The News From Spain Part 4

"I guess," you said.

"Do you just kind of ... have your pick?"

"Well," you said. "It doesn't really work that way." You tried to explain that being one of only two girls made you conspicuous. It made boys not want to be seen talking to you. They were afraid of being teased. They didn't want to stand out, to be different. In a way this was true. But in another way you knew, even as you were saying it, that it was wise-sounding bulls.h.i.t. n.o.body minded being seen talking to Lily Joyce. The boys kidded her, exchanged loud insults with her in the halls, grabbed her green book bag and tossed it to one another over her head as she ran back and forth with her arms waving, trying ineffectually to retrieve it; they imitated her shrieks-"Aaaaah! Aaaaah! Waaah. I'll tell! I'll tell!"-and she laughed at the imitations while continuing to shriek that she would tell.

Lily Joyce was a small, cute, flirty girl. You were tall, heavy, serious-somehow not a girl at all. You were conspicuous but invisible. The boys who spoke to you asked how you had done on the math test, or if you understood this whole diagramming-sentences thing.

You couldn't tell this to your old friends. What's wrong with me? you thought, and tried not to think, all the time. You worried that there was some fundamental thing that might be missing, some difference between you and other girls that was just now starting to show itself but that would become more and more apparent as you grew up, like the progressive divergence of two nearly parallel, but not parallel, lines.

VON BRUYLING.

Once, though, a boy did say something to you.

"Any time you want it, I can give it to you."

He was older, a ninth-grader (the school went up only through ninth grade), someone whose voice had changed, who shaved. He said it to you in a low voice, coming up behind you on the stairs and smoothly pa.s.sing you before you were sure you'd actually heard him.

But you did hear him. His name was von Bruyling. You hadn't liked him, even before he muttered to you on the stairs-he wasn't nice, he wasn't smart. You got that what he'd said had been a joke. A mean joke. You, he was implying, were the last person who would ever want it, and the last person he'd ever want to give it to.

Still, sometimes after that when you were home lying on your bed, with the door shut and your hand between your legs, you thought of von Bruyling's stupid face, and his low voice growling those words over and over.

THE STRING Ba.s.s.

Another embarra.s.sment: to play an instrument that looked like you. They'd a.s.signed it to you, or you to it, in your old public school, because you were tall and strong and could physically handle it. Now you were stuck with it. String ba.s.s players were rare, so you'd won a scholarship to take lessons at a conservatory. Your mother, almost maniacally proud of what she had decided must be prodigious musical talent, drove you there every Sat.u.r.day. The string ba.s.s lay across the backseat, its neck and scroll sticking out through the open car window; you wished for a tree growing a little too close to the road, or the sudden press of a tunnel wall. The ba.s.s decapitated; you and your mother safe; but your mother somehow knocked sensible, agreeing to let you quit.

Your ba.s.s teacher loathed you for loathing the instrument. Every lesson was the same: you would plunk out a few notes, and he would stop you. "Did you practice?"

"Some," you would say.

"You have to practice."

"I know."

Practicing was the most boring thing you had ever done. Plunk plunk plunk (rest). Plunk plunk plunk (rest). That was pretty much how the string-ba.s.s part went in every piece of music your teacher a.s.signed you. He was right, you never practiced.

Then one afternoon at school, a boy came up to you and said, "I hear you play the ba.s.s."

"Yeah," you said, wary. You weren't expecting another von Bruyling incident-this kid was younger, and he seemed nice-but you had found that in this school humiliation lurked everywhere and jumped out when you forgot to look for it.

"Because I'm putting together a rock band," the boy, whose name was Henderson, went on.

So then you were the ba.s.s player in a rock band.

During the whole time you were in it, the band played only one number, over and over, a song called "Groovin' with Mr. Bloe"-which, in turn, at least the way your band played it, had only one phrase of music, repeated over and over. The ba.s.s part went: plunk plunk-plunk-plunk, plunk-plunk-plunk, plunk-plunk-plunk plunk; and so could not claim to be much more interesting than the ba.s.s parts your conservatory teacher a.s.signed you. But playing in a rock band felt strange and glamorous, out of character for you. Upstairs in your room you practiced "Groovin' with Mr. Bloe" with a diligence and fastidious musicality that would have made your conservatory teacher cry if he had ever had the chance to see it.

After a few weeks you made up your own words to "Mr. Bloe"-an incantation for Henderson to fall in love with you-and sang them softly in your room while you practiced, and silently whenever you played with the band.

TELLING.

Eventually you told Lily Joyce. "Huh," she said. "Henderson?" She'd been waiting a long time for you to start liking a boy. In the time you'd known her she'd liked Stewart, Cook, Childs, McDonald, Chesborough, Hilts, and Sperber. They were all boarders at the school; they would get off-campus permissions to go to her house on Sat.u.r.days, mostly one at a time, but Chesborough and Hilts she invited together, because she liked them both.

