Broke Heart Blues

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Why was Bart so bitter? His closest friend Clarence McQuade knew, he'd ridiculously in love with the most elusive, inaccessible girl of the Circle-Veronica Myers. "One of those girls who wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire," Clarence said with a mean grin. ) Bo Bozer's dad was gone from Willowsville. Shelby Connor's dad, only forty-four, had a minor heart attack and was back home again with his family, and Shelby was enthusiastic that--"At least, now, we know where Daddy is." Irma Skelton and Riggs shocked their women friends by entering into a partnership to the Hat Box, a boutique selling "quality ladies' hats" in Amherst.

  The saddest news was of Elise Petko's mother, a PTA officer, cancer at the age of forty-six and she was gone within six weeks, already in a coma when news came of Elise's full-tuition scholarship to Barnard--"Mom would've been so proud," Elise said, stunned with grief. "Maybe, somehow, she knows?" We comforted Elise whom we'd never liked, much, now, we invited her to have lunch with us in the school cafeteria, even to join us in our booth at the Crystal, shielding her thin tearstruck face from eyes. In time, we'd cajole Dexter Cambrook into asking Elise to prom guessing that neither would have a date anyway and why not the of them, Elise and Dexter, class brains with chipmunk teeth, horn-rimmed glasses and halitosis? We laughed fondly imagining the two trying to kiss good night holding their breaths. It was an era of erotic fever confusion.

  From the first day John Reddy Heart returned to us, pushing Katie Olmsted's wheelchair along the hall to Miss Bird's homeroom, there a sense of excited disorientation of the kind one might imagine on a sinking, shifting ocean vessel. Rumors of kissing, petting and "going all the way--almost" circulated continuously, often detached from speciflc individuals, identities.

  As if such actions, committed in privacy, might be anonymous, or to anyone. You would hear, Monday morning, that, Saturday night, half the basketball team had made out with half the cheerleading squad in Scott's swimming pool--"Most of the water was splashed up onto the tiles.

  Rubbers were floating everywhere, even outside on the lawn." Yet you would hear that Sandi Scott was one of several girls involved in "practically an orgy" at Roger Zwaart's house, while Roger Zwaart, or some guy just like him, and Millie Leroux, or some girl who looked just her, were "all over each other, shameless" in the back row of the Glen Theatre dur. ing the late showing of Bonnie and Clyde. Mr.. Stamish was overheard with the youngest secretary in his office, for a date, Coach McKeever and Heidi Flechsenhauer, the girls' gym teacher, were overheard in a lovers' quarrel in the gym after hours, Miss Bird, her hair ever redder and her high heels ever spikier, was reportedly sighted with certain married male colleagues, Mr..

  Lepage, Mr.. Dunleddy, even white-haired Mr.. Sternberg, who with a cane, in such obscure public places as the Erie Canal Historic Museum in Lockport and the Maid of the Mist excursion boat at Niagara Falls.

  It was reported to us by Jenny Thrun, who played flute and often music concerts in Buffalo, that, one evening, Miss Bird, Mr..

  Dunleddy and John Reddy Heart were together at Kleinhans Music Hall for an of Beethoven quartets. Another evening, Jon Rindfleisch's parents Miss Bird, Mr.. Dunleddy and "that Heart boy, the murderer"

  dinner together at the Hungarian Village, a popular restaurant on Street, Buffalo--"The Bird woman Jon says is so eccentric was gripping both men's hands and looking at them with such intensity! Like they strange sinister family." Larry Baumgart was leaving his dentist's office in the Amherst Dental Center when, he claimed, he saw Miss Bird and Reddy entering another office--"Sort of hurrying inside like they didn't want to be seen. It makes sense, John Reddy's teeth would be in pretty bad shape after Tomahawk Island, right?" One afternoon in the late Cambrook was half hidden behind a fence casually watching the girls' hockey team practice behind school, the sky was like a gray washboard overhead, there was a cold breeze yet the girls were perspiring, galloping along the field like Valkyries in their maroon shorts and hooded school jerseys, calling and laughing to one another, Dexter was certain he wasn't spying on the girls though perhaps he'd singled out Pattianne Groves to follow with his admiring eyes, how impressive a hockey player she was, in her position as forward, her long wavy auburn hair pulled back into a swinging wildly as she ran, the straight-cut bangs across her perfect forehead blown by the wind, Dexter's heart lurched as he noted winglike patches of damp on Pattianne's back, soaking delicately through her jersey, he was gazing at the girl who'd seemed to have emerged angellike out of the horde of her teammates, an angel of wrath with her flashing hockey stick, her luminous eyes narrowed to slits, her lovely knees flashing points of light, her sturdy, long feet in grimy white ankle-high sneakers thudding in the frost-stubbled grass, Dexter felt her charging spirit rush through him with the happiness and certitude of love, I have no need to tell her, have no need to tell anyone, I have no need to be loved in return--and in the next instant he was on the ground, out cold. "Something hit me on the side of the head and I was down. It felt like a small rock. A rock traveling at the speed of light.

