I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

  “I’m going outside,” I told Leo. It was sometime after midnight by then. “Walk the beach or something.”

  He had connected with the redhead after all; their slow-dancing was starting to look like foreplay. “Nice knowing you,” Leo said.

  Outside, the air was cool and misty and the moon had a hazy glow. Someone at the far end of the parking lot kept trying to start their car, grinding the ignition over and over and over again.

  I climbed up the bank and down the other side to the ocean. The tide sounded like a flushing toilet. Clots of seaweed littered the beach.

  There was nobody else around. I took off my sandals and flung them back toward the lifeguard stand. Rolled up my jeans and walked down by the water.

  The cold sea air sobered me up some—washed away the wooziness and the stink of cigarettes and the strobe light flashes from inside. Meat shows: that’s all these bars were. I could still hear the thump of the music inside, but more and more faintly, the farther I walked. The surf lapping over my feet felt good. I stared back up at the moon.

  I must have walked for a mile, mile and a half, just thinking about shit: how it must feel to be way up there, looking down at the earth. Not being a part of it. Taking in the place, whole. That was the thing, man. That’s what was hard: we were all moon walkers, in a way. Me. Leo. Ralph Drinkwater. My brother. Even my stupid stepfather, locked in a three-against-one with Ma and Thomas and me. Even all the clowns back there at the Dial-Tone Lounge, getting loaded so they could get up the nerve to try and fuck some girl—any girl—tether themselves to someone, even for a couple of minutes in the backseat of someone’s car. For a couple of seconds, everything was all clear. It all made sense. Who was that guy we’d read in my philosophy class last semester? That existentialism guy? He was right. Every one of us was alone. Even if you were someone’s identical twin. I mean, why had Thomas gotten up in the middle of the night and run those laps around the dorm? None of it made any sense, man, that was why. Because the whole freaking world was absurd. Because man was existentially alone. . . . Whoa, far out, I said, teasing myself back to earth again. Heavy, man. I’d actually remembered something from school a whole month after the final exam. I was turning into a freaking philosopher. I reached down and picked some rocks off the beach. Chucked them, one by one, into the rolling surf. I don’t know how long I stood there, pitching stones.

  When I got back and went to get my sandals, I saw a silhouette up in the lifeguard’s perch. Someone small. “Yoo-hoo,” she called. “Do you have jumper cables?”

  I told her I didn’t. “Were you the one I heard a while ago? Sounds like you might have flooded her. If I were you, I’d wait a little while longer, then try again.”

  As I approached, I realized who it was: that little waitress from the Dial-Tone. She was sitting with her knees to her chest, wearing a sweatshirt with her hands tucked inside the sleeves.

  “Not that I’m trying to rescue you or anything.”

  She smiled. “Hey, I really did appreciate you trying to get those jerks to back off,” she said. “It was sweet. Thanks.”

  “No problem.”

  “I just get so tired of it, you know? Guys playing grab-ass all night. Showing their buddies what he-men they are. One of the other waitresses—one of the veterans—taught me to cop an attitude. Snap at them like you’re their mother and if they don’t stop it you’ll send them up to their room. So that’s what I do. It works.”

  I nodded. “Sure scared the crap out of me,” I said.

  She looked back toward the Dial-Tone. “God, I hate that place,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, if it’s true Western civilization’s in decline, I guess we may have hit bottom with the Dial-Tone Lounge.” She laughed that pretty laugh of hers. That night out by the lifeguard stand was the first time I ever heard it.

  “So what’d they do, fire you?” I said. “Or did you quit?”

  “Neither. My replacement finally showed up. God, I hope I can get that stupid car started. I don’t want to have to sit around until two and wait for my sleazy assistant manager to bring me home.”

  “Where do you live?” I said. “Maybe my buddy and I can give you a lift.”

  She smiled. “The guy who grades women? Thanks anyway.”

  “No problem.”

  Neither of us said anything for several seconds. I started to walk away.

  “You feel like sitting up here with me?” she said. “Come on up. There’s room.”

  “Yeah?”

  She said she had a spot all warmed up for me.

