Next to Love (34 page)

“I remember what I wore on my first date with your father.”

“What?” She doesn’t really care, but she wants to be nice, because her mother is letting her go. And she wants to keep her mother thinking about what she wore a hundred years ago, not what she, Amy, is going to wear Saturday night. She does not want her mother messing around with her and Eddie Montrose. She wants to keep this for herself.

Her mother is still going on about her father. She cannot imagine her father, no matter how many stories her mother tells her. Sometimes she thinks if he were alive, he would love her so much. Sometimes she thinks he would see through her good-girl front to the mean, selfish, sneaky person she really is. And sometimes she thinks he would see through the mean, selfish, sneaky person to the real her.

WHEN THE BELL RINGS
that Saturday night and she opens the door to find Eddie Montrose standing in the vestibule, she is surprised. Is this the same Eddie Montrose she knows from school, the one who stars in the movies she runs in her head before she falls asleep every night? She never noticed his eyebrows before. They run straight across his forehead without a break. She’s not saying he isn’t handsome. She just never noticed them before.

He steps into the front hall. She is relieved that she does not have to drag him in, because her mother would never let her go off with some strange boy she hadn’t met. She introduces him to her mother, and Morris, and Uncle Mac, who is here again this weekend. It’s like running the gauntlet before they can get away.

In the car, she is even more nervous than she was when he drove her home from school. She keeps thinking of what her mother told her. When you get to the movie, don’t jump out of the car. Wait for him to come around and open your door. That shows he respects you. Amy doesn’t think it shows he respects her. She thinks it shows she’s a spaz who can’t open her own door. But when he gets out of the car, she goes on sitting in the passenger seat while he walks around to her side. It takes forever.

In front of the movie, she spends another forever reading the poster, just about memorizing the poster, because she can’t bear to watch him buying the tickets. She feels funny about his spending money on her.

She can barely follow the movie with him sitting beside her. Spencer Tracy is supposed to have one arm, because he lost the other in the war. It’s kind of like Uncle Claude’s fingers, except no one ever mentions Uncle Claude’s fingers, but in the movie everyone keeps making fun of Spencer Tracy’s missing arm. When he beats up one of the villains with what Eddie leans over and says is judo, everyone in the audience cheers, even Eddie, so she cheers too. Then the audience settles down again, and Eddie reaches an arm around her shoulders. She stops breathing. She does not start again until they leave the theater.

After the movie, they go to the Hut, where everyone goes after the movies, unless they go to Caputo’s for pizza, and because he orders coffee and pound cake, she does too, though she usually has an Awful Awful. It’s a huge glass full of ice cream, milk, whipped cream, chocolate or vanilla flavoring, and God knows what else, and if you drink three in a row, which she has never been able to do, you get your name up on a board.

“I don’t get how people can drink those things,” he says as a tray full of them goes by.

“Me neither,” she says, and is glad her name is not up on the board.

When he pulls up in front of the house, she gets ready to wait until he climbs out and comes around the car to open her door. She wouldn’t put it past her mother to be sitting in the window seat in her bedroom, watching. But instead of getting out, he turns toward her and reaches over as if he is going to tug her ponytail, only she has left her hair down tonight. He changes course, takes her scarf in his hand, and pulls it toward him.

“Come over here, squirt.”

She scuttles along the front seat after her scarf.

His breath smells of cigarettes. She tries not to mind. How can she mind? She’s kissing Eddie Montrose. But when she kisses him in her bed before she falls asleep every night, he doesn’t smell of anything. At night in her bed, he doesn’t stick his tongue in her mouth either. She’s heard of that, but she’s never had anyone do it to her. She starts to pull away, but he won’t let her. He takes his tongue out long enough to whisper relax, then sticks it back in. She just hopes she doesn’t choke. After a while, she begins to get used to it. After a while, it doesn’t even seem so bad, as long as she doesn’t think about the cigarette smell. She wonders how long this is supposed to go on. She’s getting kind of bored, but she doesn’t want to hurt his feelings. And she doesn’t want him not to like her.

