AND SO IT WAS UNTIL THE DAY in her junior fall when the girl was outside with her fire batons on a day her father was burning leaves. She was spinning them skyward, where they blazed bright against the glum fall sky. Her monkey-faced sister was raking leaves, sulking in an old red sweater of their brother’s, and everywhere the glorious smell of singed leaves, smoke as thick as wool.
The girl sent the fire baton into the air with her left hand as she did an Around the World with her right. When the baton fell, it fell a little askew, and she missed catching it with her palm; it fell on the ratty fringe of the old jeans she was wearing, they flamed up, and she stared at the bright blaze, blank, for a couple of seconds before she began to scream, Help me, help me, help! clapping at the flame. The father dropped his wheelbarrow and ran, but for the younger daughter, for the red sweater — he tackled the younger daughter, and smacked out the flames of her red sweater before he realized they weren’t flames at all. By the time he reached his eldest daughter and put out the fire, holding her as the sister ran for the telephone, there were black scorch marks on the flesh of the girl’s shins and calves, and she had gone limp and unconscious.
When the girl awakened, she was in the burn unit, tubes in her arms, her legs bandaged and elevated and feeling as if they were packed with clay. Her idiot brother was kneeling on a chair beside her, nobody else in the room. He rubbed her cheek with his finger and cooed.
Oh, little guy, she would have groaned if she could only get her mouth to work. Oh, little guy, what happened? She only remembered the flames when she saw, on the stand, monuments of flowers, from the principal, from the football team, from the boys who knew every inch of her skin rather well, from her calculus and biology teachers, from her stepgranddaddy, from her baton teacher’s good-looking husband. All, she realized, from men. She picked up a novel her mother had dropped there, and she read to escape the thought.
By the time the flowers wilted and dropped their petals one by one, the girl had devoured a tower of books. She was a religious convert for books, parched and feverish. While she spun her batons she had forgotten that terrible ache; the books made her forget for longer. She gave up the idea of Miss America with nary a pang; nobody wants a singed beauty queen. And when she began walking again with her skinny, tender legs, and zipped up the long boots she would forevermore have to wear with her skirts, and she realized her grades were not good enough to slide into school on them alone, she began twirling again. Only halfheartedly. Only to stay in the light. She was good at it. It would take her where she would need to go: to college, that distant horizon.
In the summer, she was selected to be the head majorette for Big 33, the state high school football championships, and as such, she choreographed the routines of forty-five of the state’s best twirlers. On the big day, she did a perfect routine with three fire batons. On television, in front of everyone, Joe Paterno watched her and gave a little smile and said, Hell, if I had any say over the Penn State band, that young lady would be my number one draft pick.
Flushed with her success, knowing this was the pinnacle of her half-abandoned life as a majorette, she drove home in her coughing Hornet, her father by her side, her mother crammed in the back. And perhaps it was what Paterno had said, but her father looked at his firstborn, and his eyes filled, and he couldn’t say a word, only turning away from her, to look out into Pennsylvania flying by. The girl felt the heat of his gaze, and then the relief as he looked away.
Though that autumn her history and English teachers had a great blowup in the faculty lounge about who, exactly, should take credit for the girl’s turnaround, neither was responsible: after the fire, after Paterno, the girl read at night until the books made her fall asleep. That was how she earned herself a full scholarship to Lafayette College, near Allentown. For their first coed class, the admissions committee wanted a diverse group of girls. She fluttered her eyelashes. She aced her interview.
THE SERENITY, THE BEAUTY, the aged brick of the campus stirred in her something close to exploding, something sweet and good. She smiled, she got along well with her roommates, both city girls, both rich. She borrowed their White Shoulders, their miniskirts, their brandy; their bracelets chuckled on her wrists. And though the football games were quieter than her high school ones — the team was awful, the fans more interested in smoking pot and watching the clouds above explode into psychedelic shapes — every weekend, she put on her flabby handed-down uniform and twirled mightily and gained a few fans.
Hey, Darlin’, war protesters outside the union would shout at her as she crossed the quad, Hey, Majorette. Come twirl over here to protest the war.
And when she’d give them a shy smile at halftime as she marched out for the routine, one boy with gleaming reddish hair and a sweet face under his glasses would trot before the bleachers and woo the sky, singing, One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war! And the crowd would raise their fists and say, Five, six, seven, eight, twirl them sticks to set them straight!
And the girl, under the spinning batons in the air, would laugh. She’d give a little antiwar shuffle to the beat of the chant. And then she would think of her glowering father if he were to see her, and become scandalized at her own daring, and flush and run off.
She didn’t know that the redheaded boy was in her biology class until the day she saw him as she was coming down the steps of the lecture hall to hand in a test. Her skirt was the miniest she had, her boots white platforms, and he dropped a pencil to peer up the stretch of her legs. He grinned at her, and, despite herself, she grinned down at him, and this is how they met. He was in premed, he said, because his draft number was ridiculously low, and if he didn’t get into graduate school he’d be in some Asian jungle somewhere, torching babies.
What do you think? he said, naked, gleaming with sweat on his frat-house bed, looking at her anxiously. If I don’t get into med school, would you go to Canada with me? For weeks her greatest anxiety had been how to hide her seared calves under his sheets, but now she forgot her own body entirely. And she looked at him, began to blink, and as she blinked, there was a tremendous shifting as if something began to strain closed inside her. He frowned. What’s the matter? he said. And she said, Nobody ever asked me what I thought before. And he said, That’s silly, you must have been asked what you thought at some point, and she said, No, and he said, Well, you have to have opinions, everyone has opinions, and she said, I don’t. I don’t know. I don’t know how to make opinions. And he pried her hands from her face and kissed her on the nose, and instead of saying, as she thought he was going to say, Well, I’ll have all the opinions you need, little missy, he said, Well, you can have all the opinions you want around me. Go ahead and practice.
And she looked at him, at the laughing redheaded boy who squinted at her presbyopically, she saw the lick of salt from the dried sweat on his forehead and said, I think you are the kindest man I know. And he said, Well, that’s a good one. You’re about the only woman in the world to ever have that opinion, and they laughed together, and he stopped laughing and he looked at her very seriously, brushing the bleached hair from her face. He opened his mouth. And when all the other men she’d known would have said, Baby, you’re so beautiful, he didn’t. Instead, he said, Beautiful, you are smart. Believe it.