I read somewhere recently that it’s difficult to recreate a state of ignorance. In my case, it’s humiliating, but it’s less difficult because my particular state of ignorance was a result of trying to build a code of behavior from what I learned watching TV. My parents contributed only inadvertently to my development. As figures of influence and respect, they were only slightly more palpable to me than Uncle Bill and Mister French.
What I didn’t know then, or maybe I just didn’t know I knew, was why I needed so much to discover whether Dana was a good girl or a bad girl. If she was a bad girl, then it would be absurd to fall in love with her and court her and I’d only ruin my shot at sleeping with her by trying. If she was a good girl, then it’d be cruel and disrespectful and beastly to want to have sex with her and I’d ruin all hope of our future life together by trying. What seems weird is that the girl had to be one way or the other, while the guy was supposed to be both. In fact the good girls always hankered after guys who were scoring like crazy, while guys like me who couldn’t get anywhere with the bad girls never got anywhere with the good girls either. The nuances of this were far, far away from my mind as I walked into homeroom the morning after giving up on Dana.
It didn’t take long to notice that I was being carefully monitored. Lenny, instead of slouching at his desk nervously rapping out syncopated rhythms on the desktop, stood guard outside the door. When I came in, he flashed me a boy scout salute and said, "Be prepared." Not catching the tone of his volley--neither of us had ever been in the scouts--I saluted back and went in. Clearly this was not the reaction he’d expected. As his confederates arrived, he passed giggling messages to them and they’d salute me as well. Kids from other cliques whispered to each other, stared at me and then resumed their whispers. I opened my math book and pretended to read the assignment I hadn’t prepared the night before. No one said anything else to me through homeroom or first period, and there was no one I could ask what was up. The only relief was that it distracted me from pondering my failure with Nabokov, the unassailable gatekeeper who barred me from Dana’s world.
After math class, I went up to my locker to exchange books and drop off my jacket. Such were the terms of my laziness that I’d carry my coat and all my books from the bus to homeroom and first period rather than climb up to the third floor to put them in my locker. When I got there, the guys from homeroom were waiting for me. Cascading from the vent in the door was a strip of particolored condoms. I tried to open my locker nonchalantly, but my hand rattled on the combination lock and when I got it open my face in the mirror was a deep, purplish red.
Fat jokes never bothered me, or stupid jokes, and before long I could insult myself better than the guys could insult me, but I never reacted well to sex jokes. I’d blush and stutter and get embarrassed and lose access to the store of snappy retorts I held in reserve for such occasions. Whenever the subject of sex came up and my friends shifted into tones of experience and bravado, I’d revert to a childlike state. I couldn’t even bluff a convincing first experience. Now, in front of the jeering crowd surrounding my locker, I was speechless and on the verge of tears, doubly confused because I didn’t know if the timing of the assault was coincidental or if people had been talking about seeing me and Dana together on the late bus. Lenny led the guys in another salute and a farcical march down the length of the hall.
I didn’t hear a word Mrs. Damasek said in social studies, and couldn’t keep up tempo in band practice, so worried was I about what might happen next. Lenny, I knew, excelled at ambushing guys in the cafeteria, and I couldn’t face that. So I decided to skip lunch altogether and hide in the library. They had two books there with scripts of famous routines from Marx Brothers movies along with lots of pictures. Mitch and I had memorized a few routines and even performed one together at a talent show in tenth grade with Mitch as Chico and me as Groucho.
I took down Hooray for Captain Spalding and reread the scene where Groucho proposes to two women simultaneously, but I couldn’t concentrate on it, so I reshelved it and walked along looking at titles until I came across one of the ones Dana had listed among her favorites: The Stranger, by Albert Camus. It was a dogeared paperback copy with a bunch of people on the cover made up like mimes with their faces whited out and their eyes darkened, whose expressions seems at once to challenge you to read the book and to be completely disinterested in your response.
The first pages were like that too: two ways at once. The first words were "Mother died today," so I thought it would be really sad, but then it went on, "Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure," and the narrator sounded as if he were more concerned with a point of accuracy than with the death of his mother. All his descriptions were like that; he talked about these really sad things, but never seemed to feel anything. The Stranger was easier to read than Pale Fire, and when the buzzer went off ending the period I found I was completely absorbed in it.
