by Kate Manning
“How can you guess you are in love?” Diana whispered. “Don’t you know?”
“Everyone says we’re perfect for each other?” I said.
Christmas dinner. The whole family. Charlotte and Peter home. The enormous roast beef festooned with parsley, dark and bleeding onto the platter. The polished silver, the crystal water goblets. The crèche on the sideboard with the pies. All of us were dressed up and famished after church. Peter got us all holding hands for the blessing. It was quiet. The smell of the roast was torturing everyone. Especially Sean, who was nearly fainting, yawning to cover the sound of his stomach growling, and trying hard to sit up straight. His wrists hung out of his handed-down sport coat. He was constantly eating, constantly hungry, wilting now like a plant. He was my favorite, Sean. He had a new shaving shadow on his fourteen-year-old jaw. Christmas Eve he stayed up with me and Diana and listened to music, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground. “Shh, Sean, Mom will hear,” Diana kept saying. “Shhh.”
“Relax, willya, Diana?” Sean said. He was taking after me. He had already gotten in trouble for driving a friend’s car without a license, Diana told me.
Peter said: “Hear us, Lord O God, that You may make us thankful and worthy of Your love on this day Christ our Savior was born.” He went on about how we were not worthy, we were low and had to do better to get up there to the level of Jesus. I peeked at him while everybody else sat with their eyes squeezed shut. Seeing Peter pray like that, I remembered how I used to go in his room and watch him sleep, his metal race cars balled up in his hands. Two years older, he was like a supernatural being to me, a really handsome boy. But since he’d started at Bible College in Virginia his hair looked too combed, parted 60 percent on one side, 40 on the other. And buzzed short. Normal guys his age had hair down the back, at least hitting the collar. He looked preoccupied all the time and talked a lot about his Personal Savior, which to me now sounded like something you might find under the seat of an airplane. I supposed he was always heading for the ministry, even when he was little. Once, when he was eight years old, we took his turtles out of the turtle aquarium and let them go free in the backyard. One got lost and Dad ran over it with the lawn mower. We had a funeral. Peter did all the readings. And he really cried. He said, All life is precious. I remember I hugged him and said, “Don’t worry, Pete, you still have me.” I love him, of course, but he is not the same brother. Religion used to be normal with him. Now it’s extreme. All life is precious. He said that to me, too, when I got In Trouble. He was furious. More even than Mom and Dad. “God forgives you,” he told me. “I pray to be strong enough to forgive you, also.”
“You are the Light and the Way, O Lord. Amen.”
Sean attacked his plate. Mom played with the glass beads on her neck and said, “Tell us about all your beaux, Charlotte honey, the boys you’ve met at school.” She always called them beaux, as if she was Scarlett O’Hara.
“There’s just Jack,” I said.
“He’s going to ski in the Olympics,” Diana said.
“Maybe,” I said.
“He’s incredibly handsome,” Diana said. “Charlotte has a picture.” They made me drag it out and show it around the dinner table.
“Nice-looking fella,” said my dad, who was still so nice-looking himself, hair graying with what is called “distinction” for a man, and his eyes pale as a husky dog’s. He looked at Jack’s picture, and I wondered if he thought of himself at our age, how he looked, what he felt then. “Nice-looking.”
Sean made kissing noises.
“Is he a Christian?” This was all Peter wanted to know lately.
“He’s an Episcopal,” I said. “He’s also from California.”
“Episcopalian,” Peter corrected me. “Like Catholic, only not strayed as far from the Lord, I think. Don’t you? Dad? Am I right?”
Here we go now. God, scrod, Lord, bored. I was thinking of how I could mention Deuteronomy and get points for studying religion when Diana decided to rescue the conversation.
“You should see what Jack gave Charlotte,” said Diana. “Mom, you’ll love it. You should see.”
“Di-an-a,” I said.
“What, sweetheart?” said Mom. Diana went and got the fluffy stuffed kitten. She brought it out holding it like it was alive, stroking its neck.
