That Night (11 page)

(And here our school officials should be commended for their foresight. What might have happened to my own classmates had they included their names and addresses when they wrapped their two cans of hairspray and card of bobby pins in Christmas paper? What requests might they have received from the Wayside girls in return: Go into your parents’ room while they are sleeping. Remove the following from your father’s handkerchief drawer ...)

Two of the children said, almost immediately, “I’ll be right back.” The others said, “We’ll bring you some tomorrow.” And magazines, the girls said, good magazines like Modern Romance, 16, True. Could they ever get them magazines? The children conferred. One climbed the ladder to say her sister read 16 and Teen Screen. She was forced down by the breathless return of the others, who carried packs of Camels and Pall Malls.

And makeup, the unwed mothers asked. Could they maybe bring them some makeup? But suddenly one of them said, “Beat it,” and the teenagers scrambled. The children crouched at the foot of the fence, mouthing to each other, “Someone’s coming.”

When they climbed the ladder again, after night had fallen, they saw only the yellow lights of the distant dormitory windows and the bloated shadows of the girls who passed behind them.

The next morning, deprived of their ladder by an irate mother, the children heaved three issues of Teen Screen over the fence and were startled to hear the voice of some woman—a teacher or warden or nurse—warn them that she would call the police if they tried that again.

I could draw on my own experience to imagine how Sheryl felt in the months before that night, draw detail and scene from what I remember of my own brief pregnancy and from all the awkward and untimely pregnancies of my friends, but I fear something would be lost. Unwed mothers at that time, at the time Sheryl joined their ranks, were a specific group; they fell somewhere between criminals and patients and, like criminals and patients, they were prescribed an exact and fortifying treatment: They were made to disappear.

So I would have to add to my own memories of my own troublesome pregnancy not merely some sense of shame and a bit more drama but also a different kind of fear: when her period didn’t come (this would have been late spring, not very long after she had stopped to talk to me), when she found herself dizzy with nausea every morning, unable to eat her cereal (she would get up before her mother and grandmother, pour a bit of milk and a few crumbs of corn flakes into a bowl and leave it unwashed in the kitchen sink), when she had to keep herself from imagining the taste and the smell of the eggs, the frozen green beans, the jars of peanut butter she rang up on her register and packed into brown paper bags.

I would have to add to my own experience a kind of fear that another fifteen years would make obsolete: the fear of a criminal with the police at the windows and doors, of a patient trapped in some unrelenting illness.

If she was pregnant, an unwed mother, she would have to be sent away. In all her theories of love and dying and keeping one another alive, in all her certainty, she could not have anticipated this simple, insurmountable problem: if she was pregnant, she might never see him again.

Another month passed. Another period failed to begin. Her breasts felt tender, her stomach was no longer quite so taut between the protruding bones of her hips. Leaning with him against his car, listening to them all talk and laugh, watching some of the boys and some of the girls who had not yet become lovers move toward one another, she might have wanted to beg for silence. Please, just everyone be quiet. Her cigarettes were beginning to make her feel sick. She would have to pretend to sip from her can of beer, though the smell alone was enough to send her reeling. Rick, beside her, his arm heavy on her shoulders, would at moments seem a stranger, as the healthy always seem strange and uncaring to those who are ill. She would have to slip her fingers through his belt loop, pull him closer to her, rest her nose and her lips on the arm of his cool leather jacket. Closing her eyes against the dim parking-lot lights and the childish sound of their voices, she would have to breathe him in, the odor of the leather, of his aftershave and, indistinguishable from it, her own perfume, of the summer night, sun-warmed parking lot and litter.

Later, she held the bag of Coke and rum as he climbed the jingling chain-link fence. She followed him, lowering the bag over the top, pausing at the top herself to remember how her hands, even her legs, had shaken the first time she had made this awkward turn, from the outside of the fence to the inside. Making it easily now, her fingers knowing just how lightly to grip the thin wire, her toes finding just the right spaces even in the dark. Rick touched her legs as soon as he could reach them. Took hold of her hips with both hands.

