by Frank Conroy
The driver, Mrs. Moon, was short, fat, and hyperthyroid, with kinky red hair and blotched skin. She stared straight ahead every morning, her face set in an unchanging grimace of irritation. She never even looked at me, just pulled the door shut with a beefy arm and threw in the gears. As her short legs jabbed at the pedals her skirt rose under the large white dinner napkin, fresh each morning, that lay on her knees. She drove a steady thirty-five miles an hour over potholes, dead snakes, and fallen vegetation, never veering, never wavering, as if the bus represented an irresistible force separate from the petty realities of life.
I didn’t like school. The kids were polite but distant. Well-dressed, healthy, athletic, always with a dollar in their pockets, they were town kids who’d known one another all their lives. I didn’t fit. My Northern accent and relatively large vocabulary (from reading) must have seemed suspiciously classy, and yet I dressed like a red neck and lived in red-neck territory. They didn’t know what to make of me, and since there was nothing particularly attractive about me they had no great desire to find out. I’d be gone soon anyway, they assumed, back to wherever I’d come from. They were good kids, though, and had circumstances been more favorable, or had I been less shy, I’m sure I would have made friends with some of them. Although as Florida kids they were preoccupied with things physical—swimming, diving, basketball, and baseball went on all year round—they never teased me about being so thin. Instead they emanated a kind of mild concern, as if I were suffering from an illness for which I couldn’t be held responsible.
The class hours merged into a day of boredom. The books were dull, mechanical texts from which the teachers rarely strayed. Voices droned at an impossibly slow pace, ideas emerged sluggishly, words and phrases repeated over and over became incomprehensible—my mind could find nothing to attach itself to. I was cast adrift, and it frightened me. One could disappear in such a state, simply cease knowing the difference between up and down, or who one was, or where one was. So I put myself to sleep and accepted the mediocre grades I’d done nothing to earn.
I liked the twenty minutes before the first bell. There was a broad-jump put in one of the athletic fields and the kids from the buses would line up for turns. I’d take a long run, kick off, and sail through the air knowing the sand would be soft at the other end. No one kept records. When you’d jumped you simply waited for the next man, marked his leap on the sand, and ran back to the end of the line. The best jump was marked by a peg or a schoolbook, but only the older kids were concerned about that. Once or twice I came within a foot of it.
Lunch hour I often went to the Y.M.C.A. and sat at a favorite table near the window where I could watch the other kids or the cars going by outside as I ate my sandwich. If I had a quarter I’d buy a deviled egg on white and an orange soda—a combination my body craved so strongly my hands would tremble uncontrollably as I unwrapped the cellophane. Most often I had a sandwich from home.
(I am intensely hungry, and yet the hunger is held down, deep in my body, a smothered force that never reaches my mouth. I’ve carried the paper bag all day. The top edge is rolled and crinkled, as soft as cloth under my fingers. The kids are laughing and yelling at ping-pong or the pinball machine. Why do I even open the bag? Every step closer to the sandwich drives the hunger deeper until my mouth is too dry to eat anything. The wax paper comes off. I already know the sandwich is completely unacceptable. There is no question. It’s an imitation. It isn’t real. Eating it wouldn’t nourish me. Look at the paper bag! Look at the wrapping! The whole thing is a fraud. I separate the bread. Bacon fat. Lunch meat. I am neither disgusted nor attracted. The sight has no meaning. It isn’t food. I look up, vaguely uneasy. I should get up from the table and go away. There’s no point in staying. I have no money, nor any way to get some before the hour is out. I should move, yet something holds me. I can’t eat and I can’t not eat. I stare into the paradox with catatonic rapture—a moment more, a moment more. Hunger is transcended as my mind achieves perfect balance, perfect stillness. The sandwich lies in its waxed paper. My hands lie on the table beside it. I can’t move.)
Sometimes after school I’d hitchhike out to the beach and hang around the Olympic-size salt-water pool where all the kids were. I achieved a certain celebrity doing tricks on the yo-yo, and even though no one knew my name they accepted me as part of the scene. When it got dark I’d go over to Lucky’s house.
