Billie Standish Was Here (19 page)

I stewed and squirmed until my folks pulled into their driveway about nine, and I called as soon as they were in the house. Daddy answered and I talked way too fast. “They're just about to walk on the moon and we've been watching all afternoon and please can I stay? Please?”

I heard him sigh. He said in a tired voice, “Ten o'clock.”

“Oh, but Daddy I don't know how much more there'll be and it's not like there's school tomorrow—”

“I said ‘ten o'clock.' ” No louder, no edge. No room for bargaining, either. I told him okay.

A few minutes later none of us blinked as that grainy gray guy in the fat space suit bounced down those steps. Neil Armstrong's “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” fell on us like a prayer. We helped Miss Lydia up when “The Star-Spangled Banner” started and we were all three standing there bawling by the end. We knew each other's minds well enough by then not to bother feeling stupid about it.

Out in the middle of nowhere, we were connected by live television transmission to the brotherhood of man. And in that one little room the three of us were connected to one another by something even stronger than blood.

At ten o'clock Miss Lydia followed me to the door and asked in a low voice, “You have the ruby pin these days, right?” I nodded and she said, “Do me a favor and pin it to your nightgown tonight.” She pinched my cheek and I managed a smile as she closed the door with Harlan on her side of it.

Our house was dark and my parents were in bed when I let myself in. I walked through the living room and put my hand on top of the TV. It was cold.

I knew my parents had to work hard. But it seemed to me just then they could make time to look up if they wanted to. If not at me, at least. At the world outside.

For the first time, I felt sorry for them that they weren't me.

I
  t couldn't be avoided forever. By early August we had cleaned every inch of Miss Lydia's house except behind that one closed door and there was just no plausible explanation to give Harlan for wanting to skip it. Besides, I figured it would have to be dealt with someday, and better us than Miss Lydia.

I had myself believing it wouldn't bother me. But as soon as I stepped inside, it
smelled
like Curtis. All sweat and cigarette smoke. It was over ninety degrees in there and I started shaking like a barefoot Christmas caroler.

Harlan asked what was wrong. I couldn't look at him. I kept trying to clear my throat but couldn't get past a phlegmy gargling sound. Sweat started running out of my hairline into my eyes and even so I was shaking hard enough to rattle my teeth. The smell of the room turned into a taste in my mouth.

Harlan asked if I was getting sick. I shook my head. Then I reconsidered and shrugged. I reached back to steady myself against the headboard of the bed then pulled my hand away like I'd been burned.

I could see Harlan out of the corner of my eye. He bowed his head and clasped his hands down low in front the way men pray at church.

Without saying anything more, he took me by the shoulders and propelled me out of the room and down the stairs. Miss Lydia was in her chair in the front room staring at a television that wasn't turned on.

Harlan steered me to the end of the sofa nearest her chair. He walked to the doorway and looked back and forth between the two of us half a dozen times, studying us for what seemed like an hour. He spent some time after that studying his shoes.

Then he said, “You know, Miss Lydia, it's such a pretty day it's a shame for us all to be inside. You keep saying your iris bed needs to be thinned out and I know my mom would love to have some. Could you maybe show Billie Marie where to dig?”

I don't believe in love at first sight. It might make for an easy shortcut if somebody's writing a movie, but in real life I think it's nothing more than hormones performing a parlor trick. I have come to believe that real love is like learning to read, one letter at a time, sounding things out until it all comes together. It takes time to build, step after step. And I know that was the exact moment Harlan climbed up that first step for me.

He must have worked like a dervish, because he was finished by our usual parting time. The bed of his old pickup was filled with plastic garbage bags. You could smell a mix of pine cleaner and Glade wafting down the stairs.

He said, “Miss Lydia, unless you've got other plans, I'll just take all those bags of clothes home and have Mom drop them off at Goodwill tomorrow.”

She had to clear her throat to mumble, “You're a good one, son.”

I did the same before whispering, “Yeah. Yeah, you sure are.”

It was impossible to tell whether he was happy or horrified. He turned beet-purple, nodded, and left.

That night, Curtis raped me over and over again in my dreams. I would wake up drenched in sweat. Feeling actual pain. It would take forever to calm down and get back to sleep.

Then my head would hit that lunchroom floor and it would start all over.

About the fourth or fifth time, just before Curtis could wrestle my panties off, Harlan came running into the lunchroom with a big gun and chased Curtis off.

You don't have to be Freud to figure that one out.

Miss Lydia looked almost as haggard as me the next day and I figured her night hadn't been any better. Harlan showed up with a guitar—I hadn't even known he played—and after lunch he insisted we sing all the songs we knew. Even “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider” and baby stuff like that. Before we knew it Miss Lydia and I were laughing our heads off.

He was starting to flat-out astound me.

G
  oing back to school in September was barely a bump in the road. I didn't look forward to it like Christmas, but there was no reason to dread it either.

