Adultery & Other Choices (7 page)

‘What?' Bobbie said. ‘What did you say?'

‘Never mind,' Roy said.

‘No: listen. Wait a minute.'

Then she started. All those things she had thought about and learned in silence came out, controlled, lucid, as though she had been saying them for years. At one point she realized Frank was watching her, quiet and rather awed, but a little suspiciously too. She kept talking, though.

‘You fumbled against Vanderbilt,' she said to Roy. ‘Should we call you fumbler for the rest of your life?'

Annie, the drunkest of the four, kept saying: That's
right
, that's
right
. Finally Bobbie said:

‘Anyway, that's what
I
think.'

Frank put his arm around her.

‘That takes care of gossip for tonight,' he said. ‘Anybody want to talk about the game?'

‘We tied 'em till the half,' Roy said. ‘Then we should have gone home.'

‘It wasn't your fault, fumbler,' Annie said, and she was still laughing when the others had stopped and ordered more drinks.

When Frank took Bobbie to the dormitory, they sat in the car, kissing. Then he said:

‘You were sort of worked up tonight.'

‘It happened to a friend of mine in high school. They ruined her. It's hard to believe, that you can ruin somebody with just talking, but they did it.'

He nodded, and moved to kiss her, but she pulled away.

‘But that's not the only reason,' she said.

She shifted on the car seat and looked at his face, a good ruddy face, hair neither long nor short and combed dry, the college cut that would do for business as well; he was a tall strong young man, and because of his size and strength she felt that his gentleness was a protective quality reserved for her alone; but this wasn't true either, for she had never known him to be unkind to anyone and, even tonight, as he drank too much in post-game defeat, he only got quieter and sweeter.

‘I don't have one either,' she said.

At first he did not understand. Then his face drew back and he looked out the windshield.

‘It's not what you think. It's awful, and I'll never forget it but I've never told anyone, no one knows, they all think—'

Then she was crying into his coat, not at all surprised that her tears were real, and he was holding her.

‘I was twelve years old,' she said.

She sat up, dried her cheeks, and looked away from him.

‘It was an uncle, one of those uncles you never see. He was leaving someplace and going someplace else and he stopped off to see us for a couple of days. On the second night he came to my room and when I woke up he was doing it—'

‘Hush,' he said. ‘Hush, baby.'

She did not look at him.

‘I was so scared, so awfully
scared
. So I didn't tell. Next morning I stayed in bed till he was gone. And I felt so rotten. Sometimes I still do, but not the way I did then. He's never come back to see us, but once in a while they mention him and I feel sick all over again, and I think about telling them but it's too late now, even if they did something to him it's too late, I can never get it back—'

For a long time that night Frank Mixon held his soiled girl in his arms, and, to Bobbie, those arms seemed quite strong, quite capable. She knew that she would marry him.

Less than a month later she was home for Christmas, untouched, changed. She spent New Year's at Frank's house in New Orleans. In the cold dusk after the Sugar Bowl game they walked back to his house to get the car and go to a party. Holding his arm, she watched a trolley go by, looked through car windows at attractive people leaving the stadium, breathed the smell of exhaust which was somehow pleasing, and the damp winter air, and another smell as of something old, as though from the old lives of the houses they passed. She knew that if she lived in New Orleans only a few months, Port Arthur would slide away into the Gulf. Climbing a gentle slope to his house, she was very tired, out of breath. The house was dark. Frank turned on a light and asked if she wanted a drink.

‘God, no,' she said. ‘I'd like to lie down for a few minutes.'

‘Why don't you? I'll make some coffee.'

She climbed the stairs, turned on the hall light, and went to the guest room. She took off her shoes, lay clothed on the bed, and was asleep. His voice woke her: he stood at the bed, blocking the light from the hall. She propped on an elbow to drink the coffee, and asked him how long she had been asleep.

‘About an hour.'

‘What did you do?'

‘Watched some of the Rose Bowl.'

‘That was sweet. I'll hurry and get freshened up so we won't be too late.'

