An American Tune

by Barbara Shoup

  What was wrong with her, anyway? She knew nothing about the war in Vietnam, really. Plus, hadn’t she been as disrespectful to the flag as Tom had been, dumping it on a park bench because she was too embarrassed to be seen carrying it?

  So he had lost his temper. So what? What right had she to judge him over a stupid fight when there were dozens – maybe hundreds – of things she’d seen him do that tipped the balance the other way. The ragged old guy who hung out near the square, looking for a handout. Most everyone just ignored him, but didn’t Tom always stop and give him a quarter? Wasn’t he constantly out in the parking lot of the Sig house working on the old, beat-up car of one of the cooks, buying parts with his own money because he knew she couldn’t afford them? And as for fighting, hadn’t he also decked Jack Newley who’d dragged a couple of pledges up in his room, gotten them drunk, and then paddled them with one of those fraternity paddles after he ordered them to do pushups and they collapsed, slipping and sliding in their own vomit?

  “Jesus,” he’d said afterwards, rubbing his scraped knuckles. “What’s the matter with him, anyway? Causing misery just because he can.”

  Jane slid down onto the bed, curled up with her arm over her eyes. She didn’t even care about the war; it had nothing to do with her. What had she been thinking to risk the only real happiness she’d ever known for some idea put in her head by a guy like Wayne Dugan, who as far as she could tell spent his whole life pissed off about everything. She was stupid, stupid – and now Tom knew. Already, she missed him so much. But hadn’t she known, deep in her heart, that it was just a matter of time before he figured out how pathetic she really was and fell out of love with her?

  When the phone rang, she didn’t answer it. Bridget, she thought. She wasn’t ready to talk to her. But it rang twenty, thirty, forty times and, finally, she picked up the receiver, resigned to it.

  “I’m downstairs,” Tom said. “We have a date, right?”

  She was so shocked to hear his voice she couldn’t answer.

  “Jane? Jane, look, I –”

  “But I’m not ready,” she said. “I –”

  “It’s okay. I’ll wait for you.”

  She threw on some clean clothes, put on some makeup. She waited five minutes at the elevator, agitated, her heart pounding, watching the lights above the door blink as it stopped and started, collecting girls and carrying them down toward their Saturday night dates, then finally gave up and rushed down nine flights of stairs, surprising Tom who was searching for her among the girls spilling out of the elevator.

  “Jane!” he said, and she stepped into his arms. For a long moment, he held her so tightly she could hardly breathe. “I’m sorry,” he said, stepping back so he could look at her. “You were right. I was a jerk about the flag. I mean it. I’m sorry.”

  “No,” she said. “I was –”

  “Hey.” Tom drew her close again, cupping her head with his hand. “Forget it, okay? Jane? I don’t give a shit about any of that.”

  “Me, either,” she whispered, against his chest.

  “Let’s go, then. I’m starving.”

  But he continued to hold her close to him as they walked out into the chilly evening together.

  3

  “Unchained Melody”

  Jane set out for the bus stop every day in the mid-afternoon, the hottest part of the day, carrying a sack lunch and whatever book she was reading. It was a half-hour’s walk, through neatly laid out subdivisions of little square houses like the one she lived in with her family, past the swimming pool in the park full of happy, screaming children, past the public library to which she’d ridden her bike most summer afternoons of her childhood. She longed to walk up the steps, into the cool of the little stone building and lose herself reading in a quiet corner. But she trudged on, tired, bored nearly to tears, the hot concrete burning up through the thin soles of her loafers. The new trees lining the streets gave little shade, and she was sticky with sweat, nauseous from the heat by the time she climbed on the wheezing bus and sat down next to an open window.

  She clocked in at her summer job at the bookbindery at three and walked through the factory, past the big machines spitting out pastel maps that would be bound into the atlases she would spend the next eight hours packing into cardboard boxes. The work was mind-numbingly repetitive, the factory hot, her fellow workers unfriendly. But a year of college had taught her something about irony, and she could appreciate the image of herself, her own world shrunk to this workstation, her shoulders aching from packing an endless supply of atlases, worlds she longed to see.

