by John Irving
'I got to tell you how sorry I am,' De Meo said to her. 'I won't still be here by the time you're a student. I'll be graduated already.'
'What do you mean?' Franny said.
They're going to take in girls,' De Meo said.
'I know,' Franny said. 'So what?'
'So, it's a pity, that's all,' he told her, 'that I won't be here by the time you're finally old enough.'
Franny shrugged; it was Mother's shrug -- independent and pretty. I picked De Meo's mouthpiece up from the cinder track; it was slimy and gritty and I tossed it at him.
'Why don't you put that back in your mouth?' I asked him. I could run fast, but I didn't think I could run faster than Ralph De Meo.
'Beat it,' he said; he zipped the mouthpiece at my head, but I ducked. It sailed away somewhere.
'How come you're not scrimmaging,' Franny asked him. Behind the grey wooden bleachers that passed for the Dairy School 'stadium' was the practice field where we could hear the shoulder pads and helmets tapping.
'I got a groin injury,' De Meo told Franny. 'Want to see it?'
'I hope it falls off,' I said.
'I can catch you, Johnny,' he said, still looking at Franny. Nobody called me 'Johnny.'
'Not with a groin injury you can't,' I said.
I was wrong; he caught me at the forty-yard line and pushed my face in the fresh lime painted on the field. He was kneeling on my back when I heard him exhale sharply and he slumped off me and lay on his side on the cinder track.
'Jesus,' he said, in a soft little voice. Franny had grabbed the tin cup in his jock strap and twisted its edges into his private parts, which is what we called them in those days.
We both could outrun him, then.
'How'd you know about it?' I asked her. The thing in his jock strap? I mean, the cup.'
'He showed me, another time,' she said grimly.
We lay still in the pine needles in the deep woods behind the practice field; we could hear Coach Bob's whistle and the contact, but we were hidden from all of them.
Franny never minded when Ralph De Meo beat up Frank, and I asked her why she minded when Ralph beat up me.
'You're not Frank,' she whispered fiercely; she wet her skirt in the damp grass at the edge of the woods and wiped the lime off my face with it, rolling up the hem of her skirt so that her belly was bare. A pine needle stuck to her stomach and I picked it off for her.
'Thank you,' she said, intent on getting every last bit of the lime off me; she pulled her skirt up higher, spit in it, and kept wiping. My face stung.
'Why do we like each other more than we like Frank?' I asked her.
'We just do,' she said, 'and we always will. Frank is weird,' she said.
'But he's our brother,' I said.
'So? You're my brother, too,' she said. 'That's not why I like you.'
'Why do you?' I asked.
'I just do,' she said. We wrestled for a while in the woods, until she got something in her eye; I helped her get it out. She was sweaty and smelled like clean dirt. She had very high breasts, which seemed separated by too wide an expanse of chest, but Franny was strong. She could usually beat me up, unless I got completely on top of her; then she could still tickle me hard enough to make me pee if I didn't get off her. When she was on top of me, there was no moving her.
'One day I'll be able to beat you up,' I told her.
'So what?' she said. 'By then you won't want to.'
A fat football player, named Poindexter, came into the woods to move his bowels. We saw him coming and hid in the ferns we'd known about for years. For years the football players crapped in these woods, just off the practice field -- especially, it seemed, the fat ones. It was a long run back to the gymnasium, and Coach Bob harangued them for not emptying their bowels before they came to practice. For some reason the fat ones could never get them entirely empty, we imagined.
'It's Poindexter,' I whispered.
'Of course it is,' Franny said.
Poindexter was very awkward; he always had trouble getting his thigh pads down. Once he had to take off his cleats and remove the entire bottom half of his uniform, except his socks. This time he just struggled with the pads and pants that bound his knees precariously close together. He kept his balance by squatting slightly forward with his hands on his helmet (on the ground in front of him). This time he crapped messily on the insides of his football shoes and had to wipe the shoes as well as his ass. For a moment, Franny and I feared he would use the ferns for this purpose, but Poindexter was always hurried and panting, and he did as good a job as he could with the handful of maple leaves he'd gathered on the path and brought into the woods with him. We heard Coach Bob's whistle blowing, and Poindexter heard it, too.
