Julie’s waist-long blonde hair swings from side-to-side as I walk behind her like a dutiful little duckling. With a confident stride, chin held high, shoulders thrust back to perfect her posture, I am in awe of her as she yanks open the door to “Frank’s Burger Palace.” The place, trapped in a bit of a time warp, has survived urban renewal, and is always packed. The cacophony of metal chairs scraping along the vinyl floor, the jukebox playing pop tunes, the sizzle of the grill, and patrons shouting to be heard is deafening. The décor is a medley of 1930s art deco, 1950s drive-in, and 1970s melamine and pressboard. No updates have been made in over 30 years. Frank himself flips burgers in the back and occasionally is heard yelling, “For crying out loud.” Julie peruses the crowd looking for Jim Dempsey, the young man she thinks is her fiancé. He gave her a large white opal for Christmas that she takes to be an engagement ring. When I ask her with great interest how he proposed, for truly I can not imagine being engaged myself in just a year, she replies with an assured smile as she admires the gemstone on her finger, “Well . . . he didn’t really have to say anything. I just knew.” I marvel at the romantic notion of being one mind with another person.
Even though every day at the diner turns out the same, tension suffuses the air in the moments just before we see Jim wave us over to a table. He is always seated with his closest friends—guys with sport-fucker reputations that girls like me generally steer clear of. But, I am with Julie, who is practically the Virgin Mary, and Jim always plays the role of fatherly protectorate if any of his guy friends say anything that might be considered crossing the line of propriety.
“Hey, dick-face,” he says one day to Mark Kohler, who has just put his hand on my knee, making me blush up to my hairline, “Mind your manners.” Mark readily obeys the alpha male of his pack.
When both my schedule and Julie’s change for second term, the whole rhythm of my high school existence changes with it. Julie’s two classes are in the morning. The first isn’t until second period; she is done before noon. Having spent the past two and half years as one of Julie’s appendages, I find myself a bit friendless in the wake of her departure from my daily life. I start taking the bus each morning, a drudge I have been spared thus far by the welcome appearance of the Lumina in my driveway each morning. Having no way of getting to Frank’s, I start packing PB&J in a brown bag. It is January, and the cold north winds off the ocean blow impartially into the city whipping us kids indoors.
On the first day of the new schedules, I wander into the cafeteria alone and unsure of where to go to purchase a carton of milk. I stand in what seems to be a very long line looking surreptitiously over my shoulders to make sure no one notices how alone I am. The school has 3,000 students and yet, it seems, as I stand here amidst the din of hundreds of conversations, I know no one. Just as I am about to slink off to a corner to eat my PB&J in solitude having decided to get some water at the fountain afterwards, someone taps me on the arm.
An attractive auburn-haired girl smiles as she asks, “Is this the line for lunch?”
I am surprised by this coincidence that halfway through the school year someone else should be just as lost as I am. Extremely relieved to find a kindred spirit, I cough a little laugh and say, “I really am not sure myself, but I think so.”
“Do you mind if I stand here with you?” she asks, displaying a sweet face with beautifully aligned white teeth. She has warm brown eyes and long dark lashes. I am instantly interested in getting to know her better and welcome the comfort she brings me by offering some companionship in the lonely lunch line.
Maggie Stone is from somewhere in Ohio. I find that she moved to our town early last summer. As we talk, I discover that her parents are the new owners operating a restaurant called The Old Mill. She and her family live above the restaurant located less than a mile from my house. I am pleased to learn she lives so close and she is happy to finally make the acquaintance “of a girl I think I could actually like.” We are fast friends.
With her parents in the restaurant business, a relentless microcosm of activity off kilter with the traditional schedules of schools and other businesses, Maggie is a wild child. The apartment above the rustic-style restaurant is one huge room with perhaps as many as a dozen oriental rugs covering the unpolished pine board floor. Long large windows along the southern side look out onto a curved stone driveway where guests of The Old Mill can be dropped off under the shelter of a wisteria arbor. A view of the little inland pond, where the still-operating water mill churns rhythmically, is also visible. I am enchanted.
The first thing Maggie invites me to do is attend a play she is performing in at The Old Mill. Her parents are attempting to create a cultural environment to attract the Boston crowd to the bucolic atmosphere of their restaurant. They founded a small community theater group and turned one of the restaurant’s previous owner’s banquet rooms into an art gallery. The gallery showcases work by local artisans and Mr. and Mrs. Stone woo artists struggling for recognition in the Boston Metro area to it. In the play, Maggie plays one of the daughters in Paul Zindel’s The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. I am completely and utterly clueless as to the meaning of this play, but nevertheless compliment Maggie on her performance.