I was self-conscious about carrying the book around the halls. Mr. Drake taught The Stranger in his senior honors English class, and kids who were reading it for him bore it as an emblem of their collegiate aspirations, of their having outgrown the training wheels of high school. Mr. Drake was one of the younger teachers who was always patient and encouraging with me. Once on a paper he handed back to me he drew a big arrow between two sentences and wrote, "great work up to here." When I asked him what went wrong after the arrow, he said I took the easy way out: I turned the paper into a cheap joke when I could have made it "germane to the topic" and still be funny. He said that someday I’d realize that I could actually be smart when I wasn’t too busy being smart-assed.
Brent Durkin and Otha Lawrence were sitting at the back of the late bus, so I stayed near the front. I thought about reading more of The Stranger, but in case Dana got on I didn’t want her to think I was reading it because of her. Instead I doodled on my arm with my four-color pen. I used to draw fake tattoos, but switched to fake stab wounds and fake festering sores. They were pretty convincing from a distance; once even my mom noticed and asked if I’d been in a fight.
Someone sat next to me. Dana. She did not look pleased. From her satchel she extracted an envelope with her name on it, which she put into my wounded hand.
"This was in my locker after lunch." In the envelope was a crude drawing of Fred and Wilma Flintstone, standing very strangely together. I turned it sideways and it made more sense. Fred was lying on top of Wilma. Wilma was wearing little wire-rim glasses like Dana’s, and Fred’s face was covered with freckles like mine.
"I wasn’t going to talk to you, but then I thought, ‘that’s stupid.’ You didn’t tell anyone you were going out with me, did you?"
"No!," I stammered.
"Good. I’m sorry. I didn’t think you would, but then somebody told me you say some pretty weird things."
I couldn’t say anything. The implications of the drawing were still dawning on me.
"I-I’m sorry," I said, though I’m not certain why.
"It’s okay. Some people think sex is just something to joke about. Did anything happen to you?"
"No." I wasn’t trying to be stoic; there was no way I could say the word "condom" to her without embarrassing myself. Then I thought maybe she knew about my locker and was testing me. But it was too late. If it was a test I flunked. She didn’t say anything else and I still couldn’t think of anything to say to her, not even a joke. When the bus got to her stop I got off with her.
"Do you mind if I walk you home?"
"Mind? No."
When we had walked a short distance, she asked if I had something I wanted to say to her. I said I did but couldn’t think of what it was. Instead I asked her how much longer she’d be taking the late bus, hoping she’d reveal whether she was a do-er or a detentionite."
"Probably not any more after today." "
"You been doing something after school?""
"Yeah. A project sort of, with Mr. Drake. But it’s over.""
I had my answer. Already my mind was reaching forward to the future, me in some vague job in an office somewhere like dads on television, and then coming home to Dana and a bunch of kids on the porch of our little bungalow. Brought to you by Ivory Snow and roll the closing credits."
"What’s the matter," she said."
"Could we like go on a date sometime?," I blurted. "I mean, just like to a movie or something…I mean…not like--""
"Calm down. We can go out sometime. Sure.""
Now I was really scared. She said she’d go out with me, but I didn’t know how to get from where we were to the kids and the bungalow. Suddenly I wanted to propose for real.
"If my father’s home I don’t want you to come in," she said. "Sometimes he gets too drunk at lunch and has to go home in the afternoon, and then he gets mad real easy and shouts a lot. He hit me once."
"What for?"
"Caught me smoking pot in my room."
The bungalow went up in a wisp of marijuana smoke. Wifely Dana was replaced by a girl in a ruined shack being beaten by some redneck in filthy overalls. This was the kind of girl who had sex. And I’d be invited inside as long as her dad wasn’t home.
But we weren’t in a poor neighborhood. All the houses were large and spaced well apart, with fancy lawns and hedges. One house even had pillars in front.
"It’s okay," she said. "The car’s not there." She was looking at the house with the pillars. I recognized the name on the mailbox. Dana’s father had been my mother’s divorce lawyer. I met him a few times; I’d never guess he’d be the type to get drunk and hit his own daughter. Dana was making less sense to me all the time. She wasn’t a squalid biker girl, she was a lawyer’s daughter. But she smoked pot. But she did all that reading and even did some extra work for Mr. Drake, the coolest teacher in the school. The tingle I had felt between my legs when she mentioned smoking pot was gone.
We went in through the kitchen. Dana took two cans of Coke from the fridge and led me to her room. We sat on her waterbed and she played records and showed me books and pictures and stuff, and I kept trying to interrogate these objects, to make them yield up to me Dana’s true nature. But every object cancelled out the message of the previous one. Then she leveled me.
