Solstice Page 9

  (On their way home Monica wondered aloud, half in awe, half disapproving, how Sheila could bring herself to say such things, to strangers!—and Sheila explained that that was just the point, they were strangers; they didn’t count. “Mary Beth takes things too seriously, in any case,” she said.)

  On these frantically comic evenings Sheila wore her hair brushed loose and crinkling on her shoulders, or pulled back tight in an old-fashioned ponytail—“one of the styles,” as she told Monica, “of my lost innocence.” Like a hatcheck girl she applied crimson gloss to her lips; she did something elaborate and fanciful with her eyes; her cheeks, normally so pale, were most beguilingly rouged. As to her perfume—well, it was powerful; it was potent. The luridly shiny material of her blouses grew taut against her small high breasts when she inhaled; the outline of her firm, similarly high buttocks was the more pronounced by her horsey stance at the bar. She knew her way around, did Sheila—that is, Sherrill Ann: her gaze low, level, mocking, flirtatious even as it was supremely indifferent.

  Monica disliked the taste of draft beer, Monica disliked the smoke in the air, but, well, after one or two steins at the County Line Tavern, one or two at Buddy’s Circle Café (where the hillbilly band Delaware Gap played weekend nights), after a nightcap at Flaherty’s on the way home south on Highway 30 . . . well, she didn’t quite care what she liked or disliked, it was all wonderful good fun, Sherrill Ann was indeed a “character,” and Mary Beth was no slouch either, she was beginning to loosen up.

  The men had names like Grady, Buzz, Billy, Orrin, Mason, Ryan. They worked at the Massey-Ferguson plant in Bethany, or at a General Motors plant in Edgarsville, or they drove trucks, or had small farms, or were auto mechanics, or were “between jobs.” Most of them were married—to a degree. Unless they were divorced. They drank a good deal but they didn’t invariably get drunk though sometimes of course they did get drunk but that didn’t mean—didn’t always mean—they would turn difficult or nasty or maudlin or hopeful. They were likely to ask Sherrill Ann and Mary Beth if they wanted another drink, or maybe supper somewhere, or, maybe, would they like to dance . . . ?

  “Sure,” said Sherrill Ann, wriggling her hips, “I’m game.”

  (“How come you don’t want to dance?” one of the men would ask Monica, and Monica would say, embarrassed, speaking quickly, “I don’t know how to dance these dances,” and the man would say, “Hell it’s easy—I’ll teach you,” and Monica would say, “I’m afraid I just don’t like to dance, I’m clumsy on my feet,” and the man would say, smiling, baffled, sometimes glancing down at her feet, “You sure don’t look like you’d be clumsy—c’mon and I’ll show you.” And Monica would say, no longer laughing, “Thank you, but I’d rather not,” and the man would say “Your friend’s dancing, ain’t she?—Jesus look at her,” and Monica would say, sharply, to bring an end to it, “Yes but I’m not my friend, am I, I’m someone else.”)

  If the men were initially attracted by Mary Beth’s wavy pale-golden hair and her reassuringly pretty face—the small upturned nose, the delicate features—they gradually came to prefer Sherrill Ann’s presence, her queer excited exuberant manner. Mary Beth might have been as young as twenty-one, Sherrill Ann might have been as old as thirty-five, but it scarcely mattered because Sherrill Ann was the live one; Sherrill Ann was hot.

  Monica who was Mary Beth, Mary Beth who was Monica . . . now a little drunk, borne along by a faint buzzing sensation in her head . . . but holding herself steady . . . perfectly in control . . . Monica who had done her eyes up cleverly too, black mascara and greeny-silver eyeshadow, Monica with her wavy hair, her watchful intense look . . . she was learning to loosen up, relax, have a good time. She wasn’t a prig, surely, why just look at her: laughing at the jokes: humming with the music: sliding an arm around Sherrill Ann’s waist as, laughing, swaying, Sherrill Ann slid an arm around hers.

  She wasn’t drunk but she laughed loudly, her hair falling in her face.

  She wasn’t drunk but it did strike her as funny—the seriousness with which men looked at her, and at Sherrill Ann in her satin blouse and bouncy ponytail.

  It was funny . . . the fact that, years after his death, Elvis Presley was still king of the jukebox, with eight songs listed including one called “America” which Sherrill Ann professed to love. (Mary Beth’s own favorite was “Huggin’ You” by Billy Joe. There was also a rock-and-roll number by a band called Forced Entry, a guitar number by a band called Jump-in-the-Saddle, a breathy love ballad by the Pindee Sisters—all jukebox favorites.)

