Lullaby for the Rain Girl (18 page)

Well, Sherry and I took a trip during the Spring Break of our senior year, winding our way in my little brown Ford Capri (she dubbed it the “Turdmobile”) around some of the major areas south of us on Highway 5, Highway 1, Highway 101—we just wandered, really, for nearly a week, with the ostensible notion of checking out colleges. We ate at truck stops and McDonalds and stayed at KOA campsites using her family’s camping equipment.  It was marvelous, and in fact it was at one of those campsites outside San Luis Obispo, in her tent, on a lovely spring night with our little transistor radio quietly playing Top 40 songs, that Sherry finally surrendered to me whatever tattered remnants of her virtue that we’d still somehow left intact. Although “surrendered” is hardly the word—she was the instigator, in her gentle way, not I. We were very active that night, and for many, many nights thereafter; mornings, too. I could hardly believe what it felt like to be inside a girl; it rendered everything else we’d done together sexually for the past four years instantly obsolete, at least for a while. We proved to be as compatible in this arena as we were in every other way. We would do it for hours, taking breaks occasionally for water or short naps, then diving right in again. Bodies (and brains) that age are all but insatiable, anyway. And it was then, in those early slow lovemaking sessions, that I decided that there would never be any girl in the world but Sherry O’Shea for me. We’d crossed the final threshold triumphantly. We were soulmates. We were each other’s, forever.

Nor did we suffer any disagreement about our future plans—because when we hit Southern California, we knew that we’d found what we were looking for. I remember driving for hours south on Highway 101, the ocean on our right, green mountains on our left, salty-sweet sea breezes flowing through the open windows of the car, the Eagles or ELO on the radio, Sherry’s damp palm loosely in mine, feeling that there was nowhere better than this, here, now, with this girl. The endless white beaches, the bodies tanning and splashing—it was warm enough for that—the little hot dog stands and boardwalk shops, the deep bright happy sun. We frolicked on those beaches, bought cheap plastic flip-flops and sunglasses, splashed each other in the surf.  What’s more, the first town where we stopped, Santa Barbara, had a two-year community college directly overlooking a vast, almost ridiculously beautiful beach. It took us only half a day of wandering the campus and a bit of the downtown to decide.

“This is it,” Sherry exclaimed, grinning and stretching her arms to the sun. “Ben, this is
it!”

“It is. Oh my God, it really is!” I looked at her through our sunglasses. We were standing on State Street, the Museum of Art towering majestically behind us, happy locals breezing past us in their sandals and shorts and sun-shirts. “Are you sure, though?”

She cocked her head. “Sure about what?”

“This,” I said. “Me.”

“What are you talking about, Ben?”

I shrugged. “You could do a lot better than me. You could go off to a university. San Francisco State or somewhere. Your parents said they’ll pay for you. They’re not paying for you to hang out with me down here. You don’t have to go to a community college with me and scrape for money. It isn’t necessary.”

After a moment she used her finger to push her sunglasses low on her face. She studied me with her sleepy blue eyes.

“Benjamin,” she said with a little smile, “it’s
me.”

And she grabbed my hand, marching us happily up the street.

With that, we became Santa Barbara’s newest residents. Not quite immediately—first came the small matter of finishing our high school careers—but those final months, classes and working at the restaurant, phoning south about apartments, filling out registration materials for college—are a smear of nothingness in my memory. Dad laid off me—I don’t think I was called “Shithead” more than once or twice in those last weeks—and Alice complained, perhaps sincerely, about how much she would miss me.

But I really remember little about this period. My recollection picks up when Sherry and I see the road signs for Santa Barbara coming into view as the Turdmobile rolls down Highway 101, U-Haul trailer in tow. I remember pulling up to the apartment building, stepping out, stunned once more at the rich salt air, the ocean, the tall palm trees everywhere (palm trees!), the pale blue sky. My God, I loved this city. I still do, in memory, though I haven’t been there in over fifteen years and doubt I’ll ever return.

