11/22/63: A Novel (49 page)

“Is it bad for you, having to wear those . . . you know, those drugstore things?”

“It’s fine,” I said. It really wasn’t, and never had been. There would be improvements in a great many American products between 1961 and 2011, but take it from Jake, rubbers stay pretty much the same. They may have fancier names and even a taste-component (for those with peculiar tastes), but they remain essentially a girdle you snap on over your dick.

“I used to have a diaphragm,” she said. There was no picnic table, so she had spread a blanket on the grass. Now she picked up a Tupperware container with the remains of a cucumber-and-onion salad inside it and began snapping the lid open and closed, a form of fidgeting some people would have considered Freudian. Including me.

“My mother gave it to me a week before Johnny and I were married. She even told me how to put it in, although she
couldn’t look me in the eye, and if you’d flicked a drop of water on one of her cheeks, I’m sure it would’ve sizzled. ‘Don’t start a baby for the first eighteen months,’ she said. ‘Two years, if you can make him wait. That way you can live on his salary and save yours.’”

“Not the world’s worst advice.” I was being cautious. We were in a minefield. She knew it as well as I did.

“Johnny’s a science teacher. He’s tall, although not quite as tall as you are. I was tired of going places with men who were shorter than me, and I think that’s why I said yes when he first asked me out. Eventually, going out with him got to be a habit. I thought he was nice, and at the end of the night he never seemed to grow an extra pair of hands. At the time, I thought those things were love. I was very naïve, wasn’t I?”

I made a seesaw gesture with my hand.

“We met at Georgia Southern and then got jobs at the same high school in Savannah. Coed, but private. I’m pretty sure his daddy pulled a wire or two to make that happen. The Claytons don’t have money—not anymore, although they did once—but they’re still high in Savannah society. Poor but genteel, you know?”

I didn’t—questions of who was in society and who wasn’t were never big issues when I was growing up—but I murmured an assent. She had been sitting on top of this for a long time, and looked almost hypnotized.

“So I had a diaphragm, yes I did. In its own little plastic lady-box with a rose on the cover. Only I never used it. Never had to. Finally threw it in the trash after one of those getting-it-outs. That’s what he called it, getting it out. ‘I have to get it out,’ he used to say. Then the broom. You see?”

I didn’t see at all.

Sadie laughed, and I was again reminded of Ivy Templeton. “Wait two years, she said! We could have waited
twenty,
and no diaphragm required!”

“What happened?” I gripped her upper arms lightly. “Did he beat you? Beat you with a broomhandle?” There was another way a broomhandle could be
used—I’d read
Last Exit to Brooklyn
—but apparently he hadn’t done that. She had been a virgin, all right; the proof was on the sheets.

“No,” she said. “The broom wasn’t for beating. George, I don’t think I can talk about this anymore. Not now. I feel . . . I don’t know . . . like a bottle of soda that’s been shaken up. Do you know what I want?”

I thought so, but did the polite thing and asked.

“I want you to take me inside, and then take the cap off.” She raised her hands over her head and stretched. She hadn’t bothered putting her bra back on, and I could see her breasts lift under her blouse. Her nipples made tiny shadows, like punctuation marks, against the cloth in the late light.

She said, “I don’t want to relive the past today. Today I only want to fizz.”

An hour later I saw she was drowsing. I kissed her first on the forehead and then on the nose to wake her up. “I have to go. If only to get my car out of your driveway before your neighbors start to call their friends.”

“I suppose so. It’s the Sanfords next door, and Lila Sanford is this month’s student librarian.”

And I was pretty sure that Lila’s father was on the schoolboard, but I didn’t say so. Sadie was glowing, and there was no need to spoil that. For all the Sanfords knew, we were sitting on the couch with our knees together, waiting for
Dennis the Menace
to finish and Ed Sullivan’s rilly big shew to come on. If my car was still in Sadie’s driveway at eleven, their perceptions might change.

She watched me dress. “What happens now, George? With us?”

“I want to be with you if you want to be with me. Is that what you want?”

