“Not everybody has to get married,” I said.
“Of course not!” said Caroline. “You’re not listening! If you save yourself for marriage, and then you don’t get married, then what you saved isn’t worth anything. It’s like Confederate money. You’re bankrupt, you have nowhere to spend it.”
“Someone,” said James. We waited for the rest of the sentence, but that was it. Finally, he elaborated. “I’m saving myself for Someone.”
“But who?” said Caroline.
James didn’t answer.
Caroline was right, and she was wrong. People are not tables in a nightclub up by the entertainment. Tables empty, they start fresh several times a night, seven nights a week, a clean cloth snapped across and fresh candles stuck in holders. If only one party could be seated at a table for years and years, well, the maître d’ might have different thoughts. He might keep that best table, reset it every day, waiting for Greta Garbo, the president, his future unmet undreamed-of inlaws.
And me? Now I understood. I was saving myself for James. Myself meant only my secrets. Any other commodities (my youth, my virginity, any brand of innocence or hope) I’d years ago lost, a gambler who didn’t understand the game. My secrets were all I’d saved, all these years, the only thing I hadn’t and wouldn’t cash in on just anyone. If you poured out yourself to anyone who might for a moment listen, on just a usual day—it struck me as cheap, the way some girls’ mothers used the word. I was saving what was left of myself for James.
That summer, Mrs. Sweatt died all over again, to nobody’s surprise. She’d died in January and stayed in limbo through Easter, into June, but still, death and resurrection didn’t seem so farfetched. Not that Mrs. Sweatt rose from the dead. She didn’t. Her death was just brand-new in a way it never had been. I thought of James and his theories of Heaven. Mrs. Sweatt, who died twice, was born again, converted again into the religion of the dead.
Dying seemed a shame. Still, if we’d picked a time for her to die, we’d done a good job. The town was never so alive as in late June, early July, when summer and tourists still seemed like a pretty good idea, what with more money, fair weather, new faces—it wasn’t till August that you wondered what sort of blockhead had dreamed summer up. Years hence, when James thought of his mother—those annual remembrances when mourning and regret become what you do for the day, out of loving habit—the weather would be sweet, the shop windows in bloom, the breeze off the bay full of kind meaning.
Suddenly, after having gone underground, to Iowa, to New Hampshire, wherever it was we thought she’d gone, Mrs. Sweatt was back. She was everywhere. Not just in stories, though there were plenty of those. Waltzing at her wedding with all the guests, because her new husband, after six cocktails, insisted on doing the Alley Cat using only his a priori knowledge of the dance, angling on the dance floor peppy or slow depending on the music, while Mrs. Sweatt wanted to be hospitable; besides, she’d taken lessons. Reading her True Love magazines and crying at those unfortunate women, more unfortunate than her because now the whole country knew their heartaches. Cooking her midwestern cuisine, which meant opening a can of something and pouring it over something else: meat cooked in Coca-Cola, cake mix sweetened with half a can of frozen lemonade, apples poached in red soda pop. “Use cherry, not strawberry,” she’d advised Caroline. “Strawberry is too bright.”
She showed up in photographs, too, mined from albums and boxes and envelopes, now set on the mantelpiece and tucked into mirror frames. It didn’t seem like she’d ever shied away from the camera. Her high school graduation portrait as Caroline’s bridesmaid, six years old on the boulevard at some Western amusement park. And in James’s pictures, too, where she was prettiest. You could tell which ones he’d taken; in them she was smiling at her son, not the camera, and the fond reproach on her face was unmistakable.
Maybe the kids who started showing up at the cottage were there to offer comfort to someone who had suffered a loss—though their visits were awfully loud for sympathy calls. By August, the place was full of high school kids, some who knew James well and some who’d never spoken to him. The few boys who’d toughed out the Scouts to make eagle—boys you’d expect to be polite—were the ones most likely to laugh too loud and smell of smoke mixed with chlorine from the swimming pool. It was a mean, petty smell.
