“She wasn’t a brunette,” Horton was saying. “Her hair was bleached blond.” They were still talking about the woman in cowboy boots and a cowboy hat.
“Not all of it,” Ferdy said slowly, grinning.
“Horton,” Pete said-Pete was a junior who’d won Assassin the year before-and when Horton looked at him, Pete tapped his temple. “We’re not talking about up here.”
Horton looked at Pete for a second, then made an expression of distaste. “You’re a foul man, Mr. Birney,” she said, and the guys started laughing.
“We’re just kidding,” Pete said. “Don’t be pissed. Are you pissed?”
Horton glared at him without saying anything, then finally, in a small voice, she said, “Maybe.”
“Maybe!” Pete exclaimed, and I almost thought he liked Horton, but it might have been just more of his repertoire-that he could flirt enthusiastically with her when they were in the same place, but that he’d have shown no less enthusiasm with another pretty girl. They started talking just to each other, and I wished I were eating ice cream alone and wondered if I’d been sitting there long enough that I could leave without attracting attention.
At that moment, Horton leaned across the table, extending a pack of cigarettes. “Want one?”
I shook my head. “No, thanks.”
“Because of your parents?” Horton said. She had stuck a cigarette in her own mouth and held a pink plastic lighter to the tip of it. The lighter looked both cheap and cool in its cheapness. But how had Horton known that? What made it not simply tacky? “I always tell my parents the restaurant was so full that I had no choice but to sit in the smoking section,” she said.
“Or,” Suzanne said, perking up, “you say that your friends were smoking but you weren’t. Then it’s like you’re being honest by telling on your friends.”
I smiled weakly.
“Horton,” Pete said. “If you give me the one you just lit, I’ll light you another one.”
“Okay, that makes a lot of sense.”
“No, it does. Here’s why-”
I stopped listening to them. He wanted his mouth to touch where her mouth had touched. He wanted them to be passing something between them, fingers grazing, leaning into each other. In some ways, boys were easier to read than other girls-with boys, it was pursuit and lust, it was effort. With so many girls, it just seemed to be about receiving, or not receiving, rather than trying. It was saying yes or no, but not please, not come on, just this once.
I had been at the table less than ten minutes then, and I waited fifteen more before I stood to leave-to catch my plane, I said. Everyone wished me Merry Christmas, and I waited to see if Horton had anything to say, but she didn’t; it appeared I had been summoned, I had been sanctioned by her, for no particular reason. Or I had been summoned for a particular reason that no one would ever articulate-because now I was linked to Cross. There were a lot of moments I could point to that indicated that no one knew; that afternoon in the airport, Horton’s invitation to join her table, was one of the few times I thought maybe everyone did.
In the enclosed space of the car, riding from the airport to our house, I thought that surely my mother could sense the difference in me-not necessarily that I’d had sex, but something in that direction. But if she were to ask, I’d tell her nothing. I had never been a girl who confided much in her mother, mostly because my mother had never seemed altogether certain what to do with the information I did share. “Mary McShay kissed a fourteen-year-old boy at the Y this summer,” I told my mother on the first day of sixth grade.
“Did she?” my mother asked mildly. “Fourteen sounds a bit old.” But that was all she said-she didn’t want to know more about the boy, or the nature of the kiss (it had indeed involved tongue), or whether I had plans to kiss fourteen-year-old boys myself. I think it was a mixture of my mother’s shyness and her distraction, though the things that distracted her were always motherly, like the fact that she needed to take the lasagna out of the oven; it wasn’t as if her mind was consumed with matters unrelated to our family. Basically, I didn’t consider my mother to be much of a resource, not like Kelli Robard’s mother, who listened to the same radio station we did and knew brands of clothing and the names of the cute boys in sixth grade. My mother was a benevolent but uninformed presence. In fourth grade, when I’d asked her what a hunk was, she’d said sincerely, “It’s a big piece of cheese.”
And yet she regularly surprised me by what she did know, or at least intuited, but would not comment on unless pressed. My mother was in many ways what I aspired to be-someone who didn’t spill and opine, not because she successfully stifled her urges to do so but because she didn’t have those urges in the first place.
In the car, she said, “I’m so happy to have you safely home. Dad called to say there was weather on the East Coast, and I’m sure glad you weren’t delayed.” The highway and my parents’ Datsun and my mother herself all looked exactly as they had in early September, when I’d left. This was both reassuring and disorienting-the sameness seemed at times to cancel out Ault, or make it seem like something I had dreamed. “How did things end up with math?” my mother asked.
“I didn’t know everything on the final, but I’ll probably get a B minus for the term.”
“Honey, that’s fantastic.”
“Or maybe a C plus.”
“I know you’re working so hard.”
The observation felt untrue, but I didn’t correct her.
“Last night I made cookies for Tim and Joe to take to their teachers, and I tripled the recipe and just made a mess of things. I thought, well, that’s where Lee gets it. It wouldn’t be fair to expect you to have a head for numbers when I don’t.”
“I assume we’re going to the Pauleczks’ for Christmas Eve.”
“Lee, we are and I know you don’t like to, but-”
“No, it’s fine.”
“Well, honey, Mr. Pauleczk has been such a supporter of Dad’s, and I just think it’s important-”
“Mom, I said it’s fine.” The Pauleczks were in their sixties, and Mr. Pauleczk owned a bunch of motels between South Bend and Gary and had always bought the mattresses for them from my father. For years, we’d gone to their house before midnight mass, for dessert and hot drinks, but neither Joseph nor I had eaten or drunk anything since my sophomore year, when I’d found a long gray hair in a slice of chocolate cherry cake. (Joseph was fourteen, just three years younger than I was, but Tim still ate at the Pauleczks’ because he was only seven and didn’t know better.) After that, just the smell of the Pauleczks’ house made me feel like gagging. Mrs. Pauleczk always asked if Ault was a Catholic school, and when I told her it wasn’t, she’d say, “Episcopal?” then turn to my mother. “Lee’s school is Episcopal, Linda?” Her tone would imply that perhaps I’d concealed this dirty secret from my parents until Janice Pauleczk herself had set things straight. My mother in her mild, laughing way always said something like “They have Lee going to church six days a week up there. You can’t do much better than that!”
But this year-really, who cared what Janice Pauleczk thought? And how big a deal would it be to sit for a few hours in their living room? Now I had happiness somewhere else. Cross kissed me at night, and that made tolerable all the parts of my life that had nothing to do with him. It occurred to me that I’d probably been a lot crankier before Cross, I’d been so much more dissatisfied. If you knew where your happiness came from, it gave you patience. You realized that a lot of the time, you were just waiting out a situation, and that took the pressure off; you no longer looked to every interaction to actually do something for you. And wanting less, you were more generous-definitely, this Christmas, I planned to be more generous with everyone I saw in South Bend and especially with my family.