Ice-Cream Headache (31 page)

Tom didn’t answer for a moment. He had been her hero all her life. Obviously for his benefit, but as if she were alone in the room, Emma stretched herself luxuriously, seductively in her shorts, raised her arms up over her head, yawned prettily. For her age she had nice breasts, fine long legs below a flat belly and a noticeable mound. Tom had been born in 1919, nine months almost to the day after his father’s return from The Great War, and Emma a year after that. That made her fifteen and a half. More. Fifteen and ten months. Practically sixteen. Tom continued to stare at her from the doorway. She continued to stretch out her body, teasing him.

All his mother’s precious furniture, her precious proofs that she had not always lived like this, were crowded into this one small livingroom. Back in the other house they had had two livingrooms, a Main Parlor and then an Everyday Parlor they actually used, and now almost the entire furnishings of both rooms were crowded into this one room smaller than either. Beside him at the doorway stood a woven wicker floorlamp which had a huge umbrella-like shade of faded, discolored pink silk which had been red with three-inch, faded pink fringe dangling around its circumference, one of the few items she had managed to acquire from the grandfather’s mansion and she loved it. Tom hated it. Still looking at his sister, he reached out and combed his fingers through the hated fringe, and six or eight faded fringe strings came away in his hand or fell to the floor. This fringe had always fascinated him as a little boy with the fragile, half-rotting way it came off to the touch, and he had gotten more than one whipping when his mother had caught him standing by it in complete and fascinated absorption, touching it to watch the fringe fall. This time, however, he did it totally cynically, and grinned.

His sister Emma tittered. “You’ll get caught.”

“Nobody’s ever going to lick me again in this house,” Tom said. Just the same he bent and picked up the two or three telltale fringe strings which had fallen to the floor and pocketed them.

“I said you’re late getting home,” Emma said from the couch.

“I meant to get home late,” he said gruffly. “Is our date all fixed up for this afternoon?”

“Yes. I think it is,” Emma said. She put her arms down at her sides and looked at him in a totally different way. “I talked to her about it yesterday.”

“How did Joan feel about it? What did she say?”

“She was—excited,” his sister said. “She wants to do it.” Her voice had gotten heated, and almost as choked-up sounding as his own, and her eyes had a deep almost red color in the dim light. But then she looked at him a long moment and then sat up nervously on the couch. “But Tom really I don’t think—”

“Never mind,” Tom said sharply. “I told you I’d tell and I mean it. You’ll do it or I’ll tell. Anyway,” more softly, “you know you want to do it.”

“Yes, I want to,” Emma said in a small breathy voice. A hush fell in the room. She stretched out on the couch again.

“Okay. Hadn’t you better call her up on the phone and check and make sure?”

“I’ll be having luncheon with her down there at her house anyway today,” Emma said.

“What’s the point?” Luncheon, Tom thought. Haw!

“Anyway, she wants to do it. She said so. And she said she’d be there. And I’ll be with her all afternoon. And we’ll be right next door.” Joan’s house was right across the street from their own old house which they had lost and whose backyard connected with the backyard of the grandfather’s mansion. She had been their childhood neighbor all their lives until they had had to move.

“Okay. Then I’m going upstairs. I’ll meet you both there, in the house, at three o’clock.” He straightened in the doorway.

“But why did you think to pick on grandfather’s old empty house?” Emma said.

“Do you know any better place for it?” Tom said thinly. “I mean—there’s probably no place else in the whole town that’s as safe, is there?”

“I guess not,” she said in a hushed breathy voice. Upstairs in his room he locked the door. A dull heated excitement in him made it nearly impossible for him to think. He went to the bookcase and got down the library copy of
Sanctuary,
intending to reread the part where that guy used the corncob on that girl Temple, but he found he could not concentrate enough to read. He put the book back and lay down on the bed and clasped his hands behind his head.

It had all started a week ago, exactly one week ago, when he returned from CMTC camp at the Army fort Fort Harrison in Indianapolis. He had brought home with him a brand-new pornography collection.

