The Fundamentals of Play

by Caitlin Macy

  I thought he was going to poke fun at me. But what he said was: “Utor, fruor, fungor, potior, and vescor take the ablative.”

  Startled out of my daze, I laughed out my breath. “You’re right,” I said, “they do.” After a moment I said, “Goddamn slides of Pompeii!”

  Nick tilted his chair back and balanced there on the back legs, his fingertips splayed on the table. “How many times did she make him show them.”

  “Must have been eight, ten …”

  “So was Mr. Davis senile?” Nick said seriously. “Was that the problem?”

  “I think he was, Nick,” I said. “I think he was.”

  “Georgie Len, Kate and I still owe you, you know. We haven’t forgotten.”

  That was for standing—or rather sitting—guard, with my pupil desk in front of the closet the slide projector came out of, to give them a knock when Vesuvius erupted. “Pater! Pater! Vesuvius fumat!” Kate would crawl out of the closet giggling, her hair in place, loving the game of it; Nick would appear a moment later, his eyelids at half-mast, and slink to his seat, as if in a dream. “Thanks, man,” he used to whisper. “We owe you.”

  We talked boats for a while. Nick reheated some coffee, and we sat at the kitchen table and drank it black, because Deb had forgotten to buy milk. Nick kept remembering bits and pieces of school, and every few minutes would say something like, “Muckrakers, George—The Jungle!” in a tone of delighted disbelief. “Paris is well worth a mass!” or “N’avez-vous pas vos vélos? Non, nous sommes à pied.” I guess I reminded him of his education.

  Chat and Deb were gone a long time. When we finally heard the Diesel sputtering in the driveway, Nick stood up and stuck his neck out the kitchen window, craning it toward the water. “You wanna go waterskiing,” he asked. “It’s a perfect day—no air, flat water.”

  “But the boat’s wrecked, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Nah, it still works. You can still drive it.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “It’s not like she crashed into Halftide and blew up the motor, too.”

  At the word “she,” I felt a coolness start at the base of my spine and creep up my neck. “How’d it happen?” I said dryly.

  “Usual.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, you know—night before Fourth of July. We were drunk. Forgot about Halftide.”

  “You and Deb.”

  “Deb?” said Nick. “No, sad part was, Deb was stone-cold sober, and was she ever ripped at me. It’s her boat, see. She got it off Katie-Lynn’s father when they split.”

  “Oh, really.”

  “See, I shouldn’t have been standing up. That’s why I flipped over the bow.”

  “And Kate?” I said, because that’s the way you talked with Nick: you didn’t have to contextualize anything, because he never did; you just tried to keep up.

  “Kate was okay. She got a little whiplash. That was a good thing, see, ’cause she had to drive up to Maine the next day, and you know, that would not have been a fun drive with a broken arm.”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” I agreed. “No, it wouldn’t.”

  “So, whadda you say, man?”

  It wasn’t the fact that Kate was responsible for breaking his arm that decided me, but the uninflected serenity with which he defended her. I still remember the false composure with which I stood up and said we had to be going. “Maybe another time, Nicko.”

  “Really?” I felt him looking at me. He hadn’t expected me to be a phony like the others; to go with him only so far.

  “Yeah, I’ve actually got to get Chat and we’ve got to get on the road.”

  Chat and Deb were having a companionable cigarette by the car when I came out. The baby on Deb’s hip was looking around with that strangely independent look babies can have when they’re being held—as if they’re only using their mother for the lift. But the look on Chat’s face, when I “reminded” him that we had to go, was equally strange, before he arranged his features into an expression of reluctant remembrance—it was very much like triumph. “You’re right, George. We’d better get on the road.” He dashed his cigarette to the tar. “So sorry, darling.”

  “You really have to go? Shit, guys,” Deb lamented. “We were just stattin’ to have fun.”

  Nick came out in cutoffs, carrying a homemade ski. “You’re really going?”

  “Yeah, sorry about that, Nick,” said Chat.

  “Sorry nothing. Deb’ll take me, won’t you, sis?”

  “Yeah, I’ll drive forya, Nicko.” She threw her cigarette to the ground and shifted Katie-Lynn to the opposite hip. “You wanna take a beer for the road.”

