Chapter 6
Saturday nights were date nights. I told my friends, and any boy who asked, that I had no interest in going on a date with anyone.
Most Saturday nights, I babysat. I liked that after my charges went to bed, I had privacy I didn’t have at home.
Sometimes I just read, but often, I’d get out my drawing pad and sketch Leonard’s face from memory.
It was the only thing that eased the ache, and with practice, my sketches got better.
By December, the week before Leonard turned eighteen, I finished a drawing of him that I was proud of, and it was small enough for me to tuck into a card.
The morning of his birthday, I waited in a corner with a view of his locker.
I planned to slip him the card as I passed.
He never showed up. I waited at lunch, too, but never saw him. I found Dale, talking with two other boys in front of the auditorium. I asked if he knew if Leonard was sick at home.
He seemed surprised that I would ask.
“I would think you’d know more than I would.” His voice had an edge to it. I waved him away from his friends, and though he did step away from them, he seemed begrudging.
“You know we broke up?” I whispered.
He nodded. “Now he’s always busy brooding.”
I guessed what he meant. Before we’d broken up, Leonard was always, or often, busy with me. We’d brought Dale along on plenty of outings; still, Leonard’s quick change in availability must have been hard for Dale. They’d been friends since seventh grade.
“You know it’s his birthday?” I asked.
After a moment’s consideration, Dale agreed this was true. “I’ll call him later,” he said. “I’m sure he’s fine, Nora. You can get the flu on your birthday.”
But I had a bad feeling, and the feeling grew throughout the afternoon. When I got home, Mae and Janet were off somewhere, and of course my father was still at work. I found Bobby lying on the couch, listening to the radio. I offered him a quarter to call Leonard.
He squinted. “Why can’t you call him?”
“Because I can’t,” I said, and nothing else. He knew very well that Leonard and I had broken up.
“What am I supposed to say?”
I told him if one of Leonard’s parents answered, he should ask to speak to Leonard. If he was asked who was calling, he was to say it was Bobby from the junior swim team.
Bobby appeared offended. “Why junior swim team?”
“Because you’re in seventh grade, and you sound like it. Listen, even when you get Leonard on the phone, just keep saying you’re Bobby from junior swim team, wanting to wish him a happy birthday. He’ll know it’s you. But they’ve got two telephones, so one of his parents could be on the line.”
“Jeez.” Bobby rolled his eyes. “What’s the big secret?”
I shook my head.
“Fifty cents,” he said. I agreed, and he got up, very slowly. My brother was almost my height now, and though anyone who looked would have guessed we were siblings, he resembled our mother more than I did. He had her sharp, alert-looking eyes.
“Why do they have two telephones?”
“They just do.” I wanted to pinch him. I turned off the radio and followed him into the kitchen, standing close as he dialed.
I expected to hear Mrs. Lifton say Good afternoon, Lifton residence, in her way that almost sounded like singing.
To my surprise, Leonard’s father answered, his greeting clipped and sharp.
Bobby made big eyes at me, but he pressed ahead, asking if he could please speak to Leonard.
Mr. Lifton said Leonard wasn’t taking calls.
He didn’t ask if he could take a message. He just hung up.
“Jeez Louise,” Bobby said. “Somebody needs some manners.”
When I tried to give him the quarters, he squeezed his nose to sound like an operator and said, “No connection. Your payment will be returned,” then went back to the living room and turned the radio on. I stayed in the kitchen, staring at the telephone, as if it could explain.
—
The next morning, I got to school early and again waited by Leonard’s locker. But it was Dale who tapped me on the shoulder. He told me that at lunch, Leonard would meet me behind Triplett’s, the drive-in across the street.
“Why?” I asked. “What’s going on?”
Dale held up his palms. “I’ll let him tell you. You won’t believe it.”
“Just tell me.”
He shook his head, walking away. “You won’t believe it!” he yelled. His long legs had moved him halfway down the hall when he looked back over his shoulder. “You won’t! He’s lost his mind!”
At that point, I guessed what had happened, or I thought I did.
The only thing that made sense was that Leonard had gone along with his original plan of dropping out of school.
Maybe he’d already gotten a job in construction, or he’d started training.
Of course that would make his father angry.
I was angry, too. Now he was asking me to head over to Triplett’s and meet him in broad daylight, when he knew what I’d promised his mother, and what would happen if she learned we’d been talking.
But when the lunch bell rang, out I went, dashing across Fifth Avenue North.
Triplett’s was always busy at lunch, a car parked in every space, the carhops hustling.
I kept my head down, glad to duck behind the building, where it was quieter, though the air smelled like cooking grease, and the dumpster swarmed with flies.
Leonard sat alone at a picnic table hidden from the street.
He stood and opened his arms to me. I glared and shook my head.
“You dropped out?” I asked.
He put his arms down. It was a cool day, overcast. At the edge of the pavement, the withered leaves of a Pindo palm rustled in the breeze.
“I did,” he said. And still I wanted to go to him. He was wearing his green jacket, which I once wore home after swimming. After Janet fell asleep, I’d gotten it out of my schoolbag and slept with it beside me.
