“Betty,” he said, “this is Jamie. Can I talk to Connie, please?”
“Where are you, you dirty dog?” Betty said.
“Up here in Shottsville.”
“Where the hell is Shottsville?”
“Up here someplace,” he said. “Sounds like a good party.”
“It’s a magnificent party, I may never speak to you again for missing it. Let me see if I can find her.”
He heard the receiver clattering onto the tabletop, heard Betty yelling, “Connie! Jamie’s on the phone! Has anyone seen Connie?” He listened to the background din.
“Hello?” Connie said.
“Hi, honey, how’s the party?”
“Terrific,” she said flatly. “Parties are always marvelous when your husband’s in Nome, Alaska.”
“Where were you?” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Took you a long time to get to the phone.”
“Oh. Some of us are in the den playing Dictionary. How’s Lissie?”
“Fine. We went to a movie.”
“When are you coming home?”
“After lunch tomorrow.”
“Then you’ll be able to come to the Guild with me.”
“What time is the opening?”
“Three o’clock, I think.”
“Yes, sure.”
“Where are you now?”
“In bed,” Jamie said.
“Alone?”
“No, with two black girls.”
“I believe it,” Connie said.
“Want to talk to them? Lula Belle, my wife wants to say hello.”
“Take pictures,” Connie said. “I want to see if I approve of your taste.”
“Haven’t got my camera with me. Edna Mae, my wife wants to know how I taste.”
Connie laughed.
“See you tomorrow, honey,” he said, smiling. “How long are you going to be at that party?”
“Oh, I don’t know. How would you define ‘peculate’?”
“Peculate?” He thought for a moment, and then said, “To rummage aimlessly.”
“Good, I’ll use it. Give Lissie my love.”
“I will. Good night, darling,” he said, and hung up.
He recognized at lunch the next day that he and Lissie were collaborators of a sort, recklessly conspiring to nullify the punishment meted by the school. He felt, along with her, that the punishment was absurd, and he firmly believed that it was essential to reduce absurdity of any kind to its lowest level of idiocy. Lissie had not been smoking pot, and the rest was utter nonsense. The rest, in fact, had been behavior he considered somewhat creative. Lissie sensed his approval and plundered it like a pirate, teasingly asking him to come up on the following weekend, even though it was an academic weekend when normally she would not have been allowed home. He drew the line there, telling her he’d end up in a divorce court if he left her mother alone at home on yet another weekend. Lissie’s face went suddenly sober.
“You’d never even consider divorcing Mom, would you?” she asked.
“Never in a million years,” he said.
He was lying.
Lissie’s academic weekend officially started after her fourth-period class on Friday, February 28. Jamie, as he’d promised, did not go up to see her; neither was she allowed to go home, since that would have amounted to a total revocation of the Intermediate Discipline she was allegedly suffering. On Saturday afternoon, she and her roommate Jenny played a vigorous if amateurish game of squash, showered and washed their hair afterward, and were sitting in bras and panties on one of the locker-room benches, waiting for their hair to dry more completely before venturing out into the cold.
Jenny lived in New York City with her mother and her stepfather, and she went to thousands of Broadway shows each year, and had the albums for all of them, not to mention the albums for another thousand she’d never seen. She was almost eighteen, six months older than Lissie, and she still used the name Groat, even though her stepfather wanted to adopt her and give her his name. She liked her stepfather a lot, but his name was Fenner, and Jenny could just feature calling herself Jenny Fenner! She’d never met her real father, who’d abandoned Jenny’s mother the minute he learned she was pregnant; but according to what her mother had told her, she resembled him a lot, with the same black hair and brown eyes, and the same upturned little Irish nose. Groat, she proudly informed Lissie, was an Irish name going all the way back to the days of the widcairns.
Except for the two of them, the locker room was empty. A shower dripped interminably in one of the stalls. They talked ramblingly about their game — Lissie felt that Jenny’s backhand was improving — and then about the guest violinist who was scheduled to play that night at the arts center, and then, as it invariably did, the conversation switched to the injustice of their punishment; by then, Jenny had convinced herself she was truly innocent, and that the sentence levied upon the three nonsmoking girls was enormously extravagant. Lissie, who had seen her father more often during the three weeks of restriction than she had in any previous three weeks of the school term, nonetheless agreed that these were hard times, and began toweling her hair again. When she took the towel away from her head, the first thing she saw was the joint in Jenny’s hand.
“What the hell is that?” she said, knowing full well what it was. “Come on, put that away, are you crazy? Where’d you get that?”
“From a boy at Rogers House,” Jenny said, the joint bobbing between her lips, her dark head bent over her open handbag.
“Hey, come on,” Lissie said. “For Christ’s sake, we’ll get kicked out! If somebody walks in here...”
“Everybody’s over at the rink, watching the Taft game,” Jenny said, and found the matchbook she was looking for.
“Then wait till I’m gone, okay?” Lissie said. “I’m getting the fuck out of here, you just wait till—”
“Why?” Jenny said. “You chicken?”
“That’s right, I’m chicken, right, that’s it,” Lissie said, pulling on her jeans.
“You ever try it?”
“Nope, and I don’t intend to,” Lissie said. She reached for her sweater, pulled it on over her wet hair, and then sat on the bench again to put on her socks and shoes. She left the laces untied, grabbed her squash racket, and was starting for the door when Jenny’s voice stopped her.
“Who are you running to tell?” she said.
“What?” Lissie said, turning to her.
“You heard me.”
“Nobody. Why would I...?”
“Then stay here with me.”
“No.”
“You don’t have to smoke, if you don’t want to. Just stay with me and—”
“No. Jenny, you’ve got to be out of your—”
“Some friend,” Jenny said, and struck the match.
“Jesus, are you going to smoke it right here in the locker room?” Lissie said.
“The john then, okay?”
“Jenny...”
“Come with me, okay? Just to stand watch, okay?”
“Jenny, I’m scared shitless.”
“Just to stand watch.”
“Okay, but...”
“Thanks,” Jenny said, and blew out the match, and picked up her handbag.
The toilets were on the other side of the shower room. Jenny went into one of the stalls and closed the door. Lissie heard her striking another match, and then smelled the burning marijuana. If somebody walks in here, she thought, they’ll know in a minute...