Into the Great Wide Open (4 page)

Kenny tried to think of what he might say, came up with nothing, the sound of the rain. At least she had apologized; at least she noticed he was there, but she had put her finger on a place where it hurt. Getting high, getting drunk: sometimes they seemed like completely
different things, other times they looked the same. They looked the same to Junie. He felt himself judged.

She said, “I don’t know what I’m talking about, anyway. I shouldn’t be talking about other people.”

“Why not?”

Before she could answer, the door flew open and two boys came tumbling out, wrestling—Kenny couldn’t tell at first whether they were playing or fighting, not till they backed away from each other and they were both laughing.

“The Transylvanian toehold!” one of the boys said.

“The flying scissor drop!” shouted the other, and then they fell onto each other again, grunting and shoving, while the others came out onto the porch to watch. Kenny stood to see the fight better, to watch the crowd: the counselor McHenry stood on the stairs with his arms folded, grinning, holding the other boys and girls back. The fighters were streaked with mud now, rolling in the pine straw and straggling bushes. The boys on the porch were clapping, shouting, grinning, while the girls were telling each other how disgusting boys were, how stupid. Kenny thought to look: Junie was folding her glasses, putting them in her pocket. She slipped through the fringe of the crowd and off the porch and into the darkness outside, sideways, graceful.

“Hey, wait,” he said, but there was no way for her to hear him above the shouting and clapping. He tried to reach her but the angle was wrong, caught in the crowd, tangled in elbows and legs. She was gone when he got down the steps. Running? Something changed in the sound of the fight: the boys on the porch stopped cheering, one of the fighters called the other one a fucker, loud enough for Kenny to hear. McHenry’s voice said, “Hold it, hold it.”

Then he saw her outlined against a cabin light, walking away from him. Kenny didn’t stop to think but ran after her, didn’t want to lose her. Walking away from me, he thought, remembering her dark figure on the beach. Walking away from me. Before he could
make anything out of it, he had caught up to her, breathing hard.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” Junie said.

“That’s sort of the point, isn’t it?” Kenny said. “I mean, I don’t think they were trying to show how intelligent they are.”

She didn’t slow down for him, didn’t look at him after her opening glance at his face. As tall as he was, long-legged. Junie Long-legs.

“More good clean fun,” she said bitterly.

“What’s the matter with that?” Kenny said; then thought it might be a mistake. He said, “I’m just asking.”

“Well, it’s stupid.”

“So are a lot of things,” Kenny said. “I mean, work is stupid, school is stupid, getting along with your parents is stupid, not getting along with your parents is stupid. You go out with somebody, most of the time that’s stupid, and then you break up with them and everything’s stupid for a while. Either they dropped you, so you wander around with your stupid feelings hanging out all over the place, or you dropped them, so you feel superior, which is really stupid. Somebody puts you down, you feel like shit, being smart doesn’t help. You fall off a fence, break your wrist. I mean, it’s stupid but it’s still happening, right? Do you know what I mean?”

“Kim said you were smart,” Junie said.

They walked along. Kenny felt stupid. “Where are you going, anyway?” he asked.

“Just getting away.”

“You want to go down to the beach?”

She thought for a minute; again, Kenny felt her judgment on him. Don’t mistake me. She didn’t want to be a body and he understood that. The life of the body: fighting, fucking, getting drunk. Junie wanted something else.

“I should leave a note at my cabin,” she said. “In case they come looking for me again.”

He wondered why they were worried about her, but he knew better than to ask. He wanted to keep her near him. Followed her down the path to one of the little toy houses, followed her inside, watched her handwriting, which was long and tall and carefully considered:

Artistic
, Kenny thought. A life beyond the body. Then they were back in the dunes, the saw grass rustling in the wind, sound of the waves. Junie was leading, Kenny following. The rain had let up and the clouds were breaking apart in the sky, edged in moonlight. A wind coming off the sea, bone-cold. They left their shoes on, stepping lightly, hoping the sand wouldn’t seep in, which it did anyway; down to the hardpack at the edge of the water, and then she sat down in the sand and stared out at the waves. Kenny sat beside her, following her movements—like church, he thought. I kneel, you kneel. But following seemed like the only way he was going to stay with her.

