Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

The next morning I received a call from Dawn Cupertino, Doyle’s fiancée. She said she was worried about Doyle and wanted to talk. Could I come over? Dawn had been in the class ahead of ours and dropped out at sixteen to have a baby, which she lost during her first trimester. She had never returned to school, instead taking a waitress job at Frederick’s Lounge and an apartment in Crescent City, the second floor of an old frame house. She was thin and blue-eyed, a dirty blonde two years older than Doyle, almost three older than me, and had milky skin, nice legs, and a sharp mountain face that might remain pretty for three or four more years before starting to look dried-up and waspish. That would likely be fine with Dawn. Three or four good years would be about what she expected.

Though Doyle bragged on having an older woman with her own place, I thought the real reason he stuck with her was that she shared his low expectations of life but was cheerful about them. She was given to saying things like, “You better be enjoying this, babe, ’cause it’s all we’re gonna get,” and accompanying her comment with a grin, as if even the pleasure of having a beer or watching a movie was more than she could have hoped for.

That morning she met me at the door in jeans and an old sweatshirt three or four sizes too big; her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She sat on the living room sofa with her knees tucked under her, while I sat beside her, looking around at her collection of glass and porcelain trinkets, a display of old football pennants on the walls, pictures of cute kittens and cuddly dragons, her high school annual on the coffee table. It was a museum of her life up to the point that the baby had come along. Apparently nothing of note had happened since. I felt ungainly, like I was all elbows and knees, and any move I made would shatter the illusion.

Dawn put on a pot of coffee, we chatted about this and that. She said it was too bad about Carol Ann and asked how she was doing.

“She hates me,” I said. “I expect she’s finding some strength in that.”

Dawn giggled nervously, as if she didn’t get my meaning.

“What?” I said.

“It just was funny. the way you said it.” She brushed loose strands of hair back from her brow, then briefly rested her fingers on my arm and asked with exaggerated concern. “And how’re you doing?”

“Fine. What’s this about Doyle?”

She heaved a sigh. “I don’t know what’s got into him. He’s been acting all weird and. ” Her chin quivered. “You think he’s getting ready to break up with me?”

“Why would you think that?”

“He don’t seem real interested anymore.” She knuckled one eye, wiping away a trace of moisture from beside it. “Seeing how you broke up with Carol Ann, I figured he might follow suit. Doyle loves you, Andy. Sometimes I think more than he ever loved me.”

“That’s bullshit,” I said.

“It’s true. He’s always talking about Andy this and Andy that. If you started putting on lipstick and wearing a dress, I swear he’d do it, too.” She squared her shoulders. “Maybe we should break up. I’m almost twenty. It’s about time I stopped going out with a kid.”

“Is that how you see him?”

“Don’t you? In a lot of ways Doyle’s the same ten-year-old runt who was always trying to lift up my skirt with a stick. Even after he got it lifted up proper, he treated sex like it was something neat he found behind the barn and he’s just busting to tell his friends about.”

The coffee was ready, and Dawn brought in a tray with the pot and two cups, cream and sugar. When she bent to set it on the table, the neck of her sweatshirt belled and I could see her breasts. I’d seen them plenty of times before whenever a group of us would go skinny-dipping in Crescent Creek, but they hadn’t stirred me like they did now. It had been three weeks since I’d been with Carol Ann, and I was way past horny.

I asked Dawn to fill me in on how Doyle was acting weird. She said he’d been spacey, easy to anger, and I told her it had more to do with the Taunton game than her, how he had been obsessed with Taunton ever since the linemen kicked our butts, and how it had made him extradepressed. That appeared to ease her mind, and she turned the conversation back to Carol Ann and me. I opened up to her and told her everything I’d been feeling. She took my hand and commiserated. I knew what was happening, but I didn’t allow myself to know it fully — I kept on talking and talking, confessing my fears and weaknesses, thinking about her breasts, her fresh smell, until she leaned over and kissed my cheek, at the same time guiding my hand up under her sweatshirt. She pulled back an inch or two, letting me decide, her eyes holding mine; but there was really no decision to be made.

Afterward, in her bed, she clung to me, not saying anything. I recalled Doyle’s stories about her ways. She was a talker, he said. Being with her, it was like making it with a radio play-by-play announcer. Oh, you’re doing that, she’d say, and now you’re doing this, as if she were describing things for a nationwide audience who couldn’t see the field. But with me Dawn had scarcely said a word — she was fiercely concentrated, and when we had done, there was no game summary, no mention of great moves or big plays. She caressed my face and kissed my neck. This made me feel guilty, but that didn’t stop us from compounding the felony and doing it a second time. Only after that, as I sat on the edge of the bed buttoning my shirt, did Dawn speak.

“I suppose you’re blaming me for this,” she said.

“What gives you that idea?”

“You just sitting there, not talking.”

“No,” I said. “It was mutual.”

“Well, that’s refreshing.”

She padded into the bathroom. I heard the toilet flush, and she came out belting a robe that bore a design of French words and phrases: Ooh La La and Vive la Difference and such.

“Don’t go whipping yourself for this. Okay?” she said, sitting beside me.

“I’m not.”

“Sure you are. You’re fretting about what Doyle’s gonna say. Don’t worry. I won’t tell him. Me and him are over. mostly, anyway.”

I glanced at her and began pulling on my socks. She looked neither happy nor sad, but stoic.

“It was my fault, kinda,” she said. “I needed to be close with someone. Doyle hardly ever lets me in close, but I thought you would. even though it’s a one-time thing.” She angled her eyes toward me, awaiting a response; then she nudged me in the ribs. “Cheer up, why don’tcha?”

“I’m all right. I was thinking about my mama. About how I used to scorn her when I was in junior high for sneaking around behind my daddy.”

The seconds limped past and she said, “I don’t reckon we’re much smarter than when we were in junior high, but we’re for sure less likely to be judging folks.”

She offered to fix me lunch, and not being urged in any direction, I accepted. We sat in her kitchen and ate. It was dead gray out the window. Four or five grackles were perched in a leafless myrtle at the corner of her front yard, flying up and resettling. No pedestrians passed. No cars. It was like after an apocalypse that only grackles had survived. I polished off two BLTs and Dawn fixed me another, humming as she turned the strips of bacon, like a young wife doing for her man. I suddenly, desperately wished that I could fit into her life, that we could sustain the fantasy that had failed my parents.

She slipped the sandwich onto the table and handed me a clean napkin, and sat watching me eat and swill down Coke, smiling in pretty reflex when I glanced up. I asked what she was thinking and she said, “Oh, you know. Stuff.”