Open Secrets (31 page)

“All kinds? That’s good. You sound like the right kind of girl for Billy Doud.”

“Does he drink a lot?” Rhea said. “Billy?”

“Put it this way,” said Wayne. “Is the Pope Jewish? No. Wait. Was Jesus Catholic? No. Continue. I would not want to give you the wrong impression. Nor do I want to get clinical about this. Is Billy a drunk? Is he an alcoholic? Is he an assoholic? I mean an asshole-oholic? No, I got that wrong too. I forgot who I was talking to. Excuse please. Eliminate. Solly.”

He said all this in two strange voices—one artificially high, singsong, one gruff and serious. Rhea didn’t think that she had ever heard him say so much before, in any kind of voice. It was Billy who talked, usually. Wayne said a word now and then, an unimportant word that seemed important because of the tone in which he said it. And yet this tone was often quite empty, quite neutral, the look on his face blank. That made people nervous. There was a sense of contempt being held in check. Rhea had seen Billy try and try to stretch a story, twist it, change its tone—all in order to get Wayne’s grunt of approval, his absolving bark of laughter.

“You must not come to the conclusion that I don’t like Billy,” said Wayne. “No. No. I would never want you to think that.”

“But you don’t like him,” Rhea said with satisfaction. “You don’t at all.” The satisfaction came from the fact that she was talking back to Wayne. She was looking him in the eye. No more than that. For he had made her nervous, too. He was one of those people who make far more of an impression than their size, or their looks, or anything about them warrants. He was not very tall, and his compact body might have been pudgy in childhood—it might get pudgy again. He had a square face, rather pale except for the bluish shadow of the beard that wounded Lucille. His black hair was very straight and fine, and often flopped over his forehead.

“Don’t I?” he said with surprise. “Do I not? How could that be? When Billy is such a lovely person? Look at him over there, drinking and playing cards with the common people. Don’t you find him nice? Or do you ever think it’s a little strange when anybody can be so nice all the time?
All the time
. There’s only one time I’ve known him to slip up, and that’s when you get him talking about some of his old girlfriends. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed that.”

He had his hand on the leg of Rhea’s chair. He was rocking her.

She laughed, giddy from the rocking or perhaps because he had hit on the truth. According to Billy, the girl with the veil and the purple gloves had a breath tainted by cigarette smoking, and another girl used vile language when she got drunk, and one of them had a skin infection, a
fungus
, under her arms. Billy had told Rhea all these things regretfully, but when he mentioned the fungus he broke into a giggle. Unwillingly, with guilty gratification, he giggled.

“He does rake those poor girls over the coals,” Wayne said. “The hairy legs. The hal-it-os-is. Doesn’t it ever make you
nervous? But then you’re so nice and clean. I bet you shave your legs every night.” He ran his hand down her leg, which by good luck she had shaved before going to the dance. “Or do you put that stuff on them, it melts the hair away? What is that stuff called?”

“Neet,” Rhea said.

“Neet! That’s the stuff. Only doesn’t it have kind of a bad smell? A little moldy or like yeast or something? Yeast. Isn’t that another thing girls get? Am I embarrassing you? I should be a gentleman and get you another drink. If I can stand and walk, I’ll get you another drink.

“This has not got hardly any whisky in it,” he said, of the next Coca-Cola he brought her. “This won’t hurt you.” She thought that the first statement was probably a lie, but the second was certainly true. Nothing could hurt her. And nothing was lost on her. She did not think that Wayne had any good intentions. Nevertheless, she was enjoying herself. All the bafflement, the fogged-in feeling she had when she was with Billy had burned away. She felt like laughing at everything that Wayne said, or that she herself said. She felt safe.

“This is a funny house,” she said.

“How is it funny?” said Wayne. “Just how is this house funny? You’re the one that’s funny.”

