Daring (5 page)

“I've got my knife, got my ladder, I'm ready for them,” he said. He sounds like he's back in the swamps of Korea. He's a man on a mission. My crazy brave Romeo is going to spirit me away on his extension ladder to a life of adventure where my father can never hold a gun to my back again. All my new girlfriends are jealous.

They sing to me as I back out the window, sobbing silently.
Goodnight, sweetheart
,
well it's time to go, Doo doo doo de do.
One last glance at my roommate's sad face, our cozy little room, the poster of Elvis we tacked to the wall, the books on my desk that invite me into new worlds—do I really want to give all this up?
I hate to leave you, baby, and I don't mean maybe
. My foot slips, the high heel falls off—
heels, Gail, what are you thinking?
I feel his hands, big mannish hands, the hands of a tree surgeon who knows how to brace branches. His hands circle my whole waist and steady me like a falling tree. I am in his hands now.

We get no farther than the Vermont border before I ask to stop. “I need to make a phone call.” I can see that McCarthy—that's his name (he likes to be called by his last name as if he's still a soldier)—is not pleased. He senses something is not right. His mission is to steal me away from college before I get any high-class ideas about another kind of life and throw him over. He drives straight through this dot of a city, past the police station, the public library, the opera house. I beg him to stop.

“I have to call my mother.”

“What the hell do you want to do that for?” he demands.

“I always tell my mother what I'm doing,” I fib.

“I don't like this idea, Gail.”

I stare at this man's profile, his lips drawn tight as a slash, and wonder how I let him take over my life. When he turned up in town at the start of my senior year in high school, the proverbial tall dark stranger, he pursued me wherever I went, offering me rides home from school, turning up at football games, even crashing parties where he must have known I would be bored with boys my own age. He was worldly and exuded a dark and illicit energy. There were days when he would lure me to sit in the cab of his truck during my study hall break and have a cigarette with him. He brought me wildflowers and told me of the terrors of war. I thought, of course, that I could save him from his paranoid fears; I would make him believe again that people can be good.

Toward the end of the year, I would sneak out at night to meet him a few blocks from my house. He would take me to his house and make us scotch and sodas and kiss me with a violent passion. He showed me the long purplish dent in his thigh where he had been knifed by the enemy. I found it strangely erotic. When we finally coupled, the scream of pain quickly surged into a crescendo of desire that scarcely left me for the rest of the summer. I was lost to lust.

My mother tolerated him. My father wanted to kill him.
That maniac McCarthy
, he called him.

Before we cross the Vermont border, I persuade him to pull into a roadhouse. He finds the bar while I look for a pay telephone. Thank God it's in the ladies' room. I call home. I pray my mother's head won't be in the clouds. She answers.

“Hello, honey, everything all right?”

“McCarthy wants to marry me,” I blurt. “We're eloping, but don't worry, we'll be fine.”

A long pause, I hear her thick breathing. “Where are you right now?”

“Driving. In his truck.”

“You've left school?”

“It was really exciting, Mom. He came for me with his tree ladder and all the girls—”

“Where are you headed?”

“Massachusetts. He has a nice motel picked out.”

Her voice shifts suddenly into a calming neutral. “Honey, don't do anything right now. Marriage is a big step. Don't you want to have a lovely wedding? Honey?”

She must know. This isn't all the romantic getaway I'm pretending it is.

“Mom? Are you there?” She must be telling my father. I wait, trembling. When she comes back on the phone, her voice is silky as warm bathwater. She coaxes me to come home and we'll talk it all over. “You don't want to elope and miss all the fun, you know? Shopping for the dress, I can give you a new hairstyle, we can have the reception on the terrace of the new house . . .” She is making it up as she goes along, bless her heart.

“Can I speak to Daddy? It won't cost him anything, if I elope, I mean.” I hear her put her hand over the receiver and my father shouting in the background.

“Your father is going to bed tonight with a gun beside him.”

“A gun? Why?”

