Village life

Richard
Village Life
October 20, 2006

I wrote this at Yaddo in response to a prompt Laurie suggested. I had told her about marrying my first wife when I was 17, who was pregnant at the time. Also about our son, whom I raised with her until he was three when we went our separate ways—she to other relationships and then remarriage, me into the 1960's and a debriefing from Timothy Leary. My son is 40 now. We haven’t seen each other since he was 15—when contact felt strained and communication very difficult. Laurie understands that I carry the loss with me all the time. In her gentle but urgent way, she said, “Write the story.” And I did, with enough alteration–I wrote is as a story not as memoir–to make it possible.

The photographer shouted, “Okay everybody, look at the camera. Groom’s family in a bit. Come on, let’s get friendly. You sir,” gesturing to the older brother of Marylyn, the bride, with one hand, holding the shutter-release in the other. “No fags, please. Wait for the reception. There’s a good lad.” Ernie, who was standing in for Marylyn’s missing father and had just done the honors by giving her away, folded his leg and stubbed out the cigarette on the sole of his new shoe, bought with the money given him after his recent release from prison. Flashing a cheeky grin all around and shrugging, he took up position with the rest of the wedding party.

The camera went “Whap!” The bulb flashed, and suddenly our groom, Michael, was beyond sound and vision—no friends smiling and congratulating him with a slap on the back, no mother and father looking strained and tired, no bride appearing radiant in her floor-length, powder-blue wedding dress—just a silence, and in the center of it an overwhelming realization that he had made a terrible mistake. “Whap!” the camera went again, and he was back, offering that soft smile of surrender. The moment of clarity—half a second at most—would be unavailable again for many years.

It was Saturday, June 8th , 1968. Michael and Marylyn were seventeen. Marylyn was five months pregnant, which the dress concealed deftly. Like dominoes falling, the chain of events leading to this day had begun with a comment a year earlier, when Michael had said to Marylyn, “I think I love you” on a single-decker, Midland Red bus, as it traveled country lanes from the village of Snarston, where they lived, to Market Harboro. Nothing much went on in the Market Harboro, but it was preferable to Snarston, where nothing at all went on. The real advantage of Harboro, as locals call it, was the Dog and Gun pub near the bus station, for the landlord served beer to teenagers in the back lounge, even when they were obviously under age, reckoning he couldn’t start too early recruiting lifetime customers.

The pub was their evening destination, which they’d returned to since first meeting there through friends. On that first encounter, they happened to get the same bus home, and he noticed her, and they got talking and she asked if he’d like to go out, for she wasn’t at all shy with boys. Things developed from there. Or rather they didn’t really develop, because mainly they went back to the pub or wandered around the village, and that was about it. Still, they drew close, finding themselves among friends who either liked the Beatles or the Stones, but not both, while they were drawn to the Memphis sound of Stax Records—Sam and Dave, Booker T and the MGs, Irma Thomas, music that was bluesy and gritty.

Six months after they met, the bus was, as usual, approaching the outskirts of Harboro and fields were giving way to monotonous streets of red-brick homes when Michael uttered the fateful phrase. He hadn’t felt any deep sense of love welling up that needed expressing but rather a vague sense of obligation to make a declaration, given how long, Marylyn pointed out, they’d been going together. The caveat “I think I love you,” which he’d unconsciously borrowed from a Jim Morrison song, was the most he could produce. And so he was surprised and gratified by the snogging with tongues on the back seat of the bus that followed. That was, until the conductor shouted, “Oi, Romeo and Juliet, not on my bus please, save it for down the bloody recky!,” by which he meant the recreation grounds local councils in each village provided teens for smoking and groping.

