11/22/63 Кинг Стивен

“Depends on the questions. I ain’t tellin you my goddam bra-size.”

“I want to know how long you’ve been here, for a start.”

“This place? Six weeks, I guess. Harry thought he might catch on at the Monkey Ward warehouse, but they ain’t hiring. So he went on over to Manpower. You know what that is?”

“Day-labor?”

“Yeah, n he workin with a bunch of niggers.” Only it wasn’t workin, it was woikin. “Nine dollars a day workin with a bunch of goddam niggers side a the road. He says it’s like bein at West Texas Correctional again.”

“How much rent do you pay?”

“Fifty a month.”

“Furnished?”

“Semi. Well, you could say. Got a goddam bed and a goddam gas stove gone kill us all, most likely. And I ain’t takin you in, so don’t ax. I don’t know you from goddam Adam.”

“Did it come with lamps and such?”

“You’re crazy, mister.”

“Did it?”

“Yeah, couple. One that works and one that duddn’t. I ain’t stayin here, be goddamned if I will. He tell how he don’t want to move back in with my mama down Mozelle, but tough titty said the kitty. I ain’t stayin here. You smell this place?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“That ain’t nothin but shit, sonny jim. Not catshit, not dogshit, that’s peopleshit. Work with niggers, that’s one thing, but live like one? Nosir. You done?”

I wasn’t, quite, although I wished I were. I was disgusted by her, and disgusted with myself for daring to judge. She was a prisoner of her time, her choices, and this shit-smelling street. But it was the rollers under the yellow headscarf that I kept looking at. Fat blue bugs waiting to hatch.

“Nobody stays here for long, I guess?”

“On ’Cedes Street?” She waved her cigarette at the hardpan leading to the deserted parking lot and the vast warehouse filled with nice things she would never own. At the elbow-to-elbow shacks with their steps of crumbling cinderblock and their broken windows blocked up with pieces of cardboard. At the roiling kids. At the old, rust-eaten Fords and Hudsons and Studebaker Larks. At the unforgiving Texas sky. Then she uttered a terrible laugh filled with amusement and despair.

“Mister, this is a bus stop on the road to nowhere. Me’n Bratty Sue’s sailin back to Mozelle. If Harry won’t go with us, we’ll sail without him.”

I took the map out of my hip pocket, tore off a strip, and scribbled my Jodie telephone number on it. Then I added another five-dollar bill. I held them out to her. She looked but didn’t take.

“What I want your telephone number for? I ain’t got no goddam phone. That there ain’t no DFW ’shange, anyway. That’s goddam long distance.”

“Call me when you get ready to move out. That’s all I want. You call me and say, ‘Mister, this is Rosette’s mama, and we’re moving.’ That’s all it is.”

I could see her calculating. It didn’t take her long. Ten dollars was more than her husband would make working all day in the hot Texas sun. Because Manpower knew from nothing about time-and-a-half on holidays. And this would be ten dollars he knew from nothing about.

“Gimme another semny-fi cent,” she said. “For the long distance.”

“Here, take a buck. Live a little. And don’t forget.”

“I won’t.”

“No, you don’t want to. Because if you forgot, I might just be apt to find my way to your husband and tattle. This is important business, Missus. To me it is. What’s your name, anyway?”

“Ivy Templeton.”

I stood there in the dirt and the weeds, smelling shit, half-cooked oil, and the big farty aroma of natural gas.

“Mister? What’s wrong with you? You come over all funny.”

“Nothing,” I said. And maybe it was nothing. Templeton is far from an uncommon name. Of course a man can talk himself into anything, if he tries hard enough. I’m walking, talking proof of that.

“What’s your name?”

“Puddentane,” I said. “Ask me again and I’ll tell you the same.”

At this touch of grammar school raillery, she finally cracked a smile.

“You call me, Missus.”

“Yeah, okay. Go on now. You was to run over that little hell-bitch of mine on your way out, you’d prolly be doin me a favor.”