“Tch. Ohhhhhh. Look.” Mom’s face softened up and she made the sounds many women make at babies or lambs or Easter chicks. “Ohhh, that’s so precious. He really gave you that?” She was so pretty, my mom, with her jonquil-colored hair in parentheses around her delicate face. Her eyes were the same arresting blue as the fluffy kitten’s and when she took it from Diana, its fur matched the angora of her new white Christmas sweater. She looked at me and put her hand over my hand on the tablecloth. “Charlotte, I’m so happy. So proud of you.” She looked at Jack’s picture just shaking her head back and forth.
“I’m glad you’re happy, Mom,” I said, and patted her, too. And to my surprise, she held my hand, clenched on to it, her thumb rubbing back and forth like a windshield wiper, warm and soft.
“I’m proud, sweetie.”
“Thanks.”
She was proud. She did her best to love me, her idea of me, which was all she could do, and I loved her, too, the way she held my hand for dear life, squeezing it. For one minute I felt there was a door I could have gone through, to find her in the room on the other side, where we would be dressed in identical mother-daughter dresses, sharing recipes for gelatin-mold salads, or needlepointing, our heads bent close to our work. My mother loved me. She saw Jack in the picture and he looked just like she wanted him to look: handsome, strong, important. Safe. She was proud I could get a man like that. Then she snapped out of it and said: “Don’t do anything to ruin it, now.” She looked right at me with her eyes hard, like: You know what I’m talking about, my girl.
I did, too. I knew perfectly well: Dave Mueller.
On the face of it, Dave was a lot like Jack. I picked both of them out for identical reasons. Dave was the choice guy in our school. Captain of this and that. Good-looking and a little dangerous because of it. He could break your heart. He was eighteen and I was sixteen, senior and junior. My official eligibility for dating had just been granted that year by Barbara and Arthur. I was allowed out till ten. Before then I had been out, of course. But they thought I was with Kids for Christ, strumming guitar and singing “Kumbayah.” But no, mostly I wasn’t. And even so, some of the Kids had my same interests. Skipping out of meeting. Heading for the woods. Christ spent some time in the wilderness, I often said, and we must emulate him in all things.
Let’s go, Dave. I have to go home now.
He wanted to find his watch. It was a spring evening. It was our three-month anniversary. We were supposed to be at the movies but we were lying in the DeNunzios’ apricot orchard in the tall wild mustard. It was cold. Crazy about you, Dave said. The air made gooseflesh on our bare skin, even under his big jacket crusted with letters and insignia.
I swear he lost his watch on purpose. There was no need to take it off. He had taken it off along with my bell-bottoms, my sweater, his black jeans. He wanted to keep going. He wanted whatever he could have. Whatever I would let. I had never let anyone. There had been plenty of chances and I had let a lot, but not that. I was afraid. Lately in school I heard people saying things. Frigid slut. Tease. Christian virgin saint whore. They wrote things on my locker.
That night was a night full of complicated problems for me. It was getting tiring, all this holding out. I liked the feelings. Loved them. I liked the weight of Dave lying on me. Tongues and murmurs. But I was scared. Pebbles or apricot pits were digging into my back. What about sin? What about babies? God, not yet, not that. What about marital love, pure and sanctified? To save yourself for your husband to have and to hold. The gift of yourself. I didn’t believe I was a gift exactly, but what if it was true? What other way it could be was not clear, nobody talked about it, except as if it was some kind of hunt. Did you n
ail her? Did you lose it? Did he pork her? Did you get him? Did she do him? Did he pole her? In sex ed they said intercourse, and we just howled. Intercourse! The word was hysterical. I knew all the facts. The birds, the bees. The four bases. But I had no clue about anything. What I wanted versus what I was supposed to want, allowed to want. How to say yes. Or no. How to be safe. It was terrifying, wonderful, great. How the sucking swampy quicksand of sin and wrong choices lurked ready to drag you down, and how the risk was so intoxicating. Yes, no, yes, no, yes. This but Not That. Here but Not There. Oh my God. I loved how it felt to not know whether it would happen that night or not yet. All the while my parents waited up, reading quietly in their hospital-cornered bed, trusting me, that I would be home with my nice young man. Ready to spring like big cats, claws ready, if I was not. But I was always right on time. Always brushed and combed and composed.