At some point she must have considered telling him. She must have imagined their conversation. They would be lying together on their hill or sitting side by side like children, their knees raised, the bottles of Coke in their hands.

“Rick, what if I got pregnant?”

“You won’t. We’re careful.”

“But what if?”

A shrug, but his eyes would be far away. “We’d get married.”

“How?”

“What do you mean, how? I don’t know. You get a license.”

“And move in with my mother?”

Another shrug.

“Or your father?”

“You could get an abortion.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. I’d have to find out.” Laughing, “I could ask my old man to do it. You’re not going to get pregnant.”

She would have to whisper, “Not that it would matter. It wouldn’t matter anyway.” But still he would see she had been wrong; it wasn’t just them. There was also family and school, getting a job and getting older. There was all that long life that had become for her since the day her father died a sentence, a burden. There was all that long life, all those years until she would see him again, years of family and friends and school and getting a job and getting older-years that would be double and triple, four, even five, times the years she had already lived—and none of her promises, none of her assurances, could shorten them or lighten their load or, as she had wanted to do, obliterate them completely. They loved each other and they would continue to love each other, as they did on those dark nights when they seemed alone in the world, even after one of them died, but what until then? How would they get through all the years until then?

She stretched beside him on the damp ground, aware of the tenderness in her breasts, the weeks and days since her last period, a certain tightness at her waist. She began at the edge of the woods and worked outward: not this, not this, nothing else mattered.

When she went into her mother’s room that morning, she knew what she was setting in motion. Other girls in her school had suddenly disappeared. One, when Sheryl was a freshman, had been banned from the school, actually turned away from her homeroom, because her pregnancy had become too obvious to ignore. She knew what would happen, and only the speed of it all startled her.

While her mother rose and immediately went to the phone, Sheryl got up off her knees and sat carefully on the edge of the bed. The nausea made her weak, made her limbs feel thick and sodden. The sound of the children’s voices as they came through the open windows made her want to put her hands to her ears. Her mother spoke into the phone, and Sheryl, in her thin summer pajamas, in the warm blue room, trembled. Trembled once to think that the night before, when he’d said from the bottom of the steps, “I’ll meet you tomorrow after work,” and then turned and walked toward his car, was the last time in her life she would ever see him. Trembled to remember the morning she had come downstairs into the kitchen where her father was taking a final gulp of coffee before he kissed her mother and then parted her just-teased hair to say, “So long, sleepyhead.” The last time in her life she would ever see him.

I must add to my own memories of my own pregnancy-for mine was fifteen years later and far too early in my marriage to be allowed to come to term—her strange assurance: It would not be forever. It wasn’t possible that people who loved each other could be apart forever.

In the days that followed the fight, while our fathers moved together to share their wounds and rehearse their triumph, while we children stepped back from the sidewalks and the streets to make way for them—suspending our present, you might say, while they recalled some part of their past—our mothers watched Sheryl’s house as if they knew something. Passing behind their own windows, their own summer screens, they paused, bent a little, glanced out. Each morning they took their coffee to the living room and drank it standing in the shaft of white sunlight that came through their front door. At night they kept vigil in unlit rooms. We would discover them quite by accident when we flipped a light switch: they would be flattened against the wall beside a drawn shade or crouched by a window, one finger still caught in the slat of a blind. Coming upon them, we would jump more than necessary, yell, “Ah!” or “Yikes!” the way startled people did on television. Our mothers would hiss, “Turn it off,” as if they feared someone else might hear.

