The Last Time They Met Part 21

"Why?"

"I can't."

"There isn't anything I wouldn't tell you," Thomas says, and she can hear that he's aggrieved.

"I know," she says, wondering if that's altogether true. Everyone has things, private things, embarra.s.sing things, one keeps to oneself.

She shudders as she takes a breath. "Let's not do this, OK?"

It is much the same in a dark car parked later that week at the beach. They can hear, but cannot see, the surf. The windows are steamed from the talking. In addition to the steam, she notices, the winds.h.i.+eld has a film of smoke on it in which she could write her name. She is staring at the line of rust where the top of the convertible meets the body of the car.

"So where will you apply?" Thomas asks.

"Apply?"

"To college. You're smart. You must know you could get in anywhere."

He has a plaid scarf wound around his neck. It isn't that late, only seven o'clock. She is supposed to be at the library. He's supposed to be at hockey practice.

"I don't know," she says. "I was thinking about secretarial school."

"Jesus Christ, Linda."

"I'll have to get a job."

"So go to college and get a better job."

"Money might be a problem.

"There are scholars.h.i.+ps."

She doesn't want to talk about it. She is wearing a rose heather cardigan and a matching wool skirt. She has on one of Eileen's white blouses. She's begun parting her hair in the middle and letting it curl down on either side. She likes the way it obscures her face when she bends forward.

Thomas is looking out the driver's-side window, annoyed with her. "You have to get over this ... inferiority thing," he says.

She scratches a bit of crust from the knee of her skirt. She has nylons on, but her feet are freezing. The Skylark has any number of holes through which the cold seeps.

"Thomas, if I told you, you wouldn't ever be able to think about me in the same way again," she says.

"f.u.c.k that."

She has never heard him use the word.

She is silent for so long, and he is breathing so shallowly, that the winds.h.i.+eld begins to clear of fog. She can make out the cottage fifty feet in front of them. It looks lonely and cold, she thinks. She would like to be able to open the door, turn on the lights, make a fire, and shake out the bedclothes. Make a pot of soup. Have a place of her own.

If only she could have a place of her own, she thinks.

She is sweating under her sweater.

"My aunt had a boyfriend," she begins just at the very moment Thomas leans forward to kiss her. She digs her fists into the red leather seats.

His mouth is tentative against her own. She can feel his straight upper lip, the fullness of the lower. He puts his hand to the side of her face.

She is embarra.s.sed and looks down. He follows her eyes and sees her balled fists.

"Don't be afraid of me," he says.

Slowly, she opens her hands. She can smell his breath and the sweat on his skin, as unique and as identifiable as a fingerprint.

He is twisted in his seat, the parka jammed against the steering wheel. He presses his mouth against hers, and she feels his fingers on her collarbone. Despite herself, she flinches.

He withdraws his hand.

"I'm sorry," she says.

He pulls her head to his shoulder.

"What about the boyfriend?" Thomas asks.

"He went away," she says.

This goes on in increments, the way a timid swimmer might have to enter a frigid ocean, inch by inch, getting used to the brutal cold. Linda has had no way, before, to know how hard it might be; it has not been necessary to imagine physical love with a boy. Her mind does not flinch, but her body does, as if it had different memories, memories of its own. Another boy might have laughed at her, or given her up for hopeless, not worth the effort. Or might have insisted, so that she would have had to grit her teeth and think of something else, ruining pleasure forever. But Thomas doesn't push.

One morning in November, the aunt says to Linda, "You have to get a job. Eileen works. Tommy and Michael work. Patty works. You want clothes, you've got to get a job."

In her travels through the town, Linda has seen several possibilities for employment: a discount jewelry store; a Laundromat; a bowling alley; a photographic studio. In the end, she takes a job at the diner, waiting tables. She wears a gray uniform of synthetic material that crackles when she sits down. The dress has cap sleeves and a white collar and deep pockets for tips.

On a good night, she will go home with fifteen dollars in coins. It seems a fortune. She likes to walk out of the diner with her hands in her pockets, feeling the money.

Linda is a good waitress, lightning-fast and efficient. The owner, a man who drinks shots from a juice gla.s.s when he thinks no one is looking and who tries once to pin her up against the refrigerator and kiss her, tells her, in a rare sober moment, that she is the best waitress he's ever had.

The diner is a popular spot. Some of the students are regulars. Donny T. sits in the same booth every day and holds what seems to be a kind of court. He also has what appears to be a long memory.

