Almost every day after school they go down to his basement. He tells his mother that they’re working on a chemistry project so not to worry if she smells smoke. They light up a joint, and invariably it’s up to Lou to get things started, but as soon as she does, he takes right over. He ejaculates on her stomach. One time she has an orgasm, and it’s then, just as he withdraws, seeing the evidence of his orgasm.
“I love you,” she tells him.
“I know,” he answers, and she thinks he means that it goes without saying he loves her back.
She is so happy! She is nice to everybody—she
wants
to be—
while being her true wild self with Tom. At last! What a relief not to have to try to impress him any longer! She stops reading every book he reads and admits to him it was only a ruse. Anything that enters her head, she says. He sometimes looks shocked, but he’s never put off. “Let’s go back to my place,” he says. Afterward they have tea in the kitchen, served by his mother, a drab, frowning, old-fashioned-looking woman in a housedress and apron, who seems to have been warned by someone in another room to act normal. When they sit down at the table, she always comes out with something that sounds as if she’s on to them: “You can’t give it your best without nourishment.” “You’ve earned this, I imagine.” But Tom says she’s as thick as two boards. Once she’s poured their tea, she leaves them alone.
Lou would like to tell Tom’s mother the truth. The last thing she feels is bad. In fact, she feels the opposite: holy, because love is flowing out of her, in all directions. Even their father she loves. She recalls how he was when he had Lovergirls, how he seemed, then, to be in the same mood that she is in now, and it occurs to her that he must have been in love with all of those women to act so happy and nice.
Of course Lou doesn’t tell Tom’s mother the truth. She doesn’t tell a soul, except Sherry, who thinks she and Tom have been doing it for months anyway.
“When do I get to meet him?” Sherry asks.
Lou taps her teeth with a fingernail she no longer bites. Before the acid trip the fact that she had a school drop-out for a best friend was one of the secrets she kept from Tom. Now she likes to see him surprised. “We’ll come by your work,” she says.
They go there the next day. In the lobby they stuff their pockets with the free cigarettes that are lying around in silver cases for golf-club members. The promise of this is how Lou got Tom to come anywhere near what he calls a capitalist temple.
Tom also takes a handful of matches. Then they go down a green-shag-carpeted hallway with overhead lights like giant golf balls.
“This better not take long,” Tom mutters.
Since it’s off-season, the bar is almost empty. In the gloom Sherry stands out like a spotlit entertainer. She calls “It’s okay!” to a man with a brush cut, who has demanded their identification. “They’re my friends!” she calls. She hurries over to them.
Seeing her through Tom’s eyes, Lou can’t believe that this bouffant blonde in the tight low-cut white dress and white high-heeled go-go boots is anyone she remotely knows. She turns traitor. As they follow Sherry to a table, she looks over her shoulder at Tom. “Think of it as a freak show,” she whispers.
Sherry goes back to the bar and returns with three glasses of Coke on a tray.
“Spiked?” Lou asks.
Sherry sighs. “There’s some dumb regulation that I’m not allowed to pour. Can you believe it?”
Lou looks over at the man with the brush cut. “I thought my father was the last holdout,” she says.
“I hope it doesn’t mean your father’s a premature ejaculator,” Sherry says. “Because that’s what Gino is.”
Tom’s laugh is embarrassed.
“No, he
is,”
Sherry says seriously. “It’s really a hang-up for him. It’s really sad.”
“Sherry has a heart of gold,” Lou explains, standing and leaning forward so that Tom can reach his match to her cigarette. Somehow she’s across the wide table while he and Sherry are beside each other on a plush leather loveseat.
“Talk,” Sherry says to Tom. “I want to hear your accent.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Lou says, because Tom hates having his accent pointed out. But he smiles at Sherry and says that he’s more popular than Jesus Christ.
“Oh, remember?” Sherry cries. “That got the Beatles in so much shit, remember? God.” She turns to face Tom, a shift of position that deepens her cleavage. “I can’t believe it. It’s like having John Lennon right here in The Nineteenth Hole. I mean—,” she looks at Lou,“for you it must be like going to bed with John Lennon.”
Lou’s eyes are on Tom, whose eyes are on Sherry’s tits.
