Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work (2 page)

When Natalie's mother first heard that her daughter was in love with Dion, she said nothing, only stared at the wall. She was one of the last to know; people were afraid to tell her at first. Finally Mrs. Dawson called up to tell her while pretending she must already know. “You mean you don't know? Oh, my.” Maybe, Mrs. Dawson was thinking, Natalie's mother will do something now.

Most of Natalie's clothes came directly from her mother's sewing machine, but they were not cheap looking on her. Every article was made to fit every precocious curve. Her father, on disability from the Bath Iron Works, was rarely seen except at the Wharf having a few or driving around in his truck scratching his beard with his
CAT
hat low over his brow. He could only see out of one eye.

Before Dion, she and Ron would walk down the hill after school, passing my house, crossing the tracks, on their way to the public library, which was where a lot of us went, strange to say, when we had nothing else to do. They walked alone, holding hands, had been going out since she was in sixth grade, he in junior high. In sixth grade people kissed on the playground, Missy D. and Kevin R. yelling at each other across the lunch
room, the curses from their lips exactly the opposite of the intoxicated delight and fear on their faces, and there was even a story of David M., the short calm kid, getting a hand job at the movie theater. But no one went out, went steady, held hands in public at that age, except them. Ms. Hegel, the librarian, had no worries when they sat down to hold hands across the top of the reading table. Others had to be watched and checked on, would be up to nasty business in the stacks among the geography books. Ron and Natalie would only kiss each other for half a minute on the grass in front of the library while waiting for his mother to pick him up for dinner, and then her mother would come pick her up. Later they would talk on the phone for thirty minutes, no longer, according to his mother's rules. His mother worried that her mother made no rules. A girl should have rules, his mother said.

Occasionally people saw them kissing in front of the library. Mr. Wally drove by and happened to stop at the corner and look in their direction. Mr. Dawson, on his way to practice, saw them once. Her father saw them once, other kids saw them. I saw them, as I stepped out of the library door. They did not realize I was there. They sat on the steps two feet apart and strained their necks sideways to have their lips meet for this one moment, no more, before he checked to see if his mother was rounding the corner yet. Her mother was often late, and once did not arrive at all. Mr.
Dawson, returning from practice, just before dusk, saw her sitting there, knees pulled up, and offered her a ride home.

My mother must have forgotten, she said, with her hands clamped between her knees, palms out. But Mr. Dawson suspected it was more than that—everyone suspected, and he asked her if everything, honestly, everything, was all right. Everyone knew everything was not what it should be in that vinyl-sided house at the edge of a field her grandfather had once owned but father had sold off one piece at a time. Mr. Dawson, Ron's former coach, said she could talk candidly, that she could trust him, but not even Ron had ever been inside her house. When asked this time by Mr. Dawson, she responded in the same way she always did: Everything is fine. I'm just tired is all.

At first it was hard to believe she and Dion were together at all. No one saw them holding hands or even talking in the daylight. Denise reported seeing them kissing in the dark behind the school, and she was the first to confront Natalie about it, about Ron. Ron's over, she said. How? Denise wanted to know. How did this happen? Natalie shrugged her shoulders.

When she and Dion first got together, she insisted: Not in the daylight, not on Central Street by Dawson's or Tom's Pizza, not in his brother's car, which he drove only at night because he didn't have a license, even if his father's brother was a cop and didn't care. People
saw them, though, at the fringe of the bonfire's light out at the pit or down by the river at the landing on one of the benches out of reach of the fluorescent lights.

At the same time Mr. Dawson heard that she was in love with Dion, he heard that Dion had quit his basketball team. He went into the back room after Denise and her friends left and leaned his forehead into his hand. They are in love, Denise had said. Nothing from her mouth had ever interested him before this statement. He tried not to think of Natalie. She ran track; she had been into the store with her mother, with Ron. Ron with acne. When he closed his eyes he saw her tanned thigh last summer as she sat on the bench outside the store, her blue shorts scrunched up above a pale line, the knob of her shoulder beneath her yellow sweater, and the curve at the corner of her mouth, which would harden into a battered smirk, he knew, by the time she was his age—by the time she was half his age.

