The Collected Stories by Grace Paley Page A

factual occurrence, to parry an experience or even a small per-adventure?
    I relit her cigarette. Then I said, with no pacing at all, like a person who lacks aptitude, “What do you think, Cindy, listen, will you have trouble with your family about dating me? I’d like to spend a nice long evening with you. I haven’t talked to someone your age in a long time. Or we could go swimming, dancing, I don’t know. I don’t want you to have any trouble, though. Would it help if
I
asked your mother? Do you think she’d let you?”
    â€œThat’ll be the day,” she said. “No one tells
me
who to go out with. No one. I’ve got a new bathing suit, Charles. I’d love to go.”
    â€œI bet you look like a potato sack in it.”
    â€œOh, Charley, quit kidding.”
    â€œO.K.,” I said. “But don’t call me Charley. Charley is my last name. Charles is my first. There’s a ‘C’ in the middle. Charles C. Charley is who I am.”
    â€œO.K.,” she said. “My name is Cindy.”
    â€œI know that,” I said.
    Then I said goodbye and left her nearly drowned in perspiration, still prone, smoking another cigarette, and staring dreamily at a beam from which hung an old doll’s house with four upstairs bedrooms.
    Outside I made lighthearted obeisance to the entire household, from rumpus room to expanding attic. I hopped onto my three-wheeled scooter and went forward on spectacular errands of mercy across the sycamore-studded seat of this fat county.
    At 4 a.m. of the following Saturday morning I delivered Cindy to her eight-room house with two and a half bathrooms. Mrs. Graham was waiting. She didn’t look at me at all. She began to cry. She sniffed and stopped crying. “Cindy, it’s so late. Daddy went to the police. We were frightened about you. He went to see the lieutenant.” Then she waited, forlorn. Before her very eyes the friend she had been raising for years, the rejuvenating confidante, had deserted her. I was sorry. I thought Cindy ought to get her a cold drink. I wanted to say, “Don’t worry, Mrs. Graham. I didn’t knock the kid up.”
    But Cindy burned. “I am just sick of this crap!” she yelled. “I am heartily and utterly sick of being pushed around. Every time I come home a little late, you call the police. This is the third time, the third time. I am sick of you and Daddy. I hate this place. I hate living here. I told you last year. I hate it here. I’m sick of this place and the phony trains and no buses and I can’t drive. I hate the kids around here. They’re all dopes. You follow me around. I hate the two of you. I wish I was in China.” She stamped her feet three times, then ran up to her room.
    In this way she avoided her father, who came growling past me where I still stood in the doorway. I was comforting Mrs. Graham. “You know adolescence is a very difficult period …” But he interrupted. He looked over his shoulder, saw it was really me, and turned like a man to say it to my face. “You sonofabitch, where the hell were you?”
    â€œNothing to worry about, Mr. Graham. We just took a boat ride.”
    â€œYou’d better call the police and tell them Cindy’s home, Alvin,” said Mrs. Graham.
    â€œWhere to?” he said. “Greenwich Village?”
    â€œNo, no,” I said reasonably. “I took Cindy out to Pottsburg—it’s one of those amusement parks there on the other side of the harbor. It’s a two-hour ride. There’s dancing on the boat. We missed a boat and had to wait two more hours, and then we missed the train.”
    â€œThis boat goes straight to Pottsburg?”
    â€œOh yes,” I said.
    â€œAlvin,” said Mrs. Graham, “please call the police. They’ll be all over town.”
    â€œO.K., O.K.,” he said. “Where’s Cynthy Anne?”
    â€œAsleep