Daughters of Eve (12 page)

Laugh, Pete?

Well, you never know. Some girls would think a guy was soft in the head getting involved so fast. I don't want to scare you off or anything, but... but...

Gently. Encouragingly. Yes?

I... just want you to know... there's never been a girl in my life who mattered... really mattered... until now. Even Bambi... she was just a way of filling the time... waiting... until the real thing came along....

In her mind the lines had written themselves, falling so easily and naturally into place, but now in the car with Peter really beside her she could not speak the initial sentence that would begin the flow.

Instead, she heard herself asking, "Where are we going now?"

"Where do you think? To an exotic island in the Caribbean where coconut palms sway in the breeze and dancing girls in grass skirts line the shore."

"No, really," Laura said. "You're headed down to Pointer's Creek Road, aren't you?"

"Well, sure," Peter said. "Where else can we park where there won't be any streetlights?" He paused and then turned to glance sideways at her as a thought occurred to him. "Say, you're not on the rag, are you? If you are, you should have told me before now."

"I'm not—on the what?" Laura asked in bewilderment.

"It's not your time of the month?"

"Oh, no—no." Under cover of the darkness, Laura felt her face growing hot with embarrassment and was astonished by her own reaction. She and Peter were lovers. They had known each other in every sense of the word. Surely there was nothing so intimate that it couldn't be discussed between them, and yet...

"It's not that," Laura said hastily. "It's just that it seems so early. It can't be much more than ten o'clock."

"That second feature was a dud," Peter told her. "I saw it before when it was playing at the Cedars. I'd have gone to sleep if I'd had to sit through it a second time."

"We could have gone somewhere else for a little while. To McDonald's, maybe. Isn't that where the crowd usually goes after a date?"

"I'm hungry for something, all right, but it's sure not hamburgers." He reached across and put a hand on her knee.

Laura shivered slightly and slid closer to him on the seat, tilting her head so that it rested against his shoulder. Three weeks ago if she could have pictured herself in this situation she would have died of joy. It had all come to pass so quickly that she kept having to stop and ask herself if it might not be a dream, something from which she might awake as she had from so many other dreams, to find her mother bending over her, shaking the covers and saying, "Wake up, you little sleepyhead, it's time for breakfast!"

Even now there were times when she wondered about its reality. In the halls at school, Peter passed her as though she were a stranger. In the cafeteria he sat at a table with a group of male cronies while Laura ate with Fran and Paula. When he spoke to her at all, it was casually as to a friend of his sister's—"Hey, Laura, how's it going, kid?"—with a quick, impersonal smile and his eyes sliding past her to focus elsewhere.

How astonished they all would be, the kids at school, the teachers, everybody, if they had any idea that this disinterest was a facade to conceal the fact that Peter Grange and Laura Snow were going together!

"This is nobody's business but our own," Peter had told her the first night they had been together. "We've got a good thing going here, and we don't want a lot of outside pressure spoiling things. That Daughters of Eve bunch would put the screws to you for sure if they thought you were going out with me after I broke off with Bambi."

"You're probably right," Laura had agreed in a daze. "Still, it's not as though I had anything to do with what happened between the two of you. You wouldn't have gone back to her anyway, would you? It's over and finished?"

"Sure it is," Peter said. "But Bambi may not think so. She's a spoiled chick, used to getting her way about everything. She'd take it as a real put-down if she knew I'd found somebody else so soon."

This had seemed to make sense when he said it. Bambi would, indeed, have been angry, and the other girls in the group would have been also. They had taken the oath of loyalty to support the members of the sisterhood in all situations, and as Ruthie herself had put it, even though Peter was her brother, he was "on the club's official shit list"

"He's a chauvinist pig," she had said. "He thinks girls are second-class citizens. I never could see how Bambi put up with him as long as she did."

"I'm a sucker for charm," Bambi admitted ruefully. "For a while there I thought he was something pretty special." Then she had laughed. "Oh, well, there are other fish in the sea. At least I've got my sisters for moral support. Maybe the bunch of you can toss me some of your castoffs."

They had all laughed at that, and Laura, turning away, had stared out through the art-room window at the blue autumn sky with guilt rising thick within her, the biblical words of Ruth painfully sharp in her mind—

Whither thou goest, I will go... thy people shall be my people....

"My people" are the Daughters of Eve, she thought, and I am deceiving them. But I can't help it. I love Peter—I love him more than Bambi ever could have! I've loved him from the first time I ever saw him, and I'll keep on loving him till the day I die.

Now, close beside him in the moving car, she at last brought the preplanned words to the surface, forcing them out with a little gasping breath.

"... we have to talk."

"You say something, kid?" Peter asked her.

"I said... we have to talk about something," Laura said more loudly. "This thing... of being secret... it's just not working, Pete. I mean, we can't ever go anywhere this way."

"We're going somewhere now," Peter said lightly.

"You know what I mean."

"We just came from a drive-in. That's 'somewhere,' isn't it? At the prices they charge, it had better be."

"That's all we ever do, though—go to drive-ins. And out to Pointer's Creek."

"You don't like that? You don't like being alone with me? You'd rather go to McDonald's and sit around with a bunch of jabbering people eating hamburgers and drinking Cokes and stuff?" He sounded hurt. "If that's the way you feel, I'll take you home now. I don't want to force a girl to do something she hates just for my sake."

"That's not it at all," Laura exclaimed, clutching at his arm. "I love being alone with you. It's just that I want to be with you other times too. I don't care if the Daughters of Eve get mad at me. They'll get over it, and if they don't—well, they'll just have to put me out of the club. When you were going with Bambi you went everywhere together. You walked her to classes and waited for her by her locker and took her to parties."