  I climbed the tower and squeezed in next to her. Saw the book in her lap. She’s always been a big reader—even back then she was.

  “Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to read in the dark?” I said.

  “I wasn’t. I was reading by the moonlight.”

  “Same difference. What’s so good that you’re wrecking your eyesight over it?”

  “Richard Brautigan,” she said, handing me the paperback. “I don’t really get it, but I can’t stop reading it,” she said. “It’s mysterious. . . . It intrigues me.”

  I opened it up and squinted. Made out the first paragraph. Read it aloud. “In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar. I’ll tell you about it because I am here and you are distant.”

  “Look at his picture,” she said. “He has his picture on all his book covers.”

  I closed the book, held it up to the moon. “Looks like Mark Twain on acid,” I said. She laughed. Passed her hand through my curly hair, messed it up a little. Am I remembering it right? Was that all it took? I know this much: that I fell in love with her right there. Before I even jumped down from that lifeguard tower.

  She was easy to talk to—that was the thing. And pretty. And smart. Funny, too. She told me she was twenty-one, a senior at Boston College majoring in early childhood education. Besides waitressing, she worked mornings at a Head Start program. “My father wanted me to work for him again this summer,” she said. “In the bookkeeping department with my uncle Costas. He owns a car dealership. But I’d done that for three summers in a row. I was looking for a little change. And some independence, I guess. Can you believe I actually wanted to go through the interview process? Fill out applications to see if anyone besides my family would hire me? Does that make sense?”

  “More sense than the fact that your father owns a dealership and you’re riding around in a car that won’t start,” I said.

  “Oh, God, Daddy would die if he knew I was out here stranded. He means well, but he’s just so overprotective. What’s your name?”

  “My name? Dominick.”

  “Dominick,” she repeated. “Italian, right?”

  “Yup. Well, half.”

  “What’s the other half?”

  The whack of the funny bone. The unanswerable question. “Oh, little of this, little of that,” I said. “How about you?”

  “Greek,” she said. “Both sides. My father’s Greek-American and my mother’s an immigrant. By the way, my name is Dessa.”

  “Dessa what?”

  “Constantine.”

  “Constantine? As in ‘Come see the Dodge boys at Constantine Motors’?” I started singing the radio jingle I’d heard a million times from Ralph Drinkwater’s radio.

  She laughed. Swatted me one. “I’ll have to tell my father when he gets back that those ads are starting to pay off.”

  “I haven’t bought a car yet, have I?” I said. “Where’s he at?”

  “What?”

  “Your father. You just said, ‘when he gets back.’”

  “Oh. He’s in Greece. He and my mother and my little sister. They go back every year to visit relatives. This is the first year I haven’t gone. Have you ever been?”

  Yeah, sure, I thought to myself. The jet-setting Birdseys. “Can’t say that I have.”

  “Oh, go sometime if you get the chance. The Aegean’s so incredible. The sense of history, the sun—t
he light there doesn’t look anything like it does around here. And the water! You wouldn’t believe the color of the water.”

  We sat there for a minute or so, watching the ocean, saying nothing. Ordinarily, with a girl, I would have panicked at that amount of dead airtime. But with Dessa, the silence felt comfortable.

  “How old’s your little sister?” I said.

  “Athena? Yuck. She’s seventeen.”

  “Athena? As in, the goddess of wisdom?”

  She laughed. “More like the goddess of obnoxious behavior. She hates the name. We’re supposed to call her Angie. She’s such a brat! My parents let her get away with murder.”

  I told her I had a twin brother.

  “You do? Identical or fraternal?”

  “Identical.”

  “Oh, wow,” she said. “Is that cool? Having a twin?”

  I gave her a short snort. “No.”

  “No? Why not?”

  For some reason, I started telling her about our first year at UConn—Thomas keeping himself cooped up in our room, taking his frustration out on our typewriter.

  She just listened. Just let me keep talking, which I couldn’t quite believe I was doing so much of.

  “I guess it would be hard, having someone that close to you,” she said. “Especially if he’s so dependent. You must never feel like you have any breathing room.”