When he ran back toward the practice field, Franny and I started clapping. When Poindexter stopped and listened, we stopped clapping; the poor fat boy stood in the woods, wondering what applause he had imagined -- this time -- and then rushed back to the game he played so badly and, usually, with such humiliation.
Then Franny and I snuck down to the path that the football players always took back to the gym. It was a narrow path, pockmarked from their cleats. We were slightly worried where De Meo might be, but I went up to the edge of the practice field and 'spotted' for Franny while she dropped her pants and squatted on the path; then she spotted for me. We both covered our rather disappointing messes with a light sprinkling of leaves. Then we retreated to the usual ferns to wait for the football players to finish practice, but Lilly was already in the ferns.
'Go home,' Franny told her; Lilly was seven. Most of the time she was too young for Franny and me, but we were nice to her around the house; she had no friends, and she seemed entranced by Frank, who enjoyed babying her.
'I don't have to go home,' Lilly said.
'Better go,' Franny said.
'Why's your face so red?' Lilly asked me.
'De Meo put poison on it,' Franny said, 'and he's looking around for more people to rub it on.'
'If I go home, he'll see me,' Lilly said seriously.
'Not if you go right away,' I said.
'We'll watch out for you,' Franny said. She stood up out of the ferns. 'It's all clear,' she whispered. Lilly ran home.
'Am I really all red in the face?' I asked Franny.
Franny pulled my face up close to hers and licked me once on my cheek, once on my forehead, once on my nose, once on my lips. 'I can't taste it anymore,' she said. 'I got it all off you.'
We lay together in the ferns; it wasn't boring, but it took a while for the practice to be over and for the first football players to come down the path. The third one stepped in it -- a running back from Boston who was doing a postgraduate year at Dairy, basically to get a little older before he played football in college. He slid a short ways in it, but caught his balance; then he regarded the horror in his cleats.
'Poindexter!' he screamed. Poindexter, a slow runner, was well to the rear of the line of players heading for the showers. 'Poindexter!' screamed the running back from Boston. 'You turd, Poindexter!'
'What'd I do?' Poindexter asked, out of breath, forever fat -- 'fat in his genes,' Franny would say, later, when she knew what genes were.
'Did you have to do it on the path, you asshole?' the running back asked Poindexter.
'It wasn't me!' Poindexter protested.
'Clean my cleats, you shit-for-brains,' the running back said. At a school like Dairy, the linemen, although bigger, were the weaker, fatter, younger boys, often sacrificed for the few good athletes -- Coach Bob let the good ones carry the ball.
Several rougher members of Iowa Bob's backfield surrounded Poindexter on the path.
They don't have girls here yet, Poindexter,' said the running back from Boston, 'so there's nobody but you to clean the shit off my shoes.'
Poindexter did as he was told; he was, at least, familiar with the job.
Franny and I went home, past the token cows in the falling-down school barns, past Coach
Bob's back door, where the rusty fenders of the 1937 Indian were inverted on the porch -- to scrape your shoes on. The motorcycle fenders were the only outdoor remains of Earl.
'When it's time for us to go to the Dairy School,' I said to Franny, 'I hope we're living somewhere else.'
'I'm not going to clean the shit off anybody's shoes,' Franny said. 'No way.'
Coach Bob, who ate supper with us, bemoaned his terrible football team. 'It's my last year, I swear,' the old man said, but he was always saying this. 'Poindexter actually took a dump on the path today -- during practice.'
'I saw Franny and John with their clothes off,' Lilly said.
'You did not,' Franny said.
'On the path,' Lilly said.
'Doing what?' Mother said.
'Doing what Grandpa Bob said,' Lilly told everyone.
Frank snorted his disgust; Father banished Franny and me to our rooms. Upstairs Franny whispered to me, 'You see? It's just you and me. Not Lilly. Not Frank.'
'Not Egg,' I added.
'Egg isn't anybody yet, dummy,' Franny said. 'Egg isn't a human being yet.' Egg was only three.
'Now there's two of them following us,' Franny said. 'Frank and Lilly.'
