"Magnets? What's magnets?" Ronny turned all the way around to ask me.
"Those things that make iron stick to them," I explained. "Augie and I are fooling around with them. Trying to make things move. We broke a light bulb last time."
That last detail seemed to satisfy him that ours was an acceptable activity.
"You should be practicing batting for Saturday," Tony Duyckman said.
"I'll always be a lousy batter. My left eye's too bum," I added, referring to an infant accident which had left me astigmatic and, while dramatic enough in the telling, unfortunately hadn't left a scar, except inside my eyeball, where no one but an ophthalmologist could see it.
The boys broke off in twos and threes, leaving me to dawdle the rest of the way home with Kerry White, a small, thin boy with excessive blond hair, himself a hanger-on of the group. We were silent until I reached the path to our door, where I left him with a curt "Bye," to which he responded with a sunny smile and overeager farewell.
Too bad for Kerry, I thought, even lower than me with the other guys. I opened the screen door, hoping I'd never fall so low as to walk home with five other kids without being spoken to and then be satisfied with someone saying good-bye. I grabbed the kitchen door handle and it didn't open. It was stuck or—locked!
Café curtains misted the kitchen-side windows. Even so, peering through I didn't see my mother anywhere in the room. So I knocked on the door. Then on the kitchen window. When that didn't work, I dragged my schoolbag to the front of the house and tried that door. Also locked. I rang the bell, knocked, shouted, and walked all over the grass down the slope to the garage door, located under the living room windows. No car in the garage. And the door was also locked.
I sat down in despair awhile, reading into these locked doors, that empty garage, the worst: my mother had left. Or, some terrible accident had befallen my father and sister and she'd rushed out to the hospital. I'd not been very nice to anyone in my family of late, and I was feeling guilty. Finally I got up and slogged over to our neighbor's house.
Mrs. Furst didn't know anything. Or said she didn't. She was busily entertaining a bevy of women in their mid-sixties, all of them sipping coffee out of narrow porcelain cups as they eyed an orange-frosted angel food cake. No, Mrs. Furst assured me, she had not seen my mother leave, and she had no message for me. In fact, she seemed to have but one thing on her mind: how long she could keep those biddies from attacking her culinary masterpiece.
Which reminded me that I was hungry too. My pockets contained only nine cents, not even enough for a Mars bar, but I knew that my mother kept a charge account open at a local grocery. I brazenly charged a Yoo-Hoo chocolate soda, a rectangular single-serving pineapple pie, and just to make it look legit, a box of Gold Dust cleanser.
I moped, eating in front of the grocery until several local women passed by and one of them asked me why I wasn't at home. I noticed the time on the "Moderne" 7-Up advertising clock in the window. I was late for Augie.
He was changed into his dungarees, in his backyard, playing with his metal dump trucks when I arrived, and he immediately asked why I was still in my school clothing. When I explained that my mother wasn't home and my house was locked up, he said I could borrow a pair of his overalls. I did, and they were so large I could wear them easily over my school pants and shirt.
The next hour was misery. I was too depressed to think about all the neat things I'd previously planned to do with the large magnet we'd found in his father's toolshed. Every once in a while I would sigh, and when Augie asked what was wrong, I'd reply, "Oh, nothing!" Then I mysteriously asked if he thought his folks would let me move in until I could find a job.
"Sure!" Augie said. But Augie would have replied the same if I'd asked him for all the blood in his body. Worse, he seemed to take my plight altogether too lightly, continuing to fill up, move along, and empty his toy metal trucks with exasperating imperturbability. In Augie's world my anxieties were unthinkable: "You're nuts to worry, your mother probably went out to get her hair done." I suddenly saw myself as Augie must see me: exotic and neurasthenic. And I suddenly saw Augie clearly: too unimaginative, too plain stupid to recognize that a future existed; possibly a not very pretty one.
This led to new guilt at my failure even to be a good friend, and I began talking about Ronny Taskin's pals and the upcoming game. Finally I let Augie pitch balls to me and tried batting them. We were in the middle of that when he was called inside to do his homework and I was sent home.
