A Ticket to Ride

by Paula McLain

  When we first started playing, I thought it was going to be pretty tame. There was no penalty of any kind for playing it safe and narrow, and some of the girls opted for this route at first. “I’ve never cheated on a test,” said Diane Yost, who volunteered to go first. Patty Clabber, a pretty but timid-looking brunette sitting to Diane’s right, was clearly flummoxed for something to confess and blurted, “I’ve never stolen thread from my mother’s sewing basket.”

  “Give me a break,” groaned Claudia. She took up her glass of “tea,” said, “I’ve never roller-skated naked,” and emptied her drink in three theatrical gulps. That she was alone in her odd confession didn’t seem to matter. Everyone howled with laughter, including Claudia herself. And the game grew more interesting suddenly, escalating quickly.

  “I’ve never had sex with two guys in one day,” said Amber Noonan. “Not at the same time,” she clarified before emptying her glass, “that would be slutty.” Fawn drank on that round too, and although a few of the girls’ eyebrows lifted, no one asked questions. That was the beauty of “I never.” Details weren’t part of the game.

  Next in the circle was Tessa Dodd, who confessed she’d spent a night in jail for “borrowing” a neighbor woman’s pearl necklace (out of her underwear drawer, no less), and then it was Fawn’s turn. “I’ve never sucked a total stranger’s dick,” she said proudly.

  I had no idea what she was referring to or who. She hadn’t told me this story, and either she was making it up for effect, or it was simply something she had kept to herself. Just how much did I know about Fawn? I wondered, as she downed her drink and pressed Claudia for a refill.

  It occurred to me that, in other circles, the point of the game might be to reveal little or nothing, to concoct the perfect “I never” confession that would allow you to stay sober, chaste, virtuous, while drawing others out, forcing them to confess to doing what you’d only dreamed up. In this version, however, the girls seemed hell-bent on spilling every last gritty secret. And just when I wondered what on earth I could possibly contribute without looking like a fool, Fawn cut in. “Why don’t we just skip you, Jamie?” She turned to the group, her voice arching with sarcasm. “You’ll have to forgive our little Jamie,” she said. “Nothing’s ever happened to her. Here, honey,” she said. “I’ll go for you.” Crouching so that she looked smaller, shier, she stuttered, “Um, I’ve nnn-ever k-k-k-issed a b-boy,” then took the smallest sip of her tea. That was supposed to be me, I realized with horror. I could feel my face growing hot as I flushed, but no one seemed to notice. They were all laughing, and then it was Claudia’s turn again. Only I knew it wasn’t meant to be a joke at all. Fawn hadn’t even particularly wanted to embarrass me, it was simply how she saw me: a peon, baby, nun. I was a bug Fawn flicked off her arm without looking or thinking, a bit of hair blown out of her eyes.

  I stood up, feeling sick suddenly, and went to find the bathroom. I headed to the right, where I could see a crack of light beneath one door, and realized that I was drunk. For the better part of an hour, I’d been taking recreational hits of my drink without even realizing it. Now the hall was like a collapsing tunnel. I put both hands out, steadying myself, and aimed my body at what little light there was. When I made it to the door, I opened it to find not the bathroom but Tom’s bedroom, and him in it. He sprawled lazily out on his water bed, wearing cutoff shorts and nothing else. I glanced quickly around the room, from the zebra-print bedspread to the pinup poster of Jill St. John, to the chain of beer tabs draped over a hook on the wall and nearly trailing the floor.

  “You lost?” His eyes flicked dismissively over my nightgown with its lace collar and cap sleeves.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled, backing out of the room.

  “No hey, wait up. I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned against the door, waiting for his question. But he wasn’t in a big hurry. He sloshed his way over to the edge of the bed and then sat there, scratching his bare chest. Finally, he stood and walked over to me, stopping when he was less than a foot away. “What’s the deal with your friend?” he said. “Is she crazy or something?”

  “Fawn?”

  “Yeah. She’s like stalking me now. You need to tell her to back off, all right? She’s freaking me out.”

  My mind reeled. Didn’t Fawn say Tom was the one who’d gotten too serious? Wasn’t that why she’d decided to cut him loose? “Maybe you should tell Fawn yourself,” I said, not knowing how to respond. Tom made me nervous. He was half-naked, and close enough that I could have reached out and touched him if I wanted. And then there were his yellow-green eyes, staring me down.

