just two people, together. No stags. You know, so that everybody has a dance partner.” She looked at me a moment, as if trying to find another way to explain it. “I mean, so when the dancing starts, nobody’s left out,” she added finally.
I turned toward my locker and needlessly began fiddling with the books and papers I’d crammed inside. “Have you talked to Kelli about this?”
Sheila shook her head. “No, I wanted to talk to you first.”
“Well, Kelli might want to bring somebody else,” I told her.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I think she scares the other boys off. Being new, you know, and from up north. And some of the things she writes in the
I instantly recalled Luke’s warning that Kelli wouldn’t be “new” for long, and that if I were interested in her, I needed to act right away. It seemed to me that Sheila’s Christmas party offered the perfect opportunity to do just that.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll talk to Kelli about it.”
“Great,” Sheila said happily, her smile still in place, a feature that, at the time, seemed so fixed and unchangeable, so much the permanent product of an innocent and kindly nature, that I could not imagine her face without it.
I SPOKE TO KELLI THAT SAME DAY. WE’D BEGUN TO SIT NEXT to each other in English class, by then, sometimes chatting quietly before class began, and later exchanging occasional glances as Miss Carver described in oddly haunting terms the “tormented” combination of love and hatred that Heathcliff had felt for Catherine Earnshaw. At certain moments, Miss Carver seemed personally shaken by the dark clouds that had swept over that distant moor. In soft, faintly grieving tones, she spoke of passion and tragedy as if they were an inevitable part of life’s unknowable weave, the thread of one inseparably entwined with the other, each generation bearing anew its legacy of loss and ruin.
By that time, too, Kelli and Miss Carver had begun to linger in the room when class was over, Kelli to ask questions or make some comment she had preferred not to make during class, Miss Carver to elaborate, at a deeper level, some point she had purposely simplified for the other students. Occasionally I would also remain behind, listening as the two of them talked about a book in a way that I, as a science student, never talked about one, but which at last made me understand that certain books did not express things simply and directly, but from an angle and mysteriously, because the things they described were themselves inexact, and in part unknowable, and so could not be spoken of in terms of weights and measures, predictable actions and reactions.
On that particular December morning, however, Kelli did not remain in the classroom, but headed directly into the hallway. She was almost at the stairs before I reached her.
“Kelli,” I called to her as I came up from behind.
She stopped and turned toward me.
“Listen, Sheila Cameron came up to me this morning,” I told her. “She said she was planning on having a Christmas party in a couple of weeks. Sort of a semiformal-type thing. She’s having it at the Turtle Grove Country Club.”
Kelli watched me expressionlessly.
“It’s sort of a dance,” I added, now growing more nervous under the gaze of Kelli’s motionless black eyes. “It’s just for couples. You know, so everyone will have a partner.” I hesitated, then bit the bullet. “She thought that you and I might want to come.”
Kelli smiled. “Okay,” she said lightly.
She had accepted too quickly, so I wanted to make sure she understood what I was getting at. “I mean the two of us,” I added pointedly. “Together.”
“I know what you meant,” she said. Then she gave me a quick smile, turned breezily and trotted down the stairs.
Luke was delighted when I told him later that afternoon.
“That’s great,” he said happily. “We can all go together. You, me, Betty Ann and Kelli.”
As it turned out, we did exactly that. It was the night of December twenty-second, and though a cold winter rain had been predicted, it was clear and brisk, the moon so bright that its light actually outlined the high mountain ridges that loomed in the distance.
Luke selected a huge late-model Lincoln from his father’s used-car lot, picked up first Betty Ann, then me, and finally drove us all out to Collier to pick up Kelli.
“This thing’s got great speakers,” Luke said proudly, then rattled off the car’s other features. “It’s got AC, dual-reclining seats, genuine velour upholstery, adjustable leg room—”
“Enough, Luke,” Betty Ann said sharply. “I’m not going to buy the damn thing.” She glanced back at me. “Are you, Ben?”
I shook my head.
We headed on toward Kelli’s house, and as we neared it I could feel myself growing more and more nervous. I adjusted my tie, wiped my glasses, checked my fly, my jacket handkerchief, the shine on my shoes.
“I was really surprised when Sheila invited me to this thing,” I said.
“Well, I don’t think it was really you that was invited, Ben,” Luke said with a playful wink. “I think it was Kelli that was invited.” He glanced at Betty Ann. “In case you haven’t heard, Ben’s just the fly on the chariot wheel as far as this party goes.”
Betty Ann tossed her head back and laughed. She was a large, red-haired girl, the type who always sits in the shade and whose skin, in summer, is perpetually pink. She was quick to laugh, particularly at Luke, with whom she has lived now for nearly three decades. She is considerably larger now, a fad dieter with a gently rounded double chin, and middle age has robbed some of the dazzling highlights from her hair, but of all the people of my youth, I think that Betty Ann has built the strongest life. She owns a store in the sleek new mall, stocks its fancy mirrored shelves with what she jokingly calls “southern objets d’art” and at the end of each working day returns to Luke and the last of their three sons, the other two having already left for college.
I saw her again only a few weeks ago, while doing my Christmas shopping in the mall. She was dressed to fit the season, in a bright red skirt and blouse, with a holly-green sash wrapped around her waist. “If Santa Claus were a woman,” she said, twirling around slowly to show off her outfit, “he’d look just like me.”
I had come in to buy a few presents for some of the people at the hospital, a practice I began after Dr. McCoy died, and of which, I am sure, he would have disapproved.
“It looks like we might have a white Christmas this year,” Betty Ann said as she completed her turn and came up to me.
“So they say.”
“It’s been a long time since that happened.” She thought a moment. “Eight or nine years ago, right?”
“Yes,” I said. “At least that long.”
“Jimmy was still a little thing, remember? So was your Amy.”
I nodded.
“We took them sledding.”
I remember that day very well. The mountain had been a wall of white, and Luke had driven all of us up the mountain road, past the recently abandoned high school, to where we’d huddled together in the ankle-deep snow and watched our children sled gleefully down the more gentle upper slope of Breakheart Hill. Luke had stood with Betty Ann beneath his arm, and I with Noreen nestled at my side, the four of us chatting quietly under a crackling skeletal roof of frozen limbs.
After a time the children had exhausted themselves, and we’d all trudged back toward the car, Noreen and Betty Ann walking a little ways behind Luke and me.
“You know, all of us being in the car together on the way up here,” Luke said, “it reminded me of that night we all went to Sheila Cameron’s party in Turtle Grove. Except, of course, that was with—” He stopped, then lowered his voice and continued hastily and self-consciously, as if he’d unexpectedly stumbled upon a grim association and was rushing to get through it. “Well, that was with Kelli, you know,” he said.
I glanced back and almost saw her as she might have been that snow-white afternoon, a handsome woman