“Next stop, Portugal,” he said.

“I’ve been to Portugal,” she said.

“And?”

“It was full of people speaking Portuguese, and gentlemen trying to pinch your butt. My butt, anyway. I don’t want to sound like that.”

“What?”

“Oh, those girls that go around the world and then come back and tell you how much they hated it. France is all right but it’s not good enough for me.”

“I’ve never been anywhere,” Kenny said.

“Not even Canada? Mexico?”

“Not even Chicago. I went down to Day tona Beach for spring break once.”

“What’s the deal with that?”

“Oh, it was stupid. It was this girl I was going out with, she wanted to go, she wanted me to drive down there with her. We got into a fight. I ended up sleeping in the backseat of the car.”

“But she looked terrific in a bathing suit,” Junie said.

“She did,” Kenny said. “As a matter of fact, she did.”

“She had gigantic bosoms.”

“Not quite gigantic.”

“A voluptuous behind. I love that word,
voluptuous
.”

Kenny wanted this part of the conversation to end. He said, “Where should I go if I do go somewhere? Pick a spot for me.”

“I don’t know what you’d like.”

“A place that you would go back to, then.”

Junie thought for a minute; glanced at him, and then back out at the Atlantic. She was wearing her glasses again, holding her legs in front of her, bent at the knees and circled by her arms. She was leaning forward, like she was looking for something in the waves. Her skirt was restless in the wind. All half-unseen, the faint light of the moon shining through clouds, reflecting. The ocean talking, edge of something.

“All right,” she said. “I’m going to send you to Verona. In the summer, they give operas at the old Roman amphitheater in Verona.”

“I’ve never been to an opera, either,” Kenny said.

“Me neither, not till then,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. It’s just where everybody goes on a summer night in Verona. And it’s beautiful, you know, people have been coming to this same place to hear music for a couple of thousand years. Everybody waits outside like wolves, waiting for the gates to open so they can grab a place to sit. I mean, they leave their kids behind.”

“Who were you there with?”

The question bothered her; she woke from her trance, decided
to answer. “This was Kim and I,” she said. “We were traveling around with her parents, last summer. The grand tour.”

His question had somehow wrecked it, and she didn’t go on. She unlaced her black boots instead and slipped them off, practical wool socks that she stuffed inside; and then, barefoot, she lifted her skirts and walked out into the water. This was unexpected, and Kenny didn’t know what to do: rescue her, join her, stay where he was. The night felt like a small closed room, the edges invisible, but not far away. She waded in past her ankles, up to her knees, letting out a little shivery yip when the wave came in to meet her.

“Jesus,” she said. “Cold!”

Then stood there with her back to him, holding her skirt bunched together in her left hand, clutching her jacket, close to her throat, with her right. Looking for something?—or going where he wouldn’t follow her. He didn’t know. The distance between them. Kenny felt how strange and apart people were from each other, how far he was from Junie, separate planets. He didn’t know what she thought, or what she felt. He wouldn’t know, until she took some action to show it: start to sing, or wade in deeper, to her waist, to her chin, over her head, Kenny could imagine that. He longed to close the distance. I want to be inside you, he thought. Both ways. The way that men’s bodies were closed, his own body. Kenny ended at the skin, no way out; but women’s bodies had a hole in them, a place you could enter. It wasn’t going to happen, he guessed that much—not this night, not this girl. Which was all right, more or less, he was liking her company so far. Just the longing wouldn’t stop, the isolation. He wanted to escape himself. He watched her, turning a little to one side and then the other, the way somebody will move when they are singing to themselves. Her bare legs, the round dark shape of her penitent’s head.

She came out of the water, still holding her skirt away from her wet legs, and she sat next to Kenny again except closer than before. This seemed like the time to put his arm around her and he did—quickly,
before he lost his nerve. He put his arm around her waist and felt her tighten under his hand, through the heavy nylon of her parka, like he was going to hurt her.

He waited for her to relax but she didn’t seem to. They stared at the ocean, not at each other. He shifted his hand and felt the sharp intake of her breath, felt the tensing.

