The World of Normal Boys

by K. M. Soehnlein

  Two girls wearing feather earrings and tight jeans and high-heeled sandals pass them, heading back toward the building he and Scott just left, gossiping to each other, their conversation peppered with swearing and laughter. Robin lowers his head as he moves by, smelling their sharp perfume, wondering what they might smell on him.

  “So I’m gonna go that way,” Scott says when they get to the edge of the park. He nods in the direction opposite town, the other way from Robin’s home.

  “I think I’ve got a whole lot of trouble waiting for me,” Robin says, calculating the lost hours, the explanation he’ll have to provide. He pictures his school books in his gym locker, untouched for most of the day.

  “A shitload,” Scott says.

  “See you tomorrow?” Robin asks.

  “Yeah. In fucking gym class.”

  “Maybe I’ll try to find you before homeroom.”

  “OK,” Scott says. “Later.”

  He watches Scott walk away, hoping he’ll turn back and just wave at him. But Scott is walking fast, he doesn’t check for cars when he gets to a curb, enters the intersection without looking. Robin hears a car horn, the screech of brakes—he runs toward the noise in a panic. Scott hops aside and the car slams to a stop, its chrome fender plowing over the crosswalk, the driver yelling a reprimand. Scott flashes his middle finger at the car and breaks into a run, disappearing downhill into the grainy evening. Robin loses sight of him in the twisted oak branches and pale streetlight. “Later,” he says, pushing his hands in his pockets.

  He turns and runs the opposite way, darting into the street, into the glow of an approaching car. He stops short on the solid yellow line in the center of the road, waiting for the oncoming traffic to pass, feeling the dangerous growl of speeding vehicles just inches from his body. The vibration of the road grumbles under his feet, up through his legs, into his body like a fever.

  He has his story prepared, but it evaporates as he approaches the driveway and sees only his mother’s car. He remembers his father had wanted to take him to the hospital tonight, and his stomach tightens in apprehension. Most of the lights are off. He reaches under the flower pot at the bottom of the stoop for the key but finds the door unlocked. Light spreads across the hall carpet from the living room. His mother is home. The stereo plays an aria, the one from Tosca she adores so much. “I have lived for only art and love” is the English translation. He brushes off his pants—white pants smeared with crud—and swallows and walks forward.

  She is on the couch, gripping the edges of a New Yorker. Her hair is clipped up in the back. The floor lamp glows on the back of her neck and casts half her face into shadow. It occurs to him to walk up the stairs and ignore her, but her eyes are upon him immediately, cold and severe. He cannot think of a single thing to say. She shuts the magazine, folding it into one hand. With the other, she lifts her wineglass from the coffee table and drains the last mouthful. She rises and steps toward him, moving into silhouette and then into the glow of the votive candles, burning softly on the table at his side. Her eyes scrutinize him.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  The magazine swings flat against the side of his face. He trips backward, has a moment to register the sting of the first swipe before a second and a third are upon him. The edge of the pages nick the soft skin under his ear. “Your apology means nothing to me,” she says, her voice shrill, trembling. “You were sorry last night.” She raises her arm again and he catches the next blow on his shoulder. He smells the stench from his armpit, which smells to him like Scott, which makes him feel dirty and self-protective all at once.

  She lets the magazine drop to the floor and pulls him desperately to her. He lets her hug him, listens as she sniffles and her weight falls upon his shoulders. He holds her waist, steadying them both, sure he cannot support her, that they will collapse to the floor together.

  “I am sorry,” he says after a moment.

  She pushes him away. “Shut up,” she says, her throat choking on speech. “Don’t lie to me, Robin.” She wipes moisture from her eyes and stumbles to the couch.

  Seeing her try to recover, Robin thinks he might cry, too. He rubs his hand along his neck, hot from the swatting she gave him.

  Dorothy composes herself, blows her nose into a cocktail napkin, shakes the hair from her eyes. “Let me be clear, Robin. I don’t really want to know where you’ve been because I’m sure it will only disappoint me, but you are going to tell me because I am your mother. I am your mother and you are going to tell me where you’ve been for”—she checks her wristwatch—“the past seven hours.”

