Lowry laughed. “What the hell you want with a goldfish?”
Clara felt a little hurt. “I like them. At the store, it's nice to watch them.… I feel sorry for them, see, in the damn old tank they live in.”
“Goldfish.” Lowry shook his head, smiling. “What do they cost, thirty cents?”
Clara felt her face burn, but it was a pleasant sensation. She loved being teased. Nobody except Lowry teased her now, not in a long time.
“Well,” Clara said, biting her lip to keep from smiling in an angry, hard way, “that woman you were with tonight—”
“Christ! You're really jealous, aren't you?”
“No! 'Cause you're with me here, and not with her. So goddamn her to hell.”
“I'll see her some other time. We keep in touch.”
“But right now, you're here with me.”
Clara spoke with childlike obstinacy. She wanted to throw her cup of coffee into Lowry's face.
She was too restless to sit down. If she couldn't sit close beside Lowry on her bed, which he wouldn't like, she couldn't sit anywhere for long. Felt like a cat, cooped up in this small space, a cat in heat, Nancy had said the poor things really suffered, wailing and moaning if you kept them cooped up at such a time. Clara leaned against the sink seeing through the small oval mirror she'd hung on the wall Lowry behind her, lifting the coffee cup to his mouth and drinking, bemused, not even looking at her.
“Where'd you go with her? In your car?”
“Who wants to know?”
“You fucked her, did you? That's what you did?”
Lowry shrugged. Now he was looking at her, but not taking her seriously.
Like none of it matters. Fucking.
None of it matters much.
“Does she do that with other men?”
“How do I know? Possibly.”
“Does she like it, too? Do women like it?”
“Sure, why else would they do it?”
Clara turned to face him, smirking. She was beating her thighs with her fists lightly, half-consciously.
“ 'Cause men want them to do it, I think. So they do it. 'Cause they love the men, they want the men to love them. I think.”
Lowry shrugged. His expression was casual, indifferent. An edginess in his eyes, that were fixed on Clara as if he thought her childish, someone to be humored.
“My ma used to tell me it would hurt real bad,” Clara said earnestly. “But that was just to scare me, I think. Now I'm bigger, I'm different. Anyway I wouldn't care, if—”
“Clara, drop it. I told you.”
“—if I loved who it was. The man.”
“You don't know what the hell you're talking about, actually. You're just a kid, what—fifteen?”
Clara fumbled for a hairbrush, and began brushing her hair.
Like a movie scene, this was: Bette Davis brushing her hair in quick angry strokes. Eyes glaring like a cat's.
“You don't like me. You feel fuckin sorry for me. My new dress, you didn't even notice.”
“Sure I did. It's a very pretty dress.”
“It isn't! It's a cheap stupid dress. It's what I can afford. And if some guy wants to buy me a dress, you tell me no. Fuck you.”
Lowry laughed. Watching her now, more alertly.
“Damn dress is all wrinkled and wet now, I been sweatin.” Clara pulled at the collar as if she wanted to rip it off. Rip the dress off herself. “I'm gonna take it off. I can't stand it.” Fumbling at the buttons Clara removed the dress, yanked it over her head and let it drop onto a chair. Standing now in her slip that was a soft amber color, a fabric smooth like silk, or almost, she'd purchased at the dime store at half-price. Clara was panting, tears in her eyes. She saw how Lowry stared at her, not smiling now. “Someday you might want to love me, and I'll tell you to go to hell. I'll say—‘You're the wrong age. You're too old.' I'll be married then and I'll drive past your car in my car and honk my horn at you, to get out of my way.”
“You do that, honey. I deserve it.”
“I will! Goddamn I will.”
Lowry said, in a softer voice, “Hey. I didn't mean to laugh at goldfish. If you're lonely, get a goldfish. I'll buy you as many as you want.”
Clara said, wiping at her nose, “You have to buy the bowl, too. And seaweed to put in it, and fish food.”
“In Woolworth's?”
“Sure! Real nice ones. Not just only gold, but black and pink and white, stripes-like. Different sizes.”
