Without makeup, her face was fresh as dew, he told her. She was his elf, She was loveliness, he said. After a while, Nicole got the impression that he was just like her and could hardly comprehend what was happening. The feeling of something beautiful next to you all the time.
Then, just before he was ready to leave, he would get up and lock himself in the bathroom for twenty minutes. Nicole supposed he combed his hair and did his thing. Afterward, they'd spend five minutes at the front door, and she would watch from there while he got in the car. A lot of times he'd have trouble starting it. Sometimes, after slipping on her Levi's, she'd come out to push. Sometimes he would have to take her car. It was dependent on which Mustang had the most gas. They got pretty broke sometimes.
She didn't regret, however, quitting her job. After the day she played hooky from the sewing factory to have a picnic with Sue, she knew she wasn't going to keep working. She needed time to think. It was hard to stay serious about a sewing machine when you wanted to dream all the time about your man. Besides, they had his paycheck, and her welfare, and Gary was just as happy if she quit.
While he was away, she'd piddle around, clean the house, feed the kids. She'd work in the garden a lot, and drink coffee. Sometimes she would sit and drink coffee for a couple of hours and think about Gary. Sit there and smile to herself. She felt so nice she couldn't believe some of the things she felt. A lot of times she would drive over with his lunch just to be with him, and he'd come sit in the car.
She began to visit her mother a lot because Kathryne's house wasn't far from where he worked, and Nicole could have coffee with Kathryne, then leave the kids, and be alone with Gary. She really enjoyed such time. She'd go back to her mother's for an hour or so, then back to Spanish Fork to straighten out the house and wait. It was the first time in her life she felt like a lady of leisure.
One Sunday while she was digging away in her garden, Gary carved their names on the apple tree. He did it with a pocket knife, real nice, really neat: GARY LOVES NICOLE. Nobody had ever done that before.
Next day she had a lot of things to do, and kept wanting to get back. When she finally reached home, she cleaned his car out first, then climbed up the tree to a place above where he had done it, and carved out: NICOLE LOVES GARY. Then she went into the house just in time to meet him.
He came out in the backyard with a beer and she told him to look at the apple tree. He didn't see anything and she finally had to point it out to him. Then he was happy as a kid, and said she had done hers better than his. Told her it was a beautiful heart she had carved around the names.
Maybe a week after Gary came to live with her, she found a big yellow folder in his stuff with a bunch of papers about a dispute he had with a prison dentist. The arguments were all typed up in prison language and seemed so funny she just sat there and laughed. All those big words about a set of false teeth. When she told Gary, however, he got upset. He had never mentioned he had false teeth. Bothered the hell out of him that she found out.
Of course it wasn't new to her. She had discovered it the first night. She had lived before with a guy who had a plate and knew how they felt. You could always tell when kissing a man because they never wanted you to put your tongue in their mouth, whereas they were always putting their tongue in yours. She went so far as to tease him about the chompers, but he took it bad. Changed like somebody just turned out the lights. She still kept teasing him, as if to make him see it didn't bother her. She had no desire to compare him to other guys, or rate him in one department or another. She was ready to buy the package, string and all.
Each day she kept coming across the realization that some of the little things he did gave her surprising pleasure. He didn't smoke, for instance, yet when he saw her rolling her own, he brought home a carton of cigarettes. It was beautiful, those little lifts.
They would sit around and drink beer in the evening, and there was hardly time enough together. She could be as honest as she wanted, and tell him anything about her past. He would listen. He would observe everything she had to say. If another fellow would have sickened her with such constant attention, it didn't bother Nicole a bit. She was studying Gary the same way.
All she wanted was more hours with him. She had always appreciated any minute she had to herself, but now she would get impatient with wanting him to be back. When five o'clock rolled around and he was there, the day was made. She loved opening that first beer for him.
Sometimes, he would take his BB gun out to the back, and they would shoot at bottles and beer cans in the twilight until you couldn't tell anymore when you were hitting except by the sound of the ricochet or a plink of glass. The twilight came down slowly. It was as if you were taking one breath and then another from a cluster of roses. The air was good as marijuana then.
In those early evenings, if they stayed home, there were always kids around. Their baby-sitter was a girl named Laurel, an adolescent who had a lot of little cousins, and they came with her. Sometimes when Gary and Nicole got back from a drive, all those kids would be around and he would play with them. He'd give them piggyback rides. They'd stand on his shoulders and touch their hands to the ceiling. He liked to play with the ones who had enough nerve to walk all the way across the room like that. They just loved the holy shit out of him.
A lot of the time, though, as soon as he got home, they would get Laurel over, and take off for a ride alone.
Usually they would eat at a drive-in, and a couple of times he took her to the Stork Club to play pool. There were afternoons right after work when they went to the shopping mall and selected sexy underwear for her, or picked up beer and cigarettes for the drive-in movie.
Pretty soon after they parked, he'd want her to take her clothes off. Then they would make it in the front seat. Gary just loved to have her naked. Couldn't get over the idea he was holding a naked woman.
