“So what do you say, dickhead, you want to go test it out now?” The boys laugh. “I’ll bet you twenty-five you won’t go in.”
Thomas turns to Linda and snorts, as if to say, I told you they were jerks.
Linda glances down at her feet and over toward the boardwalk. Lovers are walking arm in arm, and some are descending to the beach. Overcoats will become blankets. In the wind, the streetlamp, on a wire, swings wildly, making the shadows lurch.
“He’s right,” Linda says quietly to Thomas.
He looks at her, a quizzical expression on his face.
“The water’s warmer in October. It’ll feel like a bath on a night like tonight,” she says.
At the home for wayward girls, Linda sometimes slipped out of her room when the nuns were asleep and walked out onto the rocks. There was one rock from which it was safe to dive. She would take off her robe and pajamas and plunge into the surf. She liked being naked, the sense of being free of the nuns.
Beside them, the argument continues. The boy who is sure the water is warm, whose name is Eddie Garrity, gets down on his belly, rolls his sleeves, and extends his arm to the water to test it. He can’t reach. It is, of course, too much trouble to leave the pier, take off his socks and shoes, roll his cuffs, and test it at the shore, as any sensible person would.
“Hey, Eddie, I’ll lower you down you want to test it,” a boy named Donny T. says and laughs hysterically. He means, I’ll lower you down and then let you fall in.
“Screw you,” says Eddie, scrambling to his feet.
“I told you twenty-five,” says Donny T.
Linda listens to the argument. She leaves Thomas’s side and walks to the far end of the pier. With her back to the boys, she takes off her peacoat and head scarf, her sweater and skirt, her shoes and socks. In her slip, she dives into the water.
______
When Linda comes up for air, she can see Thomas kneeling on the pier. He has an overcoat in his hands. Behind Thomas, within the pod of boys, Eddie has his arms wrapped around his chest. He is silent. The girl has gone in for him.
She hitches herself onto the pier, does a quick turn mid-air and sits with her back to Thomas. She is hunched in the cold. Thomas wraps her in the wool overcoat.
“Donny, give me your shirt,” he demands.
There is no sound of protest from Donny T. Within a minute, Linda feels a cotton shirt grazing her shoulder.
She uses the shirt to dry her face and hair. She puts on her sweater and her skirt as best she can with her back to the boys. She lays a hand on Thomas’s shoulder to balance herself as she steps into her shoes. Thomas holds her peacoat open for her, and she slips her arms into it. The boys are absolutely silent.
“The water’s warmer than the air,” Thomas says to them as he and Linda leave the pier.
______
Linda and Thomas have to walk quickly because she is shivering.
“I have a car,” he says. “I’ll give you a ride.”
“No,” she says. “I just live across the way.”
She has an image, which she doesn’t like, of leaving a wet spot on the seat of Thomas’s car. More important, she doesn’t want the cousins asking questions.
______
He walks her across Nantasket Avenue and up Park. Her sweater is scratchy on her arms, and as she walks sea water drips from her slip onto her calves and runs down into her socks.
“Why did you do it?” Thomas asks.
Her teeth are chattering beyond her control. Thomas puts an arm tightly around her to stop the shaking. Watching them, one might think the girl was sick, had perhaps drunk too much, and that the boy was walking her home.
Why has she done it? It’s a valid question. For the theatrics? To prove a point? To overcome the commonness of her name? To cleanse herself?
“I don’t know,” she says truthfully.
Her hair is plastered to her head, all the fuss with the rollers forgotten. She looks her worst, her nose running from the sea water.
Her hair is, and always has been, her one vanity. Normally, it is thick and long, the color running to warm pine. At the home for wayward girls, she sometimes grew it to her waist, though the nuns always made her wear it in braids.
“Well, it was great,” he says, rubbing her arms to keep the circulation going. And then he laughs and shakes his head. “Jesus,” he says, “they’ll be talking about this for weeks.”
______
Linda leaves Thomas at the bottom of her street.
“I’m all right now,” she says and detaches herself from his arm.
“Can I call you tomorrow?” he asks.
She thinks a moment. No one has yet called her at the apartment.
“It would be better if I met you,” she says.
“Here?” he asks. “At noon?”
“I’ll try.”
She runs up the street, though her limbs are shivering and stiff, and she knows she looks ungainly. As she turns the corner, she cannot resist glancing back. He is standing where she left him. He raises a hand and waves.
______
Her aunt is in the hallway when she enters the apartment. The aunt’s hair is rolled in pin curls and is secured with a hairnet: little coils of gold on silver stems behind a wire fence. Normally, her hair is frizzy, and sometimes Linda can see her scalp. The aunt has a pronounced widow’s peak that she tries to hide with bangs.
The aunt has on a pink seersucker bathrobe and flannel pajamas with teapots on them. The slippers, once pink, are worn beige. The aunt’s eyebrows are unkempt, but she has traces of maroon lipstick on her mouth, as though she were ambivalent about her vanity.
They stand on separate sides of a fault, each wanting something from the other.
“Where have you been?” the aunt asks.
“I fell in,” Linda says, walking past her.
______
Thomas picks Linda up the next day in a white Buick Skylark convertible with leather trim the color of her aunt’s lipstick. Linda is wearing dungarees in defiance of the Sunday, even though she has dutifully gone to church with the cousins. Thomas has on the same jacket he wore the night before, but good trousers, like a boy would wear to school.