"Our Olympic hopeful," he says as Linda takes her pad out. He has bedroom eyes and a canny grin and might be attractive were it not for his yellow teeth.

"A cherry c.o.ke and fries," says Eddie Garrity, skinny and blond and nearly lost inside his leather jacket, a precise imitation, she notices, of Donny T.'s.

"How many laps you do today?" Donny T. asks Linda, a sn.i.g.g.e.r just below the surface.

"Leave her alone," Eddie says under his breath.

Donny T. turns in his seat. "Hey, c.o.c.kroach, I want your advice, I'll ask for it."

"Do you want anything to eat?" Linda asks evenly.

"Just you," Donny T. says. He puts his hands up, mock-defending himself. "ONLY KIDDING. ONLY KIDDING." He laughs, the sn.i.g.g.e.r unleashed. "Two cheeseburgers. Fries. Chocolate milkshake. And don't make me one of those thin jobbies, either. I like a lot of ice cream."

Linda glances beyond Donny T. to the next table, where a man is having trouble with his briefcase: one of the latches keeps popping open every time he tries to shut the case. Linda watches him fiddle with the latch a half-dozen times and then, in seeming defeat, set the briefcase on a chair. He looks familiar, and she thinks that she might know him. He is twenty-two, twenty-three, she guesses, good-looking in a jacket and a tie. She wonders what he does for a living. Will he be a salesman? A teacher?

Linda takes the orders of the other boys in the booth. Donny T. travels with a retinue. She snaps her order book shut, slips it into her pocket, and bends to clear the booth of the previous party's trash.

"You settling in OK?" Donny T. asks an inch from her waist.

"Just fine," she says, reaching for a gla.s.s of c.o.ke that is nearly full.

"Don't you miss that place where you came from? What was it, a Home or something?" Donny T.'s voice has risen a notch, just enough to carry to the next table. The man with the errant briefcase looks up at her.

"I'm fine," she repeats, letting the c.o.ke tip so that it spills onto the Formica in front of Donny T.

"Watchit!" he cries. He tries to press himself into the back of the vinyl booth as the c.o.ke drips over the edge of the table and onto his jeans. "That's my leather coat there."

"Oh," says Linda. "Sorry."

"What does Donny T. do in the backseat of Eddie Garrity's Bonneville?"

This to Thomas later that night as they are driving home in the Skylark.

"You don't know?"

"No, why?"

"He deals."

She has an image of a deck of cards. And then she realizes. "Drugs, you mean?"

"Yes."

"Marijuana?"

"That," he says. "And then some."

"Why do you hang around with him?" Linda asks.

"We've been friends since first grade." He pauses. "Do you think it's immoral to deal drugs?" A slight challenge in his voice.

"I don't know," she says. She hasn't thought about this much.

"He doesn't deal to kids," Thomas says.

"Aren't we kids?" she asks.

In increments, Thomas kisses her mouth and her face and her neck. He opens the top two b.u.t.tons of her blouse. He gives her a back rub, lifting up her blouse from the waistband of her skirt. Once, his hand lightly brushes her breast. This takes two and a half months.

They are in the car in back of the cottage at the beach. It seems a good place to park: the beach is deserted, and the car is mostly hidden by the dunes. Though it is just before Christmas, the windows are steamed. The top four b.u.t.tons of Linda's blouse are opened. Thomas has his hand on the smooth skin of her collarbone, inching his way down. She feels nervous, breathless, the way she did on the roller coaster. A sense that once she reaches the top, she will have no choice but to go down the other side. That there will be nothing she can do about it.

He brings her hand to himself. She is surprised and not surprised - - boys betrayed so visibly by their bodies. She wants to touch him and to please him, but something putrid hovers at the edges of her consciousness. boys betrayed so visibly by their bodies. She wants to touch him and to please him, but something putrid hovers at the edges of her consciousness.

He feels her resistance and lets her go.

"I'm so sorry," she says.

A light swings wildly through the car. It bounces off the rearview mirror and blinds Thomas, who looks up quickly.

"Oh, Jesus," he says, as the other light, the flas.h.i.+ng light, reveals itself.

Linda and Thomas are frantic in the front seat, a kind of comedy routine. Thomas gets his s.h.i.+rt b.u.t.toned and his trousers zipped, and Linda pulls her peacoat around herself. Impossible not to be reminded of the aunt shouting wh.o.r.e wh.o.r.e and then and then s.l.u.t. s.l.u.t. Flailing her arms. Flailing her arms.

