Things You Should Know

by A M Homes

“Can you swim?”

  I nodded.

  “Tomorrow we’ll go to the pool.”

  He hurled a series of questions at me like rockets, little hand grenades. I ducked and bobbed; I answered as best I could. It was a test, an application for friendship.

  “I’m allowed to go off the diving board but I don’t like it,” he said. “But I don’t tell anyone that. If someone is going, I go too, but it’s nothing I’m in a rush to do. You first,” he said, dropping the dice into my hand. I started to shake them. He immediately stopped me.

  “We don’t play that way,” he said. “You go like this.” Between his thumb and forefinger, he held one up in the air then dropped it with a whirling twist. Before the first one stopped spinning, he dropped the second one the same way. The dice splashed down onto the board, knocking over my marker, giving me a six and a four. “See,” he said, moving my marker for me. “It’s better that way.”

  “I should go home,” I said when the game was over, when he’d played the whole thing for both of us, when I’d never touched the marker or the dice.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to have a snack?” Mrs. asked me as I headed for the screen door. “I made cream-filled cupcakes.”

  “The ones with white stuff inside,” Henry said.

  “You can make cupcakes like that?”

  “Yes.” She smiled at me.

  Every year just as I started to have a sense of how things were laid out, of where Philadelphia started and stopped, it was time for me to leave. The Henrys’ car wound down the streets with me pressed to the window, wondering where the hell we were.

  “Where’s baby June?” I asked, my twelve-year-old voice cracking with what I thought was middle age or Parkinson’s disease.

  “Day camp,” Mrs. Henry said.

  Baby June’s real name was Constance, but since her mission in life appeared to be a well-studied imitation of Mrs., everyone except Mrs. and Mr. called her baby June.

  Henry and I were quiet. There was the familiar awkwardness of beginning again, of seeing a body once more after months away. In between, we’d talked a couple of times, signed our names to birthday cards picked out by mothers in a hurry, we’d given the okay to a present we knew would be perfect only because we wanted it so bad for ourselves. But that was about it.

  “You’d better check in,” Mrs. said when we pulled into the driveway. “Then come over for lunch. We’ll be waiting.”

  “You’ll be waiting,” Henry said, slamming the car door. “I’m eating now.”

  Except for the hum of the air-conditioning, which was running even though it was only seventy-some degrees out, my father’s house was without signs of life.

  I left my carry-on in the hall and called my mother. Dr. Frankle answered the phone. I didn’t tell him his luggage was missing.

  “Is my mother there?”

  “She’s on the Lifecycle,” he said, and then there was silence.

  “Could I talk to her please?”

  “I’ll have to get the cordless.”

  “Thank you,” I said. There was the longest silence, as though Dr. F. thought if he waited long enough to get my mother, I’d grow up and be gone.

  “You’re there,” my mother said, out of breath.

  “I’m here.”

  “That was fast.”

  “They can’t find my suitcase.”

  “Don’t worry, they will,” she said. “They have to. Did your father pick you up?”

  “No. Mrs. Henry did it.”

  “What the hell’s wrong with him. That’s part of our agreement.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Have you spoken to him?”

  “I called you first.”

  “When you talk to him, tell him to call me right away. That’s all. I’ll deal with him. I don’t want to drag you into this.”

  “What if my stuff doesn’t show up?”

  “Your father will take care of it,” she said.

  According to all reports—except my own—by marrying Dr. Frankle, my mother had done well for herself. On the other hand, my father seemed to have taken a small financial slide. Even though Dr. F. could more than cover the world with money, my father still sent my mother a check every month, supposedly for me.

  “Did they leave you lunch?” my mother asked.

  “I’ve been invited out.”

  “Well, have fun. I’ll talk to you Saturday morning before my hair appointment. If you need anything just call.” I could hear air rushing through the sprockets of the Lifecycle.

  My father answered his own phone at the office. “Hi ya, sport. Get in okay?”

  “My suitcase is temporarily dislocated.”

  “Happens all the time.”

  “Mom wants you to call her.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, lying.