  Funny too were the Christmas decorations at the Circle Café (blinking red and white lights, tinsel looped across the walls like festive cobwebs, green plastic trees above the bar, florid-faced Santas advertising Pabst, Schlitz, Miller High Life, Miller “Lite,” Coors). Black Billy’s had a near-life-sized plywood Santa’s sleigh, complete with reindeer, nailed atilt on its sloping roof; Hedy’s had frosted windows with red candles painted on the glass; tinsel was draped across the twelve bowling alleys at Walt’s, just above the pins.

  And here was Sherrill Ann dancing and cavorting like a girl of sixteen, Sherrill Ann clowning as she bowled (her freestyle technique, all legs and elbows, resulted in both gutter balls and spectacular strikes, to everyone’s amusement), Sherrill Ann mock-serious about a game of pool, a white camellia pinned drooping to her hair. She prided herself on keeping pace with Grady and Ben and Buzz and Orrin, matching them drink for drink—or almost. She argued the finer points of horse breeding with them, she commiserated with their angry tales of “unfair” alimony and child support payments, the custody rights they had to live with. The courts—the lawyers—the welfare workers—were all biased against men, against men who were fathers but ex-husbands: that was a fact of life! that couldn’t be denied! It’s just what they can suck out of you, Grady, or was it Buzz, complained to Sherrill Ann—after they decide they don’t want you no more; and Sherrill Ann, feeling subdued that evening, said, People shouldn’t get married, maybe, in the first place, “—Hell, just look at me.”

  One night Monica found herself watching Sheila intently, by way of a fly-specked mirror behind the bar of the Swedesboro Inn, thinking, What is she doing? and why? Sheila was dancing with a trucker named Mick, or Mike, a former state trooper (why former, no one knew), her left arm slung across his shoulder and her right arm crooked tight at the elbow, the man’s arm—beefy, thick, covered in dark hairs—pressed hard against the small of her back. The music was drawling, throbbing, standard country-and-western from the jukebox; the air was stale with smoke; the dancers were both slightly high, their cheeks touching, their bellies, their thighs. Their feet scarcely moved. Watching them, idly, yet intently, her eyes burning from the smoke in the air, Monica told herself that she wasn’t embarrassed for her friend, or annoyed: Sheila was only joking, pretending, behaving like a teenaged girl with her first boy friend . . . or like a teenaged slut. Monica saw the man sway suddenly, as if he were about to fall; she saw Sheila grip him hard to hold him upright; she heard Sheila’s strident laughter. The man then kissed her, or made an attempt, half-clowning, yet surely seriously, and Sheila eluded him; she simply pushed him away. It was all good fun. It was all fun. Wasn’t Sherrill Ann after all wearing a “suede” cowboy hat that evening, slanted rakishly across her forehead, and very tight boy’s jeans—which she claimed to have found somewhere at Edgemont, left behind by a forgotten guest?

  She returned to Monica, she interrupted the man who had been talking to Monica (about the insult of his salary check being garnished, for alimony payments, by order of the Swedesboro County Court), she said laughing: “Okay, Mary Beth, knock it off—you two lovin’ it up here—our babysitter’s going to give us hell if we don’t get our asses out of here now.”

  Sometimes on their way home Sheila talked Monica into stopping impulsively for a pizza (a “freak pizza” with all the works), sometimes for a stack of pecan waffles topped with whipped cream, or the Strawberry-and-Almond Baghdad Surprise, at t
he International House of Pancakes—though Monica could do no more than take a few bites, and Sheila rarely got through half of what she ordered. It was the idea, after all. It was the atmosphere of the pizzeria, and the pancake house.

  All innocent, Monica thought. And fun.

  If a little crude.

  . . . But innocent, surely. And so different from her real life (her life as a teacher, her life, her ceaseless dinning life, in her head), surely it was healthy and rejuvenating and good for the soul, as Sheila claimed. (“I suppose we’re too narrow, too cautious,” Sheila brooded. “We could pick up a couple of men and bring them back to my place . . . or stop at a motel . . . what do you think? Do you think it would be worth it? Or would it just be trouble? and boring?” Without waiting for Monica’s reply she said, as if thinking aloud: “Hell, they’d just give us the clap, or knock out a few teeth. The fun of it now is what we do—and what we don’t do.”)

