Lying there with Pete Imhof, his weight on me as our breathing and our heartbeats slowed, I thought how there was nothing else, nothing on any topic that any person could say. This was the only thing more powerful than grief.
DENA HAD REALIZED
that Andrew’s death was an act of God. She told me this while I sat on her bed watching her apply makeup before meeting people at Tatty’s on Saturday night. Several times, she had invited me to go, but I’d declined, and she’d said, “You have to quit thinking about him. Andrew was an angel taken from us too soon, but it’s not for us to ask why.”
Because she’d been having trouble sleeping, she told me, her mother had arranged for her to meet with their priest, and Father Krauss had helped her see that it was all part of God’s plan. “You should talk to your pastor,” she said.
I said nothing, and then she said, “You’re looking at my sideburn stubble, aren’t you?”
“I wasn’t looking at anything.”
“Nancy said I should just grow them out, but how many months will that take? Three?”
I hadn’t told Dena about Andrew’s brother, and I couldn’t. It was not a juicy tidbit, not even a moral quandary for us to debate; it was unspeakable.
“Your sideburns look fine,” I said.
WHEN MY FAMILY
walked to Calvary Lutheran that Sunday, I drove back to the Imhofs’ farm. I knocked on the door, and Pete took so long to answer that I decided he wasn’t home, but I knocked once more anyway, for thoroughness. The previous night, the temperature had dropped to the low forties, and I wore a coat.
When he opened the door, he said, “That was stupid of you to come out here. What if my parents were home?”
“You said they went to Racine.”
“I didn’t say when they were coming back.”
“Should I leave?”
He gave me a surly look. “If you’re already here, you might as well come inside.” He turned and headed back toward the kitchen, and as I had both times before, I followed him.
In addition to scrambling what had to be five or six eggs, he was frying sausage and toasting two pieces of bread, and as I watched, he poured himself a glass of orange juice. When he’d assembled all the food on a plate, he sat at the kitchen table, so I sat, too. I took off my coat, folding it and setting it on the chair next to me. Neither of us spoke until Pete had finished his food. He leaned back, folded his arms, and looked at me.
“Should we go upstairs?” I asked. Although it was a forward question, it seemed so obvious this was the next step that to say anything else would have been disingenuous. Besides, once we were in his bed, undressed and entangled, I knew the dull hostility of his mood would recede.
But he ignored my suggestion and said, “What are your hopes and dreams, Alice? Think you’ll stay in Riley forever?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’d never stay here,” he said. “I’m moving to Milwaukee or Chicago to make something of myself.”
I was, of course, too young to know there’s no surer sign of a man who won’t make something of himself than his repeated assertions that he will, and I also was bewildered by why we were having this conversation. The wish to go upstairs was like a bar of gold hovering vertically inside my chest. “I went to Chicago with my grandmother,” I said.
“Yeah? Congratulations.” Though his comment had its desired effect—it made me feel foolish—I couldn’t tell if it meant Pete himself had or hadn’t been. “I could take over the farm, but farming is for chumps,” he continued. “I had to get up at six this morning to feed the chickens. You break your back in the fields, live at the mercy of the weather, and for what? I’m looking for a white-collar job, business or banking. Andy liked it here, but I never understood why.”
We both were quiet. I don’t think he’d meant to mention his brother, I think he’d temporarily forgotten my connection to Andrew or perhaps he’d even forgotten Andrew’s death.
All this time, there had been no light on in the kitchen, and we sat there in the gloomy quiet. In an unfriendly voice, he said, “Come here.” I stood and walked around the table. He was wearing the same tan corduroys from before and a sweater with wide black and red stripes. “Get on your knees,” he said.
When I was kneeling in front of him, I said, “Like this?”
Sarcastically, he said, “Pretend you’re in church.”
He held my gaze a she unbuttoned his pants, unzipped them, and slid them to his ankles along with his white jockey shorts. His penis looked shockingly small, but he took my hand and brought it toward him and said, “Move it around and rub it,” and soon his erection had sprung to life. “Come in closer,” he said. “Now put it in your mouth.” Even as he spoke, he was cupping my head with one hand, pulling me in.
