At the Break of Day (2 page)

She had gone to the dance because the letter had not yet come, and therefore there was still time. And now she laughed, but it was not a proper laugh as she thought of Joe’s arms around her, the taste of vermouth and lemonade, the talk of College, of majoring in Politics, of his wish to enter journalism, his hopes that he might work on Frank Wallen’s newspaper.

She had listened to his ambitions, which were also hers, and pushed away the thought of England. Later she watched the lake as they drove back to the house in his Buick, and then smelt his skin as he leaned down, his lips touching hers, but then his tongue pushed into her mouth and she drew back, uncertain. She had never kissed like this before.

Her feet crunched on the gravel as she walked towards the porch. ‘I’ll see you, Rosie,’ he called as he drove away, his wheels spinning.

‘Sure,’ she said and had hoped that she would, in spite of drawing back, because he made her heart beat faster and her lips feel full, her skin feel as though it needed to be touched, and if she felt like this, she thought, it couldn’t all end. Could it? Grandpa? Could it?

She did see him again, within two days, because Sandra had rung and asked her to a barbecue on the beach, where Joe would also be. She had answered the phone then grinned at Nancy as, later, they both strolled down to the lake and Nancy sat while Rosie swam in the cool clear water out to the raft. She lay on the wet wood, then dived into the water again, swimming back to shore, to the beach house.

She had rolled down her costume, running her hands down her body, brushing at the wet sand which had caught between her breasts and along the top of her cold buttocks, and between her thighs. Should she let his tongue search her mouth? What did she do with her own? What did other girls do?

She returned to Nancy, and sat against her chair, taking handfuls of sand and letting it run through her fingers on to the ground.

‘So why don’t you ask that Joe over for a swim?’ Nancy had said, handing her a salad roll.

The tomato was warm and the lettuce limp. It was the taste of summer by the lake for her.

‘I don’t know really, Nancy. I guess I just don’t want to somehow.’ She had bent her head down, resting it on her knees.

‘You know, when you’ve just come out of the water and your hair’s wet it’s just the same as when I used to wash it back in 1940 when you first came,’ Nancy said, her voice lazy. ‘I remember my first date. I didn’t want him to see my body, even in a costume. Too kind of personal if you know what I mean?’

Yes, she’d known what Nancy meant and now she remembered the feel of Nancy’s hand stroking her head, her voice as she said, ‘You’ve really grown, Rosie, and I guess Joe has too. I remember it was difficult to know what to do with a new date at your age. Sometimes things that you’ve read in books become real and you don’t know what you think about it.’

Rosie remembered now how the lake had lapped at the shore while Nancy continued.

‘I guess my mom was right, Rosie, when she said that you do what seems right at the time but don’t let yourself get hustled, if you know what I mean, my dear. Letting a boy go too far is wrong at your age. Kissing is enough, I think.’

And Rosie remembered saying, ‘But Grandpa is hustling us. Can’t we just say I’m going to stay here?’ She had gripped Nancy’s hand, looking up at the woman who had come to her in the night when she had been ill, the woman who had smiled from the front row when she collected her literature prize. The woman who now said that Grandpa had the right to make the decision for them all. Rosie was sixteen, not twenty-one. It was only right, but Nancy had turned away as she said this.

At the barbecue they had all jitterbugged in the humid heat which was heavy with the smell of hamburgers and onions. Joe was good, very good, but so was she and they picked up the rhythm and didn’t talk, didn’t laugh, just danced as a breeze at last began to ease in from the lake. Dave, Sandra’s date, tapped Joe on the shoulder and they swapped partners and danced again, but though the rhythm was the same it wasn’t Joe’s hand which caught her and turned her and threw her up and then to one side, and so it was good to be called to eat, over by the glowing barbecue.

She didn’t eat the onions but sat with Sandra on blankets out where the woods met the sand and they laughed while the boys fetched root beer which Sandra’s mother had brought from the ice-box. The parents smoked cigarettes which glowed in the dark and Rosie watched the lanterns blowing near the barbecue. Frank and Nancy hung up lanterns in their garden when they had a barbecue and people danced and ate. Did Grandpa? Of course not. But it hurt too much to think of that, so she watched as the moths beat against the lights.