She sat up, the sheet puddled around her waist, and reached for her cigarettes. “Very much. But I’m married, and that won’t change until next summer in Reno.
If I tried for an annulment, Johnny would fight me. Hell, his
parents
would fight me.”

“If we’re discreet, everything will be fine. But we have to be discreet. You know that, right?”

She laughed and lit up. “Oh yes. I know that.”

“Sadie, have you had discipline problems in the library?”

“Huh? Some, sure. The usual.” She shrugged; her breasts bobbed; I wished I hadn’t dressed quite so fast. On the other hand, who was I kidding? James Bond might’ve been up for a third go-round, but Jake/George was tapped out. “I’m the new girl in school. They’re testing me. It’s a pain in the keister, but nothing I didn’t expect. Why?”

“I think your problems are about to vanish. Students love it when teachers fall in love. Even the boys. It’s like a TV show to them.”

“Will they know that we’ve . . .”

I thought about it. “Some of the girls will. The ones with experience.”

She huffed out smoke. “Great.” But she didn’t look entirely displeased.

“How about dinner out at The Saddle in Round Hill? Get people used to seeing us as a couple.”

“All right. Tomorrow?”

“No, I have something to do in Dallas tomorrow.”

“Research for your book?”

“Uh-huh.” Here we were, brand-new, and I was lying already. I didn’t like it, but saw no way around it. As for the future . . . I refused to think about that now. I had my own glow to protect. “Tuesday?”

“Yes. And George?”

“What?”

“We have to find a way to keep doing this.”

I smiled. “Love will find a way.”

“I think this part is more lust.”

“It’s both, maybe.”

“You’re a sweet man, George Amberson.”

Christ, even the name was a lie.

“I’ll tell you about Johnny
and me. When I can. And if you want to hear.”

“I want to.” I thought I had to. If this was going to work, I had to understand. About her. About him. About the broom. “When you’re ready.”

“As our esteemed principal likes to say, ‘Students, this will be challenging but worthwhile.’”

I laughed.

She butted out her cigarette. “One thing I wonder about. Would Miz Mimi approve of us?”

“I’m pretty sure she would.”

“I think so, too. Drive home safe, my dear. And you better take those.” She was pointing at the paper bag from the Kileen Pharmacy. It was sitting on top of her dresser. “If I had the kind of nosy company who checks the medicine cabinet after they tee-tee, I’d have some explaining to do.”

“Good idea.”

“But keep them handy, honey.”

And she winked.

On the way home, I found myself thinking about those rubbers. Trojan brand . . . and ribbed for
her
pleasure, according to the box. The lady didn’t have a diaphragm any longer (although I guessed she might arrange for one on her next trip to Dallas), and birth control pills wouldn’t be widely available for another year or two. Even then, doctors would be wary about prescribing them, if I remembered my Modern Sociology course correctly. So for now it was Trojans. I wore them not for her pleasure but so she wouldn’t have a baby. Which was amusing when you considered
that I wouldn’t be a baby myself for another fifteen years.

Thinking about the future is confusing in all sorts of ways.

The following evening I revisited Silent Mike’s establishment. The sign in the door was turned to CLOSED and the place looked empty, but when I knocked, my electronics buddy let me in.

“Right on time, Mr. Doe, right on time,” he said. “Let’s see what you think. Me, I think I outdid myself.”

I stood by the glass case filled with transistor radios and waited while he disappeared into the back room. He returned holding a lamp in each hand. The shades were grimy, as if they had been adjusted by a great many dirty fingers. The base of one was chipped so it stood crooked on the counter: the Leaning Lamp of Pisa. They were perfect, and I told him so. He grinned and put two of the boxed tape recorders next to the lamps. Also a drawstring bag containing several lengths of wire so thin it was almost invisible.

“Want a little tutorial?”

“I think I’ve got it,” I said, and put five twenties down on the counter. I was a little touched when he tried to push one back.

“One-eighty was the price we agreed on.”

“The other twenty is for you to forget I was ever here.”

He considered this for a moment, then put a thumb on the stray twenty and pulled it into the group with its little green friends. “I already did that. Why don’t I consider this a tip?”

