I am surprised when I receive a letter from Bryn Mawr, and it turns out I’ve done much better in my exams and essays than expected. I decide to give college a chance before I determine whether or not I want to drop out.
I speak to Tilly, who, for once, is warm and generous with her time. It’s like she has instinctively worked out she needs to give more to our friendship. She urges me to give it until summer.
I call the school and ask if I can stay behind for a week longer due to “urgent family business”—pure nonsense, but I need more time at home. Everything is moving too fast.
For his birthday, I buy the boy a watch. He loves it, and has had his eye on it for a while. It’s a Lord Elgin watch, and I think it’s ugly and too à la mode for my liking, but the boy thinks it’s exactly right, so his happiness trumps my taste.
I decide I need a new car. After I call Grandpa George and speak to him about it first, of course. A blue Fleetwood Series 60. On a whim I ask if they can repaint it pink, the boy thinks this is a swell idea.
“It’s incredible how you can just go get whatever you want,” he says, shaking his head and whistling.
“Freedom,” I tell him.
“Freedom in any way you can get it is important to happiness. Freedom of mind, spirit, and soul.” I need to shut up about money and freedom and all that kind of business. It’s all too easy for me.
“One day, I’ll have financial freedom too,” he says as we drive around town, singing along to the radio.
“You will,” I say and kiss him on the cheek. “You have all the talent in the world to achieve anything you want.”
He sighs.
“I can’t keep off going back to Sun Records for much longer.” He turns to me. “I better get a move on and try my luck anywhere I can.” He reflects.
“Let’s do it,” I say and lean over and snuggle in beside him as the car jumps forward through the green light.
***
This time, I go with him to the Memphis Recording Studio to cut the boy’s second record. Miss Keisker is warm and psychologically generous; I take to her at once. She reassures him, tells him he’s doing well, and later confides in me that she’s been urging Mr Phillips to do something with him, they just haven’t found the right thing yet.
I know his whole reason for coming is really to be noticed, to have Mr Phillips hear something in him and decide he’s worth a shot. His dream is to sing, and I’m proud of him for pushing himself. I keep telling him that just showing up takes courage.
The boy lays down two new songs: a tender, aching rendition of I’ll Never Stand in Your Way, and It Wouldn’t Be the Same Without You. On the drive back to his parents’, he stays quiet. Then, as we pass the lights on Lamar, he starts talking.
“Maybe you oughta just go on with that guy Topper,” he says. “He’s got money. Comes from a real good family. He’s got a future.”
I turn to him, surprised. “What are you on about?”
“In good conscience, I can’t keep you for myself,” he says, staring at the floor of the car. “You stay with me, you’ll just end up miserable.”
“Don’t say that,” I reply firmly. “I’m here because I want to be.”
He shakes his head. “You oughta go on back to college. Do your thing. Live your life. Don’t let me hold you back.” He sends me a martyred look.
“You’re not holding me back,” I say. He’s gone quiet again. His mind seems made up.
The last few days before I go back to college are filled with melancholy. I make up an excuse and go visit Grandpa George instead of seeing any more of the boy.
Miss Mary doesn’t understand any of it, and she keeps trying to reassure me he will change his mind, that he is just being flippant like a teenage boy can be.
The saddest day comes when the dealership calls and tells me the car is ready, a few days early. Miss Mary and I end up picking up the now-pink Cadillac without the boy, and I am so inconsolable that I don’t even want to look at the new car again before I head back up to school. It is so beautiful and joyous to look at, yet it only reminds me of heartbreak.
***
In February, I hear the boy is now dating a girl who’s still in high school, and that he seems happy. Mabel tells me this. Apparently, he’s taken up smoking a pipe and even gotten a curly perm,“looking more eccentric than ever,” she says, “but not in a good way.”
None of that matters. My heart is officially broken for the first time in my eighteen and a half years. I call Cornelia and tell her I’m coming up to Radcliffe for a long weekend.
Tilly rolls her eyes and calls me a drama queen. “He’ll come back around,” she says, with her usual self-assurance. “Trust me, he’ll live to regret this.”
***
I spend Easter in New York with Tilly and her family. In the evenings, we go to clubs with Topper and Buddy. It’s like all this being away at school and now college is softening my edges and making me into a better version of myself, a more tolerable one.
Little by little, as the weeks and then months pass, I start to feel like myself again.
One afternoon in Central Park, our little group stretched across blankets, I glance up mid-conversation and see Topper lounging nearby, golden in the spring light. His sandy hair, the clean angles of his face catching the sun like sculpture in motion.
And suddenly, I see him, I mean really see him.
He’s devastatingly good-looking. Greek-god good-looking.
The thought of the boy ruins the moment, and the old familiar ache returns.
As I walk back to Tilly’s parents’ house near the park, shoulder to shoulder with Topper, I know he would never behave like that toward me, and I warm to him again, giggling at his stories, looking ahead at the others in front of us. Maybe, just maybe, I could, if I really tried, open my heart again to someone like Topper.
My World of Interiors 