Meeting Rozzy Halfway

by Caroline Leavitt

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The day before I was to start work, the last day of school when no one did anything, when everyone came dressed in blue jeans and faded T-shirts, Jay Keller asked me out. Jay was infamous, every parent’s nightmare, every girl’s twitching daydream. He was a transfer student from Cambridge, a loner with few friends and a few enemies. He took every drug there was to take: acid, speed, diet pills, cold capsules, mixing over-the-counter drugs with prescriptions and creating effects he claimed no one else had experienced. He supplied half the school, staggering belligerently in the halls, jittering through his classes. He had very long brown hair that he kept slicked back with oil during school so they wouldn’t throw him out. When it was washed, it touched his shoulders, it frisked along the top of his back. He always wore blue jeans and the same blue denim workshirt that he washed out every evening.

  He was bright, but he was always being thrown out of class for saying things about God being dead and the war being wrong and how he would just as soon go to Canada as fight. Belmont High School had a small pack of hoods, and one day they grabbed Jay in the parking lot and beat him up. “Get a haircut, faggot,” they screamed at him, kicking him with their heavy boots, in his face, his stomach, wherever they could make contact. Jay wouldn’t fight. He crouched down and tried to shield himself with his arms, but it only enraged them. They left Jay bleeding and torn in the lot for Mr. Ames, the driver education teacher, to find. Mr. Ames took Jay to the hospital and waited in the emergency room. He called Jay’s parents and took Jay home. After that, Jay came to school with a bodyguard, and he wouldn’t leave the building until the guard, a big stupid-looking blond, showed. He kept the guard for over a month. Jay and Mr. Ames became friends. No one knew what they talked about, but you could always see the two of them drinking coffee in the cafeteria. It was funny to see a teacher and a kid like that.

  I had no classes with Jay. He really didn’t know me. After he was beaten up, he became a sort of celebrity. Girls flocked around him, and there were stories that he used them up and discarded them as easily as he would Kleenex. Someone said he had a woman in Maine who had borne his child; someone else said he had a twelve-year-old girl friend in Texas. He slept with all kinds of women—and, it was hinted, with men, too.

  I was talking with Hilly outside the school, swinging my legs against the high stone ledge we were perched on. Jay walked by. “Boy, he’s gorgeous,” said Hilly. “He gives me wet dreams.” She looked at me and giggled.

  “Shut up. He’ll hear you,” I hissed.

  Jay suddenly pivoted, freezing me into position. “Hi, Jay,” said Hilly, blushing.

  “Your name is Bess, isn’t it?” he said, studying me, unsmiling. I couldn’t trust myself to open my mouth, so I nodded, feeling like a fool. “You work after school?” he said. “You want to meet me at Ralph’s, you know where that is, by the market? We can have coffee, I can be there in an hour. I have to clean up some things first.” He suddenly grinned at me, his face changed. “It’ll be OK. Can you make it? An hour?”

  I swallowed and moved my head up and down, a yes. “Good,” he said, “I’ll see you then.” I didn’t speak until he was further down the road, away from us.

  “Oh my God,” I said.

  “Everyone in the school will know in five minutes and you’ll be famous,” said Hilly. “Jay Keller. Can you believe it? I’m so jealous I could puke.”

  “I’m terrified. He doesn’t even know me.”

  “Well, anyway, even if he ever asked me, I wouldn’t be able to date him. My parents would have a fit, the drugs and all.”

  “Parents,” I said, feeling suddenly queasy. I could see Bea zeroing in on Jay, demanding information from him as if it were her right. She’d want to know where we were going, what we were planning to do there, and how serious we were going to become. And Ben—oh God, Ben—would judge, would want to check Jay’s family, his past, and then there would be no relationship, there would be no Jay in my life. And of course there was Rozzy to think about. I could just see it—a cozy little dinner with Rozzy making strange noises at the table.

  “I’m not telling my parents about Jay,” I said.

  “You’re not going to tell them anything? You could lie and say it was another boy.”

  “No, they’d want to meet him.”

  “Well,” said Hilly, “you can use me as an alibi anytime you need, but you have to promise to tell me all the details.” “OK.”

