Nikki (2 page)

“You mean you take to me, too?” The soft look of approval and affection on Dolores’s face made Nikki fairly giddy. “Oh, I’d just love having a lovely friend like you. Let’s go over to The Holy Cow and have shakes and burgers … boy, am I famished! And the good way I feel about us, Taffy Head, is that we’re so different in personality … and yet somehow so alike, deep down … that we’ll make a swell team—just swell!”

“I know we will … Storm Front. And what I said about your making a career out of self-dramatizing, I didn’t mean that. You speak out because you believe in things, and you’re terribly intelligent, and you’ve got real character. I’d just give anything to be like you!”

A half hour later in a booth in the ‘burger joint Nikki was saying enthusiastically: “Do you suppose you could spend part of your Christmas vacation down home with me?”

“Maybe. If you’d come out to Ohio for a part of your spring vacation.”

“Well, that’s a deal! Oh, you’ll love Virginia. And my parents will …” there was a sudden plunge down from her high-happy mood. “… my parents will just love
you
.” Nikki wasn’t aware of the tone of her voice or her facial expression until she felt Dolores reach across and squeeze her hand. She felt a quick little run of pleasure at the touch, then withdrew her hand and said edgily: “Let’s not get girly-girly.”

There was a melting look of concern on Dolores’s face. “You looked so
sad
, Nikki … and you emphasized that
‘you,’
as if … as if your parents might love
me
but not you. You don’t really feel that they don’t love you … do you, dear?”

Nikki shrugged irritably. “I just meant that … oh, forget it. I want some pie; what kind do they have?”

“Tell me, Nikki!”

“Well,” she began fumblingly. “I was their darling, their pride and joy. Soft and pretty and sweet. Then I grew up … not like you, but nasty and bitchy and clashy … All I ever give them is pain … and they used to be so happy with me and so proud, and …” she bit her lip, frowned and turned her face and got up out of the booth. “Be right back,” she called, heading for the rest room.

All that had been a long time ago, Nikki reminded herself. She paused in her dressing and stared dumbly out the window, her throat aching. She’d cried there in the rest room that night, and when she’d come out Dolores had had the good judgment to say nothing about it, but she’d understood, and there had been the priceless feel of her sympathy.

They had become roommates at the end of the quarter that first year and remained together not only throughout college but during many vacations.

When Dolores was her houseguest, Nikki herself was calmer, and, as Nikki had known, her parents found Dolores’s sweetly passive nature charming. Nikki’s mother had seemed to come alive again, as if her lost baby had been returned. Her father, with a dry, private wit calculated to enrage Nikki, had gone to work on the romantic Taffy Head, assuming an exaggeratedly gallant Southern gentleman air smelling of crinoline, magnolias and duels at dawn.

A tall, handsome man with Mephistophelean eyebrows and a certain raffish air, he’d always had the power to turn women into silly geese, and even after booze and age had begun to take their toll there was an excitement about him. Dolores had gotten a powerful crush on him.

Nikki knew her father had had no real interest in seducing her friend, that his whole show in fact had been an attempt to goad Nikki into starting a fight with him. More than one night she’d lain awake resisting the powerful temptation to yield to that wish of his, that dark, immensely stimulating and frightening desire for clash and battle between them. But she’d pretended not even to know what was going on, and had gone back to college feeling strong but raw with tension.

True higher education was not in the gracious tradition of Duquesne women, although they often attended ladylike social-club colleges, and for years Nikki had fought relentlessly and sometimes cruelly for the chance to go to the University. Her parents had wanted at least to take her there, but she had insisted on going alone at the start of her freshman year.

As she had feared, the final good-bye was painful. Her parents stood on the platform gazing up at her. Her father looked wilted and mournful in the heat and in need of a drink, while her mother, her small plump body uncomfortably girdled, looked simply mournful. Nikki, in a crisp little linen suit and wearing her mother’s childish choice of a hat, a tiny lavender bonnet-like fluff set far back on the glowing red crown of her slender head, presented them with as nice a picture of herself as she could.