They always came in groups. I watched them tour the cottage sometimes, each teenager clearly thinking that if only it were him—if only his parents agreed to build him a house in the backyard—his life would be perfect.
I stopped by the cottage every day after work. I brought books, small gifts—cookies from the bakery, or a marbled composition book, or a new pack of cards. James sometimes spent hours shuffling; when you talked to him, you got used to the steady noise of the deck meeting itself. His hands seemed to double over themselves to manage it. He shuffled several packs at a time.
“That’s quite a nervous habit you have there,” I said.
“Not nervous.” He cut the cards several times. “Trying to keep my fingers limber.”
Work piled up at the library. I was as thorough as I could be during the day, but I’d stopped staying late evenings to read reviews and do the statistics and balance the budget.
“Are you having an affair?” Astoria asked me.
I looked at her. “Would I tell you if I were?” I said. But then I saw the delight in her face and had to own up. No, no affair, no intrigue. Just helping some friends. I wondered who she thought the affair would be with.
Soon others came to the cottage. I’d forgotten what an odd place it was, the high ceilings, the oversize furniture. On one side of the room the builders had set windows into the wall in two rows, because specially made proportional windows were too expensive, but the ordinary number of ordinary windows would have looked as strange and dismal as submarine portholes. People loved to sit in the big armchair, let their legs dangle off the edge. Teachers came, and neighbors. Astoria asked me if I’d take her with me one day.
“Why do you need to come with me?” I asked.
“You know me, Peggy. I’m not so good with idle chitchat.”
“Astoria. You do nothing all day but chitchat idly.”
She twisted her wedding ring around. “I’m not so good with sick people. With sick young people, I mean. I get sad easily.”
“He’s not sick,” I said. “He’s tall, and you can’t catch that.”
“I’m just curious. I just want to see.”
“See what?” When she wouldn’t answer, I said, “I can’t stop you from visiting, but do it yourself. We’re not here to satisfy your curiosity.”
For a while there were almost always a few kids loitering when I arrived. They brought records for the player; sometimes they even danced in the middle of the room, in the pleased, measured way you dance for someone else’s benefit. James sat in his chair; a visitor balanced on the arm, which was big enough to be a chair itself. I tried to like the music. Mostly I lurked by the door, feeling like the oldest person in the world. Some nights I could not bear all that youth and possibility: I’d hear laughter through the door, and I’d turn around and leave.
One night as I came up the walk, I saw through the window a boy and girl dancing—or should I say, embracing while revolving in tandem. The music was slow treacle. Boys sat on the floor or the bed, looking up at the couple every now and then, not talking. Other people’s happiness is always a fascinating bore. It sucks the oxygen out of the room; you’re left gasping, greedy, amazed by a deficit in yourself you hadn’t ever noticed.
The song was just ending as I walked in; the couple parted, and the girl clapped her hands three times, as though she believed she would hurt the singer’s feelings if she did not acknowledge him.
The boy looked at his watch, then at the girl.
“I know,” she said.
She had dark wavy hair pulled back in a ponytail, and her tight sweater rode up in creases above her bustline. Her lipstick was a bit smudged; I locate
d some of it on the boy’s cheek.
“We have to go,” he said to James.
“Us, too,” said one of the boys on the bed.
“Okay,” said James. “Tomorrow?”
The dancing boy pulled his record off the player. “It’s Friday,” he said. “There’s a dance in Brewster. You should come, Jimmy.”
“Oh,” said James. He kicked at his cane, which he’d set down at the foot of the chair. “I’m not much for dancing.”
“I’ll dance with you,” said the girl. She obviously thought that this promise—not even the dance itself, but the promise of a dance—would solve anything, and she was the type of girl who might convince a boy it could. I will save you from being a wallflower, she’d say, I will cure your life, and a boy, looking at her face, the line of delicate beauty marks on her neck, would think he was the only boy who’d ever been promised such a thing.
