“There aren’t any women in my life.”
“There’s the Simpson girl, isn’t there?”
“She’s not my girlfriend, though.”
“It doesn’t matter. You know each other, you interact with each other. And there will be more. Women aren’t like men, and there are too many of us on both sides who don’t understand that, or respect it. Take them for what they are. They may drive you crazy sometimes, but that’s all right. We drive them crazy too. It would be a lousy world without them. And listen,” he went on, “if you ever feel like hitting a woman—which you probably will, someday—don’t. Get away from her instead until you calm down. We have the advantage over them in strength. But it’s not fair of us to use it.”
It occurred to me then that Doctor Connor was perhaps the most unusual person I’d spoken to in quite a long time, and maybe even a bit insane, but even so he was making a lot of sense.
“Do you know who my mother is?” I asked him abruptly.
Doctor Connor was silent.
“Because if you do,” I said, “I have to know. I can’t stand not knowing. Grandpa won’t tell me. He won’t even hint if he knows or not. I don’t know anything about myself. I didn’t know my dad, and I never will, but my mom is out there somewhere. She might even be here in Mannville. I have to find her.”
“Why?”
“Why? Why do you think? She’s my mother!”
“But what will you ask her, when you see her?”
“I don’t know!” I was exasperated. “I just want to see her!”
“Are you certain of your motives, young William?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, have you ever considered how seeing you might affect her?”
“Do you know or not?” My voice was suddenly rising in pitch and volume. I could feel trails of wetness working their way down my cheeks. “Tell me! Do you know?”
“No, Billy, I don’t know who your mother is,” he said. “If I did, I would tell you.”
“Swear?”
“Yes. I swear it. I would tell you if I knew.”
“If you’re lying—” I said, but I didn’t finish that sentence. That was the boldest statement I had ever spoken to an adult in my life, and I was suddenly afraid he was going to be angry. But Doctor Connor was not like most adults. He could see through me, right to who I was, and I knew he wouldn’t be angry at me no matter what I said.
“Son,” he said. “Everything will resolve itself in the end. You have burning questions. You need to know things. That is what will give you purpose. Follow your nose. Someday you’ll find out. Don’t get disappointed when things aren’t immediately available.”
We sat in silence while I wiped my nose and eyes.
“What are you going to do when you grow up?” he asked me. Coming from him, it didn’t sound like the same mindless question adults always ask of children. He was actually curious.
“I’m going to be a writer,” I said.
“Ahhh,” he said. “A writer.”
“Of short stories,” I went on. “And maybe novels. I’m writing a short story now.” Not even Grandpa knew that about me; not even Annie knew.
There came a small tinkle from the bell on the front door. Someone was waiting in the parlor.
“I would like to see it, when you finish it,” said Doctor Connor. “If you wouldn’t mind, that is. Not to criticize it. What I know about literature wouldn’t fill a thimble. Just to read it.”
“Just to read it,” I repeated.
“Think about it,” he said, getting up. “I know how hard it is to show these things to others. But I will always be interested.”
“There’s one more thing,” I said.
“What is it?”
I took a deep breath. I wanted so much to tell him about Annie, to tell him everything she’d told me. But there in the office the events in the Galaxie that night seemed unreal. That, I remembered now, had been my original reason for coming to see him—not to talk about myself, or my father, or my mother, but Annie. But I found myself unable to say it, or else I didn’t know how. I was beginning to wonder if she’d really said the things she’d said, if it was all true. I wonder now if things would be any different if I’d told him then. Somehow I don’t think so. I think things would have turned out exactly the same anyway. And I had promised her that I wouldn’t tell, after all. I still meant to. I was going to tell someone. I was going to do something. But for some reason, I didn’t do it that day.
“Nothing,” I said. “Never mind. Just—thank you for talking to me. You’re the only one I can say these things to. I appreciate it.”
Connor smiled, his wrinkled, kindly face creasing with pleasure.
“I’ve always felt like you were sort of a son to me, Billy,” he said. “And I will talk with you about anything you want. Any time at all.”
If I’d been younger, I would have hugged him. Instead I shook his hand. He patted me on the shoulder and gripped my hand warmly, strongly, in his large hairy fist. Then without warning he drew me to him and clasped me against his chest, just for a brief moment. His arms were around my shoulders in a fatherly sort of way, and I smelled him, his odor of pipe tobacco and cologne and disinfectant soap. Then he released me and I went out of the examination room and down the hall and out the front door, avoiding the eyes of whoever it was sitting in the parlor.
Mr. Gruber put down the phone and handed me a slip of paper with an order on it. Mechanically, without reading the address, I grabbed a brown paper bag and began filling it with items from the slip. Pork chops, soap, tampons, canned fruit, bananas, beer, a pack of cigarettes. Then I checked the address, to see whether or not I would have to take the bicycle.
I hoped not. I always felt like an idiot riding around on the Gruber Grocery bike; it had a basket on the front and a big red flag on the back, which Mrs. Gruber had insisted on installing to protect me from maniacal drivers, and—what was probably the most humiliating touch of all—a bell on the handlebars for me to ring in times of distress. Some guys from school had seen me riding this bike once, and the ribbing that followed was, though not mean-spirited, definitely unacceptable. Once was all it took; I had vowed never to ride the bicycle again.
