by John Irving
'What's a dayroom?' Egg asked. It seemed everyone wanted to know that.
Franny and I listened to Ronda Ray's room on the intercom for hours, but it would be weeks before we learned what a dayroom was. At midmornings we would switch on Ronda's room and Franny would say, after listening to the breathing for a while, 'Asleep.' Or sometimes: 'Smoking a cigarette.'
Late at night, Franny and I would listen and I would say, 'Perhaps she's reading.'
'Are you kidding?' Franny would say.
Bored, we would listen to the other rooms, one at a time, or all together. Checking out Max Urick's static, over which we could -- occasionally -- hear Max's radio. Checking the stockpots in Mrs. Urick's basement kitchen. We knew that 3F was Iowa Bob, and we would tune in the sound of his barbells every once in a while -- often interrupting him with our own comments, like: 'Come on, Grandpa, a little quicker! Let's really snap those babies up -- you're slowing down.'
'You damn kids!' Bob would grunt; or at other times he would slap two iron weights together, right next to the speaker-receiver box, so that Franny and I would jump and hold our ringing ears. 'Ha!' Coach Bob would cry. 'Got you little buggers that time, didn't I?'
'Lunatic in 3F,' Franny would broadcast on the intercom. 'Lock your doors. Lunatic in 3F.'
'Ha!' Iowa Bob would grunt -- over the bench presses, over the push-ups, the sit-ups, the one-arm curls. 'This hotel is for lunatics!'
It was Iowa Bob who encouraged me to lift weights. What happened to Franny had somehow inspired me to make myself stronger. By Thanksgiving I was running six miles a day, although the cross-country course at Dairy was only two and a quarter miles. Bob put me on a heavy dose of bananas and milk and oranges. 'And pasta, rice, fish, lots of greens, hot cereal, and ice cream,' the old coach told me. I lifted twice a day; and in addition to my six miles, I ran wind sprints every morning in Elliot Park.
At first, I just put on weight.
'Lay off the bananas,' Father said.
'And the ice cream,' said Mother.
'No, no,' said Iowa Bob. 'Muscles take a little time.'
'Muscles?' Father said. 'He's fat.'
'You look like a cherub, dear,' Mother told me.
'You look like a teddy bear,' Franny told me.
'Just keep eating,' said Iowa Bob. 'With all the lifting and running, you're going to see a change in no time.'
'Before he explodes?' Franny said.
I was going on fifteen, as they say; between Halloween and Christmas I gained twenty pounds; I weighed 170, but I was still only five feet six inches tall.
'Man,' Junior Jones told me, 'if we painted you black and white, and put circles around your eyes, you'd look like a panda.'
'One day soon,' said Iowa Bob, 'you're going to drop twenty pounds and you'll be hard all over.'
Franny gave an exaggerated shiver and kicked me under the table 'Hard all over!' she cried.
'It's gross,' Frank said. 'All of it. The weight lifting, the bananas, the panting up and down the stairs.' In the mornings when it rained, I refused to run wind sprints in Elliot Park; I sprinted up and down the stairs of the Hotel New Hampshire, instead.
Max Urick said he was going to throw grenades down the stairwell. And on a very rainy morning, Ronda Ray stopped me on the second-floor landing; she was wearing one of her nightgowns and looking especially sleepy. 'Let me tell you, it's like listening to lovers go at it in the room next to mine,' she said. Her dayroom was nearest the stairwell. She liked to call me John-O. 'I don't mind the sound of the feet, John-O,' she told me. 'It's the breathing that gets me,' she said. 'I don't know if you're dying or trying to come, but it curls my hair, let me tell you.'
'Don't listen to any of them,' said Iowa Bob. 'You're the first member of this family who's taken a proper interest in his body. You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed,' Bob told me. 'And we have to beef you up before we can strip you down.'
Thus it was, and so it is: I owe my body to Iowa Bob -- an obsession that has never left me -- and bananas.
It would be a while before those extra twenty pounds came off, but they would come off, and they have stayed off ever since. I weigh 150 pounds, all the time.