I said I had to go. I said Hurry, hurry. He said please. He said—no, gasped—Charlotte, I’m desperate for you. What happened was this time we stayed, we lingered, and one thing led to another thing and then another thing and then to the thing. I still have trouble talking about it plainly. Then there were no words. There were the school nurse words and the girls’ room graffiti. You didn’t say make love. That’s not what was happening, anyway. Nothing was being made, at least not that I knew of then. It was desperate. Nothing you could help or stop. Why would you? Why would you want to?
I was not ashamed. Not even sorry. I was glad. I didn’t care what they thought. I believed they had no idea what they were talking about. The stuff about wrack and ruin. Cheapening what is sacred. It was fine, I thought. Over with. Dave was nice with me. He worried he hurt me. He didn’t hurt me. Not that time. That time he was nice.
I got pregnant. Despite the odds against it. But of course. I was the one in a zillion chance. Somebody always is, and it was me. Bingo.
No way could we have it, keep it. We couldn’t even say baby, either of us. Dave drove me to Sacramento for the procedure. It would have been fine except my mother found out. She saw I was queasy. I was late. The clues added up. The pads did not disappear from the box on schedule. She kept track, estimated on a monthly basis. How many for her, for me, for Diana. I was green at breakfast and at lunch. Sleepy. One Saturday I said I was going off to a neighbor’s house. Dave’s father mentioned we’d borrowed the car all day. I came home gray and weepy, bleeding. She figured it out, told my father.
It took a whole year of lies to get them to send me to college. It was all I wanted. None of the women in my family had been. It’s not that I was a student, really. I had good grades. You got them by showing up, by filling in the answers, by spelling well. I wanted to go to college. To say I had. To get away and figure things out on my own. Just to get away.
“I’m sorry for what I did,” I said. I blamed it on Dave. I said he forced me. This was not true. I knew how to hang my head down at just the right angle and tell them, “I know I strayed but I’ve realized the errors of my ways and I am back with you in faith.” It was easy. I just repeated what the pastor said in the service on Sunday, all my life since we started going there. It wouldn’t work to argue with them, claim they’d been wrong. Their answer then would be to make me stick around Conestoga. I could go to Pacific Union College right nearby. Stay home and be safe with them. Get a job where Dad worked at the pharmaceutical company, filing or something.
When Jack called from Vermont my mom was thrilled. Her cheeks flushed. “It’s for you, Charlotte honey,” she sang out. “Woo-hooo,” and then hissed: “Long distance,” widening her eyes. “He sounded so nice,” she said later. “Big deep voice.”
His voice did not sound particularly deep to me. “Hey, Charlotte,” he said, “I’m clocking great times.” He was burning up the training camp, he told me. Coach had been talking to Team USA about him. They would be scouting him at Lake Placid. “The U.S. team,” he said. “Think about it.” His voice sounded staticky. It was hard to picture him. There were patches of silence in our conversation. “Charlotte? Are you there?” I was there, but I didn’t really have anything to say.
When school started up again in January, Jack came back from training camp and started in on a new campaign. “When are you gonna get your little coed luggage set and fill it up with your jeans and your new diaphragm and your toothbrush and unpack it all over here to live with me?”
One night we were in his room, supposedly studying after dinner, and he wouldn’t drop the subject. “Spacious room,” he said. “Fireplace. Large closet. Warm bed. Me. Come on, Charlotte.”
“I can’t,” I said.
“Na-ze ikenai?” he said in his harsh samurai voice. “Onna, naze ni?”
“What?”
“I said: Why not, woman?”
“Because my mother would find out. I’d have to leave.”
“Why?”
“Never mind. I’d have to leave school if I did that.”
“Did you know that in Japan the wives live in the houses of their mothers-in-law and have to do whatever the mother-in-law says, and also walk two paces behind the men, and also they cover their teeth when they smile?”
“What do they cover them with?” I said.
