Trip brought his boots together. “I want to ask Lux to Homecoming.”
At that point, Mr. Lisbon told Trip to sit down, and for the next few minutes, in a patient voice, he explained that he and his wife had certain rules, they had been the same rules for the older girls and he couldn’t very well change them now for the younger ones, even if he wanted to his wife wouldn’t let him, ha ha, and while it was fine if Trip wanted to come over to watch television again, he could not, repeat not, take Lux out, especially in a car. Mr. Lisbon spoke, Trip told us, with surprising sympathy, as though he, too, recalled the below-the-belt pain of adolescence. He could also tell how starved Mr. Lisbon was for a son, because as he spoke he got up and gave Trip’s shoulders three sporting shakes. “I’m afraid it’s just our policy,” he said, finally.
Trip Fontaine saw the doors closing. Then he saw the family photograph on Mr. Lisbon’s desk. Before a Ferris wheel, Lux held in one red fist a candy apple whose polished surface reflected the baby fat under her chin. One side of her sugar-coated lips had come unstuck, showing a tooth.
“What if it was a bunch of us guys?” Trip Fontaine said. “And we took out your other daughters, too, like in a group? And we had them back by whatever time you say?”
Trip Fontaine made this new offer in a controlled voice, but his hands shook and his eyes grew moist. Mr. Lisbon looked at him a long time.
“You on the football squad, son?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What position?”
“Offensive tackle.”
“I played safety in my day.”
“Crucial position, sir. Nothing between you and the goal line.”
“Exactly.”
“Thing is, sir, we’ve got the big Homecoming game against Country Day, and then the dance and everything, and all the guys on the team are going with dates.”
“You’re a good-looking young fella. Lots of girls would go with you, I bet.”
“I’m not interested in lots of girls, sir,” Trip Fontaine said. Mr. Lisbon sat back down in his chair. He drew a long breath. He looked at the photograph of his family, one face of which, smiling dreamily, no longer existed. “I’ll take it up with their mother,” he said, finally. “I’ll do what I can.”
That was how a few of us came to take the girls on the only unchaperoned date they ever had. As soon as he left Mr. Lisbon’s classroom, Trip Fontaine began assembling his team. At football practice that afternoon, during wind sprints, he said, “I’m taking Lux Lisbon to Homecoming. All I need is three guys for the other chicks. Who’s it going to be?” Running twenty-yard intervals, gasping for breath, in clumsy pads and unclean athletic socks, we each tried to convince Trip Fontaine to pick us. Jerry Burden offered three free joints. Parkie Denton said they could take his father’s Cadillac. We all said something. Buzz Romano, nicknamed “Rope” because of the astonishing trained pet he showed us in the showers, covered his protective cup with his hands and lay moaning in the end zone: “I’m dying! I’m dying! You got to pick me, Tripster!”
In the end, Parkie Denton won because of the Cadillac, Kevin Head because he’d helped Trip Fontaine tune up his car, and Joe Hill Conley because he won all the school prizes, which Trip thought would impress Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon. The next day Trip presented the slate to Mr. Lisbon, and by the end of the week Mr. Lisbon announced his and his wife’s decision. The girls could go under the following conditions: (1) they would go in a group; (2) they would go to the dance and nowhere else; (3) they would be home by eleven. Mr. Lisbon told Trip it would be impossible to get around these conditions. “I’m going to be one of the chaperons,” he said.
It’s difficult to know what the date meant to the girls. When Mr. Lisbon gave them permission, Lux ran and hugged him, kissing him with the unself-conscious affection of a little girl. “She hadn’t kissed me like that in years,” he said. The other girls reacted with less enthusiasm. At the time, Therese and Mary were playing Chinese checkers while Bonnie looked on. They broke their concentration from the dimpled metal board for only a moment, asking their father the identities of the other boys in the group. He told them. “Who’s taking who?” Mary asked.
“They’re just going to raffle us off,” Therese said, and then made six ringing jumps into her safety zone.
