Adultery & Other Choices (6 page)

The picture had been cut out of the high school yearbook. Her blonde hair had been short then, an Italian boy; her face was tilted down and to one side, she was smiling at the camera, and beneath her face, across her sweater, was written:
Good piece
.

It had been thumbtacked to the bulletin board approximately two years after she had lost her virginity, parked someplace with a boy she loved. When they broke up she was still fifteen, a long way from marriage, and she wanted her virginity back. But this was impossible, for he had told all his friends. So she gave herself to the next boy whose pledge was a class ring or football sweater, and the one after that (before graduation night there were three of them, all with loose tongues) and everyone knew about Bobbie Huxford and she knew they did.

She never found out who put the picture on the bulletin board. When she got to school that day, a group of students were standing in the hall; they parted to let her through. Then she met the eyes of a girl, and saw neither mischief nor curiosity but fascination. A boy glanced at the bulletin board and quickly to the floor, and Bobbie saw the picture. She walked through them, pulled out the thumbtacks, forcing herself to go slowly, taking out each one and pressing it back into the board. She dropped the picture into her purse and went down the hall to her locker.

So at graduation she was not leaving the camaraderie, the perfunctory education, the ball games and dances and drives on a Sunday afternoon; she was leaving a place where she had always felt watched, except when Sherri King had been seduced by an uncle and somehow that word had got out. But the Kings had moved within a month, and Bobbie's classmates went back to watching her again. Still there was nostalgia: sitting on the stage, looking at the audience in the dark, she was remembering songs. Each of her loves had had a song, one she had danced to, pressed sweating and tight-gripped and swaying in dance halls where they served beer to anyone and the juke box never stopped: Nat ‘King' Cole singing ‘Somewhere Along the Way,' ‘Trying' by the Hilltoppers, ‘Your Cheatin' Heart' by Joni James, all of them plaintive songs: you drank two or three beers and clenched and dipped and weaved on the dance floor, and you squeezed him, your breasts against his firm narrow chest feeling like your brassiere and wrinkled blouse and his damp shirt weren't even there; you kept one hand on the back of his neck, sweat dripped between your fused cheeks, and you sang in nearly a whisper with Joni or Nat and you gave him a hard squeeze and said in his ear:
I lave you, I'll love you forever
.

She had not loved any of them forever. With each one something had gone sour, but she was able to look past that, farther back to the good times. So there was that: sitting on the stage she remembered the songs, the love on waxed dance floors. But nostalgia wasn't the best part. She was happy, as she had been dancing to those songs that articulated her feelings and sent them flowing back into her blood, her heart. This time she didn't want to hold anyone, not even love anyone. She wanted to fly: soar away from everything, go higher than rain. She wanted to leave home, where bright and flowered drapes hung and sunlight moved through the day from one end of the maroon sofa to the other and formed motes in the air but found dustless the coffee table and the Bible that set on it.

She was their last child, an older brother with eight years in the Army and going for twenty, and an older sister married to a pharmacist in Beaumont, never having gone farther than Galveston in her whole life and bearing kids now like that was the only thing to do.

In the quiet summer afternoons when her mother was taking a nap and her father was at work, she felt both them and the immaculate house stifling her. One night returning from a date she had walked quietly into the kitchen. From there she could hear them snoring. Standing in the dark kitchen she smoked a cigarette, flicking the ashes in her hand (there was only one ash tray in the house and it was used by guests). Then looking at their bedroom door she suddenly wanted to holler:
I drank too much beer tonight and got sick in the John and Bud gave me 7-Up and creme de menthe to settle my stomach and clean my breath so I could still screw and that's what we did
: WE SCREWED.
That's what we always do
.

Now, looking out into the dark, Bobbie wondered if her parents were watching her. Then she knew they were, and they were proud. She was their last child, she was grown now, they had done their duty (college remained but they did not consider it essential) and now in the clean brightly-colored house they could wait with calm satisfaction for their souls to be wafted to heaven. Then she was sad. Because from the anxiety and pain of her birth until their own deaths, they had loved her and would love her without ever knowing who she was.

