Between Friends (22 page)

Eleanor grimaced. “Dean is hardly messing up your hair. All you have to do is run your fingers through it. So what business are you talking about?”

Dean released Dallas and stepped out of the way of her attempts to punch him in the arm. “Nothing …”

“Must be that new girl he’s seeing,” Eleanor directed to her husband.

“She’s a woman, not a girl,” Dean corrected smoothly.

Lyle Oliver got quietly up from the table, poured out the rest of his coffee, and put the cup on the counter.

Dallas stole a glance at her brother, sensing his restlessness. He’d made mention to her of someone new. What was it he’d said?

I called you last week, and some girl answered your phone,” Eleanor said.

“Ma …” Dean sighed.

Dallas shook her head. For all of her brother’s confidence, for all his mouth and machismo and attitude, only with his mother did Dean become differential and uncertain.

Smart black men. Stronger black women …

“I’m going to bed,” Dallas’s father announced.

“I’m not being nosy,” Eleanor placated her son.

But both Dallas and Dean exchanged glances that said otherwise.

“But I have
not
been happy with some of the girls you’ve been dating. I remember the one who was a so-called model …”

“Carrie …” Dallas supplied, much to her brother’s annoyance.

“That’s right. She was cute, with her little narrow self,” Eleanor characterized. “But she didn’t have two sentences she could put back to back that made a paragraph, let alone a complete thought.”

“I don’t think Dean was interested in her thoughts,” Dallas said, grinning at him.

“Well, just as long as he doesn’t bring me any illegitimate grandchildren to raise … or some white girl.”

“Good night,” Lyle Oliver said as he quietly walked from the room.

“Good night,” came back the chorus of replies.

For a second Dallas focused on her father’s departing form. She’d wanted to say more to him, bring him into the bantering discussion of his son’s love life. But it was too late. Now she was distracted with Dean’s response to his mother’s bold and impertinent harping.

“What have you got against white girls?” Dean asked.

“They’re not black,” Dallas filled in, but doubted that either had heard her.

“Not a thing,” Eleanor said with a shrug. “But not with
my
son.”

Dallas and her brother had been listening to this indoctrination from Eleanor all of their lives. Only as she’d gotten older and knew more about Eleanor’s background and family had Dallas understood. Her stepmother had been raised in the South, with its history of segregation and miscegenation and racism, where there were strict boundaries. Black is black, and white is white, and never the twain should meet.

That’s how Dallas knew that she was in on a pass. She’d always believed that Eleanor had treated her as if she were tainted. Certainly not white, but not exactly black. It might not be her fault that she had a white mother, but now she had to do something about it. Prove herself. Pick a side. Buy black.

“Hey, why are you on my case?” Dean asked his mother. “I’m not the one you should be worrying about.”

“
Now
what are you talking about?” Eleanor asked suspiciously.

Suddenly Dallas saw it coming. She could feel the shift as Dean searched for a way out from under his mother’s relentless probing. Dean nodded in her direction, and Dallas frowned, not having a clue where her brother was headed.

“Ask Dallas. She was the one sitting out in front of the house with a white guy.”

Dallas didn’t even bother getting annoyed. It was a juvenile ploy and so typical of the way she and Dean would dig at each other. Eleanor looked sharply at her, however, a look that Dallas had seen often enough growing up. It had always made her feel as if she was about to do something reprehensible that was going to prove to her stepmother that she’d been right all along about her.

“Who?” Eleanor asked.

Dallas realized she didn’t have a ready answer. To say the name Alex Marco would immediately evoke all the uncertainty and horror they’d all first attached to the family when they’d first moved into the neighborhood. She couldn’t think how to sum up the brief, unusual relationship she had with Alex Marco. What was it, really?

Who was he?

Dallas finally shrugged. “He’s a friend.”

T
HE HOUSE WAS ABSOLUTELY
silent as Dallas lay in bed. She was thinking about Dean’s baiting of her in the kitchen with Eleanor, then about sitting with Alex in his car … and talking about the time they’d made love. Both of the evening’s encounters were oddly linked. Alex was the common denominator.