  They said I had a concussion, I must've been out cold, but I to know what was happening, I heard cries and screams, I heard her voice--'Oh God, it's who? Dexter Cambrook! --she was crouched over me panting and star. ing, her hockey stick clutched in both hands, she was saying, Oh my God, is he dead? Did I kill him? Dexter, wake up! I saw tears in her eyes, I saw her bite her lower lip, poor Pattianne was so frightened, so sorry, tried to smile, I was able to move my lips, It's O. K. , Pattianne, if you me, I don't mind, I love you. And then Miss Flechsenhauer took over, and rest is history." Dexter was carried in to school and revived and taken to Amherst General for X rays. It would seem to him that, judging Pattianne Groves's subsequent behavior, her polite, slightly embarrassed friendliness, that she hadn't heard him declare he loved her, perhaps he hadn't spoken aloud, though he was certain he'd been conscious. In recounting the story, years and eventually decades later, Dexter would insist he Pattianne kneeling beside him and touching--"Stroking, almost"--his forehead, and that it had been worth it, the pain, the shock, swelling that would be the size of an auk's egg, but a more reliable witness, Cornish, Pattianne's teammate, flatly denied that Pattianne had Dexter--"Pattianne's dad was a litigator, she'd have known not to touch her victim. Anyway, poor Dex was out cold. His eyeballs had rolled around in his head so what you were looking at was white grapes. Ugh!" Though angry at Mary Louise Schultz for dropping him, to resume dating suave Smoke who now drove a sexy red Thunderbird, Art Lutz continued to dream helplessly of her and to stare after her, at school, with such an expression of dopey longing, his own buddies hadn't the heart to laugh at him.

  Art was desperately dating a succession of girls, purposefully not-nice girls like Tessa Maypole who'd reputedly put out for the entire first-string football team, he parked with Tessa in his dead brother Jamie's Dodge Castille for hours, but though Tessa would allow Art to touch, caress, fondle and stroke her breasts, which had the bouncy texture of melon-sized balls, she never allowed him to proceed any further, and he had himself with trying to pretend she was Mary Louise--"You'd think, abstractly, that if girls' breasts are approximately the same size they'd be identical breasts for all practical purposes but, God damn, they're not." Of his hurt, frustration and adolescent fury Art Lutz would cultivate sidesplitting hilarity we'd elect him class clown by twice as many ballots as his nearest rival Nosepicker Nordstrom, as many as thirty-five years later certain of his ex-WHS classmates, female as well as male, would still telephone Art with the plea, "Make me laugh, Artie! I'm scared won't make it through the night. Can you still do Daffy Duck Stamish at assembly'?

  Please." Jon Rindfleisch, whose father owned Rindfleisch Realtors, Willowsville's premier real estate agency with which Dahlia Heart listed the house at 8 Meridian Place, "borrowed" the keys to the notorious house from the office in the brief interval after the Hearts moved their furnishings out and the new owners from Cleveland moved in, though Jon warned her never, never to tell anyone, "my old man would break my ass if he knew,hi
s girl Deedee Drummond, a gum-cracking business major junior from south Garrison Road, boasted to her girlfriends of how Jon, a rich man's son, took her on a tour by flashlight of the big old mansion on the hill where Mel Riggs had been shot dead, and made love to her not once but on the very floor of Dahlia Heart's bedroom where there were, swore, "actual bloodstains in the wood you could see if you knew what to look for! It was far out, it was sick, but it was fantastic."