  “Well, I gotta get to work,” he said. “There should be something there for lunch if you’re hungry.”

  “I’m invited to the Henrys’.”

  “Oh, that’s good. Well, run along. Don’t keep people waiting. And don’t forget, Cindy’s making dinner tonight.”

  “Great.”

  Every year Cindy made dinner my first night in town. “A real dinner,” she called it: sitting down, plates, glasses, a meatlike item, strange salad—one year with flower petals in it—doctored brown rice, and herbal iced tea. After that, for the rest of the summer, eating was pretty much something I took care of at the Henrys’, where they seemed to have a firmer grasp of what was food and what was indigenous vegetation, animal habitat, something to be seen, perhaps cut and put in a vase, but certainly not eaten. Sometimes, I’d ride to the grocery store with Mrs. and buy real food, making sure to get enough for my father and Cindy, who ultimately ate more crap than anyone.

  Cindy was ten years younger than my dad, and all they’d talked about when they bought this place was how great it was for kids. For these five years, I’d felt the burden of making that seem true.

  “He shops,” I once overheard Cindy tell someone. “And he’s such a pleasure to have around.”

  A pleasure because I was hardly around. Plus, I was household-oriented. I liked things clean and neat. I found comfort in order. I was also used to being around people I didn’t know, living with people I wasn’t related to. I kept my own secrets. I’d taught myself to be a little less than human. I’d taught myself to be a person whom people like to have around, half boy, half butler: half, just half—no one wanted the whole thing, that was one of the tricks, if you wanna call it that.

  I pulled the box of chocolate I’d brought for Mrs. H. out of my carry-on. I’d picked liquor-filled, thinking it was safer than milk chocolate in terms of keeping it from Henry and baby June. Liquor-filled tasted so foul that only an adult would eat it. I washed my hands and face and set out for the Henrys’.

  Lunch was like something out of a commercial or a dream, although I suppose there was nothing unusual about it. Baloney-and-cheese sandwiches on white bread—mayo on one side, mustard on the other, and pale pink meat and yellow cheese in the middle. Heaven. In Dr. Frankle’s house the only baloney was verbal, and in my father’s the only meat was a soy-based pseudohamburger mix called bean-burger.

  “Chips?” Mrs. Henry asked.

  “Yes, please.” Real chips, not extra crispy, gourmet deep-bake-fried, slightly, lightly not salted. Normal American chips out of a big old bag-o’-chips. I was glowing. Orange drink. Not orange juice, but drink. It may as well have been a birthday party. Henry didn’t notice, he didn’t care, he didn’t appreciate anything.

  Mrs. H. topped off my glass. My tongue would be orange all day; if I sucked on it hard, I’d be able to pull out little flashes of flavor for hours to come.

  “I’m so glad to be here,” I said, meaning it completely.

  “We’ve missed you,” Mrs. said.

  “I haven’t,” Henry said. “I’ve been busy.”

  “Oh, Henry, you sit in the house,
whining all the time, ‘I’m bored. There’s nothing to do.’”

  “TV is your best friend,” I said.

  “No, yours,” Henry said.

  “No,” I said. “Yours. We don’t have a TV.”

  “God, how depressing,” Henry said.

  There was a moment of silence while everyone—even Mrs. H.—reflected on the idea of life without television.

  “That was great, thank you,” I said to Mrs. when we were finished.

  “It was baloney,” Henry said.

  I carried the plates to the sink.

  “You’re so considerate,” Mrs. said, staring Henry down.

  I try, I said to myself. I try so hard.

  “Come on,” Henry said. “Hurry up.” He pushed me out the screen door.

  From the edge of their backyard, if I listened hard, I could hear the deceiving rush that five years ago I thought was water. From the end of this block that went nowhere—dead-ended three houses away into a thick wood—I’d heard a clean whooshing sound that I thought was a lot of water. A waterfall maybe. A paradise on the other side of something. An escape from the starkness of this street. Before I knew better, I went charging off into fifteen feet of thick woods, the kind of woods bogeymen come from, woods where little kids playing find a human hand poking through the leaves, the nails long from the inattentions of the not-so-recently dead, the kind of place where animals crawl off to die. I punched my way through only to find that what whooshed and roared was an eight-lane highway where a hundred thousand cars sliding by in both directions had the nerve to sound like a waterfall. Hearing it again on this first afternoon depressed me.

