When I woke up the Sunday after I’d been with Dean, I had a headache from too much sleep. Mommy and I went to church, and I stood there and I sang the words to the hymn, and listened to Reverend Bill, but I didn’t hear what he was saying so passionately up there in his pulpit. I just saw him waving his arms, and his soft, round face, smooth as if he didn’t even have a beard yet.
All day Sunday, Dean did not call. He loves her, I thought. My thoughts were sluggish, as if my skull were filled with fog. I’d walk into the kitchen for a glass of juice and then wander around, forgetting what I’d come for. I imagined dying. What would be the easiest way?
Mommy would be better off without me. She wouldn’t have to support me. Pills. How do you get pills? Jesus would understand I couldn’t go on living like this.
Then, Tuesday, 6 P.M., he phoned, and when I heard his voice all my dark thoughts were stilled, like I was a drug addict or something given momentary relief with a fix.
“Can you go out?” he asked.
But I wasn’t giving in so easily. I was going to stall. “You still with Terry?” I asked.
A hesitation. Silence, then, “I guess so.”
“That’s not right,” I said. “I shouldn’t be seeing you if you’re still with her.”
“I’m looking for a job,” he said. “Soon as I find something I’m outta there. She doesn’t know it yet.”
I asked, “Do you love her?” Had to know.
“Yeah. I love her. But since you, everything’s changed.”
That night, he came to get me, and we drove around in his truck. The drive was just an excuse to talk. We drove through the empty streets, turned onto Courthouse Square, where the rich people of Sparta had once lived, the old coal and gas families, in houses hidden behind vines and hedges. We drove past the white courthouse with its wide steps and fluted pillars, like a temple. Behind it was the jail, a relatively new building, shiny yellow brick.
We talked. The talk rushed out of me like a river. The talk was like love, like kissing.
We had stopped by the side of the road, left the motor running for the heat. As I talked, he gazed at my face, as if he were listening to something beyond my words, as if he understood everything, all my thoughts. Talking was like making love would be.
“Talk about Brian,” he said, watching my lips.
“What about Brian?”
“You ever kiss him?”
“No. Not really.”
“You ever have sex with him?”
“No!”
“Does he say he loves you?”
“I don’t know! I don’t want to talk about Brian.”
He was still staring at my lips, as if a spell had been cast over him, and I thought he was going to kiss me. “He can’t help it,” he said. “You’re so beautiful.”
“I don’t want to be beautiful. I’m not beautiful.”
“Your skin’s all transparent. Like glass, or a pearl.”
We were related, I thought, brother and sister born on some distant planet, not Earth. He would never hurt me. He was soft. It was myself somehow that I wanted in him.
And as the engine of the truck rumbled, he took my hand, turned it over, smoothed out my fingers, kissed the flat palm. I could feel his warm breath on my skin. His face was moving closer to my face. As if he were going to kiss me. Then, suddenly, he turned away, sat back in the seat.
He said, “It’s okay if we don’t make love now. We can go for months and months, and I’ll still love you. That isn’t what counts for me.” He had said he loved me—he had uttered the words.
Then he said, “It’s cold. We better go.”
* * *
We drove home, and he asked if he could come inside the house. Mommy was already in bed, and I let him.
“I want to see your yearbook,” he said.
We sat together in the darkness under the light of the brass standing lamp. He paged through the yearbook, his eyes eager for pictures of me. There were the group photos, me with the conflict mediation team. Then he came to the picture of me as Schoolgirl Queen. My crown had flattened my hair down. There were these two bright crazed glints in my eye from the camera’s flash reflected in them.
He whispered at my image on the page. “Look at you.” As if the picture were the real thing, and I wasn’t even there beside him, flesh and blood. I glanced at the photo. What I saw on the page was the face of another person. Even in two years my face had changed, whatever baby fat was there had dissolved, my bones were more defined now. “One of those people nobody can have. . . .” he murmured.
“That’s not true,” I said.
“Everybody wanted you—right?” he said. “You were perfect?”
“I’m not perfect. Nobody’s perfect. And not everybody wanted me.”
He raised his eyebrow, grinned, that bad-boy look on his face. “Could I have had you?” he asked.
I was gazing at his lips, the pouty lips, creased skin, mole above the mouth. Little gold hairs above the upper lip, and just below his jawline, barely visible unless you were up close. “It’s okay,” I said. “You can kiss me.”
He looked at me hard a moment, then reached forward and kissed me—too quick.
He glanced up at the stairs, looking to see if she was there.
“She’s in bed,” I said.
“She can hear us. I know she can.”
“She can’t. I know what she can hear.”
He took both my hands in his. “I’ll still love you. Even if we don’t do it. Let’s wait. Till we’re ready.” And then he turned back to the yearbook, his eyes fixed on my photo again.
I had heard someone say once that desire is one half curiosity. Now I was all curiosity.
* * *
Next evening, Mommy was lying on the couch, the TV droning, her eyelids drooping. She was always tired from her job, always fell asleep right after dinner.
