She turns to the basket of balls, a slender girl of good height in denim shorts, sneakers, and a shell top. Her legs flex as she rises on tiptoe with each serve. Shes good-looking and knows it, her knowing of the functional and non-fussy sort. Shes smart, and knows it. Very few Fairhaven girls manage relationships with boys from the Academyother than the usual we-all-know-where-we-are, quick-and-dirty Winter Carnival or Spring Fling weekends, that isand she has done so in spite of the ski that trails after her wherever she goes, like a tin can tied to the bumper of a family sedan. She has managed this social hat-trick with Bruce Hope, also known as Buddy.
And when they were coming up from the basement media room after playing video gamesmost of the others still down there, and still with their mortarboards cocked back on their headsthey had overheard his gran, in the parlor with the other adults (because this was really their party; the kids would have their own tonight, first at Holy Now! out on Route 219, which had been fourwalled for the occasion by Jimmy Fredericks dad and mom, pursuant to the mandatory designated-driver rule, and then later, at the beach, under a full June moon, could you give me spoon, do I hear swoon, is there a swoon in the house).
That was Janice-Something-Unpronounceable, Gran was saying in her oddly piercing, oddly toneless deaf-lady voice. Shes very pretty, isnt she? A townie. Bruces friend for now. She didnt quite call Janice Bruces starter-model, but of course it was all in the tone.
She shrugs and hits a few more balls, legs flexing, racket reaching. The balls fly hard and true across the net, each touching down deep in the receivers box on the far side.
They have in fact learned from each other, and she suspects thats what these things are about. What they are for. And Buddy has not, in truth, been that hard to teach. He respected her from the firstmaybe a little too much. She had to teach him out of thatthe pedestal-worship part of that. And she thinks he hasnt been that bad a lover, given the fact that kids are denied the finest of accommodations and the luxury of time when it comes to giving their bodies the food they come to want.
We did the best we could, she says, and decides to go and swim with the others, let him show her off one final time. He thinks theyll have all summer before he goes off to Princeton and she goes to State, but she thinks not; she thinks part of the purpose of the upcoming Appalachian hike is to separate them as painlessly but as completely as possible. In this Janice senses not the hand of the hale-and-hearty, good-fellows-every-one father, or the somehow endearing snobbery of the grandmothera townie, Bruces friend for nowbut the smiling and subtle practicality of the mother, whose one fear (it might as well be stamped on her lovely, unlined forehead) is that the townie girl with the tin can tied to the end of her name will get pregnant and trap her boy into the wrong marriage.
It would be wrong, too, she murmurs as she wheels the basket of balls into the shed and flips the latch. Her friend Marcy keeps asking her what she sees in him at allBuddy, she all but sneers, wrinkling her nose. What do you do all weekend? Go to garden parties? To polo matches?
In fact, they have been to a couple of polo matches, because Tom Hope still ridesalthough, Buddy confided, this was apt to be his last year if he didnt stop putting on weight. But they have also made love, some of it sweaty and intense. Sometimes, too, he makes her laugh. Less often, nowshe has an idea that his capacity to surprise and amuse is far from infinitebut yes, he still does. Hes a lean and narrow-headed boy who breaks the rich-kid-geek mold in interesting and sometimes very unexpected ways. Also he thinks the world of her, and that isnt entirely bad for a girls self-image.
Still, she doesnt think he will resist the call of his essential nature forever. By the age of thirty-five or so, she guesses he will have lost most or all of his enthusiasm for eating pussy and will be more interested in collecting coins. Or refinishing Colonial rockers, like his father does out in theahemcarriage-house.
She walks slowly up the long acre of green grass, looking out toward the blue toys of the city dreaming in the far distance. Closer at hand are the sounds of shouts and splashing from the pool. Inside, Bruces mother and father and gran and closest friends will be celebrating the one chicks high school graduation in their own way, at a formal tea. Tonight the kids will go out and party down in a more righteous mode. Alcohol and not a few tabs of X will be ingested. Club music will throb through big speakers. No one will play the country stuff Janice grew up with, but thats all right; she still knows where to find it.
When she graduates there will be a much smaller party, probably at Aunt Kays restaurant, and of course she is bound for educational halls far less grand or traditional, but she has plans to go farther than she suspects Buddy goes even in his dreams. She will be a journalist. She will begin on the campus newspaper, and then will see where that takes her. One rung at a time, thats the way to do it. There are plenty of rungs on the ladder. She has talent to go along with her looks and unshowy self-confidence. She doesnt know how much, but she will find out. And theres luck. That, too. She knows enough not to count on it, but also enough to know it tends to come down on the side of the young.
She reaches the stone-flagged patio and looks down the rolling acre of lawn to the double tennis court. It all looks very big and very rich, very special, but she is wise enough to know she is only eighteen. There may come a time when it all looks quite ordinary to her, even in the eye of her memory. Quite small. It is this sense of perspective before the fact that makes it all right for her to be Janice-Something- Unpronounceable, and a townie, and Bruces friend for now. Buddy, with his narrow head and fragile ability to make her laugh at unexpected times. He has never made her feel small, probably knows shed leave him the first time he ever tried.
She can go directly through the house to the pool and the changing rooms on the far side, but first she turns slightly to her left to once again look at the city across all those miles of blue afternoon distance. She has time to think, It could be my city someday, I could call it home, before an enormous spark lights up there, as if some God deep in the machinery had suddenly flicked His Bic.
She winces from the brilliance, which is at first like a thick, isolated stroke of lightning. And then the entire southern sky lights up a soundless lurid red. Formless bloodglare obliterates the buildings. Then for a moment they are there again, but ghostlike, as if seen through an interposing lens. A second or a tenth of a second after that they are gone forever, and the red begins to take on the shape of a thousand newsreels, climbing and boiling.
It is silent, silent.
Bruces mother comes out on the patio and stands next to her, shading her eyes. She is wearing a new blue dress. A tea-dress. Her shoulder brushes Janices and they look south at the crimson mushroom climbing, eating up the blue. Smoke is rising from around the edgesdark purple in the sunshineand then being pulled back in. The red of the fireball is too intense to look at, it will blind her, but Janice cannot look away. Water is gushing down her cheeks in broad warm streams, but she cannot look away.
Whats that? Bruces mother asks. If its some kind of advertising, its in very poor taste!
Its a bomb, Janice says. Her voice seems to be coming from somewhere else. On a live feed from Hartford, maybe. Now huge black blisters are erupting in the red mushroom, giving it hideous features that shift and changenow a cat, now a dog, now Bobo the Demon Clowngrimacing across the miles above what used to be New York and is now a smelting furnace. A nuke. And an almighty big one. No little dirty backpack model, or
Whap! Heat spreads upward and downward on the side of her face, and water flies from both of her eyes, and her head rocks. Bruces Mom has just slapped her. And hard.