She gave a little smirk, then resumed the look of sadness and fear.
“Trust me honey,” I said. “Tell me what you want and I will help you if I can.”
“I don’t want to be pregnant anymore.”
“We can do that if you want.”
“Do what?”
“An abortion. It’s perfectly legal.”
She started crying softly and quietly. There was an unlit candle on the table, and an ashtray. I lit a cigarette, then the candle. She did not look at me, but I saw tears, glistening now in the candlelight, running down her face to her chin. Her nose was running. I handed her my napkin and she wiped under her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Leslie, have you considered having this baby?”
“I can’t.” She started crying again.
“You’ve considered it.”
“I don’t want this to happen to me. Raphael would never have me if he knew.”
“How do you know?”
“He’s married,” she said this with a little bit of a sob.
As gently as I could, I whispered, “Is he in love with you, honey?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” She sounded so much like a little girl. It took all of my strength not to just take her in my arms and hold her. She cried so hard that saliva started collecting on her lips, tears streamed down her face. She kept wiping them away with the napkin. “This can’t happen to me.”
“Well it won’t then. We can do everything without letting anyone know.”
“We can?”
“Yes.”
“No one will know?”
“I will and you will. The doctor and maybe a nurse or two. No one else.”
“My parents?”
“Don’t have to know. It’s no one’s business but your own. You’re eighteen. An adult.”
She wiped under her eyes again, started to get control of herself. “If I was an adult I wouldn’t be so stupid as to let this happen to me.”
“It happens to lots of women,” I said. “Adult women.”
She only looked at me with those shimmering eyes. Up to that point she had seemed so self-possessed and willful she emanated nothing but control and even a kind of supremacy over everything and everyone around her. It was possible to admire her and even to fear her a little bit. If only her critics at the school could see her now, they would not be so quick to judge her unworthy.
“When you are lost in passion,” I said, “It’s supposed to be bad form to be considering the future.”
“What?”
“Nothing. It was a stupid thing to say.” I reached into my pocket and got the name and address of the clinic in Alexandria. “Here’s where you have to go. This Saturday.”
“I can’t go alone,” she said.
“Why not?”
If you could have seen her eyes—the way she pleaded with me with just a helpless look. “I’ll go with you,” I said. “In fact, if you want I’ll drive you there.”
Now, in the midst of her tears, she smiled. It was absolutely perfect. In movies and on television, I’ve seen the most beautiful women on earth, made up as perfectly as the makeup artists can do it, under the most favorable lights, with the exact camera angles to produce the most unreachable allure, and all of them would sadly pale next to Leslie’s tearful smile in that candlelight. I wanted to reach out and touch her face, just to confirm that it was real.
She cast her eyes down again briefly, then she said, “Why are you doing this for me?”
I didn’t know the answer to that question and I didn’t want to think about it. I am aware that some will say I was falling all over myself to help her because she was so beautiful; that if she was less attractive I would have ignored her problem, but I just don’t think that is true. I wanted to help her because she so desperately needed help, and I knew I could help her. What would you do? It’s not like I was in love with her or anything. I barely knew her.
42
An Impression of Fall
That Saturday, it took a while to convince Annie that I was only going to the mall to see about getting a new pair of shoes. (There was no way I was going to tell her the truth about what I was up to.) I told her all that standing up and walking back and forth in my classes was killing my feet and I needed to pick up some shoes that would be soft and cushiony. She suggested a pair of black tennis shoes, or maybe some Bass loafers. “Do they still make Hush Puppies?” she asked. I said I’d look into it. She offered to go at first, but I told her I wanted to walk into the shoe store, get the pair I wanted and walk out again. She likes to wander around the mall for hours, so she told me to go on and get my shoes; she really didn’t want to be impatiently herded in and out of the mall because of my insanity.
At the right time, I got in the car and drove to Glenn Acres where I met Leslie, then I drove her to Arlington Ridge Shopping Center—which was only about ten miles up the road from Glenn Acres—and the Alexandria Family Planning Center and Free Clinic.
We drove most of the way in silence. She fumbled with her car keys, then shoved them down into her jacket pocket. It was a windy day. Bright sun and a cloudless sky. The wind was relentless; it would not stop. Simply walking into it gave you the feeling that you were moving at thirty or forty miles an hour. Leaves swirled in the bright sun and gave an impression of fall, although that was long past.
I was surprised at the efficiency of the clinic. We barreled through the door, struggling to settle from the disarray of the wind—Leslie’s hair was all over the place; I had leaves in the collar of my shirt—and even as we stood there in front of everybody putting ourselves in order, a black woman shaped like a cannonball came from behind the counter with a clipboard and a pen attached to it. She welcomed us, bade us have a seat.
