There are people who remain connected to us throughout our lives, who seem to follow a similar trajectory, more often through accident than design. It was that way with Tommy Pendleton and me: all those years since we’d both left Fields, Ohio, right up until last week when I got the call from his sister Betty. Strange how quickly I placed her: regal brown Betty Pendleton, four grades ahead, the school’s first black homecoming queen. I hadn’t seen her in over twenty years. Now, Betty’s tone was pleasant and matter-of-fact, with the familiar flattened vowels and slow drawl of our hometown. She’d just flown in to San Francisco, she started off in a chatty way. I knew better than to think this was just a social call.
Her voice softened ever so slightly as she asked if I’d heard about Tommy. That he’d died—this past Wednesday—and his funeral service was going to be held day after tomorrow in Oakland. Did I think I could make it? When I recovered myself, Betty said sweetly, “I’m so sorry, Marsha,” as if she’d done something wrong.
My “yes” got lost in my throat. I jotted down the address of the chapel in someone else’s shaky handwriting.
“I’m glad you can come,” Betty said. “You were one of his best friends. The Lord bless you.”
When I hung up, I realized that when I’d asked, “How?” Betty had avoided the word “AIDS.” Instead, she said, “Pneumonia.” I cursed myself for not having figured out that Tommy was sick. Of course he wouldn’t have told me, not the way he was about these things, always so clever about protecting himself. But it would explain his conversion to religion, the final wedge between us that made it so difficult to communicate much at all the last couple of years. “Best friend,” I thought bitterly. Tommy and I were never best friends. I don’t cry often, but I let myself go on this one.
Back in Fields, all through junior high and high school there were only three of us in the advanced classes. Me, Diane McGee, and Tommy, a regular triumvirate of color, toting around our accelerated literature anthologies and advanced trig textbooks, along with the other college placement kids.
The Tarbaby Triplets, Diane used to joke, loud-talking in her more audacious moods, just to make the white kids turn red. In that snowy dominion, we did manage to quietly flourish, three dark snowflakes alighting on the ivory pile like bits of ash. We ran the spectrum from light to dark—Tommy the color of a biscuit, me cinnamon brown, and Diane bittersweet dark chocolate—handpicked from our 40 percent of the population there in Fields and carefully interspersed among the white kids for that slow-fizzling illusion known in our liberal town as racial harmony. Other than that, we had little to do with one another. Me, Diane, and Tommy, someone’s proof of something, all going our separate ways, Diane with the black kids, Tommy with the white, and me floundering somewhere in between.
It was in junior high that Diane indignantly informed our stunned English class that we were no longer “colored,” nor “Negro,” but “black.” She spat out the word with proud anger that reverberated distantly within a part of an as-of-yet undiscovered me. I quickly seconded her outburst, conscious of the puzzled looks of my white classmates. Hadn’t they guessed, I thought, sitting there year after year, tolerating us and taking their own privilege for granted? Hadn’t it ever occurred to them that beneath our agreeable demeanors there was more than just a faint rumble of discontent? Diane held out one long, thin ebony arm. “Can’t you see?” she demanded. “I’m not colored. Everybody’s colored. I’m black.”
The whole time she talked, her voice trembling and passionate, Tommy Pendleton sat stiffly in his seat, never saying a word. I didn’t have the nerve, but Diane did. “You too, Tommy Pendleton,” she needled. “You too, brother.” There was a barely perceptible flutter of movement in his left jaw.
The Pendletons owned a small horse farm on Lincoln Street not far from Mt. Zion Baptist Church. There were four boys and Betty, Tommy being the youngest. Mr. Pendleton was a cripple, his body hunched and crumpled like an aluminum can. Years before, he’d been the victim of a horrible riding accident. Everyone said the crippling had affected his mind, as if twisted limbs could spawn a meanness of spirit. You could catch him out back in his icy field in the most inclement weather, staggering among his horses, as if daring another one to kick him.
Tommy’s mother was known as “the invisible woman.” She was a Jehovah’s Witness, spent all her time inside praying. Rumor had it that Mrs. Pendleton was so weak she let Tommy’s father padlock the refrigerator so Tommy and his brothers wouldn’t eat him out of house and home.
“That man is downright stingy and hateful,” Diane informed me once. She lived just down the street from the Pendletons. “He treats those boys something awful. Beats them—those grown boys, too. That’s why Tommy’s that way, you know.”
Back then, I hadn’t a clue what she meant. Diane knew so much, but I was too caught up in myself to understand.
Tommy never seemed troubled. Every morning he sauntered good-naturedly up the school’s circular walkway with the boys in our advanced classes, or goofed off with white girls at their lockers.
