Chapter 3: Declaration of Independence

Marilyn Grant accompanied her parents to church her first Sunday back in Evanston. Pete refused to go. Andy was there, but they didn’t speak. He did call that Tuesday, though. It was an invitation to a movie Saturday. They set the time he’d come by.

“Is Marilyn here?” It was Andy’s voice Saturday night.

“One more minute,” she called She had her eyes on, but not her lips.

“Come in,” Dad said in his most parental voice. “I think we should establish some guidelines.” God! Was this 1975 or 1875? Dad sounded just like he had when she was in junior high. She closed the lipstick on her way down the stairs.

“You want guidelines,” she started shouting before she was halfway down. “I’ll give you some. One: I am fucking well an adult. Two: I choose my own friends.” By this time, she was in the living room. She walked towards Dad very slowly and dropped her voice, but not much. “Three: I decide my own rules. Four: I decide my own hours. Five...” And now she was in full voice again. “Butt! Out!”

“Come on, Andy,” she said more quietly. She swept out the door without giving him a chance to open it for her. His car was backed into the driveway.

He opened the door for her. She noticed that it was a Buick. The guy had no fanciness about him, but he came from money. He got in and started the car.

“Stop somewhere. I haven’t put on my lipstick yet.”

“You didn’t get that mad at your sisters for asking me questions.”

“Well...” She hadn’t blown up at them, but she’d decided that they wouldn’t run her life.

He pulled into a parking space, and she pulled the rear-view mirror around where she could see her lips. He clicked on the overhead light.

“You know,” he said, “your father loves you. It worries me to see you so mad at somebody who loves you. Will that happen to me?”

“Well, if you still love me fifteen years from now, love that Marilyn. He treats me like I was five.”

“Sixteen, maybe. Look, I’ve got Kleenex in the back. Want some?”

“S’okay. I’ve got some here.” Finished with her makeup, she pulled out a tissue and blotted the lips.

He got them to the theater, and the movie was all right. When the hero picked the heroine up in his arms, it looked like a hell of a lot more effort than Andy used on her. She patted the hand over her shoulder on that thought. The parking spot he found was nice and shaded from the streetlights. His hand went to her neck and he massaged her there. She started to melt. He kissed her forehead and then the tip of her nose.

“Marilyn.” He always made her name sound special. He kissed her full on the lips, holding her neck and the back of her head while he did so. When their tongues met, she melted completely. His hand cupped her tit quite gently. The thumb stroked over her nipple so softly that it didn’t irritate through blouse and bra. When he broke the kiss, he moved her head with his other hand. He kissed the corner of each eye and then sucked her ear lobe. She reached hungrily for his head to make him return to the deep kiss. His mouth and his hands left her feeling wonderful. Yet, when he started the car, she had no more energy than a soggy tissue.

He got out of the car to open her door and walked her up to the porch. Standing two steps below her feet, he touched her shoulder. She turned, and he kissed her again on forehead, nose tip, and mouth. His hand ran down her back to her butt. She swayed towards him, but they couldn’t really hug where they were standing. She turned around, opened the door, and locked it. If Pete were out, and he probably was on a Saturday night, he had his key.

She’d been sitting down for hours. Why did she feel like she was dragging herself up the stairs? She’d forgotten the ugly start of the evening until Mom called from her and Dad’s room.

“Did you have a nice time, dear?”

“Shh,” she stage-whispered. “I don’t want them to hear you, Andy.” She could hear Dad’s chuckle from her parents’ room. Pete, on the other hand, stuck his head out his door. What was Pete doing home this early on a Saturday night?

Sunday, she was up, showered, dressed, and fed well in time to leave with her parents for church. The liturgist was a high-school kid, a year older than Pete; Reverend Lawrence was making some changes. As they left the service, Andy came up to them.

“Mr. Grant. I’m Andy Trainor.” Dad grunted affirmatively. “There were really two questions. Is Marilyn an adult capable of judging her associates and free to decide upon her friends? And am I a serial killer stalking your daughter for my next victim?” As if murder were what was on Dad’s mind. “Well, the first question being decided in the affirmative, I don’t at all mind setting your mind at ease with respect to the second. After all, I’m only one of several men Marilyn dated at U of I. I’m likely to be the only one of them you’ll ever meet.”

“Well,” Dad said, “then who are you?”

“I’m Andy Trainor, a member of this church. Once upon a time, I was a member of the MYF chapter that Marilyn led. I’m an Electrical Engineering student at the U of I. What more do you want to know?”

“What fraternity do you belong to?”

“I don’t belong to any. I live in a dorm, and never tried to pledge.”

“Don’t you think you’re missing out on part of college life?” Dad still sounded hostile.

“Well, what I want out of college is to be trained for the career I’ve chosen. I don’t see how being paddled will prepare me for that career.” Right now, Andy was getting an edge to his voice too. It was still light, but she could hear the effort he was putting in to keep it light.

“Do you think that becoming an engineer is really being educated?”

“A college education, most certainly. That is the advantage of passing a college course. You know that you’ve absorbed all that the powers that be consider part of that section of knowledge.”

“But that ‘section of knowledge’ isn’t something that everybody has to know.”

“That’s certainly true. It is, however, something that somebody has to know. We don’t all have to know brain surgery, but it’s damn convenient to have some brain surgeons around. Now take History. I passed the general American History course. I could take another course in the history of the Civil War. But, if I did that, I’d have to learn all about the War in the east. I happen to be interested in the War in the west -- it was mostly east of the Mississippi, but contemporaries considered anything west of the Alleghenies as west.

