I was wearing anklets and Mary Janes and a shirtwaist dress of that color we call aqua, a minty blue with cold in it. My mother’s short white gloves were folded in her lap. We always put our best foot forward in Winfield, as though we represented our town or our lives in a subtle contest. The day felt like a normal shopping trip, except the light coming in the windshield was whiter and too hot, like we were driving right into the sun. I squinted, staring straight ahead.
“Alma,” my mother said quietly, “I’m sorry there aren’t any lessons. I’ll practice with you, if you want, at home.”
“Are we going to have coffee at the bus station again?”
“Well, no. I thought we’d go to Craigie’s and then I’ll walk you over to Souders, and you can just stay there and shop by yourself. Don’t go anywhere else, now. I’ll meet you by the big front door, just as you go in, right at the stroke of three. All right?”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to the bus station to talk to Nickel Campbell.”
“What about?”
She shook her head and sighed. “I don’t know, I don’t know what to say to him. Listen, look in my purse and take five dollars. If you get hungry you can get a sandwich at the lunch counter. You remember where it is.”
“In the basement.”
She continued looking ahead into the road. “Oh, I have a notion to go with you, and order a club sandwich, and stash our shopping bags back against the wall like always.”
That first Saturday I drifted through the oversize revolving door of Souders and proceeded along the main aisle of the first floor, anonymous among the cosmetics counters, the mirrored displays of bottles, tubes, hair clasps. I carried the new baton in a plastic bag with a fancy handle and wished it had come in a case with a clasp; I wanted to assemble it, break it down, like a clarinet or a gun. In the hosiery department a succession of disembodied plastic legs were sheathed in different tones of smoke, cinnamon, beige. Far above their upturned ankles the ornamental tin ceilings of the old building hinted at an opulence of fifty years before, but now no one looked up; fluorescent lights hung down at a more reasonable height, and the wide marble stairs were never crowded. Everyone squeezed into the elevator in a profusion of boxes and perfumes. The cage moved, lurched to a stop, and the operator called out the floors. She was the color of oiled walnut, her voice a hoarse baritone. She was thin, small as though she held herself in from long habit, as though it was part of the job to take up as little room as possible. Half sitting, half leaning against a tall metal stool, she stood sentinel before a brass lever. Numerals lit up in neat glass buttons. With her left hand she drove the cage along its vertical route, B through 5. With her right she opened and shut the folding metal gate, latching it so the modern pneumatic doors on each floor could function with clean, short sighs. The metal gate rattled and resembled a wildly exaggerated piece of jewelry or a torture device. Through its lattice of steel triangles I watched our passage through the shaft itself and thought of tunnels, mining, a dark netherworld. Women habitually watched the illuminated strip above the gate, but it wasn’t necessary to check our position. The operator stopped at every floor unless the elevator was packed full. She was the only one who spoke. Her passengers murmured directives and thanks but never conversed. Ongoing exchanges stopped as though by mutual consent, and women snapped their purses shut with authoritative clicks. Whole families stood nearly silent, all but the youngest children quieted. The small, oblivious ones continued to jabber and sing, their voices whole and pure in the enclosure, large beyond their own expectations. Their breathy talk permeated our ascending cage. Listening, I heard their words and phrases as the lost, receding language of a home now far from me, and I understood that I was no longer a child.
Blue Moon
My brother was a gymnast, the best in the Tri-County area; he refused to perform on any equipment but the trampoline. The trampoline was a new acquisition for Bellington High School in 1968, and Billy wanted to do things no one in Bellington had ever seen anyone do.
I didn’t know I loved him deeply, not then, not yet; for days on end I had no conscious thoughts of him. After all, I was the elder sister; I was a senior, I would graduate with Honors (as honors went, in Bellington), I was pretty enough. I did right in superficial ways. I kept structures intact by attending to surfaces, trying to conceal the fact that I belonged nowhere. Uneasy, I watched Billy practice in the gym, twisting and turning as though borne up by some liquid medium.