I drove back to Jodie and found a note thumbtacked to my door:

George—

Would you call me? I need a favor.

Sadie (and that’s the trouble!!)

Which meant exactly what? I went inside to call her and find out.

4

Coach Borman’s mother, who lived in an Abilene nursing home, had broken her hip, and this coming Saturday was the DCHS Sadie Hawkins Dance.

“Coach talked me into chaperoning the dance with him! He said, and I quote, ‘How can you resist going to a dance that’s practically named after you?’ Just last week, this was. And like a fool I agreed. Now he’s going down to Abilene, and where does that leave me? Chaperoning two hundred sex-crazed sixteen-year-olds doing the Twist and the Philly? I don’t think so! What if some of the boys bring beer?”

I thought it would be amazing if they didn’t, but felt it best not to say so.

“Or what if there’s a fight in the parking lot? Ellie Dockerty said a bunch of boys from Henderson crashed the dance last year and two of their kids and two of ours had to go to the hospital! George, can you help me out here? Please?”

“Have I just been Sadie Hawkinsed by Sadie Dunhill?” I was grinning. The idea of going to the dance with her did not exactly fill me with gloom.

“Don’t joke! It’s not funny!”

“Sadie, I’d be happy to go with you. Are you going to bring me a corsage?”

“I’d bring you a bottle of champagne, if that’s what it took.” She considered this. “Well, no. Not on my salary. A bottle of Cold Duck, though.”

“Doors open at seven-thirty?” Actually I knew they did. The posters were up all over the school.

“Right.”

“And it’s just a record-hop. No band. That’s good.”

“Why?”

“Live bands can cause problems. I shapped a dance once where the drummer sold home brew beer at intermission. That was a pleasant experience.”

“Were there fights?” She sounded horrified. Also fascinated.

“Nope, but there was a whole lot of puking. The stuff was spunky.”

“This was in Florida?”

It had been at Lisbon High, in 2009, so I told her yes, in Florida. I also told her I’d be happy to co-chaperone the hop.

“Thank you so much, George.”

“My pleasure, ma’am.”

And it absolutely was.

5

The Pep Club was in charge of the Sadie Hawkins, and they’d done a bang-up job: lots of crepe streamers wafting down from the gymnasium rafters (silver and gold, of course), lots of ginger ale punch, lemon-snap cookies, and red velvet cupcakes provided by the Future Homemakers of America. The Art Department—small but dedicated—contributed a cartoon mural that showed the immortal Miss Hawkins herself, chasing after the eligible bachelors of Dogpatch. Mattie Shaw and Mike’s girlfriend, Bobbi Jill, did most of the work, and they were justifiably proud. I wondered if they still would be seven or eight years from now, when the first wave of women’s libbers started burning their bras and demonstrating for full reproductive rights. Not to mention wearing tee-shirts that said things like I AM NOT PROPERTY and A WOMAN NEEDS A MAN LIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE.

The night’s DJ and master of ceremonies was Donald Bellingham, a sophomore. He arrived with a totally ginchy record collection in not one but two Samsonite suitcases. With my permission (Sadie just looked bewildered), he hooked up his Webcor phonograph and his dad’s preamp to the school’s PA system. The gym was big enough to provide natural reverb, and after a few preliminary feedback shrieks, he got a booming sound that was awesome. Although born in Jodie, Donald was a permanent resident of Rockville, in the state of Daddy Cool. He wore pink-rimmed specs with thick lenses, belt-in-the-back slacks, and saddle shoes so grotesquely square they were authentically crazy, man. His face was an exploding zit-factory below a Brylcreem-loaded Bobby Rydell duck’s ass. He looked like he might get his first kiss from a real live girl around the age of forty-two, but he was fast and funny with the mike, and his record collection (which he called “the stack-o-wax” and “Donny B.’s round mound of sound”) was, as previously noted, the ginchiest.

