Dan Wakefield - Going All the Way - A Novel

Her mother had to call her, and Sonny was afraid she might not get there before his time ran out. It was probably only a minute or so, but it seemed a long time to Sonny while he stood there waiting in the lighted phone booth, and he got more edgy. When Buddie finally answered, all out of breath, he was kind of mad at her. He told her without any explanation to come and pick him up at the Standard station.

“Do I have time to change?” she asked.

“No!” Sonny shouted.

“All right.”

She drove up about five minutes later in her mother’s station wagon. She was wearing a pink party dress made out of some stiff, frilly material, and she had a gardenia corsage on the left shoulder.

“What the hell are you all dressed up for?” Sonny asked when he got in the car.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was going to a dance.”

“A dance? What dance?”

“At Meridian Hills. One of those summer dances they have.”

“With a date?”

“Harry was taking me.”

Harry Stapler was a very nice, serious guy who had a good position at the Indiana National Bank and was madly in love with Buddie. As Sonny’s mother so often and ruefully summed up the situation, hinting at her son’s own lack of appreciation, “Harry Stapler worships the ground that girl walks on.” His mother knew all the gossip about Sonny’s friends.

“You mean you broke the date with him,” Sonny asked with irritation, “at the last minute?”

“He understood,” Buddie said.

“What the hell did you tell him, for Chrissake?”

“I told him something came up.”

“Oh, my achin’ ass.”

Sonny chewed her out something awful for breaking the date with Harry, but all the time he was doing it he secretly somewhere felt this little twinge of pleasure that she’d done it, broken a date for a dance at a country club just to come and meet him at a goddam filling station.

After Buddie said how sorry she was, Sonny told her to drive to the Topper, he had to have a drink real quick. It was too early for the combo and the place was fairly quiet. The few people in the place stared at Sonny and Buddie, probably trying to figure out what a girl all dressed up was doing with a guy in a T-shirt and dirty khakis. Sonny felt like rum and Coke, and Buddie had that too.

“Is anything the matter?” she asked.

Sonny said he didn’t feel like talking till he finished at least one drink. He sat in glum silence, swallowing the stuff like medicine. When the second round came, he lit a cigarette and told all about Luke Matthews and how pissed off he was at his mother. He said he felt like taking off for some place, just getting the hell out. He didn’t want to go back and sleep in his room with that religious nut. They had more drinks, and Sonny said he was running kind of low so Buddie opened her purse and slipped him a ten-dollar bill under the table.

“Maybe I’ll hitchhike to Michigan,” he said after his fourth rum and Coke. “I could sleep on the beach. Bum around.”

“Oh, Sonny. Don’t do that.”

“Why not? ” he demanded.

“Something might happen to you.”

“Who gives a shit?”

She reached across the table and touched his hand. “I do,” she said.

He pulled his hand away. “I don’t.”

“Oh, Sonny.”

“What?”

“I wish you were happy. I wish I could make you happy.”

She sounded so syrupy sweet it made him sick.

“Fuck it,” he said and ordered another drink. Buddie didn’t have any more drinks. She had only another three dollars after the ten and didn’t want the money to run out if Sonny still felt like drinking. The combo came on around nine, and the place began to fill up and get real smoky. That made Sonny cheer up a little; the hazy darkness and the booze and the music. The colored guys in the combo played fairly good jazz, the kind Sonny liked where you could pretty much always figure out what the melody was, the way Brubeck did it. After the second set Sonny had lost count of his drinks and he was feeling a lot less pain. He had one more and then figured he might just go home and sack out instead of hitchhiking up to Michigan and bumming around on the beach until he got arrested or starved to death or was carried away in an undertow or something.

Buddie drove him home and parked across from the house, turning the lights and the motor off. Sonny really just wanted to go on in and hit the sack, but he felt like he owed her at least a kiss, for being a good kid. He put his hand on the back of her neck and she scrambled all over him. Her mouth was open so wide he thought she might fracture her jaw. She was hot as a furnace. He tried to mess around a little, but he didn’t really feel much like it. Her crinkly pink party dress didn’t sex him up at all, and it scratched the hell out of him. He started thinking of Marty, the stuck-up Jewish girl at the museum, and imagining how great it would be to have her get hot with you. He closed his eyes, picturing how she looked, but he knew it was good old Buddie sprawling all over him. He pulled away.

“What’s wrong?” Buddie asked in a hoarse whisper.

“We can’t really do anything here,” he said. “We better just stop.”

“We could do something ,” she said and pulled his hand down, placing it inside her panties. “Please,” she whispered.

Automatically, trying not to think about it, he felt around with his longest finger, rubbing it in the soft part between her legs. She was already wet. The finger probed inside, like a trained animal that didn’t really have anything to do with Sonny. It moved itself around, obediently, performing its task. Buddie shivered and squirmed and panted, digging her fingers into Sonny’s neck and then let out a frightening gasp as a sudden stream made Sonny’s hand warm and sticky wet. Buddie rested her head on his shoulder and he sat perfectly still, thinking how great and exciting this had been in high school. The next day, when the guys asked you what you got the night before, you could say you got finger action inside the pants. That wasn’t as good as really fucking but it rated right along with dry-humping and was much better than just the necking stuff like frenching and getting covered-tit or even bare-tit. It was really pretty much of a failure if you parked with a girl and got only covered-tit, and sometimes when Sonny just got covered-tit he actually lied if anyone asked and said he got bare-tit.

“Oh, darling,” Buddie sighed.

Sonny took his hand away and wiped it on the upholstery of the car seat. “Listen,” he said. “I really got to go.”

Her crinkly dress was all scrunched around and tangled up, and her hair was a mess. She looked like she’d been through a wringer. “Call me,” she said. “Please?”

“Sure. I promise.”

He gave her a little peck on the cheek, got out of the car, and walked straight up to the house without looking back.

Most of the house was dark, but the porch light was on, and a light in the downstairs hall. Usually his mother kept the light in his room on for him—a torch burning in the window, “Make my bed and light the light …” but tonight it was dark because of the sleeping guest. Sonny felt his way into his room and to the desk, where he turned on a small lamp with an imitation antique shade of dark-green glass. He looked around the room, and sure enough, there was old Luke Matthews sacked out in the lower bunk. Sonny took off his shoes and socks and pants, and was ready for bed. Ever since he’d been old enough to get ready for bed by himself—his mother still put his pajamas on him until he asserted his independence at around twelve years of age—he mostly wore the shirt and undershorts to bed that he’d worn during the day. It was easier than taking everything off and getting into pajamas.