Читать книгу After Surfing Ocean Beach - Mary Soderstrom - Страница 6

He was lying on the pavement, just lying on the pavement. I thought he’d fallen, maybe. He limped, he had since he was a little kid and he had that accident on the cliffs, and I worried about him still. He was thirty-two years old, but I’d always been more uncertain about him than I had about the girls.

That figures, of course. It was just him and me for such a long time. Him and me against the world, whereas Chuck had always been there for the girls. Bless Chuck.

But of course I didn’t even know it was Will when the alarm sounded. I’d been on duty not more than ten, fifteen minutes, so I was still in the staff room, I’d just put down all the bags of Christmas stuff I’d brought and I started going over what had happened during the night with the team head. Sundays are quiet in some ways—you don’t schedule baths and physio as a rule, there are no routine medical or dental appointments to get folks ready for—but you never know what might happen. Visitors come and that can be good and bad. Sometimes they help feed the ones who have trouble eating, and sometimes they blow up at you because their mother’s socks don’t match. You never know, and I’d just as soon not work then. But this was just a couple of weeks before Christmas when we’re always trading around time, so that folks can get the days off they want over the holidays. Chuck and I planned to be away from December 27 to January 16, too, so I was working even more odd shifts than I usually do that time of year.

Will wasn’t supposed to be working. When he finally went back to school after knocking around for a while—he drove a truck and was a motorcycle mechanic for my father, among other things—he signed on at the complex to work Saturdays, Sundays, and a couple of overnight shifts during the week. He started out as a cleaner, but because we were very short-handed then and he was quick and careful, he got slotted into an aide’s job after a few months even though he didn’t have the right training. (I didn’t have anything to do with that, swear to God. I had no say in who got promoted or things like that. And I didn’t even see him much on the job because our work schedules rarely synched.)

But the spring before he’d got his teaching credential and in the fall he’d been hired to teach second grade, so he stayed on the “call-in” list only as a favour. In fact, he’d worked only two times since September, both times when no one else was available and someone had called in sick at the last minute. That day I didn’t even know he was coming in until I saw him on the pavement.

Gus Fraser found him. Gus goes outside every morning to look around and get some fresh air in his motorized chair. He’s the one who hit the alarm button on the desk by the front door, and when the team head and I came pounding down the hall to see what was happening, I thought at first he was the one in trouble. He takes chances sometimes, he had a huge argument with the administrator about his morning visits because what would happen if his chair turned over on one of the paths he likes to take along the top of the canyon?

But he was shouting. “Outside. Outside, there’s somebody in a pool of blood in the parking lot.”

I grabbed the cordless phone unit from the front desk while Doris charged out ahead of me. Should I call 911 now? I remember thinking. We’re not set up to handle big emergencies, see. We provide backup service, we have trained nurses and a couple of doctors on call, but aside from basic first aid we aren’t supposed to do anything that a doctor hasn’t told us to do. I couldn’t imagine anything terrible happening outside, though. There had been nothing unusual when I came in, the place is a long ways from any place where bad guys hang out.

Doris was already kneeling beside the body when I came up behind her. I couldn’t see much, except for long legs in jeans because her back blocked my view. “My God,” I heard her say, and I started to dial for help. Whatever had happened was not good.

But when she heard my voice telling the dispatcher that we needed an ambulance right away, she turned around and yelled at me. “No,” she said. “Go back in the building and send somebody else out.”

“What?” I said once I’d given the information about where the paramedics should come. “Here, let me help,” I added, going over and getting ready to kneel next to her.

“No,” she said. She stood up and almost pushed me off balance. “No, you don’t belong here. Get somebody else to come out.”

When I first started working as a practical nurse I might have moved out of the way without thinking. You do that when you’re young, when you’re inexperienced, when you’re not sure you’ve learned all the stuff you were supposed to. But I’ve been working in hospitals and nursing homes for more than twenty-five years, and I know I know my stuff. “Oh, come on,” I said to Doris. “Don’t hog it.”

“I mean it,” she said. “You don’t belong here.”

It sounded to me like a challenge, an insult to my competence, and it made me mad. Doris and I had worked together for years, she knew I could be counted on.

So I pushed her aside.

To see my son lying in a pool of blood. His eyes were shut, his head was turned a little as if he were looking toward the complex building. I could not tell if he was breathing, but in the seconds I watched I saw the blood spread outward across the front of his shirt.

