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Outside the quiet snow fell down. The lobby was deserted. We might have been anywhere, in any time. The downtown, old-fashioned city. The USO headquarters next door. The coffee shop with its Formica counters, silent now. The Midwest winter drifting into spring.

"Let's go back to the hotel," Paul said at last.

We walked back through the snowy, cold night streets, talking and laughing, leaping the murky puddles. We were all tired and bumping into each other as we walked, clutching each other to keep from falling down. And then, suddenly, we were at the Sheraton Shroeder, tall and bright in the city night.

Paul glanced at Steve.

"I've got to meet someone," Steve said, and he disappeared.

We were up in the room where Paul was staying with a bunch of guys. Nobody else was there.

"You want to watch TV?" Paul asked me.

"OK," I said.

I didn't know what was supposed to happen next. It felt as if it were up to me.

He turned on the TV.

There were beds all over the room, but nobody else was there.

He would kiss me or not kiss me.

I could wait, but then it might never happen. I might have to be the one.

But what did I do? How did I start it — that slow swim?

There were no parents here. There was no one to call down from upstairs. No one to hear us. There was only the dark huge hotel room full of unmade beds and the big television showing some old black-and-white movie and the abandoned room service trays and the boy beside me sitting on the bed and it was late.

I could feel the hum of his body near mine. Could feel how his hair would feel; the tender edges. How it would feel for his hands to touch me.

Everything rushed around us and was done.

Everything seemed inevitable and certain.

And all I really wanted was to be there with him now, with everything about to happen.

He had the front of my dress pulled down and his mouth on my breast when the door opened and we could see the tall dark shapes of the boys in the doorway.

Paul pulled my dress up; yanked the blanket over us both.

I started giggling and he put his hand over my mouth.

"You okay?" somebody shouted.

"Sure," Paul told him in a tired voice that said it all. Boy language. I had her clothes partly off. You interrupted us. I could have, maybe would have, but then you barged in.

But to me in the dark he was elegant. Courteous.

"Are you okay?" he whispered.

I tightened my arm around him the way I imagined a woman would tighten her arm around a man.

And we fell asleep like that with all our clothes on and Paul's arm around me and my face against his chest, which felt like a man's chest. That was really what I wanted anyway, that and the brief sight of my own breast in the dim room. That and his head bent over me tenderly. That and the expectation and the TV flickering away with the sound off and the quiet distant thump of the night snow falling from the roof of the hotel.

The next night Paul lay on top of me with all our clothes on and ground himself against me again and again. There was a name for this. I didn't know it. Ground himself against me until it kind of hurt, but it also felt good in a dark, fierce way.

I couldn't believe it. Here I was — Martha Dudman — grinding away with Paul Wright, the most handsome boy I had ever seen in my life with his perfect features, his rich, important father, his big Catholic family. His big happy important family and he had chosen me! I was the one he was grinding away at in the dark hotel room. I was the one he did the Temptation Walk with in the lobby of the Milwaukee Hotel. I was the one whose hand he took almost as if by accident and squeezed when Steve said something funny. I was the one he looked around at, smiled at. It was like a dream.

It was like a dream of a dream. Better than anything I could have made up in a story. Could have made up late at night trying to get to sleep imagining this perfect world full of handsome boys and near sex and the dim romantic veiled desire of Milwaukee.

Then it was over. Back to reality and back to school. Back on the bus and the girls' faces and the dull, slow start of spring and classes with the same weary linoleum floor and all the world just beyond the windows and the whole dull time of it; the boring stupidity of it; the plod of it! None of them knew anything about it — anything I'd seen! Anything I knew! McCarthy, any of it, Vietnam. Didn't know about the grown men I'd talked to late in the night — talked about the things grown-ups talked about; politics, deep stuff, philosophy, ideas. But here was the same dull treadmill, the same small frilly phony debutante whirl of horses, boyfriends, diets, and geometry, of drinking on the weekends, parties, boys. They didn't know a thing.

