by Bryan Hurt
I was so relieved I practically thanked her. They were in the living room when I came downstairs. Even I have to admit we’ve got a pretty fantastic living room, which is centered around these two absolutely amazing Chippendale sofas facing each other. I mean, my dad restores furniture for a living, and he’d done nothing but the best job on those sofas. In particular the leather on them was like butter, which on the one hand feels especially soft but on the other hand means you sort of have to watch yourself when you sit on them, or else you’ll just like slide right off them. But anyway, my mom and dad were sitting on the one sofa and I sat down on the other one. In between the two sofas is this coffee table which my dad always calls “contemporary” to the sofas—which means it was made at the same time they were, but he’s not sure who made it—and like right on top of the coffee table was a pair of underwear, and the fly was facing up, and like right on the fly were these stains. The underwear was mine, the stains were mine too, and if I mention that I was fourteen then I don’t think I have to say anything else.
“Have a seat, Boo,” my dad said, even though I was already sitting down.
I guess right off I should mention that my parents more or less never called me Book, ever, unless they were mad at me or introducing me to their friends.
And I guess, saying that, that I should also say how it is I ended up with such a dumb name. See, my parents aren’t just bridge players: they’re bridge fanatics. They’ve played bridge every Tuesday against Angela and Tony Ferucci since like way before I was born. I don’t really play bridge myself—I’ve watched them a lot, but the one time I asked them to teach me they laughed and said I should call them again when I’m like thirty—so if any of you play bridge I apologize if I’m getting this all wrong. Anyway, what happens in bridge is, you make your bid by taking six tricks on top of the number of tricks you bid for, so to take a bid of, say, five clubs, what you really have to do is take eleven tricks, which is actually a hard thing to do, and, I mean, whatever, if you don’t get it it’s not really important. What’s important is that those first six tricks are called book, and when you take these tricks it’s called making book.
Supposedly it was my mom who was struck by the phrase. Like I said, my dad’s a furniture restorer but my mom’s an editor, so I guess it makes sense that she was the one. I mean, my dad’s not particularly articulate if you know what I mean: Have a seat, Boo, when I’m already sitting down, and like that. Making book. They used the second word for my name, my real name—I didn’t start using Booker until this year—but I bet it was the first word that really got them. See, my mom edits this food magazine you’ve probably heard of even if you’ve never read it, but the only reason she edits it, she once told me, is because she can’t write a decent sentence to save her life, and she can’t cook either. What she does have is great taste, in food and writing both, which is why her magazine’s so famous. My dad’s got kind of the same relationship to furniture. I’ve seen him take what looks like a bundle of wood and turn it back into a two-hundred-year-old Louis Quatorze dining chair—which he then sells for like an amazing amount of money—but whenever he tries to make something himself it’s a total disaster. I guess what I’m trying to say is that my parents have never been able to make anything, except me.
“How’s school, Boo?” my mom started things off, and she reached for her drink. My mom always allows herself two drinks before dinner—she calls them “aperitifs”—and I was guessing from the little wobble in her hand as she picked up the glass that she was already on her second one. The glass was sitting right next to the underwear on the table, but she just picked it up and drank from it and put it back down on the table as though the underwear wasn’t even there.
“You want to put a coaster under that?” my dad said. He himself was holding his beer in his lap. “I mean, the wood.”
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” my mom said.
“It’ll leave rings. That table was a lot of work, I could sell it for a mint.”
“Well, okay,” she said then, and then she sort of looked around for a coaster but there wasn’t one, and I guess she didn’t want to get up or something, and so what she did was, she picked the drink up and put it down on my underwear.
No one said anything for what seemed like a long time.
“Boo,” my mom finally said.
“Look, Mom, we talked about it already. In school. Health class. I know all about it. Everything’s fine, really.” And then I remembered: Tuesday. “Hey, won’t the Feruccis be here soon?” By which I didn’t actually mean Mr. and Mrs., but Ace, who always came over with them.