Clara dared to touch Lowry's leg with her bare foot; she'd kicked off her shoes, that were hurting her feet. She smiled in her slow sly way she'd practiced in the mirror. “I washed my hair in this special stuff, just for tonight. For you. I know I look pretty sometimes, if I don't talk loud or rough. I see it in people's faces.” Lowry swiped at Clara's bare foot as if he wanted to capture it but she was too quick for him. She came to sit beside him on the bed, arched her back, eager and trembling she leaned forward to kiss him. It was a movie kiss, magnified: slow and sweet and concentrated. Because she knew he would not kiss her back, it had to be her act solely. Sliding her arms around his neck as she'd never done before, and letting him feel her breasts against his arm. Pressed her cheek against his. Lowry's warm skin, the smell of his hair, his coffee-tinged breath. “You're gonna come next week, Lowry? Please?”
“Maybe.”
“I'll be so lonely, if you don't.”
Clara felt his hands, hesitant, on her back, on her bare skin. His thumb nudging the strap of her slip. Beneath the silky fabric she was wearing only underpants. Like a warm ripe peach her flesh felt to her, and she was in dread that he, the man, would be revulsed by it, and by her.
“If I come next week, are you going to bitch again?”
“No.” Clara spoke sleepily.
“If we go out somewhere, and I leave you for a few minutes—are you going to bitch?”
“No, Lowry.”
“You're gonna remember I'm your friend?”
“Yes, Lowry.”
“And nobody else?—any other bastard, you won't let touch you?”
“Yes, Lowry.”
“Then maybe I'll see you next week. Maybe.”
After he left Clara replayed this conversation, staring at her reflection in the mirror. Close up, her face looked feverish, wounded. She was exhausted as if she'd been arguing with Lowry for hours. Her body ached, between her legs and her nipples, a dull throbbing ache that would stay with her in her sleep, she knew. She shut her eyes to recall kissing Lowry. She had done it: she'd kissed him, full on the mouth. That could never be undone. That could never be forgotten between them. She remembered the way he'd detached himself from her, when Clara was leaning against him, on the bed; his fingers careful not to hurt her, but firm, the way you'd grip an obstinate child, to bend her to your will. And, at the door, when Clara had stood on tiptoes to kiss him again, Lowry had laughed, flush-faced, and kissed her on the forehead.
She loved him, goddamn she would die for him. Goddamn him he didn't wish to know it. But she'd felt how hard he was, through his trousers. That, Lowry couldn't undo, either.
“But someday I'll get back at him,” Clara said aloud.
3
Wedding! Clara was shivering with excitement.
She was in her friend Sonya's house. An old ramshackle farmhouse on the outskirts of Tintern. Always Clara liked visiting her girlfriends in their houses allowing them to think it was natural for Clara Walpole, to have friends who lived in their own houses; it was natural for Clara Walpole to have friends, girls of about her age who seemed to like her. Sonya, a big girl, was standing before a narrow vertical mirror brushing her hair, and Clara could see herself in the mirror beyond Sonya's head and shoulders. She'd told Sonya about Lowry, finally. These months, Clara hadn't been able to resist.
“What if he comes while I'm gone, and doesn't wait? What if I don't get back in time?”
“Hell with him. You got better things to do than wait around for him.”
/> Sonya was a wide-shouldered, wide-hipped girl with bristling dark hair and a smooth, oily, olive-dark skin; her fleshy shoulders and arms exuded strength, confidence. She was brushing her hair impatiently. When she moved aside, Clara's glimmering-blond hair glowed out of the mirror. Clara stood in her good high-heeled shoes nearly as tall as Sonya, staring at her reflection and breathing lightly through parted lips. They were going to their friend Caroline's wedding, and they were both dressed up. There was an odor of something sharp and oversweet in the air, like lilac—their perfume, Sonya's, which they'd shared—and their bright clothing gave the attic room a look of frantic, festive disorder.
“Any guy you wait around for, he's gonna take you for granted.”
