants. He noticed things, a beetle crawling on a leaf, a robin high up in a tree, the way a particular shadow hit the ground.
It became our pattern: coffee and then a walk, only after that first walk Ben was always venturing deeper and deeper into unfamiliar neighborhoods, streets with rusted cars parked in the yards and tiny houses, their sinking porches crowded with black people, old and young. Ben would whistle while he walked and wave to people on their porches. Some waved back, some stared at him like they wanted to ask just exactly what did he think he was doing walking over there?
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