Little Boy

by Anthony Prato

  “Please just tell me if you think he’s cute.”

  “No,” she answered, lifelessly.

  ***

  January is the worst of all the months of the year. Not only does it begin after a week-long Christmas vacation which makes school all the more difficult to get used to, but it’s also fucking freezing. The January of my senior year was especially bad because of all the goddamn snow we got in New York. A few inches would’ve been acceptable, we got twenty inches in January alone. It was so bad that for a three-day stretch end of the month, all the schools in the city had off.

  Everyone in my family was home those days. The snow began on a Tuesday evening. Spending the next five days in a cozy-warm house watching rented movies and TV provided a welcome relief to frigid air outside.

  I’d always liked blizzards. Not being in them, but watching them. Slowly, but deliberately, each square inch of terrain gets covered with these mysterious white particles called snowflakes. Watching those snowflakes fall, I thought of good old Mr. Dick. Attempting to jolt some interest into his ordinarily mundane class, Mr. Dick used to wave his arms and say that we were pummeled daily with “billions and billions” of different wavelengths of all sorts, from ultraviolet to cosmic waves. He squealed it, in a high-pitched voice. Mike and I used to laugh about it during class. As I walked home from the grocery store, I kept thinking about the billions and billions of snowflakes that fell to earth and covered up everything that was familiar to me. All of the dirt and shit on the streets was gone. Old and new cars, Cadillacs and Fords, were identical beneath sheets of snowdrift. Children on my block burrowed through snow dunes and raced down their front lawns in garbage can covers.

  A part of me hated those kids for upsetting the equality and peacefulness that immediately followed the blizzard. When my father asked me to clear the driveway and sidewalk, I balked at first not because I hated shoveling, but because, somehow, the snow looked like it belonged there, at least for a while. It concealed the city’s stains, and I liked that. Removing it was like waking a little baby when he’s asleep.

  After a snowstorm, the sun is always so bright white and the sky so azure. I guess I just felt that the snow should naturally melt away as the sun glistened through the great blue sky and melted it, snowflake by snowflake. And then, within a few weeks, barring further snowfall, the neighborhood would return to its old self again. You always knew that sooner or later you’d see again what you’d seen before.

  I thought of all this as I shoveled the sidewalk and steps in front of my house. As I did that, the mailman trudged up the street toward my stoop with a fistful of envelopes. I wondered why he was forced to go to work on a day when everyone else off. And I sort of felt bad for the guy.

  ***

  To every guy in Queens, and all across America, February 14, 1993 was Friday. For women, however, it was Valentine’s Day, the most meaningful day of the year.

  In light of this, I was determined to give Maria my best and most unexpected present yet. I would cook her dinner that night, that much was sure. But I had to do more than that.

  I sat at my bedroom desk a few days before Valentine’s Day with one thought in mind: I won’t leave this back-breaking chair until I have written a poem about Maria. Three hours and a hand cramp later, I’d churned out the most truthful, accurate poem of my life:

  Once upon a time, a time more dark than now

  You were a little girl, but more than you know how.

  You had your energy, and those same brown eyes

  Your voice sounded the same, but your head told lies.

  You didn’t lie to friends, or people that you knew

  Your lie was even worse. You told a lie to you.

  Cloaked by a trick mask, where you did not belong

  You knew it felt so wrong, but you went right along.

  In this land of tears, from which you could not part

  You had but one bright light, and it was your heart.

  For in your heart you knew of your deadly sin

  And one more day of lies was sure to do you in.

  So all that you did, after all that while

  Was listen to your heart, and give yourself a smile.

  It looked the same to them, your audience of friends

  But it was not an act. You’re part came to an end.

  Your past can’t be destroyed—Be that as it may

  A lesson still remains to this very day.

  Don’t compromise your smile to please someone else

  For it is tough enough just to be yourself.

  I didn’t read this poem to Maria. I didn’t give it to her in a typical off-white envelope. Instead, I had it published in New York Newsday. Each February 14th, Newsday published a special classified section devoted not to used cars and help wanted ads, but to romantic blurbs sent in by readers, one buck per line.

  So, after cooking Maria breaded veal cutlets, curry rice, and fresh cauliflower, I gazed across the twin candles on the table and into her fiery eyes.

  “I have another present for you,” I said, smiling.

  “A.J., you don’t have to give me anything. What you’ve done for me tonight is more than I expected. In fact, it’s wonderful.” She walked over to my chair, grabbed my hand, and led me downstairs to her bedroom.

  Standing beside her bed, she spoke softly, as if she had just made an important but pleasant position. “I want to thank you for your gift, and show you how much I love you.” She unbuttoned her blouse, exposing a transparent, lacy pink bra. She began to unzip her jeans when I stopped her.

