The opening of Meg Files’ fine novel The Third Law of Motion?introduces the?book’s first-person narrative as we enter protagonist Dulcie White’s life as a college-bound high school student. In alternating chapters throughout the book, the young woman’s sometimes boyfriend, a confused and needy?young man, also narrates, but in the third person. Meg does an expert job of creating strong characters with?strong voices. This alternating point of view keeps us turning the pages to find out how and when these two will work their way out of a?stifling?bond. I have learned so much?from Meg in my 17 years of teaching with her, and I am delighted to share the opening to this book. I think?you will want to find the novel and continue reading.?And, of course, I hope you’ll think of coming to study with Meg in person at our 19th and final Writers’?Conference this June 9-12.?

The Third Law of Motion, a Novel by Meg Files
CHAPTER 1, an Excerpt

I met Lonnie at dancing class. I never really learned to dance.

My friend Annie Halverson convinced me that we?d get asked out if we knew how to do the twist and the jerk. ?How?s any guy supposed to know?? I said. ?You gonna get a big tattoo? ?This chick can do the funky chicken??? Really, I thought, Annie was guilty of the post hoc fallacy ? she believed we didn?t have dates because we couldn?t dance ? when both were just symptoms of our invisibility. Besides, bodies couldn?t be taught to twitch and beat the way Annie and I had seen them at the armory dance. When my mother caught me trying it before the full-length mirror, she said, ?Don?t grind. That?s nasty.? Annie said the girls who put out were the tamest dancers. Wild or subdued, they all moved in an oily repetition that I knew couldn?t be learned.

Still, I went with Annie to the studio downtown and lined up with the other rejects where for six Saturday mornings we shuffled around under fluorescent lights to rock-and-roll played softly.

On the final Saturday, when Lonnie Saxbe was paired with me, he said he was a junior at Battlebush, ran track, and wanted to take me out.

?I?m a senior,? I said. ?At Central.? I didn?t know if I was saying yes or no.

He said he?d pick me up next Friday if I?d tell him where I lived.

When I told Annie on the bus, she said, ?For a track star, you?d think he?d be able to dance. He dances like he?s made out of cardboard.?

?And I?m so great,? I said.

?But he is cool-looking,? she said sadly. ?Well, now you?ll be with him and I still can?t dance.?

****

?He?s clean-cut. A very good-looking young man,? my mother said sadly. Lonnie made everybody sad, as if his presence fixed my future. ?But he isn?t so great in the brains department, is he??

?I?m not going to marry him, Mom. But it?s nice to do something on Saturday night besides watch Gunsmoke with Dad.?

?You don?t want to live your life with a man who?s your intellectual inferior,? she said. ?Whatever else, at least your father?s got a sizeable brain.?

By January I?d been accepted to the small private college I?d chosen for its reputation for scholarship and its junior-year-abroad program. Nobody would force me to marry Lonnie Saxbe. We went to movies and ate pizza and made out in the back seat of his maroon Tempest. We didn?t mention his junior or my senior prom.

My parents were merely parents. My father paid my extravagant tuition and set up a checking account for me, no questions asked. My mother wanted to help me plan a college wardrobe. I didn?t think about what they were to each other.

In the summer, Lonnie worked at a Shell station, pumping gas, checking oil, and cleaning windshields. His father had some disability and no job. Lonnie took me once to their trailer. His broad-faced mother wore man?s pants and served macaroni, hot dogs, and beans for supper.

?The musical fruit,? his father said, and Lonnie turned red.

The father was small and gray. The mother?s head seemed too large even for her sturdy body: megacephalic was the word, I thought, though it might just have been the thick bouffant hair.

?Your old man does what?? Lonnie?s father said.

The hot dogs were terrible, boiled instead of grilled, reminding me they were made of animal parts like lips and glands. Lonnie sometimes called himself my old man. I chewed and chewed the rubbery meat and worked at the question: Did he want to know what Lonnie did to me in the back seat?

?He does something with drugs,? Lonnie answered for me.

?Drugs?? Mrs. Saxbe made the word two shocked syllables.

?Oh, my father,? I said. ?He does research. Pharmaceuticals.?

?What I said,? Lonnie said.