  “Give me your glasses,” Henry said, kneeling down.

  I handed them over, imagining Henry slipping the frames under the ball of his foot, and then leaning full forward, laughing at the snap-crackle-pop sound of two hundred and fifty dollars shattering.

  “They’re very expensive,” I said.

  “I’m not buying them.”

  He used the glasses to catch the sun and burn holes through an old dead leaf.

  “Handy,” he said, giving them back to me. “I guess you can keep them.” He stopped for a second, then looked at me. “So, what’s wrong with you, how come you’re not talking? Brain go blind, too?”

  “Trip,” I said. “I don’t like to fly.”

  “Wouldn’t know,” Henry said. “Pool’s open. We can go tomorrow.”

  In Philadelphia there was a community pool, long and wide. All you had to do was show up and sign in. Henry and I ruled it in the summer. We never took showers before entering. We stepped over the vat of milky green below the sign ALL BATHERS MUST IMMERSE FEET BEFORE ENTERING WATER. Whatever disease we might have had, we thought it better than the lack of disease we saw around us, we wanted to infect everyone, anyone, we wanted everything about ourselves to be contagious, we were dying for someone to be just like us. We were the boys who only got out of the water when the guard blew his whistle fifteen minutes before the hour—every hour—and announced, “Adult swim. Eighteen and under out of the pool.” Those words were mystical, almost magical. We’d crawl out and sit by the edge watching, as if adult swim meant that the pool would become pornographic for those fifteen very adult minutes just before the hour. But nothing ever happened. The only pornography were the old women with breasts big enough to feed a nation and old men with personal business hanging so far down that it sometimes fell out the end of their bathing suits.

  Every day we stayed at the pool until Henry’s mother called the office and had us paged and ordered home. Then waterlogged, bloody-eyed, bellies bloated from the ingestion of too much chlorinated water, cheap snack-bar pizza, and too many Milky Ways, we walked home, wet towels around our necks, our little generals shriveled, clammy, and chafing under our cutoffs. We bore it all proudly, as though it were the most modern medical treatment, the prescription guarantee for a better life, a bright manhood. Our flip-flops slippery wet, heels sliding off and into the dirt, strange evening bugs and twigs snapping at our ankles, we wound down the long hill onto the road, and then across the road, through some yards, through the short woods between developments toward the light in the Henrys’ kitchen window.

  As the days stretched out to full length, Mrs. Henry always started talking about where she wanted to spend her summer vacation, two golden weeks she’d suffered the year for. She’d talk about going to Rome to see the pope or to Venice to ride in a gondola or even off to Australia to see koala bears, but in the end the Henrys always ended up going somewhere like the nearest beach, toting me along because it was easier to bring an extra kid to entertain Henry than to try to do it themselves.

  In the evenings, after dinner, Mrs. Henry went out onto the new wooden deck that Mr. had built over the old slab-o’-concrete porch. While baby June played with her dolls, Mrs. Henry sat back on a lounger holding a tall glass of diet soda, filled with ice cubes melted down into hailstones. Every now and then, she’d shake the drink, mix it up, and say, “Brings the carbonation to life.”

  As soon as the weather got warm and everyone started running in and out of the new sliding glass door, Mrs. Henry went to the hardware store, bought a roll of glow-in-the-dark orange tape, and made a huge safety star on the glass door, top to bottom, to remind everyone not to go charging through.

  “I don’t want anyone ending up with a face full of glass, stitches, scars, and disfigurement. I’d feel terrible.”

