by Wally Lamb
The light went on in their bathroom. I heard him peeing.
He came out with a new beer. “I’d love to make a switch, believe me,” he said. “There’s a top-forty station up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, that’s looking at me, but Rita doesn’t want to move.”
“I don’t want you to, either. This house was so boring before you guys got here,” I said. “The lady who rented your apartment before you was a drunk. And she had this retarded little dog.”
He was smiling at me, running his fingers through his chest hair. “Oh, yeah?” he said.
“Yeah.”
His hand touched my arm. “How good are you at keeping secrets?” he asked.
The fan blowing against my back caused a shiver. My spoon clinked against the ice cream dish. “Okay,” I said. “Fine.”
“The reason she doesn’t want to move is because she’s pregnant.”
“Rita? She is?”
He pulled his knee up against his chest, took a sip. “Life stinks,” he said. “Maybe that dead uncle of yours was one of the lucky ones. . . . She’s already lost two babies, you know.”
“Two.”
“Which is why we left my last job in Newark. I was up for the morning show—fifty-thousand-listener potential, perfect exposure to the New York guys. . . . You bored out of your skull yet? Just tell me.”
“I’m not bored.”
“She’d go nuts if she knew I was telling you all this. ‘It’ll be okay this time, Jackie, I promise,’ she says. ‘Even if something happens, I’ll be all right.’ You may have noticed my opinion doesn’t fit into any of these little decisions she makes. You catch that? So now here’s this baby coming and Randolph says I’m too—what do you call it?—too fanciful. Says he’s waiting to see what happens before he renews me. Wait’ll she hears that one—she’ll shit the kid right out her other end.”
My stomach heaved a little. “I better go,” I said. But I didn’t move.
He looked over at me and smiled. “Dolores Del Rio,” he said. “You and me against the bad guys, right?”
I didn’t answer. He reached down and touched my bare foot.
“Right?”
“Right.”
“What are you?” he said. “Ticklish or something?”
The word “ticklish” made me flinch. I let out a nervous laugh. “You are, aren’t you?” he said. “See, I told you!” His grip tightened around my ankle. His fingertips danced along the sole of my foot.
“Come on,” I said. “Cut it out. I could fall right off this—”
He was on top of me, his knees pressing into my sides, his fingers jumping and jabbing. “You ticklish here? What about here?”
My head thumped back against the porch floor and I bucked and shoved, unable to breathe. I couldn’t stop laughing. His hair flapped on and off his forehead as he rubbed against me, tickling and poking.
“Stop it, okay? . . . Really!” I squealed. But he wouldn’t stop.
My head rocked back and forth and I suddenly saw how close I was to the fan. My leg shot out. The tower of beer cans flew off the porch, clattering down in the alley.
The noise made him stop. He was laughing, breathing heavily. His beer breath came out in damp, sour blasts. “Do you mind?” I said. “You’re crushing me to death.”
“Phew. Just don’t ever let me hear you say you’re not ticklish,” he laughed. He got off of me. “Teach you a lesson.”
I was coughing. Then crying—hard and without control.
He laughed at me. “Hey?” he said. “Stop it. What’s the matter?”
When I could speak, I told him I was sorry.
“For what?”
“For acting so stupid.”
He reached for me but I pulled away.
“What’d I do, scare you or something? I was just trying to cheer us up. All this talk about death and bosses and shit. What’d you think I was doing?”
“Don’t mind me,” I said. “I’m just an idiot.”
I got myself up and started down the stairs, smearing away tears.
“I still don’t get it,” he said. He was leaning over the railing. “First you’re laughing your head off, then—what’s the matter with you, anyway?”
* * *
Up in my bedroom, I heard his knocking and calling down at the back door. I let the phone ring and ring, echoing up the stairwell from Grandma’s front hall. All he was trying to do was cheer us up, I told myself. No wonder nobody talked to me at school. I acted so retarded.
Ma and Grandma were home. I positioned myself on the bed, my science book in my lap. Grandma went by my room, grumbling to Ma about hooligans and beer cans and decent people’s property.
