by Ron McLarty
“Thanks, Norma.”
“Smithy, I’m sorry I said all that about not being held and making you feel bad so you had to say you’d hold me.”
“I didn’t feel bad, Norma. I’d hold you.”
We hung for a minute in the air, and then she said, “Bye, Smithy.”
“Bye, Norma.”
20
Dr. Glenn Golden had been recommended by several members of Grace Episcopal as a caring physician with a warm, outgoing personality. He could talk to Mom and Pop and even occasionally me about Bethany’s profound psychosis as if he were talking about some slight outbreak of teenage acne. His process was loosely like this: He would visit Bethany at Bradley on Tuesdays and Thursdays (when she came home, he added Saturday) and then schedule a weekly chat with Mom and Pop, usually on Mondays. The financial arrangement, again loosely, was that Pop agreed never to take another vacation for the rest of his life and to give all the money to Glenn. My pop thought this was actually a fair deal, because it coincided with my sister’s voice hiding out for a while—and he was all too happy to give credit to the warm and outgoing Glenn Golden.
“What do we do when the voice comes back?” I asked one Monday, sitting with Mom and Pop in the Thayer Street Medical Building.
“Say hi,” the doctor joked, smiling his warm smile.
Mom and Pop smiled also, but I kept the question on my skinny face.
“Well, you know, Bethany’s voice is not something that’s really there. It’s not something she really hears.”
“Yes she does,” I said.
He smiled warmly. “No, what I meant was, she gets a feeling, maybe, but she doesn’t actually hear a voice.”
“Yes she does.”
“Shhhh,” Mom whispered.
“You see, the voice she hears is sort of intuitive. It’s really not correct clinically to call it a voice at all.”
“But she hears it. She really, actually hears it, and she really, actually talks to it. Sometimes I’ve heard it, when she’s in her room alone. It says things, and what it says is crazy.”
“Lots of people talk to themselves,” he said, less warmly.
“This is not talking to yourself or anything. This is real, like, conversations.”
“Let’s remember Bethany first,” he said. “Let’s remember that she comes first.”
I didn’t understand what he meant, but he got up and walked over to the door. “We’re counting progress minute by minute. I’m very encouraged.”
We left the doctor and drove home. Bethany had cooked for us, but she seemed distant, as if she were thinking of something she shouldn’t have been thinking. That, I would say, is the hardest of all. Knowing that something called her, from God knows where.
21
At first they wouldn’t give me the money. I really didn’t blame them. My reason for not having any identification must have seemed crazy. How I took the exit ramp too fast and how my brakes weren’t adjusted properly, causing me to crash through the trees and fly into Wood River. The bank officers kept saying, “Just a second,” and they’d get another officer to hear the story, then another, until all the Chemical Bank officers at Fifth and Fourteenth knew my story. If it weren’t for Norma, who had driven to the Old Stone Bank and was sitting right there with her banker, I never would have been able to take the money she wired.
It was almost noontime when I walked out of the bank. The money felt very nice in my shorts pocket. I kept feeling it. Money is nice. I don’t mean it’s wonderful like a river or anything; and, as they say, it can’t buy happiness, but it’s comfortable in your pocket. And it’s a real pleasure to know you can fill up your bike’s saddlebags with bananas and apples, and even those huge juice oranges, anytime you want. Which I did on Sixteenth Street. Right next to the fruit stand was a clothing store, and in the window was a serious answer to my porkiness. A huge XXL, twelve-pocketed, khaki fishing vest. The store dummy had camera gear in his vest, but I figured the pockets were a bonus. The vest could cover my Europe-size hips and Mount McKinley ass. Especially on the road. This doesn’t mean anything, but I thought I looked okay in it. Twenty-five bucks. So I was getting set. I was sort of taking some control. I stopped at a bookstore and bought a pocket map of the United States and a paperback novel at the checkout line. The novel was called Iggy, and I didn’t know what it was about, but, like money, it felt good zipped into my vest pocket.
