by Bill Clegg
Because she knew they’d blame her, Dana hesitated to tell her parents about the attack. At dinner with them in the city the next evening, she struggled to find a way to begin, but as Ada was clearing the first course, she accidentally knocked a bowl of soup that splattered onto Mr. Goss’s trousers. When Ada nervously apologized and moved to retrieve the bowl, he smacked her hand away and coldly told her she was done for the night and to leave. Her father then turned to Dana and told her she was grounded from evening plans with her friends in the city until further notice since she’d clearly evaded Joe Lopez the night before. He said he didn’t want to know what she’d gotten up to but knew that the excuse that Jackie had given Joe at the end of the night about Dana feeling ill and accepting a ride from one of the teachers made no sense.
In the days that followed, there were times she came close to telling Jackie, mostly in the pauses between her obsessive Floyd-focused reports of the rest of the evening. But Dana was so deeply shaken by her own drunken behavior at the prom, and the murky and frightening feelings that seemed to drive it, she held back. She decided she’d answer honestly when Jackie got around to asking about her night, about Ben. That she would never ask hadn’t occurred to her. When they spoke on the phone the next day, Jackie teased Dana about running out of the prom early with an older boy and told her she’d covered her tracks with Joe Lopez, but she did not ask where they’d gone or what had happened.
Weeks passed and Jackie never mentioned it again; not a word of curiosity or concern about the stranger her best friend and prom date left with that night. Through the end of the school year and into the summer, Dana’s impulse to tell Jackie persisted. Despite her building resentment, she believed they should talk about it, put the night in its place as they had so many lesser upsets since they were children. It became a kind of test to see how long it would take her friend to bring it up. But Jackie was not interested, her silence had made that clear. Still, for a long time, it felt important to Dana that she know. And then it didn’t.
Part Four
Floyd
He’d left the diapers and the jug of iced tea in the backseat. Jackie didn’t seem to mind staying behind while he walked back to the car. Amy was asleep beside her on the blanket they’d spread out at the far end of the second field at Hatch Pond where they could see the fireworks but be away from the drunken shenanigans closer to the parking lot. Families like the Moreys hauled in kegs of beer and took over the brick barbecue pits in the first field by the entrance and many of them stayed through the night until morning. They would also bring an arsenal of illegal and very loud firecrackers. Amy was seven months old and still breast feeding, so the last thing Jackie wanted was to be near the families who used the Fourth of July as an excuse to get rowdier and more intoxicated than usual.
Celebrating the holiday at Hatch Pond mattered to Jackie because it was where she and Floyd had their first kiss. Right out there, at the end of the dock, she’d reminded him when they pulled into the parking lot. He did not need reminding. For most of their first year together, before Amy was born, he’d gone over that night hundreds of times, wishing he’d done it differently.
His sister Hannah had invited her entire high school class to her sixteenth birthday party at the farm and at the end of the evening, Jackie needed a ride home. Something had happened with her father’s car, his mother had explained, after informing Floyd that he’d be driving her home. Soon after they got in his truck, Jackie suggested they make a quick stop at Hatch Pond. The moon was full, she’d said, and above the lake it must be quite a sight. Yes, he’d agreed. Of course. He was tipsy that night. Tommy Hall had smuggled a bottle of his mother’s vodka out of the house and had come over to kill time in the cow barn while Floyd did the afternoon milking. The two boys spent the evening drinking the vodka out of Mason jars mixed with chunks of frozen orange juice Floyd sneaked from the basement freezer. It was long past dark when Tommy left and by then Hannah’s party was breaking up. When Floyd came through the kitchen door, his mother, without turning around from the sink, said Floyd, Jackie here needs a ride home. Half an hour later, the two of them stood at the end of the dock looking at the moon in excruciating silence. Floyd was woozy from having been up at five-thirty in the morning with the cows, drinking with Tommy, and listening to him talk about having sex with his girlfriend, Dorinda. Dorinda was a little heavy but had huge breasts and the guys in school loved to joke with Tommy about how they felt and ask him if he’d milked her yet that day. They teased him because they were jealous. Tommy was one of the only guys their age who they knew was having sex on a regular basis. And Tommy was a talker.
