“Hey, Charlie!” Tim Humphrey called. He nodded toward a seat next to him.
Tim sat at the table occupied by the popular eighth graders. The prettiest girls, including Joy Ebert, would often be sitting there, though at that moment it was just a bunch of guys. It seemed utterly impossible that he was suggesting I sit with him. Was he talking to someone else?
I approached hesitantly, setting my tray down.
“You going to try out for cross-country this year?” Tim wanted to know.
“No,” I said automatically.
“Why not?” he asked, puzzled.
I lowered my eyes. The truth of it was that joining in team sports or doing anything fun like that felt like it would somehow be a betrayal of Mom. Bit by bit I was letting go of this attitude, but it was still by and large my ethic. “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Maybe I will. I never thought about it.”
“You should,” Tim said. “I was wiped out today in gym, but you looked like you could keep running.”
All the way across the room, I could feel Beth looking at me. I knew if I turned our eyes would meet.
“Um…,” I said. Tim looked at me questioningly. “I sort of said I’d sit with a friend of mine. Some friends,” I told him.
He shrugged. “Sure.”
I’ve come to conclude that for every person like me—people who found junior high to be a nuanced, torturous negotiation, with inviolate rules and devastating punishments—there were students like Tim, who went through it all as if it were just normal school, with no rigid hierarchy and no social regulations. At the time, though, I believed we all subscribed to the same code and that surely Tim understood the significance of me leaving his table when I’d just been granted a free pass. Had I played it right, I might have eaten lunch there the next day, and then the next, and I’d be popular and happy.
But Tim gave no sign and I was drawn by a power far greater than anything I’d ever encountered. I carried my tray across the room, sure that everyone was whispering behind their hands about me.
The space across from Beth was unoccupied, and I sat down. The rest of the girls at the table instantly went quiet. “Hi,” I said.
“For a minute there, I thought you forgot,” Beth said.
“Oh, well, Tim just wanted to know if I was trying out for cross-country. You know. Tim Humphrey.”
“I know who he is,” she replied, ignoring my whole point, which was that I hung out with popular kids.
I was introduced to Beth’s friends. I miserably mumbled my way through a greeting to each one. They were all perfect examples of why seventh graders didn’t belong in junior high—gaunt, sticklike girls for whom puberty was only a concept in biology class. I lost track of their names because they all looked the same, though their expressions and quick head movements reminded me of birds. They cut their eyes back and forth at each other, grinned, and then sat back as if expecting me to entertain them. What, I wondered, am I doing here?
Beth turned to her friends. “Charlie,” she told them, “is a man with a mysterious secret.”
“What is it?” one of them immediately chirped.
“Well, it’s a secret,” Beth responded. “If we all knew it, we’d have to call it something else. Like ‘common knowledge.’”
The girls all cackled and clucked and pecked at their food. I focused on my lunch as if I’d never in my life seen anything more fascinating.
“One time Charlie and his parents came out to our ranch to ride horses and I spied on him from the hayloft. Whenever he looked up, I’d drop down behind the window. But he knew I was there. It was the first time we ever saw each other.”
I was astounded. “That was you?” I blurted before I had a chance to think. But that meant that I had seen Beth when I was in fourth grade. I remembered a little girl’s face popping up and down like a monkey when we were mounting our horses.
The girl who’d asked about my secret had something else to say: “I’m really sorry about your mom.”
When people said this to me they usually wore exaggeratedly sad expressions, like this girl now, or they looked a little afraid. At first I was convinced that the people with the sad faces were attempting to tear off a piece of my grief for themselves, to become uninvited participants. Now I figured they were sad, probably. The fear, though, I was still trying to figure out. Were they afraid of my reaction, that I would burst into tears and embarrass them? Or maybe they were worried it could happen to them, that they, too, could lose someone who should never, never be lost.
I looked up at Beth’s eyes and saw warm sympathy, just the right amount, and no fear at all. It made my stomach drop inside me as if I were on the Tilt-A-Whirl at the Boundary County Fair. Kay had never made me feel like this. There was just something about this girl.