The address was 1213 Evergreen. It was Elsie Orfenbacher.
“It’s getting to be closing time,” said Harold jocularly. “Might as well just go home after you finish that one.” He was, I noticed, not looking at me.
“Pay the lad,” said Emily, because it was Friday.
“Yah.” Harold went to the register and hit the NO SALE button. He counted out my week’s wages in bills and change and handed it to me. I put it in my pocket without counting it. It would, I knew, total fifty-seven dollars and forty-three cents. That was how much I made every week, not including tips, which generally added another fifteen or twenty dollars. I’d been working for the Grubers now for over six months. In my very own bank account there resided nine hundred of my own dollars, which was enough to buy almost anything I could think of. I was practically a millionaire. It was late August of 1984; I was still riding high on the feeling of turning fourteen; life was good, and soon I was thinking of buying a car, just to have around. Something to work on in my spare time.
“I think I’ll just walk, long as I’m going home,” I said, with a casualness that belied the tremendous hurry in which I suddenly found myself.
“Yah, that sounds fine,” said Harold, who seemed to understand without being told.
“Take the bike home for the weekend, why don’t you?” said Emily, who either knew nothing or was pretending to know nothing.
“No thank you,” I said.
“Might as well—save you the walking.”
“Emily,” said Harold, “he hates the bike.”
“Why does he hate the bike? It’s a perfectly good—”
“Well, see ya,” I said. I grabbed the groceries and slipped out the door before I could get swept up in another of their interminable arg
uments.
It was a ten-minute walk to Evergreen Street. I let myself in the backdoor as I had been instructed to do. I put the groceries away in the kitchen and then went down the hall to the back of the house, where the bedroom was. There I knocked.
“Come in,” she said.
Elsie was sitting up in bed, smoking and reading a magazine. She wore a large T-shirt, and the covers of the bed came up to her waist. I knew that under the blankets she was naked.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” I answered. I was getting used to this. I wasn’t nearly as frightened as I’d been the first few times, when I had been practically incoherent. But I was still eighteen years younger than she was; she was, in all things, the boss.
“Come give me a hug,” she smiled, putting down her magazine. I obeyed, kneeling awkwardly next to her on the bed. I was, she had told me, allowed to touch her anywhere I wanted, anytime, as long as we were alone and nobody could see us. It was part of my education. I lifted up her T-shirt and slipped one hand under there, feeling for her breast. They were my first breasts and I couldn’t get enough of them. Their softness was inconceivable.
“Still like ’em?”
“Yeah,” I grinned.
“My own little Mann,” she said. She ran one hand through my hair. “Who ever would have thought it?”
“You forgot to pay me for the groceries last time,” I said. “I had to pay for them myself.”
“Oops. How much?”
“About twenty-seven bucks.”
“Jeez. Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“That really that much money to you? I thought you were millionaires!”
“No,” I said patiently. I had explained this to her before, but I thought it was charming how she persisted in her notion that we were still rich. “We don’t really have any more money. We’re broke. But we still have the house.”
“You must have some left,” she insisted. “All that money doesn’t just disappear overnight.”
“Grandpa has a few investments. They’re old, left over from a long time ago. That’s what we live on. They’re just enough to make it.” This, I didn’t add, I knew from bitter experience, for in the last year it had fallen to me to add up the bills every month and pay them with money from the dwindling dividend checks. Funds were running appallingly low. But I didn’t want to think about that right now. “Lift up your arms,” I said.
She lifted up her arms and I took off her shirt.
“I still can’t believe this,” I told her.
“I could go to jail,” she said, in a perfectly willing and agreeable tone. “But I won’t, because you need me here, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I agreed, as I removed my clothes. Because Elsie had volunteered to provide me with exactly what I had been looking for—a teacher, a tutor, a private instructor in the ways of the sexual world.
It had begun on my second visit to her home. I’d dropped her groceries on the table as usual, but this time, to my astonishment, she was wearing only a short bathrobe, and as I stood waiting for her to tip me or tell me to get lost or whatever she was going to say, she had opened it with a deliberate calm and shown me her body.
“See this?” she’d said.
The room reeled around me. I thought perhaps I was going to faint. She had just taken a shower and her body was glistening wet.
“You need a woman,” she’d said. “I can tell.”
“You can?”
“Everyone can.”
“What?”
“Don’t worry about it.” There was something in her manner oddly similar to Doctor Connor’s when she said that; it was reassuring somehow. “It’s perfectly natural. It’s all part of the dance. Come here.”
I stepped closer. She unbuckled my belt and loosed my pants so that they dropped down around my bottom. Then she reached into my underwear, freed my cock, which strained upward in its eagerness like a thing possessed, and began to stroke it. I came almost immediately.
“Jesus,” she’d said, laughing. “You are a horny little guy, aren’t you?”
