First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories (6 page)

“Me,” I said. “Are you busy? Would you like to come out for a little while and talk?”

She drifted closer to the screen door and pressed her nose against it. She looked pale without makeup.

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll have to go put my shoes on. I’m not in a good mood or anything.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “Neither am I. I just want to talk to somebody.”

While I waited for Eleanor to come out, Mattie Seaton appeared, striding along the sidewalk. He was on the track team. “Hey, Mattie,” I called out to him.

“Hi,” he said.

“What’s new?”

“Nothing much,” he said. “You got your trig done?”

“No, not yet.”

“You going with
her?”
he asked, pointing to the house.

“Naw,” I said.

“Well, I got to get my homework done,” he said.

“See you later,” I called after him. I knew where he was going: Nancy Ellis’s house, two blocks down.

“Who was that?” Eleanor asked. She stepped out on the porch. She had combed her hair and put on lipstick.

“Mattie Seaton,” I said.

“He’s pinned to Nancy,” Eleanor said. “He likes her a lot….” She sat down in a white metal chair. I sat on the porch railing, facing her. She fumbled in her pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “You want a cigarette?” she asked.

“No. I’m in training.”

We looked at each other, and then she looked away, and I looked down at my shoes. I sat there liking her more and more.

“How come you’re in a bad mood?” I asked her.

“Me? Oh, I don’t know. How did you know I was in a bad mood?”

“You told me.” I could barely make out her face and the dull color of her hands in the darkness.

“You know, I think I’m not basically a happy person,” Eleanor said suddenly. “I always thought I was…. People expect you to be, especially if you’re a girl.”

“It doesn’t surprise
me,
” I said.

A breeze set all the leaves in motion again. “It’s going to rain,” I said.

Eleanor stood up, smoothing her yellow skirt, and threw her cigarette off the porch; the glowing tip landed on the grass. She realized I was staring at her. She lifted her hand and pressed it against her hair. “You may have noticed I look unusually plain tonight,” she said. She leaned over the porch railing beside me, supporting herself on her hands.

“I was trying to do my geometry,” she said in a low voice. “I couldn’t do it. I felt stupid,” she said. “So I cried. That’s why I look so awful.”

“I think you look all right,” I said. “I think you look fine.” I leaned forward and laid my cheek on her shoulder. Then I sat up quickly, flushing. “I don’t like to hear you being so dissatisfied with yourself,” I mumbled. “You could undermine your self-confidence that way.”

Eleanor straightened and faced me, in the moonlight. “You’re beautiful,” I burst out longingly. “I never noticed before. But you are.”

“Wait,” Eleanor said. Tears gathered in her eyes. “Don’t like me yet. I have to tell you something first. It’s about Joel.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” I said. “I know you’re going with him. I understand.”

“Listen to me!” she said impatiently, stamping her foot. “I’m
not
going with him. He—” She suddenly pressed her hands against her eyes. “Oh, it’s awful!” she cried.

A little shudder of interest passed through me. “O.K.,” I said. “But I don’t care if you don’t tell me.”

“I want to!” she cried. “I’m just a little embarrassed. I’ll be all right in a minute—

“We went out Sunday night…” she began after a few seconds. They had gone to Medart’s, in Clayton, for a hamburger. Joel had talked her into drinking a bottle of beer, and it had made her so drowsy that she had put her head on the back of the seat and closed her eyes. “What kind of car does Joel have?” I asked.

“A Buick,” Eleanor said, surprised at my question.

“I see,” I said. I pictured the dashboard of a Buick, and Joel’s handsome face, and then, daringly, I added Eleanor’s hand, with its bitten fingernails, holding Joel’s hand. I was only half listening, because I felt the preliminary stirrings of an envy so deep it would make me miserable for weeks. I looked up at the sky over my shoulder; clouds had blotted out the moon, and everything had got darker. From the next block, in the sudden stillness, I heard the children shouting, uttering their Babylonian cries as they played kick-the-can. Their voices were growing tired and fretful.

“And then I felt his hand on my—” Eleanor, half-drowned in shadow was showing me, on her breast, where Joel had touched her.

“Is that all?” I said, suddenly smiling. Now I would not have to die of envy. “That’s nothing!”