She tilted her head slightly to one side in the young winsome way they cherished, and smiled very softly and kept her eyes enormously wide and shining on them, as if to say that in spite of everything, in spite of everything, she loved them. Then the train was moving and she babied her lips out sweetly, saying the silent words, sensing acutely how young and frail she must seem to them, although she never knew how young and frail she actually looked.

Her father rallied and gave her one of those irresistible grins and winks, and waved. Then they were gone from sight and Nikki sat rigidly, staring straight ahead, thinking she was now free to take off that silly-adorable hat, but not taking it off.

For almost two days Nikki was dutifully awed by the splendor of her new world. She properly appreciated greens, flower-bordered walks, groves, gardens, fountains and trees, trees, trees, but she could not avoid observing aloud, while on a conducted campus tour, that she found a tree interesting only when someone was hanging from it.

When a tour-mate, a pedantic young man from Nebraska, deplored the scramble of architectural patterns, she found herself agreeing that the original Greek classic motif should have been maintained. But after thinking it over, she observed that maintaining all those useless symbols from dead religions was ridiculous ancestor worship of somebody else’s ancestors.

She was there to study and had hoped to find a community of scholars, but the room she was assigned was in a dorm filled with gabby, giggly, silly young girls who thought of the place as a circus or a matrimonial bureau.

Alumnae she had known as a little girl had written to their sororities about her, and she visited five sororities during rush week. She went to the affairs as a student of life, with no intention of pledging, considering most of the sisters bubbly people who had no business in a serious environment. Yet, to her annoyance, she found that however inconspicuous she tried to make herself, whatever corner or sideline she chose tended to become a center of attention. She tried to be passive and uninteresting, wearing tepid little smiles and imagining that her observing eyes were blank.

But her grace and carriage and the exquisiteness of her delicate face caught attention, and the unconcealible glowing aliveness of those green eyes had a sort of eager young expectancy about them which challenged others to meet that expectancy, to come up with their wit, their charm, their wisdom or whatever might meet her approval. And she could not help appreciating and responding. She knew she had to stay clear of social involvements or betray her purpose, which at that time was vague and vast, simply a chartless following of her instinct to learn and grow.

For a few weeks she went to classes, ate, slept, studied, studied, studied, coming finally to the bleak realization that she needed relaxation. She got on the swimming and diving team only to keep herself in better shape for mental effort, never dreaming at first that her natural abilities in sports of every kind would crowd out her real purpose.

She had no friends, scarcely even an acquaintance, till Dolores.

Their room-and-a-half was on the third floor of the old ivy-covered Independent Union building, featured south-and east-facing windows from which they could see most of the central campus, and was within walking distance of their classes. Nikki’s taste for uncluttered lines was outraged, whenever she stopped to notice, by Dolores’s passion for pennants and frilly curtains and window boxes and souvenirs from everywhere she’d ever been.

Still, Dolores was good for her, not only keeping her out of the more pointless campus political wrangles, but smoothing out her erratic study pattern, which tended toward fanatical stretches of voracious reading followed by periods when she never opened a book. Though she often called Dolores “smug,” “drone,” “sentimentalist,” she valued and respected her, and she was upset when she heard someone refer to the Taffy Head as nothing but her shadow.

That evening, while they were studying at opposite ends of the window seat, Nikki said, without looking up from the book on her knees, “I can’t help trying to boss people. I wish you’d quit letting me.”

Dolores hadn’t answered, and, sensing something, Nikki had glanced over at her. Dolores’s eyes were down and her underlip was out a mile. Dolores had slicked her blond hair back and, without the soft curtain around her cheeks, her round sweet face looked doubly vulnerable. Nikki scrambled onto her hands and knees, crawled along the seat, grinned and tickled her under the chin.

“I didn’t mean anything, Taffy Head.”

“Yes, you did,” Dolores said in a hurt little voice. “You think I’m weak and characterless and contemptible.”

“Oh, nonsense! The only thing bad about being feminine and submissive is letting people run over you too much … the way
I’d
do if you let me. All you need is just a little more confidence, and I’ve got plenty of
that
to spare. Here, sit forward a little and turn your head.”

