The Stand (Original Edition) (3 page)

She walked softly up behind him and laid both hands on his shoulders.

Jess, who had been holding his rocks in his left hand and plunking them into Mother Atlantic with his right, let out a scream and lurched to his feet. Pebbles scattered everywhere, and he almost knocked Frannie off the side and into the water. He almost went in himself, head first.

She started to giggle helplessly and backed away with her hands over her mouth as he turned furiously around, a well-built young man with black hair, gold-rimmed glasses, and regular features which, to Jess’s eternal discomfort, would never quite reflect the sensitivity inside him.

“You scared the
hell
out of me!” he roared.

“Oh Jess,” she giggled, “Oh Jess, I’m sorry, but that was funny, it really was.”

“We almost fell in the water,” he said, taking a resentful step toward her.

She took a step backward to compensate, tripped over a rock, and sat down hard. Her jaws clicked together hard with her tongue between them—exquisite pain!—and she stopped giggling as if the sound had been cut off with a knife. The very fact of her sudden silence—you turn me off, I’m a radio—seemed funniest of all and she began to giggle again, in spite of the fact that her tongue was bleeding and tears of pain were streaming from her eyes.

“Are you okay, Frannie?” He knelt beside her, concerned. I
do
love him, she thought with some relief. Good thing for me.

“Did you hurt yourself, Fran?”

“Only my pride,” she said, letting him help her up. “And I bit my tongue. See?” She ran it out for him, expecting to get a smile as a reward, but he frowned.

“Jesus, Fran, you’re really bleeding.” He pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket and looked at it doubtfully. Then he put it back.

The image of the two of them walking hand in hand back to the parking lot came to her, young lovers under a summer sun, her with his handkerchief stuffed in her mouth. She raises her hand to the smiling, benevolent attendant and says: Hung-huh-Guth.

She began to giggle again, even though her tongue did hurt and there was a bloody taste in her mouth that was a little nauseating.

“Look the other way,” she said primly. “I’m going to be unladylike.”

Smiling a little, he theatrically covered his eyes. Propped on one arm, she stuck her head off the side of the pier and spat—bright red. Uck. Again. And again. At last her mouth seemed to clear and she looked around to see him peeking through his fingers.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m such an asshole.”

“No,” Jessie said, obviously meaning yes.

“Could we go get ice cream?” she asked. “You drive. I’ll buy.” “That’s a deal.” He got to his feet and helped her up. She spat over the side again. Bright red.

Apprehensively Fran asked him: “I didn’t bite any of it off, did
I?”

“I don’t know,” Jess answered pleasantly. “Did you swallow a lump?”

She put a revolted hand to her mouth. “That’s not funny.”

“No. I’m sorry. You just bit it, Frannie.”

“Are there any arteries in a person’s tongue?”

They were walking back along the pier now, hand in hand. She paused every now and then to spit over the side. Bright red. She wasn’t going to swallow any of that stuff, uh-uh, no way.

“Nope.”

“Good.” She squeezed his hand and smiled at him reassuringly. “I’m pregnant.”

“Really? That’s good. Do you know who I saw in Port—”

He stopped and looked at her, his face suddenly inflexible and very, very careful. It broke her heart a little to see that wariness there.

“What did you say?” “I’m pregnant.” She smiled at him brightly and then spat over the side of the pier. Bright red.

“Big joke, Frannie,” he said uncertainly.

“No joke.”

He kept looking at her. After a while they started walking again. As they crossed the parking lot, Gus came out and waved to them. Frannie waved back. So did Jess.

They stopped at the Dairy Queen on US 1. Jess got a Coke and sat sipping it thoughtfully behind the Volvo’s wheel. Fran made him get her a Banana Boat Supreme and she sat against her door, two feet of seat between them, spooning up nuts and pineapple sauce and ersatz Dairy Queen ice cream.

“You know,” she said, “D.Q. ice cream is mostly bubbles. Did you know that? Lots of people don’t.”

Jess looked at her and said nothing.

“Truth,” she said. “Those ice cream machines are really nothing but giant bubble machines. That’s how Dairy Queen can sell their ice cream so cheap. We had an offprint about it in Business Theory. There are many ways to defur a feline.”

Jess looked at her and said nothing.

