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MAGGIE CASSIDY
Jack Kerouac
Whitey introduced me to Maggie. "I tried and tried to work that chick!" I saw her, standing in the crowd, forlorn, dissatisfied, dark, unpleasantly strange. Half reluctantly we were brought together and paraded to the floor arm in arm.
Maggie Cassidy -- that, in its time must have been Casa d'Oro -- sweet, dark, rich as peaches -- dim to the senses like a great sad dream --
"I suppose you're wondering what an Irish girl can be doing at a New Year's Eve dance unescorted," she said to me on the dance floor; I, dope, had before danced only once, with Pauline Cole, high school sweetheart. ("She'll be jealous!" I enjoyed the thought.)
I didn't know what to say to Maggie, slavish I tied my tongue to the gate.
"Oh come on -- say, you're a football player Whitey said."
"Whitey?"
"Whitey that introduced us, dummy."
It pleased me to be called a name, as though she was a younger sister.
"Do you get hurt often? My brother Roy gets hurt all the time that's why I hate football. I suppose you like it. You've got a bunch of friends. They look like a nice bunch of fellas. Do you know Jimmy Noonan in Lowell High?"
She was nervous, curious, gossipy, womany: at the same time suddenly she'd caress me, say, at this early beginning, the necktie, adjust it; or push back my uncombed hair; something maternal, fleet, sorry. My hands clawed into fists to think of her when I got home that night. For, just ripened, the flesh bulged and was firm from under her shiny dress belt; her mouth pouted soft, rich, red, her black curls adorned sometimes the snow-smooth brow; up from her lips came rosy auras hinting all her health and merriness, seventeen years old. She leaned on one leg with the laze of a Spanish cat, a Spanish Carmen; she turned throwing fecund hair in quick knowing sorrying glances; she herself jeweled in the mirror; I looked blankly over her head to think of other things.
"Got a girl?"
"In high school -- Pauline Cole is my girl, I meet her under the clock every afternoon after third bell."
"And you tell me right away you got a girl!"
Her teeth at first didn't seem attractive; her chin had a little doublechin of beauty, if the men will understand…that unnamed dimple chin, to perfection, and Spanish -- her lip curled, slightly parted teeth charmed and enhanced sensuous, drowning lips, devourous lips; so at first you saw the little pearly teeth.
"You're probably an honest boy -- You're French Canadian aintcha? I bet all the girls go for you, I bet you're gonna be a big success."
I was going to grow up to walk in sleet in fields; didn't know it then.
"Oh," blushing, "not exactly."
"But you're only sixteen years old, you're younger than me, I'm seventeen."
She brooded and bit her rich lips. My soul began its first sink into her, deep, heady, lost; like drowning in a witches' brew, Keltic, sorcerous, starlike.
"That makes me old enough - ha ha," and she laughed her own incomprehensible girly jokes as I put my hard arm around her soft waist and took her dancing awkward dumb steps under the balloons and crinkly pop funhats of New Year's Eve America and the world orange and black like the Snow Halloween, dumb and swallowing in my ignorance and position in time. People watching us saw the girl, timid, pretty, rather small-faced in a small hair crown but on closer inspection cameo-like in choiceness but no paleness eyes therein, the gimlet fires in the beauty showed; and the boy, me, Jacky Duluoz, kid of write-ups, track teams, home and believing goodheartedness with just a touch of the Canuck half-Indian doubt and suspicion of all things non-Canuck, non-half-Indian -- a lout -- the order of the lout on my arm. They saw this boy well-brushed though not combed consciously, still a kid, suddenly big as a man, awkward, etc. -- with serious blue-eyed pensive country-boy countenance sitting in gray high school halls in button-down sweater no water on his hair as photographer snaps line of home roomers -- Boy and girl, arms around each other, Maggie and Jack, in the sad ball floor of life, already crestfallen, corners of the mouth giving up, shoulders loosening to hand, frowns, minds forewarned -- love is bitter, death is sweet.
Ah I loved my Maggie, I wanted to eat her, bring her home, hide her in the heart of my life the rest of my days. I prayed in Sainte Jeanne d'Arc church for the grace of her love; I'd almost forgotten.
Let me sing the beauty of my Maggie. Legs: the knees attached to the thighs, knees shiny, thighs like milk. Arms: the levers of my content, the serpents of my joy. Back: the sight of that in a strange street of dreams in the middle of heaven would make me fall sitting from glad recognition. Ribs: she had some melted and round like a well formed apple, from her thigh bones to waist I saw the earth roll. In her neck I hid myself like a lost snow goose of Australia, seeking the perfume of her breast. She didn't let me, she was a good girl.
"Jack - Jack, marry me someday."
"yes, yes, always -- nobody else."