“I don’t get it,” Shelia whispers. “It’s not like he’s Eric Clapton.”
“He’s good,” Addie says, “but that’s not the point.”
On TV, Senator Sam bangs his gavel. Betsy turns off the frying pan. The kitchen smells like apples and brown sugar and grease. “Shelia,” she says, “take a dollar out of my purse and you and Addie take my car to the Winn-Dixie and pick up a carton of ice cream to go with our turnovers. Vanilla or butter pecan, you girls decide.”
A Saturday like every Saturday. Bryce is up early for his golf game, which means the whole house is awake. Addie pads into the kitchen, where Claree is serving Bryce’s breakfast: scrambled eggs, soft, with a dash of Tabasco. She sets his plate on the table, and his coffee. She watches him butter his toast like it’s his dying act. Addie knows what she’s thinking: this is the last time today they will see him sober.
Sam comes in and pours himself a bowl of Lucky Charms, carries it to the living room, sits down on the floor in front of the TV and turns on Road Runner cartoons. He’s wearing his idea of a golf outfit: knit shirt, khaki shorts with long pockets for collecting golf balls, Hush Puppies, and white socks with red rings around the top. He has worn a spot on the carpet from camping by the front door. He studies the TV screen, his face bright, hopeful, his whole body tense, as if maybe Wile E. Coyote’s latest Acme device will be the one that finally works; maybe this time he’ll trap the Road Runner. Sam is so intent, he seems not to notice when Bryce comes through the room. Bryce has to step over him on his way out. “So long, buddy.”
Sam doesn’t answer. On TV, Wile E. Coyote gets blown up. Again.
Outside, Bryce’s car pulls away. Sam finishes his cereal, takes his bowl back to the kitchen and rinses it, then heads outside to play kickball with the kids across the street. Their noise fills the house — high-pitched voices yelling made-up rules, the rubbery thumping of the ball.
Half an hour later Sam is back, red-faced and wheezing, his golf clothes dirty.
“Are you okay?” Addie asks.
He drops into Bryce’s chair and puffs on his Primatene inhaler until he has enough breath to talk. “He never takes me golfing.”
“Why do you even want to go?”
Addie pictures Bryce and his friends on the golf course, humming around in their little carts. Sun pounding, dew boiling off the grass, the hot green smell of everything. After every hole they tip their flasks and wipe their mouths on the backs of their hands. Bryce tells a joke and they all laugh. He tells the punch line again and they all laugh again. Bryce laughs hardest. He’s glad to be away from home, glad not to know about Sam getting red dirt on his chair, or Claree in the back yard in her pedal pushers, hair piled on her head, sweat streaming down her face, trying to start the mower, or Addie, who’s about to desert them both and escape out the front door, just like he did.
Pet and Roland’s sister have gone shopping in Greensboro, his father is out buying gas for the lawnmower, and Roland’s been getting high, Addie can tell. His eyes are bloodshot and he smells smoky-sweet.
She follows him downstairs. He opens the stereo, puts on an album and sits down beside her on the sofa. The sofa is fat and soft. Roland is wearing his Saturday clothes: white T-shirt, cutoff jeans, and crew socks with spent elastic. He props his feet on the coffee table. His socks bunch around his ankles.
There’s a crackle from the stereo, then a swell of strings.
“What’s this?” Addie asks.
“A surprise.”
The music is lush, an orchestra, nothing like what they usually listen to. Roland sits closer. His leg touches hers.
“Want to dance?” he says.
They get up and he puts his arms on her waist. The music rises and falls. They stand close, swaying gently, barely moving.
“What is this?” she asks again. Not that it matters. He’s holding her. Music to be held by.
“Percy Faith. ‘Theme from A Summer Place,’ the old man’s favorite. Romantic, isn’t it?”
She rests her head on his shoulder. No more talk now. Only the swelling orchestra. Only the dance.
Until, from above, a roar — a car in the carport. A single slam of a car door.
Roland doesn’t lose the rhythm. He keeps swaying, not letting go.
More sounds from the carport. Clanks, thunks, sputtering, and a small explosion — Roland’s father starting the mower.
Roland stops. “I’ve got an idea,” he says.
She always imagined sex would be mysterious. That it would happen in a dark, quiet place. Not in Roland’s parents’ room on a bright Saturday with the sun squeezing in through closed blinds and a towel on the bedspread to keep it clean. Not with Roland’s father’s lawnmower making loud circles around the house, growling past the bedroom window.
She thought Roland would say things. Kiss her.
She thought it would take a long time. She didn’t know it was possible for him to finish so soon: the minute he touched her, before he was even inside her.
She thought that afterwards she would be the shy one, that he would be the one to hold her and ask if she was okay.
She thought he would tell her not to leave, not yet, instead of rolling off the bed and scooping up his clothes and ducking into the bathroom and turning on the faucet and calling out over the water that it’s too bad she can’t stay.
“Sex changes everything,” Shelia says.
“It wasn’t really sex,” Addie says. “We stopped before it got that far.”
“Good thing,” Shelia says.
They are in Betsy’s pushbutton Dodge, driving to the health clinic, a flat brick building on the highway. They pull into the gravel lot and park in back so that no one can see the car from the road.
Before they can get their pills they have to sit through a class with girls they don’t know while a nurse explains their bodies. The nurse puts diagrams on an overhead projector. She passes around a big doll to show them how to check their breasts for lumps. When it’s Addie’s turn the other girls break out laughing. “Them doll baby titties bigger than hers,” one says.
“Class,” the nurse says.
If sex changes everything, not-sex changes everything even more.
This is what Addie learns in high school. If you’re a guy, if you’re Roland, it might be okay to fail French or algebra, but it’s not okay to fail at sex.
And if you’re a girl, if you’re Addie, there’s nothing you can do or say to make it okay. She would like to tell Roland, Please, it doesn’t matter. But it does matter, all of it — the dance, him watching her undress, their bodies touching while his father’s lawnmower rattled outside, his bare, slender ass when he rolled away from her. What happened between them was as intimate and daring as she imagines sex could ever be.
They don’t talk about it. Every day, they sit together in counterculture class, they share cigarettes at the smoking wall, and they don’t talk about it.
She doesn’t want to go back to his basement without an invitation and he doesn’t invite her, so they don’t talk about it there.
Weeks go by and they don’t talk about it.
She asks about his music.
He’s putting together a band, he says, a blues trio. They practice in the drummer’s garage. “We’re going to play for senior assembly.”
“That’s great,” she says.
He doesn’t invite her to the drummer’s garage.
He doesn’t ask to read her new poems.
They don’t write a song together.
A Friday night in late May. The air is warm and humid, full of the smell of cut grass and burning charcoal, almost too thick to breathe. A thunderstorm would be a relief, but no one wants rain for the party, which is a cookout because Pet doesn’t want Roland’s friends coming in the house.