I didn't run all the way; I loitered on street corners staring at caterpillars fallen to the sidewalk. I counted bicycles dropped willy-nilly on front lawns or parked in tiers upon kickstands in driveways. I dreaded reaching our block. I turned into it reluctantly, so afraid to see the kitchen door still shut against me I wouldn't look up until I was directly in front of it.
It was still locked. I collapsed onto my schoolbag and contemplated suicide.
"His shirt was out of his pants. His shoes were caked with dirt. His mouth was a mélange of pineapple and some brown goo. His hair hadn't been combed all day. He looked like an urchin photographed outside some shanty in Appalachia"—that's how Alistair later on described me at our first meeting.
Alistair, on the other hand, was superb in a brand-new complete Hopalong Cassidy outfit, midnight-black with silver trim, including the arabesque-studded leather holster and silver-plated six-shooter, the authentic black-and-white pony Western boots, and the cream-colored felt ten-gallon hat with black embroidery.
He stepped out of the front seat of my mother's old Roadmaster, dropped a suitcase on the flagstones, and waited until my mother— carrying a larger suitcase—joined him before he said, "We used to have tramps in our neighborhood too. My mother usually gives them a five and tells them to get a haircut."
Astonished by this effrontery, as well as by the apparition that had uttered the words, I jumped up ready to punch him to the ground.
"You poor thing!" My mother suddenly dropped the suitcase and swept me up in a hug. "You must have been here an hour!" she said into my hair. "And I forgot to tell you I was going to the airport."
The airport? I pulled away from my mother. "What airport?"
"Idlewild," replied the monstrosity in my favorite cowboy star's outfit.
"It all happened so quickly," my mother said, trying to defend herself. "I knew he was coming in sometime today, but not exactly when. Then his mother called and I wasn't sure I knew the way and I got lost twice going there..."
"You flew in a plane?" I asked, writhing with envy.
"Four hours," he replied smugly.
My mother unlocked the kitchen door, reached back for his suitcase, and half lifted, half dragged it over the threshold. She gestured us in.
"By the way, this is your cousin, Alistair Dodge."
"Second cousin, actually," Alistair corrected.
My mother couldn't resist being demonstrative to me again. She half hugged me, then sat me down at the Formica table in the breakfast nook, signaling Alistair to join us. "You must be starving," she said to me. "He's used to a little snack after school," she explained to Alistair, which irritated me even farther. He seemed indifferent as he removed his cream felt hat and sat down directly across from me. "In fact, you must be starving too."
"Dodge is a car," was all I could say.
"We're not those Dodges," Alistair replied. "My grandmother says we're tons older than those Dodges. She calls them upstarts."
My mother was hustling behind us, getting food together.
I stared at Alistair, and if I'd hated him on sight, I now knew at least three reasons why. Four: he looked like me. Oh, not exactly. He was taller, and narrower waisted. His hair was a paler blond than mine, and unlike mine, it wasn't darkening—and wouldn't darken—to brown. But even as unformed, unsettled-faced nine-year-olds, we had the same features. It was more than uncanny to me, I'd just really become aware of my face, my features, my self as it were, during those past months amon
g Grace and Dawn and Lois with their attachment to and growing obsession with mirrors and their own physical uniqueness. Now I felt as though this stranger had just appeared and stolen what I'd thought was mine.
My mother set down tall glasses of milk and an assortment of snacks between us: Oreos, Fig Newtons, what appeared to be a homemade marble-swirl bundt cake.
"Well look at you two!" she said, sitting down on a third side to us. "You could be brothers rather than cousins once removed."
The phone rang, and she answered it and moved into the dining room to talk to Augie's mother.
"How long you planning to stay?" I asked: no subtlety at all.
"As long as the divorce takes."
"Divorce" was a word I'd never heard before from a child. "What divorce?"
"My father and mother's divorce," he said, delicately biting around the edge of a Fig Newton. "They're having a custody battle to see which one gets me."