“Let’s kick-start this party with a blast from the past, a rock n roll relic from the grooveyard of cool, a golden gasser, a platter that matters, move your feet to the real gone beat of Danny… and the JOOONIERS!”

“At the Hop” nuked the gym. The dance started as most of them do in the early sixties, just the girls jitterbugging with the girls. Feet in penny loafers flew. Petticoats swirled. After awhile, though, the floor started to fill up with boy-girl couples… for the fast dances, at least, more current stuff like “Hit the Road Jack” and “Quarter to Three.”

Not many of the kids would have made the cut on Dancing with the Stars, but they were young and enthusiastic and obviously having a ball. It made me happy to see them. Later, if Donny B. didn’t have the good sense to lower the lights a bit, I’d do it myself. Sadie was nervous at first, ready for trouble, but these kids had just come to have fun. There were no invading hordes from Henderson or any other school. She saw that and began to loosen up a little.

After about forty minutes of nonstop music (and four red velvet cupcakes), I leaned toward Sadie and said, “Time for Warden Amberson to do his first circuit of the building and make sure no one in the exercise yard is engaging in inappropriate behavior.”

“Do you want me to come with you?”

“I want you to keep an eye on the punch bowl. If any young man approaches it with a bottle of anything, even cough syrup, I want you to threaten him with electrocution or castration, whichever you think might be more effective.”

She leaned back against the wall and laughed until tears sparkled in the corners of her eyes. “Get out of here, George, you’re awful.”

I went. I was glad I’d made her laugh, but even after three years, it was easy to forget how much more effect sexually tinged jokes have in the Land of Ago.

I caught a couple making out in one of the more shadowy nooks on the east side of the gym—he prospecting inside her sweater, she apparently trying to suck his lips off. When I tapped the young prospector on the shoulder, they leaped apart. “Save it for The Bluffs after the dance,” I said. “For now, go on back to the gym. Walk slow. Cool off. Get some punch.”

They went, she buttoning her sweater, he walking slightly bent over in that well-known male adolescent gait known as the Blue-Balls Scuttle.

Two dozen red fireflies winked from behind the metal shop. I waved and a couple of the kids in the smoking area waved back. I poked my head around the east corner of the woodshop and saw something I didn’t like. Mike Coslaw, Jim LaDue, and Vince Knowles were huddled there, passing something back and forth. I grabbed it and heaved it over the chain-link fence before they even knew I was there.

Jim looked momentarily startled, then gave me his lazy football-hero smile. “Hello to you too, Mr. A.”

“Spare me, Jim. I’m not some girl you’re trying to charm out of her panties, and I’m most assuredly not your coach.”

He looked shocked and a little scared, but I saw no offended sense of entitlement in his face. I think that if this had been one of the big Dallas schools, there might have been. Vince had backed away a step. Mike stood his ground, but looked downcast and embarrassed. No, it was more than embarrassment. It was outright shame.

“A bottle at a record-hop,” I said. “It’s not that I expect you to stick to all the rules, but why would you be so stupid when it comes to violating them? Jimmy, you get caught drinking and kicked off the football team, what happens to your ’Bama scholarship?”

“Prob’ly get red-shirted, I guess,” he said. “That’s all.”

“Right, and sit out a year. Actually have to make grades. Same with you, Mike. And you’d get kicked out of the Drama Club. Do you want that?”

“Nosir.” Hardly more than a whisper.

“Do you, Vince?”

“No, huh-uh, Mr. A. Absolutely nitzy. Are we still gonna do the jury one? Because if we are—”

“Don’t you know enough to shut up when a teacher’s scolding you?”

“Yessir, Mr. A.”

“You boys don’t get a pass from me next time, but this is your lucky night. What you get tonight is a valuable piece of advice: Do not fuck up your futures. Not over a pint of Five Star at a school dance you won’t even remember a year from now. Do you understand that?”

