Whisper Their Love (3 page)

"What for?"

She wondered what you did on a blanket party, but was ashamed to ask. She put on shorts too and a sleeveless blouse and touched her lips with Cerise Poppy from Mimi's new line, but left her face shiny like Mary Jean's. "We look all right together."

"Except we can't wear each other's clothes. I'm too tall."

"No, I'm too short."

"Have it your own way."

"Don't we have to get permission to go out, or something?"

"We're supposed to sign the book in the hall. But if we don't sign out, then we don't have to sign in, see? Besides, Bannister hasn't been around all day."

It sounded reasonable, but it felt illicit and dangerous crossing the leaf-rustling area in the dark. Under the railroad arch a yellow convertible waited. The two boys leaning against the car were not quite men yet, but you could tell they thought of themselves as men and pretty sharp, too. Bill was stocky and fair, with sprinkled freckles and a flattop. Tony, the freshman, was dark and skinny. His Adam's apple stuck out and the rest of him hadn't quite caught up to his hands and feet, but just the same, he was a College Man, and not too bad-looking, Joyce thought. She sat down beside him and pulled her shorts down, exactly like a Victorian belle adjusting her hoops—and for the same reason, to give her hands something to do. She didn't know how to start a conversation, but at least she was conscious that there was nothing wrong with the way she looked.

The way Bill drove, they couldn't have talked anyhow. Wind whooshed past, singing in their ears and carrying the smell of exhaust fumes, mown grass and blacktop hot from the sun. People on street corners looked after the bright car, admiring or resentful.

Tony dropped his hand to Joyce's knee. She ignored it. There is nothing you can do about a hand on your knee, it's not high enough to call for moral indignation and it's hard to act reluctant without seeming prissy. She sat unmoving, careful to make no sign of responding. After all, she reminded herself, I just met this character about fifteen minutes ago.

The countryside was strange to her. At home you rode through flat country, with little clumps of trees along the riverbanks and gently rolling fields. This was up-and-down country, and after they turned off the highway onto a gravel road there were tangled stretches of woodland, thick with underbrush right up to the barbwire fences. These woods looked as though they might harbor snakes and vultures.

Tony yelled, "Hard on the tires," as they jounced, and Bill shrugged.

"Those woods look as if wolves lived in them," Joyce said, trying to put the ominous in words.

Tony wasn't interested in scenery. He squeezed her leg. "The wolves are all in the car," he said. His fingers were thin and hot.

The lake lay flat under an orange moon and the sandy beach stretched on and on, unbroken. Farther down the beach some picknickers had made a bonfire; their grotesque shadows moved between the leaping flames and the sky. Bill said, "Get busy, you females."

Joyce caught the army blanket and the carton of beer. It made a heavy load. The sand slewed under her open sandals.

She slid against Tony and he caught her and held her, too tightly, so that she dropped the blanket. Bill walked back under the edge of the wooden pavilion where the slot machines and pop vendors were locked up for the night. "All clear," he said. He dropped the other blanket and reached out his hand. "Opener." Mary Jean slapped it into his palm. He opened beer cans and handed them around. "God, that's good and cold," he said proudly.

Joyce didn't like the bitter medicinal taste of beer much, but the sweat-beaded can felt good against her cheek. She held it there and let the others reach for seconds. Tony spread a blanket on the sand and squatted down on his heels. She could see his throat wiggle up and down as he gulped. The boys had shucked off their slacks and were in swimming trunks, narrow strips of dark-colored stuff against skin that looked white in the moonlight. Bill was blocky and solid—the kind of man who grows a potbelly in the middle thirties—but Tony's ribs stuck out. He hasn't really got his growth yet, Joyce thought. Everybody knows girls are older than boys the same age. The thought made her feel protective and maternal.

Bill tossed away his third beer can. Tony's plunked on the ground beside it. "You're a quiet gal."

"You're supposed to get men to talk about themselves. It says so in the book."

He punched another can of beer. Looks like all you do at a blanket party is sit around and guzzle, she thought, smothering a yawn. She lay back on .the blanket and stretched out to look for stars, but the night was overcast. Summer nights on the farm, if you slept out in the back yard you could see millions of stars, from low-swinging planets to tiny pinpricks. And in the winter if you got up early enough there was Venus hanging in the frosty air—so clear, so bright.

