“Where on earth were you watching from? I mean exactly?”
“None of your business,” I said. “I have to keep some secrets, you know.”
“But why?”
I shrugged. “At first it was just because I was bored. There was nothing to do, so I started wandering around. I could see your place from my place and—” I almost said, and Grandpa warned me never, ever to go up there, so of course I had to, but instead I said, “—and I was always curious about who lived there. And then I saw you. So I came back, time after time.”
“To watch me.”
“Yeah. To watch you.”
“And you heard things.”
“Yes.”
“What kind of things?”
“Shouting,” I said. I was shaking harder now, and I was afraid to look at her. “Crying,” I said. The word came out of me hoarsely, like I was coughing up a burr.
“Oh my,” said Annie. “Oh my, Billy.”
She reached over and took my hand. I was ready to shriek, to start punching the roof. I began to choke on tears. I went on: “I don’t think you’re crazy. Not in the slightest. You can get over this. I know you can. You’re the only person in this town our age with any brains.”
“I will be crazy,” she said. She sat up demurely, looking suddenly like a very little girl again, the way she had when I first met her. She’d been running around the yard by herself then, wrapped up in her fantasies, singing to the chickens. Had he been doing it to her even then? It was a chilling thought. How could something like this be allowed to continue? Why didn’t someone kill him? Why didn’t I?
“I will be crazy because I can’t stand my life. As if this wasn’t enough, I have to be a Simpson too? The lowest family in town? The poorest, dirtiest, stupidest family, the one that everyone makes fun of? And look at me with you! Who do I think I am? You’re a Mann, for crying out loud. You’re not even humans. You’re like superpeople. Rich, smart, talented, popular, good-looking…”
“That’s not me,” I said. “Come on. That’s not us anymore. We don’t have any money at all left. You know that. And none of those other things are really true either. That was just my dad. He was the superhero, not me. Besides, Annie, look at yourself. You know you’re the smartest kid in town.”
“Yeah? Then why did you get to skip a grade?” She screamed this. The sudden volume was startling in the confines of the car. I jumped, startled, and she saw it, and there was something in her glance at that moment that said, You see? See how crazy I am? You’re scared of me!
She was crying now too, and not just little tears either. They were tears for a life that had so far been disregarded, not by herself but by others—it was the worst possible crime against her. Annie’s life had been stolen, and she wanted it back. Her face was contorted in agony and her chest heaved for breath as she sobbed. “Why is everything so easy for you? You never do any homework! You never do anything, and you still get all the grades!”
“I do too do homework,” I said, but it was a lame defense. She was right. Things came easier to me, not because I was smarter than she was, but because I was a Mann and she was a Simpson. Teachers expected me to do well, even if the Fiasco of the Ostriches had ruined us and made our brilliance suspect. She, on the other hand, was doomed. No Simpson had ever made it through high school without getting arrested at least once, and none of them ever went to college. Plus, she was a girl. That worked against her in the classroom. None of the other girls raised their hands nearly as much as she did, and even though teachers knew she was smart, they still acted surprised when she said something right. Some of the other girls hated her for her brains. Nobody knew what to do with a girl who refused to act the way a girl was supposed to act.
I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so we sat there in the car with the engine running. I held her hand and stroked it lightly. Gradually her sobs quieted, and I put one arm around her shoulder and leaned over and rested my head against hers for a moment. Then I sat up again.
“I don’t care if you’re crazy or not,” I said. “I love you. I mean it. I do. Do you still want to go to the movie?” What she had told me was almost too big to conceive. The implications were huge. I could only think in little steps. Suddenly the next thing we did seemed very important, no matter what it was; and all I could think of to tell her was that I loved her.
She smiled, sniffling. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We’ve probably missed the beginning.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “I can catch the beginning some other time.”
We parked behind the bank and walked across the Square. Madison was exactly where Annie had said he would be; he waved and greeted us by name, and we did likewise. Then we went into the theater and watched the horrible truth of Luke Skywalker’s parentage unfold. I’d known it was coming, but I still couldn’t quite bring myself to believe that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker’s father. It seemed too incredible, and yet somehow it made sense. In the end, I reflected, everything comes together, the good with the bad. When the movie ended we walked slowly out with the crowd, and I took her hand in mine, and she let me. I’d been thinking about her as we watched the destruction of the Empire on the screen. I didn’t care if she wasn’t innocent and pure—those words meant nothing to me anyway. She was just Annie. I wanted people to see us together. I was proud of her.
We drove out of town the back way to avoid Madison and went back to the base of the hill. I could tell she was already thinking about what she would have to say when she went back in the house. Her mind had already pushed the entire evening into the background.
“Good night,” she said. “Thanks for the movie.” She got out. I watched her climb the hill, her long braid swinging like a pendulum in the headlights.
Then I went home. That was it. My first date was over.
Grandpa was still sitting where I had left him, lolling in his recliner, unconscious. I took the glass of whiskey from his side and dumped it in the sink. Annie had missed her childhood. How much of mine had I missed? I had no father, no mother, and my grandfather, though kind, was largely absent. He was too drunk most of the time to take care of me.
