about getting me a date.” She thought with fleeting guiltiness of Charlie Ayers, and knew she would never call him; she hadn’t the guts and she hadn’t the desire.
“Oh. Well, they haven’t done it yet, have they?”
“Well, no, but—”
“Listen, Laura, there’s a terrific guy I’m thinking of—a fraternity brother of Bud’s. I could fix you up with him. Jim’s a junior, real tall.” And she went on to describe an irresistible young man. They are always irresistible until you’re face to face with them. Laura let Emmy talk her into it. She didn’t know any men and it seemed a good idea to let Emmy take care of the problem.
“Bud and I will be along the first time out,” said Emily, making plans. “It’s much easier to have somebody else along for moral support.” She laughed and Laura smiled with her. What she said was true enough. It might not be so bad.
“That sounds terrific,” she said, borrowing Emmy’s favorite adjective to amplify her gratitude. “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble for you.”
“Oh, Lord, no,” said Emily. She set one cup into another thoughtfully and went on, “Gee, I wish I could talk Beth into going out.”
Laura was suddenly alert. She turned and looked at Emily. “Doesn’t she go out?”
“Nope. Crazy girl.”
“Not at all?” Laura thought it was a requisite for sorority girls.
“No.” Emily stared quizzically at her sudden show of interest.
“I just thought—” Laura looked away in confusion. “I mean, she’s so popular and everything. I just naturally thought—well—” If a girl didn’t date was there anything wrong with her?
“Oh, she used to,” said Emmy, taking the steaming water from the burner and pouring it over the little mountains of dry coffee in the cups she had set out. “She used to go out a lot the first couple of years she was down here. But nothing ever happened, you know? Every time she got interested—sugar?”
Laura was so absorbed that it took her a minute to collect her wits and answer, “Yes, please.”
Emmy dropped it in and handed Laura her cup. “There’s no cream. There’s Pream, though. Want some?”
Laura wanted to shake Beth’s story out of her. “No, thanks,” she said briefly. “This is fine.” She was hungry for any crumb of information about Beth without stopping to wonder where her appetite came from. She was concerned only with satisfying it at this point.
Emily dipped into the Pream can with a spoon and sprinkled the white powder into her coffee. “You get used to it,” she said. “I didn’t used to like it, either.”
“Well, what happened?” said Laura in a voice that was urgent yet soft, as if the volume might excuse the words. She didn’t want to look interested.
“Oh … well,” Emmy stirred her concoction. “Nothing happened, really. In fact, that was the whole trouble. Nothing did happen.” She looked cautiously at Laura, as if trying to determine just how much she could be confided in. Laura’s face was a picture of sympathetic concern. “She’d find somebody she liked,” Emmy went on, “and they’d go together for a couple of months, and just when it seemed as if everything was going to be terrific, it was all over. I mean, Beth just called it off. She always did that,” she said musingly, “just when we all thought she was really falling in love. All of a sudden she’d call it quits.”
“Why?” said Laura.
Emily shrugged. “If you ask me, I think she just got scared. I think she’s afraid to fall in love, or something. It’s the only thing I can think of. Otherwise it just doesn’t make sense.”
“Were they nice boys?” Laura asked.
“Terrific boys! Some of them, anyway.”
“Well, didn’t she tell them why she dropped them? I mean, she must have told them something.” Laura was groping for the key to Beth’s character, for something to explain her with.
“Nope,” said Emily. “Just told ’em goodbye and that was it. Believe me, I know. I’ve had ’em call me by the dozens to cry on my shoulder. But she wouldn’t say much to me, either. She just said she got tired of them or it wouldn’t have worked out and it was best to end it now than later, or something.”
“And now she doesn’t go out any more?”
“Isn’t that something?” Emily clucked in disapproval. “You’d think she was disillusioned at the tender age of twenty-one. She puts on like she doesn’t care, but I know she does. But still, she did it to herself. After a while when the boys called up for dates she just turned ’em down automatically. As if she knew she wasn’t going to have any fun, no matter who she went with. As if it just wasn’t worth the trouble.”
Emily had lost Laura’s attention, but she didn’t know it. Laura was thinking to herself, She’s got a right not to care. Why should she care about boys? She doesn’t have to. Emmy doesn’t know everything.
“Of course,” Emmy went on, “she’s told me a thousand times she doesn’t want any man who’s afraid of her, and if they’re all afraid of her, to hell with them. I’m quoting,” she added, smiling. “She likes to swear.”
“I noticed,” said Laura a trifle primly.
“I don’t know where she got that idea,” Emmy said. “She says she won’t play little games with them just for the sake of a few dates. Well, you know men. What’s a romance without little games? I mean, let’s face it, there isn’t a man living who doesn’t want to play games.” She eyed Laura over her coffee cup and made her feel illogically guilty.
“Maybe she’s afraid of men,” said Laura. The words popped from her startled mouth like corks from a bottle. For a sickening minute she thought Emily was going to ask her questions or stare at her curiously, but Emily only laughed.
“Lord, she’s not afraid of anything,” she said. “It’s more the other way around. They’re afraid of her. She just needs a good man who doesn’t scare easy to get her back on the right track. Maybe we can find somebody for her,” and she smiled pleasantly at Laura.
Upstairs again, Laura settled into her malevolent butterfly chair and wondered why Emmy was so short-sighted. It struck her as rather fine and noble that Beth didn’t go out with men. It never occurred to her that Beth really might like men; without knowing why, without even thinking very seriously about it, she knew she didn’t want her to like them.
Laura was a naive girl, but not a stupid one. She was fuzzily aware of certain extraordinary emotions that were generally frowned upon and so she frowned upon them too, with no very good notion of what they were or how they happened, and not the remotest thought that they could happen to her. She knew that there were some men who loved men and some women who loved women, and she thought it was a shame that they couldn’t be like other people. She thought she would simply feel sorry for them and avoid them. That would be easy, for the men were great sissies and the women wore pants. Her own high school crushes had been on girls, but they were all short and uncertain and secret feelings and she would have been profoundly shocked to hear them called homosexual.
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