by Judy Blunt
Surface changes came more easily. I basted up the hems on my skirts to fashionable heights, careful to pull the threads each Friday before I took them home for washing. From articles in teen magazines I gleaned some ground rules for being a teenage girl and learned what I was supposed to look like. I gave up my mirror and studied the pictures instead. Within days of paying my rent, I made my first offering to the cosmetic gods.
Following the makeover charts in the back of one magazine, I painted my face by the numbers, sinking my eyes in a slurry of black liner and sapphire eye shadow, coating my face with beige grease, white powder, rose blush and pale lipstick. Because I wore glasses with heavy black plastic frames, everything went on a little more thickly, as per instructions. What looked back at me was magically different. I looked very, very something, I concluded, narrowing my eyes and pursing my lips to catch the full effect, though whether very good or very bad I had no clue. It felt right, or perhaps "safe" is a better word to describe it. The world seemed safer with my skin covered. The next morning I rose early to prepare and entered the halls of Malta High with new confidence, my face several shades lighter than the sun-browned neck it perched on, fever spots on my cheeks and black-on-blue eyes that might have been the result of a fistfight rather than a cosmetic makeover.
In retrospect, my first sharp lesson was a mercy, delivered a few weeks later in the privacy of the girls' bathroom as I leaned over the sink adding another layer of black to my very black eyelashes. Two cheerleaders bounced into the room, their pleated blue-and-white skirts flipping at the bottom of their rumps with every step. I moved over to make room at the mirror as they sleeked and preened for the pep assembly. One of them caught my eye as I capped the mascara, her little fists settled pertly on her hipbones, her head cocked to one side like a sparrow at the edge of a grain trough. She spoke in a wondering tone, every word a question.
"You put your makeup on by yourself?"
The other girl snorted back a laugh and hissed at her, "God, Mary!"
I didn't know how to answer. Mary flipped her hair back and tipped her chin to the other side.
"Well, Jeez. Looks like a two-man job to me." A true punch line. Her friend shrieked and folded in the middle like a rag doll. Bent double, they staggered toward the door, helpless, howling, slapping at each other as they made their escape. In the mirror, my girl mask peered back with solemn eyes and deadly calm. So. In a half an hour I could go home for the day and wash. The toilet stalls chattered with the energy of two hundred shoving, shouting students as they spilled into the auditorium across the hall. I could feel them on my fingertips where I held the door shut, tremors damping down to a hum of expectation, then the explosion as they surged to their feet and roared out the fight song of the Mighty Malta Mustangs.
The same magazines that gave me a face promised me success at dating, and when my first call came early that winter I dug through the stacks for a quick refresher course. Advice columns lent tips on how to keep the conversation up and the sweater down, while stories portrayed a variety of wholesome sock-hop, hayride-type outings. The letters from readers were my favorite. Did nice girls kiss on the first date? I tried to imagine someone's wet mouth on mine, smooching around the way they did in the movies, and a vee of goose bumps rippled up my arms. I couldn't get past the idea of warm spit— some boy's slobber on my mouth. Jeez, Louise! Yuck. I bent my thoughts in another direction. First things first. Permission to go out with a boy required the courtesy of a long-distance call to the ranch, but the most difficult ordeal would be to refrain from boasting. Though he was three years older than I was, by anyone's criteria Dennis was a real catch—a star of the debate team, active in student council, member of a very respected and well-liked family.
With my mother's blessings secured, I had one remaining obstacle. I waited until the last minute, supper on Wednesday night, to announce that I was going to the movie. Kenny shrugged. It was Take a Chance Night at the Villa Theatre, a popular midweek attraction that offered newsreel, cartoon and an unannounced B movie for fifty cents a head. The rest I added casually as I rose to clear the table, stacking plates and cups as if blind to the fact that my bombshell lit smack in the middle of forbidden territory. I wouldn't be going alone. Dennis had asked me out. He'd be picking me up in half an hour. Dennis was Kenny's age, one of his sacred circle of friends. I braced myself, expecting him to puff up and rattle his spurs to warn me away from his territory. Instead, he wheeled toward me like a whip crack and his whole body seemed to tighten down. "You're not going out with him." I drew back, startled by the intensity of his voice. This was no bluff. At the same time, I felt the heat rising in my chest.