Every time he ran through the events of that evening, Floyd always ended up blaming what happened with Jackie on Dorinda’s tits and Tommy’s bragging about what she let him do with them and to her. Why else would he have pretended to look at the moon when he was actually sizing up Jackie’s pretty decent-sized breasts and wondering if she would make out with him and let him touch them. Why else would he have become so determined to put his hands all over a girl he’d never given a second thought to. He remembered her from the prom a few months back, catching her as she fell and thinking she might be sauced, then believing his guess was right when he saw her with the drunk girl getting their picture taken together. That night, and a few days later, he did picture the two girls naked, but the appeal was not Jackie, not specifically. Or maybe part of it was, because that night on the dock he all but stood on tippy-toes to see down the scalloped neckline of her thin white, button-down sweater in order to get an eyeful while simultaneously scheming how he might get a handful, too. Why else would he have kissed her?
He regretted it the moment it happened. The way she held onto him, the instant seriousness. The starry-eyed look on her face and the growing expectations he saw there extinguished the low flame lit by vodka and Tommy’s bragging. And yet by the time he’d dropped her off at home that night, they’d made a plan to spend the Fourth of July together.
Maybe he had agreed to see her again because he knew that eventually she would let him touch her breasts and probably anywhere else he wanted, too. At seventeen, access and compliance eclipsed almost everything, even looks. And it’s not that she wasn’t pretty, she was. But she looked like so many other girls in Wells. She even resembled a much younger version of his mother. The same straight light brown hair, the same small plain face with upturned nose and hazel eyes. She was nice, too, if—he sensed it even then—a bit judgmental, a little strict. Maybe none of these little annoyances would have bothered him if he’d kissed her a month sooner. He’d wondered this often in the first year with Jackie. Would she have mattered to him from the start if he hadn’t encountered someone else only three Saturdays before?
The girl was pushing a grocery cart outside of Trotta’s grocery in Millerton. She seemed roughly his age and had long black hair tied in a thick, loose ponytail. It was the end of the day and the waning light cast dim sparks from the chrome on the cars in the parking lot. The purple and red sky marbled in the windshields and the glass doors at Trotta’s and the parking lot felt as if it had been transported to a beach town, like the kind in the movies Hannah loved, with Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. The girl looked a little bit like Annette Funicello, but more intense. The loose strands from her gathered hair fell across her face, caught the last rays of sun, and wriggled in the wind like lit, electric fibers. He didn’t know her name or where she was from, and yet he couldn’t shake the sense that he’d seen her around. He couldn’t stop staring.
Floyd had come with his father on an errand to pick up bolts of fencing wire at the hardware store. His mother had asked them to stop by Trotta’s on the way and bring home paper towels and soap. As usual, his father sent him into the store while he stayed in the truck with his black thermos of bourbon, the one he kept in the glove compartment. Floyd knew to move quickly so his father didn’t get completely sauced before they got back on the road, but even the prospect of being yelled at w
hile his father sped through stop signs and swerved drunkenly into oncoming traffic couldn’t budge him from his spot. Powerless, he watched the girl push the full shopping cart across the lot toward a car where an older woman stood waiting. The woman, he recognized her from somewhere. It took him a few seconds before he remembered—Mrs. Lopez. She attended church with his mother. His father didn’t care about church so Floyd wasn’t expected to go regularly, but at Christmas and Easter he had no choice. Lupita. The girl’s name was Lupita. He remembered her from elementary school. Two grades below him at Wells Center, one of Hannah’s few friends then. Her family worked for the family that owned Edgeweather way out on the Cornwall side of town. He hadn’t seen her since she was in the sixth or seventh grade and he dimly remembered Hannah saying she’d gone to St. Margaret’s in Amenia instead of Housatonic.