That afternoon the basketball team stood on the court in their practice gear, not bouncing the ball, staring off in different directions, in disbelief that Dion had quit for her. Mr. Dawson was late; he was never late. They couldn't believe Dion was with her right now. Maybe off in his brother's car or at his cousin's house, where both parents worked, or off in Vaughn woods by the pond, or out by the pit waiting for it to get dark, or down by the river near the landing waiting
for it to get dark. Any of them would have traded places with Dion. The game of basketball suddenly seemed pointless next to the thought of his hand on her hip, and she in her green slacks and yellow sweater burying her face in his flannel shirt, curling her fingers into his back, closing her eyes to hide, even from herself, how much she loved him.

When Mr. Dawson arrived, the team was sitting on their practice balls and on the bench, with their heads low. They hadn't noticed him come in, fingers splayed out in the air. The game of basketball seemed to him a cruel drama written to parody his frustration, and now he was forced to be its director.

They had only been together for a day, but it seemed to Natalie as if they had been together forever. There seemed no need to tell him anything; with one glance she knew he knew the years they had not been together were little more than preparation for this moment. She could tell from the turn of his hand hanging out the window of his brother's car what he was thinking about. He was thinking about her. When he looked at her she had to look away. When he thought about her, she was thinking about him. When he looked away, she looked at him; when she looked away, she could feel him looking at her. She realized now that she had always been looking for him, even though they had been in school together, sitting just a few seats away, standing across the playground from each other, he with his friends at the corner of the
school parking lot by the Dumpster, she with hers by the swing sets. She had seen him but not seen him. She had been alive but not alive, until now.

On the second day she was not in school in the yellow linen shorts her mother had sewn together from Mrs. Nason's old drapes. There were only a few places she could be.

Two days later there was a teacher's meeting after school to discuss the situation, about which no one, least of all the principal, a tall man with Baptist visions, had anything to say. What can we do? Mr. Wally pleaded, his voice gruffer than usual. This was not, in other words, a passing thing. They could not just hold their breaths. The basketball team would not get to the championship, and every day, the men knew, glancing quickly at each other, they would have to see her leaving at the end of the day, as the days got warmer toward June, in her pink flannel shorts, or the blue satin ones, and the white silk shirt or the tank tops, the red bands holding her hair back from her cheeks, walking down the hill, not with Ron, but to be with
him
in all the dark crannies of the town, wrapped in nothing but his old jacket, arcing her pale stomach toward the moon, her open mouth barely giving voice to her thought: Dion.

“What about your mother?” Dion asked as they were walking by the river. “She comes to pick you up outside the library.”

She was surprised he knew this, that he had been paying attention to her long before today. Maybe she was right about the way love worked; it had been planned all along.

“My mother can wait,” she said and pulled him forward, down toward the trees. She leaned into him with her hands flat against his chest. He couldn't breathe. Her lips tasted a little of spaghetti sauce. He pulled her closer and she let her body stand flat against his for a moment before pushing away. He reached for her pants, but she pushed his hand back, explaining to him that love has its natural course. She took both his hands in hers and stood very close to him without touching him. She explained that if they rushed love it would shatter like glass.

“Like glass,” he repeated, amazed at the way she put it. She was like no one he had ever met. He closed his eyes as she touched his face, covered his lips with her fingers. When he opened his eyes again, she was running back up the trail.

“I'll see you tomorrow,” she yelled and was gone.

The rotting smell of the riverbank came to him, and he noticed for the first time that the sky was cloudy and the air quickly growing cool. But everything seemed different, somehow luminescent, awash with mercurial light. He sat down on a rock and watched the water swirl in the current.