Beth was waiting for me after school and we walked to her house together. It was as if she were my girlfriend, or wanted to be.
If I thought about Emory or my father’s injury or anything else but the green-eyed girl from seventh grade that day, I simply don’t remember it. When we entered the Shelburtons’ house, Beth’s mother told me my dad had been released from the hospital. She had me pack my things and she drove me home, but it wasn’t like I skipped out of there full of joy. The only thing that made the ride bearable was that Beth sat in the front and talked to me over her seat the whole way.
I almost lacked the willpower to unbuckle my seat belt in the driveway. “Bye, Charlie,” Beth said simply. I grunted in response, like a weight lifter doing a clean and jerk.
“Wait here; we’ll be right back, Beth,” Mrs. Shelburton said.
My dad came out of the house and stood and talked to Mrs. Shelburton as I hovered nearby with my suitcase, miserable because Beth was still in the car and I could have stayed with her but instead had elected to get out and now it would look stupid if I got back in. As Mrs. Shelburton backed away, she waved at my dad and I waved at Beth.
“Charlie.”
I turned to look at my dad. He looked a little frail, somehow, and I flashed back to how he’d appeared in the hospital bed. I was glad I didn’t need to see him like that anymore.
“You did a good job on the pole barn. I can’t even tell where there was blood,” he told me.
I nodded. We stood there, a slight breeze whistling in the pines, until it seemed to occur to both of us at the same time that the pause in conversation had lasted too long.
I put my stuff away in my room. “I think I’ll go down to the creek,” I said to my father.
“Charlie?”
I looked at him.
“What is my Polaroid camera doing out?”
chapter
SEVENTEEN
MY mom had given him the camera. The first time I was allowed to use it myself was to take an instant picture of her the night before her first session of chemotherapy. She put on a nice dress and did her hair all up and wanted a photograph of her with, as she put it, “all my hair intact.” So I knew how to use it, but it was my dad’s and I wasn’t supposed to touch it without permission.
“Oh. I had been planning to take pictures of the pole barn before I laid on a new coat of paint.”
He nodded. “Well, put it back then.”
I did as he said and then went down to the creek. There was no sign of the bear anywhere. I yelled, “Emory!” a few times but didn’t want to shout it too loud for fear my dad would hear me and wonder what I was up to.
When I climbed the hill back to our house there was that stupid Chevy Vega in the driveway. I went inside and Yvonne was sitting in our living room holding a drink in one hand and an unlit Virginia Slim in the other.
“Charlie!” She carefully set her drink down and stood up.
I didn’t know what she expected me to do: run over and hug her? I shied away, standing close to the opposite wall. “Hello, Miss Mandeville,” I said stiffly.
My dad came out of the bathroom. He looked startled, maybe even guilty, when he saw me there talking to the grocer
y lady. “Hi, Charlie,” he said.
The three of us stood for a minute. Finally my dad pulled a lighter from his pocket to set flame to the tip of her cigarette.
Why did he have a lighter all of a sudden?
“I came over to see how your dad is feeling. You had us scared half to death, George,” Yvonne said.
I wasn’t scared, I thought to myself.
Dad and Yvonne settled into some chairs and I went back to my bedroom and closed the door. My chest was tight, as if I’d just run cross-country. My dad had lied to me. He said he didn’t like her, and now here she was. She sent him loving flowers in the hospital and probably visited him more than I did.
I love you, the card had said. That was a lot more serious than Love, Yvonne.
I decided that if she stayed for dinner I’d pretend to be sick again. Maybe my father would conclude I was allergic to her and tell her she couldn’t come over anymore.
A few minutes later, though, I heard her get into her car and drive off. I went out to help my dad with dinner. He seemed to want to say something to me, but of course he didn’t.
