The Girl from Charnelle (27 page)

Inside, a pretty middle-aged woman wearing an unfortunate amount of mascara and blue eye shadow appeared beside them, asking if she could help.

“Me and my fiancée are looking for some wedding-night goodies, if you know what I mean?”

Laura blushed and slapped him on the chest. “Shut up!”

The woman smiled condescendingly, as if she'd seen these kinds of shenanigans before and they had long since lost their charm. “Just let me know if I can help you.”

The shop was full of mannequins dressed so provocatively that Laura was embarrassed to be walking among them, but John kept touching the fabric, talking loud as you please: “I like this, honey,” and “What do you think about this, sweetie?” He pulled her close to him behind a rack of colorful lacy brassieres and kissed her.

“John, stop it,” she whispered, alarmed.

“It doesn't matter,” he said and kissed her again. “We can do anything we want here.”

They left the store with a sheer purple nightgown, which she made John pay for while she waited outside the store because she didn't want to exchange looks with the lady. She watched through the window as John laughed, and then the lady laughed as well and seemed to lean in too close to him. A sudden hatred for the woman sparked in Laura's chest. But outside the store he handed her the package, took her in his arms, and whirled her around so that her dress billowed.

“What do you want to do next?” he asked. “The city is yours.”

 

They went to see a movie at a big theater, older but nicer than the Paladian in Amarillo. It was Alfred Hitchcock's
Psycho
. She remembered back in March when she'd seen the trailer for this movie at the drive-in with her brothers and the Letig boys, and how she'd come back to poker night at the house, and she and John had kissed in the bathroom. How foolish they were. How long ago that seemed. Could it have been only a few months? She was just a girl then, she thought. So much had happened since—all of it leading to this moment in Houston.

The movie scared her badly. She curled up in a fetal position, clutching his arm, hiding her face against his shoulder every few minutes. It was excruciating and wonderful, but at the end she felt queasy and ready to be outdoors. She was glad it was light out; the sun still blazed.

They ate dinner at a Mexican place, and then they went to a bar where there was a live four-piece band that played country music. They wouldn't let her in, said she was too young.

“She's my wife,” John said. “She's twenty, for Christ's sake.”

“She looks about fifteen or sixteen to me.”

“Well, she's not.”

“Where's her ring if she's your wife?”

“At home.”

“You show me the ring, and she gets in.”

“Okay, fine. We'll just do that.”

So they went to a grocery store and kept buying and opening boxes of Cracker Jacks until they found a ring, and when they returned, the doorman
cocked his eyebrow, nodded his head reluctantly, and waved them in. John ordered a couple of beers, but she didn't like the taste of hers, so he got her a margarita. The band—fiddle, guitar, harmonica, and drums—was good, though not as good as the Pick Wickers, and she and John stumbled through a couple of numbers, found their rhythm, and then danced easily over the sawdust-covered floor with under-the-arm twirls and deep-dipping finales.

“Damn, you're good!” he said.

Their faces were beaded in sweat. His shirt was soaked through. They danced for two more hours, jitterbugging, polka-ing, two-stepping, slow-dancing, breaking only to drink and go to the bathroom, but the songs kept getting better, and by the end of the night the crowd began singing along. A drunk woman tore off her shirt and whirled it above her head like a lasso, and everybody clapped while she did it, and then the band finished their last set with a series of slow waltzes, and John and Laura danced close, not talking, their clothing slick and warm from the sweat, steam rising from them both. She could feel him hardening against her, and he moved his hand to the small of her back and then lower. At the end of the song, he picked her up and kissed her.

In the parking lot, inside the truck, with the windows rolled down, they began kissing again, their hands on each other's clothes, the door against her back, mouth and fingers together, and the musky aroma of wet clothing and sweat. Then he was under her dress, his pants down, and soon they were rocking together, and she was almost there, almost, but from far away, and then suddenly very close, she heard a couple shouting, laughing, and then they were standing next to John's truck.

“Where are the goddamn keys?” a woman slurred.

“In your fucking purse,” a man said.

“John,” she whispered, pushing him away. They slid down in the seat and listened to the couple argue.

“I can do it, goddamn it!” the woman said.

“Well, do it then!”

Finally the doors opened and shut, and the car started and backed out, crunching gravel.

“Let's go,” Laura said. John lifted his head, his hair tousled, his face cracked into a drugged smile. The car was gone, but she was ready to go back now to their cabin, to the sound of the ocean, where they could do anything they wanted and no one would disturb them. “I want to swim.”

