In Stereo Where Available Read online

  Jerry was happy, as well. He was looking forward to Florida and Christmas and seeing his family, but having company for the trip, he said, made it that much better. I drove all the way to the South Carolina border, and as we passed the singlewide trailers that bordered the road, we traded potato chips and talked about race and poverty and population control.

  “I could go for four kids,” he said.

  “Four?” I looked over at him. He was munching on one of my salt-and-vinegar chips, his eyes obscure behind his sunglasses. “I was thinking more like three.”

  “I could do three.”

  “Madison only wants one.”

  “I could do one.” He popped another chip into his mouth, his chest shaking in a silent laugh. “And then screw up three more times.”

  In South Carolina we pulled off the highway long enough to get a drive-through dinner from Burger King, switching seats in the parking lot so that Jerry could drive again. It was Christmas Eve, and he wanted to arrive at his parents’ house as early as possible on Christmas Day. I passed him French fries as he drove, holding his insulated coffee cup between my knees. He scanned the radio stations and complained about all the country music, fondly reminiscing about all the Metallica concerts he had been to when he was younger.

  “All the way up until they released the Black Album,” he said. “They sold out on that one.”

  “Isn’t that the one with ‘The Unforgiven’ on it?”

  He pretended to stick his finger down his throat. “Whiny dreck. That was a grunge song. It’s a stain on heavy metal.”

  “A lot of people liked it. It was like a breakout song.”

  “That was Nirvana’s fault. Heavy metal’s supposed to say, ‘’F’ you.’ It’s not supposed to say, ‘Why me?’“

  Somewhere around Columbia I told him about my trip to the doctor and the nurse who had made assumptions and my birth-control pills.

  “I’m just being precautionary,” I explained.

  “That’s probably not a bad idea.”

  “Why? Did you have plans?”

  “Me? No. The ball’s in your court. I told you I can wait forever.”

  “You’re happy with things the way they are?”

  “Sure, yeah. I’m not in any hurry. I know what you’re waiting for.”

  “You mean love?”

  “Yeah. That’s fine with me.”

  “But you’re not waiting for anything?”

  “No. I’m already in love.”

  My heart stumbled. My first thought was that he was confessing he was in love with another girl. I laid my hands on the map that covered my lap and asked, “With who?”

  He took his eyes off the road and looked at me over his sunglasses, his brows creasing, speaking as though it were perfectly obvious. “With you.”

  I stared at him in wild-eyed wonder. Inside of me, my heart was breaking open, spilling out all the love that I felt for him and had kept a secret. If someone had tried to fit the whole night sky inside my heart just then, it couldn’t have felt any bigger.

  Jerry caught the look in my eyes and laughed—that shy, wholehearted, pure-music laugh of his—and he said ironically, “But I’m waiting for just the right moment to tell you.”

  I swallowed against my dry throat. “Now’s a good time.”

  He checked his mirrors quickly and pulled onto the shoulder. Tossing his sunglasses on the dashboard and unsnapping his seat belt, he turned his whole body toward me and leaned in. The big green gas-food-lodging sign cast a shadow over the car, and the interstate was as empty of traffic as a country road.

  “Phoebe,” he said, “I love you, and I’m so damn head over heels for you, I swear there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to make you feel the same way about me.”

  In his eyes there was an optimistic hope, plain and unguarded. For a long moment I savored it, the feeling of those words offered up and waiting for me to take them. Whatever answer I gave him would change everything.

  “I already do,” I admitted.

  He grinned spontaneously and kissed me, once, and then again, and again. It wasn’t the kind of kissing we could do in the car for very long. He smudged the fog from the windshield with the palm of his hand and jerkily shifted the car back into gear.

  “What do you say we go find a place to celebrate?” he asked, pulling back onto the highway.

  I nodded. “Sounds good to me.”

  The hotel we stopped at was a Travelodge that included a game room and an indoor pool—not that I cared, but it mattered to Jerry. As he checked us in at the front desk, he pointed to the glassed-in pool area full of shrieking preteens and pointedly caught my eye.