“Yessir,” Mike said. “I’m sorry.”

“Me, too,” Vince said. “Absolutely.” And crossed himself, grinning. Some of them are just built that way. And maybe the world needs a cadre of smartasses to liven things up, who knows?

“Jim?”

“Yessir,” he said. “Please don’t tell my daddy.”

“No, this is between us.” I looked them over. “You boys will find plenty of places to drink next year at college. But not at our school. You hear me?”

This time they all said yessir.

“Now go back inside. Drink some punch and rinse the smell of whiskey off your breath.”

They went. I gave them time, then followed at a distance, head down, hands stuffed deep in pockets, thinking hard. Not at our school, I had said. Ours.

Come and teach, Mimi had said. That’s what you were meant to do.

2011 had never seemed more distant than it did then. Hell, Jake Epping had never seemed so distant. A growling tenor sax was blowing in a party-lit gym deep in the heart of Texas. A sweet breeze carried it across the night. A drummer was laying down an insidious off-your-seat-and-on-your-feet shuffle.

I think that’s when I decided I was never going back.

6

The growling sax and hoochie-coochie drummer were backing a group called The Diamonds. The song was “The Stroll.” The kids weren’t doing that dance, though. Not quite.

The Stroll was the first step Christy and I learned when we started going to Thursday-night dance classes. It’s a two-by-two dance, a kind of icebreaker where each couple jives down an aisle of clapping guys and girls. What I saw when I came back into the gym was different. Here the boys and the girls came together, turned in each other’s arms as if waltzing, then separated again, ending up across from where they had begun. When they were apart, their feet went back on their heels and their hips swayed forward, a move that was both charming and sexy.

As I watched from beside the snack table, Mike, Jim, and Vince joined the guys’ side. Vince didn’t have much—to say he danced like a white boy would be an insult to white boys everywhere—but Jim and Mike moved like the athletes they were, which is to say with unconscious grace. Pretty soon most of the girls on the other side were watching them.

“I was starting to worry about you!” Sadie shouted over the music. “Is everything all right out there?”

“Fine!” I shouted back. “What’s that dance?”

“The Madison! They’ve been doing it on Bandstand all month! Want me to teach you?”

“Lady,” I said, taking her by the arm, “I’m going to teach you.”

The kids saw us coming and made room, clapping and shouting “Way to go, Mr. A!” and “Show him how you work, Miz Dunhill!” Sadie laughed and tightened the elastic holding her ponytail. Color mounted high in her cheeks, making her more than pretty. She got back on her heels, clapping her hands and shaking her shoulders with the other girls, then came forward into my arms, her eyes turned up to mine. I was glad I was tall enough for her to do that. We turned like a wind-up bride and groom on a wedding cake, then came apart. I dipped low and spun on my toes with my hands held out like Al Jolson singing “Mammy.” This brought more applause and some pre-Beatles shrieks from the girls. I wasn’t showing off (okay, maybe a little); mostly I was just happy to be dancing. It had been too long.

The song ended, the growling sax fading off into that rock n roll eternity our young DJ was pleased to call the grooveyard, and we started to walk off the floor.

“God, that was fun,” she said. She took my arm and squeezed it. “You’re fun.”

Before I could answer, Donald blared out through the PA. “In honor of two chaperones who can actually dance—a first in the history of our school—here’s a blast from the past, gone from the charts but not from our hearts, a platter that matters, straight from my own daddy-o’s record collection, which he doesn’t know I brought and if any of you cool cats tell him, I’m in trouble. Dig it, all you steady rockers, this is how they did it when Mr. A. and Miz D. were in high school!”

They all turned to look at us, and… well…

You know how, when you’re out at night and you see the edge of a cloud light up a bright gold, you know the moon is going to come out in a second or two? That was the feeling I had right then, standing among the gently swaying crepe streamers in the Denholm gymnasium. I knew what he was going to play, I knew we were going to dance to it, and I knew how we were going to dance. Then it came, that smooth brass intro:

Bah-dah-dah… bah-dah-da-dee-dum…

Glenn Miller. “In the Mood.”