I have no recollection of what I did then. If there’s any help around, you’re not supposed to try to treat a loved one, not in an injury as serious as this. You’re too involved, your judgment might be off, you’re thinking love and caring and help when you should be running down the possible actions to take and their possible consequences. You need a cool head, a steady hand, a critical eye. Maybe I remembered all that, maybe I just did what Doris told me to do. Whatever, at least they let me ride in the ambulance that took him to the hospital in Vista.

The other time, the time on the cliffs when he was just a little guy, I rode in the ambulance, too, but in the back. It was a very long ride, and he clutched at my hand and I tried to keep out of the way of the medics. I knew something about emergencies, about health care then, and even though he was crying, I was hopeful. He would be all right. We had come this far together, it wouldn’t be fair if anything happened to him, now that I was beginning to get it right.

This time I knew more. I knew enough to realize that if he were a patient coming in from outside, the docs would be ready to tell the family to prepare for the worst.

I grew up along the cliffs, that was part of the reason it seemed so wrong that Will was injured there. We bought the house when I was eight, it was one of the first nice ones built along there, but we probably would never have got it if it hadn’t been for the housing project at the end of Sunset Cliffs Boulevard. Azure Vista was built as military housing during the war, and navy people were still living there when we moved into our house. The last of them moved out over the next couple of years, and the government sold the property to developers.

But the man who built our house had been slightly ahead of it all. It was a really nice house with a picture window and a circle drive and a two-car garage. My mother noticed it right away when she went wandering around. She’d been looking for a good place that we could afford for a long time, but my dad ran a garage and he had very definite ideas about how much we could pay. The places she liked were all “rich people’s” houses, he said, we should have something less pretentious, we couldn’t afford more, we’d be poking our heads up higher than we should. But then she found this house, which the builder could-n’t sell because of the housing project. She watched it from the time construction started through the year a big real estate agency had it listed until a homemade “for sale” sign appeared. Then she had Dad call and make an offer, which couldn’t have been much more than the construction costs.

Like I said, I was eight then, and my brothers were thirteen, fifteen, seventeen, and twenty. I had my own room and the boys shared two bedrooms. There was a patio in back and a big kitchen and a living room with pale carpet that my mother really loved. The only thing wrong with the house was both an advantage and a disadvantage: it sat just across the road from a stretch of cliffs about twenty feet high. To look out the picture window you would think you were right on the water. The cliffs dropped off steeply, with red sandstone terraces spreading out at the bottom. The whole stretch along there is a park now, but then it didn’t belong to anybody and we were free to scramble up and down and play in the tide pools and race the waves when they roared in from the middle of the Pacific.

Nothing ever happened to me and my friends, we were old enough to have a little sense, I guess. But the place is not as safe for little kids, and when Will and I moved back in when I started the LVN program, one of the things I tried to teach him was that he wasn’t supposed to cross the road unless he had a grownup with him. Didn’t take, obviously, but I guess what matters is all’s well that ends well. Aside from the limp, he was okay. He even surfed for a long time.

I say that like surfing was a badge of accomplishment, as if it was some sort of ultimate proof of fitness or skill or well-being or rank. Silly ideas left over from when I was in high school, I suppose; it’s strange how they stick to you. Lord knows I’ve put a lot of that stuff behind me, but there are things that are still there.

Girls didn’t surf back then. No, that’s not completely true. There were a handful who did: all thin, strong, blonde girls who could handle the big boards, which hadn’t yet been replaced by balsa and fibreglass ones. But I wasn’t one of them. Girls like me didn’t surf, partly because it was too expensive and partly because it just wasn’t done. A lot of energy went into avoiding things that weren’t done back then.

Chuck says that high schools are all alike—you have the ins and the outs, and the rich and the poor. He says that at his high school the football and basketball players were the stars. He says he knows all about it. Well, maybe, I say, but he is from eastern Kentucky, from a little town on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He never took me back there, so I can’t say firsthand, but it sounds less like Point Loma than like Alpine or Julian in the Cuyamaca Mountains where Danny and Will and I lived for a while. What I do know is that for a long time the rest of the world looked to the California Coast to find out what was going on, like we were golden kids who cast golden shadows. Precursors, foreshadowers of what would happen elsewhere, as Mrs. Rutherford would have said—maybe did say—in English class.

We went to Point Loma High School, which at that time was full to overflowing with kids born in the years following World War II. There were 547 kids in my graduating class, and about that many in both tenth and eleventh grades too. A pretty big school, housed partly in an old building built back in the 1920s when San Diego started to expand. The original building was torn down a few years ago when everyone got so worried about earthquakes, but back then it sat on the top of the range of hills that formed the Point and protected San Diego Bay. No other building was as tall, and the jet fighters taking off from the naval air station at North Island just skimmed over the top. Teachers had to stop talking when they roared by, and once I remember looking out the windows of Mrs. Rutherford’s third-floor class to see a plane level with us. You could actually see the pilot in the cockpit.