Our building was on a little hill, a long walk or short drive from downtown. We had two bedrooms, a kitchen, a tiny bathroom, and a magnificent third-floor view of the town and the sea beyond from our living room window. The building was surrounded by lush greenery. It was so much better than any place a couple of community college students had any right to expect that it almost literally took my breath away. “(What can I tell you?” said our landlord, the obese and eupeptic Mr. Bogg. “You got nice faces.”)

We commenced quickly to get to know the city, mostly on foot, which is how to get to know any city. Sherry would grab my hand, a habitual gesture of hers, and lead us on a wander up and down State Street, visiting the Art Museum and the library and the various restaurants and bookstores—Earthling Books was a great favorite of ours, with its quaint enclosed fireplace in the middle of the floor and benches all around it. We visited the County Courthouse on Anacapa Street, a lovely old Spanish-style building—most of the architecture in Santa Barbara is Spanish, adobe walls, arched doorway, red-tiled roofs—and investigated its hushed corridors, its old-style intricate tile work and big murals depicting California’s history and industries, finally taking the elevator to the El Mirador clock tower, leaning over the railings together some eighty-five feet from the ground and taking in the breathtaking, panoramic views of the city. We toured the beautiful Old Mission and the Natural History Museum. We went for drives in the glorious, winding foothills, where the celebrities reside.

But we were serious, too. We dutifully registered for classes and dutifully obtained, with pleasant ease, jobs, such as they were: I managed a great step up in my professional career when I became an honest-to-God waiter at a café on Anapamu Street, only a fifteen-minute walk from the apartment. Sherry did even better, landing a position as clerk at one of the used bookstores off State Street. We worked only three blocks from each other, and, since I generally had the breakfast and lunch shifts, our hours were often similar. I would stop by the bookstore when I was off work and paw through the thousands of old paperbacks, all of them temptingly available at Sherry’s employee discount price, or she would visit me when she finished, allowing me to serve her a little meal at the café while the owner, a big gregarious woman named Mrs. Wade, teased us with questions about when I would make an honest woman of her.

Classes were, for the most part, easy—easy for both of us. We studied, we worked, we read books; I wrote stories on my yellow pads, later revising them on my little Olympia typewriter. I grew my hair out nearly to my shoulders. (Mrs. Wade didn’t mind; she teased that it made me prettier than any girl.) We made love most nights, long into the night. In my memory every day was clear and beautiful, every night cool and star-sparkling, and really, that’s probably not far from the truth.

It’s true that we had very little money. The rent was tough to make each month, and at least a couple of times we found ourselves literally searching through what little furniture we had for spare quarters. Sometimes we would sell off some of our old books or records to raise a few dollars. But somehow we were never put out on the street, didn’t starve, and even managed some entertainment now and then. It was the kind of life that, at least for a while, is easy when you’re eighteen or nineteen and in love.

But the never-ending scrabbling for cash did begin to wear us down—Sherry particularly. Once, in bed, the night breeze wafting through our gossamer bedroom curtain, she surprised me by saying, “Ben, maybe I should talk to my parents. We’re both doing well in school. Maybe they’d be willing to help us out.”

“We’re doing all right, though,” I said, “aren’t we?”

She sighed, nestling her face against my chest. “I guess,” she said.

But we weren’t. Soon enough—six or seven months after arriving in town—we’d run out of books and records to sell; the last thing we got rid of for money was our TV, which we sold to the neighbor next door; in the evenings we could hear it playing softly through the wall. The telephone service was disconnected, then turned on again when I took a second job, a few hours a week in the college’s cafeteria. It helped, but not much.

Alice came to visit one late-summer day. I remember her standing in the doorway of the apartment—it’s difficult for me to imagine that she was all of twenty-six then—and saying, “Ben, Sherry, what a nice—little—place.” And then, quietly, when Sherry was out of the room: “Ben, do you need me to loan you some money?”

“Why? No. We’re okay.”

“Okay? You don’t have any furniture. And this rug...” She looked distastefully at it.

“It’s just that we don’t have a vacuum.”

“Are you eating? The both of you?”

“We’re eating. I work in a restaurant
and
a cafeteria, Sis.”

