The five towns, p.22
The Five Towns, page 22
“No, I don’t,” said Amy. Marci was shocking her, but she was afraid to show how she felt.
She saw little of her sister that summer. Marci was always sleeping, or locked in her room with her records, or out with mysterious friends who arrived in cars that honked their horns and then sped off with her into the night. When Marci left the house, Amy could see her parents relax, and she knew that they had given up on her. At her mother’s office, she sometimes overheard her mother on the phone with her friends, explaining how she no longer knew what to do with Marci. Apparently her friends all had similar problems, and Amy began to wonder if she was the last good girl left in the Five Towns.
The only nice times she had during those weeks were when Stephen came over for dinner. Then her mother would brighten and put on a nice dress and have Lulu prepare a special meal, and they would sit around the dining-room table and tell family stories about Amy as a baby and the house on Bush Road and Stephen would talk about how he hoped to open an office in Hewlett and Evelyn would glance at Arthur and raise her eyebrows. Amy, catching sight of this exchange, would know it meant that her mother was hoping she’d be engaged soon.
But if she were engaged, she would then have to think about marriage, which scared her a little. Stephen still refused to have sex with her. She wanted to try, but was afraid to make her desires known for fear he would think she’d had some experience already. It was a strange summer, living in that house with Marci and feeling like a nineteen-year-old throwback to ancient times.
There was another strange presence in her life that summer, and that was Lulu’s son, Georgie Pearce. He had moved into the house after the death of her grandmother, but recently had grown a great deal the way boys sometimes do at a certain age and was now a tall, silent young man. At fifteen he looked nineteen, and there was something in his eyes, in the way he looked at Amy and her family, that made her feel afraid. Marci was fearless around Georgie, teasing him and calling him pet names, but Amy was afraid to go near him. His mother had been one of the most important people in her life when she was young; she thought of Lulu as a mainstay of care and love. But Georgie was removed from all of them, and it was clear that he hated their whiteness and their wealth.
She’d never really known any black people except for Lulu and the students in her high school who played football, studied shop or beauty culture, and hung around the halls in tight-knit, rowdy groups. Georgie was different from them. He was always thinking, and when you looked at him you knew that he was not thinking kind or nice thoughts. Amy had tried to read James Baldwin, for she thought she could attempt to understand better by reading, but Another Country had seemed dirty to her and not very revealing of what might be in the mind of the boy she saw passing through her house, eating with his mother at the kitchen table, or standing in the backyard staring at the bushes and trees and never moving a muscle.
When the summer ended, Amy was glad to be getting out of the house. She began to pack her things two days before her father was going to drive her up to Massachusetts, and while she was emptying her drawers her sister wandered into the room. She had a dreamy, satisfied expression on her face that she often had after sleeping away the morning. She was wearing blue jeans and an old cotton shirt with frayed edges. She had sewn little embroidered patches onto her jeans, on the knees and back pockets: butterflies, small suns, flowers. Her hair, which was straighter than Amy’s, hung down over her shoulders. Amy could see that her breasts had developed quite a bit; they were even bigger than hers. Marci caught her glance and laughed.
“You get big tits from the pill. It’s one of the nice side benefits. You sure you don’t want to try?”
Amy shook her head and continued to fill her suitcase.
“I can’t blame you for wanting to get out of here. It’s a real drag, isn’t it? I don’t know how I’m going to stand it for two more years. You’re incredibly lucky to be going away again.”
“You’ll manage,” Amy said. “If I know you.”
“But will you?” said Marci. “You’d be a lot better off without all those weird hang-ups of yours.”
“Don’t you ever have any fun?” said Amy suddenly.
“Of course. What do you think I do every night?”
“But we used to have fun in high school. We had pizza, we went to the beach, we went to football games—”
“You sound like it was a drag. Are you jealous because I don’t care what they think?”
“Of course not.”
“Yes you are. I can tell. You wish I had to listen to them too.”
“They’re very worried about you.”
“Oh, shit. They’d worry about me no matter what. What’s the big deal? I don’t care. I’m having a really good time. My friends feel the same way I do. Why shouldn’t we? We’ve got the money, and the time, and it’s incredibly boring out here unless you do something fun. You want to have fun? Get rid of your virginity.”
“Marci!”
“Yeah, I mean it. What are you worried about? You care what that dentist guy thinks so much? I’ll bet he’s not fucking you. You know, if you run around worried about being a virgin all the damn time, it gets to be a hang-up. You can get really bad and then you’ll never enjoy it. Do you know I fucked when I was fourteen?”
“I don’t believe you,” said Amy. But in truth she believed everything her sister was saying, every word. “I’m not hung up on my virginity.”
“Oh, yes, you are. You are. I know about that, and it can really mess you up. If you take my advice, you’ll get rid of it right away. Here—a going-away present for you.” And she tossed down a small package in a paper bag and left the room, slamming the door defiantly.
Amy looked inside the bag. It was exactly what she expected. Marci had given her a package of birth-control pills. Ortho-Novum. They were in a little plastic container that turned as each pill was taken to expose the next. She wanted to throw them away. She tossed the bag into the garbage pail, but as she packed her sweaters and nightgowns she kept thinking, and before she closed the suitcase she took the bag out of the garbage and hid it at the bottom of her clothes.