I sighed. I could have had it a lot worse, I thought. He didn’t have to take care of me, after all. I wasn’t really his problem. He didn’t make me. He could have taken me to an orphanage when I was a baby. He could have just left me with the Shumachers. There was no point in complaining, or in feeling sorry for myself. Yet I had the same feeling that Annie had. There was something irrevocably different about my life, about who I was and how I came to be, that made me nothing like other kids my age; and what was more, it was too late to do anything about it. It always had been, in a sense. I was doomed to be a freak.
I scrubbed out the whiskey glass and went upstairs to my bedroom. There I took out my notebook and opened it to the last page of writing. Having no idea how the story ended, I couldn’t tell how close I was to the finish, but I had a sense that things were drawing to a close. Grandpa’s mutterings were beginning to add up. I was learning to decode him.
I scribbled away until midnight, adding things here, taking them away there, trying to make sense of a story that was being given to me in tiny bits and pieces. I could not afford to let my mind register fully the events that had unfolded with Annie in the car. But one little corner of my brain began to focus on the sound of Grandpa’s footsteps coming up the stairs. He was walking more slowly and heavily than usual and it sounded like he was dragging one leg. I heard him come up the hall and stand outside my bedroom door, where he paused to look in at me, breathing heavily.
“I had a good time,” I said. I hoped he hadn’t figured out I’d taken the Galaxie. Not that he’d have minded—we Manns made our own rules, he often said, and they didn’t always coincide with what the laws were. But he said nothing.
“Want to know what I’m doing?” I said.
“Writing,” he said, except the voice was not his. It was deeper and older, a strange voice, y
et familiar. A horrible chill shot through me. I whipped around to look at him.
There was nobody in the doorway.
“Jesus Christ,” I whispered. The air in the room had suddenly grown very cold. The hair on the back of my neck stood up.
“Willie,” I said.
There was no sound except for my own rapid, panicked breathing.
“I’m trying to get it right,” I said. “How am I doing?”
Again, I heard nothing. But he was there. Or had been there. I was sure of it.
Gradually the temperature of the air returned to normal. My raised hackles subsided and I calmed down.
“You have to help me,” I said sleepily. “I can’t do it by myself.”
This was the last thought that came to me that night. I woke up in the morning, tucked snugly into my bed, though I didn’t remember getting into it.
Doctor Connor and his wife lived on the second and third floors of his house. It was a large Victorian mansion, built around the same time as our farmhouse. There was a well-kept lawn in front and back and a row of tall hedges lining the sidewalk. Pasted to the front door was a small hand-lettered card that read PLEASE DO NOT RING DOORBELL. This meant you were just supposed to walk in. Underneath that, it said in smaller, less optimistic lettering, PAYMENT IS EXPECTED AT TIME OF SERVICE. That, as everyone knew, was just a formality. Doctor Connor’s patients were mostly those who didn’t have insurance and couldn’t use the doctors at the hospital; as a result, payments were not only often not made at time of service, but sometimes never made at all. That didn’t bother Doctor Connor. He was not in medicine for the money, he once told Grandpa. Any doctor who was could have done better becoming a stockbroker.
A bell tinkled behind me as I closed the door. There was a small waiting room, which in previous times had been the front parlor of the house. It boasted a coffee table smothered in magazines and a couple of easy chairs that reclined only so far before they bumped into the wall. Doctor Connor himself was sitting in one of these chairs reading a fishing magazine. A large gape-mouthed bass glared at me from the cover. Doctor Connor peered at me over his glasses as I came in.
“Well, hello there, young William,” he said. “Nice to see you. Come for a checkup?”
“Sorta.”
“Um-hmm,” he said. He led me down a narrow hallway to his examination room, where he pointed to the paper-covered table. “Have a seat,” he said.
“There’s nothing really wrong with me,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “I can tell just by looking at you. You Manns are as healthy as rocks. But it never hurts to check, as long as I’ve got you here.” Healthy as rocks was one of Doctor Connor’s favorite phrases; I was never sure how to take it, but since I was never sick, I assumed it was good.
Connor felt my throat and looked into my ears, eyes, and nose with his light scope. He tapped my knee with his rubber hammer; obediently my leg swung out and back again. “Head bother you since your little run-in with that football player?”
“No.”
“Heart still beating?”
“Yuh.”
“Brain functions normal?”
“Huh?”
“Joke. Sexually active?”
“I—” My face burned suddenly, a deep and humiliating red. “I’m not here for a checkup!” I said, beginning to wish I hadn’t come.
“Relax,” he said. “I’m a doctor. I’m supposed to ask you these things. You don’t have to answer.”
“No,” I said. “Not yet.”
“Good. Bit young yet. How old are you now?”
“Fourteen.”
“Yes,” said Connor. “I knew that.”
He sat down in a chair in the corner and indicated the other one. “Hop down from there,” he said. “Examination over. What is it you really wanted to talk to me about?” Because, being a healer like my grandfather, he had developed a sort of X-ray vision. He could tell things about people just by looking at them. That was why I had decided to pay him a visit in the first place.
