‘Yeah. I do.’
I saw something else, too: she was saying almost exactly what Nate had said not an hour before . . . only she had marched. Had taken one of the signs and marched with it. Of course Nate Hoppenstand had never been beaten up by three boys who started out joking and then decided they were serious after all. And maybe that was the difference.
‘He carried me up that hill,’ she said. ‘I always wanted to tell him how much I loved him for that, and how much I loved him for showing Harry Doolin that there’s a price to pay for hurting people, especially people who are smaller than you and don’t mean you any harm.’
‘So you marched.’
‘I marched. I wanted to tell someone why. I wanted to tell someone who’d understand. My father won’t and my mother can’t. Her friend Rionda called me and said . . . ‘ She didn’t finish, only sat there on the milk-box, fidgeting with her little bag.
‘Said what?’
‘Nothing.’ She sounded exhausted, forlorn. I wanted to kiss her, at least put my arm around her, but I was afraid doing either would spoil what had just happened. Because something had happened. There was magic in her story. Not in the middle, but somewhere out around the edges. I felt it.
‘I marched, and I guess I’ll join the Committee of Resistance. My roommate says I’m crazy.
I’ll never get a job if a commie student group’s part of my college records, but I think I’m going to do it.’
‘And your father? What about him?’
‘Fuck him.’
There was a semi-shocked moment when we considered what she had just said, and then Carol giggled. ‘Now that’s Freudian.’ She stood up. ‘I have to go back and study. Thanks for coming out, Pete. I haven’t ever shown that picture to anyone. I haven’t looked at it myself in who knows how long. I feel better. Lots.’
‘Good.’ I got up myself. ‘Before you go in, will you help me do something?’
‘Sure, what?’
‘I’ll show you. I won’t take long.’
I walked her down the side of Holyoke and then we started up the hill behind it. About two hundred yards away was the Steam Plant parking lot, where undergrads ineligible for parking stickers (freshmen, sophomores, and most juniors) had to keep their cars. It was the prime makeout spot on campus once it got cold, but making out in my car wasn’t on my mind that night.
‘Did you ever tell Bobby about who got his baseball glove?’ I asked. ‘You said you wrote to him.’
‘I didn’t see the point.’
We walked in silence for a little while. Then I said: ‘I’m going to call it off with Annmarie over Thanksgiving. I started to phone her, then didn’t. If I’m going to do it, I guess I better find the guts to do it face to face.’ I hadn’t been aware of coming to any such decision, not consciously, but it seemed I had. Certainly it wasn’t something I was saying just to please Carol.
She nodded, scuffing through the leaves in her sneakers, holding her little bag in one hand, not looking at me. ‘I had to use the phone. Called S-J and told him I was seeing a guy.’
I stopped. ‘When?’
‘Last week.’ Now she looked up at me. Dimples; slightly curved lower lip; the smile.
‘Last week? And you didn’t tell me?’
‘It was my business,’ she said, ‘Mine and Sully’s. I mean, it isn’t like he’s going to come after you with a . . . ‘ She paused long enough for both of us to think with a baseball bat and then went on, ‘That he’s going to come after you, or anything. Come on, Pete. If we’re going to do something, let’s do it. I’m not going riding with you, though. I really have to study.’
‘No rides.’
We got walking again. The Steam Plant lot seemed huge to me in those days — hundreds of cars parked in dozens of moonlit rows. I could hardly ever remember where I left my brother’s old Ford wagon. The last time I was back at UM, the lot was three, maybe even four times as big, with space for a thousand cars or more. Time passes and everything gets bigger except us.