  Sometimes when Monica was insufficiently Mary Beth—not sufficiently mollified by drink, that is—she had to admit that the excursions were exhausting, and beginning to be predictable. The tobacco smoke made her slightly ill, the noise from the jukebox made her head ring, there were indefinable odors she hated, and there was, inevitably, and frequently, the women’s lavatory. . . . The jostling in the barroom, the crowding, the loud good-natured bantering; the bantering that turned into bullying; the outright propositions, delivered in a tone of “fun” (Let’s go somewhere and fuck right now, men might say to Sheila, and Sheila would say, simply, Nope); the rivalrous women who might have been wives out for a good time, an illicit good time, or divorcées, or semiprofessional hookers—the women who eyed Sherrill Ann and Mary Beth with both shrewdness and resentment. And poor Sherrill Ann sometimes drank too much, trying to keep up with the boys, and got sick to her stomach in one or another filthy lavatory or parking lot . . . or at the roadside, on their way home. (Monica generally drove, on Sheila’s bad nights.) Once Sheila gripped her arm—squeezed it—said in an elated voice, “You’re a good sport, Mary Beth, hon—I wouldn’t have predicted.”

  And Monica felt, despite herself, an immediate flood of childish gratification.

  What of Sheila and men, Monica wondered. What did she really think, what did she really feel, about men . . . ?

  It was hard to take them seriously, Sheila said. Then added, with a sly narrowing of her eyes: “It’s hard to take anyone seriously.”

  If Monica tried to draw her out, to make inquiries, Sheila seemed rather aloof; or, perhaps, shy; everything was deflected into a jest, an airy bon mot, a shrug of her thin shoulders. When she was slightly drunk she boasted of herself as a woman who liked men and who sometimes craved men but, in fact, she could “take them or leave them: it’s all so banal in the end.”

  Except for Morton, of course.

  Except for Morton whom she had—well, hadn’t she?—loved.

  “Been crazy about, you might say—‘crazy’ about,” Sheila said, rubbing her hands over her eyes. “But that was a long time ago, Monica.”

  Evidently there were no men in her life at the present time except friends—artist friends—two or three “gentlemen farmers” in the area—acquaintances and connections in New York, Key West, Mexico, North Africa. And Paris. Sheila showed Monica the photograph of a Jamaican Parisian, as she called him—a muscular, near-bald black man, very handsome, very sure of himself, who, dressed in a paint-splattered sweater and jeans, bared his magnificent teeth at the camera. What do you think of Henri, Sheila asked Monica, nudging her as a man might nudge another man, contemplating the photograph of a sexually attractive woman, and Monica said, smiling, wondering if she were meant to smile, “Well—he’s certainly unusual. Was he a lover of yours? Is he, still—?”

  But Sheila only grunted; laughed rather contemptuously; and took back the photograph. “Thus, Henri—!” she said.

  When Sherill Ann and Mary Beth went out for one of their evenings on the town, it was Sheila’s task, undertaken with zest, to fend off men if they grew importunate or bullying, or overly affectionate. At Jake’s, or Hedy’s, or The Place, or Walt’s Bowling Emporium, Sheila liked to declare that they came unescorted and they intended to leave unescorted—and that was that.

  As for Bud, and Billy, and Mack, and Mike—Sheila liked them so long as the conversation was amusing, the banter impersonal and breezy. She took offense, however, if one of them tried to interrogate her (“How many kids?—I thought you said three”), or if it appeared that sweet little Mary Beth was being made uncomfortable. In turn, she angered the men by muddling their names, or mixing them up (“Buzz?—oh yeah Bud—sure as hell you are Bud”), as if it scarcely mattered who was who. In the morning she frequently telephoned Monica to ask “how her head felt” and to sift through their little adventure of the night before, and it was clear then that she couldn’t distinguish one man from another—Fitch, Grady, Max—Johnny, Steve, Jeb O., Ryan. She felt sorry for them, she said. Their jobs, their marital problems, their debts; their old-fashioned swaggering machismo with nowhere to stick it.

  “If you feel such contempt for them,” Monica said one morning, irritated because her head ached, and she knew she was doomed to drag herself through the day, “—why do you go out? Why do we go out?”

  “I don’t feel contempt for them at all,” Sheila said. She seemed quite startled by Monica’s remark; even a little hurt. “. . . I like them and I like it that they like me.”

  Monica carried the image of one or another of the men, the nameless men, around with her, at school, in her classroom, in the faculty dining room; she recalled the silly powerful downbeat of the jukebox; her sense—wholly irrational, wholly irresistible—that she was someone not quite herself, a girl, a golden girl, again, with all of her adult life ahead.

  What she and Sheila did was chaste enough, wasn’t it?—and innocent. And it was certainly exhilarating. To be looked at by strangers, and admired; to arouse some hearty male desire, however anonymous and futile; to know that she seemed—though assuredly she was not—mysterious. All of my life ahead, Monica thought, her lips curling in irony. She knew it was supremely foolish yet it was exhilarating.

