Flesh and Blood (7 page)

1968/
It was too late not to have done it. The kisses had become something Susan did and now there was no language to say no in. Now it was only possible to let it happen. Not saying anything gave it no shape, no beginning or end; it was only possible to not say anything.

If she hadn't started it, if she was innocent, she might have been somebody who could say no. An innocent girl could have done that.

As herself, with no one else to be, she let it happen. She wanted it. She didn't
not
want it. And it was only kisses and hugs. It only happened when he drank. She was like a little girl and she was like a nurse. He kissed her with romance, playfully. He was careful about his hands.

He wasn't, to blame, not really. She had started it and now it existed, a secret they shared. Saying no would have given it a name.

It was two minutes to halftime. The band waited in formation under the bleachers, quick glimmers of gold glancing off their trumpets and trombones. As Susan and Rosemary led the victory cheer, they smiled at one another. Two minutes. All four cheerleaders turned cartwheels, and Dottie Wiggins, popular in spite of her looks, mugged for the crowd, wiping her brow as if it had been a strenuous effort. Laughter rose up into the chill air. Someone threw a streamer, a liquid ribbon of dark red against the black sky.

“Victory victory is our cry, V-I-C-T-O-R-Y.”

When play started up again, Susan and Rosemary stood close together, watching the field. “Are you nervous?” Rosemary whispered.

“No. A little. Are you?”

“No. You're going to win.”

“No, you are.”

The ball was snapped. Maroon jerseys collided with orange. Susan heard the grunts and cries, the musical click of one helmet striking another. The ball sailed, spiraling, in a graceful arc, and Rosemary whispered, “Have you seen Marcia? She looks like she's ready for Halloween.”

Susan nodded, grimacing. Marcia Rosselini was a tough, beautiful girl who did everything. When the nominations were announced, Rosemary had said to Susan, “Marcia just got all the boys she's slept with to vote for her.” Although Susan didn't despise her the way Rosemary did, she understood about Marcia's unsuitability. No one could question her lavish, cocoa-colored hair and hazel eyes, the buoyant languor of her body. She was the most beautiful girl in school. But she drifted from boy to boy, went all the way. She squandered her beauty like an heiress spending her whole fortune in a few crazy, glittering years. Boys gathered around her like hungry dogs, growling and snapping, and for all her good fortune Marcia was, finally, a pathetic case. Because she fed herself to the dogs. Because she laughed too knowingly and wore tight skirts and would end in an apartment in Elmont or Uniondale, married to the fiercest, sexiest boy, who'd carve the years straight into her skin with his tempers and habits. You could see the Marcia Rosselinis of ten and twenty years ago, working as waitresses or cashiers or shouting from front porches at their own wild children. They'd lived a life of desire and desire had burned to ash in their perfect, practiced hands.

Being queen didn't mean anything so simple and doomed as desirability. The homecoming queen was destined. She had grace. She was someone particular. She was vivid enough to live without shame, and any mistakes she'd made were burned clean by the radiance of what she'd become.

“Marcia can't win,” Susan said. “She can't. You're going to win.”

“No, I think you are,” Rosemary said. “I have a feeling, I just do.”

Impulsively, Susan squeezed Rosemary's hand. All right, she'd admit it, at least to herself. She desperately wanted to win. She needed to win, more than Rosemary did. She permitted herself a prayer.
Please, God, let me be chosen. Let me be the one.

At halftime, as the band marched onto the field, Susan waited with Rosemary and Marcia at the fifty-yard line. Susan and Rosemary wore their cheerleading outfits. Marcia wore a low-cut powder-blue dress and a sapphire on a thin gold chain. She had a prominent collarbone and a small, well-shaped head. She'd outlined her eyes with heavy black pencil, and brushed sparkling blue shadow from her lids to her brows. She looked at Susan and Rosemary with the sleepy, irritated expression that had become her trademark.

“This is it, girls,” she said.

Rosemary smiled, and picked a speck of lint from her sweater. She hated Marcia the way a housewife hates disorder. Susan harbored a certain admiration for Marcia's harsh self-confidence, but so feared the fate Marcia would make for herself that she felt a twinge of nausea in her presence.

“Right,” Susan said wanly. “The big one.”

