It was the last time Rhoda would ever see Bob Rosen in her life. Perhaps she knew that the whole time she was driving to meet him, the long drive through the November fields, down the long narrow state of Kentucky, driving due west, then across the Ohio River and up into the flat-topped hills of Southern Illinois.
If it had been any other time in her life or any other boyfriend she would have been stopping every fifty miles to look at herself in the mirror or spray her wrists with perfume or smooth the wrinkles from her skirt. As it was she drove steadily up into the hills with the lengthening shadows all around her. She didn’t glance at her watch, didn’t worry about the time. He would be there when she got there, waiting at the old corrugated building where he worked on his car, the radio playing, his cat sitting on a shelf by the Tune Oil, watching. Nothing would have changed. Only she was two months older and he was two months older and there had been another operation. When he got home from the hospital he had called her and said, “Come on if you can. I’ll be here the rest of the semester. Come if you want to. Just let me know.” So she had told her mother and father that if they didn’t let her go she would kill herself and they believed her, so caught up in their terrible triangle and half-broken marriage and tears and lies and sadness that they couldn’t fight with her that year. Her mother tried to stop it.
“Don’t give her a car to go up there and see that college boy,” her mother said. “Don’t you dare do that, Dudley. I will leave you if you do.”
So her father had loaned her the new Cadillac, six thousand dollars’ worth of brand-new car, a fortune of a car in nineteen fifty-three, and she had driven up to Southern Illinois to see Bob Rosen and tell him that she loved him. No, just to see him and look at his face. No, to watch him work on his car. No, to smell the kind soft whiteness of his cheeks. To see him before he died. Untold madness of the dark hour. “Now by this moon, before this moon shall wane, I shall be dead or I shall be with you.”
He was waiting for her. Not working on the car. Not even inside the building. Standing outside on the street, leaning against the building, smoking a cigarette and waiting. One foot on top of the other foot, his soft gray trousers loose around the ankles, his soft white skin, his tall lanky body fighting every minute for its fife.
“Hello,” he said. “I’m glad to see you. Let me see this goddamn car. Where did you get this car? My God, that’s some car.”
“He’s getting rich. Just like he said he would. Who cares. I hate it there. There isn’t anything to do. No one to talk to. I think about you all the time.” He slid into the driver’s seat and turned around and took her into his arms. It was the first time in two months that she had been happy. Now, suddenly, it seemed as if this moment would be enough to last forever, would make up for all the time that would follow.
“I ought to just turn around and go home now,” she said. “I guess I just wanted to make sure you were real.”
“It wouldn’t be a good idea to get in the habit of loving me. I shouldn’t have let you come up here.”
“I asked to come.”
“So you did. Well, look here. Let’s go to the Sweet Shop and get a sandwich and see who’s there. I’ll bet you haven’t eaten all day.”
“I don’t want to eat anything.” She pulled away. “I want to do it. You said you’d do it to me. You promised me. You swore you would.”
“When did I do that?”
“You know.”
“Rhoda, Rhoda, Rhoda. Jesus. Exactly where did you envision this deflowering taking place?”
“In the car, I guess. Or anywhere. Where do people go?”
“I don’t go anywhere with sixteen-year-old girls. I’d go to jail, that’s where I’d go. Come here.” He pulled her across his legs and kissed her again, then turned around toward the steering wheel and turned on the ignition. “Talk while I drive. I’ll take you out to the roadside park. It’s completely dark out there. You can see a thousand stars. Remember that night Doc Stanford was here from Louisville and we played music out there? You were having that goddamn slumber party and I had to take all your goddamn friends to get you out of the house. My friends still haven’t let me stop hearing about that. That cousin of yours from Mississippi was there. Do you remember that night?”
“You won’t do it?”
“Hell, no, I won’t do it. But I want to. If it gives you any satisfaction you’d better believe I want to.” They were cruising very slowly down a dark street that led upward through a field of poplars. There was one streetlight at the very top of the deserted street. “I drive by your house every now and then. It seems like the whole street died when your family left. Everyone misses you. So your father’s doing well?”
“They’re getting a divorce. He’s having an affair and my mother acts like she’s crazy. That’s why I got to come. They’re too busy to care what I do. They sent Dudley off to a boys’ school and next year I’m going to Virginia. I’ll never get to come back here. If we don’t do it tonight, we never will. That’s what’s going to happen, isn’t it?”
“No, we are going to the Sweet Shop and get a malt and a ham sandwich and see who’s there. Then I’m going to take you over to the Buchanans’ house where you’re supposed to be before someone calls out the state cops. Did you call and tell them you’re in town?”
“No, they don’t even know I’m coming. No one knows but Augusta. And Jane Anne. She had to tell Jane Anne.” He shook his head and pulled her very close to him. She was so close to him she could feel him breathe. I’m like a pet dog to him, she decided. I’m just some little kid he’s nice to. He doesn’t even listen to what I say. What does he want me here for? He doesn’t need me for a thing. It was dark all around them now, the strange quiet weekend dark of small midwestern towns in the innocent years of the nineteen fifties. Rhoda shuddered. It was so exciting. So terrible and sad and exciting, so stifled and sad and terrible and real. This is really happening, she was thinking. This feeling, this loving him more than anything in the world and in a second it will be over. It ends as it happens and it will never be again in any way, never happen again or stop happening. It is so thick, so tight around me. I think this is what those old fairy tales meant. This is how those old stories always made me feel.
“I want you to know something,” he said. He had stopped the car. “I want you to know that I would have made love to you if I had been well. If you had been older and I had been well and things had been different. You are wonderful girl, Rhoda. A blessing I got handed that I can’t ever figure out. DeLisle loves you. You know that? He asks me about you all the time. He says he can’t figure out what I did to deserve you writing me letters all the time.”
“I don’t want to talk about DeLisle.”
“I’m taking you to the Sweet Shop now.” He put the brake on the car and kissed her for a very long time underneath the streetlight. Their shadows were all around them and the wind moved the light and made the street alive with shadows and they held each other while the wind blew the light everywhere and her fingers found the scars on his neck and behind his ear and caressed them and there was nothing else to say or nothing else to do and they expanded and took in the sadness and shared it.
After a while he started the car and they went to the Sweet Shop and ate ham sandwiches and talked to people and then drove over to the Buchanans’ house and he left her there and walked the six blocks home with his hands in his pockets. He was counting the months he might live. He thought it would be twenty-four but it turned out to be a lifetime after all.