Since early childhood, the twins and I had accepted Kenny's authority as an extension of our parents'. He'd been groomed to follow in Dad's footsteps, and in the absence of hired men, he'd been expected to do a man's work at a very young age. He learned to drive a stick shift as soon as he could perch on the edge of the seat and reach the foot pedals. As young as ten he'd been left in charge of us when Mom and Dad were gone to town, directing us in our chores and taking charge of the ranch work that had to be done in their absence. By the time he was in high school, his directorate as Dad's right-hand man was absolute. Kenny was the crown prince of the ranch, responsible and honest to a fault, handsome, confident and smart. He was what we were supposed to be like, we knew, though not one of us quite measured up. He was only two years older than I was, but his approval had the power to make me happy. I hadn't expected him to like me dating. But forbid me?
Kenny had kept himself aloof from my town school struggles, either ignorant of, or indifferent to, my painful first few weeks. I accepted that, and thought little of it. We had an agreement, after all, and I did not bother him with questions about school. But now that I'd been given a chance to join in, a shot at being somebody, here he stood with his orders, ready to take away what I'd worked so hard to obtain.
But I held the upper hand for a change, and I let him know it. Mom had given me permission and there wasn't a damned thing he could do about it. I finished with my arms crossed. Kenny's lips clamped shut on what he'd started to say and his head wagged, as if in wonder at my stupidity. I waited him out. Again he started to speak, searching for a way in, then dropped his gaze. This was all too strange. My stomach felt taut and queasy, the way it always did when I lost.
"God, it's only a date." The words came out as a question. His hands rose from waist level, palms out, one wave of surrender and dismissal. He spun on his heel and disappeared down the basement stairs, retreating to where I could not follow.
The whole encounter had taken only seconds, yet rang so far out of proportion I stood uneasily in the kitchen staring at the basement door. Why the big deal? What did he know that I didn't? His eyes kept coming back to me like an echo, deep brown gone black in the center. The way his jaw clenched, the way his hands hung at his sides half curled into fists, that was anger. But his eyes held something else.
Whatever it was, it was his problem. I grabbed my coat and slipped outside to wait on the front stoop. I pulled off my gloves in the bitter night air and dug eagerly for the open pack of cigarettes in my purse. The smoking games that I had played since childhood had taken a serious turn since my move to Malta. While I was slowly finding my way through the first months of high school, my budding tobacco habit had zipped from zero to half a pack a day. Junipers bracketed the doorway. I glanced around, then stepped back into their shadow, cupping the match flare, palming the red coal as I drew deeply, calming myself. I made less effort to hide the smoke, partly because at ten below zero everyone exhaled white clouds, partly out of pure defiance. My first days in town I had imagined a future of boundless freedom. As it turned out, I'd been sorely mistaken. My new life was beginning to feel a great deal like the old one. A week seldom passed that I didn't experience the creepy feeling of being watched and turn to find some unidentified adult studying me intently, fingers pop-pop-popping until Eureka, she had it! "You're a
Blunt girl, aren't you? I knew it! I've known your folks since when. Look at you, just the spitting image of your father!" Or mother or grandmother or brother. It didn't matter. The town was growing eyes around me.
Most recently those eyes threatened to reach all the way to the south country. Mrs. Crowder had discovered my stash of cigarettes in a dresser drawer. I had my suspicions when the pack began to migrate during my absence every weekend— not disappearing, just shifting from a nest under a stack of clean dresser scarves to a perch on the pillowcases, from one side of the drawer to another. I made them disappear, but the rumors were already launched, little nuggets of information skipping from ear to ear like flat stones on a still pond. So far, quite miraculously, they had missed my parents. Just a matter of time, I thought bitterly, before half the county had its nose in my business. Even my brother had shown disturbing signs of looking out for me. It was all so hopelessly unfair.
