Short
Distances
by George Slanger
Pearl Lessor was partially deaf, and consequently spoke with an
accent, but she could run like the wind. A thick wire ran from
her hearing aid to the battery pack she kept in a shirt pocket, which
meant she could not wear sweaters like the other girls. She minded
this, because she knew she had fine breasts. When she ran in her street
cloths, she had to hold the battery case close to her chest, but she
still ran every chance she got. She ran to the grocery grocery for her
mother and back, to school, at school during
the break after hot lunch, and home to her large and penurious family.
During track and basketball season, though, she could take off the
hearing aid and run in shorts and a t-shirt. Then she could disappear
into the world she made with her own speed. In basketball, she was not
skilled at shooting but she was a wizard on defense, able to get down
the floor before anyone, hassling her opponent, frequently stealing the
ball and racing toward the basket, hoping one of her teammates would be
close enough to pass to for the basket.
Father Hobbes Hobbes was teacher in English IV. He was a Roman
Catholic priest from the monastery nearby, one of those the
school sometimes hired to teach Latin or English when secular teachers
were not available. Before his call, he had been a runner himself in
high school, outstanding in the short distances. He still ran three
times a week down the left side of the country roads and all the people
waved and smiled.
“Fr. Hobbes,” they said. “He sure keeps in shape.”
It was natural, then, for him to take an interest in the high school
track team. After his 6th hour class, he would walk out to the track
and visit with his students or with the coach, Herb Parker. Gradually
he became a kind of assistant, taping ankles, helping with the timing.
Pearl Lessor was his student in English IV and also a standout in
track, the teams best hope for making state.
Fr. Hobbes had become tormented by her, not suddenly but a little at a
time: first by her candor and e energy in his class, then by her speed,
then by her willingness to accept instruction in the classroom and on
the track, and only later by her breasts which moved under her shirt as
she ran. After he got to that part, however, he had trouble going back
to her other charms. He pretended for a long time that he did not
notice her body. He looked elsewhere when he could could and
tried to watch her only from behind.
There were times he could not help it, though. Coach helped with
her starts, showing her how to put her feet in the blocks, how to raise
her hips when the starter said, “Get set.” But all he could imagine was
how her breasts hung like fruit at the instant before he fired the
starting gun. He had to time her also, holding a watch as she blazed
past him on oiled joints, her feet throwing cinders with each stride.
Not only was she beautiful and talented. She had a handicap.
Wounded in the inner labyrinths of her ear, she had to struggle to hear
what others heard without effort. Every day she suffered, but her
wounds were open and visible. He saw the others mock her and
often so subtly he could not legitimately intervene. But his own pain,
which he had borne from adolescence, was hidden--the episodes of
self-loathing so intense it contracted his abdominal muscles and wrung
from him inhuman groans, when mental suffering became pervasive
physical pain, as if the membrane separating every cell were caught in
a giant vice. That was partly what brought him to the church, of
course. As an adolescent, he had stared at the crudely painted wounds
on the terra cotta Christ's in the smoky Chicago church and realized he
could, if he chose, worship a God that was had been wounded as he was,
a God that he could be connected to through weakness, but who was also
the God of creation, strong beyond all telling, who had been present
before the stars caught fire and would still be there when the
last one went dead. Now he thrilled to think that his burden and
Pearl’s deafness were joined together with Christ’s wounds in a kind of
trinity, a trinity of pain.
After practice, he returned to his cell a driven man. He
put on his cassock for evening office, nodded politely at the brothers
as they passed in the long hallway. Some them , like him , taught in
the academy. Others served small parishes nearby, or worked in town at
secular callings or cared for the monastery farm, or made wine, or
worked in the bookbindery. Each enterprise made a little money but it
was never enough, and the diocese was often called on to help. Every
year there were fewer students and less money. It was rumored the
school might close.
He was still thinking about Pearl Lessor’s form when the brothers
trooped in and took their places on opposite sides of the chancel at
the front of the church. Brothers and priests sat side by side in
narrow stalls on seats that flipped up. On the back of each seat was a
knob called the Pope’s nose, where they could lean when they were
supposed to be standing for a long time. For nearly 125 years, monks
had been standing and sitting and kneeling in these stalls. Their
posteriors had worn the pope’s noses smooth. and their feet had
worn shallow basins in the soft wood of the floorboards. They chanted
the psalms back and forth in Latin, though some in the church thought
they should be in English, and the issue was being debated in
Rome. Some said the Pope agreed and even wanted to abandon the
high altar in favor of a plain table at the front of the nave. But for
now the high altar still shone, Baroque and guided, in the
evening sun that filtered through the intricate stained glass and
colored the delicately modeled statues of Jesus and the Virgin.