“Please fill out the form completely, okay?” she said. “And then we will set you up with a doctor. Fill this little card out first and give it to me, so I know your name, honey, okay?” She smiled at both of us, clearly assuming we were there for some sort of “family counseling.”
“Just a friend,” I said, with a tight smile.
Leslie looked at me, and I shrugged. “Well, I am.” Remember, I was all of nine or ten years older than she was.
She found an empty seat and began filling out the form. I remained standing by the door. The room was small, and close. Blue plastic chairs sat in rows from one side to the other, almost all of them occupied. I was the only man in the room. Some of the older women, I felt, eyed me suspiciously.
The procedure was complex and took more than two hours. Not the abortion, mind you—just what Leslie had to do before she went in for it. The black woman came back out and took her form. We waited for what seemed like a very long time—Leslie standing next to me now, watching the others in the room who one by one were led through the door into the back offices. Finally it was her turn. The receptionist came out and led her on back. I waited by myself, though more women came in, one with a fat man who sat right across from me, his belly bulging out of his sweat suit. Every so often he’d snap the pages of the Wall Street Journal he was reading, and between snaps he breathed so loudly through those tight little nostrils of his, it was as if I were sharing his every intake of air.
Finally, Leslie came back out. I could see she’d been crying. She came right up to me and put her head against my chest. I put my arms around her and held her a moment. It was as innocent as any hug on earth. I wished I was her father, to tell the truth, so I could forgive her, you know? So I could offer her … absolution.
She remained there a long time. “What’s the matter?” I whispered.
“Nothing.” She moved next to me and I kept my arm around her shoulder. I didn’t even know if it was done yet.
“Is it … I mean, have they …”
“No,” she said. “I had to talk to a counselor and then fill out a whole other form.”
“Oh.”
“I had to, you know, agree to the procedure and all.�
� She sniffed, wiped her eyes. She was hardly more than a child. “And then I had to sign this new form that said I had seen and signed the other form.”
“Jesus.”
“Like, they want me to be sure of what I’m about to do.”
“Case somebody wanders in here and thinks they’re in for a fucking mud bath?”
She smiled, even managed to laugh a little through her tears. “You’re so funny sometimes,” she said.
I couldn’t help feeling rather proud of myself. I don’t want to go into the reasons. It just seemed unerringly right: getting her to laugh a little in that situation; nothing romantic about it, just the joy of a kind of release. Hoping to score another laugh, I said, “What do they think? Like, somebody might wander in here expecting a yoga lesson?”
But her mind must have returned to the procedure. She got this scared look on her face, tears brimming in her eyes again.
“Sure you want to do this?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Did those forms … upset you?”
She shook her head no, but tears were still running down her face.
“Leslie you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”
“No. I want to,” she said. “I have to.”
“Okay.”
“I just don’t think it’s right.” Now she put her head on my shoulder and took hold of my arm. “I know it isn’t right.”
“Well then you shouldn’t do it,” I said.
“I have to.”
“But you don’t have to. You really don’t.”
She buried her head against my chest again, sniffling.
“Honey,” I said. “Maybe you should trust your parents in this, okay? They might handle it better than you think.” But then I remembered what she’d said about being six—a six-year-old girl—when her father made her kneel on uncooked rice, and realized I didn’t believe a word of what I’d just said.
She looked up at me, her eyes searching my face, and I couldn’t help myself. I leaned down and kissed her very softly on the mouth. It was the only kiss I’ve ever given out of … I don’t know … a kind of innocence? It was pure, perfect. I loved her then with only love—nothing else. Understand? There was no sex in it at all in that moment.
It wasn’t a long kiss, and when I pulled back from it and looked at her, she smiled as if she knew what it was; as if she understood it completely. Tears still filled her eyes and ran down her cheeks. As tenderly as I could, I brushed them away.
She didn’t say anything. A few minutes later, a nurse came out and called her name, startling her. I held her a little tighter, to reassure her. She looked up at me, gave a half smile of what? Determination? And then she was gone.
I waited a long time. It didn’t seem right to look at a magazine, so I just stared out the window, watched the wind swirling the leaves. When she finally came out again, she was silent. She looked as if she’d just awakened from a very long nap. Her eyes were puffy, and her hair seemed to have lost some of its luster. She walked carefully, as if it hurt the bottom of her feet.
“You all right?” I asked.
“Fine.” Her voice was normal, slightly disinterested even.
I drove her back to Glen Acres. Again we rode in silence. I couldn’t think of anything to say, and didn’t want to keep asking her if she was all right. In the parking lot of the school, before she got out of the car, she leaned over and hugged me. “Thank you, Mr. Jameson,” she said.
Like an idiot I said, “You’re welcome.”