I doused the cigarette in a skiff of snow and pulled on my gloves, settling into the shelter to wait. Seconds later, a set of headlights appeared around the corner and pulled up in front of the house. Dennis was punctual, I noted with some satisfaction, yet another touchstone mentioned in my teen bible. He leaped out to open the passenger door, and I slid into the front seat as if accustomed to courtly displays. As we sped toward the main drag, Dennis filled the silence easily with talk about his car, his classes, the farm he remembered from childhood. He was a nice-looking boy, I thought, with a shock of blond hair that fell over his forehead and a toothy smile. I sat up tall in the passenger seat, laughing and nodding in all the right places, seeing and being seen.
As it turned out, I need not have pored over the pages-long discussion about whether to kiss on the first date. The answer was yes, though I had no part in the decision. By the end of the first month, our routine was firmly established. He picked me up in his car. We drove to the movie or more often, to Joe's In and Out, a drive-through restaurant, for a soft drink, then cruised the drag. After half an hour of circling, the car would begin to break from the predictable pattern, darting down a side street, overshooting the turnaround spot, and my stomach would clench. Asking to go home triggered instant obedience, a careening ride that ended in a sliding stop in front of Mrs. Crowder's house, engine revving as I got out, the door jerked from my fingers as he squealed away. Obviously that was the wrong thing to do. As our relationship progressed, the little test runs became shorter and soon were dispensed with altogether. Coke in hand, he looped the main drag once or twice, then veered east, steering in silence past the cemetery, past the cement plant to the wide dirt lot overlooking the city dump.
I dressed carefully for my dates by then, high necks, long sleeves, and under that, one of my brother's T-shirts tucked securely into a pair of jeans. I looked at Dennis quietly whenever he suggested I "dress up" for our next date, staring until he turned away, a flush darkening the fair skin of his cheeks. My role was difficult enough in tight jeans with a safety pin across the zipper tab so it couldn't be pushed down—this last my own invention. A dress, indeed. Once parked with the lights off, he had the first move, an arm stealing across the back of the seat as we talked about school and music, his activities and his car. I countered just as casually, leaning forward to adjust the radio to escape capture, and the game was on. When he kissed me, my hand rose automatically to his cheek, bracing to shove him back, for I'd learned how easily the force of his lips could pin my head to the back of the seat, a move that freed both of his hands.
Conversation generally dwindled away as he became more insistent. "Stop that" and "don't" pretty well covered my contributions, while his ranged from outright denial—he wasn't doing anything, I was imagining things—to accusations—I was cold, unnatural, a cock tease. "What's your problem, anyway?" he would shout, pounding his fists against the steering wheel in frustration as my ten o'clock curfew drew near. I won by acting calm and in control, but after he dropped me off, I would flop across my bed and wait for the shaky feeling to subside, conscious of the reek of my own sweat. Secretly, I too wondered what was wrong with me. I had felt my first sexual stirrings at eleven, sharing raunchy paperback novels with my cousin Lois. I knew I was supposed to want him to touch me, that it was supposed to be hard to say no. But it wasn't. I felt no physical desire for him and I did not enjoy having him touch me. What I loved was the idea of having a boyfriend. I tolerated his attentions dutifully, willing to trade some degree of affection for status, and it drove him crazy I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong.
By all the measures I'd been given to use, Dennis was a nice boy from a nice family, and I was lucky to have him interested in me. I knew that what he was after fell short of "going all the way," for he reassured me frequently that he knew when to stop. He wanted something called "the next best thing," which involved my hands on him in ways I refused to imagine, and his ail over me in ways I refused to permit. He wheedled and reasoned and coaxed, and when I remained unmoved, he raged. Clearly, as a female it was my job to keep a checkrein on these forays and to enforce a proper standard of decency, whatever that was. Were his demands really as reasonable as he claimed they were? For all I knew, all boys acted like Dennis, all dates were staged like contests in a dark alley—the girl and boy faced off, one maneuvering toward safety while the other tried to block her way and push her back into the darkness.
My physical resistance seemed to surprise him. I suppose I was stronger than he expected, but I had also been raised in a tribe of fighters, which freed me of any ladylike hesitation or caution. The rougher he got, the harder I pushed back. I had no sense of the escalation taking place, his methods gradually growing more insistent, his anger more easily triggered, or what the culmination of this might be. And for the hours I spent replaying events in my mind, deciphering his moods, trying to figure a way through this maze of conflicting pressures, it never crossed my mind to confide in someone else.