The Latin took his mind far away from the the balance sheet of the
Academy, away from the stacks of compositions, from everything except
Pearl Lessor’s wonderful torso carried on magnificent legs that became
a burr as she raced toward the finish line in the short
distances, toward her coach who stood with his forefinger poised
above the stem of his stopwatch, he eyes fixed on the delicate wand of
the hand sweeping round the numbers, and his body aching in every fiber
to touch, to posses that miracle of flesh that was speeding toward him.
He fought to translate the Latin as he chanted: “Your book says
[indicative singular] I love to do your will O my God [yes, vocative,
singular]. Someone’s [Singular, genitive. Third person? No second, of
course--Your] law is deep in my heart.” Yes, he did love to do God’s
will, but he could not. Or perhaps he did not even love to do God’s
will, since it was clear that what he really loved to do
was think about Pearl Lessor’s softness. Miss Lessor’s softness,
he made himself say.
At supper, she sat with the Abbot and three brothers. The dining room
had large windows that overlooked the gently rolling cornfields and
pasture lands.
“How’s the teaching going,” asked Brother Anthony, who was in charge of
the dairy operation. It has been converted to a mechanical system
against Brother Anthony’s wishes, but Brother Anthony still milked one
cow by hand each day as a symbolic gesture, and the Abbot had agreed
that every monk had to learn to milk by hand as a link with the past
and a reminder of their calling to a simple life. Fr. Hobbes had taken
his turn and found it soothing, sitting on the three-legged stool with
his head pressed against the cow’s flanks, simultaneously pulling and
squeezing the rough teats, gradually establishing a rhythm in
which the cow seemed to participate so the milk spurted with surprising
force, first with a tinny sound against the side of the bucket
and then with full rich sound, foaming the surface of the milk as the
bucket filled.
“Going well. I enjoy it. I get to help out with the track team too.
"That must be fine. They are having a good year, according to the
papers.
“They’ll be good in the short distances,” said Fr. Hobbes.
”Don’t they have a deaf girl on the team.
“Yes, Pearl Lessor, but she’ not completely deaf. She can hear
with a hearing aid. And she’s very bright. I have her in English
too.” The Abbott looked up from his dinner. Fr. Hobbes averted his eyes
“She could win state. She could set records.”
“Could she be operated on?”
“I don’t know. But I know her parents are poor.”
“How do you know that?”
“From her compositions.”
“You have them write about that?”
“No, of course not. They write about irony in literature, but things
about their life come out. Where else would they get examples?”
“Could the church help?”
The Abbot intervened. “The church can always help,” he said,” but not
always with money.”
After dinner, Fr. Hobbes sat for awhile on the broad slab of
cement that overlooked the monastery’s fields. Already it was warm in
the evening but not uncomfortably hot. The pasture land sloped away
from the refectory and then continued as rolling hills. The cows
grazed, most of them facing the same way. He was
aware of someone standing beside him and looked up to see the abbot.
“Gorgeous isn’t it?” he said.
“It is.” He was grateful for the distraction.
“May I join you, coach?”
“Please.” He indicated a chair beside him. "Though I'm not a coach."
Yes, I know. But you help out."
"Yes, I help out."
“But you were thinking about the high school track team.”
“Yes.”
“About that deaf girl who is getting so much publicity.”
“Sure, among others. She’s very gifted.”
“Her handicap makes her even more special doesn’t it?”
“Yes, I guess it does. She carries a banner for all weak and wounded in
the world.”
“That is to say, for everyone.”
“Yes, of course.”
“I don’t have to tell you about temptation, do I?”
“No, but it is your job, isn’t it?” His voice had an edge.
“Yes, it is my job. She’s young, she’s pretty, she’s talented. Be
careful. Don’t let yourself be alone with her. You are her mentor, her
authority. You stand in for God. You could be tempted to take advantage
of that. Of course, you know all that.”
“Yes, but reminders never hurt. Thank you, Father.”
The Abbot stood and Fr. Hobbes extend his hand in the gathering
dark, palm up, offering the power handshake that they saw on TV. The
Abbot picked up the cue and bent his hand to accommodate. “Off to
paperwork. Good night Lewis. See you at Compline?” Only the sung
vespers were required but the other canonical hours were optional and
brothers came as they could to terce, sext, nones, compline.
