“Not all men,” Ann said, frowning. “Dave isn’t like that, and neither is my dad.”
“My dad isn’t either,” Tammy said. “He lets my mom have her own career.”
“He lets her?” Irene repeated the words, putting them in the form of a question. “The very fact you phrase the statement that way makes my point. Why should he have to ‘let’ your mother have a career, as though he’s offering her some special privilege? Would you ever think of saying, ‘My mother lets my father teach science’?”
“Men are supposed to have jobs,” Tammy said. “They have to support their families. With women there’s usually a choice. When a woman decides to work it’s because she wants to—”
“That’s not true,” Paula broke in. “Maybe your mom works because she likes to. She’s a writer. That’s like a hobby, something she can do on her own time when she feels like it. My mom works at the salon because we need the cash, and when she’s through with that she comes home to clean and do laundry and make dinner. Dad sits there on the sofa watching TV, acting like Mom’s long day doing people’s hair wasn’t anything and the stuff she’s doing at home is her recreation.”
“What about the rest of your mothers?” Irene asked. “How many of them hold jobs outside of the home?” Kristy Grange raised her hand, as did Madison. Holly raised hers halfway.
“My mother gives piano lessons part-time. Does that count?”
“Do you think it counts?” Irene asked her.
“Well, sure. It’s work, isn’t it?”
“Does your father think it counts? If someone were to suddenly ask him, ‘Does your wife work?’ would he say, ‘Yes’?”
“I don’t know. Probably not,” Holly admitted. “It’s not what you’d call a career. It’s just a couple of hours a day, and she uses the money for extras like presents for people and my music lessons and stuff like that. How’d we get onto this subject, anyway?”
“Straight from Abigail Adams,” Madison said. “Irene was saying men want to hang on to the whip, and Ann said, ‘Not all men.’ How can you know that, Ann? Dave isn’t your husband yet. You haven’t had anything to disagree about. When you do, maybe you’ll see another side of him.”
“No way,” Ann said crisply. “You’re just bitter.”
“Admitted. Pete’s a shit—sorry about that, Kristy—but I can get him back if I want him. I’m in the driver’s seat. That’s the way it should be.”
“Dave and I don’t have a driver’s seat,” Ann said. Her normally gentle face was flushed with irritation. “We love each other. When people love each other, nobody has a whip. That makes it sound like you’re going to hit somebody. No man hits a woman unless he’s some kind of lunatic, and in that case—”
“Shut up!” The thin, shrill voice interrupted her in mid-sentence. All faces turned toward the girl who had come so abruptly to her feet.
Jane Rheardon stood, clutching at the edge of the table as though for support, her eyes wild and anguished. The left side of her face jerked uncontrollably.
“Shut up, all of you!” she shouted at them. “You don’t know what you’re talking about! You don’t know anything at all!”
“What is it, Jane? All I said—” Ann regarded her with startled bewilderment.
“I know what you said, and you don’t know anything about it. Men do hit women, they do it all the time, and women put up with it because there’s nothing else to do! I’m right, aren’t I, Irene? It does happen!”
“Yes, Jane, I’m afraid it does,” Irene said quietly.
“You can’t know what it’s like—hearing it happen—with him yelling and swearing and her crying and furniture knocking over—and afterward, it’s even worse, because we have to hide it! We’re just the nicest family! Everybody thinks so!”
With a choking sob she sank back into her chair and brought her hands up to cover her face. Rising quickly, Irene went over to her and put an arm around the slim shoulders. Her own face was dark with anger.
“So that’s the way it is,” she said. “I knew there was something. Poor Janie—poor little Janie. But at least you’ve told us. It will be better now. You’re not alone anymore. You’ve got your sisters.”
Chapter 9
Peter, we need to talk.
Such a simple statement, composed of five easy words. There was nothing there to trip up the tongue or to cause the speaker to stop for a breath halfway through it. Why, then, was it so impossible for her to say?
Laura had been repeating the line over and over in her mind from the moment that Peter’s car had pulled to the curb at their usual meeting place at Locust and Second streets. She’d rehearsed it at home before that, sitting silent at the dinner table, staring down into her plate while her mother bustled about pouring more milk and getting the rolls out of the oven.
Peter, we need to talk.
In her daydream, the words had rung out clear and bell-like, and Peter, his face suddenly sweetly vulnerable, had turned and said hesitantly, I was just going to say the same thing to you. I didn’t know how to start. I was afraid you might laugh.
Laugh, Pete?
Well, you never know. I don’t want to scare you off or anything, but… but…
Gently. Encouragingly. Yes?
I… just want you to know… there’s never been a girl in my life who mattered… really mattered… until now. Even Madison… she was just a way of filling the time… waiting… until the real thing came along….
In her mind, the lines had written themselves, falling so easily and naturally into place, but now in the car with Peter really beside her, she couldn’t speak the initial sentence that would begin the flow.
Instead, she heard herself asking, “Where are we going now?”