And I would be seventeen before I finally grew another two inches, and stopped for life. That's me: five feet eight inches tall and 150 pounds. And hard all over.
In a little while I will be forty, but even now, when I work out, I remember the Christmas season of 1956. Now they have such fancy weight machines; there's no more sliding the weights on the bar, and forgetting to tighten the screws and having the weights slide together and mash your fingers, or fall off the end of the bar on your toes. But no matter how modern the gymnasium, or the equipment, it only takes a little light lifting to bring back Iowa Bob's room -- good old 3F, and the worn oriental rug where his weights were, the rug Sorrow used to sleep on: after weight lifting on that rug, Bob and I would be covered with the dead dog's hair. And after I've been pushing the weight for a while, and that long-lasting, luxurious ache starts creeping over me, I can bring to mind every scruffy person and every stain on the canvas that dotted the horsehair mats in the weight room of the Dairy School gym, where we would always be waiting for Junior Jones to finish his turn. Jones took all the weights in the room and put them on one barbell, and we would stand there with our empty bars, waiting and waiting. In his days with the Cleveland Browns, Junior Jones weighed 285 and could bench-press 550. He was not that strong when he was at the Dairy School, but he was already strong enough to suggest to me a proper goal for the bench press.
'What you weigh?' he'd ask me. 'Do you even know?' And when I'd tell him what I weighed, he'd shake his head and say, 'Okay, double it.' And when I'd doubled it -- and had put 300 pounds or so on the barbell -- he'd say, 'Okay, down on the mat, on your back.' There were no benches for doing bench presses at the Dairy School, so I'd lie down on the mat on my back and Junior Jones would pick up the 300-pound barbell and place it gently across my throat -- there was just enough room so that the bar depressed my Adam's apple only slightly. I gripped the bar in both hands and I felt my elbows sink down into the mat. 'Now lift it over your head,' said Junior Jones, and he'd walk out of the weight room, to get a drink of water, or go take his shower, and I'd lie there under the barbell -- trapped. Nothing happened when I tried to lift 300 pounds. Other, bigger people would come into the weight room and see me lying there, under the 300 pounds, and they'd respectfully ask me, 'Uh, you gonna be through with that, after a while?'
'Yeah, just resting,' I'd say, puffing up like a toad. And they'd go away and come back later.
Junior Jones would always come back later, too.
'How's it going?' he'd ask. He'd take off twenty pounds, then fifty, then one hundred.
'Try that,' he'd keep saying; he kept going away, and coming back, until I could extricate myself from under the barbell.
And all 150 pounds of me has never bench-pressed 300 pounds, of course, although twice in my life I have done 215, and I believe that doubling my own weight is not impossible. I can get in a marvellous trance under all that weight.
Sometimes, when I'm really pumping, I can see the Black Arm of the Law moving through the trees, humming their tune, and sometimes I can recall the smell of the fifth floor of the dorm where Junior Jones lived -- that hot, jungle nightclub in the sky -- and when I run, about the third mile, or the fourth, or sometimes not until the sixth, my own lungs remember, vividly, the feeling of keeping up with Harold Swallow. And the sight of a slash of Franny's hair, fallen across her open mouth -- no sound coming from her -- as Lenny Metz knelt on her arms and pinched her head between his heavy, running-back's thighs. And Chester Pulaski on top of her: an automaton. I sometimes can duplicate his rhythm, exactly, when I am counting out the push-ups ('seventy-five, seventy-six, seventy-seven'). Or the sit-ups ('one hundred and twenty-one, one hundred and twenty-two, one hundred and twenty-three').
Iowa Bob simply introduced me to the equipment; Junior Jones added his
advice, and his own marvellous example; Father had already taught me how to run -- and Harold Swallow, how to run harder. The technique and routine -- and even Coach Bob's diet -- were easy. The hard part, for most people, is the discipline. As Coach Bob said, you've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed. But for me, this was also easy. Because I did it all for Franny. I'm not complaining, but it was all for Franny -- and she knew it.