“Afraid I’ll be reading papers on The Scarlet Letter.”
“Ah, the Scarlet Letter. Well, good night then.”
“Good night Abbot.” Fr. Hobbes resented that fact that his motives were
so transparent when they seemed to him so unique. He remembered once
playing hide and seek and finding a place so obscure he thought
he would never be found, but the person who was “it” walked
directly to him. Yet me was grateful too for having the road to
righteousness pointed out once again. That was another reason he had
joined the church, where he would always know what the right
thoughts were, even if he could not, in a given moment, follow it--as a
lost person who has wandered off the road still rejoices that roads
exist. When his mind descended into prodigious sexual fantasies or into
self-loathing, at least he would know those thoughts came from outside
the edges, that somewhere in the center of things the love of God and
righteousness still existed--nurtured and protected by the Church--and
that he could at least will his mind to conform to that reality.
Fr. Hobbes continued to stare into the pasture. As it softened in the
evening light, the greens grew more intense. A band of pink emerged
between the blue of the sky and the pasture. The pink darkened into a
kind of dusty rose and finally to gray. Fr. Hobbes’s mind hummed with
images. Somewhere in town, Pearl Lessor would be at home, maybe doing
her homework, maybe doing the assignment he had given her on The
Scarlet Letter. What would she be wearing? Would she had taken off her
hearing aid and with no need for the pocket, would she have put on a
shirt that stretched tight across her chest. He fought back from the
image with a Hail Mary which seldom failed him since he began to
practice it as he entered the darkness of adolescence on the streets of
Chicago.
But tonight the sweet lady crumbled before the onslaught. He soft hum
of monastery routine, the pastoral scene in front of him were shattered
in a holocaust of lust. What if it were all a fraud, a voice whispered.
What if the church had got it all wrong? What if the church made a
monstrous mistake in arraying itself against unrestricted sex? Could it
reasonable to restrain so elemental a force? The church had built a dam
to hold back the power of self-indulgence and what was the result? A
world poised on the brink of nuclear disaster. A half-century of
nearly uninterrupted world war. Concentration camps. To say
nothing of the quiet suffering endured by all those million human
beings who rose and worked all day at soul-numbing jobs.
Maybe it could all be different. What if the dam were to burst and the
water of human desire allowed to run free? His body ached for Pearl
Lessor. Surely hers ached for him or could be led to do so. Could not
every species except man lie with whom they would? Yet no animal had
fought a world war. When the Church sent him to English conferences in
Chicago, he frequented the bookstores and found news of the underground
social communities where the senses had the same centrality as God.
What if all that energy were to be let loose? What if
people who ached to touch simply did so again and again until they were
satisfied. There was a pill now to stop the babies, invented by a
Catholic, though the Church was poised to oppose it. Perhaps if
enough people ignored the church, the world could be transformed.
Perhaps that could be the Kingdom of God that Christ proclaimed.
He shuddered as he stood at the brink of apostasy. He knew that the
best minds, thinking hard for 7,000 years had found that
restraint and discipline were necessary for humankind to survive. But
so what? In one pan of the balance scale he put the accumulated
insights of seven millennia of human civilization. In the other, he put
his desire to embrace Pearl Lessor. The needle trembled but would
not move. It was even-all, a dead heat.
Fr. Hobbes walked back to his the high school to do his
papers. He could do them in his room, but he preferred to keep his room
for sleeping and devotions, every surface bare and dusted. He longed
for that same condition in his office, but it filled up with papers. He
let himself into the school office to get his mail, recoiling from the
clutter, the dingy smell of office routine, and the wet coffee grounds
in the wastebasket that had not yet been emptied. On the desk spindle
Kathy, the secretary, had impaled half a dozen notes to herself. A
plate of pastry fragments was drying on the conference table. The door
to the principal’s office was closed but a ray of light shone out
across the thin carpet. He hoped he had been quiet enough so
Bernice Walker, the principal, would not come out, but as turned
from sorting his mail, the light increased, and when he turned, she was
standing in the doorway. She was carrying sheaf of papers.
“Hello Father, she said.
“Hello Bernice
“No rest for the wicked?
“Or for principals or English Teachers.
“Who are not wicked?
“Not by necessity though perhaps by accident,” he said
She paused. Isn’t the opposite of accident substance, not
necessity.”