Rhea looked down at his wagging black head and laughed because he reminded her of some kind of dog. He was clever but there was a stubbornness about him that was close to stupidity. There was a dog’s stubbornness and some misery, too, about the way he kept bumping his head against her knee now, and jerking it back to shake the black hair out of his eyes.

She explained to him, with many interruptions during which she had to laugh at the possibility of explaining, that what was funny was the tin curtain in the corner of the room. She said that she thought there was a dumbwaiter behind it that went up and down from the cellar.

“We could curl up on the shelf,” Wayne said. “Want to try it? We could get Billy to let down the rope.”

She looked again for Billy’s white shirt. So far as she knew, he hadn’t turned around to look at her once since he sat down. Wayne was sitting directly in front of her now, so that if Billy did turn around he wouldn’t be able to see that her shoe was dangling from one toe and Wayne was flicking his fingers against the sole of her foot. She said that she would have to go to the bathroom first.

“I will escort you,” Wayne said.

He grabbed her legs to help himself up. Rhea said, “You’re drunk.”

“I’m not the only one.”

The Monks’ house had a toilet—in fact a bathroom—off the back hall. The bathtub was full of cases of beer—not cooling, just stored there. The toilet flushed properly. Rhea had been afraid it wouldn’t, because it looked as if it hadn’t for the last person.

She looked at her face in the mirror over the sink and spoke to it with recklessness and approval. “Let him,” she said. “
Let him.
” She turned off the light and stepped into the dark hall. Hands took charge of her at once, and she was guided and propelled out the back door. Up against the wall of the house, she and Wayne were pushing and grabbing and kissing each other. She had the idea of herself, at this juncture, being opened and squeezed, opened and squeezed shut, like an accordion. She was getting a warning, too—something in the distance, not connected with what she and Wayne were doing. Some crowding and snorting, inside or outside of her, trying to make itself understood.

The Monks’ dog had come up and was nosing in between them. Wayne knew its name.

“Get down, Rory! Get down, Rory!” he yelled as he yanked at Rhea’s crinoline.

The warning was from her stomach, which was being shoved so tightly against the wall. The back door opened, Wayne said something clearly into her ear—she would never know which of these things happened first—and she was suddenly released and began to vomit. She had no intention of vomiting until she started. Then she went down on her hands and knees and vomited until her stomach felt wrung out like a poor rotten rag. When she finished, she was shivering as if a fever had hit her, and her dance dress and crinoline were wet where the vomit had splattered.

Somebody else—not Wayne—pulled her up and wiped her face with the hem of the dress.

“Keep your mouth closed and breathe through your nose,” Mrs. Monk said. “You get out of here,” she said either to Wayne or to Rory. She gave all of them their orders in the same voice, without sympathy and without blame. She pulled Rhea around the house to her husband’s truck and half hoisted her into it.

Rhea said, “Billy.”

“I’ll tell your Billy. I’ll say you got tired. Don’t try to talk.”

“I’m through throwing up,” Rhea said.

“You never know,” said Mrs. Monk, backing the truck out onto the road. She drove Rhea up the hill and into her own yard without saying anything more. When she had turned the truck around and stopped, she said, “Watch out when you’re stepping down. It’s a bigger step than a car.”

Rhea got herself into the house, used the bathroom without closing the door, kicked off her shoes in the kitchen, climbed the stairs, wadded up her dress and crinoline, and pushed them far under the bed.

Rhea’s father got up early to gather the eggs and get ready to go to Hamilton, as he did every second Sunday. The boys
were going with him—they could ride in the back of the truck. Rhea wasn’t going, because there would not be room in front. Her father was taking Mrs. Corey, whose husband was in the same hospital as Rhea’s mother. When he took Mrs. Corey with him, he always put on a shirt and a tie, because they might go into a restaurant on the way home.

He came and knocked on Rhea’s door to tell her they were leaving. “If you find time heavy, you can clean the eggs on the table,” he said.

He walked to the head of the stairs, then came back. He called through her door, “Drink lots and lots of water.”

