The Last Time They Met

by Anita Shreve

  “Everybody knows about Magdalene,” he says.

  “Do they? I always thought she was an especially Catholic idea.”

  “Do you go to church regularly?”

  “That’s a personal question.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “And Confession?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you confess?”

  She is unnerved by his questions. No one has ever probed her quite like this. Not even the nuns. Their questions were predictable and rote. A catechism.

  “I’m just asking,” he says, somewhat apologetic. “What a girl like you would possibly have to confess.”

  “Oh, there’s always something,” she says. “Impure thoughts, mostly.”

  “Impure meaning what?”

  “Impure,” she says.

  ______

  Thomas takes her to a diner on the beach and leads her to a booth near the entrance with seats as red as those they’ve just left. She is embarrassed about her hair, which she tries to finger-comb in the sun visor. Thomas looks away while she does this. Her hair is hopeless, and she gives it up.

  “Next time, I’ll bring a scarf,” he says. “I’ll keep it in the glove compartment.”

  She is elated by his assumption that there will be a next time.

  ______

  She might not have eaten in years. She eats her hamburger and fries, his cheeseburger, drinks both milkshakes, and witnesses the first of dozens of meals that Thomas will hardly touch.

  “You’re not hungry?” she asks.

  “Not really,” he says. “You eat it.”

  She does, gratefully. It seems there is never enough food at home.

  “I know Michael. We play hockey together,” Thomas says.

  Varsity Hockey 2, 3.

  “You’re playing already?” she asks.

  “Not yet,” he says. “We’ll start soon. I see Michael around.”

  “Do you have cousins?” she asks flippantly.

  “Hardly. Only two.”

  “Let me guess. You’re Episcopal.”

  “Nothing, really. Why don’t you live with your parents? Did something happen to them?”

  “My mother died,” she says, mopping up the ketchup with her bun. “In a bus accident. My father just sort of disappeared after that.”

  “Broken heart?”

  “Not really.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  He asks her if she wants anything else to eat.

  “No,” she says. “I’m stuffed. Where do you live?”

  “Allerton Hill,” he says.

  “I thought so.”

  He looks away.

  “Did we go by your house?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you point it out?”

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  ______

  Later, he says, “I want to be a writer.”

  This is the first of a hundred times someone will tell Linda Fallon that he or she wants to be a writer. And because it is the first, she believes him.

  “A playwright, I think,” he says. “Have you read O’Neill?”

  She has, in fact, read Eugene O’Neill. A Jesuit priest at the Catholic girls’ school made the class read Long Day’s Journey into Night on the theory that some of the girls might recognize their families. “Sure,” she says.

  “Denial and irresponsibility,” he says.

  She nods.

  “The fog. The obliteration of the fog.”

  “Erasing the past,” she says.

  “Right,” he says, excited now. “Exactly.”

  ______

  He sits sideways in the booth, one long leg extended.

  “Did you write your paper yet?”

  “God, no,” she says.

  “Can I read Keats to you later?”

  “Keats?”

  From time to time, boys who know Thomas come by the booth and kick Thomas’s foot or rap their knuckles on the Formica tabletop. No words are ever exchanged, but the boys study Linda. It is a pantomime of sorts.

  In a booth across the room, Linda recognizes Donny T. from the night before. Sipping a Coke, eyeing her carefully. Will he hate her for having proven him wrong? Yes, she thinks, he will.

  A table of girls, in the center of the room, also watch her. Then they turn and make comments to their companions that are clearly about Linda. She notes their perfect curls, their skirts, the nylons running into the loafers.

  When they leave the diner, Donny T. is sitting in the back of a powder-blue Bonneville counting money.

  “That’s your friend,” Linda says to Thomas.

  “Yeah,” Thomas says. “I guess.”

  “Why is he counting money?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  ______

  Thomas drives to the beach and parks behind a deserted cottage. He reaches into the backseat for a book that says, simply, Keats. Linda decides she won’t pretend to like the specific poems if in fact she doesn’t. Thomas reads to her in a voice oddly rich and gravelly.

  “When I have fears that I may cease to be

  Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain . . .”

  As he reads, she gazes at the dirt drive that leads through the dune grass to the back of a shingled gray-blue cottage. It is small, two stories tall, and has a wraparound porch of white trim. There is a hammock and a screen door, and all the shades are drawn. The cottage has a kind of poverty-stricken charm and makes her think of the Great Depression, about which they are reading in history. Clay pots with withered geraniums stand by the back door, and roses have turned to beach plums beneath a window.

  She can see, if she tries, a dark-haired woman in a dress and an apron. A small girl with blond hair playing on the porch. A man in a white shirt with suspenders. A boater on his head. Is she confusing her father with Eugene O’Neill?

  “Thou still unravished bride of quietness,

  Thou foster-child of silence and slow time . . .”

  To one side of the house, two posts have been hammered into the ground. Between the posts runs a length of clothesline with wooden pins on it that someone has forgotten to put away.