“Baby, just drive right straight home and we'll work it all out, together.” I can't remember when my mother sounded so sober and sure of herself.

McCarthy has that beery look in his eyes when I find him in the bar. He interrogates me about the phone call. Foolishly, I tell him about my father and his gun. I can almost see the hairs on the back of McCarthy's neck stand up, the macho surge. Back in the truck I can't stop thinking about McCarthy's knives. He likes to show me how he can skin a rabbit with his army combat knife. His evasion knife is the most menacing, thin, black, easily hidden.

I somehow convince him that we need to see my parents together, to show them we're serious. The fight starts when we pull off the Saw Mill River Parkway. I know, he knows, once I go back home and think about sacrificing college to be Mrs. Tree Surgeon, our elopement will lose its allure. It is almost five in the morning. We are turning off the Boston Post Road onto the avenue leading to my house.

“Let me off before Claflin Avenue, okay?”

“I'm not letting you off anywhere,” McCarthy says. “I love you and we're getting married, just like you said on the phone.”

“But my father—”

“Forget your father. I'm going to take care of you now.”

As his truck grumbles into the long climb up our hill, I am overtaken by nausea.

“Stop the car, let me out, I have to puke.” He refuses. I beg. He reaches across me to try to lock my door. I grab his hand. “Don't make me bite you!”

He slows down and I bolt out. Jackknifing up from the fall, I start running, streaking across backyards, scrambling over fences; spilling out two driveways from our house, I feel my skirt catch on something, a bush? No, a hand. His big hand, he's trying to clutch at me! I feel the rush of adrenaline. I'm little but I'm fast. There's a light on in our living room. I sprint for the door.

It is my mother's arms into which I fall. I hear the swoosh of a window sash sliding up. My father's voice: “Crazy McCarthy! I'll give you a count of three to disappear—you hear—or I'll point my weapon right at your pecker!”

His truck spits gravel as he tears off. My mother nudges me to the sofa, covers me with a quilt, and brings me tea. It isn't useless to expect help from my mother, after all.

“Mom, I'm pregnant,” I choke out.

“I know.”

“How?”

“I'm your mother.”

We sit for a long time in the dimness of a slow dawn, hands clasped. My mother begins to pray: “The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters.”

I repeat with her: “He restoreth my soul.” I start to sob. “My soul”—the shame chokes me—“my soul has no scruples.”

“Let's pray to the Lord to take away your sins.”

We pray. Time passes.

“Don't cry,” she says. “You do not have to have this baby.”

It takes time for the enormity of her gift to sink in. Gone is the cloudiness in her eyes. The whites glare like searchlights. She has stopped spinning out of the present and coalesced around the memory of a moment she lived before, the memory of a father who foreclosed her own future. Later that morning she dials doctor after doctor, then phones McCarthy and commands him to drive us in her car to New Jersey, that is, if he ever wants to see me again. She sits with me in the backseat and keeps up a pleasant pretense of conversation with him, the way people do when humoring a kidnapper.

The anesthesia of fear has robbed from my memory where exactly we went, except there was no back alley, just a normal doctor's office. Of the procedure, I remember nothing. What I will never forget is my mother's voice, singing to me in the backseat of the car as she cradled my head in her lap on the way home . . .
Hush little baby, don't you cry, Mama's going to sing you a lullaby
. . . her soft hand stroking my forehead, dabbing at my tears, mothering me.
Hush little baby
. . .

THE DEAN WAS NOT HARSH.
She told me I could return to the University of Vermont but only if all of my professors agreed. I called them, one by one, and apologized for my reckless behavior. My English professor confessed that she had thought of eloping herself but was saved when her boyfriend's junk car broke down; she and I would become friends. I took a Greyhound back and walked up the long hill from the bus station and the half mile to the women's campus, longing for the very confinement that I had sought to escape. My roommate and I squealed with delight to be back in our private girl-world together.

McCarthy called my dorm night after night. My dorm mates knew to put him off. Over that Christmas vacation he drove by my house to tell me, no, threaten me, that if I didn't come back to him, he was going to marry someone else. I feigned disappointment. I never saw him again.