When I went to bed that night I reached into my sock drawer and pulled out a small cigar box I’d had for a long time. I kept stuff in it that I imagine no one would ever find of any value but me, stuff I’d found, mostly, like an arrowhead and the perfectly preserved skull of a small snake. I had a new item in there as well.
I hadn’t lied to my father. I’d gotten the Polaroid camera out because I’d been planning to take a picture of the pole barn before I’d painted over it; that much was true. In matter of fact, I did take a picture of the pole barn before I painted over it. I turned the Polaroid over in my hands now, reading the mysterious words.
I, Emory Bain, pvt. 3rd regt., inf. of GR Mich, May 1862 pursued rebels at Chickahominy, wounded, took fever, now returned. I have a message.
Gazing at those words, I had, for the first time, the sense that my life was undergoing a profound change and that as a result, when I told the story of Charlie Hall people would no longer look at me with solemn eyes and say, I’m sorry.
On the bus the next morning I sat close to the front, as usual, marooned by my first day’s choice in the middle of a field of seventh graders. From where I sat I could monitor what was going on behind me by looking into the huge mirror hanging over the driver’s head, which was how I noticed Dan’s friend Jerry stealthily making his way forward, moving from seat to seat even though you weren’t supposed to get up when the vehicle was moving. At the next stop, just as the bus was lumbering to a halt, he darted forward, sliding into the seat next to me.
He didn’t look me in the eye; he was watching straight ahead, as if he were a spy or something. I regarded him curiously.
“Dan wants to fight you after school today,” he said out of the corner of his mouth.
I thought Dan and I had pretty much settled this particular matter on the first day of school and was more than a little unhappy to hear it brought up again. What would be the point of a fight? We both knew that I’d lose.
It was on my lips to ask why, but I squelched the impulse. I knew why. I’d seen adolescent bighorn sheep banging their heads into each other when they were too young to do any mating—it was just a way of proving something to themselves and maybe to the other sheep who were watching. This was the same thing; we were all jockeying and jostling our way into manhood. Boys fought all the time, either because some spark of anger set them off or because of something like this, a formal, almost ritualized appointment, as if we were dueling with pistols.
Why couldn’t I just forfeit?
“We’ll go down to the city park, off school property so you won’t get in trouble. You can take the late bus home,” Jerry told me, anticipating my legal argument.
So, well, there it was. I shrugged. “Yeah, okay,” I said. My heart was pounding as if I’d just asked a girl out on a date.
At the next stop Jerry slipped back to give Dan the good news that I’d agreed he could pound me into a pulp after school that day.
I bolted from the bus as soon as the doors flapped open. I didn’t want to so much as make eye contact with my partner in pugilism. I was oddly embarrassed, as if Dan and I shared an intimacy now.
Word of the fight spread through the school fairly rapidly, and I found myself the subject of a few speculative glances in the hallways. I’d like to say there was admiration in those looks, but it was actually more as if they were picturing me lying in a chalk outline.
Why was I cursed with such a small body? Why wasn’t I big and strong and tough like so many other eighth graders?
I’d have to wait until my twenties before anyone could answer these questions. I had finished defending my dissertation and was officially a Ph.D., but instead of luxuriating in the accomplishment I found I was restless at the sudden cessation of stress, plagued with an intractable insomnia. When my medical doctor’s drugs didn’t work I started seeing a therapist. Dr. Sat Siri was an American Sikh, an elegant, pale woman in white flowing clothes and a turban. Unlike some of the other professional listeners I was sent to in the name of psychotherapy, she seemed to believe that the purpose of our sessions was to make their continuation unnecessary.
Sat Siri was the only person to tell me about studies done on the effect of grief and other stresses on prepubescent children. “It’s no wonder your physical growth went dormant on you, Charlie,” she told me. “You’d lost your mother; that’s a great emotional shock.”
