Coffee, Tea or Me? (8 page)

“How stupid can you be?” Rachel exploded at her one night in the room. “Why don’t you stay away from him until you’re married, or take the pill?”

“Well, I always ask Warren to stop a little sooner but he never does. Poor Warren. I guess it’s pretty hard when you’re a fella.” Then she cried.

On Thursday, just four days before graduation, Sally Lu burst into the room and announced, “Warren wants to treat all of you to a Coke for bein’ so nice to his girl. Isn’t that just so sweet of him?” Betty, Trudy, and I decided to go with them. Cynthia declined and remained slumped at her desk browsing through a copy of
Women’s Wear Daily
that her mother sent her.

We piled into Warren’s car for the drive to a local drive-in, where girls sit in their fathers’ cars while boys cruise around the parking lot in their fathers’ cars. Usually they never hook up. But the parade is always fun to watch. The place was called Ma’s Root Beer Stand, a fifteen-minute drive from the school but accomplished in ten by Warren. We sat sipping our drinks while Sally Lu shared a big orangeade in the front seat with Warren, their two straws sucking up the syrupy soda in between kisses on the ear and light touches of the thigh.

“Why don’t you two get married?” Rachel asked, the root beer going to her head.

“Soon’s I git my own gas station,” Warren proudly answered as he gunned the running motor for emphasis.

“That’s why I decided to be a stewardess,” Sally Lu said giddily as she played with the hair coming through Warren’s shirt front. “Soon as he has his own station, I’ll stop flyin’ and we’ll get married. Right, hon?”

“You betcha,” he grunted. “Unless she goes and meets some fancy dude on one a’ them airplanes.” He laughed off the comment but his look indicated he would slit her throat if she did.

Sally Lu nudged him and kissed his ear.

We left Ma’s at 10:15, in plenty of time to get back before curfew, especially with Warren driving. He shot away from the parking lot and headed along a dirt road that was a new shortcut he’d found. Totally desolate, it wound around the perimeter of the school grounds. We were directly behind the campus when Warren’s drive shaft popped or broke or snapped or did something that brought us to a rattling halt.

After much swearing by Warren, we decided to try to walk back in hope of beating the curfew. We were sure losers because it looked as though a car hadn’t been over that road for a year, but anything was better than sitting there all night.

“Come on,” we prodded as Warren held Sally Lu tight against the front fender and smothered her with kisses.

They broke and we took off at a slight trot. We soon slowed to a walk and had progressed about fifteen minutes when we spotted a car ahead, parked under an oak tree. The sight of it gave us a momentary feeling of glee. But that feeling lasted only six seconds. Then, the car took on a menacing shape. Maybe a madman was there waiting for the girls he saw walking down the road. Maybe there was a dead body.

“I wish Warren was with us,” Sally Lu moaned as we gathered behind a tree perhaps seventy feet from the car.

“Look, maybe it’s just somebody necking, or admiring the moon, or something.” Good old Rachel, steady as a rock in all situations.

Silence reigned until Rachel again spoke up. “Look, we’re late already. And we have to pass that car to get back to the gate. I’ll slip up quietly and see what’s up. If everything is OK, we’ll pass. If it looks like a nut or something, you can all weep over the great sacrifice I made for you.”

“If he’s good lookin’, yell.” That was Betty.

Rachel stalked the car like someone out of a James Bond movie. She stooped low as she came up behind the vehicle and then raised her head to look in the rear window. She stayed there looking for over a minute. Then, she turned and came back in a low run.

“You’ll never believe it,” she panted. “Never!”

“What’s up?”

“You’ll never believe it,” she repeated. “It’s Big Momma. Gruel. With a man.”

“You’re putting us on.”

“No, I’m not. And you know who I think it is? I think it’s that man who delivers meat to the cafeteria.”

“Gruel with the meatman?”

“I think so.”

“He’s kinda good lookin’,” Betty recalled.

“He’s not,” I said.

“Ah wanna see,” Betty insisted.

“I don’t think we should,” Sally Lu protested.

“Come on. You’ve got to see it to believe it.”

It was a ridiculous thing to do. All Gruel had to do was catch us and we could kiss our wings good-bye. But then again, and the thought ran through all our minds, Gruel would be hard-pressed to make any fuss. We were within ten feet when we heard Gruel’s voice. It had taken on a little girl quality, a far cry from the studied tones she used in the classroom.

“Alan,” she squealed, “don’t do that.”

“Shhhhhhhhh, Louisa,” a gravel voice replied. “It’s dark and I’m reading your lovely figure in . . . whatta ya call it? Braille.”

I wanted to throw up. The whole world must use that cornball line. And I almost spent a lifetime hearing it.

“Ah wonder if he’s wearing his apron,” Betty muttered.

We stood there in the darkness, barely breathing. Then we circled the car and reached the front door. When the doorman called in our late arrival we received a stern scolding from the dorm adviser.

“You’ll have to answer to Gruel in the morning.”

The thought was almost appealing. We got into bed and Betty said, “Ah was last in line when we sneaked past the car. Ah saw them climbin’ into the backseat.”

Miss Gruel looked tired the next morning as she lectured us on the terrible thing we’d done in breaking curfew. Our broken car story didn’t hold much weight with her, but it probably did save us from being kicked out of school.

We didn’t see Gruel again until the final class on conduct and personal habits. This was, by reputation, Big Momma’s favorite class. She always taught it herself.

Her lecture was brutal. It ran on for an hour in wall-to-wall words about the importance of living a life worthy of the stewardess image.

