25
Dancing and Demise
In the days that followed, Tasma felt like hiding in corners when she saw Jill or Johnny nearby, but Tommy turned out to be an excellent friend, and listener, as to keep her company. During this period, Johnny and Jill settled down at night by the TV in the living room and drank beer and ate potato chips, popcorn, etcetera, as Tasma called them: the Coke days in her diary, for she drank a lot of coke. The problem was, as Tasma had seen it, if Jill didn’t drink with Johnny at home, he’d go out and drink. And she didn’t want to go to the bar anymore than what she had to; plus the gang was still looking for him; not looking hard, but looking, so it was a do-win situation, so she remained his drinking partner.
All in all, it came to be, Tasma and Tommy spent more time talking than Jill and Tasma; her shyness seemed to fade with him, as herself-confidence matured and blossomed like a rose. It was during these dozen or so days they started to play music together and dance in each others rooms; it was almost becoming routine. On a different note, during these same days, Johnny give the impression to be missing something, he was kind of wishy-washy. Tommy got to thinking, and expressing to Tasma he felt Johnny and Jill’s relationship was based on some mindless pride, or maybe they were just proud idiots. Tasma did not take his side she knew he was hurt, what man wouldn’t be after being cheated out of what he might think was his possessions, as men often do think.
—Johnny, hated Jill’s clinging on to him, but he accepted it with disquieting placidity. He didn’t mind pleasing, but hated responsibility. The child would simply be an interruption for him, an uncomfortable one at that. To be quite honest, Jill was not all that, entirely happy about her being with child. By all accounts, her child would be due the first week of November, she figured she got pregnant the first of March, and some five weeks now had passed.
Spring, l968
The days had clotted by, into weeks, then months and it would be not long before a year would be under Tasma’s belt for being gone. Spring had arrived. During this time, the following weeks of spring, Tasma continued doing some light housekeeping for Jill and the Belmont’s. Although Tasma’s life was not so hard, Jill’s in many ways being harder, yet it was difficult for her to repeat it by moving back home to Minnesota. And the longer she was gone, the more this became written in stone for her salvation; as she saw it anyway, and everything was changing, or had changed, and the gap widen between Minnesota and Seattle.
If anything moved these four young adults, it was youth and gravity, with crying hearts. All in their own way had a rigid appetite for life’s recklessness, surprises, emotional roller coaster, and sweets.
26
Drinking and Playing
And so Johnny and Jill drank theses days away watching TV, going to the bar, working, as Tommy and Tasma become better friends with playing records and dancing.
As Tasma was dancing with Tommy in her room, a Friday evening, she started to notice the rise and fall of his heart, its vibration, its beat; it was like a baritone at times and a fast beating drum; it lasted as long as she danced with him. She put Tommy’s hand on her heart, “Do you feel my heart beating fast, “she asked. Tommy unable to talk, his hand seemingly was paralyzed in-between her breasts, partly on the lower portion of her right breast.
[Finally he choked out] “Can’t say I can;” for some anomalous reason he felt there should be shame in his face, but there wasn’t any: as they say, ‘A face without blood,’ but I say again, he didn’t feel that way. Tasma had on an Elvis tune, “Love me Tender,” and it was playing over and over. Tommy’s hand felt her thin waist and hips, as if she was a ship, slowly moving them only inches in each direction. Tasma at the present was feeling a little strange, she wanted to tell Tommy to stop ironing her dress with his hands, but couldn’t figure on how to tell him to move them, she was speechless for the moment.
Suddenly Tommy said, “Let’s go for a walk, alright?”
“Yes, yes,” she babbled out in a free immolating manner.
The cool dark air seemed enchanting as they walked down the sidewalk by the many houses and trees on the boulevards. She broke into a silence as they walked past doors and streets and cars. She picked a top of a splinter from a support wall to a yard and put it in her mouth, her mother used to do that. Then with the splinter in her mouth she continued to walk the dark street. Tasma wanted to tell Tommy she was a little scared of walking in the dark like this, she would have liked to indicate this; although she liked the fresh and coolness of the night; but he suddenly turned around and they headed back as if he could read her emotions in the silence.