I looked around, not knowing how to begin. In fact, I’d forgotten exactly what it was I was going to say. In desperation I folded my hands in front of me and stared at them, hoping the answer would come if I looked at them hard enough.
“Something wrong?” His voice was kind, warm.
“Did you know my dad?”
It was not what I had intended to say, but there it was. I’d meant to ask him about Annie. Doctor Connor took off his glasses and put them in the pocket of his white lab jacket, which he wore everywhere, including to Gruber’s Grocery to do his shopping.
“Yes,” he said. “I knew him quite well.”
“What was he like?”
“Doesn’t your grandfather ever tell you about him?”
“Not much,” I said. “It makes him too sad.”
“That’s understandable. He was a lot like you.”
“He was?”
“Yes he was. About your height. No, shorter. Same eyes. Same personality, even—intelligent, friendly. Good-looking.”
“Am I good-looking?”
Doctor Connor laughed.
“You really wouldn’t know, would you?” he asked, and laughed again, but his laughter was mixed with some sadness. “You teenagers are all alike. So shy, so uncertain! I was the same, of course. Everyone was.”
“Was my dad shy?”
“Was he?” He cocked one eyebrow and appeared to look into space for a moment. “Well, you know…your dad was different from the rest of us, Billy. He had a kind of glow about him. He was always confident. But never overbearing.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was never stuck-up. Didn’t have a cocky attitude. He easily could have, you know. He was perhaps the most popular person in town. Everyone knew him, and he knew everyone, and what was more, he liked everyone. Genuinely liked them. He was always going out of his way to do things for people. Opening doors for them. Helping little old ladies across the street. That sort of thing. Anyway, I never answered your question, which is the burning question for all of us when we are young. Yes, Billy, you are good-looking, and you will be a handsome man, barring any unforeseen mutilation, of course. So be sure and always wear a seatbelt.”
“What?”
“When you’re driving,” he said sternly. He gave me a look then that told me that somehow he knew I’d driven Annie to the movie in the Galaxie. Had he seen us? Spooky, I thought. But I chose to pretend I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“There’s…”
“Hmmm?”
“I, uh—you know, I was…” I was stuttering badly.
“When someone as bright as you hesitates, it’s probably because he wants to ask me a question about sex,” said Doctor Connor, who was a genius at reading the minds of teenage boys. I was amazed.
“How did you know?”
“It’s not hard to figure out what someone’s thinking about when he only thinks about one thing,” said he, winking, and I blushed again. “Hormones,” he said. “Testosterone. That is the force that rules your body, and that in fact rules the world.”
“It does?”
“It makes things happen,” he said. “I shouldn’t say rules—that implies superiority, and men are not in all things superior. But it is what makes us want to do things.”
“What things?”
“Stupid things, often,” said Doctor Connor. “Sometimes good things. It makes men act brave, or foolhardy, or careless, or sometimes downright cruel. It was testosterone that made Columbus sail across the ocean and murder the Indians.”
“It was?”
“Well, perhaps that’s a little oversimplified,” he admitted, “but it’s basically true. Men have a tendency to want to go out and do things, to cause them. Sometimes it’s not for the best of reasons. We want to take things that belong to someone else, or hurt someone, or kill them. Most of history was written by men because it was men who caused it, but that doesn’t make us necessarily n
oble, or better than women. Some idiot gets an idea in his head that he ought to go murder the tribe that lives next door and take their land and their wives and daughters. So he does it, because his testosterone is making him crazy. It fills him with blood lust. And that’s how Rome was born, and why it lasted a thousand years.”
I was silent. This was news to me.
“It makes us do good things too,” he went on. “We have families because of it. Athletes thrive on it, male and female. Did you know most women athletes don’t menstruate?”
“No.”
“Nor do they grow breasts, often,” he continued. “Or maybe just small ones. It seems odd, but it’s completely explainable by science. It’s because their bodies are producing too much testosterone. And scientists, too, are driven to achieve partly because of their testosterone, although they might deny it, and women scientists can also do just as much as male scientists without testosterone—and I know for a fact that women scientists both menstruate and grow breasts. But men discovered things. We built bridges, skyscrapers. It was testosterone that sent us to the moon. The rocket ship was merely the vehicle. Is that good or bad? Who knows? Nothing is absolute. But this is really not of any concern to you, is it? You want to know why you’re growing pubic hair, why you have constant erections, why all you think about is sex. Is that right?”
I said nothing. My face was aflame and I couldn’t bring myself to look at him. Nevertheless, a stifled laugh escaped me.
“Silence is consent,” he said, smiling. “There is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. You are a healthy, normal boy, soon to be a man. Your testosterone is simply raging through you right now like Niagara Falls being forced through the eye of a needle. That’s how it’s supposed to be. Eventually it will calm down.”
“When?”
“When you’re about thirty-five, maybe, if you’re lucky.” He laughed.
“But—”
“Look,” said Doctor Connor. “It’s like anything else. You can use it as you wish. You have this energy in you that is telling you to do things. Therefore it means you have power. It’s up to you how you’re going to use it, or whether you will let it use you. But you have a responsibility to the people in your life to use it wisely. To be a good man. Especially to the women in your life.”
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