Tommy, never pretending one thing while being another, eventually slipped through the cracks of rebuke and after a while the black kids seemed to forgive him for his betrayal and left him in peace. He was so determined in his position that people quit linking him to the Toms and Oreos who faked it on both sides. It was as if, at least in our minds, Tommy had ceased to be black, or even white. He was just Tommy, handsome Tommy Pendleton (“Mr. Too Fine Tommy Pendleton, some of us girls used to concede enviously), even in his downright square clothes: long-sleeve cotton button-down shirts, pressed slacks, and lace-up Hush Puppies from J.C. Penney’s in Elyria. When the other black kids were growing their hair, Tommy kept his short and cropped like a newly mowed lawn. You wouldn’t have caught him dead with a cheesecutter in his pocket or a braid in his head.
Instead, he walked off with the highest test scores and model essays, posing solemnly for yearbook photos of the Speech, Drama, and Chess Clubs, the only poppyseed in the bunch. His best friend was a white egghead named Paul Malloy.
“The Pendletons must be so proud,” my mother used to say wistfully of Tommy’s top grades. “Watch, that boy ends up at Harvard.”
Big deal Harvard, I grumbled to myself, let him go ahead off with a bunch of peckerwoods and see if anybody cared. Tommy aroused in me all my own uncertainty, about myself, about my awkward friendship with a shy white girl named Mary, about militant Diane acting like everyone’s conscience, about my goody-twoshoes boyfriend Phil Willis, and the accompanying push and pull of contradictions. I used Tommy as proof that I was more acceptable.
Though we saw each other daily all through grade school and junior high, we rarely spoke. High school was no different. Even now I can remember only little incidents, like the time he broke a piece off the black frames of his glasses during silent reading and I wordlessly took them from him and repaired them with a piece of masking tape from my bookbag. As the weeks wore on, he never bothered to have his glasses fixed. I derived an odd and private satisfaction from seeing the piece of masking tape there. Too bad, I used to think, too bad he’s so fine and so peculiar.
Social divisions run all latitudes and longitudes, and we were all mostly too busy worrying about black and white and on which side of the racial borders romance was flowering to give much attention to what Tommy Pendleton might actually be.
After high school, turned upside down by racial tensions and old pains, I went off to college in the rolling hills of southern Ohio; Tommy predictably left for Harvard on a scholarship, though his father had loudly protested. But our lives, oddly enough, remained entangled long after Diane McGee turned to drugs, my old boyfriend Phil Willis married a white girl named Ellen, and I had moved as far away from Ohio as I could get.
The morning of Tommy’s funeral service I canceled my classes in San Francisco and drove over the East Bay Bridge to the Chapel of the Chimes where Tommy’s body lay. I took a seat on a wooden pew in the very back of the chapel. It was an odd bunch, to say the least—mourners taken from someone else’s life, I couldn’t help thinking. Half the pews were filled with formally dressed Japanese business people from a company Tommy had done legal work for. The other half were occupied by mostly well-scrubbed white couples who looked as if they might want to sell me insurance. There was a sprinkling of single men, what Tommy used to in his rare candid moments jokingly refer to as “friends of Dorothy.” The front row was packed with a conspicuous group of black women in silk dresses and oversized hats, obviously relatives. There were a couple of men as well, portly and graying. All I could see were the backs of their heads, but I had a feeling Betty and Mrs. Pendleton were among them.
Viewing the corpse was a shock. I had never looked at the dead body of someone my own age, pasted and glued together with heavy makeup, worn out from the ravages of a devastating disease. It didn’t look like Tommy at all, too pale, too thin. I turned away, ignoring the woman next to me who was murmuring, “Doesn’t he look just wonderful?”
I was both stunned and angered by the simplistic explanation of Tommy’s death which, according to the minister, was “part of God’s wonderful plan to call his son Tommy home, because Tommy had special business with God.” Still no mention of AIDS. It was as if Tommy’s “special business” was the reassurance we all needed to pacify us against the senselessness of his death. Easier to believe God chose Tommy than to believe Tommy had slept with many men. I thought about one of the last conversations I’d had with him. I’d accused him of choosing this religion as a way of turning his back on himself. He was smart enough to know what I meant, and he looked pained. Now I wanted to yell, “It’s not true!” Somehow, deep inside, I think Tommy might almost have approved.
I kept waiting for someone else to object. I looked to the front row; not so much as a feather on those wide-brimmed hats trembled. As the minister talked on about Tommy’s talents (he’d directed the church youth choir), I wondered which one, if any, of those starchy looking white men present had caused him to grow sick and die. I studied the bowed heads, the impassive faces, the soft “Praise the Lord’s,” and I knew that no one here, except maybe me, was really part of Tommy’s past.