There had been no chance that his father would spring with the money to send him—or Emma—to summer camp this year, just as he had not done last year either, or any of the four years before that. So Tom had signed himself up with the Civilian Military Training Corps, taken the physical exam and gone to Indianapolis at government expense. It was the first time he had been away from home on his own and he had learned a lot, mostly from the older boys in CMTC, who were all quite happy to break him in to life in Indianapolis. One of the first things he learned was that downtown in the low dive section where the whores were were certain shops, usually disguised as antique shops, which specialized in selling pornography under the counter. This pornography was not like the badly smudged photos and comic-strip books you could buy at the shoeshine shop in his hometown. This pornography was real modern-day glossy photographs, of real live people, well composed and well focused. You could see everything, and the people were doing just about everything. Since he did not go to the whores himself (he had never been with a woman yet and anyway he was afraid of catching a disease) he had spent every dollar he had, and every dollar he could scrape together or get his father to send him, on the pornography.

It was Emma who had found it. How, he didn’t know. She had come into his room and lain on his bed while he was unpacking, but that had not bothered him. The stuff was all in a plain brown paper envelope, and he had put it quietly into his handkerchief drawer to wait until he was alone to hide it. He had already picked out his hiding spot even before he got home. In this rented house the never-used trapdoor to the attic, papered over the same color as the ceiling, was in his room; by pushing that up he could slip the brown paper envelope up onto a couple of rafters. This he had done, after Emma left. Two days later when he went to look for them again, three of his best pictures were missing. Furious, he had scoured her room and found them. And that was how it all had started. She had put them down among her lingerie in her underwear drawer, a stupid place to put them.

When he accosted her, she confessed and then she started to cry. She herself did not really know how she had known, either. Something about the way his back looked as he so quietly put the envelope in the drawer had told her, given her a hunch, that whatever it was it was something sexy, something dirty. Later when she looked and found the envelope gone, she had gone automatically to the little attic trapdoor as the hiding place.

It had never occurred to Tom that girls might have dirty thoughts, sexual thoughts, too, the way boys did. Girls to him had always been objects of desire, basically anti-sexual creatures, and therefore unattainable objects of desire, after which he chased eternally and never reached. Almost all the boys he knew played with themselves, and quite openly, and sometimes even in groups. It was understood that it was dirty and therefore fun, that if parents or grownups caught you, you would be given a whipping or punished, but they all did it anyway. But it had never occurred to him that girls might.

Such, he soon found out, was not at all the case, or not Emma’s case. Caught, and in his power, she went further and confessed she and Joan had been doing things like that, looking, and touching themselves, for years. Then, stopping her crying and looking at him shrewdly, she had offered to arrange a meeting with Joan. Or, failing that, if Joan balked, to arrange for him to come upon them unexpectedly and catch them. But she hadn’t had to. Joan had agreed quite readily enough.

On his bed Tom felt flushed all over. They had done nothing together yet, he and Emma, only looked. But Tom had some ideas about things he wanted to do, scenes out of his new pictures, when he got the two of them together. Feverishly, he fell asleep.

When he woke it was after lunchtime, Emma had clearly already gone, and he was still feverish. Still on the bed, he stretched himself. He felt hot all over. His face was flushed, and even his eyes felt hot behind their lids. If that was the way sex made you feel, then it was not at all all that pleasant. But when he thought of what was in store for him this afternoon, he felt hotter still. He got up a little woozily and unlocked the door.

As he did, his eye fell on the letter lying on his working table, his study table, and he paused. It was a letter of commendation from the General commanding the Army fort in Indianapolis. The night before breaking camp to go home Tom had been on guard duty, and there had been a cloudburst. The General’s two small children had taken refuge from the downpour on the ring platform under the roof of the fort’s boxing arena, and when the cloudburst filled the natural hollow waistdeep with water that couldn’t run off fast enough, had become marooned there. On the second or third tour of his ten o’clock shift Tom had heard them calling and, flashing his light down there, had found them. The little girl was crying. Not knowing whether to call the Corporal of the Guard for such a thing—afraid to really, embarrassed to—and already soaking wet anyway, he had waded out to them and, feeling both magnanimous and a little heroic, had carried them both back, first one, then the other, through the cold waistdeep water to the safety of the bleachers. The boy of ten, who already had about him the authority of at least a Lieutenant Colonel, had asked him his name. Next day the letter had been delivered to the Captain of his company for him. More important, he had slept the rest of the night, if you could call it sleep, in his wet clothes on his bare cot under his one blanket, shivering and shaking, since there was no provision for the Guard to change its clothes. He had been sure he was going to get a bad cold, but there had been no after-effects at all.

