Kip flushed. “Of course not,” she said uneasily. “I just—”
“I know, I know,” Roddy said, nodding and looking at the wall. “You pretend you don’t want violence, but you crave it. You think I should be defending my honor and all that. I don’t understand girls. You pretend you want somebody sensitive and understanding. That’s a lot of junk. What you really want is a stupid, drunk, college kid like Christopher Vann.”
“I don’t, either! I wouldn’t go out with Chris.”
“You don’t want to be out with me, either,” Roddy said.
He flung the words at her like a weapon, and Kip, wanting to be peaceful, wanting to make friends, flung them right back instead. “You called me an hour before the dance. Did you think I would be thrilled or something?”
Roddy froze. After a bit he said, “Stupid, wasn’t it?”
I am lower even than Molly, Kip thought. He knew Molly would be rotten to him. But he had every right to figure I would be nice.
Slowly Roddy moved away from her, giving her time, if she wanted it, to call him back, or to follow him and apologize. All her mother’s training in good manners passed before Kip’s eyes and all of it she chose not to bother with.
The thing is, Roddy, she thought after him, I don’t like you! This is my dance and I want to be here with someone I like!
Roddy’s slumped shoulders vanished in the press of dancers. Kip stood utterly alone, facing the cafeteria that she and she alone had transformed into a place of beauty with its aura of romance.
You win, world! Kip thought. I surrender. I’m sick of fighting. I’m sick of working every single minute to make people like me and failing.
Gary and Beth Rose passed her on their way to get something more to eat. “Just have to tell you again how much I’m enjoying your dance,” Gary said to her, smiling his sweet smile.
She was not jealous of Beth. In her heart Kip knew that the only reasons she liked Gary were first his wonderful good looks and second his completely relaxed poise, as if he owned the cafeteria, and possibly the town. But Kip had tremendous ambition, and Gary had none, except to pitch in occasionally in his father’s restaurant.
What’s the answer? Kip thought. Am I constructed so that there is not a right boy for me? Is my personality the kind that won’t let me fall in love? Or am I so busy being captain of this and chairman of that that boys don’t know I’m a girl?
She had her car.
She could not seem to feel the slightest obligation to Roddy.
I’ll just drive home, she thought. I admit it. This world is tougher than I am. I can’t take another three hours of this.
Beth Rose kept thinking of her Aunt Madge’s remark. “There’s nothing quite so wonderful as a dance where every girl there is looking at you.”
The dress is magic, Beth thought. For Aunt Madge it meant going with Virgil Hopkinson. For me it means Gary. Who is also magic.
“Come on,” said Gary. “We’ve got to have pictures.”
Beth Rose stared at him. Pictures? That cost so much.
“I’ve been keeping an eye on the photographer,” said Gary. “If there’s one thing I hate it’s standing in line.” Gary had his route through the crowd all picked out, and before Beth Rose had time to think about it, they were standing by the rose arbor.
Kip had gotten the garden center to loan her an actual arbor, and she’d twisted green twine around it, and felt leaves, and had pots of silk roses in bright pinks and reds and blushing scarlets. A tiny rustic seat for two slender people sat next to it. The seat wasn’t quite big enough for two, so mostly the girl ended up sitting on the boy’s lap.
Gary sat down first, taking up a lot of space, and grinned up at her. Her heart flopped over. He patted his knee, not the bench.
She was very, very aware of the couples around them. There must be a good twenty people whose conversations drifted to a halt, whose dance steps slowed, as they watched Gary and Beth Rose.
“Sit down, Beth,” Gary said.
Beth sat. The old ivory lace that lined the neckline of her gown brushed against Gary’s face. He looked down, then back at her, and they both flushed slightly, and ignored remarks from two giggling couples near them.
Fall in love with me, Gary! she thought. Please. Please sit here holding me and think there’s nowhere on earth I’d rather be than here, and no girl I’d rather have in my lap than Beth Rose Chapman.