  At the dinner break, she went to a table in the far corner of the cafeteria and read while she ate the meal her mother had packed for her. She and Bridget had decided to make their way through the list Professor Farlow had handed out the last week of class: “Some Novels Every Serious Reader Should Know.” They’d gone to the bookstore and bought used, battered copies cheap. She was at the D’s. Halfway through Dreiser’s American Tragedy, mesmerized by the unfolding story of the young man who dared to dream. The sounds of the factory around her enhanced the effect of the book, so that when the whistle blew she was momentarily both in the book and in the real, grim world of the factory. Herself and the desperate young man in the book who was willing to do whatever he had to do, anything, not to fall backward into the small, mean life the world intended for him to live.

  When she emerged from the bookbindery a few minutes after eleven, her father was waiting for her, smoking, listening to big band music on the car radio. She could hear it through the open window as she came across the parking lot – Glenn Miller, the Dorsey Brothers. The music of his youth, music he had danced to with her mother when they were not much older than she was now. Happier times, when he could not have imagined himself in a dark car at midnight waiting for a resentful daughter’s shift to be over so that he could drive her home, the last place she wanted to be, without a single meaningful word passing between them.

  There was music that would always make her happy, too. She would never hear James Brown or the Righteous Brothers without thinking of the smoky dance floor at the Sigma Chi house. The Supremes would always make her think of Bridget, who could not hear them without singing along. The Beatles singing “Things We Said Today” would always be on the radio of the car Tom borrowed the night before she left to come home for the summer, the words of the song tangled up with the words he spoke trying to make her feel better. “I love you. It won’t be that long, you’ll see.”

  Just like certain songs would always pitch her into despair. Wherever she was, whoever she turned out to be, she knew that The Mamas & the Papas singing “Monday, Monday” would bring back the loneliness, the misery of entrapment she felt at home with her family this summer. The long, hot walk to the bus stop every afternoon; the high windows of the factory darkening slowly toward night. The sense that she’d found and lost herself, her own real life, the feel of time stretching out endlessly toward the moment when she could return to Bloomington in September.

  It occurred to her one night, quite suddenly, that maybe the music her father listened to didn’t bring back happy memories at all, but rather wartime memories. The years he and her mother had spent apart. Things that had happened during the war that he’d rather not remember. He’d been in England for a while, then France and Belgium for the worst of it. He never talked about it, though; and the only time Jane pressed him about what he remembered, her mother said afterwards, “Leave him be, Jane. He had a hard time in the war. He just wants to put it behind him.”

  “But I wasn’t asking him about the war,” she said. “I was asking about London and Paris. What he saw –”

  “Jane.”

  That’s all, just her name, and the war and everything surrounding it became one more thing they didn’t talk about. Like the drinking, like money problems, like Bobby’s bad attitude, the fact that he’d skipped school so much in the last year that he’d flunked most of his classes, and that his friends we
re greasers – boys with hopped-up cars and bad attitudes, going nowhere.

  “How’d it go?” her father would ask each night when she slid into the passenger’s seat of the car after her shift. She’d shrug and look away. If she answered his question, really answered it, she’d have to say, I hate the job. I hate everything about my life here, and if I could figure out a way to leave now and never, ever come back, I swear I’d go.

  Sometimes in the silence that fell between them on the drive home, she’d remember standing at the back door of the house they lived in when she was a little girl, waiting for him to come home from work. How her heart lifted when she saw him turn from the bus stop and start down the alley toward home. Her mother, pregnant with Susan, was busy in the kitchen; Bobby was busy playing. But she waited. She wanted, always, to be the first one he saw. Thinking of her five-year-old self, tears sprung to her eyes and grief washed over her.

  But wasn’t grief something you felt when someone had died? How could it be grief when there was her father, sitting right beside her?

