The man said quickly, “Do you live around here?”
“Oh, I live back there. I was just going for a walk.”
“School’s out now?”
“Yes.”
“Are you in high school?”
“I’m a senior.”
“What’s your name?”
“Maureen.”
He smiled nervously, not hearing any of this, and she too smiled—but not nervously. She let her long chestnut-colored hair fall forward. Under her coat she wore her navy-blue jumper, a little short for her now, and loafers like all the girls wore; she carried her books cradled childishly in her arms.
Once in the car she felt relieved, as if she had safely crossed a boundary line. She let her books fall onto the seat between them. She said softly, “On a nice day like this I like to go for a ride, but we don’t have a car. My parents don’t have a car; I don’t know anyone who has one.”
“Nobody at all?”
“Oh, maybe somebody.”
“No boy friends?”
“I’m not interested in boys,” Maureen said.
“You’re in—high school? What year are you?”
“My last year,” she said, lying with a dazzling smile, letting herself relax. The sunlight was like honey. Somewhere she could smell cologne—she imagined it. Notes of music drifted into them from passing cars. She felt as if she were in a boat, being borne gently along a stream, without effort.
He drove toward the river. Maureen thought it was strange, how familiar everything looked. She stared at everything; she was blank and smiling. The very odor of the air was familiar. They passed warehouses, vacant lots. On the river there were boats—great barges, lake barges that moved slowly, without sound. She was free. No one could even see her. Freedom came to her like air from the river, not exactly fresh, but chilly and strong; she was free and she had escaped.
The man was maybe thirty-five. She couldn’t tell. He was silent, and in his silence there was pleading. Shrewdly she recognized it but gave no sign—like a man, she was contemptuous of pleading. He stopped the car somewhere. He took out his wallet and took snapshots out of it, showing Maureen pictures of his family. She stared past the pictures to the wallet itself, which was cracked and worn, like Furlong’s. One of the snapshots showed a man in a soldier’s uniform—the man himself! Maureen smiled at the pictures. She thought, I’m not afraid at all. I don’t feel anything.
After a while, nervously, clumsily, the man kissed her. Though she could feel his mouth against her own, she did not really feel anything. She felt the pressure of his mouth. She kept thinking clearly, I don’t feel anything at all…Past his head was the sky. It was normal. The man leaned over her, breathing sharply, and in a strange eager haste embraced her and kissed her again. There was pleading in him, in every part of him. She put her hands up against his shoulders, not to push him away but just to complete the embrace as she supposed she should. Still she felt nothing. She was untouched. In another minute he was kissing her throat; he clutched at her and pressed his mouth against her, and Maureen felt a little uneasy for the first time—but only for an instant. They were out in the open. The blue sky faced them above the Detroit River.
After a while he moved away. He was very nervous. He said, “I better drive you home.”
“All right,” said Maureen.
“Do you get a ride home from school most days? A boy friend?”
“I don’t have a boy friend,” Maureen said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t have time for boys.”
“Will you be out there tomorrow? I mean, where you were? Tomorrow around this time?”
“All right,” said Maureen.
There was silence between them. She did not look at him. Finally he said, “If I came by tomorrow again, maybe we could go for a ride. Would that be all right?”
“All right.”
“We don’t have to go far.”
“All right.”
She met him on the street the next afternoon. She was not wearing her school outfit since she had cut school; instead she wore a skirt and sweater. Her hair was loose in the wind.
The man stared at her when she got in the car; it was a hard, helpless stare. She did not look at him. She smiled toward him. They drove out along West Jefferson; the day was slightly overcast and seemed to press them together, to urge them together.
“Sit closer,” the man said.
Maureen moved over closer to him. “Can’t you sit any closer than that?” he said.
Maureen gathered her skirt up about her knees and moved over again. The man took both her hands in one of his, at once. She felt again a slight uneasiness, almost a memory of fear, but it passed. At the very center of him was the money he had that he would give to her—she thought about that.
They drove along. They passed trucks, cars, buses. Maureen looked around as if she’d never seen all this before, and the man kept glancing from the street to her, to the side of her face. He was jumpy and his driving was a little clumsy. Maureen wondered what would happen if he had an accident. A police cruiser passed them, in no hurry. Maureen glanced over into the car. Three policemen, smoking cigarettes. They wore sunglasses in spite of the dull air.
He took her to an old hotel on West Jefferson. Maureen did not bother looking around. She climbed the stairs ahead of him, feeling him behind her with that eager intense stare. Still she felt nothing. It was not personal. If her heart was beating fast, it was in imitation of what she ought to be feeling but did not quite feel, as if her body were at a safe distance from herself. She believed that her teachers, the nuns who had cautioned the girls about certain things, would have felt nothing more than she was feeling—it was not possible to feel much. Even fear was too much.
They were entering a room. The man closed the door behind them and fastened a chain. Maureen looked around and saw a bed, a chair, a bureau, then she gave up looking.
“I wish you’d take this off,” he said, meaning her coat.