'Don't forget De Meo,' I said.
'I can forget him easy,' Franny said. 'I'm going to have lots of De Meos when I grow up.'
This thought alarmed me and I was silent.
'Don't worry,' Franny whispered, but I said nothing and she crept down the hall and into my room; she got into my bed and we left my door open so we could hear them all talking at the dinner table.
'It's not fit for my children, this school,' Father said. 'I know that.'
'Well,' Mother said, 'all your talk about it has certainly convinced them of that. They'll be afraid to go, when the time comes.'
'When the time comes,' Father said, 'we'll send them away to a good school.'
'I don't care about a good school,' Frank said, and Franny and I could sympathize with him; although we hated the notion of going to Dairy, we were more disturbed at the thought of going 'away.'
' "Away" where?' Frank asked.
'Who's going away?' Lilly asked.
'Hush,' Mother said. 'No one is going away to school. We couldn't afford it. If there's a benefit to being on the faculty at the Dairy School, it's at least that there's someplace free to send our children to.'
'Someplace that's not any good,' Father said.
'Better than average,' Mother said.
'Listen,' Father said. 'We're going to make money.'
This was news to us; Franny and I kept very still.
Frank must have been nervous at the prospect. 'May I be excused?' he asked.
'Of course, dear,' Mother said. 'How are we going to make money?' Mother asked Father.
'For God's sake, tell me,' Coach Bob said. 'I'm the one who wants to retire.'
'Listen,' Father said. We listened. 'This school may be worthless, but it's going to grow; it's going to take on girls, remember? And even if it doesn't grow, it's not going to fold. It's been here too long to fold; its instincts are only to survive, and it will. It won't ever be a good school; it will go through so many phases that at times we won't recognize the place, but it's going to keep going -- you can count on that.'
'So what?' said Iowa Bob.
'So there's going to be a school here,' Father said. 'A private school is going to go on being here, in this crummy town,' he said, 'and the Thompson Female Seminary isn't going to go on being here, because now the girls in town will go to Dairy.'
'Everybody knows that,' said Mother.
'May I be excused?' Lilly asked.
'Yes, yes,' Father said. 'Listen,' he said to Mother and Bob, 'don't you see?' Franny and I didn't see anything -- only Frank, sneaking by in the upstairs hall. 'What's going to become of that old building, the Thompson Female Seminary?' Father asked. And that's when Mother suggested burning it. Coach Bob suggested it become the county jail.
'It's big enough,' he said. Someone else had suggested this at Town Meeting.
'Nobody wants a jail here,' Father said. 'Not in the middle of town.'
'It already looks like a jail,' Mother said.
'Just needs more bars,' said Iowa Bob.
'Listen,' Father said, impatiently. Franny and I froze together; Frank was lurking outside my door -- Lilly was whistling, somewhere close by. 'Listen, listen,' Father said. 'What this town needs is a hotel.'
There was silence from the dining room table. A 'hotel,' Franny and I knew, lying in my bed, was what did away with old Earl. A hotel was a vast ruined space, smelling of fish, guarded by a gun.
'Why a hotel?' Mother finally said. 'You're always saying it's a crummy town -- who'd want to come here?'
'Maybe not want to,' Father said, 'but have to. Those parents of those kids at the Dairy School,' he said. They visit their kids, don't they? And you know what? The parents are going to get richer and richer, because the tuition is going to keep going up and up, and there won't be any more scholarship students -- there will only be rich kids coming here. And if you visit your kid at this school now, you can't stay in town. You have to go to the beach, where all the motels are, or you have to drive even farther, up toward the mountains -- but there's nothing, absolutely nothing to stay in right here.'
That was his plan. Somehow, although the Dairy School could barely afford enough janitors, Father thought it would provide the clientele for one hotel in the town of Dairy -- that the town was so motley, and no one else had dreamed of putting up a place to stay in it, didn't worry my Father, in New Hampshire the summer tourists went to the beaches -- they were half an hour away. The mountains were an hour away, where the skiers went, and where there were summer lakes. But Dairy was valley land, inland but not upland: Dairy was close enough to the sea to feel the sea's dampness but far enough away from the sea to benefit not in the slightest from the sea's freshness. The brisk air from the ocean and from the moutains did not penetrate the dull haze that hung over the valley of the Squamscott River, and Dairy was a Squamscott Valley town -- a penetrating damp cold in winter, a steamy humidity all summer. Not a picture-pretty New England village but a mill town on a polluted river -- the mill now as abandoned and as ugly as the Thompson Female Seminary. It was a town with its sole hopes hung on the Dairy School, a place no one wanted to go.