“Where do you think? To an exotic island in the Caribbean where coconut palms sway in the breeze and dancing girls in grass skirts line the shore.”
“No, really,” Laura said. “You’re headed down to Pointer’s Creek Road, aren’t you?”
“Well, sure,” Peter said. “Where else can we park where there won’t be any streetlights?” He paused and then turned to glance sideways at her as a thought occurred to him. “Hey, you’re not on the rag, are you? If you are, you should’ve told me before.”
“What?” Laura asked in bewilderment.
“It’s not your time of the month?”
“Oh, no—no.” Under cover of darkness, Laura felt her face growing hot with embarrassment and was astonished by her own reaction. She and Peter had already gone all the way. There shouldn’t be anything so intimate that they couldn’t talk about it, but…
“It’s not that,” Laura said hastily. “It’s just that it seems so early. It’s barely ten o’clock.”
“That other movie wasn’t any good,” Peter told her. “I saw it before when it was playing at the Cedars. I’d have gone to sleep if I’d had to sit through it as a double feature.”
“We could’ve gone somewhere else for a little while. To the coffee shop or the diner, maybe. Isn’t that where the crowd usually goes on weekends?”
“I’m hungry for something, for sure, but it’s not burgers.” He reached across and put a hand on her knee.
Laura shivered slightly and slid closer to him, straining against the seat belt, tilting her head so that it rested against his shoulder. Four weeks ago, if she could’ve pictured herself in this situation she would have died of joy. It had come to pass so quickly that she kept having to stop and ask herself if it might not be a dream, something from which she might awake as she had from so many other dreams, to find her mother bending over her, shaking the covers and saying, “Wake up, you little sleepyhead, it’s time for breakfast!”
Even now there were times when she wondered about its reality. In the halls at school, Peter passed her as though she were a stranger. In the cafeteria, he sat at a table with a group of his friends while Laura ate with Erika and Paula. When he spoke to her at all, it was just casually, to a friend of his sister’s—“Hey
, Laura, how’s it going?”—with a quick, impersonal smile and his eyes sliding past her to focus elsewhere.
How astonished they would be, the girls at school, the teachers, everybody, if they had any idea that this disinterest was a facade to conceal the fact that Peter Grange and Laura Snow were going out!
“This is nobody’s business but ours,” Peter had told her the first night they had been together. “We’ve got a good thing going here, and we don’t want a lot of outside pressure messing it up. That Daughters of Eve bunch would turn on you if they thought you were going out with me after I broke it off with Madison.”
“You’re probably right,” Laura had agreed in a daze. “Still, it’s not like I had anything to do with what happened between the two of you. You wouldn’t have gone back to her anyway, would you? It’s over and finished?”
“Of course it is,” Peter said. “But Madison may not think so. She’s a spoiled bitch, used to getting her way about everything. She’d freak out if she knew I’d found somebody else so soon.”
This made sense when he said it. Madison would, indeed, have been angry, and the other girls in the group would have been, too. They had taken the oath of loyalty to support the members of the sisterhood in all situations, and as Kristy herself had put it, even though Peter was her brother, he was “on the club’s official shit list.”
“He’s a chauvinist pig,” she’d said. “He thinks girls are second-class citizens. I never could see how Madison put up with him as long as she did.”
“I’m a sucker for charm,” Madison admitted ruefully. “For a while there I thought he was something pretty special.” Then she’d laughed. “Oh, well, there are tons of guys out there. At least I’ve got my sisters for moral support. Maybe you guys can toss me some of your leftovers.”
They all had laughed at that, and Laura, turning away, had stared out through the art-room window at the blue autumn sky with guilt rising thick within her, the biblical words of Ruth painfully sharp in her mind—
Whither thou goest, I will go… thy people shall be my people….
“My people” are the Daughters of Eve, she thought, and I’m deceiving them. But I can’t help it. I love Peter—I love him more than Madison ever did! I’ve loved him from the first time I ever saw him, and I’ll keep on loving him till the day I die.
Now, close beside him in the moving car, she at last brought the preplanned words to the surface, forcing them out with a little gasping breath.
“… We have to talk.”
“You say something?” Peter asked her.
“I said… we have to talk about something,” Laura said more loudly. “This thing… about being secret… it’s not working, Pete. I mean, we can’t ever go anywhere this way.”
“We’re going somewhere now,” Peter said lightly.
“You know what I mean.”
“We just came from watching a movie. That’s ‘somewhere,’ isn’t it? At the prices they charge, it better be.”
“That’s all we ever do, though—go to movies. And out to Pointer’s Creek.”
“You don’t like that? You don’t like being alone with me? You’d rather go to coffee shops and sit around with a bunch of other people chattering all around us?” He sounded hurt. “If that’s the way you feel, I’ll take you home now. I don’t want to force a girl to do something she hates just for my sake.”
