22
The Del Ray
The Doo Dads, in their white suits and white bucks and black shirts and white ties, are swaying in unison, doing a finger-poppin version of “My Girl” at the fashionable Del Ray Ballroom (“You’re A-OK at the Del Ray”), and Kate and I are dancing, close, her head on my left shoulder, my face in her neck, my nose grazing the short hairs.
Her skin so soft and fair
My face buried in her hair
I don’t care if I ever go home
I could spend the night alone
With My Girl
All my old friends—out the door
All the things I did before
Ever since she took my hand
I’ve been living in the land
Of My Girl
“Take me out on the veranda,” she whispers, and we step outdoors into the glittering summer night, a long trail of light etched from the moon across Lake Elmo to us, and she whispers, “You’re driving me mad, the way you put your lips on my neck. Making me think crazy thoughts. There’s a whole wild side of me that nobody knows. Except you.”
The Doo Dads are singing inside, and we slip behind a potted palm and we kiss, her tongue fluttering in my mouth, and she says, “I want to be yours. Tonight.”
“We can’t. We’re cousins.”
“We’re not really,” she whispers. Our faces an inch apart, our eyes meet unblinking. She says, “I’m adopted. Mother told me. Last week. I was left in a basket on the parsonage steps. My daddy was an Indian and my mama was a minister’s daughter. Or so they think.”
A few minutes later, we stand in the shadows beside the bathhouse. In the lighted windows of the ballroom, our friends go on dancing.
“Maybe we’re too young to be in love,” I say. “Maybe we should wait.”
And she tugs on her zipper and her dress falls into the sand and she drops her bra and steps out of her panties. “Be naked with me,” she says. So I follow suit. She leads me into the warm water and we float together and paddle lazily out to the diving dock and embrace in its shadows, her proud young breasts pressed against me.
“God created our bodies, what is the sin in enjoying them?” she says.
“What if they find out?” I say, my manhood thickening.
She kisses me hard and I grab hold of her firm young buttocks and our bodies meet and then she gasps as we are united and she moans and thrusts against me, my hardness inside her, and she thrusts again and again and again and now her fingernails are deep in my back and her teeth in my lower lip as her body trembles violently and she throws her head back and shrieks—
I could not decide what she should shriek. I left it unfinished.
The big sister came home the day after the Fourth, in a state of anguish. She had gone off to a Bible conference in the Apostle Islands on Lake Superior with Uncle LeRoy and Aunt Lois and, as Sanctified Brethren liked to do on car trips, Lois and the sister rolled up Gospel tracts in bright yellow or red or blue cellophane and tossed them out by rural mailboxes so that when folks came to get their mail they’d see the shiny thing on the ground, unwrap it, and read the tract, entitled Where Will You Spend Eternity? and be convicted of their sins and accept the Lord as their personal Saviour. LeRoy, as the driver, was exempt from this duty. As they drove along, Lois and the sister tossed out a few hundred tracts, and then LeRoy started kidding them and referred to it as “gospel bombing,” and made a whistling and exploding sound when Lois tossed one, and if he saw a farmer up ahead he’d yell, “Git him! Git that sucker!” and step on the gas, which the sister felt was not behavior that glorified the Lord, and then, after fifty miles or so, as tedium set in, Lois gave up tossing tracts and sat in a stupor listening to the radio, a worldly station, not a Christian one, and the poor sister was left with sole responsibility for the souls of the people of northern Wisconsin. Before, she’d been tossing only to the left side of the car, and now she was responsible for both sides, and LeRoy was driving too fast for accurate tract-tossing, 70 and 75 mph. She planted herself in the middle of the back seat, wraping the tracts as fast as she could, and threw left and right as they flew past mailboxes; meanwhile, LeRoy and Lois were playing the Alphabet Game and 20 Questions in the front seat as if it were a joyride. The car was hot, the seats sticky, the road a narrow concrete ribbon with asphalt seams that thumped on the tires, and when a semi went by, it almost blew them into the ditch, and somewhere around Hayward, the sister simply felt she couldn’t throw one more tract. She begged LeRoy to stop so she could rest and he said, “We’ll stop in a little while,” and kept right on driving. She was so tired she couldn’t make her arm throw and she slumped in the seat, her head resting against the window, and up ahead she saw a man standing at a mailbox looking at mail. She prayed for strength to throw one more tract, and she sat, arms limp at her sides, as he flew past and she caught a glimpse of his face and it was a face full of weariness with sin and hunger for the Gospel. This man in Hayward, Wisconsin, might die and face an eternity in hellfire because she was unable to bestir herself and throw out the lifeline of Good News.
The sister spilled out this whole tearful tale to Mother on the porch. Mother patted her hand and told her not to fret, to pray for the man, that prayer is the real lifeline, but the sister said, no, she felt that this man’s soul was on her conscience and that she must—she must—go to Hayward and find him. The sister was very dramatic, sniffling and holding her head in her hands and flouncing around and striding across the room and so forth. When Mother went to get a Bible to read a comforting passage from, I stepped onto the porch. The sister turned a bleary tear-streaked face to me, and I said, “Don’t imagine that you’re all that important, because you’re not, you know.”
She tore after me and I dashed across the living room and into the kitchen and out the back door as Mother came trotting down the stairs with the Bible and the sister grabbed the sugar bowl off the table and hurled it at me as I lunged out the back door and she yelled, “God damn you to hell!” and the bowl smashed on the kitchen wall.
I immediately went to work in the garden, laboring quietly over the tomato plants, snitching out the little weeds, and hoeing, and when Mother came out a few minutes later, I was the picture of diligence.
She told me she wished I could be more understanding toward my sister. She couldn’t understand why there was so much bad feeling between us. It broke her heart to see family members so angry at each other.