It was afternoon, and I was ready to ride. Where? I needed to go somewhere. Denver. I spread my map, and I saw it. I felt something, and I think it was determination. People looked clear on the street. I had a book, for God’s sake, in one of my pockets. An older man in shorts and a New York Yankees T-shirt jogged in place next to me waiting for the light to change.
“Excuse me, sir, what’s the best way to get out of the city?”
“Out of the city?” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“You don’t get out of the city. Nobody does.” After he jogged off, I asked a young woman.
“Where to?”
“Denver.”
“That’s west.”
“I guess.”
“PATH tubes.”
“PATH tubes?”
“Fourteenth, Sixth.”
“Thank you.”
“Then Jersey Transit.”
“Thank you.”
“West.”
“Thanks.”
I walked my bike to Fourteenth and Sixth, and everybody helped me west. Out of New York from under a river, I got on a train heading toward a place I recognized from my map of New Jersey. Montclair. I got off the train with my Raleigh, and nobody said boo about a fat guy with a bike in the aisle. I bought a tuna sandwich and some apple juice and took it to a little park and ate and marked up my map. Denver didn’t look that far. I walked across the space between New Jersey and Denver with my fingers. A dog ran across the green of the park, and I thought of Malzone. I began Iggy, there in that park. Reading is a lot like riding a bike. Once you get back to it, it’s easy, it’s natural. But at first—like the deep, deep, stab in your legs and hips and stomach and chest from the Raleigh—the sentences twist your head. I read eleven pages that afternoon before my brain said, “Wait.” I found out that Iggy was black, was a cowboy, and that 70 to 80 percent of the true cowboys in the Old West were black. Eleven pages. Headache.
I ate some bananas, and when it got dark, I pushed the bike under a pine tree and lay near it on the grass. In the very early morning, I was cold and damp, and I dreamed it had rained all night. I made a mental note, in a part of my huge head that Iggy hadn’t banged up, to get a sleeping bag and a raincoat; then I pumped off in the general direction of Pennsylvania.
22
So I picked up Jill Fisher at six o’clock in my pop’s Ford wagon. She looked nice in a sort of off-white long dress that made her appear taller than she was but didn’t show how big her chest was. I gave her the corsage, which was expensive but just what she wanted, with yellow somethings and lilies. Her mother made a big fuss about how nice we looked together. I could tell that Jill had been crying, because her eyes were all red.
“I wish your father could see his little girl,” Mrs. Fisher gushed. Jack Fisher had gone to school with my pop and had bought it in Italy on the last day of the Big War. Pop always thought some wop had got him, but Mom said it was most likely a leftover kraut. Whatever, I was glad I didn’t have to deal with another parent. I don’t mean that like it sounds.
I opened the door to the Ford, and she got in and folded her long dress in with her.
“Listen, Jill,” I said, “we have to stop at my house for five minutes. My mom wants pictures and stuff.”
Jill Fisher was quiet for a few blocks. Then she said, “Look, no big deal, but Billy is going to the prom, too, and we’re probably going to run into him.”
“That’s okay,” I said.
“He’s going with Cheryl Adams. It’s no big deal.”
We drove for a minute, and then she st
arted to cry. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know why she would cry for somebody who didn’t want to be with her. I guess I don’t get that part of it.
“Don’t cry, Jill.”
“Cheryl Adams,” she sniffed, “honest to God.”
When I pulled into our driveway, Mom and Pop came out. We posed for pictures, and Jill did that girl thing that girls do so good. Made it all seem natural and happy. I looked around for Bethany and finally saw her looking out her bedroom window. She waved at me with a small wave, and I waved back. I knew Norma was watching, too. I almost walked next door to show her my tuxedo, which was all black with the purple tie and purple cummerbund, but there were too many years now. I’d let them pile up, like a coward. I could feel her venetian blinds bend and snap behind me.