Hi, he called out. Lupita, right? She looked up and they stood a few yards from each other under the darkening sky, but he couldn’t think of what else to say to her. He’d never felt anything but lust or indifference or annoyance for a girl before. He’d not been friends with any and beyond a few quick pecks playing spin-the-bottle in eighth grade before high school started, he’d never touched one. His response now was more than lust, though it was definitely that, too. But there was something about her face. It was friendly, in a strange way very familiar to him, but at the same time it was serious, intimidating. She looked at him now as if she knew something about him that he did not. That’s the only way he could describe it to himself later as he tried to make sense of his reaction to her.
Lupita didn’t respond to his clunky greeting, nor did he figure out what else to say. They stared at each other while her mother loaded the groceries from the cart to the car until Floyd’s father got out of the truck and started hollering. What the hell, boy.
Lupita was in the car and out of the lot by the time he answered. All he could think to say was, I think her name is Lupita.
I don’t care what her name is, son, that one’s not for you. Floyd could smell the bourbon coming from his pores. He had shoveled cow and chicken shit his whole life but to him there was nothing worse than the smell of dark alcohol reeking from his father’s sweat glands. He winced as he let a whiff of the awful body brew invade his nose. His father clenched his fist and knocked him hard at the top of his hip where there was little skin, only joint and bone. Floyd’s knees buckled. The blow was unmistakable punctuation to his father’s pronouncement and also a clear signal to get in the store and fetch the groceries they’d come for.
From that afternoon on, Lupita was the only girl on his mind. She was the center of every fantasy—sexual, romantic, mundane. He imagined her naked—in the shower, on a beach, in his bedroom—and pictured every kind of imaginable sex with her. He daydreamed about raising children with her on the farm, even imagined them grocery shopping. They’d exchanged no words, but by seeing her and by her holding his gaze for a few charged moments, she had become what he wanted most. That want was agitated and no doubt deepened by the hard fact that nothing could come of it. If his father had anything to do with it, Lupita Lopez was not and would never be allowed.
* * *
As Floyd reaches the end of the second field, he can’t remember why he’s going back to the car. It’s not the first time he’d deliberately left something behind. In the two years he’d been with Jackie, he’d built up a mental catalog of needed items that justified hasty exits—wallet, a phone number for a job scribbled down on a matchbook, work gloves. Additionally, he’d developed a talent for conjuring impromptu tasks that unexpectedly needed completing—gas tanks to fill, borrowed tools that needed returning, garbage runs for his aunt. Long-planned or spontaneously concocted, his escape hatches allowed him to slip away with little warning anytime he wanted. Not that he had a plan when he did—mostly he drove his truck around town, occasionally stopping at Tommy Hall’s apartment or his family’s farm. He felt guilty for fibbing, but knowing that he could disappear for a while gave him a sense of control, something he’d lost since finding out that Jackie was pregnant a year and a half ago. The decisions that followed—getting married, renting the house, assuming financial responsibility for this sudden family—felt less like his own and more like orders given collectively by his family, Jackie’s, and Jackie herself. As Tommy said the day of his wedding, Son, you got bagged and tagged.
So he sneaked away every once in a while, but never long enough to raise suspicion. And Jackie didn’t seem to mind or suspect anything. This evening, after they’d laid out the blanket and unpacked the food and he’d made his excuse to return to the car, her response was typical. She held both hands above her eyes to ward off the sun blasting behind him and said, without disappointment or doubt, Ok, we’ll be right here.
