Roberta hovered over Shelby and spoke in a deaf person’s shout, “He took me to Canobie Lake. He got fresh!”
“Remember what you wrote in my yearbook?” Annie said. “‘You’re the ultimate in feminine pulchritude.’”
“I guess I had a way with words,” Ray said.
“You had a way with your hands,” Roberta said, shouting again.
Maura said to Shelby, “I’ve known Ray Testa since I was seven years old.”
Everything that he’d forgotten was real and immediate to them — the prom, the lake, the yearbook, Miss Balsam’s third-grade class. He had lived his life without looking back, and he’d been happy. But had their disappointment made them dwell on the past, as a consolation?
He said, “Shel and I need a drink.”
Maura said, “I’ll get it.”
“Don’t bother.”
But she insisted, and after she slipped away they spoke with Annie and Roberta. While they chatted about changes in Medford, he remembered the rowboat at Canobie Lake, the fumbled kiss, his clutching Roberta, the way she had snatched at his hands. And Annie — the summer night on her porch, her arms folded over her breasts, and “Don’t, please.” And when Maura returned with the drinks he recalled the back seat of his father’s car at the drive-in, the half-pint of Four Roses, and “Cut it out.” Horrible.
Maura handed over the two glasses of white wine. Ray sipped his, but Shelby held hers in both hands as though for balance, not raising it.
“Drink up,” Maura said.
Shelby put her glass to her lips, and Ray did the same. The warm wine had the dusty taste of chalk and a tang he couldn’t name, perhaps a metal — zinc, maybe, with the smack of cat piss — and he found it hard to swallow, but to please Maura he swigged again, and he knew he was right in thinking it was foul, because Shelby did no more than sip. And seeing Shelby struggle, Maura looked on with what he took to be satisfaction.
He remembered their flesh, and he sorrowed for what they had become, parodies of those young women. They had badly neglected their teeth. He felt grateful that Shelby did not resent his being so much older, but he was never more keenly aware of their age difference.
In the ballroom, where a small band played, some couples had begun to dance. His arm around Shelby’s waist, as he steered her onto the floor, he could feel her body go heavy, resisting the music.
“How you doing?” he heard. It was Malcolm DeYoung, a high school friend. “Hey, who’s this fine lady?”
“Shelby, I want you to meet my old friend Malcolm.”
Malcolm said, “What about some food? There’s a buffet over there.”
They stood in the buffet line, and afterward they sat together at a table. Ray said, “I used to know everyone. But the only people I’ve met so far, apart from you, are those three”—Maura, Roberta, and Annie were at a nearby table. “The funny thing is, they were my girlfriends, at different times.”
Malcolm said, “You got a target on your back, man,” and he winked at Shelby.
“I really wanted to introduce Shel to my old friends.”
Malcolm put his fork down. He stood up and said, “I don’t drink these days. But let me tell you something. In a little while these people are going to get a little toasted. I don’t want to be here then. I don’t think you want to, neither.”
Then he left them. Ray didn’t speak again, nor did Shelby say anything more. She put her knife and fork on the uneaten food on her plate, and her napkin on top, like a kind of burial. Ray hugged her and said, “Ready?”
She said, “I was ready an hour ago.”
They left quickly, not making eye contact, and in the hotel lobby Ray said, “Shall we go upstairs?”
“What did you do after the prom?”
“We watched the submarine races up at the Mystic Lakes.”
“Show me.”
He drove her through the town and to the familiar turnoff, then down to the edge of the lake, where he parked, the house lights on the far shore glistening, giving life to the black water. He held Shelby’s hand, he kissed her, as he had in the first weeks of their love affair. He fumbled with her, loving the complications of her dress, delighting in the thought of her body under those silky layers slipping through his fingers, and now she seemed as eager as he was.
“Here?” he asked. “Now?”
“Why not?” She shrugged the straps from her shoulders and held her breasts, and as she presented them to him, their whiteness was illuminated by the headlights of a car, swinging past to park beside them.
“Cops,” Ray said.
Shelby gasped and covered herself, clawing at her dress, and ducked her head, while Ray rolled down his window. A bright overhead light came on inside the other car, which seemed full of passengers.
“You pig.” It was Maura Dedrick, her face silhouetted at her window, someone beside her — Annie, maybe — and someone else in the rear seat.
Ray was in such a hurry to get away, he started the car without raising the window, so he heard Maura still calling out abuse as he drove off, and the shouts were mingled with Shelby’s choked sobs that made her sound like a sorrowing child.
Back at the hotel (the reunion was still in progress — fewer people, louder music) Shelby lay in bed shivering, repeating, “That was awful.” Ray tried to soothe her, and in doing so felt useful, but when he hugged her, she said, “Not now.”
Once, in a dark hour of the night, the phone rang like an alarm. Ray snatched at it, and the voice was a shriek, the accusation of a wronged woman, which Ray felt like a snatching at his head.
“Wrong number,” he mumbled, and hung up, but was unable to get to sleep again.
In the morning Shelby said, “Show me whatever you’re going to show me,” and slid out of bed before he could touch her, “then let’s go home.”
He drove her to his old neighborhood and then slowly down the street where he had lived as a boy. The trees were gone, the wood-frame houses faded and small. Shelby sat, inattentive, as though distracted. But he urged her to get out of the car, and he walked her to the side of a garage where he’d scrawled a heart on the cinderblock with a spike, the petroglyph still visible after all these years. It was here, in the garage between two houses, that he’d kissed a girl — what was her name? — one Halloween night, crushing her against the wall, tasting the candy in her mouth, and running his hands over her body.
“Hello, stranger.”
A great fat woman with wild hair stood, almost filling the space between the garage and the nearby house. She laughed and put her hands on her hips. She wore bruised sneakers and no socks, and when she opened her mouth Ray could see gaps in her teeth, most of her molars missing. She raised her hand, clapping a cigarette to her lips, then blew smoke at him.
“I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Is it”—he squinted to remember the name—“Louise?”
“Who else?” she said, then, “Who’s that, your daughter?” and laughed again.
Shelby said, “I’ll meet you in the car.”
“She’s scared,” Louise said triumphantly.
Ray was frightened too, but didn’t want to show it. The woman was hideous, and her sudden appearance and her weird confidence made him want to run. But he sidled away slowly, saying, “Don’t go away. I’ll be back.”
“That’s what you told me that night. I’ve been waiting ever since!”
Had he said that? Probably — he’d told any lie for the chance to touch someone. She had scared him then, she scared him now. He had the sense that she wanted to hit him, and when she took another puff of her cigarette and tossed the butt aside, he feared that she was coming for him. She was big and unkempt and reckless-looking.
“Please,” he said, and put his hands up to protect his face and ran clumsily to his car.
Louise did not follow him. She watched from the passageway beside the garage, potbellied, her feet apart, and as he started his car she shook another cigarette from the pack, fearsome in her confidence.