Swimming Sweet Arrow (5 page)

I should have yelled then—Del would have been down the stairs in seconds—but I didn’t. The whole thing caught me by surprise, and yet even as it was happening I knew that every second I stayed silent made it look like I wanted to be there.

I felt the bones in Frank’s face against the bones in my face. When he used one hand to yank a nightgown strap down off my shoulder, I could see the dark homemade tattoos he had on his knuckles and wrist. He sucked and snuffled at my breast, then turned his head so he could bite my nipple with his back teeth. In a little while he tried to kiss me again. That time I let him. The kiss was hard, and I tasted alcohol when he licked the inside of my mouth.

We got on the floor, and I could feel his pubic hair scratching against me when he tried to use his fingers to push himself up inside me. He was too soft, though, and after clawing at me for a while, he gave up. We lay breathing against each other, and I could have left then but I didn’t. I didn’t know why I did the next thing I did—except that it
seemed easier to go on than to stop. I moved down over Frank’s body and took his penis in my mouth.

He stopped me after a little while. “I don’t want you to blow me,” he said. “I want to fuck you.”

What I did was enough to get him a little harder, though, and this time when he used his fingers, he was able to push his dick inside me. It didn’t feel like much of anything to me. He moved against me for about a minute, then quit. I couldn’t tell if he came or not, though I doubted it. He was too soft and too drunk.

As soon as he rolled off me, I got up from the floor and away from him. In one more moment I was moving silently up the stairs.

When I got upstairs, I stood in the bedroom doorway a long time, listening to Del’s steady breathing, waiting for my own breath to calm. When I could move without shaking, I passed through the air of the room and slipped back behind Del. I wrapped my arms around him, burrowed into his back. I did not let myself think of that other one moving through the house.

The rest of the night I only dozed—the same sleep I slept when I lay beside June after we had been doping. Del slept hard. He didn’t move much on the bed, and he didn’t wake me up in the middle of the night for sex the way he told me he would. When we did screw again, it was getting light, and we did it without talking. I kept thinking it was an angry fuck, but at the end when Del came, he said,
I love you, I love you,
and I felt shitty.

Though I couldn’t believe what I’d done with Frank, I
knew part of why I did it. I knew it even that morning as I lay beside Del in the blue light. I’d wanted the thing to happen. Not the part where Frank was pounding his arm across my spine, and not the lousy fuck itself— I wanted the wanting. It was a sign of my power and my body and my effect. And when Frank kissed me, it was exciting to me because it was a stranger’s kiss—except Frank was not a stranger. He was more dangerous than a stranger. I would not have chosen to fuck him if he hadn’t been Del’s brother. And I clearly did choose to fuck him when I took his dick in my mouth.

One other thing went through my mind when Frank started to touch me. When I watched his mouth pull at my nipple, I liked the look of it: the lips concentrating, the cheeks hollowed out a little from the sucking. His face was unfamiliar, yet it was familiar. I felt the same tug inside me as I did when Del sucked on me. There was nothing so different about it. I didn’t know what it said about me that I felt that way, but it was the truth. So I let myself fuck him. It wasn’t hard. It was only after, when I came upstairs to Del, that everything got hard.

WHEN DEL
and I finally got up and went downstairs the next day, even after I saw for certain that Frank was gone, I felt sick in my stomach. Del started making breakfast right away, but I knew there was no way I’d be able to eat what he was making.

“You sleep okay?”

“Okay,” I said, and tried to pretend I was the same person I was ten hours ago, before I fucked his brother. I went on pretending when Del and I screwed a couple last times, and when we showered together. I touched Del all the ways I knew he liked, and I wondered if that made me an even bigger traitor—because I seemed to have no difficulty with licking Del’s ass or playing with his cock in the shower until he came. I could do that to Del, but I could also fuck his brother. It made me wonder what I was.

All I know is at the end of the morning, after we’d sucked and fucked, I did not feel so far away from Del. I felt terrible, like the worst kind of liar, and I knew I’d never tell Del the truth. I betrayed Del with my fucking and my lying, but those were also the only ways I could make a bridge back to him, so I chose them.