“Now if you want real ice cream, you have to go to some place like a Deering Ice Cream Shop, and that’s—”

She burst into tears.

He slid across the seat to her and put his arms around her neck. “Frannie, don’t do that. Please.”

“My Banana Boat is dripping on me,” she said, still weeping.

His handkerchief came out again and he mopped her off. By then her tears had trailed off to sniffles.

“Banana Boat Supreme with Blood Sauce,” she said, looking at
him
with red eyes. “I guess I can’t eat any more. I’m sorry, Jess. Would you throw it away?”

“Sure,” he said stiffly.

He took it from her, got out, and tossed it in the waste can. He was walking funny, Fran thought, as if he had been hit hard down low where it hurts boys. In a way she supposed that was just where he had been hit. But if you wanted to look at it another way, well, that was just about the way she had walked after he had taken her virginity on the beach. She had felt like she had a bad case of diaper rash. Only diaper rash didn’t make you preggers.

He came back and got in.

“Are you really, Fran?” he asked abruptly.

“I am really.”

“How did it happen? I thought you were on the pill.”

“Well, what I figure is one, somebody in the quality control department of the jolly old Ovril factory was asleep at the switch when my batch of pills went by on the conveyor belt, or two, they are feeding you guys something in the UNH messhall that builds up sperm, or three, I forgot to take a pill and have since forgotten I forgot.”

She offered him a hard, thin, sunny smile that he recoiled from just a bit.

“What are you mad about, Fran? I just asked.”

“Well, to answer your question in a different way, on a warm night in April, it must have been the twelfth, thirteenth, or fourteenth, you put your penis into my vagina and had an orgasm, thus ejaculating sperm by the millions—”

“Stop it,” he said sharply. “You don’t have to—”

“To what?” Outwardly stony, she was dismayed inside. In all her imaginings of how the scene might play, she had never seen it quite like this.

“To be so mad,” he said lamely. “I’m not going to run out on you.”

“No,” she said more softly. At this point she could have plucked one of his hands off the wheel, held it, and healed the breach entirely. But she couldn’t make herself do it. He had no business wanting to be comforted, no matter how tacit or unconscious his wanting was. She suddenly realized that one way or another, the laughs and the good times were over for a while. That made her want to cry again and she staved the tears off grimly. She was Frannie Goldsmith, Peter Goldsmith’s daughter, and she wasn’t going to sit in the parking lot of the Ogunquit Dairy Queen crying her damn stupid eyes out.

“What do you want to do?” Jess asked, getting out his cigarettes.

“What do
you
want to do?”

He struck a light and for just a moment as cigarette smoke raftered up she clearly saw a man and a boy fighting for control of the same face.

“Oh hell,” he said.

“The choices as I see them,” she said. “We can get married and keep the baby. We can get married and give the baby up. Or we don’t get married and I keep the baby. Or—”

"
Frannie
—”
"Or
we don’t get married and I don’t keep the baby. Or I could get an abortion. Does that cover everything? Have I left anything out?” “Frannie, can’t we just talk—”

“We
are
talking!” she flashed at him. “You had your chance and you said ‘Oh hell.’ Your exact words. I have just outlined all of the possible choices. Of course I’ve had a little more time to work up an agenda.”

“You want a cigarette?”

“No. They’re bad for the baby.”

“Frannie, goddammit!”

“Why are you shouting?” she asked softly.

“Because you seem determined to aggravate me as much as you can,” Jess said hotly. He controlled himself. “I’m sorry. I just can’t think of this as my fault.”

“You can’t?” She looked at him with a cocked eyebrow. “And behold, a virgin shall conceive.”

“Do you have to be so goddam flip? You had the pill, you said. I took you at your word. Was I so wrong?”

“No. You weren’t so wrong. But that doesn’t change the fact.”

“I guess not,” he said gloomily, and pitched his cigarette out halfsmoked. “So what do we do?”

“You keep asking me, Jessie. I just outlined the choices as I see them. I thought you might have some ideas. There’s suicide, but I’m not considering it at this point. So pick the other choice you like and we’ll talk about it.”

“Let’s get married,” he said in a sudden strong voice. He had the air of a man who has decided that the best way to solve the Gordian knot problem would be to hack right down through the middle of it. Full speed ahead and get the whiners belowdecks.