"And, so, what happened?" Peter said. "We broke up, that's what. Too much togetherness can do that."

"The Homecoming Dance is two weeks from now. Can't we go to that? I've never been to a dance since I started high school."

"Two weeks is a long time off," Peter said. "Who knows what we'll feel like doing two weeks from now? Let's hang loose and play it by ear, okay?"

"But I need to know. I have to get a dress." She hated the note of pleading that had crept into her voice, but she had to make him understand how important it was to her. "Girls like to plan ahead on things. They need time to get ready."

"Don't push me, Laura. I don't like being nagged at, okay?" He tightened his hand on her knee, giving it a quick squeeze. "There are better ways to get a guy to do things than by nagging at him. A sweet, loving girl can get just about anything she wants as long as she doesn't keep pushing and getting a guy irritated."

"I just think it would be so much fun," Laura said, "to go to a dance."

"Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't. I'll think about it." He slowed the car. "You call it, lad. You want to go to the creek or not? If you don't, just say so. I'll take you home."

"Do you—love me?" She asked the question in a whisper.

"Talk up, kid. I can't hear you."

"I said—yes. I want to go to the creek." He was here with her now, wasn't he, not with some other girl? The question was ridiculous. Of course he loved her.

Holly Underwood sat with her eyes closed, listening to her mother at the piano building Debussy's castle note by silver note to the height of the stars. The room was filled with the ocean, with foam and froth and circling gulls and salt winds whipping icy spray against palace walls.

The winds grew steadily stronger as Holly had known they would. The waves leaped and splashed, and the gulls began to scream their warning. Still the shining notes continued to pile one upon another to form spires and towers. At the window of one of these stood a princess with a face like a flower, her eyes focused dreamily on the horizon as she waited for the ship that would bring the prince she was to marry.

But she lingered too long in the starlight. The waters beneath the castle opened, and the waves came rolling green and wild through the marble halls and up the stairs and into the chamber where the princess stood. She opened her lips to cry out, but the salt water filled her mouth and her nose and her eyes and lifted the strands of her golden hair and sent them swirling around her like a cape. Then, with one great roar, the sea came crashing in upon her, and the palace sank forever beneath the waves.

In the silence that followed, Holly drew a long breath and opened her eyes. Her mother turned from the piano with a sigh.

"I did that badly. I've gotten so out of practice."

"Considering how little you play these days, I thought it was fabulous."

"It's a vicious circle. I don't play much anymore because I can't stand to hear myself, and the lack of practice makes it worse than ever." Mrs. Underwood lifted her hands from the keys and flexed her fingers. "Piano-hands, my teacher used to call them, wide and strong with a lot of stretch to them. You've got them too, dear, but don't ever let them stiffen up on you like mine."

Holly looked down at her own hands. They were as her mother described them, broad and muscular with stubby, square-tipped fingers. Once at a Halloween carnival when she had thrust her hands through the opening in a screen to have her palm read, the unseen fortune-teller had taken her for a boy.

"A beautiful, dark-haired woman will enter your life," she had told her, and when Holly had asked, "To do what?" the fortune-teller had gasped, apologized, and started a whole new fortune in which the "dark woman" was replaced by a "dark man."

"Gary has piano hands too, doesn't he?" Holly said. "But he's never played."

"Gary has the hands but not the ear. What a waste!" Her mother smiled at her. "The music in this family has come down through its women. My mother played beautifully, and her mother also. In fact, this piano used to be your grandmother's. I picture her sometimes as she must have been as a young girl practicing her scales on it."

"Is she the one who taught you?" Holly asked her.

"She gave me the basics, the same way I did you. Then, later, I had lessons. All little girls had piano lessons in those days. I had so many friends who hated them, but they had to keep plugging away anyway until they were twelve. That was the break point where you got to decide whether to quit or continue."

"And you continued," Holly said. "If music meant so much to you, why didn't you ever do anything with it?"

"Like what?" her mother asked her.

"Like—oh, I don't know—play with a symphony orchestra—give concerts—make records."

"I did win a contest once," Mrs. Underwood said. "It was sponsored by some music-appreciation group—Friends of the Arts, I think it was. My music teacher sponsored me, and I got a medal. It was a great, awful gilt thing, and I wore it to bed at night on my pajamas."

"You didn't answer my question," Holly persisted. "Why didn't you go on? If you were good enough to win contests, why are you here now giving beginner lessons in a podunk place like this?"

"Because this 'podunk place,' as you call it, is where we live," Mrs. Underwood said reasonably. "It's where your father has his business. Besides, I haven't had the training to be a concert pianist, and I certainly don't have the time to put in the necessary practice."

"You would have had the time if you hadn't gotten married."

"I don't know about that. I'd have had to be out doing something to earn a living."

"That's the whole point, Mom. You could have earned a living with your music." Holly leaned forward eagerly. "Isn't that the greatest thing that can happen to somebody, to be able to support herself doing something she loves? Think what it would be like to get up in the morning and go right to the piano and not have to do anything except the thing you wanted to do?"

"Life isn't like that," her mother said. "Nobody lives like that, dear. If I'd done that with my life, you and Gary wouldn't be here now. The two greatest moments in my life were when my babies were born, and I certainly wouldn't have stuck you off in a nursery for somebody else to raise while I practiced piano eight hours a day."

"I don't want children," Holly said.

"You'll feel differently after you're married."

"I might not get married."

"Of course you will. The right boy will come along, and you'll fall in love just like everybody else. I guarantee it." Her mother regarded her with amusement. "You'll play Debussy for your own daughter, and if you're lucky, she'll understand and love it, and you'll have something special to share. That's what music is—something lovely to share with somebody you care about."