I wanted to kiss her again. I think now, to be honest, I needed to kiss her again. But we only stared at each other for a brief moment. “Ben,” she whispered. “You really are the very best teacher I ever had.” And I knew at that moment, looking into those dazzling eyes, that I would never be anything more than that. She would go on with her half-charmed life, graduate in the spring. Whatever she might do about Randy and Raphael would be none of my business. I wished with all my heart that I could think of something memorable to say, because I also knew at that moment that I loved her in the only way I ever could.
She smiled fully now, understanding all of it. I kissed her on the forehead, and then she got out of the car and without looking back, trudged over to her little Ford Escort. I watched as she fumbled in her pocket for her keys, got in, and then a moment later pulled out of the lot.
I still had to go buy a pair of comfy shoes and I wasn’t sure what I would tell Annie, since I’d been gone most of the day. It turned out that Hush Puppies were not all that hard to find.
In the end I didn’t tell Annie anything. She was napping when I got home, and when she woke up, didn’t seem interested in my day. I showed her the Hush Puppies I’d bought and all she did was smirk at them. “Who wears gray shoes?”
“They’re gray?” I picked them out in a hurry and I wasn’t sure of the color. I would have said they were light brown.
“You idiot. You don’t know what color they are?”
“Didn’t they all use to be gray?”
“God what a silly name for a shoe.”
“Oh yeah, and mules isn’t.”
She laughed and that was that.
43
Aftermath
Leslie came back a little after that day. I mean she was beginning to be interested again in classes. We did not communicate outside of class at all, and all she ever said to me directly was “Hi, Mr. Jameson” (I never could get her to call me Ben), and at the end of the day, “Bye,” with a glamorous wave of her hand. But she took part in the class discussions, worked in her journal when I asked for it, and turned her papers in on time. (She wrote an A paper about the rock group Foreigner that was insightful, involved, and a pleasure to read. She said she was afraid the band was for older listeners and had been around too long. She compared them to Talking Heads.) I was beginning to wonder what she was thinking about my kiss, and then one day in early April, I stayed in my class during the last break of the day, and she came in very early, walked up to my desk and said, “Can I see you?”
“Sure. What can I do for you?”
“After school.”
“Oh.” The idea flustered me and I found myself wondering what to do with my hands. I said, “Sure. How about Jolito’s?”
“Can you give me a ride? My mother has my car today.”
“From here?” I was worried about how that would look, but I didn’t say that to her. She didn’t answer me. There was no one in the room yet, not even Suzanne.
“Okay,” I said. “Wait for me out back.”
She turned, went to her desk, and started unloading books and settling herself for class. Under a dark blue sweater, she wore a white dress with a small leafy pattern cut into the fabric around her neck.
Suddenly I was worried about what she might want. I still felt so protective of her, and I didn’t want her to misunderstand anything between us. I didn’t know what to think of it myself. I knew I felt a kind of tenderness for her, but it was not romantic as much as it was spiritual. In fact, it was almost religious. How could I tell her that?
That afternoon, I walked to my car and she was waiting there beside the front door, holding her books in front of her. She almost curtsied, as I opened the door, then she got in the car, sweeping her dress in with her legs. I closed the door and walked around the back of the car, trying not to look furtive; trying not to check the windows and other cars to see if anybody was watching us. Of course people were watching us. The place was crowded with folks scattering to jobs and home. I wondered if Mrs. Creighton saw me. Or Doreen.
I had kissed Doreen too. Or she had kissed me. She started it anyway, and it wasn’t the same kind of kiss. I know I should have wondered what was wrong with me, but I really didn’t. I believed I was in love with Annie; I believed I had been faithful. In the one case, Doreen had sort of ambushed me, and for a few minutes I gave into it. I’d never say this to her, but it’s possible I responded because I felt a little sorry for her. And, it’s also pos
sible that some part of me was interested, because when she turned her head in a certain way, or when she laughed through something she was saying, she could look pretty sexy. Still, I had been shocked into it and we had been avoiding each other ever since.
When I kissed Leslie it was as if some elemental facet of my humanity wanted to touch her as sweetly and gently as possible. It was an offering. Nothing more.
But what if Leslie had seen it as romance? What would I do? I actually wished I could ask Doreen about it.
I felt so alone and I was in dangerous territory.
We drove to Jolito’s without saying very much. She held her books in her lap and stared out the window, her face inscrutable. When we got there I found a place to park and turned off the car. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” She put her books down between us and got out.
I followed her into the restaurant. When we were seated at the same table as the other two times, she said, “I want a Coke.”
I went to the bar and ordered two Cokes.
When I came back she was smiling, her eyes bright and gleaming in the candle on the table.
“Did you light that?” I said.
In the Fall They Come Back Page 31
