Winning the City Redux

by Theodore Weesner

“You don’t have to worry about me. I really like you.”

  “What if you stop liking me?”

  “You don’t have to worry. I won’t ever say anything.”

  “Thanks for saying that. I’m going to hang up now, Dale. Please, no more phone calls. I’ll see you in class . . . as your teacher. Okay?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  On which word she hangs up and the dial tone commences. Experiencing less rejection than before, Dale pauses before replacing the receiver. She did not tell him strictly not to call. She said please. Did it mean, if he called again, that she would talk to him anyway?

  CHAPTER 11

  THERE COMES AN AFTERNOON IN A SCHOLASTIC CONFERENCE game in which the bleachers are full as Dale puts the ball in play and, moving up-court, glimpses Miss Furbish standing near the stepping-stone of bleachers, where she has a view of the action on the court. His heart balloons. Miss Furbish in half-heels, a tweed suit over a blouse, glasses on a lanyard, and, alas, a wrist in her hand as she is watching. Might she be wearing and holding the bracelet, taking in its secret power? Despite all that she has said, is she a girlfriend stopping by to watch her boyfriend play basketball?

  Returning down-court, of a self-conscious mind to display his manly leadership, Dale steals a glance to where she had been only to find her gone from any of his searching glances. At home by himself that night, obeying her instruction that he never call again, he has to fight himself against taking up the receiver, dialing her number, and having her know, as before, that he loves her and wants to be with her.

  # # #

  DAYS AHEAD OF Miss Furbish going out of town (to attend a teachers’ conference in Chicago) Mr. Plourde makes a remark in metal shop that Dale knows he will not be passing on to his ever-worried Secret Flame. “Miss Furbish a good homeroom teacher?” the man asks as Dale clamps a sheet of copper into a vice in the making, with rivets, of a small lidded box.

  “She’s cool,” Dale says as the man lingers at his shoulder in safety glasses and the shop coat he always wears over his shirt and tie. Mr. Plourde is sort of smiling, and Dale guesses he’s out to hear anything he can of Miss Furbish (like Lucky and Doreen Zimmerman!) for the thrill any mention of the attractive teacher will trigger. No way the man with a perpetual five-o’clock shadow would imagine a fourteen-year-old ninth-grader with a twenty-six inch waist having been involved with a teacher, Dale assures himself.

  Nor any need to make Miss Furbish worry, he also thinks, not like she did during his call, when she asked in a low voice if anyone had said anything else to him? Mrs. Marr, civics, she admitted, leaned close to her in the teachers’ lounge and said, “Some of these ninth-grade boys can be downright sexy, can’t they?” That was it, a remark from out of nowhere that had Miss Furbish feeling suspicious. Why would Mrs. Marr address such a question to her? Had Dale ever caught Mrs. Marr looking at him? Miss Furbish could not help thinking that Mrs. Marr had seen something that had triggered an awareness that had her putting out a feeler to see if it might provoke a response?

  “I’m not even sure where her room is,” Dale said. “Isn’t it . . . near the library?”

  “It’s how these things come out,” Miss Furbish told him. “An ‘innocent question’ can be for the record, to see how someone responds. To see if something is explained differently later! There comes a call from the principal, a note in your mailbox asking you to stop by. Dale, you have to read more mystery novels,” she added, as if to lessen her paranoia as well as her worry.

  “I think she has something going with Mr. Plourde,” Dale said, to lighten things up.

  “Fine, make fun of me. The unfortunate truth is that things do come out. When people look back they always say the first clue came by way of how someone looked when a certain something was said in the teachers’ lounge.”

  While laughing, Dale said, “It won’t come from me. I’ll take it to the grave. Nothing really happened anyway.”

  “There’ll come a day. I’ll be long gone—hopefully—and you’ll be all grown up. You’ll say to someone, ‘You know . . . when I was in ninth grade I had something of a relationship with my homeroom teacher, who was thirty-six. I promised I would take the secret to the grave . . . but I have to tell someone.’”

  “I won’t do that,” Dale said.

  “This is one thing I know better than you. You’ll admit that she sat with you on her couch in the dark . . . before she came to her senses and sent you packing.”

