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The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Silent Night: Difference between revisions
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“Why are we here?” I said, alarmed. I was drunk enough to feel the need to bolt, to walk fiercely into the night with the cold on my skin and in my lungs. Perhaps sensing this, Paul put the truck into gear and backed out of the driveway and began a circuit around town, looking for people out. This is what we did when the night was over, but not quite. You’d find someone circling the town the way we were, prolonging the inevitable return to our parents’ houses. Maybe someone knew of a party, or a bar where everyone else congregated. We were at in-betweens—too old to hang out at the usual high school places, too young to have our own families and homes. Those of us who’d married young invited other couples over for dinner—awkward evenings that seemed a parody of our parents’ lives. There’d be lobster casse- role and the Doobie Brothers playing on the stereo. There’d be a joint smoked and chit chat that was pointless, really. You already knew who you would sleep with, and the drama and intrigue had been stripped of the night. | “Why are we here?” I said, alarmed. I was drunk enough to feel the need to bolt, to walk fiercely into the night with the cold on my skin and in my lungs. Perhaps sensing this, Paul put the truck into gear and backed out of the driveway and began a circuit around town, looking for people out. This is what we did when the night was over, but not quite. You’d find someone circling the town the way we were, prolonging the inevitable return to our parents’ houses. Maybe someone knew of a party, or a bar where everyone else congregated. We were at in-betweens—too old to hang out at the usual high school places, too young to have our own families and homes. Those of us who’d married young invited other couples over for dinner—awkward evenings that seemed a parody of our parents’ lives. There’d be lobster casse- role and the Doobie Brothers playing on the stereo. There’d be a joint smoked and chit chat that was pointless, really. You already knew who you would sleep with, and the drama and intrigue had been stripped of the night. | ||
Paul parked his truck in front of my mother’s rented house. The lights were out and it was nearly one a.m. The night had involved a series of choices and chances and I had missed each one. He pulled me into his arms and I was pliant and curious. We’d kissed the first night we went out to the theater, but nothing else had happened beyond that, and tonight I knew his hands would slide beneath my dress, which they did. I was drunk and drowsy from the pill and I let him do what he wanted, falling into a sort of stupor. He pressed my head down to the front of his pants, and I pulled back for a moment, but finally relented and did what he wanted, and he moaned and said, “Carol, oh, Carol.” | |||
His voice held a note of longing and sorrow, and later it was clear to me that he wasn’t confusing the two of us, but in that moment, I’d imagined he was. | |||
“I’m not Carol,” I said, secretly gratified that I might be mistaken for her. He was ashamed for revealing too much. | |||
The trick to the past is that its details can be manipulated to serve our | |||
purposes. And sometimes, I got out of the truck and slammed the door and went inside my mother’s house and went to bed. Others, I let myself re- member the way he held me by the throat, the feeling of his fingers on my neck. The things he called me that were far worse than another girl’s name. The way he drove the truck, with one hand, holding me down with the other. The passive way I let him do that, settling into the truck seat, my head pressed against the passenger door handle. | |||