Celestial Navigation (8 page)

Then sometimes he doesn’t call at all, not all day, or he does call and says he will not be able to make it. He has a business crisis, or a trip coming up, or his wife is stopping by for some belongings. I have never seen his wife. I believe that she must be very beautiful, because she works as a model for one of the department stores. When they were first married, John says, she was a homey type. She made all the curtains and cooked and kept house, but then she got restless. She took one of those courses you see advertised in the newspaper and became a model, and after that she was never home at all any more and she got a new set of friends and even her personality seemed to change. “Brittle, sort of,” he told me once. “Not at all like the person I married. I wanted a
wifely
wife, someone warm and loving that smells like cinnamon.” Which made me feel happy, because he always says I smell like cinnamon. But sometimes in low moods I stare at myself in the mirror, I see how enormously tall I am and how busty I have grown since the baby and how even if I lost weight, I would never
have that chiseled look that models have. I haven’t the bones for it. And I think, Does John regret me? Does he wish I were Carol’s type? He did marry her, after all. I take down my hair and fold it under to see how it would look if I cut it. I stand sideways to the mirror and suck in my stomach. It is the days when I know I won’t see him that I go through all this. I have nothing else to do. I file my nails or sew on a button, during Darcy’s nap I open library books that I can’t pin my mind to or I leaf through magazines that I have already worn to tatters. When she wakes up, we go on long walks. I know this street now the way I know our room : every crumple in the sidewalk, every spindly tree, every turret and gable and leaded window of these endless dismal rowhouses. We take Mr. Somerset’s toast crusts and feed the pigeons. We go to the library, where Darcy dallies forever in the children’s section, choosing books and changing her mind and putting them away again. I never hurry her. What use is time now? We have so much of it. When she has decided on her books we walk very slowly home and then I read them to her, over and over, until my mouth is dry and my throat aches from imitating squeaky mice and growly bears. Darcy nestles under my arm, following the pictures with her great blue eyes. She has started sucking her thumb again. Four and a half is too old for that, I tell her, but I never really try to stop her. I figure she might as well take her comfort from wherever she can.

It was through Darcy that John first got to me. One morning I looked up and there he was, squatting to talk to her and asking her if she knew how pretty she looked. “You’ve got your mother’s mouth,” he said. Most people see only Guy in her. “Bright, too,” he told me. Then he rose and shook my hand. We had met a couple of times before, but this was the first notice that he had taken of Darcy. After that he spoke to her every time he came by, and often brought her something—a jump-rope, or a set of checkers, and once a little dress-up
doll that had a lot of extra costumes they sold separately. He brought her those costumes one by one; in the end I believe she had them all. And meanwhile, of course, he and I were getting to know each other. But Darcy was the starting point. I remember the first time I ever thought seriously about John. It was a few months after we had met. He said, “Now that you have this
one
pretty little girl, are you going to have a whole crowd more?” “Oh, no,” I said, “Guy says one is plenty.” “He’s a fool,” John said, and he looked straight at me for a long time and then turned and left. I don’t know why that stuck with me for so long. I remember that I went back to the house and started washing dishes, and suddenly I stopped with my hands in the suds and looked out the window after him and got this strange springing feeling in the bottom of my stomach. That was how it began.

The man who owns this boarding house is very odd, and at first I was afraid of him. He reminded me of a slug. You see people like that in the newspaper all the time, caught molesting children or exhibiting themselves on picnic grounds or shooting into crowds; there is something curled and lifeless and out of touch about them. But when I had been here longer I saw that he wouldn’t harm a fly, and now I let him talk with Darcy even when I am in another part of the house. You can tell he loves children. He doesn’t know what to say to them, really, but he tries hard and he often takes Darcy up to his studio and lets her cut and paste. It does her good to get away from me for a while. When I think he might be growing tired I climb the stairs to fetch her, and I find them bending over separate tables, Darcy chattering away a mile a minute and covered with paste while Mr. Pauling works silently on those kaleidoscope things he seems to like. “I’ll take her now,” I say, and he says, “Oh, well, oh, no hurry, we were just—she was just—” Then he stands there wringing
his hands, the first person I ever saw who truly does wring his hands. He doesn’t appear to like me much, or maybe that’s just his manner. He makes me feel too tall and too loud and too strong. I never know how to act with him. Evenings, watching TV, which is the only time when we boarders are all together, he is so confused and some of what he says is so out of place—things a deaf man would say, having lost touch with the world—that I have to hold down a laugh. The others are very kind to him.
They
never laugh. They have a habit of bending their heads toward him as they listen, and then straightening to puzzle over what he says, and even if he makes no sense they give him some grave and courteous answer. Because of this all conversation moves slowly, with long pauses, in a sort of circle that is designed to protect him. No wonder the meek will inherit the earth.