  “Is that what happened?”

  “Of course it is. I do enjoy talking to you on the phone . . . when what I should be doing is preparing tomorrow’s lesson plans. Sending you packing is what I needed to do then and is what I have to do now. This terror is not good for my health.”

  Miss Furbish was so serious in her sudden willingness to talk a bit that Dale, made heartsick by her words, did not know how to respond. Whereupon she said she was going to hang up, and did so.

  CHAPTER 12

  DALE DISCOVERS THAT HE ENJOYS BEING ALERT TO Mr. Plourde making veiled inquiries about Miss Furbish, though he has no intention of passing anything on to her. Following his Friday practice—by which time Miss Furbish is on her way to Chicago, by train, as she disclosed in homeroom—what Dale does have to process, in the locker room, is Sonny Joe and the Bothner brothers entering the gym for their privileged workout.

  “What could be more unfair than one City League team getting to use a school gym?” Dale says to the lanky boy.

  “Screw you, hillbilly,” is Sonny Joe’s shocking reply, avoiding eye contact.

  Eye contact being avoided is hurtful to Dale in his ongoing ostracism at the hands of his long-time teammate, and leaves him feeling hopeless and helpless. Exclusion has occurred in other ways, however small or hardly recognizable. Not least of which are moments of Scholastic hoop itself. In-bounds plays and full-court presses. Blocking out and breaking out. The Mother Truckers are learning moves and plays that Dale—for all his practicing and commitment—has not been taught by anyone, certainly not Coach Burke, and he finds himself stricken with jealousy.

  He also overhears that Zona Kaplan is having another party on Saturday night and that she and the older Bothner brother have become an item. His team, his gym, and now Zona, the original girl of his adolescent dreams. The messages may be no more clear than what Miss Furbish believed had come from Mrs. Marr in the teacher’s lounge, but they have Dale sitting lost in despair on a locker room bench. What the Flintstone Truckers are taking from him has been as intrinsic as school itself. Was it his fate alone, or does he deserve the losses he’s being compelled to endure?

  # # #

  MISS FURBISH TRAVELING to Chicago in a lighted train car, gazing from a window. Dale’s missing of her grips his imagination, no matter many weeks having passed since he shared her silken embrace. In response, his urge, as before, is to light up in the locker room, to be a tough kid willing to deal some independence and defiance to any and all. To stand proud like Lucky, Grady, Chub, with a grin on one side of his mouth, a cigarette on the other. Perch on this, you jerks, he imagines telling them.

  He also imagines visiting Zona’s party and lighting up before them all. He would be the only one smoking and the girls from his years of bringing wins to Walt Whitman would be shocked . . . but maybe thrilled. Dale Wheeler is smoking! Some bossy girl or overbearing parent would tell him to take his filthy cigarettes and leave, which is what he’d do, saying, “Up yours—perch on this!” Or maybe some boy would act smart with him and he would say, “Flying Wheel is my name, asshole, and kicking ass is my game. Step outside and tell me about it.” Flying Wheel for sure! His fists would flash, smack, zap, pow, and two or three of them would end up in a bloody pile. “Up your candy asses with a ten-foot pole!” he’d tell them. “You mess with Flying Wheel . . . bleeding will be your deal!”

  His experience, in fact, standing to button up at last, is an intake of breath and an instant of heartbreak. Eyes blurring. He never did anything to any of them,
only worked to be good on the court, to represent them well, and they cut him out of everything. In-bounds plays and full-court presses. With that training, going into high school, he’d make varsity in his first year for sure. For no one ever worked harder, or would gain more from being coached by an ex-pro . . . while what they did was give his position to the coach’s son. Day after day, the clinging misery refuses to wash away.

  # # #

  SATURDAY EVENING, WHEN his father has gone carousing and Dale doesn’t have Miss Furbish about whom to dream, he dials Zona’s number, thinking, as in homeroom, that she remains a friend and might reassure him that all isn’t lost at Walt Whitman. “It’s me,” he says when she is called to the phone. “Handsome guy who sits beside you in homeroom.”

  “Dale?”