Custody battle? What was that? I pictured two adults facing each other with guns in their holsters, about to draw like they did on TV.
"My dad thinks he’ll win because he found my mother with a... a correspondent!" He whispered the last word.
"Isn't that someone you write to?"
"God, you're naive!"
"Where's this battle happening?"
"Grosse Pointe. Actually, the court is in Detroit. But we're from Grosse Pointe."
I tried picturing Detroit, Michigan. On our school map it was pink and broken into two pieces by one of the Great Lakes.
"Chief Pontiac," I said. "The Indian."
"They make Pontiacs up in Flint," he corrected. He got off his chair and carried his half-finished glass of milk over to the Pyrex coffeemaker, then he adroitly poured some of the dark liquid into his glass. "Flint is a dreary place."
My mother turned back into the kitchen, wrapped in pink telephone-wire spirals.
Now he's going to get it, I thought.
"Oh, I'm sorry, Alistair. I didn't know you..."
"That's okay, Cousin Eleanor, I can help myself." He showed her the glass. "I'm used to taking mine au lait!" he said.
She left the room, and I watched as he actually dipped his Oreos— whole, without separating them and licking off the cream—into the coffeed milk, sitting in my kitchen and eating my snack, calling my mother "Eleanor," which was reserved for adults only, speaking French, having flown in a plane, with his parents divorced and battling for him, and I knew a fate had befallen me far worse than the abandonment I'd earlier feared.
When my mother came back into the kitchen to sit, she bumped against my schoolbag and it opened up.
"What's this?" she asked, pulling out the box of Gold Dust cleanser I'd bought before.
"I picked up a box at Wallford's," I said, embarrassed. "I know how you're always running out."
"I've stopped using this. I'm using Ajax now. Gold dust at my feet," she added, musingly.
"Huh?"
"That's what you two are," my mother said, holding the box on the table in front of us, "my Gold Dust Twins!"
I envisioned the next few days as pure torture. I was wrong. Well, it was torture, but of a different kind than I had supposed.
To begin with, Alistair wasn't under my feet day and night as I'd at first feared. In fact, I hardly saw him. I continued my life as usual, going to school, playing with Augie, undergoing the humiliation of batting one early evening, and striking out in several ways with Ronny Taskin's gang.
And my second cousin was nowhere in sight. He acted more like an invalid than a pest. He was still asleep in the guest bedroom each morning I woke up, breakfasted, and went to school. He was up by the time I came home after three, but sometimes in his room, reading a hardcover novel in bed, or out in the backyard, on a chaise longue, wearing my dad's oversized sunglasses, with one of my mother's movie magazines and a glass of milky coffee on the side table. Alistair stayed up long after I went to bed—sometimes talking to my parents; at other times watching "Studio One" and other post-10 P.M. programs alongside them in the living room.
One day I flashed into the house to change into my roller skates and Alistair was talking on the phone, taking notes with my mother's ballpoint pen, asking questions of whoever was on the other line. Another afternoon I found him in my sister Jennifer's bedroom, perched on the edge of her pink chenille bedspread, which was strewn with copies of Seventeen and makeup color charts, saying to her, "No. I'd go with the peach halter top. The beige holds down the color of your hair." He glanced at me, and my sister looked out at me in the hallway and soundly slammed the door in my face. That night I woke up past midnight and had to use the bathroom. I was surprised to see a light on, then thought it must have been so he wouldn't lose his way in the dark. But when I emerged from the john, I heard what were clearly the sounds from our TV, low but on. I peeped a look and spotted Alistair, all alone, looking small on the sofa, the night wind from a slightly open window behind him lightly furling his hair, as he puffed on one of my mother's Tareyton filter cigarettes. The film on the Motorola—it had to be "The Late Show"—had men in suits talking quickly and a woman in a slinky black dress. I could make no sense out of what they were saying.