She opens her eyes to try to get a glimpse of the clock on the dashboard. All she sees is his face, all squinched up against hers, with that line of eyebrows. She closes her eyes again. A minute later, she thinks he has his hand on her chest. She can’t be sure, because she’s wearing a coat. Then he begins pressing, and she’s sure. This isn’t like the scenes she puts herself to sleep with either. In those, he slips his hand inside her bra, smooth as silk. Now he’s mashing around. She doesn’t know why. It would make sense if she were Miss Amison, but you can’t feel an A-cup through a coat and twin sweater set. When he stops kissing her for a minute, she says she has to go in.

He doesn’t say anything. He just gets out of the car. She sits waiting for him to come around to her side. It takes even longer than it did at the movies. He’s silent on the walk up the path. He is angry at her. She never should have said she had to go in. But she does. She has a curfew. She can’t say that. She does not want to remind him she’s only a sophomore.

They reach the door and stand in the glare of the overhead light that burns white and cold as ice. She looks up at him, then away. His lips are swollen and he has pink lipstick smeared on his chin. She wonders if she is supposed to tell him.

“Well, thanks,” she says.

The swollen lips move. “Want to go out next Saturday, squirt?”

He is not angry at her. He likes her.

THEY ARE A COUPLE
. She is Eddie Montrose’s girlfriend. She has a boyfriend who is a senior. No one calls her Mamie Amy or makes fun of her anymore. Every Saturday night, they go to the movies. A couple of times a week, after they finish working at the newspaper, he drives her home from school. Sometimes she would rather walk with Karen, but she does not say that. No girl in her right mind would want to walk with another girl when she could drive home with a boyfriend, a boyfriend who is a senior, and the editor of the paper, and has a car. Only sometimes they don’t drive home. Sometimes they drive out to a road beyond the pond and park. A funny thing begins to happen. The more they do in the car, the less she runs the movies in her head before she goes to sleep. She tries to, because she misses them, but no matter how tight she closes her eyes and imagines, she can’t summon that romantic Eddie.

FEBRUARY 1956

Grace feels like a girl again. But feeling like a girl when you’re a thirty-six-year-old woman with a husband and daughter is dangerous. It is also thrilling.

She lies listening to the sound of Morris’s breathing in the other bed and the hush of the snow-shrouded night beyond the windows. Now and then tire chains clank in the silence.

She cannot sleep. She does not want to sleep when she can keep running the scene in her head.

She was in the kitchen, making another pot of coffee, because Al and Claude and Mac needed coffee before they got behind the wheel to drive home.

“Can you use any help?”

She did not turn when she heard his voice.

“Now you made me lose count.”

“You’re up to six spoons.”

So he had been standing there watching her for a while.

She turned to face him. He was not leaning against the counter with his hands in his pockets or his arms crossed at his chest, pretending ease, as he usually did when he stood watching her. He was not even trying to hide the tension. Or was she projecting her own quickening of senses onto him?

The murmur of Morris telling a joke and Millie’s purr of laughter were faint whispers in the distant living room. The only sound in the kitchen was the soft whir of the electric clock over the stove, the hum of her life running out.

They stood that way for a moment, then, as if the dance had been choreographed, as if they had been rehearsing it for years, they moved together at the same instant. He bent to her, and she lifted her face to him, and somehow the synchronization erased any qualms. This was right. The dizziness in her head told her that, and the tightening in her stomach, and the contraction in her groin. She felt his erection against her. It was not only right, it was inevitable.

She heard the familiar creak of the floorboards between the front hall and dining room. They let go of each other and stepped back.

“I thought you might need help,” Morris said as he came into the kitchen. His big smiling face was innocent as a child’s. His voice did not hold a whisper of suspicion.

A car clanks by in the street below.

They had both had a lot to drink. Everyone always did at these dinners. She wonders if Mac is regretting it. She imagines him lying in his boyhood bed in his parents’ house, wrestling with his conscience, chastising himself for wrecking what he thinks is a marriage.

Two feet away, Morris exhales noisily, like a baby blowing bubbles of saliva.

She turns her head on the pillow. The room is dark. She can barely make out his shape. Except for the sound of his breathing, he could be a heap of blankets or a pile of laundry. His being there, his lying in a separate bed, his oblivious sleep infuriate her. It is all his fault. If he were a real husband, she would not be falling into other men’s arms just because they reach for her. He deserves whatever he gets.

