A Bigamist's Daughter

by Alice McDermott

  The exact transition is unclear, but after God, there were the Beatles. Their importance should not be underestimated. They established in her and, she sometimes likes to believe, in her entire generation, a quality of devotion that to this day endures, if only to fill her with a sweet nostalgia when faced with the concept of undying and unrequited love. If only to keep her believing, as all women are said to believe, that the imported male is always more desirable than the domestic.

  For two years (eleven to thirteen? twelve to fourteen?), she lived and breathed the Beatles, wrote their names all over her notebooks at school, plastered her bedroom walls with their pictures, studied their lives. At the time, she and her friends were too young to be allowed to actually go see them in concert, and so they went to their first movie and, imitating the audiences they had seen on Ed Sullivan, screamed at the images on the film, crying, reaching out, calling names and secret messages. When the movie ended, they hugged one another, their own Paul, George, John and Ringo surrogates.

  She was just beginning to hear about the details of sex then, and although she found the concept of it somewhat repulsive and certainly humiliating, she decided (recalling St. Lucy?) that, for the love of Paul McCartney, she could bear it.

  With the right man, she was sure, all things were possible.

  It shouldn’t be surprising that she spent her teenage years in a state of what might be called push-me pull-me virginity.

  On the one hand, there were the nuns at Blessed Virgin who couldn’t say enough about the sacredness of sex—as if, having hooked the Almighty, they were anxious to prove that they were not scornful of those who had to settle for lesser mates. They constantly assured their students that “secular” marriage too was a divine union and the marriage act (what the girls were then calling “doing it”) quite nearly a religious experience. (A ceremony of Holy Orders for lay people, Sister Barbara had called it in Elizabeth’s junior year, coining a phrase.) And, ironically, it was their approbation of marriage and the marriage act and all the wonders it entailed, impressed upon her in religion class, during retreats, in her senior-year marriage course, and even in Home Ec, that brought her to the conclusion that the right man would be second only to the nuns’ Mate Himself, and that, as with Saint Theresa, once he appeared, all nit-picking details should be put aside and their consummation be immediate and miraculous.

  On the other hand, there were the boys.

  At the time, all the boys she knew she’d met at dances given by the all-male Catholic high schools in the area, and, later, at bars where everyone had phony proof and drank sloe gin fizzes or whiskey sours. They were typical Catholic high school boys, boys who tended to travel in groups, who often poked each other, slapped each other, held each other in headlocks and half Nelsons. Boys who threw up between cars and popped pimples while they danced. Who were without theories about love and sex and the role of women in their lives; who wanted only to know if you would or you wouldn’t (and how their voices lacked—was it only a British accent?) because they had to get up early on Sunday to play basketball.

  Often, she said she would.

  Crushed up against a car door, believing the miracle of the act would somehow transform him, she’d hold her breath and whisper yes, trying to recall all the things she liked about this particular young man—the way a martyr must recall past favors in order to face the rack—trying to remember why she’d noticed him at the dance, the bar, why she’d been so happy he’d called and asked her out, praying he’d say some magic word that would make the moment perfect. But then, five well-bitten fingernails would be shoved down her pants or a penis would appear like the groping head of a curious one-eyed turtle, and she’d have to admit that she’d changed her mind.

  (“You’ve gone too far,” she’d say, meaning, of course, that he’d gotten too close.)

  And a week later, ever hopeful, she’d find herself in the same position, with the same or another boy, saying yes again. Then no again.

  She chalked up her hesitation—and the dissatisfaction of her friends, who were one by one losing their virginity and assuring her that it was no big deal—to her theory of the right man. She, and they, simply hadn’t met the right man, or if she had met him, he hadn’t, like Rosemary Hart’s brother or Mr. McKinney, the basketball coach at one of the boys’ schools, been available to work that miracle that would change her life.

  Gradually, like many of the bored or dateless girls in her school, she began to turn the bulk of her romantic energy toward a more appealing, more worldly, and, because of the upper middle class’s penchant for college deferments, an even more incorporeal set of knights: the boys in Vietnam.

  No one she knew knew one personally. But still they watched them on TV and saw them in magazines and history-class documentaries, and every once in a while a girl would come to school with the story of someone’s brother’s friend’s friend who was blown up a week before he was, to return, or someone’s older sister’s boyfriend who came back without a leg, and they would all shake their heads and let their eyes fill with tears. They prayed for them in homeroom every morning, drew peace signs on their notebooks, cut bloody pictures out of Life magazine and hung them on their bulletin boards. They sandwiched tear-filled arguments about our boys in the swamps between discussions of prom decorations and who had just had an abortion. They were, once again, too young to actually participate in marches on Washington and takeovers of administration buildings, but they looked forward to college, when they would have that kind of freedom, and she began, as her senior year came to a close and her virginity was still upon her, to associate the romance of protest with other sorts of romance as well.

  But by the time she started college, Kent State was old news and the war was “winding down.” Her visions of herself as a red-faced college student screaming her anger and crying her love on the barricades would have gone entirely unrealized if it hadn’t been for one demonstration, organized early in her freshman year: The last demonstration the college, which had been surrounded by the National Guard four separate times during the sixties, would ever see.