Sat Siri also gently asked me if I didn’t see something “worth looking at,” as she put it, in the fact that when my yearning for some kind of communication with my father was at its most acute I found myself talking to a wild bear. I didn’t have an answer for that one, because she, it seemed, like every other person in her profession, discounted my story about the words on the pole barn wall, choosing to believe they were the product of some rational, prosaic event, like a couple of kids committing vandalism or maybe a cry for help from a growth-stunted eighth grader.
At any rate, I was years away from that conversation, and whatever the cause, I was small and weak and, I knew, terrified. Several times that day I went into the boys’ room, stared into the mirror, and admonished myself over and over, Don’t cry.
This was all that I was afraid of. I didn’t mind if Dan’s fist broke my nose; I wasn’t worried about losing the fight or feeling the pain. I was just terrified that I’d become so upset that I’d cry like a baby in front of the other boys and then I’d forever be rejected from the company of men. Just standing in front of the mirror I could feel my emotions fluttering inside my chest, reacting to the upsetting news that Dan Alderton, Danny my friend, wanted to hit me and hurt me.
I sat with Beth and her flock at lunch and it was easier, this second day. Compared to my upcoming humiliation on the battlefield, what did it matter if everyone saw me lunching with a bunch of seventh graders? Besides, Beth was beautiful. It never did any male reputational damage to be seen with a pretty girl. I felt lucky that some other boy hadn’t swooped in already.
Beth apparently knew nothing about the title bout that was scheduled for that afternoon and I decided it would be best not to mention it.
I was at my locker when Dan suddenly appeared, flanked by Gregg the ninth grader and fellow eighth grader Mitch.
“Are you going to show?” Dan demanded hotly.
The funny thing is that once you’ve had a grizzly bear in your face, a skinny thirteen-year-old just isn’t that intimidating. I mostly observed that he was flushed and had worked himself into a state of aggression that didn’t come naturally to the Dan Alderton I knew. His freckles were scarlet and pulsing on his pale cheeks.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll be there.”
“You’d better,” he replied.
It was on my mind to remind him that I’d just said I would, but I bit back the smart remark. “I will,” I finally said when the silence of Dan and his pals became awkward.
“You�
�d better,” he warned again. I guess that’s all he could come up with.
I turned my back on him then and I suppose there was some deliberation in my movements, a direct expression of contempt. I pulled my history book out of my locker and slammed the door shut, moving past Gregg, who had to step out of my way. As he did so, someone—I’m assuming Dan, but it could have been any one of them—hit me in the back of my head with his knuckles. It wasn’t a hard blow, just one designed to insult, and it did the trick: my eyes were stinging.
Don’t cry.
At the closing bell I trudged down the street to the city park, which was just a place with grass and some benches—probably the whole thing was constructed so that junior high students would have some place to fight. A few boys had already gathered and were milling around in excitement, but Dan and his entourage hadn’t arrived by the time I got there, which put me in the ridiculous position of having to wait to be punched out. I noted glumly that Tim Humphrey and Mike Kappas both had shown up—I doubted they’d have much respect for my physical prowess once Dan had knocked me unconscious.
There was, as they say, a fairly good crowd. No one talked to me—they maintained a respectful distance. I pretended to do some stretching, as if I needed to get my body limbered up before I folded it into the fetal position.
When you were ready to surrender in a fight, you said, I give. It was, however, considered poor sportsmanship to say this before the other guy had even shown up.
Eventually Dan, Gregg, Jerry, and Mitch arrived. Dan’s friends were grinning broadly, but Dan seemed pretty grim. His eyes didn’t meet mine as he took off the light jacket he was wearing and handed it to Gregg. If Dan’s freckles got any hotter they’d probably burst into flames.
He knows this is ridiculous, I thought to myself. He knows we have no reason to be doing this.
Dan and I approached each other warily. Was this it? Were we supposed to just start fighting?
“Glad you could make it. Wussy.” Dan sneered at me.
I could see that he needed to work himself into a froth before he could justify swinging at me, so I just waited for him to get there. Since I didn’t want to do this in the first place, I didn’t sling any insults back.
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