When I was seven my parents took me for the first time to the Museum of Modern Art. I vaguely recall my first sight of those big strange Picassos and some of the more tender Impressionists, but what I remember most clearly was eating ice cream in the café afterward while my parents quizzed me about what I had liked best. I liked the gift shop best, with its racks of postcards, though I knew enough not to tell them that. I said “Mondrian,” the first painter that came into my head, and basked in their approving astonishment. When I finished my ice cream we walked up Fifth Avenue to Central Park; I remember holding both their hands while they talked about the hawks that lived in the park. I even recall what I was wearing: pink-and-blue striped tights, a short red skirt, and my white fur earmuffs. That day lingers in my memory, but there were plenty of others like it: My parents had a gift for happiness.
Many years later, in London, I told this to a friend, and she raised an eyebrow. “For whose happiness, Wynn?”—one of those casual remarks that opens up a whole new world, or closes up an old one.
So I will say as a child that I found happiness in my parents’ satisfaction with their lives—that for years, until the longing for my own happiness became unbearable, I subsisted on theirs.
• • •
Marietta and I weren’t the type to go to Deirdre’s loud, wild, drunken parties—the kind of parties where the police were sometimes called to break things up. Our own parties were quiet, dark, pot-smoking affairs, with Dave Van Ronk and Jack Elliott on the stereo, where people got into intense, indignant discussions about the war. We called movies films. We thought Paul was a drip, adored John. Bob Dylan could do no wrong. We would rather have died than go to a football game. Our crowd was arty, hippie, peacenik—a small but not insignificant slice of the student population. We were the ones who played guitar, who wrote poetry, who dressed like gypsies and wore our hair long and marched in antiwar demonstrations carrying candles.
I was a founder and editor of Dead Duck: A Journal of the Arts. Deirdre Coyle was a cheerleader. I suppose that pretty much sums it up.
I had no real desire to go to Deirdre’s party. But Marietta was in love with a football player named Spencer Lewis, and she wanted to see him. “I just want him to notice me, damn it!” Her jaw was set; her green eyes blazed with determination and lust. “Just look at me, that’s all. I’m not even saying he’s got to dance with me. Just tell me he likes my earrings or something. Anything.” Her face softened. “I’m pathetic—right? Going after that jock playboy animal. Like I’ve really got a chance.”
“You’ve got a chance,” I said loyally. “Remember I told you how he was staring at you that time in geometry class.”
She feasted on such crumbs. We all did. Our sparse romantic lives were mosaics of such tiny triumphs: a glance, a few words, a smile, a rumor. Marietta pleaded with me to go to the party with her for moral support. It was a hot, boring Saturday night, and I had nothing else to do, so I went.
Deirdre lived in Dunster. Marietta and I got a ride to the party with the Hausers—Terri and Neil—stocky blond twins who lived near us. Neil drove. He was already a bit drunk, sipping from a quart-size beer bottle in a paper bag. “Deirdre’s folks are in Europe,” Terri said as we pulled up to the Coyles’ front door. “This party could go on for a week!”
Marietta had had her hair cut: a mistake. She usually wore it long and loose, but now it was hacked into a jagged, severe cut that made her pretty face look too thin. She caught sight of herself in a mirror in the front hall and let out a little scream. “I look horrible! Horrible! I look scalped!” She was right; I didn’t know what to say, except that it would grow out. Small consolation. Marietta took one last, despairing look and announced, “I’m going to get shitfaced. It’s all I can do. If Spencer paid any attention to me, he’d have to be nuts.”
It was a discouragingly underpopulated party. Deirdre barely spoke to us; she was in black bell bottoms and a tank top, her hair was teased into a beehive, and she was visibly unhappy. She kept making phone calls, frantically trying to get more people to come over. “This party is dead,” I heard her say into the phone. “It’s full of losers.” As the evening went on, everyone began to get very drunk, especially Marietta, who swallowed enough rum and Coke to remove all her inhibitions. She kicked off her sandals and retied her gauzy white blouse high under her breasts. Her hair became tousled and lost its prim, gamine look. She danced alone in the middle of the floor—all tight jeans and bare midriff—and everyone watched her. Spencer Lewis came in just then with his friend Mark Erling. Marietta went up to Spencer and asked him to dance, and they did what passed for dancing at a drunken party: rocked slowly together in a dark corner, his cheek against her hair, her arms around his neck. “Goin’ Out of My Head” was on the stereo. “Light My Fire.” “Never My Love.” “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” I danced with Neil. I danced with a boy I hardly knew named John Hannigan, who held me much too close and kept trying to slide his hand under my T-shirt. I danced with Neil again. Finally I escaped upstairs to one of the bedrooms and shared a joint with Janet Luther and Chuckie Garrone, who were in my American history class. Then I fell asleep for a while.
