Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [123]
So I stood in the classroom doorway, each rib visible underneath my skin and my nipples poking out against my shirt, and I let him take me to his place, an apartment that took up the whole second floor of an old Victorian downtown. There, I let him give me half a glass of tart red wine and then, by the flickering light of a half-dozen candles, I undressed myself while he stared up at me from his bed and lay on top of him and kissed him until he groaned and rolled on top of me, taking me in his arms. Three weeks after the first time we’d slept together, he resigned from the school. No big deal, he told me; he had a little family money. The next day we drove to a justice of the peace after school on the Friday afternoon before Christmas, and became man and wife.
I finished school, at David’s insistence, and it wasn’t half the scandal you might imagine. For a week I was the subject of scrutiny and jokes—my history teacher, I remember, took great delight in addressing me as Mrs. Carter, and the girls all wanted to see my ring—a tiny solitaire on a band of gold—but there were two girls who were pregnant in my class, plus a boy widely suspected of being gay, and it wasn’t long before people lost interest in the oddity of a married woman attending high school, especially once it was clear that I wasn’t pregnant.
Another teacher was hired; and David got a job at a small theater in Hartford, as part of the company, and teaching drama to little kids on Saturday. After classes I’d walk to our apartment, stopping at the grocery store with the list David had given me in the morning to pick up whatever he needed for dinner, and the money he’d given me to buy it. Upstairs, I’d lock the door behind me and pour a glass of wine—an adult pleasure that I’d quickly adopted—and settle on the green velvet couch with my homework, or one of the novels or plays from David’s shelves. The nights he didn’t have shows, he’d be home by five-thirty. “My child bride,” he’d say, gathering me into his arms. I’d pour him his own wine, and sometimes we’d go right to bed and make love, but, more often, he’d go to the kitchen to cook. I’d perch on the counter and watch him chop onions, sauté garlic, swirl a melting knob of butter into the pan. “I’ve got to fatten you up,” he would say. He’d scoop pasta into my bowl, grating drifts of Parmesan on top, and keep jars of olives and wedges of cheese around for me to nibble at.
We’d eat, then read together or listen to music from David’s collection of classical and opera albums. On Saturday afternoons, we’d go to the library, filling bags with books and compact discs. On Monday nights, when the theater was dark, we’d go out to dinner and then to a movie, and on Sunday mornings we’d buy the New York Times, take our clothes to the Laundromat, buy doughnuts and coffee, and sit in the molded plastic chairs attached to the wall, reading the paper, snacking, then folding our fresh, dried sheets and pillowcases together. Maybe it was an oddly sedate life for a teenager—most of my peers back in Toledo, I knew, were spending their Saturdays at parties in fields or parks or in houses where the parents weren’t home, and I could only assume that my classmates in New London were doing the same things—but, after all those years with my exhausted, emotionless grandparents, after being rejected by my mother and spending all those cold nights in my car, our routines and traditions were comforting.
The hardest part was seeing Raine around town. I glimpsed her once at the supermarket, a different one from the one where she worked. She looked tired and frail in her winter coat, snapping as Sophie and Emma tried to sneak a box of Lucky Charms into the shopping cart, and I’d hidden behind a stand-up display of Entenmann’s cookies until they passed. Once, coming back from the Laundromat with a basket of clean clothes, I saw her and Phil and the girls on their way into church. That time there’d been nowhere