Dallas shifted in bed until she was flat on her back. She hesitated and then slowly ran her hands down her body, from the tops of her breasts to the flat plane of her rib cage and belly. To her navel and groin and thighs. Her inventory was not an attempt at self-stimulation. She was trying to figure out what men really responded to when they touched her, saw her naked. When a man desired to penetrate the soft center into her body, pump and grind until release and satisfaction were achieved, what had she achieved in return? When it was over they took their whispered words of seduction and left. Not just her body. But
her.

Dallas remembered every single man she’d ever been to bed with. It was easy. There hadn’t been that many. They could all be accounted for on one hand. She remembered the first time she’d ever had a climax. That much described, praised, and mystified sensation of the flesh that was supposed to make the effort all worthwhile. It had been, but it had not touched her heart or soul.

He was a musician she’d met. A cool and worldly clarinet player who blew jazz. Dallas recalled that she was supposed to interview him and his band at their club appearance in an East Village joint for a small weekly she worked on as an undergrad intern. He’d teased her with his sophistication, seduced her with his music. The foreplay between them had gone on for several weeks before they ever even touched. Dallas thought she was falling in love with him. But the physical euphoria that had brought her to the edge of madness and toppled her into gasping breaths and pulsing nerves had been less his skill and expertise than it was her need for affirmation and affection.

It had been great sex.

But it had been a one-night stand.

So had the first time she’d made love. She had wanted to lose her virginity. At sixteen being a virgin had become a burden. The boys in school were after her, not because they were infatuated, but because they wanted to be the first.

Valerie had lost hers at thirteen.
Thirteen!
Dallas remembered how Valerie had giggled, proud of herself. It had been with one of her brother’s friends, a boy of seventeen. But what had amazed Dallas was not that her best friend had already done it, but that she had apparently really liked it. With Maureen it had been much different. Not exactly rape, Maureen had decided years late, but definite coercion. She’d been compromised by a visiting cousin when she was nine. Someone she’d always liked. Too young to know that what was happening was wrong, she’d never said anything. But neither had she been left particularly traumatized.

Dallas thought about seeing Alex Marco again, about being with him earlier for most of the day, and sitting talking in his car. Feeling, oddly enough, that same protectiveness with him she’d first experienced in the Marco basement when she was fifteen. But bringing up the delicate but bold subject of her virginity now kept her awake. The loss of it. No … the surrender of it to Alex Marco. Because she’d asked him to.

Dallas recalled that it was fear that had sent her to him. Fear of failure at the fumbling hands of one of her classmates, who would then naturally need to shoot his mouth off about his success, and of her incompetence as a lay.

Actually, it was Brett Percell who’d helped Dallas to make the decision. She thought they were going together. He’d started to sit with her at lunch, to ask her questions. He walked her almost all the way home from school one day rather than take the bus. When they held hands, she was aware that their entwined fingers reminded her of a zebra. She thought Brett really liked her, and maybe he really did. He’d taken his time and told her she was fine … he was used to dating girls with darker skin, but he liked her anyway.

She liked him because he was funny and cute. He was popular and stayed out of trouble. She’d felt nothing when he’d kissed her and even less when Brett had tried to touch her. Which is probably why, when the opportunity was there to go all the way, Dallas knew she didn’t want to. Not with him. And then he had said something that had cleared up the mystery of his sudden interest in her. He had promised that if she’d let him do it to her, he’d take her to the Westbury Music fair to see … well, she couldn’t remember who. It was then that Dallas had decided that if the only thing she had of any value was the place between her legs, then at least it should go to someone who had never tried to use her, or wanted anything from her.

She’d searched everywhere for the scrap of paper with the phone number on it. For more than a week she leafed through notebook pages, dug into the pockets of sweaters and jackets, emptied out totes and bags and wallets, and then gave up. Finding it by accident as it slipped out quietly and slowly, like a leaf falling from a tree, from between the pages of a novel she’d never finished reading. By then Dallas was having second thoughts. Until Valerie and a group of their friends had decided on an evening out together, and she had stayed home rather than go along stag, not attached to anyone. Not having anyone to hold hands with. Not wanting to be the only token in a group that never accepted her as being quite the same as they were anyway.
Not
when it came to dating.
Not
when it came to pairing off.

