11/22/63: A Novel (48 page)

“Do you mean like the Lindy Hop?” she asked.

“That’s what I mean.”

“Well . . .”

“Go, Miz Dunhill,” one of the girls said. “We want to see it.” And two of her friends pushed Sadie toward me.

She hesitated. I did another spin and held out my hands. The kids cheered as we moved out on the floor. They gave us room. I pulled her toward me, and after the smallest of hesitations, she spun first to the left and then to the right, the A-line of the jumper she was wearing giving her just enough room to cross her feet as she went. It was the Lindy variation Richie-from-the-ditchie and Bevvie-from-the-levee had been learning that day in the fall of 1958. It was the Hellzapoppin. Of course it was. Because the past harmonizes.

I brought her to me by our clasped hands, then let her go back. We separated. Then, like people who had practiced these moves for months (possibly to a slowed-down record in a deserted picnic area), we bent and kicked, first to the left and then to the right. The kids laughed and cheered. They had formed a clapping circle around us in the middle of the polished floor.

We came together and she twirled like a hopped-up ballerina beneath our linked hands.

Now you squeeze to tell me left or right.

The light squeeze came on my right hand, as if the thought had summoned it, and she whirled back like a propeller, her hair flying out in a fan that gleamed first red, then blue in the lights. I heard several girls gasp. I caught her and went down on one heel with her bent over my arm, hoping like hell that I wouldn’t pop my knee. I didn’t.

I came up. She came with me. She went out, then came back into my arms. We danced under the lights.

Dancing is life.

The hop ended at eleven, but
I didn’t turn the Sunliner into Sadie’s driveway until quarter past midnight on Sunday morning. One of the things nobody tells you about the glamorous job of chaperoning teenage dances is that the shaps are the ones who have to make sure everything’s picked up and locked away once the music ends.

Neither of us said much on the way back. Although Donald played several other tempting big-band jump tunes and the kids pestered us to swing-dance again, we declined. Once was memorable; twice would have been indelible. Maybe not such a good thing in a small town. For me, it already was indelible. I couldn’t stop thinking about the feel of her in my arms or her quick breath on my face.

I cut the engine and turned to her.
Now she’ll say “Thank you for bailing me out” or “Thanks for a lovely evening,” and that’ll be that.

But she didn’t say either of those things. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at me. Hair on her shoulders. Top two buttons of the man’s Oxford-cloth shirt beneath the jumper undone. Earrings gleaming. Then we were together, first fumbling, then holding on tight. It was kissing, but it was more than kissing. It was like eating when you’ve been hungry or drinking when you’ve been thirsty. I could smell her perfume and her clean sweat under the perfume and I could taste tobacco, faint but still pungent, on her lips and tongue. Her fingers slipped through my hair (one pinky tickling for just a moment in the cup of my ear and making me shiver), then locked at the back of my neck. Her thumbs were moving, moving. Stroking bare skin at the nape that once, in another life, would have been covered by hair. I slipped my hand first beneath and then around the fullness of her breast and she murmured, “Oh, thank you, I thought I was going to fall.”

“My pleasure,” I said, and squeezed gently.

We necked for maybe five minutes, breathing harder as the caresses grew bolder. The windshield of my Ford steamed up. Then she pushed me away and
I saw her cheeks were wet. When in God’s name had she started to cry?

“George, I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t. I’m too scared.” Her jumper was in her lap, revealing her garters, the hem of her slip, the lacy froth of her panties. She pulled the skirt down to her knees.

I guessed it was being married, and even if the marriage was busted, it still mattered—this was the mid-twentieth century, not the early twenty-first. Or maybe it was the neighbors. The houses looked dark and fast asleep, but you couldn’t tell for sure, and in small towns, new preachers and new teachers are always interesting topics of conversation. It turned out I was wrong on both counts, but there was no way I could have known.

“Sadie, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. I’m not—”

“You don’t understand. It’s not that I don’t want to. That’s not why I’m scared. It’s because I never have.”

Before I could say anything else, she was out of the car and running for the house, fumbling in her purse for her key. She didn’t look back.