This was not the time of a shooting war, of course. Vietnam was just around the corner, and Korea was in the past. But the Cold War was always in the background. Every once in a while as we were growing up there’d be something in the papers about the targets the Soviets would go for in the event of nuclear war, and we were surrounded by them. North Island, the fleet in the Bay, the airport, the aerospace plants, the research facilities: where we lived and went to school always showed up in those “circles of maximum destruction” that surrounded the targets on the maps the Civil Defense folks put out.

And the town was full of military personnel. When we were thirteen or fourteen, and just beginning to look grown-up, it was kind of fun to have sailors try to pick us up when we were waiting for a ride downtown or something like that. But later we got wary. Not that they were dangerous, they were just outsiders, and we weren’t.

When you’re sixteen or seventeen or eighteen what matters is what is happening then. Kids like me don’t think too far in the future. I expected to have some good times in high school and then go to San Diego City College and then work for a while. I’d get married, I’d be happy. Mrs. Rutherford changed that, though, when she saw that I took physics in my senior year.

Gus Fraser said that he and I were her “equal opportunity” kids. Not equal opportunity as in “civil rights,” because we were white as they come, but as in “encouraging some poor kids.” My mother would have caterpillared if she heard that, because we definitely weren’t poor, we had this nice house and several cars and always more than enough to eat. And Gus’s dad did even better than my dad. He was a skilled tool and die maker at Convair, he was the one all the engineers wanted to get when they were making a prototype for a missile or a jet plane, he was at the top of the wage scale, and he worked lots of overtime.

But Point Loma was a school designed for the children of doctors and lawyers and navy officers and corporate executives and rocket scientists. They all expected their kids to go to college, they wanted advanced placement this and enriched that, and they saw that their kids were signed up for all of them, whereas my folks didn’t see the point. Office practice and business math, maybe a little Spanish because that way you could talk to customers from Tijuana: yes. But doing three years of a foreign language and biology, chemistry, physics, and math beyond geometry wasn’t necessary. For a girl it might not even be desirable.

Gus didn’t care what he took as long as he could go surfing when the surf was up. That’s why he liked classes on the third floor, because you could see out across the low buildings to the beach. On days when the surf was up, he and his friends left at lunchtime. That meant that he missed a lot of labs and got sent to the vice-principal’s office often and just barely got by on the exams.

But he got by, he never flunked flat out, which says a lot about just how smart he was, so I guess it’s not so surprising that Mrs. Rutherford pushed him. She pushed me, too, which means that she must have seen something in me that I didn’t see myself.

So there I was in physics senior year, on a lab team with Gus and R.J. and some girl who was already talking about going back east to school. I felt out of place, but Gus took it all in stride.

“Hey, man, my mom said you’d be back here this year, but I didn’t think we’d have any classes together,” Gus said to R.J. as soon as we were told to go over and check out the equipment. “How’s your mom doing?”

I didn’t know it then, but Gus’s mother and R.J.’s mother had been friends for a long time. That was unusual in a stuck-up place like Point Loma where a doctor’s wife and a skilled mechanic’s wouldn’t know each other ordinarily unless they were on the same PTA committee or something like that. But somehow they’d discovered that they both hated housework and liked to drink martinis on the beach in the afternoon, so there was a long period when R.J.’s mother would paint while Gus’s mother did horoscopes and the boys would play together.

“She’s better,” R.J. said. I remembered hearing something about her having breast cancer, and from the way he looked around quickly at me and the other girl, I guessed he didn’t want to talk about that. It was bad enough to have cancer, but the very term “breast cancer” was embarrassing.

Our eyes met for just a second. His were lovely grey-green ones, which I’d never noticed when we were younger and we went for a while to the same elementary school. Since then he’d grown, he was a little shorter than Gus but a good five, six inches taller than me. His hair was light brown and cut short, and he was tanned like most of us were at the end of the summer, with the hair on his forearms bleached white. Yes, very nice looking, I thought.

The other girl knew him from some country club place she belonged to. “Didn’t I meet you last winter at the Kona Kai Christmas dance?” she asked. “Weren’t you home from that boys’ school up near Ojai?”

