Stealing Time Read online

  Copyright © 1994 by Mary Grimm

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Some of the stories in this work were originally published in Beloit Fiction Journal, MSS, The New Yorker, and Redbook.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Grimm, Mary.

  Stealing time / Mary Grimm. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80156-2 : $18.00

  I. Title.

  PS3557.R4933S74 1994

  813′.54 — dc20 93-30657

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Research

  We Who Are Young

  Book of Dreams

  Teenagers Living in Cleveland

  Stealing Time

  Buying a Pumpkin

  True Stories

  Five Years

  Mommy and Doris

  The Life of the Body

  Before

  We

  Interview with My Mother

  Bring Back the Dead

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  RESEARCH

  At the beginning of my sophomore year of college, I realized that I knew a great deal.

  The three months of summer had been like a long dream of being a child again. My parents had moved the summer after I graduated from high school from our house in the city to a suburb of new houses and no sidewalks. When I came back after that first year, I found that my sister and brother, who had spent it in the local high school, were taken up with new friends. My mother was occupied with making the house exactly as she had imagined it before it was built. My father was working.

  The whole summer long I did nothing much. I went to the pool — where I knew nobody — and lay on the tiles, scorning a chair, flipping from one side to the other, drinking Cokes. I wandered around the dim, shuttered house, eating my favorite sandwich — American cheese and bologna on white bread with mayonnaise. I was in a sort of trance. I went on dates, at about ten-day intervals, with Andy, my old boyfriend. We never actually went anywhere except to the Valley, a park near his house, where we necked, kissing so passionately and energetically that my lips and tongue would be sore. Nothing else ever happened. With every day that passed, I felt less in control, younger and stupider. I vaguely imagined living with my parents forever, slopping around the house in old clothes, while my brother and sister pursued their vigorous normal lives.

  But as soon as I saw my parents driving away from me where I stood in front of the dorm, I snapped out of it. The folds of my new identity draped themselves around me again — not someone’s child, not someone’s boring older sister. I had a life. I knew people. I had done things.

  It all came back to me: how I could go out without telling anyone, how I could smoke in front of adults, how I could stay up as late as I wanted without anyone asking me if I knew what time it was. I was just then trying to become accustomed to the idea that I was a woman. I set it as a task: I would not think of myself as a girl anymore. “Woman,” I said to myself, standing there in front of the dorm, “this is the beginning of it,” and I saw no irony in the statement.

  When I went back upstairs, I found that my roommates and a couple of other girls were making a list of guys that they considered possible. It was our plan to get as many of these guys as we could to ask us out. Some of us were more committed to this than others. Donna Donovan, for instance, was tied up, sort of pre-engaged. Nancy was agreeable to the idea, but it was secondary to her more important objective, which was to get into it with one of the few male professors at our all-girl, nun-ridden school. Julia and I had a further agenda, which we didn’t reveal to the others. We wanted to do it — that is, we wanted to stop being virgins, a wish we thought was truly unique. So for us the list had other, hidden, connotations. When a likely name came up, we would look across the room to signal each other, making small movements with our eyes and mouths, holding in our delight at our wildness, our cleverness.

  I lay across my bed and smoked, blowing the smoke carefully up into the sun-thickened air, listening to them adding names to the list, and considered the sum total of what I thought I knew. I believed that I knew how to flirt, that I knew how to break up with someone, how to conduct myself in the presence of strange men. I had always known how to pretend I didn’t care about something or someone: not caring is the refuge and the art of a shy teenager. I knew how to smoke, how to let someone light my cigarette. I knew how to sit to make men notice me, how to look up at men from under my lashes and my bangs so that they felt tall and powerful. With these things, and good grades, I considered myself to be prepared for life.

  “So how was summer?” Nancy said to me.

  “It was deadly.”

  “What about Andy?” she said, and everyone stopped to listen.

  “He was all right,” I said, and paused. “Actually, he was pretty boring. He seemed awfully young.”

  “That’s the way it is with high school boyfriends,” Nancy said.

  “Oh, not Jimmie,” Donna Donovan said, and they began to debate if you could sustain true love over a distance, if you could be sure when you fell in love in high school that the guy was the one, when you hadn’t seen what the world had to offer in the way of men. We had to stop ourselves from saying “boys” instead of “men.”

  The truth was that Andy and I had broken up. The truth was that he had come over one night after a longer-than-usual interval and we had, as we always did, gone and gotten hamburgers from the frozen-custard stand, had driven down to the Valley and necked for a while. When we were back at my house, sitting in the car in the driveway, he told me he wanted to break up. There followed a long conversation in which we dissected our relationship and what we had liked about each other and what he liked about the girl he was breaking up with me for, Darlene. We had been remarkably frank, even more remarkable if you considered the fact that we had never had a conversation before at all. It turned out that Darlene looked something like me — brown hair, brown eyes, tall. She was more developed, he said. I took this in good part, because I had a horror of becoming more developed. It turned out that he had been seeing Darlene for more than a year.