  “See?” he said. “It’s not a cheap motel.”

  “I wasn’t worried about it.”

  “Just for the record. I don’t want it to come back to haunt me in twenty years.”

  “My, you’re making plans, aren’t you?”

  He took the key cards from the desk clerk. “I’m just being precautionary.”

  “Famous last words.”

  We climbed the outdoor stairs and followed the numbered signs to our room. My insides did gyroscopic flips as I walked beside him through the corridors. There are times in people’s lives, every now and then, when they can see some kind of countdown taking place, as clear and rapid as the timer on the TV screen on New Year’s Eve. This was one of them. At the end of the hallway, a maid placidly stacked folded towels onto her yellow cart, as though nothing were strange.

  Jerry jiggled the key card in the door, and we stepped inside. Before the door had even slammed closed, he’d tossed his jacket over the dresser and had his shirt halfway over his head. It felt like the first time I’d ever seen him undress. My eyes dropped to the front of his jeans and stayed there. I hadn’t even touched him yet, but he was ready to go. I sat down on the side of the bed and pushed my fists into the bedspread nervously.

  “You want to, right?” he asked, dropping his shirt to the floor. “The whole thing?”

  “Yeah. You’re going to go easy on me, right?” He was running on pure hormones. I’d seen him like this before, but only when he knew he’d eventually have to curb it.

  “Absolutely.” He stepped around the bed and turned the radio on low. “No way would I let you down.”

  Suddenly I felt unbearably anxious. I had a flash of a memory of being at the front of a roller-coaster line with Madison, the moment when they loaded the car just ahead of ours. I’d gone on it anyway, but not without feeling like I’d left my stomach back at the entrance.

  “Have you ever done this before?” I asked him.

  He smiled at me over his shoulder, turning the radio dial. “You know I have. Plenty of times.”

  “I mean with a virgin.”

  “Nope.” He settled on a mix station. “Don’t worry. I’m sure I can figure it out.”

  In a few months I’d be thirty, but right then I didn’t feel a day older than fifteen. The desire I’d felt for him just a little while before was slipping away, and one intimidating thing after another was stepping into its place: Jerry’s buoyant enthusiasm, his inscrutable amount of experience, the strange room, my own fear of pain. I thought about the gynecologist’s office, the jabbing pain as I stared up at the Ansel Adams picture. That wasn’t how I wanted to remember his confession of love.

  “Jerry,” I said.

  He set his hands on his hips and smiled at me. “What?”

  I bit my bottom lip and looked up at him uncertainly. He got the point. His eyebrows lifted, and he offered me a disappointed smile.

  “You having second thoughts?” he asked.

  “Kind of. I don’t know. I’m worried, that’s all.”

  “I’m not going to get you pregnant, Fee. If you’re concerned about that, I can take care of it.”

  “No, not that. I just think it’s going to hurt.” I didn’t know how to explain the rest of it—that his experience intimidated me, that the power of his desire scared me. I couldn’t possibly
satisfy something like that. There was too much of it, all careening toward me at a hundred miles an hour.

  “If it hurts, we’ll stop. Phoebe.” He sat down on the bed beside me. “Listen, it’s up to you. I didn’t tell you I love you because I thought it would get me in bed with you. But if you want me to make love to you, I’m happy to and I’ll make it worth the wait.”

  I considered that. “Promise it won’t hurt?”

  He sighed. “I promise I’ll stop if you tell me to. And I promise I’ll do everything I can to make it feel amazing.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. I love you, Phoebe. I swear I’m not going to let you down.”

  I met his appealing eyes and weighed my fear against what I wanted. I wanted to be able to look at him, tomorrow or the next day, alone or in a gathering of people, and know that I’d held nothing back from him after he’d told me he loved me. I wanted to know what drove him, what lay at the end of the spectrum of his senses, the shape of the passion he had been holding back. And I didn’t want to live any longer with the knowledge that there were women in the world who knew him in ways that I didn’t know him. I didn’t want to live with that at all.