In the weeks preceding the gym show, Billy was granted special practice time during homeroom hour. Mornings in the crowded high school, I had homeroom in the gymnasium. Thirty of us sat in one section of the portable bleachers, waiting for the scream of first-period bell. Roll was taken, announcements made. Girls gossiped. In front of us lay the basketball court, vast and blond; on the other side of it, my brother hurled himself into the air repeatedly, warming up. He was oblivious to spectators, and most only glanced at him once or twice and went back to copying homework assignments. I kept my hands open in my lap and stared at my palms, at the lines, the whorls and stars and crosses. If I looked at Billy, I wouldn’t be able to look away.
I suppose Billy took up gymnastics because our mother, whose high school boyfriend had died of a heart attack after a football game, wouldn’t let him play the only team sport he found glorious and interesting. He wasn’t tall but his body was compact and well muscled; he could have played football. He liked the uniforms that made boys into giants, the green field progressively floodlit in the dark, the shape of the ball, the mathematical precision of the plays moving in and out of each other like animated puzzles. It didn’t matter to Jean that Billy was infinitely healthy and had no heart problem. The ghost of Tom Harwin, President of the Class of ’43, doctor’s son, all-round hero headed for medical school, was resurrected on the three or four occasions football was reexamined as an issue; Billy was raised with the understanding that the sport was taboo. Our father, Mitch, fifteen years older than Jean, hadn’t known Tom Harwin, but he allowed her this undisputed commandment as though he refused to validate her long-ago loss by arguing about it. Mitch liked football, but Bellington’s passion was not his; he’d come of age in the Depression and was not a team player. He worked alone, a salesman on commission, and he let Jean’s dictum stand. Billy was allowed the slow hot clockwork of baseball, the indoor bounce and jar of basketball, but he chose neither.
My brother told me he used to ask Mitch to overrule Jean about once a year; after all, Mitch was his father and football was a question of male honor and skill. Why should Jean’s unreasonable fears prohibit her son a shot at the stardom she herself had valued?
I remember one discussion. Billy must have been about thirteen. We were in one of the big white Pontiacs my father owned through the years. His cars were never luxurious; they were unadorned, American, massive. It must have been summer; I remember the hum of the air-conditioner, the sighing of the vents as Mitch leaned forward to adjust the temperature. The outside world, wavering in heat lines, seemed a movie we were voyaging through, and the room of the car was a kind of inviolate space. Watching the two of them in the front seat, Billy’s profile a smoother, classic version of my father’s, I felt a sense of what I now know is called déjà vu—that I had watched them in just this circumstance before.
It was unsettling—even then, I didn’t want to be the one who would remember everything. I wanted to physically escape the fields of feed corn fanning out from the boundaries of the two-lane road, escape the valley and the worn hills. In my memory the town stays moistly humid, green, stifled with the summer fragrance of flowering weeds. I was afraid I would watch my father and Billy speak to each other forever while the dense, mustard-bitter flowers tangled in roadside ditches. Always, my father would wear his summer hat and white, short-sleeved shirt, Billy his earnest, young face.
“Dad, I want to play. If I don’t start practice as a freshman, I won’t have a chance later.”
Mitch looked ahead into the road and took his time answering. “Why are you so set on football?”
“Dad,” he said urgently, “I want to play.”
“I understand that.” He waited.
“All my friends play.”
“Not all of them. Some do, and some will get hurt. Oh, not hurt in ways they can’t live with. I sure knocked myself around playing football, and I can’t say I know why.” He shifted in his seat, then sat back again, touching the leather guard on the steering wheel with one finger. “If she’d kept her mouth shut, you might never have decided you wanted it. Look, you should know that you can’t talk to your mother about a damn thing. A thing is the way she sees it, and that’s all. She has a certain picture in her mind, why, she can’t see around it.”
“Why not?” Billy raised his voice in frustration.
“She don’t want to.”
Billy sighed angrily. “Who was this Tom?”