“I’ll be fine,” said Tasma, as Tommy looked at her, leaving her at her bedroom door.
“Of course you will,” she said with a smile, as he stood staring at her. Having said that, she moved her hands lightly over his shoulders, delightful that he had once seen her naked now, and no one else; these were all new feelings for her. As they stood there a moment longer, Jill’s cigarette smoke drifted up to her from the living room and made her cough a bit, distracting their gaze into each other’s eyes.
His gentile voice said something, but she didn’t make it out, her pulse was activated and she didn’t know why, and well, she pulled him to her mid-body section, against her body tightly, she felt something hard against her thigh, slightly astonished by what she felt and thinking to herself she looked down: “Oh well—(eyes wide open) it’s only you,” she felt it must be alright and now rested into and onto his shoulder area, she completely forgot the hardness upon her thigh, somehow the feeling was good. Her frock was a thick white; Tommy could see her long thin legs through it.
It was a good finish for a long day and night thought Tommy as he walked a ting awkward back to his room. For Tasma it was a trying day, she was mentally and physically worn out. They both fell into bed like a sack of potatoes, and dreamt of one another.
Sleeping
Tasma, tried to sleep, but in such cases like love, or so she was feeling she was in such a stage, a comatose state of love, or that it could be such a juncture, one has to departmentalize such things she computerized. Sort them out, kind of, and that is what she was doing, tossing and turning now in bed. [She thought]: ‘Tommy is trying to be nice to me, not out of feeling sorry for me, for he is, or seems to be emotionally attached, what I would want, but I don’t want my character broken, or running wild over some emotionally healing kick because of his loss with Jill, I don’t want a rebound; I want to keep my respect.’
In a way she found Tommy much like her, in regards to they both could be considered: separated from the herd and they both knew this. And night demanded less from each other, other than respect, fun and conversation, companionship, friendship. With Jill and Johnny, it was just Johnny who was not as much involved emotionally with Jill, for she was crazy about him. All of them wanted most of what life had to offer, in one way or another.
27
Le Coup de Foudre
[Love at first Sight]
Tommy was now writing everyday between seven-hundred and two-thousand words a day; and working at the bar still; he had finished up his schooling completely, so that was out of the way (although he’d have to take an internship in the near future). Tasma notice his profound love for the word, and his endless energy he put into everything; it reminded her of F. Scott Fitzgerald who lived not far from her uncle’s home in St. Paul, Minnesota, at 599 Summit Ave. She especially liked his short stories in the book called, “Floppers and Philosophers,” they were most entertaining. She remembered that his family had provided him with a room to write his stories in, in particular, “This Side of Paradise,” which was his first book, and some say his most promising. This of course, allowed him the quiet time he needed to do his story, and to get involved with it. She kind of felt like Zelda, his wife, she had to do the same, or would like to do the same for Tommy; yet she recalled, Zelda was a little ill and demanding if not demented, so she took Zelda’s body, and his mother’s kind interest, and pretended she was a part of them in Tommy’s writing career. She knew that at first glance, when she had met him in the bar upon arrival, she liked him, and even more when he was introduced to her as Jill’s boyfriend. Oh she questioned his loyalty and intentions, but it was, ‘love at first sight,’ so she felt now.
She then turned her thoughts to her diary, and how it was getting along as Tommy was finishing up a draft to his book in the living room.
“I got to send it off to some publishers tomorrow,” he said with satisfaction. On another matter as she sat in the armchair, she was not cupid’s daughter she told herself, nor a mischievous mortal like Jill, yet her human nature was working overtime with her youth and it would seem to a lesser degree she was being—or had been—smitten, had been I think was more the truth of the matter.
This new experience of love for Tasma was a new and biological one, with a drive that filtered into ‘the lust,’ area so she claimed to herself, her second-self. She was now, somehow feeling it was ok to go ahead, so she told her second-self within her body; she was not in the hunt for mate in particular, she didn’t think so anyhow, but her focus and energy was going in that direction (toward Tommy), nonetheless; her neurological, and endorphin level was for sure—and they were high.