“That’s not it at all,” Laura exclaimed, clutching at his arm. “I love being alone with you. It’s just that I want to be with you other times, too. I don’t care if the Daughters of Eve get mad at me. They’ll get over it, and if they don’t—well, they’ll just have to kick me out of the club. When you were going out with Madison, you went everywhere together. You walked her to classes and waited for her by her locker and took her to parties.”
“And so, what happened?” Peter said. “We broke up, that’s what. Too much togetherness can do that.”
“The homecoming dance is this Saturday. Can we at least go to that together?”
“Saturday is pretty far away,” Peter said. “Who knows what we’ll feel like doing Saturday? Let’s hang out and play it by ear, okay?”
“But I need to know. I have to get a dress.” She hated the note of pleading that had crept into her voice, but she had to make him understand how important this was to her. “Girls like to plan ahead. They need time to get ready.”
“Don’t push me, Laura. I don’t like being nagged, okay?” He tightened his hand on her knee, giving it a quick squeeze. “There are better ways to get a guy to do things than by nagging. A sweet, loving girl can get just about anything she wants as long as she doesn’t keep annoying a guy.”
“I just think it would be so much fun,” Laura said, “to go to a dance.”
“Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t. I’ll think about it.” He slowed the car. “You call it. You want to go to the creek or not? If you don’t, just say so. I’ll take you home.”
“Do you—love me?” She asked the question in a whisper.
“Speak up. I can’t hear you.”
“I said—yes. I want to go to the creek.” He was here with her now, wasn’t he, not with some other girl? The question was ridiculous. Of course he loved her.
Holly Underwood sat with her eyes closed, listening to her mother at the piano building Debussy’s castle, note by silver note, to the height of the stars. The room was filled with the ocean, with foam and froth and circling gulls and salt winds whipping icy spray against palace walls.
The winds grew steadily stronger, as Holly had known they would. The waves leaped and splashed, and the gulls began to scream their warning. Still the shining notes continued to pile one upon another to form spires and towers. At the window of one of these stood a princess with a face like a flower, her eyes focused dreamily on the horizon as she waited for the ship that would bring the prince she was to marry.
But she lingered too long in the starlight. The waters beneath the castle opened, and the waves came rolling green and wild through the marble halls and up the stairs and into the chamber where the princess stood. She opened her lips to cry out, but the salt water filled her mouth and her nose and her eyes and lifted the strands of her golden hair and sent them swirling around her like a cape. Then, with one great roar, the sea came crashing in over her, and the palace sank forever beneath the waves.
In the silence that followed, Holly drew a long breath and opened her eyes. Her mother turned from the piano with a sigh.
“I’ve gotten so out of practice.”
“Considering how little you play these days, I thought it was fabulous.”
“It’s a vicious circle. I don’t play much anymore because I can’t stand to hear myself, and the lack of practice makes it worse than ever.” Mrs. Underwood lifted her hands from the keys and flexed her fingers. “Piano-hands, my teacher used to call them, wide and strong with a lot of stretch to them. You’ve got them, too, but don’t ever let them stiffen up like mine.”
Holly looked down at her own hands. They were as her mother described them, broad and muscular with stubby, square-tipped fingers. Once at a Halloween carnival when she’d thrust her hands through the opening in a screen to have her palm read, the unseen fortune-teller had taken her for a boy.
“A beautiful, dark-haired woman will enter your life,” she’d told her, and when Holly had asked, “To do what?” the fortune-teller had gasped, apologized, and started a whole new fortune in which the “dark woman” was replaced by a “dark man.”
“Gary has piano hands, too, doesn’t he?” Holly said. “But he’s never played.”
“Gary has the hands, but not the ear. What a waste!” Her mother smiled at her. “The music in this family has come down through its women. My mother played beautifully, and her mother also. In fact, this piano used to be your grandmother’s. I picture her sometimes as she must have been as a young girl practicing her scales on it.”
“Is she the one who taught you?” Holly asked her.
/> “She gave me the basics, the same way I did you. Then, later, I had lessons. All little girls had piano lessons in those days. I had so many friends who hated them, but they had to keep plugging away anyway until they were twelve. That was the breaking point, where you got to decide whether to quit or continue.”
“And you continued,” Holly said. “If music meant so much to you, why didn’t you ever do anything with it?”
“Like what?” her mother asked her.
“Like—I don’t know—play with a symphony orchestra—play concerts—make records.”
“I did win a contest once,” Mrs. Underwood said. “It was sponsored by some music-appreciation group—Friends of the Arts, I think it was. My music teacher sponsored me, and I got a medal. It was a huge, awful gilt thing, and I wore it to bed at night, pinned to my pajamas.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” Holly persisted. “Why didn’t you go on? If you were good enough to win contests, why are you giving beginner lessons out here in the sticks?”
“Because ‘the sticks,’ as you call it, is where we live,” Mrs. Underwood said reasonably. “It’s where your dad has his business. Besides, I haven’t had the training to be a concert pianist, and I certainly don’t have the time to put in the necessary practice.”