Their lukewarm reaction made sense in terms of family history. In concert with other church mothers, Mrs. Lisbon had arranged group dates before. The Perkins boys had paddled the Lisbon girls in five aluminum canoes along a murky canal at Belle Isle, while Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon and Mr. and Mrs. Perkins kept a watchful distance in paddle boats. Mrs. Lisbon thought the darker urges of dating could be satisfied by frolic in the open air—love sublimated by lawn darts. On a road trip recently (no reason for going other than boredom and gray skies) we stopped in Pennsylvania and, while buying candles in a rough-hewn store, learned of the Amish courting custom wherein a boy takes his homespun date for a ride in a black buggy, followed by her parents in another. Mrs. Lisbon, too, believed in keeping romance under surveillance. But whereas the Amish boy later returns in the dead of night to throw pebbles against the girl’s window (pebbles everyone agrees not to hear), no nocturnal amnesty existed in Mrs. Lisbon’s doctrine. Her canoes never led to campfires.
The girls could expect only more of the same. And with Mr. Lisbon chaperoning, they would be kept on the usual short leash. It was difficult enough having a teacher for a parent, on view day after day in his three suits, making a living. The Lisbon girls received free tuition because of their father’s position, but Mary had once told Julie Ford this made her feel “like a charity case.” Now he would be patrolling the dance along with other teachers who had volunteered or been forced to chaperon, usually the most uncoordinated teachers who didn’t coach a sport, or the most socially inept for whom the dance was a way of filling another lonely night. Lux didn’t seem to mind because her thoughts were filled with Trip Fontaine. She had gone back to writing names on her underthings, using water-soluble ink so that she could wash the “Trips” off before her mother saw them. (All day, however, his name had been continuously announcing itself against her skin.) Presumably she confessed her feelings about Trip to her sisters, but no girl at school ever heard her mention his name. Trip and Lux sat together at lunch, and sometimes we saw them walking the halls, searching for a closet or bin or heating duct to lie down inside, but even at school Mr. Lisbon was on hand, and after a few suppressed circuits, they came past the cafeteria and up the rubber-matted ramp leading to Mr. Lisbon’s classroom and, briefly touching hands, went their separate ways.
The other girls barely knew their dates. “They hadn’t even been asked,” Mary Peters said. “It was like an arranged marriage or something. Creepy.” Nevertheless, they allowed the date to go forward, to please Lux, to please themselves, or just to break the monotony of another Friday night. When we talked to Mrs. Lisbon years later, she told us she had had no qualms about the date, mentioning in support of this claim the dresses she had sewn especially for the evening. The week before Homecoming, in fact, she had taken the girls to a fabric store. The girls wandered amid the racks of patterns, each containing the tissue-paper outline of a dream dress, but in the end it made no difference which pattern they chose. Mrs. Lisbon added an inch to the bustlines and two inches to the waists and hems, and the dresses came out as four identical shapeless sacks.
A photo survives of that night (Exhibit #10). The girls are lined up in their party dresses, shoulder to square shoulder, like pioneer women. Their stiff hairdos (“hairdon’ts,” Tessie Nepi, the beautician, said) have the stoic, presumptuous quality of European fashions enduring the wilderness. The dresses, too, look frontierish, with lace-trimmed bibs and high necklines. Here you have them, as we knew them, as we’re still coming to know them: skittish Bonnie, shrinking from the flash; Therese, with her braincase squeezing shut the suspicious slits of her eyes; Mary, proper and posed; and Lux, looking not at the camera but up in the air. It was raining that night, and a leak had developed ju
st over her head, hitting her cheek a second before Mr. Lisbon said, “Cheese.” Though hardly ideal (a distracting light source invades from the left), the photograph still conveys the pride of attractive offspring and liminal rites. An air of expectancy glows in the girls’ faces. Gripping one another, pulling each other into the frame, they seem braced for some discovery or change of life. Of life. That, at least, is how we see it. Please don’t touch. We’re going to put the picture back in its envelope now.
After that portrait was taken, the girls waited for the boys in individual ways. Bonnie and Therese sat down to play a game of cards, while Mary stood very still in the middle of the living room, trying not to wrinkle her dress. Lux opened the front door and wobbled onto the porch. At first we thought she had sprained her ankle, but then we saw she was wearing high heels. She walked up and down, practicing, until Parkie Denton’s car appeared at the end of the block. Then she turned, rang her own doorbell to warn her sisters, and disappeared inside again.
