That Night (10 page)

He thought of telling her this but knew there would be no sense to it right now. Instead, he imagined, he’d call her into his office in another month or two. He could see himself leaning across his desk, speaking softly, or taking the girl down to the cafeteria and gallantly buying her a carton of lemonade. “It’s hard to have to learn this so young,” he would say. “But loss is what life’s all about.”

The imagining pleased him as he drove the ten blocks to her house, even relieved some of the pity he felt for her, and his own bloated sense of sadness.

Sitting beside him, Sheryl was at first stunned by his kindness. To think that she was riding alone with the principal in his own car. To think he had called her by her first name and let her briefly cry in his arms. The peculiarity of it made what he had told her even more unreal. She found herself wondering why he wasn’t married, if he had a girlfriend or spent countless weekday evenings calling women he had just met, trying not to sound too anxious when he asked to see them once more. She wondered who would be called if, driving this very car, he pulled to the side of the road and died. She wondered if anyone loved him.

The neighborhood at this hour had a different life and this, too, made the morning seem dreamlike. There were pillows and blankets being aired from upstairs windows and crowds of clothes hanging on nearly every line. She saw a woman unloading grocery bags from her car, a large cookie stuck in her mouth and a child on her hip. Another two talking in the middle of the sidewalk, one with a baby carriage that she rocked back and forth as she spoke. They passed Angie’s house, where it looked as though no one was home, and a house where she sometimes baby-sat, an empty playpen in its driveway.

At this hour there were only women in the neighborhood, as if somewhere a war still raged, and Sheryl saw that every one of them was unaware that what was ordinary about the day had been arrested and forever transformed. This was the day her father died.

She began to whimper, and the principal, who was by now thinking of the teachers’ meeting he would be late for, whispered, “I know, honey,” reminding her again of his kindness.

She had said, “How can that be true?” because she could still see him, hear his voice. And worse, because she still loved him. She had not been good; she had fought with him about her makeup and her hair. She had accused him just the other day of disapproving of everyone and everything, of wanting her to be lonely, but she loved him. And wouldn’t her love stop or change, begin even now slowly to disappear, if what the principal had told her was true?

It was not logical, she thought, for it to be so pointless. He was not just anyone who had died in the middle of an ordinary morning. He was her own father. He was loved.

She saw the police car at the curb when they approached the house, and closed her eyes, refusing to believe it. Because how could the daily wash and the grocery shopping and the test that was still unfinished back at school, Mrs. Eason and the principal and the toddler she sometimes minded all continue to matter when love could so quickly be made pointless? When love always, finally, would have to be dismantled and unraveled, put away and forgotten because it couldn’t keep its own object from forever leaving the earth.

Unluckily, as the neighborhood women later put it, just minutes before the principal arrived with Sheryl, another policeman had pulled her father’s car into her driveway, returning it to the family. When Sheryl saw it there, she pushed wildly at the car door and then ran up the steps to her house. She seemed to be laughing and the women all up and down the block could hear her call to her father as she entered.

In order to even begin to understand, Rick would have to imagine the triumph in her voice that morning, when she had believed that by the mere force of her love she had saved him.

Their nights together always began with the others in the parking lot outside the bowling alley or in the schoolyard. I imagine she was quiet then. She would watch from under her bangs as the boys bragged and joked. She would watch Rick with only the slightest smile as he stepped away from her to illustrate some story. He would raise his arms, lifting the hem of his jacket, and at the punchline wriggle his backside. The other boys would notice her squinting through her cigarette smoke, smiling slightly, her eyes on his tight pants, and they would remark to themselves, although not in so many words: Still waters run deep.

His joke told, his status among them confirmed, Rick would step back to where she leaned against his car and once again pull her under his arm. She would hold his belt, and the homely boys, or those simply less lucky in love, the virgins, the chronic masturbators, would have to remind themselves that Sheryl was not really all that great looking, lest they weep with envy. When the hour came for the two of them to drive off alone together, the boys would nod coolly, say, “See ya.” They would turn to the remaining girls with new interest. Turn especially and with the greatest charm to those known as the tramps among them.

Alone, Sheryl and Rick would simply drive for a while, Sheryl sitting close to him in the wide front seat, her hand on his thigh. Rick with his arm around her. Slowly, she would begin to tell him things, about his friends or his family, about the meaning of the songs that came on the radio, speaking with that same assurance she had shown me, the assurance that she had been through more than any of them, that she knew more.

“Larry really likes that girl he’s dating,” she might tell him. “He just won’t admit it because she’s so heavy. He’s afraid you guys will make fun of him.”

“No,” Rick would say. “He’s using her. He’s just getting laid. He told me himself.”

Sheryl would nod. “Just wait and see. See what he gives her for Christmas.”

He would learn to depend on her and the way she looked at things. He would begin to believe she knew more than anyone.

During that summer when they first met, through the fall they spent together, again in the spring as soon as the ground had begun to dry and that part of the summer they had before she went away, they would end their nights in the park on the other side of town. It was a long, narrow piece of land fronting on the busy, brightly lit boulevard but surrounded on its farthest end by dim streets lined with small homes. On the boulevard side there were swings and slides, basketball courts, and in summer a concrete wading pool, but the back half was given over to a baseball diamond, a picnic area and, on a hill that marked the end of the property, a sparse approximation of a wood.

Seven or eight years later, when I was Sheryl’s age, this was the place to buy and use drugs, to drink sweet apple wine or sangria from leather wine skins pretending you were at Woodstock, but then, when the park still closed at dusk, it was a place where only the most serious couples went to make love.