  “I trust you,” I told him.

  He put his hand behind my neck and kissed me, not quite the way he had in the car, but with a mind toward my fear. I could feel my anxiety slipping away with the touch of his hands, and then, empty of fear, the love rushing in to fill the void.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Check it out,” said Jerry. We were stopped at a convenience store in Georgia, buying peach tea Snapples and a bag of pistachios and a local newspaper that Jerry would later read aloud from as I drove, quoting the conservative columnists in a deadpan Southern drawl that almost caused two accidents south of Savannah. He held up a copy of the latest edition of People magazine. Rhett, Ashley, and the four remaining Belle of Georgia girls decorated the cover in a photo montage. Across the bottom of the cover, in huge white letters, the text read, The Final Battle!

  I grabbed it from his hands and flipped quickly to the article. Across the counter, the gritty-looking man with gray curls under his Lot & Feed Stores baseball cap leaned toward me and said around his toothpick, “You going to buy that, missy?”

  Out on the cement curb, I pulled the magazine back open and scanned over the bubbly text. “The Rebel cry has been ‘take no prisoners,’ but it’s every belle for herself as Georgia rushes to its thrilling conclusion. The past week’s announcement that one winning couple will star on MTV’s Newlyweds has the contestants plotting anew to win the hearts of Georgia’s leading men. But true love is its own reward!”

  Jerry stood behind me with his head over my shoulder, looking at the pictures while he rubbed up against my backside in full view of the locals passing in and out the door of the Circle K. Ever since we got back on the road toward Florida, he had been acting like a middle-school kid trying to grope his girlfriend behind the gym after a school dance. For a guy who had claimed that the decision between sex and Trading Spaces was a toss-up, he didn’t seem to be thinking too much about paint colors and the thousand-dollar budget.

  “Can you wait until tonight?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure. I can try.”

  “Try to focus on Christmas. That’ll take your mind off it.”

  “Yeah, I was just thinking about that. My parents are probably planning for us all to go to church this evening. They’ve got a pretty nice church where they live.”

  “See? Isn’t that better than just sitting around being frustrated?”

  “Yeah. If we tell them we went to church yesterday, we’ll have the house to ourselves for at least an hour and a half.”

  I handed him the magazine. “Get back in the car. I’ll drive for a while.”

  Jerry’s parents’ house was a little Spanish-style place on a street lined with palm trees and impeccably tidy gardens. Sunhaven, said the sign at the entrance to the development. A Community of Active Adults.

  “If you consider the VFW to be ‘active,’“ Jerry said as I read it aloud.

  “Is your dad in the VFW?”

  “No. He did a tour of duty in Vietnam, but the thing he’s interested in now is golf. He plays golf practically every day of the week. Sometimes my mom plays with him. I’m sure he’ll get me out on the course a couple times before we go home.”

  “You play golf, too?”

  “Sure, when I come down here. I don’t have the time back home. Or the money. But I like it. I’m okay at it.”

  “Heavy metal and golf, huh?”

  He smiled, blinking behind his sunglasses. “Don’t knock it. Everybody gets old eventually. My goal is to be one of those old guys who plays golf all day long and goes out to the Old Country Buffet for dinner every night to talk to all my old friends about prescription-drug coverage. And I bet Metallica will still be touring.”

  I laughed. “So, have your parents said anything about sleeping arrangements?”

  “Nah, they’re keeping me in suspense. Usually I get the sofa, but I’ve never brought anyone down with me before. Stella and her husband always got the extra bedroom, but obviously, her husband’s not here. My mom’s really nice, but I don’t know how she’d feel about us sleeping in a bed together. It’s never come up before.”

  “How conservative are they?”

  “Not overly. They’re like me. That’s why I can’t predict it. I don’t have a problem with unmarried people sharing a bed, of course, but if it were my kid asking, I might get a little jumpy. So we’ll see.”