The gravesite was three blocks away up a green hill. I parked my car and stood on the periphery, feeling anxious. An overly polite white couple in shades of gray and black and moussed hair accosted me. “We’re Bill and Cynthia, friends of Tommy’s from church. Are you a relative?”
I shook my head. “We grew up together, back in Ohio.”
“Oh!” they cooed, “isn’t that nice?” I was suddenly being introduced around to strangers. “This is Marsha. She grew up with Tommy in Ohio.”
In a way it was true, I thought, truer than anyone could imagine, the growing-up part, I mean. The words rebounded unexpectedly like a heavy fist. I moved back along the edges of the mourners. As the preacher prayed over Tommy’s casket, I wandered a ways up the cemetery hillside and looked out over the Bay, the stunning view from Tommy’s gravesite, which he would never see, now that he would soon be six feet underground.
The Christmas dance of 1969—such a silly thing, but a turning point of sorts. Tommy and I had never talked about it. Not when we ran into each other one summer on Harvard Square, not when we stumbled on each other in the Cleveland Art Museum one wintry afternoon during Christmas break. And not even when Tommy moved to San Francisco and shared my apartment for six months, shortly after I’d finished graduate school and he was studying for the California bar exam. I knew better than to think Tommy had actually forgotten. Perhaps it was why he felt comfortable inviting me as his “date” to subsequent law office parties and events, even holding my hand sometimes when we were among strangers.
Tommy could be so peculiar about his private life. I mean, one minute he and I would be laughing about the baths and red rooms and glory holes and the games boys used to play, and the next he’d draw back, like a crab in its shell, and say disapprovingly, “MAR-sha,” as if I’d said something too personal for him.
Even when Tommy shared my apartment and I’d go to tease him about one of his occasional tricks I’d passed that morning in the hallway, he’d tell me sternly, “It isn’t what you think.”
“Then what is it?” I’d ask him.
“It’s too complicated,” he answered. “Don’t try to figure it out.”
Actually, one night I did broach the subject of the 1969 Christmas dance. Tommy and I were sitting around the kitchen table eating fried egg sandwiches and laughing about the old days in Ohio. We were laughing about Fields, about Diane McGee, about the time gay Terence Lords put on makeup and ran down the school hallway shouting, “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille!”
“Tommy…” I began, still convulsed with laughter. “Tommy, do you remember that stupid dance we went to?” It slipped out before I knew it.
He looked up at me in such a way that the laughter died on my lips. And then the phone rang. Tommy went to answer it, and from the other room I heard him say cheerfully, “Hi, Jeff.” A pause, followed by a low soft chuckle, and then the door of his bedroom closed. A terrible pang cut through me. I had underestimated, as I often did with Tommy, the ways I could offend him.
The 1969 Christmas dance happened like this. In tenth grade I broke up with Phil Willis because, in my teen arrogance, I decided he was a nobody. His only future was to inherit his father’s bakery, one of two black-owned businesses in town, and I couldn’t picture myself behind the counter for the rest of my life wearing a white baker’s apron and serving up dozens of oatmeal cookies to local kids. His parents were what we used to call “siddity.” They were extremely fair people, with pink skin and curly sandy hair, the kind of “good Negro that, oh, if only the others could be like, we wouldn’t have such problems.” Mrs. Willis headed the Boy Scout troop, composed mostly of little white boys, Phil being the exception. Oh, how people like the Willises kidded themselves! Black is black, no matter how white.
I myself had found this out the hard way when, the summer after tenth grade, my friend Mary’s family became “concerned.” They thought Mary ought to be relating more to her own “peers,” and stopped finding it convenient to have me over. Finally, when confronted, Mary’s mother informed us gently that we were too old now to continue our friendship, that there would be too many problems. I knew exactly what Mary’s parents believed to be in store for Mary: tall, jet-black friends of my boyfriends with hair like tumbleweed sidling up to their front porch asking for porcelain Mary in silky whispers; parties on the east side of town where Mary might dance a hairsbreadth from dark-skinned boys in Ban-Lon shirts and smelling of hair oil.
I started hanging out with other black girls, Camille Hubbard and Monica Pease, who lived on streets named for presidents. We’d meet after school for our singing group and practice in the choir room, and then accompany one another home. I now bypassed the streets named for trees, avoiding the route Mary and I used to take.
Just after Halloween, Camille and Monica and I sneaked into a college dance on borrowed ID’s. It was that night I fell in love with Calvin Schumate, a student majoring in political science. Calvin was the kind of boy who gets under your skin and keeps you restless every second of the day. He was, in the opinions of Camille and Monica, just about the finest, toughest, bossest thing that ever set foot on the college campus, ooooh, girl. Tall and chocolate brown. His hair was thick and wild, and added softness to his angular face. He was a full three years older than I, an abyss I leaped with pure frenzy.