A bunch of us were going to Chip Santos’s house before heading to Rhodes on the Pawtuxet for the dance. I liked Chip, and I thought his mother and father and sisters were terrific. Mrs. Santos had the rec room all decorated and lots of food and soda and stuff, and Mr. Santos came down and told Chip that if the gang wanted to go to their summer home in Bristol for a late party after the prom, that was okay. He made a big deal about giving Chip the key. It was this thing that Mr. Santos could do for his boy. It was just so nice.
Jill found some of her girlfriends and went over to them immediately, and I went upstairs and watched some Red Sox with Mr. and Mrs. Santos.
“Radatz has no snap in his arm,” Mr. Santos said to no one in particular.
“That’s not good,” his wife said.
“No snap at all.”
After a while I went back downstairs and got some soda and went over to stand around sort of close to Jill. I assumed that was my assignment. Her friends, I guess, didn’t like me, because some of them acted as though they had to protect her from me. That was really getting someone wrong. Nobody in the world ever had to be protected from me. I never even fired my weapon in-country. Ever.
Anyway, I stood there; then we all left in a kind of caravan to Rhodes on the Pawtuxet. Jill was very quiet, and she squnched against her door as if at any second I was going to reach out and grab her. Well, here is the truth. Here is my dilemma. I do not like to touch, and I cannot stand being touched. Not that I wouldn’t like to have sex with a girl or touch her in wonderful places, and not that I don’t think about it, or used to think about it, but I suppose I really, really would have to love that girl, and I haven’t done that yet. The stuff I told you about those prostitutes was awful. I couldn’t bear it. I don’t know why I did it. I understand why they hated me so very much. Yes.
Todd Sanderson and his swing band—a piano, a trumpet, a saxophone, and a bass, with Naomi Lesko from Warwick, Rhode Island, on vocals—performed arrangements of Dion & The Belmonts, Fats Domino, and Elvis, as well as some outstanding movie themes. The bandstand was in the middle of the dance floor, so of course you danced around it. Like standing near Jill in Chip’s basement, I wanted to try to get the assignment right.
“May I have this dance?” I said, as cute as I could.
“I . . . have to go to the girls’ room.”
“Okay,” I said, and Jill walked away. This was going better than I thought. I had imagined there might have been some social or cultural rituals to proms that I didn’t know about, and I wasn’t prepared for any surprises. The girls’ room was something I guessed might happen.
I stood around for an hour or so, and then I figured I better find Jill and go stand near her. I thought I saw her by the parking-lot door, but as I walked over, somebody grabbed my arm.
“Where you going?”
I turned around, and Dick Marshall stood there, not letting go of me. Like all really dumb guys, Dick had a group that did everything together. Billy Carrara, who was usually a pretty good guy, was also part of this group. Actually, Jill was part of it and Billy sort of joined up. I shook off his hand.
“So where you going?”
“Outside.”
“Stay inside.”
“What do you mean, ‘stay inside’?”
His girlfriend, for as long as I remembered, even in grade school, was Barbie Zinowitz. I see her now sometimes, when I go to the big movie complex in Sekonk. She’s bigger than me, and I pretend I don’t know her.
“Stay away, that’s all. Jill and Billy are talking,” Barbie snarled.
“Yeah,” added Dick.
“Why don’t you dance with Cheryl Adams or something,” Barbie said. Her group laughed.
I saw Cheryl across the dance floor, moving in place, snapping her fingers by her side. She didn’t seem sad or anything, so I walked over. I enjoyed walking in my tuxedo. It hung on me nicely, and I looked heavier in it. I put my hand in my pocket and swung the other arm coolly and evenly.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hi.”
She continued dancing in place, and I looked at her from the side. She was a short girl, with a nice face and brown hair that she wore in the way that Dutch Boy, on the paint can, wears his. Her dress was light blue and tight and reached the top of her toes. She looked more Portuguese than most of the Rhode Island Adamses, and she had, I guess, a more or less normal chest.
“I like this band,” I said casually.
“I don’t like them,” she said, not looking at me.
“I mean, for a band that’s a bunch of older guys, I mean, I don’t really like them either, but . . .”
“You mean they’re not good but the beat is okay.”