  “You were seeing her when we were going out last summer?” I said.

  “Well, yeah,” he said, fiddling with the car keys.

  I thought I ought to be mad. “I ought to be mad,” I said.

  “Are you?” he asked.

  “No. Is she sexier than me?”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I guess it means yes.”

  “Well, in what way is she?”

  But here he stuck, unable to say how she was sexier than me. They had done other things, he said, other things than kissing. I was fascinated, on the edge of my seat. What things? I wanted to ask. He said he didn’t think of me that way.

  “But then why did you ever go out with me?” I said.

  “Well, there was something about you.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Something.”

  I really wanted to know. It never occurred to me then that he had gone out with me for the same reason that I had gone out with him: because I was safe, because I was good practice. We had been nice to each other, although we didn’t know each other at all. We had gotten to be good, maybe even great, kissers.

  I had been depressed for a couple of days. He was only my second boyfriend, and one of the only three boys I’d ever dated, and one of those three had been someone my mother had made me invite to the prom, the son of a friend of hers. Thanks to Joey Skrovan I had a picture of myself in a long white flouncy strapless dress with matching chiffon stole to take out and look at when I was old.

  But I didn’t mention any of this to the other girls. I had made Andy more interesting than he was, and for that reason I now had to pretend that I was more upset than I felt.

  “It was just fate,” I said. “We grew apart.” I thought that bringing fate into it sounded very worldly, almost jaded.

  “You can’t expect to form a lifetime relationship in high school,” Nancy said.

  “You’re better off without him if he was so fickle,” Donna Donovan said.

  Julia said nothing. She looked at me consideringly, and I knew that she suspected my explanation. I shrugged to confirm her guess, and as a promise that I would tell her about it later.

  The list lay on the floor. We forgot about it, telling stories about the summer. Everyone’s parents had been impossible in varying degrees. Everyone’s old friends had been unsatisfactory. We had all been bored, we said, except Donna Donovan, who had been a counselor at an ecumenical camp where she had learned a lot and grown in Christian love. We let her tell us about the masses held outside by the lake and the prayer trail, but when she got to how the chaplain had done laying on of the hands as part of the Spiritual Search and Growth Workshop, it was too much for us, and we started to make dirty jokes. We loved Donna, but we considered it to be our duty to make her more real. She was miffed and retired to the bathroom to wash and set her hair, but we knew she wouldn’t be gone for long, she would forgive us.

  After she left, the conversation got more graphic and more personal. I believed then that all of us were virgins, and the talk honored this convention. But we
went as far as we could, given this limitation. I felt able to make a pretty respectable contribution, even though Andy and I had never done anything but kiss. I had last year at college under my belt, so to speak, when one guy (“guys” was what we said when it seemed too unbearably silly to say “men”) had tried to get his hand inside my panty girdle, and I had allowed another to unhook my bra. I had seen a busboy in his underpants, at the cafeteria where I worked. I made as much of all this as I could.

  I took the list with me when Julia and I went off to her room. She was sharing a double with a senior. She explained the advantage of this to me: the senior had a key. Perhaps she could be persuaded to lend it. We could stay out past curfew. I liked the idea of staying out, but not the idea of the key. I imagined coming back at three or four in the morning, unlocking the door and stepping into the dimly lit lobby of our dorm, straight into the arms of Miss Trudell, our housemother. She was a silent woman who had a graduate degree in Phys. Ed., so burdened with her huge ruddy arms and legs that she seemed barely able to move. Her face, too, was immobile, all horizontal, her mouth and eyes straight lines under the dense thatch of her hair. I was afraid of her, not so much of what she would do, but just of her being what she was in the same world that I lived in, struggling.

  “We could go down the back stairs,” I said. “Patricia told me they’re all open from this side and there’s a door at the bottom that opens out at the back of the building. Then you’re not signed out. No one even knows you’re gone. You just can’t get back in.”

  We considered this. The first question was whether it was reliable. Patricia Lee was a mine of information, most of it having to do with men and the wiles needed to entrap them. She was Chinese, a junior. She seemed years older than anyone else there. Her flat Oriental features were placid, the folds and curves of her gold skin made me want to touch them, trace them with my fingers. She liked to give us advice, Julia and I, and we loved to hear it, for she was so cynical, so practical. Some of the things she said made no sense to me, but I liked them. She had told us last year, right in the middle of the hall, that we should get an undergarment called a “merry widow.” This was to protect our virtue.

  “They put their hands in but it is no good. It is all the same” — she indicated with her hands a wall from chest to crotch — “from here to here. That stops them.”

  “It sounds awful,” Julia said. “Isn’t it uncomfortable?”

  Patricia shrugged. “You can get it trimmed with lace. Black. They call you a tease, but they like it.”

  Even then I had had doubts about whether I wanted my virtue protected, but I didn’t air them in the hall.

