"It's raining over there," says Colleen. "Can you see it?"
Owen looks up. The world is divided up ahead by a moving wall of iron grey water. The rain gushes in rolling sheets that smack against the windshield and drench them in the second before Colleen has pulled the roof into place.
The seats are damp and steaming under their warm wet bodies. Rain splats on the roof and pounds on the hood and is everywhere surrounding the car like thick smoke, turning houses and fields into square shadows floating on seas of grey. The headlights serve only to illuminate the raindrops in two long yellow-grey shafts. It is tiring to drive in the pouring rain.
"I wanna drink," Colleen tells Owen. "You drink?"
"Sure I drink, Colleen. What do you think anyway?"
She laughs at him. "Owen drinks and eats sandwiches and does his homework."
"That's not all I fucking do, Colleen," Owen says, scowling. He keeps scowling for the next two miles and is still scowling when they pull into the parking lot of Tillie's Bar 'n' Eats. He doesn't laugh with her when they race for the door, rain drenching them again in heavy cold wet pellets. He concentrates so hard on scowling that he forgets to feel nervous when they go inside, when dark angry faces turn to look up at them shaking the rain from their heads.
Colleen says, "Come on, sugar," and shakes her ass as she walks up to a stool. "Fur Cap--it's goddamn freezing out there," she tells the bartender.
The bartender is tall and skinny like Owen, but with a long black beard and a long ponytail. Owen stares at the bartender's red suspenders and tries to keep scowling. "Tequila shot," he growls.
"You twenty-one?"
"Oh, gimme a break," says Colleen and squeezes Owen's thigh. "It's my boyfriend, for chrissakes."
Someone in the bar chuckles. "Way to go," says the bartender, setting them up. Colleen raises her glass--"To nudie pictures," she says, and he smiles finally and clinks her glass before tipping his head back to toss it down, breathing steadily so he won't cough. Colleen giggles and rubs her ribs. "Oooh, that's better there."
Thank god he was supposed to have paid the dry cleaner--he has twenty dollars in his pocket. "You wanna smoke?" he asks her.
"You smoke too, Owen?" she says, but she smiles flirtatiously, so he says, "Smoke, homework, sandwiches," striding to the cigarette machine like a twenty-one-year old might.
Colleen has finally figured why Owen got so mad. It hadn't occurred to her, what with his being so young, but when she thinks about it, maybe he's not so young. She was younger when she got pregnant. "God," he had said slow and breathy, just like she'd imagined. And already she feels different and she knows they are looking at her, those men in the bar. She watches Owen swagger back, holding a cigarette between his lips as he digs in his pockets for matches. He walks like a man. Those men looking at her think Owen is her boyfriend and that makes them think of her in a different way. They look at her and then also they think about her, about why would have this young kid for a boyfriend. And they wonder what Owen's got that would make this lady they are looking at want to be with him.
Owen is saying something, asking the bartender for matches. He downs another shot. He lights two cigarettes at once, looking up at her as he draws in and the ends glow orangey-red and crackle. A few hours ago he was just Owen, she thinks, just the kid from next door. Now he's lighting cigarettes all sexy like a movie star because he sees her in this new way and is trying to act in a way he thinks will make her want him. She takes a cigarette from him, brushing his fingers with hers because now she wants to see how far it can go. She can't see him as Owen. All she can see is what he looks like to everyone else in the bar. It's like all the eyes on her are the shutter eye. Her whole body is buzzing underneath the hot damp cling of her clothes and she is dizzy from the rum and the cigarette--hot wet waves, pumping with her blood, seep out of her skin into the dark air. The bar is full with waves of her, waves of her washing over the men in the bar, and over Owen, and through them; they are soaking up air drenched with her.
"Colleen," Owen is saying. "Colleen, why'd you ask me to take that picture, Colleen?"
It isn't Owen. She laughs and drapes her arm over his on the counter.
"Colleen," he says.
It isn't Owen. She wants to see how far it can go, this girl that was inside her, this ghost set free in front of a million shutter eyes that stretch out into forever. She leans in to him. "What, Owen? I can't hear you, sugar." She closes her eyes and kisses his mouth.
Inside her kiss is deep silvery blackness that fills his closed eyes, that fills all of him. The bartender and his red suspenders are somewhere beyond the deep silvery blackness; somewhere beyond Colleen the bartender is standing with thumbs looped around his belt loops, standing there watching him melt into her. Her lips part slightly just as she is pulling away, pulling away for hours, for years is her mouth moving backwards away from his and she sucks the silvery blackness back inside her and he is opening his eyes as she turns from him almost smiling to suck on her cigarette, pulling that smoke, too, inside her.
It's like she's driving again, how she knows just how to be, smoking and looking around her as if she had to concentrate on sitting there as much as driving a car, that way of concentrating where you can still think about other things. And then there is a smack like the rain on the windshield when she turns to him suddenly and says, "Let's go."
But still, he pushes her hand away when she takes out her wallet, and puts his own money on the counter with a big tip just like a twenty-one year old might.
It isn't raining anymore, and the grey is melting away across the hills. She'll have to drop Owen off at the end of the road so John won't see her car.
"Where we going, Colleen?" Owen asks her.
"I'm taking you home."