  Just get to August, she told herself again and again. She, Tom, and Bridget planned to meet at Pete’s house in Indianapolis for a long weekend, and she counted the days as she worked, making each atlas she packed count for a day. Then, when she had counted all the days, each atlas packed and sent along the conveyor belt into oblivion became something that pained or annoyed her. The way her father still cut up her meat each night and handed her the plate, as if in his alcoholic haze he had forgotten she and her siblings were not still little children. Her sisters’ bony, sunburned shoulders. Bobby’s cracked, dirty fingernails. The bus fare her mother left on the dinette table for her every morning. She fell into bed beside her sleeping sisters when she got home near midnight, then lay, wakeful, until she heard her mother put away whatever housework had kept her busy all evening.

  “Hon, don’t you want to come to bed?” she’d say to Jane’s father, who by then was sleeping – no, passed out – on the couch.

  He’d growl at her. She’d stand a moment, looking at him, then go to bed by herself. She was exhausted; she was always exhausted. It was no time before Jane could hear her light snoring. Quietly, she got up, her sisters stirring, sighing back into each other’s arms. She got the locked book satchel she kept tucked deep in her closet and crept past her father, away from the smirking, self-satisfied stars on The Johnny Carson Show, and out the back door to a battered chaise lounge she’d bought herself when she was in high school for sunbathing in the backyard. She put an oxford shirt on over her cotton nightgown. Who would see her?

  Her father, maybe. Often he got up around two, got in the car and drove through the quiet neighborhood. Jane knew he was going to drink somewhere, probably the Red Star. If he said anything to her about being up so late, which she knew he probably wouldn’t, she’d threaten to tell her mother. Who also knew where he went. But would do almost anything not to acknowledge it.

  She’d lie back on the chaise, staring up at the stars. She’d taken Astronomy last semester and could name the constellations, though they were hard to see in the smoggy air. It pleased her, nonetheless. There was so much to know. She felt small beneath the stars, but in a good way. Not small in the way she felt here in this place.

  In time, she unlocked the satchel with the silver key she kept on a chain around her neck. She brought out her little Hallmark calendar and colored in the whole square of the day with a black ballpoint pen, pressing so hard that the paper became crinkly beneath it. She’d count the days again, though she always knew exactly how many there were to August 4, which she had highlighted in bright yellow. On that Thursday morning, she’d take the Greyhound bus to Indianapolis, Tom and Bridget would drive up from Evansville, and they’d have four days together. After that, there’d be less than a month to endure before school started.

  She and Bridget had planned the trip obsessively – down to what they’d wear, what they’d read, sunbathing, what meals they’d attempt to the cook for the boys. They’d bought bikinis the week before they left for summer break. Hers still had the tags on it. It was in the satchel, too, along with Tom’s fraternity pin and her journal, and after she’d colored in the square and counted the days, she’d take it out and look at it, imagining herself in a lounge chair by Pete’s pool, tanning in the sun. His parents would be in Europe, so it would just be the four of them. They’d sleep with the boys for the first time, she and Bridget had decided. Who’d know? She’d told her parents she’d been invited to a girlfriend’s house for a dorm floor reunion.

  “Will Karen be there?” her mother had asked.

  “Probably,” she said, not only continuing to let her mother believe she and Karen were roommates but that they were the closest of friends, continuing to keep Bridget and Tom a secret – able to keep them a secret because the mail came when nobody else was home and she could retrieve the letters they sent before anyone saw them.

  Fat letters from Bridget with news about skirmishes with her parents, who simply could not accept that their baby girl had grown up and had her own life now. They set curfews, which she broke – sometimes just on principle. She and Tom would stay out late, talking, for no other reason than to assert her right to do as she pleased. “About you,” she wrote. “So in case you worry about what we’re up to, don’t.”

  Tom’s letters were short, with a summary of what he’d done the past days. Worked at the pool, mowed the lawn, worked in his mom’s garden. He wrote about fishing with his dad, hanging out with his high school buddies. He’d always include some funny, outrageous thing Bridget had said or done. “I miss you,” he always said at the end. Underlining all three words. “Love, Tom.”