  “I have told her, that’s what I’m saying. She’s not exactly getting the hint.” He walked back over to the bed, and reached under a long blanket that was draped over the edge, to pull out a small bong. The glass bulb was smoke-stained black on the inside, all the way up to the mouthpiece. He cradled it in one hand as he lit the stem, inhaled deeply, and then offered it to me.

  “I should probably get back,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Don’t let me stop you.”

  What am I doing? I suddenly thought. I’m in Tom’s room, and I really want to go back to the slumber party where Fawn is being a bitch? “Maybe just one hit then,” I said, closing the door.

  We shared the bong and then Tom put on a Jethro Tull album, blowing on each side before placing it lovingly on the turntable. When he lifted the needle to set it in the groove, it was with the precision of a surgeon. “Aqualung” flared like a match into the room and only then did he seem to remember I was still there.

  “So what’s your dilemma?” he said, coming back to the bed where he sat next to me. The water sloshed, slapping the inside plastic mattress with little fishtail sounds.

  “My what?”

  “You know, your dilemma. Your plan, your propaganda.”

  I squinted at him in the dim room, but seeing his mouth more clearly didn’t make his meaning any plainer.

  “Are you going to get all weird on me like your girlfriend?”

  “Definitely not,” I said.

  “That’s what I like to hear.” He took my shoulders in his hands and steered me that way, down onto the bed. His face blurred, inches from my own. I could smell tacos and pot on his breath and some kind of sweet liquor, maybe Southern Comfort. I was sure he was about to kiss me, but he didn’t. He wasn’t looking at my face, even, but at the floppy bow at the lace collar of my nightgown. “You do have nice tits,” he said. “I’ll give you that.”

  “Thanks,” I said, but immediately felt stupid for saying it. After all, it wasn’t as if he had complimented my shoes.

  “So why are you here, anyway?”

  “You invited me.” I tried to sit up but couldn’t get a purchase on the rocking bed. “You’re the one who asked me to stay.”

  “No, no. You can stay.” He held my shoulders firmly. “But what do you want? This?” he said, grabbing one breast roughly through my nightgown. He grazed my nipple with his thumb and currents of electricity shot out seven ways at once. “Or this, maybe?” He straddled me then, easily pinning my hips down, his knees close to my rib cage. I closed my eyes. I was terrified. Was this it, then? If I said the word, would we have sex? Should I tell Tom I was a virgin or did he already know? “I want you,” I whispered.

  And just like that, something changed. His eyes snapped shut then open again, and he made a little huffing noise. “Guess I was right,” he said. “You’re all the same.” And then: “You’d better go back to your party.”

  I sat up dizzily. My body throbbed in odd places. I could feel my pulse in my forehead, in my fingertips, in a vein that ran along the top of my foot. He was right? About what? Had I just failed a test or something? Was I supposed to say no, supposed to turn him down? Then why had he teased me? Was it some kind of game or trick from the beginning? I moved numbly to the door, then turned back to see Tom kneeling reverentially at the turntable
. He didn’t look up.

  When I made it back to Claudia’s room, almost an hour had passed. Half of the girls were already asleep, sacked out in their sleeping bags in the middle of the floor. I stepped over them carefully to get to Claudia’s bed, where Claudia and Fawn sat sharing a cigarette.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Fawn said.

  “I threw up,” I said. “In the bathroom. Then I passed out, I guess.”

  “Figures,” said Fawn, rolling her eyes.

  “It happens,” Claudia said more gently. “Maybe you should go lie down.”

  Claudia seemed genuinely concerned, and it occurred to me that this was what friends were supposed to do—care about you, notice when you were feeling lousy and try to make you feel better. But there was Fawn, my supposed best friend, glaring at me with disgust.