  “Now more than ever seems it rich to die

  To cease upon the midnight with no pain . . .”

  “She was a whore, a prostitute,” Linda is saying.

  “She repented her past,” Thomas argues. “She’s Christ’s symbol of penance.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I’ve been reading.”

  “I hardly know anything about her,” Linda says, which isn’t strictly true.

  “She was present at the Crucifixion,” he says. “She was the first to bring word of the Resurrection to the Disciples.”

  Linda shrugs. “If you say so.”

  ______

  The papers about Keats and Wordsworth have been written. The amusement park has closed. A hurricane has blown in and out, washing cottages on the beach into the sea. Thomas has read Prufrock and passages from Death of a Salesman to Linda in the Skylark. The aunt has relented and bought Linda an outfit on discount at the store where she works. Linda, in response to a vague reference to someone else’s hair by Thomas, has stopped teasing her own. They are sitting on a hill overlooking the Atlantic.

  “We’ve known each other exactly a month,” Thomas says.

  “Really?” she asks, though she has had precisely the same thought earlier in the day.

  “I feel like I’ve known you all my life,” he says.

  She is silent. The light on the water is extraordinary — as good as any of the poets Thomas often reads to her: Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell.

  “Do you sometimes think that, too?” he asks.

  The straining toward the light on the water feels instinctive. It encompasses the specific moving of the waves, the boy beside her in his parka and loafers, the s
teep slope of mown grass down to the rocks, and the expanse, the endless view, Boston crisply to the north, a lone fisherman, late to his pots, to the east.

  “Yes,” she says.

  She wants to be able to paint the light on the water, or to put it into words at the very least. Capture it, hold it in her hands. Bottle it.

  “You’re crying,” Thomas says.

  She wants to deny that she is crying, but cannot. She sobs once quickly, like a child. It would be delicious to let go, she thinks, but disastrous: once started, she might not be able to stop.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She can’t answer him. How can she explain? No one cries because of the light. It’s absurd.

  She sniffs, trying to hold back the snot that wants to run out of her nose. She has no handkerchief or tissue. Thomas searches his pockets, producing a stick of gum, a pack of cigarettes, and a ditto sheet from school. None of which will do. “Use your sleeve,” he says.

  Obediently, she does. She takes a long breath through her nose.

  “You’re . . . ,” he begins.

  But she shakes her head back and forth, as though to warn him not to say another word. Reluctantly, she has to let the light go. She has to think about what might be on the ditto sheet, about how she’ll have to sit on the mattress to do her homework later, about her aunt — thoughts guaranteed to stop the tears.

  “Linda,” Thomas says, taking her hand.

  She squeezes his, digging in her fingernails as if she were about to fall. He moves to kiss her, but she turns her head away. His lips graze the side of her mouth.

  “I can’t,” she says.

  He lets go of her hand. He moves an inch or two away from her. He shakes a cigarette from the pack and lights it.

  “I like you, Thomas,” Linda says, sorry to have hurt him.

  He twists his mouth and nods, as if to say he doesn’t believe a word of it. “You don’t seem to want any part of me,” he says.

  “It’s just . . .” she begins.

  “It’s just what?” he asks tonelessly.

  “There are things you don’t know about me,” she says.

  “So tell me,” he says.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t.”

  “There isn’t anything I wouldn’t tell you,” Thomas says, and she can hear that he’s aggrieved.

  “I know,” she says, wondering if that’s altogether true. Everyone has things, private things, embarrassing things, one keeps to oneself.

  She shudders as she takes a breath. “Let’s not do this, OK?”

  ______

  It is much the same in a dark car parked later that week at the beach. They can hear, but cannot see, the surf. The windows are steamed from the talking. In addition to the steam, she notices, the windshield has a film of smoke on it in which she could write her name. She is staring at the line of rust where the top of the convertible meets the body of the car.

  “So where will you apply?” Thomas asks.

  “Apply?”

  “To college. You’re smart. You must know you could get in anywhere.”

  He has a plaid scarf wound around his neck. It isn’t that late, only seven o’clock. She is supposed to be at the library. He’s supposed to be at hockey practice.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I was thinking about secretarial school.”

  “Jesus Christ, Linda.”

  “I’ll have to get a job.”

  “So go to college and get a better job.”

  “Money might be a problem.

  “There are scholarships.”

  She doesn’t want to talk about it. She is wearing a rose heather cardigan and a matching wool skirt. She has on one of Eileen’s white blouses. She’s begun parting her hair in the middle and letting it curl down on either side. She likes the way it obscures her face when she bends forward.

  Thomas is looking out the driver’s-side window, annoyed with her. “You have to get over this . . . inferiority thing,” he says.

  She scratches a bit of crust from the knee of her skirt. She has nylons on, but her feet are freezing. The Skylark has any number of holes through which the cold seeps.

  “Thomas, if I told you, you wouldn’t ever be able to think about me in the same way again,” she says.

  “Fuck that.”

  She has never heard him use the word.