His face turned red under his tan. Boys’ school? Boys’ boarding school? Like I said, Point Loma High had pretensions—and over the years it produced some hotshots, like Dennis Connor, the guy who did those America’s Cup races, and Sharon Patrick, who was president of Martha Stewart’s empire. When we were there it was considered, if not the best high school in San Diego, then right there at the top of the list. Even folks who had ambitions for their kids sent them to Point Loma and not to private schools, unless they were strong Catholics who might try to remove their kids from temptation by sending them to a parochial school. Or, and this was much rarer, a family going through some kind of crisis might ship a kid off to a boarding school. But to have either happen meant you were really different from everyone else, and nobody wants to be different at that age.

R.J. sort of nodded at the girl. It was a yes, but it was like he didn’t want to admit it.

Gus rescued him. “And this is Annie Wallace, she’s the one who’s going to see that we all get through this course. Annie takes truly excellent notes.”

I laughed, because he was kidding me. Last year when we’d been in the same chemistry class he’d copied some of my lab reports, but I hadn’t got one of the formulas right so we’d both just barely passed that unit.

The other girl sniffed, like she didn’t believe him. “Do you take good notes, too?” Gus asked, putting his arm around her. “If you do, that’s terrific. I’ll never have to do any work.”

“I, I, I, I ...” she tried to say something, but she couldn’t get anything out. She wasn’t the kind of girl who let anyone copy anything, but I could tell she liked having Gus holding her close to his side. He was cool, he might not go to Kona Kai dances, but in the high school world (which in one sense was all that mattered then) he was legendary. He was the latter-day incarnation of the Great Kahuna, he was the king of Ocean Beach, the prince of Sunset Cliffs.

Later, during those long nights Gus and I talked when I was working the 11:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M. shift, he told me that his mother had insisted he try to help R.J. out. She didn’t ask him to do anything like that very often, so he knew she put a big store on making things easy for R.J. “And besides,” he said all those years later, “he was an okay guy.”

I thought so too. At that point I didn’t do anything more than think it, though, because I was sort of going steady with my brothers’ friend Danny. Besides, the talk about private schools and club dances made me feel uncomfortable.

Then the second week R.J. noticed a book of poetry I had on top of my pile of books. The physics teacher was late, and I had dumped the books on my desk to go looking for a pen I’d left in one of the drawers of the lab station. As I turned back to my desk, I caught R.J. flipping through one of the books, a copy of archie and mehitabal that I’d found in the library. Poems written by a cockroach, with a refrain—toujours gai, kid, toujours gai—that sounded both exciting and exotic, even in those days.

“One of my teachers last year read them in class,” R.J. said, handing the book back to me. “Pretty cool. Hope you don’t mind if I looked.”

“Oh no,” I said, looking around to see if anybody else had noticed. I didn’t have a reputation for reading a lot, and I didn’t particularly want one. “The librarian downtown suggested it, when I told her I liked that record Word Jazz. You know the one I mean, Mrs. Rutherford played it in English the first day of school.”

We both had her for English, although we weren’t in the same class: I’d seen him going in as I was going out.

He nodded, and might have said more, but the physics teacher had suddenly realized that time was passing and started talking about atomic weights. After that sometimes we showed each other what we were reading, but I still went to the movies with Danny.

Until the spring. Until the weekend before Easter vacation when Gus had a party for his eighteenth birthday. His parents were away, off visiting his grandma in Borrego Springs, and he and his brothers had talked them into letting them have a party while they were gone. The place had to be spotless when they got back, there could be no complaints from the neighbours about noise, no underage drinking: you know, the usual list of conditions that parents put down. But Gus and his older brothers knew how to work things their way, so Gus invited everyone he knew. It was going to be, he said, the party of the year.

I said I might go, I even said that Danny, who was twenty-one and legal, might buy some beer. But even when we left my house that night, I wasn’t sure I would ask Danny because he might not fit in.

Things started out all right, though. Danny felt good at first because he’d just been hired at a garage nearer to downtown than the one my father owned, where he’d worked before. This garage specialized in custom vehicles, which Danny said was a lot more challenging than the maintenance work on Mom- and Popmobiles that he’d been doing for my dad. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll go show you where it is before we do anything else.”

Well, why not, I thought. It would make him happy, and that could set the tone for the evening. Not that I planned on bringing up the party necessarily, but I knew Danny wouldn’t be interested at all if he were feeling put upon.

The garage was still open when we got there—or at least a guy was still at work in one of the bays at the back when we pulled in. Danny turned off the ignition and turned to me. “Want to meet the boss?” he said, sounding more eager than he had for a long time. “He does great work.”

I didn’t really. I had on a short-sleeved dress. During the day, it had been plenty warm, but now that the sun had set, the idea of standing around, watching some guy poke at the insides of a car while Danny offered a running commentary, sounded boring and cold. But here we were, and I didn’t know just how to escape.