“No,” she said. “I don’t want to marry you.”

It was as if his face was held together by a number of unseen bolts and each of them had suddenly been loosened a turn and a half. Everything sagged at once. The image was so cruelly comical that she had to rub her wounded tongue against the rough top of her mouth to keep from getting the giggles again. She didn’t want to laugh at Jess.

“Why not?” he asked. “Fran—”

“I have to think of my reasons why not. I’m not going to let you draw me into a discussion of my reasons why not, because right now I don’t know.”

“You don’t love me,” he said sulkily.

“In most cases, love and marriage are mutually exclusive states. Pick another choice.”

He was silent for a long time. He fiddled with a fresh cigarette but didn’t light it. At last he said: “I can’t pick another choice, Frannie, because you don’t want to discuss this. You want to score points off me.”

That touched her a little bit. She nodded. “Maybe you’re right. I’ve had a few scored off me in the last couple of weeks. Now you, Jess, you’re joe college all the way. If a mugger came at you with a knife, you’d want to convene a seminar on the spot.”

“Oh for God’s sake.”

“Pick another choice.”

“No. You’ve got your responses all figured out. Maybe I need a little time to think, too.”

“Okay. Would you take us back to the parking lot? I’ll drop you off and do some errands.”

He gazed at her, startled. “Frannie, I rode my bike all the way down from Portland. I’ve got a room at a motel outside of town. I thought we were going to spend the weekend together.”

“In your motel room, no doubt. No, Jess. The situation has changed. You just get back on your ten-speed and bike back to Portland and you get in touch when you’ve thought about it a little more. No great hurry.”

“Stop riding me, Frannie.”

“No, Jess, you were the one who rode me,” she jeered in sudden, furious anger, and that was when he slapped her lightly backhand on the cheek.

He stared at her, stunned.

“I’m sorry, Fran.”

“Accepted,” she said colorlessly. “Drive on.”

They didn’t talk on the ride back to the public beach parking lot. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, watching the slices of ocean layered between the cottages just west of the seawall. They looked like slum apartments, she thought. Who owned these houses, most of them still shuttered blindly against the summer that would begin officially in less than a week? Professors from MIT. Boston doctors. New York lawyers. These houses weren’t the real biggies, the coast estates owned by men who counted their fortunes in seven and eight figures. But when the families who owned them moved in here, the lowest IQ on Shore Road would be Gus the parking attendant. The kids would have ten-speeds like Jess’s. They would have bored expressions and they would go with their parents to have lobster dinners and to attend the Ogunquit Playhouse. They would idle up and down the main street, masquerading after soft summer twilight as street people. She kept looking out at the lovely flashes of cobalt between the crammed-together houses, aware that the vision was blurring with a new film of tears. The little white cloud that cried.

They reached the parking lot, and Gus waved. They waved back. “I’m sorry I hit you, Frannie,” Jess said in a subdued voice. “I never meant to do that.”

“I know. Are you going back to Portland?”

“I’ll stay here tonight and call you in the morning. But it’s your decision, Fran. If you decide, you know, that an abortion is the thing, I’ll scrape up the cash.”

“Pun intended?”

“No,” he said. “Not at all.” He slid across the seat and kissed her chastely. “I love you, Fran.”

I don’t believe you do, she thought. Suddenly I don’t believe it at all . . . but I’ll accept in good grace. I can do that much.

“All right,” she said quietly.

“It’s the Lighthouse Motel. Call if you want.”

“Okay.” She slid behind the wheel, suddenly feeling very tired. Her tongue ached miserably where she had bitten it.

He walked to where his bike was locked to the iron railing and coasted it back to her. “Wish you’d call, Fran.”

She smiled artificially. “We’ll see. So long, Jess.”

She put the Volvo in gear, turned around, and drove across the lot to the Shore Road. She could see Jess standing by his bike yet, the ocean at his back, and for the second time that day she mentally accused him of knowing exactly what kind of picture he was making. This time, instead of being irritated, she felt a little bit sad. She drove on, wondering if the ocean would ever look the way it had looked to her before all of this had happened. Her tongue hurt miserably. She opened her window wider and spat. All white & all right this time. She could smell the salt of the ocean strongly, like bitter tears.