Night Kites

by M. E. Kerr

  Then she took my arm and said why didn’t we walk around for a while? Nobody ever took my arm, except my mother sometimes in St. Luke’s Church, on our way up or down the aisle, and I was always awkward crooking my elbow, walking that way. Dill and I usually held hands. There was something almost formal about going around with someone’s arm in yours.

  Nicki was right at ease. We started up the street, past the movies and Paper Palace.

  “How come you talked to Dill?” I asked her.

  “She called to tell me I didn’t make pom-pom girl.”

  I was trying to think of something sympathetic to say when Nicki laughed. “I thought we’d celebrate. You can buy me a Coke at Sweet Mouth.”

  I said okay. I said, “Why did you try out for pom-pom if you really didn’t want it?”

  “You know why. Jack wanted me to. Jack wants me to be one of them. He’s one of them, so I suppose I should try to be one of them.”

  I was thinking that I was one of them, too. Didn’t she know that? Jack and Dill and I were part of that whole Seaville High scene, part of the crowd.

  “Does Jack know you planned to pick me up?” I asked.

  “Did I plan to pick you up?” She bumped against me lightly, purposely, and laughed, as though there was a double meaning to the “pick me up” part of the sentence.

  I felt a little sorry for her. I remembered Pete telling me Dad told jokes when he was nervous. Maybe Nicki flirted when she was.

  When we got to Sweet Mouth, I held the door open for her. It was crowded. It was the kind of night that brought kids into the village to hang out. Every head in the place turned when we came through the door, then turned again for a second look.

  I knew most of the kids there. I said hello, hi, how ya doin, all the way across the floor, to the table for two. Nicki didn’t greet anyone. She didn’t let go of my arm until we got to the table.

  Roman Knight was there. He was the senior class wiseacre, a glitzy character, easily the richest kid in school, and the smartest, too. His dad was an international talent agent. He was the kind of kid who spent summers at the family villa in the south of France.

  “Hel-lo, Nicki!” he called out, but he wasn’t really talking to Nicki. He was showing off for everyone’s benefit, making some other cracks to the group with him. I knew the kind of cracks. She seemed to invite them. When she was hanging around with Ski, she even seemed to enjoy them, tossing her long hair back, hanging on to Ski on his Kawasaki, giving everyone the finger behind her back.

  “Roman Knight is a sleazeball,” she said as we sat down. She fished a Bic lighter out of her pocket and put it down on the table. Then she put a Merit 100 in her mouth.

  I took the hint and lighted her cigarette.

  She was a no-hands smoker.

  “Do you know how Roman got his name?” I asked her.

  “I don’t care how a scumbag gets his name,” she said.

  I told her anyway, grateful for any subject of conversation. I was getting that trapped feeling: What the hell was I going to talk to her about?

  “Roman was supposed to have been conceived on a night in Rome, after lots of champagne,” I said.

  “See, I don’t care about Roman Knight or any of that crowd,” she said. I don’t know what crowd she thought I was in.

  We ordered Cokes.

  “Jack’s birthday is the first weekend in October,” she said. “Bruce Springsteen’s going to be in New York that weekend. I thought we could all go.”

  “Jack doesn’t know Bruce Springsteen from Rick Springfield,” I said.

  “He says he likes him.”

  “He’s just saying that to please you.”

  “Well, he’s right. That pleases me … Jack says your dad has an apartment in New York he never uses on weekends.”

  “Do you know how hard it is to get tickets to a Springsteen concert?” I said.

  “We could watch everyone go in, if we couldn’t get tickets. Then we could see New York.”

  “It costs an arm and a leg to see New York, Nicki.”

  “Just see it. See Times Square. See Greenwich Village.”

  “See us all get mugged,” I said.

  “Jack says he’d love to get away for a New York weekend.”

  “If that’s what he said, okay, I’ll ask my father—but don’t count on seeing Bruce Springsteen.”

  “I never count on anything,” she said.

  When our Cokes came, she put out her cigarette, picked up a fresh one, and waited for me to give her a light.