This is what is important: I vowed to revirginate myself. Not until I married would I ever allow myself to go “all the way” again. I kept that vow. In my junior year, however, my southern boyfriend in the Kappa Sig house next door to my sorority house made a grandstand play. We were in his car, enjoying a light makeout session, when music on the radio was interrupted for an emergency broadcast. The Soviet Union had sent something called
Sputnik
into orbit, the first artificial satellite in history. All the commentators sounded unnerved. This meant the evil rival could attack us from space. My boyfriend put his lips to my ear.

“We could be blown away tomorrow. This may be our last chance to know real love. Let's do it.”

“Nice try,” I said.

Countless
Sputnik
babies were conceived that night. I was proud not to be included in those statistics.

THINGS BEGAN LOOKING UP ONCE I
graduated from UVM in 1958. I had interviewed for a job at the Manhattan headquarters of J. C. Penney on West Thirty-Fourth Street. My friends snickered when I came back to school from spring vacation and told them how excited I was to have a job at J. C. Penney. “What, selling long johns to old ladies?” That's what the stores in rural America were known for, of course, but I had done some research and found out that Penney's had a consumer service department, forerunner of the public relations bonanza, and it published two consumer magazines.

“No, actually,” I told my friends. “I was interviewed by Mr. James Cash Penney himself.”

The legendary entrepreneur from Missouri was then in his eighties and had a bushy white mustache that wagged when he smiled. He had Golden Rule written all over his face (indeed, his first stores were called Golden Rule stores). I had learned from reading about him that he always called his employees “associates.” Men became manager-partners in new stores and shared in the profits. Penney's goal was not to build a chain of stores but to assemble a chain of “good men.”

“What do you want to be in five years?” Mr. Penney inquired. A writer, I said, or maybe a buyer. He asked if I'd like to start in their management training program. “Do you train girls as managers, too?” I asked. He said they were just starting. “Do you pay girls the same as boys?” I dared to ask. He looked surprised. He smiled, puffed up a little, and pulled on his suspenders. “We certainly should.” And so he did.

That was 1958. Unbeknownst to me, I had struck a faint blow for equal opportunity employment, which would not become a national issue for another decade. That job allowed me to travel America in a hat and gloves to put on educational fashion shows at college home economics departments, displaying Penney's fabrics. Oshkosh, Appleton, Kansas City—it was an education in small-town American values that never left me. I was also able to write for the company's magazines and work with Madison Avenue ad agencies to make informational filmstrips. This was so much more exciting than the lives of my girlfriends who had graduated with engagement rings or fraternity pins padlocked over their bras. They seemed to be time traveling straight into middle age.

I made an ironclad pact with myself: I would not marry anyone, not even Prince Charming, for at least two years after college. I wasn't going to be trapped like my mother. I just made it to age twenty-three. My suitor was a charming imposter who found me at Manhattan's White Horse Tavern on a Sunday afternoon. My roommate and I were waiting for the paint to dry in our one-room bachelorette pad a block away.

“Squadron Leader Greville Bell, RAF.” He introduced himself in an impeccable British accent. “Fair lady, would you be so kind as to help out a stranger to your city?” I was a pushover for men in uniform, although now that I recall, this man was wearing a raincoat. But he was good-looking and so very polite and obviously helpless. He needed assistance in counting out change for a tip. “This is the pub made famous by Dylan Thomas, is it not?” he asked.

“The very one.”

“‘If I were tickled by the rub of love, I would not fear the apple nor the flood,'” he recited.

“‘Nor the bad blood of spring,'” I chimed in. It wasn't every day that a man recited poetry to me. I could be smitten by this Englishman. Squadron Leader Greville Bell was adorably sincere and worth another chance. Over the next few weeks, he called several times for dates but I was always busy. In a final attempt, he trotted out his true identity. The accent flattened suddenly to the nasality of a nice Irish Catholic boy from Connecticut.