  Jerry’s mother had a blue tin of butter cookies out on the coffee table when we came in. She shook my hand with both of hers and ushered us over to the plastic-covered sofa with a multicolored afghan draped over the back of it. She was about five feet tall and very plump, with upswept dark brown hair in a style that looked like it hadn’t changed since 1969.

  “So you’re Phoebe,” she said. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

  I smiled and took a butter cookie. Why was that such a common thing for people to say during an introduction? Wasn’t it always a little frightening? Shouldn’t it be rude to imply that endless conversations about the person have been going on behind their back?

  “Thanks,” I returned. “I’ve heard a lot about you, too.”

  “I understand you’re a teacher.”

  “Yes, I teach first grade.”

  “Jerry’s a teacher, too. No wonder you get along so nicely.”

  Jerry sat back and draped his arm across the back of the sofa. Like I was going to drive seven hundred miles with the guy to meet his parents and not know what he did for a living. I looked across the room, where the spindly, tinsel-strewn artificial Christmas tree stood beside a large, old-fashioned stereo cabinet. There were about two dozen pictures of Betsy and Marco lined up on top of the cabinet. Suddenly, I got it. To her, this wasn’t just a Christmas visit. This was like a college interview, with me as the admissions officer. It was potentially her one chance to get her thirty-three-year-old only son married off.

  “We do have a lot in common,” I agreed.

  “Did I tell you how we met, Mom?” asked Jerry.

  She smiled, her cheeks dimpling. “How?”

  “She was a wrong number. I got a phone number from a woman I met at a teachers’ conference and it turned out to be Phoebe’s number instead. How’s that for crazy?”

  “Sounds lucky to me.”

  “It gets weirder,” he added. “Her younger sister’s in one of my classes. The poor kid starts doing duck-and-cover maneuvers under her desk every time I start talking about Dante’s love for Beatrice in The Inferno or whatever. The whole thing’s killing her.”

  Jerry’s mother laughed. “Small world, I suppose.”

  “You got that right.” Jerry fanned his fingers out and rubbed them up and down my back, curled like he was holding a ball. “So Stella hasn’t gotten here yet?”

  “Your father’s at the airport picking her up right now. I
’ve got the bed all made up for her. Shame about her and Rick. I never did like him any too much.”

  “Yeah, it’s a shame all right. She’s doing a good job holding herself together. So…where should Phoebe and I put our stuff?”

  “Oh, just out here on the sunporch. Your father and I got a new bed and we moved the old one out here.” She stood up, and we followed her out to the glass-walled room, a little musty and tiled in white linoleum, with orange-carpeted cat perches along the windows. There was an old queen-sized bed pushed up against the wall, covered in bright white sheets, with an orange blanket folded down at the end. “That should do, I hope.”

  “Sure, it’s fine.”

  “Well, I’ll let you get settled in, then. Phoebe, it’s so nice to meet you.”

  “You, too.”

  She toddled off on her short legs, and Jerry grinned at me. “Slick, huh?”

  “What’s slick?”

  “You see how she pulled that off? See, she’s letting us share a bed.” He gestured to the windows. “In here. Where we can’t do anything.”

  “Is that what she’s thinking?”

  “Oh, I’m sure it is. She’s a smart lady. She even gave us the white sheets. I’m sure she’ll be going over them with a magnifying glass when we leave.”

  I giggled. “Maybe we should get a box of those Afterglow things.”

  “I should have warned you about her, though. Don’t take anything she says too seriously, okay? She’s kind of got an agenda. As you may have noticed.”

  “I noticed. Don’t worry about it. All mothers are like that, except mine.”

  “Just ignore it. I’m actually pretty surprised about this bed-sharing thing. She never let Stella and Rick get away with that before they got married. She must really be desperate.”

  “Maybe she’s taking a cue from what happened to Stella and Rick.”

  “Maybe. After they got married, though, it was a whole other story. Nothing like hearing your sister and her husband going at it on the other side of the wall to ruin a perfectly good holiday vacation.” He sighed and flicked the light switch off. “We’ll make it work. I can probably get Stella to distract her. She owes me big time.”