Dan didn’t talk on the way back. He had a scratch on one cheek. Just one scratch. When they got back to Hart Hall, her dorm, she told him she didn’t want to see him anymore.
‘Any way you want it, babe,’ he said with an indifference that had chilled her – and the second time he called after the Brass Rail incident she had gone out with him. Part of her had hated herself for that.
It had continued all that fall semester of her senior year. He had frightened and attracted her at the same time. He was her first real lover, and even now, two days shy of Halloween 1970, he had been her only real lover.
She and Johnny had not been to bed.
Dan had been very good. He had used her, but he had been very good. He would not take any precautious and so she had been forced to go to the university infirmary, where she
talked fumblingly about painful menstruation and got the pill. Sexually, Dan had dominated her all along. She did not have many orgasms with him, but his very roughness brought her some, and in the weeks before it had ended she bad begun to feel a mature woman’s greediness for good sex, a desire that was bewilderingly intermixed with other feelings: dislike for both Dan and herself, a feeling that no sex that depended so much on humiliation and domination could really be called ‘good sex,’ and self-contempt for her own inability to call a halt to a relationship that seemed based on destructive feelings.
It had ended swiftly, early this year. He flunked out. ‘Where will you be going?’ she asked him timidly, sitting on his roomie’s bed as he threw things into two suitcases. She had wanted to ask other, more personal questions. Will you be near here? Will you take a job?
Take night classes? Is there a place for me in your plans? That question, above all others, she had not been able to ask. Because she wasn’t prepared for any answer. The answer he gave to her one neutral question was shocking enough.
‘Vietnam, I guess.’
‘What?’
He reached onto a shelf, thumbed briefly through the papers there, and tossed her a letter.
It was from the induction center in Bangor: an order to report for his physical exam.
‘Can’t you get out of it?’
‘No. Maybe. I don’t know.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘I don’t think I even want to try.’
She had stared at him, shocked.
‘I’m tired of this scene. College and get a job and find a little wifey. You’ve been applying for the little wifey spot, I guess. And don’t think I haven’t thought it over. It wouldn’t work. You know it wouldn’t, and so do I. We don’t fit, Sarah.’
She had fled then, all her questions answered, and she never saw him again. She saw his roommate a few times. He got three letters from Dan between January and June. He was inducted and sent down south somewhere for basic training. And that was the last the roommate had heard. It was the last Sarah Bracknell heard, too.
At first she thought she was going to be okay. All those sad, torchy songs, the ones you always seem to hear on the car radio after midnight, they didn’t apply to her. Or the cliches about the end of the affair or the crying jags. She didn’t pick up a guy on the rebound or start doing the bars. Most evenings that spring she spent studying quietly in her dorm room. It was a relief. It wasn’t messy.
It was only after she met Johnny – at a freshman mixer dance last month; they were both chaperoning, purely by luck of the draw that she realized what a horror her last semester
at school had been. It was the kind of thing you couldn’t see when you were in it, it was too much a part of you. Two donkeys meet at a hitching rail in a western town. One of them is a town donkey with nothing on his back but a saddle. The other is a prospector’s donkey, loaded down with packs, camping and cooking gear, and four fifty-pound sacks of ore. His back is bent into a concertina shape from the weight. The town donkey says, That’s quite a load you got there. And the prospector 5 donkey says, What load?