  “Right on both counts,” he says, wondering, if the Bothners had not come along, would what happened with Miss Furbish have happened with Zona? Is that how it works, when you go steady? “I was wondering what you meant that time you said you couldn’t believe some of the things I said,” he says to Zona, scrambling for something to say.

  “When was that?”

  “I don’t know . . . sometime.”

  “Is that why you called?”

  “Sort of. And to find out when you were going to invite me to that party you told me about and said not to tell anyone.”

  Upon a pause, she says, “What party?”

  “The one you told me about.”

  “Didn’t you come to that party?”

  Even as it stings to have her play false with him, Dale says, “Hm, maybe I did. I go to so many parties, I forget sometimes which ones are which.”

  “Is there something else, because I have to go.”

  “Well—”

  “I have to go,” she says, interrupting him.

  That was that, and Dale sits with the dial tone buzzing in his ear. Replacing the receiver, he feels stupid. Yes, down deep he had imagined doing with Zona what he nearly did with Miss Furbish, but Zona’s world has become one where he knows he no longer stands a chance. He has a life, doesn’t he? Why did he turn to her, and let her make him feel like a loser? He should have known better.

  # # #

  IN TIME, DALE takes down the phone again. It’s another chance call. Despite something telling him not to do it, he is unable to help himself. Lucky Bartell. In his mind is not any image of Crazy Johnny but of meeting up downtown with some of the Little Ms and maybe hanging out together or going to a movie. Anything to be away from the foolish person who just called Zona Kaplan and was told, in so many words, that he had been removed from her list of junior high school friends.

  “Lucky, Dale Wheeler,” he says when Lucky’s father has called him to the phone.

  “Flying Wheel, what’s the deal?”

  “Ah . . . just calling to see . . . by chance . . . if you guys are doing anything . . . wanna take in a flick . . . something downtown?”

  A pause follows. “Shoot, man, cain’t tonight. What I’m doing is going to Doreen Zimmerman’s and, truth is, have played all kinds of hell getting her to let Grady come along for some action with her girlfriend, Sandy Shaw. Sandy Shaw has a thing for Grady, and, thing is, two rednecks is about all they will tolerate at one time on the north side of Miller Road. You know what I’m saying?”

  “No sweat . . . just thought you guys might be hanging out.”

  “Won’t be long, we’ll be in the playoffs,” Lucky says. “Looks certain we’ll be playing Lowell in the first round.”

  “They’ll be tough, but we can handle ’em.”

  “We win . . . it’s your guys in your gym, man. Gonna be up for that?”

  “I’ve never wanted to play a team like I wanna play the Mother Truckers. We’re gonna kill ’em for being the fat rich jerks they are.”

  “It’ll be tough, from what I hear . . . but you got it right. Orange and black, take no flak! Always show up, always fight back! We’ll show those fat rich jerks.”

  “Betcher ass.”

  CHAPTER 13

  LATE SUNDAY DALE CONSIDERS TELEPHONING MISS FURBISH again—on her return from Chicago—no matter having been all but told not to call again. He won’t ever be allowed to visit her again, he’s certain, but maybe she’ll give in to talking on the phone, if only for a few minutes.

  When the time comes and his father remains at home (Sunday evenings are more for snoozing than playing tunes when his father isn’t on a bender) Dale slips out and hikes into Lower Downtown, to use one of the pay phones in a folding-door booth at Peck’s Drug Store. Alas, there is her voice, and while he hasn’t expected to receive the dressing down he is about to receive his heart leaps up at the prospect of speaking with her a bit on the phone. But something is different at once—her voice has an edge—and when she says, “Dale, I thought I asked you not to call me?” he can only say, “I just wanted to say I was worried, that’s all . . . and tell you what I did over the weekend.”

  “Which was what?”

  “Well, nothing. I called Zona, about her party, only to have her give me some baloney. And I tried Lucky Bartell, to see about getting together in town, like going to a movie, only to have nothing come of that either.”

  “You did call Zona?”

  “I wanted to see if she was having another party to which I wasn’t invited.”

  “Was she?”

  “I guess so. She wouldn’t say.”

  “It’s what you should be doing, calling girlfriends and going to parties.”