Todd walked up to them, grinning, his shoulders thrown back and his left hand thrust casually into his pocket. He moved as if this occasion, the next second and the next, contained a series of openings exactly his size. He held the sealed envelope. It was his duty as class president to read out the name of the winner. He wore his gray slacks and navy-blue blazer, which Susan knew as intimately as she knew her own clothes. She felt related to prominence, magnified, because she had lain with her head on that blazer, bare-breasted under the stars. Then she felt shamed by what she'd done, accused. It was impossible to know what to feel.

“Hi, everybody.” Todd smiled. “You ready?”

Because he believed in duty, Todd didn't look directly at Susan. He didn't wink at her, or sneak her a special smile. In his official capacity he conducted himself as if he were on cordial but distant terms with all three contestants, and Susan briefly and bitterly hated him. She glanced at Marcia, who probably considered Todd a joke. A team player, too dull and honorable.

“Let's get it over with,” Marcia said. Susan wondered if she was so certain, so lost to her own future, that she genuinely did not care about being chosen. If she won—for being foolish and beautiful and doomed—would she end the evening drunk, laughing, makeup smeared, setting the rhinestone crown over Eddie Gagliostra's erection? Susan felt an envy more potent than anything she'd known with Rosemary or the other celebrated, well-behaved girls. By being mean and sluttish, Marcia had taken herself to a realm where losing meant nothing because winning meant nothing.

Rosemary pinched Susan's arm, gently, through her sweater, and Susan returned to herself. Rosemary was her best friend, her true sister. Rosemary was what she wanted to be. Todd led all three girls to the middle of the field, where the band members had arranged themselves in a half circle around the pale green Cadillac convertible that would drive the queen and her court around the track. Underclass boys stood ready with flash cameras. Peggy Chandler, last year's queen, waited to crown the new winner. Peggy, a handsome, forceful girl wearing an expensive dress covered with red poppies, had taken the train down from Albany, where she would soon marry a state attorney's aide. “Good luck,” Rosemary whispered, and Susan said “Good luck” back. She felt dizzy, short of breath. The world shrank before her.
Please,
she said silently.
Please, God.
Neither Rosemary nor Marcia needed the crown the way she did. They were already on their way to the places they were going.

The girls stood in a line before the Cadillac, facing the bleachers. Peggy Chandler stood on one side, waiting, staunch and satisfied within her dress. Susan knew where her family was sitting, though from where she stood they were merely part of the shifting, admiring crowd. The world was so large. There was so much to win or lose. Todd stepped up to the microphone stand. He adjusted the mike, grimaced over its squawk, then smiled expansively at the crowd.

“Welcome, everybody.” His voice boomed, hollowed and deepened, through the loudspeakers. “Welcome fellow students and alumni. Hope you're enjoying the game. No. I stand corrected. Hope you're enjoying the way we're clobbering those Panthers.”

The night filled with cheers and hoots. Maroon streamers flew. Clouds of confetti cascaded through the electric light.

“We Trojans are known around these parts for our team spirit, our honor, our ferociousness on the playing field. Well, some of us are. Others are just as well known for beauty and charm. Now the time has come to crown the girl who best represents those qualities. Ladies and gentlemen, it's my privilege to announce the queen of the 1968 homecoming game.”

Again, the crowd cheered, but not as loudly. Todd leaned closer to the microphone. His face in profile was grave and competent. He had a low forehead and a short nose, a jaw so heavy Susan sometimes thought, without meaning to, of the shape of his skull.

“Let me begin by saying that all three of these lovely ladies deserve to be queen. All three, each in her own way, represent the Trojan ideal. But tradition dictates that only one can be chosen. So, without further ado . . .”

He held up the envelope, sparkling white. He tore it open, pulled out a sheet of white paper. Nothing changed on his broad, mild face.

He said, “Permit me to present the first princess of the 1968 homecoming game. Marcia Kosselini.”

Cheers and whoops, scattered boos, rose from the crowd. Marcia smiled and lifted her chin higher, as if defying Peggy Chandler to place the single red princess's rose in her hand. Rosemary and Susan turned to each other at the same instant. Each knew not to permit any sign of relief or triumph to show on her face. Rosemary mouthed the words, “It's you,” and Susan shook her head slightly, mouthing back, “No, it's you.” For a moment Susan wanted Rosemary to win so that no disappointment would ever stain her. For a moment she wanted Rosemary's perfection to expand and expand until she embodied everything, every feminine virtue, and she, Susan, could become her acolyte. Her kind and deserving daughter.

