I ended things with my cowboy boyfriend in the middle of junior year by getting into the back seat of a car with another boy and letting the cowboy find out, not from me, but from the way stories were whispered from ear to ear, about girls in back seats of cars.
After that new boy, word got around. More boys asked me out. They took me for a drive. I kept up my habit of not saying no.
In a small town, with a high school of not much more than a hundred kids, it’s possible to be many things. I was a popular girl, Honor Society president, an actor in every school play, the girl friends came to with their problems. I was the dance team leader, a setter on the volleyball team, a princess at the prom. And I was a slut. I excelled.
The boys I gravitated to were the older ones, most of them already graduated from high school. They smoked pot and partied and knew things about cities and music and drugs and the world. Things I thought I should know. Things I wanted to know.
Each time with each new boy that first urge and pull, the hot breathlessness, flamed possibility that this boy could do for me what I did for myself when I was alone: bring pleasure and relief. The possibility he could give me love and I could give it to him, that we could go on like that, romance under the moonlight. In the back seat of a car. But that didn’t happen. They were boys. They knew even less than I knew.
Some girls had serious boyfriends. Girls already planning to marry after high school, to stay in Condon, start a family. This was not my plan. This was not Mom’s plan. She’d been talking about college since my sophomore year; talking about it like it the idea came from me, something that would happen, not a question. Talking about it long enough that I did think it was my idea. This is where Mom focused her attention. She saw to it that I made it home by curfew, kept up with my grades, did my chores. She didn’t know about all those boys. All those back seats.
One night, late in my senior year, I drove home from a party, whiskey and beer and cigarettes and boy on me. I took the highway slow and careful and drunk, and went even slower at the turnoff to our ranch, up the gravel road. The lights of the house blurred in the distance.
Mom would be awake as she was always awake, waiting for her family to come home. But the older kids were grown and gone. Cris was still a child, already in bed. Dad was out at the bar like he was most nights while she waited, while I waited, while we all waited. While we looked for his lights in the driveway, felt the disappointment when he finally came home, drunk and distant. She had stopped waiting for him; he’d be home sometime. I was the only one left to wait for.
I parked in the driveway. Turned the engine off. Mom there in her chair in the lamp-lit picture window. TV flicker. I got out slow and careful. Held myself on car door, hood of car. Steadied on the picket fence, breathed whiskey breath, up the sidewalk on legs like bendy straws, up the porch steps.
I came in the front door and stood there, slack-eyed. Mom had a pad of thick art paper on her lap, calligraphy pens spread out around her. Some old movie on TV.
“Hi,” I said, the thick drunk of it in my throat.
She looked me up and down. “Hi,” she said.
This was where Dad stood, all those nights when he finally came home, his dinner dried up in the oven.
Mom looked at the clock.
I looked at the clock. Squinted my eyes. It was one a.m. Just on time.
He’d ask us what we learned at school that day. Stand there, the top of him making small swaying circles. We gave one-word answers. Fine. Okay. Good. Knowing he wouldn’t remember in the morning.
I started past her to go to the bathroom. My shoulder bumped the wall, and I caught myself there, looked to see if she saw.
She sat up straighter. “Are you drunk?”
I stood up tall. “No,” I said. Tried to hold my eyes steady on hers. Like that would prove it.
Her eyes didn’t move from me. “You are,” she said.
“I am not,” I said.
She looked back at the paper in front of her. Rows of practice calligraphy letters, curvy lines and swirls. “It’s not good for a girl to get drunk.” Her innocence floated in the air between us. “It’s not ladylike.” She said it like another mother-daughter talk, one she’d forgotten. “You’re only supposed to get a glow on. A drink or two,” she said, “to feel happy. That’s all. Otherwise it’s sloppy. And ugly.” A last chance for her to teach me. A last chance for me to listen.
She picked up her pen. She drew slow inky lines on the thick paper, and the paper took that ink in.