That Night by Alice McDermott

Author:Alice McDermott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-05-18T04:00:00+00:00

On the morning after the fight, I left Leela and my mother and little Jake in our kitchen and stepped outside, where Diane Rossi, Georgie Evers and the Meyer twins were already searching the sidewalk and street in front of Sheryl’s house. I knew precisely what they were looking for, and without comment I joined them. In each of our basements and attics, in grimy shoeboxes and old footlockers, in paper bags as limp as cloth, our fathers, we knew, had iron crosses and silver swastikas, tarnished medals marked with bright red suns, heavy foreign coins and black-and-white postcards fading to yellow and brown, and what we searched for that morning was in some way our own version of those souvenirs: mementos of a battle, a night of high drama we were not likely to see again.

As we searched, we discussed what had happened to Sheryl.

Diane said, “They got married secretly, her and her boyfriend. And when her mother found out, she sent her away.”

“To Ohio,” Georgie said. He crouched to touch a piece of mica that gleamed up from the road. He already held a small shard of black glass. I held another.

“They didn’t get married,” one of the Meyer twins said, his voice full of scorn. “She’s going to have a baby.”

“Yeah,” the other said. Both of them had long, thin, freckled faces and only the slightest brown fuzz of a crew cut. Their voices, too, were identical. “She’s pregnant,” he said.

The word alone startled us.

We were silent for a moment and then, together, Diane, Georgie and I said, “We know that,” although I’m not sure any of us knew it with such certainty until then. The night before, parents all up and down the block had offered their children short, contingency courses in the birds and the bees, just as my mother had done for me and apparently with as much detail and tact. They were of that generation who spelled the words they couldn’t speak and followed strict rules regarding what could be discussed in mixed company, so this morning, we, their children, were more confused than ever about just what was involved.

We studied the tire tracks on the grass by the curb and then crossed the sidewalk and stepped only one inch at a time onto Sheryl’s torn lawn. We were all thinking about sex.

“But they got married, too,” Diane finally added.

“No they didn’t,” the Meyer twins told her.

She paused and squinted at them. “Yesss,” she said. “My mother told me.”

They stuck out their chins. “Nooo,” they answered. “Your mother’s wrong.”

She put her hands on her hips. “How could she have a baby if they weren’t married?”

The Meyer twins stopped in their tracks and then slowly staggered backward, their hands on their stomachs, their mouths wide open. Then they threw their arms around one another and whooped with laughter.

Georgie and I moved closer to Diane. We knew she had made a terrible mistake, but we knew our own parents, in explaining Sheryl’s dilemma, had said an awful lot about marriage as well.

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