Then Allie and Eric kissed for a while, rubbing each other’s jeans while Sammy and I sat on the couch across from them, pretending we didn’t see what was happening, like we were very interested in the movie. I think of this whenever I see William H. Macy on TV now — how I sat like a mouse next to Sammy while Allie got on his friend.
Allie took Eric to her room. She grinned wildly at me as she closed the door, leaving me alone with Sammy.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I have a girlfriend, but there’s an agreement in place.”
I said, “Oh.” I didn’t really understand what he was saying.
“I’m not supposed to do anything below the waist,” he explained. “Otherwise we’re good. She understands what goes on out here.”
I hadn’t wanted to do anything with Sammy, but when we started kissing it wasn’t such a big deal. It was sexy the way his tour scruff scratched my lips and how the calluses on his fret hand tickled the skin of my neck. His long curly hair and days’-old clothes were permeated with cologne and sweat, cigarette smoke. It was cliché, I knew this, and it caused me to vacate my senses.
Sammy pulled my shirt off and teased me in ways no one had before. With the guys at the dorm it was more like they were tuning a radio, but Sammy knew what he was doing. He somehow knew my body.
I wanted to draw the line somewhere, to stop him before he went below my waist — like his girlfriend had made him promise — but I couldn’t overcome the fluency of his experience. He pulled off my tights and panties so he could go down on me. But before I’d even felt his tongue, he changed course and was on top, working around my fingers to push his thing inside.
“Don’t,” I said. But he insisted. Maybe he was egged on by my objection, by the fact that, even though I was wet, he had difficultly working his way in.
I tried to stop it from happening, by constricting my muscles, by clenching myself tight, but I was slick and his member designed for this action, long and sleek. It still burned as he wormed inside, and in those few minutes he held out before coming on my stomach. Allie and Eric, I learned later, watched from her bedroom door. She told him I was a virgin and they joked about that as Sammy humped.
The part I felt bad about was how I betrayed myself by getting wet. I tried to explain to Sammy how I hadn’t wanted to do it, once it was done.
“Why were you wet then?” He laughed in that spiteful, mocking way guys do when they think we’re being stupid. “Don’t lie,” he said. “You were wet. That means you wanted to. Everyone knows that.”
After Sammy turned his back to me and fell asleep, I convinced myself that what happened didn’t count as my first time because I hadn’t wanted him to do it. It was like an examination, asexual, unloving, and nothing more. I fell asleep then too, believing this.
It wasn’t until the next morning that I regained my senses, in the kitchen at breakfast with Allie and the two guys from the band. My dress was stretched and hung loose from my body, my legs bare and shoeless, my tights and sandals stuffed in my purse.
Allie’s impish face told me more than I wanted to know. She was giddy for me. And from the way Sammy grimaced as I sat across from him, avoiding eye contact, I knew that I’d come to a breaking point with my old life. I couldn’t say anything to him. He’d changed me and everyone knew it.
It was after breakfast, with the Zapruder Films on the road again, that I told Allie what happened.
“We were watching,” she confessed. “That’s pretty much how it’s supposed to go. Don’t turn yourself into a victim.”
On the drive back from Omaha I decided to leave school. My father came to rescue me after I called and asked him to. He helped load my things out of the dorm into his Park Avenue. It would have been too embarrassing to have him watch me pack, to have my Amazon roommate edge by in nothing but a towel like she’d done on move-in day, her hair dripping wet from the showers, my father’s forehead flushed and sweaty. So I packed first and waited by the dorm lobby door. I leaned against the radiator and searched for his Buick, my face pressed against a freezing pane of glass until the tip of my nose ached. When I ran to his car I could feel the hot spots on the back of my jeans where the metal of the radiator had touched my legs.
2
Chadron Gutschow steadies himself at the top of a ladder. He unscrews a burnt-out light bulb then drops it into a plastic sack. Alex hands him a different bulb from another sack and Chadron winces when the bare bulb he’s screwing in illuminates. He says, “It’s going to be a long weekend,” and laughs with his roommates as he rubs his eyes.
The doorbell interrupts them, Chadron on the ladder. Jeff opens the door to reveal Chadron’s wife Amy on the other side. The men stare at her for a moment, they grin dumb. Amy wears jeans tucked into snow boots and a puffy black coat. This house belongs to her and Chadron, it’s her name on the deed, in fact, but she’s been gone eight months, in the Twin Cities, and has in many ways given up claim to this house. Even so, she looks pissed to see these two men standing in her living room, her husband out of sight.
“Where are you, Chadron?”
“Up here,” he says, humped over the top of the ladder. He’s a tall man. His hair self-cut with scissors, choppy and short.
Jeff closes the door after Amy comes inside and follows behind her. Chadron climbs down and then the three men circle her, their proximity somewhat accidental. Chadron worries how Amy sees them, as she looks them over. He and his roommates all look similar, the rough haircut, their uniforms from the animal testing facility — green tee shirts, off-brand dungarees, velcro tennies. At the plant, it’s their job to exercise the subjects at a fenced-in area they call the Dog Shit Factory.
This is the Friday before Christmas, so Jeff says they should celebrate. He goes to the kitchen to dig in a cabinet. “The first round is on me,” he laughs, cracking the seal on a bottle of Kessler while Alex pops ice cubes into glasses at the sink.
Chadron waits for Amy to say something. The two of them alone in the living room. There’s different furniture now, polyester sofas from the Salvation Army, a wooden chair that sits in the corner. Since she paid for it, Amy took their furniture with her to Minnesota when she left.
“You came back,” Chadron says, holding his hand out to shake hers. Tears build in his eyes.
“I won’t stay long.” Amy walks past Chadron to the kitchen. “Just in town to visit my folks,” she says. “And to take care of some business.”
In the kitchen she sits with Alex and Jeff. Jeff leans into the table and drips tobacco spit into a Gatorade bottle. An odor of wintergreen fills the house while Chadron watches them from the living room.
“Only two bulbs this time,” Alex says, looking at the ceiling. He has a dark complexion. People in high school wondered if he was a gypsy. “This is Jeff,” he says to Amy. “I’m Alex.”
“Get in here,” Amy says to Chadron, pointing to the empty seat. After he sits, there’s a drink in front of each of them.
“Don’t forget to throw in.” Jeff looks at Amy while he taps the brown plastic Kessler bottle. “We all chip in for booze.”
“Shut up,” Alex whispers. “She don’t need to pay.”
“This is her house,” Chadron says.
“Yeah,” Jeff whispers back, “but we’re the ones paying rent.”
The window next to the table is dark and all the lights in the house are on because it’s easier than fiddling with them if they change rooms. Later, they’ll move to the sofa and watch TV. It’s what most men in the world do when they lack an essential ingredient — talent or ambition — they sit around a dreary room and drink.