“So how far’s this gone—?”
“It’s not like that, David. She’s sweet. She’s Catholic.”
“What do you guys do?”
“Same shit as anybody, what do you think? Go to the movies. Went to the Teen Center a couple of times. But I like to go over to her house and sit on the back step and talk, too. She’s got a nice family. She never—she never even dated before. She’s so shy, till you get to know her.”
“That’s great, Ellis. Boy, things go on when you’re out of town!”
“Remember the year we got to be friends?” Ellis said. “Seventh grade. I don’t know what my daddy was thinking, bringing us out here. He couldn’t make it, farming. I guess he thought oil fields were full of something you could pick wild. He didn’t know he’d be a donkey ever after.”
“You got here just in time to watch the whole prairie dry out good.” David said.
Ellis laughed. “You know last year, when it rained? Mikey, he’s second grade, he said the teacher let all the kids go outside and stand in it all afternoon. They’d never seen a real rain. They’d never seen rain.
“Someday do you think we’ll look back, Davy, and this will have been a wonderful year? Our senior year? Will we never forget it?”
“I don’t think I’ll ever think of it again, man. Once it’s over, there’s too much ahead.”
“I hope so,” Ellis whispered. “I mean, I hope it gets better and not just grown-up.”
13.
Speech was turning out to be David’s favorite class, as good as English. He wrote an original oratory on the dangers of appeasing the “sleeping bear, the Soviet Union.” Mr. Turnbow said it was good enough to take to a speech tournament if he wanted. The first one would be in Abilene late in October. All David had done, really, was go through a stack of magazines half a foot high, picking out ideas he could agree with, and then arranging them to suit himself. He used a lot of stuff from the U.S. News and World Report. When he got up to say it, though, he believed it, and he wanted the class to believe it too. If we don’t stop giving pieces of the world away to those tyrants, we won’t have any world left. You can’t keep evil at bay by feeding it. You have to stand up to it. Of course, he didn’t say what they ought to do. He didn’t want a war, that was for sure. He wasn’t planning to throw himself away on some cold battlefield, like Korea had been. Ellis had had an uncle, his mother’s brother, killed over there. There had been kids from Basin, too, probably joined up for the excitement, who had had their tanks blown all to hell. On the other hand, you did have to keep the Russians and the Chinese over on their side of the world. You couldn’t have Communists in the Western Hemisphere. You couldn’t have them inching their way right around the world.
The next assignment was to prepare a four- to six-minute interpretation of a poem or group of poems, and David knew just where to go for that, Robinson Jeffers, one of his favorites. When he read the two poems he had selected in class, Turnbow said, “I want to see you after class, Puckett.”
Mr. Turnbow gave David a bright yellow copy of a play called “The Heiress.” It said it was based on a novel by Henry James. David had never read any James yet, but he knew he would get around to it, in college if not before. “I want you to try out for the part of Morris Townsend,” his teacher said. “I need you. I won’t have a good show without a strong Morris. I know you can do it.”
David had never tried out for a play—the idea of acting always seemed a bit precious to him—but as soon as he had the script in his hand he was eager to see if he could do it. Maybe it was being invited like that, the teacher seeing something in him, like a coach checking out a boy’s broad back.
That night he helped his mother at the hospital ward. After supper, he told Sissy he was going to try out for a play. “You might like working on a play,” he said. “Can you act?”
She giggled and said she had no idea. She was looking fine, perfectly normal; she was going to be discharged the very next day. Someone had set her hair for her, and it was wavy on each side of her part. She showed him a small leather wallet she had made, sewing through already punched holes to hold the two cut pieces together. He said it was nice, she had done a nice job, and she shoved it into his hand. “You take it,” she said. He demurred, but she said, “Please, you’ve been nice to me, you take it.”
He asked her if she was still writing in her notebook. She said, “Nothing happens here. I write things I remember, or I copy passages from the Bible.” He asked her about that, and learned she was Church of Christ, and had been baptized by immersion, the same as her momma. She spoke very softly. “It was the devil trying to work his way,” she said. He supposed she meant when she acted crazy out on the desert, but he did not ask to make sure. He did not think it would do her any good if someone heard her talking about the devil.