  They walked through town on a warm fall day, in single file, chanting like acolytes and feeling very smug when men in bars or gas stations called them hippies and gave them the finger, and then, in the center of Main Street, they came to a halt. One of their leaders, the word went around, was to run down the line like a MIG fighter plane, and as he passed them, they were to scream and fall to the ground, as if they’d been shot. They were to lie in the road like that, blocking traffic and representing the many civilians killed in the war, until the featured speaker had completed his address.

  They nodded solemnly to one another, and then, from the front of the line, a fat boy with long, thinning hair came running toward them, his arms stretched, his cheeks puffed, his pale belly peeking out from under his American flag T-shirt and his fat, corduroyed thighs chafing each other with a soft, farting sound. As he passed them, he showed his teeth and screamed rat-tat-tat, and they fell like dominoes, clutching their hearts, screaming too. On the ground, she carefully rested her head on the thigh of the boy behind her—everyone was making pillows of everyone else—and prepared to listen closely to the bald, one-armed Vietnam vet who was the guest of honor. But just as the speech started (“Where have all the flowers gone?” the vet began), she felt a twitch beneath her head. At first it was just a slight ripple, but as the speech continued, it grew stronger and stronger, until she was sure her head was literally bouncing up and down. Behind her, the boy who owned the leg was giggling—holding his breath as if to stop, whining a little, and then giggling again. She caught it, her head bouncing, and started giggling too, and the boy in front of her, who had his arm across her stomach and his nose to the road, started whispering, “I’m going to pee. Stop it, you’re gonna make me pee,” which started the person in front of him giggling, and so on.

  When the speech finally ended (“When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?”), about a
dozen of them lay immobile in the street, tears streaming down their faces. Two had actually peed.

  That night, she went out with the boy whose leg she’d been on. They drank beer until they’d convinced each other that they really were very concerned about the war, very serious about life in general, and then she went back to his dorm room with him to prove just how serious she could be.

  First, they smoked some hash and discussed what was about to occur. (“Talk strategy,” he’d said, as if they were about to run a three-legged race together.) She told him she was on the Pill, although she wasn’t. And that she’d done this many times before, although she hadn’t.

  He said he didn’t believe in commitment and thought sex was just a basic human need, like food and air and water.

  Being an antiwar activist, she agreed.

  He said he only thought they should be honest with each other.

  She said, “We can ask no more.”

  It took six minutes, by the clock, and the only perfect thing about it was the way he lit two cigarettes afterward, both at the same time, and handed one to her. The gesture made her believe she loved him for nearly six months.

  Her next two years were occupied with a succession of boys who, with their plaid shirts and beer drunks and worn Cheech and Chong imitations, all seemed alike. (As, she is sure, she, with her uncertain major in social science and her crush on her anthropology professor and her dilemma of to pledge or not to pledge, must have seemed to them like every other girl.) Boys who were worth more to her as stories she could tell Sunday morning back at the dorm or apartment (or, for a semester, the sorority house) than as companions in bed or bar. Boys whom she often told, when drunk or high enough to be able to deny it in the morning, that she loved.

  Early in her senior year she saw Bill for the first time, and thought of the height and breadth and depth that her soul had yet to reach. Like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus, she was struck, reprimanded, enlisted. She knew her life would never again be the same.

  A year later, he spoke to her.

  Tupper Daniels travels her body and returns with reports of spices and silks, strange seas, small treasures, deposits of pure gold. He details the pleasure she gives him.

  There is, he tells her, a small bone or tendon near the skin inside her thigh, that rises or tightens under his tongue, creating a deep hollow in the flesh around it. A hollow that could, he is sure, catch rain.

  There is, at the small of her back, a slight dimple like a gentle thumbprint. When he puts his thumb to it, she moves her hips. Always toward him. (He says this seriously, uncertainly, as if he himself believes it too good to be true.)

  At the back of her neck, under her dark hair, there is a tapering line of lighter, finer hair, fading down into the shadow of her spine. If his fingers follow it, he thinks of fur, quick bones moving underneath. If he reaches around to her soft stomach, he feels he has suddenly lost his footing, as in a dream. Like a sailor who has suddenly considered the depth of the ocean beneath him.

  He lies beside her, whispering: She tastes of rain—the way the heavy air tastes just before a thunderstorm, or just after. Of sea salt. He licks his lips in the dark, puts her hand to his mouth to taste her again.

  He sometimes asks that they leave the light on. He loves the way her mouth seems to turn into itself at its corners, as if, he says, her lips, having given the world enough pleasure, quickly and demurely meet to withdraw.

  Her bottom lashes are unusually long, did she know that? They seem to move together, forming points like small petals.

  Her hair, he tells her as they are walking, takes on a different odor in bed. It loses its perfume, has a humid, grassy smell, much better. It feels cool when it brushes his chest.

  One morning, he proudly shows her where she has bitten him, dug her nails into his flesh. He laughs when she apologizes and says she was unaware. He tells her they are his first tattoos. Gained while on adventure in a foreign land.

  Alone, she studies herself, remembering his fantastic reports. She lifts her hair, watches her thighs, doubts him. Begins to believe.