When I went back downstairs, it wasn’t very late—not even midnight—but the party was breaking up. Deirdre was sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor, drinking whiskey from a bottle. Marietta hung on Spencer, who was holding her up. John Hannigan leaned against the wall as if he might fall down without it. Mark Erling stood by, looking uncomfortable, jingling his car keys in his pocket.
“Who’s driving you guys home?” Mark asked me.
“Terri and Neil, I guess.”
“Well, Terri just left with Chuck, and Neil went home half an hour ago.”
After a lot of conversation, it was finally decided that Mark would drive Spencer and John Hannigan and Marietta and me home. Deirdre looked up briefly as we left. She had combed out her hair, and it hung on her shoulders, lifeless and ratty. “Hey,” she said. “It’s been real. Stay loose, guys.”
“Yeah, right,” Mark said. He didn’t seem thrilled about chauffeuring everyone, but we piled into his car anyway—a baby-blue Oldsmobile Cutlass convertible. I was just sober enough to refuse to get in the backseat with John and his roving hands. So Marietta and Spencer and John got in back—Marietta flopped across Spencer’s lap in a stupor—and Mark and I sat in front. We drove down Main Street in a comfortable haze of music and alcohol and heat. The radio played Dylan, Judy Collins, Simon and Garfunkel; hesitantly, Mark and I softly sang along. He reached across to the glove compartment, took out a pint bottle of vodka, and offered it to me.
We dropped John off in town, and then headed out Route 8 to West Dunster. Marietta and Spencer were very quiet in the backseat. When I turned to look at them, I saw that they had recovered enough to be frantically necking; when I looked again a minute later, Marietta was asleep, her mouth slack, her blouse undone, Spencer’s arm around her.
Mark and I passed the vodka back and forth. I had never talked to Mark Erling before. He was the rich kid who lived in the big ugly stone castle on the hill. I was dimly aware that he played some sport—basketball?—and wasn’t exactly a dedicated student. He was widely believed to do drugs more serious than pot and acid. I knew he had once gotten into a fight with George Fisher, a boy in the class ahead of ours, and George had ended up in the hospital. That was the extent of my knowledge of Mark Erling, except that he was tall and good-looking in a movie-star kind of way, with lots of wavy blond hair he was always brushing out of his face. I can’t say that, aside from his bland gorgeousness, he impressed me much. And I was quite sure he had never noticed me before.
“Not much of a party,” he said.
“Where was everybody?”
Mark shrugged. “Deirdre’s parties are getting kind of lame.” He glanced over at me, his hair whipping back in the breeze. The sideburns that grew down his cheeks looked soft, pleasantly furry. “I haven’t seen you around much.”
“I try
to keep a low profile,” I said. This amused him. He passed the bottle, and then he put his arm across the back of the seat, and I slid closer. Before I knew it, I was snuggled against his shoulder, and when we stopped at a red light he leaned down and kissed me.
We pulled up in front of Marietta’s house, and I got out and made her sit up in the backseat. I buttoned her blouse and shook her until she opened her eyes. Spencer woke up briefly; he and Marietta exchanged a long kiss. Then Mark and I helped Marietta up the front walk. She was humming to herself and smiling. Her sister Pat came to the door in a nightgown with a Dunster High T-shirt over it, her hair up in rollers. “Oh Christ,” Pat said. “She’s fried.”
Gladly, we turned Marietta over to Pat and went back to the car. Spencer lived half a mile down the road in a housing development; we dropped him off and watched him weave unsteadily to his door. A light went on in an upstairs room. Then Mark turned to me and smiled. “What time do you have to be home?”
I shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter.”
