Most of her college girl friends had dropped over the horizon after graduation. Bettye Hackman was with the Peace Corps in Africa, to the utter dismay of her wealthy old-line Bangor parents, and sometimes Sarah wondered what the Ugandans must make of Bettye with her white, impossible-to-tan skin and ash-blonde hair and cool, sorority good looks.
Deenie Stubbs was at grad school in Houston. Rachel Jurgens had married her fella and was currently gestating somewhere in the wilds of western Massachusetts.
Slightly dazed, Sarah had been forced to the conclusion that Johnny Smith was the first new friend she had made in a long, long time – and she had been her senior high school class’s Miss Popularity. She had acepted dates from a couple of other Cleaves teachers, just to keep things in perspective. One of them was Gene Sedecki, the new math man –
but obviously a veteran bore. The other, George Rounds, had immediately tried to make her. She had slapped his face – and the next day he’d had the gall to wink at her as they passed in the hall.
But Johnny was fun, easy to be with. And he did attract her sexually – just how strongly she couldn’t honestly say, at least not yet. A week ago, after the Friday they’d had off for the October teachers’ convention in Waterville, he had invited her back to his apartment for a home-cooked spaghetti dinner. While the sauce simmered, he had dashed around the
corner to get some wine and had come back with two bottles of Apple Zapple. Like announcing his bathroom calls, it was somehow Johnny’s style.
After the meal they had watched TV and that had turned to necking and God knew what that might have turned into if a couple of his friends, instructors from the university, hadn’t turned up with a faculty position paper on academic freedom. They wanted Johnny to look it over and see what he thought. He had done so, but with noticeably less good will than was usual with him. She had noticed that with a warm, secret delight and the ache in her own loins – the unfulfilled ache – had also delighted her, and that night she hadn’t killed it with a douche.
She turned away from the window and walked over to the sofa where Johnny had left the mask.
‘Happy Halloween,’ she snorted, and laughed a little.
‘What?’ Johnny called out.
‘I said if you don’t come pretty quick I’m going with-out you.’
‘Be right out.’
‘Swell!’
She ran a finger over the Jekyll-and-Hyde mask, kindly Dr. Jekyll the left half, ferocious, subhuman Hyde the right half. Where will we be by Thanksgiving? she wondered. Or by Christmas?
The thought sent a funny, excited little thrill shooting through her. She liked him. He was a perfectly ordinary, sweet man.
She looked down at the mask again, horrible Hyde growing out of Jekyll’s face like a lumpy carcinoma. It had been treated with fluorescent paint so it would glow in the dark.
What’s ordinary? Nothing, nobody. Not really. If he was so ordinary, how could he be planning to wear something like that into his homeroom and still be confident of keeping order? And how can the kids call him Frankenstein and still respect and like him? What’s ordinary?
Johnny came out, brushing through the beaded curtain that divided the bedroom and bathroom off from the living room.
If he wants me to go to bed with him tonight, l think I’m going to say okay.
And it was a warm thought, like coming home.
‘What are you grinning about?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, tossing the mask back to the sofa.
‘No, really. Was it something good?’
‘Johnny,’ she said, putting a hand on his chest and standing on tiptoe to kiss him lightly,
‘some things will never be told. Come on, let’s go.’
2.
They paused downstairs in the foyer while he buttoned his denim jacket, and she found her eyes drawn again to the STRIKE! poster with its clenched fist and flaming background.
‘There’ll be another student strike this year,’ he said, following her eyes.
‘The war?’
‘That’s only going to be part of it this time. Vietnam and the fight over ROTC and Kent State have activated more students than ever before. I doubt if there’s ever been a time when there were so few grunts taking up space at the university.’