The Stand (Original Edition) Read Free Page B

her. The fee for visitors was a dollar a car, but he knew Frannie lived in town without bothering to look at the RESIDENT sticker on the comer of her Volvo’s windshield. Fran came here a lot.
    Sure I do, Fran thought. In fact, I got pregnant right down there on the beach, just about twelve feet above the high tide line. Dear Lump: You were conceived on the scenic coast of Maine, twelve feet above the high tide line and twenty yards east of the seawall. X marks the spot.
    Gus raised his hand toward her, making a peace sign.
    “Your fella’s out on the end of the pier, Miss Goldsmith.”
    “Thanks, Gus. How’s business?”
    He waved smilingly at the parking lot. There were maybe two dozen cars in all, and she could see blue and white RESIDENT stickers on most of them.
    “Not much trade this early,” he said. It was June 17. “Wait two weeks and we’ll make the town some money.”
    “I’ll bet. If you don’t embezzle it all.”
    Gus laughed and went back inside.
    Frannie leaned one arm on the warm metal of her car, took off her sneakers, and put on a pair of rubber thongs. She was a tall girl with chestnut hair that fell halfway down the back of the buff-colored shift she was wearing. Good figure. Long legs that got appreciative glances. Prime Stuff was the correct frathouse term, she believed. Looky-looky-looky-here-comes-nooky. Miss College Girl, 1980.
    Then she had to laugh at herself, and the laugh was only a trifle bitter. You are carrying on, she told herself, as if this were the news of the world. Chapter Six: Hester Brings the News of Pearl’s Impending Arrival to Rev. Dimmesdale. Dimmesdale he wasn’t. He was Jess Rider, age twenty, one year younger than Our Heroine, Little Fran. He was a practicing college-student-undergraduate-poet. You could tell by his immaculate blue chambray workshirt.
    She paused at the edge of the sand, feeling the good heat baking the soles of her feet even through the rubber thongs. The silhouette at the far end of the pier was still tossing small rocks into the water. Her thought was partly amusing but mostly dismaying. He knows what he looks like out there, she thought. Lord Byron, lonely but unafraid. Sitting in lonely solitude and surveying the sea which leads back, back to where England lies. But I, an exile, may never—
    Oh balls!
    It wasn’t so much the thought that disturbed her as what it indicated about her own state of mind. The young man she assumed she loved was sitting out there, and she was standing here caricaturing him behind his back.
    She began to walk out along the pier, picking her way with careful grace over the rocks and crevices. It was an old pier, once part of a breakwater. Now most of the boats tied up on the southern end of town, where there were three marinas and seven honky-tonk motels that boomed all summer long.
    She walked slowly, trying her best to cope with the thought that she might have fallen out of love with him in the space of the eleven days that she had known she was “a little bit preggers,” in the words of Amy Lauder. Well, he had gotten her into that condition, hadn't he?
    But not alone, that was for sure. And she had been on the pill. That had been the simplest thing in the world. She’d gone to the campus infirmary, told the doctor she was having painful menstruation and all sorts of embarrassing eructations on her skin, and the doctor had written her a prescription. In fact, he had given her a month of freebies.
    She stopped again, out over the water now, the waves beginning to break toward the beach on her right and left. It occurred to her that the infirmary doctors probably heard about painful menstruation and too many pimples about as often as druggists heard about how I gotta buy these condoms for my brother—even more often in this day and age. She could just as easily have gone to him and said: “Gimme the pill. I’m gonna fuck.” She was of age. Why be coy? She looked at Jessie’s back and sighed. Because coyness