“Maybe the next dance,” said James. “When my leg is better.”
“Swear you’ll dance with me sometime,” said the girl.
“I swear.”
She looked at me and smiled. I was happy to see there was something a little wrong with her teeth, a faint chalky discoloration.
“Good night,” she said, and then she walked out, followed by first her dance partner, then the whole line of boys who had watched them.
“You have a lot of friends,” I said to James.
“I don’t really know some of them. I know Ben—” He patted the arm of the chair to indicate the heavy boy who’d been sitting there. “And I know Stella.”
“She’s pretty,” I said, which was what I said as soon as I could about any pretty girl. I wanted people to know I saw it, too.
He nodded, then kicked the cane up with his foot and caught it. He twirled it in one hand; his card exercises were paying off. “I can’t dance,” he said.
“Neither can I.”
“You could,” he said. He spun the cane faster, and I could tell he wished he’d thought to try this trick while Stella was in the room. Then he missed, and the cane fell to the floor. “Maybe in a while I can. When the braces come off.”
“The braces are coming off?” I asked.
“They might,” he said, the way you say things that you have made yourself believe, other evidence to the contrary. “I mean, I won’t ever be a dancer.” He moved his feet across the floor nervously, knocking into the cane. “But that. What they were doing. I could dance like that, maybe. Slowly. If I had someone to lean on.”
“Maybe so,” I said. No girl in the world was tall enough for James to lean on. That girl was just a usual height; taller than me, but not tall. I handed James the book I had under my arm. “William the Conqueror,” I said. “It’s a new one.”
She knew he couldn’t dance. He could barely walk.
Still, she was one person who could offer him things I could not. Let’s face it: a girl his own age.
When I was in eighth grade, there was a girl all the boys called Hickey Vickie. Whether she’d realized at a young age that the neat rhyme made the practice inevitable, or whether it was a coincidence, she was a master at this teenage art, and boys proudly wore her work. Some advanced girls delivered orderly hickeys, circumspect enough to be mistaken for some other adolescent skin problem. Vickie was the Rocky Graziano of kisses; necks left her mouth nothing short of mauled.
I was what is known as a late bloomer—though I am not sure I’ve bloomed yet—and years away from the crude puberty that would visit me late my senior year of high school. I didn’t understand. I knew what a hickey was, technically, but I’d seen movies and believed that passionate kisses were strictly a mouth-to-mouth transaction. Occasionally a leading man would tenderly apply his lips to a forehead or cheek, but his lady would only close her eyes, clearly unbitten.
No amount of prepubescent contemplation could explain it. I did my best. I tried to imagine a situation in which I would be willing to receive (delivering was out of the question) a kiss on the neck at all, never mind a forceful, capillary-busting buss. And though I was able—had long been able, as a matter of fact—to imagine myself with some handsome man who curled his fingers beneath my chin, tilting my lips toward him, these pictures might well have been movies themselves, so devoid were they of any physical nuance. I knew what a kiss looked like, but I had no idea of what one felt like and, being an unimaginative child (as I am now an unimaginative woman), was unable or unwilling to speculate.
Which did not stop me from picturing those kisses. I needed them. I hoarded them. Still, I would not have confessed them, even to girlfriends who, assaulted already by puberty, confessed to much more. In eighth grade it seemed that puberty was a campaign whose soldiers could not find me—I was down the hall and around the corner, or already in a nook in the library, while puberty, like polio, struck the kids who hung around in crowds by the swimming pool or punch bowl. By the time puberty located me, I was sixteen and so frightened of boys I’d given up my dreams of kisses. I’m not sure what I was afraid of. It wasn’t exactly sex, which I’d read up on, eager to understand my still-dreaming and sometimes treacherous friends. Maybe it was too much contemplation, maybe I was finally certain that, left alone with me, a boy would surely try to sink his teeth into my neck.
