The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [45]
“Take everything off.”
“We can’t here,” said Frances, though she knew they would. They always took all their clothes off, even that first time in the woods; she had never believed she could feel the cold so little.
Only once before here, in the school, in this same room, and that had been in the summer holidays, just after dark. All the woodwork in the science room had been freshly painted and there had been no warning signs up—why should there be, nobody was expected to get in. The smell was strong enough, when they finally noticed. They had twisted around somehow so that their legs were in this doorway, and they both got smeared with the paint from the door frame. Fortunately Ted had been wearing shorts that evening—an odd sight in town, at the time—and had been able to tell Greta the truth, that he had smeared his leg when he went to do something in the science room, without having to explain how his legs were bare. Frances did not have to explain since her mother was beyond noticing such things. She did not clean the crescent of paint off (it was just above her ankle); she let it wear away, and enjoyed looking at it and knowing it was there, just as she enjoyed the dark bruises, the bite marks, on her upper arms and shoulders, that she could easily have covered with long sleeves but often did not. Then people would say to her, “How did you get that nasty bruise?” and she would say, “You know, I don’t know! I bruise so easily. Every time I look at myself, there’s a bruise!” Her sister-in-law Adelaide, her brother’s wife, was the only one who would know what it was, and would find occasion to say something.
“Oh-oh, you been out with that tomcat again. Haven’t you, eh? Haven’t you?” She would laugh and even put her finger to the mark.
Adelaide was the only person Frances had told. Ted said he had told nobody, and she believed him. He did not know that she had told Adelaide. She wished she had not. She did not like Adelaide well enough to make a confidante of her. It was all vulgar, discreditable; she had done it just to have somebody to parade in front of. When Adelaide said tomcat, in that crude, taunting, aroused and unconsciously jealous way, Frances was gratified and excited, though of course ashamed. She would be frantic if she thought Ted had made similar confidences about her.
The night they got the paint on themselves was such a hot night, the whole town was cranky and drooping and waiting for rain, which came toward morning, with a thunderstorm. Frances looking back at this time always thought of lightning, a crazy and shattering, painful kind of lust. She used to think of each time separately, would go over them in her mind. There was a peculiar code, a different feeling, for each time. The time in the science room like lightning and wet paint. The time in the car in the rain in the middle of the afternoon, with sleepy rhythms, so pleased and sleepy they were then that it seemed they could hardly be bothered to do the next thing. That time had a curved, smooth feeling for her, in memory; the curve came from the sheets of rainwater on the windshield, looking like looped-back curtains.
Since they were meeting regularly in the church, the pattern did not change so much, one time was much like another.
“Everything,” Ted said confidently. “It’s all right.”
“The janitor.”
“It’s all right. He’s finished here.”
“How do you know?”
“I asked him to finish up so I could work here.”
“Work,” said Frances, giggling, struggling out of her blouse and her brassiere. He had undone the buttons down the front, but there were still six buttons on each of the sleeves. She liked the idea of his planning it, she liked to think of determined lustfulness working in him this afternoon while he was busy directing his class. And in another way she did not like it at all; she giggled to cover some dismay or disappointment