In her travels through the town, Linda has seen several possibilities for employment: a discount jewelry store; a Laundromat; a bowling alley; a photographic studio. In the end, she takes a job at the diner, waiting tables. She wears a gray uniform of synthetic material that crackles when she sits down. The dress has cap sleeves and a white collar and deep pockets for tips.
On a good night, she will go home with fifteen dollars in coins. It seems a fortune. She likes to walk out of the diner with her hands in her pockets, feeling the money.
Linda is a good waitress, lightning-fast and efficient. The owner, a man who drinks shots from a juice glass when he thinks no one is looking and who tries once to pin her up against the refrigerator and kiss her, tells her, in a rare sober moment, that she is the best waitress he’s ever had.
The diner is a popular spot. Some of the students are regulars. Donny T. sits in the same booth every day and holds what seems to be a kind of court. He also has what appears to be a long memory.
“Our Olympic hopeful,” he says as Linda takes her pad out. He has bedroom eyes and a canny grin and might be attractive were it not for his yellow teeth.
“A cherry Coke and fries,” says Eddie Garrity, skinny and blond and nearly lost inside his leather jacket, a precise imitation, she notices, of Donny T.’s.
“How many laps you do today?” Donny T. asks Linda, a snigger just below the surface.
“Leave her alone,” Eddie says under his breath.
Donny T. turns in his seat. “Hey, cockroach, I want your advice, I’ll ask for it.”
“Do you want anything to eat?” Linda asks evenly.
“Just you,” Donny T. says. He puts his hands up, mock-defending himself. “
ONLY KIDDING. ONLY KIDDING
.” He laughs, the snigger unleashed. “Two cheeseburgers. Fries. Chocolate milkshake. And don’t make me one of those thin jobbies, either. I like a lot of ice cream.”
Linda glances beyond Donny T. to the next table, where a man is having trouble with his briefcase: one of the latches keeps popping open every time he tries to shut the case. Linda watches him fiddle with the latch a half-dozen times and then, in seeming defeat, set the briefcase on a chair. He looks familiar, and she thinks that she might know him. He is twenty-two, twenty-three, she guesses, good-looking in a jacket and a tie. She wonders what he does for a living. Will he be a salesman? A teacher?
Linda takes the orders of the other boys in the booth. Donny T. travels with a retinue. She snaps her order book shut, slips it into her pocket, and bends to clear the booth of the previous party’s trash.
“You settling in OK?” Donny T. asks an inch from her waist.
“Just fine,” she says, reaching for a glass of Coke that is nearly full.
“Don’t you miss that place where you came from? What was it, a Home or something?” Donny T.’s voice has risen a notch, just enough to carry to the next table. The man with the errant briefcase looks up at her.
“I’m fine,” she repeats, letting the Coke tip so that it spills onto the Formica in front of Donny T.
“Watchit!” he cries. He tries to press himself into the back of the vinyl booth as the Coke drips over the edge of the table and onto his jeans. “That’s my leather coat there.”
“Oh,” says Linda. “Sorry.”
______
“What does Donny T. do in the backseat of Eddie Garrity’s Bonneville?”
This to Thomas later that night as they are driving home in the Skylark.
“You don’t know?”
“No, why?”
“He deals.”
She has an image of a deck of cards. And then she realizes. “Drugs, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Marijuana?”
“That,” he says. “And then some.”
“Why do you hang around with him?” Linda asks.
“We’ve been friends since first grade.” He pauses. “Do you think it’s immoral to deal drugs?” A slight challenge in his voice.
“I don’t know,” she says. She hasn’t thought about this much.
“He doesn’t deal to kids,” Thomas says.
“Aren’t we kids?” she asks.
______
In increments, Thomas kisses her mouth and her face and her neck. He opens the top two buttons of her blouse. He gives her a back rub, lifting up her blouse from the waistband of her skirt. Once, his hand lightly brushes her breast. This takes two and a half months.
______
They are in the car in back of the cottage at the beach. It seems a good place to park: the beach is deserted, and the car is mostly hidden by the dunes. Though it is just before Christmas, the windows are steamed. The top four buttons of Linda’s blouse are opened. Thomas has his hand on the smooth skin of her collarbone, inching his way down. She feels nervous, breathless, the way she did on the roller coaster. A sense that once she reaches the top, she will have no choice but to go down the other side. That there will be nothing she can do about it.
He brings her hand to himself. She is surprised and not surprised
—
boys betrayed so visibly by their bodies. She wants to touch him and to please him, but something putrid hovers at the edges of her consciousness.
He feels her resistance and lets her go.
“I’m so sorry,” she says.
A light swings wildly through the car. It bounces off the rearview mirror and blinds Thomas, who looks up quickly.
“Oh, Jesus,” he says, as the other light, the flashing light, reveals itself.
Linda and Thomas are frantic in the front seat, a kind of comedy routine. Thomas gets his shirt buttoned and his trousers zipped, and Linda pulls her peacoat around herself. Impossible not to be reminded of the aunt shouting
whore
and then
slut.
Flailing her arms.
The cop bangs hard on the window. Thomas rolls it down.
A flashlight explodes in Linda’s face, and for a moment, she thinks: it isn’t the police; it’s someone who will kill us. So that when the cop swings the flashlight away and asks to see Thomas’s license, she is nearly relieved.
