An American Tune

by Barbara Shoup

  “It’s really beautiful,” Jane said.

  He shrugged, ambled away from them and drew a beer from the keg in the utility room just off the kitchen.

  “He is not okay,” Bridget said later, when the boys were out of earshot. “You know I was worried about him all spring. One more semester of shitty grades and he’s screwed. I told him he should take a class in summer school, something easy to bring up his GPA a little. But you know Pete. He didn’t even get a job. He sleeps half the day, then hangs out with those idiot friends of his from high school. I swear, I hate his parents. I don’t even know them and I hate them. Neither one of them gives a shit about him. Not really. They let him get away with things to hurt and aggravate each other. Then they get mad when he has problems. Like it’s not totally their fault.

  They were stretched out on chaise lounges by the pool, wearing their bikinis, just as they’d imagined. “I love him so much,” Bridget said. “I didn’t even realize how much till I was away from him. I didn’t know it would be like this. To be in love, I mean. How much it would hurt. How I’d worry about him. How I’d just want to be with him. We –”

  She lowered her voice. “This morning. When Tom went to get you –”

  She didn’t finish the sentence, but Jane knew what she meant.

  Bridget grinned at her, then whooped, jumped up from her chair and threw herself toward Pete, who was floating on a raft in the deep end of the pool. She was like a child, Jane thought. Sometimes she simply could not contain herself. The two of them like big, beautiful children, wrestling and shouting in the water. Shimmering in the sunlight.

  The Lovin’ Spoonful was on the radio, a bee buzzed near the bottle of Coke Bridget had abandoned. Jane watched Tom swim laps in the turquoise water. She liked his steady pace and how, when he reached the end of the pool, he made a deft little flip and powered himself off into the opposite direction. Nothing he ever did made her worry, as Bridget worried about Pete. In all the time they’d been together, they’d had only one real argument – about the demonstration in Dunn Meadow in the spring. It still scared her to think of herself, alone in her dorm room afterwards, certain she’d ruined everything. When the phone rang and she heard Tom’s voice, she felt much as she did right now, watching him climb out of the pool and come to sit at the foot of her lounge chair.

  “Bridget picked me up at five AM,” he said. “She wouldn’t let me drive, because she said I’d go too slow. I swear to God, she drove ninety the whole way. She’s insane. I kept saying, ‘Bridge, your dad’s a judge in Evansville. It won’t do you a goddamn bit of good if you get a speeding ticket in Terre Haute.’ ”

  Jane raised an eyebrow. “Scary when you’re the voice of reason.”

  “No shit.” He grinned. “On the other hand, getting up at four-thirty is a good excuse to take a nap now.”

  “Yeah?” She grinned back.

  “Yeah. Aren’t you tired, too? That long bus ride?”

  “Oh, I am,” she said, catching his outstretched hand, letting him lead her to the guest room where he’d taken her suitcase earlier.

  It was pale pink, like the inside of a seashell, with cream-colored wood shutters on the window instead of curtains. The bedspread was pink and cream striped chintz, turned down to reveal pressed sheets and pillowcases.

  “I love you, Jane,” Tom said, wrapping his arms around her, pulling her down gently to the bed.

  “I love you, too,” she said.

  All those stupid junior high movies, parents tongue-tied, mortified in the face of it. The threats, the whispering about how boys wouldn’t respect you if you went too far – or, heaven forbid, all the way. The bad girls who’d done it anyhow and disappeared for a semester, a year maybe, nobody knew exactly where, though there was plenty of talk about them, lots of murmured speculation when they came back, sometimes dull and sad, sometimes wilder, more reckless than they’d been before. Of course, of course, they hadn’t dared tell what it was really like. The way the world disappeared, the way your whole body sang into the void.

  “The nuns said it was addictive,” Bridget said, when they came downstairs hours later. She and Pete were curled up on the sofa in the family room, watching a movie on TV. “My, my. Who’d have thought they were ever right about anything?”