That first night I danced every record with Calvin. He danced New York, I danced Detroit. “You’ve got some moves there,” he said admiringly. Afterwards, dripping sweat, we wandered into the moonlight, fanning ourselves with paper napkins. I suffered from that delicious exhaustion when one is beyond caring. Calvin clasped my hand in his, walked me out to the square, and kissed me so deeply I thought he’d sucked my heart out.
I accepted his ring. My parents heard about this through the grapevine and confronted me immediately.
“He’s a full-grown man,” said my father, “and you’re still a young girl. He’s much too old for you.”
“He’ll pressure you,” worried my mother. “He’ll expect things of you. I don’t understand for the life of me why you broke up with Phil. Now those were nice people, the Willises, whatever could you be thinking?”
I could explain it: Calvin came from the mean streets of Harlem, which was about as exotic as you could get for a sheltered middle-class black girl from a tiny Ohio college town. And he was brilliant and tough. He had grown up in a neighborhood where streets were numbered, where everybody had a hustle, and junkies shot dope in the alleys. He’d shot it himself, he told me, and gambled, and hung around prostitutes until his fed-up father finally dragged him around to the nuns at a Catholic boarding school and insisted they and their God “do something with my wild boy before he gets himself killed.”
I thrilled to these stories of the precocious street hood turned scholar, wise and sassy beyond his years, full of himself, and not fooled for one minute by me and what he called my “bourgeois thinking.”
My parents and I fought terribly about Calvin. Raised voices and slammed doors were not acceptable at our house, yet the subject of Calvin provoked both.
“He’s not even Catholic,” my mother fretted.
“He went to Catholic school.”
“Not the same,” said my mother. “Phil’s Catholic.”
“I don’t love Phil!”
“You don’t love this boy either. You’re too young. You’ll thank us later,” my mother went on. “We have only your welfare in mind.”
My father warned me, “I want to see you go on to college and get a good education. A boy like Calvin could get you involved in things…” His voice trailed off at that intersection of truth where what he really wanted to say lay well beyond what a man can comfortably say to his own daughter.
Little did my parents know that their cryptic, anxious warnings came too late. I did not mean to be careless, but Calvin had a man’s ways and a man’s ideas. He told me the most compelling things a man can tell a woman, and I was a foolish, lovesick girl with my nose open a mile wide.
We pursued a ritual of clandestine meetings in his dorm room, dangerous and heated congresses, where under sagging fishnets suspended from the ceiling a red strobe light whipped over our bodies with the force of fireworks and stern-faced posters of Malcolm X and Huey Newton observed our tussles grimly. Jasmine incense burned ceremonially in a small ceramic holder by the bed. Now, I was still cautious about certain things and refused Calvin the final token of romantic commitment, but we played at everything else, tumbling around in his sheets, even showering together after in his yellow-tiled shower stall, with me soaping up his thick gorgeous hair. He’d lie naked in bed and read me Harlem Renaissance poetry and essays by Baldwin. We listened over and over to the Last Poets, memorizing together the rhythms of our own lives and talking about “the struggle,” Calvin explaining to me earnestly what it meant to be part of a revolution. When he was out on the town square, megaphone in hand, railing against “the Man,” I stood on the edge of the crowd, reading his passionate appeals as a secret message directed to me.
At Calvin’s urging I took the straightener out of my hair and grew a curly ‘fro. I talked more and more about the Revolution, and took to wearing dashikis and brass bangles and the African elephant-hair bracelet Calvin gave me. In my sophomore speech class I expounded on such subjects as “The Role of the New Black Womyn” and the necessity for black students to bear arms. I was Calvin’s mouthpiece, his right hand. I was frightening even to myself, uncovering decades of rage my parents had covered over with their prosperity.
“Girl, where the hell do your folks think you are all the time?” Camille wanted to know as she waited for me outside Calvin’s dorm room one afternoon.
“Aren’t you afraid of… you know…?” Monica asked.
“Calvin and I don’t do that,” I informed them self-righteously. Virginity was still a big deal back then, and I wore mine like a badge. “I love Calvin and he loves me, but that is out of the question.”
I believed what I offered Calvin was enough for any man. I believed Calvin when he said we were two lost halves who’d made a whole, destined to leave our mark on the world together, and that our grapplings in the dark were a natural extension of the sublime communion that passed between us as two exceptional lovers.
And so the Christmas dance approached. I was crazy with wanting to bring Calvin, just long enough to stroll through the door with him and let everyone who’d ever snubbed me, black and white, see me with my fine college brother on my arm. I wanted to set their ignorant tongues to wagging.
