by Clark Howard
Occasionally they even had a pleasant moment together, sharing hot chocolate in front of a wood fire on a cold winter night just before bedtime. Sometimes she talked about her own youth as a girl in Kentucky, her stories of turn-of-the-century rural America fascinating Richie. Other times she discussed more mundane subjects, such as the burial insurance on which she had been paying twenty-five cents a week for years, and which would see that she was properly buried next to her husband in the Lamont cemetery.
Now and again they talked about when her daughter was a little girl: how she looked, what she wore, the games she played. Richie had never thought of his mother as being that young. She had always been a happy little girl, Mrs. Clark said, loved and protected, especially by her father, as long as he lived. “I reckon we spoiled her,” she concluded during one of their talks. “Gave her too much. Got her used to not doing for herself. Maybe that’s what made her so weak.”
Whenever they talked about Chloe, it made Richie acutely aware of his grandmother’s advancing years. She seemed to be aging so fast. He wanted to do something especially nice for her, so as the holidays approached, he picked out a pretty new linoleum to replace the worn one in her kitchen and put it on layaway for Christmas, paying for it by the week.
It was as close as he could come to telling her he cared for her.
After Richie rewrote Jennie’s article for the Hi-Life, they settled into an unspoken agreement that he would continue to do so. At first, she did not take it for granted, asking him pointedly the next day, “What do you expect to get out of this?”
“What have you got?” Richie asked back. Then he grinned. “Just fooling. I don’t want anything.” He shrugged. “I like to write. It’s good practice.”
“You’re a funny one,” she said quietly.
“I’m a Yankee, remember? We’re all funny.” Noticing on her desk a copy of So Big by Edna Ferber, he asked, “That your assignment in English? Want me to do the book report for you?”
“God, would you?” she asked, as if he had just offered to pardon her from the guillotine. She started to hand him the book. Richie shook his head.
“I don’t need it. I read it when I was a kid.”
The next day he gave her a neatly hand-printed three-page report to copy over. She was amazed.
“How in the world can you remember a book you read so long ago?”
“When I read a book,” he said, shrugging, “it becomes sort of like an old friend. You can’t forget an old friend.”
“You are strange, Richie,” she said. It was the first time she had ever addressed him by name.
“Yeah, I know,” he replied. “Just pretend you don’t know me.”
Within two months, Jennie’s grade average in English went up from a C-minus to a B-plus. Richie did three more book reports for her, carefully incorporating into them her own rather bland writing style and projecting himself into her attitude as best he could for a female point of view. Jennie was euphoric over the results; she had never received higher than a C in English in her life.
“My mother and daddy are positively thrilled,” she told Richie. “Daddy even raised my allowance to twenty-five dollars a week.”
Richie stared at her. She got more for allowance than he earned in a week. And he was doing her schoolwork. You’re not too bright, Richie my lad, he told himself.
“You want part of my allowance every week?” she offered.
“No, thanks. I’ve got more money now than I know what to do with.”
He noticed from time to time, when he and Jennie were not alone in the Hi-Life room, that she would look at him as if she wanted to talk to him in front of the others—really talk rather than just say something—but for some reason could not bring herself to. Richie shrugged it off; if she had conflicting notions concerning him, that was her problem. He wasn’t trying to get invited to any senior class parties, just doing a little extra writing to help her out. But more and more he became mindful that a deeper awareness was growing between them.
Their relationship crested one Saturday night when he left Levy’s after work and found Jennie parked in front of the drugstore next door, her convertible top up, smoking a cigarette behind the wheel. He was on his way with a casual wave when she rolled down the window and asked, “Where are you going?”
“Over to the City Café to get something to eat.”
“Want to come out to my house?” she asked. “I’ll fix you something to eat.”
“Your house?” Richie winced in disbelief. “Very funny.”
“I’m not fooling,” she said evenly. Their eyes held. “My parents went to Memphis for the weekend.”
Standing next to the car, Richie looked down through the window at the contour of her breasts under a green turtleneck sweater where her coat was open. She seemed paler than usual, but he decided it might be the artificial light of the street. Her long hair, with its shiny tobacco color, glistened in the neon. There were still a number of people on the square as Saturday night wound down.
“Where do you want to pick me up?” he asked, remembering that she was engaged.
“Over by the post office. There won’t be anybody around there.”
Richie nodded and walked away. Five minutes later she pulled up next to the dark post office and he got in.
Her house was on the nicest street in Lamont, built up off the sidewalk with cement steps leading up to a columned front porch. Richie had seen it many times in the daylight; it was big and formidable, like a fort.
Jennie drove up the inclined driveway and pulled into an already open garage. “Wait here five minutes and then sneak in the back door. I’ll have the shades down by then.”
When he let himself in and went into the kitchen he saw that Jennie had taken off the turtleneck and put on a man’s wool shirt, leaving the tail out. “It’s Daddy’s,” she said. “I know it’s too big, but it’s comfortable. Sit down at the table.”
