That Night (9 page)

I understood: she was bored, friendless, without him. She was speaking to me merely to pass the time, maybe to keep from having to go home.

I watched her extract a single cigarette and a matchbook from her bag. She looked at me cautiously but without a word and then lit up. I watched her draw, her chin raised.

“Are you going steady?” I asked, although I knew.

She said, “Yeah,” smoke pouring from her nostrils, and then lifted her arm to show me Rick’s heavy ID bracelet. She turned her wrist to show me where she’d had a jeweler add an extra catch so it wouldn’t slip over her hand. The inside of her wrist was pale white, almost blue, marked with red and purple veins. She pulled the bracelet around so the nameplate rested there. We both looked at it. The name was engraved in bold straight lines like Roman numerals.

I leaned over my lap to touch it and was surprised to find it wasn’t ice-cold.

“Did he have to ask you?” I said, making plans of my own. “Did you have to wait until he asked you to go steady?”

“He had to ask me,” she said. She turned the bracelet again and then shook her wrist until it fell, just so, over the back of her hand. “But I knew he was going to.” She looked at me from under her bangs. “I knew it the minute I met him.”

Her perfume reminded me of my father’s aftershave. Her eyes were rimmed with smooth black eyeliner that grew, expertly, I thought, thick just over her eyeball and then quickly tapered to a fine, feathery tail that ended about a quarter of an inch beyond the corner of her eye. There was a touch of white powder on her lids.

“How did you know?” I asked.

She held the cigarette between the porch step and her legs and slowly leaned back against the railing. “I just knew,” she said. She raised her other hand to brush the bangs from her eyes. The bracelet slid down her arm.

“But how?” I said again. “Who told you?”

Sheryl shrugged and then pulled her lips over her teeth to smile. “No one told me,” she said. “I just knew it. In fact, I told him.” She looked toward her house again. There were thin short wisps of hair pulled down in front of her ears like sideburns. There was something hard and tense about the set of her jaw. She quickly raised the cigarette. “I told him the very first night we met.”

This was marvelous to me: that she knew, that she told him. And more, that she was here telling me.

“What did he say?” I asked her.

She toyed with the corner of her paperback, flipping the pages. “He didn’t know,” she said. She looked at me. “See, he’d had a lot of girlfriends before me. He didn’t think it was going to be any different. He just kind of said, “Oh yeah?”” She raised her chin, imitating him, then laughed again.

I was still leaning toward her, my Barbie doll all but forgotten. I don’t think I’d ever been this close to Sheryl before—certainly not for this long—and I don’t know which I took in more eagerly, what she said or how she looked. I remember there were a few pimples on her chin, almost buried beneath the thick makeup, a few flecks of pale pink lipstick on her small mouth. Her cigarette smoke curled toward me, and I breathed deeply.

“What we have,” she said, and she may have looked a little sly as she spoke, “is completely different.”

“How come?” I asked.

She thought for a moment and then leaned forward, pulling her books up onto her lap, her tight skirt binding her thighs. I saw the flash of her ankle bracelet under her dark stocking: another gift from Rick, another sign of going steady.

“It’s just different,” she said. She was holding her mouth as if she wanted to grin. “I mean, I’m not like any of those other girls. I’ve been through a lot of things and so I know more.” She seemed to squint at me, perhaps gauging my understanding. “And I’m not afraid of anything,” she added. “I’m really not.”

I nodded. I saw that she had written their initials on the cover of her paperback as well.

“I’m not even afraid of dying,”” she told me, the cigarette at her lips. Her tone was pleasant but self-assured. She blew smoke upward into the air. “They showed us movies of these car accidents in school and it didn’t even bother me. Even Rick got nervous when he saw them, but I said, “So what? Everyone’s going to die.”” She looked at me carefully through the smoke and then sat back again, letting her head touch the railing. She wore a navy-blue scarf around her throat. One end was thrown behind her, the other hung down in front of her bright red shell. Except for a small bruise just above her scarf, what the Meyer twins had taught us to recognize as a love bite, her throat was as white as the inside of her wrist.