“Their hands,” Jack said. “Like this.” He put the flat of his hand sideways across his face and bucked his teeth out over his bottom lip and said, “Ahhhh sooo. Ahhh sooooo desu. If I make the U.S. team I’ll get to ski in Sapporo.”
“They ski in Japan?” I didn’t know.
“Yeah. They go banzaiiiiiiii.”
He leaped at me, onto the bed where I was sitting, and started wrestling with me, till he hammerlocked me down and said: “Charlotte, go get your stuff. It’s moving day.”
“Maybe,” I said. “I have to go to my room anyway, because I have an art history test tomorrow and I need the book.”
“Let’s go to the Red Hat.”
“Jack.”
Jack wouldn’t let me up until I said, “I will be back in just one hour.” He made me say it over and over so that when finally I got out of the hammerlock there was no blood left in my arms.
“Where the hell have you been?” Claire looked up from her book and her beer. She was bitter. It had been a week since I’d slept in our dorm room.
“Jack,” I said.
“What, there was a wedding?”
“No.”
Claire looked at me and held her beer out. “You need this,” she said. I took it and drank some but it was warm. Tastes like dog saliva, I thought to say, and then did say it, so Claire laughed. I missed her.
“Your mom called,” she said. “She’s been calling, actually, a lot.” Then she imitated Barbara, with her voice high and full of exclamation points and extra syllables: “Hi-iii there! Is this Claire? Oh! Hi! Charlotte’s told me all about you! From the big city! New York! My, my! I don’t know how you could grow up in a place like that! Remarkable!”
“So. Any message?” I said.
“She asked me not to tell you she was asking this,” said Claire, then took a deep breath, “but she wanted to know did you entertain men in your room?”
“Holy Lamb of God,” I said. Barbara was checking on me. Avon calling.
“That’s not all,” said Claire. “She said she’d be grateful for any information I had about that sort of thing.”
“She wants you to rat me out?”
“Yeah. She asked were you still drinking and I said, ‘Oh, no, Mrs. Halsey, she’s too busy studying.’ ”
“Jesus,” I said. “She should’ve been in the FBI or a narc or something.”
“Aw, she wasn’t so bad, Charlotte,” said Claire. “She sounds nice. She’s around, anyway.” And she was suddenly so glum and blue. I wanted badly to snap her out of it.
“Believe me,” I said, “your setup with your mom has its perks.”
Claire looked away into the dim yellow desk light of the room. “No, Charlotte,” she said, “it does not.” She started to cry then. “It has no perks.”
> Geez, I’m an idiot, blurting without thinking. I had wanted to cheer her up and now she was sobbing. “I’m sorry, Claire, oh God, I’m sorry,” I said, and hugged her.
“I just miss you, Charlotte,” she said, shrugging me off. “You’re always with him.”
“Where have you been?” Jack wanted to know as soon as I got back.
“Just in my room,” I said. “Just talking to Claire.”
“What took you so long? Why didn’t you come back? You said one hour. You said an hour.”
“So I was gone two.”
“Have you been drinking?”
“Just a beer with Claire. Just one beer. She’s my friend.”
“She’s a slut.”
“Shut up.”
“What did you say? What? Did you say to shut up?”
“Yes.”
He came over and held my jaw. “Don’t say shut up to me,” he said. “Sweetheart. Don’t.”
I moved his hand down from my chin. He smiled at me. “Now unpack your little things,” he said. “See? I made a space for you.” He stood behind me while I put my clothes in his dresser. He rubbed the cords of my neck, kissed me behind the ear. “I love you, Charlotte,” he said.
I folded my underwear. Hung my jacket in the closet, my vest, my long skirts. What in the world was I doing? He loved me, he said. He wanted me. My mother would call, she would find out.
Well, maybe I wanted her to.
Jack was happy. I was his roommate. Whenever I needed to spend a night in the library studying, which, believe me, was not often, he got worried. Whenever I went without him anywhere, to meet Claire for a drink, he wanted to know: “Why? Where are you going? Who will be there? What will you be doing, huh?” He always said this with his fingertip lifting my chin, as if he thought that to want me all the time, every second, was love.