“Is this all right?” he asked her quietly. “Can I do this?”

“You seem to be,” she said; awkward. She didn’t move away, didn’t move closer. Separate planets. I want to be inside you, Kenny thought, and sent the thought her way, so she would at least know: I want to be inside you, I want to be inside you. Wondering what would happen if he tried to kiss her—wondering which should come first, whether he should kiss her on the lips or on her beautiful heck or not at all—when he felt her start to shiver under his hand.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” she said quickly. The shivering didn’t stop. What did she mean? The wind, though it had died down a little, was still cold and clean. Her wet, bare legs, he thought. But she wasn’t cold until he touched her. She shivered.

“You’re cold,” he said.

She started to deny it but saw that she couldn’t.

“We should go back,” Kenny said.

“Maybe we should,” she said. Apologetic, but already getting to her feet, his hand left to fall to the sand, wherever it fell, careless. Nothing was going to happen here anyway, he reminded himself. But still.

“I, urn,” Junie said. Composed herself while Kenny got to his feet. “I don’t mind, what you were doing. I mean, that’s not the reason.”

“No,” Kenny said.

“I’m not doing anything to hurt your feelings,” she said, although he had accused her of nothing.

“Nobody said you were,” he said.

“Apparently I can’t be trusted with other people’s feelings. That’s what they tell me.”

“Let me tell you about my feelings,” Kenny said. They were walking back, and he knew he was losing her, and he didn’t know why. Her own internal drama. He didn’t know if it was right or not, to talk about his own difficulties, but it was the only way toward her Kenny could see.

He said, “I came home last week, I don’t know, Tuesday or Wednesday and my father was home early from work and he was drinking again. I guess he went out to lunch and had a couple and just kept right on going. He was sitting there at the kitchen table and reading the paper. So it’s like Hi Dad, Hi Kenny, and I go off to my room because I don’t like to be around him when he’s drinking, nobody does. He gets to feeling sorry for himself.”

Suddenly he didn’t feel like telling the rest of the story, which ended with his father pissing in bed and calling Kenny a bastard.

“What?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Various shitty things happen. I’m sorry.”

“Let’s spend the evening apologizing to each other,” said Junie.

“For things we have no control over,” said Kenny.

The magic word, apparently: she slipped her hand into his, their fingers laced together and they walked back through the dunes that way. Touching. Leaving the ocean behind them, the wild sea. Kenny saw her again, wading out toward Portugal, holding her skirt in her hand, bare cold legs, and wondered what she meant to do then. He had the sense of calling her back from her home under the sea. Half the year on land and half the year drowned. They left the sea behind and then, dropping down into the pine grove out of the dunes, they left the wind behind, except for the noise of it in the trees. There were electric lights, the smell of the outhouse, the distant sound of laughter, loud talk, Springsteen.

At the door of her cabin, while he was getting ready to let go of
her, she turned instead and kissed him: briefly, awkwardly, but still. Smack dab on the kisser. The sudden reality of another body. He felt the damp wool of her sweater with his cheek, coarse nylon of her parka, the
fullness
of her: as tall as he was, breasts pressing through the layers of cloth. Then the awkward, disentangling. She blinked, sleepily, still caught in some dream.

“Well …,” she said—the opening to some drab good-bye, so very nice to meet you, what a pleasure, let’s do it again. Kenny didn’t want to hear it.

“Can I come in?” he asked.

Sparrow startling out of a hedge, birds taking flight: Kenny was sure she would fly away. But no, she opened the door of the little cabin, she held it open wordlessly, she followed him in, and the door slammed shut behind them. A bare bulb racketed to light, casting crazy shadows into the damp corners of the room. “It’s cold in here,” Kenny said.

“There’s a little stove.”

“Is there any firewood?”

“I don’t,” she said. “I mean, I don’t want to be always making rules and so on. But I don’t want to, not tonight. I mean, I don’t want to give you the wrong impression.”

“No.”

“But it’s OK if you stay, if you want to. I mean, I’m not trying to get rid of you, I just don’t want to …”