‘Don’t they know it’s hopeless?’ she murmured.

‘D’you remember that darn great Polyphemus the old coach stopped the game for in ninth grade?’ Joe called across to Dave. ‘He stopped play and we watched it crawl out all wet. We had to wait until it dried and the wings got as tough as Flying Fortress wings. Jeez, those moths are more like birds. Six inches from wing-tip to wing-tip. We swatted it.’

The breeze had become a wind as the music played again and Joe pushed his fingers between hers, pulling her up, dancing so close. Her head had lain against his shoulder. The humidity remained and they were drenched with sweat and Rosie had thought of the wings beating about her face. She hated moths. She always had done and she remembered Grandpa swatting at a hard-bodied one which had banged into the kitchen light but it was Jack who had come in, cupped it in his hands, taken it into the yard, set it free. Grandpa, let me stay.

She shivered and Joe held her, looking into her face, but it wasn’t the moth, it was the thought of England. Joe kissed her and she felt his lips on her forehead, in her hair, his breath on her skin, and it was what she had wanted all evening.

The music was slow and she felt his chest against hers, his hips, his legs. She wasn’t going to think about moths any more, about anything any more. Not about school, not about ninth grade – only kids were in ninth grade. She was sixteen, Joe was eighteen. They were no longer kids.

Her breath made a wet patch on his shirt and she concentrated on this, not on the mailbox which would one day soon hold the letter.

Then they were dancing in the darkness beyond the lanterns, and all she could smell was him, all she could feel was him, as he moved his hand all over her back and kissed her, again and again, and her mouth opened under his, but this time his tongue didn’t flick into hers.

The hand which led her off to the shelter of the wood was soft and sure and kind. The ground was dry, his kisses were on her face, her neck, and hers were on his, but then he unbuttoned her dress, slipping his hand across her shoulders, her neck. Her breathing felt strange.

She put her hands either side of his head, holding his face so that she could kiss his mouth, see his eyes which looked at her, then through her, heavy-lidded. At his lips which were as full as hers felt. Now she let his hands stroke her breasts and she knew the adults would not approve and she thought they could go to hell.

She closed her eyes as he pushed her dress back off her shoulders and it was now that he kissed her breast with his open mouth, with his tongue. She felt it, soft and warm, and allowed him to do all this because the adults were making decisions, had always made decisions, and this was hers. And they wouldn’t like it.

But then she opened her eyes. The wind was howling now and she saw his head down against her skin, her body felt his hands along her thighs and his mouth was no longer soft and neither were the sounds which came from him. She was frightened, wanted Nancy. Everything was so quick. After six years everything was rushing, too fast, too goddamn fast, even this, and she didn’t know how to stop Joe, how to stop anything, anything at all.

But then the rain came and Joe lifted his head, pulled back her dress, took her hand, helping her from the ground, laughing, running, and that night the waves on the lake were three feet high as they drove along the surface of the water. Tomorrow the sand would be solid and wet as she walked on it and she knew now it would be all right because the rain had fallen tonight when she needed it. So that meant everything would be fine, wouldn’t it? And she and Joe would have the time they needed to take everything so much more slowly.

But she did not walk on the sand the next day and everything was not all right, because there was a letter from England in the mailbox. Norah insisted that she came home and Grandpa agreed. The waiting was over. There was only grief and anger to take its place.

Rosie lifted her hands now, leaning against the rail, standing on her toes, looking back, and, yes, Manhattan was still visible, she hadn’t quite left, not yet.

She hadn’t said goodbye to Joe, or to Sandra. Frank had driven them back to the house on the last day of June and there had been an ache inside her which seemed to reach into the air, taking the colour from the maples, the sky, the whole world. The ache hadn’t left her still. She wondered if it ever would.

She had packed her trunk, listening to Louis Armstrong, ignoring the visitor from the Children’s Aid Society who called to speak to Frank and Nancy. She folded her clothes neatly but left her baseball bat, skis, her pennants on the shelves and on the walls, because there would be no place for them in London.