It was out of the question.
My mother began pestering me about making up with Phil. She even went so far as to drop hints about having seen Mrs. Willis at Sparkle Market and letting me know that Phil had looked longingly at her when she stopped in the bakery to buy a pie. “You need a date for the dance,” she pressed.
And that’s when I seized on the idea. In a moment of pure inspiration I became the architect of a crafty plan: I couldn’t stand Phil, but I could, yes, I would, invite Tommy Pendleton. The perfect camouflage. My parents, content to think I was finally out with a “nice boy,” would extend my curfew, and after I’d pleaded the flu and rid myself of the unsuspecting Tommy, the remaining hours would be spent in rapture with Calvin.
Camille’s only comment, when I told her, was “You might as well invite a white boy as invite Tommy Pendleton.”
Frostily I approached Tommy outside of English class a day or two later. It felt more like a business proposition than a party invitation, but I said my piece in a casual, upbeat tone I had rehearsed in front of the bathroom mirror.
Tommy studied me a moment, fingering the masking tape on his black-framed glasses. For a moment I thought he might say no, a possibility that had not occurred to me. “Okay,” he said simply, as if it were about time a black girl like me showed interest. Perhaps it was relief I saw in his face, more than expectation. “Thank you,” he added. I walked off feeling strangely sad.
I bought a new orange minidress and matching fishnet stockings and T-strap, sling-back heels. I even roamed the lingerie department and selected a silk bra-and-panty set, with Calvin and Calvin alone in mind. This would be the night, I thought, my entire body radiating the heat of anticipation. I would be sixteen in the spring; it was time.
“Why doesn’t Tommy pick you up?” my mother asked over an early dinner.
“He doesn’t drive,” I explained, which was conveniently true. “You know how weird and strict the Pendletons are, with that crippled dad and all their crazy religion that’s gone to their heads.”
“Now that’s no way to talk about folks,” said my mother, the devout Catholic. “Make sure you two stop by here so your father and I can get a peek.”
They were suspicious of my sudden interest in Tommy Pendleton, but I could read the one word in their minds: Harvard.
I drove my father’s blue Buick LeSabre across Main Street to Tommy’s house. When I pulled into the dark driveway and honked, the headlights picked up Mr. Pendleton’s twisted silhouette out near the small barn behind the house. He might have been a crooked, leafless tree. A shiver ran through me as though I’d had a premonition. Then the porch light flashed on and Tommy’s father vanished into wintry darkness. Mrs. Pendleton stood foregrounded on the porch, her arms clasped across her chest to ward off the chilly December night. She motioned me to come in. Reluctantly, I cut off the motor and got out of the car.
It was the first time I’d ever seen Mrs. Pendleton up close. She was a plain woman, but not severe. She wore her hair pulled back in a loose bun, and a long, brown flowered housedress. She had been pretty once.
“Hello, Marsha,” she greeted me with warmth and drew me by my arm into the stale house. “I’ve heard so much about you. Tommy says you’re in all his classes.”
“Except P.E.,” I clarified nervously. The house was overheated and the smell of cooking grease hung in the air.
Mrs. Pendleton offered to take my coat and insisted I join her for a cup of tea. I had no choice. The house was uncannily silent. Tommy was nowhere in sight. I took a tentative seat on the sofa under a triple portrait of Martin Luther King and the Kennedy brothers. Just knowing they hovered above disturbed my conscience.
“So, Tommy tells me your father teaches at the college.” She seated herself across from me, her eyes bright in that smooth, serene face.
“Administration,” I corrected her. “He works in administration.”
“Isn’t that wonderful!” She asked me all about my mother, my brothers, and the exact location of our house. “Of course,” she said, “that lovely big white one on the corner of Pine. And I know who your mother is too. Pretty woman, has all that nice thick hair.”
She prattled on, appraising me with her eyes as if I were an article of clothing she was assessing for a good fit. Guilt made me overcompensate. I had what folks call good home training, and I didn’t hold back. Each courtesy seemed to please her more, until I realized my politeness would be my own undoing.
Her smile was broad now. “I’m just so pleased you two are going to this dance. I don’t normally let Tommy go to such things, but I know what a nice girl you are.”
I glanced nervously at my watch. When I looked up, Tommy was standing in the doorway in a dark brown suit, his hair parted on one side. We exchanged cautious hellos.
Mrs. Pendleton had a camera ready and she insisted we pose before the fireplace. “Turn this way, you two,” she cooed. “Now, give me a big smile. I can’t see your eyes, Tommy.”
Tommy removed his glasses and held them behind his back as he squeezed awkwardly beside me. We stared dutifully into the blinding flash.