The few times I spend the night with her, we take the back way to the kitchen whenever we are hungry. The Old Mill chef fixes us anything we want. One night after he has made us baked potatoes and lets us split a filet mignon dinner that has been sent back to the kitchen for being overcooked, we switch off all the lights in the apartment, strike a match to a bunch of candles, and curl up on the overstuffed couch. We gaze out large windows that allow a perfect view of the restaurant property’s little pond and water mill. The sky is clear and full of stars. The silence grows long between us as we each let our minds wander to our own thoughts. “Laura,” she whispers in the candlelit darkness of the room, “have you ever done it?” My heart takes a little leap at the question. The only person I have ever talked about sex with is my best friend, Evy, who spends most of the year away at boarding school.
“You mean, ‘done it’ done it?” I ask not quite ready to divulge any information to Maggie.
“Yes,” she answers.
Besides whispered words with Evy, this is a subject the people I know would simply not bring up, unless it is in the context of a rumor. There are rumors, of course, mostly about the group of girls that call themselves The Fivers. Several long minutes pass by before Maggie picks up one of the candles and holds it close enough to my face to see if I am still awake. “Gees, I thought you’d fallen asleep or something.”
I look sheepishly at her and say, “No, I’m awake.”
She sets the candle down between us and snuggles up closer to me linking her arm with mine. “Well,” she asks again, “have you?” The candlelight flickers and throws a beautiful glow of light on our faces.
“No,” I lie, “I haven’t.” I’m not embarrassed about my relationship with Scott. I just don’t want anyone to know.
Another silence stretches out between Maggie and me before I then ask, “Have you?” I scrunch my face up as if bracing for a blast of hot air. Maggie settles in next to me as she relaxes all the muscles in her body. Until then, I hadn’t realized how tense we’d both been.
“Last summer,” she begins, “right after we moved here, I met Eric Shields.” Eric is a year older than we are and a high school senior with Evy’s brother Marcus. I can’t say I ever really met Eric, although I certainly know who he is. His mother is one of the best piano teachers in town. She often plays with local symphony orchestras and has guested with the Boston Symphony on a number of occasions over the years. Eric is a soft but good-looking blonde sixteen-year-old when Maggie meets him. She mistakes his shy introvert of a personality for depth and mystery and is immediately attracted to him.
“How did you meet Eric?” I ask.
Maggie explains. “He and David Samuels came into the restaurant looking for Dave’s older brother, Tim. Tim was part of the crew my dad hired to convert the old banquet room into the art gallery. I was in the dining room helping to reset the tables after the lunch crowd had left and there he was standing there with his mop of blonde hair and those sparkling blue eyes of his.” Maggie takes a moment to let out a little sigh. “We just sort of smiled at each other and that was it. He came back later in the afternoon, got up the courage to ask where I was, and we went out for a walk around the pond.” I conjure the picture Maggie paints of her and Eric walking around the pond and smile at the sweetness of it. “We started making out and he reached up under the skirt I was wearing. I swear to god, Laura, I never have breathed that hard in my whole life.”
“Weren’t you scared?” I ask feeling my own heart starting to beat a little faster.
“Hell no,” she says, as she goes into graphic detail. The way she talks is even more provocative than the first time I read a sex scene in a novel. Thinking about what she is saying and imagining what she and Eric did, makes me have that same achy feeling I got when I read about Scarlett and Rhett in Gone With the Wind.
“Are you still going out with him?” I ask.
“No, we broke up just after school started. But, all summer long we did it just about every day.” I try to imagine doing it every day. “The best time,” she continues, “was after we’d drunk half a bottle of vodka. We worked ourselves into such a frenzy that when it was over, we were both soaking wet with sweat. All we could do afterwards was lie there in a puddle of body fluids.” I look over at Maggie whose sweet face is lit by the moonlight that pours in through the big windows. Candlelight flickers in the room and I lie there staring up at the ceiling stunned by her story. Maggie is already living a very grown-up life. I am jealous of her freedom from convention even though I don’t really have a desire to imitate it.
Having shared such an intimate detail about herself with me, I feel guilty about not returning the favor. But, I just simply cannot divulge my most closely guarded secret to her. Evy doesn’t even know about Scott. I can’t even say his name without a frisson rippling its way through my body. The secret ritual of our affair and our feelings for one another is too great, too deep, too terrifying, and too precious to reveal. I am afraid that if anyone else knows, the passion will be sucked away by the jealousy and contempt others will have for a bond they can’t begin to understand.