Darcy’s eyes are blue like Guy’s, and her hair is his fine, white-blond color and not much longer—Guy always did wear it long. I remember when I first saw him, he was swimming in Dewbridge Lake and every time he came up for air he had to give his head a sharp flick to get the hair off his face. Wet, it came nearly to his chin. When it snapped back spangles of water flew out from him like jewels. Then he climbed onto this old fallen tree that people used for a diving board.
Other
people used it; I wasn’t allowed to, for fear of stobs and hidden branches. I wasn’t allowed to do anything back then. I was fifteen, a nice quiet girl who didn’t even wear lipstick yet, and I had come with my parents and we were sitting on an oilcloth with a picnic lunch that would feed an old folks’ home and great quantities of insect repellent and sunburn ointment and wet cloths wrapped in cellophane in case of spills. This boy with the long slick hair (I didn’t know his name then) seemed to have brought nothing but himself, barely covered by one of those tight satin bathing suits that
I always thought were so tacky. He stood on the farthest limb that would bear his weight and then flung himself up and out, and he cut through the water like a knife and came up flicking that hair and laughing. I just stared. I thought he was fascinating. Now I am not talking about love at first sight or anything like that—why, he scared me half to death! He and all his friends, with their horseplay and their great splashing butterfly strokes and the wolf howls they gave toward the girls out on the barrel raft. They didn’t howl at
me
. I was just sitting there in the shade with my parents, watching out for sunburn, shrinking when any of them came too close. And when my mother said, “This lake would be right fine if it weren’t for the rougher element,” I said, “Yes, ma’am,” and meant it. But that didn’t stop me from staring at Guy Tell.

My father was the principal of Partha High School in Partha, Virginia. My mother was an English teacher. They were middle-aged when they had me and I was an only child, which may be why they guarded me so well—that and their being religious. They were Baptists. My father passed the collection plate on Sunday mornings. At one point I was religious too, and had thoughts of growing up to be a missionary and eventually getting martyred, but that all passed away in time. I don’t know why. I just turned out not to be a believer, that’s all. But I continued to go to church with my parents. I sat folding my program into a fan, feeling chafed inside by some irritation that extended even to the starchy smell of my mother’s best dress and the way my father kept tugging his shirt cuffs down when he didn’t need to. Yet I loved them. I was very close to them, especially to my mother. What bothered me was not my parents or even their way of living, but the fact that it seemed to be the only way open to me. I would grow up, of course, and go to college and marry and have children, but those were not changes so much as
additions. I would still be traveling their single narrow life. There was no hope of any other. At least, not till Dewbridge Lake.