“This is it,” Todd said into the microphone. A silence cut through the air, marked only by the loudspeaker's soft crackle and the remote shrill of a baby crying.

“May I present princess Susan Stassos, and the queen of the 1968 homecoming, Rosemary Potter.”

Rosemary and Susan fell into each other's arms. Susan felt relief and a flood of devotion. Yes, of course. Rosemary was always going to win; it was what she was born for. Susan felt the touch of Rosemary's hair, and thought, 'I'm the first to hold the queen.' The crowd cheered. When Rosemary and Susan drew back, Rosemary was weeping and Susan realized that she herself was not. “Congratulations,” she said. She had not expected the tone of formality she heard in her own voice. Rosemary nodded, helpless with tears, and Susan saw, with a shock, how much she, too, had wanted to win. How much she had wanted to finish school in complete, untarnished victory. Susan felt herself stiffen inside Rosemary's embrace. Rosemary had said, 'It's you,' knowing—she'd surely known—that Susan could not win. Susan had a Greek name. She wasn't blond.

They parted. They smiled out into the cheering crowd. Peggy Chandler hugged Rosemary, and carefully placed the rhinestone circlet on her head. She gave Susan her single rose, put a dry kiss on her cheek, and then placed a dozen roses, wrapped in tissue, in Rosemary's arms. Susan glanced at Todd. He was looking straight at her, smiling, and she smiled back, thinking, 'I can survive this, I'm being changed by it but I'll survive.'

The band played “Stardust,” and all three girls took their places in the back seat of the convertible. Rosemary held Susan's hand. They didn't speak. They waved to the crowd. As the car was driven slowly around the track, before the noise and waves of the spectators, Susan fingered the stem of her single rose and wondered what she had expected. Maybe she was surprised because her expectations had been so entirely met. Maybe she'd believed that Rosemary's obvious destiny, the ease with which she'd always won, somehow disqualified her. As the car rounded the far end of the track Susan saw that the world's capacity for surprise was limited. Facts prevailed over romantic unlikelihoods. A poor girl—a dark, foreign girl—could be a princess. The horizon extended no farther than that.

When the car finished its circuit, the girls were told to remain in the back seat, still waving up into the bleachers, while the band finished its number. Then Todd opened the rear door. Marcia got out first, followed by Rosemary, whose emergence inspired scattered applause. Susan got out and Todd took her in his arms with such force she gasped. “I'm so proud of you,” he whispered. When he released her she scanned his face for signs of sympathy or disappointment. She saw none, but he was impossible to trust. He claimed he'd never met a man he didn't like.

Several girls, those who'd expected to be nominated but had been passed over, congratulated Susan and she began to know, for the first time, the particular kindness the world extends to those who do not win. Rosemary stood several feet away, beside her boyfriend, Randy, her face still shining with tears. Tonight it was safely behind her—a girlhood of unqualified success. Flashbulbs snapped, igniting Rosemary's crown, and when Susan blinked she saw the crown's phosphorescent red image.

“The yearbook people told me I've got to keep you three together for pictures,” Todd said softly. It was uncharacteristic phrasing. Ordinarily Todd would have said, 'You have to stay together for your pictures.' Ordinarily he acknowledged no gap between what was expected and what was necessary. He squeezed the back of Susan's neck, and she grazed his cuff with her fingernails.

Two more girls offered congratulations, and then Susan's family emerged from the crowd. Her mother reached her first, clasped her quickly to her breasts, and said, “You looked so beautiful out there.” Her father chucked her under the chin with his thumb, laughed, and said, “Robbery. There should be a recount. Don't you think so, Todd?”

Todd said, “Sir, there's no doubt in my mind who the winner is.”

Her father nodded, and shrugged. “Blondes,” he said. “The whole world goes crazy over blond hair. I've never understood it, myself.”

Susan shifted her weight toward Todd. Her father blamed her, though he wouldn't admit it. She'd never missed the honor roll, never lost a club election. She'd danced the lead in her ballet recital. Now she stood uncrowned, with one rose, while cameras clicked and flashed around a girl who had somehow worked harder, exerted subtler charms, been more. Susan Stassos was a handmaiden. Of three sisters, she was one of the two the prince disdained to marry.