“I—I slapped his face!” She exclaimed. Her lip trembled. “Oh, I didn’t mean—I sort of wanted—Oh, it’s all so terrible!” she burst out. She ran down the front steps and onto the lawn, and leaned against the trunk of an oak tree. I followed her. The pre-storm stillness filled the sky, the air between the trees, the dark spaces among the shrubbery. “Oh, God!” Eleanor cried. “How I hate everything!”

My heart was pounding, and I didn’t know why. I hadn’t known I could feel like this—that I could pause on the edge of such feeling, which lay stretched like an enormous meadow all in shadow inside me. It seemed to me a miracle that human beings could be so elaborate. “Listen, Eleanor,” I said, “you’re all right! I’ve
always
liked you.” I swallowed and moved closer to her; there were two moist streaks running down her face. I raised my arm and, with the sleeve of my shirt, I wiped away her tears. “I think you’re wonderful! I think you’re really something!”

“You look down on me,” she said. “I know you do. I can tell.”

“How can I, Eleanor. How
can
I?” I cried. “I’m nobody. I’ve been damaged by my heredity.”

“You, too!” she exclaimed happily. “Oh, that’s what’s wrong with me!”

A sudden hiss swept through the air and then the first raindrops struck the street. “Quick!” Eleanor cried, and we ran up on her porch. Two bursts of lightning lit up the dark sky, and the rain streamed down. I held Eleanor’s hand, and we stood watching the rain. “It’s a real thunder-shower,” she said.

“Do you feel bad because we only started being friends tonight? I mean, do you feel you’re on the rebound and settling on the second-best?” I asked. There was a long silence and all around it was the sound of the rain.

“I don’t think so,” Eleanor said at last. “How about you?”

I raised my eyebrows and said, “Oh, no, it doesn’t bother me at all.”

“That’s good,” she said.

We were standing very close to one another. We talked industriously. “I don’t like geometry,” Eleanor said. “I don’t see what use it is. It’s supposed to train your mind, but I don’t believe it….”

I took my glasses off. “Eleanor—” I said. I kissed her, passionately, and then I turned away, pounding my fists on top of each other. “Excuse me,” I whispered hoarsely. That kiss had lasted a long time, and I thought I would die.

Eleanor was watching the long, slanting lines of rain falling just outside the porch, gray in the darkness; she was breathing very rapidly. “You know what?” she said. “I could make you scrambled eggs. I’m a good cook.” I leaned my head against the brick wall of the house and said I’d like some.

In the kitchen, she put on an apron and bustled about, rattling pans and silverware, and talking in spurts. “I think a girl should know how to cook, don’t you?” She let me break the eggs into a bowl—three eggs, which I cracked with a flourish. “Oh, you’re good at it,” she said, and began to beat them with a fork while I sat on the kitchen table and watched her. “Did you know most eggs
aren’t
baby chickens?” she asked me. She passed so close to me on her way to the stove that, because her cheeks were flushed and her eyes bright, I couldn’t help leaning forward and kissing her. She turned pink and hurried to the stove. I sat on the kitchen table, swinging my legs and smiling to myself. Suddenly we heard a noise just outside the back door. I leaped off the table and took up a polite position by the sink. Eleanor froze. But no one opened the door; no one appeared.

“Maybe it was a branch falling,” I said.

Eleanor nodded. Then she made a face and looked down at her hands. “I don’t know why we got so nervous. We aren’t doing anything wrong.”

“It’s the way they look at you,” I said.

“Yes, that’s it,” she said. “You know, I think my parents are ashamed of me. But someday I’ll show them. I’ll do something wonderful, and they’ll be amazed.” She went back to the stove.

“When are your parents coming home?” I asked.

“They went to a double feature. They can’t possibly be out before eleven.”

“They might walk out on it,” I said.

“Oh no!” Eleanor said. “Not if they pay for it…”

We ate our scrambled eggs and washed the dishes, and watched the rain from the dining-room windows without turning the light on. We kissed for a while, and then we both grew restless and uncomfortable. Her lips were swollen, and she went into the kitchen, and I heard her running the water; when she returned, her hair was combed and she had put on fresh lipstick. “I don’t like being in the house,” she said, and led me out on the porch. We stood with our arms around each other. The rain was slackening. “Good-bye, rain,” Eleanor said sadly. It was as if we were watching a curtain slowly being lifted from around the house. The trees gleamed wetly near the street lamps.