Mitch shook his head. There was quiet in the car, and then he said, “Just a boy. A boy who died young.”
But I wanted to know. “Dad, you don’t know anything else about him?”
He looked into the rearview mirror. “Danner, hon, nothing else matters. It was twenty-five years ago.”
Billy and I said nothing, unable to comprehend a quarter-century of death.
“Think of something else you want to do,” Mitch said. “Something she hasn’t thought of, and do that. She won’t be able to stop you.”
“Why not?” Billy asked.
“She just can’t. She wouldn’t try.”
“How do I know?”
“Because I’m telling you.”
“You mean you won’t let her stop me?”
Mitch raised his voice again. “It’s not a question of that, Billy. This thing is between you and her.”
“But would you not let her?”
Mitch smiled a sort of half-grimace, turning his head to glance at me over the seat. Billy had entered a phase of life in which promises were sacred, and he exacted them at every opportunity. “All right, Billy, I wouldn’t let her.”
“You promised.”
Mitch nodded.
Our father never had to make good on that promise. The next winter Billy started gymnastics and he got involved with Kato. For quite a while their relationship stayed as innocent as any relationship with Kato could be.
The high school hallways seemed subterranean after the brilliant daylight of the gym. Turning the corner near the water fountain I usually saw Kato, her blond hair brassy or honey-dark from one rinse or another. She gleamed. Her pale blue eyes glistened with a flat shine. If she’d grown up in a normal way, not motherless in the lawless den of her dad’s pool hall, she might have been the average pretty girl, assured and not very interesting, but there was a street smarts and an urgency to her, something a little scary. She was like some high-strung animal living in a big field, always looking for cover. Billy had been a cover of sorts for over two years, despite our parents’ reservations. Shinner Black, Kato’s father, had been a friend of my mother’s in high school; maybe that’s why Jean never actually demanded Billy find himself a “nice” girl. Nice girls weren’t vulnerable, and Billy seemed to have tremendous power over Kato, a whole different order of power that was partly Billy and partly something she invented for him. She often stopped me in the hall on our way to first period and talked in low tones, as though we shared the same secret but knew not to admit it. She’d pass me little gifts, a piece of gum or the kinds of chocolates and mints Shinner sold behind the bar at the pool hall, and she was always sucking on something herself, a red or green Life Saver she held between her teeth. Today she leaned close and I smelled the tart sugar of the candy. “Danner,” she asked, “is Billy practicing? Did you watch?”
“Yes, he’s warming up.”
“Did you watch?”
“What do you mean?”
She smiled. “He says you never watch.”
“Kato, I’ve got other things to do besides watch Billy.”
“Yeah.” She nodded. “Scares you, doesn’t it, all these new routines he’s doing.”
I shrugged. “Not really. He’s very exact.”
“Oh, absolutely.” Her face serious, she gazed off and said distractedly, as though we’d struck a bargain, “I’ll go by and watch for a while. I’m failing geometry anyway.” She rummaged in her purse and pressed a folded square into my hand. “Here, I wrote you a note. See you in gym.”
I’d resolved not to look at Kato’s notes anymore, but I couldn’t help myself. She had homeroom in the library, and she sat looking at magazines in the back of the room. Evidently she thought of Billy then, and by extension, she thought of me. She gave me whole glossy pages soundlessly torn from their bindings, folded into long narrow lengths, then wrapped around themselves to form tight small squares. Each full-page advertisement (she settled for nothing less) showed people in gracious surroundings, enjoying cars, appliances, perfumes. One showed a Lincoln: a couple lounging against the car, the woman in furs, the man in formal dress. A uniformed chauffeur waited, smiling, his arm draped over the hood of the impossibly long silver car. “Me,” Kato had written across his chest, and on the couple, “you and Billy.” Underneath: “off for a night on the town.”