  “Don’t say anything to Jack until you’ve asked your dad, okay?” she said.

  “I can ask him tomorrow night. He’s coming out to dinner with my brother.”

  Nicki said she didn’t even know I had a brother. Where was he?

  “He lives in New York. He’s ten years older than I am.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He teaches French and English at a private school, but he really wants to be a writer. He writes science fiction.”

  I told her about the one story Pete had published. It had won all sorts of prizes. It appeared in a little magazine called Fantasy. It was about a world where everyone was both male and female except these characters called Skids. They were male or female, not both, and they needed each other to reproduce … Pete’s story, called “On the Skids,” was about a male and a female who fell in love, and were being hunted down for “skidding,” which was against the law.

  Since Pete had written it, it’d appeared in a lot of anthologies. Pete was expanding it into a book. He would work on it off and on. He was always upstairs typing away on something when he still lived with us.

  I told Nicki about Pete’s world, called Farfire, and the inhabitants, called Farflicks, who were all capable of self-fertilization. I told her that I’d been the first one in the family he’d tried it out on, and how Dad said Pete’d been dining out on that little short story for all of his adult life.

  Nicki Marr wouldn’t win any Best Listener prizes. Some people listened to other people’s conversations while you were talking to them; Nicki listened to songs. Her eyes were glazed over while I talked, and Bryan Adams sang “Somebody” in the background. She tapped her fingers on the side of her Coke glass and seemed to be whispering some of the words to herself, the cigarette dangling from her lips.

  She finally said, “Bryan Adams used to wash dishes in a restaurant.”

  Then she said, “I’m sorry. You were talking about your brother.”

  “Pete.”

  “That’s why you’re so good at French? He teaches it?”

  “Pete and I talked French when we were little,” I said.

  Mom had grown up bilingual. She was speaking French by the time she entered kindergarten. She used to talk with Pete in French most of the time. Dad finally stopped her doing it with me. Dad was rotten at languages. He didn’t like being left out that way.

  Nicki said, “I still remember that French poem you translated for class two years ago. I’ve never forgotten it. Are you surprised?”

  “‘Poem to the Mysterious Woman,’” I said.

  “Yes.”

  Pete got the credit for that one. He loved that poem. Old Stamiere, who’d been teaching French at Seaville High since the building was erected, remembered that, and made some crack after class about next time finding a poem on my own—“You’re Erick Rudd, aren’t you? Not Peter Rudd.”

  Nicki was playing with some keys. She had long, thin fingers, and long nails, manicured but not colored. They were the kind of hands you imagined did nothing but arrange flowers in vases or stroke Persian cats, or touch silk and velvet. Dill had little square hands that felt small in mine, the way my hands, when I was little, must have felt in Pete’s.

  “Say something from that poem, can you?” Nicki asked me.

  “‘J’ai tant rêvé de toi que tu perds ta réalité.’”

  “Now in English.”

  “You take French,” I said.

  “Som
ething about dreaming of someone too much.”

  “‘I have dreamed of you so much that you lose reality.’”

  She didn’t say anything right away. There was some song of Madonna’s playing. I was thinking that she looked a little like Madonna. She was looking out the window, where there were some kids on bikes under the streetlight, talking. Beyond them, people were sitting on the benches outside the A & P, enjoying the warm night.

  “It reminds me of something my mother’d write,” Nicki said when she looked back across the table at me. “My mother did this automatic writing? She was sort of psychic. She’d go into her room and just write these poems she said came to her from the spirit world. They were all love poems.”

  “In French?”

  “Not in French, no. They were in English … After she died, you read that poem in French class. And you know what I thought?”

  “What’d you think?”

  “I don’t think it anymore. Right after someone dies you’ll think almost anything.”

  “What’d you think?”

  “I thought she was coming back through you.”

  She picked up her keys and ground out the cigarette in the ashtray. “My mother was a little bent, but in a nice way. She believed Siamese cats carry messages from the beyond. Do you like Siamese cats?”