The trick in Sheryl’s day was to find an inconspicuous

spot to leave your car, somewhere along one of the side streets, far enough from the park itself to avoid suspicion but not so far that you could be seen by too many people as you walked, with a brown paper bag filled with Cokes and a bottle of rum, toward the lowest part of the fence.

Once over the fence, you would only have to choose your niche among the trees. A police cruiser would pass through each night at about twelve or one, but it would never leave the road that circled the baseball diamond and so it was easy enough to avoid its headlights.

Sheryl and Rick would sit down together on a sloping bit of dirt and grass. Rick would open the bottles of Coke, pour out half, open the flask bottle of rum. In the semidarkness (there were two or three tall night lights in the park, some small bit of light from the surrounding streets), he would match the lips of the two bottles carefully, pour the rum with a precise and steady hand. (“This is what my old man does for a living,” he told her. “Pours piss and blood from one bottle to another.”) They would sit shoulder to shoulder, their knees raised, the bottles in their hands.

She might tell him then: “I used to think it was stupid that people you really loved could just die ...”

Moving her hand across the dirt and the grass, she might say, “If one of us died.”

He would tell her about the car accident he had been in before he met her. An older friend had been driving. They had cut school and smoked some reefer. They had been drinking all day. At about nine o’clock that night, in a town not far away—his friend had been looking for the house of some girl he knew—they turned a corner and hit a parked car. Neither of them knew how or why. They both might have been asleep.

They were laughing when they crawled out, one through a window, one through a back door. The engine was nearly in the front seat. Rick’s father said that if they’d hit a tree or a pole, something that couldn’t have rolled with the impact as the car did, they both would have been killed. His father had said it would have served them right.

Sheryl would whisper, “Before me, you would have been forgotten.”

Or perhaps by then she would no longer have to say it. By then, he would understand it himself, even as he told her the story, as he remembered his father’s tired, angry voice, his mother’s dazed indifference. If he had died then, before he met her, who would have loved him enough to make his disappearance from the earth illogical?

Perhaps by then he understood only that when she spoke of dying he should turn to her, loosen the scarf at her throat or her waist, gently push her back onto the grass.

He lay beside her, his cheek to the cool ground, his arm across her waist. She studied the sky, speaking softly and with that same sure tone. Beyond her were the two empty Coke bottles, his wallet, opened flat, the ripped silver paper from the condom, the circle of her scarf.

He watched the line of her profile, the shadowy movement of her dark lashes as she whispered to him, her face to the sky. The police headlights passed through the trees, but they hardly made her pause; she was afraid of nothing in that world that seemed only, even superfluously, to begin at the end of these woods. Speaking softly but with that same assurance, she would name for him all the things that didn’t matter to them, that didn’t have to matter to them, and it seemed to him that she started at the foot of those woods and worked outward, dismissing, obliterating, the entire world: not friends, she told him, not family, not school, not getting older or getting married or finding a job. Not car accidents or hospitals, not any kind of luck, good or bad, not dying.

She turned to him and even in the darkness he saw that same brightness in her eyes, a hard, challenging gleam. Only they mattered. They loved each other. It would not be logical for love to bring them to anything else. And later, when she sat up, laughing, draping her scarf over her bare shoulders like a shawl, he reminded himself that she knew things no one else seemed to know.

In a town not far from ours, there was a school run by the Salvation Army or the Baptists and called, blatantly enough, the Wayside School.

For troubled girls, my mother would tell me as we drove past, for girls in trouble. (The irony of it was never lost upon her: all her prayers and all her formulas for pregnancy coming to nothing while mere children were conceiving, casually, inadvertently, in parking lots and playgrounds.) It was surrounded by a high stockade fence so that only its green and silver sign was visible from the road, and the driveway that led into it was blocked by an iron gate. I never saw the school buildings themselves, never knew anyone who went there, but each Christmas one of the classes in our own school would draw Wayside as its place to send Christmas packages. Draw it from a field that included the children’s ward at the nearby mental hospital, a city prison, a Catholic orphanage and innumerable nursing homes. The girls at Wayside, the class would be told each year, would appreciate perfume, hand cream, small stuffed animals and dusting powder. Each year the class was asked not to enclose notes, names or addresses with their gifts.

In college, I met a girl who had grown up just a few blocks from the school. She told me about the occasional incident when one of the “students” tried to bolt, running wild and confused (and sometimes, too appropriately, barefoot) through their neighborhood or down the main street. Once, she and some of her girlfriends—they couldn’t have been more than nine or ten at the time—took a ladder from a set of bunk beds and carried it through the backyard of a neighbor and across a gully to some obscure part of the school’s high fence. It had been about dusk on a summer evening and they had taken turns climbing up. They stood on tiptoe, on the top rung, gripping the points of the fence’s wooden stakes, but what they saw made the effort worthwhile: a half dozen teenage girls, most of them pregnant, listlessly tossing a beach ball across a lush green lawn.

Eventually, one of the teenagers noticed the children, or perhaps one of the children grew brave enough to call out, and the entire group moved toward the fence. At first they exchanged information politely, with some of the cautious fascination of Martian to Earthling. “Hello!” they said. “Where did you come from?” The unwed mothers, with their hands on their hips and their bangs in their eyes, laughed each time one of the children stepped down and another head appeared. It must have been a kind of puppet show for them. “And what’s your name?” they’d ask each new face. “And what kind of house do you live in?” The children themselves turning to look down—“What? What?”-taking instructions from the invisible chorus below.

When some kind of rapport had been established, the teenagers asked for cigarettes. Of course the children had none, but yes, they had parents who smoked. Their parents would never miss one pack, the pregnant girls assured them.