He was as tall as Furlong, a tall man, but he was very nervous. What she could see of his face was all right. He had fair, ordinary skin. So long as the fear was on his side Maureen did not have to be afraid at all. He helped her off with her coat politely and hung it up. Then he came to her and embraced her. She cried out a little in surprise. Her hands rose to his shoulders, as if to push him away, but she stood facing him and did not push him away. There was no fear in her. She did not feel anything really; she was at a distance from this. She closed her eyes. He pressed himself against her, all the length of him, an adult man pressing himself against her. As if they were familiar to each other, she began to move her hands behind him, up to the back of his neck. He was kissing her mouth. She felt the short sharp hairs at the back of his neck. So close together, they could not see each other now; he would never be able to remember her face.
In five minutes it was over. Maureen lay beside the man, her eyelids trembling. She had not felt much pain really. She’d heard a cry, a muffled sobbing, but it hadn’t been her—had it? Between her legs where he’d pushed himself, there was a burning rawness that seemed to be part of another person, not her; she would not accept it. Her thoughts floated like ash. Broken into pieces, but soft filmy pieces. Everything in the man had been concentrated, vivid and urgent; in Maureen everything was vague, filmy. There was so much feeling on his side, she had not needed to feel anything.
She smiled. Was it to be this easy?
After some time they prepared to leave. He was flush-faced, shaky. His eyes, snatching at hers, reminded her of Pa’s eyes when he’d come home drunk, not mean-drunk but dazed-drunk, perplexed-drunk, frightened. Maureen’s clothes were badly wrinkled and the man tried to smooth them on the bed with the flat of his hand. “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” Maureen said, surprised that he should care—what did her clothes matter? What did she matter? The concern of this stranger touched her. Sh
e began to cry, surprising herself and him. She covered her face, crying; but it was not serious. She was able to make herself stop. She forced herself to stop. She didn’t know why this had happened—she had felt no pain and no fear. It was over. Nothing had really happened.
He pulled her onto his knees tenderly. He seemed like someone’s father.
“I need money,” Maureen said. “I need to buy things of my own, clothes and things.”
He embraced her. He told her to stop crying. He wiped a teardrop from her cheek with his finger and brought the finger to his mouth.
“I need money, money,” she said. She understood that he would give her money. He was anxious to give her money. But it would take a certain passage of time, a few minutes, several minutes…but he would give her money. That fact kept her from breaking into pieces.
16
“She had a baby…the bottom part of the spine wasn’t right, what-ya-call-it…it kept dripping out, some water…the baby only lived a few weeks…”
“That’s really lousy…”
Maureen sat on the edge of her bed, leafing through a book. From time to time she glanced up at the door to her room, which could not be shut tightly enough to keep out the voices from the kitchen. Loretta had a visitor, a woman named Rita. Maureen hated to hear their voices, hated to hear the things they said, yet at the same time she yearned to be out there with them, understanding everything. They talked in bright patches of sound, rhythmic, robust, in total sympathy, very much together: Maureen did not know if she hated them or envied them. All her life she had heard women talking, together, almost out of earshot but never out of earshot. But the talk did not make sense: she sat on the edge of her bed, alone, leafing nervously through a library book, understanding nothing.
This woman Rita had bounced up the stairs that morning out of nowhere, “just back from Florida and for good,” wearing a black sweater with spangles on it and black slacks. Her hair was too black to be real. Her ears were pierced and she wore gold knobs in them. Loretta, opening the door to her, had cried out in surprise and delight, and the two of them had embraced, very excited, affectionate. Maureen had ducked back to her room to get out of the heady air of their excitement and affection. She did not like excitement and she did not understand affection.
The book on her lap was Poets of the New World, just the right size and with the right title to keep out snooping people. On this page were a number of bills. One of them was a fifty-dollar bill. On this page there were more bills. Maureen sat leafing dreamily through the book, not watching the page numbers to see if she was coming to her hidden money but letting herself come upon it by surprise. She felt a mild shock every time she came upon it. That was the strange thing about money; it was always a surprise.
She sat for a while in her room, waiting. Betty’s side of the room was a mess; they had divided the room in two, and Betty’s junk lay right against the boundary line, where Maureen had pushed it back with her foot. Betty’s clothes lay everywhere in a jumble, clean and dirty clothes, and the junk she collected—comic books, even small traffic signs—lay in uneven piles. Betty’s husky, hurried presence was almost audible in the room, while Maureen’s was not; this neatness on Maureen’s side of the room, the made-up bed and the small row of books along the floor, suggested that no one lived here permanently. And this was almost true: on nights when Loretta fought with her husband she kicked Maureen out of bed and Maureen had to sleep on the sofa. This bed had become Loretta’s bed as much as it was Maureen’s. Maureen did not really own it. Like everything else of hers, it was precarious, and anyway it seemed to her right that she should now be sleeping or lying awake on top of so many strange beds since she had never really had one of her own.