“Come on,” Danny said, reaching over in front of me to open the car door on my side. “Don’t just sit there.”

“It’s cold,” I said.

He looked at me as if I’d said something incredibly stupid. Then he turned so he could root around in the back seat. “Here,” he said, pulling a beach towel into the front. “Take this.”

He thrust it at me, but I didn’t want to take it. “It’s all greasy,” I said. “It’ll get me filthy.”

“So then don’t take it,” he said. “Come on, let’s go say hello.”

I balled the towel up and dropped in on the floor, but didn’t move to get out. He opened the door on his side. “Suit yourself,” he said finally. “You can just wait here.”

“I think I will,” I called after him before I shut the door on my side. But he didn’t hear me, or he pretended he didn’t hear me. I watched while Danny tapped at the garage window with his keys, and the other guy looked up, then grinned and came over to open the door.

The sky grew steadily darker and more stars appeared. A half-hour passed, at least, then maybe an hour: I couldn’t tell because I didn’t have a watch. Through the windows in the garage door I could see that Danny was holding a light while the other guy was doing something under the hood. Not once did I see Danny glance back outside. He was making me pay, I decided.

I wanted to leave him there, let him come out and find me missing, listen for the explosion when he found he’d been stood up. I had no wheels, though, and taking the bus home was out of the question. They didn’t run this late, and even if they did, it would take two hours and three changes for sure before I got back to Ocean Beach.

Calling one of my brothers or a girlfriend crossed my mind, but at this hour on a Friday night nobody was going to be home, and I had no idea where to track anyone down except at Gus’s party. I might call there, but who would I ask for? And how could I ask anyone to trek across town to pick me up?

Then I saw a taxi stand with a telephone in the parking lot at the liquor store across the street. I got out of the car and, hugging myself against the cold, walked across to the entrance to garage. Through the window I saw that Danny was still holding the light while his boss was wiping something clean.

All right for him, I thought. I fished in my purse for paper, then scrawled two words—“gone home”—on the only thing I found, a cash register receipt. I went back to stick it under the windshield wiper of Danny’s car.

I didn’t realize just how down-at-the-heel the neighbour-hood was until I got to the corner. Two laughing men burst out of the door to the liquor store, each carrying big paper bags full of something, as I waited to cross the street. They piled into a car in the parking lot, and a third man, who was at the wheel, shoved the car into reverse so that it squealed backwards before turning and heading out into the street.

The men were Negroes, and I was suddenly frightened—the only black folks I knew were the handful at Point Loma, and I didn’t have classes with any of them. There was no taxi at the stand, and what if I called and none could come for a while? And how much would it cost? I had a five-dollar bill, but I’d only been in a taxi twice, once when my mother suddenly took ill at the supermarket and once the day my grandfather died, and both times someone else had paid.

But I was in luck because by the time I’d made it to the stand, a cab pulled up, and the driver opened the door for me and drove away even before I’d told him where I wanted to go. He didn’t know the beaches well, though, so he got lost. By the time we made it to Gus’s neighbourhood the meter registered $5.35.

“This is all I have,” I said to the driver, as I handed over the five-dollar bill. “Wait here and I’ll see if I can borrow the rest.”

“What the hell ...” he began. “I’d never have come all the way over here if I’d thought you didn’t have the fare. No,” he said, “you can’t get out. You’ve got to come up with some more.”

By then I was on the sidewalk, searching the folks gathered outside the house for familiar faces. There had to be someone I knew. Not that I wanted to go begging, particularly not when I was coming empty-handed. I’d forgotten that you were supposed to bring something to drink, somehow that had been buried under all my irritation with Danny. But everybody seemed to have something with them: a six-pack of beer, a bottle in a brown paper bag, a bola bag that probably contained wine, a big Thermos clinking with ice cubes in some sort of punch.

And from what I could see, I was the only girl alone. Oh, there was a group of girls—five or six, who I knew by sight, but not by name—standing next to the Frasers’ little front porch, but they quite clearly had come together, as a group, giving each other protection and courage.

Behind me the taxi driver yelled, “Come back here. You owe me.” He was standing beside the cab now, but he leaned in and pressed on the horn. “You owe me.”

The clutter of people up ahead turned around almost as one at the sound of horn.

“She owes you what?” a voice said off to the side. It was loud and male and registered as someone I knew, although I was so flustered I couldn’t put a name to it.

“My fare,” the cabby said. “I picked her up over in Logan Heights and she’s short ...” he hesitated, apparently taking the measure of other person “... two bucks.”

I whirled around to face the driver. “Two bucks? No, less than that, fifty cents maximum, if you count in a tip,” I said, “and giving you a tip after the way you went around Robin Hood’s barn to get here ...”