“Oh, the flowers!” Mrs. Pendleton disappeared into the kitchen and I heard the refrigerator door open and close. Too quickly, I thought, for her to have undone a padlock.
She’d seen to it I had a corsage, something frilly and white, with perfume and ribbons, which she pulled from the chilled box. She handed the corsage to Tommy and then photographed him pinning it to my chest (“Oh, I wish I’d known you were going to wear orange!”), cautioning him when he came too close to my breasts (“Careful now, you don’t want to stick your little girlfriend!”). I could see how hard she was trying, how important this moment was to her. She wanted to make things right.
Tommy was flustered under the pressure. Beads of sweat broke out over his forehead.
“Now put your arm around Marsha’s waist,” insisted Mrs. Pendleton. “There, now don’t you make a lovely looking twosome? Praise the Lord.”
The flash went off three or four more times. I finally pleaded sensitivity to bright lights.
“Look at me keeping you all to myself. I wish the others were around. I’m so sorry Tommy’s father wasn’t here tonight to see you two off.”
I was still at an age when a lie from an adult startled me. Mrs. Pendleton followed us to the door, her eyes bright as a child’s: her son Tommy was off to a dance with a girl, and a black one at that, and now she had the pictures to prove it. She stood on the porch clutching the camera as if she’d just photographed Our Lady of Lourdes.
“My parents want us to stop by,” I explained dully to Tommy as we came down the driveway.
“Quid pro quo,” he said agreeably, but I had no idea what he meant.
Fortunately my parents seemed satisfied just to have us stand in the living room and be viewed. Tommy was not Phil, but my mother made over him just the same. Coatless, she and my father braved the cold and followed us onto our front porch.
“So, will it be Harvard or Princeton?” my father asked Tommy, already joining the two of us in his mind’s eye.
“Let them go, Ralph. Have a nice time,” said my mother. “Don’t worry about hurrying home. Take your time.”
We piled back into the LeSabre, and I backed out of the snowy drive. By now it was almost nine, and I was frantic. Calvin’s face loomed before me; I felt the irresistible pull of his soft lips on my neck.
“I need to stop by the college for a minute,” I said on impulse. “I have to drop something off to a friend.”
Tommy didn’t object. Instead, he sat stiffly in the passenger seat, staring out the window.
We drove the few blocks to Calvin’s dorm. I left the engine running and my maxi coat flung across the back seat: a promise that I would return quickly.
Adrenaline swelled my pulses. Every joint in my body throbbed as if badly bruised. I scampered quickly in my thin-soled T-straps through the darkness, feeling the cold on my half-naked feet and in my bones. Calvin was a hot fire in my brain.
I took the stairs two at a time, coming up through the propped-open fire-exit door. I was Cinderella from the ball. I tapped at his door. No answer. I tapped again. Then again.
“Who’re you looking for?” asked a boy poking his head out from the room next door.
“Calvin.” My tone implied privilege.
“He’s gone.”
I should have left it at that and headed for the dance with Tommy. I should have realized that the fever and chills alternately coursing through me signaled danger. But I couldn’t resist one more knock, and then the knob was in my hand, turning much too easily, and the sudden chill of my own body startled me in the wake of damp heat that poured toward the open door.
It was like entering a sauna. First the dimness, then the steam rising from Isaac Hayes’s brooding Hot Buttered Soul album and mingling with the essence of jasmine incense. The air was thick and moody, the candlelit walls alive with ambiguous shadows.
A motion from the corner of the room caught my eye, and then it became two separate motions I saw: one was Calvin rising up from the sheets, with nothing but his medallion around his neck; the other was the silhouette of a long dark body with large tubular breasts and a huge halo of black hair unfolding itself with knowing insolence.
Someone exclaimed, “Oh, my God!” There was a sudden flurry of sheets and pillows and brown limbs, then a woman’s voice cried out, “Calvin, what the hell is going on here?” and I realized it was me speaking, using the tone of voice I had imagined only a woman capable of.
“Marsha!”
I didn’t recognize my own name. I yelled, “Bastard!” and ran out, twisting my ankle when one of my heels caught on the carpet.
I was too stunned to cry. My chest threatened to cave in on itself. As I ran back out the fire exit, I found I could not catch my breath. Panic set in. It took several minutes of standing in the outside stairwell below, pulling in the frosty air with lungs so tight I thought they would explode.
I had never suspected, because I lacked the experience to suspect.
I stuffed my fist in my mouth and bit down hard until I tasted salt. I shook my hand free and thrust it into a thin layer of snow to stop the pain. And then there was nothing to do except walk back around to the other side of the dorm and get into my father’s car next to Tommy Pendleton as if nothing had happened. My voice had disappeared somewhere deep in my throat. As if mutually agreed upon, I said nothing and Tommy said nothing. We went grimly on to the dance at the school gym, my heart as hard as a rock.