I got home at twenty to one, walking from the garage to the house in my own version of the Blue-Balls Scuttle. I had no more than turned on the kitchen light when the phone began to ring. 1961 is forty years from caller ID, but only one person would be calling me at such an hour, and after such a night.

“George? It’s me.” She sounded composed, but her voice was thick. She had been crying. And hard, from the sound.

“Hi, Sadie. You never gave me a chance to thank you for a lovely time. During the dance, and after.”

“I had a good time, too. It’s been so long since I danced. I’m almost afraid to tell you who I learned to Lindy with.”

“Well,” I said, “I learned with my
ex-wife. I’m guessing you might have learned with your estranged husband.” Except it wasn’t a guess; it was how these things went. I was no longer surprised by it, but if I told you I ever got used to that eerie chiming of events, I’d be lying.

“Yes.” Her tone was flat. “Him. John Clayton of the Savannah Claytons. And
estranged
is just the right word, because he’s a very strange man.”

“How long have you been married?”

“Forever and a day. If you want to call what we had a marriage, that is.” She laughed. It was Ivy Templeton’s laugh, full of humor and despair. “In my case, forever and a day adds up to a little over four years. After school lets out in June, I’m going to make a discreet trip to Reno. I’ll get a summer job as a waitress or something. The residency requirement is six weeks. Which means in late July or early August I’ll be able to shoot this . . . this joke I got myself into . . . like a horse with a broken leg.”

“I can wait,” I said, but as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wondered if they were true. Because the actors were gathering in the wings and the show would soon start. By June of ’62, Lee Oswald would be back in the USA, living first with Robert and Robert’s family, then with his mother. By August he’d be on Mercedes Street in Fort Worth and working at the nearby Leslie Welding Company, putting together aluminum windows and the kind of storm doors that have initials worked into them.

“I’m not sure
I
can.” She spoke in a voice so low I had to strain to hear her. “I was a virgin bride at twenty-three and now I’m a virgin grass widow at twenty-eight. That’s a long time for the fruit to hang on the tree, as they say back where I come from, especially when people—your own mother, for one—assume you started getting your practical experience on all that birds-and-bees stuff four years ago. I’ve never told anyone that, and if you repeated it, I think I’d die.”

“It’s between us, Sadie. And always will be. Was he impotent?”

“Not exact—” She broke off. There was silence for a moment, and when she spoke again, her
voice was full of horror. “George . . . is this a party line?”

“No. For an extra three-fifty a month, this baby is all mine.”

“Thank God. But it’s still nothing to be talking about on the phone. And certainly not at Al’s Diner over Prongburgers. Can you come for supper? We could have a little picnic in my backyard. Say around five?”

“That would be fine. I’ll bring a poundcake, or something.”

“That’s not what I want you to bring.”

“What, then?”

“I can’t say it on the phone, even if it’s not a party line. Something you buy in a drugstore. But not the Jodie Drugstore.”

“Sadie—”

“Don’t say anything, please. I’m going to hang up and splash some cold water on my face. It feels like it’s on fire.”

There was a click in my ear. She was gone. I undressed and went to bed, where I lay awake a long time, thinking long thoughts. About time and love and death.

At ten o’clock on that Sunday morning, I jumped into the Sunliner and drove twenty miles to Round Hill. There was a drugstore on the main drag, and it was open, but I saw a WE ROAR FOR THE DENHOLM LIONS sticker on the door and remembered Round Hill was part of Consolidated District Four. I drove on to Kileen. There, an elderly druggist who bore an eerie but probably coincidental resemblance to Mr. Keene back in Derry winked at me as he gave me a brown bag and my change. “Don’t do anything against the law, son.”

I returned the wink in the expected fashion and drove back to Jodie. I’d had a late night, but when I lay down and tried to nap, I didn’t even get in sleep’s neighborhood. So I went to the Weingarten’s and bought a poundcake after all. It looked Sunday-stale, but I didn’t care and didn’t think Sadie would, either. Picnic supper or no picnic supper, I was pretty sure food wasn’t the number one item on today’s agenda. When I knocked on her door, there was a whole cloud of butterflies in my stomach.

Sadie’s face was free of makeup. She wasn’t even wearing lipstick. Her eyes were large, dark, and frightened. For one moment I was sure she was going to slam the door in my face and I’d hear her running away just as fast as her long legs would carry her. And that would be that.