“So he’s the Sheriff of Nottingham trying a little extortion? What does that make you, Annie? Maid Marion? ”The voice was right next to me, and when I turned I saw that it belonged to R.J. He was fishing in his pockets. “Fifty cents? That’s what you want, my man? Here you go.” And he threw a handful of change at the cabby, who immediately began to scrabble on the ground. “Now get out of here,” R.J. said. “This is a private party.”

The driver, red-faced, stood up. “Listen, kid,” he said. “I ought to teach you a few manners.” But he looked around at the others, standing around, beer bottles in hand, and he thought better of it. He got back in the cab and blasted off down the street toward Naragansett.

“Lucky for him there was nobody coming,” R.J. said.

“Lucky for me you were here,” I said. I was shivering now, teeth chattering, arms bumpy with gooseflesh.

R.J. looked at me for just a beat longer than necessary. “If you say so,” he said finally. Then he noticed how I was shaking. “Come on inside. You’ll freeze out here.”

Inside it was too hot from too many folks packed into the Frasers’ little house. Before we bought our house, we’d lived in one like it: a two-bedroom cottage built before World War II. Gus’s folks had bought their home after the war, when his dad went to work for Convair. Over the years Mr. Fraser added on two more bedrooms and a family room to the back of the house so that the lot was nearly filled. But Mrs. Fraser had found room for oranges and grapefruit overgrown with bougainvillea and cup-of-gold vines. Inside, the house was full of heavy-duty over-stuffed chairs and sofas. Everything was nicked and scraped from collisions between boys and wood.

Only the tiny bedroom off the entry hall was different. That’s where Mrs. Fraser had her horoscope paraphernalia: her charts, her books, her worksheets. She also had a teak desk, and a matching black upholstered office chair was set facing Mr. Fraser’s Lazy Boy. They had taken over the room two years before when Gary, Gus’s oldest brother, moved out and got married. Gus said his parents didn’t cry at Gary’s wedding because they were so glad to claim the room.

It was off-limits for the party. The door didn’t have a lock, but Gus had taped “Entrance Prohibited” signs all over it, and Jeff, the oldest of his brothers still at home, stationed himself by the door for the first hour or so to warn off folks in search of a little quiet. “My mother would rather you slept in her bed than you messed with her stuff,” he said again and again. “I mean, don’t go in their bedroom either, but for God’s sake stay out of their den.”

By the time R.J. led me inside, the living room, kitchen, and the two bedrooms the boys shared were full of folks. Music was blasting from the hi-fi set up near the sliding glass doors, which led to the small deck in back. Folks were dancing out there as well as in the living room. Bottles of various sorts covered the table and counters in the kitchen. Cases already refilling with empties stood along the wall, and cigarette smoke had turned the air grey.

The warmth felt good to me. R.J. told me to wait for him in the hall while he got me something to drink, and I leaned against the wall, getting my bearings. Gus saw me standing there and pushed his way through the mass of people: “Hey, Annie-baby, where’s your friend?”

“Which one?” I asked. “Danny couldn’t make it, and R.J. just headed that way.” I pointed toward the kitchen.

“R.J.? R.J., of course, R.J. But I thought you were coming with your boyfriend.”

“If you mean Danny, he decided not to come,” I said.

“And R.J.’s getting you something?” Gus grinned. “Ah yes, I understand.” He leaned over and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Good, good. Be nice to the poor guy, life’s complicated for him these days.”

R.J. came up then, too late to hear what Gus was saying but in time to see the kiss. “Thought you were spreading yourself around,” he said to Gus. “Not going to get involved with anybody, no playing favourites.”

“Hey, man,” Gus said as he stepped backwards. “She has her own stuff going for her, and ...” He took my hand and raised it to his lips like some guy in an old movie. “I’m just one of her many, many admirers.” Then he left us alone.

We didn’t stay very long at the party. R.J. didn’t have a car—he’d walked to the party, he’d always walked to Gus’s house ever since he was old enough for his mother to trust him to cross the street safely—so he walked me home, the long way around.

The next morning when I woke up I felt good. At first I had no idea why. It was as if my room was full of low-level excitement the way it was full of filtered light. “Suffused” was one word I thought of. “Glowing” was another. For a moment I lay on my back with my hands spread flat on the tops of my thighs under the covers and took it all in through wide-open eyes.

The house was quiet. Not surprising for a Saturday morning. My brothers were either at work or not up yet, and my mother would be at the supermarket. Even though she had plenty of time to shop for groceries during the week, she liked to be one of the first to hit DeFalco’s on Saturdays. The produce was always better then, she said. They kept their best meat for Saturday too.