  It worked. We all felt careful and safe. Mrs. H. sat out there resting with baby June while Henry and I played badminton in the yard. Shuttlecock. We loved that word. We said it loudly and brightly a thousand times a day for absolutely no reason. We’d go down to Woolworth’s and loudly ask each other, “You don’t think they’d have shuttlecocks here, do you?” The shuttlecock would go up high in the air, its red rubber end obscene, wonderful, and probably the only reason we played the game. The cock would rise into the last moment of light and then sink into the darkness of the Pennsylvania backyard, dropping softly onto the grass.

  Deep at the farthest end of the yard, round, multicolored plastic lights bobbed up and down on the back fence. The lights had been up every one of my Philadelphia years, as though the Henrys’ life were a never-ending tropical party, as if they were the happiest people in the world. Sometimes the lights were like buoys. Henry and I would lie out on the deck pretending we were at sea. Depending on our mood, the lights were beacons, telling us how to steer, how to avoid dangerous straits and shipwrecks of summers past. Other times they were other yachts filled with wonderful and famous people. We’d stand on the bow, waving. We’d look through Henry’s binoculars into the dead black of night and pretend we were seeing all manner of decadent behavior. In detail, we’d describe it to each other.

  One afternoon, later that summer, Mrs. Henry started gliding around the kitchen in a definite rhythm—one-two-three: refrigerator-sink-stove—as though cooking were dancing, as though she could waltz with hamburgers.

  Tiny grease balls spattered and popped in the frying pan, shooting off into the gas flames where they exploded into miniature blue-and-orange fireballs of fat, cheap summer sparklers. The hamburgers were almost done. I usually didn’t pay this much attention to the state of dinner, especially dinner that wasn’t really my own, but I happened to be in the middle of a growth spurt or something and was on the verge of starvation. My stomach was puffing out, and I was having difficulty concentrating on anything other than the six hockey pucks of beef sizzling not a body’s length away, wondering how the six pucks would be divided among four, hopefully five, people.

  Voluntarily, I set the table, pretending not to be anything other than a good neighbor, a nice boy.

  Mrs. turned from the stove to a dying head of lettuce.

  “Where is he?” she said, referring to Mr. Henry. “I hate it when he does this. Dinner’s almost ready. We’re going to have to eat.”

  She raised the frying pan up off the fire. The phone rang and rang again. She
answered it. “I’m sorry, what?” she said, using her chin to pull the phone closer to her ear. She held the pan above the stove, slightly tilted. The hamburgers stopped sizzling. “No,” she said. “No, I don’t think that’s right.”

  Without realizing what she was doing, she pushed the frying pan forward, threw it down in the sink, which was more than six inches deep with dirty water, dead lettuce, and mixed vegetable scraps.

  Henry screamed, “No.”

  The burgers landed with one great searing hiss, immediately sank, and neither Henry nor I could figure a rescue plan fast enough.

  Six burgers a goner was all I could think. I could tell Henry was furious. His top lip had disappeared into a thin white line of pure Henry fury.

  “I’m going to give you ten dollars to keep an eye on Constance for a couple of hours. Don’t use the stove or the oven. You can microwave.” She turned off the gas, picked up her purse, and went out the door. “That’s our dinner,” Henry said, pointing to the handle of the frying pan poking up. A single burger had risen and was somehow skimming the surface of the muck looking less like food than the final result of eating. “It’s gross, I’m not touching it.”

  We went through the cabinets, found a box of macaroni-and-cheese mix, bright orange and gooey. Later, it made my stomach turn.

  “I’m hungry,” Henry said after the neon glop was gone.

  “Would you like me to make you something?” baby June said, dragging her Easy-Bake out of the kitchen closet.

  “Oh, I wanna cake baked by a lightbulb,” Henry said. “That sounds wonderful, a gourmet treat.”

  “You do?” She lit up like she was the electricity that would power the bulb. “Isn’t it wonderful,” she said, patting the oven. “What kind do you want? Yellow or black?”

  “It’s yellow or chocolate,” I said.

  Baby June shrugged. She didn’t care. She baked us each a cake and then delivered them as though waiting on us was the greatest thing in the world. We thought she was nuts.

  “You want a real toy?” Henry asked her. Baby June nodded. He went deep into his closet and pulled out an old toy machine gun. “It still works,” he said.