She looked out at the baseball target set up by Frank on the back of the garage, then took the ball from the shelf, feeling its stitches, its leather-covered hardness, the slap as she whacked it into her other hand. The mitt was there on the shelf. She put the ball with it. It was all over and the tears would not stop running down her face.

They took a cab from the house the next day and she waved at Mary, the domestic help, who cried, but Rosie did not, she seemed too empty, too grey, too tired. But she had cried all night. Had Frank and Nancy?

They talked on the train to New York but the words were dry and flickered from her mind and it was as though everything were happening two feet above the ground and there were no shadows.

At Grand Central Frank showed her the bulbous clock above the information desk.

‘This is a good meeting place,’ he said, taking his pipe from his mouth. ‘You just remember that when you come back.’

For a moment she had seen the colours and shapes of Grand Central Station and then it slipped back to the flatness and to the noise which whirled around her, sweeping in and out of her head but never staying, and she turned away but Frank pulled her back, put his arm around her. His brown eyes close to her brown eyes.

‘You’ve got to fight a good corner. Make something positive out of the next three days before you get on that boat. We want you to soak it in, remember it. Remember America. That’s why we’re filling in the time here, not back home. The future is yours, Rosie. You must make something positive out of the rest of your life. Have we got a deal?’

Rosie looked at Nancy and then back to Frank and wanted to shout, But there’s this pain, deep inside and it’s because I’m leaving you, the lake, Sandra, America; and Joe. And I’m angry with Grandpa and Norah and you, for letting this happen. And I’m frightened because I’m going to a place which used to be home but which isn’t any more.

Nancy touched her face as the people parted around them. ‘None of this is the end of the world, you know. We can write. You’ll come and stay, or we’ll come over.’ Her voice was heavy with sadness, her eyes shadowed as Frank’s were, and Rosie knew that these two people were hurting too. That they loved her, that they didn’t want her to go, any more than she wanted to leave.

They walked on through the pillared hall and the noise was greater. People clustered at the ticket booths. Were they going home? Were they laughing and smiling because they were going to people they knew and loved?

Frank had gripped her then, as Rosie now gripped the rail again, her hands down from her face, Manhattan all but gone, though not quite.

He had gripped her, pulling her back to him. His hands had been the same as they had always been, short-nailed, strong. Would they be old when she saw him again?

He had said, ‘Nearly sixty cleaners come in the early hours, just so you can put your toots down on the great big shine. Now isn’t that something?’

She had nodded, but it was nothing in amongst the pain. She had leaned her head back at Nancy’s command and looked at the picture of the zodiac on the towering ceiling.

‘There’s something wrong with it, so people say. Maybe Orion is back to front or something. But it looks pretty good to me.’ But it was nothing.

They called in to the Oyster Bar, then passed the movie house and stood and looked at the bronze doors behind which the trains waited at their platforms. There would be one taking Nancy and Frank back to Pennsylvania on the fourth, but not her. No, she would take a ship and a train and then a cab, each one taking her further from them, from Joe, from them all.

‘These trains leave at one minute past the scheduled time. Always one minute past. Remember that when you come back,’ Nancy said.

They took a cab to the Plaza Hotel but Rosie turned before they left the station and saw 89 East 42nd Street in gold lettering above the main doorway. Did Euston have its address written up? She couldn’t remember. She didn’t care.

She still didn’t care, standing here, surging away from America, remembering the avenues they had driven along and across, the streets they had turned down which were plunged into darkness by the shadows of the skyscrapers. They had driven beneath bridges, slicing in and out of the shadows of the girders.

‘In winter the tops of these skyscrapers are sometimes in the clouds,’ Frank had said, his hand clasped over the bowl of his pipe because Nancy would not tolerate that goddamn smell in the car.

The buildings reared up, jagged against the blue of the sky. They were complete, untouched. But the place she was going to wasn’t. The bombs had made sure of that.

In the Plaza lobby there were plants with rich green waxy leaves. They looked so cool in the heat, like the lake. She touched one. It was plastic and warm.