The light squeeze came on my right hand, as if the thought had summoned it, and she whirled back like a propeller, her hair flying out in a fan that gleamed first red, then blue in the lights. I heard several girls gasp. I caught her and went down on one heel with her bent over my arm, hoping like hell that I wouldn’t pop my knee. I didn’t.
I came up. She came with me. She went out, then came back into my arms. We danced under the lights.
Dancing is life.
The hop ended at eleven, but I didn’t turn the Sunliner into Sadie’s driveway until quarter past midnight on Sunday morning. One of the things nobody tells you about the glamorous job of chaperoning teenage dances is that the shaps are the ones who have to make sure everything’s picked up and locked away once the music ends.
Neither of us said much on the way back. Although Donald played several other tempting big-band jump tunes and the kids pestered us to swing-dance again, we declined. Once was memorable; twice would have been indelible. Maybe not such a good thing in a small town. For me, it already was indelible. I couldn’t stop thinking about the feel of her in my arms or her quick breath on my face.
I cut the engine and turned to her.
But she didn’t say either of those things. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at me. Hair on her shoulders. Top two buttons of the man’s Oxford-cloth shirt beneath the jumper undone. Earrings gleaming. Then we were together, first fumbling, then holding on tight. It was kissing, but it was more than kissing. It was like eating when you’ve been hungry or drinking when you’ve been thirsty. I could smell her perfume and her clean sweat under the perfume and I could taste tobacco, faint but still pungent, on her lips and tongue. Her fingers slipped through my hair (one pinky tickling for just a moment in the cup of my ear and making me shiver), then locked at the back of my neck. Her thumbs were moving, moving. Stroking bare skin at the nape that once, in another life, would have been covered by hair. I slipped my hand first beneath and then around the fullness of her breast and she murmured, “Oh, thank you, I thought I was going to fall.”
“My pleasure,” I said, and squeezed gently.
We necked for maybe five minutes, breathing harder as the caresses grew bolder. The windshield of my Ford steamed up. Then she pushed me away and I saw her cheeks were wet. When in God’s name had she started to cry?
“George, I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t. I’m too scared.” Her jumper was in her lap, revealing her garters, the hem of her slip, the lacy froth of her panties. She pulled the skirt down to her knees.
I guessed it was being married, and even if the marriage was busted, it still mattered — this was the mid-twentieth century, not the early twenty-first. Or maybe it was the neighbors. The houses looked dark and fast asleep, but you couldn’t tell for sure, and in small towns, new preachers and new teachers are always interesting topics of conversation. It turned out I was wrong on both counts, but there was no way I could have known.
“Sadie, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. I’m not—”
“You don’t understand. It’s not that I don’t want to. That’s not why I’m scared. It’s because I never have.”
Before I could say anything else, she was out of the car and running for the house, fumbling in her purse for her key. She didn’t look back.
I got home at twenty to one, walking from the garage to the house in my own version of the Blue-Balls Scuttle. I had no more than turned on the kitchen light when the phone began to ring. 1961 is forty years from caller ID, but only one person would be calling me at such an hour, and after such a night.
“George? It’s me.” She sounded composed, but her voice was thick. She had been crying. And hard, from the sound.
“Hi, Sadie. You never gave me a chance to thank you for a lovely time. During the dance, and after.”
“I had a good time, too. It’s been so long since I danced. I’m almost afraid to tell you who I learned to Lindy with.”
“Well,” I said, “I learned with my ex-wife. I’m guessing you might have learned with your estranged husband.” Except it wasn’t a guess; it was how these things went. I was no longer surprised by it, but if I told you I ever got used to that eerie chiming of events, I’d be lying.
“Yes.” Her tone was flat. “Him. John Clayton of the Savannah Claytons. And
“How long have you been married?”