The gym was decorated with Christmas tree boughs and ribbons. An inflatable Santa-and-reindeer set hung from the ceiling. A huge fir tree stood in the middle of the floor, lit up and covered with red balls and silver tinsel.
After we’d gotten ourselves settled and I’d managed to swallow some punch, Tommy asked me to dance. We moved stiffly around the floor, nodding to people we knew. “You look very nice,” he told me. “You really do.”
His touch left me cold inside. I kept my face turned.
We joined Tommy’s red-haired friend Paul Malloy and his date, a pale white girl named Lisa from Firelands. Tommy and Paul immediately began whispering together. I made a point of ignoring them all, including Lisa, who was feeling ignored by Paul. She kept trying to show off her corsage that seemed to have taken root right there on her wrist.
“So are you and Tommy going together?” she asked.
“No,” I told her and turned my head. Monica and Camille appeared then in jovial moods with dates they’d gotten from a Catholic school in Cleveland. They were both dressed and perfumed and oiled, looking like Cheshire cats.
“How’s your health?” asked Monica boldly, with a meaningful look at the clock.
Camille flashed a wicked smile. “Feeling a little sick, Marsha?”
Sitting there with them all, my surroundings melted away and I realized how alone I was, nursing my grief in this empty space. I was seized with panic, afraid I could never dare desire again. Cold terror set in like rigor mortis. In my mind, the door to Calvin’s room kept shutting sharply behind me as if forced by a fast wind.
Monica whispered to me that she had a fifth of Wild Turkey in her Rambler. I rose up and followed like a sleepwalker, leaving Lisa and Paul and Tommy sitting there. Outside in the wintry air I shivered in my thin dress. We sat on chilly vinyl car seats, me on one end, Camille on the other. Monica opened the bottle deftly, trying to prove she was practiced. Before us, our lighted school blazed like an alien spaceship that had just landed next to the expanse of football field.
I took several long swallows of fiery liquid.
Monica poked me with her elbow. “Come on, girl, what’s bugging you? It’s Christmas. Tommy looks go-o-o-d.” She urged the bottle on me again.
I swallowed my agony and enough Wild Turkey to fuse my nerves back together. The slow burn rounded off the razor-edge of suffering. Camille took the bottle and shoved it under the front seat. The three of us climbed out and bent, shivering and coatless, into the fury of white.
The fiery pain that seared me comes only once in one’s life: it is that first scorch of real grief. It is like losing a limb; surprise and horror join forces at the junction of what should be the impossible. At that moment I would have traded my sight to erase what I had seen in Calvin’s room.
When Camille and Monica got up to dance with their dates, I informed Tommy flatly that we had to leave. No explanation. He seemed only mildly surprised. As I gathered my coat and purse, I saw him pause and say something to Paul. When we walked out, Camille and Monica cast knowing glances at me over their dates’ shoulders.
In the car, when I put the key in the ignition, I burst into tears and cried for several minutes into the collar of my maxi coat, without explanation. I lowered my head onto the steering wheel while Tommy sat dutifully by.
Finally he said, “Is there anything I can do, Marsha?”
“No,” I sobbed.
“It was probably hard for you to see Phil Willis there with someone else.”
Phil! I hadn’t even noticed.
“I know,” said Tommy, “it’s always hard to be with the wrong person.” Consumed with my grief, I took this as an apology, Tommy’s acknowledgment of his failure.
“I’m not ready to go home yet,” I told him. I eased the car onto the highway, away from town, and turned directly into the snow. I had no destination, only found satisfaction in the motion of the car. We ended up driving eight miles in the wrong direction, to the edge of Lake Erie, where we sat in my father’s car, listening to CKLW from Detroit and staring out at the black frozen space ahead.
As for what happened next, I can’t make any excuses for Tommy, except to say that perhaps he was just plain curious about himself and desperate to have an answer.
And as for me, I had grown sleepy from the Wild Turkey and my own grief, and when I closed my eyes I could almost imagine it was Calvin, gathering me against him, then brushing his lips against mine, pressing against my chest, then bearing down on me, lifting my dress, tugging at my orange fishnets.
“Do you really want to do this?” I asked the boy hovering over me, my eyes still tightly closed against the black void. There was no answer, just a purposeful sigh into the hollows of my right ear.