 

Although they were on the southeast side of Houston, it still took them a while to reach Galveston. With the windows open and the wind blowing in, their clothes dried. She was chilled by the time they drove up to the cabin, and swimming in the ocean no longer seemed such a good idea. Inside, they undressed, and despite the interim, they quickly found their previous rhythm, and the sound of the gulf unleashed something in her, allowed her to give herself to him in a way that was on the verge of frightening. She kept pulling him closer to her. As his mouth and hands and then body moved over her, she felt like she was swimming in air as thick and sweet as molasses.

Afterward they lay exhausted on the bed. Her legs tingled from the dancing, and she listened to the ocean roar hypnotically, the night gulls whimpering. She wiggled her sore toes, rotated her ankles. She looked at John. His eyes were closed. She reached over and ran her fingers slowly over his face and then down his body. She put her leg over his, pressed against him tightly. Without opening his eyes, he moved his arm under her head.

Tomorrow was their last day. She could sense the real world encroaching, the long drive home, her father, her brothers, John's wife and sons. The unanswered questions about his interest in the jobs here, what that might mean. She didn't want those thoughts crowding in on this moment. She counted by Mississippis until she reached thirty and breathed deeply.

“John,” she said.

He didn't answer.

“John, are you asleep?”

“Almost,” he said.

“I wish it could always be like this,” she said.

He nodded but didn't say anything.

“John…”

“Yeah, me too,” he mumbled.

She listened as he breathed steadily beside her. She wished that she could tell him how she felt, what she hoped was their future, though she was afraid to do that. They'd said more to each other during this time than all their other times combined, but still she feared saying aloud to him that what she really wanted was to never go back to the silence and secrecy of
Charnelle. She wanted to be together like this without the nagging sense of time always running out on them. Perhaps Gloria was right, after all. No matter how much Laura insisted that she wanted to just enjoy this time with John for what it was—wanted simply to let it
be
rather than worry about where it was
going,
what it would
become,
how it would
end
—she could sense a growing attachment to her dreams about their future and a deeper undercurrent of fear that they
were
only dreams.

She closed her eyes and told herself to go to sleep, though part of her wanted to lie awake all night, right here, right now, not allow sleep to rob any more of their time together. But she nestled closer to him, and then soon she was asleep, because, for now, that was okay.

T
hey had another day together in Charnelle before either Mrs. Letig or Laura's family returned. They spent that night at the old barn. It was nice but anticlimactic, which Laura attributed to the arid heat and the absence of water, the sizzle of cicadas instead of night gulls and insistent waves. Their backs and shoulders and noses were sunburned, and in the kerosene lamplight they took turns peeling sheets of skin from each other's bodies and laying them on the cloth that covered the splintery end table by the pallet. She had a headache, which the cola and cheese and crackers didn't drive away, so she slept against him as he read a Jack London book,
The Call of the Wild,
that she'd given to him as a gift; she'd bought it at a dime store in Fort Worth when they stopped for gas and Cokes, and it delighted her to see him enjoying what she'd offered him, caught up in Buck the dog's journey back to the wild. Though there was a failure of magic on this final night together, it was comfortable and soft. She had a sense that this was how it was supposed to be, this slow and easy.

And when her father and brothers returned that Tuesday evening, they were so caught up in telling her their adventures that they never even suspected she'd had adventures of her own. And by the next day, all their routines resumed as if nothing had happened, as if the week had never existed.

Disappeared,
she thought.
Disappeared
.

 

She and John didn't meet that Thursday or the next Monday, and that, too, seemed fine, but by Tuesday depression began to nibble at her.

The days felt prolonged and busy, irritatingly meaningless: watching Rich and Gene, cooking meals for everybody—all that fish to be cleaned and then fried or grilled—and scrubbing the dishes afterward, washing the clothes, clipping them to the lines outside in the heat, badgering Gene and Rich to help, she and Manny snapping at each other again with that unsettling animosity that had grown like scar tissue between them. Her father returned in the evenings from work and would read the paper in his old chair, and they'd maybe listen to the radio—a baseball game or the combination of country and rockabilly on KSNP—or watch television—
Gunsmoke, Leave It to Beaver, Rawhide
—all these stupid shows with the sole purpose of helping the evening pass. She reread her magazines. She bought new ones. But they seemed just as stupid, just as frivolous. Who cared about Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh's marriage or about Elvis's time in the army and what lucky girl he fell in love with? The only stories that really grabbed her attention were the ones about Senator Kennedy's wife. She loved one picture she'd seen of Mrs. Kennedy sitting atop a horse, dressed in a riding outfit, long English boots, and a riding cap. It made Laura think of that fall she took that one Easter and how it might not have happened if she'd grown up like Jackie Kennedy, riding Thoroughbreds and wearing sleek boots and fashionable riding caps instead of galloping around (in her tennis shoes) on jumpy, unpredictable mares like Hayworth. She went swimming with Debbie and Marlene, but even that irritated her, trying to pay attention to Marlene's stupid jokes or hearing about Debbie's nails or which boy she now had a crush on.