Sonya spoke with that emphatic yet vague air of a woman watching herself in a mirror. She was a good-looking girl though her skin was coarse and her eyebrows heavy; she had a way with men, you had to admire Sonya Leznick. Clara watched her friend nervously, not wanting to be judged. Yet knowing that Sonya was right, for of course Sonya was right. Lowry had said he might drop by that day, but it hadn't been a promise, had it?—not really. Look, kid. If I can. She'd wakened with the conviction that, yes Lowry would be dropping by to see her that evening. After Caroline's wedding. In the mirror, despite the distortion of the cheap glass, the look of Clara's face made her blood tingle.
She was damned good-looking, she knew. With her face made up, and her hair curled and brushed. Long as she didn't get nervous, and stammering like a dope.
“I left a note on the door, if he comes early. Told him where he could find me …”
Sonya approached the mirror and turned her head from side to side, critically. She was only eighteen but the pouting, dissatisfied slant of her brows and mouth made her appear perhaps a decade older. When Sonya smiled it was like a nudge in the ribs, a ribald surprise, so you wanted to make Sonya smile. Especially, men did.
“Caroline's real lucky, ain't she?”
“Yes.” Clara spoke dreamily. It was of the wedding they were thinking, not the marriage to come. Neither would have wanted to marry Caroline's fiancé Dave Stickney. But maybe they have to. Have to get married. Clara wondered if, if Lowry made her pregnant, he would marry her.
It was more than two years now. Since she'd first seen him, in that tavern in Ocala, Florida. He let her kiss him sometimes, and run her hands over him. Like it was a game, the man himself wasn't exactly playing.
“You look nice, Sonya. Your hair like that.”
“Shit. It ain't what I wanted.”
“No, it's nice. Let me—” Clara took the hairbrush from her friend, and gave Sonya's thick, manelike hair several deft swipes. She wanted to hide her face in Sonya's hair sometimes, or maybe just to lift it to her face, to smell. Reminded her of, what? who?— maybe Nancy. The way Nancy had slung her arm around Clara's shoulders that time, running with her in the mud.
“And like this, Sonya, see? So the bangs don't hang down straight.”
Sonya smirked cross-eyed at her reflection. Still, she liked it that Clara primped her. A feeling passed between the girls, that they could trust each other. A man, a boy—you couldn't trust them. Sonya was always saying she couldn't trust her bitchy sisters, either.
An automobile horn sounded out front. The girls descended the stairs from the attic, which were so steep they had to make their way sideways in their high heels. Clara was conscious of her smooth silken legs and the way her dress, a bright electric blue, clung to her body. She dreaded Lowry laughing at this dress, that had a kind of cobwebby netting over the bodice, and a rhinestone pin the size of a silver dollar. She knew he'd laugh at her white gloves.
White gloves! Clara had to laugh, herself. She was giddy with happiness. Infatuated with everything about herself and about this day, a wedding on a balmy Saturday in May. Sonya pushed Clara along to the front door of the house which was a door the Leznick family rarely used except for visitors, themselves rare. “Hey, how do I look?” Sonya asked, rolling her eyes. “Really.”
Clara told her she looked beautiful. Really.
Beautiful, wasn't it beautiful! Isn't the bride beautiful!
Like Clara's head was trapped inside a bell. Ringing, ringing the same words beautiful beautiful which she heard uttered in her own voice, too. After the ceremony in the little gray shingle-board church, and after the bride and groom had driven away in their crepe-paper-festooned car.
Clara decided, no I can't. Can't stay for the reception.
In the church she'd had to grind the heels of her hands into her eyes. Christ, why was she crying! Not her but Caroline was getting married, four months pregnant the rumor was. Not her but another.
Blurred faces. “Clara, hello!”—“It's Clara, isn't it? Hello, dear.”— “Clara? Where are you going?”
These people, mostly women, she knew from the store. They were customers, they recognized her face and her pale blond hair. They recognized her aloneness. That Clara, in the five-and-ten. Doesn't that girl have any people? Even as the minister spoke in a warm smothering voice of God, Jesus Christ, love, even as the organist pumped away at the organ, Clara was hearing White trash. That one is white trash. They were kind to her in that way you might be kind to a dog with three legs.
Oh, she hated them. Even Sonya sometimes, she hated. Because they were kind to her, they pitied her. In these pews, in which families crowded. In this place where it all became clear who was alone, and who was not. She did hate them. She hated their eyes on her. Like Lowry. Sons of bitches she did not need them, any of them. She needed only Lowry.