As he watched, she fried a hamburger patty and melted cheese on it while toasting a bun and putting mustard and pickles on the table. When it was ready, she served it to him with potato chips and a bottle of Coke, opening one for herself as well. Richie, as usual, wolfed down his food as if there might be someone around who might take it away from him.
“Where in the world did you learn to eat so fast?” she asked.
“Reform school,” he replied.
“Oh, of course,” she said skeptically. “In for murder, I suppose.”
Richie smiled as he ate. It amazed him how often the truth was disbelieved, a lie accepted as fact.
When he finished, Jenny got him a second Coke and said, “I’ve got a hi-fi in my room. Want to listen to some records?”
“Sure.”
She led him through the elegantly furnished and decorated house to a wide, angled staircase and up to the second floor. On the way, Richie took in as much as he could of the place without being too obvious and gawking. It was easily the most beautiful home he had ever seen, like something in a movie about wealthy people. Jennie’s room was done in peach and pale blue. She had a four-poster bed, her own easy chair, a desk, a bookcase filled with books—what a waste, Richie could not help thinking—a hi-fi in one corner, and her own bathroom. What must it be like, Richie wondered, to be born into this kind of life?
“Do you like Vic Damone?” she asked.
“Sure.” He stepped over to her desk and looked at a photograph of a serious young man in a white navy uniform. “This your fiancé?”
“Yes. Jerry Lyle. He graduated last year.”
The sound of Vic Damone singing “You’re Breaking My Heart” softly filled the room and Jennie came over and put her arms around his neck. “Dance with me,” she said. It was almost an order.
“I don’t know how to dance.”
“Just put your body up close to mine and move when I move.”
Richie tried it for a minute, awkwardly, and Jennie backed them up to the bed and stopped.
“You ever be
en lonely?” she asked quietly, in a different voice than he ever heard her use before.
“I’m lonely all the time,” he said, just as quietly, and immediately wondered why he had been so frank.
“I thought you were. Only a very lonely person would offer to do someone else’s assignments just to make a friend.”
“That wasn’t why I did it,” Richie told her. The reason he had helped Jennie was because he felt sorry for her, but he knew he could never tell her that.
“You don’t have to be ashamed of it,” Jennie said. “It’s all right. I understand. I’m lonely too.” She pulled him down onto the bed. “Come on. . . .”
As Richie took her in his arms and they began to kiss, he could not help wondering if her pubic hair was going to be that same strange tobacco color.
50
One Saturday morning in March, Richie’s stomach felt as if it were going into a knot as he looked up over the shirt counter and saw the farmer Lester stride into the store. Because Richie was kneeling behind the counter checking stock, Lester did not notice him as he passed. A sick feeling rising in his throat, Richie watched the farmer walk back and say something to Sam Levy. The store owner shook hands with Lester and escorted him up to a small open mezzanine office that looked out over the sales floor. There the two men began to talk. It was, Richie thought, the same goddamned thing that happened at Chalk’s Drug Store.
Rising, Richie picked up several empty shirt boxes and walked back into the rear stockroom. A heavy, almost physical depression came over him. Why couldn’t that son of a bitch Lester leave him alone? What the hell did the bastard get out of finding him on a job and telling his employer who his goddamn father had been? Goddamn it, Richie thought dismally.
Glumly, Richie thought about how much he admired Sam Levy. The little dynamo of a man, in his brightly colored shirts and ties, always had a cheerful word for everyone, white and black alike. He extended credit more liberally than any store owner in town, and never dunned a man when he was having hard times. Universally well-liked throughout the county, he had a rich repertoire of marvelous stories with which he frequently entertained customers as well as employees. It hurt more than angered Richie to think that this fine gentleman might now be reduced in his esteem to the same low level as Rollie Chalk.
After he had been standing in the stockroom for a few gloomy minutes, Richie heard the sound of footsteps coming down from the mezzanine. Stepping over to the door, he saw Lester stride through the store and leave. Then he heard Levy’s voice.
“Richie, are you down there?”
“Yessir,” Richie said, walking out of the storeroom.
“Come up here a minute, please.”
“Yessir.”
Climbing the half flight of stairs, Richie felt like he imagined a condemned man must feel walking up to the gallows. There was not even any anger at Lester now, although Richie knew without thinking that it would come back later. But at that moment there was only an impotent misery.
When Richie reached the mezzanine, the store owner, sitting back in a swivel chair, asked, “How long have you been working here, Richie?”
“Nearly six months, Mr. Sam.”
“Like your job?”
“Yessir. I like it a lot.”
“You doing well in school, getting good grades?”
“Yessir.”
“That’s good. School’s very important for a young man.” Levy pursed his lips in thought for a moment, then said, “Starting next week you’ve got a five-dollar-a-week raise.” Richie’s mouth fell open and he stared incredulously at Sam Levy as the little man got up from his chair. He patted Richie on the arm, said, “Go on with your work now,” and started down the stairs.
Richie finally mustered the composure to say, “Thanks, Levy!”