Ma came in. She sat down on my bed and brushed my bangs away from my forehead. “I got a strike and two spares tonight. How are you feeling?”
I shrugged without looking up from the book. “Do you mind?” I said. “I’m tired and I have to get this reading finished.”
“Okay, honey. Good night. I love you.”
She waited several seconds for me to say I loved her, too. I wanted to say it. Risk it. It wouldn’t come out.
Later, in the dark, I hugged myself and thought about Uncle Eddie. Not being able to breathe up there on that porch—having no control of it: that was what his drowning must have felt like.
My right side was sore. There was a long scratch on my arm.
I was still awake when Rita got home from work. Their voices murmured up there together. My foot wouldn’t stop twitching. My mind wouldn’t shut off. . . . It must have been something else I had felt up there when he was on me, tickling me. His knee or his elbow or something. He and Rita were married, they were having a little baby together, for pity’s sake. I was just being a pig and an idiot. I was pitiful.
“How good are you at keeping secrets?” he kept asking me.
* * *
“Do you take sugar or are you sweet enough?” I heard Grandma say in the cheeriest of voices as I came down the stairs the following morning. Somewhere in the night, a storm had taken away the hot, gluey air. A cool breeze was flapping the living-room shades.
In the kitchen my eyes bounced from Jack’s red-striped shirt to Grandma’s smile to the brown cardboard bakery box on the table. Jack was sitting in my mother’s place. Ma was in mine, biting into a doughnut.
“Well, here she is!” Grandma announced with fake enthusiasm. She dragged the kitchen stool to the table and patted the seat. “Sit down, Dolores, and have one of these delicious pastries Mr. Speight brought us.”
Jack raised one of our coffee cups to his lips and smiled.
The room smelled of aftershave. His red-and-white pinstripes looked so crisp and clean, I wondered for a second if I’d made up the evening before.
“Hey, Dolores,” my mother said. “How can you tell if an elephant’s been inside your refrigerator?”
There was a sprinkle of powdered sugar on her khaki blouse. Jack’s smile looked more than ever like Uncle Eddie’s.
“I don’t know.”
“Because he’s left tracks in the butter.” She and Grandma grinned in anticipation.
“Oh,” I said. “That’s a pretty good one.”
Inside the box were three doughnuts, top-heavy with whipped cream and jam. At Ma’s insistence, I lifted one out and onto my plate.
“Is little Rita getting used to her new schedule?” Grandma asked.
“Well, she dragged herself in last night, nodded at me as though she remembered me from somewhere, and then pulled the covers up over her head. She’s still snoring up there.”
Ma began telling a story about when my father worked nights right after they got married. I poked at the doughnut and brought a forkful to my mouth. The whipped cream was warm and yellowy. From the corner of my eye, I saw Jack watching.
“Well,” Grandma said, refilling his coffee cup, “you tell Rita for me to lock her car doors when she’s driving back and forth after dark. All these cuckoo heads and beatniks these days
. Some wild Indians dumped beer cans in the alley last night. I guess they just like the thought of decent people having to clean up their messes for them.”
The table fan was on the counter, its cord wrapped tightly around the base.
“Did you hear that thunder last night?” Jack said. “Wasn’t it something?”
I had slept through it.
“You must be exhausted this morning, Ma?” my mother teased Grandma. “She makes the sign of the cross at every lightning bolt, Jack.”
Grandma made a face. “Well, this house hasn’t been struck yet, has it, Miss Smarty-pants?”
I pushed my plate away. “I’m not very hungry,” I said.
“Dolores, Jack said he’d be glad to drive you to school this morning,” Ma said.
“That’s okay. I don’t mind walking.”
“It’s no trouble at all,” Jack said. “Really.”
At the door, Grandma brushed the sleeve of my uniform and clutched me by the wrists. “If those nasty DP sisters give you any trouble this year, just tell the teacher. Or better yet, send them to Mr. Speight and me.”
