Lawrence Block - Chip Harrison Scores Again

But Lucille was something completely different. Short blonde hair all neatly cut and combed, and a short navy blue skirt and a powder blue sweater and blue knee socks and saddle shoes and a touch of lipstick on her mouth and a perfect complexion. One look at her and you knew that (a) she took two baths a day, seven days a week, and (b) she never got dirty in between, never even perspired.

When I think about it now, I can’t stop thinking that there was nothing on earth a whole lot squarer than Lucille. Knee socks and saddle shoes, for Pete’s sake. One look at her and you could hear Bill Haley and the Comets playing in the background. I mean, she looked like a cheerleader, which as it turned out she was, and in this day and age the idea of a girl hopping around like an idiot and doing the sis-boom-bah number for the basketball team is about as unhip as you can get.

Even the cleanliness thing, really, is overdoing it. Not that I’m in favor of being dirty, but there’s a point where it gets ridiculous and you wind up with this feminine ideal of a girl who’s been carefully wrapped in plastic wrap and never touched by the world. Girls are people, too, and it’s more fun for everybody if you don’t lose sight of this.

But I was really ready for Lucille, knee socks and saddle shoes and sis-boom-bah and all. It occurred to me that she looked pretty square, but it didn’t occur to me that there was anything wrong with this. All I knew was that she looked good enough to eat, and it didn’t matter much whether you called it lunch or dinner or coffee break.

Even so, it took me close to a week to do anything about it. It wasn’t that she looked too pure to approach, because I could tell right away that she was reacting to me the same way I was reacting to her. But for awhile I had this feeling that if I so much as touched her hand I would be back in jail again, and this time it wouldn’t be anywhere near as easy to get out again. I suppose this was partly because she was a minister’s daughter and partly because I still felt like some sort of fugitive from justice. The trouble with getting by with a lie is that it’s very hard not to go on worrying that the lie will catch up with you. I hadn’t really done anything but change the truth a little in a few unimportant ways. Even so, it took me a while to be comfortable with myself. I felt, oh, as though I was on probation, I guess.

Another thing was that Lucille and I would spend an hour talking while her father was putting his food away in the back parlor. And the conversation was all things like how much trouble she was having with geometry, and how the basketball team was doing, and how her steady boyfriend was taking her to this dance, and how her friend Jeanie saw this really cool sweater in a department store in Charleston, and how Joan Crawford was her favorite actress, and things like that.

It’s amazing the conversations didn’t bore the hell out of me. I think if I had tapes of them I could use them to put myself asleep on bad nights.

I didn’t get bored, though. I probably must have listened with only half of my head. One thing that helped, I think, was that she was younger than I was, and less experienced, and I wasn’t used to this. The girls I knew were generally older and brighter and hipper than I was (which it isn’t all that hard to be, actually).

I’m sure I would have gotten bored sooner or later. But after about six days of this, with our conversations never getting the least bit personal or intimate and never even beginning to make the transition from talking to rapping, I came up behind her while she was carrying some dishes to the sink, and when she turned around I lowered my mouth to hers and kissed her.

The first time I took her bra off she made so much noise I thought her father was going to come upstairs. It was only the second time we had gone upstairs. She had a small bedroom furnished largely in stuffed animals and pictures of movie stars. The day before we took her sweater off, and today we had her bra off.

Her breasts were large, milk-white, creamy pink at their tips. I don’t know why in hell she thought she had to wear a bra. I can’t really understand why any woman would harness herself up that way, and Lucille was so firmly built that she certainly didn’t need the support.

Of course I suppose a cheerleader without a bra would really bounce all over the place, but what’s wrong with that? It would just increase the crowd at the basketball games.

“Oh, Chip,” she said. “We shouldn’t be up here.”

I was too busy kissing her to answer her.

“You make me feel so funny. I never felt like this before. And you’re so fast !”

There’s a word you don’t hear much anymore.

“’Cause I been dating Jimmie Butler for three years and steady dating him for two years in April and in all that time he never got as far with me as you did in a week. I’ll let him take off my sweater and reach in under the bra but not take it off, that’s as much as I’ll let him do, and you went and skipped over that step completely, and how long have we known each other? Two weeks?”

The next day she made the old man’s dinner in five minutes flat and went upstairs without being asked. I paid a few minutes’ attention to her breasts and then put a hand under her skirt.

She pushed my hand away, snapped her legs together, sat bolt upright and crossed her arms over her breasts. She looked so frightened that at first I thought her old man had walked into the room or something.

She said, “Chip, I never should have let you kiss me. At first I thought you were never going to get around to trying, and then you did, and right then I should have known what was going to happen.”

“Nothing happened, Lucille.”

“What you just tried to do.”

“I wanted to touch you. That’s all.”

“You wanted to touch me under my skirt.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Oh, my God !”

“Hey,” I said. I put a hand on her bare shoulder and she jumped. “Hey, calm down,” I said. “Take it easy.”

“Jimmie Butler doesn’t even try touching me there. He knows if he tries that I just won’t let him touch me at all. We’ll go out every Friday and Saturday and park in his car for hours and he never so much as tries to do that.”

The past Saturday, Jimmie Butler had been a customer at the Lighthouse. He had three quick beers for courage and went upstairs and spent ten dollars with Jo Lee. That worked out to about five dollars a minute. “All the rabbits ain’t out in the fields,” Jo Lee said afterward.

“Because he knows I won’t let him do anything if he tries to touch me there,” Lucille was saying.

“Why?”

She looked at me, wide-eyed.

“Why won’t you let him?”

“I won’t let anybody.”

“Why not?”

“Because I want to be pure, Chip.”

I looked into those wide blue eyes, and then I closed my own, and when I opened them she was still there.

“I want to be pure on my wedding night,” she said. “The way you look at me —”

I said, “What does a hand up your skirt have to do with being pure?”

“Chip!”

“Because it doesn’t make sense to me, Lucille.”

“One thing can lead to another.”

“One thing’s supposed to lead to another. That’s what life is all about. Life is just one damn thing leading to another.”

“Chip, nobody ever touched me there.”

“How about you?”

“Me?”

“Don’t you ever touch yourself there, Lucille?”

Her face had gotten gradually whiter during the course of the conversation. Now all the color that had drained out came back in a rush, until most of the blood in her body must have been in her head. She looked like a sunburn ad.