  They were, though, Jane thought. They definitely were. All their plans for elaborate meals gave way to carry-out pizza and fried chicken. Their plans to go waterskiing and to the County Fair, the books she and Bridget had brought to read dissolved into late, lazy mornings and long afternoon naps. In the evening, they lounged by the pool, the stereo on loud – the hot, humid air, their own hot, sated bodies, cold beer, the Righteous Brothers and Rolling Stones and the Temptations all blurring at the edges.

  Only on the last night did she begin to come out of the trance, tensing in Tom’s arms, chatter in her head filling her with anxiety about going home.

  “Thirty-two days,” Tom said, holding her closer. “Come on. It’s not that long.”

  But as she boarded the bus late the next afternoon, the feel of him still against her, the scent of him still in her clothes, her hair, it seemed an eternity before she would see him again, and she could not look back, could not bear to see him there, his hand raised, growing smaller and smaller, finally disappearing as the bus pulled into traffic.

  She felt weary, like she imagined her mother must feel after hours on her feet at the A&P, knowing there’d be no rest when she got home, just the endless round of household chores, the squabbles and complaints of her children.

  “How was Karen?” she’d ask Jane tonight, her voice eager and bright.

  She thought of Bridget laughing, regaling Tom and Pete with stories about Karen’s grim, Lutheran disapproval of anything that smacked of fun. How she’d cracked them up, breaking into her best Bob Dylan impression – I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes / you’d know what a drag it is to see you – claiming it was all they really needed to know about Karen, anyway.

  “That’s mean,” Mrs. Barth would say.

  It was mean, a little. Jane knew that. But it was true, too. Bridget never said anything that wasn’t true. It was one of the things Jane most admired about her. And she made Jane feel like it was all right to tell the truth, too – though she never pressed her to tell everything, or made her feel guilty if she didn’t. Just smiled and reached out to touch Jane on the hand or maybe the shoulder, as if to say that she was glad to know whatever Jane had told her. It was a gift to know it. Enough.

  If Jane told her mother anything true about the weekend, even some small thing, all she would do was worry – or worse. No. It was better to keep on as she had and then, when it was time to leave in September, mention that she would have a new roommate. Bridget Kelly. A girl she knew from the dorm.

  “Karen pledged a sorority,” she’d say. “She’ll be living in the sorority house. I thought I’d told you.”

  She’d feel guilty, of course. It was wrong to lie to her mother about her friends, her life. But she couldn’t imagine how to begin telling her now, or what her mother would say if she knew who Jane had become. She wouldn’t understand. How could she? Jane really didn’t understand it herself. She could be kinder, though, which would make up a little for lying. She’d paid little attention to her sisters all summer and, with some of the money she’d made working, she’d treat them to the movies, take them shopping for school supplies.

  She’d sign up to work extra shifts in the next weeks, which would also help make the time pass more quickly, and when things got tense or she felt lonely or anxious, she’d think about Tom. Right now she’d think about him, she decided, and closed her eyes to avoid talking to the stout, grandmotherly woman knitting beside her, to erase the man chain-smoking a few seats ahead of her and drown out the baby crying a few seats behind. She took deep, even breaths until she could see the room where she and Tom had slept. The beautiful, beautiful room. An extra room in a house she could not have imagined until th
is weekend.

  She could not have imagined living like man and wife with someone before this weekend either, but she could imagine it now. She and Bridget sang “Wouldn’t it be nice” along with the Beach Boys by the pool, only half-laughing at the words. She could not say how it had felt to be with Tom the past few days, what it had meant. But she knew all her life she would remember that first waking into bright morning sunlight, Tom’s naked body curved around hers.

  The thrill of it shivered through her all over again.

  “Dear?” the lady beside her asked. “Are you all right?”

  Jane jolted back with her words. “Yes. Fine. Thanks.” And flushed with embarrassment, as if the woman knew.

