To the four of them baby Joan was what the new car was until Gordon smashed it into a tree. They often stood together in a group and just looked at her. They ran their hands over her body and strove to find words worthy enough and took her for spins around the block to show her off. At the very thought of her they laughed. They had their picture taken with her.
To the four of them baby Joan was what the sales brochure had said the new car was. Glamour plus. A supreme thrill, and a joy, and a blessing.
Now that they were back home Doris’s apprehension about her was gone. Now that they were away from those senile Dearness crackpots was how she saw it. (Just like the nuts that fall, I’m a little cracked, that’s all! were her theme lyrics for the whole bunch of them.) Strangely, she felt redeemed when she was holding Joan, as if Joan were the miraculous flowering of her own illicit sex.
Sonja felt redeemed all of the time. Those days of shame back when she’d first learned she was pregnant out of wedlock were no longer even a memory, let alone an unpleasant one, and any time Yours crossed her mind, after she had shuddered at the recollection of his nostrils, she thought almost fondly, “What a character.” Without him there would be no Joan, there wasn’t any getting around that. And the way he had pounced on her and got it over and done with in no time, that struck her as pretty smart now, like a doctor slipping the needle into your arm when your mouth is open for the thermometer. She never did see his penis, so it wasn’t as if she had nightmares about it, although she’d had two weird dreams about green hammers—going into Ted’s Cigar Store and all they were selling was green hammers, and a dream about her father having green hammers for arms.
There’d been a hammer with a chipped green handle lying in a nail box on Yours’s windowsill. When she felt something pushing between her legs, it happened so suddenly and the thing was so solid she thought he was trying to stick the hammer handle up her. With his hand over her mouth she couldn’t cry out. The blood on the fingers of his other hand, which he showed to her while she was still pinned down, was from splinters, she thought. What’s more she thought it was his blood. She wasn’t hurt. She hardly felt a thing. “Serves you right,” she said as soon as his hand left her mouth. She was embarrassed to have been touched down there, she was scared to death because he was obviously a mental case after all, but even when he zipped himself back up she didn’t catch on. She had to see the unbloodied hammer still lying in the nail box before another possibility struck her.
“Did we go all the way?” she asked.
He patted down her skirt and brushed a coil of hair out of her eyes. “We sure did,” he said, smiling as if remembering a wonderful, romantic time.
“We did?”
His eyes emptied. “You give a fella the come hither, what do you expect?”
It was like missing the last bus. It was like losing her wallet. And she knew, she knew that she was pregnant. Yes, there it was—already!—another, faster heartbeat behind her own. Yours got up and left the room and she just sat there, listening to her two hearts. When he came back he had a facecloth. For her, she thought, but he used it to wipe the blood on the chesterfield. He asked if she could name the four blood groups.
They had met for the first and last time less than an hour before, at the Swan Restaurant next door to where her father worked. She had gone downtown for a polio shot and to bring her father a manuscript he’d left at home, since his office was in the same building as the doctor’s. “Gin Alley” the manuscript was called. On the bus she opened it to read the recipes but it was a story about a man named Ratface.
“Potboiler means trash,” her father said when she asked why he was always going on about how his company published nothing except cookbooks. “Private-eye novels, shoot-’em-up hoodlum novels.” He spoke nicely but he looked at her as if he couldn’t believe how stupid she was, and suddenly she craved apple pie à la mode. And then she remembered that she was next door to where they had the best apple pie she had ever tasted! Her father smiled and said, “Oh, I get it, you were pulling my leg.” With his finger he wiped away the saliva at the corner of her mouth.
It was a Thursday morning. Phys. ed., math, chemistry—all her worst subjects were on Thursday morning. So she was in no hurry. She ordered two pieces of pie and a glass of chocolate milk, using up her whole allowance. She was just digging in when a huge man with nostrils the size of quarters sat beside her at the counter and extended a pack of Lucky Strikes. “No, thank you,” she said, “I don’t smoke,” and he said in a Southern accent, “I’m with you a hundred percent, stunts your growth.”
She glanced at him. He winked. She looked down but couldn’t help smiling. Stunts your growth, she thought. That was a good one.