Once, watching Peter Pan, they got out and sat on the rear deck over the trunk, back to back, and she was naked then. The Mustang was parked way in the outfield, but there were other cars around, and she had nothing on. God, it was the nicest feeling. After all those years in prison, Gary was insane about watching her walk about with her bootie exposed and her boobs bouncing. She dug it that he liked her without clothes. He had her right around his finger and she didn't mind it a bit.
Yet, he didn't get arrogant. He was so touching when he asked her to do something. One night, late at night, she even took off her clothes on the back steps of the First Mormon Church, in Provo Park, practically the center of town. It was late at night. They just sat there on the steps, her clothes on the grass, and she danced a little, and Gary began to sing in a voice like Johnny Cash, although not as good, unless you were in love with Gary, and he sang "Amazing Grace"—
Through many dangers, toils and snares, We have already come, 'Twas Grace that brought us safe this far, And Grace will lead us on—
That way she sat beside him naked at two in the morning, on a hot spring night, with the heat pushing in from the desert instead of the cold settling down from the mountains.
That night, very late at night, back in bed, they really made it. Just as the sex was going good, he talked of putting his rough hands on her soft warm bootie and of breathing into her soul, and she came with him then, really came for the first time.
In the morning she sat down and wrote a letter to say how much she loved him, and that she didn't want to stop. It was just a short letter and she left it out there by his vitamins. He didn't reply when he read it, but a night or two later they were walking by the same church off Center Street, and saw a falling star. They both made a wish. He asked what hers could be, but she wasn't going to tell him. Then she confessed having wished that her love for him be constant and forever. He told her that he hoped no unnecessary tragedies would ever befall them. She had a rush of memories then like falling down in a dream.
Chapter 5
NICOLE AND UNCLE LEE
Once, when Gary asked her if she remembered
the first time she fucked somebody, Nicole paused in her reply and said, "Vaguely."
" 'Vaguely?' " Gary asked. "What do you mean, 'vaguely'?"
"It wasn't that big of a deal," said Nicole. "I was only 11 or 12."
Of course, she didn't tell him all her stories at once. She told him cute things first like the one about the pet raccoon when she was 6. She used to walk to school with it on her shoulder and think she was hot stuff.
She used, she told him, to play hooky a lot. Sometimes she would just drift on up the hill above the school, sit in the middle of the pine trees and look down on all those little idiots in class. One time Nicole was being smart-ass and instead of keeping to the woods, went walking back by the road. Just then her mother drove around the corner. There Nicole was. She could remember her mother saying, "All right, girl. Get in the car."
Or the time her mother cut her hair so short you could see the skin behind her ears. People used to think she was a boy. One time some kids in the playground said so, and she proved to them she wasn't.
Gary laughed. That sped things up.
She remembered, when she was 10 or 11 writing a pornographic letter to a very nasty little boy who had a very dirty mouth.
Now she didn't know why she wrote it, just that when she finished, she took one look, and tore it up. Kathryne fished it out of the garbage and taped it together. Then her mother told her how horrible she was. Especially since she had written: Okay, you talk about it so much, let's do it.
There came moments when Nicole thought her mother was very intelligent, for Kathryne could pick up on what other people were thinking. Nicole never believed Kathryne listened much to her own soul, but she could sure hone in on others. If you lived around her long enough, you didn't have to think about something before her mother would mention it. That sure gave her a way of bending you out of shape. Kathryne was a tiny woman, but she would tell her big handsome husband with his beautiful black mustache that he was nothing but a slob. Tell him to go fuck the lady he had just been with. When Charley came home from work, which was usually late, because he'd stopped off to have a few at a bar, it wasn't that he walked drunk, or his speech was slurred, but he'd have a half smile on his face like Clark Gable, and Nicole could tell he was feeling good. Then Kathryne would start to fix his mood. She wasn't about to forgive him for a lot.
One time, Kathryne actually caught him coming down the stairs in some motel. He had a girl on the second floor. Kathryne had his service pistol and threatened to shoot him. But she didn't. In turn, Nicole's father would always accuse Kathryne of adultery, her mother!—Charley Baker was the first man she had, and she never had another one. Didn't stop her father. Once he got home late and nobody was there, and he thought Kathryne'd left forever with the kids and a man. Instead she had just taken the kids to a drive-in movie. When they got home, Charley wouldn't believe it. The kids had to run out of the house and climb in the car, and when Mom leaped in to drive away, Charles tried to jump on as they were all pulling out, and broke his leg. That was when Nicole was around 7 and her father was 25.
There were always fights about money. Her mother's argument was that he was just plain stingy about the family and spent his money on hunting rifles or drinking with his Army buddies. Still, Nicole could remember when she was 10, and her daddy was in Vietnam and her mother was worried that he was going to get killed. They would hear her cry sometimes late at night.
When Gary said he would like to meet her mother, Nicole didn't tell him about her last conversation with Kathryne. Her mother had said this new boy friend was a little old, she'd heard. And then there was his having been in prison. That had to be a very good influence.
"I'll go," said Nicole, "with whom I goddamn well please."