This was a lie; I had a one o’clock curfew. But I can remember, all these years later, the odd mood of recklessness I was in, how the vodka had pushed me over some edge into that agreeable state where I was still functioning normally but everything was different, heightened. I didn’t care if I got home late, angered my parents, did something stupid. I liked kissing Mark. I liked being a girl who rode around in a convertible with her hair flying, singing along with the radio.
Mark pulled away from the curb and said, “Let’s go down to the lake.”
I hesitated demurely. “Well, just for a little while.”
Mark pulled me over to him again. “Half an hour.” He winked. “Just long enough to see the submarine races.” Ha ha.
Osmar Lake was big, clear, cold—beautiful on a summer day, romantic on a summer night. Mark parked in the lot, and we went down to the beach. He tossed the empty vodka bottle far out into the water, then took my hand, and we walked along on the pebbled sand. I can still see the shiny-black water, with the moonlight spilling across it and vibrating on the moving surface. I remember the moon, and the lake, and something else: the way desire rose up between us, desire as solid and inescapable as the beach under our feet. We didn’t even get as far as the woods before Mark stopped, pulled me close, and began kissing me again.
He was a good kisser, and he was handsome in the moonlight. And he was sweet. I had never expected to even like Mark Erling; if anyone had asked me, I would have insisted scornfully that he wasn’t my type. And there I was kissing him with more passion than I’d ever felt with David Donnelly. And then I was lying down on the sand with him. My clothes came off and were bunched up beneath us—my long purple skirt, my blue tie-dyed T-shirt—and he was on top of me, and—well, et cetera.
I was sixteen. A virgin. Drunk, on a soft summer night in 1968. Stung, maybe, by Deirdre’s scorn. And in love, for that half hour, with Mark Erling. I decided I’d been a virgin long enough. It hurt, too, but I didn’t care. By the time he collapsed on me with a groan, I had almost started to enjoy what he was doing, or at least to have a sense that it might, in some other circumstances, be enjoyable. Then he kissed me, whispered my name, helped me to my feet, hugged me against him. “You were great, baby,” he whispered. “You were fantastic.”
I believed it. I put my clothes back on and we drove to my house. “I’ll call you,” he said at the door, and kissed me again. I believed that, too. I went inside and opened the refrigerator and drank half a quart of orange juice straight from the carton. Then I leaned my head against the cold white porcelain. There was sand in my shoes, sand between my legs, down my neck, in my hair. I felt dizzy, elated, drunk as a skunk. I wanted to call Marietta and tell her what I’d done, tell her what a great guy Mark was, and how come we’d never known him better, and just because a person lived for sports and got C’s in English and drove a big glitzy car, it didn’t mean he wasn’t a nice person.
What I did do, though, was go upstairs to my room, trying not to stumble into walls. My parents were sitting up in bed reading.
“Congratulations on getting home at a decent hour,” my father said as I went by their door.
“How was the party?” my mother asked.
I didn’t stop. “Fine,” I said, trying to sound normal. “But I’m exhausted, I’m going straight to bed.”
Unbelievably, the clock on my bookcase said it was only ten minutes to one. Hours and hours seemed to have passed since Mark and I got out of the car at the beach. I stood in front of the mirror with my eyes closed. July seventh, 1968, I said in a whisper. I opened my eyes and looked. My hair, of course, was beyond description. Otherwise I looked no different on the seventh than I had on the sixth. And yet everything was transformed.
I dragged myself into the bathroom and wiped the blood off my thighs and washed out my underpants, then crawled into bed and was out until noon the next day when Marietta called to compare hangovers.
I had thought, vaguely, if I had thought anything, that it was a safe time for me. But I knew within a couple of weeks of Deirdre’s party that I was pregnant. During that time, everything had clarified itself perfectly. Mark Erling and I were not in love with each other. He wasn’t going to call me. I didn’t want him to call me. We’d gotten drunk and done it. I’d thrown away my virginity with some guy I barely knew. And then I didn’t get my period. I was as regular as moonrise, and on the fifteenth nothing happened. Or the sixteenth. Or the twentieth. Or the thirtieth.
On the last day of July, I went to a doctor in Dunster for a pregnancy test, and on the fifth of August I got the results. I called Mark that evening when my parents were out. He had his own listing in the phone book, under his father’s name. My hands were shaking as I dialed.
