“We’d better stop,” he whispers, “before I can’t stop.”
Aida swallows hard before she says, “You don’t have to stop.” She doesn’t recognize the girl who says this. But she understands that she is that girl. Aida Caruso is lying down kissing a boy in a lettuce field in California. She will give herself to him. It is so romantic she thinks she might cry.
He kisses her lightly on the lips. “Not here,” he says. “Not now.”
She turns away from him because she thinks she really is going to cry. She wants him to keep going, even though she is unsure exactly what that means. She and Linda Martino read all of the dirty parts in The Harrad Experiment, so she understands basically what would happen. But she cannot imagine how it would actually feel, any of it.
“Hey,” he says.
“It’s romantic,” she manages to say. “Out here in a lettuce field.”
He gets up and pulls her to her feet. He drapes his arm around her shoulder as they walk back to the bus, and holds on to her, tight.
SIX HOURS LATER, the bus rolls into San Francisco. Aida had expected sunshine and soaring skyscrapers; she expected to see flowers everywhere, like in that song. But it is cloudy and cold, the buildings squat and dingy.
Stiff and aching, she steps off the bus, trying to hide her disappointment.
Bill stands awkwardly beside her, like a stranger.
“So,” he says, “is your uncle here or do you have to call him?”
“Oh,” Aida says, caught off-guard. “He doesn’t even know when I was coming for sure.”
Bill nods and lights a cigarette.
They stand like that, like they hadn’t made out in a lettuce field last night. His words had held a promise. Not here, he’d said. Didn’t that mean, but somewhere else? The air stinks of diesel and urine.
Aida says, “I know your face by touch when it’s dark, I know the profile of your sleeping face, the sound of you sleeping.”
He raises his eyebrows, confused.
“ ‘Stanyan Street,’” she says, embarrassed. “It’s a poem. By Rod McKuen.”
He takes a drag on his cigarette.
“Maybe we could hang out together for a few days,” she says bravely. “Before I call my uncle.”
He focuses on the arrival of another bus. Its doors creak open, and schoolchildren spill from it.
“About that,” Bill says. “I was thinking I’d maybe go back.”
Her poem hangs stupidly between them. “Back?” she says.
“Beth finally stopped yelling at me,” he says. His eyes flit over her face, then back to the bus.
“Oh,” Aida says.
“She finally gets it. That stupid war changed me. How could it not? I don’t want an electric can opener or an ice crusher or any of it. I want to come back out here and breathe, you know?”
Aida nods. “That’s what I want too,” she says, wondering if he can hear her pleading with him.
“Outside the city there’s all these great towns along the coast. A buddy of mine told me about them in Nam. Point Reyes and Bolinas and Bodega Bay. We could get a shack there, right on the beach, you know? We could light bonfires and stay up all night.”
Aida keeps nodding until she understands that he isn’t talking about her. The “we” is him and Beth.
Finally he looks at her. “You’ll be in college in no time,” he says. “Maybe someday you’ll think about me, the guy on the bus.”
“Maybe,” she says, her voice as light as air.
“Can I have a kiss good-bye?” he says.
You fool, she thinks as she stands on tiptoe and offers herself to him, you could have had everything.
She doesn’t look back, not once, as she walks away from him, her lips buzzing with that bee-stung feeling. Aida thinks of that poem, “Stanyan Street.” She thinks of having read it and cried over it in her small bedroom back home. Downstairs, her aunts had yelled at each other; they rolled ground hamburger and breadcrumbs and eggs and parsley from the garden into meatballs; they drank strong black coffee and smoked Pall Malls; they called her name, “Aida!” Aida!” in a way that was not at all operatic.
Aida recites the poem out loud as she walks past hippies asleep on the bus station floor, past creepy men with ragged beards offering her baggies of pot, past one lone antiwar protester sitting quietly with a big sign: MAKE LOVE NOT WAR.
Finally, she is outside. It looks like the Combat Zone in Boston, not like the San Francisco where Karl Malden and Michael Douglas chase criminals up sky-high hills. Aida raps her knuckles on a taxi’s window. The driver is Indian. He has nervous eyes and a turban. She has never seen anyone wearing a turban before. She hopes Bill is watching her.
“Stanyan Street?” she says.
“Get in!” he barks.
Aida opens the door of the cab and steps inside.
The Importance of Similes