gathering wood for a fire and then getting one going for Harold’s kettle of water… and pretty soon he came back with one (he’d pretty obviously stayed at the stream long enough to have a bath and wash his hair). He hung it on the whatdoyoucallit that goes over the fire. Then he comes & sits down beside me.
We were sitting on a log, talking about one thing and another, when he suddenly put his arms around me and tried to kiss me. I say tried but he actually succeeded, at least at first, because I was so surprised. Then I jerked away from him—looking back it seems sorta comic altho I’m still sore—and fell backward right off the log. It rucked up the back of my blouse and scraped about a yard of skin off. I let out a yell. Talk about history repeating, that was too much like the time with Jess out on the breakwater when I bit my tongue… too much like it for comfort.
In a second Harold’s on one knee beside me, asking if I’m all right, blushing right down to the roots of his clean hair. Harold tries sometimes to be so icy, so sophisticated—he always seems to me like a jaded young writer constantly searching for that special Sad Cafe on the West Bank where he can idle the day away talking about Jean-Paul Sartre and drinking cheap plonk—but underneath, well covered, is a teenager with a far less mature set of fantasies. Or so I believe. Saturday matinee fantasies for the most part: Tyrone Power in
So when he knelt beside me and said, “Are you all right, baby?,” I started to giggle. Talk about history repeating itself! But it was more than the humor of the situation, you know. If that had been all, I could have held it in. No, it was more in the line of hysterics. The bad dreams, the worrying about the baby, what to do about my feelings for Stu, the traveling every day, the stiffness, the soreness, losing my parents, everything changed for good… it came out in giggles at first, then in hysterical laughter I just couldn’t stop.
“What’s so funny?” Harold asked, getting up. I think it was supposed to come out in this terribly righteous voice, but by then I had stopped thinking about Harold and got this crazy image of Donald Duck in my head. Donald Duck waddling through the rains of Western civilization quacking angrily:
After a little bit I managed to stop. I wiped the tears off my face and wanted to ask Harold to look at my back and see how badly it was scraped. But I didn’t because I was afraid he might take it as a LIBERTY. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of Frannie, oh-ho, that’s not so funny.
“Fran,” Harold sez, “I find this very hard to say.”
“Then maybe you better not say it,” I said.
“I have to,” he answers, and I began to see he wasn’t going to take no for an answer unless it was hollered at him. “Frannie,” he says, “I love you.”
I guess I knew all along it was just as bald as that. It would be easier if he only wanted to sleep with me. Love’s more dangerous than just balling, and I was in a spot. How, to say no to Harold? I guess there’s only one way, no matter who you have to say it to.
“I don’t love you, Harold,” is what I said.
His face cracked all to pieces. “It’s him, isn’t it?” he said, and his face got an ugly grimace on it. “It’s Stu Redman, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Now I have a temper, which I have not always been able to control—a gift from my mother’s side, I think. But I have struggled womanfully with it as applies to Harold. I could feel it straining its leash, however.
“I know.” His voice had gotten shrill and self-pitying. “I know, all right. The day we met him, I knew it then. I didn’t want him to come with us, because I
“What did he say?”
“That he didn’t want you! That you could be mine!”
“Just like giving you a new pair of shoes, right, Harold?”
He didn’t answer, maybe realizing he had gone too far. With a little effort I remembered back to that day in Fabyan. Harold’s instant reaction to Stu was the reaction of a dog when a new dog, a strange dog, comes into the first dog’s yard. Into his domain. I could almost see the hackles bristling on the back of Harold’s neck. I understood that what Stu said, he said it to take us out of the class of dogs and put us back in the class of people. And isn’t that what it’s really all about? This hellacious struggle we’re in now, I mean? If it isn’t, why are we even bothering to try and be decent?
“No one owns me, Harold,” I said.
He muttered something.
“What?”
“I said, you may have to change that idea.”
A sharp retort came to mind, but I didn’t let it out. Harold’s eyes had gone far away, and his face was very still and open. He said: “I’ve seen that guy before. You better believe it, Frannie. He’s the guy that’s the quarterback on the football team but who just sits there in class throwing spitballs and flipping people the bird because he knows the teacher’s got to pass him with at least a C so he can keep on playing. He’s the guy who goes steady with the prettiest cheerleader and she thinks he’s Jesus Christ with a bullet. The guy who farts when the English teacher asks you to read your composition because it’s the best one in the class.
“Yeah, I know fuckers like him. Good luck, Fran.”
Then he just walked off. It wasn’t the GRAND, TRAMPLING EXIT that he’d meant to make, I feel quite sure. It was more like he’d had some secret dream, and I’d just shot it full of holes—the dream being that things had changed, the reality being that nothing really had. I felt terrible for him, God’s truth, because when he walked off he wasn’t playing at jaded cynicism but feeling REAL cynicism, not jaded but as sharp & hurtful as a knife- blade. He was whipped. Oh, but what Harold will never see is that his
Well. Now everyone is back, supper eaten, smokes smoked, Veronal handed out (mine is in my pocket instead of dissolving in my stomach), people settling down Harold and I have gone through a painful confrontation which has left me with the feeling that nothing has really been resolved, except that he is watching Stu and me to see what happens next. It makes me feel sick and pointlessly angry to write that. What right does he have to watch us? What right does he have to complicate this miserable situation we are in?
When Frannie came upon him, Stu was sitting on a rock and smoking a cigar. He had scraped a small round circle of bare earth with his boot heel and was using it for an ashtray. He was facing west, where the sun was just going down. The clouds had rifted enough to allow the red sun to poke its head through. Although they had met the four women and taken them into their party only yesterday, it already seemed distant. They had gotten one of the station wagons out of the ditch easily enough and now, with the motorcycles, they made quite a caravan as they moved slowly west on the turnpike.
The smell of his cigar made her think of her father and her father’s pipe. What came with the memory was sorrow that had almost mellowed into nostalgia. I’m getting over losing you, Daddy, she thought. I don’t think you’d mind.
Stu looked around. “Frannie,” he said with real pleasure. “How are you?”
She shrugged. “Up and around.”
“Want to share my rock and watch the sun go down?”
She joined him, her heartbeat quickening a little. But after all, why else had she come out here? She had known which way he left camp, just as she knew that Harold and Glen and two of the girls had gone into Brighton to look for a CB radio (Glen’s idea instead of Harold’s for a change). Patty Kroger was back in camp babysitting their two combat-fatigue patients. Shirley Hammett showed some signs of coming out of her daze, but she had awakened them all around one this morning, shrieking in her sleep, her hands clawing at the air in warding-off gestures. The other woman, the one with no name, seemed to be going in the other direction. She sat. She would