At the pool, she lay on the grass and listened to the other swimmers splashing, having fun, and she tried to relive her time in Galveston, but it never worked in the way she wanted it to. There were always interruptions, usually Marlene with some idiotic question or comment—“What do you
think? Red or pink nail polish?” Or: “Oh, I dread going back to school” (this said for the hundredth time).

Passing the time
. That was her mother's old phrase for these kinds of days.

Killing time
. That was the other phrase for it. Her father's.

There was no urgency in these phrases, no sense of alarm, unless there was some chore to do. For the most part, these things were said with smiles, at the end of the day, after work and before sleep as they tried to occupy themselves. Time passed away. Or was killed. She began to think of the days and nights as a kind of prolonged death, a murder that everybody seemed strangely happy about.

She fully expected that the trip to Galveston would rejuvenate her, but it had the opposite effect, an unwelcome surprise. She felt like a prisoner granted a week of freedom, and not just grimy, grubby freedom but true, blessed, intoxicating freedom. The prisoner believes that these days will help sustain the rest of the sentence, but instead they make the return all the more miserable. The contrast ruins it. Knowing what is possible but not probable transforms reality into a peculiar misery.

The days plodded along in a weary torpor. But at night she had trouble sleeping. She heard every snore and fart and belch and cough, every twitching in the bed of her brothers. It disgusted her. The cicadas and crickets blared like a fire alarm. When she shut her eyes, trying to transport herself back to her time in Galveston, she would be close to getting the sense of it, the rhythm of it, but she could never penetrate to the heart of that experience, not even in her dreams. Instead she felt on the periphery, as if she were excluded even from her own memories.

Late one night, her thoughts drifted to last year's civics class. Mrs. Conroy had them read Plato's “Allegory of the Cave.” The people were all in chains in the cave, facing forward, looking at a wall, upon which shadows from the flames behind them flickered, and the people believed that the shadows were the real thing, and so they were content. But then one person escaped the chains, turned, and saw that the flames made the shadows and that there was an opening to the outside. He went out into the light and was nearly blinded. When he went back into the cave to tell the others what he'd seen, they wouldn't believe him.

In their class discussion, Mrs. Conroy had suggested that Plato's question, the one he never answered completely but posed so forcefully, was
whether the people
should
know what the reality was. Or if, because they were content in their ignorance, they should stay where they were. “Was ignorance a kind of bliss?” she asked, dropping her glasses to the end of her nose, staring at them provocatively. Laura understood that the allegory suggested something ambivalent about new knowledge—not just a light but a
blinding
light, made all the more blinding because of so many years spent in the dark.

During that discussion she had thought about Gloria, how they'd kept her in the dark about their mother disappearing, and how happy her letters seemed for a while. Though Gloria had protested this summer that it was her right to know, Laura still believed that Gloria would have been better off if they'd never told her.

But now the allegory took on an even more personal meaning. For hadn't her and John's time in Galveston been a kind of escape into the light? And now this return seemed all the more depressing because there was really no escaping again, at least not in the foreseeable future, and even if it did happen, it wouldn't be the same. Couldn't be the same, in fact, because now she knew that the disappointment of returning to Charnelle, to their normal lives, apart from each other, would be waiting on the other side of any idyll. And wouldn't that knowledge taint the idyll?

Like when you put a drop of black ink in a glass of milk, the whole thing would be darkened.

 

The fall term began the next Monday, and she was thankful. That first week of school, she didn't get to meet John. They'd spent an extra-long time together the previous Thursday, and then she kept the Letig boys on Saturday, which was the first time she'd watched them since they'd returned from their trip. She felt a new eagerness to be in their company, more appreciative of their desire to hug her and hold her, more tolerant of their fussiness. Tucking them in, she had a quick, dark moment where she imagined Mrs. Letig dying in the hospital or leaving the boys as her own mother had done—Laura moving in, consoling and caring for them and for John. Later, doing the Letig dishes, picking up puzzles and toys, she had to shake her head to clear the scenario from her mind.

He'd driven her home, told his wife he was going to stop by a coworker's house to retrieve some tools he'd loaned him. They had almost
an hour then, too, parked in his truck alongside the Waskalanti Creek, the windows rolled down, the sound of the water trickling close by, the dark trees looming above, both of them hurried and fierce so that afterward there were striped lines from the vinyl upholstery on her arms and the backs of her legs. Her lips burned, her thighs chafed.