  “I ditched gym,” he says.

  “That much was made known to me by Mr. Cortez. On the telephone.” She stares at him. He has never seen her look at him this way, the way other people’s mothers look at their teenage children, as if they are strangers. “Sit down,” she says.

  He sits on the arm of the chair across from her.

  “Your pants are filthy,” she says.

  He retraces his steps with Scott, back to their locker room conversation. He selects the parts of the day that matter least, the things he can tell her. “I went into town,” he says. “I got pizza and looked at magazines at Woolworth’s and went to that antique store where you can watch old flip movies in the viewer. You know, the five cent ones.”

  “Nickelodeons.”

  “Yeah. We saw a funny one with Keester Cops.”

  “Keystone.”

  “And then we went to the park.”

  “We?”

  He slides down to the seat cushion. He looks at his fingers, rubs one hand with the other, wishing he could have washed before he got home.

  “Me and Scott,” he says. He is unsure how much to say, does not want to be trapped into saying everything.

  “Were you drinking? I can tell you were smoking cigarettes. I can smell that on you.” Her posture remains rigid, her eyes unblinking now that the tears have stopped.

  “We had one,” Robin says. “Scott found it.”

  “Who is Scott?”

  “Scott Schatz. A kid from school.”

  “What kind of kid?”

  “Just a kid, some kid in my gym class.”

  “One with enough luck to find a cigarette in the park.”

  “Exactly,” Robin says, matching her sarcastic tone. “And nice enough to share it.”

  “Hooray for you, pumpkin. You’ve made a friend.”

  He slams his fist into the seat.

  “Don’t you have a temper tantrum, Robin,” she hisses. “You have not earned a temper tantrum. So what else?”

  “There’s nothing else,” He watches her refill her wineglass, hating the gurgling sound, the sound of his mother drinking more. He crosses his arms. “Where’s Dad and the rest of them?” he asks.

  “At the hospital. Where do you think?” He hangs his head guiltily. “When your father found out you left school unexcused, he hit the roof. He was ready to hit you.”

  “You did a pretty good job for him,” he says, rubbing the side of his face for emphasis.

  She bangs her wineglass on the table and raises her voice. “You’re acting like a juvenile delinquent—what do you expect from me?”

  “I left school ’cause I couldn’t take it!” he blurts out. “It was worse than ever and nothing made sense and these guys in the locker room were calling me names. What was I supposed to do? Stick around and take it?”

  “You should have come home. That’s where you belong—not in the park like a common New Jersey greaseball. You should have come home.”

  “I made a friend, you should be happy I have a friend. A guy friend.” His voice trembles. He hears the truth and the lies in his words battering against each other and cannot contain the explosion of it. “Isn’t that what everyone expects, for me to be more like a guy? Have guy friends? So you know what guys do? They ditch school and hitchhike and smoke and they don’t run home to their mothers like a big crybaby.”

  Without expectin
g it, he has shattered a silence so ever-present, so old, he’d forgotten it was there. Up until third grade, he hadn’t felt so separate. He’d played with guys and girls, moving between different circles during recess. And then, after some arrangement between the school and his parents, he’d been put up to fourth, and it wasn’t ever the same. He was suddenly an interloper, a brain, spurned by new classmates whose social hierarchies were already cemented. He’d already dropped out of Cub Scouts, stopped going to Little League—moving up a grade severed the last link. There were still guys he could call friends if he wanted to—George Lincoln, his lab partner, Ricky Feeney from down the street, a shy kid who sits next to him in social studies, Gerald the Trekkie from the cafeteria—all of them contained by school hours, familiarity that starts at nine A.M. and ends at three. Only Victoria has been constant, someone to gab with for hours on the phone, to accompany him on bike rides to Dairy Queen, to watch Grease with a half dozen times, she singing Sandy’s songs, he singing Rizzo’s. A girl for a best friend.

  “I’m taking Jackson fishing on Saturday,” his father might say. “Why don’t you come along? Bring a friend?”