  must have taken Polaroids of this allegedly bloodstained floor for, for a week or so, pictures of bare floorboards were passed among us with an air of lewd if puzzled excitement, described as "the place where it happened." In the lighting, it wasn't clear whether there were bloodstains in the floorboards or simply stainlike shadows. ) In December, at a performance of Our Town, Hewson, captain of the football team and class vice president, to the stunning realization, watching Verrie Myers in her luminous portrayal of the girl-heroine Emily, that he was probably in love with her, and with Pattianne Groves, his pretty, devoted girlfriend, he'd probably been in love with Verrie since kindergarten at the Academy Street School, when the willful little blond-headed girl had stolen his Crayolas, torn his book and made him cry, but, shrewdly, for Dwayne was a quarterback by instinct, he decided to remain at a distance from her--"I knew how that neurotic had fucked up poor Ken, and I didn't want it to happen to me."

  didn't, through the decades, Verrie never guessed. "And that's best way." For there was brainy Dexter Cambrook mooning over Pattianne Groves, half the time made Dwayne restless, she was so normal, so healthy, so good, and there was Dougie Siefried stuck on Ginger McCord who was stuck John Reddy Heart, staring at the guy glassy-eyed in Mr..

  Cuthbert's fifthperiod social studies class, there was poor Roger Zwaart, Dwayne's he'd about given up on, determined to date any slut who'd put out for him, or possibly just jack him off, or allow it to be believed that was occurring, and regularly, to exact revenge on Suzi Zeigler for dropping him for, inexplicably, Norm Zeiga the transfer from Niagara County everybody was "kind of weird but O. K. , maybe." There was Ritchie Eickhorn, a like Cambrook, writing embarrassing love poems, mooning over some you had to know wouldn't "piss on him if he was on fire" as the guys laughingly said, a favorite expression, so Artie Lutz cracked us up at the Haven jumping up in the booth and protesting loud enough for every other to hear, "Yes! Yes she would! Mary Louise Schultz thinks that of me, you assholes, she would piss on me if I was on fire, you just ask her!" There was that cynical shrimp Bart Digger in love with, probably, like Ritchie, one or another of the snobby girls of the Circle. There was Ken himself, Dwayne's good friend, who'd "given up on other girls, I kind of think Verrie needs me," though it was clear that Verrie, flying on diet Coke possibly) diet pills, was obsessed with John Reddy Heart, hinting that meaningful had passed between them, "I can't say," despite the that, at school, she and John Reddy were never seen together, and if breathlessly between classes to pass by John Reddy and flash him an muted version of her trademark cheerleader smile, John Reddy took no notice. It was believed that Ken Fischer was the only individual of more than four hundred WHS students who seemed not to have heard titillating rumors of "something weird going on" between Mr.. Lepage and his Verrie, angrily denied by Verrie's girlfriends but promulgated by others including Sandi Scott who surprised the guilty couple in the rehearsal room late one afternoon--"The lights weren't exactly out in there but almost!" Sandi told us breathlessly. "Mr.. Lepage and Verrie were standing a funny way, sort of too close together, and when I came in both of them jumped!

  Verrie's lipstick was gone, I swear, and Mr.. Lepage, you know his hair's so perfect, it was kind of mussed, and his necktie was crooked, he was breathing funny and his eyes! --I said, Uh, gee, excuse me!

  backed out.

  And nobody called after me." Art Lutz and that greaser Stan Kurschman got into a fistfight, allegedly over Tessa Maypole, and Art's nose broken.

  Deedee Drummond's older brother Seth who'd graduated a few years of us and worked at Curtiss Wright showed up to "beat the shit out of Rindfleisch" but failed to find him--Jon was hiding terrified in trunk of Smoke's Thunderbird. And the guys wouldn't spring him for hours, all over hell hitting potholes, laughing like hyenas. Sallie Vetch, a junior business major, quit school abruptly--"She's p. g. You wanna bet?

  started a rumor that Ketch Campbell whose prick was approximately size of, in Chet Halloren's cruel words, "a tumescent snail," the father.

  Ketch cracked us up vigorously denying it. Blake Wells decided not to kill himself by overdosing on his mother's barbiturates when he was down by Harvard, Princeton, Yale in a single hellish mail but accepted by the University of Michigan (where he'd excel, win and fall seriously in love), instead, as an acte gratuit, he sent one longstemmed yellow roses anonymously to his rival Evangeline who'd recently won a Buffalo Evening News-sponsored high school essay contest in which Blake himself had placed fifth. "I figured, what the hell.