"What do you do when they come over?" you had asked her once.

Lily Joyce shrugged. "Swim. Listen to records. Sometimes we make out." With Chesborough she had played something called Seven Minutes in Heaven. You didn't know what it was, and you didn't ask Lily Joyce to explain. But Chesborough was another one of those manlike, shaving ninth-graders; and Lily Joyce's exact words were "I let him play Seven Minutes in Heaven," so you sort of knew.

"Why Henderson?" she asked you.

You weren't going to give Lily Joyce a list of reasons. He's so clean. I like how his eyes are blue and his eyelashes are dark. I even like how his gla.s.ses are held together on one side with tape. He's a very serious, not very good guitarist. You didn't like him because of those things; it was more that you liked those things because you liked him. "He's cute," you told Lily Joyce.

This was a term she recognized and honored: it was valid currency with her. "What are you going to do?" she asked.

"Do?"

"I know. You need to get Mrs. Sturm to put you with him at the dance."

There are children who are too old to be children. It stops being a problem when they get older-they grow into themselves-but before that happens it's perpetually awkward. For you it was a mix of judgment and wistfulness. You thought all this stuff was stupid, but you also had no idea how to get it, and you wanted it.

"Oh, goody. Let's," you said to Lily Joyce. She laughed; she liked it when you were sarcastic. Egged on, you grabbed her hand and started skipping toward the Sturms' house. The two of you skipped along the colonnade, laughing, just as the boys were trailing out of their dorms to go down to the gym for sports. You felt wildly happy, bounding forward with the wind blowing against your face and hair, with all those boys watching. (Later, though, you'd use the memory to humiliate yourself: it had felt like two pretty girls skipping along a colonnade, but it must have looked like big you galumphing along beside little Lily Joyce.) Mrs. Sturm made tea and put out the mysterious pale cookies on a flowered plate. You sat in her living room, where she always had a fire going on these winter afternoons. "Well, ladies," she said.

"Ask her," said Lily Joyce to you.

"No, that's okay," you said. You knew that Mrs. Sturm was in charge of organizing the upcoming dance, and that each boy from your school would be "put with" a girl bused in from some girls' school. But asking her to put you with Henderson seemed cra.s.s to you, dishonorable. She liked you; didn't you owe it to her not to take advantage of that fondness by asking for a special favor? Maybe you would end up with Henderson anyway, either accidentally or because Mrs. Sturm, with her almost magical delicacy, would somehow know without being told to put the two of you together.

Besides, you were afraid to tell her you liked a boy. You didn't want to bore her, or make yourself look silly.

But Lily Joyce was pointing at you. "Mrs. Sturm, she wants to be put with Henderson for the dance, and I want to be with Sperber."

Mrs. Sturm went over to her writing desk-a small, many-compartmented thing that she had told you was an old campaign chest from the time of the Napoleonic wars-and came back with a pad and a tiny pencil. "Lily Joyce, Jeff Sperber," she said, writing. She smiled at Lily Joyce, and then at you. "And Mark Henderson?"

You nodded, emboldened by her matter-of-fact feminine complicity: all right, you would throw yourself onto the conveyor belt and let it carry you toward the dance.

"Mark Henderson," she said in her light, silvery voice as she wrote. "Very sweet boy." She smiled at you again. "Muy bien, Marisol."

AT THE DANCE.

Your band played. You were up on a platform, grooving with Mr. Bloe. Then suddenly Henderson lifted his head and yelled out, "Drum solo!" and the kid on drums went crazy for a few minutes, banging out what sounded like a big collision of pots and pans and sandpaper all happening in a bowling alley. "Keyboard!" yelled Henderson, and you started to realize that you were going to be next. s.h.i.t. "Ba.s.s!" shouted Henderson, and the other instruments quieted down and there you were-the lighting didn't change but you felt like it had and that you were suddenly standing in a cone of merciless brightness-and you didn't know what to do, but you settled for plunking out your usual sequence of notes with what you hoped was special emphasis, as loudly as possible, twice; and then you nodded at Henderson and he went into his own loud, squeally guitar solo which, you saw then, had been the whole reason why he'd accorded solos to the rest of you.

Seeing this-how badly he had wanted to play this energetic, incoherent solo, how transparently he'd tried to hide his desire to do it, how the tape on his gla.s.ses gleamed beneath the lights-made you tender toward him, and maybe a little less shy when Mr. Bloe finally came to an end and you laid down your instruments and joined the dance. Still, you were pretty shy.

"Mrs. Sturm put us together," Henderson said, leading you over to the punch table.

You shrugged. Mrs. Sturm winked at you from her seat by the refreshment tray.