“Sherry works in a bookstore. Does she eat the books?”

“No,” I said sourly. “I bring home scraps off people’s tables in a doggie bag for her.”

“Ben, come on. I’m just saying.”

“We’re okay, Sis.”

“All right, all right,” she said, wandering to the living room window and looking out. “Just remember that we can help you if you need it. My goodness,” she exclaimed, “at least you have a wonderful view. You know, this is a big place. Have you ever considered getting a roommate?”

We’d considered it, but always rejected the suggestion. This place was always so much our little love nest that it was impossible to imagine other people here. Anyway, the spare bedroom was my study; I had my typewriter and writing chair set up there, along with a portable radio and whatever books we still had (mostly those so tattered that no used bookstore would take them).

But it became apparent that we had to do something, particularly when Sherry began to grow depressed and listless.

“It’s not,” she said one night, “like I thought it would be, Ben.”

“Maybe I can find a better job.”

“It’s not that. Well, it’s partly that.”

“We just need more money, that’s all. And it’s hard. Full-time in school, full-time jobs...plus my
part-
time one. There aren’t enough hours in the day.”

“We have to change things somehow. I can’t go on like this. It’s too hard.”

I held her. She cried softly for a while. But then we made love, and that calmed both of us down again for a time. But even that wasn’t quite what it had been six months before. We were becoming used to each other. I’ll confess that at school I’d begun to notice some of the other girls in my courses, lovely tight-bodied things that would come to classes straight from the beach, a light summer blouse tossed over their bikini tops and the shortest of short-shorts over their bottoms. These girls were nearly bronze from all their time worshipping the sun. Their little tanned feet still had sand between the toes, sand that would sift down onto their flip-flops and drop onto the classroom floor in minute quantities as I watched idly. They had names like Linda and Joanie and Veronica. As I tried to listen to Mr. Surwillo talking about Biology or Ms. Powers discussing Cultural Anthropology I found my eyes and brain wandering constantly to these girls, my erection pressing against my shorts and my mind in bed with each of them in turn, or sometimes with two or three of them together. It was only with Ms. Gage, in my Great Women Novelists course, that I managed to consistently focus. I loved reading Jane Austen and George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, and I loved talking about them. It helped that the California beach bunny ratio in that particular class was, for some reason, abnormally low.

We finally agreed, Sherry and I, to clear the study, put the things in our bedroom, and get a roommate. We discovered a roommate-locating service on Castillo Street and put in a listing. To our surprise, the phone was ringing by the time we got home. We made an appointment with a guy who said that he and his girlfriend needed a place to stay immediately, could they come right over? I said yes.

“I don’t know, Ben,” Sherry said. “Strangers in our house? This is
our
house. And there’s only one bathroom.”

“We’ve been through this,” I said, touching her. “If we can stand it for a few months, maybe we can get ahead a little financially. Get out from under this—this
stone.”

“I guess you’re right,” she said glumly, turning away, not looking at me.

The doorbell sounded; I went to the door and opened it.

Before me stood a tall guy, even taller than me, and I’m six-two. He was well-groomed, wearing a white sports jacket and sunglasses. He whipped off the glasses and looked at me with strikingly bright and piercing gray eyes. He appeared to be maybe two or three years older than Sherry and me.

“Peter,” he said. “Peter Welch.” He held out his hand. “I called?”

“Right,” I said. His handshake turned out to be a bone-cruncher. “Nice to meet you, Peter. C’mon in.”

“Babe?” He turned, and as he did so I realized there was someone standing behind him. The girlfriend he’d mentioned, obviously. She was very small, hardly five feet. She wore blue jeans torn at the knees and a very old black T-shirt with some faded and broken words on it:
The Flesheaters
. Her face was small, pale, and pinched-looking. There were what appeared to be fishhooks in her eyebrows along with a plethora of silver rings in her earlobes. She had dry little pimples on her forehead; her black hair, short, straight, was disheveled and greasy; she wore odd, heavy blue makeup under her eyebrows. Her eyes, also dark, darted around impatiently, landing finally on me. She moved forward, not smiling.