Left out, we watched the boys drive up. Parkie Denton’s yellow Cadillac floated down the street, the boys suspended in the car’s inner atmosphere. Though it was raining, and the windshield wipers were going, the car’s interior had a warm glow. As they passed Joe Larson’s house, the boys gave us a thumbs-up.
Trip Fontaine got out first. He’d pushed up his jacket sleeves as male models did in his father’s fashion magazines. He was wearing a thin tie. Parkie Denton had on a blue blazer, as did Kevin Head, and then Joe Hill Conley vaulted from the backseat, wearing an oversize tweed blazer belonging to his father the schoolteacher and Communist. At that point, the boys hesitated, standing around the car, oblivious to the drizzle, until Trip Fontaine finally headed up the front path. We lost sight of them at the door, but they told us the beginning of the date was like any other. The girls had gone upstairs, pretending not to be ready, and Mr. Lisbon took the boys into the living room.
“The girls’ll be down in just a minute,” he said, looking at his watch. “Jeez. I better get going myself.” Mrs. Lisbon came to the archway. She was holding her temple as though she had a headache, but her smile was polite.
“Hello, boys.”
“Hello, Mrs. Lisbon” (in unison).
She had the rectitude, Joe Hill Conley later said, of someone who had just come from weeping in the next room. He had sensed (this said many years later, of course, when Joe Hill Conley claimed to tap at will the energy of his chakras) an ancient pain arising from Mrs. Lisbon, the sum of her people’s griefs. “She came from a sad race,” he said. “It wasn’t only Cecilia. The sadness had started long before. Before America. The girls had it, too.” He had never noticed her bifocals before. “They cut her eyes in half.”
“Which one of you is driving?” Mrs. Lisbon asked.
“I am,” said Parkie Denton.
“How long have you had your license?”
“Two months. But I had my permit for a year before that.”
“We don’t usually like the girls to go out in cars. So many accidents nowadays. It’s raining and the roads will be slick. So I hope you’ll be very careful.”
“We will.”
“OK,” Mr. Lisbon said, “third degree’s over. Girls!”—delivered to the ceiling—“I’ve got to get going. I’ll see you at the dance, boys.”
“See you there, Mr. Lisbon.”
He went out, leaving the boys alone with his wife. She didn’t meet their eyes but scanned them generally, like a head nurse reading charts. Then she went to the bottom of the stairs and stared up. Not even Joe Hill Conley could imagine what she was thinking. Of Cecilia perhaps, climbing those same stairs four months ago. Of the stairs she had descended on her own first date. Of sounds only a mother can hear. None of the boys ever remembered seeing Mrs. Lisbon so distracted. It was as though she had suddenly forgotten they were there. She touched her temple (it was a headache).
At last the girls came to the top of the stairs. It was dim up there (three of twelve chandelier bulbs had burned out), and they held the banister lightly as they descended. Their loose dresses reminded Kevin Head of choir robes. “They didn’t seem to notice, though. Personally, I think they liked the dresses. Or else they were just so happy to be going out they didn’t care what they wore. I didn’t care, either. They looked great.”
Only when the girls reached the bottom did the boys realize they hadn’t decided who was taking whom. Trip Fontaine, of course, had dibs on Lux, but the other three girls were up for grabs. Fortunately, their dresses and hairdos homogenized them. Once again the boys weren’t even sure which girl was which. Instead of asking, they did the only thing they could think of doing: they presented the corsages.
“We got white,” Trip Fontaine said. “We didn’t know what color you were wearing. The flower guy said white would go with everything.”
“I’m glad you got white,” said Lux. She reached out and took the corsage, which was housed in a little plastic case.
“We didn’t go for wrist ones,” Parkie Denton said. “Those always fall apart.”
“Yeah, those are bad,” said Mary. No one said anything more. No one moved. Lux inspected her flower in its time capsule. In the background, Mrs. Lisbon said, “Why don’t you let the boys pin them on?”
