Girls' Dormitory (3 page)

Jerry stubbed out the cigarette in an ash tray, did the same with hers, and then lay down beside her.

"I don't like the idea of you having this double room," he said. "It's the only one in the house and you had to draw it."

Helen nodded. "I told the old bat I didn't want it but she said I was the oldest one here and that she might get in some young kid who needed company." She laughed. "Can you imagine me playing nursemaid to some silly dame who doesn't know what it's all about?"

Jerry laughed. "I can imagine it, but it doesn't fit. Besides, I just don't like this double room business," he said, kissing her lightly on the mouth. "I won't be able to come up here after you get a friend. It's going to be pretty inconvenient."

"I know where you sleep," she said softly.

"Or we can go out to the garage."

"I don't like the garage. It reminds me of that awful old man."

The garage reminded Jerry of the old man, too. He had met the guy in an uptown bar and the old guy had been so drunk he hadn't been able to get up the stairs to the room on Kennedy Street. Mrs. Reid had been away for the night, visiting a sister, so they had used the garage in back of the rooming house. The old man had been too drunk to get what he was paying for and just slept on the cot until noon the next day. But he had paid fifty dollars for all the trouble he had caused.

"I'm no old man," Jerry told her, feeling her mouth, wet and hungry, beneath his lips. "And I can prove it."

She put her arms around his shoulders and pulled him down to her.

"Prove it," she whispered.

And he did.

Later that morning, at breakfast in the kitchen—he never ate with the girls—Mrs. Reid told him what he was to do that day.

"Wash the car," she said.

"Sure."

"And dry it off after you do. I don't want a lot of spots on it."

"Okay."

"At one you go down and meet the bus. There're two girls coming in on it."

"Who are they?"

"Patty Cain. You remember Patty from last year?"

"Yes."

Patty was a serious-minded student who wore thick glasses, still showed the effects of braces on her teeth, and who had the shape of a wet shirt hanging on a washline.

"The other girl is Peggy Markey."

"A new one?"

"A new one. I might put her in with Helen."

Jerry drank his coffee and watched Mrs. Reid move around the kitchen. She had a young shape for a woman almost forty, and he liked to watch the movements of her breasts under the house dress when she bent over the table to pour herself a cup of coffee.

"You can do the lawn after that," she said. "I think it's the last time you'll have to mow it this year."

"I hope so."

The lawn was thick and rambling and there were a lot of rocks. He had wanted to take out the rocks and haul them away but she had said that the rocks kept the moisture in the ground. Keeping the rocks meant a lot of extra work for him. He had to get down on his knees to trim around them, and if he didn't do a neat job she complained.

She sat down at the table, pouring cream into her coffee, and he studied her face. It was a youthful face, as young as the students she boarded, and there was something sweet about her chin and mouth and hazel eyes. He could look into her eyes, the way he was doing now, and think of her as somebody young and fresh and very much alive.

"I got some paint for room ten," she said, reaching for a package of cigarettes. "Blue. For the walls. The ceiling is all right but the walls, where that girl taped up those Presley pictures, are a mess. As soon as you get done with the yard you can get to that."

"I'm a freak," Jerry said. "I was born with only two hands."

Thelma Reid laughed and when she laughed she looked even younger.

"Tomorrow then," she said. "Start it tomorrow."

"Yeah."

She finished her coffee and left the kitchen. He sat there for a long time after she had gone, smoking and thinking. She was a strange one all right, real strange. Sometimes she seemed warm and soft and at other times she seemed hard and cold.

Almost like Helen Lee.

Helen Lee dressed slowly. She never ate any breakfast and consequently there was no hurry. She could take her time, unpack and then lie around doing nothing. Lie around and think. Think about what a stinking world she had been brought up in.

She was twenty years old and the people who knew her said she was as wild as a hawk. Well, maybe she was. There were few things she hadn't done and even fewer she hadn't thought about doing.

Her attitude was simple. The world gave you nothing; you had to take it by the horns and grab whatever meat there was for yourself. And you could never stop. If you did that, you were done, finished.

Helen had been born in the carnival, the daughter of Mable Lee, girlie dancer, and a magician in the side show.

"Art was a magician all right," her mother had often said. "He disappeared as soon as I got in the family way."

"For good?"

"For keeps."

Helen had been brought up in the carnival, smelling the popcorn, listening to the music and learning at a very young age about all the hates and loves that were a part of the city of tents. At ten she had seen her first man—with her mother—and at fifteen she had ceased to be a virgin. At seventeen, in an effort to remain in high school and graduate, she had gone with a man the first time for money. And she had been doing the same thing for money ever since.

She sighed and stepped into her panties, her legs long and naked and straight.

Men.

She hated them.

She hated the touch of their lips and everything they did to her. She disliked everything about them except their money. She endured them only because of that, or because they could, like Jerry, do things to help her. But some day, however, she would make it pay off. Some day she would make all of this studying and sex pay off in a big way.

She wouldn't be like her mother. She would never be like that. All her mother had was her body, and the attractiveness of that was fast leaving her. A girl couldn't count on beauty, and she couldn't count on brains. A girl had to count on money.

Money.

Helen wanted oceans of it, to swim in it, to drown in it. She wanted Cadillacs and furs and the finest clothes made. She wanted a French maid, and she wanted a home so big that she had to use a telephone to be heard from one end of it to the other.

She put on a sack dress, one of those things that so many people didn't like but which she did. It was red, red as her hair, and the belt was down below her knees. It didn't show off her bustline or her hips but that wasn't very important. The men who bought her paid for what was underneath. Sometimes she wondered if they were aware of what really was underneath—the hate and the loathing.

"You love me, honey?" they would ask. And she would lie.