  “Oh, that’s all right—”

  “You’re damn right I do!” Chat said. “I paid for it, madam, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  Deb giggled. “Here’s a six—it’s cold.”

  Chat tucked the beer into the backseat. I could feel the baby watching me as I walked around to the passenger-side door.

  “Nice meeting you,” said Deb as I opened it to get in.

  “Oh, you too. You too,” I said. It made me ashamed that she had to say it first.

  “I miss you, Chattie!” Deb started to weep. She leaned her heavy chest into the window. Chat patted her fried peroxide hair. The baby began to cry. Chat revved the engine with a glint in his eye, Deb stood back reluctantly, and we drove away.

  We made it to Manhattan by dusk. I took a long shower in the Wetherses’ creaky Upper East Side bathroom and stretched out on the divan and wished our plans for the evening would evaporate. Already I had my New York feeling on, of exhaustion and poverty, of not being up for the fight. I couldn’t think of a thing that would cheer me up, least of all going out drinking with Chat’s grade school buddies on my fake I.D. I wanted to go off alone somewhere and hoard the story Chat had told me to pass the time between New Haven and the Triboro Bridge, about when he and Kate and Nick were little. I had ruined Deb’s day by insisting we leave. “We were just stattin’ to have fun!” And when I closed my eyes to go over Chat’s story and get it all straight, I would picture Katie-Lynn’s mother instead, standing heavy and sad in the driveway, the color of the crayon nobody wanted—brick red—and, as Chat drove us away from their cottage by the sea, waving her daughter’s hand like a doll’s.

  Then we went out and met Kate and her friends in a restaurant across town.

  Just the sight of her made me instantly, profoundly optimistic. She was remarkably fresh, at any hour of the day. She was wearing her hair pulled back in a ponytail, and I remember it seemed to me as jaunty, as promising, as an ensign flying off the stern of a sloop, reaching through a fair day. Her eyes lit up when Chat presented me. “George! How fun!”

  She was all collarbone and straight lines. I took her in my arms for as long as I dared.

  We got an outside table, and Kate sat beside me and told everyone in the group—her and Chat’s New York friends—how far we went back, she and I, six years, six formative years ago we had met, why we had practically grown up together (except that we hadn’t)—and all I could think to say when it was my turn to speak was, “Did you hear we saw Nick today, too?”

  I remember that she didn’t answer me right away. It gave me time to search wildly for a change of subject—and to come up empty-minded. She took a long, unhurried sip of her white wine. It was a summer evening, the summer she turned twenty-two, and she was off on the grand tour with Granny come Labor Day. I’m sure she didn’t need reminders like that, but then, they weren’t going to throw her, either: she was out to have fun. “How nice for him,” she said eventually. “How nice of you to stop by, George. I’m sure Nick appreciated that.”

  Her accent hadn’t quite decided where to go. It was a good measure St. Chattlesex, which at that time derived from California surfer (the hurried, telltale “No, totally, totally”), but there had been other influences as well. Now it was hovering a few shades shy of the World War II–vintage dahling-dahling her parents no doubt spoke. I could h
ave listened to it all night, and every time she said my name it sounded like a compliment.

  At some point I made another brilliant contribution to the conversation by asking her what she had majored in. Still, I was curious to know.

  “American studies.”

  “How’d you pick that?” I said.

  “Same as anyone.” But of the other couple hundred students who had graduated with that degree, I doubt a single one would have given the same reason Kate did. “I love this country,” she said. I thought at first she was being disingenuous, but she got a look in her eye then which I have never forgotten. It was a look of highly intensified complacency—if that’s possible—which I was certain no feast or threat of famine would ever shake.

  We ended up at Chat’s playing I Never, playing Thumper, playing Galley Slave—the version of Asshole that came out of Cold Harbor—and finally we ended up sitting around talking to one another in Nicko-speak, making decontextualized comments because we were too drunk to compose the lead-ins. Chat was trying to get some friend of Kate’s into bed, and I found myself cornering a little sofa with her at the other end.

  “You must miss those summers,” I said. “You and Nick.”

  “Miss them? Oh, we still go there,” Kate corrected me.

  I struggled to explain. “No, but I mean—the high school summers, and before. They must have been—great.” I was going to say “carefree,” or something that I hoped would prompt Kate into giving her childhood a name, but somebody switched a light on behind us and at the illumination it gave to her clean, practical profile, I shied from the word.