You and Henderson fast-danced. Then you slow-danced. He held one of your hands and put his other arm around your waist, leaving six inches between you: mannerly, respectful, correct, a relief, disappointing. Everyone else was hugging, barely moving. All these strange girls had arrived on a bus, pretty, in pretty dresses, and had gone in straight for the kill. Their faces were buried in the shoulders of the boys from your school. They were letting themselves be touched, and kissed, forgetting or not caring about the teachers who were chaperoning. Sperber's hands were moving lower on Lily Joyce's back; her dress was hiked up and you could see the striped cotton of her underpants. Mr. Sturm came over and said something to them, and they moved apart a little. The Sturms danced: majestically. They looked like ice skaters. It would have been funny, if they had done it with any less grace or dignity.

In the last slow dance Henderson pulled you gently to his chest and you were one of the hugging couples. "I like you," he said, low against your ear. "You're my girl."

IN YOUR BED.

You replayed it over and over. He holds you. "I like you," he says. "You're my girl."

YOU ARE NORMAL.

Or if not quite normal, then at least pretty close.

YOUR G.o.dMOTHER.

"I'm so glad for you," Mrs. Sturm said. "Tell me everything."

You did. About how Henderson was getting off-campus permissions now and coming over to your house, often, on Sat.u.r.day afternoons. How much he liked your parents, and how much they seemed to like him. How your mother cooked for him: pot roast, spaghetti and meatb.a.l.l.s, rice pudding-he said her rice pudding was his favorite dessert ever. How he teased your little brother and sister (he introduced himself to them using an outlandish false name, and refused to back away from it even when they shrieked at him to tell them the truth), and how they teased him about his accent (he was from Kentucky). How gentle he was when he petted your old German shepherd. How you and he went for long walks in the fields and woods behind your house, how the two of you never ran out of things to talk about.

"He's a nice boy," Mrs. Sturm said. "A real gentleman."

This was an afternoon when the two of you were alone in front of her fire, an afternoon when you'd just dropped by, hoping to see her. Lily Joyce was home with a cold. You would not have talked this way if she'd been there. You wanted to tell Mrs. Sturm these things about Henderson: she would understand them. Lily Joyce was always trying to pry things out of you, but if you told her she would call it "the sappy stuff" and want more details about the kissing. "Has he tried to put his hand inside your shirt yet?" she would ask, in a voice that was impatient, excited, but also gruff and businesslike: if the answer had been "yes," she would have had an entire set of campaign plans ready to unfurl and explain to you in detail. "Of course not," you said, and you could see her rolling up the plans again and putting them away.

You had talked to Lily Joyce some about the kissing-you had technical questions that you knew she would be able to answer-but you didn't mention it to Mrs. Sturm. It was private; and your conversation with Mrs. Sturm was about something more. You didn't use the word-neither of you did-but you were talking about love.

"When I met my husband," she told you, "I knew right away. I was very young. Not as young as you are, but young. It was my junior year of college, I was spending it in Madrid. He'd finished graduate school-he studied mathematics at Gottingen, did you know that?-and he was backpacking around Europe with a couple of friends. We met standing in line to get into the Prado."

Suddenly you were nervous. You were moved that a grown-up-this grown-up-would talk to you so frankly. But you had never heard of Gottingen or the Prado, didn't want to interrupt to ask what they were, hoped she wouldn't quiz you on them later. And though you dreamed about marrying Henderson, you didn't expect to actually do it. You loved Mrs. Sturm for taking you seriously, but she was taking you too seriously.

"I was intimidated," she said. "He was older. So confident. He had so many languages-German, Spanish, Italian, French, even some Dutch. And so handsome! Unattainable, I thought, when he spoke to me. But he did speak to me. Smitten, he told me later. Right away he was smitten. He told me I was beautiful." She smiled at you, and there was a silence. She wrapped her soft cream-colored shawl more tightly around her shoulders and crossed her arms, hugging herself.

For some reason you expected that now she would say something about children, about how sad it was that she and Mr. Sturm didn't have any. But what she said next surprised you.

"Marry for kindness."

The front door opened and Mr. Sturm walked in.

"Well," Mrs. Sturm said. "This is a surprise." She trailed a white forearm over the back of the sofa, and he came and took her hand.

"Darling," he said, and kissed her forehead. "A pleasant one, I hope."

"We were just talking about you."

"Sturm und Drang," he said, and she laughed and so did you. You had heard him make this joke in math cla.s.s, after he'd a.s.signed an especially tough problem to solve. You could tell from the way she laughed that she had heard the joke before, too, and that she was protecting him from knowing how many times he'd already told it.

MEN.

You were getting that men were strong and fragile, powerfully tempting and dangerous, gentle and mean, impressive and obtuse, in need of both placating and protection. Meanwhile the boys' school kept ticking away with its own peculiar, habitual brutality.

The day after spring vacation ended and all the boarders came back to school, a boy in your English cla.s.s was crying. He was quietly but audibly sniffling, and his face was red and wet.