  (She had told herself at the breakup of her marriage that she had not been hurt, not deeply hurt, it wasn’t that important, it wasn’t that significant, her divorce like her marriage was “ordinary,” “average,” a “typical” sort of suffering: Don’t take yourself too seriously, Monica! Of course Harold’s sexual interest in her had gradually declined over the years. The nine years of their “relationship.” It had begun with ferocity, a high keen rather pitiless passion, romantic if one chose to think it so, and flattering as well, for who, being fiercely desired, does not feel flattered . . . ? There was a day, however, more precisely a night, when Harold no longer looked at her, no longer required looking at her, though he continued to require a body—a legitimate female body—to make his sexual performance “normal.” Whether Monica and body were joined was a question, a tricky little question, fraught with embarrassment, which she didn’t dare ask. For there were no words. No words not thumbed-over, banal, stale. Monica could not reproach her husband after all when he betrayed her with her own body, making love—what “love” there remained to be “made”—to the flesh with which he shared a bed and a last name, while thinking, dreaming, plunging deep in his private thoughts. Perhaps, Monica thought, one of the phantom-images with whom he betrayed her was an earlier, younger Monica, mysterious and elusive, not yet his . . . ?)

  But the exhilaration too was winding down.

  Indeed, it was becoming too “exhilarating.”

  . . . Friday night at Buddy’s Circle Café and there was great amusement at: Mary Beth’s panic when a hard-shelled beetle fell (from the ceiling?) into her hair; Mary Beth’s plight when, her bladder swollen from beer, she had to go to the women’s lavatory but the women’s lavatory (a single squalid room, a single toilet) was in use, in use, in use, in use . . . and, finally, under Buddy’s protection, with
Sherrill Ann also standing guard, she used the toilet in the men’s room. (“Absolutely filthy,” Monica said afterward, stung with humiliation, “—sickening,” and Sheila said, laughing, indifferent, “I’ve been in worse and was grateful enough at the time—you’re just spoiled.”) A Thursday night at Walt’s Bowling Emporium outside Swedesboro, much noise, gaiety, gaiety that seemed in fact sheerly noise, and there was Sherrill Ann the divorcée and mother of two (or was it three) strutting about, clowning, in a new shiny-leather jumpsuit (funky overlarge zippers, trousers pegged at the ankles), drawing the attention of men she and Mary Beth had never met before, drawing their attention rather too successfully, so that, before long, there was an unpleasant exchange—which hadn’t any air of romance about it, or intrigue, or simple interest—“cock-teasing bitches,” they were called, “dykes who ought to have their heads knocked together,” they were dismissed as, finally: which Sherrill Ann professed to find amusing.

  (“Don’t you think it might be dangerous,” Monica said, “—now that they’re coming to know us.” “They don’t know ‘us’ at all,” Sheila said curtly. “That’s the point: no one knows ‘us’ at all.”)

  And then it happened, one night later in December . . . a tavern outside Edgarsville, a carload of men, Sheila and Monica were hurrying across the parking lot to Sheila’s car when one of the men called out to them, his name was Fitch, Fitch’d taken a liking to Sherrill Ann a few weekends ago, but there was some beef between them, the reasons weren’t clear, maybe he was mistaking her for another woman but he didn’t think so, Fitch was anxious for them both to get in his car, Fitch was saying that Sherrill Ann had promised to meet his kids, hadn’t she said she wanted to meet them, he’d shown her some snapshots and she’d said she wanted to meet them, now she pretended she didn’t know who the hell he was, what the hell did she and her girl friend think they were pulling . . . ? Fitch’s friends followed after him, they were all a little drunk, good-natured drunk, maybe not so good-natured if Sherrill Ann wouldn’t cooperate, if Mary Beth kept dodging away like they were lepers or something, like they were shit, Fitch was saying that Sherrill Ann and him, they had an understanding, and now she pretended she didn’t know him, “We got some talking to do,” Fitch said, “honey you promised, you know you did,” and Sherrill Ann told him to please leave them alone, they were on their way home, they were late getting home, their babysitter would call the police if they didn’t get home in the next fifteen minutes, and Fitch just said, “You two come along now, hon, we got some talking to do,” and Sherrill Ann told Mary Beth to get in the car and lock the door, which she did, and Fitch tried to stop Sherrill Ann from getting in the car, “I don’t like no bitch lying to me, I don’t stand for no bitch lying to me,” Fitch said, and Sherrill Ann said he was drunk, and they weren’t getting in his car, and they were going home, and that was that. “Our babysitter will call the police,” Sherrill Ann said, her voice raised, angry, perhaps just perceptibly trembling, “—she knows when we’re expected home and she knows we’ve been here.”