Into the Great Wide Open (26 page)

She was soundly asleep in her prim, high-collared nightgown (she slept in the nude when Kenny was with her). My victim, Kenny
thought. Suitably high-powered moonlight drifted in through the window, across her face, her one hand pressed to her cheek in alarm, Oh, no! He studied her face, her fine long neck, and remembered how he had wanted to kiss her neck when he first saw it.

But how to wake her? The old-movie standby, the hand over the mouth—but she was pregnant, delicate, he didn’t want to alarm her.
Pregnant:
he let the word linger on his tongue, silently tasting it. Fecund, fertile, gravid. Kenny felt a rude indelicate pride:
my
woman,
my
child,
my
life. He pressed his lips to her beautiful ear and whispered, his hand standing ready in case she cried out after all. “I love you,” he whispered; softly, not trying to wake her up at first, but trying to plant himself in her mind. “I love you, Junie.”

She muttered something to her companions in sleep, it sounded like “The bridge!”

“I love you,” he whispered again.

“Oh!” she said, and turned onto her side. Kenny felt her breath on him, the hot breath of deep sleep, and as always her breath was colorless.

He kissed her neck, the place behind her ear, and heard her breathing quicken under him. You are in my power, Kenny thought, you are getting sleepy. You will cluck like a chicken when you wake up. Touched her breast, softly as he could; kissed her neck again and was surprised to feel her nipple harden instantly through the soft flannel of the stupid nightgown.

“Oh!” she said again, softly.

Kenny whispered her name, said that he loved her. She stirred again, but not toward waking. It felt to Kenny that he was sending her back into sleep, toward some dream of sexual possibility or impossibility … She rolled onto her back again, lay with her arms at her sides, lay with one leg up, half-bent, and the other loosely out, open to him. His hand strayed down the flannel of her belly and he thought
pregnant
. Something was living in Junie’s belly, the secret
place below her navel. A chakra, he had read and believed it, a secret energy center, bigtime kundalini. He let his hand stray south from there, didn’t mean to but things were taking on a life of their own. Found the lip of her nightgown and under it and discovered, to his surprise, that she wasn’t wearing underwear.

“Kenny!” she whispered hotly. She stiffened under him, scuffed his hand away like a stray fly. “Kenny, what are you doing here?”

He backed away, undignified.

“I came to ask you a question,” he said.

“What?”

“I can wait till you wake up.”

“What is it?”

“It’s important. I want you to be awake to think about it.”

“I’m fine,” she said, rubbing her hands against her elbows, arms crossed, and looking around her small room like it was strange to her. Wisps and cobwebs of dreams still in her eyes.

“How did you get in here, anyway?” she asked.

“I let myself in.”

“You’re not supposed to be here,” she said, remembering.

“I know I’m not,” he said. “That’s why I had to let myself in. Are you all right?”

“I’m not,” she said. “You know. It took me forever to get to sleep, and now you wake me up.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “I’m glad to see you. Things have been so strange.” She took his head and cradled it to her chest and they rested there; or Junie did, while Kenny’s body was contorted into an awkward shape. He was supposed to be having elevated thoughts but mainly he was thinking about the shape of her breasts, a single thickness of cloth away.

“What are you doing here?” Junie asked; and the sadness of her voice called Kenny back. He moved away from her, composed himself.
She sat primly on the edge of the bed, the last of the Waltons, sleep-tousled.

“This is going to seem weird,” he said.

“What?”

“I don’t know what you’re going to say.”

“What are you trying to say?”

Kenny in short pants, stammering schoolboy.

“Will you marry me?” he asked.

She looked away quickly, disappointed then angry. “Don’t fuck with me, Kenny,” she said. “Not now.”

“I’m not,” he said. “I mean it.”

“Don’t!”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t tease me, Kenny, I’m confused enough.”

She sat slumped at the edge of the bed, resting on her elbows, staring down at the carpet, disconsolate, distant, gone. Kenny racked his brain for the words that would make everything fine and sunny. You aren’t pregnant anymore. We’re twenty-one now. Love conquers all.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” she said. “She wants me to get rid of it, they both do. I mean, she doesn’t say so but she keeps talking about my future, my beautiful future. Do you like my future, Kenny?”