  “I don’t know any,” I said.

  “I’ll introduce you to some,” she said. “We’ve got six of them out at Kingdom.”

  She was pushing her chair back, ready to go.

  I wouldn’t have minded staying.

  Chapter Three

  “WHERE’S THE BOTTLE OF wine I brought out for dinner?” Pete asked when we were all seated under the crystal chandelier in the dining room. He had on a sweater and cords, like me. His looked really baggy on him, he was so skinny. He said he’d picked up some kind of amebic dysentery in France last summer.

  If there was anything going around, it always found its way to Pete. If he didn’t have something wrong with him when he came out to Seaville to visit, he came down with it immediately. Something between Dad and Pete brought out every kind of symptom from hives to postnasal drip.

  “I put the bottle in the wine cellar,” said Dad.

  As usual, Dad was in a business suit and tie. Dad had the Rudd red hair, but he was losing it now and, like Mom, putting on a little weight. But Mom was the dramatic type (directing Come Back Little Sheba for the Seaville Players that fall), and she hid her weight under capes and caftans. She had on a long white caftan that night. Her ash-blond hair was held back with a white ribbon; her blue eyes were shining, as they always did when Pete was home.

  Pete said, “That’s a good cabernet. I picked it out very carefully for this occasion.”

  “You and your mother already had two martinis,” Dad said. “Since when do you drink so much?”

  “Arthur. Darling. It’s a special occasion. Pete’s home.”

  “So am I,” Dad said. “I don’t like to see my son turning into a lush.”

  “You’re home every weekend,” Mom said.

  Pete got up while Mrs. Tompkins was putting down the soup bowls. “I’ll get it.”

  “Your soup will get cold,” Dad said.

  “I’m going to skip the soup.”

  “It’s cream of broccoli your mother made especially for you.”

  “He can skip the soup if he wants to,” Mom said. “But you’re so thin, Pete.”

  I kept my mouth shut. You never knew when things were going to explode between Pete and Dad. Mom once said their problem was they both wanted to be autonomous. That’s when I learned the word autonomous, which means subject to its own laws only. I pulled it on Dill once, when we were having the usual argument in the backseat of Jack’s Mustang.

  I said what kind of a relationship was it, anyway, when she wanted to be autonomous? Dill said I don’t know where you got that word, but it’s going to take more than a big word to change my mind on this subject. What’s it going to take? I said … A big gold wedding band, she said, sometime in the future, after I’ve worn the small diamond engagement ring for a while.

  When Pete left the dining room, Dad pulled his chair back, lifted the tablecloth, and said, “OUT!”

  Oscar, our fourteen-year-old English bulldog, crawled out from under the table with his head down and wobbled into the living room. He was really Pete’s pet; Pete had gotten him for his thirteenth birthday.

  “I know we do a lot of things around here in honor of Pete’s infrequent visits,” Dad said, “but dining with a dog that smells like a dung heap under the table isn’t one of them.”

  “Poor old Oscar,” Mom crooned.

  Mrs. Tompkins was headed back into the kitchen when the phone rang. Dad told her to tell whoever it was calling that we were having dinner.

  Pete poked his head through the door. “Erick? It’s Dill. She’s calling from a pay phone.”

  I said I wouldn’t be long and Dad scowled.

  While I walked toward the kitchen, I heard Mom say, “Don’t be cross, darling. Please. Not tonight.”

  Pete was opening the wine. Mrs. Tompkins was taking a rib roast out of the oven. She was a big, blond widow who’d worked for us since before I was born and had an apartment over our garage.

  “Erick?” Nicki said. “I just said it was Dill.”

  “What’s up? We’re eating.”

  “I just wanted to tell you the first weekend in October is perfect. There’s no game that weekend. It’s the one weekend Jack doesn’t have to play.”

  “I doubt that we can get tickets, Nicki.”

  “Tickets to what?” Pete whispered.

  “Bruce Springsteen,” I said. “Don’t get your hopes up, Nicki.”

