“They said they’d put me in j-j-jail,” Art said.
Rachael said, “I told them I was going to have a baby. I wasn’t then. So they let us alone.” She was pensive a moment, and then she said, “One night we were walking home; we were walking back from a show. And a police car stopped us and made Art stand up against the wall. And they asked us a lot of questions. And they pushed him around.”
“There’s the curfew,” Art said. “We were out after the curfew.”
For some reason it had never occurred to him that there was a curfew for kids. “You mean they can pick you up if you’re on the street at night?”
“Any kids,” Art said. He and his wife nodded somberly.
“And they didn’t believe we were married,” Rachael said. “We had to go with them in the police car to our place, and show them the license. And while they were inside, in the apartment, they looked all around; you know? They sort of poked into things. I don’t know what they were looking for, just looking I guess.”
“Well, what did they say?”
“Nothing. They just asked us questions.”
“Th-th-they asked what I did for a living,” Art said.
“I’ll, be darned,” he said. It was macabre.
“There’s a lot of places we can’t go,” Rachael said. “I mean, even though we’re married. They think we’re going to bust something or steal something. Because we’re kids. Like one time we went into this restaurant, when we were just married. I got my job, this job with the airline I have. I figure out how much tickets cost.”
“She’s real good at math,” Art said.
“And we wanted to go out and have a good time. Go to dinner arid everything. And they asked us to leave. That was at this real nice-looking restaurant.”
“We didn’t have the right clothes,” Art said. “No,” she said, “I don’t think that was it.”
“If we’d had the right clothes, they wouldn’t have thrown us out—” He nodded vigorously. “No, it was because we were kids.”
Jim Briskin said, “Didn’t anybody do anything? Protest or anything?”
“When the police car stopped us that night,” Rachael said, “a bunch of people—they were coming out of bars, I guess—stood around and watched. There was these old women, these fat old women in ratty-looking furs. They were yelling something at us. I didn’t hear what it was.”
“And,” Art said, “they’re always telling us what to do. Like Mr. Larsen, this old guy I work for, this printer; he’s always got some sort of a-a-advice. Like one day he said to me, d-d-don’t never give any credit to Negroes. He really hates Negroes. And he does business with them all the time. But he doesn’t give them any credit; they have to pay cash.”
Rachael said, “I used to know this Negro boy, and my mother and father almost went: crazy; the were afraid I might—you know—start going around with him.”
“Delinquents,” Jim Briskin said, following her account and finding in it no humor, whether in her attitude or in the account itself.
Art said, “That’s what one of those old dames was yelling. Delinquents. I heard what she said.”
Rachael looked up at him. “Is that what they were saying? I couldn’t hear. So much was happening.”
“It seems as if there ought to be something you can do,” Jim said. “Curfews for kids . . . they could extend that to men in their twenties or whatever they wanted. Why not forty-year-old men with red hair?” Anybody, he thought. Whatever they wanted.
Now, he thought, he was saying ‘they.’ He was thinking as Art and Rachel were thinking: in terms of the unyielding ‘they.’ But to him the ‘they’ would not be adults; they would be—what? He pondered, drawn into this in spite of himself. Looney Luke, perhaps. Or Ted Haynes. Or, for that matter, anyone and everyone.
But nobody was keeping him out of restaurants. Nobody had halted him at night arid shoved him against a wall. So it was in his mind; it was not real. For these kids it was real enough. Civil rights, he thought. The good people talk about civil rights, the protection of minority groups. And then they passed a curfew.
“No children and dogs,” he said.
“What?” Art said. “Oh yeah, r-r-restaurants.”
He had not expected either of them to understand. But they had. The sign in the restaurant windows in the South: no niggers or dogs. But here it was not Negroes. Not exclusively, anyhow.
Art said, “Hh-hey, how’d you get to be a disc jock?”
“It must make you feel strange,” Rachael said, “to know when you say something everybody’s listening. I mean, anything you say, like you always say to drive carefully. It’s not as if you were just talking to one person.”
“It’s a living,” he said.
“Don’t you enjoy it?” The girl’s eyes, the immense dark eyes, fixed themselves on him. “It must be very strange. I mean, you must feel funny.”
She did not seem able to make herself any clearer than that. Both of them were agitated, trying to put something across to him; the tension reached him but not the meaning.
“No,” he said, “you get used to it. You mean if I fluff a line or something? Get a word backwards?”
Rachael shook her head. “No,” she said, and she seemed then to drop into a mood; she no longer was trying to talk to him.
Art said, “We better get going. We have to get home.”
“Excuse me,” Rachael said. She slid to the edge of the seat and stood up. “I’ll be right back.”
As she went off among the patrons, Jim and Art watched her.
Jim said, “I never realized you were married.”
“Just for three months.”
“She’s very pretty.”
“Yy-yeah,” Art said, scratching with his nail at the table.
“How’d you meet her?”
“Bowling. We used to bowl. I mean, I knew her in school. And then we were in this bowling alley, me and Joe Mantila, you know? A-a-and I saw her and I recognized her.”
Opening the bag, he found she had bought him a roll, a sweet Danish pastry roll.
“She likes to do that,” Art said, standing up beside his wife. He put his arm around her. “She buys people stuff.”
Rachael said, “Would you like to come over sometime and have dinner with us? Maybe some Sunday. We don’t know an awful lot of people.”
“Sure,” he said, also getting up. Automatically he began closing up the white paper bag. Nobody had given him a roll before. He did not know how to react. He was deeply distressed, and he wondered what he could do for them. He grasped the fact that he owed them something.
Pushing back his sleeve to uncover his watch, he said, “You have a car to get home in? Maybe I could—”
“We’re not going home,” Rachael said. “We thought maybe we’d go to a show.”
“Thanks,” Art said.
“Maybe some other time,” he said. Casting about for something more to offer them, he said, “How would that be?”
“Okay,” Art said.
Rachael said, “I’m very glad to have met you.” It was a formal little set of words, but she gave the words an energetic push; she twisted them and squeezed them and put them forward in a carefully worked fashion. And then she said, “Did you really mean that, about coming by sometime?”
“Absolutely,” he said. And he did.
He watched the two of them go out of the café. Art walked ahead, leading her, holding on to her hand. Her movement was slow. The weight, he thought. Already she was beginning to bulge; the dress lifted out before her, and she walked with her head down, as if she were meditating. At the sidewalk they halted. They did not give the impression of going anywhere in particular, and he had a vision, an image of them wandering along the sidewalk, not noticing anybody, not aware of where they were, drifting on and on until they became tired and went home.