“Frank, don’t you want any more than that?” Gertrude asked. “You eat like a bird, child.”
“Thank you, ma’m. I’m full.”
“His stomach’s shrunk,” said Uncle Victor, unfolding the Fort Lauderdale News over his recently emptied plate. “Coffee. I’m late for the A.A. meeting.”
“Leslie, would you clear the table, please?”
Lucky’s sister began stacking dishes. I helped her carry them back to the kitchen. Leslie was a tall, good-looking girl, a swimming champion at sixteen. She smiled as I brought in a platter. “Thanks.” I always blushed when she smiled at me, and the fact that I desperately wanted not to blush but to look straight in her eyes didn’t make any difference.
Back at the table Lucky was talking to his father about Sneezy, his pet squirrel. “But Daddy, he’s better since he was fixed. He gets better every day.”
“A week more. Then we’ll either put him to sleep at the vet’s or let him go in the woods, whichever you prefer.” Victor had a habit of not looking at his son while talking to him. It was odd—he’d look at everyone else, moving from face to face while addressing Lucky.
“He always minds me,” Lucky said, betraying some emotion.
“It’s unpleasant, but it has to be done. He bit the mailman and he bit George.” (The Negro handyman.) “I could be sued.” He pushed back his chair and took a cup of coffee from Gertrude’s outstretched hand on his way to the living room. He walked with his head slightly bent, as if he were too tall for the house.
“Damn,” Lucky said when we were alone.
“Don’t let them gas him. Set him free in the woods in Chula Vista.”
“The worst thing is I lose my cover.”
“What do you mean?”
“My cover. My excuse if I ever get caught around Schmidt’s cottages at night. I’d just say I was looking for Sneezy.”
“Of course.” I was struck with admiration at his thoroughness. “The girls.”
“Damn.” He drummed his fingers on the table impatiently. “I’ll never think of anything as good.”
“Are you going tonight?”
Lucky looked up, hesitating a moment before he answered. “Yes.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“You might not see anything, you know. Sometimes the blinds are down.”
“Leslie honey,” Gertrude called from the kitchen. “You better hurry. I see your date coming down the drive.”
I stood in the darkness doing stages one and two of The Universe. Black Beauty picked up stray fingers of light and sparkled dimly in the air like a dying fireworks wheel. My mind wasn’t on the yo-yo. I waited, listening for Lucky on the other side of the hedge. He was due back from reconnaissance.
“Phsst!”
The trick fell apart in my hands.
“Phsst!” he called from the other side.
“Okay. I’m here,” I whispered.
“The coast is clear. Come on through.”
Bending down to get through the almost invisible break in the hedge I had a moment of panic. The idea of getting caught at something as shameful as peeping through windows was no laughing matter. I’d done bad things, but never anything to earn my parents’ scorn. I’d been able to hold my head high and fight them openly. But if I got caught at this I’d be ashamed before my enemies.
Coming up on the other side, inhaling as I rose, the perfume of the flowers rushed into my brain. A lush aroma, thick with sweetness, thick as blood, and spiced with the clean acid of tropical greenery. My heart pounded like a drowning swimmer’s as the perfume took me over, pouring i
nto my lungs like ambrosial soup. Slightly dizzy, I took a step and bumped into Lucky.
“Sorry,” I whispered, stepping back. His dark shape moved in front of me and I could see Sneezy riding his shoulder. “Chtt-chtt.” The squirrel spat in the air.
“Follow me and stay in the shadows,” Lucky said calmly, and moved quickly away along the hedge, his arm brushing slightly against the leaves. Sneezy ran over the back of his neck to the other shoulder, still spitting, his small body writhing with excitement.
As we got near the cottage Lucky stopped. “Walk naturally across the lawn. There’s a place behind those bushes over there.” He moved out over the grass and disappeared into the shadows. I followed an instant later, beads of nervous sweat collecting on my brow. The front of the cottage was dark, but Lucky had told me to expect that. The girls lived in back, in a large room with two windows. As I came up behind him I could see the lights winking through the bushes.