“That’s it,” I said. “I like the beat.”
“I’d give it a seventy,” she said, moving gracefully.
“Absolutely.”
I started to move a little, too. You wouldn’t call it dancing, but maybe a beat move or step. Maybe. I didn’t think Todd Sanderson and Miss Lesko did a bad job at all with “Jailhouse Rock” and made a neat transition into “Throw Momma from the Train.”
When the song ended, I asked Cheryl if she’d like some punch, and I got her some. Then we danced again, like before, kind of side to side and separate. This was okay. I could do this. I looked around, and I guessed I must be having as good a time as anybody else. I mean, nobody looked particularly happy except during the bunny hop, which Cheryl and I just watched.
“Where’s your date?” she asked.
“She’s somewhere. I’m not sure.”
“Who is she?”
“Jill Fisher.”
Cheryl stopped dancing and turned and for the first time that evening looked right at me.
“You?”
“Me.”
“But Billy said he had to go and protect her from you.”
“Huh?”
“You’re so jealous and you grab her and stuff.”
I looked around to make sure people weren’t looking at me and hearing things about me I didn’t know myself.
“I’m jealous? I grab her?”
“That’s what she told Billy. He went off to protect her.”
When I was sixteen years old, I had grown to my full height of five foot eleven. I weighed 121 pounds. I took my hands out of my pockets and let them dangle at the ends of my arms. My butch cut had grown out about a quarter of an inch and lay flat on my big head. Cheryl looked me over. I started to sweat a little.
“Why do you grab her?”
I shrugged and looked around. I wanted to be in the Ford.
I wanted to stop, all by myself, at the A&W in Riverside and get a cheeseburger and onion rings and a big root beer in a frosty mug and eat it alone. I didn’t want to hurt Cheryl’s feelings, and I figured I could if I told her that Billy Carrara was a liar and a guy who gave rings back in toilet paper.
“How long have you been Billy’s girlfriend?”
“I’m not his girlfriend.”
“You’re not?”
“We’re just at the prom together. He’s just a nice guy.”
“So he’s not, like, your boyfriend or anything.”
“No, he’s not my boyfriend.”
; “Oh, well, he’s a big liar, then. I mean, Jill’s not my girlfriend either. I’m not jealous. I don’t grab anybody. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings or anything, but since you’re not his girlfriend, he’s out in the parking lot with Jill.”
Cheryl Adams’s hair went limp.
“What?” she yelled so loud that Naomi Lesko, in the middle of Pat Boone’s “April Love,” looked over to us.
“Want some more punch?” I asked hopefully, but by then Cheryl was rushing toward the parking lot with tears of rage splashing over her mascara.
I went to the bathroom and had a Marlboro with the other guys, and then I walked back to the spot where I had stood with Cheryl. Some of the dancers had made a circle and were clapping to the music, and inside the circle dancing and twirling was Lewis Rand, a senior man about campus, and Carol Robey in her wheelchair. Carol was the president of our junior class, and Lewis was her boyfriend. I felt good to see her always so happy, and I felt bad about a littler girl behind her blinds. I watched them twirl for a while; then I went back and had another smoke.
Carol Robey became the principal of East Providence High School some years later, and people still love her and like to see her happy. Lewis Rand went to Carnegie Mellon’s School of Drama and died of AIDS maybe five years ago. Carol named the high school stage after him. Love dies hard.
I waited until most everybody had gone, but I couldn’t find Cheryl or Jill or Billy. I drove back to East Providence, but the A&W was closed.
23
On Tuesday I rode an hour before the sun had technically come up. I stopped for breakfast at a diner that promised country brown eggs, and I had them poached. Poached eggs are a treat, because they don’t back up on you like fried eggs and they have a form on the toast that makes them look like a face. It was like breakfast at Mom’s. There were truck drivers and guys in suits, and just everybody was friendly. I used the bathroom and took a sort of sink shower and felt really good. Like usual, after I woke up and rode and walked a little, the pain and stiffness in my body seemed to go away.