The Evening News (11 page)

This occurred in 1957, in September, when Bobbi was four years old.

There was barely time to hesitate—it was happening too quickly—there was barely time in which to think, but Bobbi realized that she was falling. She broke her fall with her left arm. Then she was on the rug, beneath the dark table, trying to make her escape. Around her was the thick clutter of chair and table legs. Tom was holding her, his arms circling her bare thighs. She tried to kick loose. She was afraid, yet curiously aware that in this time when she should have been terrified she was still thinking coolly, rationally; and as the hands pulled her back she felt strangely proud. She was still in control of the situation. She wasn't crying. She wasn't hysterical. She was still able to function and to think. With these abilities she could handle this boy and his suddenly rude hands, this Tom, her Tom, quiet Tom, Catholic Tom, stupid clean-cut Tom. He would stop if she wanted him to, she thought. He wasn't as
bad as the city animals she went to school with. Why, all she would have to do would be to say
stop.

So this was a game like all the other games, all the at-the-movies games and in-the-front-hallway games and oh-just-let-me-touch-you-for-a-moment tricks and twists. Bobbi thought about the ways she could get boys to notice her at a dance, the ways the boys fumbled in their pockets for a match to light her cigarette, the way they cleared their throats before they tried to speak, the way they pressed against her, trying always trying to get a little further, a little closer, somewhere they had never gotten to before, when all she had to do was to change the way she smiled, to push a hand against a shoulder, to yawn into an eager pimpled face. Oh how they stopped. Cold. Flat. Bobbi knew boys, how they stopped: deflated, tumbled, put down, down, down. Oh, how the boys would tumble. Boys were such silly prissy pampered things, and just as long as she stayed away from the gutter types she could control them, tease them, wind them clear around her little finger, and they loved it. They always came back to her for more because they truly loved it.

How she hated them. Boys were so weak and easy, and finally so boring; how easy it was to predict what they would do. Tom straddled her, kissing her neck. How she truly hated him. She said, “Tom, stop.”

He grunted, pawing the front of her dress.

“Tom,” she said, “Tom, please stop and get off of me.”

Again he grunted.

She pushed against his shoulders with her hands. He slapped her arms away easily. When she pushed against him again he grabbed her wrists and pinned her hands over her head against the rug, and she realized how much stronger he was. She considered whether or not she should fight him. She stared up at the light over the table. A spider web floated between two of the bulbs. If she struggled, she thought, he
would have to stop. Wouldn't he? Wouldn't he stop if she struggled?

Then all at once she started to cry, thinking not so much that he was hurting her or that she was so afraid, but simply that it had now come to this, this abject humiliation, this pushing and grunting, and now she would lose both him and something she had always felt was an important part of her.

Behind that, there emerged something deeper, a scary feeling. The girl felt for the first time that she understood something about her father, and she pictured the old tradesman. She imagined him walking wearily from door to door to door, and as she felt the sharp sudden pain of Tom's weight pressing against and into her she pictured her father wildly waving his arms down in the dark bowels of the Washington Street station, and she thought this was how he must have felt when he killed himself. The boy's body above her heaved and jerked. She felt his breath against her face. This was how he felt, why he did it. She relaxed then, holding in her cries. Even though her eyes were shut tightly, the tears continued to run from them. The tears were hot and searing as they streamed down her cheeks into her ears and hair, and then the boy's body finally came to rest, heavily and silently, upon her.

In the bathtub the girl began to wash herself. At least it was over, she thought. He was gone. He couldn't have left more quickly if he'd tried. Lying on the rug, her eyes still closed, she'd heard him zip his pants and then open and close the front door. He'd said nothing. What do you say? There was nothing he could say. Not even
sorry.
She thought bitterly that he could save his apology for his Catholic confession, and she smiled, imagining him kneeling and beating his chest in some dark church. The bastard. It was ludicrous.