  Outside, night had fallen. Far out into the country, lamps glowed in the occasional farmhouse, casting quilt squares of light into the yards. There were fields of corn and soybeans on either side of the highway, but they were invisible, and gazing into the darkness made Jane remember the first time she and Tom had driven the winding road out to Bean Blossom Forest at night.

  “It’s so dark,” she said, bemused. Then, “Oh! No streetlights!”

  Tom laughed. “City girl,” he called her.

  Later, in the spring, she had marveled at the daisies growing along the side of the road, and he had pulled over so that she could pick her fill of them. She would live with flowers in her real life, she told him. She would never, ever be without flowers all around her.

  He had remembered it, bought a bouquet of daisies for their room at Pete’s.

  She was flooded with happiness at the thought. And strength.

  Her father would meet her at the bus station, just as he met her every night after work. She could manage that. Once home, she’d plead exhaustion and go straight to bed. When she woke in the morning, her mother would have left for work. By the time she got home, Jane would be at the bookbindery. If she played it just right, the rest of her days at home would pass this way – she and her mother never quite connecting.

  But when the bus arrived at the station, her father wasn’t there. Could he have forgotten the time? Or worse, stopped by the Red Star for just one drink . . . and then another? There were vagrants and low-life types hanging around outside the station, so she sat down on a bench near the ticket counter. She waited five minutes, ten, and was just about to dig in her purse for a dime to call home when she saw him hurrying toward her.

  She stood, then sat down again when she saw his face.

  “Honey, something’s happened. Bobby –” He sat down abruptly beside her. “He’s in the hospital, Jane. An accident. It happened Saturday night. Late. The girl with him –

  “She was thrown out of the car. She died, Janey. Bobby was in pretty bad shape for a while there. We weren’t sure –

  “He’s okay. He’ll pull through. Honey, we tried to get in touch with you –”

  The way he looked at her, the sad question in his eyes, made Jane go liquid with dread.

  “Janey, the number you gave us.”

  “What?” Jane asked, though of course she knew.

  “You weren’t there.”

  “I –” she began.

  But her father stood and said, “It doesn’t matter. Not now. I told your mother I’d bring you to the hospital. She won’t leave. And I knew you’d want to see Bobby as soon as you got here.”

  She didn’t, really. She wanted to get back on the bus and go – anywhere. To Tom. But when her father picked up her suitcase, she stood and followed him to the car. She sat huddled in the front seat of the car, her teeth pressed together to keep from chattering. It wasn’t cold. The air coming in through the open windows was close and warm.

  “Eighty degrees,” the radio deejay said. “Midnight.”

  Jane knew it was irrational, but it seemed to her a measure of her disconnection from her family, a kind of punishment, that she hadn’t somehow known that something terrible had happened and would have to live forever with the knowledge that, all the while her brother lay near death and her parents were frantic with worry, she had been floating in the pool with Tom in the moonlight, their beer cans in the neat little pockets of the rubber rafts they kept close together by holding hands. But there was nothing she could do about it now, just go where her father was determined to take her and try as best she could to make up for it.

  The hospital was shockingly bright inside, the corridors endless and gleaming. Jane walked behind her father, glancing now and then toward the sounds of suffering, the occasional lit room where nurses hovered. The smell. It was like that awful green soap the school nurse used to clean scraped knees and elbows, and brought with it that panicky feeling she’d felt when she was a child, hurt, already feeling the sting she knew would come. The tears she would not be able to keep back. Baby. She hated crying. Hated the way it made her feel.

  “Here.” Her father stopped so suddenly at one of the rooms along the hall that Jane had to take a step backward to enter. The first bed in the room was empty, a yellow curtain drawn across the room dividing it from the second bed where Bobby lay, swathed in bandages from head to foot.

  He was asleep, Jane saw with relief.

  Her mother was not. She sat straight up in the plastic hospital chair that she’d pulled next to Bobby’s bed. One hand was on his, holding it. The other she held out to Jane, who had no choice but to take it, thinking that her mother was asking for some comfort. She was shocked off-balance by the force of her mother’s grip, shocked to find herself bent over, face-to-face with her.