“All right, honey, move your arm a little this way,” ordered the photographer. She moved her arm a little this way and she thought, Why ever move again? Why not just stay here in paradise with Gary?
They took one picture with Gary looking up into her face and another with both of them looking toward the photographer. One of the boys said, “Hey, Gary, you really need one of you scanning that neckline.” And the photographer said, “Okay, let’s have a kiss.”
It was the first kiss of her life.
Nicer if he weren’t obeying instructions, Beth Rose thought, and nicer if we were in private. But still. …
Gary’s hand came up behind her head, and he tilted her head down ever so slightly, and strained up to reach her. The kiss was very light: a mere brush of the lips that would not even disturb her lipstick, but Beth Rose thought she would drift into the air, spun off into space by the pleasure of his touch.
Some of the kids started making remarks, but Beth hardly heard them. She slowly got off Gary’s lap, wondering if she had been too heavy, or just right, and then Gary got up, and the photographer said, “That’ll be a ten dollar deposit and another thirty when the photographs come in.”
Beth froze. She had never expected it to cost that much. She had figured a quarter of that. Her heart fell as quickly as it had risen.
But not a moment of doubt crossed Gary’s face. “Sure,” he said, pulling a wallet out of his back pocket, handing over a ten, and taking the receipt. Beth watched the receipt being folded in half, tucked into the wallet. He can’t forget me now, she thought. I’m in his wallet. I’m an investment. “Thank you,” she said.
He just smiled.
Only reflex made Kip walk into the girls’ room to check on her hair before she left. She was amused at herself in a dark and dreary way. You’re leaving the dance, lady, she told herself. Now you worry about your hair? Nobody noticed you when you walked in, why should they notice you now?
She tried to remind herself of all the compliments she had had on her dance, but in the end only one compliment counted: to have a boy love her.
She felt so much like crying that it did not surprise Kip at all to walk in on sobs. They sounded rather like the sobs she was expecting from herself. In the row of mirrors, she could see nothing at all reflected in her face: not joy, not misery. In fact, she looked very nice. I know what a formal dance is now. Pretty dresses, desperate hearts. Gradually she grew aware that somebody in this bathroom really was crying her heart out. Reluctantly, not really wanting to handle somebody else’s agony when she was so busy with her own, Kip said, “Can I help?”
Pause. Then, whispery, fragile, “No, thank you.”
The sobs were held under control. Kip waited, but nobody came out. “I’m going to leave the dance myself,” Kip said tiredly. “If it’s bad enough that you need a ride home, I’d be glad to take you.”
More silence. Then, “Kip?” in a disbelieving voice.
“Yeah.”
The door opened. And there stood Anne Stephens.
Nothing could have surprised Kip more.
Anne?
Whose life was perfect? Whose personality, talent, brains, figure, teeth, complexion, and style were all to be envied? Anne, standing hidden in the bathroom, sobbing until her mascara ran?
Probably had a fight with Con about something important, thought Kip sarcastically. Like whether to have tonight’s photographs under the rose arbor or by the fountain.
“Oh, Kip,” said Anne, her voice throaty from crying. Actually it sounded very attractive. Con probably told her he liked
it. “Oh, Kip, I might have known it would be you. Not Con. Oh, no, Con wouldn’t come after me. But I could count on you, Kip. You’re so reliable.”
Kip felt like smacking her. “So what’s wrong?” she said. She really didn’t care. Of all the adjectives she wanted to hear, reliable was the last. If Anne didn’t need an ambulance or a ride home, Kip was bailing out. She wanted to go home and nurse her own hurts, not waste time over some pretend agony from a winner like Anne.
“I’m pregnant,” said Anne.
For a moment the sentence meant nothing to Kip. She could not focus on it at all.
The distorted features of Anne’s face seemed to shatter, and then come foggily back together, and what Kip saw there truly was agony. Not grief, not worry, not depression. Agony. “You’re pregnant?” repeated Kip.
Anne nodded.
“Does Con know?”
“Yes. I told him when we got here.”