She was looking at me the way people look at each other in the movies when they’re about to kiss. But she didn’t move. I had to move. I leaned forward and kissed her. When she didn’t back away I put my arms around her. Still kissing, she made a noise inside her throat. I opened my eyes and saw that her eyes were wet; I thought this meant she was in love with me. I held her tighter, but she pulled away and began sobbing.
"What’s wrong?" I was worried that maybe she could feel my hard-on, which was throbbing so hard I thought it must be shaking the whole bed. I had betrayed myself. Now we’d never marry.
"I shouldn’t be doing this."
"Why not?"
"This is too fast. It’s not fair to you."
I couldn’t understand this at all. How could her kissing me be unfair to me?
"I broke up with someone today. I’m--I dunno--upset." She snuffled and wiped her eyes with the side of her arm.
"For me? You mean--"
"No. I’ve been trying to break up with him all week. I should never have seen him in the first place."
My mind was in a million places at once. She liked me. She’d been going out with another guy. Had she slept with him? Did that mean she’d sleep with me? Who was the guy? Was he a do-er or detentionite? Did everyone else at school know about it? Why did she break it up? I felt my hands shaking and teeth chattering though I wasn’t at all cold.
When she had stopped crying, I asked who he was. She said she couldn’t tell me, but I pressed her. I thought that having just kissed her entitled me to know everything about her.
"He’s older than us," she said, as if that would obviate any further explanation.
"Us? You mean like he’s in college?" I was already way out of my depth, but I felt compelled to go on. "As long as you’ve broken up," I offered magnanimously, "it doesn’t matter to me."
"You? What does this have to do with you?"
There was nothing to say. I had been back on the marriage track, and felt that forgiving her past mistakes was a required gesture. I pretended to take a sip of Coke so I could grit my teeth and stop shivering. It didn’t stop. I was ready to give up.
"Look," I said. "You don’t have to tell me a thing. I guess for the first time I felt I could handle it. It’s like for once in my life I’ve got confidence to spare."
She stared right into my eyes. I thought she was getting ready to ask me to leave, but when she opened her mouth, all she said was "Wow."
She kept on staring, processing something in her brain. Her gaze was softening, and I thought she wanted to kiss me again.
"That’s it exactly," she said. "That’s exactly what I need. Confidence to despair. God, you’re so right. I just have to say, ‘hey, it had to end’ and deal with it. I mean, I never wanted things to go anywhere. Then once it happened, I thought how great it would be if it could last forever, and I hated him for reminding me that it couldn’t. Poor Mr. Drake."
In silence, we were buoyed gently up and down and from side to side on the waterbed. I was struck dumb. She told me the story of how it happened with him. She spoke in soft, determined tones free of blame or anger. The only detail I remember clearly was that she realized it was over when, after making love in his office after school, she still called him Mr. Drake. She couldn’t make herself call him by his first name and she didn’t like that.
She had her hand on my arm while she told her story. When she finished, I removed my arm from under her hand as if she were asleep and I didn’t want to wake her. My movements seemed to be executed in slow motion: rising from the bed, hoisting my bookbag over my shoulder, descending the staircase, shutting the front door, passing between the pillars, walking the roads. I watched myself move about, fascinated to see myself in motion, wondering what would happen next. At some point I was in my own kitchen feeding myself straight out of the refrigerator. Later I was in front of my bedroom mirror, naked, examining my soft, slouching body. Later still I was in bed, awake, vacant.
Next day in school, there were no more practical jokes. People were still pointing and whispering, but differently than before. Lenny was tapping away feverishly at his desk. He kept sending conspiratorial glances my way, but seemed shy of actually speaking to me. It was soon evident: everyone thought I’d scored. Dana was not on the late bus that day. After that I started riding my bike to school. Soon the school year was over.
This memoir has not come out as I had planned. I thought of it as an apology to Dana, and a celebration of her maturity, her unique beauty, her pain--her mystery. But all I’ve written about is myself: me before I met her, me reflected in her, me now writing what I took to be her story. Maybe I can’t write about her after all. Or maybe the only way to know another is by the effect that person has had on you. In those two days, Dana exposed to me the emptiness at the core of my life, and my life since then has been an effort to become what she must have imagined I was, someone who could sit and listen to her story, and stay, and respond, and understand.
Go back to my home page a better person for the experience.
© 1994 David Cohen "The Late Bus" first appeared in Crescendo 3, 1995.
I endured days of detention in high school.
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