For a moment she pretended she was washing herself with holy water. She prayed the water running into the tub would make a miracle. “Holy water, holy, holy water.” Turn me back into a virgin, lift the stain from the dining-room rug, lift the pain, the memory.

Bobbi felt broken. Her insides ached. Then she began to shake her head, thinking that now she was the one who was ludicrous, talking to ordinary bathtub water in a dark bathroom on an afternoon when she should be doing her chores around the house. She had the morning dishes to wash, the kitchen floor to scrub. She could take care of the stain by spilling a cup of coffee or cola on the rug. She would tell her mother and her stepfather that it had been an accident. It would be all right. Sure. She was all right. It wasn't an expensive rug.

She shut off the faucet, sighed, then stood and reached for the light switch above the sink. The fluorescent bulb made a tinkling sound, and then the radio hidden inside the medicine cabinet blared: too loud and too tinny, violins and singing, a man's sudden voice. Her stepfather's latest doing: he must have wired the radio to the light switch. Bobbi shut both off, and as she did she was startled and terrified, realizing she might have electrocuted herself standing in the water in the tub.

The warm water embraced her as she sat. They had never found out exactly what it was that killed her father. If he touched the subway's third rail before being run over by the train, he would have been killed by that. The third rail was electric. Once she had seen a gang of young boys on the Armitage Avenue EI platform trying to hit the third rail with their spit, and they had yelled out across the tracks for her to watch them, saying that their spit would sizzle. It made her cry, and after that she always took buses. At the hospital one of the city workers told her mother that if Constantine had brushed the third rail his death would have been immediate, painless. The worker had meant to be comforting. The train had severed one of her father's legs and crushed his head.

Did it matter? she wondered as she washed.

She would have lost her virginity anyway. It was bound to happen, sooner or later. The pain inside her would still hurt if it had been someone trying to be tender, someone she loved. Her father still would have died. Maybe he would have crossed Washington Street and had a heart attack. Or been shot while being robbed. There was crime everywhere, even in the halls of her school. She could have been attacked behind the school or in an alley or in a gangway. She could have been knifed and killed. Her father could have eaten poisonous food or been killed in a brawl in a tavern. He could have contracted some ugly, hideous disease—

No, she thought. She held her body perfectly still. Nothing moved. There was no sound. No, what happened mattered. She'd made a mistake, trying to trade herself. And now there was no one to fix her.

She looked down at her legs. She pretended they were broken. She imagined her entire body was paralyzed, because she'd touched the subway's third rail. And now was the moment when her great efforts would allow her to move. She tried to wriggle her toes in the water. Yes! She was doing it! She was cured! She slowly rotated her right foot, then her left foot. She bent her knees. Moved her head, her hands. A complete recovery.

Bobbi looked at the sink, the toilet, the gray walls. She was aware that she was acting silly, and she tried to laugh out loud at herself—she was kicking her feet now and flexing her arms and splashing sheets of water out of the tub—but instead of laughter a bitter cry came from deep inside her. Bile rose in her throat. The girl's cry echoed terribly in the small, darkened bathroom.

Sometimes when I'm hauling I drive right past her house. The Central Avenue exit from the Kennedy Expressway, and then north maybe two, three miles. The front is red brick and the awnings are striped, like most of the other houses on Central Avenue. Her name was Suzy and she was the kind of girl who liked cheese and sauerkraut on her hot dogs. She was regular. She went in for plain skirts, browns and navy blues, wraparounds, and those button-down blouses with the tiny pinstripes all the girls wore back then. She must be as old as I am now, and the only girl ever to wear my ring. She was special. Suzy was my only girl.

I met her at a party at a friend's house. A Saturday night, and I was on the team, only I had pulled my back a couple of days before—too serious to risk playing, they said, sorry, we think you're out for the season. I'd been doing isometrics. And though they gave me the chance to dress and sit with the team, I said the hell with it, this season's finished, get somebody else to benchwarm with the sophomores.