“I’m not angry whatsoever,” I said. I smiled at her. “I have no idea why she is. I’ve stopped trying to figure her out.”
Mother sighed. “It’s beyond me what to do with you. It’s absolutely beyond me.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’m fine.”
It was clear from the sister’s syrupy disposition the next evening that she had gone and done an evil deed. Gone was her sour mug and her anguish about the unsaved Hayward man. She was all smiley, as if she’d won first prize in a cuteness contest, and she got lovey-dovey with Daddy after work and poured him iced tea and squeezed the lemon and perched on the arm of his chair beaming at him like a child in a Sunday-school magazine and asking charming questions about banking and what was the best car to buy and why is there a lunar eclipse and got him to tell stories about boyhood on the farm and how hard he worked and how contented he and his brothers and sisters were, playing in the dirt with blocks of wood and stones, wearing hand-me-down clothes, never demanding more. Poor Daddy melted like a pat of butter. At supper he asked if she cared to say table grace. Oh boy, would she! She folded her fat little hands and clamped her beady eyes shut and went to town, thanking God for sending Jesus to die on the cross and also for this macaroni and cheese for the nourishment of our bodies, praying for those who might not have accepted Christ as Personal Saviour, may their hearts be exercised and so forth, and praying for the sick and suffering, and distant loved ones, and classmates, and young people everywhere, the orphans especially, and missionaries in foreign climes, and teachers, and Scout leaders, and also Camp Fire, and then she turned to President Eisenhower and prayed for him, and for those in the Armed Forces, and Those Who Are Lonely and in Distress—it’s too bad you can’t interrupt someone who’s praying and say, “Oh, knock it off, would you?”—and she prayed for farmers, that their labors might be richly blessed, and fishermen, and foresters also, and now she was running out of gas, but she tossed in the Bereft and Bereaved, and the Backsliders, and those on Beds of Pain, and in Prison, and came back to Those Who Had Not Accepted Christ, and finally she said, “We ask it all in Jesus’s Precious Name. Amen.” And we all took a breath. The macaroni was cold, the cheese congealed.
And the very next morning Miss Lewis called while I was mowing the grass and asked me to come to her house. I said I was busy and she said it was important and if I couldn’t come to her she’d come to me, so I went. She was sitting on her front step, in her slacks and green blouse and sun hat, and she had my story about the Del Ray Ballroom on her lap.
—I hear you have a nice new typewriter, she said. I nodded.
—Is this yours? she said.
I looked at it and saw the part about my manhood being large.
I shook my head.—No, ma’am. I never saw this before in my life.
—It sounds like something you might’ve written, Gary.
I shook my head. Not my style at all.
—Then who do you suppose wrote this?
—I wouldn’t have any idea. A lot of people could have. It’s really not that good.
—What do you suggest I do with it?
I said she should burn it probably and then be sure to speak to the person who stole it and explain to her the meaning of private property.
I walked home, heart pounding to think of Mother reading about me and my manhood, and the small friendly animals, and in front of the Lutheran church I heard my name called and turned and there was Leonard striding across the church parking lot. He said he wanted his magazine back.
“What magazine?” I said. I wanted him to say High School Orgies out loud.
—You know what magazine. The one I gave you a month ago.
—Oh. I forgot all about that.
He said that he didn’t like the way I was acting these days, like I thought I was better than anybody else. He didn’t think we were friends anymore. He just had that feeling. In fact, he said, I was on his stink list.
—Yeah, well, I’ve been busy writing for the Herald Star. I have a job now. I have no idea where your magazine is. I have better things to do than look at titties.
—Then you better buy me another.
—I wouldn’t know where to go to buy garbage like that.
—Then give me the money.
—I’ll think about it.
—How much they pay you to write those dumb stories? Fifty cents?
—Fifteen bucks apiece, I said coolly, giving myself a nice raise. That shut him up for a second. Finally, he said, “I hear Roger Guppy is nailing your cousin.” I didn’t stop to think, I just grabbed him around his scrawny neck and flailed on him as hard as I could right there in the parking lot of the Lutherans, got him in the gut, in the chops, across the throat, whaled on him with one hand and held on with the other, until he slithered away, and then I cracked him one in the back and let him go. He ran a hundred feet or so across the asphalt and turned and cursed me in a harmless, amateurish way and yelled, “You want to know something? You’re nuts. Your whole family is nuts. And you can’t write for beans! Anybody could write better than you!” He gave me the finger, waving it high in the air as if that should put the fear of God into me, and turned and slunk toward home. What a pitiful person. To think that I had wasted time on being friends with him. I resolved never to make that sort of mistake in the future.
I went home and retrieved High School Orgies from its hiding place and took it out to the incinerator along with the trash and lit the fire. I had snagged an empty Cloud O’Cheese aerosol can and I tossed it in when the fire was going good, the pages of the magazine curling one by one and blackening in the flames. I saw the librarian go by and the tennis instructor and the English teacher and all their gleaming orbs and lovesticks, and then the Cloud O’Cheese blew up, whump, and the orgies were over.
When Aunt Flo came over that afternoon, I was sure Miss Lewis had passed my story on to her. Aunt Flo was no dummy. She could look at that page and see it was Sugar’s old typewriter. She sat on the porch with Mother and I said hello and Mother asked me to please leave them alone and I was glad to.
From inside, I heard Flo say, “She is driving them to a nervous breakdown, going around with this Roger. Those two can never be happy together. Sugar and Ruth are sick about it. Ruth said to her, ‘I hope you’re not doing what I think you’re doing.’ And Kate went through the roof. She said, ‘I love him and there’s nothing anybody can do about it.’ ”
Mother says she thinks Kate is someone who will do the right thing. There is a calmness in Mother’s voice that astonishes me.