Sonya said, surprised, hurt, “Clara! You can't leave yet. Hey—”
“I can walk. I don't need a ride.”
“But, Clara—”
Oh, why didn't they let her go! It was enough that Caroline tossed her bridal bouquet in Clara's direction, and another girl had leapt for it, quick as a long-beaked heron snatching a fish out of shallow water. It was enough that Caroline had hugged Clara so tight the girls' faces nearly collided. “You'll be next, Clara. I have a feeling.”
The reception was being held in the minister's house next door. The minister's wife, mannish and bossy, stood on the front porch and waved people inside. “You, where are you going? You in the blue dress!” she yelled.
In a few minutes Clara was free. She hurried along the road, walking in the middle so her shoes wouldn't get dirty. They were already flecked a little with mud. Around her, sunlight shone with that peculiar wet intensity it has in spring, and if she were to lift her eyes from the road she would see the range of mountains to the north glimmering and dazzling in the light—the boundary to another, savage, unpopulated world. The Eden River had carved for them this deep, long valley out of the foothills, and to the south and east hills rolled for miles, endlessly. Clara had always had the strange idea, in this part of the country, that the very sweep of the land did not let people stay small and allow them to hide, but somehow magnified them. Here one's eye was naturally driven to the horizon, to the farthest distance, run up against that uncertain boundary where the misty sky and the damp mountains ran together like the blending of heaven and earth in one of Clara's cheap little prints.
She heard an automobile coming up behind her. She supposed she had to stand aside, to let it pass. So she made a waving gesture and turned to the side of the road, walking cautiously, both arms outstretched as if to help her keep her balance. The road was muddiest at the side. In the car was a man with dark hair that had turned partly gray. He had a severe, critical look that made Clara want to turn away in shame.
“Would you like a ride?” he said.
Clara smiled feebly. “I don't mind walking, I'm used to it,” she said.
His car slowed to a stop. She did not know whether he was afraid to splash her with mud or if he was really stopping. She saw that he had a large, heavy head, that his eyes were framed with tiny creases that gave his face a depth she had never noticed in anyone else. Then the car struck her eye: it was new, big. It must
have been expensive. She narrowed her eyes at the sight of it and wondered who this man was.
“I couldn't stay for the reception either,” he said. “I'll drive you back to town.”
She did not answer at once. His voice was an ordinary voice, but behind it something was pushing, prodding. “Get in,” he said. Clara felt the warm sunlight on her face and the image of herself she had been reserving for Lowry released itself: she felt strong and her body coursed with strength. She smiled at the man and said, “All right.”
When she went around the front of the car she reached out with her white glove to almost touch the hood, in a half-magical gesture. She opened the door herself and stepped up into the car. It smelled rich and dark and cool inside. The man wore a dark gray suit and a necktie with tiny silver stripes in it. Clara thought at once that no woman had picked that out for him. He had picked it out for himself.
“Are you a friend of Davey's?” she said shyly.
“Yes.”
He drove on. Clara looked around and saw that the countryside was changed a little by the windows of this car: the cider mill and the empty fields and the houses set back from the road looked clearer, sharper. Clara thought that sunshine revealed everything cruelly—the drab little town had looked better in winter, hidden by dirt-streaked slivers of melting snow.
“You can let me out anywhere,” Clara said. She saw that Lowry's car was not parked out front. But she could not control her excitement. In the future lay everything—everything. Lowry in the doorway of her room, Lowry in her arms, his face, his voice, his calm stubborn will that was a wall she kept hurtling herself against— “Thanks very much,” she said, polite as any child. She was about to get out, but her excitement prompted her to talk. She chatted the way she'd chatted for other men: “It was nice that you stopped because now my new shoes didn't get all muddy.… Wasn't it a nice day today? I'm glad Caroline and Davey are married and happy and everything.… Thanks very much for the ride.”
“Do you live in town here? Where?”
She glanced at him, still smiling. “Upstairs there,” she said, pointing. It somehow pleased her that the man bent a little to look.