“I suppose you think you can whip me.” It was the seventeen-year-old’s constant preoccupation—who could whip him.
“Probably,” said Hagar.
“Ha! Well, I guess I better not try to prove you wrong. Pilate might be back with her knife.”
“Pilate scare you?”
“Yeah. Don’t she scare you?”
“No. Nobody scares me.”
“Yeah You tough. I now you tough.”
“Not tough. I just don’t let people tell me what to do. I do what I want.”
“Pilate tells you what to do.”
“But I don’t have to do it, if I don’t want to.”
“Wish I could say the same for my mother.”
“Your mother boss you?”
“Well … not boss exactly.” Milkman floundered for a word to describe the nagging he thought he was a victim of.
“How old are you now?” asked Hagar. She lifted her eyebrows like a woman mildly interested in the age of a small child.
“Seventeen.”
“You old enough to be married.” Hagar said it with the strong implication that he should not allow his mother to have any say about what he did.
“I’m waiting for you,” he said, trying to regain (or acquire) some masculine flippancy.
“Be a long wait.”
“Why?”
Hagar sighed as if her patience was being tried. “I’d like to be in love with the man I marry.”
“Try me. You could learn if you’d try.”
“You’re too young for me.”
“State of mind,” he said.
“Uh huh. My mind.”
“You’re like all women. Waiting for Prince Charming to come trotting down the street and pull up in front of your door. Then you’ll sweep down the steps and powie! Your eyes meet and he’ll yank you up on his horse and the two of you ride off into the wind. Violins playing and ‘courtesy of MGM’ stamped on the horse’s butt. Right?”
“Right,” she said.
“What you going to do in the meantime?”
“Watch the lump grow in a little boy’s pants.”
Milkman smiled, but he was not amused. Hagar laughed. He jumped up to grab her, but she ran into the bedroom and shut the door. He rubbed his chin with the back of his hand and looked at the door. Then he shrugged and picked up the two bottles of wine.
“Milkman?” Hagar stuck her head out the door. “Come in here.”
He turned around and put the bottles down on the table. The door was open, but he couldn’t see her, could only hear her laughing, a low private laugh as though she had won a bet. He moved so quickly he forgot to duck the green sack hanging from the ceiling. A hickey was forming on his forehead by the time he got to her. “What you all got in there?” he asked her.
“That’s Pilate’s stuff. She calls it her inheritance.” Hagar was unbuttoning her blouse.
“What’d she inherit? Bricks?” Then he saw her breasts.
“This is what I do in the meantime,” she said.
Their tossing and giggling had been free and open then and they began to spend as much time in Guitar’s room when he was at work as Guitar himself did when he was home. She became a quasi-secret but permanent fixture in his life. Very much a tease, sometimes accommodating his appetites, sometimes refusing. He never knew when or why she would do either. He assumed Reba and Pilate knew, but they never made any reference to the change in his relationship to Hagar. While he had lost some of his twelve-year-old’s adoration of her, he was delighted to be sleeping with her and she was odd, funny, quirky company, spoiled, but artlessly so and therefore more refreshing than most of the girls his own age. There were months when Hagar would not see him, and then he’d appear one day and she was all smiles and welcome.
After about three years or so of Hagar’s on-again-off-again passion, her refusals dwindled until finally, by the time he’d hit his father, they were nonexistent. Furthermore, she began to wait for him, and the more involved he got with the other part of his social life, the more reliable she became. She began to pout, sulk, and accuse him of not loving her or wanting to see her anymore. And though he seldom thought about his age, she was very aware of hers. Milkman had stretched his carefree boyhood out for thirty-one years. Hagar was thirty-six—and nervous. She placed duty squarely in the middle of their relationship; he tried to think of a way out.
He paid the clerk for the presents he had chosen and left the drugstore, having made up his mind to call it off.