On his way to the parking lot, Floyd passes a large white shed where the town beach association kept an old lawnmower and life preservers that no one, not since Floyd was a kid, ever used. He steps around to the back where there is a mess of smashed Coca-Cola bottles, and a small, stuffed giraffe whose legs are covered by a child’s T-Shirt dirtied with pine needles and sap. This was where he went when he pulled the ripcord the very first time. Two years ago to the day. He and Jackie had come to Hatch Pond with Tommy and Dorinda and a few other friends of his from school. He’d turned their Fourth of July date into a group activity to relieve some of the pressure and hopefully send a signal to Jackie that would adjust her expectations. Everyone brought beers and vodka and bags of potato chips. After his first beer he switched to ginger ale since the last time he’d been drinking around Jackie he’d ended up kissing her and making plans, and he had no intention of letting either happen again. She, however, had two beers and by the end of the second one was resting her right hand on the back of his T-Shirt, between his shoulder blades. He was just beginning to feel her fingers move in a slow, circular motion, when he saw Lupita. She was with her mother again, and an older man he assumed was her father, along with a few other people he didn’t recognize. It would take almost an hour before she saw Floyd and when she did she laughed, the flash of her teeth a quick, bright comet. They locked eyes and with his head, as cautiously as he could, he motioned her toward the parking lot. Several excruciatingly long minutes later, she stood and began to navigate the obstacle course of coolers and portable grills surrounded by families sitting in lawn chairs and on old blankets. Floyd interrupted something Jackie was saying to excuse himself to go the bathroom. It’s that way, Tommy shouted at him as he left in the opposite direction, but Floyd paid no attention. He watched Lupita circle to the woods side of the shed, out of sight, and he wasted no time following her there.
You have a girlfriend, she said plainly as he stepped toward her, oddly calm, as if she were stating any other obvious fact. He didn’t say anything in response, not because he felt caught or conflicted, but because he was speechless. It was the first time he’d heard her voice. It was lower than he’d imagined, scratchier. Less girly but somehow still more feminine. He stared at her as if to confirm the encounter they’d had more than a month before was real. That she was real. Her hand began to wave him off and her head shook, indicating a second, and better, thought. I have to get back, she said as she attempted to move past him in the narrow gap between the shed and the bramble that preceded the woods. Awkwardly, he thrust his hand out to block her path and then yanked it back in the same movement, grazing her forearm. She didn’t flinch, just looked directly into his eyes and laughed. Not a friendly laugh, a taunting one that had under its music a dare. He still could not find words, but he knew she would not stand there longer than a moment more, so he stepped toward her and kissed her on the mouth. Unlike with Jackie that night on the dock, this time he didn’t miss. He landed his lips directly on hers and she kissed back with such force he stumbled backwards into the shed wall. He’d thought about kissing Lupita many times since he’d seen her in the parking lot at Trotta’s, but he hadn’t anticipated the instant desperation he felt when he finally did
. Everything that he was discovering—her voice, her lips, the impossibly soft skin of her cheek, the smell of Juicy Fruit gum on her breath, her surprising strength—each registered like the very best that any of these things could ever be, but as he adored them for the first time, he felt them leaving, very likely for good. As he remembered his father’s ugly words in the parking lot, he sensed her pulling away. I should get back, she stammered, suddenly looking nervous. Floyd felt that if he didn’t do something quick he’d never see her again. Words, like miracles, came: Come to the farm tomorrow morning… at seven, if you can. I know it’s early, but I’ll be done with the morning milking and no one will be around then. Pull into the road called “Crow’s Path” and meet me there behind the big green barn. You can’t miss it. Lupita nodded her head. The plan was made, and she was gone.
* * *
At the car, Floyd realizes he still has Jackie’s Kodak camera hanging from a leather strap around his neck. She’d asked him to buy her one so that she could document all of their daughter’s firsts—today was Amy’s first Fourth of July picnic. And now he remembers why he’s come back to the car. Diapers and iced tea. He opens the trunk and grabs the bag and the jug and thinks about taking a swig, but decides against it. He turns to walk back to Jackie and Amy, but before he’s taken a step, he sees the yellow Mercedes convertible, and next to it, waving, Dana Goss. Hello there, she shouts, her hand scooping the air, I need your help.
Lupita
The fire has burned down and sputtered out hours ago. The stars have left. Soon it will be morning. Lupita watches the jagged, inky silhouette of the hills over Princeville articulate, gradually, as light slowly makes its way west. She’s watched this show thousands of times. She knows just how dark the sky will bruise from black to purple, how slowly it will brighten to a chalky pink before the sun appears, and she will sit in this grass, a few feet from where the sand begins outside her gate, until it does.