After the patients had gone to bed, except for the few who sat in the day room playing cards, David read “The Heiress.” He loved the elevated language of the play. People in 1850—people who had an education—spoke carefully, with fine words and extravagant courtesy. That was Morris Townsend’s forté, fine language. He said things to Catherine, the wealthy woman he was pursuing, like, “You are so gay, so sought after. It makes my way harder.” He was able to turn her every doubt to his advantage, as when he said, “If you are puzzled, you are thinking of me, and that is what I want above all—that you should think of me.” And of course it worked perfectly. Poor plain Catherine fell hard. David could see that Morris was a kind of villain, although the father, who saw through him and blocked the marriage by threatening to cut off his daughter’s inheritance, was the true villain. It was the father who was cold and implacable and ungiving! The father who taught Catherine that she was not lovable. Perhaps it was true that Morris was willing to marry her only because she was rich, but that did not mean he would not be a good husband. It did not mean that he would not be affectionate company. There was nothing in the script to suggest that he would not be kind to her. And when, at the end, after he had returned, truly sorry, and they had made plans again, Catherine jilted him in revenge, David felt like crying in frustration. How could she be so stupid! She would have got what she was paying for; was that so bad? That sort of thing must have happened all the time, must still happen. Morris was a man with no resources, who was willing to trade what he did have, his own charm and intelligence, for a comfortable life. That did not seem villainous to David. And he wanted the part. Something about the deceitful, artfully soulful Morris touched him. And he could see the pleasure there would be in dressing in a fine period costume and saying those lines, appearing before all his classmates in this guise of charmer-scoundrel. They would see that he had a talent he had not used before!
He stood in front of the bathroom mirror and practiced the dialogue. He lifted his eyebrow and tilted his head just so, standing as tall as he could. He tried lowering his voice. He stared at his reflection as if it were Catherine, making his eyes say, Trust me. Then he went to tryouts.
Except for one girl from student council, the kids at the audition were ones that David did not really know. There were no athletes, no pep squad girls. It was not that the students were weird, exactly, it was that they were like woodwork, unremarkable members of a large student population. It was interesting to watch them read. Most of them were not especially good, but they tried hard, and several were all right. You could hear them, and you could tell they wanted to be someone else, someone different from themselves. You could tell how much they wanted to be in the play. One boy who had been in a couple of David’s classes over the years, Derek-something, was an obvious choice for the father, Dr. Sloper. Derek was fat, with a nice clear voice, and you could see that in a costume, with sideburns and makeup, he would look prosperous and older. Girls seemed to have come from everywhere, pale-lily types and fat girls, but also perfectly presentable girls he just did not know. He read with several of them, twice as Dr. Sloper, a part he did not want, and after the first hour or so, as
Morris, with three different girls. Although one girl looked a lot like he imagined Catherine looking, plain as oleo, she had an insipid voice, and she could not seem to stand still. David noted how distracting her purposeless movement was, and immediately resolved to stand in place, as if he owned his little part of the stage. Each time Mr. Turnbow interrupted to change the student reading Catherine, but kept David on, David felt more confident. He stopped wiggling and gulping, stopped worrying so much about how he sounded, and concentrated instead on the words, on Morris’ goal, to win Catherine and her fortune.