“Of course. How could I have forgotten. You are an amazing woman.”
“My brother went to your all-male Academy. I read it books at
night when he was asleep. He dropped out, of course, to join the
Army, just as the Latin was getting interested.
“But you never pursued it?”
“No, that was not what women did. I did beg to go to normal
school rather than become a hairdresser. Now, here I am, going
through the mail at night because I spend my days disciplining boys for
trying to look up girl's skirts with mirrors on their shoes. And what
are you doing. Reading essays, I suppose.”
“Yes. The Scarlet Letter.”
“Must they read that book?”
“It’s your curriculum.”
“I must make a note to look at the curriculum guides sometime.
“It’s not that bad, you know. It does not make adultery very
attractive.”
"No, and it doesn’t make men very attractive either-- a vindictive
husband and a cowardly lover. Not much to choose between. In fact, it
makes a pretty good case for divorce.”
“You’ve read the book pretty closely, haven’t you?”
“ I have a half-decent memory. I remember it as a book about virtues of
repression and denial.”
“Are they virtues?--in the novel, I mean,”Fr. Hobbes, said, more to
himself than to her.
"Well, maybe they aren’t--in the novel, I mean. What do you tell your
students about that?”
"Well, I try not to tell them anything,” Fr. Hobbes said. “We discover
together. That’s what the curriculum guide says.”
“It actually says that?”
“I think so.”
“Maybe we both better check on that. And what about laughter. Does
anyone in the whole book laugh.”
“Pearl laughs.”
“Oh, yes. Now I remember. But her laughter has nothing of the
earth. The laughter of a changeling. It’s Protestant laughter. It
protests but does not embrace.”
"You should come in a talk to the class.
“I’m talking to you.”
“I’m listening.”
“Good night, Father
“Good night, Bernice.”
Fr. Hobbes went out into the dark hallway and down to the tiny
office she shred with Henry, the math teacher. The offices were tiny,
designed for one but with two in them, partly because teachers is
encouraged never to be in the office alone with students. He and Fr.
Henry had partitioned off the office as best they could with
bookshelves, back to back. Fr. Otto squeezed in behind his desk and
turned on the gooseneck lamp. He recoiled for a moment from the harsh
glare across his desk. He taught students to file the papers lengthwise
and write their name and class on the outside--”like the cover of a
book.” These could be bundled and bound with rubber bands and stacked
neatly on the low table beside his desk. Reading papers consisted of
snapping the rubber band off a stack, lightly editing the prose, making
marginal annotations, writing a summary comment and in some cases
a grade on the front. If the papers were longer, he would discipline
himself to do ten without a break. Years ago, he had needed a
timer to keep himself from bogging down in exasperation and despair.
But now he could keep the rhythm in his head: look for patterns,
provide at least one positive comment for every negative one, always
treat the work “in terms of what it was trying to become.”
Sometimes the the prose was so painfully toneless and and the
errors so egregious and persistent they seemed willed, but he bore on
past that, searching for the potential writer behind the student
writer, behind that to the literate and thoughtful person the students
wanted to be, at least to the extent they could acknowledge what God
wanted them to be. Sometimes he wondered how he knew what a piece of
writing was trying to become, or how he knew that God truly wanted
everyone to be literate and thoughtful. He had never thought it
through. But he had placed himself in a culture that believed it
and that would have to do for now. If the culture ceased to believe it,
they would inform him. Meanwhile, he must do his work.
The assignment had been to write a sketch of one character. He expected
plagiarism and had even scanned the encyclopedia in the library to hone
his already gimlet eye. He tried to head it off my insisting the
students write about why they were drawn to that particular character.
Steadily he made his way through the first 10 papers. the
students were predictably tough on Chillingworth, who has deserted
Hester and then returned to torment her and just as tough on the man to
whom she had given herself “in a moment of weakness” as one student put
it. Some saw beyond Chillingworth’s evil to the evil of a society which
made a monstrosity like Chillingworth possible, which took him for
granted. In the margin of one paper, he wrote, “Of course, no one know
who he was or what he was doing. If they had, would they have
approved.” He worked hard at phrasing his substantive comments as
questions, promoting dialogue, though he had no way of knowing whether
the gambit was every accepted, whether any student in the five years he
had pondered his questions, formulated a response, discussed it with
another student. Still, he dropped his offering into the void. The
church assured him the void was lined with gold. If it were not, well,
he was better for wagering, with Pascal, that it was.