  Lying under the stars, her body tingled just thinking of him, thinking of where and how he’d touched her and the way his warm breath felt against her skin, his lips whispering endearments as they moved from her mouth, to her ear, her neck, her breasts. She touched herself here, there, something she’d never, ever done before. Something she felt strange and guilty about. Yet she could not stop. She’d lie there on the chaise lounge, her eyes closed, her face wet with dew, and imagine her hands were Tom’s. Imagine him there, beside her.

  She drifted to sleep sometimes, waking surprised and a little embarrassed to find her hands cupping her breasts or between her legs. She wouldn’t move them, though. She’d lie perfectly still, her fingers lightly pinching her nipples or pressing against the warm, wet place between her legs until waves of desire made her body arch up and she shuddered, breathless. It scared her, what she might do to continue to be able to feel this way. She wanted so much. She wanted everything, though she couldn’t have said what “everything” meant.

  Finally, there he was. He stood, smoking, on the little slice of sidewalk at the edge of the parking bay, and when the bus pulled in she sat for a long moment, looking at him until he saw her framed by the window and her own true self was shocked back into being with his sudden, dazzling smile. He tossed his cigarette to the pavement, took a step forward. She gathered her things, hurried down the aisle and stepped down into his open arms.

  “Jane,” he said, into her hair. Just that.

  She said nothing, only burrowed her head into the dent just above his collar bone that she loved, breathed in the scent of him: smoke and soap and English Leather.

  “Jesus, I’ve missed you,” he said.

  “Me, too,” she whispered. “I’ve missed me.” And burrowed deeper into him, squeezed her eyes tight to keep back the tears that threatened to come.

  “Let’s run away,” he said. “I’ve got Pete’s Corvette. He wouldn’t care; his dad would just buy him another one. Hell, now that Bridget’s here he probably wouldn’t even miss it. I haven’t seen either one of them since we got here this morning. I’ve had to sit out by the pool, nursing my beer, all alone.”

  “Poor baby,” Jane said.

  He grinned, kissed her, then stepped away and grabbed her hand. “Let’s go,” he said. “You won’t believe Pe
te’s place. There’s a built-in beer keg, for Christ’s sake. It’s amazing.”

  “Oh!” was all she could say when they got there. She felt embarrassed stepping into the foyer with its marble floor, its crystal chandelier. What would Pete think if he could see her parents’ house, the world she’d come from this morning?

  She thought of the pile of beautifully ironed clothes her mother had set on her dresser the night before. Jane had meant to iron them herself when she got home from work; she’d told her mother she would iron them. But there they were.

  “I didn’t have anything extra to give you for your trip,” she said, when Jane asked why.

  Which shouldn’t have made Jane angry, but it did. And, of course, guilty – for countless reasons, not the least of which was that she had lied about where she would be this weekend. She thanked her mother for the ironing, but couldn’t make it sound sincere. She couldn’t make what her mother had done for her, what her mother wanted and needed to do for her, touch her. If she did that, how could she continue to allow her whole family to make the sacrifices she knew they were making so that she could have this new life? Sacrifices she knew were way too much to ask.

  Don’t spoil this, she said to herself. Don’t think about her, all the ways you’ve hurt her.

  How you know you’ll hurt her again and again.

  Then Bridget appeared, radiantly disheveled, at the top of the beautiful staircase and hurried down into Jane’s arms. “God, I thought this weekend would never come,” she said. “One more day of teaching swimming lessons and I’d have drowned a six-year-old, just for the pleasure of it. Oh, Jane, I’ve missed you so much. And here we are!” She stepped back, flung her arms out to encompass the house, the pool that Jane could see through the French doors in the next room.

  Pete watched, his hands in the pockets of his khaki shorts, grinning. His sun-streaked hair was mussed, his madras shirt unbuttoned, the shirttails out. He was barefoot. “In case you’re wondering about the digs,” he said to Jane, “it’s all about my mom one-upping my dad, because my stepdad’s so much richer. He’s an asshole. But filthy rich. I mean, hey, isn’t that what really matters?”