I followed Hampton downstairs to the party room, where two hundred identical people were herded together shouting at each other over the music. The room was dimly lit, tiled, and furnished entirely in contemporary American bodies, arranged in small circular groups, holding drinks, laughing. Unfortunately they were alive, and might have to be conversed with.
Hampton, I noticed, had lurched over to the jukebox and was seeing to it that “My Girl” would play thirty-six times in succession. Dutifully, I followed.
I was standing there studying the checkerboard pattern on the floor, when I suddenly realized with horror that I had not spoken for nearly twenty minutes.
“Hamp, I’m sorry I’m so quiet!” I blurted. “But today I just broke up with the guy I’ve been going with for three years.”
“Gee,” said Hamp.
An electronic scream shook the room, and the lights on the jukebox faded out. A combo, with the name THE FABULOUS PROPHETS OF ECU painted on their drums, had just set up in a corner of the room, and they were either warming up or playing their opening number. It was hard to tell which. The couples surged toward the dance floor, pressing us up against the bandstand with approximately two feet of space in which to move. Hampton was spinning around like a wound-up toy mouse to the blare of the band. I moved mechanically to the rhythm, but really the noise was wrapped around me like a cushion, too loud to scream through, holding my thoughts inside. I thought about all the trivial things I’d been saying to Hampton, and all the real conversations I used to have with Anthony. It was an odd wake to bury three years. Hampton disappeared briefly between dances and came back with two plastic cups of warm beer, one of which he pressed into my hand. I smiled and nodded, indicating that I understood I was to drink it. I sipped enough of it to get the level down so it wouldn’t slosh while I was dancing, I had only managed to drink two-thirds of it. Hampton, by then, was several beers away.
I wondered what time it was. Nine-thirty by now, surely. But on reflection, I decided that I could think about Anthony here as well as anywhere. The music prevented conversation, and the company was certainly no distraction.
The last time I’d seen Anthony, we went to dinner at the Pines, and then sat down under a tree in the arboretum and talked about life. It had been dark and quiet there, with stars shining between the leaves, and Anthony had held me while we talked. I had felt that I really belonged there. Now I didn’t belong anywhere, and I didn’t know what to do or say when smiling cardboard people came up and screamed imitation questions. I wished I could explain all this to Anthony, because he would understand. But he didn’t care now. He didn’t care at all.
There was a sudden silence in the room, and I was there again. The Fabulous Prophets of ECU began to play a slow, sad melody, “I’ll Be There,” and people began to surge together. Hampton returned from orbit and looked at me with a curiously human expression. Without a word, he held me. I clung to him, occasionally remembering to move my feet, thinking how good it felt to be close to somebody. It felt warm and safe… and… just the way it always did with Anthony.
Suddenly I knew why Vicki had sent me. She wanted to put an emotional Band-Aid on my suppurated ego. And I nearly fell for it. But she was missing the point: I didn’t want to feel better, I wanted to get back at Anthony! By the end of the slow dance, Hampton and I were looking at each other with new interest: I was seeing an instrument for revenge, and he was seeing a five-foot-three-inch mound of fresh meat. When he suggested that we go for a walk in the arboretum, I didn’t even pretend to think it over.
We left the party hand in hand and headed for the arboretum in silence; we still couldn’t think of anything to say to each other. Hampton led me to a spot between two large azalea bushes that he apparently knew quite well, and we sat down on the wet ground. Fortunately it had stopped raining. At this point I considered mentioning my inexperience, but I decided to rely on dance etiquette: let him lead and do your best to keep up. What followed could best be compared to having a pelvic exam while someone blew beer and Lavoris fumes in your face. After a discreet interval-the time it took for Hampton to smoke one Benson & Hedges cigarette-he walked me back to my dorm. As we reached the front door, Hampton shuffled his feet awkwardly and mumbled: “I’ll call you.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Good night.” I didn’t offer to tell him my real name; I was inside and running up the stairs before he got to the edge of the porch.
When I reached the third floor, the hall was dark and quiet-most everybody was in Vicki’s room and the door was half open. Confessions would be heard until one A.M. I hesitated outside her door for a moment, staring down the barrel of LBJ’s machine gun, and then I turned and walked off toward the lair of P. J. Purdue.
There comes a time when you outgrow Vicki Baird.
A SNARE AS OLD AS SOLOMON
FRANCHETTE BELTED HER car coat over her swollen belly and eased her way down the icy back steps. Ramer was still in the shed. Her breath made little puffs of smoke in the chill morning air as she stumbled down the path toward the road. She hurried as if she could still hear the cries coming from the crate out front, or the sound of the hatchet on the hen’s neck.
She didn’t look back as she made for the dirt road beyond the trees. The crocuses she’d planted were beginning to put up green shoots. It was going to be an early spring, and that was good. Soon she wouldn’t have to worry about the pipes freezing, or about having to carry firewood in her condition, when Ramer went out drinking and left her alone. She couldn’t stop to look at the plants just now, or to check for deer tracks in the yard. She wished she could do something about the prisoner in the crate, but she couldn’t. She had left the kettle boiling on the stove, and the butcher knife laid out on the newspapers, just like Ramer had asked her to, but she had to get out of there.
If she ignored the catch in her side, she could be around the bend to Della’s trailer in five minutes. Della worked the lunch shift at her uncle’s diner in town, so she’d be leaving soon. If Franchette said she had a doctor’s appointment on account of the baby, Della would let her ride in to town with her for nothing. She couldn’t tell Della the real reason she wanted to go. Della’s man was living over across the river with a bleached blond dental assistant, and he never sent Della a cent for the kids or the payments on the Pontiac. Della would laugh and say that pregnant women always got fanciful, that Ramer was being protective like a man ought to be, and he was a heap better than some. Maybe he was being protective, but Franchette didn’t think so. She thought he was saving his own pride at the cost of hers. And the worst part was the way he’d done it. It was like the Bible story turned inside out, but she hadn’t seen that until today. Della couldn’t be made to understand. She’d say: “Ramer killed that old stray hen. So what?”
It had been no use trying to talk about it to Ramer either. They had been married a year now, and already the talk had run out. Used to be, Ramer would listen to her way of looking at things, her dreaming out loud, but now when she tried to talk to him, he’d look at her for a minute and then go back to what he was doing. It wasn’t all his fault, though. Being out of work was hard on a man’s pride. When he took her high school diploma down off the wall, she hadn’t said anything, because she knew it was reminding him that he’d quit in tenth grade, and maybe if he hadn’t he’d be working. Things had been different when he had the job in the sawmill. He’d wanted her to finish high school before the wedding and at graduation he’d showed up in his white tie and suit coat and had taken her out to dinner at the Beef Barn to celebrate. Those were happy times. They talked about her getting a typing job in town so that they could buy a new truck and maybe a dish-shaped antenna for the television. He had let her go and get the birth control pills at the clinic, so they could save up and have a few things before the babies started to arrive. But that was before. Now if she even brought home a book from the bookmobile, he accused her of showing off her education. So Franchette had given up reading and started a quilt. Sometimes she thought something had died inside Ramer, and that he’d be damned if he’d let it live anywhere else.