Our last date, I pulled myself out of the car by sheer determination and slammed the passenger door in his face as he lay across the front seat. Lining out along the plowed shoulder of the road, I tucked my chin into my coat collar and aimed for town. The bitterly still night carried sound on a knife's edge, and I tracked his progress by ear as he pulled out to follow me, gravel popping like sparks under the frozen tires, his voice ringing through the open window, pleading, apologizing, arguing. My hands and feet throbbed with cold when I finally relented and let him drive me the rest of the way to Mrs. Crowder's house. I was already late, an hour past curfew, and my brother simmered at the bottom of the stairs, waiting. I remember nothing of what he said, only my own inability to speak. I was afraid that I couldn't explain without making everything worse. By remaining silent, I made a choice. A sentence from me, a few words, one tear falling down one frostbitten cheek and my brother would have been pounding on Dennis until someone pulled him off. Perhaps it was fear that stopped me, fear that this night would not end but continue to spread outward in ever larger ripples—from Kenny to our parents, Dennis's parents, the whole town. Perhaps it was pride. I had thought myself grown up enough to handle my own decisions, and I wasn't about to ask for help now.
That last date was not our final meeting, although it took a week of phone calls before Dennis persuaded me that we could not break up without a face-to-face talk. He picked me up at the house and with more resignation than outrage I endured his nervous chatter as we traced the familiar dirt road to the dump and pulled up in the usual spot. He shut off the lights but left the engine idling, the heater blowing a warm fan of air over our feet. His face was earnest and eager as he leaned toward me, one arm falling along the top of the seat. I turned sideways to face him, my back firmly against my own door. He had a surprise for me, he said. He'd been going to mention it last time, but after the way I'd acted, he'd decided to make me wait. His hand stretched toward me as he made his announcement, displaying the prize circling his third finger. He had decided to let me wear his class ring. We would be going steady!
> I shook my head slowly, baffled by his offer. Had he gone goofy? Had I somehow not made myself clear over the phone? Crossing my arms, I stared at him a second, then spoke with every ounce of disdain I could muster. "I wouldn't wear your ring if you gave it to me." I left the words dripping in midair and turned to the view out my window, the lance of starlight pooled below -in the spread of the little town, the night achingly clear. I steeled myself for his anger, my muscles slack with forced nonchalance, arms folded across my chest, unprepared for the swiftness of his move. One hand closed over my crossed wrists, and with a strength he'd been reserving all this time, he pulled me forward, then bent me back across the seat. There were no more games then. We fought in dead silence until I freed an arm and began slapping the side of his head. He reared back out of reach, leaning his weight on the arm across my chest. The air left my lungs in a rush. I felt his other hand push beneath the waistband of my pants. He spoke then, his words grunted and muffled so only the last bit stuck: whether you like it or not. Words that held the firm resolve of someone doing something for my own good, doing what had to be done. At the precise moment I realized I could not keep his fingers from invading me, a piercing whoop echoed through the car and the front seat seemed to explode around us. Above me, Dennis's head jerked upward and froze in the red and blue strobe of police lights.
On slow nights our city cops cruised for parked cars, stalking passionate teens with the singular stealth and patience of the truly bored. If two heads were visible over the front seat, the patrol car generally moved on with only a blink of the headlights. An idling car with no heads in sight got a burp of the siren and the full bubble-gum light show. I sucked my first deep breath past the ache in my chest as Dennis lurched upward and fumbled for his glasses, then scrambled out, leaving his door wide open. I leaned across the seat to jerk it shut. The dome light winked out and I sat up, fighting a wash of dizziness. I could hear them talking behind the car, the teasing rumble of a man's voice, the rapid squeak of the boy's going high and low, rhyming the pulse of color around us. Then footsteps approached my door. A white glare lit up the backseat, as the officer drew a beam over the floorboards looking for beer. The light danced over the seat, shafting past the tip of my nose to the driver's side, then slowly back toward my feet. I watched the light climb my leg, slowing each breath as the flare oozed over my lap, crawled up my arm and along my neck. Heat bloomed against the side of my face and paused, wavering. I didn't make a sound.