Sadie reached behind her and pulled the elastic, releasing the ponytail. She was still laughing and beginning to hip-sway just a little bit. Her hair slipped smoothly from one shoulder to the other.

“Can you swing?” Raising my voice to be heard over the music. Knowing she could. Knowing she would.

“Do you mean like the Lindy Hop?” she asked.

“That’s what I mean.”

“Well…”

“Go, Miz Dunhill,” one of the girls said. “We want to see it.” And two of her friends pushed Sadie toward me.

She hesitated. I did another spin and held out my hands. The kids cheered as we moved out on the floor. They gave us room. I pulled her toward me, and after the smallest of hesitations, she spun first to the left and then to the right, the A-line of the jumper she was wearing giving her just enough room to cross her feet as she went. It was the Lindy variation Richie-from-the-ditchie and Bevvie-from-the-levee had been learning that day in the fall of 1958. It was the Hellzapoppin. Of course it was. Because the past harmonizes.

I brought her to me by our clasped hands, then let her go back. We separated. Then, like people who had practiced these moves for months (possibly to a slowed-down record in a deserted picnic area), we bent and kicked, first to the left and then to the right. The kids laughed and cheered. They had formed a clapping circle around us in the middle of the polished floor.

We came together and she twirled like a hopped-up ballerina beneath our linked hands.

Now you squeeze to tell me left or right.

The light squeeze came on my right hand, as if the thought had summoned it, and she whirled back like a propeller, her hair flying out in a fan that gleamed first red, then blue in the lights. I heard several girls gasp. I caught her and went down on one heel with her bent over my arm, hoping like hell that I wouldn’t pop my knee. I didn’t.

I came up. She came with me. She went out, then came back into my arms. We danced under the lights.

Dancing is life.

7

The hop ended at eleven, but I didn’t turn the Sunliner into Sadie’s driveway until quarter past midnight on Sunday morning. One of the things nobody tells you about the glamorous job of chaperoning teenage dances is that the shaps are the ones who have to make sure everything’s picked up and locked away once the music ends.

Neither of us said much on the way back. Although Donald played several other tempting big-band jump tunes and the kids pestered us to swing-dance again, we declined. Once was memorable; twice would have been indelible. Maybe not such a good thing in a small town. For me, it already was indelible. I couldn’t stop thinking about the feel of her in my arms or her quick breath on my face.

I cut the engine and turned to her. Now she’ll say “Thank you for bailing me out” or “Thanks for a lovely evening,” and that’ll be that.

But she didn’t say either of those things. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at me. Hair on her shoulders. Top two buttons of the man’s Oxford-cloth shirt beneath the jumper undone. Earrings gleaming. Then we were together, first fumbling, then holding on tight. It was kissing, but it was more than kissing. It was like eating when you’ve been hungry or drinking when you’ve been thirsty. I could smell her perfume and her clean sweat under the perfume and I could taste tobacco, faint but still pungent, on her lips and tongue. Her fingers slipped through my hair (one pinky tickling for just a moment in the cup of my ear and making me shiver), then locked at the back of my neck. Her thumbs were moving, moving. Stroking bare skin at the nape that once, in another life, would have been covered by hair. I slipped my hand first beneath and then around the fullness of her breast and she murmured, “Oh, thank you, I thought I was going to fall.”

“My pleasure,” I said, and squeezed gently.

We necked for maybe five minutes, breathing harder as the caresses grew bolder. The windshield of my Ford steamed up. Then she pushed me away and I saw her cheeks were wet. When in God’s name had she started to cry?

“George, I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t. I’m too scared.” Her jumper was in her lap, revealing her garters, the hem of her slip, the lacy froth of her panties. She pulled the skirt down to her knees.