Is Dewbridge Lake still there? Well, it must be. But after that one summer I have never been back. It’s as if the lake had fulfilled its purpose and then vanished from the face of the earth. Its mildewed gray pavilion was erected overnight for me to do the bunnyhop in with my girlfriends, the only dance I was allowed. Its rainbow-colored jukebox was expressly filled with Pat Boone songs so that one day, at the end of a bunnyhop, Guy Tell might step up to me and say, “This here is for me and
you
to dance to, honey,” and fold me up in a long walking clinch because I was too scared to say no. That pine forest with its shiny hot floor was grown for the two of us to hide in, leaning against a spruce trunk, Guy perpetually sliding a swimsuit strap off my shoulder while I perpetually slid it back up. His kisses tasted of tobacco. I had never been kissed before and found it tiring; my neck ached and my mouth felt bruised. Drawing back from me, he would smile with his eyes half-veiled as if he had won some contest. I was the loser, and I didn’t even know I was
in
a contest. Then we would separate and I would return to my parents, leaving the pine trees shimmering behind me. Now I imagine that the entire forest has fallen, giving off no sound, like that tree they always bring up in science classes. All that will remain of it is a little golden dust floating upward in the sunlight. Yet there is a thirty-nine-cent strawberry-flavored lipstick in the dimestore whose smell can still, to this day, carry me back to the ladies’ changing rooms at Dewbridge Lake. Hot pine needles will always make me feel pleasantly endangered and out of my depth. The trashy taste of orange Nehi fills me even now with a longing to break loose, to go to foreign places, to try some adventure undreamed of by my father in his baggy plaid trunks and my mother in her black
rayon bathing suit with the pleated skirt. Oh, I would do it all over again, if I were fifteen. Even knowing how it would end up, I would continue to glide across that splintery dance floor with Guy Tell’s hand clamping the back of my neck.

He was twenty-two—older than anyone will ever seem to me again. I wouldn’t be sixteen till December. (Sixteen was the age my parents were going to let me start dating. And even then, of course, only boys my own age. Only boys from good families. Only in groups.) All that fall, when the Dewbridge Lake Pavilion was boarded over and school had reopened, I continued to see Guy without anybody’s knowing. I said I was going to the library, or to visit a friend. Then I stood on a corner of Main Street and waited for Guy to come pick me up in a towtruck, and while he was pumping gas I would sit inside the filling station reading his racing magazines. He worked evenings. Daytimes he was free. Afternoons, as I was walking home from school, he slid up alongside me in his battered Pontiac and plucked me from my girlfriends and bore me off to a country road at the edge of town. While we were continuing our contest—he undoing a blouse button, I doing it up again—I felt lost and uncertain and longed to be safe at home, but once he was gone I forgot the feeling and wanted him back. I remembered the things that touched me: the intent look he wore when I told him anything; his habit of remembering every anniversary of our meeting, weekly, monthly, with some small clumsy gift like a gilt compact or a cross on a chain; the swashbuckling way he dressed and the eagle tattooed on his forearm and the dogtags always warm against his chest. Sitting in church on Sunday morning I called up his kisses, which from this safe distance filled me with a dizzy breathlessness that I thought might possibly be love. My mother sat beside me, nodding radiantly at the reading from Job. My father extended the long arm of his collection plate down the pews. I thought, I
am never going to be like them, I have already broken free. I thought, Why aren’t they taking better care of me?

On December seventh I turned sixteen. My mother said, “Well, now I suppose you can go out some, Mary.” “Yes, ma’am,” I said. I went to Main Street to wait for Guy, and he brought me a charm bracelet hung with little plastic records to remind me of our first dance. Then he said, “I reckon we could get married now if you want. Don’t look like I am going to get over you any time soon.” So ten days later we eloped. I kept expecting my parents to follow me and take me back, but they didn’t. I had to send them a telegram announcing I was married. And in the motel room, when I cried, Guy said, “Now
don’t
take on so, you’re tearing me up. You want just for tonight I should sleep in the other bed?” “I’m not crying about
that,”
I said. “Well, what, then?” Why I was crying was that here I sat, married, and I had never even had a real date. But it didn’t seem the kind of thing that I could tell him.

Last week I took out a post office box and then wrote Guy and asked for a divorce. The box was John’s idea. “You don’t want him coming after you,” he said, “tracking you down to your boarding house and making a scene.” He went with me to the post office, and afterwards we took Darcy to the Children’s Zoo. It was the nicest day I had had in a long time. Darcy played in the sand while John and I sat on a bench nearby in the sunlight, talking over our plans. John said that someone had seen us together in a restaurant and told his wife. “I believe it’s made her jealous,” he said. “You know how she is.” (Although I didn’t know, at all.) “She wants to have her cake and keep another piece waiting in the tin. As soon as she heard she came right over to the house all dressed up, sweet as sugar, asking questions.”