  I couldn’t believe someone had actually heard me. That someone, on some level, understood. I reached over and kissed her. She kissed me back. “You taste nice,” she said. “Kind of salty.”

  Half a dozen kisses later, I was wired up and hungry for her—had gone from zero to sixty in about a minute. “Hey, hold it, cowboy,” she said. She pulled my hands off of her and jumped down from the tower. Looked up at the moon. “It’s strange, isn’t it?” she said. “To think there are actually a couple of earthlings up there, right now, walking around? The men on the moon. It’s surreal, isn’t it?”

  She walked slowly to the water’s edge. Waded in.

  I am here and you are distant, I thought, unsure if I meant Dessa, or my brother, or the astronauts up there on the moon. Unsure of what I meant.

  “Hey, Dominick, come here!” she called. “Look!”

  When I reached her, she took my hand. She was staring into the water. “God, I haven’t seen this since I was a kid,” she said.

  “Seen what?”

  “Phosphorescence. In the water. Right there!”

  “Right where?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

  “Those little twinkles of light along the surface of the water. You have to be quick. They only last about a second. Look! There’s another one! See it?”

  I saw ocean. Sand. Our feet in the water.

  “My sister and I used to call it pixie dust. There’s another one!”

  I kept thinking she was pulling my leg. Kept missing it. Then, son of a bitch, there it was. Phosphorescence.

  Pixie dust.

  Her car started on the first try.

  Later on, I rode home half-listening to Leo complain about what cock-teases redheads were. “It’s like a club,” he said. “An unwritten law.” We stopped at the Oh Boy Diner. Drank coffee, ate eggs. I didn’t mention anything about Dessa—didn’t say a thing. I didn’t want to hear any of Leo’s theories about waitresses, or girls with braids, or rich guys’ daughters. On the way back to the car, I reached into my jeans pockets and fingered the Dial-Tone Lounge matchbooks. I’d had Dessa write her number on the inside covers of two of them, not just one. The second was for security, in case I lost the first. I wasn’t taking any chances.

  It was after two by the time I got home. My brother and my mother had both gone to bed; Ray lay stretched out on the couch, snoring, alone with his big night in history. The TV was still on, Walter Cronkite keeping watch at mission control. His skin glowed infrared. He babbled on and on about the moon.

  19

  1969

  Dell Weeks never drank before noon and usually not before the middle of the week. But by Thursday or Friday, he’d start sipping from his pint bottle of Seagram’s at lunch and be wasted by midafternoon.

  Dell was a Jekyll and Hyde drunk. Sometimes alcohol made him everyone’s best friend. “No sense killing yourself for minimum wage,” he’d say, his arm around your shoulder, his sweet, boozy breath in your face. Other times he’d needle and harass—start mouthing off about “lazy spooks” and “dumb-ass college faggots” who didn’t know which end of the shovel did the work. It was during one of his mean drunks that Dell started calling my brother Dickless.

  If we got lucky on the afternoons he was drinking, Dell would curl up and doze in the shade of some tree or alongside or even under the city truck. He’d tell us to just get lost somewhere if we finished the job early—to leave him alone and not bother him unless we saw Lou Clukey’s truck coming. At first, Leo and Thomas and I would just sit around and bullshit and Ralph Drinkwater would park someplace nearby—far enough away to be antisocial but close enough to listen in on the conversation. If one of us had remembered a deck of cards, we’d play pitch or setback. A couple of times we were so bored, we even played tag—keepaway or whatever—as if we were all nine instead of nineteen.

  Sometimes when the rest of us were killing time, Ralph would take out a joint and sit there, toking away and smirking at us as if there was some joke that went over everyone’s head but his. As if Thomas and Leo and I were the joke. It was that same smirk he used to wear in Mr. LoPresto’s history class. “Nope,” Ralph would say whenever we’d asked him if he wanted to join us in some cards or whatever. “Not interested.” I kept waiting for him to return the invitation and pass around one of those joints of his—I’d gotten high a couple of times at school and liked it—but Ralph didn’t offer and I wasn’t about to beg.