I guessed it was being married, and even if the marriage was busted, it still mattered—this was the mid-twentieth century, not the early twenty-first. Or maybe it was the neighbors. The houses looked dark and fast asleep, but you couldn’t tell for sure, and in small towns, new preachers and new teachers are always interesting topics of conversation. It turned out I was wrong on both counts, but there was no way I could have known.

“Sadie, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. I’m not—”

“You don’t understand. It’s not that I don’t want to. That’s not why I’m scared. It’s because I never have.”

Before I could say anything else, she was out of the car and running for the house, fumbling in her purse for her key. She didn’t look back.

8

I got home at twenty to one, walking from the garage to the house in my own version of the Blue-Balls Scuttle. I had no more than turned on the kitchen light when the phone began to ring. 1961 is forty years from caller ID, but only one person would be calling me at such an hour, and after such a night.

“George? It’s me.” She sounded composed, but her voice was thick. She had been crying. And hard, from the sound.

“Hi, Sadie. You never gave me a chance to thank you for a lovely time. During the dance, and after.”

“I had a good time, too. It’s been so long since I danced. I’m almost afraid to tell you who I learned to Lindy with.”

“Well,” I said, “I learned with my ex-wife. I’m guessing you might have learned with your estranged husband.” Except it wasn’t a guess; it was how these things went. I was no longer surprised by it, but if I told you I ever got used to that eerie chiming of events, I’d be lying.

“Yes.” Her tone was flat. “Him. John Clayton of the Savannah Claytons. And estranged is just the right word, because he’s a very strange man.”

“How long have you been married?”

“Forever and a day. If you want to call what we had a marriage, that is.” She laughed. It was Ivy Templeton’s laugh, full of humor and despair. “In my case, forever and a day adds up to a little over four years. After school lets out in June, I’m going to make a discreet trip to Reno. I’ll get a summer job as a waitress or something. The residency requirement is six weeks. Which means in late July or early August I’ll be able to shoot this… this joke I got myself into… like a horse with a broken leg.”

“I can wait,” I said, but as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wondered if they were true. Because the actors were gathering in the wings and the show would soon start. By June of ’62, Lee Oswald would be back in the USA, living first with Robert and Robert’s family, then with his mother. By August he’d be on Mercedes Street in Fort Worth and working at the nearby Leslie Welding Company, putting together aluminum windows and the kind of storm doors that have initials worked into them.

“I’m not sure I can.” She spoke in a voice so low I had to strain to hear her. “I was a virgin bride at twenty-three and now I’m a virgin grass widow at twenty-eight. That’s a long time for the fruit to hang on the tree, as they say back where I come from, especially when people—your own mother, for one—assume you started getting your practical experience on all that birds-and-bees stuff four years ago. I’ve never told anyone that, and if you repeated it, I think I’d die.”

“It’s between us, Sadie. And always will be. Was he impotent?”

“Not exact—” She broke off. There was silence for a moment, and when she spoke again, her voice was full of horror. “George… is this a party line?”

“No. For an extra three-fifty a month, this baby is all mine.”

“Thank God. But it’s still nothing to be talking about on the phone. And certainly not at Al’s Diner over Prongburgers. Can you come for supper? We could have a little picnic in my backyard. Say around five?”

“That would be fine. I’ll bring a poundcake, or something.”

“That’s not what I want you to bring.”

“What, then?”

“I can’t say it on the phone, even if it’s not a party line. Something you buy in a drugstore. But not the Jodie Drugstore.”

“Sadie—”

“Don’t say anything, please. I’m going to hang up and splash some cold water on my face. It feels like it’s on fire.”

There was a click in my ear. She was gone. I undressed and went to bed, where I lay awake a long time, thinking long thoughts. About time and love and death.