But when she set the empty cup on the bedside table he kissed her; then he was lying on top of her.

‘Your folks—'

‘They're at a party.'

She was yielding very slowly, holding him off tenderly then murmuring when his hand slipped into her blouse, stayed there, then withdrew to work on the buttons. She delayed, gave in, then stalled so that it took a long while for him to take off the blouse and brassiere. Finally they were naked, under the covers, and her hands on his body were shy. Then she spoke his name. With his first penetration she stiffened and he said It's all right, sweet darling Bobbie, it's all right now—and she eased forward, wanting to enfold him with her legs but she kept them outstretched, knees bent, and gave only tentative motion to her hips. When he was finished she held him there, his lips at her ear; she moved slowly as he whispered; then whimpering, shuddering, and concealing, she came.

‘Will you?' he said. ‘Will you marry me this June?'

‘Oh
yes
,' she said, and squeezed his ribs. ‘Yes I will. This is my first time and that other never happened, not ever, it's all over now—Oh I'm so
happy
, Frank, I'm so
happy
—'

The Fat Girl

H
ER NAME
was Louise. Once when she was sixteen a boy kissed her at a barbecue; he was drunk and he jammed his tongue into her mouth and ran his hands up and down her hips. Her father kissed her often. He was thin and kind and she could see in his eyes when he looked at her the lights of love and pity.

It started when Louise was nine. You must start watching what you eat, her mother would say. I can see you have my metabolism. Louise also had her mother's pale blonde hair. Her mother was slim and pretty, carried herself erectly, and ate very little. The two of them would eat bare lunches, while her older brother ate sandwiches and potato chips, and then her mother would sit smoking while Louise eyed the bread box, the pantry, the refrigerator. Wasn't that good, her mother would say. In five years you'll be in high school and if you're fat the boys won't like you; they won't ask you out. Boys were as far away as five years, and she would go to her room and wait for nearly an hour until she knew her mother was no longer thinking of her, then she would creep into the kitchen and, listening to her mother talking on the phone, or her footsteps upstairs, she would open the bread box, the pantry, the jar of peanut butter. She would put the sandwich under her shirt and go outside or to the bathroom to eat it.

Her father was a lawyer and made a lot of money and came home looking pale and happy. Martinis put color back in his face, and at dinner he talked to his wife and two children. Oh give her a potato, he would say to Louise's mother. She's a growing girl. Her mother's voice then became tense: If she has a potato she shouldn't have dessert. She should have both, her father would say, and he would reach over and touch Louise's cheek or hand or arm.

In high school she had two girl friends and at night and on week-ends they rode in a car or went to movies. In movies she was fascinated by fat actresses. She wondered why they were fat. She knew why she was fat: she was fat because she was Louise. Because God had made her that way. Because she wasn't like her friends Joan and Marjorie, who drank milk shakes after school and were all bones and tight skin. But what about those actresses, with their talents, with their broad and profound faces? Did they eat as heedlessly as Bishop Humphries and his wife who sometimes came to dinner and, as Louise's mother said, gorged between amenities? Or did they try to lose weight, did they go about hungry and angry and thinking of food? She thought of them eating lean meats and salads with friends, and then going home and building strange large sandwiches with French bread. But mostly she believed they did not go through these failures; they were fat because they chose to be. And she was certain of something else too: she could see it in their faces: they did not eat secretly. Which she did: her creeping to the kitchen when she was nine became, in high school, a ritual of deceit and pleasure. She was a furtive eater of sweets. Even her two friends did not know her secret.

