The high school had a program where kids who worked got off at 2ccde instead of 3ccae so they could go to their jobs. They also got credit for having the jobs. A commie would look at it as a sweet but dishonest plan by greedy merchants to get cheap labor. I wondered what Ayn Rand would make of it.
It’s funny that at my age, not long out of law school, I was as sentimental as an old man. The girls looked great, shiny and new, and I knew what most of the boys would do, ride around in their cars and then play a little pool or pinball, and then head home for a quick dinner where they would evade every single important question their parents threw at them. God, it all seemed so far away and so wonderful, Mgm wonderful, sort of like an Andy Hardy movie except the girls would let you get to third base and you had all those great Dashiell Hammett and Ed Lacy novels to read.
Now, I had responsibilities and people expected things of me and even at my age I could see a few gray hairs on my head, one of the McCain genetic curses.
I sat there and listened to a local station that played rock and roll in the afternoon. I was nostalgic about rock, because it’d changed, too.
They played a lot of Fabian and the Kingston Trio and, God almighty, novelty songs like “Pink Polka-Dot Bikini.” And then I started thinking about Buddy Holly again and how Jack Kerouac said that even at a very young age he’d had this great oppressive sense of loss, of something good and true vanished, something he could never articulate, something he had carried around with him as young as age eight or nine, maybe when his brother died. I guess I had too, this melancholy, and somehow Buddy Holly dying at least gave me a tangible reason for this feeling.
Maybe it’s just all the sadness I see in the people around me, just below the surface I mean, and the fact that there’s nothing I can do about it. Life is like that sometimes.
Ruthie came out the front door as I’d expected. I was parked up the street. She looked preoccupied and didn’t see me. She just started walking fast toward downtown, which was three blocks north. It was overcast now and the temperature was dropping and the school seemed shabby suddenly, shabby and old, and the sense of loss I had became anger and I felt cheated then, as if my past really hadn’t been all that wonderful, as if I’d made up a fantasy about my past just because I was afraid to face adulthood. Maybe Joyce Brothers, the psychologist who’d won all that money on the Tv show The $64eajjj Question before everybody found out some of it was a fake, maybe she could explain my sudden mood swings. Nobody in this little Iowa town could, that was for sure.
When Ruthie reached the corner of the school grounds, I was there waiting. She got in.
I said, “Did you try that stuff?”
She stared straight ahead. She looked pale and tired. “It didn’t work.”
“Oh.”
“And it really burns down there now.”
“Maybe-”
“Just don’t give me any advice right now, okay?” She still didn’t look at me.
“Okay.” Then, “How’re you feeling, physically, I mean?”
“I’m too tired to know. Let’s just not talk, all right?”
“All right.”
“Could I turn that off? Why can’t they play anything decent?”
She snapped off the radio. The song had been “The Purple People Eater.” Then, “I’m sorry I’m so bitchy.”
“It’s all right. I’d be bitchy, too.”
“I just need to handle this.”
“Don’t do anything crazy, Ruthie.”
“I don’t think I’m the “crazy” type, do you?”
“No, I guess not.”
“I’ve got a couple of girls working on a couple of things for me.”
“Like what?”
“I’m not sure. They just both said they could probably come up with something.”
“God, Ruthie, didn’t you hear what happened to the girl they found last night?”
“Oh, I heard, all right. But it was obviously somebody who didn’t know what he was doing.”
“You shouldn’t let anybody except a doctor touch you.”
“It doesn’t have to be a doctor. It’s not a tough thing to do if you know what you’re doing.”
“You’re scaring the hell out of me, Ruthie.”
“My life’s over if I have this baby.”
“I know, Ruthie. But still-”
“Here we are.”
I pulled over to the curb. Sheen’s Fashion Fountain was the most expensive woman’s apparel shop in town. It was where you bought your girlfriend a gift if it was her birthday or if you’d really, really pissed her off.
She opened the door right away. I had one of those moments when she didn’t look familiar.
Her fear and grief had made her a stranger.
I reached over and touched her cheek. “I love you, Ruthie. You know that. I wish you’d let me help you.”
“I did this to myself. It’s my responsibility.”
“You need a ride home tonight?”
“I can ride with Betty.”
Betty was one of the older clerks. She drove to work and lived about two blocks from Mom and Dad.
“I know some people in Cedar Rapids,”
I said. “They may know a doctor there.”
She leaned over and returned my cheek kiss.
“Thanks. But let me see what my friends come up with first, all right?”
“Just please let me know what’s going on.”
“I promise.”
She got out of the car. I sat there in gloom, gray and cold as the overcast afternoon itself. Then a car horn blasted me. I was in a No Parking Zone and holding up traffic.