THAT SUMMER THE Puerto Rican girls had straightened their hair like Mariah Carey but the white girls were still frizzing their hair out with big perms like, I don’t know, like the women on The 700 Club or something. What can I say, Long Island. But straight or frizzy they were all in bikinis—the one-piece was definitely out—and one of the two brunettes sunbathing in front of us was lying on her back, sucking in her stomach and making these like finger-paint-type designs in the baby oil and sweat that puddled around her belly button, and her friend was on her stomach and doing this thing where she hooked a finger through the string that ran around her hip and pulled up on it to cover the top of her ass, after which she’d slide a finger under the seat of her suit and pull it down to cover the bottom of her ass, and I tell you what, I could’ve watched her do that all day long. But instead Ace came running up from the dunes and said he’d got an idea, come quick and bring the camera and tripod, hurry up Book, we haven’t got all day, and what could I do? Ace saw me looking back at the two brunettes and just sort of smiled and said what he had in mind was way better than that. What he had in mind, he said, would keep me warm all winter long.
*
“BOO,” MY MOM said now, like I hadn’t said anything. She smiled, and took a drink, and when the glass was in her hand you could see that it had left a little hollow ring on the front of my underwear, and when she put it down I could see that she was careful to put it down in exactly the same spot. “I’m sure that your health teacher was able to give you a perfectly adequate technical explanation for the changes occurring in your body.”
“Technical,” my dad sort of threw in.
“No, really, Mom, I mean, thanks, I appreciate it, but you should get ready for your game.”
“Nevertheless,” my mom went right on, “your father and I feel it is our duty to provide you with a warmer, more emotional rationale for what’s going on.”
“Emotional,” my dad threw in. His beer was empty but he took a little pull from it anyway. He looked at his watch. “The Feruccis are due in about an hour.”
My mom picked up her glass again. “I found this in your hamper,” she said, and I guess it must’ve been that I didn’t really want to focus on the underwear or whatever, but I was kind of confused for a minute.
“Your glass?” I said.
My mom tittered then, which is what she calls it, which when I asked my dad what she meant he said it was sort of the sophisticated way to chuckle.
“No, no, the glass was in the cabinet,” she said. She hadn’t put her glass down and she took another sip. “I mean your underpants.”
My dad: “The underwear.”
All three of us kind of looked down at them. The front was pretty much wet from my mom’s drink, which unfortunately brought out the stains all the more, and my mom, I guess since we were all looking at the underwear, she didn’t put her glass back down but instead took another sip, and then, when nobody said anything, another, but by that point her glass was empty and she just looked over at the bar. She didn’t get up though, just looked back at me.
“I’m sure it must seem a bit overwhelming to you,” she said finally. “I mean, the changes. But your father and I are here to assure you that the things that are happening to you are perfectly natural, and that these processes, which must seem a bit”—she paused long enough to look down into her
empty glass, and then she settled for a word she’d already used—“overwhelming,” she said, and kind of shrugged, “they’ll all work themselves out in time, and come to seem perfectly natural.”
“Perfectly natural,” my dad threw in at that point. I’m not sure if he meant to clarify what my mom was saying or if he was just repeating her. He looked at his watch again. “Forty-five minutes, really.” He spoke to my mom this time, and I knew that he wanted to get this over as much as I did.
My mom was looking at her drink again, and then she looked at my dad, and then she said, “Maybe just this once. Another aperitif.”
“I could go for a beer myself,” my dad said. “Boo, what about you?”
I’d’ve loved a drink, but whatever.
My dad went over to the bar to fix new drinks, and while he was up my mom and I just kind of smiled at each other. I mean, she kind of smiled a little bit, and then I kind of smiled back at her, which made her smile a little more, and so I felt like I had to smile even more back at her, which of course only made her smile even wider, and so on, until by the time my dad came back we were both grinning like circus monkeys.
