All Shook Up

The carhops at Rusty’s Drive-In wore skates the color of butter and skirts that flared out like dinner bells when they turned, and on a Friday night in September the whole lot they wore a groove into was lit up gold under the big neon sign that buzzed ROOT BEER — HAMBURGERS — CURB SERVICE like it was reciting a prayer nobody quite believed in anymore. Eleanor Whitfield sat in the back seat of Brad Cunningham’s Bel Air with her saddle shoes propped on the hump of the transmission tunnel and thought, not for the first time, that she could recite the whole evening before it happened, the way you could hum along to a song you’d heard so many times you’d stopped hearing it.

Brad would order for her. Brad always ordered for her — a cherry Coke and a basket of fries, because that was what nice girls ordered, and Eleanor Whitfield was, by every measure the North Side of Cedar Falls kept, a nice girl. Sandra Kessler would lean over the front seat and say something about the Bijou’s picture this weekend, and Ellie would say she’d love to go, and she would go, and she would enjoy it in the mild, agreeable way she enjoyed most things now, like a radio playing two rooms away.

“You’re a million miles off tonight,” Brad said, catching her eye in the rearview mirror. He had a face built for rearview mirrors — square jaw, the kind of easy handsome that made teachers forgive him for daydreaming in class. He was the quarterback of Cedar Falls High and the bank president’s favorite depositor’s son and, as far as anyone in Cedar Falls was concerned, practically Ellie’s husband already, even though nobody had actually asked her anything yet. It was simply understood. Understanding, Ellie had come to notice, was a thing that happened to her a great deal, and rarely a thing she was consulted about.

“I’m right here,” she said, and smiled the smile that cost her nothing because she’d practiced it in the bathroom mirror since she was twelve.

The carhop skated up with a tray that hooked onto the window, and Sandra was laughing about something Debbie Fenwick’s mother had said at the country club, and the whole scene had the particular shine of a photograph — pretty, flat, a little unreal — when the sound came rolling up out of the dark like weather.

It was a motorcycle. Not the tame little Cushman scooters some of the North Side boys puttered around on to look daring for their mothers, but a real motorcycle, low and lean, engine growling with a note that had been tuned by somebody who loved it. It came off Route 9 and cut along the far edge of the drive-in lot, not stopping, not slowing much, just passing through on its way to somewhere else — the Wagon Wheel Diner, probably, or the garage on Miller Street where the South Side boys were always tinkering under hoods until all hours.

Ellie turned her head before she decided to.

The rider had on a leather jacket gone soft and dark at the elbows the way leather goes when it’s been worn hard and cared for anyway, and his hair was combed back close to his skull, black as a phonograph record, with just enough of a wave in front to catch the neon and throw it back blue. He didn’t look at the drive-in. He didn’t look at anybody. He rode through that lot of Bel Airs and Fairlanes like a man crossing a river he had no plans to swim in, and for just a second, at the far edge of the light, he turned his head to check his mirror and Ellie saw his profile — a sharp jaw, a mouth that looked like it knew how to be either kind or hard depending on what the moment called for — and something in her chest did a small, unauthorized thing, like a bird startled up off a wire.

Then he was gone, taillight shrinking down Route 9, and the ordinary noise of the drive-in rushed back in to fill the space he’d left, and Sandra was saying, “Well, I never,” in the voice she used for anything South Side, which was the voice of a woman discovering a spider in her shoe.

“Grease,” Brad said, not even bothering to sound angry about it, just bored, the way you’d say weather. “They let them ride right through here like they own the place.”

“It’s a public road,” Ellie said, before she’d decided to say that either.

Brad looked at her in the mirror again, longer this time. “Since when do you stick up for grease monkeys?”

“I’m not sticking up for anybody. I said it’s a public road. It is one.” She picked up her cherry Coke and drank it so she’d have a reason not to keep talking, because the truth — that she couldn’t have told you why her pulse was still doing that small stupid stutter-step, why she’d gone and memorized a stranger’s jaw in under two seconds flat — was not a thing she planned on handing over to the back seat of Brad Cunningham’s Bel Air on a Friday night.

She didn’t know his name. She wouldn’t have said, if you’d asked her right then with her hand on a Bible, that she wanted to. It was only that Cedar Falls divided itself so neatly — the Hill and the Flats, the bank and the mill, saddle oxfords and engineer boots — that a boy passing clean through the middle of it, belonging to neither side of the line the drive-in was built on, had the strange effect of a window left open in a house that had never once, in Ellie’s whole life inside it, let in fresh air.

*

Later, walking up the flagstone path to the big white house on Chestnut Street with its columns her mother was so proud of, Ellie let herself in quiet as a held breath, because her father would still be up in his study with the ledgers from the bank spread out under the green-shaded lamp, and lately it seemed to her that everything in that house happened under a green-shaded lamp, careful and correct and dim.

“That you, Eleanor?” her mother called from the parlor, where she’d be doing needlepoint in front of the new television set, more for the pleasure of having a television set than any particular interest in what played on it.

“It’s me.”

“Did Bradley behave himself?”

“Bradley always behaves himself, Mother.” That, at least, was true, and it was somehow the saddest true thing Ellie knew how to say about him — that in eighteen years of being alive Brad Cunningham had never once behaved in any way but exactly as expected, and neither, until tonight, watching a stranger’s motorcycle taillight shrink into the dark, had she.

She went up to her room and sat at her vanity and took the pins out of her hair one at a time, watching herself in the mirror the way she sometimes did, like she was watching a girl in a department store window — pretty enough, dressed correctly, entirely still. Downstairs the television laughed its tinny laugh at something. Down the hill and across the tracks, she supposed, the Wagon Wheel’s jukebox would be playing, and somewhere in all that neon and noise a boy in a soft old leather jacket was doing whatever boys like that did on a Friday night, a whole life running along beside hers that she had never once had a reason to wonder about.

She wondered about it now. She didn’t know why, and she didn’t try very hard to talk herself out of it, and later, lying in the dark with the radio turned down low so her parents wouldn’t hear it through the floor, she found she could still hear that motorcycle’s engine if she closed her eyes and let herself, a low certain sound cutting a clean line through a town that liked to pretend its lines couldn’t be crossed.

She didn’t know his name yet. She would learn it soon enough, and it would turn out to be a name she’d hear in her sleep for the rest of her life, though on that particular September night, brushing out her hair in a bedroom on the Hill, Eleanor Whitfield had no earthly way of knowing that the whole shape of her future had just gone by her at forty miles an hour and hadn’t even slowed down.

Down the hall, she heard her father’s study door open, the slow tired tread of his step on the stairs, the murmur of her parents’ voices trading the small currency of a married life built on ledgers and appearances — had the Hendersons’ note been renewed, was Constance still set on the Harvest Dance committee, had Eleanor eaten enough at supper. It was a kind house. She wanted, lying there, to be fair to it, to remember that her father worked hard and her mother loved her in the only language she’d ever been taught, which was china patterns and good marriages and doors kept firmly, correctly shut. It was a kind house. It was also, she thought, the first time she’d ever let herself think it in so many words, a house with all its windows painted over.

She turned off the radio. She lay in the dark. And for the first time in longer than she could remember, Cedar Falls, Ohio, felt like a town that might still have a surprise or two left in it.