Good for you, Kip thought. I myself would always time my tragic announcements for the entrance to my first formal dance. I hope you’ve learned from this, Anne old girl. Timing is all. “What did he say?” Kip asked.
“He got mad at me. He said he couldn’t talk about it. It’s my problem, he said. I was probably making it up, anyway, he said.”
So this is what it’s like to be the perfect couple, when the first thing goes wrong, Kip thought. Out loud she said, “We could cut him up in little pieces with a dull putty knife.”
Anne nodded. “That has definitely passed through my mind. The problem is I love him. Anyhow, dead fathers aren’t very useful.”
Fathers.
To Kip the word “father” meant her own: forty, getting bald, teaching her to drive, gearing up to pay for her college tuition. But when Anne said “father” she meant Con. Con!
“I thought he’d come after me,” said Anne. “I thought he’d want to be alone, too, and follow me out of the dance.”
“This is the girls’ bathroom,” pointed out Kip. “No matter how much he wants to talk he won’t follow you here.”
“He won’t follow me anywhere,” said Anne dully.
“Do your parents know? Does anybody else know?”
“Only Con.” Anne leaned against the wall. How thin she looked. Kip found her eyes floating toward Anne’s waist, and lower, trying to imagine both the conception and creation of a real person who was half Anne, half Con. Kip couldn’t. Could Anne? Did Anne feel different inside? Could she feel this little person—or was it just cells bunched up together, presenting more problems than Anne knew how to handle?
If you wanted to go that way, there was one easy solution. If Anne felt like it, the whole thing could be ended without her parents and grandmother ever knowing.
But those were questions Kip could not quite manage.
“I haven’t told my parents and my grandmother,” whispered Anne. “They think I’m perfect. They’ll hate me. And Con won’t be with me when I have to tell them. He’s mad at me. That’s his only response to this. Mad at me, as if I’m the only one around, and he didn’t do a thing. Oh, Kip, I trusted him completely to be the most important person in my life—and now I know differently. Whatever decision I make—whatever I do about this pregnancy—he won’t be there. I’ll be alone.”
That’s the sentence, Kip thought. That’s the one we’re all so scared of. It isn’t the being pregnant that panics her as much as the being alone. And do I know how that feels! Worst punishment on earth, I suppose, to be alone. Wounds don’t heal without friends and love. “Oh, Anne,” she said softly. “Oh, Anne, I’m so sorry. It sounds so awful.”
Anne began to cry again, terrible sobs that came out of her as if attached to her lungs: sobs that came protesting, bleeding, wrenched from Anne’s throat.
She clung to Kip, because there was no other help there. What if somebody walks in on us like this? thought Kip, trying to comfort Anne with pats and hugs—Anne whose life was a shambles, for whom the only good hug would be one from Con.
She had a slight sense that maybe the door had just opened.
While Anne sobbed, had Kip heard a creak?
Had there been a click while Anne talked?
Kip looked over her shoulder. The bathroom door was closed. It was much too heavy and too tight to listen through.
But had somebody already been there?
And edged out, not wanting to witness a scene?
Or heard it all … and left … hugging the gossip to herself, ready to spread across a roomful of fascinated listeners?
Chapter 11
EMILY’S FATHER BROUGHT HER favorite jeans, her favorite slate blue cotton turtleneck, and her beloved gray-blue tweed pullover with the cables. She’d worn this so often it was practically a uniform.
“I don’t know if those jeans will pull up over the bandage,” said the nurse doubtfully, but Emily had no trouble. The pant legs were wider than they were fashionable.
Emily stared at herself in the mirror.
She was dull and bedraggled. Her hair, vigorously toweled by one of the aides, was nearly dry, and hung the way it always did when given no attention: nearly straight, but not quite. A wrinkled look, actually, as though there was something wrong with her.
No makeup. No color whatsoever in her cheeks. No eyelashes, of course, because Emily’s were invisible without mascara.