“There,” he whispered, pointing to a small hollow in the undergrowth. I moved into position. Sneezy jumped from his shoulder to mine, startling me so severely I almost fell over. His sharp claws dug through my shirt into the skin. Wincing, I listened to Lucky.
“If you pull back this branch you get a clear view of both windows,” he said, demonstrating. I looked out, my heart leaping like Ricardo’s yo-yo. The blinds were down to within six inches of the sill. Every now and then something moved in the room. “Chtt-chtt,” said Sneezy into my ear, his claws scrabbling for better balance on my small shoulder. “You keep him,” Lucky said. “I’m going closer.”
Alone, with the scent of flowers trickling down my throat like syrup, I watched the windows. Was that a pair of arms moving behind the blinds? Legs perhaps? An immense stone rolled over in my chest. Good God! Was that a thigh? Was that a bare shoulder? Lust exploded inside me, pure, hot lust bathing me like internal sunshine. I hardly noticed Lucky creeping through a bed of greenery to kneel at the corner of the window. “Chtt-chtt!” Sneezy ran up on top of my head and down again, his claws like needles. Lucky leaned forward, his hands touching the wall.
It was Judy! Crossing the room in a bathrobe, her bare thighs exposed with every stride! And there was Redhair in a bra and half-slip! Unable to believe my eyes, shaking from head to foot like an overbred French poodle, I leaned forward and spread the branches farther apart. Sweet Jesus! She was undoing the belt of the bathrobe! She was ...
“Eeeyow!” I leaped into the air beating at Sneezy, who hung from my earlobe by his teeth, his hot breath roaring in my head. I screamed, crashing blindly through the bushes and out onto the lawn, swatting at him trying to find his jaws and simultaneously trying to hold him up. Lucky arrived out of the darkness at express-train speed, his face mirroring in that one brief instant before he passed all the stunned amazement that must have been in mine. For a moment we became the same person, like facing yourself in the glass with a new suit. Neither of us knew which body was his own. He reached out, plucked Sneezy from my ear, and in a single fluid movement tossed him ten feet through the air into the branches of a pepper tree.
Lights went on behind us. Doors slammed. Voices called. Lucky had disappeared ahead of me, and with fresh blood streaming down my neck I ran after him, trusting his path, hoping I could leap as high, my heart wild with fear.
One late afternoon in the woods everything fell into place. I’d been practicing for an hour, running through the easy tricks abstractedly, the way an expert mechanic might shuffle cards while waiting for his victims to take their seats, when I began to realize something special was happening. Never had I yo-yoed so effortlessly. Never had the tricks clicked with such mathematical precision. The yo-yo seemed to be playing itself as I stood waving my hands like a conductor before an invisible orchestra. The time was ripe for an assault on The Universe, not only the separate parts, but the whole trick as one unit.
Unbelievably, it came on the first try. I was flabbergasted. I’d been trying for weeks—for so long, in fact, I was reconciled to creeping up on it slowly, perhaps over a period of months—and suddenly victory was mine. Breathless, hoping it hadn’t been a fluke, I threw again. As I watched the trick unfold, it came to me that a ghost or a spirit was controlling the yo-yo’s movements, and that to be really good one had simply to give up one’s desire to dominate the yo-yo and instead let the ghost take over. It was as if someone spoke to me through the yo-yo. See how easy, was the implication. Just practice till you get over your clumsiness, practice until you can yo-yo without thinking about it and then let me take over. I threw back my head and laughed. I danced a little dance on the sand and shouted out into the pine trees. I knew that in all of Fort Lauderdale and very probably in all of Florida there was not one other boy who could do what I had just done.
I knew I was best. As for what happened, I was no more than moderately disappointed when my supposedly unobtainable Black Beauty went on sale at the five-and-ten for sixty cents. I’d gone as far as one could go on the yo-yo. I’d learned tricks the demonstrators didn’t know. So when the final contest arrived and I learned that after one or two extremely easy tricks the choice of champion would be based on the greatest number of consecutive Loop-the-Loops, when I learned that my skill counted for nothing in the eyes of the non-yo-yoing judges, when I found myself screwed once again as my string broke at seventy-three (eleven less than a muscle-bound idiot from the beach who couldn’t do a simple Cannonball)—when, to wrap it up, all this reality was finally absorbed by my brain, the knowledge that I was without question the best yo-yo player around kept me from despair. There was no despair, only a mild confusion at the sloppiness of things, and a faint sickness at my own bewilderment.
