She was an old pro at this White House stuff by now, having been there six times. She casually flashed the White House press card to the guard at the gate and strolled up to the West Wing entrance without her stomach muscles cramping or her hands shaking so badly she was sure everyone would notice. Sometimes she just sat and stared at her card, with her picture in color and the words White House Press on it. She put it on top of all the other cards in her wallet and flashed it, trying not to be too obvious, at the checkout counter when she bought the groceries. It was silly, but she did it anyway. And since the editor, Charlie Layhmer, had gotten lots of compliments on the spreads she and Jay had been doing about the famous and near famous who came to the White House, he even let them go into Washington on company time now and then. She was for real, a member of the White House Press Corps. The sense of adventure she had known as a child came flooding back. She had been a tomboy whose knees were always skinned and whose face was often begrimed with dirt. She loved climbing trees higher, faster than anyone else. Her father had gone away to the war when she was five, and for four years all she knew of him was a photograph of a tall, thin, dark-haired man in a uniform. The photograph became more real than her memories. Then suddenly he was back, and at first it was strange; her mother, who had talked so long about his return, seemed edgy and out of sorts, but that soon passed and they were a family again. Until the night a year later when her father’s car skidded off an icy pavement when he was coming home from an AMVETS meeting. Four years in combat in Europe and he didn’t get a scratch, but he was killed instantly when his car slammed into a tree. He went back to being only the figure in the photograph, and she and her mother to the tight little family unit they had been before.
Her father had been the owner of a small drugstore in Belvedere, so her mother sold half ownership to the man who had been running the store and went to work. Mary was in school by then, and she stayed with her aunt after school until her mother returned home. Now and then her mother had dates with men; she went out for a time with a salesman Mary didn’t like much, because his fingers were stained brown from nicotine and he was fat, not at all like the slender young man in the photograph. One night she heard her mother and the salesman arguing, his voice rising in an angry rasp. “That goddamn kid, that’s all you think about!” and she never saw him again. She was glad.
In school, she was dutiful and got A’s, but what she liked best was after school, when she could run and climb trees. Puberty hit like a bombshell. All sorts of strange and unsavory things were happening to the sturdy little body that had served her so well. Worse, at school, girls who used to be full of interesting talk about movies and games and trading cards now only talked about boys. She thought about boys, too, but they never seemed to think about her. She didn’t know how to do the stuff the other girls just seemed to inherit along with their periods — flirting and teasing and inviting.
She was bewildered by this turn of events — she would gladly have packed puberty in, who wanted periods? — but she was also mystified by the new feelings and urges she was starting to experience. She picked out the popular girls to study, but of course there was the hand-eye problem with Barbara and the allergies with Mary Jane and Becky she could only admire from afar. She looked horrible in black, and besides, dying before thirty didn’t seem like much fun, especially since she expected she wouldn’t get to do a lot of living before then, at the rate she was going.
By her senior year she was just coasting along, having no idea at all about what she might do with her life. The guidance counselor, Mr. Sweeney, suggested dental hygiene. He suggested that to all the girls, along with nursing school, but Mary did not find the prospect of sticking her fingers into people’s mouths and getting them covered with saliva especially appealing. Mr. Sweeney didn’t talk to her about college, despite her A average, because in Belvedere, only rich girls went to college, and she had no interest in nursing school.
Harry Springer came into her life as suddenly as fairy godmothers appeared in the tales her mother read to her when she was a child, and no apparition with a magic wand could have surprised her more than Harry. She had, in her usual fashion, mooned over him from afar, as did nearly every girl in the school. He was the captain and the star of the baseball team, and everyone agreed that he was “very cute.”
On her dresser was the picture of him as he had been that spring, wearing a baseball uniform with the word Belvedere lettered in red across his chest, holding his bat high and his rump thrust out, the way Bobby Doerr used to stand. His hair was as golden as the hair of the Little Prince, in her favorite storybook. The face had not changed, essentially. The man had outgrown it. Some faces seem made for a certain age, oddly out of place at others. Harry Springer’s face, round and open, was made for eighteen. On the torso that had thickened from too much beer and too little exercise, it looked misplaced. It might come into focus again at forty-five, with lines in the right places.
Harry was going steady with Sally Quigley, the first girl in the class to bleach her hair, and she’d had knockers since seventh grade. Mary agreed to go out with Pudgie Bird, who managed the baseball team, and was well liked by all the boys, because he had mastered the art of sychophancy at a tender age. She dated him only because he hung around with Harry. It was certainly not a coup to be seen with him, but at least it did not put one beyond the pale, such as dating Clifford Maylin, who had terrible acne, or George Bruno, who was a thug.
The actual dates were all right because Mary now and then got to dance with Harry and joke and talk with him. Parking afterwards was an exercise in masochism, listening to Harry and Sally sighing and moaning in the front seat while trying to keep Pudgie’s fat, fast little fingers away from anything strategic.
When Sally’s family moved to Detroit, Harry was heartbroken for an afternoon, and then he started to date another popular girl, and Mary and Pudgie stayed in the backseat, maneuvering.