The next thing Michael knew Marylyn was miraculously offering to have sex with him while they sat in the Dog and Gun. She’d just downed three Babychams, and he was finishing a single pint of Best. They were at their usual table, and it was littered with empties and fag stubbed out in the large ceramic ashtray. Marylyn liked to have her back to the wall, so she could call out to men she knew from the factory as they made their way to the toilets at the back. Her friend Annie was next to her, and Annie’s boyfriend, Brian, an old school friend of Michael’s, was there as well. The girls giggled. The boys compared their favorite bands. Jimi Hendricks’ “Hey Joe” was playing over the sound system and Michael’s right leg vibrated to the bass. As a cheer rose from the front as someone hit triple-top to win at darts, Marylyn leaned over to Michael and whispered, “We’ll do it tonight if yer like.”

He nodded and as he drained his glass and caught sight of the woodpecker on the beer mat, he wondered where they would go. He was a lucky bird. He noticed that one of the horse brasses nailed along the wall was missing. Someone had nicked it. He was dying to leave.

He had full coitus for the first time standing up outside in the dark against the front door of Marylyn’s council house home. He gasped an unqualified, “I love you,” as his orgasm rapidly approached and her mother, hearing huffing sounds from her upstairs bedroom, shouted, “Is that you our Marylyn?” The young woman didn’t answer, rather adeptly pulled him out, rearranged her nylon panties, tugged her miniskirt back into place, and slipped a key in the lock, pausing to turn and say, “See ya, tomorrow.” Then she was gone.

He was left to return his penis to his trousers, zip up, and set off for the mile-and-a-half journey home. With all that is possible at seventeen, he was half way back before his erection subsided and he was in his bed in less than fifteen minutes. He felt better than he had ever felt in his life. Marylyn wasn’t the sharpest conversationalist, but she was good looking and available.

She stood five foot-two and had dark auburn hair cut in a page-boy that framed a round, open face. Despite her sugary diet, she had Chiclet white teeth she considered as dazzling as any model’s. She painted her full, kissable lips with Mary Quant pink lipstick, and she had bright clear eyes, done up with liner and mascara and notable in that one was blue and the other brown—in fact, she was known in the village as “the girl with the different colored eyes.” Michael liked that her breasts were small and even more that she was happy for him to feel them as soon as he tried.

That Marylyn had never directly asked for love didn’t register on him, and why exactly he needed to make such a declaration he could not have said, but that night each of them—Marilyn in the room she shared with her three sisters and he, alone in his room, at the other end of the village—wondered about the implications of his avowal. Would he be having sex again tomorrow? She was asking herself if she’d have to take this boy seriously and quit shagging the others she’d managed to conceal from Michael. The answer to both questions was yes, at least for awhile.

A mere six hundred people lived in their village, and yet, oddly, they hadn’t met until that night in the pub. Marylyn had moved to Snarston from Leicester when the council informed her mother that a three-bedroom house, big enough to accommodate her large family, had become available. They’d left the two-bedroom terraced house—now in the path of a new bypass—that Marylyn’s mother had struggled to pay the rent on. The council even provided furniture, and so now there was enough left from her welfare check to keep her family in food, fags, and the occasional night down the pub.

Marylyn had left school at fifteen to work in a shoe factory on the outskirts of Market Harboro. Michael had attended the local grammar school but had left at fifteen as well. Owing to a miscalculation, he hadn’t attained enough O levels to go into the lower-sixth form, so instead of re-entering the fifth-form he and his parents had decided—although not with reasoning he embraced—that it would be best for him to leave school altogether. There was a haziness in his family about matters others thought crucial, a slackness that Michael loathed and yet slipped into. He was attending, or pretending to attend, the local community college for an Ordinary National Diploma in Business Studies. He had no plans for the future, didn’t think he needed them.

He lived with his parents in a dull but trim bungalow in a cul-de-sac off the main road to Leicester. His father was an assistant manager at Barclay’s Bank. Marylyn’s father had never lived long in any home and when last heard of was somewhere in Lincolnshire dealing in scrap metal. Michael’s mother considered Marylyn’s mother and her brood of four daughters and four sons “common.” She hoped her only child would get over his infatuation. Marylyn’s mother thought kindly of everyone she didn’t owe money to and, more to the point, thought that our Marylyn was a scamp and that Michael was “a precious duck.”