  Without saying another word, I crawled over to the sleeping bag I’d borrowed from Raymond and buried myself in it. The outside was a heavy green burlap sort of fabric, the inside was deep red flannel with a Western print, cowboys and lariats, horned bulls standing in pools of kicked-up dust. When I breathed, I could taste the smell of it, something swampy and historical and not entirely pleasant. But the urge to stay hidden was strong. I didn’t want to see anyone or be seen. I didn’t want to listen to anyone or to confess my newly acquired secret, though silence put me in an especially lonely position. Fawn was possibly the only person in the world who could help me translate the humiliating weirdness I’d just experienced with Tom, and also the one person in the world I could never talk to about it. So I lay there alone, my arms crossed over my head to hold the marshmallowy fabric of the bag off my face, and let the moments I spent with Tom in his room spin through my head like images in a viewfinder, as puzzling and coded to me as photographs from someone else’s exotic vacation.

  The next morning as we walked home from Claudia’s, Fawn said, “You’re awfully quiet.”

  “I’m just thinking.”

  “Really? About what? What has our witto Jamie got to think about?” she said, slipping right into her baby-talk impression of me from the night before.

  “Shut up.”

  “Shut up,” Fawn mocked.

  “Leave me alone!”

  “Leave me alone!”

  I couldn’t bear to hear Fawn’s version of my voice coming back at me, weak and whiney. “Fuck off,” I said, flaring up.

  “Fuck off.” Fawn wasn’t about to give up the game. It was working too well.

  “Stop it, Fawn.”

  “Stop it, Fawn.”

  I couldn’t bear it a moment longer. I trotted ahead, trying to get far enough away from Fawn so that I didn’t have to hear her anymore, but Fawn tagged me easily. “Waah wah, where are you going, little baby?”

  “I’m not a baby,” I said, spinning around.

  “Really?” Fawn’s left eyebrow arced with perfect precision, like always. “Only babies run away.”

  “You want to know where I was last night?” The words rushed, crowding each other to get out of my mouth, and it felt strangely good, that sensation of being out of control, strangely powerful. “I was with Tom. In his bedroom.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I was too.” And then, “I fucked him.” Now I had done it, crossed a line into new territory where I said things like I fucked him. I couldn’t take it back; I didn’t want to take it back.

  “You fucked him? You fucked Tom? You’re such a fat liar.”

  “You’re the liar,” I said. “You were all, ‘Tom’s getting too serious,’ but he broke up with you. He told me all about it.”

  “What?” Fawn spit the word as if it were acid. “He told you what?”

  “That you were a freak, if you really want to know. That I was supposed to tell you to stay away from him.”

  There was a split second of collapse, Fawn’s face changing, falling like something constructed of pick-up sticks, and then she was herself again, composed and detached and harder than ever. “You can both go fuck yourselves,” she said, and with that turned to head back the way we’d come.

  I walked home alone. Once the anger dissipated, which took all of about three seconds, I felt dizzy, deflated. What had just happened? I hadn’t meant to say anything about Tom at all, and I certainly hadn’t meant to hurt Fawn, but I’d been forced to. Fawn had picked and picked at me. What was I supposed to do, just take it? That wouldn’t have worked either. Fawn didn’t want me to be a baby, but didn’t want me to stand up for myself either. There was no right answer, just like with Tom. What if I’d lied and said I didn’t want him to touch me, would he have done it then? Was that what he wanted to hear? No. If I lied, if I told the truth, if I said nothing—there was a tiger behind every curtain.

  When I got home, Raymond was out, no note. Fawn was nowhere to be found. I tried to take a nap and failed, and then watched TV for a while, switching back and forth between a movie about pioneers and a gospel choir in flowing robes and white collars. When I turned the sound off, it looked like they were floating or swimming, deranged underwater angels with their mouths opening and closing like Felix’s. I went to the freezer for the plastic bag of pinkies and fed him, feeling no particular relish or disgust. He was a carnivore; it was his nature. What was my nature? I had felt a flare of power when I told Fawn what Tom had said about her, the word freak like a shell casing in my mouth. But now I felt awful, remote from Fawn and remote from myself. I stretched out on the couch and reached up under the sheet so I could feel the fabric. It was satisfyingly coarse, making my palm and fingertips itch. I rubbed it harder. In the corner, Mick thumped his tail with his eyes closed, and somehow, to that whacked percussion and the sensation of my hand moving in serrated circles on steel wool, I fell asleep.

  It was dusk when I woke, and I was still alone. I walked outside and sat in the grass for a long time. Where was Fawn?