I forgot it easily. That same night, hidden in the greenery under the window, I watched a naked girl let down her long red hair.
9
Falling
WE ARRIVED in New York during the last week of the school term. Over the years I’d put in enough time at the local grammar school (P.S. 6 of J. D. Salinger fame) for the authorities to stretch a point and allow me to graduate along with everyone else, an important detail since only then would I be eligible for a public high school. Most of my classmates were signed up for private schools and I seemed to be the only boy who didn’t know where he was going. In desperation I picked the nearest free school with entrance requirements—Stuyvesant High School on the East Side—and went down to take the test.
It was a short exam, a rudimentary intelligence test. I answered the questions in a small office and was marked immediately.
“Did I get in?” I asked when the man came back.
He smiled. “Of course. You weren’t worried, were you?”
I took his cue and acted as if I hadn’t been, but the idea of four years at some place like the High School of Needle Trades had weighed heavily on my mind, and I’d resolved that if Stuyvesant didn’t accept me I wasn’t going to go to school at all.
As the result of some stories he’d heard at Stanley’s Cafeteria it suddenly became clear to Jean that the fruit vendors of New York had one of the sweetest deals around. “You wouldn’t think it to look at them,” he’d say, “but they’re making a fortune. And the job is simplicity itself. You go down to Ninth Avenue, buy the stuff wholesale, find yourself a nice corner somewhere, and sell it retail. No boss. No time clock. Good healthy work out in the open air. It’s a cinch.”
We chopped off the back of the old International truck, built up a set of tiers for the boxes, and went into business. As always, Jean’s enthusiasm was contagious, and I gladly assumed the duties of weigher, fly-shooer, hawker, and charmer of little old ladies. (Jean took care of the young ones himself.) We’d leave early in the morning and not come home till after dark. The first week we moved around, trying different spots, but finally settled on the northwest corner of Sixty-eighth and Lexington just opposite the subway entrance. (My wife, whom I was not to meet for many years, lived in a town house one block away and must have passed us many times. Who knows? Perhap
s I palmed off some bad grapes on my mother-in-law. It’s not entirely impossible that my father-in-law’s mysterious reluctance to receive me into the bosom of his family was related to a buried image of myself with a thumb on the scales, under his bananas.)
I developed a style for dealing with the customers. My usual quietness disappeared and, like an actor onstage, I felt free to let loose a flood of exhortations, aimless commentary, and snappy remarks. (It was probably good for me; in real life I was becoming more and more withdrawn.) Every buyer was someone to win over, and the game fascinated me. My specialty was extreme politeness, which always took them by surprise, and then, if they seemed sufficiently disarmed I’d interject some small bit of myself—a remark about the weather, a subtly couched compliment on the customer’s dog, a pun, a big word—anything to get that quick, slightly puzzled glance of recognition. It must have been difficult to ignore me in any case, since I approached even the smallest transaction with all the élan of a headwaiter making crepes suzette. Without looking, I’d slip out the appropriate paper bag from a concealed shelf under the scales, lift it high in the air over my head, and snap it down like a whip to open it, at the same time selecting the fruit with my other hand. “One pound of fresh seedless grapes,” I’d say with a certain amount of pride, gently lowering a fat bunch onto the hanging scales. My eye was good and when I missed the correct weight it wasn’t by much. In a single sweeping movement I’d lift the removable tray, insert the narrow end into the open mouth of the paper bag, and transfer the fruit with exaggerated care. “Some cherries, ma’m? They’re very sweet today, very succulent.” If they were deaf to my words and blind to my ballet they nevertheless came to the moment when they put money in my hand. At that moment I won the game, or so it seemed to me.
