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“Huh?”
“I mean, really, Elro. What were you thinking?”
He shrugged. “Nuthin’.”
“Do you know Eddie Boggs?” I asked.
“Know who he is.”
“Well, last week, we were out at a picnic on the Little Carp, Eddie and Bunny and I, and he tried to explain to me how he felt, and it just didn’t make any sense at all. I couldn’t understand. He ended up getting mad at me.”
“So?”
“Now you. I can’t figure out what you’re thinking. I mean, I’m grateful and all, but I wonder.” I started talking fast and using my hands. I was tired and suddenly I was getting too many ideas. “Are you just thinking about tonight, about doing it? But what about tomorrow or the day after that or the day after that or ten years from now? I mean, I can hardly make a move anymore without my head filling with these questions about what the move will mean for tomorrow and the future. It’s as if for every move I see these dominoes falling, and I try to follow where the last domino will drop. I don’t like it necessarily, but that’s the way I think. And the few times, the few, tiny moments, when I don’t think like that, I end up in Butcher Benedict’s bedroom. But I wonder—in those moments, am I like Eddie and you are all the time?” I paused. No response from Elro. I was talking to an ear, a big, meaty catcher’s mitt of an ear.
“It’s so hard to figure out,” I went on, a bit more slowly. “Sometimes I think it’s as if there’s some code out there that men are following, something invisible, you know? And I can learn the rules, like football, I can learn how the game is played, but, still, overall, it doesn’t make any sense. I can’t see the purpose. You know what I mean?”
“Nope,” said Elro, shaking his head. But he was softening. I could see the corners of his mouth slackening and his grip easing up on the steering wheel. Slowly the tension was seeping out of him. After another mile or so, he said, “I always wanted to get away from that town. I never liked that town.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know. The people, I guess. And the way it looked. It always looked wrong to me. It’s like everything was there, but in the wrong place. The square, the park, the Ward’s building, the library—they were all in the wrong place. It hurt my eyes to look around. It gave me a headache.”
“That sounds awful.”
“Ever since I can remember,” he said, “I wished I was someplace else.”
We drove a few more miles and came to a larger road. Elro hesitated, then turned down it, following signs for a town called Fullerton. After a while, the farms along the road gave way to a nursery, an equipment store, a Ford dealership. On the left, we spotted a sign, JIM’S FLORIDA MOTEL AND MINIATURE GOLF. Elro turned into the driveway. The motel was a single, long, low building that stretched away from the road. The building was painted pink, and the front edge of the roof was decorated with blue trim cut to resemble waves. In a couple of places, the trim had broken loose, and the waves dangled down like stray curls on a girl’s forehead. The golf course curved around in back of the motel. In front was a small, battered lawn where a couple of children were playing with trucks, and a man and a woman in bathing suits were sitting out on beach chairs, taking in the sun. Elro parked down the line from the office and looked around.
“What do you think?” I asked.
He considered for a moment. “You wait here,” he said. He climbed out of the truck and walked slowly to the front of the building, disappearing into the office through a flapping screen door. A few minutes later, he came out. He was walking fast, and when he caught my eyes, he couldn’t restrain a smile.
“Got it,” he said at the truck window. “Get your stuff and let’s go.” He reached in back and pulled out his suitcase. Beyond him, in the window of the motel office, a face appeared. An elderly bald man was watching us closely.
I followed Elro down the walk past each pink motel door, every one marked with a blue number: six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. At twelve, on the far end, he stopped and opened the door with a key. The shades were drawn,
and the room was dark. A damp, moldy smell hovered over the thin rug and the few pieces of dark, low furniture—two padded chairs, a bureau, a broad, undulating bed.
“Wow!” said Elro. He put his suitcase down and walked over to the side of the bed. “Look at the size of this thing.”
“We need some air in here and some light.” I went to the back wall and pulled aside the heavy, green curtain. Sunlight bounded around the room. The walls were actually aqua; we could have been standing in a swimming pool. I opened the window a crack, and in seconds the air and light had burned off the moldy odor and even brightened the ominous barge of a bed. But there was a problem. The miniature golf course came right up to the back of the motel. Not ten feet away sat a huge, spotted frog, each eye a red blinking light bulb. The frog’s pink tongue stretched down its front and onto the green carpet of the putting surface. While I lingered at the window, a boy about Elro’s age stood hunched over a ball. His girlfriend leaned on a putter and watched. With a quick, hard stroke, the boy sent his ball rolling up the tongue and into the hole of the frog’s mouth. Moments later, the ball popped out a small opening in back, rolled over the flat, green carpet, and plunked into the cup. The boy looked up to celebrate his hole-in-one and looked right at me. He had a crewcut and a bright, clear face, and, in a moment, he’d taken in me and all of room twelve, including Elro, now stretched out on the bed. The boy’s smile quickly twisted, as if he couldn’t quite control the muscles in his face. I pulled the curtains closed again, plunging the room back into semidarkness.
“That’s better,” said Elro. “I like it better this way.” He had his hands behind his head, and he was staring at the ceiling. “My brother and his girl did it fourteen times the first night,” he said.
“Who was she?” I started unbuttoning my blouse.
“You don’t know her. She goes to the Catholic school.”
I took off my blouse and slipped out of my shoes. “Do they still go out?” I asked.
“Nah. They hardly went out after that. She was kinda fat.”
I stepped out of my jeans. I was standing in the middle of the room in my bra and panties. Elro hadn’t noticed. He had closed his eyes, and he was humming a song, “Tutti-Frutti,” to himself.
I wasn’t scared, and I didn’t have second thoughts. Other girls had talked about saving their virginity as a “gift” for their husbands, but that had never made sense to me. Women get divorced all the time or become widows and then marry again without any “gift” for the second man. It couldn’t be that important. Besides, Bunny never talked about it. Everything I’d ever heard about the sacredness of virginity had come from other girls.
Still, standing in the center of room twelve, I hesitated for a moment. I guess I was concerned with history in a way—my first time—and I wanted to make sure I had taken in the setting: the pale walls; the white bowl of a ceiling light, with its crown of dust; the painting of a palmy beach hanging above the bed; the small pile of clothes left at my feet; the laughter of the boy and girl, still putting around the golf course.
