I fantasized as best I could, jealous first of Rebecca, then of Lee, and switching back and forth as I considered their roles and how they’d betrayed me, since already I’d decided that Rebecca was mine. She was my consolation prize. She was my ticket out. Her behavior with this boy really threatened all that. Was this what they’d taught Rebecca to do at Harvard — to win these boys over with charm and affection, then educate them? Perhaps this was some new way, I tried to think, some kind of liberated thinking. But the more I considered it, the crazier it seemed. What was she saying to him? How close could they have become in a matter of days? What had Rebecca done or said to earn Lee’s trust? I imagined the scene back in Rebecca’s office. I wanted to know what was happening. Visitors came and went. I felt sick with abandonment. I was so very dramatic. I figured I ought to leave then and there, to spare myself any more misery. Once again I imagined driving my Dodge off the cliffs and down onto the rocks by the ocean. Wouldn’t that be thrilling? Wouldn’t that be the way to show them all that I was brave, that I was tired of following their rules? I would rather die than stand around, be among them, drive on their nice streets, or sit in their nice prison — no, not me. I nearly cried standing there. Even Randy, beautiful and smelling of smoke and polished leather, couldn’t cheer me.
But then I saw it — the notebook. Rebecca had left it on the ledge of the window behind the table. And so when the last visitor left, I snatched it and walked down through the corridors toward Rebecca’s office, quite pleased that I’d found such a good excuse to poke my nose in. I hoped that Lee was still in there with her and I could catch the two of them red-handed. I don’t know what I was expecting to find, but I put my ear to the door, straining to hear sighs and moans, or whatever people sounded like when they made love. I’d never heard my parents make love. If they made love, they did it silently, like bank robbers, like surgeons. I heard, felt nothing. I knocked on Rebecca’s office door.
“Oh, Eileen,” she chirped when she opened it. “Are you all right?”
I took a step back, feeling like a child, a nuisance. I extended the notebook toward her. She took it, thanked me, said she hoped I hadn’t read it.
“Of course I didn’t,” I told her. I couldn’t have, anyway — that chicken scratch was indecipherable.
“I’m only teasing,” she laughed. “My book of secrets.” She clutched the notebook to her chest. She had a way of laughing, head thrown back, jaw cut so smooth and white and hard, as if it were rimmed in porcelain, eyes first pinched in ecstasy, then wide and wild — devilish eyes, beautiful eyes — then face lowered, beaming with affection or derision, I couldn’t tell. I turned to leave, but she stopped me by laying a hand on my shoulder. This sent chills down my spine. Nobody had touched me like that in years. I forgave her instantly for betraying me with the boy. I could hear him inside clearing his throat.
“Say,” she began. “Would you be up for a drink after work tonight? I don’t know anyone in this darn town, and I would love to treat you to a cocktail, if you’re game.”
The way she talked was so canned, so scripted, it inspired me to be just as canned. “Say.” People didn’t really talk like that. “A cocktail.” If she seems insincere, she was. She was terribly pretentious, and later, in hindsight, I felt she’d insulted my intelligence by selling me her scripted bunk. “Darn it all.” But at the time I felt I was being invited into an elite world of beautiful people. I was flattered. And I was flustered. I had never received such an invitation in my life, so this was as thrilling and terrifying as hearing someone tell me, “I love you.” I was full of gratitude. I didn’t think of my father, my evening duties, any of that. I just said, “OK.”
“OK? I’ve twisted your arm?” Rebecca joked. She let the door swing open a bit. I could see Lee Polk sitting in a chair in front of her desk, looking through a large book of pictures. When he saw me he held the book up to hide his face.
“Sure,” I said. “How about O’Hara’s around seven?” I was shocked by how easily the words came out of my mouth. I hoped my death mask had not betrayed me, prayed I sounded cool. O’Hara’s was just a dark dive with hard wooden booths, a place working-class locals went. The usual clientele were cops and firefighters and men from the shipyard who stank powerfully of sweat and salt. Two single women alone at a place like O’Hara’s would inspire strange looks, or worse. But I was game. I was a peon and I was a child, but I was not a coward. “It’s the only bar in town,” I added.
“Sounds perfect,” Rebecca whispered. She made a playful, conniving face. “I’ll see you there. With bells on! Is that the expression?” She shut the door.
So that was something. You have to remember I was what you’d call a loser, a square, a ding-a-ling. I was a wet blanket. I had never gone out at night. Even in college, the dances were chaperoned, and among the girls in my dorm was the sense that to stray from the flock meant you were a floozy, a prostitute, a sinner, greedy, disgraceful, a threat to civilization, bad. Setting foot in a place like O’Hara’s would have been frowned upon. But if Rebecca was doing it, I would do it, too. What did I have to lose? I left work early to give myself time to go home and change. I figured I had to put on a dress, do my makeup, find my mother’s perfume. Getting dolled up was completely silly, of course. You can always tell something when a woman is overdressed — either she’s an outsider, or she’s insane.
I wasn’t a stranger at O’Hara’s. Sandy, the bartender, was a thick and slow-moving man with deep acne scars and a gold cross, a flirt. I’d been there plenty of times, first as a young girl sent in to fetch my father from an extended after-work beer with his fellow cops while my mother waited in the car, and later as a sober escort when he’d get drunk and refuse to accept a ride home. I remember one autumn evening in particular when I was home from college for the weekend, my mother sent me to the bar to pick up my dad. Driving home along the moonlit streets, he laid his head on my shoulder, told me I was a good girl, that he loved me, that he was sorry he couldn’t be better, that he knew I deserved a real father. It moved me at first, but then his hand went to my breast. I beat him off easily. “Quit fussing, Joanie,” he said, slumping back in his seat. I never mentioned it to anyone.
Before I left Moorehead that day, I finished the vermouth in my locker, and then I drove to the liquor store for more gin and beer for my father and another bottle of vermouth for me. I’d need a drink before meeting Rebecca at O’Hara’s, I was that nervous. At home, I set the bag of booze down next to my father, who was sleeping in his recliner with his face smushed against the cushion, eyebrows raised, forehead clenched, body twisted and clunky under the flannel robe. I ran up into the shower as silently as I could. Let me be clear about this: I was not a lesbian. But I was attracted to Rebecca, yearned for her attention and approval, and I admired her. You could call it a crush. Rebecca might as well have been Marlon Brando, James Dean. Elvis. Marilyn Monroe. In such company, any normal person would want to look right, smell good. I worried what might happen if Rebecca wanted to lean in close to me the way she did with Lee. What if she could smell that I was menstruating, and that I hadn’t washed? What if she smelled it clear as day but didn’t say anything? How, then, would I know whether or not she’d smelled it, and how ought I act to pretend I didn’t know Rebecca smelled it? My poor nether regions. My body’s readiness to bear a child seemed classless and vulgar to me, and I felt that if Rebecca had any idea that I was menstruating, I would be humiliated. I would die. These were my thoughts as I scrubbed.