The more impossible it seemed that Mary could ever get Harry Springer, the more desperately she wanted him. When he went off to the state All-Star game — major league scouts would be there, it was said — she reconciled herself to the inevitable. If he signed with a major league team, they would ship him off for seasoning to the minors someplace, where he would find other girls willing to share the front seat with him. The way the men in town talked, he might be the first local boy to play with the Washington Senators, and as a big league player, he would be as far out of her reach as the moon.
But Harry came back to Belvedere after the game somehow different. The talk about the Senators continued, but he no longer wanted to hear it. He asked her out, no longer immune to her adoration, which she did not even try to hide. Now she was in the front seat, and stopped maneuvering. On the fifth date he lay on top of her and unzipped his fly, and he thrust himself into her. She braced for the terrible pain of defloweration, legend in the girls’ locker room. Mary Frances Conlan had actually fainted at one story of a girl who had bled to death screwing, although the worst story — believed by one and all — was of the virgin who was given Spanish fly by her boyfriend and was so overcome that she grabbed the nearest thing she could find to plunge into her lust-bedeviled body; it turned out to be a screwdriver. She died horribly, of course.
There wasn’t much pain as Harry bucked up and down, but not much fun either. When he said, “How was that, babe!” she sighed, “Wonderful,” while she wondered, Could that be it? What they wrote all the poems about, what Romeo and Juliet died for? In the locker room, it was practically Scripture that some girls were frigid, and that they could never enjoy sex unless they went to a doctor and maybe had some kind of mysterious operation — which was not as good as Spanish fly but at least cured you of being frigid. She guessed she must be frigid but hoped she would get over it, because she was as much in love with Harry as ever.
After that, Harry dumped her. She heard stories that he had been seen at a roadhouse where the really wild kids hung out, the ones who Would Never Amount to Anything, and drank themselves senseless. Harry had been seen with an actual whore — which Mary pronounced “war” because she had seen it written but never heard it said.
As graduation neared, she was in a panic. She was a slut now, and she was in love with a man who didn’t want her. No other man would want her either, because all men wanted virgins to marry, that was sacred writ in the locker room too. They felt cheated if they didn’t get a virgin, and sometimes, even after many years of marriage, would throw it up in a girl’s face in an argument, “You were a slut and I married you anyhow.”
How could she get a man, now? Becky Bellingrath, who had a store of arcane information, said that there were people you could go to who would insert a little sac full of pigeon blood into your vagina, and on your wedding night you would bleed convincingly. But one girl had unwittingly been given blood from a sick pigeon, and when the sac burst, all the pigeon germs seeped into her body and she died a horrible death, her face contorted and screaming in pain. Or you could buy a horse. Girls were known to break their hymens in vigorous riding, so if you owned Trigger, you could say it was his fault you weren’t a virgin.
Neither pigeon blood nor horses seemed a solution to Mary’s problem. She was not sure how to get the former, and the latter was not practical on her street of neat little ranch houses. She was still going to her pediatrician, Dr. Adderly, and he gave her lollipops after each visit. She could not imagine herself saying to him, “Forget the lollipops, Doc, can you get some pigeon blood for my vagina?” As for Trigger, he’d hardly fit in the garage between her mother’s car and the wall, and her bike was there anyhow.
She was, she realized later, a bit mad at the time. She took to waiting outside Harry’s house, behind a line of trees, to see him as he came in and out. She called him on the phone, and when she heard his voice, hung up. She lived as if she were moving underwater—everything was slow and out of sync, and pain was everywhere. It hurt even to breathe.
One night, as she waited in front of his house, a car pulled up, full of boys, and Harry climbed out, laughing. As he walked not too steadily to the door, Mary ran out and grabbed his hand. She couldn’t believe what she was doing; some part of her seemed to be watching from someplace else. She grabbed his hand and said, “Harry, help me. Help me!”
“Mary? What’s the matter?”
“I’m pregnant. You made me pregnant, Harry. Oh, God, what am I going to do?” His eyes glittered, bright with drink. “Help me, Harry.”
He put his arms around her. She began to weep hysterically. “It’s all right. It’s all right, Mary.”
He held her and wiped away her tears. She was amazed at his gentleness. She thought he would curse her or hit her.
“Don’t cry. It’s all right.”
“What are we going to do?”
“We’ll get married. We’ll get married right away.”
He held her and kissed away the tears. “It’s all right. We’ll get married.”
It all happened so fast that nothing seemed real. They walked down the aisle together in First Presbyterian Church and then went to Ocean City for three days. On the wedding night she wore an absurd-looking negligee that she had gotten at her shower, which was green with ribbons on it. This time it was really sort of OK when he touched her, but very quickly he was inside her again, and once again, there was no pleasure. That was it, she was frigid for sure. But she had something worse to worry about. It was all a lie, everything was a lie, she wasn’t pregnant, and he never would have married her if she weren’t. What was she going to do? What the hell was the new Mrs. Harry Springer going to do?