Elizabeth studied Peg’s red hair, pug nose, and cat’s-eye glasses. She didn’t approve of Peg. Even though Elizabeth was a tomboy, she had strict standards for grown-up women: they should clean house, bake delicious meals, tuck their feet in at their ankles, and be quiet. Peg’s house was a jumble of political posters and wobbly stacks of magazines and newspapers. Her standard contribution to the Methodist Church potluck was beans and weenies. When she and her husband played bridge with Elizabeth’s parents, Peg ignored Elizabeth’s mother’s attempts to discuss hairstyles and hemlines, turning the conversation to the Domino Theory. Nevertheless, when Peg said she was abandoning her son and husband to six weeks of hot dogs and dirty laundry to “cook up a constitution,” and asked Elizabeth to be a page, Elizabeth was thrilled.
She would be 114 miles away from her parents. She would be on her own for an entire week. And she planned to have sex.
It was 1972. It was time.
Everyone who was anyone was doing it. There was woozy, sex-oiled music on the radio with lyrics about kissing and free love and opening your mind. She didn’t have a partner, but that was irrelevant. Sex was the key that would unlock the door between her and the great throng of human life. She’d had the standard boyfriend experiences: going-steady rings wrapped in yarn, movie theater make-out sessions. She’d even examined her vagina with a hand mirror as Our Bodies, Our Selves instructed, but she thought it was a hideous, drippy piece of flesh, disfigured by masturbation. This was different.
She wanted shock, a bolt of pure pleasure to blast her out of her paralysis. Paralysis stemming from bridge nights, when the Thompsons came over and as the adults studied their cards, Peg’s son crept upstairs, opened the door, unzipped his pants, and shoved her hand onto the thick, knobbed head of his penis, the bumpy swollen shaft, moving it up and down until he ran to the bathroom next door where she could hear his grunting release.
“We’re making history, Elizabeth!” Peg said as they drove past beaver slides, large contraptions farmers used to stack hay, and pastures of dreamy cattle with newborn calves curled in small bundles of black or brown, their mothers licking their coats. “Aren’t you excited?”
“I can’t wait,” Elizabeth replied, thinking of an empty room and some boy she would meet, the image of his face blurred and indistinct. She looked out the windshield at the larch logs, round and raw, on the truck ahead of them as it roared through a mud puddle and fanned dirty water over the side of the road.
The room at the Y was the color of canned salmon. The bed frame was iron. There was a window, a rickety chest of drawers, and a closet with a pipe to hang clothes on. Elizabeth stacked her underwear in a drawer lined with newspaper and set her patent-leather loafers on the closet floor. She hung her dresses hemmed to four inches above the knee — as specified by the Dress Code for Pages — on the pipe, grimacing at the scratchy ping! of wire hangers against the metal. She set her cherished Yardley Slicker lipstick, paid for with weeks of babysitting, on the dresser.
She stood at the window and looked out past the filmy curtains, the kind her father called Band-Aids, as the cathedral tower in the distance rang the hours with slow, dolorous chimes. Behind that was another sound: skittering footsteps somewhere in the YWCA.
She opened the door to walk to the bathroom and in the dim hall came face to face with Lillian dressed in a nubby, stained robe, holding a dented pie tin.
“My God!” Elizabeth’s heart banged against her chest. “You scared me. I didn’t realize you were here.”
Lillian looked at Elizabeth like she’d never seen her before and hurried down the hall as if she were being chased.
From the direction of the old woman’s room, Elizabeth smelled the tang of cat piss. She put her coat on and locked the door behind her. As she walked down the hallway, she heard tinny music from a distant radio and the thud of her footsteps on the floorboards.
Outside, she took gulps of cool air until her heart settled, until she felt the quiet of the streets enter her. She felt close to the great, mummified heart of Helena. There was something ghostlike about the town, with echoes of its former glory days when rich people built mansions here to have a presence in state government. She imagined parties spilling onto elegant porches, waiting carriages, women in muffs, piano music slicing the frosty night. Her parents, who loved turn-of-the-century novels, longed for that world, not the one her father cursed each night on television.
She felt lonely as she walked, but lonely in a new way; not the weak, piercing abandonment of the playground, but the loneliness of dark streets, of looking in at lighted windows, of watching trees toss their armloads of leaves in the wind, a loneliness pure and singular and strong.
As she headed down the hill into the Gulch, she walked past bars named the Gold Dust, the Claim Jumper, and the Mint, where men peered at her through open doors with vague curiosity. She saw herself through their eyes: an unaccompanied girl walking the street at dusk, no doubt on her way to ballet or piano lessons, a girl with family connections, a girl who meant trouble.
How would she make this happen? She wasn’t old enough to walk into a bar. Would she stand at the door until someone suitable came out, and then just ask him point blank, Hey, mister, want to have sex?
The thought was erotic and terrifying.
When she imagined having sex, she pictured herself and her lover wearing wool sweaters and making snowmen, walking in leaves and crying a lot because they were so in love.
She headed back to the Y, down sidewalks lined with dirt-crusted snow. As she pushed open the heavy door, a voice said: “Where have you been?”
When her eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw the large shoulders of Mrs. Neal rising above the sofa.
“For a walk,” Elizabeth said.
With a grunt, Mrs. Neal heaved herself up. “Let’s keep our breaths of fresh air to the daytime, shall we, dear? Walking at night is not something ladies do.”
At the Hen Haus, Peg gave her name to the receptionist and steered Elizabeth to a flank of green leather chairs. The beauty parlor was a riot of pink sinks and blue and green curlers, the air an overripe tang of hairspray, shampoo, and perming solution.
Peg patted Elizabeth’s knee. “This is nice. It’s like having a pretend daughter.”
Her ears buzzing with the patter and slice of women’s voices and scissors, Elizabeth didn’t know how to respond. She felt suddenly superior to Peg, with her creepy son and her husband who hid behind a newspaper wall. Maybe Peg was lonely. Maybe her politicking was just a way to escape.
Elizabeth startled herself by asking, “Did you want a daughter?”
“I lost twin girls.” Peg flipped the pages of Screen Star then turned a pained smile on Elizabeth, leaning in so close that Elizabeth could see the large pores on her nose and the reddened tear duct in her left eye. “Some things just aren’t meant to be.”
The words were right there on Elizabeth’s lips: Your son. Made me. Touch him. She saw him standing by her bedside, pants pooling at his knees. “Did you know?” she blurted.
“Know what?” Peg asked.
Elizabeth’s face felt numb. The room receded.
“What?”
“I want to go on a protest march.” Those words seemed to arrive in her mouth on their own. The creak of his foot on the stairs, the triangle of light widening across her bed.
“Against the war?” Peg stiffened. “With hippies? Honey, they’re killing Communists over there.”