Wally Lamb - We Are Water

One night, while Albie’s holding up his elbows because I’m wiping down the counter where he sits, he asks me out. I didn’t expect it, and I don’t know what to say at first, so I say, “Let me think about it.” Then later on I tell him yes, okay, I’ll go. Because, hey, I’m not stupid. He’s my boss’s son.

For our date, Albie takes me to the drive-in. It’s a double feature: the first and second Planet of the Apes movies. (I’ve already seen the first one and thought it was stupid, but Albie picked the movie.) At intermission, he asks me do I want anything from the snack bar. I tell him yes please, a box of Good & Plenty. When he gets back in the car, he’s got my candy plus, for himself, three foil-wrapped hot dogs and a big soda. In between eating my Good & Plenty, I keep shaking the box, which is partly just this habit I’ve had since I was little but also partly because I like the sound. It comforts me.

Albie keeps looking over at me while he’s eating and I can smell that he has liquor breath. “Did you put something in your Coke?” I ask him.

“It’s not Coke. It’s root beer.”

“Yeah, but did you?” He nods, smiles, and pulls a half-empty bottle out of his back pocket. When he hands it to me, I squint and read the label. LONG JOHN’S GINGER BRANDY, it says. Eighty proof.

“You know something?” Albie says. “You’re pretty.”

“No, I’m not,” I tell him. I’m thinking about what I heard someone call liquor once: “Dutch courage.” I don’t know why. What’s so Dutch about getting drunk?

“Yes, you are, and you know you are, too,” Albie says. Ha! I think. He’s either drunk or blind. But then I think, well, maybe in Albie’s eyes, I’m like those girls at the mall who I got fired trying to impress. He scoots closer to my side and starts playing with my hair and my left ear. Then he leans over and starts kissing my neck. He’s trying to be sexy, I guess, but it just tickles, plus now his breath smells like both brandy and hot dogs, which isn’t very appealing. After a while, he reaches down and takes my hand in his. It makes me think of that song “I Want to Hold Your Hand” that’s on my brother Donald’s Meet the Beatles! album. When Donald got married and moved out of state, he gave me all of his old Beatles albums, which I still play quite a bit, even though the Beatles broke up because of Yoko Ono. Instead of watching Return to the Planet of the Apes or thinking about what Albie’s up to, I start singing that song in my head. And when I touch you I feel happy inside … It makes me think about this girl in my fourth grade public school class named Carol Cosentino who used to wear a pink sailor hat that had all these little metal Beatles buttons pinned all over it. Carol’s favorite Beatle was George, I remember. I wonder whatever happened to her. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice that Albie, while he’s still holding my hand, is using his other hand to fiddle with his pants. Then I hear this snap-snapping sound and I see his belt flying into the back. From the way he just lifted his butt off the seat, he might have just pulled his pants down. I’m not sure, but I’m certainly not going to look over there and find out. But then he moves my hand over to his side and puts it down there—him and his Dutch courage. I can feel that he’s still got his underpants on, which is a relief, but I can also feel that he’s got a lump in there. A “boner,” I’ve heard boys at school call it when they’re talking dirty in the cafeteria. “Please?” he whispers, moving my hand up and down against his lump. I let him do it, not because I want to but because he said please, which makes me feel, kind of, that it’s me who’s in control of the situation, not him, and also because if Albie likes me, then maybe Winona will like me better, too, and assign me to Section A, where those lawyers from the office building next door always sit, and they’re big tippers. Those booths are Althea’s section, usually. Althea is Winona’s pet and she used to be Albie’s girlfriend. One day I overheard her telling one of the other waitresses that she broke up with him because he has no class. But according to Albie, he broke up with her because, unlike me, Althea is “a bitch on wheels who thinks her shit don’t stink.” That’s one thing I have to say for myself: I never, ever leave a bathroom smelly; I’m very careful about that kind of thing. I keep matches in my purse even though I don’t smoke, and whenever I have to use the toilet and, you know, get the bathroom smelly, I always light a match and burn some toilet paper to, what’s it called? Oh yeah, fumigate it. Part of me wants to yank my hand away from Albie’s lump, but another part of me says, what do I care? It doesn’t even feel like it’s my hand that’s doing what he’s making it do, and while he’s over there, mouth-breathing and making my hand go faster, I try thinking of other things. I make up this game where I have to think of all the songs on Abbey Road in the right order: “Come Together,” “Something,” “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” I get all the way to “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” and then I can’t think of what comes after that. It’s like my mind’s gone blank or something. Thinking about other things is something I learned to do on those nights when Kent would sneak into my room. I’d recite stuff they made us memorize in school: the Ten Commandments; the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries. I can still remember some of the Mysteries—the Annunciation, the Nativity, Finding Jesus in the Temple. And, let me think … the Resurrection, the Crowning of Mary as Queen of Heaven. (One time, this girl who sat next to me, Tammy Tusia, had to go to the office for being sacrilegious because she leaned over and said to me, trying to be funny, “Gee if Mary got queen, who got first runner-up?” and Sister Presentation heard her say it. Luckily, I didn’t laugh so I didn’t get in trouble.) So that’s how many mysteries? While I’m counting how many I’ve said, Albie starts going, “Oh, god! Oh, fuck! Faster!” Oh, and there’s the Scourging at the Pillar, the Descent of the Holy Ghost. Albie starts to groan and now I can feel the wet stuff. I know from Kent that after the wet stuff comes out, they quiet down and stop bothering you. I finally remember the song that comes after “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).” It’s “Here Comes the Sun”—the one George sings. I wonder if Carol Cosentino, wherever she is, still likes George the best, even though he has long scraggly hair now and a beard that makes him look like a hillbilly. In my opinion, the Beatles looked better when they had their Beatle haircuts, like on the Meet the Beatles! cover.

It’s after midnight by the time the drive-in gets out, and when Albie pulls up in front of my foster family’s house, he asks if he can kiss me good night and I say no, it’s late and I have to go in, and he accepts it. See? I’m in control. Not him. “Can I call you?” he asks. I make him wait a couple of seconds. Then I say, “Yeah, okay.” Albie’s not handsome or anything, but he’s sort of cute. Priscilla from work thinks he’s borderline fat and has kind of a pig face, and I can see her point, too. Upstairs, while I’m getting ready for bed, I decide Albie’s ugly-cute, like Ringo. Not that he looks anything like Ringo. He looks like Winona, although he acted kind of insulted when I told him that.

On our next date, Albie and I go to the drive-in again. Saturday Night Fever is playing this time, and I’ve been looking forward to seeing it because I’ve had a little bit of a crush on John Travolta from when he was Vinnie Barbarino on TV. But Albie’s wrecking it for me because he keeps telling me he’d bet me any amount of money that John Travolta is a homosexual. (How would he know?) I’m sitting there, trying to enjoy the movie, and Albie keeps saying stuff like, “Look! There’s your evidence. That’s a flitty walk” and “You know who dances like that? Queers, that’s who. I swear on a stack of Bibles: that guy is light in the loafers.”