Sherry changes the subject to listing anyone she’s slept with who is vaguely well known: the guy who owns the Chevrolet dealership down the street, the guy who does the helicopter traffic reports on the radio. For the first time in months Lou feels spite. She hates the feeling, but she can’t keep it out. She wants to catch Tom’s eye, to make Sherry a joke between them, but he’s in a slack-jawed staring trance.
Eventually Lou can’t stand it. She gets up and heads straight for the bar. Like she owns the place, she goes around behind to the bottles and pours vermouth into a beer mug. The bartender stays facing the other way, talking to somebody. Lou has two gulps, refills the mug, then takes it back to the table. “Here,” she says, plunking the mug down in front of Tom, jolting him and Sherry out of intense conversation.
“What’s this?” he asks.
“Booze,” Lou says. “Free and contraband.” She sits on the arm of the loveseat.
Tom takes a sip, smiles and raises the glass, toasting the air between her and Sherry.
He has a mysterious smile on his face all the way home. Lou can’t get an acknowledgement out of him that Sherry is either cheap or stupid.
“I thought you were her friend,” he smiles, wagging his finger.
“I am!”
He doesn’t ask her to come into his house.
He doesn’t show up for school. She phones him. “He’s at school,” his mother says. The day after that he says,“You’re not my jailer,” when Lou demands to know where he was. Walking home, they don’t talk. Because she senses what is about to happen, she clings to his arm, which he holds so rigidly she feels sick with humiliation and loss. But she doesn’t let go. At the turnoff to his house he stops.
“Am I coming to your place?” she asks. She has to ask it.
He looks directly at her. “In some things,” he says,“you are absolutely innocent.”
“You fucking bastard,” she cries. She slaps his face and runs away, her head roaring with fury. She will shoot him.
She gets the gun and conducts a mad search of the bomb shelter for bullets. After forty-eight hours of dread, the truth is exhilarating. Except for revenge she feels as if she’s completely over him.
The bullets are nowhere to be found. Their fuck-up of a father probably only ever had one, and he shot his foot with it. Lou sits on one of the bunks and regards her thin, cold-reddened thighs and lets out a sob. Nothing seems more pathetic than her inability to kill.
Up in the house she calls Sherry, who denies sleeping with Tom, then confesses and apologizes all over the place, then says she had a lousy time, then says she wouldn’t do it again if she was paid to.
“You are my enemy,” Lou tells her coldly. She calls Tom, intending to tell him the same thing, but the first words out of her mouth are,“You’re not a fucking bastard.”
He says he is. He says it’s over.
“I don’t care about Sherry,” she lies.
“Sherry has nothing to do with it.” He lets out a long sigh. “Look, I just don’t love you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“Every word of this conversation is a small death,” she says. “Enough small deaths constitute dying.”
“You cannot die,” he says.
She detects a ray of light. “I don’t want to,” she says, her voice cracking.
“Even though your body is cut into pieces,” he says, and she realizes he is quoting from
The Tibetan Book of the Dead,
“you will recover.”
“You fucking bastard!” she cries, slamming down the phone.
Not since the baby carriage was hit by a car has Lou cried, and not since Rapunzel went through the fan belt has she cried in front of anyone. Rapunzel is the only time that Norma knows about. She sits on the edge of Lou’s bed and strokes Lou’s hair, down to her waist. Lou’s crying doesn’t sound like someone crying. If their mother is paying any attention, she’s going to think one of them has gone into labour or something. Halfway down Lou’s back, Norma spreads her fingers. They almost reach either side, that’s how thin Lou is. But Lou is as hard as a board. When Norma was small, for reassurance she liked to lay her hand on Lou’s hard, straight back. What Sandy liked to do was to lay her ear on an empty dinner plate.
“Bastard!” Lou cries. That’s all she’s said so far. Bastard, fucking bastard. Since their father isn’t home, it must be Tom. Norma finds herself a bit staggered to realize that Lou was probably sleeping with Tom, if she is this upset.
“I never trusted that guy,” Norma says passionately, which is true, though based entirely on the fact that his glasses are tinted. She looks at the bedside clock. A quarter to six and she hasn’t started dinner. “Dad’s going to be home soon,” she warns without much hope.
But in another minute the desperate, gasping cries stop, and
Lou rolls over onto her back. “I’m nothing now,” she says. “I’ve got nobody.”
“You’ve got me,” Norma says. “And Sandy.” She pauses. “And Mom.” Lou’s hand drops on Norma’s thigh, and Norma feels the wrist for a pulse. The truth is, she knows what Lou means. Who would
she
be if Stella didn’t want to be her friend anymore? Oh, just the thought makes her light-headed!