“Ho ho ho,” my dad said. “What’s the big joke, huh?” He sat down and then he set the drinks on the table, but right off the sound of the glass on the wood must’ve made him realize that he’d forgotten to bring coasters because he immediately picked them up, and he sort of held them for a moment, kind of half getting up and then sitting back down again and getting up and sitting back down and then finally just handing my mom her drink and putting his beer in his lap.
At that point it was starting to look like this was going to take all night, and the thought of Ace Ferucci walking in and seeing my underwear on the table was making me kind of panicky. But the new drinks seemed to speed things up, and I guess, well, the long and short of it was that the books my mom had read were all about making sure your pubescent adolescent takes responsibility for his or her new feelings, by which I’m pretty sure they meant being careful when you have sex, but my mom and dad, you know, being more practical people, kind of reduced it all to would I please make sure that if I had any further “accidents” as the stains had come to be referred to then would I please make sure I soaked my underwear in a sink filled with water, cold water, hot would only set the stains, cold water with a capful of bleach in it, so that this wouldn’t happen again, by which I think they meant the stains and not the conversation, but whatever. I was all ready to get up and grab my undies and go back to my room—it must’ve been well after six by then—when my dad kind of put his beer down.
“Boo,” he said. “There is one more thing.”
Well. I guess I should’ve realized that the whole set-up was a bit much for a laundry tip. I mean.
THE THING ABOUT Ace is that he’s always had good luck with girls. On the one hand he’s so big and on the other so sweet and dopey, and so whatever, what I’m saying is that it wasn’t long before he came back to the dunes with this girl in a yellow bikini with this totally eighties-ed out short spiky haircut that actually sort of looked good on her. From where I sat I couldn’t really see her face—especially since Ace’s was more or less glued to it—but I could see his hands, making like Lewis and Clark and exploring her entire body. Ace was good. He’d told me the secret: never let your hands sit too long in any one place, that way the girl’ll never have an excuse to push them away. And like I said, Ace’s hands were busy, traveling from top to bottom and back to front, he kept constantly moving so the girl never got like nervous, like some girls do if you cop a feel while you’re making out. Which I don’t think this girl would’ve gotten nervous anyway: her hands were as busy as Ace’s, and if anyone seemed a little put off it was him, what with me in the bushes with the camera and the girl’s hands snaking inside the back of the loose waistband of his Jams, and through all this the two of them were doing this sort of slow descent to the blanket, like, first one of Ace’s knees went down, then one of the girl’s, then Ace’s other knee, then the girl’s, and so on, until eventually they were stretched out on the blanket and somehow even while doing that Ace had managed to untie the neck string of the girl’s bikini top, and two tiny triangles of fabric hung below her breasts like banana peels. It wasn’t until Ace, you know, actually laid himself right on top of her that I could tell the girl was reaching her stopping point‚ and thank God she did or I don’t know what I would have done. Before she left I heard her say that she went to Coram and Ace said maybe he’d drive over there one day and the girl sort of smiled and said she was going to have half days on Tuesdays all next year. When she was gone Ace just fell down on his back with his arms and legs spread wide open, and I was about to slip out of the bushes when he made this noise, it sounded just like a hungry dog watching someone open up a can of food that they then, like, eat themselves, and this noise stopped me dead in my tracks.
*
MY MOM STOOD up now.
“Boo’s right,” she said. “I really must call Angela and Tony.” Meaning Ace’s parents.
“Barbara,” my dad said. Meaning my mom, who was heading for the door.
“It will only take a moment. It’s Angela’s turn to bring the wine, and you know how she always ‘buys’ that same terrible Chianti. I know they’re Italian, but still.”
My mom supplied the quotation marks with her fingers. And even though I knew she was just trying to create a diversion, it was also true: Mrs. Ferucci did always bring the same kind of wine, and just one bottle at that. By now it should be pretty obvious that one bottle wasn’t going to go very far in that crowd—believe me, the Feruccis could match my folks drink for drink any night of the week.