  Hilly walked me to Ralph’s and then we parted. Jay was already there, pushed into a red plastic booth in the back, smiling. I was nervous, but Jay turned out to be funny and smart, in perfect control. I couldn’t think of things to say, and sometimes I would be so busy trying to phrase a sentence that I would lose track of Jay’s words. I babbled a lot. I spilled my coffee on the table, making the waitress irritable with me. She wiped up the liquid with a damp blue checkered cloth.

  “I want to see you tomorrow,” said Jay. “Is that OK?”

  When I didn’t say anything, he said, “Look, I like you. I’ve been watching you in school, how you move, what books you read during lunch while everyone else fucks around and acts like a cretin. But you—there’s something different about you, something special.”

  I blushed.

  “You seeing someone else, is that it?”

  “No, I do want to see you, really. It’s just that there’s something I have to tell you about, something we’ll have to work out. My parents—”

  Jay held up his hand, amused. “Aha, parents,” he said. “How well I know that routine.” He was used to parents not liking him. He had been hidden in closets by girls, threatened with the police by fathers, screamed at by mothers. It didn’t bother him. He had devised elaborate systems to avoid detection, codes and signals. “Who wants to have to get dressed up and eat some crummy dinner at some parental table, all the time having to answer nosy questions. Every adult thinks they have the right to be your parent.” He reached across the table and touched my hand. “Look, when you want to talk to me, you do the calling. If I call and you don’t answer, I’ll hang up. Is there anyone that might sound like you at home?”

  “Rozzy—my sister,” I said. “You better not call.”

  “Fine. And you don’t have to worry about my folks. They’re almost never home and my sister is so dim I could feed her any line and she’d believe me.” He stretched. “We’ll spend a secret summer together.”

  When I got home, heady with Jay, Bea called out to me that I was late. Rozzy was in the kitchen, eating brownies from the pan, digging them out with a knife. She had just washed her hair and it was all silky and wet and she looked lovely. I had promised to call Hilly, but I didn’t want to talk about anything. I didn’t want to share.

  “You missed hot brownies,” said Rozzy.

  “Who cares about that?” I said, smiling. “I have better things to think about than brownies.”

  “Suit yourself,” she shrugged.

  “I do,” I said and went to wash for dinner.

  I had never had a summer quite like that one. Every morning, I said good-bye to Bea and walked to the corner bus stop for camp, avoiding the few young kids straggling around, punching one another and snickering. I waited for them to hop onto the Blue Skies bus, and then I caught a downtown express. I called the camp from a pay phone and told them I was sick. They didn’t seem to care. There were three people assigned to a unit, and they were probably delighted to pocket the extra money.

  I walked to Jay’s house from downtown. Jay didn’t work. He never left his house all day, but stayed home smoking dope and playing his flute, having the whole empty place to himself. “I can’t meet you,” he said. “You have to get here by yourself. You can come upstairs and wake me. I’ll make sure the front door is open for you.” I didn’t mind. I didn’t see it as unfair because he was creating a special secret environment for us.

  All that sleepy summer, we never saw another person aside from each other in that house. I never met
his mother or father; I never even bothered to ask what they did, and his sister was away at camp. Inside that house, neither of us had a family. We sprawled on his small blue bed upstairs and let the shrill whining fan blow hot dusty air over us. He played me moody pieces on his flute and liked to watch me sketch and I made pocket-sized pictures of him that I carried in my wallet like snapshots. Evenings were terrible. I was wrenched back into the world. I escaped with swimming. Bea would drive me to the Y and arrange to pick me up, and sometimes Jay would show up. He didn’t swim, but he would walk around in the shallow part or flick water at me.

  Jay gave me my first kiss. It surprised me. His kiss felt sharp, uncomfortable, his hands moved inside my blouse. He wanted me so much that I couldn’t imagine not letting him have me. He tried to build me up to it. We’d lie on his bed, in our underwear, beneath his printed sheet. I was shy about my body, thinking it was too thin, too uncurved, but Jay was rapturous. He wouldn’t let me touch him at first, but spent hours rubbing and stroking my body, taking his finger and gently sliding it in and out of me. I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel, most of the time I simply watched his face, the way his eyes flickered under the closed lids. When I thought he was getting tired, I sighed, signaling a finish. I rolled over onto my stomach. Then he would stretch out and place my hand on his penis and guide me in stroking him until he shuddered in orgasm. He’d doze, one arm thrown carelessly onto my belly, and I would watch him and wonder just what it was that made his face take on that expression, that feeling.