  “Yes, they were great,” Kate concurred. She let herself have a smile over the memories—I think it was the closest I’d ever seen her come to nostalgia—and there wasn’t anything more than contentment on her face when she added, “But now is so much fun, too. You know?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said.

  The past was fun; now was fun. We cracked open some more beers from the case at our feet.

  The thing was, I’m sure Nicko would have agreed.

  CHAPTER 13

  “Nick Beale was a very good-looking kid,” Chat had said, turning to me at the first red light between Nick’s sister’s and the highway. “He never went through the awkward stage. It was very unfair.”

  That was the premise. The story followed. Chat must have told it over and over, polishing and embellishing, making it more his own. Each of the Cold Harbor kids must have had his own version; each of the parents as well. It was too good a story not to repeat.

  “All the moms were in love with him when he was like eight or nine. They used to go down to the wharf and have him fish their lobsters out, and if he wasn’t there they’d ask Ma Beale, ‘Isn’t Nicko working today?’ ‘Playin’ hooky,’ she’d say. ‘Kid’s just like his father.’ Ma worked behind the short-order counter. She smoked when all our moms quit, and the ash always needed ashing and looked like it was about to fall on us or the food—the lobster rolls, you know, or the hot dogs. Pa Beale was a lobsterman. Oldest kid Timmy took after him. Deb got pregnant, had an abortion, dropped out. Donny got away, went halfway through Maine on a hockey scholarship. Now he delivers boats for people, works some charter line down in the Caribbean. Nick was a mistake. Ma had him when she was forty-something and Pa was in his fifties, looked about a hundred. Fat. Could barely get in and out of the boat. Needed Nick to help him.

  “It just happened there were a bunch of us Nick’s age. Cold Harbor baby boom, I guess. There was me, Katie and Vivi, the Palls, Jess Brindle and the step-Brindles, Jay Cushing—he only came up every other summer—Tim Hertzlich (guy had a cute sister). And Nicko used to hang out with us. We’d play roofball down the wharf with him. Our moms would be like, Go and play with Nicko while I talk to Ma. He used to ride his bike over to Chillyick and rig a boat and take it out and sail in the fleet with us. Nobody said anything. One time this instructor tried to pull rank, and she got laughed off the water. We used to have races at the end of the lessons. Nick won more than anyone else, and at first I thought it was talent, but then I realized it was because he cared. It was kind of sad how much he cared. He wouldn’t just win the races; he’d win, like, the cone drill and the tacking duels. He’d win the capsize drill, for God’s sake. And he always got to the dock first and got his boat unrigged first. It was annoying as hell.

  “The moms used to watch out for him, make sure he got invited to stuff. I remember one time my mom screamed my head off because I invited a bunch of kids to go sailing on my dad’s boat for my birthday and there’s Nick Beale standing on the shore watching us go off. Mom took him home and fed him my fucking birthday cake. He ate the whole goddamn thing. She said she felt so bad for him, he was so thin. The thing that pissed me off is he just was thin. It wasn’t like he was starving. He wasn’t some Victorian fucking pauper. Ma Beale fried him up a huge fried dinner every night, for fuck’s sake. But you couldn’t go telling that to my mom or Mrs. Brindle—they’d go ballistic. We all knew it was something about trying to make up for his having to stay there when we went away, but beyond that we didn’t get it. Christ, what does a kid know. I hated going home in the fall. I used to cry in the car the whole way back to the city.

  “We started partying when we were around twelve or thirteen. Nick knew about that, too. He was always one up on us. He could get Timmy to buy for us, and he could get pot off his sister. And he knew how to smoke it. Ha! Then he got to go on my dad’s boat all the time. We’d have the launch drop us off at Rum Punch and row the dinghy back. We used to get baked off our asses and look at the stars and think up funny boat names. Charles Pall wanted to name his Morning Wood. Isn’t that good? ‘Morning Wood.’

  “This was just the boys. The girls didn’t party, really, not that young. They, you know, hung out at home more. They had slumber parties. Once in a while, one of the older girls would come out with us. One of the sixteen-, seventeen-year-olds. Marnie Pall—God, she was gorgeous. If anyone was getting any play, though, it was with the au pairs. There was this Swedish girl one summer. ‘Please to help me with my rucksack.’ Jesus. But mostly we’d see ’em—I mean the real girls—at square dancing Wednesday nights.

