Free Outer Banks by Anne Rivers Siddons

Court Road. God! Not me, no thank you.”
    And I think she did mean that. Marriage and children were not in any of our talk at night, not even an alliance of any sort. Sometimes we made vague talk about Great Loves, and the suffering they entailed, but if we got more specific than that, we set foot on a heavily mined path that led inevitably to It, and we fled from it. She shied away, I am certain, out of a deep fastidiousness of soul. I shied out of embarrassment and fear of the ensuing entanglement. In my mind, It meant, inevitably, marriage, and that meant that strange, duplicitous, abyss-dance that had linked my father and mother.
    And so I was able to say, when she said, “No thank you,” “Amen.” But I wondered about sex, endlessly and sometimes near obsessively. I would lie in bed at night, after we had turned off our lights, and move around two anonymous, androgynous figures in my head like cutout paper dolls, trying this position and that, andI still could not quite figure out what you actually did. Who gets on top of who? If it’s him, does he mash the breath out of her? If it’s her, how does it get up in her? I had seen male genitalia only in paintings and statues, cozy, chunky bundles that dangled straight down. Even if he lay on top, how would he get it inside her? And then what? Does that stuff come right out into her, or do you have to wait for it; is it like pushing the button on a can of shaving cream? Do they move? Does he? Does she? How do you know when it’s over?
    And the questions at the heart of it all: Does it hurt, and will I want to?
    It did not seem likely to me, on those nights, that I would ever learn the answers, though common sense told me that one day even I would cross that damp chasm between those who had done It and those who had not. But my heart didn’t believe it. Meanwhile, there was Romance and Impulse, and songs to be sung…while we were young…
    And so we talked, if we talked of the future at all, about careers, and what we would do after school. I planned to go straight to New York and plunge myself into the esoteric world of Eames and Bertoia and Saarinen furniture and rich, thick textiles and bright, explosive abstract paintings and cool, sculpted white houses by the sea. Cecie meant to go through Duke Law, pass the Virginia bar, and then take off for a couple of years and roam the world before settling down to practice some nebulous, unnamed branch of law in an old house on the shore where water light danced on walls and ceilings and the tide slapped hollowly under a silver-gray dock. Neither of us thought how we would get from graduation day to those distant, shining futures, but neither of us doubted that the worlds of international design and law would welcome us with open arms. Our grades, after all, were exemplary.
    â€œCome with me to Europe before we start to work,” shewould say. “It won’t cost anything; we’ll backpack and get jobs along the way if we need to.”
    â€œYou come to New York with me,” I replied. “You can practice out on Long Island if you have to have water and gray shingles, and I can come out on weekends, and we can earn enough to go to Europe in style.”
    â€œYou’re going to be perfectly happy to find somewhere wonderful and stay, Kate,” she said. “But I’m always going to want to see what’s around the next turn.”
    It was a simplistic prophecy, but I thought at the time it probably had a grain of truth in it. I also thought that somehow, when all was said and done, Cecie and I would stay close to each other through our lives. It was what you do think, in the middle of those devouring early friendships. That it is simply ludicrous to think that anything, even marriage, even death, can broach them, such is their power and sweetness.
    Cecie was always the one of us who had doubts about that.
    â€œYou’re going to meet somebody and get