After the ceremony there was an all-night party at Rhonda Miller's camp. Bobbie's date was a tall shy boy named Calvin Tatman, who was popular with the boys but rarely dated; three days before graduation he had called Bobbie and asked her to be his date for Rhonda's party. The Millers' camp was on a lake front, surrounded by woods; behind the small house there was a large outdoor kitchen, screened on all sides. In the kitchen was a keg of beer, paper cups, and Rhonda's record player; that was how the party began. Several parents were there, drinking bourbon from the grown-ups' bar at one side of the kitchen; they got tight, beamed at the young people jitterbugging, and teased them about their sudden liking for cigarettes and beer. After a while Mr. Miller went outside to the barbecue pit and put on some hamburgers.

At first Bobbie felt kindly toward Calvin and thought since it was a big night, she would let him neck with her. But after Calvin had a few tall cups of beer she changed her mind. He stopped jitterbugging with her, dancing only the slow dances, holding her very close; then, a dance ended, he would join the boys at the keg. He didn't exactly leave her on the dance floor; she could follow him to the keg if she wanted to, and she did that a couple of times, then stopped. Once she watched him talking to the boys and she knew exactly what was going on: he had brought her because he couldn't get another date (she had already known that, absorbed it, spent a long time preparing her face and hair anyway), but now he was saving face by telling people he had brought her because he wanted to get laid.

Then other things happened. She was busy dancing, so she didn't notice for a while that she hadn't really had a conversation with anyone. She realized this when she left Calvin at the beer keg and joined the line outside at the barbecue pit, where Mr. Miller was serving hamburgers. She was last in line. She told Mr. Miller it was a wonderful party, then she went to the table beside the barbecue pit and made her hamburger. When she turned to go back to the kitchen, no one was waiting: two couples were just going in the door, and Bobbie was alone with Mr. Miller. She hesitated, telling herself that it meant nothing, that no one waited for people at barbecue pits. Still, if she went in alone, who would she sit with? She sat on the grass by the barbecue pit and talked to Mr. Miller. He ate a hamburger with her and gave her bourbon and water from the one-man bar he had set up to get him through the cooking. He was a stout, pleasant man, and he told her she was the best-looking girl at the party.

As soon as she entered the kitchen she knew people had been waiting for her. The music and talk were loud, but she also felt the silence of waiting; looking around, she caught a few girls watching her. Then, at her side, Rhonda said: ‘Where you been, Bobbie?'

She glanced down at Rhonda, who sat with her boy friend, a class ring dangling from a chain around her neck, one possessive hand on Charlie Wright's knee. She doubted that Rhonda was a virgin but she had heard very little gossip because she had no girl friends. Now she went to the keg, pushed through the boys, and filled a cup.

Some time later, when the second keg had been tapped and both she and Calvin were drunk, he took her outside. She knew by now that everyone at the party was waiting to see if Calvin would make out. She went with him as far as the woods, kissed him standing up, worked her tongue in his mouth until he trembled and gasped; when he touched her breast she spun away and went back to the kitchen, jerking out of his grasp each time he clutched her arm. He was cursing her but she wasn't afraid. If he got rough, they were close enough to the kitchen so she could shout for Mr. Miller. Then Calvin was quiet anyway, realizing that if anyone heard they would know what had happened. When they stepped into the kitchen people were grinning at them. Bobbie went to the beer keg and Calvin danced with the first girl he saw.

When Charlie Wright got drunk he came over and danced with her. They swayed to ‘Blue Velvet,' moved toward the door, and stumbled outside. They lay on the ground just inside the woods; because of the beer he took a long time and Bobbie thought of Rhonda waiting, faking a smile, dancing, waiting… Charlie told her she did it better than Rhonda. When they returned to the kitchen, Rhonda's face was pale; she did not dance with Charlie for the rest of the night.

At breakfast, near dawn, she sat on the bar and ate bacon and eggs with Mr. Miller, hoping Rhonda would worry about that too. Calvin tried to leave without her, but she had taken his car key, so he had to drive her home. It was just after sunrise, he was drunk, and he almost missed two curves.