But she didn’t run. “Come on in,” she said. “I made chicken salad.” Her lips began to tremble.
“I hope you like . . . you like p-plenty of m-may—”

Her knees started to buckle. I dropped the box with the poundcake inside on the floor and grabbed her. I thought she was going to faint, but she didn’t. She put her arms around my neck and held tight, like a drowning woman to a floating log. I could feel her body thrumming. I stepped on the goddamned poundcake. Then she did.
Squoosh.

“I’m scared,” she said. “What if I’m no good at it?”

“What if I’m not?” This was not entirely a joke. It had been a long time. At least four years.

She didn’t seem to hear me. “He never wanted me. Not the way I expected. And his way is the only way I know. The touching, then the broom.”

“Calm down, Sadie. Take a deep breath.”

“Did you go to the drugstore?”

“Yes, in Kileen. But we don’t have to—”

“We do.
I
do. Before I lose what little courage I have left. Come on.”

Her bedroom was at the end of the hall. It was spartan: a bed, a desk, a couple of prints on the walls, chintz curtains dancing in the soft breath of the window air-conditioning unit, turned down to low. Her knees started to give way again and I caught her again. It was a weird kind of swing-dancing. There were even Arthur Murray footprints on the floor. Poundcake. I kissed her and her lips fastened on mine, dry and frantic.

I pushed her away gently and braced her back against the closet door. She looked at me solemnly, her hair in her eyes. I brushed it away, then—very gently—began to lick her dry lips with the tip of my tongue. I did it slowly, being sure to get the corners.

“Better?” I asked.

She answered not with her voice but with her own tongue. Without pressing my body against hers, I began to very slowly run my hand up and down the long length of her, from where I could feel the rapid beat of her pulse on both sides of her throat, to her chest, her breasts, her stomach,
the flat tilted plane of her pubic bone, around to one buttock, then down to her thigh. She was wearing jeans. The fabric whispered under my palm. She leaned back and her head bonked on the door.

“Ouch!” I said. “Are you all right?”

She closed her eyes. “I’m fine. Don’t stop. Kiss me some more.” Then she shook her head. “No, don’t kiss me. Do my lips again. Lick me. I like that.”

I did. She sighed and slipped her fingers under my belt at the small of my back. Then around to the front, where the buckle was.

I wanted to go fast, every part of me was yelling for speed, telling me to plunge deep, wanting that perfect
gripping
sensation that is the essence of the act, but I went slow. At least at first. Then she said, “Don’t make me wait, I’ve had enough of that,” and so I kissed the sweaty hollow of her temple and moved my hips forward. As if we were doing a horizontal version of the Madison. She gasped, retreated a little, then raised her own hips to meet me.

“Sadie? All right?”

“Ohmygodyes,” she said, and I laughed. She opened her eyes and looked up at me with curiosity and hopefulness. “Is it over, or is there more?”

“A little more,” I said. “I don’t know how much. I haven’t been with a woman in a long time.”

It turned out there was quite a bit more. Only a few minutes in real time, but sometimes time is different—as no one knew better than I. At the end she began to gasp. “Oh dear, oh my dear, oh my dear dear God, oh
sugar
!”

It was the sound of greedy discovery in her voice that put me over the edge, so it wasn’t quite simultaneous, but a few seconds later she lifted her head and buried her face in the hollow of my shoulder. A small fisted hand beat
on my shoulder blade once, twice . . . then opened like a flower and lay still. She dropped back onto the pillows. She was staring at me with a stunned, wide-eyed expression that was a little scary.

“I came,” she said.

“I noticed.”

“My mother told me it didn’t happen for women, only for men. She said orgasms for women were a myth.” She laughed shakily. “Oh my God, what she was missing.”

She got up on one elbow, then took one of my hands and put it on her breast. Beneath it, her heart was pounding and pounding. “Tell me, Mr. Amberson—how soon before we can do it again?”

As the reddening sun sank into the everlasting gas-and oil-smog to the west, Sadie and I sat in her tiny backyard under a nice old pecan tree, eating chicken salad sandwiches and drinking iced tea. No poundcake, of course. The poundcake was a total loss.