  “What did Patricia say about the stairs?” Julia asked now.

  “She said she uses them when she wants to stay out all night. Then she comes back in the morning, so it’s just like she went out early.” She had said that she used the stairs mostly on Saturday night, taking care to wear her good coat over her date clothes and, I guess, her merry widow. In the coat, with a chiffon scarf tied over her shiny black hair, she would purse her lips devoutly as she came in, playing the part of one who had attended early mass.

  We both thought about the idea of staying out all night. Where would we go? Who would we be with?

  “We could find out right now if it would work,” I said.

  We left Julia’s room and strolled casually down to the other end of the hall where the laundry and TV room was. I looked into it. There was one girl sitting with her back against the radiator, reading while her wash whirled and sloshed. The double doors that led to the stairs were right next to the laundry-room door. Julia stood with her hand on the knob. Silently we gestured to each other — she would go down and I would stay by the door as lookout. She took off her shoes, gave them to me, and slid through.

  It was hard to be standing there with no excuse, holding a pair of shoes. It was a quiet time, when we were supposed to be studying, or anyway not making noise. But no one had any homework yet, so girls were visiting back and forth between rooms, trying on each other’s new clothes, looking at pictures of new boyfriends or engagement rings, exchanging stories about summer jobs. I put Julia’s shoes on the floor. Every once in a while someone came out in the hall and I tried to look as if I was waiting for something. I stooped down to make it seem as if I was fixing my sock. I leaned against the doorjamb of the laundry room, but the girl inside looked curiously at me. Finally, I merely stood. I saw Miss Trudell come out of her suite at the other end of the hall. I waited for her to lumber toward me, but she simply got on the elevator and disappeared. “She wouldn’t be so fat if she took the stairs,” I thought.

  It seemed like a very long time before Julia tapped on the door. I opened it and we ran, snorting with laughter, Julia in her socks, me clumping along behind her. When we got to her room, her senior roommate was there. She looked at us with amazement as we rolled around on the bed and the floor, laughing and hitting each other. She raised her eyebrows, but smiled at us, and putting her finger in her book to mark her place, got up and left, saying she would be in the lounge if anyone wanted her.

  “We did it, we did it, we did it,” I said. “You did it.”

  “It was easy,” Julia said. She lowered her voice. “You just go down, down, down. I bent over when I went past the doors. I looked out at the bottom. It was right by the garbage cans. I can’t think why we never noticed it before.”

  We felt wonderful. We fished the list out from under the bed, and spent the hour before dinner adding to it, planning which guys we would stay out with all night, which ones would be the most difficult, which were the best-looking. When we went down to dinner, we were so sick with laughing that we could hardly eat.

  But we forgot about all that, really, for the next month. I don’t know what happened to the list. We never saw it again. We were taken up with our classes, and we started to go downtown to the Loop, taking the El, which we hadn’t done the year before. I began the habit of taking long walks with Nancy all over Chicago’s North Side, where our college was, during which we talked about our future careers. I was most serious with Nancy. She was going to be a doctor. I vacillated. Every avenue seemed tainted to me. My mother thought I was going to be a teacher, but I did not want to be like the teachers I had known, who were either nuns or lay teachers who were odd in some way. Being a doctor was gruesome. Being a lawyer sounded boring. Even if I wanted to do what my father and my uncles had done, which was work in the steel industry, this was closed to me. I was a girl, and the first girl in my family to go to college, and it was my duty to look to better things. It is strange that, interested as I was in sex, I never considered just getting married.

  I started going out with Ben Ehrenberg, the roommate of one of Nancy’s boyfriends. He was half Jewish, which I found exotic. He had told me this when we first met as if he expected me to sneer or turn away, but, a Catholic from a densely Catholic city, I had never even met a Jew before. I only knew about anti-Semitism from books, and because I had read about it I thought it was something that was all over and done with. I found his defensiveness, his chip, disarming. We would go out to a movie or to eat, and then back to his apartment, which he shared with a fraternity brother. We would lie on his bed fully clothed. We would kiss every once in a while. I already knew that he didn’t turn me on. This was something about which I was newly expert, for it had happened to me a month before, dancing with a stranger at an IIT mixer. It was not the first time I had slow-danced, but it was the first time that I had been held so close by someone I physically liked, my chest against his chest, my stomach against his, his leg pressed between my legs, his hand solidly on my back. I was wearing a dress made of some thin crepe material — very demure, a little bow at the neck — but no protection, no barrier to what passed between our skins. When I felt him rising against my body, and my own spreading heat, the pressure, the opening, I knew what it was. I didn’t feel this with Ben.

  But there were things I liked about him. I liked the fact that he talked a lot, since it meant that I didn’t have to, and I liked the things he talked about, for he liked books and plays, and had an attachment to them that was made even more intense by the business degree that was in his future. I liked his articulate, aggressive intentions toward me. It was flattering to be so unmistakably wanted.