“Pretty day,” she said softly, looking up at the sky. I looked, too, ready to follow her anywhere. “Yeah,” I said.

And then, still studying the sky, she told me, “My father died last year.”

I don’t know when the deaths in other people’s lives stop seeming merely inevitable and start becoming a kind of embarrassment. I know that now I would greet such a statement with a quick consolation and a change of subject, but then I simply said, “I know it.”

With her head still back, she turned and once again reached out to touch the doll dresses, the cigarette burning between her fingers. “Before that,” she said with some disgust, “I didn’t know anything. I thought it was stupid that people you really loved could just die. I used to think that it would be better if we were all like squirrels or something so when people died we wouldn’t feel so terrible.”

She dropped her hand and slowly ran her finger along the edge of the step. “I didn’t know anything,” she said.

Then she raised her head and looked at me. Her mouth was low in her face. There were clumps of mascara in her long lashes. “Listen,” she said. “If you knew everybody you loved was just going to end up disappearing, you’d probably say, Why bother, right? You’d probably even stop liking people if you knew it wasn’t going to make any difference, they’re just going to eventually disappear. Right?” She leaned closer. I began to understand what my mother meant when she said that girls who dressed like Sheryl looked tough. There was something tough, even arrogant about her now. “I mean how logical is it,” she went on, “for you to love somebody and then they just die, like you never existed? How stupid would it be to keep loving someone who was dead if you were never going to see them again—what do you love, then, air?”

I shrugged and she suddenly sat back. “No you don’t,” she said impatiently. “You don’t end up loving air.”

She raised her cigarette again, her elbow resting on the binder. “That’s why it wouldn’t matter if Rick got killed or something,” she went on, cool, even nonchalant. “I guess it would be lonely, but it wouldn’t be like I’d never see him again or anything. It would be just like with me and my father. I miss him, but I know I’m going to see him again because I think about him all the time. And you don’t keep loving someone who doesn’t exist anymore. You can’t just stop loving someone because they die. Right?” She suddenly looked at me, demanding a response. “Right?”

“Right,” I said softly. I had no idea what she was talking about. “I guess.”

She glanced down at her books, ran her finger over the inked initials.

“The problem with Rick was nobody loved him enough before me. If he had died, and once he was in a car accident where he could have, he wouldn’t have had anyone who still cared about him. He would have just stopped being, like a squirrel or a cat or something. He would have been forgotten about completely. Maybe not right away, but eventually.” She picked a piece of tobacco from her tongue, lowering her thick lashes as she did, and then flicked her cigarette, dropping ashes onto our bricks. “His mother has mental problems. Sometimes she even forgets about him now, so what difference would it make to her if he died all of a sudden? She’s in her own world. I met her one time.” She shook her head. “And his father has too many problems to ever really think about him. His sisters, too. If he had died before he met me, everybody would have felt bad for a little while and then they would have forgotten about him. Pretty soon it would have been like he’d never been born in the first place. But I wouldn’t forget.”

We sat silently for a few minutes. My backside was growing cold against the bricks, but I didn’t want to go inside.

“Are you getting married?” I asked her.

She shrugged and again looked over her shoulder to her own house before snuffing out her cigarette and tossing it onto our lawn. “I guess so,” she said. She leaned back once more, holding an elbow in each palm. She was completely, amazingly, self-possessed. Completely sure.

Tough.

“Probably we’ll get married,” she said. It was clear the subject was not nearly as interesting to her as their immortality. “Maybe in a couple of years. Not that it would make any difference.” She glanced at me, but I failed to catch her meaning. “None of that matters to us. You know, getting married and having kids and buying a house. None of that means anything to us.”

“How come?” I asked, and she smiled as if she had just proven her point.

