Seventh Heaven (17 page)

“All right, stupido,” Danny said to Rickie. “But you're making a big mistake. Ace is definitely not for you. You're the cashmere type, so you might as well face up to it.”

Rickie let the water run in the sink; she looked over at her brother. “I thought he was your best friend.”

“Was,” Danny said softly. “That's the operative word.”

In his clean white shirt and blue jeans Danny looked the same as he had when he was ten years old. He never had to be told to take the garbage out on trash nights. You could trust him with your life, but you couldn't talk to him; you had the feeling that if you even tried he'd dart away from you, he'd disappear under layers of glass. Rickie put her head under the water and lathered up some shampoo. She didn't ask her brother what had happened between him and Ace because she didn't want him to question her.

Danny was used to being smart, but he didn't know everything. He didn't know, for instance, that on New Year's Eve Rickie and Ace planned to do a lot more than kiss, or that Rickie had been the one to suggest, once again, that she leave her bedroom window unlocked. He might know biology and he might know calculus, but he certainly didn't know that Rickie had already planned to be wearing pink satin baby doll pajamas that would drive Ace crazy when he finally came in through her unlocked window. He had no idea that, sitting there on the bathroom counter, he looked so lonely you had to wonder how he could stand it. You had to wonder if loneliness like his was catching and if, in spite of everything you were feeling, you'd better just steer clear.

T
HEY WERE HAVING A PARTY OVER AT THE
W
INEMANS'
just the way they'd planned, in spite of Donna's disappearance. They decided they had to, and not just because Marie McCarthy had already baked two banana cream pies and Ellen Hennessy had fixed a cheesecake and Lynne Wineman had learned how to make sloe gin fizzes. They went on with it because it was the last night of the decade and it would never be the first minute of 1960 again. They did it because they needed to put on earrings and high heels. They needed to see that their husbands still looked handsome when they put on their suits and ties, that their arms still felt strong when they danced to the slow songs down in the Winemans' finished basement.

Nora Silk was trying her best to have a party of her own. She was wearing a black cocktail dress and she'd made pigs in blankets and cheddar cheese balls, which she set out on a silver tray. She fixed a highball for herself and a Shirley Temple for Billy, but after eleven she couldn't get him to stay awake and watch Guy Lombardo with her on their new TV. He fell asleep on the couch, clutching his blanket, while Nora went into the kitchen to freshen up her drink.

It was a cold, starry night. It was the kind of night when, if you left your two sons sleeping and went to stand on the front stoop, you could hear the music from a house halfway down the block. Nora had taken her highball out with her, and she took little sips as she watched the stars. Ten years earlier, when it was almost 1950, she'd gone dancing with Roger, and later in the night he'd gotten so drunk he'd thrown up on Eighth Avenue. She had been completely in love with him. She'd taken him back to their apartment and put a damp washcloth on his forehead and fixed him coffee that was so strong it made him gasp. Then they'd gotten into bed, just a mattress made up on the floor, and made love until it was light. So maybe he was a better magician than Nora had ever admitted, because for years he'd made it seem as if what they had was enough. Washing diapers in the kitchen sink, walking up four flights of stairs with her groceries—it was enough when he kissed her, when he brought home the gold charm bracelet, when he put on his tuxedo and combed his hair back with water. If they had never had children, they might be together still, in Las Vegas, where the light was thin and purple and New Year's Eve was a drunk and sweaty night, celebrated as it should be.

It caused Nora great pain to hear the music from the Winemans', physical pain, as if she'd drunk sour milk that was turning her stomach. Who were these people who danced in the dark, whose children taunted Billy and threw rocks? Good people, she had to believe that, people who tucked their children in at night, who packed school lunches with tender care, who made the same sacrifices she did, maybe even more, so that their children could play in the grass and sleep tight and walk to school holding hands, safe on the sidewalk, safe in the streets, safe the whole night through. And it was not their fault, or anyone else's, that tonight Nora felt as if she were the only person on the planet who was all alone.