Walking, I unfolded the paper. This one was a champagne ad: an oceanside terrace at sunset. A woman sat alone at a table in a diaphanous robe, touching her fluted glass; behind and below her, a couple walked along the beach, their backs to the camera, holding identical glasses. Kato had written, in block letters across the bottom, “your house!” No one was labeled and for a minute, pausing at the big trash can by the door of my soc. class, I wondered who was who. Then I folded the paper in half and threw it away quickly, as if it constituted some evidence against Kato, or maybe against me. It was as though she spoke a strange language and I understood the words against my will, but I couldn’t have explained their meanings to anyone else.
Kato wasn’t like the rest of us. In many ways she lived like an adult. She came and went as she pleased. She had a job—working in the pool hall making sandwiches, pouring drafts behind the bar except when the cops came in. She kept house, after a fashion, for Shinner and two older brothers, both employed now in steel mills in Ohio and seldom home. She’d never been a member of various girls’ cliques around school, never a Y-Teen or Girl Scout, a delegate to Girls’ Congress or church camp. Maybe it disturbed me that I’d done those things and still felt a nervous kinship with her.
She’d been an outsider, seldom spoken to by the girls in her class, teased warily by some of the boys. By virtue of her association with Billy she was no longer branded an outcast, and last summer she’d won the Miss Jaycees beauty contest. She’d borrowed a white formal of mine and entered on a dare from Billy and her father. When she won, her female compatriots at Bellington High were shocked into silence. Now she was accepted, included, even elected to the various positions high school kids invent, but she seemed to view the favor of the masses with an edgy disbelief. She knew too much to trust their change of heart.
Kato knew a lot. She knew what it was to be abandoned. A long time ago, her mother had taken off. She knew about drinking because Shinner sometimes drank. She knew about men and boys; she’d witnessed their private camaraderie and fights and gambling as a four-year-old, playing with her dolls under the pool tables. At twelve she was cooking grilled cheese sandwiches behind the bar and baking the frozen pizzas; even then, she knew about women because her dad and her brothers brought them home. She knew how to be discreet because Shinner, attractive, on the loose, occasionally got involved with someone’s wife, though his visitors were more often waitresses from the truck stops. She knew how Bellington viewed her family, living over the only pool hall in town. She didn’t want to know all she knew.
I wanted to know more. Last summer, in the same week Kato had triumphed in the pageant, I’d made love, twice, with an older boy from the state capital, a just-graduated senior
taking courses at the local college. I liked riding down by the river in his yellow convertible. The river was steamy and brown and the trees dipped into it with the desperation of foliage choked by town dust and cinders. My friend, older, convincingly arrogant, weakened his considerable advantage over me by coming out with unbelievable, rehearsed lines like a summer evening, a blue sky, a pretty girl. But I liked being with him; it made me feel as though I weren’t in Bellington anymore. When I said good-bye to him at summer’s end like a casual friend rather than a girl who expected something, he insisted, with admiration, that I was “different.” I denied it. Now I sometimes remembered the lines he’d delivered, maybe because the embarrassment I’d felt for him in those moments was a sympathy akin to love. I’d never talked to anyone about making love with him and I wondered lately if it had really happened.
Kato and Billy were lovers. Neither of them talked about it but everyone knew. Other couples cruised the streets of the town in cars, finally wrestling in backseats on some country road. Billy and Kato simply went to her house after the movies on Fridays, sports events on Saturdays, Sunday afternoons. Billy’s car sat out front, parked in one of the angled spaces marked on the pavement in white paint. A door beside the pool-hall storefront led up a long narrow stairway to the Blacks’ apartment.
Once I asked Billy, half kidding, what he did all those hours at the Blacks’.
“Watch TV. Play cards.” He smiled.
And I believed him. They did have time to sit around like a married couple, then retire to Kato’s room. Around one A.M. Billy got up, put on his clothes, and came home to make his curfew.
Maybe my mother let herself believe at first that someone was chaperoning them, but Shinner was downstairs in the pool hall, managing the peak hours of his business in a clamor of voices, cigarette smoke, jukebox music. I imagined the dull roar vibrating the floor of Kato’s square white room.
Fast Lanes Page 10
