Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [41]
Sitting in the back seat, Nicole remembered a time when she was 12 years old and her dad took her to a bar. She thought he was showing her off, but soon found out he had a girl friend in there he wanted to show off, and knew she wouldn't tell her mother. Only, at the door, she stopped. NO ONE UNDER 21 ADMITTED was what the sign read.
Her father pointed to the 2 and the 1 and he said, It says no one under 12. You're old enough. She never was all sure when she was reading numbers backwards and so thought 21 was 12 that day. Now that she had become 14, it was all she could do to keep from laughing about it.
Charley sure made a sight drinking with Hampton. In fact her father looked a little like her husband-to-be. She began to think they both looked like Uncle Lee, damn him!
Well, the trip turned out to be not too bad. They picked up a friend of hers named Cheryl Kumer, and she drove with them to Elko, Nevada, where Nicole and Jim Hampton got married.
Jim was never rough with her, but kind of sweet, and treated her like she was a precious doll. He was always saying to the rest of his friends who weren't married, Hey, look what I got. You know? He didn't have a job so they were living on unemployment. He wouldn't go to work, but really knew how to use a fingernail file on Coke machines. Even if she didn't wholly like living on dimes and quarters, Nicole thought they were having fun.
After a few months, she was still faithful to him, which wasn't a bad trip. She was trying to unsort her sex hang-ups. They went from too little to too much. She could never come in those days which she knew wasn't all Hampton's fault. Besides Uncle Lee, she had one other big secret in her past she never told Hampton about. It happened the first time she left the nuthouse on a weekend pass and stayed at the party for two days and two nights. That was months before she'd even met Hampton.
The guy that talked her into coming over from her grandmother's house on that occasion was about 28, and there had been booze and dope to smoke. She really liked that dude. He babied her, and paid a lot of attention, and kept her close by. When he made love, it left her feeling kind of mellow. Then he told his buddies there was a sweet little thing in the bedroom, go talk to her. Nicole was really hung up on the guy even when he began to hint to her that she would be befriending him if she would fuck his friends, you know.
Nicole felt a lot of things as it was going on. She took herself off to a distance and watched herself. It was a way to think about things. Think out problems.
Bottom of all, she was proud. Even if, to some degree, the fellows were fucking her over, yet she was into the kind of party her friends would be too chicken to go along on. That was exciting. So she got a little wasted and ended up with just about every guy in the house. Maybe she was there for three days. She just never went out.
In the middle of it, she met Barrett for the first time. He came walking into the bedroom, a skinny little guy she'd never seen before. There she was all alone in bed on the second day, feeling spacey, and he walked in, and spoke to her from the hallway. He said, You know you don't have to do this. You're better than this. Yes, he said, you don't have to waste it all. That was her first memory of her second husband, Jim Barrett. He was only there a few minutes, but she always remembered the way his face looked then.
She didn't see Barrett again until a month later when she was back in the nuthouse, and they threw him in, too. He wasn't the least bit crazy. He had, however, gone AWOL from the Army, so his father signed papers to have him committed. The nuthouse was better than the Stockade. Barrett's father had been a State Trooper, he told her, before he became an insurance agent, so from the point of view of the authorities, the son had to be kind of crazy.
She really fell in love with Barrett in the nuthouse. They were almost the same two people. He was so cunning looking, so really sweet, a real pussycat.