Years before, in sixth grade, my classmate Roy Ziemniak, our dentist’s son, had described this act to Dena and me, and I hadn’t known whether to believe him. He had apparently been telling the truth.
I gagged twice in the first minute, and then I tried to keep a rhythm, up and down, and I thought,
I’ll count to twenty-five,
and I made sure to count with Mississippis in between so real seconds were passing:
One Mississippi, two Mississippi . . .
Above me, I could hear Pete sighing increasingly deeply. After thirty-four seconds, I raised my head. His eyes were closed, but he opened them quickly, and his voice sounded half sleepy and half desperate—it did not sound cruel—when he said, “No, you have to finish.”
When I’d resumed, I began to cry. I didn’t want him to notice, and I don’t think he did, preoccupied as he was; there was a lot of wetness down there already because I was drooling from not swallowing. When at last he erupted into my mouth, I quickly pulled back my head, and most of it dribbled onto his pale, hairy thighs. There was only a little I wiped from the edge of my lips, a tiny bit that might have gone down my throat. He leaned over to pull up his jockey shorts and trousers, and I bent my head, my tears flowing rapid and hot and unobstructed. Perhaps thirty more seconds had passed when he said, “Are you
crying
?”
I’d been sitting with my knees forward and my rear end balanced against my heels, and I shifted then so my rear end was on the floor and my knees were a tent. I crossed my arms, leaned my face into them, and wept so hard my shoulders shook.
“What’s wrong with you?” I heard Pete say.
When I looked up, he towered over me. A minute before, he’d been sitting and I’d been kneeling, but he’d gone higher when I went lower. Our eyes met, and I could feel my face contract (it would have been so different with Andrew; I would have wanted to make him feel good, and afterward he’d have held and kissed me). I said, “I know there’s nothing I can do to make it up to you or your parents, but I miss him, too.”
“You don’t think the two of you were in love, do you?” The fury in Pete’s tone told me not to answer. “That he was your boyfriend?”
I did not reply, but I had stopped crying and gone on a kind of bodily alert. I suddenly knew I would be leaving this house very soon, and the likelihood was slim that I would ever come back.
“My brother wasn’t your boyfriend,” Pete said.
I wiped my eyes, I tucked my hair behind my ears. As I stood, I held on to a chair.
“Did you hear me?” Pete said. “He wasn’t your boyfriend.” As I pulled on my coat, it occurred to me that he might try to bar my exit. “What you just did,” he said, “only whores do that, and my brother would never have dated a whore.”
I walked out of the kitchen, down the hall past the living room and front staircase. Pete followed me, but when I reached the door, he stayed over ten feet back. I grasped the doorknob, turning it, and he said, “See, you can’t even defend yourself. That’s what a whore you are.”
That this ugliness had arisen so quickly between us—it could only mean it had been there all along. I looked back at him and said the one thing I knew was true. I said, “I’m sorry it wasn’t me instead of him.”
IT WAS THEN
in my life that I entered a twilight in which all I tried to do was move forward. I saw how, with Pete, I’d been trying to fix the situation—I’d been trying in a perverse way, but trying all the same—and now I understood that the situation was unfixable. That, in fact, I’d made it worse. And it wasn’t as if I could take consolation in the idea that I’d been martyring myself: I’d mostly liked it when Pete touched my body, I’d liked the physical aspect (he had been a naked, hairy man five years older than I was, stroking me in ways he ought not to have tried and I ought not to have allowed—of course it had been exciting) and I’d also liked the plot of it, wondering what would happen next, thinking about something that was close to Andrew without having to think about his death. But the end result had turned out to be rancor, rancor on top of tragedy, as well as new and incriminating secrets, misbehaviors that would further hurt the people who knew me if they learned of them. The solution was to retreat, to shut down, and doing so did not require effort. Rather, it was the opposite of effort—capitulation.
I went to school, and I continued to turn in all my work, most of which I completed in study hall; after sophomore year, study hall was optional, and in the past, I’d spent it in the gym with Dena, sitting on the bleachers while boys in penny loafers shot baskets, ducking when the balls came threateningly close. In the evenings, I watched television or played cards with my family just enough so they wouldn’t think I’d stopped watching television or playing cards with them, and at meals, I talked enough so they wouldn’t worry that I was on the brink of doing something rash and destructive, which I wasn’t. I didn’t have the energy.