  “Pa Beale was Caller. Every Wednesday at the yacht club, right-hand star, allemande left, allemande right, swing your corner, do-si-do your own. Warm up with Alley Cat. Close down with the Virginia reel. Dads and daughters. Old slacker kids with old slacker kids. Mr. Cushing with Mrs. Pall, quel scandale, quel scandale. So anyway, one night Pa doesn’t show up. Guy’s never missed a Wednesday in like forty years. They find him down the wharf, dead on the floor by a barrel of chum. Heart attack. It must have been his third or fourth. Big surprise, the guy ate lard for breakfast and smoked about a carton a day.

  “Nick disappears. Steals a whaler and takes off for three days. Nobody knew where he went, and he never told. The girls wrote him these stupid little notes with flowers in them and like, haikus. They rode their bikes over to the Beales’ and shoved them in the mailbox because they were too scared to knock on Ma’s door. That’s the first time I heard about him and Kate. Some stupid girl told me how sorry she felt for Kate Goodenow. I said, ‘Why Kate?’ And she was like, ‘Well, obviously.’ I bet she just liked him. I don’t think Nick could have even said who she was. I don’t think Nick could have told her from Jess Brindle or Heidi or any of them.

  “Next Wednesday there’s a big meeting, the dads go to the club to decide what they’re going to do for Pa. I went with my dad because Mom was away. I was the only kid there. They planned a whole big memorial service, but I don’t remember if they ever had it. Maybe they had it and the kids didn’t go. That was it, we went up to the Hertzlichs’ and partied—that was it. Played quarters on the kitchen floor, went up to Top of the World and got fucked up, probably, I don’t know …

  “At the meeting Artie Goodenow, Mr. Goodenow stands up and says what about taking up a collection to help out Ma—pay off the mortgage, put Nick through school, something like t
hat. It’s totally fucking crazy. Everybody jumps on the bandwagon. Everybody’s forking over a couple thousand. My mom gave her own donation besides my dad’s, and she wasn’t the only mom who did. In less than twenty-four hours they’ve got fifty thousand dollars. Mr. Goodenow’s the ringleader and he’s taking suggestions, and next week when they meet again—still no square dancing—he stands up and says, ‘Why don’t we send Nick Beale to boarding school?’

  “And that’s what they did. St. Paul’s? Exeter? No, that would have been pushing it a little. Katie and one of her friends from home were going to Chatham, and I’ll bet you anything she begged her dad to send Nick there, too. Daddy Goodenow is loving it. Overnight the guy’s a fucking Pygmalion. Calls up admissions, pulls the requisite strings, does the give-a-kid-a-chance routine, poor-family routine, says ‘potential’ a lot, Nick’s in like Flynn.”

  Closing my eyes against the oncoming traffic, I knew the answer before the question, that one could never say was his going for the better or the worse.

  “Now you know as well as I do, George,” Chat went on, with the arrogant air of one who knows, “that a lot of people reinvent themselves in boarding school. The whole school knows you when you go in and the whole school knows you when you leave. Maybe you won’t touch a drop when you go in and you leave filching the chapel wine. And maybe you spend four years as an Exeter loser and the next four years at Harvard name-dropping Exeter for prep-tool credibility. And maybe you go in wearing flammable slacks and leave wearing Nantucket reds. I knew a guy at Hotchkiss who got ragged on for wearing sixty/forty shirts. Guy’s mom had bought them for him because she thought they’d be more ‘practical’ than hundred-percent cotton. Kid took those twenty practical shirts out behind the dorm one day and set them on fire. The disciplinary committee was like: ‘Why didn’t you at least give them to charity?’

  “Nicko goes in, he’s got dork-out L.L. Bean outlet-wear and this green blazer. It wasn’t hunter green, either. It wasn’t the green of the forests. I guess Goodenow was a little sketchy on the details of shipping the kid off. They made a big deal of presenting Nicko with a patch from the yacht club to wear on his jacket pocket. Never did inquire if he had a jacket. He was supposed to write letters to Mr. Goodenow, and Goodenow was going to forward them to the others—the Association, or whatever the fuck it was they called it.