Jane Smiley - Early Warning

If he had doubted that he recognized Lydia’s face (but he never really did) or her posture or the back of her head, Frank knew that he did recognize her crotch, the texture of her pubic hair, the shape and prominence of her labia, the exact way she took him in and held him, the recesses of her vagina. He always preferred the way they had done it that first time, him lying on his back on the bed, so sleepy from the war, and her sitting on him. But they tried different things, just so he could pretend that he wasn’t that boy anymore, that he had had experiences and learned from them. However Olivier Forêt treated her, and she said nothing about that, she seemed to enjoy Frank’s ardor, and his kindness. He never told her that, outside this room, he was not known for kindness.

AFTER HE WATCHED the Beatles on TV, and then got himself into the performance at the Coliseum, Steve Sloan made Stanley and Tim watch the second Ed Sullivan performance together. They were absolutely quiet; Steve watched George Harrison’s guitar playing as closely as he could. The next day, he threw out all of their songs and fired the drummer. Enough “Tom Dooley.” Enough “Banks of the Ohio.” If you wanted girls to scream, then hangings and drownings were not the way. Steve had to admit that when he’d heard “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” he hadn’t been impressed. But the song had a beat, the Beatles had a look, and the girls in the audience were weeping and clawing their faces. Steve’s goal was that they would play at least one set at their senior prom, in June. Between now and then, they had to come up with new songs and a new look — not imitation Beatles, but themselves renovated and renamed: The Sleepless Knights? The Knight Riders? The Colts?

Debbie watched the Beatles at home, with Mom, Dad, Dean, and Tina, and two days later, she came home with a Beatles magazine. Tim laughed at her, but when she wasn’t looking, he glanced through it. He decided that he looked most like John. At school, he noticed that the girls quickly formed into groups — those who preferred John, Paul, etc. The mommy types, like Debbie, preferred George; otherwise, he couldn’t detect a pattern.

Tim had applied to Williams, Amherst, and U.Va. His father had gone to Williams, Amherst was down the road from Williams, and his great-uncle had gone to the University of Virginia two years before his grandfather had gone to West Point. Steve Sloan hadn’t applied anywhere. His plan was to leave home the day after graduation (his eighteenth birthday was in May) and head for New York, guitar in hand. Stanley was a year younger, so he would be working for his father all summer. The prom would be their farewell gig.

They all spent the last two weeks of March writing songs, and, Steve said, the stupider the better. “I Want to Hold Your Hand”? “I Saw Her Standing There”? Not a word about fucking. No wonder the ninth-graders were going bananas. Tim came up with “Come here to me, yeah yeah. Baby, I see you now. Come here to me, yeah yeah, and say hello. Hellooooo. Helloooo. Come here and say hello. Baby, I see you now, please don’t go.” They did it in G, with Tim singing the harmonies. Once they had mastered the first verse, he came up with a second verse: “Walk me down the street, yeah yeah. Baby, take my hand. Stand next to me, yeah yeah, and please don’t go. Don’t gooooo! Don’t gooooo! Walk me down the street, sweep me off my feet, please don’t say no!” Then the first verse again. He was pretty proud of it.

He was sitting in his car in the parking lot of the high school at the end of the day, with the windows closed, practicing this song at the top of his lungs, when Fiona Cannon walked up, opened the passenger’s side door, and got in. She said, “No, sing it. I want to hear.” So, though he warbled and went off key for a note or two, he finished the song.

She said, “Could be worse.”

“The song or the voice?”

She laughed.

Fiona Cannon had had one boyfriend, Allen Giacomini, who rode a motorcycle. The other boys were afraid of her. She said, “You want to drive me home?”

“Where’s your car?”

“In the shop. They’re replacing the brake pads.”

“How many miles does that thing have on it?” Fiona drove a ’56 Chevy, blue and white.

“A hundred and four thousand.” She leaned across him and looked at his odometer. He was driving his dad’s old Mercury Comet, ’60 station wagon. It was useful for hauling the Colts and all their instruments around, but he wasn’t proud of it. The odometer said 54568. She didn’t remark upon it. He said, “Sure, I’ll drive you home.”

After that, he didn’t drive her home every day, but sometimes he did, and sometimes at lunch she would come out to the parking lot and say, “Want to go get a Coke?” Or she would get in, lift her hair from her collar, and say, “Want to see a movie Friday night?” (Never Saturday at first, because the fox hunting was on Sunday until the end of March.) Even when her car was there in the parking lot, she would leave it behind; that meant he had to pick her up in the morning and bring her to school.

He took other girls out — Allison Carter and Janie Finch, on regular dates to movies and parties when he wasn’t practicing with the other Fire-Eaters, Dragons, Camerons. “The Camerons?” he said to Steve. “What is that?”

“A famous highland clan. The Camerons are coming.”

Stanley said, “Those were the Campbells.”

For two weeks, they were Steve and the Rattlers. When The Beatles’ Second Album came out, and Steve saw that it had “Long Tall Sally” and “Roll Over Beethoven,” which were by Little Richard and Chuck Berry, he relaxed a bit, and said that they didn’t have to write all their own songs, but the ones they didn’t write had to be by black people. They started practicing “What’d I Say.”

Then the skinny envelopes arrived from Amherst and Williams, the ones that said, “Thank you for applying.” The fat one was from U.Va., but Tim had known he would get in there. Tim wasn’t disappointed. His dad was disappointed, but Tim wasn’t. There was nothing wrong with U.Va. And it was cheap, which was what he said to his mom. Amherst was thirty-two hundred dollars a year, and Williams was thirty-six hundred. His mom said they would have found it, it was worth it. But U.Va. was fine with Tim, not such a change from everything he knew.

With his fate decided and Fiona showing up now and then, Tim maybe felt better than he had his whole life. She started saying, “Ever driven ninety? Ever gotten over a hundred? How fast will this thing go, really? Ever spun out?” Once, at seventy-five, she put her hands over his eyes and laughed. That evening, she showed him a spot on the hill above her house, looking west, toward the Blue Ridge, and while he was kissing her, she unzipped his khakis and put her hand in there. He felt her hand through his shorts, and then she eased his cock out of his shorts, too. He said, “You’re the only person I ever met who is crazier than I am.”

“How crazy are you?”

“Ninety-five, but not a hundred.”

She unbuttoned his shirt, and slid her cold hands across his bare skin and lay her head on his chest. His cock pressed into the rough fabric of her Levis. But that was as far as he got that night.

A week later — it was now May — they were driving in the Comet to Arlington to see The Last Man on Earth , and she kept reaching over and tickling him. For a while he laughed and pushed her away, but she kept at it, so finally he lost his temper, which he had never done before, and shouted, “Quit it! Fuck you!” They stopped at the next light; she opened the door and jumped out. When she slammed the door, he reached over and locked it, and then the light turned green, and as he was pulling away, she vaulted onto the roof of the Comet. He drove. She started pounding. He sped up, but she stayed up there, pounding, and when he pulled over, maybe a mile down the road, and unlocked the door, she jumped down, pulled it open, and threw herself across the front seat. She was laughing. She took his hand, and they went to the movie, which was about vampires. That night, she showed him a way to get into her room — he had to climb a tree, cross a roof, and go through the window she opened. It was worth it.