But two houses down, at a quarter to midnight, Rickie Shapiro would have given anything to be alone. She had just decided that she had made a terrible mistake, and, if she wasn't careful, she might never recover. Something as simple as this could ruin her whole life. She had never let anyone touch her before, and he had somehow gotten his hand under the elastic waistband of her pajamas and was moving his fingers in and out of her. Her lips were swollen from all their kisses, and her skin was hot and flushed. There were marks on her breasts, as if his touch had burned her. If she wasn't careful, he would reach up and pull off her pajama bottoms and then it would be too late. But nobody could make her do this if she didn't want to. He looked like a complete stranger, like somebody on fire and far away. And what would she get from him, what did he really have to offer her? Nothing. Her mother's heart would break, and her father would weep and tear out his hair, and her brother would tell her, You're so stupid, I told you not to. She had twelve sweaters folded in her bottom bureau drawer; she had college to think about after her senior year; she had boys dying to go steady with her, boys who were in the chemistry club and on the football team both, who'd be too shy to put their tongues in her mouth when they kissed her.

She'd have these marks on her breasts for days. She knew that. She would open her blouse and unhook her bra and run her fingers over the marks, and her eyes would fill with tears. Girls like her didn't do this, and that was why Rickie Shapiro was changing her mind. Because if she didn't stop him now, she never would.

“Wait a second,” Ace said, when she pushed him away. “This was your idea.”

Her parents were out at their favorite restaurant, a French place in Freeport, and Danny had left the rest of the math club at the bowling alley and was down at the creek behind the high school smoking marijuana and listening to his transistor radio. She would never get caught, but she just might get trapped.

“I can't do this,” she said.

She had let him in her window nearly an hour ago. She made him leave his dog outside, in the yard, and every once in a while they'd hear a faint yelp, but they had gone on kissing, they had gone crazy. Now the sound of the dog got through to Rickie and made her panic. She thought about Cathy Corrigan and the other girls like her, the ones who used too much hairspray, and put on eyeliner so thickly they looked beaten up, who sometimes disappeared weeks before graduation, mysteriously removed to an aunt and uncle's in upstate New York, to return the next fall subdued and sullen and treated like poison.

Rickie wrenched away from Ace. She was shaking when she stood up.

“All right,” Ace said. He had his shirt off, and now he reached up and put it on and began to button it. “Don't get upset.”

Rickie was breathing too fast. It seemed to Ace that she just might hit him if he moved too quickly.

“I made a mistake,” Rickie said. She went to her closet for her bathrobe and put it on. “I could never be with you.” She reached toward her bureau and grabbed her brush, the expensive kind, made in France, with a real tortoiseshell handle. She brushed her hair with hard, even strokes. “You can't even write your own term papers.”

Rickie put the brush down; she felt like crying. Ace looked up at her blankly. “You don't even know when you've been insulted,” Rickie said.

Ace stood up and tucked his shirttails in and grabbed his jacket off the wicker chair.

“You can't tell anybody about this,” Rickie said. “You wouldn't do that to me.”

Ace went to the window and opened it. He stepped on the wicker chair to hoist himself up.

“Look, I'm sorry,” Rickie said. “I didn't want to hurt you.”

“What makes you think you did?” Ace said.

At the very least he wouldn't give her that. He wouldn't turn to glass and let her see into his soul. He went through the window and dropped to the ground. In the dark, the dog was waiting; he rose to his feet and shook himself, then stood close to Ace, leaning against his legs.

“Good boy,” Ace whispered.

He was so empty that he didn't question Rickie's change of heart. He'd never believed he deserved very much, and now he could see he would get even less than he'd imagined. The air was sharp and clear; it hurt to breathe. He went through the Shapiros' yard, the dog at his heels. He could have cried, if he'd had anything left inside him. He stopped in the Shapiros' driveway and took out a cigarette, but before he lit it he held his hand over the match, and when the flame touched his skin, he didn't feel a thing.