And because she always wore those jeans and sweater, she looked faded, as if she’d been standing there for years in the same clothes.
“Okay, sweetie,” said her father when she was dressed, and in front of all the emergency room staff, he hugged her. Emily was surprised. He was undemonstrative at the best of times, and she could not remember a hug in front of people.
Slowly she was aware that he hardly noticed all these other people. He was looking only at her. This is the way Anne Stephens’ family always looks, Emily thought. This is how it feels to have your parent look at you and think you’re perfect.
But oh, the price!
“You saved a man’s life,” her father said. “I know how scared you’ve always been of lightning. I have to admit, Emily, it always annoyed me.”
The young woman doctor looked very sympathetic. The two nurses paused to listen.
Emily thought of death.
In English class it seemed to her half the poems, plays, and stories they studied dealt with death. She had written essays about it, and analyzed some poet’s view of it. But now she knew she had never given death a moment’s thought.
She tried to feel Matt as dead.
Gone.
Forever gone. Transformed, perhaps into something else—or simply vanished, as if he had never been.
She could not grasp it. It loomed before her: horrific, strong, terrible—yet meaningless. How could death possibly have anything to do with her, Emily, in blue jeans and a cable knit sweater?
“Oh, sweetie, I’m so proud of you,” said her father huskily, and he hugged her again, and this time his arms stayed around her. The hug didn’t scare him off the way it usually did. He kept on hugging, as if to preserve his daughter from the death she, too, had nearly had.
Emily began to cry.
“Because you went through the lightning to save him, honey,” said her father. “Through the dark. Never thinking about your own safety, or what would happen to you if you got hit. You just ran, and saved the fellow’s life.”
“But Daddy, I did worry!” Emily burst out. “I was so scared. Every moment I was terrified. I was crying. And it was my dress I was worried about, not that man. I wasn’t a heroine. I just did it by accident. And I was never brave.”
It was the doctor who hugged her this time. “That’s what courage is, Emily. To keep going when you’re scared. To sacrifice your dress, when the dress really matters, because that’s what you have to do. I’m impressed, too.” The doctor smiled gently. “And proud.”
“You don’t even know me,” said Emily, weeping again.
“Oh, but we do know you. We’ve seen you at the worst
moment of your life, Emily, and you’re wonderful. We love you.”
Emily stared at the doctor. She means it, Emily thought. She loves me. It is possible to love a person you’ve known only for a minute, someone whose life is completely unknown to you. She is proud of me. As if I represented—oh—humanity, or something!
“Not as much as I love you,” Matt’s voice said.
Emily looked up.
Matt, grinning, his hair standing up damp and bristly like a porcupine. Matt, not a scratch on him. Matt, wearing clothing that looked totally wrong yet oddly familiar.
Emily’s father and the doctor let go of her, and Matt bounded forward to give Emily an extremely tight hug. She gasped. He hugged her as if shaking hands with an important person: like sealing a bond.
“Matt. I thought you were dead.”
“Me? Why would I be dead?”
For the life of her, Emily could not remember why she had come to the conclusion that he was. But who cares? she thought. What matters now is that Matt is alive! Alive—and—
And I look awful. The worst of my life. “I look awful,” said Emily.
The entire room full of people began to laugh: doctor, father, nurses’ aides, and Matt.
Emily glared at them. “It’s true,” she said huffily. “After all that energy spent on fixing my hair and getting the perfect dress, I look awful.”
“What matters is, how do you feel?” said Matt.
“Pretty good.”
“Then let’s go on to the dance.”
“I’m wearing blue jeans,” she protested. “It’s a formal dance.”
“So? We certainly have good excuses for looking like this. My father and grandfather are driving down to get the Ford. Dad’ll drive on home in his car and Granddad will drive the Ford home, so we don’t have to worry about the car.”
Emily could truly say she had never worried about the car. All she could think of was facing people like Anne Stephens or Molly Nelmes, who would look fantastic, when Emily, who was rather plain to start with, now had nothing going for her at all.