"What's the problem, Lederman?" the teacher asked. "Homesick?"

The boy didn't answer. The teacher stood up, came out swiftly from behind his desk, grabbed the back of Lederman's blazer, and lifted him into the air. He carried Lederman-a small boy; he dangled like a kitten-to the door, opened it, and threw him out into the hall.

"Stay there until you're ready to start acting like a man."

No one spoke to Lederman after cla.s.s, when the bell rang and he came back into the cla.s.sroom with his head down to collect his book bag, so you didn't either.

There was a prayer you all said in morning chapel, right after the Lord's Prayer. It started with Dear Lord in your wisdom guide my steps, and it ended: Make me strong and sound and more a man each day.

THE NEWS.

One morning in Spanish Mrs. Sturm fainted. She was in the middle of las noticias, talking about one of her innocent, rustic, pinkly romantic festivals-something about bulls, as usual, bulls and flowers-when she suddenly said, "Oh," and then folded sideways and slid to the floor.

Several of the boys jumped up and ran to her. They stood around; they knelt; one boy very lightly patted her shoulder. "Mrs. Sturm," he said. "Um, Mrs. Sturm."

You got up and went over too. "What should we do?" the boys were saying.

Her eyelids flickered, and she made a series of soft, mewing little moans. "Oh ... oh ... oh." She tried to sit up. "Oh ...," and her head sank down again.

You didn't try to help. You loved her, she'd been so good to you; but watching her lying on the floor, you felt no alarm, no sympathy. Only a cold disapproval at the whole performance. That's what it seemed like to you: a performance. The graceful slump to the floor, the bewildered fluttery coming-to amid a group of worried, gallant males-this was one of your own secret fantasies for yourself. You would faint, Henderson would catch you, bend over you, revive you. You had imagined it, but you would never actually permit it to happen. You felt, austerely, that she could have chosen not to faint. You thought this sort of thing was controllable. You recognized this scene and deplored it. She was a grown-up; she should have known better.

Two of the boys helped her to sit up, supporting her shoulders with surprisingly competent and unafraid solicitude. Someone ran to get help from the front office. "I'm all right, I'm all right," she kept murmuring. You saw that her hair was coming down: the structure had toppled, not all the way, but it was listing, and some of the little puffs were unwinding and sticking out in tufts from her head. That's when you recovered your tenderness for her, and your love; and you pitied her.

The next day the science teacher taught math; and the a.s.sistant headmaster sat in the cla.s.sroom during Spanish while you all did exercises out of the textbook. Mrs. Sturm was sick, you thought, and Mr. Sturm must be taking care of her. You were coming down the stairs to go to lunch when Lily Joyce grabbed you by the arm and pulled you into the ladies' room. "Did you hear about the Sturms?"

"Are they having a baby?" you asked, with a sudden wild lift of joy. That would fix everything, you thought, without beginning to think yet about what it was that needed fixing.

"No, no," Lily Joyce panted. "She's been sleeping with the boys."

"What boys?" you asked stupidly. You honestly didn't understand what she meant.

Lily Joyce lifted her arm and made a big circling gesture that seemed to encompa.s.s the entire school. "These boys. I don't know who all of them are yet, but ...," and she mentioned a few names, mostly boys you knew by sight but had never spoken to. Then "... and von Bruyling," she said.

"That's disgusting," you said; but all of a sudden you believed her.

"She's fired," Lily Joyce whispered, unlocking the ladies' room door-you would both have to run, if you didn't want to be marked down in conduct for being late to lunch-"and he quit. They're leaving."

WHAT YOU SAW.

Early the next morning, when your mother drove you to school, the Sturms' pale blue station wagon was turning out of the main driveway as your car slowed to turn in. You saw that the car was packed full with their things. He must have been driving, but you didn't see him. What you saw, in the quick blur of their car turning away from yours, was her drooping head resting on her hand, and her pale forearm propped against the window.

THE REST OF THE STORY.

You never knew it. Not all of it. But you got some pieces over the years.

You heard more names, of more boys. Some were big muscled football players; some were small and childlike and scholarly. There was no pattern.

You heard that Mr. Sturm had hanged himself. You had no way of knowing if it was true. You remembered him coming home unexpectedly that afternoon when you and Mrs. Sturm had been talking, and you wondered if he'd been trying to catch her with a boy, or trying to prevent her from doing something she couldn't stop herself from doing.

You thought of her saying, "Marry for kindness."

You graduated from the boys' school and went on to another school, where you were happier.

You heard that Big Lily had come home from the factory one day and found the young blond man-her husband-in bed with some girl, had thrown him out, had cracked up and spent time in a sanitarium, had come home and gone back to running the factory and a number of local charities as well. You heard that Lily Joyce dropped out of high school and married a gas station attendant and moved out west.