  I was horny as hell. But I had to stick to the plan. “Wait a second. I have another present for you.”

  “You’re amazing, A.J. You really are. Whatever it is, I don’t deserve it.” She was half-naked and looked so goddamn hot.

  “Yes you do.” My voice trembled with nerves and hormones. But before we do anything physical, I want you to open my last gift.” With that, I handed her a copy of the morning edition of Newsday.

  Confused, she smiled, politely. “Is there an editorial in here that you want me to read?”

  “Actually, yes there is. It’s on page C-23, in the upper left hand corner.”

  She opened the paper up to C-23 and began to read the poem. She mouthed each word as if she was in church reciting prayer. Then she placed the paper on her bed and jumped into my arms, legs and all.

  “Oh, A.J.!” she exclaimed. “How did you know all of this, how did you know?” She was thrilled beyond my wildest expectations, wrought with rapture and nostalgic reflection.

  “So, I guess what I wrote is true?”

  She started to cry. “Absolutely. And, without you, I would’ve never found my real smile, or the real me. Thank you so much, hopeful. I love you so much.”

  I heard a door slam upstairs. Her parents had just returned from an AA meeting.

  “Do you mind if I show my parents this poem?” she asked. “It would help me explain so much to them.”

  “Sure, go ahead.”

  She galloped up the stairs and I sat, satisfied with my triumph, anticipating the passionate sex to come. Not that I’d written the poem to get great sex. I wrote it because I loved her and believed my words to be authentic. But hell, if hot sex was a consequence, who was I to complain?

  I couldn’t hear their exact words through the floor, but the happy sounds indicated Maria was making a hubbub of my poem.

  I sat on her bed, silently awaiting the bliss to come. I was, for that moment, happy. Even doubts about her past could not penetrate my concentration. Smiling, I looked around her room. On the wall across from her bed I noticed something I’d never noticed before: a window frame. It wasn’t a window opened up to the outside. In fact, Maria’s little basement hideout had no real windows whatsoever. The window I noticed that night was a simple, glassless, mahogany frame adorned with a pair of silky yellow drapes which opened up to the cinder block wall.

  Before I had another second to ponder my discovery, Mari
a fluttered back down the stairs, poem in hand.

  “So, did they like it?” I asked.

  Maria beamed. Tears rolled down her eyes as we embraced.

  “Maria, I was just wondering what that was,” I said, pointing to the non-window.

  “Oh, I guess you never noticed that before, huh? Well, in case you didn’t realize, I don’t have any real windows down here. Long story short, there’s a second-floor apartment upstairs above my parents’ place. When I was a little girl, I used to live there. Back then, I had two real windows in my room and both allowed the sunlight to stream in all day. But when my father lost his job and my family was short on money, we had to rent out that floor. So me and my sister moved down here, to the basement.”

  “Where’s your sister’s room?” I asked.

  “It’s back there,” she said, pointing to a splintery wooden door leading to what I thought was the boiler room. “But she’s never home. She’s always at her boyfriend’s house around the corner. She sleeps there all the time. So I have this little basement all to myself. And we have it to ourselves.”

  “But what about the window?” I asked.

  “Oh yea, the window. Anyway, when I was about nine years old, I begged my mother to let me move back upstairs. I didn’t understand why we had to give up the second floor. I told her, ‘Mommy, I want to look out my window again.’ Sympathetically, she said I couldn’t have my old room and old window back, but she’d give me the next best thing: my very own special window, one that I could look through and see whatever I wanted, not just Ridgewood.” She chuckled and then continued. “My mother always promised that someday I’d have a real window to look through. But it’s been seven years and, well, you know the rest.”

  “Maria, that’s the most touching story I’ve ever heard. If I could buy you a house with a big bay window I would. Maybe next Valentine’s Day.” I smiled.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, “I don’t need a real window anymore. Until tonight, I’d never realized just how much you understood me or my life. Your poem has opened up a window to my heart tonight. And only you and I have the privilege to gaze through it, to see what’s inside.

  “I love you, A.J.”

  “I love you, too, baby.”

  ***

  I should have made every day thereafter like Valentine’s Day.

  Instead, weeks passed, more snowfall came, and I couldn’t stop worrying. Don’t you know, I asked the snow one day while shoveling, that Maria is lying to me? But the snow didn’t respond. It just melted, slowly, day after day, ultimately revealing the old neighborhood once again. Shoveling the snow each week, I thought of a zillion creative ways that Maria could lie to me. It’s all I could think about.

  Images of her laughing and joking with her old friends and boyfriends struck me like lightening each moment I was awake. As I lay in bed each night, aching to fall asleep in peace, elaborate conspiracy theories involving Maria bounced like racquetballs within my head.