  The universe is without meaning anyway." Katie Olmsted woke to good days, and days. The course of her disease, if it was a disease, was and capricious. Sometimes she walked "almost normally--you could tell" and sometimes she had to use the damned wheelchair. "I need to believe Jesus has faith in me. That He still loves me." On those days Mrs..

  Olmsted delivered Katie to school fifteen minutes early, in the wheelchair, Katie was observed lingering in the first-floor corridor near the principal's office, but John Reddy seemed rarely to appear, instead there was, unexpectedly, little Petey Merchant whom Katie had never given a glance at when she'd been well. "Isn't it sweet! It won't matter that Petey's a midget, he towers over Katie in that chair." The air in the boys' and girls' johns grew porous, bluish with smoke. We broke our fingernails trying to shove up the window in the upstairs girls'. Smoking was forbidden on school premises except for the faculty lounge where the air was blue with smoke.

  You could hear old Schoppa hacking halfway down the hall--"That's a rhinoceros?" And Dunleddy clearing his throat like he was bringing up gravel.

  Mme. Picholet smoked a classy gold-packed French brand. Even ruddycheeked Miss Flechsenhauer smoked, Bo Bozer boasted she'd bummed a from him one day when they were leaving school at the same time--"Like one guy to another. The broad's cool." We smoked surreptitiously cafeteria. We smoked in our cars. Butts were strewn everywhere on the parking lot pavement. They floated, swollen like grotesque white worms, in puddles. Alistair in his thick Scots accent fumed that butts tossed down the basement stairs--"It looks like the inside of a vacuum cleaner bag. D'ye rich spoiled brats live like this at home?" We smoked surreptitiously in Friday morning assembly, if the lights were dimmed for a film. We while necking, exhaling smoke in one another's mouths with sensual abandon. We smoked while petting, to use the clinical expression, to climax, groaning and scattering glowing ashes over one another's clothing. Sometimes our cigarettes leapt from our fingers to tumble, to roll, to smolder invisibly beneath car seats. Between the cushions of room sofas. The tale was told through school on Monday morning of how, on Saturday night, Babs Bitterman's hair caught fire in the back seat Art Lutz's funky Dodge. Unless it was Jenny Thrun's hair, in the back seat Filer's Thunderbird. Scottie Baskett complained with a clumsy wink that his Corvette had a "real disadvantage--no backseat." We loved being to nicotine. It made us adults overnight. It made us into our parents yet it was our secret from them--it was perfect! In Verrie Myers's canary-yellow Olds convertible cruising lower Willowsville at dusk, at night, rain-pelting November wind, in yellow-tinctured fog, in a brisk falling snow, like clumps of white blossoms, in subzero crystalline air that froze your eyelashes, like a ghost ship under a spell to forever cruise the lower village, Water Street south of Main, in Verrie's beautiful birthday car, we smoked.

  Avidly, anxiously. Passing a pack of Winstons. Passing Verrie's platinumplated lighter. "I guess we thought we'd live forever."

  "So what?

  You don't live forever." Even Ginger McCord whose surgeon-grandfather, a three-packa-day man
for thirty-eight years, who'd died of lung cancer--"Such a long time ago, I was just a baby. I really don't remember Grandpa too well." Even Roger Zwaart whose father had had a lung removed in September and would die twelve days after Roger's graduation in June. Even Norm whose father had emphysema. "It's something to do with your hands.

  It's cool." Bo Bozer and Tommy Nordstrom picked up some weed, as they it, in downtown Buffalo, and overnight half the senior class was dope. You could buy it at the Wheatfield Mall, at Transittown, a halfdozen places near the U-B campus and along the strip. Within decade junior high kids would be buying it in Willowsville, plus acid, speed selected downers, but not just yet. Tommy Nordstrom told of up to John Reddy Heart who was washing his hands in one of the lavatories school, meaning to be friendly, offering him a joint, and how

  "cut his eyes at me like I'd farted or something. He says, Get away from me with that shit. That shit is illegal. You could get into serious trouble with that shit. I started laughing, and Bo's with me, he starts laughing, we're naturally thinking John Reddy must be kidding, this guy who'd Riggs, but he isn't kidding evidently, he turns and walks out of the john. Jezuz." Tommy wiped his face on his sleeve as if he'd come close to some sort of grave danger. Ken Fischer said, "He's on probation, isn't he?