Two days later her father drove her up to school. He always performed tasks like this without complaint, taking the day off from work and making the long drive up and back with little time off in between. As Amy sat in the car with her father, she began to feel sad about leaving home again and even sentimental, for if Stephen and she were to get engaged this year, and possibly married when he graduated, she might never live in her parents’ house again.
“Daddy, do you think you might stop and have lunch with me before you have to get back?” she asked.
“What’s the matter?” he said to her, his eyes on the road as he maneuvered the car into the left-hand lane of the New England Thruway. “Getting cold feet? You’ve been up there to school before. You don’t need me.”
“I just thought we could talk,” Amy said. Her own voice sounded wistful to her. She felt like hanging on to her father, keeping him with her a bit longer. She’d hardly seen him at all over the summer, for he always seemed to be off at work or at the golf club, playing cards.
“Talk away,’” he said. “Something special on your mind?”
“No, nothing.”
She said no more for another ten miles. How could she ask him about love and sex and virginity? He was a man, and an old-fashioned, clumsy man at that, who could never understand what it was like to be in love. He loved her mother, she supposed, but it was a different kind of love in those days. A more practical love. You picked someone and learned to love them, like the Japanese and their arranged marriages. She couldn’t imagine anyone in the old days falling passionately in love and having sex and everything before marriage. But did she really want to have sex with Stephen? He was as old-fashioned about those things as her parents. Marci was right—he was straight. But wasn’t she straight, too?
She saw a car stopped by the side of the road. The driver had gotten out and was going to the aid of a dog who was limping along the shoulder of the road, apparently hit by a car as he tried to cross the highway.
“Look,” she pointed, and her father slowed the car and made a clucking sound with his tongue as he saw the wounded animal.
“Do you know what that reminds me of?” said Amy. “When I was little and Marci was a baby, you were driving us across the old Atlantic Beach Bridge and all of a sudden there was a bump against the front of the car—a gull had swooped down and we hit it with the car. I remember you stopped the car and got out and picked up the gull, and we took it to the toll plaza to ask about an animal shelter. Then we drove it somewhere in Far Rockaway, to a vet or something, because you wanted to try and save its life. I remember thinking how wonderful it was that you cared about the bird, and I was crying, and you said that we would try everything we could but if it died in the end it was God’s will. But you were so sorry you’d hit it, even though it was an accident.”
“What a memory,” said her father. “How do you remember all that?”
“I guess it must have been very important for me. It’s one of the things I remember best from those days.”
“I don’t like seeing innocent creatures hurt,” her father said. “It doesn’t seem fair.”
“But someone else might have driven away.”
“Yes, well, you girls might not have forgiven me if I had. You two always cried for all the animals. In the movies, you would see the whole troop of cavalry get wiped out, but you always cried for the horses—God forbid the horses got hurt.”
“Then we’re just like you.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Looks like we’ll be getting there in another couple of hours. Making good time.”
“I’m glad you like Stephen,” Amy said.
“Your mother and I think he’s a nice boy. He seems to care about you a great deal.”
“Yes—well …” Amy felt flustered and embarrassed. She could not ask her father—how ridiculous that notion was.
“You know, your mother and I have always believed you were a very special girl, very different from many other girls. We expect a lot of you, and you haven’t let us down.”
“No?”
“Why should you? You’ve done so well. But what I mean to say is that we didn’t expect any less from you. It’s too bad we never had a chance to spend much time together.”
“Remember the baseball game you took me to?”
“I guess we should have done more. But it goes so fast. It was only yesterday I was changing your diapers and now look at you, a grown-up lady, going to finish college in a couple of years, going to get married. I ask myself, Where did it go? I just turned around and it happened overnight.”
“Daddy, there’s something I want to ask you about.”
“Ask away, I’ll try and answer.”
“When I was thirteen, at my bas mitzvah party, you had a big fight with Mommy and Grandma. I thought you were talking about me. Were you? I know it had to do with Uncle Eddie.”
“There are some things that don’t concern you.”
“But it does. I heard you say something about your daughter. Or grandma said it.”
“Grandma always knew you were special. That’s all.”
“Why do you hate Uncle Eddie? What did he do with the business? And why does Mother hate him even more? Tell me. I want to know.”
“Amy, that’s enough.”
“Daddy, tell me, please.”
“It’s not something for your ears.”
“How can you care about wounded gulls and stray dogs and be so hard on your only brother? And now your mother is gone and we never see him, and all my life I’ve felt like I was the only one who really loved him, except for Grandma—”
“Amy, enough!” her father shouted. His hands clutched at the steering wheel. “I want this discussion finished, you understand?”
“He’s the only one who ever bothered to talk to me like a person,” Amy said tearily. “Why can’t you do the same? You treat me like a big baby, like I was still four years old. You gave me a stuffed dog when I went away to college. A stuffed animal, like I was a kid in a crib. How many fathers are that dumb? Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to call you dumb. Please, don’t be angry with me. I didn’t mean—oh, Daddy, why are you so hard on people?”
