Chapter 7

Young Lucy Barrett passed the crowded drive-in a half-dozen times, turning around in the deserted parking lot in front of her family's department store, before she found the courage to drive into the car-packed lot and park beside one of the speaker-boxes. She had never come here alone except that night she met David, though she knew some of the people who hung-out here were pals of her boyfriend. Anxiously, she ordered a beer and a hamburger and prayed she was inconspicuous: David would probably be furious if anyone told him his girl had come to this place alone--the only stag girls parked around Scottie's were definitely on the make. But then, she couldn't just drive around all night and David was tied up on business; no, it was safer than wheeling around suburban Washington in the middle of the night.

Lucy's mind physically ached from the tormenting cross- current of painful emotion that swept through her thoughts like a rip-tide. She had to be alone somewhere, to think, to try no matter how much it hurt to sort out this tangled web of feelings that made it impossible for the young blonde to think clearly. The car-hop brought her order and she paid the busty tough-looking girl and left a tip on the tray. Absent-mindedly, she switched on the radio and let herself be bombarded with the raucous sound of a top twenty pop station. The acid-etched memory of her mother with that horrible Marlowe man blazed in her mind like a neon billboard... her own mother, John Barrett's widow, sprawled nakedly across the bedspread like a central character in some five-dollar porno movie... pot-bellied, balding Jerry Marlowe hunched over her, his head stuffed between her lewdly-splayed thighs, his back arching and bobbing as he salaciously licked and sucked there at the banquet-table of her naked loins! Even now, over the pounding rhythms of the rock music from her radio, she could still hear, in that private inner ear of her mind, the wetly lascivious sounds of that horrible man as his lips and tongue worked ravenously between her mother's willing thighs!

Why, oh why, she asked herself, did I have to see that? If it had to happen between them like that so vulgarly, why not some night when I was out? Dear God, how could she bring that man into her bedroom, there on the very bed, between the very sheets where she once slept with Daddy! He loved her, I know he did, and I always thought she loved him as well, but now... now I just don't know anything anymore! It's all so confusing, so filthy and wicked and so hard to comprehend.

Lucy had tried all the approaches open to her young and relatively inexperienced mind... she had thought of her own actions, her times alone with David. But somehow it just wasn't the same to her... how could it be, she asked herself again and again. Mother is a married woman! Widowed yes, and certainly still too young to exile herself to wearing black and living alone, but... "Oh, I don't know what I mean any longer," she said aloud. "Nothing makes sense to me now... nothing!"

"They say that's the first sign of cracking up... talking to yourself, I mean." It was Sally something-or-other, a girlfriend of one of David's friends, and she was peering into the open passenger window. Lucy wiped her eyes hurriedly and managed a wan smile. "Sorry to intrude, Lucy. I mean, I don't really know you that well, but you seemed upset. Anything I can do to help?"

"Oh... no, Sally, it's just some silly argument I had at home, nothing really," Lucy said cheerily. "I feel better already. You know how it is... well, it's getting close to that time of the month, you know? I guess I'm just easily upset these days."

The close-cropped blonde looked disbelievingly at David's girlfriend in her expensive car, a forced smile of concern on her red-painted lips, lips that had once been David's until this rich girl with her fancy clothes came along. Sure, I'm worried about you, all right, she said to herself, you could drop dead for all I care! You and all the rest of those Valley Farms swells! But Sally was not about to betray her real feelings to this stuck-up rich bitch, not on your life... she had something better in mind, something far, far better!

"I understand what you mean, honey," she said in syrupy sweetness that nearly betrayed her acid tongue lurking beneath. "I get that way sometimes too; have to go running to my ol' man. Hey, how come you don't share all this worryin' with your boyfriend? You two had a fight or something?" Had Lucy been more keenly observant, she might have glimpsed the twinkle of maliciousness that flashed in the hardened bottle-blonde's eyes.

"Uh, no, we haven't been fighting... why?" she was nearly afraid to ask.

"Well, he's parked over there by the wall, been there for hours. I'll be running along now, can't keep the ol' man waiting too long or he might belt me!" The attractive young blonde girl, her pink schoolgirlish cheeks still streaked from crying, sat in stunned silence as the brassy platinum blonde, clad in cut-off jeans and a man's tee-shirt that was an easy size too small, strolled smugly back to her own car. A giggling pair of teeny- boppers, much younger but cut from the same case-hardened mold as the sex-toughened Sally, greeted their older friend's return with a chorus of shrill laughs... were they laughing at her? Lucy suddenly began to look around at the lined-up array of cars, all filled with the sort of people she had never known at the expensive girls' school her father packed her off to, people she felt no animosity toward, but she felt sort of uncomfortable with nevertheless. And there across the lot, backed against the brick wall of a motel next door, was David's tiny sports car. Now, more than ever, she wanted to be with him, to beg him to take her away from this place... anywhere! She leaped from her tiny compact car and made her way through the crowd of beer-guzzling boys that were clustered near the end of the parked cars, her unexpected prettiness and vulnerability a lure to their jeering catcalls and coarse invitations. She ran past them, blinking back the tears, closer with every step to David's car; it was parked so that it angled away from the crowded lot and she realized that he could not possibly see her coming. Perhaps that was why he didn't greet her or... but then an explosion of reality crashed into her already-dizzy senses... a business contact, he had said, something he couldn't break.