"Growing," a story (iii)

Abby's Aunt Gracie is five years younger than Gerald is, and she lives in Huntington Beach, California, which seems thousands and thousands of miles away. Gerald doesn't see her that often anymore. Maybe they were never that close, he thinks. 

He remembers a night at the lakeshore when he strong‑armed his baby sister. He was already in college, but she was only a freshman in high school. 

By January the beach was hard as rock, frozen solid enough to drive cars right over the sand. They used to drive the beach as if it were just another country road, north for five miles, maybe more, and back, nothing there in the darkness but the moon tossing a wide, sparkling funnel, yellow as butter, over the jagged surface, the lake half‑eased with the touch of night. At the shoreline, ice chunks formed a cliff jutting out over the open water so far that on calm nights the lake did nothing more than whisper against the frozen bank. Twenty years ago there weren't many year‑round homes along the beach. Most of the rich people would go back to the city for the winter, leave their cottages locked up tight while the wind blew cold and wet with lake snow. 

It happened one night when he was home from college, semester break, January, 1968, his freshman year. He and his friend Dean were down at the beach, riding along like the old days, when they came on this party in the middle of the long stretches of sand between lake roads‑‑ten cars circled up with their noses together, some of them with their headlights left burning. In the middle some kids were working at a fire. Janis Joplin's ratchety voice took the edge off the cold darkness, the radios in a half‑dozen cars cranked up, windows left open. 

Most of the kids were their own last year's friends, juniors and seniors now. But something had happened since he'd left the high school, something he felt afraid of. Marijuana had found its way down into the high school, a place where he didn't think it had been when he'd graduated just months before. Some of the kids were smoking weed, high school kids in clumps of four or five, on blankets around the fire, their feet tucked beneath them, Indian‑ style‑‑just kids, he thought. He'd been around people who'd smoked up at college, even done it himself, but not in high school. Things had changed at home. 

In the blast of music three couples danced, lost in the swells of the Righteous Brothers. There may have been thirty kids in all, but none of them were their friends any more, not after his being away. They stood outside the circle of fire and watched, outsiders after six months away. 

His little sister Gracie came out of the shadows on top of the ridge, her arms full of wood‑‑old slats and chunks of firewood someone else had cut, her clenched hands jammed with newspapers. She was a freshman then, only fifteen, and he would never forget her face‑‑a pudgy, child's face‑‑full of excitement. Her eyes were dark, but her eyebrows were sandy, not even there. She'd had freckles, lighter then, in mid‑winter, and she wore no makeup. Her hair, thick as her mother's, parted in the middle, long bangs draped behind her ears, was never really red, but even in the glare of headlights the deep mahogany glow shown like bronze. She wore it down over her shoulders, hair like flax around a face full of joy. It didn't seem that long ago that he'd taken home the school's Pentax and snapped a whole roll of film at her birthday party, a slumber party with six other sixth graders, giddy little girls. That night on the beach, her face had the same excitement, the same kind of joy. 

He knew the moment he saw her that she'd picked up that stuff she was carrying out of some cottage somewhere. It was not uncommon for kids to bust cottages‑‑for a certain kind of kid anyway, not the kind he thought his sister would ever be. She'd broken in some place, along with the other three or four kids who'd come into the light, bundled up with the goods. 

She dropped the load in the middle of the circle and fell to her hands and knees to arrange it on the fire, slats cracked and tossed in for kindling, logs leaned up against the flames, never seeing him there at the same party. In '68 everyone wore the kind of collarless shirt she had on that night, unbuttoned down her chest‑‑this one gray. There she was, on her hands and knees, pushing that stuff into the flames, her shirt gaping far enough for all of them to see that this child, his little sister, wore no bra, that it was probably rolled up in a glove compartment of some guy's car. Once out of the house, she'd taken it off‑‑his little sister Gracie.

Maybe it was her nakedness that made him do it. Maybe it was something of the father he would become; maybe it was just anger from a brother who wouldn't stand to see his sister taken the way he knew some girls were. Whatever it was, he walked into the middle of that circle and grabbed Gracie's arm, jerked her outside the lights before she knew what was happening.

"What you doing, Gerald? What the hell?‑‑"

"Don't swear," he said.

"What's the matter‑‑"

"You're going home‑‑that's it," he had told her that night. "I'm taking you home."

The Rolling Stones blasted out a cover for their voices as he pulled her, yelling and screaming, her heels jacking into the frozen sand. He couldn't lock her in the car, so he squeezed the keys from his pocket, threw them to Dean, then jumped in the passenger door, carrying her with him, holding her down like a criminal in the front seat until they'd driven a hundred miles of country roads and her anger had no place left to go.

"I hate you, Gerald," she told him that night, even when the fighting was over.

But he had been fortified by his sense of doing right, acting the shepherd who'd gone into the wilderness for that one lamb who'd wandered astray.

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