Which was O.K., because the night I met Suzy the team was playing out in Oak Park, and had I gone I'd have met my father afterwards for some pizza, like we usually did after a game, but instead I went over to Ronny's. The two of us hung around the back of his garage, talking, splitting a couple of
six-packs, with him soaking out a carburetor and me trying to figure if what I had done with the team was right. Ronny told me stuff it, you can't play you can't play. There are things nobody can control, he said. You just got to learn to roll with the punches. He was maybe my best friend back then and I was feeling lousy, here it was not even October and only the second game. Let's get drunk, Ronny said, laughing, so I said stuff it too, there's a party out in Des Plaines tonight. So we got in his car and drove there. Then some of the game crowd got there, all noisy and excited, and I met Suzy.

It went real smooth and I should have known then, like when you're beating your man easy on the first couple of plays you should know if you've got any sense that he's gonna try something on you on the third. I started talking to her, thinking that since I was a little drunk I had an excuse if she shut me down—maybe I even wanted to be shut down, I don't know, I was still feeling lousy—but she talked back and we danced some. Slow dances, on account of my back. And when I told her my name she said you're on the team, I saw you play last week. I said yeah, I was. She seemed impressed by that. But she didn't remember that it was me who intercepted that screen pass in the third quarter, and damn I nearly scored. She smiled, and I held her.

Things went real fine then. We danced a lot, and later Ronny flipped me his keys, and me and Suzy went out for a ride. Mostly we talked, her about that night's game, and me about why I'd decided not to suit up, which, I told her, was really the best thing for me. There's something stupid about dressing and not playing. If they win, sure it's your victory too, but what did you do to deserve it? And if they lose, you feel just as miserable.

I took her home then and told her I wanted to see her again, and all the talking made me sober up, and that started it.

I don't know if you've ever had duck's blood soup. It's a Polish dish, and honest to God it's made with real duck's
blood, sweet and thick, and raisins and currants and noodles. Her father, the father of three beautiful little girls, with Suzy the oldest, took all of us out to this restaurant on North McCormick Street and he ordered it for me. He said the name in Polish to the waiter, then looked at me and winked. He even bought me a beer, and I was only seventeen. The girls watched me as I salted it and kept asking me how it tasted. I didn't understand. I said it tasted sweet. Then Suzy's mother laughed out loud at me and told me what was in it. I think she wanted me to be surprised.

Suzy went out with me for her image. There was no other reason, it was as simple as that. Now there's no glory in dating a former defensive end. Suzy went out with me because the year before I had dated Laurie Foster, and Laurie Foster had a reputation at Saint Scholastica, where Suzy went to school. This is where everything gets crazy. Laurie somehow had a reputation, which I don't think she deserved, at least not when I was taking her out. We never did much really of anything, but because I had dated her I got a reputation too, and I never even knew about it. I guess there was some crazy kind of glory in dating and going steady with a guy who had a rep.

She said let me wear your ring, hey, just for tonight, and I said sure, Suzy. And she asked me if I liked her and I said of course, don't you like me? She laughed and said no, I'm just dating you for your looks. I was a little drunk that night and she said do you ever think about it, Mike, do you ever just sit down and think about it, and I said what, and she said going steady. I told her no. Then she asked me if I wanted to date other girls, and when I said no I didn't she said well, I think we should then, and finally I said it's all right with me, Suzy, if you think it's that important, and she said it is, Mike, it really is. She wore my ring on a chain around her neck until she got a size adjuster, then she wore my ring on her hand.

Pretty much of everything we did then was her idea, not that I didn't have some ideas of my own. But Suzy initiated pretty
much of everything for a while back then. Ronny was dating a girl who lived near Suzy out on Touhy Avenue, and I remember once when we were double-dating Suzy and I were in the back seat of the car fooling around and she said can't you unclasp it, and I said oh, sure. And that time we were studying at the table in her kitchen—her mother was down in the basement ironing and her father was still at work—and she says not here, Mike, but hey maybe in the front room.