THE SILVER RING
He
couldn’t get enough of her. When they
parted, all he wanted was to be with her again.
He had given her a silver ring.
Instead of putting it on her finger, she put it on a chain and wore it
around her neck. He thought a long time
about what she meant to tell him by doing that.
He came to some conclusions, but he never had the nerve to ask her. He would look at the ring on the chain
hanging below her throat. She kept it
like that so people could see it. So he
could see it. She gave him nothing of
her own to do something special with.
But then he understood that she gave him the ring on a chain around her
neck. It was a gift he liked.
They did not see each other in school very
often. When she was at lunch, he was in
gym, and when he was at lunch, she was in gym, so they didn’t even have lunch
time together. But when school got out,
she waited for him in front of the doors where the big yellow buses came, and
instead of getting on the bus that would take them the three miles to their
homes, they took each other’s hand, and swinging hands between them, walked
home together. They reached hers first,
and they talked a long time saying goodbye, but eventually they parted, and he
walked on for another twenty minutes until he reached his own home.
Weekends were different for them. They would always meet somewhere and go off
together. Often they would be able to
get a ride into town from one of their parents, and they would spend the
Saturday walking around the lake in the park, or sitting on a bench eating ice
cream cones and watching the swans duck their heads under the water, or they
would go to the docks, if the weather was warm enough, and watch people fish or
work on their boats, or they would walk down to the bay and kick off their
shoes and sit in the sand. If they could
find a place to hide themselves, like in the dunes on the beach if no one was
around, they would kiss. He would bend
toward her and she would tilt her head back and their lips would touch.
The feel and smell of her breath, the
softness of her lips, the tip of her tongue when she touched his lips with it
intoxicated him, made him lose all sense of where he was. He would close his eyes, and when he opened
them, he would sometimes see that hers were still closed. When he got home he would be unable to think
about anything but her. He would imagine
the feel of her tongue on his lips, the feel of her breath, warm and moist, and
the sense of her wholeness, her body, around which he had wrapped his
arms. He would be like that for so long
his parents thought he was dreamy and spacey and would sometimes make fun of
him.
A whole year this continued, into the
summer, and into the fall, so that they celebrated their first
anniversary. They talked like that, as
though each implicitly understood that they would spend their lives
together. Neither of them could foresee how
all that would be threatened. They were
young and had not yet experienced the pull of life.
But when
the change came, it came unnoticeably.
Neither saw it coming nor recognized it.
It began when she told him she couldn’t go to town with him on Saturday
because she had too many things to do.
She did have things to do. She
had to visit grandparents, and her mother had been after her for weeks to help
her younger sister with her math. “It’s
like all you do is eat and sleep here anymore,” her mother complained.
But he found no trouble filling his
Saturday. It had been a long time since
he tripped with his friends on a Saturday afternoon. They roughed him up and joked, laughed over
what they derided as his “marriage,” and pushed him into dangers that made his
heart flop. First they stole beer from a
convenience store, then they provoked a fight at the Seven-Eleven. But it was pushing the old Toyota that one of
them got from his father to a hundred and twenty miles an hour on the old
highway that sent his adrenaline soaring and made him forget all about her that
day.
The following Saturday, the anticipation of
hanging with his friends proved overpowering, and he told her he had too many
things to do and wouldn’t be able to go to town with her. He was reckless that Saturday. He got drunk with his friends in the early
afternoon, and, ripping to have some fun, began to prowl the neighborhoods
looking for “adventure,” as one of them said.
New homes were going up in a neighborhood nearby, a whole block of
them. The dirt mounds, piles of lumber,
stacks of shingles, rolls of insulation and electric wiring, the open
framing--all were too enticing a playground for him and his friends to let
be. All the workmen gone for the
weekend, they had the place to themselves.
They did so much damage that if their parents had to pay for it, they
would all go broke. For the boys,
though, it was exhilarating.
However, in the hours after coming down
from those heights of gleeful
destructiveness, the memory of what they had done afflicted them, and none more
so than him. They sat together in the
living room where they had gotten drunk and talked, talked about what each
thought lay ahead for him. Sometimes
they laughed, but mostly they listened seriously and became contemplative,
considering what each had to say. He left
his friends that evening wondering more about himself than he had ever done
before. Wondering about things he had
never wondered about before.
Weeks had passed and he had not seen her
except at the end of the school day, when they walked home together. Those walks were different, now, than they
had been before. Different, because he
was different. A gulf had grown between
them. He talked and she listened. As she listened, she felt him slipping away
from her. He talked about feelings,
ideas, the doing of things that mystified her.
She was both surprised and not surprised when he told her on Friday,
swinging hands with her approaching her house, that he had plans for Saturday,
plans that did not include her.
She filled her Saturday the best way she
could—considering how to lure him back.
She stood in front of the mirror on the door in her bedroom examining
herself, considering how much a touch of rouge on her cheeks, a little
eyeliner, and just a stroke of lip gloss would add to her appeal. She turned sideways and examined her bust
line. Not impressive, she thought. They could use a little help. She put on her tightest pair of jeans and
craned her neck to observe her backside, which she patted with both hands,
satisfied. For these contrivances to
work, she realized, she had to first lure him back because she could not go to
school with her bra stuffed and wearing makeup. To get him to see her the way she wanted him
to, she had first to succeed at that.
She gave a lot of thought to strategies.
