Your friend （I hope），
Becky
The letter, which she rewrote and copied three times to get the tone right, terrified her. She sealed it in an envelope, tore open the envelope to read it again, and sealed it in a new envelope that she then hid in her dresser. It was waiting to be delivered to Tanner, in person, forthrightly, the next time she saw him, when Clem returned from college for Thanksgiving.
She was glad that her father was the one to bring her brother home from the train station, so that she could pointedly exclude him when she invited Clem to take a walk with her. Since the summer, Clem had grown a sort of beard, and let his hair go long, and somewhere acquired a black peacoat. He looked a lot more than just three months older. As they walked in the low afterschool sunlight, he in the peacoat, she in his corduroy jacket, she had an elated sense of her own imminent adulthood; of their new formidableness as the pair of older siblings. They were the next generation. They had to be reckoned with.
From their mother’s letters to him, Clem had learned that Becky had joined Crossroads. He approved, but he wondered why she’d done it.
“I was mad at Dad,” she said.
“About what?”
“I’m more interested in why you were in it. I mean, now that I’m there and I see what it’s like. Some of those exercises…”
“The exercises weren’t that big a thing until Dad left. I stayed in for the work and the music. The sensitivity training was just a price you had to pay. There were enough other guys like me that we could pick each other as partners and talk about books or politics.”
“Did you ever do a screaming exercise?”
“I didn’t mind that one. It was better than the hugging. You were supposed to go around the room and give people hugs. Which, A, there were kids that nobody wanted to hug, and B, how did you know if a person wanted a hug? You were supposed to ask if it was okay, and the answer was supposed to be yes. I remember walking up to Laura Dobrinsky and asking her, and her saying no. She told me she wasn’t into doing things unless she really felt them. And I’m thinking, thanks, Laura. Glad we got that straight. I’d really been worrying about whether you felt like hugging me.”
“What do you think of Laura?”
“She’s got a real gift for humiliating people. You wouldn’t believe the way she spoke to Dad. She was at the center of that whole mess.”
“I didn’t realize that.”
“It wasn’t just her, but she was definitely the ringleader.”
Though Clem had explained it to her at the time, Becky had only a sketchy sense of why their father had left Crossroads. Her understanding was that he’d preached too much, and that Rick Ambrose had asked him to leave. She wasn’t feeling very loyal to him, but she was offended to think of Laura hurting him. “What did she do?”
“The whole scene was horrible. I can’t even tell you.”
“I’ve been talking to Tanner Evans, at the Grove. He and Laura play there every Friday.”
“Good old Tanner.”
“I know. It’s kind of strange that he’s with Laura.”
“How so?”
“Well, I mean, they’re both musicians. But he’s so nice, and tall, and she’s so—midgety. You know what I mean?”
Clem spoke sharply. “Laura can’t help how tall she is, Becky.”
“No, of course not.”
“You shouldn’t be hung up on superficial appearances.”
Becky felt stung. She had made, she thought, an innocuous point—that Tanner’s superficial appearance was extremely pleasing, Laura’s less so. All she wanted was that Clem agree that they looked strange together.
Instead, he launched into a telling of how Tanner and his musician friends had doubled the size of Crossroads. She appreciated the confirmation of Tanner’s social status, but Clem seemed to have changed more than just physically. It wasn’t just the beard, the hair, the peacoat. It was that he seemed more interested in talking than in listening to her. As they sat on a picnic table in Scofield Park, watching tree shadows lengthen on the yellowed grass, she learned the reason.
The reason’s name was Sharon. She was a junior at U of I, and he’d met her in a philosophy class. As he related to Becky how he’d boldly asked Sharon on a date, and how, on that date, they’d had a heated argument about Vietnam, and how amazing it was to find a woman who could more than hold her own in an argument with him, Becky had the unprecedented sensation of not wanting the details. Of being, herself, less interested in listening. The antipathy she felt toward Sharon, the discomfort it caused her to hear about Clem’s happiness, was inappropriate. It seemed to confirm, retrospectively, the inappropriateness of other things about her and Clem’s friendship. When he went on to effuse about what a revelation it was to experience a powerful animal attraction for the first time, and intense animal pleasure, by which he apparently meant full-on sex, and what a revelation it would be for Becky, someday, when she was ready for it, to connect with her own animal nature, her ears started roaring and she had to walk away from the picnic table.