Dolores complied like a lamb, resting her face against Nikki’s shoulder while Nikki deftly unpinned her hair, fluffed it back down around her cheeks. In turning, Dolores’s face brushed against Nikki’s breast and for a tight, breathless moment Nikki thought Dolores would put her arms around her and press her face to Nikki’s taut, shivering breasts.

The moment was over immediately. Dolores got off the window seat and, slipping her bare feet into furry slippers, started for the bathroom to comb out her hair. Nikki gnawed at her underlip. Then she blinked, frowned, and snapped her fingers.

“Oh, I forgot; you’ve got a date for dinner tomorrow night at the University Heights Hotel.”

“I can’t afford it, and,” Dolores half-turned, looked at Nikki, and said staunchly, “I’m not accepting any more treats till my allowance comes through and I can repay you.” She looked so determinedly characterful that Nikki broke out in giggles.

“Well, I can’t and I won’t,” Dolores said firmly.

Nikki came off the window seat, dancing with joy, and hugged her. “Your stern character’s not an issue this time. It’s a date. With men. M … E … N. We’ve got a double date. I said we wouldn’t go any place crumby.”

“But I thought you didn’t want any romance. I thought …”

“I know, I know, but this beast has been coming in after football practice and watching the girls’ swimming team, and you can guess who he couldn’t keep his eyes off. O-o-o-h, the way he looks at me just simply scares the hell out of me.”

“Who is he? Is he nice?”

“Hold on. No, he’s not what anybody’d call ‘nice’. Far from it, thank God. He’s a brute, a pure BRUTE. Whe-e-e!”

“Who?”

“Fred Wyzowski, the halfback. He thinks he’s going to make All-American. He wants to pin me. He wants me on the platform with him at the big rally next weekend. Me—a freshie, and an independent. If I let him pin me they’ll have to repaint sorority row
green
, the sisters are going to be so jealous. Your date’s Ray Powell—you know, that little guy Fred buddies with. Ray’s a quiet, nice kid, so you don’t have to be scared.”

“For me I’m not,” Dolores cried. “Oh, Nikki! I know what a feather in your cap Fred would be for you, and I know how you’d enjoy sitting up there on the speaker’s platform, and I know you’re so cocky you think you can handle everything.”

“And I can,” she said, grinning, tossing her head lightly from side to side. “I can.” She began to walk struttily around the room.

“But he’s a … a
Neanderthal
.”

And indeed he was.

He was massive, six feet high, a foot thick, a man-and-a-half wide. He had short bristly blond hair, a bleakly heavy face, a blocky body, the square hips being nearly as wide as his chest, the supporting thighs as gracefully powerful as a Percheron stallion’s. When roused, either pleasantly or angrily, he jutted his head forward and not only looked, but was, menacing.

Dolores liked believing that Nikki’s only motive in dating him was to get into the spotlight. But it was his very crudity, the somehow constantly threatening feel of him, that gripped her; if she’d felt perfectly safe with him she wouldn’t have been interested.

He came from a large family in a tough, big-city tenement district and his ambitions were, first, to make All-American so he would get a high-school coaching job in some small, quiet midwestern town; and, second, to sleep with all the “classy” girls he could—beginning with Nikki.

For three afternoons during swim team practice she had seen him behind the glassed-in spectators’ section, his gaze moving steadily with her wherever she was. On the third day, when she came hurrying out of the showers fixing her mackinaw hood over her damp hair, she wasn’t too startled to find him looming mountainously in the narrow passage. Nonetheless, her pace slowed warily and her heart quickened. Standing there bareheaded in his thick maroon varsity sweater, he looked shatteringly virile. Although he was making an effort to smile disarmingly, she was breathlessly aware that he could literally crush her.

Nearing him, she kept her chin up and her green eyes steady, but her voice sounded meek. “I’m in a hurry.”

“I guess you know me.”

She nodded, cleared her throat. “Yes. Truck Wyzowski.”

He scowled. “Fred. Not Truck. Fred.”

“Fred.”

He took a step closer to her and she went back on her heels, caught her breath, then stood her ground, and repeated, “Fred. It’s been nice.”

“Don’t be scared of me. I guess you seen I been watching you. You’re dainty. You got cute toes. And a cute fanny,” he added, and slid his hand down and around and patted her bottom.