“I don’t know anything about your future,” he said, measuring his own words; everything depended on this particular moment and what he did in it. He said, “Every time somebody talks about your future, it’s like, your life after me. I don’t want to think about that. It’s just another script that somebody’s written for you.”

“So I should do what
you
tell me, instead.”

“I don’t know,” he said; but this wasn’t the answer, it wasn’t the time to go passive, let things happen. There was no place ready for him in her future. If he wanted a place he would have to make one for himself.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he said.

“What?”

“Will you marry me?—or put it this way”—here he knelt, a joke, a parody, but it wasn’t. He said, “I love you, I will be faithful to you, I’ll do whatever I can. I know that it might not be enough. But I want to try.”

“I can’t answer that,” she said.

“I know. But you have to.”

“Get up off your knees,” she said. “I mean, it’s so stupid, Kenny, I don’t mean you, just everything. It’s not the answer. It’s like I said, What’s two plus two, and you said, Ice cream.”

Defeated: they sat together side by side, two sad sacks, slumped into uncertainty. Then Kenny saw that she was weeping. He saw a chance in her weakness, an opening.

“What?”

She shook her head, unable to speak. (And if she hadn’t been weak, hadn’t been wounded, would Kenny have stood a chance?)

“It’s just so stupid,” she said, when the tears had passed enough to let her. “I don’t know what the fuck to do, Kenny, I really don’t. And you come in here confusing me.”

“I don’t mean to,” Kenny said. “I know what I want, though—I want you, there’s no big mystery about it. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen next week, or whatever.”

He stopped, tonguetied. The search for the magic words had failed again.

“I can’t make anything better,” he said. “I can’t make anything different.”

“What do you want to do?” she asked.

“I want to get out of here,” Kenny said.

“Where?”

“Oregon, I was thinking,” he said. It sounded desperate and silly in his ears. “I don’t want to wreck everything,” he said. “You could still go to school.”

“How would we live?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, I’ll get a job. I’ve got to do something, anyway.”

A silence; and in the quiet he saw that he was stupid, seventeen and stupid, and she had outgrown him. Without her there was nothing in front of him, a blank buzzing screen, white, indefinite. There was
nothing
.

“I never told you this,” she said. “I always thought it would sound like a mother or something, you know, I love you
but
. But you scare me sometimes, Kenny, the way you let your life slip away from you. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“No.”

“But you make these decisions anyway, you just
go
.”

“I don’t know any other way.”

“It makes me angry, the mess you make,” she said. Then, in a new voice, like she was arguing with herself, she said, “You never know enough, though, do you? You never know exactly what’s right and what’s the wrong thing to do.”

“I never seem to.”

“So you let somebody else run things for you, you drift. I don’t know.”

She was saying something. The light slowly came over him: she was agreeing with him. He said, “What do you mean?”

“Let’s
go
, Kenny.”

His heart started to do tricks again. He thought she must have misspoken but her face was grinning, wolfish: I dare you. I double-dare you, Kenny thought. He said, “Where to?”

“Wherever. Oregon sounds good to me. Let’s just get out of here. Do you have any money?”

Kenny kissed her before they went on but she turned away; and he saw that this was neither fun nor games. Run for your life, he thought.

“Five hundred dollars,” Kenny said.

“I’ve got a credit card,” she said. “We’ll take the Honda, it’ll never break down. What else?”

“Get some clothes,” he said. “A lot of clothes, I’ll help you carry them. Whatever else you need to take.”

She stared at him, a figure from her dream; annunciation. I bring you tidings. She didn’t move any closer to him. Kenny didn’t take her hand. He didn’t want to seem to capture her; she had to ease herself into the net, by her own volition. Later this would seem hardhearted but he wanted her more than anything, before or since. When she turned to him again it was decided.

“Where are your clothes?” Junie asked.

“They’re in the car, out front.”

“What were you going to do, if I said no?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you know I’d go along the whole time?” she asked. “Did you have me figured out?”

“I never doubted you.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “The one real thing. I knew there was something real between us and that would work itself out. I know that sounds stupid.”