Now, with James, I was in eighth grade again, curious, not yet frightened. I longed for something physical, but what that would be I could not feature; could not even speculate.
There is his hand on the tabletop.
There are his shoes, still warm from his feet, worn down on either side from where the brace buckles around.
There is his chair, and look, he’s still in it.
There, behind me, retreating, is his window, and his light is on, he’s still awake, just as he was thirty seconds ago when I closed the door.
It’s sex you’re thinking of, Peggy, people will say, you are being naive on purpose or by nature, but anyone else can see it plainly.
Well, perhaps. But those seeing people, those who have in their lives fallen in love without impediment, cannot understand. Nowadays sex is the guest you should always expect, because it’s supposed to knock down your door without an invitation: you might as well be prepared. If you haven’t set a place at the table, you are called naive or repressed.
But sometimes, honestly, the mind makes calibrations, but not for sex, because sex is not coming to you, sex is down the street wrecking your neighbor’s house, sex has—for any number of reasons—washed its hands of you, even if you are not done with it, even if the breakup is not mutual. In which case, if you are lucky and you work very hard, you learn not only to be satisfied by other things, you start to long for them. And you don’t feel starved; you find your hungers are simply different, as if you’ve dropped your Western upbringing for a childhood in a country where ice cream was unheard of, available only in books.
And so I stared at the hand on the tabletop, wanting it to come toward me even if I wasn’t sure for what. I wanted to stick my own feet in his recently occupied shoes to sop up that warmth. I wanted to turn back at night, open the door and say, I think I’ll stay awhile—not the way they do in movies, no meaning or implied unspeakable verb, just to stay, just to be there, just to stay.
James’s ambition—besides dancing—was to attend one of the twice-yearly shoe conventions in New York. Perhaps he thought of New York as a city of size, avenues and skyscrapers and noise. Would the tallest boy in the world be such a sight on those streets? Wouldn’t he be able to walk them, plenty to look up at, thinking, this place is so big? All his life he’d taken pleasure in the smallest tricks: sleight of hand, a camera, what made one bird different from another. He looked for a patch of red beneath a wing, or made a visitor wonder where a card had gone to, or shrank the world into a snapshot.
Finally, though, these things were small, in theory and in fact, and they were no longer enough. He could not shrink himself by loving smallness, though he tried; perhaps he could manage it by courting things even larger tha
n himself. His books on magic taught him that you can convince people of anything if you just direct their attention where you want it, distract them from the matter at hand. Plenty of distraction in Manhattan.
He wrote away for train schedules.
“We could drive,” I said. I still hadn’t convinced James to get in the Nash with me. After all those years of avoiding them, cars made him nervous. They seemed an easy way to break a bone.
“I like trains,” he said.
He bought a map of Manhattan and stuck it to the wall by his bed. I brought him books about the city’s history, the stories of O. Henry, Knickerbocker Tales.
“I had a dream about New York City,” he said sometimes.
“What about it?”
“I was there,” he said. “That’s all.” I waited for him to say, You were there, too. But he didn’t.
As the summer progressed, something changed. He still spoke of New York, but it was something he’d see in years, not months. He scorned his physical therapy.
“No point,” he said. “I can’t feel it working.”
“Well, you wouldn’t,” I said. If he didn’t feel his legs, how would he feel improvement? “The doctors know best.”
“The doctors don’t live with it.”
The only place he ever went was the front house, and then only to eat, to take advantage of their more extensive plumbing. In the fall he’d be a junior at the high school, but he decided not to go back.
“You could just go some of the time,” said Caroline. “They won’t care. Show up when you feel like it.”
“No,” he said. “If I can’t do it right I don’t want to do it at all.”
“Right?” she said. “What’s right? They’ll be glad to see you whenever you show up. You always do well. Isn’t that right enough?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Jim—”
“I don’t want to fall,” he said. “Those floors are slick. I can do the work at home.”
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