My life was outside of here. My real life. I wanted the fullness of it. I wanted the red leather wallet.

Years before, when I was seven or eight, I had started stealing things. I hadn't done it very often, but I could still remember the sensation. The craving. The hungry, secret feeling; wanting things of the adult world: car keys, jackknives. One time, at the Cleveland Park Club ladies' dressing room, a red leather wallet.

Nobody locked anything up in 1959. You could go to the pool house and take your clothes off and leave them neatly folded on the shelf with your wallet right on top — a thick red leather billfold full of the mysteries of adult womanhood. Driver's license. Ticket stubs. Photographs of your friends. Money. But it was not the money I was after.

I am alone in the pale green dressing room. Afternoon light comes in through the window and the cement floor is cool and rough.

I see her clothes on the shelf, the clothes of the other women, the wallet. I want it. She used to be my baby-sitter. I want to be her: grown-up and with a wallet.

I'm barefoot. We have to leave our shoes outside the chain-link fence.

I stare at the red leather wallet; that thick wad of the grown-up world. Then I take it. I put it down the front of my shorts, but it sticks out too much, so I roll it up in my towel with my damp bathing suit, and I go out.

Past the dim room where the shower is, along the narrow corridor with puddles on the floor and outside, past the men's room. And is this the time the door flips open and I see the lifeguard with no clothes on? Or is this a different time? Which time is it? Patchy dark hair? Stolen wallet? My father waiting. You took such a long time in there, Martha.

I can see her swimming in the pool back and forth with the long, slow laps that ladies take in the late afternoon when all the splashing and the Marco Polo is done. The grown-up hour when the grown-ups swim.

My mother turns from the phone, her face is silent.

Martha, I need to talk to you.

But by now I have forgotten all about it.

I don't connect her phone call with the secret, dark, deep, buried place inside me where the wallet lies.

I came home and hid the wallet way back in my closet.

As I put it away, I'd felt the thrill again. The quivering silence in the dressing room just before I took it. The silence of the house around me. The silence of my room. My secret silence. As if everything, even the backyard where the damp towels hung on the line, even the street where the cars went by, even the trees and the sounds of my mother in the kitchen — everything, at last everything, were stilled by my action. As if there were some power. The power of the red wallet. The power of my having taken it.

But I have forgotten all that now.

Now it is late in the day and I am thinking about something else. Dinner. Hot dogs. Story time.

Did you take Suzie Taylor's wallet out of the ladies' dressing room this afternoon at the Cleveland Park Club?

I draw in; grow very quiet.

Then, yes.

Oh, Martha!

There is silence in the kitchen, but it is a different silence now. Not the good, strong, powerful silence I made. This is the cold, still silence of punishment. The light comes in through the big windows. Big and bright. The kitchen feels cold with the light, even now in summer.

Where is it?

In my room.

I'm not going to tell her where. I might need to save that secret place for other things.

Go get it, Martha.

And then, later, there are all the things that you find out come after. After the secret longing. After the guilty pleasure. After that one bright moment when you're taking it and the ladies' dressing room is so still with a magic stillness that you have created and you hold that thick red wallet in your hand.

I stole it.

Stole it! my mother howls at me, belt in her hand, coming in later to whip me. Her face looks torn.

I cower against the bureau. I am terrified.

She's crying. She's yelling at me. Yelling Stolen! Yelling You stole! and crying and I'm crying too and she's flailing out at me with the belt and I'm scared. She's so angry and so sad. It doesn't even hurt.

Later that night I write other things in my diary. I love Randy Evans, I write. I can't wait for school so I can see him.

But I know. I know what I am.

Copyright © 2004 by Martha Tod Dudman

Tags: Biographies & Memoirs

About the Author

Martha Tod Dudman is the author of Augusta, Gone, winner of a 2001 Books for a Better Life Award. A professional fundraiser, she lives in Northeast Harbor, Maine.