He'd arrived on a Monday, and now it was Saturday. Not a particularly clement Saturday either. I was eating breakfast, watching Farmer Gray cartoons on TV, when Alistair emerged from his bedroom at 10:30 A.M. and drifted into the kitchen where he bussed my mother's cheek, murmuring "Good morning, Cousin Eleanor," grasped his glass of café au lait, wandered out to the front garden, where my dad in huge stained gardening gloves was pruning back the recalcitrant roses, greeted him, then roamed back into the "family room."
My mother said the words I'd been dreading all week. "Why don't you two do something together today?"
"Like what?" I asked, then quickly added, "It looks like rain."
"Take Alistair to the movies."
This was an all-afternoon affair, beginning with cartoons and News of the Globe, moving on through Coming Attractions, into endless serials, and climaxing in a feature film. Seven hundred boys and a few intrepid girls; noise and chaos—fine with me. Except I had no intention of having Augie or Ronny Taskin or in fact anyone I knew catch sight of Alistair, let alone with me.
Before I could think up a lie, Alistair said, "I did notice a new Joan Crawford at the Bedlington when we were shopping yesterday."
I'd seen the soppy display cards for the weeper too and would endure Chinese water torture first.
"Bwana Devil's at the Community," I replied. "It's Three-D. Lions jump out at you and spears are thrown at your face."
"Charming!" was Alistair's reply. But my parents were planning to shop in a garden supply place miles away, then visit my reputedly ill Great Aunt June (no relation to Alistair). They'd be out all afternoon, and it was clear I was to be saddled with him for the day.
I wondered how to disguise myself so my friends wouldn't know me. But we were thrust out of the house with a dollar apiece so suddenly I found myself walking more or less next to him down Spring Boulevard, headed toward the movie theaters. "More or less" since I moved us to the next, far less frequented street and kept my distance from him once we got there, circling trees, walking on lawns and even in the street, as though there were infinite spots of compelling curiosity for me, while he kept to the center of the sidewalk. Should any kid approach, I could stop to tie my Keds and let Alistair walk on.
As it turned out, no one did meet us. And at the corner of Maxwell Avenue, when I stopped and was about to lay down the law to Alistair about sitting somewhere else, he simply said, "I'm going to Torch Song. See you later."
"Wait!" I caught up with him. "If we don't get back home together, they'll know."
"Don't worry. I'll think of something," he said and aimed for the Bedlington Theater.
Kerry White was waiting under the vast expanse of the Community Theater's marquee. Evidently for someone he knew to go inside with, because the minute I arrived, he bought his t
icket, waited for me, and walked in with me. Inside the huge, ornate movie house, I spotted Augie and Ronny holding their fingers sideways over the water fountain, spurting it hard at three nearby girls. We pooled our cash and raided the refreshments counter for jujubes, popcorn, and Pez. We entered the auditorium just as the lights went down—a group of six, with Kerry trailing along—forced out a row of seven-year-olds who'd had the nerve to take our usual spot, and sat down. For a blissful three hours I completely forgot about Alistair Dodge.
I was reminded of him suddenly, in a most ghastly fashion, sometime during the icky love scene—in disgusting 3-D—of the feature film, when the fat woman who passed for a Saturday matinee usherette flashed her beam all over us, to our complaints of "Hey, watch that!"
"Are these your friends?" she asked.
Teary voiced, Alistair said yes and thanked her. He sat down right next to me! I saw the entire four months' past work on my reputation swept away in an instant.
Even in the dark, even with those ridiculous cardboard 3-D glasses on, I could tell I—we—were being watched by a dozen eyes. I didn't know what to do. Ignore him? Tell him to get out?
Before I could figure out what to do, Alistair put on his glasses and spoke up in a voice free of any tears.
"Anyone here got a cigarette?"
"I do," Kerry White, of all people, piped up and withdrew from his top pocket a crumpled but entire Camel. Alistair took it and to our astonishment lighted up and began to puff on it.
"I didn't know you were coming in here," I whispered furiously.
"Don't worry," Alistair said in a loud voice. "I didn't pay. I never pay in movies. That was just an act. You go up to some stupid-looking adult and tell her you can't find your seat."
On top of his smoking, this statement was startlingly neat. Ronny Taskin whistled.
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