After a couple of times Matt started putting his hand down the front of her shirt. Inside her bra, pinching her nipple. She wondered if that was supposed to feel good. If someone had told him it did. If he cared about things like that.
Then he had his hand in her underpants. The next time—middle of July, probably—he pulled her skirt all the way up. He unzipped his pants. Except in museums, on statues, and one time when she’d walked in on her parents, Eleanor had never seen a man’s penis. Now he was pressing his against her. Then he was thrusting it inside. At first it wouldn’t go, but then it did.
Eleanor lay there on the seat, letting him move up and down on top of her. She closed her eyes.
It got to be a regular thing. Driving to work, listening to the radio. Eleanor tried hard to focus on that, rather than what would happen in the car with Matt.
They always seemed to be playing Creedence Clearwater that summer. “Bad Moon Rising.” Though sometimes Matt put on the news.
There was a riot in New York City in reaction to some policemen beating up homosexual people. As far as she knew, Eleanor had never met a homosexual, but she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to beat them up.
“That’s one way to get out of the draft,” Matt said, listening to the broadcast about the Stonewall riots. “Just tell them you’re a fag.”
Eleanor hardly ever said anything in the car with Matt, but this didn’t seem to matter. He was mostly just talking to himself, probably.
“Me, I’d rather take my chances in the army,” he said.
That summer there was a lot of talk about the moon, of course. The Apollo 11 astronauts were going there soon. Not just orbiting, but landing this time, actually walking around. Mrs. Hallinan had already made plans to host a neighborhood moon walk party.
“It’s a night you’re going to remember your whole life,” she told Eleanor. “We’re living in the middle of a historic moment.”
One time, on the drive home from work, when he pulled her underpants off, he’d seen the string of her tampon hanging out. He put his penis in her mouth that day. “No offense,” he said, “but I get sick at the sight of blood.”
That week, the cover of Life magazine had featured a photograph of the lunar landscape—those vast, empty craters with nothing around them but blackness and stars.
Remember the moon. Forget the rest.
“You ever wonder what the astronauts do about going to the bathroom in space?” Matt asked her.
“No.”
“They have a special bag in their suit,” he said. “Then they release it into outer space. Gross, huh?”
He made the right turn. He always did. She had learned now, when he got on top of her, to put some other picture in her head and focus on that one.
Sometimes she pictured the dog, Buddy. Sometimes the moon.
Matt’s biggest concern that summer was Vietnam. He wasn’t that political, and the Hallinans wouldn’t have approved of their children attending protest marches, but he knew that among the consequences of his failing to get the credits he needed and a good enough score on the law boards to get into some law school, the worst was the strong possibility of getting drafted. Whenever President Nixon’s voice came over the radio, Matt got particularly agitated.
“No way am I going into some jungle with a goddamn M15,” he said. He had a backup plan for the law boards. A guy he knew would take the test for you, with a fake ID in your name. It wasn’t cheap, but if you paid him the money, he guaranteed you a score over 700.
In other circumstances, Eleanor might have said something. As it was, she just sat there letting it happen again: The turn in the road. The engine going, so he could keep the radio on. Her underpants around her ankles that she’d pull up, after. The vinyl seat upholstery sticking to her skin and later, back at the house, Mrs. Hallinan in the kitchen offering a snack. No, thank you.
She could smell it on herself. Matt Hallinan’s semen dripping down her leg.
“You’re wasting away,” Alice told her. “You aren’t going anorexic on us or anything, are you?”
Up on the bed in Patty’s room, after, Eleanor would put on Clouds. Sad as she sounded, Joni Mitchell always made Eleanor feel better, or maybe simply less alone. First she took a shower, always. Then set her colored pencils out to draw. She knew that if she said anything to the Hallinans about what happened with Matt, they wouldn’t believe her. The whole thing—her job at DiNuccio’s, her Rhode Island summer, Mrs. Hallinan offering to take her back-to-school shopping, her friendship with Patty—would be over. Not that any of those things were so great. But where else was she supposed to go?
This was the summer Eleanor started working on the Bodie stories—the adventures of a ten-year-old girl orphan who met all sorts of kind, wonderful people in places like Maine and Antarctica and Paris. With no parents around, but also nobody like Matt Hallinan. Bodie was a girl who got to do whatever she wanted, and nobody told her what it should be. There were no boys in the story, no kissing, or any of the rest of it.
The day of the moon landing, Mrs. Hallinan prepared pigs in a blanket and deviled eggs and they all gathered around the TV set—not just the Hallinans and Eleanor, but a dozen neighbors from up and down the street—to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. Privately, Eleanor wished he hadn’t stuck that flag there. She liked how the craters looked with nothing on them. When she thought about the moon, which she did, in the car, it looked the way it did in Life magazine. Empty craters. No flag.
The next time Matt drove her home from work, he pulled over same as he always did. She closed her eyes, as usual.
As he entered her body—a sensation that had felt like a poker going into her the first time but no longer did—he put his face against her ear.
“One small step for man,” he whispered.
Patty returned home from her job at the camp the second week of August, and the five of them—Mr. and Mrs. Hallinan, Patty, Matt, and Eleanor—spent five days together in Maine. There was a music festival going on somewhere in upstate New York that week. “Bunch of hippies,” Mr. Hallinan said. “Probably pals of that nutcase that murdered the movie star.”
Alice told Matt he should take Eleanor out on the speedboat, show her how to water-ski, but she said no thank you and mostly stayed in her room that week. She didn’t even get a tan.
One night near the end of their time at the lake, she had heard Patty and her mother in the kitchen, discussing the situation. “I wish we hadn’t even brought her,” Patty said. “She turned out to be such a drag.”
“You have to remember what Eleanor’s been through,” Alice told her. “It hasn’t even been a year. I’m not saying it’s easy having her around all the time, but let’s try to be understanding.”
A couple of days after they returned to Rhode Island it was time for the two of them to go back to school. As she was struggling to get her bag down the steps, Jim Hallinan called out to his son.
“Matthew! Get your butt down here. I expect you to carry out Eleanor’s bag. And while you’re at it, give our girl a nice big hug.”
She stood a little ways off as he placed her bag in the trunk, next to Patty’s.
“Good luck on your test,” she told him.