  “Mom,” she began, “I –”

  “Don’t tell me another lie, Jane,” her mother said, gripping even harder. “You weren’t where you said. Nobody at the number you gave me had ever even heard of you. I was frantic. My God, we thought Bobby was going to die.”

  She let Jane’s hand fall, put her own two hands to her eyes and bent over, sobbing.

  “Mom, I’m sorry,” Jane said. “I am. It wasn’t like I was doing anything terrible. Honest. I wasn’t.”

  “I don’t care what you were doing,” her mother said. “I don’t even want to know what you were doing or who you were doing it with. Not anymore. I don’t want to know anything you don’t want to tell me.”

  “But –”

  “Don’t say another word to me,” her mother said. “I mean it. Not one word. Not tonight.”

  Jane stood, staring at her. It was the last thing she had expected her mother to say.

  Mrs. Barth turned to fuss over Bobby, smoothing his tangled hair, tucking the blanket up under his chin. “It’s so cold in here,” she said to nobody.

  “Hon,” Mr. Barth said. “Come home. They won’t let you stay in the room with him all night, you’re not really supposed to be in here now. None of us are. The nurse said Jane could see him, then –”

  “I’ll just stay in the waiting room,” she said. “I’m not going home until I know –”

  “Kay, he’s all right. The doctor said he’s going to be all right. You heard him say so this afternoon.”

  “I need to be here,” she said. “What if he wakes up, afraid? You take Jane home. I know she must be tired.”

  In the car, Mr. Barth sat a long moment, before putting the key in the ignition. “She nearly lost your brother,” he said, his voice tentative and small. “When we couldn’t find you, she thought she’d lost you, too. She was scared to death you wouldn’t be there when I went to meet the bus tonight. She feels you’re lost to us, Janey. Since you went away.”

  “I’m not lost to you,” Jane said.

  But she was. All she wanted was to get through the next weeks until she could go back to school, which to them might as well have been a different planet.

  When her mother finally agreed to come home a few days later, Jane was glad to feel she was invisible to her. Mrs. Barth was consumed with worry over Bobby’s recovery, fearful about what would happen to him when he was well enough to face the consequences of his acts. He’d been drinking when the accident occurred; it was consi
derably after the midnight curfew; and he’d been driving a car that he claimed he’d borrowed with the owner’s permission, but the owner said he was lying. At the very least, he’d have to pay for the car, which had been totaled. At worst, he could be sent to reform school. And the girl. Mrs. Barth grieved so for the sorrow Bobby had brought to her family that the doctor had prescribed tranquilizers to help her sleep.

  “Why did you lie to Mom?” Susan asked, the only one to bring up what Jane had done after that first night.

  “None of your business,” Jane said, instantly regretting her nasty tone of voice.

  But when Susan responded, stubbornly, “You shouldn’t have. You made Mom cry,” Jane screamed at her, “Shut up. Shut up. Just go away. Leave me alone.” And when Susan just stood there, glaring at her, Jane got up, shoved her into the hallway and slammed the bedroom door behind her.

  Alone, in the quiet room, she put her hand to her throat, which hurt from screaming. She had never in her life been hateful to either of her sisters, not like that. She adored them – and only now realized how much she counted on their adoring her back. She lay on the bed, her eyes closed tightly, smarting with tears. She thought of the little matching bowler hats her sisters had worn one year for Easter, decorated with cloth flowers. How, when she’d gotten her driver’s license at sixteen, she’d taken them in their pajamas to the drive-in movie, let them sit and eat their popcorn on the hood of the car, something that thrilled them, something their parents would never have allowed. She thought of them huddled up against her in the car on the day she left for college, and of how sometimes those first few months away she woke in the middle of the night missing their sweet powdery scent, the feel of their breath against her skin, soft as feathers. She loved them, felt responsible for them. But she could not make herself get up and go to Susan and say that she was sorry.