'Listen, kid,' she told me -- from Halloween to Christmas, 1956 -- 'you're going to throw up if you don't stop eating bananas. And if you don't stop eating oranges, you're going to have a vitamin overdose. What the hell are you pushing so hard for? You'll never be as fast as Harold Swallow. You'll never be as big as Junior Jones.
'Kid, I can read you like a book,' Franny told me. 'No way is it going to happen again, you know. And if it does -- and you actually are strong enough to save me -- what makes you think you'll even be there? If it happens again, I'll be someplace far away from you -- and I'll hope you never know about it, anyway. I promise.'
But Franny took the purpose of my workouts too literally. I wanted strength, stamina, and speed -- or I desired their illusions. I never wanted to feel, again, the helplessness of another Halloween.
There was still the evidence of a mangled pumpkin or two -- one at the curb of Pine Street and Elliot Park, and another that had been thrown from the bleachers and burst upon the cinder track around the football field -- when Dairy hosted Exeter for the last game of Iowa Bob's winning season. Halloween was still in the air, although Chipper Dove, Lenny Metz, and Chester Pulaski were gone.
The second-string backfield appeared under the influence of a spell: they did everything in slow motion. They ran to the holes that Junior Jones had opened, after the holes had closed; they lobbed passes into the sky, and the passes took forever to come down. Waiting for one such pass, Harold Swallow was knocked unconscious and Iowa Bob wouldn't let him play the rest of the long day.
'Somebody rang your bell, Harold,' Coach Bob told the speedster.
'I ain't got no bell,' Harold Swallow complained. 'Who rang?' he asked. 'What somebody?'
At the half, Exeter led 24-0. Junior Jones, playing both offence and defence, had been involved in a dozen tackles; he caused three fumbles and recovered two; but the second-string Dairy backfield had coughed up the ball three times, and two looping passes had been intercepted. In the second half, Coach Bob started Junior Jones at a running-back position, and Jones made three consecutive first downs before the Exeter defence adjusted. The adjustment was simply recognizing that as long as Junior Jones was in the backfield, he would carry the ball. So Iowa Bob put Junior back in the line, where he had more fun, and Dairy's only score, which came late in the fourth quarter, was properly credited to Jones. He broke into the Exeter backfield and took the ball away from an Exeter running back and ran into the Exeter end zone with it -- and with two or three Exeter players clinging to him. The extra point was wide to the left and the final score was Exeter 45, Dairy 6.
Franny missed Junior's touchdown: she had come to the game only because of him, and she had gone back to being a cheerleader for the Exeter game only to yell her lungs out for Junior Jones. But Franny got involved in an altercation with another cheerleader, and Mother had to take her home. The other cheerleader was Chipper Dove's hiding place, Mindy Mitchell.
'Cock tease,' Mindy Mitchell called my sister.
'Dumb cunt,' Franny said, and whacked Mindy with her cheerleader's megaphone. It was made of cardboard, and it looked like a large shit-brown ice cream cone with a death-grey D for Dairy painted on it. 'D is for Death,' Franny always said.
'Smack in the boobs,' another cheerleader told me. 'Franny hit Mindy Mitchell with the megaphone smack in the boobs.'
Of course I told Junior Jones, after the game', why Franny wasn't there to walk with him back to the gym.
'What a good girl she is!' Junior said. 'You tell her, won't you?'
And of course I did. Franny had taken another bath and was all dressed up to help Ronda Ray wait on tables; she was in a pretty good mood. Despite the rather landslide conclusion to Iowa Bob's winning season, nearly everyone seemed in a good mood. It was opening night at the Hotel New Hampshire!
Mrs. Urick had outdone herself at plainness-but-goodness; even Max was wearing a white shirt and tie, and Father was absolutely beaming behind the bar -- the bottles winking in the mirror, under his fast-moving elbows and over his shoulders, were like a sunrise Father had always believed was coming.