“I didn’t bring a scarf,” she says. “I didn’t know it would be a convertible.”
“Do you want to go back and get one?”
“No,” she says.
They sit in the car for a moment before he starts the engine. There seems to be something each wants to say, though for a time neither of them speaks.
“Did you get yelled at?” Thomas asks finally.
“I got looked askance at,” she says, and he smiles.
“Do you want to go for a drive?”
“Where?”
“Anywhere. Just a drive.”
“Sure,” she says.
In the car, there is an ocean of space between Thomas and Linda. She studies the chrome dashboard, the plugs that say
Light
and
Wiper
and
Lighter
and
Accessory.
What exactly will the Accessory be? she wonders. Thomas turns on the radio, and an energetic patter issues forth. It is all wrong for them, as though Ricky Nelson had wandered into a chamber orchestra. Thomas switches it off at once.
“Sometimes when I drive,” he says, “I don’t play the radio. I need time to think.”
“So do I,” she says. “Need time to think, I mean.”
She sits with her hands in the pockets of her peacoat. If she hadn’t worn a coat, she would sit on her hands.
She likes the open air of the convertible, even though her hair whips into her eyes, and she knows it will be snarled and stringy when he stops the car. When the aunt’s boyfriend was around and there was actually a car, she and her cousins were routinely packed into a backseat meant for three. On rainy days, the windows were shut tight, and her aunt smoked. Just thinking about it now gives Linda a headache.
Linda notes, as Thomas is driving, that the color of the water and the sky have intensified since the day before; the sun glints painfully from the sea. It is a fabulous piece of jewelry with a million diamonds.
Diplomatically, Thomas moves away from the neighborhood where Linda lives. Diplomatically, he does not point out his own house on Allerton Hill.
“Did you go away?” he asks as they make a turn onto Samoset.
“Yes.”
“Did you have a baby?”
She is stunned by the boy’s boldness, but exhilarated nonetheless. She might have spent the entire year without a single direct question, learned to live with sniggered looks and aspersions.
“No,” she says.
“I don’t care about that,” he says. He amends himself. “Well, I care, because it happened to you, but it wouldn’t have made me like you any less. I don’t care about reputation.”
“Why do you like me?” she asks.
“I liked the way you walked into the classroom,” he says. “That first day. You were trying for something
—
trying to be cool
—
but I could see that you weren’t. That you might be someone others could take advantage of.” He thinks a minute. “Now, I’m not so sure about that.”
“What made you change your mind?”
“You. Last night. When you jumped into the water.”
“Dove.”
“Dove into the water. You did that for yourself, didn’t you?”
She is silent. Even with the ocean between them, she can smell the boy
—
that warm toast scent, and something else. Of course, a laundered shirt.
“I’m a fallen woman,” Linda says, only partly joking.
“Magdalene,” he says, half turned toward her and steering with one hand.
“That was the name of the home,” she says.
“Really?”
“They’re always called Magdalene.”
“You’re a Catholic.”
“Yes. You’re not?”
“No.”
“How do you know about Magdalene?”
“Everybody knows about Magdalene,” he says.
“Do they? I always thought she was an especially Catholic idea.”
“Do you go to church regularly?”
“That’s a personal question.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yes, I do.”
“And Confession?”
“Yes.”
“What do you confess?”
She is unnerved by his questions. No one has ever probed her quite like this. Not even the nuns. Their questions were predictable and rote. A catechism.
“I’m just asking,” he says, somewhat apologetic. “What a girl like you would possibly have to confess.”
“Oh, there’s always something,” she says. “Impure thoughts, mostly.”
“Impure meaning what?”
“Impure,” she says.
______
Thomas takes her to a diner on the beach and leads her to a booth near the entrance with seats as red as those they’ve just left. She is embarrassed about her hair, which she tries to finger-comb in the sun visor. Thomas looks away while she does this. Her hair is hopeless, and she gives it up.
“Next time, I’ll bring a scarf,” he says. “I’ll keep it in the glove compartment.”
She is elated by his assumption that there will be a next time.
______
She might not have eaten in years. She eats her hamburger and fries, his cheeseburger, drinks both milkshakes, and witnesses the first of dozens of meals that Thomas will hardly touch.
“You’re not hungry?” she asks.
“Not really,” he says. “You eat it.”
She does, gratefully. It seems there is never enough food at home.
“I know Michael. We play hockey together,” Thomas says.
Varsity Hockey 2, 3.
“You’re playing already?” she asks.
“Not yet,” he says. “We’ll start soon. I see Michael around.”
“Do you have cousins?” she asks flippantly.
“Hardly. Only two.”
“Let me guess. You’re Episcopal.”
“Nothing, really. Why don’t you live with your parents? Did something happen to them?”
“My mother died,” she says, mopping up the ketchup with her bun. “In a bus accident. My father just sort of disappeared after that.”
“Broken heart?”
“Not really.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.”
He asks her if she wants anything else to eat.
“No,” she says. “I’m stuffed. Where do you live?”
“Allerton Hill,” he says.
“I thought so.”
He looks away.
“Did we go by your house?” she asks.