  “Victoria wouldn’t like that,” he’d reply, squashing the conversation. His father turning away, frustrated, baffled. The rest of it unspoken, rippling in waves.

  Dorothy leaps up and walks to the mirror, addressing her image as she speaks. “This is an absurd discussion. Your brother is in the hospital, for God’s sake, and I have to sit here and psychoanalyze you.”

  “Then don’t psychoanalyze me!” he shouts. “Just leave me alone.”

  “This entire conversation has been at fever pitch, and I won’t have it. My mother and I used to scream at each other all the time, I won’t have it with my own children.”

  Robin sees the effect of the wine in her bleary eyes. He wants to turn the spotlight off himself, so he says, “I never heard Nana scream at you.”

  She returns to the table for her glass and paces across the floor. He hears her words slurring together as she picks up speed. “Because she doesn’t anymore! When I was younger she was always drawing me into screaming matches. She’s an incredibly aggressive woman. You wouldn’t know that because she’s mellowed with age. But she has spent her whole godforsaken life waiting on Smith girls, and when she came home, she had nothing but examples to give me. Emulate this one, avoid that one. This one’s showing poor character, that one’s going to be a lady. I never had a choice but to attend Smith; it was free and it was where my mother was going to have her day, with me as Exhibit A.”

  The speakers buzz with static; the aria has ended, and the needle is hissing against the center label, stuck in place. Robin gets up and flips it over, letting the music build again into a crescendo. He falls back on the couch, exhausted. He isn’t sure why his mother is saying all this; is she still trying to get information from him about what he did today? What would she do if he told her what really happened? Would she tell his father? Would he be punished? He can’t even guess what they’d do to him if he told the truth.

  He wonders where Scott is right now, if he’s being yelled at by his father and mother. Not his mother—he remembers Scott saying his mother was in a mental hospital.

  Dorothy drops into a chair in the dining room, her back to Robin. She speaks with her face raised to the ceiling; she doesn’t seem to notice him at all. “Even in New York, she demanded that I call her every Sunday morning. I was twenty-two years old and working at Scribner’s, I was an executive secretary to the vice president of public affairs, I was dating men and going to parties. I was doing everything I wanted to do and my mother was still nagging me about doing it better.”

  He gets up and sits across from her at the table. In the dim light he can see only a hint of her faraway expression. She laughs—the sound is almost cruel. “The only thing she ever approved of was my marrying your father. She had no choice, of course.” She catches her breath and lowers her head. She reaches out and clutches one of Robin’s hands. He is surprised by the strength of her grasp. “Robin, I’m upset. I shouldn’t have struck you. Jackson’s situation is driving me crazy. Do you understand that? I know you understand that, Robin—you know me.”

  He nods in agreement, though right now he doesn’t think he knows her at all.

  “Don’t make it any worse for me. Don’t disappear on your bike. Don’t cut school. Don’t pick fights with your sister.” She is shaking his hand; their knuckles rap against the tabletop.

  He wriggles free of her grip. “Don’t drink so much wine,” he says coolly. He takes her glass with him as he leaves the table. He rinses it out in the sink, dries it, places it in the cupboard methodically. He walks past her without a word and climbs the stairs, letting the music continue its dramatic rise and fall.

  Later, tossing atop the flannel sheets on Ruby’s bed, the blanket and bedspread crumpled at his feet, he wonders if he is ill. His eyelids are heavy and dry, each blink an irritant. He is exhausted but can’t sleep. His father yelled and yelled when he got home, grabbed him by the shoulders and shook until Robin thought his neck might snap. Called him a jerk. Said he was an embarrassment. Told him he would be confined to the house except for school for the foreseeable future. His father is back at the hospital now but Uncle Stan is here. Robin can hear the distorted rumblings of the television in the living room, and the more urgent whisperings between his mother and Nana Rena from his parents’ bedroom. He is sure they are all talking about him. He leans over the edge of the bed and spits a salty, gluey gob into the white garbage pail. His throat stings as if rubbed by sandpaper. He leans his head into the pillow and his ear throbs with the memory of his mother’s slaps.