The magic words: she looked at him, she kissed his hand. They were all right, for the next five minutes, the foreseeable future. She said, “Marriage, I don’t know, it’s complicated. Not the feeling but the logistics. And I guess I don’t know about marriage.”

“What?”

“I don’t particularly want to be owned,” she said. “But I’ll go for a ride with you, all the way to Oregon. How far is that?”

“Beats me,” Kenny said. “The other side of the country.”

“We’d better get going.”

The neon sign said
WELCOME TO BREEZEWOOD
,
PENNSYLVANIA, CITY OF 10,000 MOTEL ROOMS
. It was raining, three in the morning. Kenny circled the strip, looking for suitably cheap. He couldn’t tell; he was inexperienced with motels, with everything. They were both beginners.

The Motel 6 was
SORRY
as was the Super 8 and the Motel 3 looked dubious. Junie hadn’t spoken in an hour, lost inside. She was actually leaving something behind. He wasn’t going to tell her about his father for a couple of days; not that he was trying to fool her, not exactly. But it pressed on him like a guilty conscience. He was leaving anyway. He probably should have told her.

The rain was occasional, dispassionate. The neon signs of the restaurants and motels refracted in the raindrops on the windshield, emeralds and rubies. “Any guesses?” Kenny asked.

She roused herself, like she was sleeping, and asked, “What am I guessing at?”

“Motels,” he said, “unless you feel like driving.”

“No.” Her voice was flat, remote, and Kenny wondered if she was still good to go. Good clothes, good shoes, somebody to take care of her when she broke—and now it would fall to Kenny, everything, and she had to know how little he could do. “I don’t care about motels,” she said. “Cheap is better, I guess.”

“It looks like a choice between cheap but funky and expensive but nice. I mean 1953 Motor Court.”

“I’ll take the Holiday Inn then,” she said. “I have a morbid fear of bugs.”

“Expensive.”

“We’re going to put it on the credit card anyway.”

She was still in her parents’ orbit, still in the control of their gravity. “Won’t they know where we are then?” he asked. “They can just follow the trail of receipts.”

“It’s three in the morning,” Junie said. “We can stay in the Roach Motel if you want to.”

“Whatever, whatever, whatever,” Kenny said, and drove them to the Holiday Inn.

Checking in, he was nervous: the clerk was going to call the cops, runaways. Kenny knew a friend of Boy’s who was legally an emancipated minor. He carried both their duffel bags in, ostentatiously—look! We have
lots
of luggage!—then stood uncomfortably while Junie handled the actual negotiations with the bored, pimply clerk. If anything the night clerk was younger than they were, and he was running a Holiday Inn, while they were just trying to get control of two tiny lives; the music sweet and stupid, beaming down from hidden speakers with their hidden load of propaganda: you will love McDonald’s. TV is great. More baseball, more frozen dinners. What was the word?
Subliminal:
maybe it was true, maybe not. It seemed like bad luck, though, to go around believing in a high school rumor when you were trying to escape from high school, saltpeter in the cafeteria food.

Adults:
now they were carrying the weight of their own lives, the weight of one another’s, the weight of the tiny efflorescence in Junie’s uterus. Even the words seemed wrong in his mouth, now that they were no longer jokes but descriptions: uterus, cervix, fetus. He carried her duffel bag from the elevator to the room in deference to her uterus.
I’ll take the weight
, he told himself.

Junie flopped onto one of the gigantic beds, sighing. “I’m so tired,” she said. “What’s on TV?”

“I thought you didn’t like TV?”

“I don’t want to think,” she said. “I’ve been thinking and thinking. I want to watch like
Charlie’s Angels
.”

“Don’t say it.”

“Farrah Fawcett,” she said. “Farrah Fawcett-
Majors!
” and clicked the remote.

The big eye of the TV bloomed to life and the chatterbox laughter:
M*A*S*H
. Kenny paced the room trying to avoid it. All the motel-room totems, the complimentary matches and Kleenex, the
tiny soaps, the rigid synthetic material of the brocade bedspread, a faint chemical smell in the air … Potpourri! Suddenly he missed Wentworth, wondered if he would ever see him again. Good-bye, good-bye. Sometimes the size of the jump they were taking got too big to ignore, and then it scared him.