As he put the stuff into a brown paper bag, I was struck by simple curiosity and asked him a question.

“Kennedy? I didn’t vote for him, but as long as he doesn’t go taking his orders from the Pope, I think he’ll be okay. The country needs somebody younger. It’s a new age, y’know?”

“If he were to come to Dallas, do you think he’d be all right?”

“Probably. Can’t say for sure, though. On the whole,
if I were him, I’d stay north of the Mason-Dixon line.”

I grinned. “Where all is calm, all is bright?”

Silent Mike (Holy Mike) said, “Don’t start.”

There was a rack of pigeonholes for mail and school announcements in the first-floor teachers’ room. On Tuesday morning, during my free period, I found a small sealed envelope in mine.

“What are you laughing about, Amberson?” Danny Laverty asked. He was correcting themes with a hollow-eyed intensity that suggested hangover. “Tell me, I could use a giggle.”

“Nah,” I said. “Private joke. You wouldn’t get it.”

But
we
got it, poundcake became our name for it, and we ate plenty that fall.

We were discreet, but of course there were people who knew what was going on. There was probably some gossip, but no scandal. Smalltown folks are rarely mean folks. They knew Sadie’s situation, at least in a general way, and understood we could make no public commitment, at least for awhile. She didn’t come to my house; that would have caused the wrong kind
of talk. I never stayed beyond ten o’clock at hers; that also would have caused the wrong kind of talk. There was no way I could have put my Sunliner in her garage and stayed the night, because her Volkswagen Beetle, small as it was, filled it almost wall-to-wall. I wouldn’t have done so in any case, because someone would have known. In small towns, they always do.

I visited her after school. I dropped by for the meal she called supper. Sometimes we went to Al’s Diner and ate Prongburgers or catfish fillets; sometimes we went to The Saddle; twice I took her to the Saturday-night dances at the local Grange. We saw movies at the Gem in town or at the Mesa in Round Hill or the Starlite Drive-In in Kileen (which the kids called the submarine races). At a nice restaurant like The Saddle, she might have a glass of wine before dinner and I might have a beer with, but we were careful not to be seen at any of the local taverns and certainly not at the Red Rooster, Jodie’s one and only jukejoint, a place our students talked about with longing and awe. It was 1961 and segregation might finally be softening in the middle—Negroes had won the right to sit at the Woolworth’s lunchcounters in Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston—but schoolteachers didn’t drink in the Red Rooster. Not if they wanted to keep their jobs. Never-never-never.

When we made love in Sadie’s bedroom, she always kept a pair of slacks, a sweater, and a pair of moccasins on her side of the bed. She called it her emergency outfit. The one time the doorbell bonged while we were naked (a state she had taken to calling
in flagrante delicious
), she got into those threads in ten seconds flat. She came back, giggling and waving a copy of
The Watchtower.
“Jehovah’s Witnesses. I told them I was saved and they went away.”

Once, as we ate ham-steaks and okra in her kitchen afterward, she said our courtship reminded her of that movie with Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper—
Love in the Afternoon.
“Sometimes I wonder if it would be better at night.” She said this a little wistfully. “When regular people do it.”

“You’ll get a chance to find out,” I said. “Hang in there, baby.”

She smiled and kissed the corner
of my mouth. “You turn some cool phrases, George.”

“Oh yes,” I said, “I’m very original.”

She pushed her plate aside. “I’m ready for dessert. How about you?”

Not long after the Jehovah’s Witnesses came calling at Sadie’s place—this must have been early November, because I’d finished casting my version of
Twelve Angry Men
—I was out raking my lawn when someone said, “Hello, George, how’s it going?”

I turned around and saw Deke Simmons, now a widower for the second time. He had stayed in Mexico longer than anyone had thought he would, and just when folks began to believe he was going to remain there, he had come back. This was the first time I’d seen him. He was very brown, but far too thin. His clothes bagged on him, and his hair—iron-gray on the day of the wedding reception—was now almost all white and thinning on top.

I dropped my rake and hurried over to him. I meant to shake his hand, but hugged him instead. It startled him—in 1961, Real Men Don’t Hug—but then he laughed.