He said nothing. He pressed his foot on the accelerator and drove the next hundred miles hard and fast and in silence. Amy sat next to him, crying into a piece of Kleenex. Finally he could stand it no longer and fished out his handkerchief. “Here,” he said, “use this.” He didn’t look at her as he handed it to her. Why couldn’t they just be a father and daughter going to college? Where was the ease and friendship? He’d never felt comfortable around her; he’d always felt her eyes on him, judging him, measuring him against some sort of standard, just like her mother. Of course there was no point in trying. He’d never be able to do enough. Even the little one, Marci, was easier to manage, for all her difficult ways. That kind of rebellion he understood. But this one, this was the ballbuster. She wanted him to be something else, and that something else he could never be. He could never be Edward.
They pulled up to the dormitory in silence. The crying had ended, but Amy still clutched the handkerchief. He took the suitcases from the trunk and Amy held the glass door to the lobby open while he wrestled with the bulging bags. Several girls said hello to Amy, but she didn’t introduce him. He returned to the car and collected the rest of her things—hair dryer, stereo, box of records. He was exhausted from the traveling and the prospect of the long trip home. He felt he couldn’t face himself sitting alone in that automobile. It was hard to contemplate failure as a father. But he had failed. All she remembered from twenty years was a lousy baseball game and some dead gull.
“Good-bye,” she said, turning her cheek toward him and closing her eyes.
He wanted to tell her not to give up on him, not to let go, because someday she might understand what he was trying to say. But he couldn’t even tell her that. She wanted no part of him. He kissed her good-bye, and turned and left her room.
When he had gone, Amy sat down on her bed and dialed Stephen’s number. She knew what she wanted to do and she didn’t want to waste any more time. She was on her own now and had to make these decisions for herself. As she waited for Stephen to come to the phone, she saw the stuffed dog peeping out of the top of a shopping bag among her other things. She yanked it out and stared at it, at the lolling, felt grin on its face and its ridiculous, wide-open, innocent eyes. Then she took it and threw it into the wastebasket.
Stephen Tobin knew Amy wanted to have sex with him and he knew he wanted to have sex with her. All of their playing around was a bit hypocritical, for what would be the real difference if they did have intercourse? They came pretty damn near as it was. But in terms of dating a Jewish girl from the Five Towns, he knew what the difference could be. It was the difference between going steady and getting married; it was the line you crossed when you were serious about someone, and often he thought that he was too young to be quite so committed. If he got into Tufts Dental this year, the issue would be settled: They could date another year and then get married when Amy graduated. Of course he would make Tufts; he had the grades and he’d do well on the tests—he always “tested well,” as his guidance counselors said. So why the hurry? Did she want to be engaged so fast? He knew she was a virgin, and the responsibility for taking her virginity was tremendous. He wouldn’t do a thing like that unless he was absolutely sure. You didn’t make life decisions on a whim. Look at what could happen. A girl could get pregnant or something.
But try and explain that to someone as emotional as Amy. He knew it would cause trouble. She hadn’t really come out and said she wanted sex, but he knew what she was after, all fired up after the summer break and all. Well, she would just have to settle for being his girl, and that was that. Did she think screwing would make her a grown-up? Girls had such silly notions about those things, about maturity and all. Breasts and periods and they were still big babies, not really responsible like men. But what did she have to worry about? She wasn’t in college for a career. And no one was going to try and draft her for the army. He felt safe about that, because going to dental school would get him out of it, and by the time he finished school, this war thing would be over. If it wasn’t, he’d just train further, maybe take a specialty. The only problem was that everyone wanted to be safe, so a lot more people were going premed and predental just to avoid the draft. He’d have to apply to more schools, make sure he got a place. He couldn’t worry about Amy and her silly notions and her melodramatic declarations. It wasn’t life or death; life or death was what was at stake in something like a war. And this was no war. This was just college kids fooling around.
Amy didn’t think of having sex as a prelude to engagement; for her it was engagement. Thus she was disappointed in Stephen’s continuing respect for her virginity. She was eager to grow up at last, to shed what she believed to be a burden just as Marci had said; at the same time she was fearful of marriage. She managed, though, to put aside her doubts about whether she should wait until she had a career, or had dated other people, and concentrated on the dream of settling down. Whenever a Jackson girl got engaged, a great fuss was made. You were serenaded in the dining hall. Your friends planned a bridal shower, your ring was examined by hundreds of pairs of professional eyes. Most of the engaged girls were seniors, but Amy had set her sights on being one of the first juniors to be so honored.
Stephen’s obstinacy finally wore Amy down. She tried everything she knew to convince him they would be doing the right thing. She hinted about the birth-control pills; she spoke with cool sophistication about true satisfaction; she tried to be as seductive as possible. But Stephen merely smiled, unpeeled her arms from his neck, and told her it was essential that they wait “until things are a bit more settled.”
“How much more settled do they have to be?” she pouted.
“We have to wait until I have my plans set. Then we’ll see.” He smiled at her. “Wouldn’t want to get in any trouble with your family or anything.”