KarenDebbie came back to seventh grade with their skirts even shorter, makeup even thicker, and their hair bleached to a brassy gold. They looked uneasy when they said hello to me and I couldn't tell if they were unsure of themselves or me. I didn't care. I could barely believe I had ever thought they mattered.

The boys in our class all came back about three inches taller. Their faces had erupted in angry pimples. They bounced off the walls like Labrador puppies—it was almost like somebody had put something in their water.

The eighth-grade girls huddled and giggled and kept to themselves—other than trying to distract the eighth-grade boys from staring at KarenDebbie.

Harlan had spent the last two weeks at home helping his mother, so it had been that long since I had seen him. Mrs. Willits planted a gigantic garden every year, probably an idea left over from having four kids at home, and she had taken time away from her job late August to fill the pantries and freezers.

When I laid eyes on Harlan that day he looked like he'd grown an inch. His face was starting to sprout fuzz but his skin was clear. Amid those other train wrecks he looked handsome. But when you care about somebody it seems like they automatically gain about twenty points in the looks department. Maybe he was plain as ever and I just couldn't see it anymore.

Our teacher, a Mr. Landis, didn't look old enough to be out of high school. Ten minutes after the bell rang we knew his deal. He had graduated college the spring before with a degree in economics. The only reason he had applied for this job was to stay out of the draft.

Harlan and I exchanged a look that said we were going to be on our own another year.

Now we had twice-a-day study hour instead of recess. Mr. Landis said he wanted us to keep our Constitution study partners from the year before and use one of those hours for extra concentrated work. It was starting to look like Cumberland C. P. was under a lot of pressure to have us pass that test at year's end. There must have been government money involved for them to care so much.

Harlan raised his hand and asked if we could use both study hours every day if we thought we needed them. Mr. Landis said that would be fine. It took extra-concentrated work on my part not to laugh.

Miss Lydia called her own school to session the same week the bogus real one started and announced that, besides the day-to-day news, we were going to focus on the women's movement, women's lib.

I was thoroughly and utterly appalled—the conversations I'd overheard at home about hairy-legged bra burners were even more acid than those about colored people. I hadn't formed an independent opinion of my own yet, but I knew without any consideration whatsoever that I didn't want to be discussing bras around Harlan.
Or
any body parts that needed shaving.

I said, “No, Miss Lydia, you can't just decide that. I, for one, won't do it!” and felt darned proud I was confident enough to put my foot down.

She shot me a look so hot I could almost smell my hair burning. It caught me by surprise, to say the least. I took a step back and, by reflex, put up my hands and said, “Hey, okay! Don't shoot! I'm sorry!”

She blinked a couple of times and then broke out laughing. I was staring at my bedroom ceiling later that night before I realized just what I'd said.

I was so mortified I decided I couldn't even bring it up to apologize. Harlan hadn't said anything, but it was hard to know if it hadn't kicked him in the gut or if he was too decent to say so.

I went back the next afternoon a most eager and willing pupil in the subject of women's lib.

I hadn't kept up with all the news that summer but now there were almost as many women's demonstrations and marches on TV as there were protests against the Vietnam War. I had to admit it was a current event hard to ignore.

But I still wasn't sure I could discuss all the issues—birth control and abortion and such—with Harlan in the mix. I tried to squirm off the hook by saying he couldn't possibly be interested.

He looked at me with those big blue eyes that looked darker every day and said, “You think I don't care about my sisters? You think I don't care what happens to you?”

I think I melted some just about then.

It turned out there was plenty to go around when it came to making us uncomfortable. First off, it felt a lot more personal than when we were studying civil rights. Then we had been reading about people who were very different from us in places far away. They had problems we personally would never have to face.

But there was no way to remove our own families from discussions about the roles men and women play. It was a subject that knocked on everybody's door, that walked right on into everybody's house no matter who they were.

It set us talking about everyone we knew. A lot of the wives worked now, and that seemed like a fairly recent development once it came up for consideration. But none of us knew of a single man who cooked or cleaned. Not before their wives worked, not since. Talking about it out loud made me feel like a Peeping Tom.

Harlan started out, instinct I suppose, trying to defend the men. But even he couldn't come up with a convincing case once he really thought about it. Like a lot of things, it had seemed normal until there was reason to question it. He was left feeling off balance too.

And all of it kept bringing me back to Mama. She wasn't the only woman who worked, but she was the only one around who did a man's work driving tractors. I pondered for hours on end how she and Daddy had ever come to
that
agreement. And whether or not it had been completely mutual.

She had mentioned dancing and dining with Daddy years before at the Savoy Grille. But somewhere down the road they had evolved into what appeared to be business partners. I thought about those romance novels Mama read and wondered just how far away she was living from her idea of happily ever after.

And I wondered if pure instinct had showed her the safest place to put the blame was on my head.

None of these explanations would make the way she treated me fair. None of them would make it right. But from what I was figuring out about human nature and Mama's view of the world, those explanations would make sense.