Before she called Mrs. Ferucci my mom came back over to us and just sort of dropped her empty glass in my dad’s lap. “You two carry on in my absence,” she said, and then she marched unsteadily out of the room.
When my dad got up to “refresh” her drink—that’s another word my mom always puts quotation marks around—I grabbed the underwear off the table. They didn’t really fit in my pocket and so I just stuffed them down the front of my jeans and kind of pulled my shirttails over the little bulge they made.
If my dad noticed the missing underwear when he got back with the drinks he didn’t say anything. He sat back down, and nodded his head at me. I nodded back and then he nodded again, but I remembered the smiles thing with my mom and so I forced myself to look down at the coffee table. That’s when I saw the videotape. I guess my dad must’ve grabbed it when he got the drinks. It was just an ordinary videotape, I mean, there was no reason why it should’ve creeped me out the way it did, except maybe the way it was placed between my mom’s glass and my dad’s beer exactly where my underwear had been, and then too there was the fact that the tape was labeled Making Book, which the ink was kind of faded and the label half peeling off, but you could still read it.
Making Book. No quotation marks.
The phone was just in the other room, and my mom’s voice came sailing through the door.
“Angela? Barbara Davis here.” My parents have known the Feruccis since way before I was born, but my mom still always uses her full name when she calls them. My dad once said this was a sign of my mom’s insecurity, to which my mom said drinking was a sign of insecurity but using her full name on the telephone was simply good manners.
“I’ve discovered the most amazing Camembert,” my mom was saying, which I suppose is the sort of thing you’d expect to hear from an editor at a food magazine. “It’s so creamy it’s like pudding. Anyway, I was thinking that a Le Grand Cru Saint-Émilion would be perfect with it, you know, something just full of tannic acid. Oh, well, Chianti. Did you by any chance try that Zinfandel I—well, if you’ve already been shopping. I’m sure that would be fine. No, no, don’t bother. We don’t want to hold up the game, after all.”
At the word Chianti my dad looked at me and nodded, and, unable to control myself, I nodded back. We were just about to go i
nto the whole marionette routine when my mom came back into the living room. My parents both picked up their drinks and I sort of fluffed my shirttails over the front of my jeans, and the first thing my mom did was ask me how “Ace” was. She always does the quote thing with Ace’s name too, because it’s not actually his real name, which is Tony, like his dad’s. Anthony. My mom says the Feruccis gave Ace his nickname just to imitate us, meaning the bridge thing, I guess—meaning making book—because ace, besides being a card, is also a kind of title that really good bridge players get.
“He’s fine, I guess.”
“Tony was saying Ace was going to start on the football team this year.” This was my dad.
“I guess.” I was pretty sure Ace was only second string, but it wouldn’t’ve been the first time Ace’s parents had overstated the case—or mine for that matter. Mr. Ferucci certainly knew I hadn’t made the team, which I’d only tried out for because my dad more or less insisted, and so I just nodded at the video on the coffee table, which was covered with water rings. “What is this, like, a tape of you guys playing bridge or something?” At which point my mom tittered so loud it was practically a guffaw.
“Well, no,” my dad said. “Not exactly.”
“Really,” my mom said. “Is this really, I mean, do we have to do this?” But my dad, like I said, he doesn’t really say much, but when he does set his mind to say something there’s no stopping him.
“I think we are in a position to offer Boo a unique gift,” he said. “After all, how many people can say they actually know where they actually come from?”
Well, right then who flashed in my mind was Ace Ferucci. Ace’s parents, according to my mom, liked to think of themselves as “liberal,” which is how my mom characterized the fact that they’d videotaped their son’s being born. They played it for me once about a year ago, and I mean, it—I mean, the tape—it was kind of interesting and all, but still, every time I looked at Ace I just had this vision of his face all covered with slimy goo. And plus too, and this is something I didn’t realize, but the umbilical cord looks like a hose growing out of your stomach when you’re born, and that is just gross.