She was asking herself, ‘…was this the inside stage of what people call romantic love?’ love inside her body, ‘Le Coup de Foudre [love at first sight]’ as she told herself (feeling as though a lightening bold had struck her; with a delayed reaction); some people call it, ‘love sickness,’ although I’d call Jill’s more into that category than Tasma’s, now that I think of it; and Tasma’s more at finding out she was struck with lightening a while back.
In a way, Tasma was still living in a bygone era, the Victorian idylls, contrary to Jill’s which was a new world, a fast-paced jungle, a hippy era and free love, and free it was for every male, for the price was to be paid by the female for the most part. For Tasma, there was not a lot of flexibility, which this new hippy-era demanded, her upbringing, as harsh as it may have been, like a watch-dog on the lookout for any and every possible intruder, it helped her high-sensory perception in the love system one might conclude. She was part of an era, but only the part she wanted to be part of, not the free love part. Physical love meant, mental responsibility, either with or without a mate. She felt compete either way (with or without a mate), for she had found out much about herself; she was not a pleasure or sensation seeker, for itself, yet she could be vulnerable, human nature was constructed that way. Yet the distinction was not always obvious, it was all a novelty for her, and possibly for all four of the youths experimenting in life’s forbidden fruits.
For Johnny, sex had become routine; for Jill it was an attachment; for Tommy it was at first a disposition; for Tasma a fruit yet to be picked completely, but it was becoming a drive, and it was hard to escape its surmounting echoes.
28
Looks Promising
Tasma, was now looking at many variables, night after night, Tommy became the cornerstone to her humanity, in a good way; she admired compatibility in a person, for another person, and she seemed compatible for Tommy, so this was her thinking. But all the same, Mr. and Mrs. Belmont were compatible, yet their sensitivity to one another was like a wasp to a fly, they had a lot to be desired as far as mates and parents go. Thus, she could not use them as bases for any good examples, other than allowing freedom for Jill to grow, and potentially that was not in her best interest, she went to extremes she felt.
She was now on another thought: I will not make Tommy fit into my family or anything, it isn’t my job to, plus, who could please her parents, they are good in many ways, but over powering, suffocating, not willing to let go, and let me grow. They would have to earn each others respect, glide, if you will, into each others worlds she concluded, and could they, I mean, could they deal with the differences, in time maybe. Was this not what life is all about in a nutshell? Working out differences in a relationship, be it friend or family, or wife or lover, country and nations, the world at large. So she told herself, for this is what her parents was lacking, and on the other hand it was what Jill’s parents had, but spoiled it somehow. She finished by thinking, relationships need testing. The heart is too easily led and the body is too hungry for lust at such an age. But it was a beginning she told herself, a good and honest beginning between them.
—As Tasma sat in her room hoping Tommy would visit her, she was reminiscing over all the romance books she had read in the past. I suppose in a way what she wanted didn’t exist, for it was all in the books she had read, for each book had their moments; hence, what she wanted was a fairytale romance in essence. But it is better to be hurt in youth, she told herself, than in old age, so she had read someplace—and this was kind of a fairytale romance in the making she believed. I mean, out of Minnesota to Seattle, who would ever think this would have developed a year ago. It was raining again as she looked out the window, it did seem to rain a good deal more in Seattle, than in Minnesota, she pondered on for the moment, looking at the cars hit the water in the streets, splashing people while walking with their umbrellas, the traffic lights up the corner were blinking wild, had broke down somehow, it was what life was all about, it was her time on earth, it wouldn’t last she speculated, but youth was only a short period in each person’s life, and had to be used wisely. Everyone is given but a cup of time, a cup of youth, how one uses it, well, that is how it is.
Tommy didn’t show up that evening so she looked at twilight, put out the light, started to close the curtain,—saw Mrs. Whitehead next door on the porch below, she was rocking in her chair, knitting something, she was always doing something with her hands, creative things: possibly if she could grow like her—should she be so lucky, and creative—she’d be quite happy.
The moon’s light, the stars’ light: both seemed to validate for her that the day was sufficient, or so she thought in her mind; thus, she drank a cold drink of milk—then setting it down on the bed stand, she curled up in her bed, and fell asleep. She knew Tommy somehow had a shade of shyness in him, but also a shade of fire, Tommy was a good catch in a all, and she looked for a good dream to put him into.
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