Dallas dialed the number the next day. A woman answered the phone. A woman with an aged voice.

“Hello?”

Dallas hadn’t expected a woman to answer. She struggled for her voice.

“Hello? Who is it?”

“I … I … is … Alex there?”

“Alex?” the woman repeated in the absentminded squeakiness of the elderly, as if the name meant nothing to her.

“Yes. Alex Marco. He gave me this number.”

“Oh, Alex … He’s my grandson. No, he’s not here no more.”

“Oh,” Dallas murmured, feeling a contradictory rush of relief and disappointment.

“He’s got his own place. You want the number?”

Dallas blinked. This was not a dead end. Did she want the number? “Yes. Yes, thank you.”

“All right, wait a minute … wait a minute …”

Dallas listened as the receiver was put down, and a rustling of noise came through the line as the woman searched around her for whatever source contained the number. There was coughing and a grunt of movement.

“Wait a minute …” the woman said again. “Here it is …”

Dallas wrote down the number that was recited, thanked the woman, and hung up. She felt a surge of victory, of accomplishment. Until she realized she hadn’t gotten anywhere, yet. She still had not reached Alex. She had yet to ask for his help. Dallas stood across the street from the high school, digging her fingers through the heavy load of coins in her pocket, which she’d collected to use in the pay phone. If she’d used the one at home, for sure Eleanor would have discovered the phone numbers on the bill and questioned her or Dean about long-distance calls into the city.

Dallas hesitated, staring off across the way at her classmates gathered casually around the grounds of the school before the start of the first period class. They engaged in what had always been to her the confusing rituals of mating, dating, and fitting in. She gnawed on her lip, trying to think if there was even one boy whom she liked well enough to encourage.

Dallas sighed and turned back to the phone. Her heart pounding, she dialed the second number. And then hung up before the phone began to ring. She waited a few minutes and then tried again. She had no time to change her mind this time. The phone was picked up on the first ring, and a brusque male voice answered impatiently.

“Yeah …”

“H-hi. I’d like to … to speak to Alex Marco, please.”

“Yeah, that’s me. Look, I’m running late for work. Who is this?”

“It’s … Dallas Oliver,” she whispered. Only as she said her name did it occur to Dallas that Alex Marco might not even remember who she was.

“Who?”

“Dallas. We met last year.” There was no response. No recognition, and now it was too late to hang up. “Don’t … don’t you remember? It was … because of Nicholas, and …”

“Dallas …” he murmured. “Sure, I remember. What do you want?”

She felt the blood drain from her body. She felt lonely and confused. He didn’t sound exactly pleased to hear from her. Dallas turned her back on the school and the sounds and voices of her friends and classmates. “You said I could call you. You said that …”

“Is it Nick again? I told you to stay away from him,” he said, annoyed. “Maybe you should tell Lillian this time. Maybe …”

“Can I come to see you?”

There was a short pause.

“What?”

“Can … can I come to see you?” Her voice was thin and shaky, nervous with the audacity of what she was doing. And she was scared.

“Christ … what did he do to you?” Alex asked, the annoyance building.

“I can’t talk about it,” Dallas improvised.

“All right, all right …” Alex said. “Ahh … I can’t see you until this afternoon around four or later.”

“That’s okay,” Dallas quickly agreed. “I can take the train in. Where should I come?”

“Take the LIRR into Jamaica, and change for the train to Flatbush …”

Dallas hadn’t really expected Alex to agree to see her. So she was unprepared to write down the directions. She memorized it all, repeating the details to herself all through school. She’d not mentioned her planned trip even to Valerie, knowing that she would be hounded for information. And Dallas feared that she herself would let something slip out that would betray her, and her intentions … and Alex Marco.