The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [108]
“What’s wrong?”
She can’t answer him. How can she explain? No one cries because of the light. It’s absurd.
She sniffs, trying to hold back the snot that wants to run out of her nose. She has no handkerchief or tissue. Thomas searches his pockets, producing a stick of gum, a pack of cigarettes, and a ditto sheet from school. None of which will do. “Use your sleeve,” he says.
Obediently, she does. She takes a long breath through her nose.
“You’re . . . ,” he begins.
But she shakes her head back and forth, as though to warn him not to say another word. Reluctantly, she has to let the light go. She has to think about what might be on the ditto sheet, about how she’ll have to sit on the mattress to do her homework later, about her aunt — thoughts guaranteed to stop the tears.
“Linda,” Thomas says, taking her hand.
She squeezes his, digging in her fingernails as if she were about to fall. He moves to kiss her, but she turns her head away. His lips graze the side of her mouth.
“I can’t,” she says.
He lets go of her hand. He moves an inch or two away from her. He shakes a cigarette from the pack and lights it.
“I like you, Thomas,” Linda says, sorry to have hurt him.
He twists his mouth and nods, as if to say he doesn’t believe a word of it. “You don’t seem to want any part of me,” he says.
“It’s just . . .” she begins.
“It’s just what?” he asks tonelessly.
“There are things you don’t know about me,” she says.
“So tell me,” he says.
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“I can’t.”
“There isn’t anything I wouldn’t tell you,” Thomas says, and she can hear that he’s aggrieved.
“I know,” she says, wondering if that’s altogether true. Everyone has things, private things, embarrassing things, one keeps to oneself.
She shudders as she takes a breath. “Let’s not do this, OK?”
______
It is much the same in a dark car parked later that week at the beach. They can hear, but cannot see, the surf. The windows are steamed from the talking. In addition to the steam, she notices, the windshield has a film of smoke on it in which she could write her name. She is staring at the line of rust where the top of the convertible meets the body of the car.
“So where will you apply?” Thomas asks.
“Apply?”
“To college. You’re smart. You must know you could get in anywhere.”
He has a plaid scarf wound around his neck. It isn’t that late, only seven o’clock. She is supposed to be at the library. He’s supposed to be at hockey practice.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I was thinking about secretarial school.”
“Jesus Christ, Linda.”
“I’ll have to get a job.”
“So go to college and get a better job.”
“Money might be a problem.
“There are scholarships.”
She doesn’t want to talk about it. She is wearing a rose heather cardigan and a matching wool skirt. She has on one of Eileen’s white blouses. She’s begun parting her hair in the middle and letting it curl down on either side. She likes the way it obscures her face when she bends forward.
Thomas is looking out the driver’s-side window, annoyed with her. “You have to get over this . . . inferiority thing,” he says.
She scratches a bit of crust from the knee of her skirt. She has nylons on, but her feet are freezing. The Skylark has any number of holes through which the cold seeps.
“Thomas, if I told you, you wouldn’t ever be able to think about me in the same way again,” she says.
“Fuck that.”
She has never heard him use the word.
She is silent for so long, and he is breathing so shallowly, that the windshield begins to clear of fog. She can make out the cottage fifty feet in front of them. It looks lonely and cold, she thinks. She would like to be able to open the door, turn on the lights, make a fire, and shake out the bedclothes. Make a pot of soup. Have a place of her own.
If only she could have a place of her own, she thinks.
She is sweating under her sweater.
“My aunt had a boyfriend,” she begins just at the very moment Thomas leans forward to kiss her.