R.J., of course, R.J. But I thought you were coming with your boyfriend.”
“If you mean Danny, he decided not to come,” I said.
“And R.J.’s getting you something?” Gus grinned. “Ah yes, I understand.” He leaned over and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Good, good. Be nice to the poor guy, life’s complicated for him these days.”
R.J. came up then, too late to hear what Gus was saying but in time to see the kiss. “Thought you were spreading yourself around,” he said to Gus. “Not going to get involved with anybody, no playing favourites.”
“Hey, man,” Gus said as he stepped backwards. “She has her own stuff going for her, and ...” He took my hand and raised it to his lips like some guy in an old movie. “I’m just one of her many, many admirers.” Then he left us alone.
We didn’t stay very long at the party. R.J. didn’t have a car—he’d walked to the party, he’d always walked to Gus’s house ever since he was old enough for his mother to trust him to cross the street safely—so he walked me home, the long way around.
The next morning when I woke up I felt good. At first I had no idea why. It was as if my room was full of low-level excitement the way it was full of filtered light. “Suffused” was one word I thought of. “Glowing” was another. For a moment I lay on my back with my hands spread flat on the tops of my thighs under the covers and took it all in through wide-open eyes.
The house was quiet. Not surprising for a Saturday morning. My brothers were either at work or not up yet, and my mother would be at the supermarket. Even though she had plenty of time to shop for groceries during the week, she liked to be one of the first to hit DeFalco’s on Saturdays. The produce was always better then, she said. They kept their best meat for Saturday too.
She would have left things for me to do, but I was in no hurry to do them. I stretched my legs under the sheet and brought my hands up along my belly to my breasts. My nightgown had bunched up as I turned in my sleep so that it was around my waist. I tried to remember what I’d been dreaming about, how I might have moved during my dreams, but I could not. All that remained was the feeling of satisfaction.
Which was related to R.J., I knew. To his seriousness, and his kindness, and his grey-green eyes. To the way he had stood with me on the front steps, leaning toward me and then turning away before he kissed me, as if he thought that he should not attempt anything so quickly.
I found myself running my tongue lightly over my lips. I almost had reached up to kiss him, but I hadn’t, out of fear of ... what? Appearing to be more forward, less virtuous than I was? Probably. There was something about him that made me feel out of my depth.
He would not understand parts of me, I was sure. He would not imagine the sorts of things that happened in my dreams—in my daydreams.
I ran my hand down the front of my body, from just above my right breast across my belly to where my legs met in curly hair and secret places whose names I knew but had never said aloud.
Danny had touched me there, as we sat in his car the week before, parked in the driveway at my house. His hand had worked its way slowly up my leg, his fingers had fiddled with the elastic on my underpants. I had shivered and felt ... I don’t know. Slippery and yearning, I’d say now, but then I didn’t have those words either.
But nothing more than that had happened. Nothing more. I had moved and cried out, and suddenly Danny was sitting up, adjusting his shirt and trousers, mumbling angrily to himself. “Stupid to get involved with somebody’s goody-goody sister,” I heard him say.
He’d kissed me after that, and pressed me close to him as we stood on the front porch before going in my house. But once inside, once in the family room, with my father asleep on the couch in front of the television and my mother playing cards with my oldest brother and two of his friends, there was nothing more.
I had not been sure if I’d been glad of that. I had not worked out what I would do if he tried again: that had been one of the things in the back of my mind as I sat and waited for him at the garage. One of the things that I would not have admitted.
But all that had changed. I knew now.
I knew also that I ought to get up to do the jobs my mother expected me to do on Saturday mornings: vacuuming, laundry. Slowly, I unfolded myself from the bed and went to stand in front of the window, which looked out onto the side yard. The sun had passed the point where it shone in the window, and the banana palm just outside now cast a green shadow.
Beyond, however, the sun dazzled. I heard the sound of water running, splashing on concrete. Someone was washing a car on this fine morning, someone was cleaning things up.
I turned, pulling off my nightgown as I did, reaching to open my drawer. I was putting on my underpants when I heard somebody bang open the front door.
One of my brothers? My mother home early?
Heavy footsteps crossed the living room and started down the hall. Not one of my brothers, because they would have taken off their shoes before stepping on the wall-to-wall carpet in the living room, and my dad avoided the room period, coming in the back and through the other hallway whenever he could. Strange.
It wasn’t until the footsteps turned at the end of the hall and then started toward my room that I even wondered if it might be Danny.
In my bare feet I padded silently over to the door and listened. There was someone outside. Definitely not one of my brothers.
Every one of them would have rattled my doorknob and then barged in. I hated that, I’d been complaining about it since I was nine or so and became aware of the idea that boys shouldn’t see girls in their various stages of undress. But my mother had said to keep my door shut, and that was that. Expecting anything more from men and boys was completely beyond hope.
So, the breathing I heard on the other side of the door, and the heat that seemed to come through it, were not coming from someone in the family. Not from someone who might think he had a right to be disagreeable, to bother me, to invade my territory.
And nobody else but Danny knew which room was mine. I finished pulling on my T-shirt and shorts, and then opened the door a crack.
“Hello,” I said.
His hair was standing on end, and he hadn’t shaved. His eyes were bloodshot. The smell of something sour—sweat, stale beer, confined spaces—blew toward me. His shirt was rumpled, a long drip of motor oil ran down the right leg of his pants, grease covered his hands.
Grease didn’t bother me, grease was something that my father was never able to get out from around his fingernails, something that went with security and a male world that was safe, not threatening. But Danny’s smell, his disarray, his urgency disgusted me.
“You ran out on me,” he said. His voice was hoarse, and when he opened his mouth his breath stank.
I didn’t reply right away. I could feel his edginess just as strongly as I could smell his breath.
“You took off with somebody.”
“I called a cab,” I said. “I was tired of waiting.”
“No, you ran out on me, you went to meet somebody else,” he said, pushing the door open and coming
