The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  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.”

  Dessa was the experienced one—the one with “two serious relationships” behind her. Both the dulcimer player and the antiwar organizer had been older than she—had sometimes made her feel, she said, like a foolish little girl. And although her parents only knew about the incident with Julian—she’d called them from the Brighton police station the night he’d slammed her against the wall and broken her wrist—she’d been roughed up by both men. She told me she appreciated my inexperience. My shyness. She said she felt safe in my arms.

  “That’s what I hate about waitressing,” she told me one afternoon. “The fact that, some nights, I just don’t feel safe.” The two of us were lying on her bed, listening to music and just holding on to each other. “Most guys get so hostile when they drink. I hate the way they egg each other on.” She shifted around on the bed so that she could look at me. “What are you guys so angry about?” she said.

  I rubbed my hand up and down her leg, kissed her temple, kissed the corner of her mouth. “I’m not angry,” I said. “I come in peace.”

  “But seriously, though,” she said. “Sometimes at work, even with the bouncers and the bartenders keeping an eye on us, I just don’t feel safe.”

  “Then quit,” I told her.

  “I can’t quit.”

  “Sure you can,” I told her. “How do you think I feel knowing that every guy at that bar is checking you out? If you quit, we could see each other on weekends. Go to the beach. Spend whole days together.”

  “Dominick, I have to work,” she said.

  “You’ve got your Head Start job. That’s work.”

  She laughed. “You know what I clear at that job, Dominick? Thirty-six dollars a week. I make double that—triple that some nights—bringing drunken jerks their beers down at the Dial-Tone.”

  “Hey, it’s not as if you need the money. Your tuition’s probably, what? Seven or eight car sales down at your father’s place?”

  “But that’s not the point. I need to prove something to myself.”

  I stifled a smile, swallowed a little bit of resentment. I wished I had the luxury of working for something other than the money. “You need to prove what?”

  “Dominick, my father is the most generous man in the world, okay? He’d give my sister and me anything we asked for. But that’s the problem. You pay a price by being on the receiving end of that. You give up your independence.”

  I began stroking the inside of her leg. “If I quit, it would prove his point, not mine,” she said. She yanked her shirt up over her head, unhooked her bra. “Daddy would just love it if his little Dessa couldn’t fend for herself. If she was still just Daddy’s little girl. But I’m not. I’m my own person. Right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  She slid out of her panties. Grabbed onto my arm. “Does any of this make sense to you?” she asked. “I mean, you’re saying ‘right,’ but do you really get the point?”

  I reached over and kissed her breast. “Yeah, I get the point, all right,�
� I told her. “I’m pointing all over the place here.”

  “Oh, forget it,” she sighed. “I swear, you guys are all alike.”

  She was a patient lover. After the first two or three jackrabbit sessions, she showed me the value of taking my time, making choices with her. “Do you like this?” she’d ask. “Does this feel good?” Then she’d take my hand in her hand, guide my fingertips and show me how and where I could return the favor. “Slower, now,” she’d whisper. “That’s it. Nice and slow.” When she was ready, she’d draw me against her, inside of her. I learned how to pace it, how to hold on until I’d feel her whole body tense, close to the edge, and then over the edge, lost in a pleasure that was both ours and hers in private. Sometimes that privacy would worry me a little, make me feel insecure, and I’d think, maybe she’s imagining it’s one of those other guys. Then, as if by instinct, she’d open her eyes and smile at me and touch my face. Say something like “Hey, you?” and turn her attention to me. To my pleasure. Until I was caught up in a release so wild and sweet that it was hard to believe that, oh Jesus, this was real and here and happening to me, Dominick.

  One time right afterward, when we were both still catching our breath, I told her I loved her. Watched her face go from peaceful to sad.

  “I’ve heard that line before,” she said.

  “It’s not a ‘line,’ Dessa. I mean it.”

  “Okay, why? Why do you love me?”

  “Because you’re you,” I said, groping. “And because . . . you’re a good teacher.”

  She smiled, jabbed me one. “I think you just like the lesson plan,” she said.

  On those summer nights alone together in the Constantines’ big house, teasing was part of what was sexy. So was eating. Downstairs, lying on her parents’ beige wall-to-wall carpeting, we’d play Greek music and drink red wine and feast: feta cheese and oily brown olives, tomatoes and basil, crusty bread from Gianacopolis Bakery. Sometimes Dessa would heat up the food her mother had frozen for her in little foil packages before the trip: spinach pie, moussaka. And afterward, more wine and fruit. Sometimes we’d read to each other, or watch TV, or Dessa would tell stories about when she and her sister Angie were kids. After she got me laughing, she’d say, “Now you tell me about your childhood,” and I’d remember nothing but spankings and crying jags—the time Ray caught Thomas and me eating Halloween candy at church, the time he pulled over to the side of the highway and made us get out of the car because we’d been arguing with each other. We were what? Six? Seven, maybe? We got out, stood on the side of the road, and he drove off. Just drove away and left us there. And by the time he came back, Thomas and I were holding on to each other, crying our fucking heads off. . . . It wasn’t all bad. It wasn’t always like that. But when Dessa asked about my childhood, those were the only kinds of things I could think of. So I’d just shrug and tell her I couldn’t remember that kind of stuff the way she could. Then I’d look away and change the subject. Wait for her to stop looking at me. Wait for her curiosity to pass.