Tony flopped down beside her. He pulled up her knit shirt a little and laid his head against her bare midriff. His hair had just been cut, the stiff bristles prickled her skin. "You're a cute little kid."

"That brightens up my whole evening." "Let's don't talk. Waste of time." He reached up and touched her shoulder, then moved his fingers down a little. A winey heat ran down her arm and melted into the warm spot where his hand rested. His palm was calloused—tennis, maybe, or a summer job. It tightened against her, then moved again and reached into the front of her shirt. He lifted one breast in his hand, and she felt the bud of it harden and rise. "Nice," Tony said. "I bet you're nice all over."

She looked nervously at the others. They had covered themselves with half of their blanket, which was moving convulsively. Crazy kids, in this weather. She tried to sit up, but Tony pushed her back. "Don't be scared. I'm not fixing to hurt you. Just wanna feel."

"You tickle."

"Like to be tickled?"

He rolled against her. His elbow dug her in the side, his hand was at her waist "This damn thing's too tight. The elastic."

"Please don't."

"Minute."

His hand was hot under her waistband. Answering heat grew in her. The hand moved. She moved closer. She couldn't help it; she was so scared she couldn't breathe, yet she had to get closer, she had to know. She laid her hand against his and pressed. Fingers dug in. "Ouch," she said.

"Hurt?"

"I like it."

His belt buckle cut into her as he rolled over. Below she could feel the little bulge she always tried not to stare at, yet couldn't help being conscious of when boys were in shorts or basketball trunks. He picked up her hand and moved it. Large and solid, embarrassing and menacing yet mystic and exciting.

"I got something for you," Tony whispered.

Joyce stiffened. From somewhere in the past came the smell of freshly scythed grass. The boy in sixth grade, fingering his fly and looking at her out of the corners of his eyes. "Hey, Joyce, I got somep'n for you," with a mean little snicker. Miss Gordon had come around the corner of the schoolhouse then, while Joyce stood terrified, yet fascinated. Miss Gordon's heavy middle-aged face was a dull red and she grabbed the little boy by one arm and jerked him into the schoolhouse. Joyce couldn't even remember his name now, but she remembered Miss Gordon laying on with a leather strap while the kids looked through the schoolhouse window. Miss Gordon's eyes glittered like Mrs. Severtson's did when Uncle Will brought a cow over to be serviced by the Severtson bull. Excited, yet ashamed.

The same terror filled her now as when the bull bellowed—a crawling sensation along the back of the neck, a shrinking in the pit of the stomach. Night pressed down, a heavy sky, and this strange boy's hand was at the core of her body. She tried to sit up, but he was heavy on her. She gave him a shove and caught him off balance, so that he went over backwards, looking stupid with surprise. "Hey, for God's sakes."

"I don't want to." Her voice was cold. She got to her feet, brushed the sand off her shorts, and pulled down her rumpled shirt. "I guess I'd better go home."

Tony lit a cigarette. The flame jiggled as if his hand were shaking. "Teaser," he said coldly.

Bill stuck his head out of the other blanket. How could he look and sound so ordinary, if he was doing what she thought? "You ever hear the story about the cat on the streetcar track?" he asked. "Damn cat went to sleep, and the streetcar comes along and cuts the end of its tail off. Cat whirls around, yowlin' and spittin', and the streetcar tears its head off." He rubbed his cheek against Mary Jean's shoulder. "Moral is, don't lose your head over a piece of tail."

"Very funny," Tony said. He unfolded his skinny height and walked away, his back poker-stiff. Joyce took a couple of uncertain steps toward the water's edge and stood there looking at the flat ripples, wishing miserably she were home, wishing she hadn't come, wishing she were back in her own room at the farm, with Aunt Gen putting away the supper dishes and Uncle Will watching "What's My Line" on the television. Anywhere but here.

Tony sat on the extreme edge of the back seat all the way home. Like I had leprosy or something, Joyce thought, hurt and angry. What made it worse was that he wasn't a bad-looking boy, really; it would have been fun to go out with him again, if he didn't have to be such a wolf. She sneaked a glance at him. He gave her a dirty look and turned his face away. His adolescent male pride, still shaky, had been rebuffed. She sighed.