Yet when the meeting took place, nothing did happen. Gary was polite and stood at the cupboard holding Jeremy in his arms, and looked at everybody and drank it in and didn't say a thing. It was like he'd been wound up to stay in position and send light out of his eyes. "Nice to meet you," he said to Kathryne when he left, and Nicole knew that an uncomfortable feeling stayed behind.
She cared more because of the things people could do to him. He was stiff as a 4-year-old boy with the wrong people. She understood. She knew what it was like to be in prison. Felt as if she had lived there too. Prison was wanting to breathe when somebody else had a finger up your nose. Soon as they took it out, the air got you crazy. Prison was being married too young and having kids.
She didn't always remember which story she had told him. Just as well. Some of the stories were pretty bad. Still she usually felt as if her thoughts passed over to his head with only a couple of words to help them along. Before she knew it, she was telling him more and more. He listened without getting upset. That was real important.
When she was 8 or 9, she was still ugly in her own mind, a gawky little bird. Then, suddenly, she blossomed. She had the biggest boobs in the sixth grade. In fact, there was a time when she had the biggest boobs in the elementary school. Didn't have to go looking for attention. It came to her. They called her Foam Rubber.
Before she was 11, she wouldn't let anybody put it in. Still, she liked to take her clothes off, and have them look. Then she would let the boys touch her. She liked getting attention from the best-looking boys. That was because she never thought of herself as popular. They didn't ask her out much to parties. The girls from the good Mormon families who went to Sunday School used to spite her a lot.
By junior high, she was making friends with the worst kids. Some were the biggest troublemakers and some were just the ugliest looking. She was stealing a lot, particularly out of other kids' lockers. Even when she didn't get caught, people were always suspecting her, and disgusted with her. Yet nobody was interested enough to want her to be something better. She had the feeling that if she was a good girl and went to church and got good grades, who would acknowledge it?
Then they put her into the nuthouse at 13. There was a far-out lady they sent her to for counseling, and the lady talked her into going. They told her she would only be there for a couple of weeks but after she spilled the beans about Uncle Lee, she stayed for seven months.
Right from when she started school, there was an Army friend of her father's who lived with them. His buddy, her father called him. The kids called him Uncle Lee even though he was no real uncle or any kind of relative, but her dad looked on him as a lot closer than his own brothers. He even looked something like Charley Baker. When they were out together, it was as if Elvis Presley was walking down the street with Elvis Presley.
Uncle Lee was dead now, but he had lived off and on with them from the time she was 6, and Nicole always blamed her mother and dad for Uncle Lee, because he had sure fucked her up. She even thought she became a slut because of him.
When her father would work on the Base at night, and her mother would also work late, and her brother be asleep, Lee would start. When it was late in the evening and her mother was out with her father, Nicole would know it was coming. She'd begin to feel nervous while waiting for Lee to come out of the tub. Soon after, sitting in the living room alone with her, he would open his bathrobe and ask her to play. Called it rubbing pee-pees.
With the lights out, she never really knew if it was touching, or what he was asking her to kiss. After a while, it didn't even seem that unusual, she would answer him politely when he asked, Does that feel good? She would say, Yes.
Nicole was 12 before she told him that he couldn't make her do it anymore. She was sleeping next to April when Lee woke her up. Nicole thought April was awake anyway, so she told him no. Then, Lee said he had caught her in the bathroom. Went into detail how he had seen a little masturbating. Said, You're such a free spirit, you can do it with me. She said, I don't care what you saw, you tell the world. A little while after, he went to Nam and was killed. It made Nicole wonder if she had left a curse, cause she had enough evil thoughts about Lee.
She never told anyone in the family what he had done. She was
afraid they might not believe it. Yet, now, they seemed to know. Maybe the nice lady who sent her to the nuthouse got around to telling them.
Gary was silent for a long time. "Your old man," he said, "ought to be shot."
"Are you sure you want to hear all of it?" she asked.
"I want to hear it," he nodded.
So she started to tell him about the nuthouse and her first marriage. And she didn't hide it about the orgy in between. Otherwise, it would have been too confusing to explain that she met her second husband before her first.
It was really only half a nuthouse and half a Reform School. Kind of a youth home. It wasn't all that bad, except Nicole felt crazy all the time because it was ridiculous that she was locked up. Why are they keeping me here, she would ask herself, when I'm not nuts? It would get quiet in the night, and she would feel lonely when somebody would scream.
The first time they let her home for a visit she got to stay at her grandmother's and some dudes next door asked if she wanted to party a little bit. She slipped off to the next house with them for a few days, and got in trouble overstaying her leave. They kept such a watch on her when she went back to the hospital that it took six months before she could go AWOL again.
One time, a real dopy old lady was on guard at the door and Nicole was able to get past her. She took off down the field, climbed two fences, went through a few backyards, found a good-sized road and hitchhiked over to Rikki and Sue's house where she hung around for a few days, and started to go with the guy who became her first husband, Jim Hampton. He claimed to be in love and wanted to marry her from the first date on. She thought he was a big immature clunk. Yet every day she was AWOL, Nicole was with him. She felt very conceited about being superior to him.