“Sorry,” I murmured. My knees were buckling. I could barely stand.
“If you ever tell anyone about this,” she said, “I’ll tell them you’re making it up. And that will be the last time you ever see me.”
“Don’t worry,” I said.
“Now go home,” she said. “I’ll see you in a few days.”
That was the first time. I went home and lay in my bed, staring in disbelief and wonder at the ceiling. I moved through the rest of the week with a renewed sense of vigor. Every time the phone rang at the grocery I forced myself to remain calm. She would call again, she’d said; I was not to call her, or to come over unannounced. Also, I was expressly forbidden to fall in love with her; she was not going to have some lovesick kid following her around with puppydog eyes, writing her sappy poetry. Those were the rules. I was terribly afraid that she wouldn’t call again.
But she did, once a week, which was neither more nor less frequently than she had ever called Gruber’s before, and in this way we kept things a secret.
I got in bed next to Elsie now and she stretched herself out along the length of me. She reached her hand under the covers and grabbed my penis. She manipulated me under the covers until she had me dangerously close to the edge again.
“Wait,” I said. I got on top of her. She was not yet ready, and I entered her after much fumbling, nearly giving it up once as hopeless. She put up with this with a sort of bemused smile, wincing now and again.
“Slow down,” she said, gently.
I slowed down.
We moved together as she had taught me, and soon she began to make her noises again, which made me go faster, and she told me to slow down again but this time I couldn’t and things were over soon after. But I was getting better, she said. I told her if she didn’t make so much noise I wouldn’t be done so soon, but the way she did it made me crazy. It sent shivers through me. We laughed and she gave me a cigarette, another new thing she was teaching me.
“Do you think I’m a slut?” she asked.
“What? No!”
“No,” she sighed, blowing smoke upward, “you’re too sweet for that, aren’t you?”
“I guess.”
“You’re not like most guys,” she said. “Even though you’re so young.”
I said nothing. I had already known that.
“Most guys think they can just come over and do whatever they want with me and then take off,” she said. “They even want me to be grateful. Jesus.”
“They do?”
“Oh, come on. You must have heard stories about me.”
“No,” I lied.
“Whatever. I like sex, that’s all. What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing!” I said, with conviction.
“Have you told anyone?”
“No. I promised, didn’t I?”
“My, my, a man who keeps his promises. How wonderful!” But it was not because I was wonderful that I hadn’t told anybody about her. It was because there was nobody I could tell.
“Come back next week,” she said as I got dressed. “I’ll call in another order.”
“You still owe me twenty-three for this one,” I reminded her. “Plus last week’s.”
“Cover me, can’t you, lover? Things are pretty rough for me right now. I’ll pay you back next check I get.”
“Sure,” I said. “I guess.” There was something romantic about taking care of a single woman and her child. It made me feel all the more manly. But it suddenly occurred to me that she didn’t really believe we were poor, and perhaps that had something to do with why she had decided to take me under her wing.
But none of that mattered right now. I was getting laid, and life was good. I walked whistling down the street through the Square, down Frederic Avenue and up Mann Road, the same walk I had taken every day of my life since I’d started school. It was about six o’clock. The air was soft with eve
ning and smelled of honeysuckle and swimming pools. A small boy, one of the MacDonalds, rode by me on his bicycle, a beach towel safety-pinned around his neck like a cape. “I’m Superman!” he shouted at me.
“I know how you feel,” I said. The boy stared at me and then darted off down the street.
I went home and got out my story. It was finished—all I needed to do was type it out. I’d found an old Royal typewriter in the attic and fixed it up. I opened a package of typing paper, set it next to me, opened my notebook to the beginning of my notes, and started typing. From time to time I lifted my fingers to my nose and smelled the aroma of her, which lingered over my entire body for hours.
7
In Which I Present My Very First Short Story, Entitled “Willie Mann and the Rory Fortune”
Willie Mann was digging up his garden. It was early spring, and the weather in western New York State—along the southern shore of Lake Erie—was still cold and wet. The sun refused to shine and storms still arose without warning. There was one brewing now, far off over the Lake. Willie could smell it.
The earth came up dark under his shovel, just barely thawed and smelling dank and wormy. Willie grimaced in pain each time he forced the shovel into the ground. There was a Confederate musket ball buried in his thigh, which the surgeons on the battlefield at Antietam had been unable to remove because it was too deep. But Willie didn’t pay any attention to the pain. He knew he was lucky to have kept his leg at all. Many men hadn’t been as fortunate as he. They had to ride home from the war in the backs of wagons, or limp along on crutches because they had only one leg left. It hurt Willie greatly to dig, but every time his right foot came down on the shovel and the pain shot up his leg, it was a reminder that he still had a leg to feel pain with, and so he never complained.
He was digging up a piece of land that his father had given him. It sat next to the family property, and it was his for when he got married. Willie was about to turn twenty-one years old, and although he had no immediate plans to find a wife, he knew it was wise to prepare in advance for the day when he would have one. There were many rocks in the soil, which would have to be removed before planting could begin.
Eddie's Bastard Page 19