In the following days she formed a list of things she wanted to have and do and be, without Ron. A boat,
but not any boat, a giant motor sailer they could take all the way down the coast to Florida, so big there could be a storm and they wouldn't even notice down in their cabin below, where there would be a fireplace and a television-VCR in one. Who would be sailing the boat? Dion wanted to know. They would hire someone for that. But the rest of their life was imagined in modest proportions: dogs, golden collie mixes, not pure at all; three children; a house where everyone had a bedroom and there was one extra for a guest; and some land with a view of the hills around town. She didn't want to live down by the river or so close to a neighbor that you could see in their window at night. She had never thought of living anywhere else? He had thought of Montana. Montana—the word sounded chewed in her mouth. God, she said, shaking her head. Other places. Gardner? Farmingdale? Monmouth? Those places, the only other places she knew, were bad enough. Imagine what people were like even further away. No, she wanted to go to Florida, though. Not to live, just to go there as the Nasons did every winter, taking their daughter Julie with them so that she came back with a tan, even if she did look like a squirrel. And no matter what time of year it was Natalie would have fresh flowers in every room of the house. This idea from her mother, of how people really lived. And a horse in a red barn for her daughter. And light blue carpeting in every room. Our room, she said, with a
canopy bed, but he didn't know what one was. It has a kind of roof, like a tent, she explained. He didn't see the point but pictured it anyway, a bed with a tent in a room that already had a ceiling and above that a roof. He had pictured a cabin in Montana where you could look up and see the nails from the roof shingles coming through. And lavender, she said. No one would be allowed to smoke. Every room would smell of lavender. Like me, she said, and pressed her wrist to his nose. This was the smell of their future.

None of us had been in love, not really, until now. Anything we had called love came back to us as mockery in the face of this sudden flight from reason. Andy had said he was in love with Missy, and it was a shame Missy was not in love with him. A daily lament rose from him like the steam of the heat from the pipes at school. Andy's mother hit the counter with her fist. “They're too young,” she said, talking about Natalie and Dion, and we knew she was talking about their tongues running along the inside of each other's teeth and the suddenly anxious too-tight grip of her hand between his legs, and the taste of each other's skin, and the smell of each other's bodies, and the feel of him slipping inside her and her settling down over him, the shape of her mouth, the shape of his. She was talking about their bodies but thinking about the words they had used. Everyone knew. “Love,” she finally growled, as if the creature itself had risen from her dreams to take over her kitchen. She gripped a package of
spaghetti as if it was a club and stared at the wall, paralyzed by the idea of them out there.

They hadn't been going out for a week when she got in his brother's car and rode out to the next county. They ate at a Howard Johnson's. She ordered an ice cream sundae and he ordered a grilled cheese sandwich to go, in case she wanted to go all of a sudden. She ate her sundae and ordered a milk shake; he couldn't eat. He bought her a blue shirt in a fancy store, a boutique. It's a nice shirt, he said. It looks nice on you. It's a blouse, she said, turning for him in the parking lot with her eyes closed. A blouse, he repeated.

She made him drive faster, clinging to his arm, with her lips pecking gently against the nape of his neck. God, she said, God. Her breath smelled of chocolate. His eyes watered when she rested her hand on his knee and started to rub his thigh as if he were cold. She rubbed until his leg burned. Her stomach rose and sank over the gentle slopes as Dion pressed down harder on the pedal. The road to Monmouth was straight and rolling, the Firebird rising and falling as if with the swells of a heavy sea, the shocks rattling in a drum roll. Slow down, she said, but he didn't. What's in Monmouth? she wanted to know but didn't want to know. There was no reason to know, even though she had heard and did know. The bar everyone had heard about, the Chanticleer, that no one, at least no one from Bigelow Junior High, had been to. We heard it
smelled of a cellar after a flood, the sweet twinge of wet walls and soaked carpets on a warm day.