It was snowing again. I could hear the grinding of the plow on the road. They said this was the most severe winter in years. It seemed like there was no oxygen in the house and I couldn’t breathe, I wanted to get out, wanted the sensation of the cold air on my face.
The doorbell sounded and I got up to answer it. Dean was there standing on the threshold.
“I gotta talk to you!” he said. I felt my heart rise. I stepped aside and let him in and as he brushed past me, the cold from his leather jacket ruffled my skin.
Mommy, on the couch, opened her eyes, and he nodded toward her. “Mrs. Saluggio.”
She nodded back, her expression grave, her dark eyes watchful. “Hello, Dean. Close that door, Mellie. It’s freezing.” She was accepting him in some way. She guessed—with that sixth sense of hers—that we weren’t having sex.
Dean glanced toward the kitchen. “Can we talk in there?”
I led the way. We stood there, the humming of the big refrigerator filling the room. Most beautiful thing in the house, the refrigerator. Special-order, powder blue, ice maker and water spout, everything you needed, too big for the two of us really, but she liked the vertical freezer because it held more and you could buy food on sale and keep it.
He glanced toward my mother in the living room, and moved closer to me, lowering his voice. “Listen,” he said, “I need a place to stay.”
“What happened?”
“Terry knows about us. She’s freaked. She threw me out.”
My heart raced. “I’ll ask her. Wait.”
I ran from him to the living room, knelt down on my knees at the couch in front of her. “Can Dean stay here tonight?” I asked. I saw her look doubtful, her lips part to say no. “Please,” I begged. “Please—please—please! He’s got nowhere to go. He got kicked out of where he was staying.” Drowning out any chance for her to say no. “He’ll be homeless!” I cried.
She scrutinized me with those dark brown eyes, knowing everything, careful. Knew we weren’t sleeping together. Maybe some part of her had chosen him for me because she thought he was safe. I had a fantasy—we would both be her kids, we would live here together, the two of us, under her protection.
At last she said, “Well, a few nights, I guess. Get the extra comforter out of the upstairs hall closet, and a pillow.”
She switched off the TV and climbed the stairs to bed, and I carried the pillow and comforter down to him. And as I held it out to him, I envied this cloth that would touch his skin. Anything that would touch him, I wanted to be.
We were alone now, the house dark except for the light from the single lamp. I wondered, would he change into his pajamas?
He bent down, unzipped his backpack, removed a black ditty bag from it, placed it on the coffee table. His movements were tentative, careful, as if he were worried he was taking up too much space.
Then he stood still in the middle of the room. I realized he wanted me to leave.
“Let me cover you,” I said. I wanted to do that, make him like my child. If you loved someone, he was many different things to you. Lover. Father. Child. All those things. I wanted to cradle his head, to surround him completely, cover him with my body.
But he slid under the covers fully dressed. I tucked the comforter around his body. He reached up as if to kiss my forehead, but at the same moment I moved suddenly toward him, and caught him on the lips with a kiss. He seemed surprised.
Upstairs, in my own bed, I lay for hours thinking of him down there on the couch, imagined him breathing. And his whole being seemed to hang in the air of the house.
I couldn’t sleep. At 2 A.M., I tiptoed downstairs again. She had kept the light on the stairs burning. As if to sanitize the place, a warning to us to keep away from one another.
In the living room, I could see the mound of his body on the couch under the comforter. He lay still, as if he were sleeping. I stepped closer. He was on his stomach, his arm pushed up under the pillow. I could see his face in the light from the stairs, his eyelashes resting on his full, round cheek. He was still wearing his day clothes, his flannel shirts.
I could hear the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen, clicking on and off. Had he heard me come down the stairs? Was he just pretending to be asleep? I touched him on the shoulder, he turned over suddenly on his back. I thought for a moment he was irritated at being touched because I had startled him out of some deep sleep of exhaustion.
In the semidarkness, he opened his eyes. He looked panicked, as if he didn’t recognize me. “Melanie,” he said, and he closed his eyes again.
“I can’t sleep,” I said. “I came down to get some juice.”
“Hi,” he murmured, eyes still closed, as if he hadn’t understood me. As if he were not fully awake, and was pulled back into sleep.
The house was so cold. She always kept the heat down at night to save on fuel. I clutched my arms around my chest and shivered. Hoping he’d realize I was cold, that he’d sense I was naked under my nightgown, that he’d invite me in under the covers. I sat down on the edge of the couch, perching my hip there, but he didn’t move his body aside to make room for me.
“I’m cold,” I said. “Can I get inside with you?”
Eyes closed, as if concentrating on sleep, he reached his hand up, touched my hair. “Can’t,” he said. “She’ll throw me out. Then I’m fucked.”
I could feel the warmth emanating from the opening between his body and the comforter, could feel myself drawn to the warmth there as if he were a magnet, as if I were an animal who belonged there in his heat. “Please,” I said.
He opened his eyes now, and I could see them wide and gleaming. “We can’t,” he said. “She kicks me out, I got nowhere else to go.”