But the first ten papers had not turned up the one he wanted to read.
Somewhere in the unread stack Pearl's paper burned with unholy
fire. He would not shuffle for it it, but at last it came to the
top of the pile, her name written on the front in a large, open hand,
almost that of a seventh grader. He opened it as a fundamentalist would
open the Bible, prepared to receive its words directly into his heart.
He has assumed that she would write about Pearl, her namesake, but the
paper began:
I suppose everyone expects me to write
about Pearl, but I like my name and I don’t much like that giggly
little imp in the book, so I m going to write about Dimmesdale.”
Fr. Hobbes winced twice--once at the misspelling, once at her
choice. “Dimmesdale really ticks me off. He got Hester “in
trouble” (The inverted commas were large and deliberate.) But they
didn’t have Florence Critenden homes, let alone abortion, so she had
the kid. (He wrote 34a in the margin. The students were supposed to
look up the codes inside the covers of their hand books and be referred
to a section that discussed the problem, in this case, colloquial
language. The students were then to make corrections. Sometimes he
collected papers to see if they had done so. Often he found the
corrections done so badly he could could not tell whether the students
were genuinely confused or only careless and indifferent. But
Dimmesdale wont take responsibility. He’s too wrapped up in his
reputation and what the people will think about him. He overlooked the
wrong “to,” but underlined everything from “reputation” to the
end of the sentence and wrote 56c in the margin, which discussed
redundancy. He should have marched up those stairs when he thought
about it and let old Chillingsworth do what he could. Of course there
there wasn't divorce in those days and that make it harder. But I bet
they could have found a way if they really wanted to. But Dimmesdales
(he put a circle to indicate the missing apostrophe) role was more
important to him than his love for Hester, so right now where we are in
the story, everything is going to rack and ruin. Dimmesdale the
priest and Hester are both unhappy, Chillingsworth is closing in and
Pearl is getting weird. (He circled “weird,” drew and arrow from the
word “priest” to the margin, where he wrote, ”They called him
‘minister’ because they were not Catholics.” Then on a sudden
inspiration, he wrote, “Would a Catholic community have done any
better?” Maybe they could discuss that in class. His mind began to
sketch in the lines of the ideal discussion. Dimesdale could have gone
to confession. But the confessor would have convinced him by rigorous
argument to tell the Bishop. The great machinery of the Church would
have clanked and hummed. Dimmesdale would have plucked form the
community, spirited away an obscure mission in the Philippines, never
seen again. Hester and Pearl would have received money. The
community would have returned to normal. The agony would have stopped,
along with the self-examination. Was that better?
He finished up the papers and then prepared his lessons for the
next day. His planning book allowed him a calling-card size space for
each class hour, bit it was enough to jot down brief phrases and the
page numbers of the questions provided in the student texts or in the
teacher’s edition. On the good days, these would become the skeleton on
which he would, improvise flesh by cajoling, musing, probing. On the
bad days, they would simply plod through the exercises and sign with
relief when the bell rang. Everyone accepted that there were bad days.
He tidied up his desk and stepped out into he night. Summer was coming
and the air was usually heavy and damp, selling, blocking out the
stars. But tonight the humidity had relented and he could make out the
dipper. He walked to the edge of the field where the cows would be
grazing, though he could not see them. He said his prayers there and
did not pray again when he went inside.
The next day when he handed back the papers, he watched Pearl’s
reaction and thought he saw a faint smile, but he could not read it.
Was she laughing at him. Was she pleased with herself? With him? He
tried his questions about a Catholic Hester. The students seemed
startled and resentful at being caught off guard. He tried to draw them
out but ended by supplying most of the insight he had hoped they
would discover. He wanted to think of himself as Socratic teacher, but
when he read Plato, he realized that most of those students were either
patsies supplying straight lines for the master, or else
brilliant mouthpieces for Plato’s own ideas. Still, Fr. Hobbes made his
point. He knew some students were thinking things beyond what their
blank faces showed. When he gave an essay questions, some who seemed
silent now would give him flawless but mindless
transcriptions of his point, while others would scramble the point but
in interesting ways that showed they were hearing something.