“Anyway...” Andy dragged himself away from his hobby. “Anyway, I can read books to learn lots and lots about what interests me. Since I don’t want to teach History, I don’t need to learn the other stuff. Marilyn is different. She can’t go into the classroom and tell her students, ‘Short stories bore me; we’re only going to study poetry.’ But, if somebody just wants to read, he can read only poetry, or only novels, or only detective stories. Well...” But Dad cut him off.

“That man isn’t educated, reading only detective stories.” He was huffing, and some others on the sidewalk were trying not to look. Nobody seemed in a hurry to go home, though. Suddenly Marilyn had a vision of two bull moose locking antlers for the right to the doe. The image was demeaning, and -- in Dad’s case -- obscene.

“And,” Andy asked in a low voice, but one that sounded threatening, “is a man in the 20th century really educated who doesn’t know the theory of special relativity?”

“Come on, Andy,” she said. She locked her arm in his and started dragging him away. “You’re walking me home.” Andy came, not even commenting that the direction was away from her house. “Walk briskly and don’t talk,” she whispered when they were far enough away from the crowd that she couldn’t be heard. He obeyed, and his brisk walk was hard to match. “Okay,” she said when they were farther away from the listeners, “you can slow down a little.”

“Well, you know how I feel. And starting on fraternities before going on to the purity of a liberal education!”

“He was trying to find something wrong with you. If you’d been a member of some rival frat, he’d have dug into you for that. Really, Mom always talks about her sorority life. Dad doesn’t harp on his frat background when he isn’t pawing the ground.” The allusion flew past Andy, which was just as well. She didn’t want him to get a picture of covering the doe.

“I tried to be friendly.”

“And so you did.” If he hadn’t tried for very long, that was really Dad’s fault. She ran her hand down his arm to his hand. At the next corner, they turned and walked home like that. When they got to the porch, he stopped two steps down, as usual.

“No,” she whispered. “Come up here and lift me -- high.” He did, and she locked her legs around his waist. As he dropped his hands to her butt, she hugged him around the neck and kissed him. Her face was above his this time. As their tongues wrestled, she tightened her legs around him and thrust her groin against him. When she became afraid he’d drop her, she let go with her legs and straightened them. He bent over letting her slide down his body until her feet met the porch.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you, too, but I don’t understand you.” That was fine. Let him understand electrons. She turned, opened the door, and went in.

“Well,” asked Mom, “what was that about?”

“What?” She was trying to sound innocent, not easy to do right after that kiss.

“Last night, you had a chaste kiss on the front porch. I was supposed to believe that was the only kiss in the ninety minutes after the movie let out. The neighbors who didn’t know where you’d gone, might possibly believe that. This noon, after church, not even a date, you come as close to making love on the porch as one can come while still dressed.”

“Mom! We were both standing up.”

“Don’t think that it can’t be done standing up. Anyway, what brought that on?”

“Dad was acting like a bull moose competing for the doe.”

“I think it’s a cow moose, dear. Anyway, was Andy behaving all that much better?”

“I just wanted Dad to know which moose got the ... Are you sure it’s a cow?”

“I may be certain, dear, but don’t you think an English major should look it up for herself?” So, after dinner -- a dinner at which she and Dad didn’t exchange a word -- she did look it up. This was no easy task, but the unabridged mentioned moose explicitly under their definitions of “cow.” Mom, as she often was on irrelevancies, had been right.

She’d reported on how nice Andy was in many letters. Strunk would have criticized her for lack of particulars. The problem was that she didn’t want to tell Mom the particulars. Andy, for example, hadn’t yet unbuttoned her blouse -- hadn’t even tried. Well, maybe she felt more strongly towards him than that. Maybe she’d chosen him. At least, she could give him what she’d given Colin after a much shorter period -- had it been six weeks? Could it have been an even shorter time?

“Dear?” Mom said next day when the two of them were sharing lunch.

“What now?”

“Andy said he wasn’t the only man you’d dated on campus. He was the only one your letters mentioned.”

“Well, you know how the actives run your life during rush period. There were times when we hosted a frat, times when a frat hosted us, and not only during rush. There were times when we went to all-U events, and they arranged for pledges from a particular frat to escort us. How many of those were real dates? I couldn’t say. But there were certainly some that were. I think I mentioned some of those before we got too busy.”

“Well, the events, not the boys.”

“The events were worth mentioning. the boys weren’t.” And that ended that conversation.

She’d taken swimming for a reason. She went out to the beaches almost every afternoon. She enjoyed the swimming, and the guys enjoyed seeing her in her bikini. She enjoyed their enjoyment, too, but when anyone tried to be friendlier, she brushed him away. She wished Andy were there to see her, but he wasn’t.

For their next movie, Thursday this time, she wore a sweatshirt. If she’d worn a blouse, anyone could have seen that she wasn’t wearing a bra. Andy kept his hands on her shoulders through the movie. She was so deep in anticipation, she could barely follow the plot.

After the movie, she pulled her sweatshirt out of her jeans before getting in the car. When Andy pulled into the parking spot, he kissed her forehead, the tip of her nose, her mouth. He was kneading the back of her neck gently when his other hand touched her tit through her sweatshirt. He pulled his face back from hers.

“Oh, Marilyn.” She pulled his hand to the edge of the sweatshirt. He slipped it inside and stroked up her abs to her tits. He cupped the right one. He was incredibly gentle, but the skin on his hand was rough. “Oh, Marilyn,” he repeated. His mouth went back to hers. As the night went on, he cupped one tit and then the other, he stroked his fingers all over her bare skin, with special attention to her nipples. When he wasn’t kissing her mouth, he was kissing all over her face, forehead, cheeks, ears, temple, chin. The latter required him to bend far over. She floated in bliss until her bladder got her attention.