When I started home, the rain had stopped. Water dripped on the leaves of the trees. Little plumes of mist hung over the wet macadam of the street. I walked very gently in order not to disturb anything.

I didn’t want to run into anybody, and so I went home the back way, through the alley. At the entrance to the alley there was a tall cast-iron pseudo-Victorian lamppost, with an urn-shaped head and panes of frosted glass; the milky light it shed trickled part way down the alley, illuminating a few curiously still garage fronts and, here and there, the wet leaves of the bushes and vines that bordered the back yards and spilled in such profusion over the fences, hiding the ashpits and making the alley so pretty a place in spring. When I was younger, I had climbed on those ashpits, those brick squares nearly smothered under the intricacies of growing things, and I had searched in the debris for old, broken mirrors, discarded scarves with fringes, bits of torn decorated wrapping paper, and such treasures. But now I drifted down the alley, walking absently on the wet asphalt. I was having a sort of daydream where I was lying with my head on Eleanor’s shoulder—which was bare—and I could hear the slow, even sound of her breathing as I began to fall asleep. I was now in the darkest part of the alley, the very center where no light reached, and in my daydream I turned over and kissed Eleanor’s hands, her throat—and then I broke into a sprint down the alley, slipping and sliding on the puddles and wet places. I came out the other end of the alley and stood underneath the lamppost. I was breathing with difficulty.

Across the street from me, two women stood, one on the sidewalk, the other on the front steps of a house, hugging her arms. “It’s not a bad pain,” the woman on the sidewalk said, “but it persists.”

“My dear, my dear,” said the other. “Don’t take any chances—not at our age…”

And a couple, a boy and a girl, were walking up the street, coming home from the Tivoli Theatre. The girl was slouching in order not to seem taller than the boy, who was very short and who sprang up and down on the balls of his feet as he walked.

I picked a spray of lilac and smelled it, but then I didn’t know what to do with it—I didn’t want to throw it away—and finally I put it in my pants pocket.

I vaulted our back fence and landed in our back yard, frightening a cat, who leaped out of the hedge and ran in zigzags across the dark lawn. It startled me so much I felt weak. I tucked my shirt in carefully and smoothed my hair. Suddenly, I looked down at my fingertips; they were blurred in the darkness and moist from the lilac, and I swept them to my mouth and kissed them.

The kitchen was dark. There was no sound in the house, no sound at all, and a tremor passed through me. I turned the kitchen light on and hurriedly examined myself for marks of what had happened to me. I peered at my shirt, my pants. I rubbed my face with both hands. Then I turned the light off and slipped into the dining room, which was dark, too, and so was the hallway. The porch light was on. I ran up the front stairs and stopped short at the top; there was a light on in my mother’s room. She was sitting up in bed, with pillows at her back, a magazine across her lap, and a pad of paper on the magazine.

“Hello,” I said.

I expected her to bawl me out for being late, but she just looked at me solemnly for a moment, and then she said, “Sonny proposed to your sister.”

Because I hadn’t had a chance to wash my face, I raised one hand and held it over my cheek and chin, to hide whatever traces of lipstick there might be.

She said, “They’re going to be married in June. They went over to the Brusters’ to get the ring. He proposed practically the first thing when he came. They were both so—they were
both
so
happy!”
she said. “They make such a lovely couple…. Oh, if you could have seen them.”

She was in a very emotional state.

I started to back out the door.

“Where are you going?” my mother asked.

“To bed,” I said, surprised. “I’m in training—”

“Oh, you ought to wait up for your sister.”

“I’ll leave her a note,” I said.

I went to my room and took the white lilac out of my pocket and put it on my desk. I wrote, “I heard the news and think it’s swell. Congratulations. Wake me up when you come in.” I stuck the note in the mirror of her dressing table. Then I went back to my room and got undressed. Usually I slept raw, but I decided I’d better wear pajamas if my sister was going to come in and wake me up. I don’t know how much later it was that I heard a noise and sat bolt upright in bed. I had been asleep. My sister was standing in the door of my room. She was wearing a blue dress that had little white buttons all the way down the front and she had white gloves on. “Are you awake?” she whispered.