Monday morning she snuck into her parents’
bathroom and lifted her mother’s compact, eyeliner, and lip gloss, putting them
in a brown paper lunch sack, which she then placed on top of her books. No one was the wiser when she left the house
and walked to the corner where the bus picked up the kids from the
neighborhood. When the bell rang at the
end of her two o’clock class, she rushed to her locker, grabbed the sack along
with the books she needed to take home with her, and ran to the restroom. She had practiced applying the makeup
Saturday afternoon, and it only took her five minutes. Tapping her black hair first on one side and
then on the other, she took a last look, then, grabbing her stuff, rushed up
the corridor to the front doors where she knew he was waiting for her. Outside, as she raised her hand for him to
grab it, she noticed the look in his eyes.
She gave him then a much practiced half smile, hoping it would mystify
him and also put ideas in his head.
She accomplished both. She did mystify him and she did put ideas in
his head. Or rather, she put one idea in
his head, the one she wanted. She found
him all eager to go to town with her the coming Saturday.
Proud of her success, she reflected on it
all week. She also carefully chose the
clothes she would wear. The tight jeans,
a tight black turtleneck which would accentuate her stuffed bra and against
which his silver ring would noticeably stand out hanging from its chain. With these she would wear white socks and her
black dress shoes. She decided, also, to
wear her single-pearl earrings. They
would go to the beach, she decided, and find a place in the dunes.
When he
left her that Monday and continued the walk home, he felt like he didn’t really
know her. She excited him. She always excited him, but she excited him differently
now. He thought about her, about what it
was. When she came out of the school,
she looked alive like she had never done before, looked more knowing in some
mysterious way, and her nearness provoked him, made him want to touch her, made
him want to do more than touch her. And
she looked at him as though she knew all that.
He thought about her and thought about her.
They
stepped out of the car and stood at the curb, watching her mother drive
off. When she turned at the corner, they
made their way to Stillwater, which was the road that would take them to the
beach. It was a long quiet walk, for it
was Saturday morning, and in the shade of the elms, they held hands. He frequently glanced at her, which made her
self-conscious and kept her from talking.
He, too, walked silently, though he held tight to her hand. They passed one by one the old Dutch style
homes that lined the avenue, and ahead they could finally see where the trees
gave out and the sand opened its long trek to the water of the bay.
When they stepped onto the beach, they both
sat in the sand and took off their shoes.
He tied the laces of his sneakers together so they wouldn’t get
separated, shoved her black shoes, which didn’t have laces, into his own
sneakers, and hung both pairs around his neck.
Then with hands over their eyes, they scanned the sunny beach for
people.
There are always people on the beach,
fishing, sitting and playing in the sand, or just walking. Where they were, the sand was leveled by the
city to keep the beach open for residents.
But on either side, a quarter mile distant each way, the wind piled the
sand into dunes, where the beach grass rooted and kept the dunes from rolling
away. It was to these dunes they were
headed, but they needed to decide which way to go. She grabbed his hand and tugged him to the
right, where there were no fishermen at the water. There were several men fishing on the other
side.
Trekking through the sand was pleasant because
it was still early and the sun had not yet heated it up. It still felt cool and moist. He let her take the lead in her eagerness and
watched her sway as she trudged through the sand. She was both familiar and exotic to him, the
same girl he had kissed in the dunes so many times, yet altogether alien now as
she swayed, as though he were meeting her for the first time. The silver ring at her neck, the tight black
turtleneck against which it bobbed as she walked, these symbolized to him all
that he felt.
They paused atop the first rise of dunes
and looked back up the beach. No one
seemed to be paying any attention to them, being distant and wrapped up in
their own doings. There was no beach
patrol at this hour buggying along the dunes or on the boardwalk some distance on
their right. Everything was ideal. She tugged again on his hand, pulling him
into the hollow between the dunes, but he shook his head, saying not here, it’s
too close. So he led her by the hand
deeper into the dunes, till they came upon a place where the beach grass grew
thickly and where the hollow seemed particularly deep, and the dunes around had
steep sloping sides. Down he pulled her,
the sand spilling at their feet, all in a rush, and when they reached the
bottom, he pulled her down onto her knees.
For a moment they looked at each other, and when she parted her lips, he
kissed her. The passion rose in him
volcanically, and he pushed her down onto her back and lay on top of her. She welcomed him with a tingling bite on the
neck.
He was thrusting at her through his jeans,
and she was receiving him, but all at once she shouted for him to stop, and he
paused, pushing himself up so he could look into her eyes. She wanted them both to take off their
clothes, right there, right then. He
looked, at first greedily, into her eyes, then, as he imagined himself naked
lying on top of her, something closed up in him, something he couldn’t
name. It wasn’t shame. He looked at her and felt the moment suddenly
become mysterious. She was not the girl he had thought he loved for the last
year. Another person peered through HER
eyes at him, touched him with HER hands, a person he knew was altogether alien,
whose purposes he couldn’t fathom. He
looked into her eyes, saw there the eagerness, the excitement, and again
something switched itself in him. His
own sense of self seemed to have stepped away, freeing him to engage this other
as an “other” himself.
As though watching himself, he slid the
jeans down his legs, unbuttoned his shirt and slid his arms out of it, then
slid his underpants off. She had done
the same. She reached for him, and
again, as though he were watching from the side, she pulled him on top of
her.
Walking back along the water’s edge, they
did not hold hands, though they walked side by side. He noticed how the gulls opened their wings
as they neared them and stepped into the air.
He noticed the tangle of seaweed at the water’s edge. And he noticed how the wind played in her
hair. All sense of strangeness had left
him. As they walked, the sand, the
gulls, the seaweed, the bay, the air, she herself, all seemed to belong, and he
felt, for the first time, a part of it.
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