Looking Back (14 page)

We sat in rows along the gym wall boys on one side, girls on the other, dancers in between and the group (two guitars, a drum, a tambourine, or just a record player) on the stage at the front of the room, with knots of mostly girls gathered to watch, happy—or at least less miserable than otherwise—to have something to focus their eyes on. Eyes, like hands, were a problem. Meeting someone else’s was scary; looking away—like playing chicken in a hot rod (who brakes first?)—seemed cowardly, but looking too long was proof of interest, and left you open to be hurt So the girls looked mostly at the safe things—couples dancing, chaperones smiling benignly on the few who kissed, the flag, the
DRINK MILK
poster on the wall, the crepe-paper streamers and balloons. (The boys would pop them when the dance was over, reverting suddenly, like Cinderella as the clock struck twelve, to childhood birthday parties.)

I can’t remember now how I spent all those hours on my metal folding chair not dancing, or why I came back, dance after dance, once I’d seen how it was to be. Sometimes an unattached boy would come toward me, and I’d rise to dance (hoping to save him the agony of an invitation—“Wanna dance?” or, more likely, just a shrug to indicate that there was nothing better to do) and then, once I was standing, I’d discover that it wasn’t me at all he was after, so I’d keep moving, barely changing course, toward the water fountain, as if all I’d wanted was a good stiff drink of water. Sometimes I’d dance with another girl (giggling loudly, just so everyone would know we were only doing it for fun, that we weren’t—dreaded term—
queer
). Or, toward the end, and desperate, needing some names to tell my mother when she asked me who I danced with (and never able, quite, to lie) I’d ask a boy to dance. Never someone I really liked, but someone safe and sexless who would know, in case the faces I made, as I danced with him, didn’t make it plain enough, that all I wanted was someone—anyone—in pants, who’d give me an excuse for dancing. (Dancing in front of someone else I
did
like, hoping he’d notice.)

At every dance there would be two or three boys I could count on to ask me, boys who danced with every girl’s-room-and-water-fountain type—the wallflowers—but far from being grateful to them for saving us from sitting wondering where to put our hands and on what to focus our eyes, we hated them, stuck out our tongues as we leaned our heads on their sloping shoulders in a slow dance, fast-danced so far apart we hoped no one could tell who our partner was. We’d run back to our seats and our girl friends the very second the last note was played (not lingering a second on the dance floor, as most couples did), making a big thing of washing our hands afterward, if he had touched us. When I came home, though, and met my mother at the door, asking whom I’d danced with, it was those boys’ names I’d use, and multiply, to manufacture a good, popular-sounding answer. She asks me now why I lied about the fun I had at dances, and I’m not sure of the answer. I think the reason is that none of us wants to appear pathetic, no one wants to be seen as a loser, and my only hope of winning was to pretend that I’d already won.

All of us in eighth grade knew that Sue loved Bob and vice versa. (All but me, at least. From the beginning, as I reminded my more romantic friends later, when it was all over, I had been suspicious.) Sue and Bob were no older than the rest of us—fourteen—but the permanence of their situation made them seem to us at least sixteen. As early as October, Bob had signed Sue up to go with him to every dance that year, plus the big freshman dance the next fall. She wore his ring, with tape wound around the band to keep it on her finger, and he wore on his wrist a shackle-like silver chain with a name tag on it that read
SUE
.

All through the school day they passed notes to each other—mushy, romantic, badly spelled descriptions of how much they missed each other, signed with half a page of “love’s” on Bob’s part, calmer, more domestic plans for the future written by Sue, with “Love ya” at the bottom. Sue and Bob weren’t in all the same classes that year, so helpful friends—proud to be caught up in the drama—delivered notes from one room to the other, using their student council or office helper status to get them through the halls and claiming, always, to have a message for Sue from the nurse, or a note for Bob from the principal. A couple of the teachers knew what was up, but they must have thought it was cute (the way kids playing grownup always are) because they never interfered. In the process of delivery the contents of the notes tended to lose a certain privacy, to spill all over the place, in fact. Sue and Bob’s correspondence abounded with passionate confidences and arrows pointing to blank spaces with captions that read “This is where I kissed the envelope.” And there were other enviably soppy exchanges, which Bob, at his receiving end, would stuff into his pants pocket while Sue put hers into that pregnant purse which hung from her shoulder or on the back of her chair during classes. (We stole it sometimes, just to scare her.)