“Perhaps you take offense at what you might construe as meddling into your personal lives. But your personal lives will be mirrored in your conduct as a stewardess. It is my wish that each of you always give deep thought before giving yourself . . . how shall I say it . . . giving yourself to other than the man you marry, if marriage shall be your wish. It was stated so nicely years ago by some unknown scholar who said, ‘Is an hour of pleasure worth a lifetime of hell?’ ”

We sat there trying to look deep in thought at this profound message. Betty Big Boobs broke the silence. “Mah only question is, how do y’all make it last an hour?”

Gruel didn’t understand the question at first. Then she did. Class was over and Betty became a stewardess against the better judgment of everyone.

The next to the last night before graduation I couldn’t take it any longer and I said, “Rachel, let’s go. Let’s get out of here and go into town.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “It’s only a couple of days more—let’s not get into any big trouble.”

“You’re not going to let me go alone?”

“Of course not.”

We sneaked out the balcony window at the end of the corridor, right next to our room, and got down by hanging onto a downspout and some heavy grapevines. Before we left we fixed our beds to look as if they had bodies in them—we knew there was a bed check at midnight. Well, it worked fine. We went to the bar where the airline people hung out and we danced and kidded and had a fine time and I met Chuck.

Chuck was a first officer and had already been with the airline for a year. He was very tall with a marvelous smile, a great blond crew cut and crazy blue eyes under huge eyebrows. I’d never seen such blue eyes in a man. He started getting me drinks and paying attention to me and finally I said, “Come on, handsome, we’re going to dance.”

He said, “You’ve got to be unreal. You must be from the South.”

I said, “You’ve got it—I’m from Texas and we love everybody.”

He was from way up in Minnesota where it’s so cold you can practically ice-skate in the summer. We talked and kidded as if we’d known each other forever. I hated to leave, but Rachel’s saner head prevailed. We got a lift back to school about midnight. We scampered across the front yard, crouching low to escape the beam of the searchlight and scrambled up our vine and pipe to safety.

The next night, the eve of graduation, there was no holding me. I had to see Chuck again. Rachel and I would be leaving for New York over the weekend. I wanted to find out where he was going to be. He looked too good for me to let him disappear just like that and leave it to chance that we might meet someday on a flight. Or maybe our paths would never again cross. I couldn’t bear that thought.

Rachel protested—it was too dangerous to take a chance only hours before graduation. Word had gotten around that any last-minute infraction would bring last-minute expulsion. Then the whole six weeks would go for nothing. But there was no holding me. So Rachel took super precautions. I don’t know how that kid did it, but she had someone smuggle in two department store mannequins. We tucked them into our beds and pulled the covers up to their shiny chins. We swore our roommates to secrecy. Much as we bickered with them from time to time, we knew none of them would turn us in, not even the lofty Cynthia.

We got down our vine and reached the bar and did we have a ball. We had the greatest time of our lives. Chuck and I danced for hours, all those crazy wild dances where you never touch, but even at arm’s length you get on the same beam and move with the frantic beat as intimately as if you were twined together. All the fellows from the airline knew Rachel and I were about to be graduated and they insisted on toasting us, so of course we had to toast back. They really shouldn’t have let us do all that drinking, but we were flying and no one could stop us.

“He’s going to be based in California for the next three months,” I told Rachel sadly during a lull in the racket from the jukebox. “I won’t be able to see him unless I get a California flight.”

“My money’s on you, kid,” Rachel said. “I bet you’ll make it in a week.”

Then the party closed in on us again, the drinking and the dancing and suddenly it was 3 A.M. and we were bombed. Well, they got us back to the school grounds and we made it to the wall of our dormitory and I looked up and said, “God, how am I ever going to get up there?” I went first and I kept calling to Rachel, “Come on honey, you can do it.”

Rachel just stood there at the bottom and said, “I want to die. I want to die.” The next thing I knew, she got sick.

I tapped on the window and called Betty and Sally Lu to help us. I slid down again and tried to pass Rachel up to the others. She was completely limp by then. I shoved her up and they almost had her and then she twisted her foot in that blasted vine and there she was back on the ground with an aching ankle.

Now we’ve had it, I thought. We’ll never get her back up and how’ll we explain it and we’ll be busted in the morning. And this time
I
wanted to die. But I wasn’t going to give up without a fight. Somehow the three of us tugged and hauled Rachel up, pulled her clothes off and stood her up in the shower.

“I want to die,” she wailed.

“Listen to me,” I told her. “You’re going to die if you don’t listen. You can yell now. Yell all you want. And when the supervisor comes, tell her you slipped in the shower and twisted your ankle. Got it?”

I guess she got it because the supervisor came running and Rachel was bawling and the rest of us were shrieking.

“How did this happen?” she demanded.

“Well, it’s graduation day,” I explained, “and we just couldn’t sleep we were so excited, so Rachel decided to take a shower and I guess she slipped.”

Rachel graduated with a cast on her ankle. “I could just kill you,” she hissed to me when they pinned her wings on.

Graduation was very solemn and impressive. Our parents came for the occasion and everyone cried a little as we marched down the main stairs in the dorm in uniform singing our class song, a silly set of words put to the melody of
Liza.
The vice president of sales, who we later discovered was having an affair of long standing with Miss Gruel, pinned our wings on us after making a little speech. Miss Gruel told us we were the best class the school had ever had. We knew she told that to all the classes. But we liked hearing it anyway because we all felt the past six weeks had been a turning point in our lives. Even the giddiest of us had gained assurance and knowledge. We were ready for the outside world and all the challenges it would bring. We were stewardesses.

There was a parting benediction from Miss Gruel. She sent a memo to the airline brass: “Don’t let Trudy and Rachel fly together.” I guess it got filed in a wastebasket.