The next day, Pearl had never run better. Fr. Hobbes punched the watch
as Pearl came flying by him, looked at the numbers, threw both arms
high in the air and held the watch out for her to read the
numbers as she came trotting back. When she saw them, she threw
herself into his arms in a gesture so spontaneous he returned the hug
without thinking. But instantly they both drew back and covered
their embarrassment by holding hands and dancing in a circle. Others
came running over, saw the watch, and joined the circle. Caught up in
the joy of achievement, Pearl burst from the circle of dancers
and began to cavort around the field like a young colt
until suddenly she crumpled and began to writhe in pain. On the
hard cinder track in her practiced stride she was invincible, but the
unfamiliar dance of joy had betrayed her. She had twisted her
ankle. Fr. Hobbes and Coach Neslon knelt over her as the rest of
the team gathered around. He could see a dark bruise already forming.
“I can’t tell if it’s broken, but you will have to go to the hospital,”
Coach said. She looked up blankly. He made the gesture of
breaking a stick with his hands. He looked up at Fr. Hobbes. “I should
finish the practice. We have a meet Saturday. Can you take her.
Fr. Hobbes went blank but then summoned himself from somewhere far
away.
“Sure.” he said. ‘I’ll get a car,” he said, addressing no one in
particular. He sprinted to the office and explained to Kathy, the
secretary. “Pearl’s hurt her ankle,” he said. Coach wants me to take
her to the hosptial. Is that all right?
“Why wouldn’t it be,” Kathy asked.
"Well, at the monastery . . .”
“You are not at the monastery now, Father. A friend needs help.
Be a good Samaritan.”
“Sure, I understand. I need a car. Fate seemed to closing
in on him , and he was weary of the struggle.
“You can take one of the Drivers’ Ed cars. She fished out some keys
from her desk. He took them, sprinted to the car and spun the tires in
gravel getting to the field.
There he extended his hand to Pearl who used his strength to pull her
up on one one foot. Lucille, the shot-putter, stepped forward and
guided one of Pearl’s arms around her shoulder. Fr. Hobbes slipped
himself under her other arm so Pearl could hop to the open door
of the car. When she tried to steady herself on the bad leg, she yelped
in pain. She was not wearing her hearing aid, so they did not
talk."
At the small hospital, no doctor was available, so they took x-rays and
then put her in an examining room with her foot on an ice pack.
He asked Pearl’s for her phone number, but she just smiled and pointed
to her ear. He tried shouting, but she shook her head and mimed
writing. He took out the notebook he always carried and wrote,
"What is your parent’s phone number.” She took the pad and wrote it
down. When he called her home, he got one of the siblings who promised
to to tell a parent when one showed up, but he did not seem hopeful
that it would be soon. So he sat in the chair in the examining room
beside her, reading Good Housekeeping, the only magazine available.
When the doctor finally arrived, he slipped the x-rays under the clips
on the lighted screen and showed them the thin dark line that he called
a compression fracture.
“I’d guess she won’t run again this season,” he said.
“What did he say,” Pearl asked. Fr. Hobbes wrote, “He says you’
probably get to take the the rest of the season off.” She nodded.
The doctor explained that his practice was to splint these cases and
wait for the swelling to go down before making a cast. Fr. Hobbes
explained that also in telegraphic phrases on his pages from his
notebook, tearing out pages and passing them over to her.
Fr. Hobbes pulled the car around to back ramp, so the nurse could wheel
Pearl down and help her into the front seat. She guided him with hand
directions to her home, past the dairy queen, past the A&W, past
the grain elevator, past several bars, into a part of town that had no
sidewalks, where the bigger houses were ramshackle and the smaller ones
still looked like log cabins, though most of them had some form of
siding. When she pointed to one of the large houses, he parked the car,
though he left it running.
When he looked over at her, he saw tears running down her cheeks. He
looked around hopelessly for a Kleenex, but she calmly pulled the
neckline of her tee-shirt up to eye-level and wiped her face. She tried
to say what he thought might be “Sorry coach, but between her accent
and her tears, the words were garbled. He shook his head in what he
hoped was a gesture of sympathy and forgiveness. The force of the
ages seemed to be pushing her into his arms--not just hormones, not
just loneliness, but even the soft plush enclosure of the 1960 Chevy,
and the hump that ran down the center of the car, that would have been
a hopelessly inadequate barrier to keep their legs chastely separate if
they had embraced. It was impossible she did not feel the same
thing he did. He closed his eyes and gripped the wheel, staring
straight ahead. so she would not see his eyes close from the pain of
restraint. He felt his hand detach from the wheel and reach out to take
hers, but when he looked at his hand it had not moved.