Aside from the note passing, though, their relationship seemed tame. They were the old married couple of the eighth grade, more like chaperones at dances than like kids. They kissed sometimes while dancing, but mostly they just held hands, as if they had already explored each other so well that nothing else was needed. Sue often resembled a tired, not-tonight-honey housewife with Bob, already dreaming, as they held hands in the corner while the newer, younger couples danced, of a ring and a house and a kitchen and a baby. All the romantics of the junior high were positive they would get married. (We shivered at how close that put us to being grown up, trying out Mrs. with our names, and matching them with different boys’ last names. “Just think” we’d whisper to each other, “nine months from now I could be a
mother.
”) That notion scared and thrilled us, and it must have terrified the boys. In the middle of some make-out party embrace, drunk with Sue’s hooks and fasteners, Bob must have agreed to anything she said, but sometimes, in the brighter hours, he looked a little wistful as he passed the boys out on the playground playing soccer and leaning into the engines of the older kids’ cars, while he was surely headed for a station wagon.

He strayed once, with someone’s visiting cousin, and Sue heard about it. Like the wife of an adulterous husband, she talked it over with her friends and decided at last to forgive him, but Bob had discovered he didn’t want to be forgiven so, at the end of junior high, the first real romance of our class broke up. The ring went back, the bracelet disappeared, Bob was a bachelor again, and almost giddy with his freedom, while Sue moved through the halls like a divorcée. No one would make her mistakes again. Couples would take themselves seriously, but only because love was a necessary delusion, no longer quite so sacred. It was a word from a dozen songs, the rhyme to “dove” and “above,” and changing as fashions and the week’s top ten. We entered high school believing in it less, and ready for the soap opera to begin.

Make-up and high heels, or being allowed to stay out till midnight, or a ten-dollar allowance were not, for us, the indications that we’d grown up. Even little kids were getting those things by the time we came along. But we knew we’d grown up on the day we got our driver’s licenses.

I’d planned for mine since I was twelve, imagining the shopping trips I’d make; the red convertible I’d buy. Even after I got my license, of course, those things didn’t come. (Too much traffic for city-shopping driving; too little money for convertibles.) But even without them, and with my parents’ reminder every time I left in the car to buckle my seat belt and drive carefully, my sense of release at having that slip of paper—my license—in the glove compartment was tremendous. Not that I’d ever been a tightly disciplined prisoner in our house, but any time I had to go somewhere too far for biking, it meant asking someone to drive me. I had to have a place to go to and a certain time when I’d be coming back. Besides, my parents drove like senior citizens. I felt embarrassed when kids from school roared past and saw me in our hulking Oldsmobile—we never passed or drove, like in the movies, with only one hand on the wheel, and never played the radio. (My mother said she needed all her concentration for the road. I said, then how can you drive and breathe at the same time, and she said, listen, do you want to walk?) Once I had my license I could do all those things—cruise with no real destination, honk the horn when I passed a friend, flirt with the tail of our car and the blinker lights when someone I knew pulled up behind me. My bicycle went into the garage.

When I was sixteen I got just a license. Some boys got cars too—pointy-finned Chevys and Volkswagens covered with flags and peace signs, chrome-portholed Buicks that they took jobs to support, as they’d support a wife, and rattling, rubber-laying Fords painted dull black so if the cops came after them for speeding they could hide in the bushes without the gleam of lights on paint to give them and their cars away. There was a yellow Model-T with a rumble seat and an old black Model-A, less flashy, more respected, with a window-shade in back and a motor that balked at hills. Cars and their drivers often merged for us, so that late at night, lying in bed, I’d know when Paul, the owner of the Model-A, came by. And stretched out on the lawn on summer evenings when just a flash of blue and white drove past (a grafting job—white door transplanted on a body that was blue) I knew it must be Harvey, going to buy beer with Rich.

And when we got our licenses, of course, our parents stopped driving us to parties. We drove ourselves, or rode in cars driven by friends or boy friends. Fast, on the way there, faster—accelerator foot beer-loosened—on the way home. “Don’t ride with him if he’s drunk,” our parents would tell us, “we’ll come and pick you up,” but that was an unthinkable idea; visions of a cautious station wagon and a father in his bathrobe, bent over the wheel, his headlights beaming over a path of beer cans and parked cars with the shadows of heads and arms and hands showing against the back seat, and coming out to meet him, with a mouthful of toothpaste or peppermints and all the neat curls he’d admired, hours before, all of them suspiciously tangled now.…

Toward the end of my high school career, there was marijuana, but mostly it was Budweiser, picked up by a mature-looking nineteen-year-old with an altered driver’s license, or got by standing next to the supermarket door and waiting for someone to come in who was old enough to buy for us, and not too old
not
to buy. The boys who hovered in the shadows, leaning on the Coke machine, would look over every customer, and when they saw a likely one they’d mumble the password, like something out of a prohibition movie—“Buy?” and if the twenty-one-year-old agreed, they’d hand over our pooled allowances and make arrangements for a rendezvous where they could pick the stuff up.