After dessert of red Jell-O with Cool Whip, Lonnie?s father turned on the black and white television and his mother ran a sinkful of soapy water in the tiny kitchen.

?I?m taking my girl down to the lake,? Lonnie said.

His mother looked at me over her shoulder, her hands in the dishwater, looked at my white rolled-up-sleeve blouse and my pink-checked bermudas and my sandals and then back up to my face. His girl. My head felt too small for my body.

?Thank you for dinner,? I said. ?It was awfully nice to meet you.? It came out sounding like Hayley Mills.

?That boat don?t go out in the dark,? his father said. ?You hear me??

At the lake, we took turns changing behind the boathouse. Everything was dark and marshy-smelling. On Saturday afternoons we?d raced the boat around the lake, and I?d learned to rise in the heavy water and ski it. But this night we drove slowly and in the middle of the lake Lonnie cut the outboard motor. We lowered ourselves into the dark water and swam, splashing gracelessly through the glass bubbles the boat?s headlights made, and we hung on the side of the boat and kissed, shivering.

In the boat he wrapped me in a towel and drove to a lagoon overgrown with lily pads and killed the lights. We kissed and kissed in our wet bathing suits. I didn?t lift his hand away from my breast. Behind the boathouse I?d crossed my arms and tested the feel of my breasts, and so I knew all he felt was stiff cotton and wire. I let him unhook the top of my blue and white dotted bathing suit. I let his dark hands feel my shriveled and clammy breasts. I thought they must feel like meat straight from the refrigerator.

****

In July he wanted to take me out for dinner. ?Fancy,? he said. He said the word slowly, the way he said my name, Dulcie. ?It?s our nine-month anniversary.?

Annie and I had laughed secretly at Whitman?s ?Ninth-month midnight.? Nine months were giggly words, scary words. Nine months meant shame swollen under loose dresses. Nine months meant someone in trouble, sent to a sister in California or somewhere to miss the rest of senior year, exiled from parents and hometown to live the rest of her life blooded with whispers: in trouble, gave the baby up. Nine months meant the mystery of bodies joined, as on the dirty cards Annie?s brother had, tiny smudged bodies standing front to back with a rope of flesh joining them. I shivered. I?d kissed Lonnie with my mouth open and I?d put my hand on the front of his white Levis. Everything was so secret. In nine months Lonnie and I could have made a baby, I thought. Made a baby. It was an impossibility, as if touching flesh could create flesh. It was as random and mysterious as chemistry experiments, dipping a glass rod from beaker to beaker until a liquid smoked or sizzled or reeked.

Getting dressed up for the anniversary dinner, I put my palms on my bare stomach. My skin and my insides felt dulcet, my secret name-word which meant soft and smooth, tender for my secret impossible baby. My skin twitched under my hands, and I was abruptly terrified of ropes of flesh like boiled hot dogs, of composite shapes ? lips and saliva and tongues and glands and bellies snipped up and molded into an embryo.

Lonnie?s idea of fancy was Bill Knapp?s. I ordered the ham croquettes, as I always did when my parents and I ate there after church. Though it was Saturday night, the restaurant?s light was just as frank and guileless as on Sunday afternoon.

?This is for you,? Lonnie said and pushed a little box across the table. He?d wrapped it in yellow paper with too much Scotch tape.

A pair of waiters stepped toward us with a cake and lit candles. Not nine candles in this public place, I thought. They set the cake in the midst of the family next to us and sang: ?Happy birthday dear Julie, happy birthday to you.?

In the box, clenched in blue velvet, was an engagement ring.

?The wedding band has diamond chips, too.? He leaned across the table to look at the ring. He laughed. ?Probably still be paying on it when we have our sixth kid.?

?Lonnie ? you?re still in high school.? What had I done to make him think I?d marry him?

?Well, yeah, I know,? he said. He looked uncertain, then laughed. ?I go for older women.?

?But you know I?m going to college. Next month.? I had a picture of my assigned roommate in my purse, a sweet-faced girl with dark hair in a flip just like mine. Her name was Katie Leeview. I thought of her in Minnesota staring at my senior picture, laughing at my blonde flip. Would she understand that the angle of my head was the photographer?s pose, that my lifted nose gave me a false face, that I wasn?t really stuck up but scared?