“Erling here,” he said when he picked up.
“Mark, this is Wynn.”
He paused for only a split second before he said, “Wynn! Hey! I’ve been meaning to call you. How are you, anyway? What have you been up to?”
It was worse than I expected: the insincerity, the absolute cool. Erling here. Oh God. “I’m pregnant,” I said.
“Come on,” he said with a little laugh. “You’re kidding.”
“No. I’m pregnant.”
There was a pause. Then, to my horror, I heard Mark Erling begin to cry. “Oh Jesus,” he said. “Oh Jesus fucking Christ.”
I lay awake all night, weeping, shaking, trying to think it through in a sensible way. It was a hot night, but I was chilled, and I pulled the old, soft quilt up around my neck. I thought about abortion. It was the era of coat hangers, desperate jumps down flights of stairs, scalding baths, strange chemical concoctions, evil doctors who would butcher you and leave you for dead. A girl from our school had gone to Puerto Rico for an abortion, and I had defended her to David Donnelly, who called her an unnatural monster. I knew I could find out where to go, whom to see. There was a notorious Dr. Finster in Boston, expensive but supposed to be trustworthy. There was a Penobscot Indian woman in Portland who accomplished things with herbs.
But I rejected the idea, surprising myself. I didn’t know why I couldn’t do it, I just couldn’t. I considered the ludicrous scenario of marrying Mark and moving into the Castle, the two of us starting junior year wearing wedding rings. I thought seriously about running away, taking the bus to New York, where the baby and I would live with Anna Rosa; it would grow up eating gnocchi and cannoli, I would wheel it in a stroller around the Village, I would get a job waitressing at the Café Figaro. . . .
I tossed and turned until the sun came up. A baby was growing inside me, its cells multiplying and dividing even as I lay there, even as I cried and shivered and huddled under my quilt. There was no way I could stop that life from continuing. I didn’t know what to do. But I was pretty sure my own life was over.
Later that morning, I broke it to my parents. My father sat in silence, looking down at his hands. My mother raked her fingers through her hair and asked me how, how, I could have been so
stupid. She didn’t seem to require an answer. She fished around in her pocket for a tissue and blew her nose and groaned, “Oh God, oh God.”
We were out in the barn, in my father’s workshop. Suddenly it seemed to me a paradise, that big, bright, wood-smelling room. It held so many of the blissful hours of my childhood. The floor was scattered with wood shavings, dusty sunlight beamed through the window, the cats were entwined on a chair. I looked at these things instead of at my parents: the elements of a paradise that was now lost.
“This boy,” someone said. My father, I think.
“He’s no one,” I said quickly. “I mean—it was an accident. We didn’t—” I stopped and burst into tears, something I swore I would not do. “I hardly know him,” I said. “He’s just a boy from school that I got drunk with at Deirdre’s party.”
“Oh God, Wynn,” my mother groaned again. My father turned away. It was inconceivable that this conversation was actually taking place at our house. My mother stowed her tissue back in her pocket and looked at me, shaking her head. I wanted to turn and walk out of there, go back to the house and pack a bag and thumb a ride to somewhere, anywhere. My mother had never looked at me in quite that way before, and my only thought was to escape it.
I did nothing, of course. I stood there crying quietly, absorbing my mother’s disappointment, my father’s appalled silence. Finally, my mother said, “Well, we could probably find a doctor.”
My father raised his head.
“No,” I said.
I could see the relief in my mother’s eyes—I knew she was thinking about my two lost brothers—but my father said, “Then—Molly—Wynn—what on earth—?”
We both looked at him. In his faded blue overalls, he was picturesquely handsome, like the lovable, fatherly carpenter in a children’s book, but the look on his face was both impatient and frightened. I knew he wanted only for it all to go away, to be left in peace in his sunny workshop. I remembered the day I first got my period, when my mother had sent me out there to tell my father. “He’ll want to know,” she insisted. After I blurted it out, he stared at me and blushed, and for a moment I thought he might cry. He shook my hand and said, formally, “Congratulations, my dear,” as if I had won a spelling bee, and then, slowly, the awkwardness left him, a smile spread across his face, and he said, “Well, I’ll be damned, Wynn. I’ll be damned,” and we both stood there and laughed.
Five Questions Page 3