'If there was a hotel here, however,' Father said, 'people would stay in it.'
'But the Thompson Female Seminary would make a dreadful hotel,' Mother said. 'It could only be what it is: an old school.'
'Do you realize how cheaply one could buy it?' Father said.
'Do you realize how much it would cost to fix it up?' Mother said.
'What a depressing idea!' said Coach Bob.
Franny started to pin my arms down; it was her usual method of attack -- she'd get my arms all tied up, then tickle me by grinding her chin into my ribs or my armpit, or else she'd bite me on the neck (just hard enough to make me lie still). Our legs were thrashing under the covers, throwing the blankets off -- whoever could scissor the other's legs had the initial advantage -- when Lily came into my room in her weird way, on all fours with a sheet over her.
'Creep,' Franny said to her.
'I'm sorry you got in trouble,' Lilly said under the sheet. Lilly always apologized for ratting on us by completely covering her body and crawling into our rooms on all fours. 'I brought you something,' Lilly said.
'Food?' Franny asked. I pulled Lilly's sheet off and Franny took a paper bag that Lilly had carried to us, clutched in her teeth. There were two bananas and two of the warm rolls from supper in it. 'Nothing to drink?' Franny asked. Lilly shook her head.
'Come on, get in,' I said to her, and Lilly crawled into bed with Franny and me.
'We're going to move to a hotel,' Lilly said.
'Not quite,' said Franny.
But they seemed to be talking about something else downstairs at the dining table. Coach Bob was angry with my Father, again -- f
or the same old thing, it seemed: for never being satisfied, as Bob put it, for living in the future. For always making plans for the next year instead of just living, moment by moment.
'But he can't help it,' my mother was saying; she always defended my father from Coach Bob.
'You've got a wonderful wife, and a wonderful family,' Iowa Bob was telling my father. 'You've got this big old house -- an inheritance! You didn't even have to pay for it! You've got a job. So what if the pay's not great -- what do you need money for? You're a lucky man.'
'I don't want to be a teacher,' Father said quietly, which meant he was angry again. 'I don't want to be a coach. I don't want my kids to go to a school this bad. It's a hick town, and a floundering school full of rich kids with problems; their parents send them here in a desperate effort to arrest their already considerable sophistication -- run-amok sophistication on the part of the kids, run-amok hickness on the part of the school and the town. It's the worst of both worlds.'
'But if you just spent more time with the kids, now,' Mother said, quietly, 'and worried a little less about where they're all going to be in a few years.'
'The future again!' said Iowa Bob. 'He lives in the future! First it was all the travelling -- all so he could go to Harvard. So he went to Harvard, then, as fast as he could -- so he could be through with it. For what? For this job, which he's done nothing but complain about. Why doesn't he enjoy it?'
'Enjoy this?' Father said, 'You don't enjoy it, do you?'
We could imagine our grandfather, Coach Bob, fuming; fuming was how he ended most arguments with my father, who was quicker than Iowa Bob; when Bob felt outwitted, but still right, he fumed. Franny and Lilly and I could imagine his knotty, bald head smoldering. It was true that he had no higher regard for the Dairy School than my father had, but Iowa Bob had at least committed himself to something, he felt, and he wished to see my father involved with what he was doing instead of involved -- as Bob would say -- with the future. After all, Coach Bob had once bitten a running back; he had not seen my father ever so engaged.
He was probably distressed that my father never became passionate about any sport, although Father was athletic and liked exercise. And Iowa Bob loved my mother very much; he had known her all the years my father was away at the war, away at Harvard, and away with Earl. Coach Bob probably thought that my father neglected his family; in the last years, I know, Bob thought Father had neglected Earl.