The cop bangs hard on the window. Thomas rolls it down.

A flashlight explodes in Linda's face, and for a moment, she thinks: it isn't the police; it's someone who will kill us. So that when the cop swings the flashlight away and asks to see Thomas's license, she is nearly relieved.

"You folks know this is private property?" the policeman asks.

"No, I didn't, Officer," Thomas says in a voice she's never heard before - - exaggeratedly polite, verging on parody. Of course Thomas knew it was private property. exaggeratedly polite, verging on parody. Of course Thomas knew it was private property.

The policeman studies the license, and it seems to take an age.

"You Peter Janes's boy?" the cop asks finally.

Thomas has to nod.

The cop bends down and peers in at Linda, as though trying to place her. "You all right, Miss?" he asks.

"Yes," she answers, mortified.

The policeman straightens. "Move along," he says brusquely to Thomas. "You need to be getting on home."

Parental now, which she knows will annoy Thomas no end. She wills him to hold his tongue. Thomas rolls the window as the cop walks to his car.

In the Skylark, Thomas and Linda are silent, waiting for the cruiser to drive away. When it has, Thomas leans his head back against the seat and puts his hands over his face. "s.h.i.+t," he says, but she can see that he is smiling.

"It was bound to happen," she offers.

"I can't believe he knows my father!" Thomas says, a high hysterical giggle beginning.

"You were awfully polite," Linda says.

Pa.s.sing by her aunt on the way to the bathroom, Linda thinks of Thomas. Sitting in the cla.s.sroom or handing a menu to a customer, Linda thinks of Thomas. Between cla.s.ses, they exchange notes or turn corners and kiss. He is waiting for her every morning when she walks down her street, and when she gets into the Skylark, she sits as close to Thomas as she can, the ocean of s.p.a.ce on the other side now. They shave minutes from the rest of life and are always late.

Linda,Can you meet me after school?Thomas,I was reading O'Neill again. There's this pa.s.sage: "None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever."Linda,I like O'Neill, but that's c.r.a.p. Of course we can help the things life has done to us. I prefer this pa.s.sage: "I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself - actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the s.h.i.+p and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself!"Better, no?Jesus, this cla.s.s is boring.Linda,I really like the sweater you have on today. You were driving me crazy in fourth period.Thomas,Thank you. It's Eileen's.Linda,What are you doing this weekend? I have to go skiing at Killington. I don't want to go because it will mean four days away from you. What's happening to me anyway?Thomas,I have to work all weekend. I've never been on skis.Linda,There's a hockey game tonight. Will you come?

Linda thinks the hockey game is brutal. The rink reeks of sweat and beer. There is slush underfoot. She sits on the bleachers in her peacoat with a sweater underneath, her hands in her pockets, s.h.i.+vering all the same.

The din is deafening. The shouts and calls, the drunken patter, the thwack of the puck, and the blades shus.h.i.+ng on the ice echo through the cavernous hockey rink. The imagination provides sound effects for the bits they cannot hear: a stick thrust against the back of a leg; the thud of a hipbone as a player's skates go out from under him; the crack of a helmet snapping to the ice with the force of a whip. She flinches and then flinches again. The crowd eats it up.

She doesn't recognize Thomas when he comes out onto the ice. His shoulders and legs are gargantuan in the pads. His teeth are blotted out by the mouth guard. The contours of his head have been erased by the helmet. This is a side of Thomas she has never seen before and couldn't have imagined: bent forward, stick outstretched, thighs pumping, his movements as fluid as a ballerina's, as deft as a tap dancer's. Thomas plays aggressively. She has trouble following the game, doesn't know the rules. Sometimes she doesn't even know a goal has been scored until she hears the crowd roar.

That night, inevitably, there is a brawl. This one over an intentional tripping that sends Thomas sprawling, spinning belly down on the ice. He is up in a flash, gathering himself like a spider, digging the tips of his skates into the ice, and then he is all over the player who has done this to him. Linda, who has gone to school with girls and nuns, has never seen a physical fight before, never seen the blows that land, the ricocheting of the limbs, the tugging at the jerseys, the vicious kicks. The fight takes only seconds, but the scene evokes centuries and seems more like gladiatorial combat than anything she has ever witnessed. Thomas shrugs off the referee and heads for the box to serve out his penalty, his helmet in his arm, his hair stiffened upward. He executes a neat stop just before the wire fencing, takes his punishment as his due.