  When we finally made love, I wasn’t quite aware of what was happening. He was on top of me and the whole side of my body was falling asleep, tingling into pins and needles. We were doing the same sorts of things we always did, and then, abruptly, something was pushing inside me. When I opened my mouth to cry, to wonder, Jay closed it with a kiss. I watched his face, his eyes shut, his mouth open and wet. When he sat up, panting, he looked very pleased.

  “Well, well, looks like little Bess had her first big O,” he said, brushing back my hair with the flat of his hand, swooping to claim a quick kiss. I grinned like a fool, wondering what he was talking about. “You did, didn’t you?” he frowned. “Everything tingles,” I said, rubbing circulation into my legs and feet. Something wet was dripping and oozing out of me and I worried about staining the sheets. “Good, you had one then,” said Jay.

  No one knew I was making love, not then, not unless they had heard that Jay and I were going together. And no one I knew was making love. The pill had just come out, and girls that took it were considered ruined before they had even started. Bea had warned me about girls like that. “This isn’t wrong, is it?” I said, taking Jay’s hand, stroking each finger.

  “What’s not wrong?” said Jay, lifting up the sheet to look at me.

  “Oh, nothing,” I said, and lifted up my face to be kissed.

  Jay never took me home, but he did call me cabs. I went home that day bleeding into my underwear. I had the cab leave me off two blocks away from the house, and after I checked to make sure no one was looking, I slipped off my panties and balled them up and dumped them into the nearest trash can. It would be easier to wash the blood from my legs than to rid my panties of that red. I didn’t want that part of my life to be a part of the household washing.

  “What do you do all day?” Hilly demanded on the phone that night.

  “We talk, we listen to records, you know.” I saw us cuddling on his sofa in the game room, a soap opera spinning its web on TV, while we kissed and touched each other, our jeans unzipped. “And kiss?” said Hilly.

  “Yeah. That, too.”

  The sex had begun to surprise me. I felt as if my body were separate from me, that it knew what it wanted and needed from Jay, but couldn’t relate that information to my brain. “Stop making those moans,” Jay said. “It doesn’t hurt anymore.” We used no birth control. “Rubbers are sick,” said Jay, “and anyhow, I know this herbal remedy if you get knocked up.” He tried to pull out of me in time, spilling his seed on the sheet, on my stomach, my back, my legs; but as soon as he was out of me, I felt deserted, fearful, and I wrapped my legs about him, pulling him close.

  Toward the middle of the summer, we began to venture outside for quick trips to the ice cream stand, for walks along the deserted ski slope behind his house. We even sometimes built fires up there. “We should spend a night,” said Jay.

  “I have overnights at camp,” I said. “I could lie.”

  “Why don’t you just quit that job? You never go anyway. What if your parents had to reach you and called the camp?”

  “I’d lie,” I said. “I’d say I was there but they were too stupid to find me.”

  “Quit,” said Jay.

  I picked at a nail. “I can’t,” I said.

  When I told Hilly I was spending a night with Jay, she gave me a quick curious stare. “There’s nothing wrong with it,” I said defiantly.

  “I didn’t say there was, did I?” said Hilly.

  “We’ll probably get married.”

  “That would be great.”

  “You won’t tell anyone, will you, about the overnight?” “Why would I?”

  I looked at my hands, the nails bitten. “You think I’m trash?”

  “No,” she said, “but can we not talk about it anymore?”

  I wore my heavy white sweater to the market where I was meeting Jay. I had no idea how cold it might get up there. And I didn’t really know how much more warmth Jay might be willing to share. The market was in an odd part of Belmont, but there was no real reason to be afraid. Bea would never shop at a fast-food place like this, no one she knew would. Even so, I felt watched. My skin prickled. Jay had a dentist’s appointment and was going to meet me there by five. I had wanted to go to the dentist with him, to sit in the leathery chairs and read all the junky magazines that always catch my eye in the supermarket but make me too ashamed to buy them, but Jay was adamant. “It will give us time to think about each other,” he said.