‘Hell, Calvin,' she said, ‘just 'cause you can't make out doesn't mean you got to kill us.'

He swung at her, the back of his open hand striking her cheekbone, and all the way home she cried. Next day there was not even a bruise.

The lawnmower woke her that afternoon. She listened to it, knowing she had been hearing it for some time, had been fighting it in her sleep. Then she got up, took two aspirins which nearly gagged her, and made coffee and drank it in the kitchen, wanting a cigarette but still unable to tell her parents that she smoked. So she went outside and helped her father rake the grass. The day was hot; bent over the rake she sweated and fought with her stomach and shut her eyes to the pain pulsing in her head and she wished she had at least douched with a Coke, something she had heard about but had never done. Then she wished she had a Coke right now, with ice, and some more aspirin and a cool place in the house to sit very still. She did not want to marry Charlie Wright. Then she had to smile at herself, looking down at the grass piling under her rake. Charlie would not marry her. By this time everyone in school knew she had done it with him last night, and they probably thought she had done it with Calvin too. If she were pregnant, it would be a joke.

That night she told her parents she wanted to finish college as soon as possible so she could earn her own money. They agreed to send her to summer school at L.S.U., and two weeks later they drove her to Baton Rouge. During those two weeks she had seen no one; Charlie had called twice for dates, but she had politely turned him down, with excuses; she had menstruated, felt the missed life flowing as a new life for herself. Then she went away. Sitting in the back of the car, driving out of Port Arthur, she felt incomplete: she had not told anyone she was going to summer school, had not told anyone goodbye.

She went home after the summer term, then again at Thanksgiving, each time feeling more disengaged from her house and the town. When she went home for Christmas vacation, her father met her at the bus station. It was early evening. She saw him as the bus turned in: wiry, a little slumped, wearing the hat that wasn't a Stetson but looked like one. He spoke of the Christmas lights being ready and she tried to sound pleased. She even tried to feel pleased. She thought of him going to all that trouble every Christmas and maybe part of it was for her; maybe it had all started for her delight, long ago when she was a child. But when they reached the house she was again appalled by the lights strung on its front and the lighted manger her father had built years before and every Christmas placed on the lawn: a Nativity absurdly without animals or shepherds or wise men or even parents for the Child Jesus (a doll: Bobbie's) who lay utterly alone, wrapped in blankets on the straw floor of the manger. Holding her father's arm she went into the kitchen and hugged her mother, whose plumpness seemed emblematic of a woman who was kind and good and clean. Bobbie marvelled at the decorated house, then sat down to supper and talk of food and family news. After supper she told them, with even more nervousness than she had anticipated, that she had started smoking and she hoped they didn't mind. They both frowned, then her mother sighed and said:

‘Well, I guess you're a big girl now.'

She was. For at L.S.U. she had learned this: you could become a virgin again. She finally understood that it was a man's word. They didn't mean you had done it once; they meant you did it, the lost hymen testimony not of the past but the present, and you carried with you a flavor of accessibility. She thought how much she would have been spared if she had known it at fifteen when she had felt changed forever, having focused on the word
loss
as though an arm or leg had been amputated, so she had given herself again, trying to be happy with her new self, rather than backing up and starting over, which would have been so easy because Willie Sorrells—her first lover—was not what you would call irresistible. Especially in retrospect.

But at L.S.U. she was a virgin; she had dated often in summer and fall, and no one had touched her. Not even Frank Mixon, whom she planned to marry, though he hadn't asked her yet. He was an economics major at Tulane, and a football player. He was also a senior. In June he was going into the Navy as an ensign and this was one of her reasons for wanting to marry him. And she had him fooled.

One night, though, she had scared herself. It was after the Tulane-L.S.U. game, the traditional game which Tulane traditionally lost. It was played in Baton Rouge. After the game Bobbie and Frank double-dated with the quarterback, Roy Lockhart, and his fiancée, Annie Broussard. Some time during the evening of bar-hopping, when they were all high, Roy identified a girl on the dance floor by calling her Jack Shelton's roommate of last year.