At that, the girls stepped forward, shyly presenting the fronts of their dresses. The boys fumbled with the corsages, taking them out of their cases and avoiding the decorative stickpins. They could sense Mrs. Lisbon watching them, and even though they were close enough to feel the Lisbon girls’ breath and to smell the first perfume they had ever been allowed to wear, the boys tried not to stick the girls or even to touch them. They gently lifted the material from the girls’ chests and hung white flowers over their hearts. Whichever Lisbon girl a boy pinned became his date. When they finished, they said good night to Mrs. Lisbon and led the girls outside to the Cadillac, holding the empty corsage cases over the girls’ heads to protect their hair from the drizzle.
From that point on, things went better than expected. At home, each boy had pictured the Lisbon girls amid the stock scenery of our impoverished imaginations—cavorting in the surf or playfully fleeing at the ice-skating rink, dangling ski-hat pom-poms like ripe fruit before our faces. In the car, however, beside the actual living girls, the boys realized the paltriness of these images. Inverse properties were also discarded: notions of the girls as damaged or demented. (The crazy old lady in the elevator every day turns out to be, when you finally speak to her, perfectly lucid.) Something like this revelation came over the boys. “They weren’t all that different from my sister,” Kevin Head said. Lux, complaining she never got to, wanted to sit up front. She slid in between Trip Fontaine and Parkie Denton. Mary, Bonnie, and Therese crowded into the backseat, with Bonnie getting the hump. Joe Hill Conley and Kevin Head sat on either side against the back doors.
Even up close, the girls didn’t look depressed. They settled into the seats, not minding the tight fit. Mary half sat in Kevin Head’s lap. They began chattering immediately. As houses passed, they had something to say about the families in each one, which meant that they had been looking out at us as intensely as we had been looking in. Two summers ago they had seen Mr. Tubbs, the UAW middle-management boss, punch the lady who had followed his wife home after a fender bender. They suspected the Hessens had been Nazis or Nazi sympathizers. They loathed the Kriegers’ aluminum siding. “Mr. Belvedere strikes again,” said Therese, referring to the president of the home-improvement company in his late-night commercial. Like us, the girls had distinct memories tied to various bushes, trees, and garage roofs. They recalled the race riots, when tanks had appeared at the end of our block and National Guardsmen had parachuted into our backyards. They were, after all, our neighbors.
At first the boys said nothing, too overwhelmed by the Lisbon girls’ volubility. Who had known they talked so much, held so many opinions, jabbed at the world’s sights with so many fingers? Between our sporadic glimpses of the girls they had been continuous
ly living, developing in ways we couldn’t imagine, reading every book on the bowdlerized family bookshelf. Somehow, too, they’d kept up on dating etiquette, through television or observation at school, so that they knew how to keep the conversation flowing or fill awkward silences. Their dating inexperience showed only in their pinned-up hair, which looked like stuffing coming out, or exposed wiring. Mrs. Lisbon had never given the girls beauty tips, and forbade women’s magazines in the house (a Cosmo survey, “Are you multiply orgasmic?” had been the final straw). They had done the best they could.
Lux spent the ride dialing the radio for her favorite song. “It makes me crazy,” she said. “You know they’re playing it somewhere, but you have to find it.” Parkie Denton drove down to Jefferson Avenue, past the Wainwright house with its green historical marker, and toward the gathering lakefront mansions. Imitation gas lanterns burned on front lawns. On every corner a black maid waited for the bus. They drove on, past the glittering lake, and finally under the ragged cover of elms near the school.
“Hold on a sec,” Lux said. “I want a cig before we go in.”
“Dad’ll smell it on you,” Bonnie said from the backseat.
“Nah, I’ve got mints.” She shook them.
“He’ll smell it on our clothes.”
“Just tell him some kids were smoking in the bathroom.”
Parkie Denton lowered the front window while Lux smoked. She took her time, exhaling through her nose. At one point she jutted out her chin at Trip Fontaine, rounded her lips, and, with a chimpanzee profile, sent forth three perfect smoke rings.
“Don’t let it die a virgin,” Joe Hill Conley said. He leaned into the front seat and poked one.
“That’s gross,” said Therese.
“Yeah, Conley,” Trip Fontaine said. “Grow up.”
On the way into the dance, the couples separated. One of Bonnie’s high heels got stuck in the gravel and she leaned on Joe Hill Conley while she detached it. Trip Fontaine and Lux moved on together, already an item. Kevin Head walked in with Therese, while Parkie Denton gave Mary his arm.