She would have left things for me to do, but I was in no hurry to do them. I stretched my legs under the sheet and brought my hands up along my belly to my breasts. My nightgown had bunched up as I turned in my sleep so that it was around my waist. I tried to remember what I’d been dreaming about, how I might have moved during my dreams, but I could not. All that remained was the feeling of satisfaction.

Which was related to R.J., I knew. To his seriousness, and his kindness, and his grey-green eyes. To the way he had stood with me on the front steps, leaning toward me and then turning away before he kissed me, as if he thought that he should not attempt anything so quickly.

I found myself running my tongue lightly over my lips. I almost had reached up to kiss him, but I hadn’t, out of fear of ... what? Appearing to be more forward, less virtuous than I was? Probably. There was something about him that made me feel out of my depth.

He would not understand parts of me, I was sure. He would not imagine the sorts of things that happened in my dreams—in my daydreams.

I ran my hand down the front of my body, from just above my right breast across my belly to where my legs met in curly hair and secret places whose names I knew but had never said aloud.

Danny had touched me there, as we sat in his car the week before, parked in the driveway at my house. His hand had worked its way slowly up my leg, his fingers had fiddled with the elastic on my underpants. I had shivered and felt ... I don’t know. Slippery and yearning, I’d say now, but then I didn’t have those words either.

But nothing more than that had happened. Nothing more. I had moved and cried out, and suddenly Danny was sitting up, adjusting his shirt and trousers, mumbling angrily to himself. “Stupid to get involved with somebody’s goody-goody sister,” I heard him say.

He’d kissed me after that, and pressed me close to him as we stood on the front porch before going in my house. But once inside, once in the family room, with my father asleep on the couch in front of the television and my mother playing cards with my oldest brother and two of his friends, there was nothing more.

I had not been sure if I’d been glad of that. I had not worked out what I would do if he tried again: that had been one of the things in the back of my mind as I sat and waited for him at the garage. One of the things that I would not have admitted.

But all that had changed. I knew now.

I knew also that I ought to get up to do the jobs my mother expected me to do on Saturday mornings: vacuuming, laundry. Slowly, I unfolded myself from the bed and went to stand in front of the window, which looked out onto the side yard. The sun had passed the point where it shone in the window, and the banana palm just outside now cast a green shadow.

Beyond, however, the sun dazzled. I heard the sound of water running, splashing on concrete. Someone was washing a car on this fine morning, someone was cleaning things up.

I turned, pulling off my nightgown as I did, reaching to open my drawer. I was putting on my underpants when I heard somebody bang open the front door.

One of my brothers? My mother home early?

Heavy footsteps crossed the living room and started down the hall. Not one of my brothers, because they would have taken off their shoes before stepping on the wall-to-wall carpet in the living room, and my dad avoided the room period, coming in the back and through the other hallway whenever he could. Strange.

It wasn’t until the footsteps turned at the end of the hall and then started toward my room that I even wondered if it might be Danny.

In my bare feet I padded silently over to the door and listened. There was someone outside. Definitely not one of my brothers.

Every one of them would have rattled my doorknob and then barged in. I hated that, I’d been complaining about it since I was nine or so and became aware of the idea that boys shouldn’t see girls in their various stages of undress. But my mother had said to keep my door shut, and that was that. Expecting anything more from men and boys was completely beyond hope.

So, the breathing I heard on the other side of the door, and the heat that seemed to come through it, were not coming from someone in the family. Not from someone who might think he had a right to be disagreeable, to bother me, to invade my territory.

And nobody else but Danny knew which room was mine. I finished pulling on my T-shirt and shorts, and then opened the door a crack.

“Hello,” I said.

His hair was standing on end, and he hadn’t shaved. His eyes were bloodshot. The smell of something sour—sweat, stale beer, confined spaces—blew toward me. His shirt was rumpled, a long drip of motor oil ran down the right leg of his pants, grease covered his hands.

Grease didn’t bother me, grease was something that my father was never able to get out from around his fingernails, something that went with security and a male world that was safe, not threatening. But Danny’s smell, his disarray, his urgency disgusted me.

“You ran out on me,” he said. His voice was hoarse, and when he opened his mouth his breath stank.

I didn’t reply right away. I could feel his edginess just as strongly as I could smell his breath.

“You took off with somebody.”

“I called a cab,” I said. “I was tired of waiting.”