“You folks know this is private property?” the policeman asks.
“No, I didn’t, Officer,” Thomas says in a voice she’s never heard before
—
exaggeratedly polite, verging on parody. Of course Thomas knew it was private property.
The policeman studies the license, and it seems to take an age.
“You Peter Janes’s boy?” the cop asks finally.
Thomas has to nod.
The cop bends down and peers in at Linda, as though trying to place her. “You all right, Miss?” he asks.
“Yes,” she answers, mortified.
The policeman straightens. “Move along,” he says brusquely to Thomas. “You need to be getting on home.”
Parental now, which she knows will annoy Thomas no end. She wills him to hold his tongue. Thomas rolls the window as the cop walks to his car.
In the Skylark, Thomas and Linda are silent, waiting for the cruiser to drive away. When it has, Thomas leans his head back against the seat and puts his hands over his face. “Shit,” he says, but she can see that he is smiling.
“It was bound to happen,” she offers.
“I can’t believe he knows my father!” Thomas says, a high hysterical giggle beginning.
“You were awfully polite,” Linda says.
______
Passing by her aunt on the way to the bathroom, Linda thinks of Thomas. Sitting in the classroom or handing a menu to a customer, Linda thinks of Thomas. Between classes, they exchange notes or turn corners and kiss. He is waiting for her every morning when she walks down her street, and when she gets into the Skylark, she sits as close to Thomas as she can, the ocean of space on the other side now. They shave minutes from the rest of life and are always late.
______
Linda,
Can you meet me after school?
Thomas,
I was reading O’Neill again. There’s this passage: “None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.”
Linda,
I like O’Neill, but that’s crap. Of course we can help the things life has done to us. I prefer this passage: “I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself — actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself!”
Better, no?
Jesus, this class is boring.
Linda,
I really like the sweater you have on today. You were driving me crazy in fourth period.
Thomas,
Thank you. It’s Eileen’s.
Linda,
What are you doing this weekend? I have to go skiing at Killington. I don’t want to go because it will mean four days away from you. What’s happening to me anyway?
Thomas,
I have to work all weekend. I’ve never been on skis.
Linda,
There’s a hockey game tonight. Will you come?
______
Linda thinks the hockey game is brutal. The rink reeks of sweat and beer. There is slush underfoot. She sits on the bleachers in her peacoat with a sweater underneath, her hands in her pockets, shivering all the same.
The din is deafening. The shouts and calls, the drunken patter, the thwack of the puck, and the blades shushing on the ice echo through the cavernous hockey rink. The imagination provides sound effects for the bits they cannot hear: a stick thrust against the back of a leg; the thud of a hipbone as a player’s skates go out from under him; the crack of a helmet snapping to the ice with the force of a whip. She flinches and then flinches again. The crowd eats it up.
She doesn’t recognize Thomas when he comes out onto the ice. His shoulders and legs are gargantuan in the pads. His teeth are blotted out by the mouth guard. The contours of his head have been erased by the helmet. This is a side of Thomas she has never seen before and couldn’t have imagined: bent forward, stick outstretched, thighs pumping, his movements as fluid as a ballerina’s, as deft as a tap dancer’s. Thomas plays aggressively. She has trouble following the game, doesn’t know the rules. Sometimes she doesn’t even know a goal has been scored until she hears the crowd roar.
That night, inevitably, there is a brawl. This one over an intentional tripping that sends Thomas sprawling, spinning belly down on the ice. He is up in a flash, gathering himself like a spider, digging the tips of his skates into the ice, and then he is all over the player who has done this to him. Linda, who has gone to school with girls and nuns, has never seen a physical fight before, never seen the blows that land, the ricocheting of the limbs, the tugging at the jerseys, the vicious kicks. The fight takes only seconds, but the scene evokes centuries and seems more like gladiatorial combat than anything she has ever witnessed. Thomas shrugs off the referee and heads for the box to serve out his penalty, his helmet in his arm, his hair stiffened upward. He executes a neat stop just before the wire fencing, takes his punishment as his due.
Not contrite. Not contrite at all.
______
On the morning of Christmas Eve, Linda fails to meet Thomas at the bottom of her street as planned. Eileen has just walked in the door, back from New York for the holiday, and Linda cannot bring herself to leave, particularly since it seems to be Linda whom Eileen most wants to see. Though, in truth, they are strangers. Linda has been careful that day not to wear anything that once belonged to Eileen (not wishing to seem a diminished model of the older cousin) and has dressed in clothes bought from her tips: a slim gray woolen skirt and a black cardigan, the sleeves rolled. She is saving up to buy a pair of leather boots.
Linda needn’t have worried. Eileen comes home in tie-dye, fresh from Greenwich Village, where she now lives. She doesn’t wear a bra and has on long leather boots like the ones Linda wants. There are beads around her neck and not a trace of makeup on her face. Linda, with her hair curled for the holiday, looks her cousin over carefully after they embrace.
In the privacy of the girls’ room, Eileen speaks of head shops and sensual massage. Of a band called “The Mamas and the Papas.” Of hash brownies and a job with a project called Upward Bound. She has a boyfriend who plays harmonica for a blues band, and she likes the music of Sonny and Cher. She talks about why women shouldn’t use mascara and why hair is a political statement. Why Linda and Patty and Erin also shouldn’t wear a bra.