  Sometimes after dark, we’d swim out back in their pool. Or do other stuff out there. Or go back up to Dessa’s room. Once we even made love on the floor of her parents’ bedroom, Dessa on top and me looking past her shoulder, past the bottles of fancy colognes and lotions on her mother’s bureau and into the mirror at the two of us, rocking, joined together. We hadn’t planned it. It just happened. I’d gone into Thula and Gene’s room to wait out Uncle Costas’s surprise visit and half an hour later, when Dessa came back upstairs and found me, we just . . . bam! It was like we hadn’t seen each other in five years or something. That’s the way it was at the beginning: neither of us could keep our hands off the other. Get filled up. It felt powerful and powerless both—what we kick-started that summer in the Constantines’ big empty house.

  Because of our work schedules, I saw her on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights. Come eleven or midnight, I’d throw a couple cups of coffee in me and then get back on my bike—pedal like a maniac down Lakeside, across Woodlawn, and out onto Route 165. By the time I got home, Ray would be at work and Ma and Thomas would have gone to bed. I’d sit in our pathetic plastic-tiled kitchen with its corny knickknacks, its flypaper hanging from the ceiling, studded with victims, and feel embarrassed about who and what we were. Or else I’d lie in the dark in the living room on our shabby, unraveling braided rug from Sears and think, here I am, a rich girl’s boyfriend, the only guy who can make her feel safe. And not just any rich girl, either. Dessa. And I’d feel again the small heft of her breast, my lips against her nipples—see my fingers unraveling that long black braid of hers. Exhausted but wired, I’d twist and fidget, unable to go upstairs and sleep. Unable to get filled up with her.

  I thought I was playing it cool. I didn’t think it showed, but it must have. At work, Leo teased me about my yawning, my dozing at lunchtime—about what I must be “ordering off the menu from my little waitress friend.” At home, Ma kept asking me when she was going to be able to meet my “new gal.” Thomas kept bugging me about what Dessa looked like. Possessive of what I had—reluctant to share even information about her—I volunteered the minimum. “She’s short,” I told him. “Brunette.”

  “What else?”

  “That’s it,” I said, shrugging. “Short and brunette. She goes to Boston College.”

  One morning while I was shaving at the bathroom sink, Ray walked in and stood behind me, studying my sleepy face in the medicine cabinet mirror. I’d gotten in at three that same morning, had copped a grand total of three hours’ sleep before I’d had to get up for work.

  “What’s up?” I said.

  “Your mother tells me you were out late again last night,” he said.

  I shut up. Kept shaving.

  “You and this chippy of yours being careful?” he said.

  The night before, Dessa had shaken her dialpack at me like a box of Good & Plentys, then kissed me and gulped down one of the tiny tablets that kept us safe from complications. “Safety” was something I saw as her department.

  “This chippy?” I said. Tried on a Ralph Drinkwater smirk of indifference.

  Ray took a box of Trojans out of his workshirt pocket and tossed them onto the top of the toilet tank. Said nothing. I steadied the razor in my hand and shaved—tried as hard as I could to act nonchalant, to ignore his big investigation. De-fense! De-fense!

  “I’m not discussing my personal life with you, Ray,” I said. “It’s private.”

  Ray let go a one-note chuckle. “Fine with me, Romeo. As far as I’m concerned, you can go out and be as private as you want. Just don’t come back here telling your mother and me that you got the clap or that you knocked up some little tootsie.”

  I turned and faced him, half of my face lathered, the other half clean-shaven. “Atta boy, Ray,” I said. “Go to it. Make love sound as ugly as possible.” Then I turned back and faced the mirror.

  He stood there for another several seconds, watching as I nicked myself, winced, dabbed at the blood. Then he did something totally unexpected: reached up and grabbed my arm with his leathery hand. More in a fatherly than a threatening way. For a couple of seconds, we stared at each other in the mirror. “All I’m saying, hothead, is that I remember what it’s like to be your age and getting a little pussy,” he said. “I was in the Navy, kiddo. I know the ropes. Just be careful where you’re sticking your dipstick—that’s all I’m saying. Don’t let it get complicated.”

  I couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t accept this sudden father-to-son stuff. I resented him anywhere near what Dessa and I had put in motion. So when he walked out of the bathroom, I called his name. Reached over to the toilet tank for the box of safes. “Here,” I said, tossing them back. “You forgot these.”

  He caught them. Threw them back again. They landed in the sink bowl, under the running water. “I didn’t forget them,” he said. “Who do you think I went out and bought the damn things for? The Pope? Your brother?”

  After a week or so of gr
aveball, Ralph Drinkwater did start passing around those joints of his. The first couple of times, it was a novelty for Leo and me, getting high on the job, working with a buzz on. Then it turned into a kind of semiroutine. While Dell was sleeping one off—and even some afternoons when he wasn’t—Leo and Drinkwater and I would find something real interesting out in the woods, then circulate the wacky weed. Get wrecked on company time. Leo kept trying to get Thomas high, too, poking the lit roach in front of his face no matter how many times my brother refused. It flustered Thomas, having to keep saying no; he’d get up on his high horse. “Just what I want to do, Leo,” he told him once. “Inhale something that’s going to turn me into as big a goofball as you are.”

  Drinkwater’s dope shifted the whole dynamic. Ralph, Leo, and I turned into a trio and Thomas became the odd man out. If we had a field to mow or an acre of brush to clear, the three of us would cook up a plan to make it go faster, easier, and Thomas would plod along on his own, uninvited. At lunchtime, he’d sit by himself in a huff, hardly speaking to the rest of us. Sometimes Dell would assign Thomas a separate job altogether—send the three of us off someplace and then sit there and watch Thomas work. Criticize him. Bust his balls. Dell began to take a special interest in making Thomas’s life miserable.

  “Tell your brother he better watch out for Dell,” Ralph said to me one afternoon. The two of us were painting picnic tables side by side down at the fairgrounds, high on hemp and paint fumes. Dell and Thomas were across the field, painting a set of bleachers.