Joan was thin, gangling, and flat-chested; she was attractive enough and all she needed was someone to take a second look at her face, but the school was large and there were pretty girls in every classroom and walking all the corridors, so no one ever needed to take a second look at Joan. Marjorie was thin too, an intense, heavy-smoking girl with brittle laughter. She was very intelligent, and with boys she was shy because she knew she made them uncomfortable, and because she was smarter than they were and so could not understand or could not believe the levels they lived on. She was to have a nervous breakdown before earning her PhD. in philosophy at the University of California, where she met and married a physicist and discovered within herself an untrammelled passion: she made love with her husband on the couch, the carpet, in the bathtub, and on the washing machine. By that time much had happened to her and she never thought of Louise. Joan would finally stop growing and begin moving with grace and confidence. In college she would have two lovers and then several more during the six years she spent in Boston before marrying a middleaged editor who had two sons in their early teens, who drank too much, who was tenderly, boyishly grateful for her love, and whose wife had been killed while rock-climbing in New Hampshire with her lover. She would not think of Louise either, except in an earlier time, when lovers were still new to her and she was ecstatically surprised each time one of them loved her and, sometimes at night, lying in a man's arms, she would tell how in high school no one dated her, she had been thin and plain (she would still believe that: that she had been plain; it had never been true) and so had been forced into the week-end and night-time company of a neurotic smart girl and a shy fat girl. She would say this with self-pity exaggerated by Scotch and her need to be more deeply loved by the man who held her.

She never eats, Joan and Marjorie said of Louise. They ate lunch with her at school, watched her refusing potatoes, ravioli, fried fish. Sometimes she got through the cafeteria line with only a salad. That is how they would remember her: a girl whose hapless body was destined to be fat. No one saw the sandwiches she made and took to her room when she came home from school. No one saw the store of Milky Ways, Butterfingers, Almond Joys, and Hersheys far back on her closet shelf, behind the stuffed animals of her childhood. She was not a hypocrite. When she was out of the house she truly believed she was dieting; she forgot about the candy, as a man speaking into his office dictaphone may forget the lewd photographs hidden in an old shoe in his closet. At other times, away from home, she thought of the waiting candy with near lust. One night driving home from a movie, Marjorie said: ‘You're lucky you don't smoke; it's in
cred
ible what I go through to hide it from my parents.' Louise turned to her a smile which was elusive and mysterious; she yearned to be home in bed, eating chocolate in the dark. She did not need to smoke; she already had a vice that was insular and destructive.

S
HE BROUGHT
it with her to college. She thought she would leave it behind. A move from one place to another, a new room without the haunted closet shelf, would do for her what she could not do for herself. She packed her large dresses and went. For two weeks she was busy with registration, with shyness, with classes; then she began to feel at home. Her room was no longer like a motel. Its walls had stopped watching her, she felt they were her friends, and she gave them her secret. Away from her mother, she did not have to be as elaborate; she kept the candy in her drawer now.

The school was in Massachusetts, a girls' school. When she chose it, when she and her father and mother talked about it in the evenings, everyone so carefully avoided the word boys that sometimes the conversations seemed to be about nothing but boys. There are no boys there, the neuter words said; you will not have to contend with that. In her father's eyes were pity and encouragement; in her mother's was disappointment, and her voice was crisp. They spoke of courses, of small classes where Louise would get more attention. She imagined herself in those small classes; she saw herself as a teacher would see her, as the other girls would; she would get no attention.

The girls at the school were from wealthy families, but most of them wore the uniform of another class: blue jeans and work shirts, and many wore overalls. Louise bought some overalls, washed them until the dark blue faded, and wore them to classes. In the cafeteria she ate as she had in high school, not to lose weight nor even to sustain her lie, but because eating lightly in public had become as habitual as good manners. Everyone had to take gym, and in the locker room with the other girls, and wearing shorts on the volleyball and badminton courts, she hated her body. She liked her body most when she was unaware of it: in bed at night, as sleep gently took her out of her day, out of herself. And she liked parts of her body. She liked her brown eyes and sometimes looked at them in the mirror: they were not shallow eyes, she thought; they were indeed windows of a tender soul, a good heart. She liked her lips and nose, and her chin, finely shaped between her wide and sagging cheeks. Most of all she liked her long pale blonde hair, she liked washing and drying it and lying naked on her bed, smelling of shampoo, and feeling the soft hair at her neck and shoulders and back.