After he dropped her off, she heard a pleasant buzzing sound in her head. In the bathroom, steam swirled above the tub, rising not so much from the water, she thought, as from herself. Above the buzzing, she kept hearing the lyrics to the Patsy Cline song—“I go walkin', after midnight, searchin' for you”—that had been playing in the truck when they made love, so that the words themselves and the mournful rhythms of the tune transported her back there. She liked this sated feeling, a pampered, exhausted delight, and it seemed to satisfy her for the week so that she didn't long for John or even miss him during those first days of school.

It was actually good to be back, a junior now, with status, not a measly sophomore anymore. There was electricity in the air the first morning, pushing down the crowded hallway, everyone nicely dressed, with summer tans and sun-bleached hair. She had trigonometry, which she slightly dreaded—math had never been her strong suit—though the teacher, Mr. Whitmore, promised to be funny and charming. And English with Mr. Sparling, and home economics, which all the girls were required to take, and chemistry, and American history and civics, and gym, and choir.

She had always liked school and was reminded the first day that she had, unbeknownst to her, missed it over the summer. She liked the discipline, the sense of her mind stretching like a balloon around new knowledge. That stretching had always been easy—a cinch, really. She had seen her classmates, especially some of the boys, struggle, had watched their eyes glaze over, their eyelids drooping with the lectures, and she had never understood their boredom or frustration—or their failure. She never commented on it; she knew she was in the minority. It was not really popular in Charnelle to say you liked school, or to be good at it, so she didn't talk much about it, but people knew she was bright, and she had helped classmates before and felt she had a knack for showing them what the teachers failed to make them understand in class and for helping them see that they weren't dumb. She liked this feeling. She wondered if she'd be a teacher when she got older. She could see herself doing that, though it seemed too early to make any decisions like that about her life.

It was still hot, so after school Marlene and Debbie and Laura went swimming at the pool, which wouldn't close until the following week, after Labor Day. Marlene and Debbie had both been gone the week before school started, traveling with their families, visiting relatives. Though Laura had been so tired of their company during the summer, now she was eager to see them, wanted again the easy banter, the jokes and the teasing and the hushed excitement of gossip.

Marlene confessed that she had fallen in love with her cousin's best friend while in Colorado the past week. He was her age, and they had spent most of the time hiking and climbing the hills and mountains, and she showed them a strip of pictures from one of those photo booths, where the camera takes four for a dime and spits them out immediately. He didn't look all that good to Laura. His skin was pocked, and he seemed cross-eyed and very young. Marlene told the story of their courtship, confessing to hours of kissing, and yes, she had let him go to second base, and Laura and Debbie were the only ones who knew, and they couldn't tell anyone. Marlene felt bad about what she had done, but he was so sweet, and it seemed to make him happy. And yes, she did sort of like it, but only because she loved him.

Laura listened, slightly bored, to the story, looking at Debbie, whose mouth was open. And then Debbie confessed that she, too, had let a boy feel her breasts this summer, that it was no big deal; in fact, he was clumsy and annoying with his rough hands, not knowing how hard or soft to squeeze, yet he believed himself to be some kind of apprentice Casanova. They all laughed about it, and Marlene said it could only happen while they were on vacation, and far away, where no one really knew them. They looked at Laura, wondering if she also had a confession for them, but she just smiled and shook her head like she couldn't believe their boldness. She pretended to be amusingly scandalized, but all the while she thought,
I can never tell them
. They seemed so young to her, but that also reassured her. She would sit quietly, just listen to their stories, as innocent as they were, and let them think that she was awed by what they had done.

 

Eleventh grade, as mandated by the board of education, required students to immerse themselves in American culture—American government, American history, American literature. Until recently that had been handled separately by the different departments at Charnelle High. But
Dwight Sparling, the juniors' English teacher, had the previous year launched a new, experimental curriculum designed to integrate the three subjects in a more thematically rich way. In assembly, on the third morning of the school year, he provided the overview lecture about this new initiative to the junior class.

Mr. Sparling was a small man with rounded features, a stark white complexion, and a face that didn't seem to go together but was still comically handsome. You could never quite tell if he was serious or not. It was rumored that he had almost completed his doctorate at the University of Texas in Austin but that he had returned to Charnelle because his parents were very ill. Charnelle High had refused at first to hire him because they believed he was overqualified, but he had evidently convinced the principal that there was no such thing as being overqualified in education, so he was given a probationary contract, which quickly turned into a full-status position once they realized what they had. No one really believed that he would be around for very long; it was rumored that once his parents died he would head back to Austin to complete his dissertation and get a college faculty position.