And the next day she wanted to do it again and never said another word about it being painful or disgusting.
One day I brought a vibrator from the Lighthouse. I didn’t tell Geraldine I was borrowing it. I didn’t tell Lucille where it was from, either, but of course she would have had to know.
And finally one day we got our clothes off and got into bed and she asked me what I wanted to do, and I said we would just see what happened. And after a lot of things had happened she was lying on her back with her eyes closed and I was on top of her and our flesh touched.
She opened her eyes and asked me what I was doing.
I said, “I’m going to fuck you.”
“All right,” she said, and closed her eyes again.
Afterward she said, “I guess I should have let you do it right off. I knew it would happen the first day you kissed me. I knew it and I never forgot it and I was right, and we might just as well been doing it all along.”
“Are you sorry?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.”
“Did I hurt you?”
“Not enough to talk about. You hurt me worse other times and I never minded it. Will I get a baby now, Chip?”
“No.”
“How come you’re sure?”
I showed her the condom.
“It looks so silly,” she said. “Did you buy it in a store or what?”
“I took it from—”
“From that place. I guess if Jimmie doesn’t marry me I can always work there, can’t I?”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“Knowing all you taught me. Unless you don’t think I’m pretty enough.”
“You’re beautiful.”
“I wonder do I look different now.”
“No.”
“I guess I’ll call the school in a few minutes and say I can’t come back today because my father needs me. I used to do that before you were working here.”
“You don’t have to worry, Lucille. No one can tell anything from looking at you.”
“That’s not why.” She stretched and wriggled her toes. “I guess I don’t want to get up and go putting on clothes again. I guess I liked what we did. I guess I want to do it again.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Do you have any more of those little things?”
“Uh, no.”
“Can you use them more than once?”
“It’s not a very good idea.”
“Oh, well,” she said. “There’s other things we can do, I guess. An old boy named Chip taught me a whole roomful of them.”
“You’re an angel.”
“I’m a devil is what I am. But I just don’t care.”
That was on a Friday afternoon in early March. I didn’t see her at all over the weekend. I was hoping Jimmie Butler would come to the Lighthouse Saturday night and start a fight so that I could brain him with the club. Don’t ask me why. Anyway, he didn’t show up.
I almost went to church the next morning. Just a nutty impulse.
Monday morning I helped myself to a box of a dozen rubbers on my way out of the Lighthouse. We used one of them that lunch hour, and afterward she told me she almost broke up with Jimmie Saturday night.
“But I didn’t. I wanted to, but I thought I’ll wait until the proms are over and all, because he’d have to find somebody to take and everything, and it’s easier to go along the way it is. And if I stopped going steady with him other boys might want to take me out, and at least I’m used to Jimmie. And I know I can handle him.”
“Why did you want to break up?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I just don’t like being with him is all. And I hate it when he touches me. I just don’t feel a thing. Sometimes I’ll pretend I like it but I don’t and it never does anything to me. He just keeps going with me now because it’s a habit. He doesn’t like it that I won’t let him do any more than he used to do, but if he went out with anybody else he’d have to start all over at the beginning, so I guess he thinks I’m better than nothing.”
“I think you’re better than anything.”
“I wouldn’t marry him, anyway. Even if he wanted. I don’t love him.”
“Did you love him before?”
“No, but I didn’t know it. I didn’t know anything. Not knowing what I was missing, I guess.”
I felt kind of weird. I had more than I had started out wanting in the first place, and I didn’t know whether or not I wanted it now, or what I was going to do about it.
She said, “I love you, Chip.”
I just wouldn’t tell her that I loved her. She never asked for the words, not once, not even by throwing out hopeful pauses which you were supposed to fill with the words. And I just wouldn’t say them.
I don’t know why I made such a big deal out of it. I mean, I love you doesn’t mean all that much. Nine times out of ten it’s a polite way of saying I want to ball you, and you know it and the girl you say it to knows it and just saying the words doesn’t send anyone out shopping for engagement rings.
The really dumb thing about it is that I could have said the words and meant them, because I did love her, whether or not I knew it at the time. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with her, but that’s not what the words mean anyway. I dug her and I cared about her and I enjoyed being with her and I wanted good things to happen to her and I, well, I loved her.
But instead of saying the words I even managed to keep them out of my own mind. I would ask myself things like, Well, Chip kid, how will you get yourself out of this one? After all, old man, you’ve got to be gentle with the kid. You don’t want to break her little heart.
(I’ll tell you something, I really hate writing all this down, because until just this minute I never realized what a complete asshole I was. I felt so goddamned adult with Lucille, and when I look back at it all now I can’t believe I ever could have acted like such a shitty little snotnose. And I suppose a year from now I’ll be apologizing to myself for being such an immature moron now.)
Of course I loved her, for Pete’s sake. I loved her a lot more than she loved me, if you come right down to it, because I at least knew who she was and all, and what she knew about me was more lies than truth. She fell in love with me, or thought she did, because I taught her what her body was for.
Maybe I loved her for about the same reason. Oh, the hell with it.
But figure this out. The day she told me she loved me, I sent a postcard to Hallie in Wisconsin.
Nine
Sheriff Tyles said, “Well, I hear tell you got a salary increase, boy. I hear you’re coming up in the world.”
“Oh, I’m getting rich.”
“Reckon Geraldine thinks a lot of you.”
“It was because I finally won a game of chess,” I said. “So she decided I ought to have an extra five dollars a week.”
“You wouldn’t be getting it if she didn’t like the way you were doing the job.”
“There’s not much job to do. Playing chess with her is about three-quarters of the job.” I took a sip of Coke. “Anyway, I don’t guess it’s enough to retire on.”
He clucked. “Well, it’s all in how you look at it, isn’t it? An extra five dollars a week, look at it that way and I’ll admit that it ain’t so much. But since you were only getting five dollars to start with, what you got amounts to a hundred percent increase, and I never heard of anybody kicking at a one hundred percent increase that they didn’t even have to go and ask for. Even a goddamn nigger labor union ought to be happy about a hundred percent increase.”