  She is silent for so long, and he is breathing so shallowly, that the windshield begins to clear of fog. She can make out the cottage fifty feet in front of them. It looks lonely and cold, she thinks. She would like to be able to open the door, turn on the lights, make a fire, and shake out the bedclothes. Make a pot of soup. Have a place of her own.

  If only she could have a place of her own, she thinks.

  She is sweating under her sweater.

  “My aunt had a boyfriend,” she begins just at the very moment Thomas leans forward to kiss her. She digs her fists into the red leather seats.

  His mouth is tentative against her own. She can feel his straight upper lip, the fullness of the lower. He puts his hand to the side of her face.

  She is embarrassed and looks down. He follows her eyes and sees her balled fists.

  “Don’t be afraid of me,” he says.

  Slowly, she opens her hands. She can smell his breath and the sweat on his skin, as unique and as identifiable as a fingerprint.

  He is twisted in his seat, the parka jammed against the steering wheel. He presses his mouth against hers, and she feels his fingers on her collarbone. Despite herself, she flinches.

  He withdraws his hand.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  He pulls her head to his shoulder.

  “What about the boyfriend?” Thomas asks.

  “He went away,” she says.

  ______

  This goes on in increments, the way a timid swimmer might have to enter a frigid ocean, inch by inch, getting used to the brutal cold. Linda has had no way, before, to know how hard it might be; it has not been necessary to imagine physical love with a boy. Her mind does not flinch, but her body does, as if it had different memories, memories of its own. Another boy might have laughed at her, or given her up for hopeless, not worth the effort. Or might have insisted, so that she would have had to grit her teeth and think of something else, ruining pleasure forever. But Thomas doesn’t push.

  One morning in November, the aunt says to Linda, “You have to get a job. Eileen works. Tommy and Michael work. Patty works. You want clothes, you’ve got to get a job.”

  In her travels through the town, Linda has seen several possibilities for employment: a discount jewelry store; a Laundromat; a bowling alley; a photographic studio. In the end, she takes a job at the diner, waiting tables. She wears a gray uniform of synthetic material that crackles when she sits down. The dress has cap sleeves and a white collar and deep pockets for tips.

  On a good night, she will go home with fifteen dollars in coins. It seems a fortune. She likes to walk out of the diner with her hands in her pockets, feeling the money.

  Linda is a good waitress, lightning-fast and efficient. The owner, a man who drinks shots from a juice glass when he thinks no one is looking and who tries once to pin her up against the refrigerator and kiss her, tells her, in a rare sober moment, that she is the best waitress he’s ever had.

  The diner is a popular spot. Some of the students are regulars. Donny T. sits in the same booth every day and holds what seems to be a kind of court. He also has what appears to be a long memory.

  “Our Olympic hopeful,” he says as Linda takes her pad out. He has bedroom eyes and a canny grin and might be attractive were it not for his yellow teeth.

  “A cherry Coke and fries,” says Eddie Garrity, skinny and blond and nearly lost inside his leather jacket, a precise imitation, she notices, of Donny T.’s.

  “How many laps you do today?” Donny T. asks Linda, a snigger just below the surface.

  “Leave her alone,” Eddie
says under his breath.

  Donny T. turns in his seat. “Hey, cockroach, I want your advice, I’ll ask for it.”

  “Do you want anything to eat?” Linda asks evenly.

  “Just you,” Donny T. says. He puts his hands up, mock-defending himself. “ONLY KIDDING. ONLY KIDDING.” He laughs, the snigger unleashed. “Two cheeseburgers. Fries. Chocolate milkshake. And don’t make me one of those thin jobbies, either. I like a lot of ice cream.”

  Linda glances beyond Donny T. to the next table, where a man is having trouble with his briefcase: one of the latches keeps popping open every time he tries to shut the case. Linda watches him fiddle with the latch a half-dozen times and then, in seeming defeat, set the briefcase on a chair. He looks familiar, and she thinks that she might know him. He is twenty-two, twenty-three, she guesses, good-looking in a jacket and a tie. She wonders what he does for a living. Will he be a salesman? A teacher?

  Linda takes the orders of the other boys in the booth. Donny T. travels with a retinue. She snaps her order book shut, slips it into her pocket, and bends to clear the booth of the previous party’s trash.

  “You settling in OK?” Donny T. asks an inch from her waist.

  “Just fine,” she says, reaching for a glass of Coke that is nearly full.

  “Don’t you miss that place where you came from? What was it, a Home or something?” Donny T.’s voice has risen a notch, just enough to carry to the next table. The man with the errant briefcase looks up at her.

  “I’m fine,” she repeats, letting the Coke tip so that it spills onto the Formica in front of Donny T.

  “Watchit!” he cries. He tries to press himself into the back of the vinyl booth as the Coke drips over the edge of the table and onto his jeans. “That’s my leather coat there.”

  “Oh,” says Linda. “Sorry.”

  ______

  “What does Donny T. do in the backseat of Eddie Garrity’s Bonneville?”

  This to Thomas later that night as they are driving home in the Skylark.