CHAPTER 15

1

At ten o’clock on that Sunday morning, I jumped into the Sunliner and drove twenty miles to Round Hill. There was a drugstore on the main drag, and it was open, but I saw a WE ROAR FOR THE DENHOLM LIONS sticker on the door and remembered Round Hill was part of Consolidated District Four. I drove on to Kileen. There, an elderly druggist who bore an eerie but probably coincidental resemblance to Mr. Keene back in Derry winked at me as he gave me a brown bag and my change. “Don’t do anything against the law, son.”

I returned the wink in the expected fashion and drove back to Jodie. I’d had a late night, but when I lay down and tried to nap, I didn’t even get in sleep’s neighborhood. So I went to the Weingarten’s and bought a poundcake after all. It looked Sunday-stale, but I didn’t care and didn’t think Sadie would, either. Picnic supper or no picnic supper, I was pretty sure food wasn’t the number one item on today’s agenda. When I knocked on her door, there was a whole cloud of butterflies in my stomach.

Sadie’s face was free of makeup. She wasn’t even wearing lipstick. Her eyes were large, dark, and frightened. For one moment I was sure she was going to slam the door in my face and I’d hear her running away just as fast as her long legs would carry her. And that would be that.

But she didn’t run. “Come on in,” she said. “I made chicken salad.” Her lips began to tremble. “I hope you like… you like p-plenty of m-may—”

Her knees started to buckle. I dropped the box with the poundcake inside on the floor and grabbed her. I thought she was going to faint, but she didn’t. She put her arms around my neck and held tight, like a drowning woman to a floating log. I could feel her body thrumming. I stepped on the goddamned poundcake. Then she did. Squoosh.

“I’m scared,” she said. “What if I’m no good at it?”

“What if I’m not?” This was not entirely a joke. It had been a long time. At least four years.

She didn’t seem to hear me. “He never wanted me. Not the way I expected. And his way is the only way I know. The touching, then the broom.”

“Calm down, Sadie. Take a deep breath.”

“Did you go to the drugstore?”

“Yes, in Kileen. But we don’t have to—”

“We do. I do. Before I lose what little courage I have left. Come on.”

Her bedroom was at the end of the hall. It was spartan: a bed, a desk, a couple of prints on the walls, chintz curtains dancing in the soft breath of the window air-conditioning unit, turned down to low. Her knees started to give way again and I caught her again. It was a weird kind of swing-dancing. There were even Arthur Murray footprints on the floor. Poundcake. I kissed her and her lips fastened on mine, dry and frantic.

I pushed her away gently and braced her back against the closet door. She looked at me solemnly, her hair in her eyes. I brushed it away, then—very gently—began to lick her dry lips with the tip of my tongue. I did it slowly, being sure to get the corners.

“Better?” I asked.

She answered not with her voice but with her own tongue. Without pressing my body against hers, I began to very slowly run my hand up and down the long length of her, from where I could feel the rapid beat of her pulse on both sides of her throat, to her chest, her breasts, her stomach, the flat tilted plane of her pubic bone, around to one buttock, then down to her thigh. She was wearing jeans. The fabric whispered under my palm. She leaned back and her head bonked on the door.

“Ouch!” I said. “Are you all right?”

She closed her eyes. “I’m fine. Don’t stop. Kiss me some more.” Then she shook her head. “No, don’t kiss me. Do my lips again. Lick me. I like that.”

I did. She sighed and slipped her fingers under my belt at the small of my back. Then around to the front, where the buckle was.

2

I wanted to go fast, every part of me was yelling for speed, telling me to plunge deep, wanting that perfect gripping sensation that is the essence of the act, but I went slow. At least at first. Then she said, “Don’t make me wait, I’ve had enough of that,” and so I kissed the sweaty hollow of her temple and moved my hips forward. As if we were doing a horizontal version of the Madison. She gasped, retreated a little, then raised her own hips to meet me.

“Sadie? All right?”

“Ohmygodyes,” she said, and I laughed. She opened her eyes and looked up at me with curiosity and hopefulness. “Is it over, or is there more?”