  Eventually Skinny Man came out and rolled his garden hose into a meticulous basket coil at the side of his garage. One by one the streetlights stammered on and the sky brightened to a false white-pink ceiling that looked collapsible, like one big trapdoor. Bats skittered and dove, feasting on the mosquitoes that were eating me alive. Nothing had really changed. I needed Fawn to like me as much as ever—needed to talk to her, to tell her that I would make things right between us. How I would do that I didn’t know, but I had to figure it out. Even a few hours without Fawn had been lonelier than I could have imagined.

  At the corner, a white sedan pulled up to the stop sign and someone got out. It was Fawn. She leaned over, said something to the driver through the window, and then backed up, lifting her hand in a wave. As the car pulled away from the curb, I thought I saw the silhouette of Shipman’s formidable Afro, but I couldn’t be sure.

  Fawn approached the house slowly, moving in a feline way, her hips swinging, her hair lifting lightly behind her. It was beautiful to watch. How could Tom not want her? She was amazing. In my whole life, I would never have an iota of Fawn’s grace and composure. I would never be anything like Fawn, in fact; I should just give up trying. Closer and closer, Fawn walked, her face materializing out of the dusk, growing clear and lovely features. I felt a sharp pang of guilt. Fawn was my best friend in the world and still I had gone to Tom, wanting him to come on to me. What had I been thinking?

  When Fawn got to the edge of the driveway, she stopped.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Don’t even think about talking to me, you little bitch.” Her voice was flat and even, as if she were a judge delivering a verdict, a doctor making the prognosis crystal-clear. Then she turned on her heel and walked into the house.

  SISTER GOLDEN HAIR

  It will all blow over. It will all blow over. This was my mantra in the days after my fight with Fawn, a phrase I borrowed from the country, which seemed to be saying it or something like it over and over, en masse, about Watergate. Everywhere we went that summer, radios and TVs were tuned in to the Senate hearing trials. People were interested, but mostly
in being told that it was all a big misunderstanding. Any day now, the whole thing was going to be explained away. John Dean would say his thing and then Nixon would say his thing. People had made mistakes, maybe even Nixon himself, but he would apologize and they would accept, and everything would go back to the way it had been before.

  Or would it?

  At home, we watched the trials in the evenings after dinner, but with the sound off.

  “I can only hear so much lying before I start to get really ticked off,” Raymond said.

  “Me too,” said Fawn, lifting her eyebrow pointedly at me before turning away.

  In the daytime, things were more or less the same as always. We sunbathed every day between ten and two, but unless one of us asked the other to pass the cocoa butter, or to change the radio station, we didn’t talk. From my towel, through squinted lids, I could see Fawn’s bent legs twitching back and forth, keeping their own time. If I turned the other way, there was nothing in my sight but the bleached green yard and paler curb, the asphalt curdling and blurring and going nowhere.

  It will all blow over, I repeated at bedtime, when a silent Fawn lay facing away from me, her tanned shoulder like a piece of statuary above the sheet. After enough time had passed and Fawn was sure I was asleep, she would sneak out on her own. Where she went on these nights, I didn’t know, but I supposed Fawn had a new boyfriend. Maybe it was Shipman, maybe some total stranger. Did they go to the park, or to the construction site? Did they grope each other to “Bennie and the Jets”?

  One night I lay in bed awake and started to feel like I was going crazy. My breathing was loud and steady, and with each exhalation, I felt I was sinking into the mattress. At first it was sort of comforting. This is just me relaxing, I told myself. But soon, I began to feel panicky. It was like a spell, but different, backward. Rather than starting way down at the bottom of my lungs and climbing me like a ladder, this pressure seemed to be moving from the outside in. The bed was trying to breathe me, the room itself to devour me atom by atom. I had lost Fawn or she had purposefully lost me, and what was I anyway? What was I made of and for what purpose? If Fawn wouldn’t forgive me, I’d be alone again. I could die in that room, like furniture. I might go to sleep and never wake up. Or go to sleep and wake up just as sad and hollow as I felt right then. With that thought, I forced myself upright. Adrenaline and fear pushed me out of my nightgown, into shorts and a tank top. I was out the window and halfway down the street before I could fully register what I was doing. Where was I headed? After Fawn? No, she wouldn’t be happy to see me even if I did manage to find her.