?Yeah, I know,? Lonnie said. ?I thought you?d stay here, though. We could get married now. Stay with my parents at first. Or I can just get a job and we can find an apartment. What do I need another year of shop or stupid English for, anyway??

?You?re crazy. You have to finish high school.? I wasn?t going to argue with him about my beloved English classes. I wouldn?t marry Lonnie Saxbe if my life depended on it.

?You better not say I?m crazy,? he said, low. ?You just better not, Dulcie. I admit, another year of track wouldn?t kill me. But I?d give it up if you said.?

I closed the ring box. ?Here, you keep this. You?ll find the right woman sometime.? It was odd to say woman not girl. I imagined Katie Leeview watching my gentleness. I spoke the grand lines softly. ?You know I care about you, Lonnie. But I?m not the right one for you.?

I thought he was going to cry. ?But ? I love you. I?ve been saying I love you.?

That was true. In the Tempest?s back seat, steaming up the windows, putting his hands under my blouse and on my thighs, he?d been saying he loved me, the words coming out wet against my neck, I luff you.

At the next table, the mother reached across and tapped the birthday girl?s shoulder. ?Don?t stare, Julie sweetheart,? she said.

?Let?s talk about this outside,? I said. ?People are looking.?

?Well, goddamnit, Dulcie, let them look.?

?Take this.? I stood and set the ring box beside his plate. He hadn?t finished his salisbury steak. He grabbed my wrist. ?I said I love you. I?m going to marry you. I?m going to.?

I tried to pull away. He held on. ?What do you say?? he asked the staring family at the next table. ?Don?t I have the right to marry my girl? Huh? Don?t I?? The armpits of his yellow oxford cloth shirt were wet. His face was wet and blank, as if disbelief and outrage cancelled each other out.

?Let me go.? I jerked my arm free and strode past all the ordinary people eating their croquettes, their pork chops, their little pots of au gratin potatoes, out into the humid night. I wore my true face. I was full of powers ? to cause Lonnie?s love, to stash him in my past.

****

The sweet-faced girl sat on one of the little dorm room?s beds, with the fat pink bonnet of a hair dryer on her head. She looked up at me and ripped it off. My parents stepped back into the hall to let us confront each other alone, as if we were dogs strange to each other or lovers after a separation.

We made shy arrangements: her bed, my bed, her desk and mine, her record player, mine sent back with my parents, her French dictionary, my Thesaurus, her Tchaikovsky, my Beethoven, her Brontees, my Tolstoy.

The first night we lay on our narrow beds in the little room and to Swan Lake in the sanctified darkness confessed our lives. Katie had said goodbye-forever to a boy in Minnesota, and we compared endings. I told her about the scene in Lonnie?s bedroom last Sunday when I told him to forget me.

?You did it in his bedroom??

?It was Sunday afternoon. I figured his parents would be there but they weren?t.?

His single bed had a brown plaid bedspread and no headboard. On the wall above a small pressed-wood desk hung a crucifix. That surprised me. We hadn?t talked about what we believed. We talked about movies and track and his car. With Annie Halvorson it was Anna Karenina and my piano lessons with Bernard Fink over at the university and her brother?s dirty cards and our parents? conformity and the nature of God. Lonnie was my date. I liked going out with him, I liked feeling his hand on my elbow as we walked, I liked saying my boyfriend. He looked cool, dressed cool, wore a letter sweater, and went to a different high school so nobody knew he was in shop while I was in college-bound English. He was a walking, talking boyfriend.

?I did it in Alex?s car,? Katie said. ?I wish I?d thought of the bedroom.?

?Private. Intimate. But it didn?t turn out so hot.?

He?d come to see me at college, Lonnie said. It was only a hundred miles away. He?d tool up on the weekends.

?When I said no, forget it, he ripped the crucifix off the wall,? I told Katie. ?He yelled, ?A hell of a lot of good you are,? and threw it on the floor.?

?What a scene,? she said. ?Weren?t you scared? Alex just started crying.?

I thought of how the picture hook flew out, how chips of the wall fell away, showing the cardboard under the plaster, how he hurled Christ to the linoleum floor.

?They?ll remember us for the rest of their lives,? Katie said. ?They?ll have jobs and get married and have kids, but they?ll always remember us.?