It was getting late, after nine o’clock, when Mr. Turnbow called up Patsy Randall to read Catherine. She was not a very attractive girl, bony and broad-shouldered, with wild curly hair she didn’t seem to bother styling. She might have had an okay figure, but you could not really tell under the shapeless boy’s shirt she wore with jeans. She was in David’s honors English class, had been last year, too, and she was a good student, always asking questions as well as answering them, but David, who had occasionally admired something she said, had not paid her any real attention. She did not have the delicacy he liked in a girl, nor the style. And she had never so much as looked his way, as far as he could remember. But when she began to read, he felt a shock of recognition, as if she were someone he did know and had forgotten, or someone he should have known, or, even, someone he had known in a dream, or another life. She made him nervous, in a pleasantly disturbing way. Her voice was wonderful, as deep as Susan Hayward’s in “I Want To Live.” She already had a repertoire of timid movements for the Catherine character—he guessed she had spent some time in front of her mirror, too!—and she had a compelling quality. He watched her read with a real turkey named Mark; she helped Mark along, made him look better than he was, while all the while you only really cared what she was saying. David could see what Mr. Turnbow meant about Morris’ part. If the actor playing it were weak, he would not be able to use Patsy Randall, for she would dominate the relationship, and the play. He was eager to read with her, the way he had sometimes been eager to play a certain tennis player, not because he could beat him, but because he could not be sure. When he did read, he felt like a current was passing between them. She read better than ever, and he knew that she made him look good. They read the scene where Morris proposes to Catherine, and as her eyes lit up, as if what he said were real, as if it mattered, as if she loved him and he could have what he wanted, he felt a gush of pleasure and anticipation, whether as David entering his first experience as an actor, or as Morris looking forward to a gentleman’s life, he did not have enough experience to tell.
Mr. Turnbow said, “Let’s call it quits for the night. I’ll post callbacks in the morning, for tomorrow night. If you’re not cast, remember we really need you for crew, and there’ll be another play in the spring. You’re a great group!” He came close to where David was standing and spoke to the girl from Student Council, Betsy, who had folded up some of the chairs and stacked them in the wings. He was telling her he admired her leadership qualities, and he wanted her to think about stage managing the play. David admired Turnbow’s enthusiasm and warmth, and his voice, too, which lacked all but a trace of the nasal West Texas twang, and he admired the way he took Betsy’s obvious disappointment—she was not going to be cast—and turned it to his advantage and hers at the same time, giving her a different task in the show and making it seem important, too, which it probably was.
“And you two,” Mr. Turnbow said as he caught David’s eye. Most of the kids were gone. Patsy Randall had helped Betsy pick up scripts and turn out lights. “Patsy, David.”
As soon as Mr. Turnbow came close, David felt like shouting. He could see the excitement in the teacher’s eye. Mr. Turnbow said, “You have no idea how good this is going to be.” He wanted David and Patsy to come by during lunch. “I have some tapes I want you to use to practice, get rid of those tight little e’s, put some crispness in your consonants. Can you do that, say a couple lunch hours a week for a while?”
David grinned and, not thinking, reached out and took the girl’s hand and squeezed it. She smiled and squeezed back, then pulled her hand away nicely. “Whatever it takes,” she told Mr. Turnbow. To David, as they went out of the building, she said, “Looks like we’ll be working together, huh?”
He stopped in his tracks, and so did she. They were almost exactly the same height, but she was not a small girl. He lifted his brow and smiled again. “I’m looking forward to it a lot,” he said smoothly.
“You’re already him, aren’t you?” she said. He could not tell if that was supposed to be a compliment or not.
The next time he saw Sissy was Friday, after the “Heiress” cast had been posted. The afternoon had cooled and turned blowy, and he and Ellis had batted balls back and forth the last hour of school, and for a while afterwards. They had grown desultory when David noticed Sissy standing off to the side, at the end of the court. “Want to do this tomorrow?” he asked Ellis, picking up two balls and walking along the edge of the concrete, where it was cracked like a dry cuticle.
“I’m going out with my daddy tomorrow,” Ellis said. “We’re going over by Hobbs somewhere, I don’t think I’ll get back till late Sunday.”
“That doesn’t give you much of a break.”
“It gives me a check, ole buddy,” Ellis said, and headed back toward the gym.
David waved at Sissy on his way in. When he came back out and started his walk home, she appeared off the grounds somewhere and came up alongside him.
“You live by me, remember?”
“Oh yeah,” he said. She was carrying a couple of books and an ugly plastic pocketbook. “I thought you weren’t staying there, though.”
She shrugged. “It didn’t work out, staying in a foster home. My parents wanted me home real bad.”