If Frank Pardee ever looked at me any differently after that night, I didn’t know. I never again looked at his face or met his eyes. I never told anyone what I did, either. Not even June.

6

R
IGHT
after I graduated, I got a job waitressing at Dreisbach’s, a restaurant there in Mahanaqua. It wasn’t a very nice place and I’d never thought of working there before, but it was a job and it wasn’t carrying chickens. They were willing to teach me to wait tables, so I was willing to learn.

My father wasn’t crazy about me working at Dreisbach’s. In his younger days, he drank in the bar of the restaurant, and he thought it was a rough place. There were always stories of fights that started there, and one of the bartenders had been killed when he tried to break up a fight between
two hunters. My father said, “The only way you’re going to work there is if I come to pick you up every night.”

“You can’t control me. I’m eighteen.”

“You still live under my roof.”

I didn’t live in my dad’s house, so what he said wasn’t exactly true, but he did pay the rent on the kitchenette.

“Not much longer,” I said. “Del and I are saving up. Soon I’ll be long gone.”

“Well, until then, you live by my rules.”

To me his remarks mainly signified that I had to move, but the whole argument made me realize I was handling my dad wrong. So I said, “Okay, all right. You can come get me after work. I work until midnight.”

“I’ll wait for you in the bar.”

And of course he was well on his way to being looped by the time midnight rolled around, and I was the one who ended up driving. He showed up two more nights after that, and then he must have figured it was too much trouble to worry about me, because on the fourth night, he told me he wouldn’t come again.

“You didn’t have to come in the first place. I can look after myself,” I said.

He waved my comment away. “I’ve decided to give you the truck, Evangeline. You need a dependable vehicle if you’re going to be working. I haven’t been much of a father to you, but I do what I can.”

I could have said,
You haven’t been a bad father,
but something inside would not let me. But I did think the words,
and I let myself be thrilled driving the truck back to my dad’s house. Even though it wasn’t the kind of vehicle I would have picked for myself, I was glad to have it. A rust-colored Ford with 87,000 miles on it.

When I pulled into my dad’s driveway, he asked me for his house keys off his key ring.

“How are you going to get to work tomorrow?” I said. I didn’t want him to get in trouble for his generosity, or maybe I wanted to give him one last chance to back out.

“You better go before I change my mind,” he told me. Then: “You’ve been a good daughter, Vangie, to put up with your mother and me.” Then he said, of all things, “You’re a good girl.”

I thought his words showed me how little he knew of me, but I was still grateful to him. I waited until my father let himself into his bachelor house before I drove away, and then I was on my own again, as always.

TO LEARN
the job at Dreisbach’s, I worked on slow nights with Lorraine: I knew of her before I started working there, and she knew of me because she knew my mom and dad. Lorraine had dark auburn hair that she wore in a French roll—the most glamorous hairdo I could think of when I was a little kid, and one that I still thought looked glamorous on Lorraine. She favored black-and-white uniforms, and she explained everything to me in her gravelly voice. If I became a good waitress, it was because of her.

“You never bang a plate down, honey. You set it down nice on the table. And the customer is always right. If he
ordered peas and you bring peas to the table, and then he tells you he ordered corn, you just say, ‘Oh my, I’m sorry,’ and you take the peas back and you bring him corn.”

When I told June the example of how I was supposed to admit to mistakes even if I didn’t make them, June said, “You mean you don’t say, ‘Eat your peas, asshole?’ ”

“No, you’re supposed to say, ‘Eat your goddamn peas.’ ”

Of course we were high, so we laughed for half an hour about that. Yet for as stupid as I acted with June about all the Dreisbach’s knowledge I was getting, I did want to be a good waitress, and I took my job seriously. I made plenty of mistakes in the beginning. Sometimes I forgot to bring silverware to a table, or I added wrong on the guest check. If I took too long getting someone’s meal out to them, Earl, the cook, stood in the kitchen doorway and hollered, “Food’s ready!” He bitched at me every night in Pennsylvania Dutch, and I was glad I couldn’t understand him. I felt like I was working in a maze those first two weeks, but then I got a handle on the job. I learned to make all my actions as useful as possible, and I ended up liking the way the job forced me to think all the time. Once I knew, I knew, and even Earl had to stop bitching so much.