On Saturday we walked together into town and bought blue and green plaid bedspreads, matching curtains, a shaggy rug, and two prints ? a Renoir of two dappled girls, a blonde and a brunette, on a river bank; and a Picasso, the head and torso of a woman we named Old Virgin Face. We readied our cell where for nine months we filled in each other?s words, watched rain fall to Rachmaninoff, located ourselves in each other.

****

?Why did the three old ladies dig up Tom Dooley?? Glenna said. Her room was next to ours, and she didn?t like her roommate.

?Why?? Katie said.

?They wanted to see how he was hung.?

We were silent. Shouldn?t it be hanged? Why three old ladies? What was the joke?

?You dummies,? Glenna said. ?They wanted to see how he was hung. Get it? How he was hung??

?We don?t get it,? Katie said.

Glenna had been to boarding school, and we invited her into our room whenever we needed an interpretation of some guy?s possibly suggestive comment or something we?d read in a novel or the psych text. She always knew the carnal meaning but her explanations, once she?d quit laughing at us, were metaphorical and vague. An Oedipus complex was like this older brother of this girl she?d known in boarding school who still needed his mother to tuck him in. Tom Dooley?s being hung was something like horses.

She knew all the answers, we knew, because she?d signed out to stay with a townie and then spent the entire night at a motel with Rick, the senior she was going out with. And she showed us how to dance. She brought over her records and did the jerk. She?s got a ticket to ri-hide. She got Katie and me to go over to the mixers at the state university, where we had more anonymity, more choice, too, than at our prim private school. The three of us, in knee socks and kilts, would walk over in the dusk, and I felt like a lit wick, in the center of guttering fall, in the center of the shadows, the yellow leaves, all the molten world. Glenna would find us guys ? no, they were men, not guys, she said ? and we?d dance fast and we?d dance slow beneath strobe lights, and they?d walk us back to our dorm.

There the kissing couples were assembled by the front step and in the lobby. Nobody wanted to risk getting in late after the doors were locked. Mrs. T, the housemother, supervised. If a couple strayed out of bounds, she said, ?Ah ah, you mustn?t do it on the rug, only on the tile.?

When Lonnie called, I talked to him on the hall phone, politely telling him about my classes and politely listening to his pleas. ?My blood feels like sand,? he said one time, and I kept thinking of that, blood like sand, blood slick like quicksand sliding through him.

On Friday nights, Katie and I went to the university mixers with Glenna, and on Saturdays we went to football games, more to be outside in the bright Michigan fall, with the sweet crowd and the smell of hot dust around us, than to see the game, for we thought football was stupid. Saturday nights we went out together with a pair of sophomores, roommates also, Josh and Bruce.

But when Lonnie showed up during the week, I?d go riding with him if I didn?t have a test the next day. I liked being among the girls with a leftover boyfriend. We were women with a past. The others could show off their letters, but my old boyfriend was in the flesh. ?The man?s obsessed,? Glenna said one night in the bathroom, and the other girls, putting their hair in rollers, looked away from the mirrors at me, a good-looking guy?s obsession.

****

Before finals, Katie and I began pulling all-nighters with the rest of the floor. Coffee tasted nasty, and we tried Glenna?s No-Doz. ?That could be dangerous,? my mom said when I told her how we stayed awake to cram. ?I don?t like the idea of that.? Katie and I quizzed each other on fetal pig parts and French vocabulary and B. F. Skinner, everything magnified in our wide-awake eyes. Our room was next to the bathroom, and every time a toilet flushed we jumped. I told her about my discovery that everything was connected, that all the subjects, chemistry and French and plane geometry and orchestra and social studies and even P.E., were part of each other, that crystals and proofs and counterpoint and grammar and bodies were all connected. And she nodded, no explanation needed or possible. We sat face to face at our desks, wrapped together in diaphanous continuum.

Now and then we?d stretch and walk down the hall to the lounge where others were dozing or trying to study or eating soup in the middle of the night.

?What, are you two roomies joined at the hip?? Glenna?s roommate, Andrea, said. ?I have to get away from my roomie?s snoring to concentrate.? We knew they didn?t really like each other. We knew Glenna wasn?t going to make it through her freshman year.