That had been exactly eight days ago, Tom mused woozily, looking at the letter. He knew it didn’t really mean anything, but even so he had thought of having it framed. It was his only trophy he had brought home from Indianapolis. He had been runner-up in the boxing tournament, and he had been second choice for a scholarship to a military academy. If the damned letter had arrived two or three days earlier, he might have—probably would have—won the scholarship. But if he had, his damned father in his total inertia would never have come up with the minimum tuition money for him to accept it. He turned and went downstairs.

His mother had gone out to one of her club meetings. He had not had any lunch. He had ten or fifteen minutes to kill before three o’clock. He went to the refrigerator. As heated-up and excited as he felt, he did not want to eat anyway. In the icecube freezing compartment there was a square quart bucket of strawberry ice cream and he sat down with it at the silent kitchen table. In three minutes he had eaten so much of it so fast he had a piercing headache, exactly as if somebody had struck him between the eyes with a sharp-pointed hammer. He had to quit and let it subside before he could finish the rest of it. It made him think of his grandfather. How the old guy was always feeding them ice cream like that, when they were little, and then laughing at them. He chuckled. Maybe the old son of a bitch did it on purpose, some kind of sadism. “Mark of Cain.” “Mark of Cain” was right, all right. Tainted blood!

He was surprised to find that the ice-cream headache did not go away when he went out and got on his bike to ride across town, instead it got worse. Never had he felt like this before. He had been pretty excited and hot at times, but never like this. But then never before had he ever had a prospect like this before him, two whole girls, who would do anything, or practically anything. His ears felt fiery. His eyes felt like two hot burning coals in their sockets. And he noticed that when he exhaled through his nose, his breath actually burned his upper lip. When he rode in and out of the shade into the hot September sunshine, it actually made him feel faint. But he felt faint all over with excitement anyway.

It was a long ride, ten minutes, from where they now lived back across town to the high-class section where they used to live. This seemed symbolic to Tom and he snorted. He did not try to go through his own old driveway and backyard where strangers lived now, but rode on around the block and came to his grandfather’s deserted house from the front, up its driveway which ran across the porticoed front, but which also ran around to the back. He half-hid his bike by wheeling it up the two steps and inside the latticed backporch. The girls’ bikes were not there, but that didn’t mean anything. They would have left theirs at Joan’s. Maybe they were already there, he thought secretly, cozily, already waiting for him, whispering and rustling and tittering and touching themselves. He went around to the basement window he knew was not locked.

It was while he was sliding up the sash of the basement window that he realized he had a bad stitch in his side. He had not thought he was riding that hard or that fast, but every time he took a deep breath now it hurt him. Once inside the window, which opened onto the cellar stairs, the column of air that flowed past him from the depths of the cellar cooled him off a little. He shivered twice violently. His head still throbbed with that damned ice-cream headache which would not go away. Slowly he climbed the stairs into the kitchen.

Here it all was: the old high-ceilinged elegant rooms with their moulded plaster mouldings and their mirrors still fastened to the walls behind their wooden or plaster columns or above the fireplaces. The cut-glass chandeliers still hung from the middles of the rooms. Only the furnishings, the rich old rugs, the wall tapestries, the elegant old furniture, were missing. Tom went from the sunroom with its wall of glass windows to the east to catch the winter morning sun, through the diningroom whose long hand-waxed table was gone with its twelve chairs, through the parlor itself into the hall where the big winding staircase was. Across the hall from the parlor was the old music room, empty too.