  “But we could go in anyway. Couldn’t we?”

  “I’ll ask Dad,” I said. “Are you sure Jack wants to?”

  “I already hinted around, and he does.”

  When Pete and I got back into the dining room, Dad said, “Who’s the fourth glass for?”

  “There’re four of us, aren’t there?” Pete said.

  “Your brother doesn’t drink.”

  “He may have one glass,” Mom said, “if he promises to paint the kitchen chairs.”

  “Sneaky,” I said. She’d been after me to do those chairs.

  “Do all the teachers at Southworth School drink?” Dad asked Pete.

  “Yes, sir,” said Pete. “I think it’s because they all regret not choosing business careers where they can make upward of sixty and seventy thousand a year.”

  “Oh, Pete.” Mom giggled. “Pete.”

  “Yes, encourage his sense of humor,” Dad said sourly. “He needs it when he cashes his paycheck.”

  “Pete,” Mom said, “tell him.”

  Pete got to his feet.

  “Tell me what?” Dad said.

  “Hold your horses,” Pete said. “I want to make a formal toast.”

  “A toast!” Mom said. She held up her glass. I held mine up, too. Dad looked reluctant, but he went along with it.

  “Here’s to all of you for not asking me how my novel was coming along, more than once or twice a year.”

  “We were afraid to ask,” Dad said.

  “Wait!” Mom said.

  “For your faith in The Skids. Particularly you, Mom.”

  “Did you sell it?” Dad asked.

  “There’s a Hollywood producer who’s interested in it for a screenplay, or a TV series. Shall we drink to that?”

  We all clinked our glasses together.

  “Congratulations, Pete!” I said.

  “Isn’t that good news?” Mom said.

  “I didn’t know you’d finished it,” Dad said.

  “It’s not finished. I have five chapters and an outline.”

  “Oh, it’s not even finished?” Dad said.

  “I don’t have to finish it. I’m going to turn it into a screenplay.”

  “It’ll make a superb movie!” Mom said. “Or TV series!”

&nbs
p; “Well, that’s good, Pete, that’s good,” Dad said.

  “Pete might make enough money to leave Southworth,” Mom said.

  “I don’t know about that,” Dad said.

  Somehow during the middle of dinner, after Pete finished filling us in on all the details about this producer, who thought The Skids was a hot property, the subject of S.A.T. scores came up. I know I didn’t bring it up. I was going to take the S.A.T. over again in October. I’d gotten a 500v and a 580m. Pete had gotten a 700v and a 720m when he’d taken them. But typically, Dad wasn’t on my back about my scores; he was on Pete’s back about Pete getting such good grades all through high school and college, then “throwing everything out the window” to be a prep school teacher—“Not even,” Dad threw in, “a university professor—I could live with that.”

  “I offered to stay at Princeton and finish my Ph.D.,” said Pete.

  “You offered?” Dad sputtered. “Who needs such an offer? That’s an offer I find easy to refuse! Education is a privilege, not something you offer to put yourself through to please someone else!”

  “Well, now we don’t have to worry about it,” Mom said. “Pete’s going to get to work on this screenplay.”

  “Fine,” Dad said to Pete, “but don’t leave Southworth.”

  “Don’t leave Southworth? You’re always telling me it’s a dead end!”

  “It is, but at least it’s a bird in the hand.”

  “So is this. I might make enough to write fulltime.”

  “You’d be better off using the money to go back to graduate school,” Dad said. “You could teach at a university and write on the side. Philip Roth does that. Many writers do.”

  “I can’t afford to go back to graduate school and support myself writing!”

  “You can’t afford not to, Pete!”

  It was the same old thing; it was the same kind of thing that always happened when Grandpa Rudd and Dad were together, only then Grandpa Rudd was the one Dad couldn’t win over.

  Dad would say, “There’s just no pleasing him!”

  Dad got so hot under the collar, he didn’t even notice Pete pouring me a second glass of wine. I began to get a slight buzz on. It never took much. I began tuning out.