“I told you,” she said. “I know things. I’ve been through things. I know all those things that other people think are important come down to nothing. They disappear.”

The air had grown chillier, but it was a spring chill, without the bite of winter. Sheryl suddenly arched her back and reached up to touch the teased crown of her hair. There were a thousand things I wanted to ask her: what movies she and Rick went to, what she said to him when he called her on the phone, when they sat together in his car—how she drew such perfect lines across her eyelids.

The death stuff amazed me, but no more than all the rest. It seemed only a part, a profound, important but no less puzzling part of all I would need to know in order to become a teenager. All that I feared I would somehow fail to learn.

Sheryl lifted the Barbie doll from my lap, adjusted her belt and hair, turned to the doll case to find a pair of little red high heels. I wished she were my sister and I wondered without much hope if she could somehow become my friend. She handed the doll back to me and suggested I wrap a white stole around her bare shoulders.

As I buttoned the tiny fur, I said, “Well, I hope Rick doesn’t die.”

“Everybody’s going to die,” she said quickly, and I thought for certain that I’d completely missed her point. Then she smiled, nodding slightly. “But I know what you mean,” she said.

She gathered her books into her arms. I watched her walk home: the clink of his bracelet, the gold flash from her ankle, the paperback and looseleaf binder marked with their names. There was something sullen about her walk, a kind of challenge. I saw her toss her hair back over her shoulder before she pulled open the front door, armed and ready, it seemed to me, to battle even the Angel of Death.

What Rick thought of all this I can only guess. I tend to imagine he was somewhat confused but nevertheless thrilled by it all. No one before had ever loved him enough. No one else could have saved him as she would save him. He would find it fantastic, no doubt—the first night they met he had laughed and said, “Oh yeah?” He may even have recognized some of her sources: the love songs of the Shirelles and Shangri-las, the auto accident undying love poems printed in odd spaces in her teen magazines, the old-fashioned, heaven-saturated Catholicism of her grandmother. But he was a teenager, a troubled one at that; he would not have been able to resist the heady combination of love and sex and death, even if he could never fully understand it.

Because to understand it, he would have had to see her that morning months before they met, when she had looked up from her desk at school, grateful for the distraction of Mrs. Eason, the principal’s secretary, coming into the room. He would have to know how idly she had watched as the teacher bent to listen to the old woman and then turned to look her way. He said her name softly, although he was a cold, indifferent young man who never met his students’ eyes. He took the exam she’d been working on and said she could finish it when she got back.

The principal at our high school in those days was a chubby, sweet-looking bachelor with an effeminate voice that had aroused no suspicion until years later, when he spoke through a bullhorn trying to quell a student protest. Then his thick lazy drawl, his slight lisp as he said, “Boys

and girls,” had sounded loudly over the crowd of belligerent students, crossed the playing field and the boulevard and reached the bakery and butcher shop and candy store on the other side, where it lit the rumors that eventually cost him his job.

He could not recall ever having seen Sheryl before, but he spoke to her as if they were friends, his hand on her shoulder as he led her into his office, his large white face unable to conceal his own dread of what he had to say.

The mother had requested that Sheryl be told right away. She didn’t want to have to explain it all herself: the heart attack and the car pulled to the side of the road, the police finding him already dead. Sheryl asked, “How can that be true?” facing him as she had faced me, impatient, demanding a response. And then she began to cry.

The principal drove her home in his own car. On the way, he remembered his own father’s death and how just that morning he had thought of the old man and been surprised once again at the clarity with which he recalled his thin bandy legs and his bullet-shaped head and the way he had raised his cupped hand to his bald spot. He glanced at Sheryl’s childish profile. It was, he thought, much harder on the young, but there it was. There was no help for it. The man was dead. The tragedy, even now when she still could not begin to comprehend it, was already part of her history. She would learn to accept it as he had learned to accept so many difficult parts of his own.