After I got accustomed to the job, though, I had time to notice more, and I became aware of how people treated me. I didn’t mind the men who teased me or the women who gossiped with me—at least I was a person to them—but other customers treated me like I was some sort of lower life form. Even when they weren’t outright rude, I could feel something ugly in their comments. I thought it might be all
in my head, but one night I knew it wasn’t. A man stood up and went to leave a dollar tip on the table for his and his wife’s meal. He dropped the dollar on the floor, and when he went to pick it up, the woman said, “She’ll pick it up. She’ll take her money wherever she can get it.”

What she said was true—I would take my money where I could get it—but I didn’t know how that made me different from anyone else. I went to the ladies room and checked the mirror to see if I looked any different, but all I saw was my face. I worked in a cheap, rough place, so that was how some people saw me.

Neil Roy came in every day after he got off shift to sit at my tables. He worked in the Ringer mine in Trego, and sometimes he came in for dinner still covered with coal dust. Wherever he sat, he left that fine dirt, and I had to wipe down both the table and chair after him.

After I served him dinner for a few days, Roy asked, “Why don’t you come home with me and watch me sleep?”

He had chicken gravy and chocolate milkshake in his beard, and the stink of working all day was still on him. I couldn’t think of anything worse than being near him, and I didn’t think what he said was funny. Roy wasn’t good looking or nice, but he had big arms and a big chest from the work he did, and I guess he thought his muscles made up for his stink and his dirt. The following night, after I took his order, I got myself ready for the watch-me-sleep line, but it didn’t come.

“How much for skin and how much for head?” he said instead.

I walked away. I thought he was a pig and wanted to tell him to his face, but he scared me. I believed I knew what kind of man he was. My dad had friends like that—men who were rough and didn’t even know it, who used words like
cunt
and
bitch
when they talked about any girl or woman. I served Roy’s food as fast as I could, but still I heard him say, “Do you give good head?” when I put his plate in front of him.

I knew I had to change if I was going to keep working. I had to learn to take people’s shit and not let it bother me. So I started looking at every person who came in the door as money in my pocket, and I forced myself to make conversation. I’d lie and pretend to care how people’s kids were, or I’d talk about the weather, or I’d just say, “What do you think of this crowd, now?” I said anything, just so it looked like I was friendly. I did it even with the rude sons of bitches. I did it all without meaning it, but no one seemed to care if I was just pretending. They wanted to be served by a pleasant person who brought the food while it was hot, and I don’t think they cared if my friendliness was real or not.

“You see, honey?” Lorraine said after watching me operate for a while and seeing our tips go up. “It pays to be nice to people.”

I knew Del and I would need a chunk of money to move in together, so I started doing everything I could to squeeze a dollar out of people. One night I sat down and hemmed all my skirts up short. I figured if men like Roy were going to say stuff to me, I’d give them something to say. After that,
when I had to lean into the ice cream chest to scoop out desserts, my skirts just barely covered my ass. I took to wearing underpants over my pantyhose so that if anything showed, it was only cotton with little flowers, or nylon with a little lace. I made a couple of short, ruffly aprons, too, and I thought they added to my look. The ruffle was just enough to cover the swell of my belly, and the aprons made me look like a cocktail waitress, or so I thought. Some nights, at the end of the evening, I took my hair down out of its ponytail and let it lie long on my shoulders. I’d started dyeing it with Lady Clairol, and it was a deep golden color close to my scalp and whitish gold toward the ends. Women complimented me on the color, and men just looked. One of my regulars, an older man named Bill Mahlon, told me I looked like Veronica Lake. I didn’t know who Veronica Lake was, but I could see Bill Mahlon thought I was pretty.

“She was the Peekaboo Girl,” he told me. “You ask your dad.”

“I don’t see my dad too much.”

“Oh,” he said, and I knew I was getting to him: a young woman without a father. Boo hoo.