Stealing Time

by Mary Grimm

Genres: Family Life; Short Stories; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

Fourteen stories, many of which appeared in the New Yorker. In "Buying a Pumpkin," a father struggles with three children after his wife leaves him, in "Research, " college girls draw up a list of boys with whom to lose their virginity.

Release date: October 5, 2011

Publisher: Random House

Print pages: 208

Sample

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.