THE NEXT MORNING
as she is making breakfast, she remembers the lists Millie made years ago at the beginning of the war, reasons for following Pete to camp, reasons against it. She cannot put her pros and cons on a legal pad, but she does not have to. They do battle in her head. She is a married woman. She is a nice woman. Think of Amy. What if she is found out? What if she gets pregnant? And a thousand other terrors. The column in favor is shorter. I deserve some happiness.

After breakfast, as she and Morris sit at the table with their last cups of coffee, reading the Sunday paper, she reaches over without thinking and picks up a piece of toast Amy has left on her plate. As she starts to take a bite, she notices the thick slather of butter and jam. She puts the toast back on the plate.

Mac calls that afternoon. Amy answers the phone. “It’s Uncle Mac,” she says. Morris puts down the Sunday paper, gets up out of the big chair in the sunporch, and goes to the phone.

He does not call again on Monday. She is relieved. And she is forlorn. She stands in the front hall and the kitchen and the bedroom staring at the phone, willing it to ring.

Tuesday is Valentine’s Day. St. Hallmark’s Day, Babe calls it, as she does Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. But Babe is a cynic. Mac is not. Surely he will call today. But he has not called by the time Morris gets home that evening.

He stands on the mat at the back door, taking off his galoshes, then crosses the kitchen to her and kisses her on the cheek. The gesture infuriates her. Doesn’t he know what she is contemplating? Can’t he sense it?

When he returns from putting his hat and coat and doctor’s bag in the hall closet, he is carrying a small package wrapped in silver paper stamped with red hearts. He holds it out to her.

She puts down the spatula and takes it from him.

He starts to sing. He rarely sings. He is unlike Charlie in that respect too.

“I can’t give you anything but love, baby.”

He goes on crooning as she unties the ribbon, peels off the paper, and snaps open the small velvet jeweler’s box.

“Diamond bracelets Woolworth’s doesn’t sell, baby.”

The blue-white diamond earrings wink up at her.

Damn it to hell, she thinks.

“Thank you,” she says. “They’re beautiful.”

MARCH 1956

When Mac calls again, she tells him she cannot do this to Morris. He does not argue with her. A week later, she changes her mind and calls him. No, you were right, he tells her. We can’t do this to Morris. A few days later he calls, just to see how she is, he says. She tells him she is fine and gets off the phone. They ride up and down on their consciences as if on a seesaw. But as the winter drags on, her scruples freeze over. She finds herself thinking about Mac when she should be paying attention to her husband, or worrying about her daughter, or listening to what someone is saying. Twice she slips and calls Morris Mac. He does not notice. Maybe that is what persuades her.

The next time Mac calls, the seesaw is in perfect equilibrium. Neither of them mentions Morris. He says he has to see her. She says she wants to see him.

“I think I’ll go into Boston to shop tomorrow,” she tells Morris at dinner. “Nothing fits since I’ve lost weight. And Diamond’s doesn’t have a thing.” She warns herself to stop. She is making too many excuses.

“You’re not going to be in Cambridge, are you?”

She stops with her fork halfway to her mouth. Mac’s hospital is in Boston, but his apartment is in Cambridge.

“I don’t think so. Why?”

“Nothing, really. I thought if you were, you could pick up some shirts for me at J. Squeeze.” It is what he calls J. Press.

She tells him she’ll be happy to.

KING HAS PUT
on his clothes again and is sitting in the consultation room on the other side of the desk from Dr. Flanner.

“EKG is normal,” the doctor says. “Blood pressure is fine. Your heart sounds strong. I’d say you’re in good shape for a man your age. No traces of that earlier incident. You could put on a few pounds. Otherwise, keep doing what you’re doing, and I’ll expect an invitation to your centennial birthday celebration.”

King thinks about it on the way to his car. He went for the checkup because Dorothy kept pleading with him to go. She has lost a son. She fears losing a husband, especially since his heart attack. But he does not give a damn about his EKG, or his blood pressure, or his heart. His clean bill of health is an obscenity. What right does he have to a clean bill of health at sixty-eight when Charlie died at twenty-six?