Adultery & Other Choices by Andre Dubus Page B

weeks she had seen no one; Charlie had called twice for dates, but she had politely turned him down, with excuses; she had menstruated, felt the missed life flowing as a new life for herself. Then she went away. Sitting in the back of the car, driving out of Port Arthur, she felt incomplete: she had not told anyone she was going to summer school, had not told anyone goodbye.
    She went home after the summer term, then again at Thanksgiving, each time feeling more disengaged from her house and the town. When she went home for Christmas vacation, her father met her at the bus station. It was early evening. She saw him as the bus turned in: wiry, a little slumped, wearing the hat that wasn’t a Stetson but looked like one. He spoke of the Christmas lights being ready and she tried to sound pleased. She even tried to feel pleased. She thought of him going to all that trouble every Christmas and maybe part of it was for her; maybe it had all started for her delight, long ago when she was a child. But when they reached the house she was again appalled by the lights strung on its front and the lighted manger her father had built years before and every Christmas placed on the lawn: a Nativity absurdly without animals or shepherds or wise men or even parents for the Child Jesus (a doll: Bobbie’s) who lay utterly alone, wrapped in blankets on the straw floor of the manger. Holding her father’s arm she went into the kitchen and hugged her mother, whose plumpness seemed emblematic of a woman who was kind and good and clean. Bobbie marvelled at the decorated house, then sat down to supper and talk of food and family news. After supper she told them, with even more nervousness than she had anticipated, that she had started smoking and she hoped they didn’t mind. They both frowned, then her mother sighed and said:
    â€˜Well, I guess you’re a big girl now.’
    She was. For at L.S.U. she had learned this: you could become a virgin again. She finally understood that it was a man’s word. They didn’t mean you had done it once; they meant you did it, the lost hymen testimony not of the past but the present, and you carried with you a flavor of accessibility. She thought how much she would have been spared if she had known it at fifteen when she had felt changed forever, having focused on the word loss as though an arm or leg had been amputated, so she had given herself again, trying to be happy with her new self, rather than backing up and starting over, which would have been so easy because Willie Sorrells—her first lover—was not what you would call irresistible. Especially in retrospect.
    But at L.S.U. she was a virgin; she had dated often in summer and fall, and no one had touched her. Not even Frank Mixon, whom she planned to marry, though he hadn’t asked her yet. He was an economics major at Tulane, and a football player. He was also a senior. In June he was going into the Navy as an ensign and this was one of her reasons for wanting to marry him. And she had him fooled.
    One night, though, she had scared herself. It was after the Tulane-L.S.U. game, the traditional game which Tulane traditionally lost. It was played in Baton Rouge. After the game Bobbie and Frank double-dated with the quarterback, Roy Lockhart, and his fiancée, Annie Broussard. Some time during the evening of bar-hopping, when they were all high, Roy identified a girl on the dance floor by calling her Jack Shelton’s roommate of last year.
    â€˜What?’ Bobbie said. ‘What did you say?’
    â€˜Never mind,’ Roy said.
    â€˜No: listen. Wait a minute.’
    Then she started. All those things she had thought about and learned in silence came out, controlled, lucid, as though she had been saying them for years. At one point she realized Frank was watching her, quiet and rather awed, but a little suspiciously too. She kept talking, though.
    â€˜You fumbled against Vanderbilt,’ she said to Roy.