“Sit down with me.” He gestured to the table. “I ordered you a burger. No pickles.”
“Drop back in, Leonard. Your parents already hate me enough.”
He gave me a look that suggested I didn’t know the half of it. “Please sit with me, Nora. I need to tell you something. You’re going to get upset, but it’ll be okay. Just hear me out.”
I told him I was already upset. I was cold, too. “Where’s your car?”
“I’ll get to that. You want my jacket?” He started to take it off.
I told him I didn’t. But I went over and sat at the table. He sat beside me, one knee bouncing. I thought of the principal in sixth grade, coming to get me out of Mr. Pile’s class.
“Just tell me.” I reached over to still his knee.
“I joined the army.”
I removed my hand. It wasn’t the kind of joke he would make.
“Yeah.” He laughed a little, smoothing back his hair. “I went down on my birthday and signed up. The recruiter was happy to have me.” He took in my expression. “Let me explain, okay? I thought about—”
“You can undo that,” I said.
“I signed a contract.”
“It’s just been a day,” I said. “You can undo it.”
My teeth started to chatter. He took off his jacket and put it over my shoulders. It was cotton, unlined, but it still carried his warmth.
“Listen,” he said. “This is the best way for us. And it’s the best way for me. Just for me, Nora. I can’t tell you how good it felt when I told him I’d done it. The look on his face. We both knew it. He doesn’t own me, not anymore.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Now the army does. Leonard, undo it.”
“It’s three years,” he said. “A three-year enlistment, and then I’ll be done.
Then I can pay for school myself. I won’t have to answer to him for anything.
But if I go up to school, that’s four years without you.
And the clock wouldn’t even start until next fall.
So really that’s four and a half. With the army, the clock starts ticking as soon as I’m in basic. ”
“When’s that?”
“Next month.”
“Where?”
He reached under the jacket to find my hand. “Kentucky. Fort Knox.”
“Undo it.”
A gull circled over the dumpster, then landed on the edge of the picnic table.
There it stayed, inspecting us as we quarreled.
Leonard asked what I had against the army.
It would be the same as going off to college, he said.
He’d just learn different things. I told him I had nothing against the army, but since I’d known him, he’d been talking about getting into a certain kind of school.
“You told me that,” I said. “It wasn’t just your father. You, Leonard. You wanted to go.”
“Well,” he said. “That’s not what I want anymore.
” He shrugged when he said this, like it was just a little change of plans.
“I don’t want to live like a pool ball. Aimed and pushed by somebody else.
” He turned and squinted at the gull. “The secret to happiness is freedom,” he said. “And the secret to freedom is courage.”
I asked if he was quoting someone, and he nodded and said the name of somebody Greek.
That made me turn hard. I told him that for somebody so smart, who’d read so much and remembered so much, he was being awfully foolish.
I told him what he’d done made no sense to me.
If he waited just five months, he could at least graduate from high school, get his own place, and do whatever he wanted.
“Except see you,” he said. “You’ll still be living at home, scared of my mother, what she’ll say. I might as well be serving my country. I might as well be anywhere. I’m done living under that roof.”
The waitress came out with our tray. She started to comment on the weather, then took in our faces and went silent. She set the tray down and gave me a knowing look before she went back in.
“Will you eat something?” he asked.
I shook my head. Even with the jacket, I was cold. Something bad was going to happen to him. I knew it.
“Leonard,” I said. “There’s no reason to lock yourself into something. A year from now you might decide—”
He stood up so quickly that I stopped talking. He put his hands behind his neck and walked to the palm tree. I could see, under his thin shirt, the tense muscles of his back. But when he turned around, his face was calm.
“That’s just it,” he said. “I want a lock. You don’t want to get married now?
Okay. Fine. I accept that. But I’m committing.
I’m committing right now. And if you change your mind about me, I won’t like it, but you won’t have to feel bad because I’m making this decision for me.
I want something I can’t undo. That’s what I need right now.
I’m so sick of him telling me how grateful I’ll be, how he thinks he knows me, knows everything. He doesn’t.”
Intractable, I thought. That was another thing his mother said.
“What did your mother say?”
He didn’t answer.
“What did she say?”
“That I’ve changed. She said you changed me. She didn’t mean it in a good way. But it is in a good way, Nora. I needed to change.”
“Did she cry?”
His mouth tightened. I could see he didn’t like to think of it. But I made myself picture Mrs. Lifton in tears, standing in her bright, pretty kitchen as her husband and son threatened and yelled.
“Where’s your car?”
He sat beside me again. “He took the keys back. I don’t care.”
“How’d you get here?”
“Walked.” He turned back to the tray. “Why don’t you eat something?”
“How will you get to Kentucky?”
“The bus.”
“I’m not hungry.” I stood and started to take off the jacket. He shook his head, refusing it. I was glad. I wanted to keep of him what I could.
“Nora…”
“Good luck.” I just started walking. I didn’t even turn around. I didn’t kiss him goodbye or tell him that I loved him. I believed, incorrectly, my hardness might still change his mind.