  I wandered into the market. They had two dirty aisles filled with food and toys and kitchen goods, in no order whatsoever. I picked my way up and down the aisles, checking prices, fingering the rubber toys, anything to eat away the minutes. The market had a small ladies room in the far corner and I thought about hiding out in there, but I was worried about the closed door, about not being able to face whoever might be on the other side of it. Thinking about the ladies room made me have to go, and I dug my fingers into my thighs, killing the urge.

  Jay was ten minutes late. I was hovering by the bathroom, annoying one of the young salesgirls by asking her the time every few minutes. Jay tapped me. His cheeks were puffy from Novocain. He was in his blue workshirt, jeans, and had on gray cowboy boots. His hair was shiny down his back and he looked wonderful. “Come on,” he said, talking thickly, “let’s blow this hole.”

  We walked uphill to the slope, holding hands, talking about the movies we wanted to see, the books we liked, nothing at all, really, and I wanted everyone in the strange brick houses lining the streets to disappear, to stop being a boundary for us as we passed. It took us about fifteen minutes to make the top. Jay had gone up there earlier in the day to leave off a sleeping bag, blankets, matches, and a few cans of soup. He knew no one would steal any of it—the bag was musty-smelling and torn, the blankets tattered, and the soups indifferent. Up there on that hill, we had a fire and insects and I felt the love moving within me like breath, expanding, threatening to split my very skin apart with its force. Jay made some canned soup, but we didn’t have spoons or bowls so we waited for it to cool and then took turns sipping it from the can, mouths against the raw edge of tin.

  We didn’t sleep that night. Jay wanted us to shuck off our clothing and walk around in the woods, but the dark made me timid, I saw monsters in the shadows. We lay in the sleeping bag, holding each other, twining arms and legs, making love. When the wood noises made me start, Jay took my hand. “I’m here,” he said. “I’ll always be here.�
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  In the morning, we each had about forty insect bites scattered on our arms. My face was smudged with dirt, imprinted with pine needles. Jay was still half asleep, drifting in and out of some dream. He squinted at me and then burst out, “Bill, I thought you had left.”

  “I’m not Bill,” I said, reaching for him, but he roughly twisted from my grasp, his eyes accusing. He never really came out of that dream, but began rolling up the sleeping bag, gathering the cans of soup and stuffing them into the pockets of his folded blanket. We stumbled downhill. Jay kept tripping over the small stones seeding the mountain, ignoring the path, flashing stormy looks at me.

  “You’re dreaming,” I said, cheerful and friendly.

  At the bottom of the hill, Jay pivoted. “I’m going,” he said. “Don’t you come.”

  I didn’t care. I was energetic with love. I walked to the camp, singing to give my steps beat, ignoring the rude beeping of the cars, the smart stinging remarks of boys hanging out of car windows. The camp was very surprised to see me; everyone asked how I was feeling. I went to one of the bathrooms and tried to wash off some of the dirt, tried to get some of the needles out of my hair. I kept wishing I could keep everything close to my skin, have it be a part of me.

  I called Jay around lunch time. He was baffled about the morning. “You were still dreaming,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. What are you going to do today without me?”

  “Oh, nothing,” said Jay. “I might go into Cambridge.”

  “Oh, Jay.”

  “Look, I don’t involve you in it. I’m careful.’’

  “Yeah, sure,” I said, hanging up, suddenly depressed.

  Going into Cambridge was Jay’s synonym for dealing drugs. He’d hang out around Holyoke Center, casing faces, never making an approach, letting others approach him. He’d never let me go with him. “Your face is too open. Any cop on the street could instantly tell what we were doing.” He never pushed drugs on me, although they were always available to me. In hopes I’d smoke dope with him, he went out and bought chocolate-flavored papers; he bought blotter acid on pictures of cats or hedgehogs, but I never tried anything, I never had the interest.