In the front seat Bill and Mary Jean sat glued together, hot and silent.

Back at school, Tony sat unmoving and wordless while Joyce opened the door for herself and climbed out. She decided not to say good night; it would be too embarrassing if he didn't answer. She stood in a little clump of trees while Bill and Mary Jean kissed as if they never expected to see each other again. The car rolled away, was lost in the late-night traffic.

The girls found the front door unlocked. They tiptoed into the front hall and up the stairs. Already, after the evening's letdown, the dorm was beginning to look like home. The tan-and-brown diamond pattern of the hall carpet seemed dear and familiar.

"How to win enemies and antagonize people," Mary Jean said, pulling off her shirt and shorts. She shook the sand out of her shoes onto the floor and tumbled into bed without bothering to wash or brush her teeth. A sour smell of beer hung around her, and a ripe sweaty aura Joyce could only identify as female. A small purple bruise marred the ivory of one arm. "You made a real hit with Junior," she said, yawning.

"I don't like him."

"Nobody's asking you to marry the boy," Mary Jean said. "A good man is mighty hard to find."

She'll never ask me to double-date again, Joyce thought regretfully. My only friend in this place. "Are blanket parties always like that?" she asked.

"Depends." Mary Jean rolled over, kicking off her sheet. Moonlight made marble of her body. "Maybe you're-frigid," she suggested, the sleepiness dissolving out of her voice.

"How do you tell?"

"I don't know." Mary Jean sat up. "I'm like my mother. That's all the old hens in my dad's congregations ever talk about—yack yack yack—'You better keep an eye on that girl, Reverend, she's going to turn out just like her mother.'" Her voice was bitter. "I'd sooner be like her than them, the gossipy old bitches."

"Is your father a minister?"

"Sure. He's all right," Mary Jean said quickly. "My mother couldn't help it if she fell in love with somebody else, could she?"

"I don't think I know much about love," Joyce said sadly. She lay awake for a long time after Mary Jean had gone to sleep, listening to her roommate's light rhythmic snoring and watching the lights of passing cars move across the walls. I don't care if I am frigid, she thought. But when the A.T.& S.F. tooted across the corner of the campus and jerked her out of an uneasy half sleep, she was still remembering the pressure of Tony's hand and his insistent whisper in her ear.

Chapter 3

It's silly to feel guilty and apprehensive simply because you've been called out of class in the middle of the morning. It can happen to anyone, even A students or Council members; it doesn't mean anything is wrong. Joyce walked faster, trying hush the clattering of her heels on the concrete floor because the doors that stood open on both sides of the hallway.

She wouldn't have felt so alarmed in another building, she rationalized, some place where the hall wasn't so long and narrow and didn't echo so. Art Appreciation was being held in the basement of Old Main while painters were at work in the upstairs classroom. The science labs were down there, with their faint smells of chemical and preservative, and the ceramics room, which was always odorous of damp clay. The cement floor and walls were always damp to the touch even in hot weather, and the coke and coffee machines at the west entrance were set out from the walls by a Rube Goldberg snarl of pipes and annulated cables.

She detoured around spread newspapers. The kids in Ceramics were bustling in and out of their workroom, laying their jars and candlesticks and stuff to dry where people had to walk. She brushed against something that looked like a chamber pot, only no handle. She hadn't elected Ceramics. Now she was sorry. I could have made something for Mimi, she thought, a little ashtray or something. Mimi. The name ways brought excitement and loneliness. Ever since the news of her engagement had come to the farm, scrawled at the end of one of Mimi's short letters, she had been trying to deny a secret and unreasonable dream, the dream of her childhood, given substance and form. Even city apartments could have an extra bedroom, couldn't they? Now she sucked in her breath, standing at the outside door waiting for the excitement to go away. It was better not to plan, even a little bit. All the times you expected her and she had to see a new client or something, at the last minute—it was better not to look ahead, then you couldn't be disappointed.

Two weeks had made the campus browner and dryer. The brick sidewalks were as familiar to her feet now as Aunt Gen's kitchen floor, and she made her way from one building to another without thinking about it; but she couldn't help noticing that the dropping leaves were dry and brown as wrapping paper. Back home, fall was a blaze of orange and red, with maple and elm and oak leaves whirling to the ground in every gust of wind.