Joining them in the darkness, we too would peer into the street, the white pools of lamplight and the pale gray stripes of sidewalk and driveway, the yellow glow of our neighbors’ windows. Under the moon and the stars, there were identical rooftops and chimneys and TV antennas, no minarets or onion domes, and the trees that caught and muffled the lamplight were ordinary oak and maple. A car would pass by in its familiar hushing sound and stop as it should at the stop sign (the headlights, for one moment, making the sign flash black and silver) and then carefully go on. We would lean against our mothers, hear their breaths, smell the summer dust on the windows and the blinds. Even from our second-story vantage point there was nothing exotic or unusual about the scene. Except the night. And in those days that followed the fight, the night brought to our street as well what it more famously brings to foreign cities and forests of pine. Between the soft lamplight and room light there were dark places (we now knew) where lovers threw back their heads and either grinned at the stars or howled with longing. There was the black flash of uncertainty, the wet eyed smile of stealthy chance. The sound, behind the ordinary sound of a cough or a car or of dishes tumbling in a sink full of water, of something receding, the low roll and tumble of something we had not yet even imagined as it approached.

We felt our mothers draw their breath as another car went by. We felt them slowly ease again into a kind of waiting. Standing beside them, we would stare down into the street in dull amazement, wondering at our fathers, who passed below, even lingered.

Early one evening during these days that followed the fight, Mrs. Carpenter came up from the basement where she and her family lived to glance once more toward Sheryl’s house. Her husband was in the driveway polishing his car, and she waved to him but he had already turned his attention to someone (my father) across the street. She was then free to look steadily over her own driveway, and the Rossi’s, toward Sheryl’s house. That afternoon she had seen, as we children had seen, as all our mothers had seen from behind their windows and doors (a laundry basket on the chair beside them or one hand held under a dripping spoon), an unmarked police car pull into Sheryl’s driveway and a weary plainclothes policeman climb her steps. She had seen,” as all our mothers had seen, Sheryl’s mother come to the door and let him in, and although she had to hurry back down to the basement where the Carpenters more or less lived to turn off the running water, she was again at her window when the door opened and closed and the car pulled out of the drive. Her phone had rung then, phones all up and down the street had begun ringing, but no one could say what it meant. Mrs. Carpenter learned only that Sheryl’s mother wore a bandage on her wrist—she hadn’t seen it herself—and that she didn’t look all that bad, considering. It was hardly enough.

She left her side door and climbed the two steps into her upstairs kitchen. It was yellow and white, spotless because it was, for the most part, unused. The Carpenters, Mr. and Mrs.” Billy, Wayne and Little Alice, spent most of their waking hours in their basement, and it probably says more about us than them that this never really struck anyone as queer or unusual. It was a nice basement, after all, with wall-to-wall carpeting and pine paneling and a television built right into the wall. There was even a kitchenette, a dining table, a bath with a stall shower. There were curtains on the tiny windows and crushed-velvet throw pillows on the sofa and the chairs, and these had been bought specifically for the basement, not merely demoted there after long and faithful service in the living room. There was the requisite bar with padded swirling stools and a ceramic drunk holding onto a lamppost, even a small workshop behind the finished part where Mr. Carpenter could pound nails and the boys could shoot their pellet guns. It was, by neighborhood consensus, the finished basement of all finished basements, and if a bomb wiped away all our homes, the Carpenters, it was agreed, would hardly notice the loss. This, however, was not what they were practicing for.

The Carpenters lived in their basement because the rest of their house was too beautiful to bear. At least this is what the women who had seen it (none of us children ever got beyond a glance into the upstairs kitchen) reported on their return. The first time Mrs. Carpenter gave her the full, shoeless tour, my mother came home holding her heart and saying there was nothing else like it in the world. The shine on the dining room table was blinding. The living room was all white and gold. The carpet, she said, felt like fur laid over clouds. There were flowers pressed in glass all up and down the staircase. The children’s two bedrooms were papered and paneled and full of shining brass fixtures, like something you’d see on a yacht. The master bedroom was a sultan’s palace, deep green and pink and silver with drapes hanging where there weren’t even windows. Not a thing out of place, not a thing that didn’t match. A gold swan spouting water in the bathroom sink, its wings Hot and Cold.