Sam Levy waved over his shoulder without looking back.
Richie’s relationship with Jennie escalated into a total, compelling affair that quickly began to dominate both of them.
Their first physical encounter lasted most of the night, with Richie slipping out the back door and walking the deserted streets home at four in the morning. Before he left, he had satisfied Jennie and she had satisfied him every way either of them knew how. Like Midge, Jennie seemed to thrive on uninhibited sex, giving her tall, lean, pale body to him any way he wanted it, and responding with abandon to everything he did, including pressing his lips far into her thick, curly pubic hair—which, to Richie’s delight, was tobacco-colored.
“Sweet Jesus, that feels good!” she exclaimed as he alternately worked her clitoris with his tongue, then entered her with his erection, switching each time she climaxed, as she did time after time. At one point when they were resting, she said, “God, I thought it was good with Jerry, but he didn’t know hardly any of the things you know how to do. I think I’m falling in love with you.”
“With me or with this,” Richie asked curling his fingers around a new erection.
“With both of you,” she said, quickly sitting up and leaning over to kiss the head of his erection, then moving her lips up the length of his body to his mouth. “And with your tongue too,” she added, parting her lips on his, working her own tongue into his mouth. Without leaving his mouth, she swung a leg over and put him back inside her. Grinding her hips as she moved up and down him, she whispered into his mouth, “What do they call what we’re doing, Richie?”
“Fucking,” he whispered back.
“Say it some more.”
“Fucking, fucking, fucking . . . .” The word brought on a spectacular climax for both of them.
In the weeks that followed, Richie and Jennie saw each other every Saturday night and every Sunday night, and whenever they could manage it during the week. On the weekend nights, Jennie picked him up after work or at some other predetermined time and place, and they drove to one of the surrounding towns—Covington, Dyersburg, Halls, Brownsville—where they could move about more freely without as much fear of being seen together. There they would go into a café and have something to eat, go to a movie, or just walk around town as if their relationship were not clandestine.
Their weekend nights always ended with them parking in some isolated place, next to the railroad tracks or a cemetery, and getting into the back seat to make love. As confining as it was, their eagerness helped them find a variety of positions that were enjoyable. Their favorite, which because of Jennie’s height they would not have been able to indulge in had she not had a convertible, was for Richie to sit upright and Jennie straddle him with her clothes open and breasts in his face for him to suck. The convertible’s cloth-top flexibility gave them the couple of extra inches they needed.
Occasionally they were able to use Jennie’s room, and sometimes during the week they would manage a brief interlude somewhere, down next to the closed train depot, behind the box factory outside town, at the deserted football field. Whenever, wherever they met, parting became increasingly more difficult for them each time they were together.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” Jennie would say sometimes. “I have to make myself say goodbye to you.”
“I do too,” Richie said. “I hate to leave you.”
“Are we in love, do you reckon? I mean really in love—you know, besides the sex part?”
“We must be,” Richie allowed. “I’ve never felt this way before, I know that.”
“Me either,” she admitted.
Being apart from each other at night became agony for them. Being together in school and having to control their feelings was even worse.
In April, Mrs. Reinhart called him into her office and handed him a list of colleges that offered English literature scholarships.
“I think you might be able to get into one of these,” she said. “We’ll have to write to that state school you were in up in Illinois—what was its name, St. Charles?—and get a transcript or letter or something showing what your grades were in your first two years of high school. . . what’s the matter?�
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Richie had looked down in embarrassment. He had known this moment was coming, and had dreaded it. For several weeks Mrs. Reinhart had been talking to him about scholarship material she was receiving from various colleges and how she was going to have to get his academic records in order so he could apply for them. Because of his great love of books and writing, she assumed without even asking that he would try to pursue a higher education in literature or journalism.
“I asked what’s the matter?” she said now, sitting back in her chair, her expression turning from efficient-serious to trouble-serious.
“I don’t have any high school grades at St. Charles,” he quietly admitted. “I only attended seventh and eighth grade classes there.”
“Oh, no.” All of her optimism, all her confidence, all her natural cheerfulness, faded without reserve. She looked as if her best friend had just died. Removing her glasses, she pinched the space between her eyes and sighed. “It’s my fault,” she said. “I should have checked when you first came here. I suspected, you know. But I went against my better judgment. You were so convincing; all those books you’d read! And even when my conscience bothered me, I convinced myself that I was doing what was best for you.”
“You were,” Richie assured her. “Listen, if it hadn’t been for you, I would never have stayed here. I wouldn’t have been able to stand it in the freshman class, trying to get interested in things I already knew. The only reason I stayed was because you took an interest in me. And if I hadn’t stayed, there’s no telling where I’d have ended up.”
“Yes, but what are you going to do now that it’s over? Where do you go from here?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You have such a fine mind; it’ll be dreadful if you don’t continue your education, if you waste your life.”
“I won’t waste my life,” Richie said. “I guarantee you that.” He hesitated a beat, then asked, “What about graduation?”