He had nowhere to go, and maybe he never had. But he started walking anyway; if he didn't move he'd turn to stone. It was getting cold fast, dropping one degree every second. As Ace passed the Winemans' he could hear music from inside. The sound was muffled because a dense white fog had begun to rise from the lawns. He kept walking, even though he was afraid, and the hair on his arms rose up, as if he'd been charged with internal static electricity. But it was the air that was electric. The crab apples and the poplars crackled and their branches turned blue. The sidewalk was the color of bones, the stars formed a constellation no one had ever seen before, like the spine of a dinosaur arching above the rooftops, brilliant and terrifying. And it was no use to walk any farther, because at the far end of Hemlock Street Cathy Corrigan's ghost had appeared on her father's front lawn.

She stood between the azaleas and the ivy and her feet were bare. He knew it was Cathy because she was wearing white, because her earrings were bitter globes and there were rings on all her fingers. He knew it because no other ghost could fill him with such despair or make him bleed from a wound that wasn't even there. What was the blue light that surrounded her, like a moon of the wrong color or a thumbprint of sorrow? The dog had stopped beside Ace on the sidewalk. He didn't bark or growl, but he cocked his head, then took a few steps forward, as if he'd been called. Ace reached out and grabbed the dog's collar.

“Stay,” Ace whispered.

The dog didn't pull, but he made a soft whining sound. Cathy Corrigan's ghost was disappearing as they watched, molecule by molecule, as if it were made up of fireflies. Soon there was a blanket of light over the lawn, and the light went deeper and deeper, through the ice and into the grass, and finally between the blades of grass and into the earth.

Ace McCarthy lowered his head and wept; not knowing if he'd been blessed or cursed, he was completely lost. Now more than ever, there was no place for him to go, but he couldn't stay where he was. He took off as fast as he could. The dog ran beside him, along the sidewalk and across the lawns, but the air was so white they might have been running through stars. They ran with all their might, side by side, every breath tearing at their ribs. They weren't about to stop, and they might have gone on running this way forever, headlong into the oncoming traffic on the Southern State, if Ace hadn't found himself in Nora Silk's arms, where he cried for as long as he needed, before she took him home.

1960

6

THE SIGN OF THE WOLF

T
HE AIR WAS WHITE AND FULL
of whispers, clairvoyant air, as if there were ghosts on the chimney tops and under the beds and in your own freezer, between the ice cube trays and the Eskimo Pies. As soon as twilight fell, a trellis of ghosts would appear in the white air and the children would stop throwing snowballs and race inside their houses. Late at night there would be the sound of something tapping at your window and not even the TV or the radio could get rid of the voices telling you things you shouldn't know. People began to long for color, for a line of crimson over the parkway at sunset, or a blue sky; but day after day there was nothing but snow and fog, and in the stillness you could find yourself overcome with desire, a desire that made everything ache, fingers and elbows and toes.

On Hemlock Street desire did not come alone but was twisted around a core of dissatisfaction. You might find it when you slipped your hand into a rubber glove to scour the kitchen sink, or in the wedges of pear sliced onto a plate for a baby's lunch. It was in the bottom of lunch pails brought to work, in the sleeves of black leather jackets thrown on after the last bell rang at the high school. And in the morning, when the fog was at its thickest, people stared at each other from their driveways and wondered what they were doing on this street, and the ghosts whispered in their ears, egging them on, and things began to happen for no reason at all. Things no one had imagined or ever expected and certainly had never wanted. Some of the men on the block forgot to pay the bills on time, and you'd know it when the lights in the house next door began to flicker. There were evenings when the women didn't even bother to cook but slipped TV dinners into their ovens and let their children eat right in front of the set. On Friday nights it was almost impossible to get a baby-sitter because most of the teenage girls had decided they had better things to do. They had given up wearing panty girdles and stockings and a few of the wilder ones had stopped wearing underwear and you could see their flesh through their blue jeans and their pleated skirts. Looking at them, the boys went crazy all at once and turned up their transistor radios so loud you'd have thought they'd go deaf, and they got so hot the air around them sizzled and they smelled like fire even when they stepped out of the shower, clean and soaking wet.