“No, you ran out on me, you went to meet somebody else,” he said, pushing the door open and coming into my room. He looked around quickly, and I imagined what he took in: the windows open and the curtains blowing in the light breeze. My single bed still unmade with the pillow punched into the shape I liked, my nightgown sliding off toward the floor. My desk with my school books, my stack of stuffed animals, the dirty clothes overflowing the closet, waiting for me to do the laundry.

“Why did you leave me?” he asked. He reached for my arm with his right hand and for a second I thought he was going to be rough with me. “Why did you do that?”

“Because I got tired of waiting,” I repeated, trying to be matter-of-fact. “Simple as that. I’d been sitting in the car for more than an hour and you just kept on doing whatever it was you were doing ...”

“But you knew I’d be out in a few minutes,” he said. “You knew that the guy was my boss, you can’t just get up and leave when he’s asking you to help ...”

“You didn’t have to go by,” I said. “You dragged me there, and you said you’d be only a minute, and ...”

He was reaching for my other arm now, standing close to me, raising his voice. I turned, trying to twist out of his grasp. At least one of my brothers was probably there, if I called out he would hear. Or the person washing a car nearby would. There was really nothing to be alarmed about, there was someone nearby.

He seemed to realize that his grip might be frightening. “Look,” he said, “let’s sit down and talk this over. You ran out on me and you went to some surfer party.” He pushed me gently toward my bed. For a second we stood next to it. I could feel him trying to decide if he should push me down.

“If you aren’t interested in me, I don’t see why I shouldn’t go where people are,” I said. I twisted my shoulders again, making my arms move under his grip. He wasn’t being rough with me, he wasn’t even holding me very tight, but I didn’t like it.

His eyes bored into me. “But I am interested in you,” he said. “I love you, for Christ’s sake.” Then he dropped his hands from my arms and sat down heavily on the bed. He put his elbows on his knees so he could cradle his head in his hands, covering his face. “Oh, Annie,” he said, his voice cracking into sobs.

That would have been the time to go to the door and call for my brother, I knew later. No, I knew even then, as I stood listening to him blubber. But I didn’t do anything. I merely waited and listened, and then, as his sobs began to splutter to a stop, I sat down next to him even though he still smelled, even though his dirty clothes were disgusting, even though I wanted to have nothing more to do with him.

“Are you going to be all right?” I asked.I wasn’t touching him. I knew it would be a mistake to even put out my hand to give him Kleenex from the box I kept by the head of my bed. So I sat.

“Yeah,” he said, after a minute. He pulled out a dirty handkerchief, covered with grease too. He blew his nose and then stuffed the handkerchief back into his pocket. He turned toward me and reached up with both his hands to cup my face between them. “I love you,” he said again. “I really do.” Then he leaned forward and kissed me on the lips.

It was a kiss that started out to be just as innocent as the one that R.J. might have given me the night before: dry, lip to lip, nothing enticing. His breath was awful, and I found myself holding my own breath to keep from smelling his. But it was a long kiss, which took me by surprise with only half a lungful of air. After a few seconds I found myself running out of breath, pulling back, opening my mouth to say, “Whoa, let me breathe.”

But his hands held my face next to his, and he slipped his tongue in as soon as my lips parted. I tried to pull air in through my nose, I twisted my head, I brought my hands up to push him away, but he moved closer, tipping me back on the bed so that he was covering me.

What followed was inevitable, I decided afterwards. He was stronger than I was, he was still more than a little drunk, his pride had been hurt. And he loved me after his fashion.

I saw that then, as I saw it later.

Afterwards he was embarrassed and ashamed and afraid I’d tell my brothers. But I had no intention of doing that, because to do so would be to acknowledge that he had a claim on me. As I lay under him, listening to him ask my pardon, waiting for him to let me up, I felt my heart harden. No, I told myself, this is not happening. This does not count. I cannot bear to have it count.

“Get out of here,” I said, when he had finished apologizing. “I don’t want to see you ever again,” I added, sitting up now that he was off me.“I am going to go down the hall to the bathroom, and I am going to take a shower, and when I come back I want you out of here. Otherwise ...”

I left the threat floating in the air. Then I stood up and walked, my legs shaking, to the bathroom. I shut the door and heaved everything I had eaten for the last twenty-four hours into the toilet. I turned on the shower and waited while the water warmed up, looking at myself in the mirror. My mouth tasted like vomit and Danny’s breath, and my skin crawled when I thought of how he had touched me there and there and there.

His footsteps came down the hall, then paused in front of the door. He tapped lightly. “Annie,” he said. “I’m sorry ...” I flushed the toilet and pulled back the shower curtain so I could step in. After that, I let the water run and run and run over me. I did not hear whatever he did then.