  Surprised by her words, Dale says, “She’s not my girlfriend. You are,” he adds, disguising his remark as a joke when he isn’t joking at all.

  “I have to tell you right now, Dale. I saw the light in Chicago, on the train . . . and I’m determined to put things right between us. Calling Zona, wanting to go to a party . . . that only reinforces what I’ve been thinking. It’s nice, I guess, that you have a crush on your teacher . . . no harm in that . . . but the calls and visits, the gifts, the flirtation . . . they aren’t right. I don’t mean to give up on you—I am not giving up on you—but this relationship, whatever we call it . . . has to end. There are no two ways about it. Our ‘friendship’ cannot end well, for either one of us, if it keeps going. It has to end! I’m sorry.”

  “Are you mad?” Dale asks.

  “I suppose I am—with myself more than with you. What I’m saying is that I went through a weekend of soul-searching, much of it having to do with harm I might be causing you, let alone myself. Calling Zona is what you should be doing! I understand that even if you don’t.”

  “Wow,” Dale says, feeling nailed as on other occasions by Miss Furbish. “I guess you are smarter than I am,” he adds, still hoping to make her laugh.

  “Than me,” she corrects.

  “Than me,” Dale says, stung by her tone.

  “I’m not smarter, in any case. Just more experienced. You’re bright, Dale, as I’ve known all along. Acknowledging that someone is more experienced is a bright thing to do. Listen now: I will not be able to see you again outside of homeroom! Don’t make me say it again. We can be friends as teacher and student in school. But this is the end of anything more personal. I also want you to promise to be mature, to not act hurt . . . and to never mention any of this to anyone!”

  Confused, Dale says, “You really are angry.”

  “Only with myself. I want you to understand . . . I’ll always like you as a friend from a certain time. The person I’m angry with is myself.”

  “I’ve really liked you,” Dale utters, wanting her to believe it as he stands with his back to the door, facing the interior of Peck’s Drug Store on a quiet Sunday night.

  “Please don’t be hurt. I mean it when I say I’ll always like you. My life—yours, too, believe me—passed before my eyes in that hotel room in Chicago, and I was aghast with myself for all but falling into a relationship with a ninth-grade student.”

  So it is, in his hurt and confusion, in the rejection implicit in what he feels
to be her condescending tone, that Dale is the one to hang up. Pausing for a moment, he pushes out through Peck’s with a film over his eyes and emotion gripping his heart. It’s over, he allows, only to have the hurt take his breath away again.

  CHAPTER 14

  RETURNING HOME, DALE FINDS HIS FATHER IS IN THE KITCHEN fixing himself a bite to eat. Looking up, he says to Dale, “A lady called to speak to you . . . said it had to do with school.”

  “Probably Zona. Sits in front of me in homeroom.”

  “It wasn’t a schoolgirl, son, it was a woman.”

  “Oh. Maybe it was a teacher.”

  “You got something going on with a teacher?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Continuing to suffer hurt in his bedroom, making believe he’s preparing for school, Dale decides against returning to Peck’s to return her call. She’ll have more lecturing to do, more promises to extract that will only intensify his rejection, and his thought is to let her sweat it out as well.

  Appearing in Dale’s doorway, his father says, “You doing okay?”

  “I think so.”

  “Don’t get yourself into something that will weigh you down, not at your age,” his father tells him. “I’ve always known you to be your own man . . . don’t be letting me down.”

  “I won’t,” Dale says, no matter hurting and wanting more than anything to speak to Miss Furbish, wanting to be with her again. How can he live and not be with her again?

  His father leaves Dale with an implicit invitation to join him in the kitchen if he wants to do so, which Dale does after a moment. His father knows. Just like that. He knew of the Bothners cheating in their winning of Soap Box Derbies, and knew that a teacher telephoning a ninth-grade boy at home on a Sunday night was other than it might appear to be. His father isn’t the ignorant hillbilly that people like Burkebutt want to think he is. Nor is Lucky Bartell’s father an ignorant hillbilly. Nor is he, Dale tells himself, and he isn’t going to just give in like someone who doesn’t know a thing.