They walked a few blocks in silence. David felt like he ought to be nicer, but he didn’t know how. Away from the hospital, where he had tried to make her feel like she would be better soon, he had nothing to say to her. She wasn’t likely to have anything going on at school.
“Come in a minute?” she asked. “I’ll show you my room.”
He was taken by surprise. It seemed such a pathetic request. Show you my room?
He met her mother, a grown-up Sissy with the same mousy hair and weak face, the way Sissy would look one day, all worn out. Mrs. Dossey was in the kitchen peeling potatoes while a baby squalled and banged on a pot practically underneath her feet.
Sissy’s room was done up in pink and white. She had frilly curtains, a pink flowered bedspread with a white ruffled border, and half a dozen dolls propped against pillows. It was the kind of room you invented for a girl but didn’t know if any really had, a nicer room than the rest of the small house, though the furniture was shabby, and he guessed the trimmings were all from Sears. There were magazine photos of Janet Leigh and Ava Gardner taped to the mirror. Glee liked Ava Gardner, too, and James Dean and Natalie Wood. Glee’s bedroom was yellow and light green, with a big mirrored dresser and a carpeted floor. Girls seemed to need stuff like this around them, to remind them they were girls.
“Go on, you can sit on the bed,” Sissy said. The mattress sagged as he sank onto it. She reached into a drawer in her dresser, under some other things, and brought out the notebook he had bought her, bright blue with a kitty on the cover.
She sat down on the stool by her dresser, and began immediately to read in a small piping voice.
There is a boy in my history class with pimples so bad on his neck it looks all blistered over. Once I had a pimple on my chest and it took a long time to come to a head. Every day I’d look at it a bunch of times, wanting it to do whatever it had to do. I felt like I had done something bad to deserve this little sore thing. It burst one night while I was asleep and made a little wet spot on my pajama top. I never had another, at least not yet. I never had any on my face. I guess I’m just lucky.
Christ! David thought. He could not think of a word to say
.
Sissy was looking at him happily, all pleased with herself. “I do have moles, though,” she said.
He tried to think what Morris would say, not that girls in 1850 ever mentioned the body. “The hair on my chest is not much more than fuzz,” he heard himself say. He took a long slow breath. “We all have our flaws and worries, don’t we? We all worry about things nobody else notices.”
“One more?” Sissy said, and turned a page. She looked almost perky, now that she had his attention. David thought she must be the strangest girl he ever met; actually, he was beginning to think all girls were nuts. One day he would ask her about the rabbit, and about her dad. Probably she had talked about them until she was sick of it, in the hospital. She read.
Mrs. Munsing, who lives next door, came here from Minnesota when she was a young woman, because of her allergies. She thought the clean high air would make her well. She got married and had children. Her son died of rheumatic fever, and a daughter died of polio. Her husband died of a heart attack when he was only 51 years old. But Mrs. Munsing, who moved here to stop sneezing, hasn’t even had a cold in thirty-five years. She told my mother God picked her out especially for suffering, and made her strong so she would live long enough for a lot of it, like Job.
“Well!” David said. “You could probably make a story out of that.” He meant it too, though it was not the kind of story that interested him, and Mrs. Munsing seemed a dull sort, whatever her sad life. “It’s sort of like an O.Henry story, or de Maupassant, ironic,” he said, though those writers were clever, annoyingly so. Irony did not work if you said, Look, isn’t this the oddest thing anyway! Irony was not Ripley’s Believe It or Not, not Leland’s store of amazing newspaper anecdotes. Old Bodkins had told the class once, kids your age have no sense of irony, which he thought might be true because life for Basin kids was so predictable. A sense of irony was like a highly refined sixth sense. He knew life was likely to turn around on a dime and show him something he hadn’t been expecting. Irony was his mother journeying to New York and coming home as burdened as if she had never left. His father, child of immigrants, finding a way to live in a foreign land. Irony was his sister leaving one tyrant and marrying another. Irony always had something absurd in the heart of it, it relied on gullibility or bad luck. David preferred stories that were tragic and inevitable, where events piled up on one another like a mountain of rocks, until one last event toppled everything. Like Anna Karenina.
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