?We?re not roomies,? Katie said. ?We?re chambries.?

I knew immediately that she?d transformed chambre and made us a dulcet name. ?That?s right,? I said. ?We aren?t like the rest of you roommates. We?re chambries.?

In our room we talked about operant conditioning and God. By dawn we were silly with fatigue. We laughed at Old Virgin Face on the wall. We identified the different sound of each flush on the other side of our wall and named the toilets ? the plasher, the singing serpent, the screamer, the barbaric yawper, the crepitator, and the next-to-the-last one at the far end that nobody used, the virgin.

****

Before we left for our separate homes, where we would still be children, we gave each other Christmas presents. I gave her Sonnets from the Portuguese and Beethoven?s Emperor Concerto. She gave me The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats and Tchaikovsky?s Violin Concerto.

We wrote to each other every other day during the break. I imagined our letters flying between Minnesota and Michigan, riding currents, crossing each other in the air, leaving contrails that wove together high above the blue snow. Dear Chambrie, she wrote, I can?t wait to return to our little room, to the crepitator on the other side of the wall, to more all-night study (talk) sessions, to Josh and Bruce and doing it on the tile, to Old Virgin Face, and to the only one who?s ever understood me.

On Christmas morning, I slept until nine, and Mom finally woke me. ?Hey,? she said, ?don?t you know Santa?s been here??

?Mom, I?m almost nineteen years old.?

?Well, maybe you could play along for our sake. Did you ever think about how this is for us, our only child gone??

I brushed my hair, which I was letting grow long, and tied a pink ribbon around my head, Alice in Wonderland style. I could be their little girl for the morning. For a moment, I wondered what I had been to them: to them as a married couple.

My mother had mothered me in the ordinary way, I supposed, and commiserated with me when Dad said no to something until we learned to stop asking him, and Dad had been there in my background, eating my mother?s meals, automatically saying no if I asked permission to spend the night at Annie?s or to ride the bus downtown on Saturday, paying for my piano lessons, going to work where he made money doing I didn?t know what exactly and hadn?t really asked. They were just the parents, the grown-ups, and I?d been the one who?d counted.

I was glad I?d bought them thoughtful presents last week and wrapped them carefully, like an out-of-town guest.

It was strange to think of them meeting at a dance at Michigan State and falling in love ? had that been something swooning, something that would happen to me sometime? and would that make my life like their boxed-in go-to-work make-the-beds what-will-the-neighbors-think life? ? strange to think of them in bed making a baby, making me, and Dad falling asleep and burning a hole in the green MSU blanket we still had, while Mom lay in pain waiting for me to come out of her.

After we?d opened all the presents from relatives and each other, Dad brought out two small boxes, store wrapped in silver paper. ?For my women,? he said. He rarely bought us presents, just paid for what we picked out for each other in his name.

I held my box, panicked for a moment, not one of his women like Mom, nobody?s woman, remembering Lonnie at Bill Knapp?s sliding the ring box across the table.

Mom?s was a diamond. All these years she?d worn the plain wedding band he?d bought as a student.

Mine was a garnet, my birthstone. I couldn?t look at him. ?Oh Walter, oh Walter,? my mother kept saying, ?oh Walter I can?t believe it.? I didn?t want them to see me ready to cry. My mother and I had relegated the man to background. Why was I anything at all to him? I saw myself as if through gauze: a typical teenager, as my mother said, words I relished because I?d been such a reject in high school, but also words that infuriated me ? terrible twos, typical teen ? flattening me and dropping me into a slot. I saw myself in my blue mohair sweater and pleated skirt and in an x-ray flash I saw my body walking through his house in the lightly padded bra and garter belt and nylons under the clothes. What was I to him? I used to climb onto his shoulders in Lake Michigan and dive from him into the waves. Through the gauze, I saw my graceless self that was nothing to anybody but Katie Leeview, and in a welter of guilt at my secret loyalty and at my neglect and at the secret light that shined on my parents between the sheets without me, I put the ring on, and uttered breathlessly, ?Thank you, Dad,? and ran upstairs to cry in the bathroom.

After dinner, I was modeling my new clothes for Mom and Dad, strutting through the wrappings on the living room floor, when the phone rang and I knew Lonnie?s deep voice wanted me.