"Yes, I love you."

"Just for now?"

"What more do you want?"

Some of them wanted to go steady with her—going steady meant giving it away for nothing—and some of them, the married ones mostly, wanted to set her up in an apartment.

She accepted none of their offers. She was a free agent and she was indebted only to Jerry. Jerry established contacts for her, received a percentage of her earnings and treated her squarely. But she hated him, too. She hated him because of that one thing he took from her. She hated him because he was a man and, like all men, he used a woman for his pleasure.

Her lips formed an oval as she applied lipstick. Sometimes she wondered why she continued to let Jerry have her, to pay him money. She didn't need him. Youngsville was an open town—the police never bothered anybody except couples who went to the city park—and she could make as much working in one of the houses weekends as she could fooling around this way. There were three houses of prostitution in the city, maybe another one, and only one of these had a five-dollar top. The boys from the college went to this one to get their kicks, but they stayed away from the other two which charged fifteen and up. The woman had told her that she could get twenty and twenty-five, she was that young and that pretty. But she had thought about it before and she thought about it again now. But finally, she rejected the idea. She guessed she was safer this way. A house could be raided—somebody running for office might want to make a big splash —and her room on Kennedy Street was safe. Jerry watched the house when she was up there with a man and she knew that she didn't have to worry when Jerry was around. He was big and powerful, unafraid, and he could handle anybody, even a cop. One night one of her customers had tried to hurt her, get her to do something that she didn't want to do, and Jerry had busted into the room and wracked the guy up good. She had felt closer to him that night, closer than she had ever felt to any man, but in the morning it had been gone, a horrible memory that she wanted to forget.

She unpacked, using only two drawers in the dresser and feeling more cheerful than she had felt in a long time. The thought of having another girl in with her was stimulating. Last year, secretly, she had wanted this room, wanted it desperately, and now she had it. A girl sharing the room with her would serve several purposes. It would keep Jerry from bothering her so much, she wouldn't be so lonely—and Thelma Reid might leave her alone. Of the three she was more concerned about Thelma Reid. There was something haunting about Thelma's hazel eyes, a veiled challenge that she didn't quite know how to meet. Nor did she understand why Thelma came into her room always wearing a negligee that dipped open, revealing much of her body. And Thelma asked her the strangest questions. Did she have a light? Hell, there were matches all over the place. Had the water been hot enough? All Thelma had to do was turn on a faucet to get her answer to that one. Questions, lots of questions, silly questions. They didn't make sense and yet Helen felt there was something behind them, something deep and mysterious.

Helen finished unpacking, lit a cigarette and walked to one of the windows. Down below Jerry was in the driveway washing the car. He was stripped down to the waist, bare and brown, and when he made giant sweeps with the sponge she could see his muscles ripple.

She smiled as she watched him.

She wasn't afraid of Jerry.

She could handle Jerry. If he couldn't come to her room she could go to his now and then, just to please him and keep him happy, and if she couldn't visit him there they could use the room on Kennedy Street. Jerry hated making love in the room on Kennedy Street. He said it made him feel like one of the paying customers and that upset him. She smiled again, thinking about it.

But suddenly, she remembered something. One night they had been there for hours, countless hours, and for a while she had thought she was reaching the summit, that she was crossing an unseen bridge into a new and exciting world. But it had ended for her the way it always ended. She had been hurt and disgusted and after he had gone she had laid upon the bed and cried. She had cried for her mother and for herself and for all of the things that she did not feel. She had cried because men were violent and awful, because her body was cold, because none of the beauty that should be there ever came to her.

She turned away from the window, feeling helpless and lost. Why was she that way? Why wasn't she like other girls, girls who joked about men, girls who said that a man's body was the path to the wonders of living? Why did she have to be different? Why, why, why?

But Helen was not stupid.

She knew why.

And it scared her.

The thought of another girl sharing her room, of undressing before her, scared her, but it was something that she had to face, something that she must, ultimately, conquer. Life was a series of battles, from within and from without, and she had to struggle constantly against her own desires. At school she watched the girls, the pretty girls, and she wondered if they were as pretty as they seemed, if they were as gentle and as soft as they looked. Nights she had lain on her bed, thinking of the girl in the next room, the girls on either side, wondering what they were doing, picturing in her own mind the beauty which they had. The experiences had left her shaken and disturbed, creating a self-hate which she had passed on to the men who had bought her body.

"You're frigid," some of them had told her.

She was.

"You're wonderful," they told her later.

She had learned how to fake love, to moan when she was supposed to moan, to cry when she was supposed to cry, to cling to a man, twisting and turning, when she was expected to cling to him as if he were the only thing in the world. Yes, she had learned all of these things and she had learned them well. She had studied men the way a student studies a textbook. She could pass her exam. She could pass it any hour of the day or night.

But she did not know herself. And that was the hell of it. She knew so little about herself that she couldn't ask one question and get a straight answer.

Create a problem and solve it, people said; get yourself in a mess and then dig out of it. And that, in a sense, was what was happening to her. The problem would be the other girl, whoever she might be, her nearness, her body, and she would win her battle by ignoring her own desires and frustrations. By the end of the school year, by the time she graduated, she would know that she was a woman, all woman, that there was no twilight strain in her blood. After that she would go ahead according to her plan. She would get a job in a large corporation as a secretary and she would be efficient. She would keep herself beautiful at all times and she would aim for a man who had money, lots of money. When she found him, married or single, she would put her hooks into him, drive them in deep, and she would never let him go. Marriage would not be important. If he gave her what she wanted—money, money, money—that was all that mattered. She would give him her body in exchange for cash. Even if she could not lick this thing churning within her —her coldness and her crazy desire for her own kind—she would be able to give him his money's worth.