  He is remembering Scott’s face as a series of snapshots, frozen portraits: Scott in the locker room mirror; Scott in the backseat of the car, wind on his face; Scott’s hair falling forward as he pushed his body into Robin. They were kissing—he has to remind himself of this simple fact: it seems now as if it didn’t happen, couldn’t have happened. His face is hot to the touch. He runs the back of his hand along his mouth, pressing the delicate bones into the flesh of his lips, embarrassed for wanting Scott’s mouth against him again, wondering if Scott will even speak to him again. Was he a bad kisser? Scott definitely knew how to kiss, he knew how to make it feel good. He wanted to do it with me. He got me stoned and then he made me do sex. He asks himself, How do I know that was sex?

  His hand is in his pajama pants, and the images are taking over: not Scott, but Todd, Todd’s eyes in the car that morning, Todd’s hair falling into his face, Todd’s body, bigger than Scott’s, the arms stronger against his arms, the stiffness stronger against his legs. He sees Todd smiling, a smile that scares him; he feels his skin, his neck, his spine coil together into a tightening knot. Todd is shaking a fistful of his crotch like Danniman. Danniman is saying, “This girlie wants a meal,” Robin is pinned against a locker room wall, and Long Dong Danniman is pushing him pushing him pushing him.

  He buries his face in Ruby’s pillow and lets the rush of wetness fill his cupped hands.

  The clock says 11:15. He takes a chance, tiptoes downstairs. On TV, Johnny Carson is interviewing an actress in a tight dress. Johnny is raising his eyebrows, having just told an off-color joke, and the actress is laughing along uncomfortably. Uncle Stan looks up from the TV set and breaks off his own snickering to ask Robin where he thinks he’s going.

  “I have to call my friend Victoria,” Robin says, not stopping.

  “I think the phone’s pretty much off limits to you right now, buster.”

  “I’m supposed to get a ride from her in the morning,” Robin says, still moving toward the kitchen, but slowing his steps.

  “Oh, yeah?” Stan responds in a challenging tone. Robin recognizes the start of an unbearable lecture. Here we go, he thinks, stopping, resting his hands on his hips. “Weren’t you listening to your father? You’re not getting rides from any of your hotshot friends anymore. A little taste of house arrest is the
idea. Your mother’s gonna take you to school.” Stan folds his arms smugly across his belly.

  “Well, then I have to tell Victoria before she goes to bed.”

  “She’ll figure it out.” Stan jerks his thumb toward the staircase. “Good night.”

  Robin rolls his eyes. “How long are you planning on hanging around here anyway, Uncle Stan? Don’t you have to go to work?”

  Stan glares at him. “If it’s any-a your business, wiseguy, I’m taking a couple of days off. A guy’s gotta stick by his family in times of trouble.”

  “What about Larry? He’s your family.”

  “He’s with his mother.” Stan uncrosses his arms and throws them over his head, speaking while he stretches. “Anyway, I got some ideas about physical therapy for Jackson. Your father and I are gonna check out this new system a buddy-a mine’s selling.”

  Robin frowns. “Yeah, right.”

  Stan picks at a fingernail while he continues. “It’s very state-a the art stuff. I kid you not. When Jackson gets outta the hospital, it’s gonna take the newest technology to get him back up to speed.” He looks up, catching sight of Robin’s dubious expression. “Between you and me, Robin, I’d-a bought you a beer for acting a little bit out of line today. ’Cept of course you made everyone worry, and that never works. But I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: you’re already too tied to Mama’s apron strings. When all this stuff with your brother wears off, you oughtta get out there a little. I let Larry hang out, never hurt anyone. Never hurt me. In fact, I’d go so far to say that if you get some-a that stuff out of your system now, you’ll be more prepared. You know, the real world don’t have a lotta tolerance for smarty-pants types like you.”

  “Can I just make my phone call before she goes to bed?”

  A big laugh on the TV captures Stan’s attention. “Make it fast,” he says.

  Robin dials Victoria’s number from memory and stretches the phone cord to the basement stairs.