“Am I alive?” Lou asks dully.
“As far as I can tell.” With her thumb and forefinger Norma encircles Lou’s tiny wrist. Measuring again. It has amazed her all her life that Lou is her sister.
After dinner Norma walks to Stella’s house. It’s warm for February, and windy. Norma finds herself overcome with happiness. How can she be happy when Lou has a broken heart? But she is. The wind carries her along, and she feels herself to be things she knows she is not—light as a feather, fascinating, unpredictable—and crossing the schoolyard, she just has to open her arms and run.
“Guess what?” Stella greets her at the door. “My parents are out.”
Stella also seems to be in a strange, high mood. Her hair is pinned up in big, spectacular loops, and she’s wearing white lipstick and slashes of rouge. She wants to do something crazy. “I know,” she says. “Let’s get drunk!”
Norma stares at her.
“Oh.” Stella looks crestfallen. “Don’t you want to?”
Norma can’t speak. She’s just thought of something she hasn’t thought about in years: that time she and Lou tied their mother with a skipping rope.
Before she recovers, Stella perks up and starts dragging her by the arm. “Okay, I have a better idea.”
They go into the living room, and Stella turns on the radio. “Let’s dance!” she cries.
Because the music is some old rock and roll song, they start
to jive. Norma, who learned how from their mother, leads. Stella is all loose-limbed and clumsy. She smiles flirtatiously. At the beginning of the next song,“I’m a Believer,” she squeals and runs over to turn up the volume. Then she runs back and stands in front of Norma, shaking her long body like a mop.
“Come on!” she cries. “Shimmy!”
Norma does a more moderate version. This wild Stella is overwhelming. Maybe she already is drunk. Pins fly from her hair, loosening loops that fall like ticker tape. Both of them laugh every time another pin flies out. Stella screams with laughter.
At the end of the song they collapse on the couch. Then Stella jumps right back up again, crying “Cherish!” She yanks Norma’s hand. “I love this song,” she cries.
It’s a slow dance. Norma tries to lead them in a box step. But Stella can’t follow and loses patience. “Let’s just dance normally,” she says, and moving closer she drops her head on Norma’s shoulder.
They keep their feet in one place and sway. Norma’s heart works like a piston, like a heart for both of them, where their breasts touch. When the song is over, news comes on, and Stella turns the dial, trying to find more music to dance to, then gives up and switches the radio off. Norma is still swept away. She lowers herself onto the edge of the couch.
“The Man I Love,”
Stella reads from the
TV Guide.
“? nightclub singer is in love with a pianist who is in love with a society woman.’ Let’s watch that, okay?” Norma nods. Stella turns on the t?, drops a cushion onto Norma’s lap and curls up on the couch with her head on the cushion. “I always use my mom for a pillow,” she explains.
After a minute Norma pulls out the pins holding Stella’s two remaining loops. Combing her fingers through Stella’s hair reminds her of Lou crying on the bed.
She combs Stella’s beautiful hair and curls it around her
fingers. A couple of times Stella gets up—to go to the bathroom and to bring them Cokes and cookies—but she lies back down on Norma’s lap. Presently she falls asleep. Norma strokes her hair so lightly that it will seem like a breeze.
She feels suspended in a supreme and clairvoyant point in her life. She feels that she has crossed over every murky, base desire to get to here. The height of her life is now. She is having her turn now.
Soon it will be Stella’s turn. This thought comes gradually to Norma, partly inspired by the love triangle in the movie. Stella will get a boyfriend soon. Next year at university. But it’s okay. Only a couple of hours ago the idea of losing Stella was unbearable. Now it’s okay, because from the height of her life Norma can see that Stella getting a boyfriend is inevitable and overdue. Stella will get married and be happy forever. From beginning to end, Stella’s life will be perfect. Some lives are meant to be perfect. Obviously there have to be some lives against which the rest—her own life, Lou’s life—are measured.
Lou. If a phone was within reach, Norma would call Lou up right now. She would say … what would she say? Not “You’ve got me” again, although it’s what she wants to tell her, really meaning it now. No, she’d say something that sounds closer to the truth—the tenderness and amazement she felt, feeling the beat of blood in Lou’s tiny wrist.