I tried to read novels, once my most reliable refuge, but even when I was immersed in sixteenth-century Scotland or contemporary Manhattan, I could always feel the dread of my own life at the edge of the page, an incoming tide. Sometimes the dread simply washed right over me, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it. It was worst in the morning, when I first awakened. I’d feel sick, literally nauseated, and occasionally, if I was still, it would pass. But more often I’d have to hurry to the bathroom, where I’d vomit into the toilet bowl and then try not to cry. It would be five-fifteen, five-twenty, and it would seem impossible that the day had gone wrong already.
At night, I’d lie on my bed with the lights on and my eyes shut, and I’d listen to “Lonesome Town,” and I’d feel the song steadying me, cradling me, the way another person can hold you in water when you are nearly weightless. “You can buy a dream or two / To last you all through the years,” Ricky Nelson sang. “And the only price you pay / Is a heart full of tears.” I’d fiddle with the silver necklace I’d been wearing that afternoon outside the library; though a part of me wished I hadn’t given the heart pendant to Andrew’s parents, the fact that I was bothered by its absence seemed a sign that I’d made the right decision.
ONE MORNING IN
early November, I emerged from the bathroom after throwing up—it was not yet six o’clock—and found my grandmother standing in the unlit hall, specter-like in her pink satin bathrobe and white slippers. “Were you sick in there?”
“I’m fine,” I said softly. “My stomach hurt, but now I feel better.”
She scrutinized me. “It’s not a way to stay thin, you know. It’s an old trick that lots of girls try, but it’s bad for your teeth and makes your cheeks swell. Before long, you’ll look like a chipmunk.”
“Granny, I didn’t make myself throw up on purpose.”
“If you’re worried about gaining weight, it would be much more ladylike to smoke. Cigarettes curb your appetite at the same time that they burn calories.”
I knew cigarettes were bad for you—Mr. Frisch had told us in biology—but I didn’t want to argue with her.
My grandmother reached out and held her thumb and forefinger around my chin, so I couldn’t look anywhere except at her. Since eighth grade, I’d been taller than she was, but she usually wore heels that eliminated the discrepancy in our heights. Now I was gazing down on her. “Don’t punish yourself,” she said. “It never makes anything better.”
ONCE I WAS
at school, amid the noise and all the people hurrying toward obligations that didn’t really matter, I’d often wonder if I wouldn’t have been better off staying home, if I shouldn’t drop out altogether. But home was no better, just bad in a different way. Gradually, I came to understand that I needed to leave Riley, to go to college and not come back. And I needed to enroll somewhere other than Ersine Teachers College in Milwaukee, which had fewer than twelve hundred young women in the whole school. It was too likely, in such a small community, that my story would get out, someone there would know someone from Riley, or one of my high school classmates would also enroll. I suppose it’s a mark of my provincialism at the time that I thought applying to the University of Wisconsin in Madison was a radical move. The school had an undergraduate and graduate population of more than twenty thousand; this, I thought, would surely be enough in which to get lost.
THE SECOND TIME
my grandmother caught me vomiting, she didn’t wait in the hall; she sat on my bed paging through the copy of
The Rise of Silas Lapham
that she’d found on my nightstand. Her voice was raspy with morning as she said, “Close the door.” When I had, she said, “That was very foolish of me before, wasn’t it? Thinking you were trying to lose weight.”
I stood by the bureau and said nothing.
“We’ll go to Chicago, and we’ll have it taken care of. Next week, likely. I need to make a few calls. You can do as you see fit, but I’d advise against saying anything to your parents. I just can’t imagine what purpose it would serve.”
I felt an impulse then to express incomprehension, except that I did comprehend. At night, when I listened to “Lonesome Town,” I knew. She was right.
“Isn’t it—” I hesitated. “Isn’t it illegal?”
“Certainly, and it happens all the time. You can’t legislate human nature.”
“You don’t think that I should have it?”
Quietly, she said, “I think it would kill you. If circumstances were different, I would say, ‘Go live at a girls’ home in Minnesota, go to California.’ But you don’t have the strength. You’ll be strong again, but you’re not strong now.”