Ed Gorman - The Day The Music Died

And so it went until it was finally my turn in the chair. I dozed off and dreamed of the beautiful Pamela Forrest. We were out canoeing on a gentle blue lake and she was telling me how much she loved me.

“All done, Counselor,” Bill said, waking me up.

No lake. No canoe. No Pamela.

I was out on the street again and the aftershave Bill had slapped on stung pretty good in the February winds.

Over the noon hour, at the Woolworth lunch counter and the Rexall soda fountain and the courthouse cafeteria, the town had a dilemma.

They couldn’t decide which they should talk about first, the murder-suicide out at the Kenny Whitney place, or the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly.

I was at Rexall having a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee, and reading a new Peter Rabe paperback. I always sat at the far end of the counter because that’s where the metal paperback rack was. It creaked rustily and threatened to fall over every time you turned it. I usually read while I was eating. I was a big fan of Gold Medal books. For twenty-five cents (plus a penny for the governor, as folks in Iowa like to say), you could get the likes of a brand-new novel by Rabe or Charles Williams or, my favorite, John D. MacDonald.

They were well-written, intelligent books, too, despite the lurid covers. Of course, when you told people that, they’d just wink at you and say, “Sure they are.” Then they’d nod to the cover with the seminaked girl and wink at you again.

“How about some more coffee?” a female voice asked. And I looked up into the pretty and almost impossibly sweet face of Mary Travers.

Mary works days behind the counter at Rexall. She was the brightest girl in our class but her dad got throat cancer just before Mary started at the U of Iowa. She never did make it to college.

Mary is the girl my mom and dad want me to marry and God, I wish I could make myself love her. A lot of times I get so mad at Pamela that I try to make myself love Mary.

We went out several times, even went to the county fair three nights running, and we ended up making out pretty passionately at the drive-in. Mary had loved me just about as long as I’d loved Pamela. She’d lived down the block from me up in the Knolls. I’d finally gone to the senior prom with her after it was clear that Pamela wasn’t going at all because Stu Grant was going with someone else. I’d bought Mary a corsage and even managed to prevail upon an older cousin to buy me a pint of Jim Beam. He also gave me a rubber, a Trojan, and I hadn’t even asked him for it.

“Maybe you’ll need it,” he said. “It’s Mary,” I said. “I won’t need it. I don’t think of her that way.” “Mary is beautiful, cuz. Every guy in town’d like to be with Mary, even if she is an egghead.” But at the dance, the whiskey made me sad and I couldn’t stop thinking of Pamela. Mary sensed this and then she got sad, too, and we ended up out at Tomahawk Park on the cliffs, drinking until we both got sick, and then just sitting there and listening to the wilder kids who were strewn all over the park in dark hideouts of delicious sin. A lot of girls were going to lose their virginity tonight.

Senior prom night was the time to do it. I was sitting there smoking a Pall Mall and drinking one of the Pepsis that Mary had brought along. She handed me the Trojan. “It fell out of your pocket, McCain.”

“Oh.”

“I’ve never seen one before.”

I was going to say something sophisticated-something Robert Mitchum would say-y know, trying to impress her, but this was Mary. “I’ve seen them, but I’ve never used one before.”

“Did you go in and buy it yourself?”

“Rolly kind of gave it to me.”

“Did he kind of give you the whiskey, too?”

“Yeah.”

“Russian hands and roamin’ fingers,” she said.

“Huh?”

“Your cousin,” she said, “Rolly. I went on a hayrack ride with him one night. Talk about fast.”

Then, “I’m sorry I threw up,

McCain.”

“Oh, that’s all right. I threw up, too.”

She said, “I mean maybe you were thinking we might-y know, use the rubber. I mean, I don’t know if I’d actually have done it. But I guess now we’ll never know.”

I didn’t say anything. She started to cry and I didn’t know what to do and I sort of slid my arm around her and while I was doing it I could see down the front of her formal. She had small breasts but they were very sweet. I mean there’s all kinds of breasts when you think about it, noisy breasts and quiet breasts and angry breasts and melancholy breasts and sincere breasts and superficial breasts and arrogant breasts and shy breasts and probably lots of other kinds, too; her breasts were just very sweet, like Mary herself.

I guess that was the first time I wanted to love her. I mean I couldn’t love her, not in the way she wanted me to, because I loved Pamela that way. But right then, if God had given me a choice, I would’ve said reach in my brain and take Pamela out and put Mary in.

Because it would’ve made her so happy if I could have loved her that way. Pamela didn’t care if I loved her at all. But Mary would have been all shiny and new and fine with it, just a few stupid words that you hear on the jukebox all the time, and she would have been so happy. So I held her and I kissed her and then we really started kissing and then we started rolling around on the grass and then it got real serious and while we didn’t use the Trojan, we came damned close, damned close, and then we were in my older brother’s 1946 Plymouth and headed out on the highway to where there was supposed to be a beer party at the old quarry and the radio was blasting Gene Vincent and Carl Perkins and the prairie night air was so cool and fresh and she sat so close to me and I was so almost in love with her that I didn’t have a single thought of Pamela for at least an entire hour.

And now, all these years later, in the sort-of maid’s outfit that Rexall made her wear, Mary filled my coffee cup and watched my face and said, “I just wondered if you’d heard.”

“You mean about you and Wes?”

“Umm-hmm.”

“Yeah, I did. And congratulations.”

“Thanks.”

“He’s a very nice guy.” Actually, he was a nice guy except when it came to me. He didn’t like me at all, and I supposed I understood why.

“Yes,” she said, “he sure is.” Then, “I just decided it was time to have kids, McCain.”

She was speaking in a code I understood. What she was really saying was that she was tired of waiting around for me to come to my senses.

“I’m happy for you, Mary. I really am.”

She looked as if she was going to say something else but just then two high school girls sat down at the counter. They were best friends. You could tell because they were dressed identically. Poodle haircuts, pink sweaters and large pink skirts decorated with dancing poodles and dancing 45Rpm records. The Pink Monster had invaded their brains and taken them over while they slept. The inevitable bobby sox and saddle shoes completed the ensemble. The only thing that kept these two girls from looking like twins was that one was tall and willowy and blonde and the other was short and stout and brunette.

While Mary took their orders for cheeseburgers and fries and Cokes, I wandered over to the magazine stand. Ike was on the cover of Time again, responding to the Russian general who’d boasted recently that the Ussr had atomic weapons superior to ours. And Dick Nixon was on the cover of Newsweek hinting that he just might run for president in 1960. The movie magazines had just come in and were lined neatly in a row, covers featuring Natalie Wood on a motorcycle, Tab Hunter in a cowboy outfit, Brigitte Bardot in a bikini, and Marlon Brando staring somberly out at the world. I picked up Manhunt, which had a new Shell Scott story in it, and started back to the counter.