  Each morning I woke charged with jealousy. Wicked thoughts began to dance and play within my mind before my first cigarette, teasing and taunting me like little children with BB guns. The thoughts knew who was boss. I could fight like hell each day, and occasionally win a battle against my own shame, but it would eventually win the war. Burglars can’t help but rob a home when the door is left wide open with nobody home.

  My days went something like this: One moment I’d be in school, doing math or history, and then—wham!—a thought would whack me with a punch in the jaw. With each thought, the swelling and stinging intensified in the form of more thoughts; the pain and thoughts grew exponentially. More images of Maria kissing some faceless boy I’d never met; more pictures of her smiling little face laughing at another guy’s joke; more fear and hatred for people long gone from her mind.

  Sick thoughts. Crazy thoughts.

  These thoughts were more intense when I was with her. When I gazed into her eyes, memories of times of which I wasn’t part of multiplied like amoeba, first two, then four, then eight. And then, within minutes, a thousand crazy thoughts would permeate my mind, forcing me to stop whatever I was doing and obey their lead. After being bombarded by these thoughts, my heart would feel empty and weak, and soon be overcome by resentment.

  No, not resentment. Hatred.

  I hated Maria for her past. Not because her past was particularly despicable, but because she had a past, period. There was a time before me, A.J. L’Enfant, and I couldn’t bear to think of it. And yet I thought about it all the time.

  Laying nude on Maria’s bed, wrapped in her soft arms, it would begin oh-so-innocently. Amidst a beautiful conversation with Maria following sex, or a snowball fight, or whatever, that little devil would appear on my shoulder and whisper, “Ask her, A.J. Ask her.” The devil knew precisely what particular worry was rupturing my head at the moment: ex-boyfriends, alcohol, whatever. Seldom did I subtly introduce my fears to her as a best friend should feel comfortable doing. Usually, I’d accuse her, out of the blue, of drinking again. She’d always deny it, of course. But I’d persist. I wouldn’t—no, I couldn’t—let her forget about what she did with her cousin Upstate the previous summer. It was tattooed on my brain. Occasionally, during one of Maria’s moments of rebellion, she’d say something like, “Yea, well you drank, too.” Then she’d fold her arms and smirk, seemingly victorious. But the little devil would remind me to remind her that I drank primarily because of her, because she’d upset me so much, even though that was the furthest thing from the truth.

  One day—I think it was in mid-March, right before Easter—Maria and I went shopping at Queens Center Mall. What followed was a typical scenario from that period in my life. We were in Stern’s looking for an Easter dress, but Maria couldn’t find anything she liked. I admit I was getting a little frustrated, because she’d already tried on a dozen dresses and I just wanted to go back to her place and relax. “Let’s try The Limited,” I suggested. As we entered the store, a fat guidette tapped her on the shoulder and started screaming happily.

  “Is this the infamous A.J.?” she asked. “The greatest boy alive you’re always talking about?”

  Maria smiled. “Yep,” she said, locking her right arm around my left. “This is my lover boy.” She gently brushed the back of her hand against my forehead and pushed the hair out of my eyes, just like mommy used to do.

  “Maria’s always talking about you,” the girl said. “It’s always ‘A.J. this and A.J. that.’ I never hear anything else! You’re one lucky guy to have a girlfriend like Maria. She’s so proud of you going into the Air Force and everything. She says you’re going to take her up in a jet and make out with her in the sky.” She giggled and looked for Maria’s approval.

  “We’re going to do more than make out up there,” she said, giggling back at her friend, tugging me closer. My face turned tomato-red. I’d never heard Maria talk that way to a friend before. True, I hadn’t realized how much she really admired and loved me. But I also had never heard Maria talk to anyone that way before.

  Sensing my discomfort, Maria quickly changed the subject. The girl left five minutes later. As if to say, Relax, A.J., Maria pinched my butt and smiled up at me. “Sorry you had to hear all that,” she said. “But you see, you don’t have to worry, because I talk about you with my friends all the time.”

  I ignored her compliment. “Who was that?” I asked.

  “That was Cindy. She’s in my history class.” Wide-eyed, Maria cupped her hands over her mouth in embarrassment. “Oh my God, I didn’t introduce you, I’m so sorry.” She said it strangely, as if she was muffling a chuckling, but not a humorous chuckle, more of a nervous one, a reaction to fear. She seemed afraid of me.

  Looking back on it now, it’s pretty obvious that I should’ve put my arm around Maria, smelled her luxuriant hair, and not said a thing. But in that mall on that day for whatever reason I chose manipulation. It was business as usual. I hadn’t realized that she didn’t introduce me to her friend. So
now I had two things to be pissed about.