He pocketed the cigarettes and withdrew a cigar, turning to the woman on his other side for a light. Then he turned back to Sonja and stared at her. After a few minutes he said, “You know who you look like? Elizabeth Taylor. I’ll bet folks tell you that all the time. I’ll bet folks stop you on the street for your autograph.”
She laughed. “Every day and twice on Sundays.” She knew that she looked nothing like Elizabeth Taylor.
“Shoot,” he said. “Elizabeth Taylor.” He sat there staring until she wondered if he thought she was Elizabeth Taylor. She wondered if he was a mental case. She gave him another quick glance.
“You’re of Greek origin, aren’t you?” he said.
She shook her head.
“If you were, folks would say you were Aphrodite. Know who she was?”
“No.” Looking straight at her pie.
“Goddess of love, beauty and fertility. Daughter of Zeus.”
At this point the waitress came over, but he waved her away, saying he didn’t need food, he was feasting his eyes. Sonja ate steadily and tried to ignore him and his cigar smoke. She tried to remember what fertility meant. She knew it was rude. Another few minutes passed and then he tapped a finger on the cover of her geography notebook and drawled. “Soncha.” He traced the letters with a ridged, yellow fingernail. “Soncha, now there’s a classy name. Pleased to make your acquaintance, Soncha.”
“Sonja,” she couldn’t help correcting.
“Sonja.” He nodded. “Sonja. As in I wanya, Sonja?”
She let out an embarrassed laugh. “No,” she murmured.
“You know what you can call me?”
She started eating faster, shovelling in the last forkfuls.
“Take a guess.”
She sighed, flustered.
“Go ahead, guess.”
“Red?” she tried with her mouth full. He had red hair.
“Try again.”
She swallowed. Scanned him sidelong. “Stretch?”
“Yours,” he said. “You can call me yours.” He set his cigar in the ashtray and wrested her hand from her glass. She had an idea that he was going to perform a magic trick, the one where a coin suddenly appears in your palm. “I bet this is as soft as beeswax,” he said. He balled up her hands between his. “Mmm, darlin’,” he said.
She wondered what to do. She didn’t want to be rude. She didn’t want to upset him and make him snap. His hands were the size of baseball gloves, quite pale. By comparison her hand was a little clump of brown bread dough he was working. When he began to pull on her fingers, she tried to tug away, and he gave her a heavy-lidded, broken-down look.
“I’m not allowed to date yet,” she said. It was true, although up until now it had been beside the point. She tugged at her hand again but he folded it in both of his and brought his cupped hands to his lips.
“Well, then, how about we just be close friends,” he said.
To get rid of him she agreed to walk with him as far as the corner. He said, “It’s a deal,” slapping the counter with both hands and coming to his feet. He was even taller than she’d thought, his black boots long and pointed, like a court jester’s. But with cleats. Out on the sidewalk, for every scraping chink from him, her penny loafers produced three feeble little slaps, and trying to change her pace didn’t make any difference, he automatically adjusted. He said that she was so graceful, she must be a ballerina.
“A tap-dancer,” she admitted.
“Hey, show me a few steps,” he said, but she said it didn’t work without tap shoes. They walked on. He kept looking at her, she could feel it. She looked straight ahead, clutching her books to her chest, scurrying alongside what felt like the sway of steel girders.
When they reached the corner he badgered her to walk with him just three more blocks, and seeing as she wasn’t really going out of her way, she gave in. “Oh, all right” was her half of the conversation until they arrived at his place. It turned out to be in a new apartment building. He said she’d see a grown man cry like a baby if she didn’t take a ride in his elevator.
“Oh, all right,” she said and followed him through the ritzy lobby. Partly out of curiosity because she’d never been in a highrise. Partly out of sheer surrender.
The elevator was mirrored, even the ceiling, which he came up to. He punched the highest button, nine, then clamped her shoulders and turned her in a circle. He said, “No matter which way you look, darlin’, there we are.”
It was true. Her so short and chubby and him so tall she thought for a minute they must be fun-house mirrors, except that he’d been that tall outside.
“You and me,” he said.
He turned her again.
“Going on to infinity,” he said.