At exactly five o’clock she put Poets of the New World back in its place on the floor and picked up three other books. In the kitchen her mother and her mother’s loud friend were still talking. They were drinking beer. “This is my Reeny, my Maureen, you remember her?” Loretta said, reaching out for Maureen’s hand. “Isn’t she grown up real pretty?”
“Sure I remember her. She’s real cute. She was real cute then, a little kid.” Rita smiled with affection at Maureen. “How old are you, honey?”
“Sixteen.”
“Sixteen, Christ!” The woman screwed up her mouth in a pleasant, bewildered look. “You know, your ma and I were real good friends when you weren’t even born yet. In fact your mother was about your age. What do you think about that?”
“Isn’t that something?” Loretta said enthusiastically.
Maureen looked toward the floor. Her mother was still holding her hand, expecting something from her. She was trapped by their clumsy good will. What was it about affection she now hated? Was it having to get close to someone, having to look clearly in someone’s face? She did not want to look into anyone’s face.
“That’s real nice,” she said.
“Yeah, your mother was only your age. Believe it or not.”
“I had long hair then, real long. Down my back,” Loretta said.
Maureen smiled and eased away from her. She waited for Loretta’s permission for her to escape; she was obedient and polite in her school jumper and her clean white blouse. She seemed not to want to look up at her mother and this friend. She did not want to imagine, either, her mother at sixteen years of age, with long blond hair.
“Well, kid, where are you off to now? I suppose you’re going to the library again?”
Maureen wondered at her mother’s meaning.
“Yes, Ma, I have three books to return.”
“Oh, you—you and that library!”
“She’s a real pretty girl,” Rita said warmly. “I like the way kids these days wear their hair. Only what’s that outfit?”
“The nuns’ school.”
“No kidding, Loretta? You’re sending your kids to a nuns’ school after what we went through? Those stupid bitches—?”
“Oh, it’s good for the kids, it does them good.”
Maureen said good-by and got out.
It was spring now and she wore no coat. She walked over to the library, almost happy to be out of one place and not yet in another, suspended and free for a few minutes. When she entered the library she felt a shiver of anticipation pass over her. She went to the librarian’s counter to return the books. Then she went into the reading-room where a few people sat at tables, reading, daydreaming. Someone caught her eye. He held up a copy of Newsweek before him and on the cover of the magazine was a woman’s face—Maureen did not recognize the face but it was a beautiful one. She returned his look and turned again and left the library.
Outside, on the sidewalk, she waited until he caught up with her.
“Did your mother give you any trouble?” he said.
“No. About the same.”
She walked alongside him, swinging her purse gently, smiling, and he crowded a little against her. She had met him about three weeks before, seeking him out because he had a certain safe, restless look. She could draw near to a man and through half-closed eyes assess him, never really looking at him; it was a feeling in her blood. She lowered her head in a certain way, she let one foot slide out so that the ankle touched the floor, she pretended to be thinking seriously about something in her own life, and in this way she felt his attention move upon her like a strong light, bathing her in it and marking her.
“It’s a nice day today. It’s a good day.” He leaned against her slightly as they walked, touching her arm. She felt his body leaning toward her. He was not a shy man or a very gentle man but he understood her; he gave her money. She was greedy for the money he would give her today, stuck away now in his wallet. It was supposed to be out of sight and out of her concern for the moment. But she thought keenly about it, its passing from his hands into hers, its becoming her money. The bills would not change in any way and yet they would become hers. Its power would become hers. The man’s giving her
his money was not a simple act but a transformation of the money itself, so that it became another kind of money, it became hers, it was magical in her hands and secret from all the world, and yet it was unchanged.
He was saying, nudging her, “What are you thinking about? You look so strange. What are you always thinking about?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? Not about me?”
“No.”
“Sure, you’re thinking about me!”
He was joking, and she glanced up at him, smiling. She did not quite see him. She had seen enough of him that first day to know that he had a rather hard, demanding face, that his hair was trimmed short, that his fingernails didn’t seem dirty, that the clothes he wore were fairly good—at least she thought they were fairly good. She had known that when they were alone he would grab her, and that when they tried to talk to each other their words would come out nervous and warm, like slaps. It was like talking to Loretta sometimes: not really talking. About his private life she never thought and had no curiosity. She did not wonder if he was married or not or if he had a good job or not. He might have had no job at all. She really did not think of him except as a man she met a few times a week who gave her money and who was carrying now the money he would give her later that afternoon—that was the secret and central part of his being, which would be opened up and given to her.
“You want to go somewhere?” he said.
“Anywhere,” Maureen said.
“My car’s parked here. You want to go for a ride, kid?”
“All right.”
He rubbed his hand across the back of her neck, now that they were in the parking lot and off the street. He opened the car door for her. She got in, passing near him, and he bent down to kiss her. At this point it began: a kind of beginning. He changed, she could feel him changing. He said against her mouth, “I’ve been thinking of you all this time…” And it was not any particular truth he was saying—in fact she supposed he was lying—but it was the truth of his needing to say it that made her know that everything was all right.