Arrangements always seemed to me ridiculously elaborate, complicated not so much for the sake of the town cops who, in our imaginations, spent their lives tracking us for signs of liquor, but because the complex beer pick-up system we had was fun, a combination treasure hunt and spy game. At half a dozen spots along some country road we’d stop and burrow in the snow for a case someone had planted a few hours before—digging unsuccessfully, sometimes, when the markers we had left had disappeared, and, once, coming on a case that wasn’t ours. Driving with a hot back seat of frozen beer, we were all paranoid, imagining sirens and blue lights, unmarked cars. We had tricks, though—watching telephone wires for the reflection of light that indicated an oncoming car (so that we’d lower our cans in time), thick parkas with a hundred pockets in the lining and the sleeves even. (The boys who wore them, can and bottle stuffed, entered the party houses like frozen-jointed soldiers.) And sometimes we’d buy a keg and let the beer spill from the tap like water, with—after all the effort we’d spent in getting it—a wonderful, reckless feeling of abundance.

When a new car appeared in the school parking lot, a bunch of boys would go and check it out, the owner standing by and leaning, casual and proud, against the hood, hoping they’d notice, but not pointing out, the wire-wheel hub caps and the leather seats. Beside them in the parking lot, more familiar, already inspected and broken in, other cars were lined up, warming in the sun. Couples, at lunch, would go and sit in them, chewing their sandwiches side by side, facing straight ahead, as if the Oyster River parking lot were a drive-in movie just about to start. Familiar silhouette: a boy’s head, (his neck almost army-stiff) and, on his shoulder, the head of a girl, with his hand resting on her hair—motionless, often—while they contemplated asphalt and dashboard.

Cars weren’t just for driving, of course, they were for parking. There was often no place else to go, and so—like weary nomads (absurdly, the image of Mary and Joseph being turned away at the inn comes to mind) high school couples found refuge in their cars. Maybe that’s why cars held so much importance—why sometimes they’d be ritually passed on from graduating senior to up-and-coming junior boy—so much had taken place inside them, so much drunk and explored.

Even now, a couple of years removed from beer and bucket seats and gear shifts sticking up at awkward angles and late night radios glowing in the dark until, at last, the announcer would speak of “this morning,” not “tonight”—even now I feel uneasy, writing about what went on in those cars. It was a pretty important thing to do (I catch myself from saying
pastime
—it was more central than that. It’s hard not slipping into anthropologist talk, tribal life among the high school natives—there is a tendency to condescend). Observing seems like an intrusion, because it’s easy to find comedy in zealous awkwardness, easy to smile (safe in one’s composed delicacy and arranged grace—ankles crossed and hair brushed) at the clumsiness of others. The truth is that what went on in the seats of cars, on rec. room couches and summer cabin mattresses—stiff with December ice and warmed with no more than a blanket and a body—those things weren’t meant to be watched.

And yet nobody minded being seen. It was a shock, when I first realized that, the year I turned fourteen and acted in a high school summer theater. The cast held parties every night—rehearsal parties, set-building parties, parties because the play was over and parties to celebrate the parties. I was just about the youngest one there, the most inexperienced, certainly, and looked away, gasping “excuse me” the first time I walked into a room and found a couple kissing horizontally. But turning my head was no help; wherever I looked there was a boy biting a girl’s ear or a girl rubbing a boy’s back while he rubbed hers, from inside her shirt, or two people kissing in a way I’d never seen before—not lovely and romantic, the way movie stars kissed (that’s all changed now too, of course) but what I and my still-uninitiated friends called “wet kissing,” as if they were eating overripe nectarines. And once, in great relief, I saw a vacant couch to sit on—a corner I could look in without blushing—and found myself on top of someone’s body, under a blanket. I learned that summer that no one cared what I saw, as they emerged from under the blankets, puffy-eyed and tousled; no one felt awkward facing me (as I had felt sure they would, now that I knew what they did) after it was all over.