Her newfound sassiness was all for Jack’s benefit. She referred to him as Mr. Speight when talking to me. What a laugh, I thought. Which of us knew Rita was pregnant—me or her? Who did she think he told his secrets to?
Outside, birds chirped and Pierce Street was shiny from rain water. My flip-flops sat neatly, side by side, just outside the door. Had my mother placed them there? Had Jack?
“Forgot to put the top up last night,” he said. He had draped towels over the seats of the MG.
I sat down on the dampness, slammed the door, locked it, then unlocked it again. I stared away from him and out the side. When he reached over for the stick shift, I pressed my knees together.
“How come you bought us doughnuts?”
“Oh, I don’t know . . . guess I just like to talk to people at breakfast. Don’t forget, I spend the rest of the day talking to a microphone and a bunch of sound equipment.”
I started shaking. Stopped. Started again. There was a hole in his dashboard where a radio was supposed to be. He smiled at nothing, zipping down Pierce Street. “Nasty DP sisters?” he said.
“Rosalie and Stacia Pysyk,” I said. “These two girls who used to bug me last year. That’s them right there!”
Like audiovisual aids, the Pysyk sisters appeared ahead, trudging up Division Street. Jack beeped the horn and waved. The two of them looked up at us, amazed, and I stared right back at them.
“Why did they bug you?”
“Who knows? They just did.”
“Jealous of your looks,” he said.
My mouth scrunched to the side. “Yeah, right.”
“No, I mean it. You put yourself next to those scrawny things, Del Rio, and it’s like Miss Universe at the dog pound. Here, look at yourself!”
He twisted the rearview mirror for me to see. My hair was blowing out behind me. I looked carefree, 75 percent pretty.
I pushed the mirror back in place. “Yuck,” I said.
He watched the road and me, in glimpses. “Oh, by the way, I almost forgot. About that thing last night? I didn’t mean to scare you or anything. You know—the beer, the heat, whatever. It was just one of those things. We’re still friends, right?”
My cuticles went white against the edge of my notebook. “Sure.”
“I tried to call you after you went in. I knew you were upset.”
“I guess I didn’t hear you. I was taking a bath.”
“No big deal. So let’s just forget it, okay?”
“Fine.”
He tapped his fingers against the steering wheel. He wouldn’t stop smiling. “Not to beat a dead horse or anything,” he said, “but did you say anything to them?”
“About Rita having a baby?”
“Yeah, that. About anything.”
I shook my head. “Why should I?”
“Right. Exactly.”
He pulled up in front of the school. “Well, you have a good day, now. And don’t let those two mutt faces bother you. Because you’re a special person.” Looking straight ahead, he reached over and took my hand, squeezing it softly. He held it for several seconds. I let him.
Two mulish boys in uniform shirts and ties ran down to the curb as Jack pulled away. “Check it out,” one of them said.
“How fast does that roller skate of your father’s go?” the other one asked me. He smiled dopily, exposing a mouthful of surfboard teeth.
“He’s not my father,” I said. “He’s a close personal friend.”
* * *
“Miss Price?” Sister Presentation said, mid-morning.
I felt a pulse in my neck. I knew she’d caught me.
“Yes?”
“Can you tell us what they are? The remaining sacraments?” The others craned their necks to watch.
“Baptism, confession . . .” Sister prompted. A dozen hands flew into the air; the question was a cinch if you’d been listening.
“Holy orders?” I said.
“Eric has already said holy orders.” Hope evaporated from Sister’s face; I saw her harden against me. “Did you do your homework last night?”
“Some of it.”
“Well,” Sister said. “‘Some of it’ is unacceptable. A girl who can’t be bothered to do the very first homework assignment of the school year is a girl who has a poor attitude, in my book. Do you recall what my policy is on incomplete homework?”
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“Then you’d better take out your notebook and look it up. We’ll wait for you.”
Panic-stricken, I flipped and flipped the pages, but couldn’t find it.
“Number fourteen,” Sister said, impatiently. “Read it aloud.”
