“No.” She shook her head vigorously.
I pounced on her unspoken admission. “But you did have a fight?”
“It wasn’t really a fight and I don’t want to talk about it.”
“But why?”
She stood up purposefully. “I was awfully glad to see you here again, Deborah, but right now, I think you ought to go.”
“Okay.” Frustrated and puzzled, I stood too. “I didn’t mean to make you mad, Trish. I don’t see why you can’t tell me, but if that’s the way you feel-”
“I’m sorry,” she said as she moved toward the door, “but it is.”
“Then how about giving me Kay Saunders’s address? Maybe she’ll tell me what happened.”
The idea seemed to amuse Trish. “I doubt it. Anyhow, I don’t have it. We don’t even exchange Christmas cards anymore.”
“Really?” Somehow that surprised me more than anything else that evening. “But you were so close.”
“Fred didn’t approve of me,” she said dryly. “Good night, Deborah. Come back some time when you’re tired of digging up all the dirt about Janie Whitehead.”
Interesting, I thought as I went down the walk to my car. Digging up all the dirt? Surely that said there was dirt to be dug.
I put my key in the ignition, but before I turned it, the memory that had nagged at me earlier finally came hobbling like a cork to the surface of my mind: Mother and I had pulled into this same driveway that spring behind what we thought was Trish’s blue Ford sedan. A few minutes later, we discovered that Kay was there, too, and the blue Ford in the drive was hers. Trish’s was in the garage. I’d had to go out and move our station wagon when Kay was ready to leave.
And Janie had owned an identical blue Ford sedan.
I sat with my hand on the key, struggling to put the pieces together, pieces that had to mean something.
Three young wives, three identical cars.
Now Trish drove a white Japanese import.
So did Mrs. Margie McGranahan.
Coincidence?
Suddenly I felt really stupid. It had been there all along. Even my subconscious had recognized it when I slipped in my choice of words earlier. Of course there were no condoms or aftershave in Trish’s medicine cabinet. Or birth control pills either, for that matter.
I got back out of my car and knocked on the door again.
Trish opened it warily. “I thought you were gone.”
I looked at her in a new light. That sensuous body. The sexy blouse that kept sliding off her shoulder. The soft light, wineglasses, and half-painted toenails, only it had been Margie McGranahan who had wielded the open bottle of polish.
“No wonder no one ever saw a man’s car parked here all night,” I said. “Do you limit yourself to married women?”
Trish sighed. “Maybe you’d better come back in,” she said.
14 i’m that kind of girl
In the end, we opened another bottle of wine and carried it out to the back deck and talked from the time the moon rose, swollen and orange, till it sailed like a flat white dime in the midnight sky.
“Well, of course Will wouldn’t tell anybody about it,” said Trish as crickets filled the night air with their stridulations. “Put yourself in his place. How could a man like Will admit he wasn’t stud enough to keep his wife from getting it on with another woman?”
“Were you always-?”
“AC/DC?” She smiled at my reticence. “Hard to say. I was certainly sexually aware of boys from the time I was ten, but I always had close girlfriends, too. Kay and I’d known each other since first grade. We double-dated in high school, all that sort of schoolgirl thing-pajama parties, comparing bodies when we started to mature, you remember. But the summer right before our senior year, I spent the weekend at her house while her parents were out of town. We’d bought us a couple of six-packs- Kay could pass for legal drinking age, especially if it was a man at the cash register-and after our dates went home at eleven, just like we’d promised our parents, we sat out on a quilt in her backyard to watch the meteor showers and got a good buzz on. That’s how I remember it was August. The meteors.”
There were no meteors in this May sky tonight. Only an occasional plane, blinking red and green lights as it headed toward the Raleigh-Durham Airport.
Trish filled our glasses again and there was rueful amusement in her voice. “If we hadn’t been such nice, obedient daughters, we’d have had the boys out there on the quilt with us and maybe the other would never have happened.
“Anyhow, my new bra was cutting into me and I pulled up my blouse to unhook it and the hooks were too tight so Kay leaned over to help me and then… I still don’t know quite how it began. Her hand touched my breast as delicately as a flower. Then she kissed the other, so sweetly. So gently. And everything followed as if preordained. It felt like the most natural thing in the world, so much better than the way boys fumbled with my clothes or humped themselves against me when they kissed me good night. It was the first time for both of us and it was heaven. We even had meteors putting on a light show, streaking through the sky!”
She shook her head fondly at the absurdity of it all.
“Of course, next morning, we both had heads the size of basketballs and we couldn’t handle what had happened, so we tried to pretend it really hadn’t, and we made sure we didn’t have any more two-girl sleep overs. Not till we both were married. You remember how Will and Fred were such good friends? Well, about a year before Janie died, Will and I spent a long weekend at the beach with Fred and Kay. The guys had to come back Sunday night to go to work, but Kay and I stayed down there till Monday afternoon. And that time, we did know what we were doing.”
There was a long silence. I watched lightning bugs drift across her deck on the mild night air. Trish’s yard backed up on Forty-Eight’s right-of-way, and though sounds and lights were muffled or blocked by a thick stand of trees and bushes, we could still hear the sparse weeknight traffic as cars swished back and forth intermittently.
“Where did Janie fit in?” I asked.
“Kay and I used to talk about that.” Trish sipped her wine with a meditative air. “We finally decided that Janie wanted to play with fire without-not getting burned, exactly-more like not admitting it was even fire. All three of us had been cheerleaders at Dobbs Senior, but it wasn’t till after we were married and living here in Cotton Grove that she actually started hanging out with us. I don’t think she consciously knew until right at the end that Kay and I had become lovers, but she certainly sensed there was something special between us, a force field or something, and it drove her crazy because it made her feel left out and jealous. She could be so high school at times, that ‘You like her better than you like me’ sort of thing, you know?”
I nodded.
“Take the cars. You ever hear how that started?”
“Not that I remember.”
“It was sort of ironic. Will was auctioning off a fleet of company cars for some business that had gone bankrupt. I needed a new car about then, so he got Fred to bid on one for me. Well, Fred decided it was such a good deal, he bid on one for Kay. At first we were put out with them for getting us two identical cars, but later we realized that it meant people couldn’t drive by our houses and automatically know if we were in there together, maybe spending more time together than most married women did.
“Janie thought we did it on purpose and she got one as near like ours as she could find. The front bumpers were a little different, but you didn’t notice it, in a casual glance.”
“It’s hard to think of somebody as shrewd as Janie being that naive,” I said.
