The Corrections

Don Armour’s head, looming above her, was a lion’s head, a jack-o’-lantern. When he came, he roared. His subsiding sighs overtook one another, overlapped almost. Oh, oh, oh, oh. She’d never heard anything like it.

There was blood in proportion to her pain, which had been fairly bad, and in reverse proportion to her pleasure, which had been mainly in her head.

In the dark, after she’d grabbed a dirty towel from the laundry basket in the hall closet, she pumped her fist, at having achieved non-virginity before she left for college.

Less wonderful was the presence of a large and somewhat bloody man in her bed. It was a single bed, the only bed she’d ever slept in, and she was very tired. This perhaps explained why she made a fool of herself by standing in the middle of her room, with a towel wrapped around her, and unexpectedly weeping.

She loved Don Armour for getting up and wrapping his arms around her and not minding that she was a child. He put her to bed, found a pajama top for her, helped her into it. Kneeling by the bed, he drew the sheet up over her shoulder and stroked her head as she had to assume he often stroked his daughters’ heads. He did this until she was nearly asleep. Then the theater of his stroking expanded into regions that she had to assume were off-limits with his daughters. She tried to stay half-asleep, but he came at her more insistently, more scratchily. Everything he did either tickled or hurt, and when she made so bold as to whimper, she had her first experience of a man’s hands pressing on her head, pushing her southward.

Thankfully, when he was done, he didn’t try to spend the night. He left her room and she lay utterly still, straining to hear what he was doing and whether he was coming back. Finally—she may have dozed—she heard the click of the front door’s latch and the whinny of his big car’s starter.

She slept until noon and was showering in the downstairs bathroom shower stall, trying to comprehend what she’d done, when she heard the front door again. Heard voices.

She madly rinsed her hair, madly toweled off, and burst out of the bathroom. Her father was lying down in the den. Her mother was rinsing out the insulated picnic hamper in the kitchen sink.

“Denise, you didn’t eat any of the dinner I left you!” Enid cried. “It doesn’t look like you’ve touched a single thing.”

“I thought you guys were coming back tomorrow.”

“Lake Fond du Lac was not what we expected,” Enid said. “I don’t know what Dale and Honey were thinking. It was a big nothing.”

At the bottom of the stairs were two overnight bags. Denise ran past them and up to her bedroom, where condom wrappers and bloody linens were visible from the doorway. She closed the door behind her.

The rest of her summer was ruined. She was absolutely lonely both at work and at home. She hid the bloody sheet and the bloody towel in her closet and despaired of dealing with them. Enid was naturally surveillant and had myriad idle synapses to devote to such tasks as noticing when her daughter had her period. Denise hoped to come forward apologetically with the ruined towel and sheet at the appropriate time, two weeks hence. But Enid had brainpower to spare for the counting of linens.

“I’m missing one of my good monogrammed bath towels.”

“Oh, shoot, I left it at the pool.”

“Denise, why you took a good monogrammed bath towel, when we have so many other towels. . .And then, of all the towels to lose! Did you call the pool?”

“I went back and looked.”

“Those are very expensive towels.”

Denise never made mistakes like the one she was claiming to have made. The injustice would have rankled less if it had served a greater pleasure—if she could have gone to Don Armour and laughed about it and sought his consolation. But she didn’t love him and he didn’t love her.

At work now the friendliness of the other draftsmen was suspect; it all seemed liable to lead to fucking. Don Armour was too embarrassed, or discreet, to even meet her eyes. He spent his days in a torpor of unhappiness with the Wroth brothers and unfriendliness to everyone around him. There was nothing left for Denise at work but work, and now its dullness was a burden, now she hated it. By the end of a day, her face and neck hurt from holding back tears and working at speeds that only a person working happily could maintain without discomfort.

This, she told herself, was what happened when you acted on an impulse. She was amazed that she’d given all of two hours’ thought to her decision. She’d taken a liking to Don Armour’s eyes and mouth, she’d determined that she owed him the thing he wanted—and this was all she remembered thinking. A dirty and appealing possibility had occurred to her (I could lose my virginity tonight), and she’d leaped at the chance.