  “Graveball” was what eventually got Drinkwater to let down his guard and join us. One day out at the Boswell Avenue cemetery, Leo ran his mower over something that made a loud thump and then shot out sideways. It was a Wiffle ball, nicked and battered up a little, but still serviceable. Leo invented this game where you had to hit the ball with a pair of hedge clippers, then run the bases—designated gravestones. The catch was, you had to roll your lawnmower along with you from base to base.

  We started off with Leo on one team and me on the other. Thomas pinch-hit and ran bases for both of us and we cooked up a bunch of rules for “ghost runners.” We’d been at it for half an hour or so when Drinkwater just couldn’t stand it anymore. He stood up. Ambled over. “What are you jokers playing, anyway?” he asked. He’d been pretending not to watch us.

  Leo named the game on the spot. “Graveball,” he said. “Wanna play?”

  Even stoned, Drinkwater was great at graveball. You just wouldn’t suspect how far a Wiffle ball could travel after a collision with a pair of hedge clippers. Thwock! That thing would go flying the width of the cemetery and into the woods. Half the time Ralph got his at-bats, we ended up having to stop and hunt for the damn ball. He could fly around the bases, too, lawnmower and all. The guy was fast. But anyway, it was graveball that broke the ice with Ralph.

  I’d started dating Dessa by then. The Constantines lived in a sprawling three-story house up in Hewett City, a sixteen-mile bike ride due north from Three Rivers. They had an in-ground pool out back and a tiled patio and these fancy flower gardens. The double doors in front opened to a foyer with a marble floor. Just inside the living room, with its velvet sofas and chairs—its oil paintings of Dessa and her sister—there was this massive grandfather clock. The size and workmanship of that thing—the tone—put to shame that sorry-ass clock down at the S&H Green Stamp store that Ma had loved, saved for, and never even gotten. Whenever I walked into the Constantines’ house, I felt my own family’s smallness.

  Dessa’s father had had a security system installed before their trip to Greece and had exacted promises from his brother Costas to call and check in on Dess. Daddy had made his daughter promise she wouldn’t
entertain male company alone while they were gone, especially that good-for-nothing musician who had manhandled her. Julian, his name was. She had made a mistake, Dessa told me, and her father probably wasn’t going to let her forget it for the rest of her life. Mrs. Constantine assured Dessa that her father trusted her. It was all the hippies and lunatics running around these days that he didn’t trust. Look what had just happened out in Hollywood with that poor movie director’s wife. And six months pregnant, no less! Anything could happen these days, especially to a girl who was too trusting for her own good. Anything. Dessa should be going with them to Greece instead of working as a barmaid at that kooky dance place with the telephones. She should be relaxing and soaking up the sun and meeting some nice young Greek men.

  Dessa had shared all this over the phone before my first visit, so there was something sexy and defiant about pedaling my Columbia three-speed up the U-shaped driveway and into the Constantines’ backyard, into the garage where I tripped the kickstand and parked next to Dessa’s mother’s dormant Chrysler Newport. Sexy, too, to peel off my sweat-soaked clothes after those long bike rides, drop them onto the mosaic floor in Dessa’s bathroom, and lather up under her oscillating showerhead. The first time I visited, Dessa stayed downstairs while I showered and changed. The second time, she was a talking blur in cutoffs and a bikini top on the other side of the glass doors and I had to wait out my erection before I could shut off the water and emerge. By my third visit, Dessa and I were showering together, washing away the sex we’d just made, passing the soap over each other’s body in ways that fired us up all over again.

  Before Dessa, I had never felt that kind of fire. Had wondered sometimes if I’d ever feel it. In Newsweek and on TV, they were always talking about the sexual revolution—spouting some jaw-dropping statistic about how the majority of young American males had experienced umpteen partners by the time they were my age. Maybe that had happened to Leo and every other guy, but not to me. Before Dessa, the sum total of my sexual experience had been my episode out at the Falls with Patty Katz and the time during a dorm party the semester before when a drunk girl had laughed in the dark at my confusion over her pantyhose and then stuck it inside her and said, “There. Go.”