“A little more,” I said. “I don’t know how much. I haven’t been with a woman in a long time.”

It turned out there was quite a bit more. Only a few minutes in real time, but sometimes time is different—as no one knew better than I. At the end she began to gasp. “Oh dear, oh my dear, oh my dear dear God, oh sugar!”

It was the sound of greedy discovery in her voice that put me over the edge, so it wasn’t quite simultaneous, but a few seconds later she lifted her head and buried her face in the hollow of my shoulder. A small fisted hand beat on my shoulder blade once, twice… then opened like a flower and lay still. She dropped back onto the pillows. She was staring at me with a stunned, wide-eyed expression that was a little scary.

“I came,” she said.

“I noticed.”

“My mother told me it didn’t happen for women, only for men. She said orgasms for women were a myth.” She laughed shakily. “Oh my God, what she was missing.”

She got up on one elbow, then took one of my hands and put it on her breast. Beneath it, her heart was pounding and pounding. “Tell me, Mr. Amberson—how soon before we can do it again?”

3

As the reddening sun sank into the everlasting gas-and oil-smog to the west, Sadie and I sat in her tiny backyard under a nice old pecan tree, eating chicken salad sandwiches and drinking iced tea. No poundcake, of course. The poundcake was a total loss.

“Is it bad for you, having to wear those… you know, those drugstore things?”

“It’s fine,” I said. It really wasn’t, and never had been. There would be improvements in a great many American products between 1961 and 2011, but take it from Jake, rubbers stay pretty much the same. They may have fancier names and even a taste-component (for those with peculiar tastes), but they remain essentially a girdle you snap on over your dick.

“I used to have a diaphragm,” she said. There was no picnic table, so she had spread a blanket on the grass. Now she picked up a Tupperware container with the remains of a cucumber-and-onion salad inside it and began snapping the lid open and closed, a form of fidgeting some people would have considered Freudian. Including me.

“My mother gave it to me a week before Johnny and I were married. She even told me how to put it in, although she couldn’t look me in the eye, and if you’d flicked a drop of water on one of her cheeks, I’m sure it would’ve sizzled. ‘Don’t start a baby for the first eighteen months,’ she said. ‘Two years, if you can make him wait. That way you can live on his salary and save yours.’”

“Not the world’s worst advice.” I was being cautious. We were in a minefield. She knew it as well as I did.

“Johnny’s a science teacher. He’s tall, although not quite as tall as you are. I was tired of going places with men who were shorter than me, and I think that’s why I said yes when he first asked me out. Eventually, going out with him got to be a habit. I thought he was nice, and at the end of the night he never seemed to grow an extra pair of hands. At the time, I thought those things were love. I was very nave, wasn’t I?”

I made a seesaw gesture with my hand.

“We met at Georgia Southern and then got jobs at the same high school in Savannah. Coed, but private. I’m pretty sure his daddy pulled a wire or two to make that happen. The Claytons don’t have money—not anymore, although they did once—but they’re still high in Savannah society. Poor but genteel, you know?”

I didn’t—questions of who was in ociety and who wasn’t were never big issues when I was growing up—but I murmured an assent. She had been sitting on top of this for a long time, and looked almost hypnotized.

“So I had a diaphragm, yes I did. In its own little plastic lady-box with a rose on the cover. Only I never used it. Never had to. Finally threw it in the trash after one of those getting-it-outs. That’s what he called it, getting it out. ‘I have to get it out,’ he used to say. Then the broom. You see?”

I didn’t see at all.

Sadie laughed, and I was again reminded of Ivy Templeton. “Wait two years, she said! We could have waited twenty, and no diaphragm required!”

“What happened?” I gripped her upper arms lightly. “Did he beat you? Beat you with a broomhandle?” There was another way a broomhandle could be used—I’d read Last Exit to Brooklyn—but apparently he hadn’t done that. She had been a virgin, all right; the proof was on the sheets.