  He offers to photograph her.

  She laughs, “But no one’s ever mentioned it before.”

  He’s a writer, he tells her. The first thing he learned at Vanderbilt was to be specific.

  She studies herself again. If he is no writer, what can be said for his writer’s eye?

  Chapter 14

  The simplest questions, the most ordinary responsibilities, are the ones that throw her. She can explain to any author, without hesitation, how eight pages added to a manuscript will mean adding another signature, which will mean increasing the size of the binding and the jacket, which will, of course, add considerably to the cost of production, and thus the contract itself. But let the same author ask her (after having eliminated the extra pages or paid her for them) how to get to Columbus Circle by subway, and her mouth will go dry, her heart will sink.

  It’s as if the fine web of lies and illusions with which she gets through her day is penetrable only by those small, definite questions. Factual questions that can’t be faked, that slip like pebbles through the weave of her various poses and strike at what she fears is her raw stupidity.

  How, after all, can a bright young editor at a large New York publishing house not know the difference between IRT and IND, between ounces and pints, between affect and effect?

  And so, that Saturday afternoon, as she and Tupper Daniels pull out of her street in a rented Firebird and he says, “Which way?” the name of every road on Long Island—the Expressway, Grand Central Parkway, Southern State, Meadowbrook, Northern State, Cross Island—meet and fuse in her mind, becoming, for her, one long stretch of featureless concrete.

  “Take the Tunnel,” she says, trying to buy more time in the city, where names and numbers are predictable. “The Midtown Tunnel.”

  He smiles, looking like a pale pervert in his flashing sunglasses. Though it’s late October, the day is warm and bright. He has a deep red sweater tied around his neck—it is blinding against the car’s white interior. “I take it then I have to go toward midtown.”

  “That’s right,” and before she can adjust her seat belt he has cut west, through scornful pedestrians and changing lights, and turned onto Fifth Avenue.

  She laughs. “Not this far midtown. The Tunnel’s on the East Side.”

  He shrugs. “So we’ll go down Fifth. It’s prettier.”

  Stopped for a light, he puts his hand on the seat beside him and races the engine. He only needs, she thinks, a can of beer and a wad of gum.

  “You look right at home behind the wheel,” she says.

  “I was born behind the wheel.” A teenage hillbilly grinning over his hot rod. She notices that he is chewing gum. When the light changes, he pulls out in front and cuts off two cabs, swearing he’ll make every light to Thirty-fourth Street. They’re stopped at the Plaza and in front of St. Patrick’s, and again at Forty-second Street, but he slips under each light going cross-town and veers into the Tunnel like a barnstormer.

  She laughs. It’s a silly, peacock display, but it’s been a long time since she’s ridden in a car with a man, and not terribly long since such displays truly thrilled her (like Ann, there are parts of her adolescence she’ll never shake). And there is, she thinks, something about a man’s hands on the steering wheel—thick knuckles, strong wrists—something about the casual slump of his body in the seat, the easy, screeching turns and clever shifts of gear, the absolute male confidence on the road, that makes her feel lucky, taken care of. Dad’s in his bucket, all’s right with the world.

  She remembers breaking up with a boy in college because he sat stiffly behind the wheel and bit his nails as he drove.

  In Wisconsin, her father had been killed by the other guy. Although the police had pointed out that her father, too, had been drinking.

  As they come out of the Tunnel and go through the toll-booth, Tupper looks up at the signs and asks, “Do I want the Long
Island Expressway?”

  She says, “Yes,” although she means If you say so, and tries to force her mind to remember what comes next. She can only be sure of Montauk.

  “How long do I stay on here?” he asks, getting into the fast lane.

  “I’ll let you know,” she says. “It’s a ways.”

  He glances at her, then in his rearview mirror. “Well, just give me fair warning. I hate it when women give directions like, ‘Make a right. Back there.’ ”

  She smiles. “I’ll let you know.” And now even the names of the roads slip from her mind. Of course, it’s women. Women will get wet when you drive fast and look pretty beside you, but you sure as hell can’t depend on them for intelligence, much less directions. They’ll giggle and say, “Make a right. Back there.”

  She gives up the idea of giggling and saying, “We’d better ask at a gas station.”

  “What a beautiful Ferrari,” she says instead, casually, trying to sound like one of the boys, although she has to squint to read the car’s name. She considers saying something crude about the blonde driving it. Dumb bitch, probably lost.

  Tupper turns his head to look at the car. “Nice,” he says.

  They drive silently, past the sloping lawns of Calvary Cemetery, where gray and beige and bright white tombstones crowd together like pedestrians on Fifth Avenue at lunchtime—although the cemetery has placed these New Yorkers in what seems an incongruous kind of order, as if, at their point, order mattered—and, weaving quickly through the traffic, follow the road through Queens.

  They pass a sign for a street that she knows would lead them to her old apartment in Flushing, where she lived until she moved up with Bill, but she’d spent her year there without a car, being chauffeured by Bill or Joanne or the MTA, and all but the location of her own building and her apartment within it is a blank to her now. She could have spent that year as a murmuring recluse.