“‘A student who has not completed his homework assignment will automatically stay after school on that day.’”
“That’s correct,” Sister told me. “And a girl who refuses to do her homework often enough may find herself on the sidelines instead of the graduation line come June. Isn’t that right, class?”
They nodded collectively.
* * *
At noon I avoided the lunchroom and went, instead, to the school yard. Kids chattered and screamed; jump ropes slapped the asphalt. A large group of third graders were squabbling over a game of Red Light. I hated this school—would rather drown than go here.
At the periphery of the school yard, past the swings, the white plaster statue of St. Anthony stood surrounded by a semicircle of yellow chrysanthemums. I wandered over to the shrine, drawn by the presence of a solitary girl who appeared to be praying. I studied her from the back. Her legs were long and bony—praying-mantis legs. The waist of her uniform buckled in several places beneath her belt. I approached quietly. “Hi,” I said.
She turned abruptly, gasping, slapping her flat chest. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” she said. “You trying to give me a heart attack?”
She was a seventh grader. That morning I’d watched her pick her nose during an assembly. “Excuse me,” I said. I started to walk away.
“Are you new here?” she said.
“Not really. I moved here last year. From Connecticut.”
“I been there. It’s stupid. What made you come to this shitty school?” Her wide black eyes were sunk deep into her face and roofed by a single bushy eyebrow. Smoke was leaking between the fingers of her cupped hand and I wondered momentarily if she was somehow on fire before it occurred to me she was having herself a cigarette, an act emphatically forbidden by the St. Anthony’s School Code of Conduct. I tried to relax my facial muscles of any visible signs of shock.
“Or should I say this prison?” she continued. “Any school that don’t even let you wear nylons—”
She took an angry little drag off her cigarette in a way that managed somehow to be both defiant and covert. “Homework, tests—I ain’t their slave. Kenny and me got better things to do. You got a boyfriend?”
“No,” I s
aid. “Not exactly.”
“Me and Kenny been going out for seven and a half months. Since I was in sixth grade.”
“Wow,” I said. “Is he someone in your class?”
She snorted. “Don’t make me bust a gut. I ain’t got time for baby-sittin’. He’s in high school. Except he may quit next year when he turns sixteen. On account of all his teachers are out to get him. Plus, he seen this truck deliverin’ stuff to their cafeteria one morning and it had a dog-food sign right on the side. Kenny says he ain’t eatin’ Gravy Train for anybody—they can keep their friggin’ diploma. Have you ever French-kissed a guy?”
I looked away, then back. “I’d rather not say.”
“That’s my name, French. Except I ain’t.”
“What?”
“French. My name is Norma French, but I’m one-quarter Cherokee Indian. Someone told me French-kissin’s a mortal sin but that’s nuts. Who decided that—the Pope? I’m sure he never tried it, that skinny guinea.” She held out her cigarette to me. “Drag?”
I glimpsed Sister Presentation’s classroom windows. “No, thanks.”
“Kenny looks like Elvis. Who do you like—Elvis or the Beatles?”
I knew she was a loser. I knew exactly the kinds of things Jeanette Nord and I would have said about her behind her back. But I was suddenly filled with the fear she’d stop talking to me.
“Oh . . . Elvis,” I said.
“Damn right.” She took another sip off her cigarette. “King of rock’n’roll and don’t you forget it.”
“Plus I like the Beatles,” I said.
The skin around her eyes stretched as she laughed. One of her front teeth was gray. “Those friggin’ weirdos?” she said. “Cut the comedy!”
She could see I needed straightening out, she said. The Beatles were all queers; you could tell that just by looking at them. Girls who made out in the indoor show were pretty hard up. When she was two years old, she’d swallowed a nail and to this day still remembered the ambulance ride. In 1963, she shook hands at the stock-car races with Miss America, who was ugly up close, whose makeup was thicker than the phone book.
“I have a friend who’s a disc jockey,” I ventured.
“Oh, yeah? I call those guys disc jerk eys. They should just shut their traps and play the music. Watch this!”
