Alice McDermott - After This

In June, Susan Persichetti found a job at the Woolworth’s in the mall-the cosmetics counter, which was fun and gave her a chance every once in a while to slip a lipstick or a bottle of nail polish into her purse. She had to wear a smock, a pale blue polyester thing, all the employees did, and by early August she was bringing it home and putting it on over her clothes in her bedroom before she went downstairs and out past her parents to work.

Her room was in the attic, the long, dormered space that had been left unfinished by the builder (although he did provide the center-hall staircase that led to it), and paneled and plumbed rather inexpertly by her father and Tony while he was still in high school. She’d borrowed the room while Tony was in the army and now that he had left home-for good, it seemed-the space was hers alone, but it still retained the dark scent and insurmountable dreariness of a boy’s room: oak paneling and brown shag carpet and a wooden toilet seat in the bathroom. She didn’t mind. She had even kept a couple of her brother’s old posters on the far wall.

Putting her smock on over her clothes, she skipped down the stairs, her car keys in her hand, and cried, “Going,” to her parents, who would always look up from the couch or the table or the television and then-if they were in the same room-look at each other to confirm how they both understood that this summer’s quick glimpses of their teenage daughter breezing in and out the door were mere prelude to her leaving them for college in another year. And then for the rest of her life. But the look they exchanged acknowledged, too, how pleasant it was to know that for her, stepping off into her life, there would not be the quicksand that had met Tony: the army, the war, the year away in which the child they had known was lost, utterly drawn down, sucked under by the troubled, angry, silent young man he had become.

“Drive safely!” they cried back. Or, “Be careful!”-cheerfully, because girl children went off but they also returned, bringing grandchildren and their own solicitousness to their parents’ old age.

Sometimes her father would begin to sing, teasing her, “I found a million dollar baby in a five and ten cent store.”

It was amazing, she learned, what you could find out. There was no sense looking under A in the phone book, for instance, you should look under W instead: Women’s Health. Women’s Medicine. (Woman itself sounding in their mouths like a newly coined word-not ladies, not girls anymore, but women.) Information filtered down from a college-age friend of a co-worker at Woolworth’s that one of the clinics in the city was in the same building that held a famous hair salon everyone at school was talking about going to. She called the clinic from a pay phone. She needed proof of age and three hundred dollars and if she hadn’t had a pregnancy test yet, they would do one there. Also someone to accompany her home.

She wasn’t eighteen but she could use Annie Keane’s phony birth certificate and driver’s license, the one she used to get into bars. Although Annie had hazel eyes and hers were brown, they were both five foot five or so and slim. Annie said she’d come with her, too, so no need to call the boy-”The Jackass” was how Susan now referred to him-who had stopped calling her himself early in July. There was only the matter of the money.

She had saved seventy dollars so far this summer. Annie loaned her fifty from her own savings and then two more ten-dollar bills, filched (on two separate occasions) from her mother’s lingerie drawer. Susan added thirty-five of the fifty dollars her father had given her to shop for fall clothes-indulgently, because her mother wanted her to use her own money-saved by buying a single sweater and then going into the dressing room to put a blouse and a kilt skirt into the same bag. The trick-amazing what you could find out-was to go to the better departments of the nicer stores where there was usually only one saleslady working the floor (a plump grandmotherly type in this case, whose daughter had gone to Mary Immaculate Academy as well), and no one counting hangers as you moved in and out of the dressing room, looking for another size.

She added the next thirty of the thirty-seven dollars from her second-to-last paycheck.

In her blue polyester smock, her arms pressed against her stomach, she drank a Coke and smoked a cigarette with Jill O’Meara who had come into Woolworth’s just as Susan was going on her break. They sat together on the concrete rim of a planter in the middle of the mall. It was humid, but there was that orange color at the edge of the blue sky-the beginning of a late-summer sunset. Because they had not seen each other since June-they were not particular friends-conversation demanded an accounting. Jill had had a perfectly boring summer, working at a card shop in a strip mall near her home, the backyard pool, Jones Beach, two weeks camping with her family-where, she added, a spontaneous lie, she met this guy. They went pretty far, she said, improvising, swimming together late at night, in the lake, out of their suits. He was dark-haired and blue-eyed and funny-but from Syracuse, she said, the first place she could think of that sounded like the dark side of the moon.

Susan looked at her, smiling. “How far?” she said. They were not friends, but might be becoming. Jill admired Susan. She liked her wit, her self-possession, her feline languor in the classroom, the way she slumped and curled into chairs. The way she let her eyes close slowly, never bothering to put her head down, when a teacher grew boring.

Like most compulsive liars, Jill O’Meara was skeptical of the reports others gave of themselves-the incredible dates, the wild parties, the insane mothers and alcoholic fathers-but she had always trusted what Susan had to say. Susan’s brother had gone to Vietnam and had come back a basket case. (This offered in a history class discussion about the war.) She had spent a year convinced her parents were really brother and sister, they were so identically boring. (This during a retreat day at school when the girls had been broken into small groups to discuss ways to bring Christ into their daily lives.) She had written her initials in love bites around the navel of the boy she was taking to the junior prom. (This declared amid much laughter at a table in the lunchroom.)

Jill sipped her drink, nodding slowly. “God,” she said, as if at the recollection of some astonishing memory. “We went far. Really far.”

A laugh, sophisticated, wordly-wise, broke from Susan and she said, “Start saving your pennies now,” and opened her smock and put her hand on her stomach, although what she thought of as her paunch was mostly invisible to Jill, and to everyone else.

“This ain’t pizza,” she said.

At the end of a boring summer (no boy at the lake or anywhere else, only a hopeless crush on the UPS guy who stopped by the card shop every day and called her Kid), the revelation, the sudden tears in Susan’s voice, were high drama.

Jill O’Meara had nearly two hundred and fifty dollars in her senior prom fund. (It had been her junior prom fund last year but she hadn’t found a date.) She told Susan-the summer suddenly become interesting-”I can lend you the rest. You want me to go with your

Susan spent the night before at Annie’s house so in the morning they could walk to the bus stop. They both told their mothers they were accompanying the other to the famous hair salon in the city to give her moral support while she got a new cut. (The story would be that in the end Susan/Annie had chickened out on getting something totally new and just got a few inches cut off, you could hardly notice the difference.) They took the Long Island Rail Road to Penn Station and then rode the hot subway uptown. Of course, they didn’t run into any neighbors or relatives who worked in the city, or anyone else who knew them, but that was no matter-the haircut story was already in place; they were, until they got off at the eleventh floor and not the third, precisely where they were supposed to be.