Rhea wanted to scream at them all to get out of the house. She had things to consider, things inside her head that could not get free because of the pressure of the people in the house. That was what was causing her to have such a headache. After she had heard the truck’s noise die away along the road, she got out of bed carefully, went carefully downstairs, took three aspirins, drank as much water as she could hold, and measured coffee into the pot without looking down.

The eggs were on the table, in six-quart baskets. There were smears of hen manure and bits of straw stuck to them, waiting to be rubbed off with steel wool.

What things? Words, above all. The words that Wayne had said to her just as Mrs. Monk came out the back door.

I’d like to fuck you if you weren’t so ugly
.

She got dressed, and when the coffee was ready she poured a cup and went outside, out to the side porch, which was in deep morning shade. The aspirins had started to work and now instead of the headache she had a space in her head, a clear precarious space with a light buzz around it.

She was not ugly. She knew she was not ugly. How can you ever be sure that you are not ugly?

But if she was ugly, would Billy Doud have gone out with her in the first place? Billy Doud prided himself on being kind.

But Wayne was very drunk when he said that. Drunkards speak truth.

It was a good thing she was not going to see her mother that day. If she ever wormed out of Rhea what was the matter—and Rhea could never be certain that she would not do that—then her mother would want Wayne chastised. She would be capable of phoning his father, the minister. The word “fuck” was what would incense her, more than the word “ugly.” She would miss the point entirely.

Rhea’s father’s reaction would be more complicated. He would blame Billy for taking her into a place like Monk’s. Billy, Billy’s sort of friends. He would be angry about the
fuck
part, but really he would be ashamed of Rhea. He would be forever ashamed that a man had called her ugly.

You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.

She knew she was not ugly. How could she know she was not ugly?

She did not think about Billy and Wayne, or about what this might mean between them. She was not as yet very interested in other people. She did think that when Wayne said those words, he used his real voice.

She did not want to go back inside the house, to have to look at the baskets full of dirty eggs. She started walking down the lane, wincing in the sunlight, lowering her head between one island of shade and the next. Each tree was different there, and each was a milestone when she used to ask her mother how far she could go to meet her father, coming home from town. As far as the hawthorn tree, as far as the beech tree, as far as the maple. He would stop and let Rhea ride on the running board.

A car hooted from the road. Somebody who knew her, or just a man going by. She wanted to get out of sight, so she cut across the field that the chickens had picked clean and paved
slick with their droppings. In one of the trees at the far side of this field, her brothers had built a tree house. It was just a platform, with boards nailed to the tree trunk for you to climb. Rhea did that—she climbed up and sat on the platform. She saw that her brothers had cut windows in the leafy branches, for spying. She could look down on the road, and presently she saw a few cars bringing country children into town to the early Sunday school at the Baptist Church. People in the cars couldn’t see her. Billy or Wayne wouldn’t be able to see her, if by any chance they should come looking with explanations or accusations or apologies.

In another direction, she could see flashes of the river and a part of the old fairgrounds. It was easy from here to make out, in the long grass, where the racetrack used to go round.

She saw a person walking, following the racetrack. It was Eunie Morgan, and she was wearing her pajamas. She was walking along the racetrack, in light-colored, maybe pale pink, pajamas, at about half past nine in the morning. She followed the track until it veered off, going down to where the riverbank path used to be. The bushes hid her.

Eunie Morgan with her white hair sticking up, her hair and her pajamas catching the light. Like an angel in feathers. But walking in her usual awkward, assertive way—head pushed forward, arms swinging free. Rhea didn’t know what Eunie could be doing there. She didn’t know anything about Eunie’s disappearance. The sight of Eunie seemed both strange and natural to her.

She remembered how on hot summer days, she used to think that Eunie’s hair looked like a snowball or like threads of ice preserved from winter, and she would want to mash her face against it, to get cool.

She remembered the hot grass and garlic and the jumping-out-of-your-skin feeling, when they were turning into Toms.