He looks straight ahead and flips on the radio. It is a song he doesn't know, but he shakes his head in time with the music.
"I ain't a-missin' you," Colleen sings.
"It was a strange day, wasn't it?" he says without looking away from the road.
"I sent that picture to Playboy magazine," she says. "I just wanted you to take it for Playboy magazine."
He looks out his window so he can't even see her out of the corner of his eye. He pictures Lou and Nick taping the picture up in their locker. It is the picture of Colleen on the laundry machine that he took except he is in it, kneeling at her feet, kissing her hand, surrounded by sheets that billow over him, sheets that cover him on his knees below her.
"I'm gonna be in it, too," she says. "I know I'll get in--don't you think I can get in with that picture?"
He closes his eyes and leans back against the seat. "Sure, Colleen."
At the end of Elm Road, she stops the car.
"I gotta let you out here, okay?"
"You running away?" he says, still looking out his own window.
"I hadn't thought about it that way," she says and suddenly she is afraid that he will say, "Of course you didn't, puddin'," but he doesn't. He starts to flip the handle to open the door and then he turns quickly and pulls her close in and kisses her mouth, opening his mouth too this time.
"What'd you mean, `I wish you'?" he whispers.
"I meant, I wish you were real," she whispers back and he holds his breath. The silvery blackness is like a whirlpool whose center is at her mouth. He is being pulled in.
"But I was talking about myself," she says (knowing it herself suddenly) and he lets his breath go and he is slamming the door on her, running up the yard to his house to the door and he bangs his hip on the banister, pounding up the stairs to his room where he gets to the window just a second too late to watch her driving away.
She drives out to the Grove, where she used to go in high school. Sure enough, there's some trucks parked out off the road, deep mud tracks across the grass, kids standing there under the trees. She stops the car and gets out to walk on the road, which is covered with dark splotches from the rain. Her heels click on the pavement.
"Hey, girl," someone calls from the trees. It is a girl's voice. Colleen doesn't answer, doesn't look up.
"Hey, girl, yoo hoo," shouts a boy's voice. It's really a man's voice, like Owen's, thinks Colleen, and suddenly realizes that she is alone there on this road where no one comes. It is not night, but it is grey and murky out, left over from the storm. She thinks of her tiny weak body. That is how she must look to them from under the trees, like a little black shadow. She turns around and starts back towards the car.
"GIRL!"
She starts to run and almost trips.
"We can see you, girl," someone shouts and everyone under the trees laughs.
She pulls off her shoes and runs, picturing her little black form as they must see her, flitting through the trees. She pictures herself and she pictures the car and she pictures the distance between them getting smaller and smaller as the kids under the trees close in with their eyes. The pavement is rough and damp under her feet. "I see you, I see you," she sings frantically, finally at the car, fumbling to pull open the door. Their stares are tunneling into her back, she is shivering, throwing herself into the front seat. "Don't be afraid," someone yells, laughing like Dracula, and she has the car started, it is coughing and bolting forward. "I see you, I wish you," Colleen sings at the top of her lungs, but she cannot help turning the car towards home.
"Why are you so dressed up?" John asks her at the door. "You been shopping?" He kisses her cheek.
"Nope," she says, stopping herself from pulling off her heels at the door, though her feet have started to ache.
"You gonna make dinner in those things?" he says, walking back into the living room.
"Yup." She starts for the kitchen but then remembers the basement. She stands at the top of the stairs, at the doorway to the living room. She can just see the edge of the drier.
John is behind her in the living room, smoking. "Where you been?" he calls.
If he sees the basement, he will know her own private secrets. It's the housewife's harem room, and I am the housewife, she thinks. It's my own fucking harem room.
"At Lili's," she says, but he's not listening anymore anyway. He's reading the sports page. She starts down the stairs, careful not to trip over her heels. She doesn't turn on the light, and the only light comes from a little window at the far corner of the basement. It's the same murky light from the grove, but it's soft from the round full shapes of the sheets. She sits sideways on the washer, twisting her legs and arching her back like in the picture, one hand on her ass, one on her right thigh. She leans her head back and whispers, "I wish you."
"When's dinner," John calls.
"Just finishing your laundry," she yells back. She opens the cabinet without getting down from the washer and takes out the September issue. She rips out the first page with the address on it, slowly, so John won't hear. She takes off her shoes and jumps down softly from the washer, climbs silently up the stairs. The screen door doesn't squeak anymore since she oiled that top hinge.
Colleen stands on the front porch and looks across the yard, folding the page from Playboy into smaller and smaller squares. Beyond the yard that way is Cleveland, and in Cleveland is a bedroom above a busy city street. Fabric in bold dark colors and wild patterns hangs from all the walls, across the ceiling, around the bed. She sits on a cushion by the window. No, she sits in the window, which has a seat built right in. The wind blows against giant purple and blue-patterned curtains; they billow up around her, soft on her skin. Long ivy tendrils of the plants hanging there brush against her face. She has her knees up, her back against the windowframe. She pulls out a clean white sheet of stationary. "Dear Playboy," she writes. Not clean white, but that yellowed kind that looks antique. She has scented it with lavendar, and her pen is felt-tipped. "Dear Playboy, I have moved." She leans her head against the windowframe, looking down on people passing in the grey light of the Cleveland dusk.