That was all the encouragement I needed to move over the edge. How simple it was to plunge downward when the bottom was no longer in sight! All that foolish, dutiful teetering I had done, adding to the ever-spiraling tension between me and Calvin—the tortured refusals, the last-minute “I can’ts” whispered breathlessly through our tangled bodies—now gone flat as a bicycle tire. What did it matter? The next thing I knew, strong hands were extended and someone waited below to catch me. Warmth melted my frozen body, and I fell into forgetfulness, floating gently alongside the two joined bodies in the front seat of my father’s car. I dropped off to sleep then, and upon opening my eyes later I was surprised, even shocked, to find myself crushed against Tommy Pendleton inside the cold damp car. The side windows had steamed over, the windshield wore a thick coat of snow. Tommy was sitting up straight again, staring out where the lake should have been. He was wearing his black-framed glasses. With one hand, he reached out and gently caressed my hair as if I were a small animal he had just rescued.
After that night, Tommy Pendleton and I still didn’t speak much at school. Sometimes in class I’d catch myself looking at the back of his head, trying to connect it with an old longing that never surfaced. As for Calvin, I kept taking him back, a sucker for his inexhaustible excuses, so we were together off and on for the next year or so. He finally admitted he was engaged to a tall black girl named Charmaine from New Jersey. By the time we actually broke things off, it seemed easy. I was already packed for college, a new life ahead.
Over the years I have often compared myself to that anonymous girl, the one in Calvin’s bed that night: her sweat-glistening face, her swollen mouth, her big brown legs unwinding themselves from Calvin’s back, her breasts rising and falling obscenely, her eyes like flames.
Tommy and I performed nothing like that in the front seat of my father’s car. It was something much simpler, much less eventful, and, under the circumstances, quite forgivable. So much so that I maintained I was a virgin until my freshman year of college when I met Nicholas Rush from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Now, as I headed back down the green slope toward where Tommy’s casket was being lowered into the ground, I was startled to hear my own name. “Marsha! Marsha Hendrickson!” A tall brown woman in dark red, with a black hat, moved from the group of mourners toward me. “Is it really you, Marsha?”
“Mrs. Pendleton!” She saw my tears and approved of them. This was that same woman who had coaxed Tommy and me closer together in her living room some twenty years before, to record a lie that would give her comfort later on.
“Oh, I’m so glad you could come!” she said. “This means ever so much to me. You remember Tommy’s brother Joseph? This is his wife Margaret.” They were a handsome couple who studied me solemnly. I’d forgotten how much alike Joseph and Tommy looked; it was like seeing double. “This is Marsha Hendrickson, Tommy’s high school girlfriend.” I let the exaggeration pass.
Joseph and Margaret nodded with mild interest. Mrs. Pendleton clutched my arm. “Betty said you’d be here. She’s already back at Tommy’s now getting things ready for the potluck. You will join us, won’t you?”
Before I could respond, she went on, “Praise the Lord, he didn’t have to suffer long. The pneumonia came on so quick. He lost his hearing, then his eyesight. In the end, he couldn’t remember even simple things. But he wasn’t one to complain, not my Tommy. Always kept things to himself.”
“That was Tommy,” I agreed.
“Yes, Lord love him,” she said. She turned to Joseph. “Tommy and Marsha shared an apartment for a while.”
She let the innuendo sink in. Then she pulled me against her hip, her hand gripping mine. That was when I knew she knew, that the word “AIDS” would never pass her lips, that she was still trying to make things right. As if we were all off to a party, and not a tear on her face.
“I’m afraid I have to get going,” I said. “I have to see students at four.” It was a lie, but one that just as carefully matched the conviction of her own sweet deceit.
“Isn’t that too bad?” She seemed genuinely disappointed. “It would be so nice… so nice to talk again…”
Suddenly I was sixteen years old, sitting impatiently on the Pendletons’ sofa, thoughts of Calvin having reduced everyone around me to the dispensable. Mrs. Pendleton was removing the corsage from the box, eager to pin me down like a butterfly in someone’s collection.
“Oh, please come,” she was now insisting, then caught herself. “I’m sorry.” She squeezed my waist briefly, eyes lowered. “I’m so sorry it all turned out this way.”
I couldn’t tell if she was apologizing or blaming me, but in that moment she had come as close as she probably ever would to admitting the truth.
“You take good care, Marsha. It was so nice of you to make it today.” She stepped away then, awkwardly, the heels of her dark red pumps catching in the thick green lawn. She clutched Joseph’s arm for support. Together they paused at the edge of Tommy’s grave and stared down into it. Her face was resigned, and if I hadn’t known better I would have thought she was a stranger hesitating out of curiosity, not a mother whose heart was wrung with grief. I wondered then how many times, over the years, she’d studied those photos of Tommy and me, maybe even had one framed for the mantel where it sat like an accomplishment, giving silent testimony. It may have given her much comfort, which was all she was really asking of me now. I turned and walked away. It seemed the only right thing left to do.