There were eleven couples and seven singles for overnight guests, and a divorced man from Texas had come all the way to see his son play against Exeter; the kid had gone out of the game in the first quarter with a sprained ankle, but even the Texan was in a good mood. Compared to him, the couples and the singles seemed a little shy -- not knowing each other, just having children at the Dairy School in common -- but after the kids went back to their dorms, the Texan got everyone talking to each other in the restaurant and bar. 'Isn't it great having kids?' he asked. 'God, it's something how they all grow up, isn't it?' Everyone agreed. The Texan said, 'Why don't you all pull your chairs over here to my table and have a drink on me!' And Mother stood anxiously in the kitchen doorway, with Mrs. Urick and Max, and Father stood poised but confident behind the bar; Frank ran out of the room; Franny held my hand and we held our breath; Iowa Bob looked as if he were suppressing an enormous sneeze. And one by one the couples and the singles got up from where they were sitting and attempted to pull their chairs over to the Texan's table.
'Mine's stuck!' said a woman from New Jersey, who'd had a little too much to drink; she had a sharp, squeaky giggle of the mindless quality of hamsters running miles and miles on those little wheels in their cages.
A man from Connecticut turned bright red in the face, trying to lift his chair, until his wife said, 'It's nailed down. There are nails that go right into the floor.'
A man from Massachusetts knelt on the floor by his chair. 'Screws,' he said. Those are screws -- four or five of them, for each chair!'
The Texan knelt down on the floor and stared at his chair.
'Everything's screwed down here!' Iowa Bob shouted, suddenly. He had not spoken to anyone since after the game, when he told the scout from Penn State that Junior Jones could play anywhere. His face was unfamiliarly red and shining, as if he'd had one more drink than he usually allowed himself -- or the sense of his own retirement had finally come to him. 'We're all on a big ship!' said Iowa Bob. 'We're on a big cruise, across the world!'
'Ya-hoo!' the Texan shouted. 'I'll drink to that!'
The woman from New Jersey clutched the back of her screwed-down chair. Some of the others sat down.
'We're in danger of being swept away, at any time!' Coach Bob said, and Ronda Ray came swishing back and forth between Bob and the Dairy parents poised at their well-fastened seats; she was passing out the coasters, and the cocktail napkins again, and flicking a damp towel over the edges of the tables. Frank peeked in from the door to the hall; Mother and the Uricks seemed paralyzed in the kitchen doorway; Father had lost none of the glitter he absorbed from the bar mirror, but he stared at his father, old Iowa Bob, as if he feared that the retired coach was about to say something crazy.
'Of course the chairs are screwed down!' Bob said, sweeping his arm toward the sky, as if he were giving his last halftime speech -- and this were the game of his life. 'At the Hotel New Hampshire,' said Iowa Bob, 'when the shit hits the fan, nobody gets blown away!'
'Ya-hoo!' the Texan cried again, but everyone else seemed to have stopped breathing.
'Just hold on to your seats!' said Coach Bob. 'And nothing will ever hurt you here.'
'Ya-hoo! Thank God the chairs are screwed down!' the big-hearted Texan cried. 'Let's all drink to that!'
The wife of the man from Connecticut gave an audible sigh of relief.
'Well, I guess, we'll just have to speak up if we're all going to be friends and talk to each other!' the Texan said.
'Yes
!' said the New Jersey woman, a little breathlessly.
Father was still staring at Iowa Bob, but Bob was just fine -- he turned and winked at Frank in the hall doorway, and bowed to Mother and the Uricks, and Ronda Ray came through the room again and gave the old coach a saucy stroke across his cheek, and the Texan watched Ronda as if he'd forgotten all about chairs -- screwed down or not screwed down. Who cares if the chairs can't be moved? he was thinking to himself -- because Ronda Ray had more moves than Harold Swallow, and she was into the spirit of opening night, like everyone else.
'Ya-hoo,' Franny whispered in my ear, but I sat at the bar watching Father make the drinks. He looked more concentrated with energy than I had ever seen him before, and the gradual volume of voices came over me -- and always would: I will remember that restaurant and bar, in that Hotel New Hampshire, as a place that was always so loud with talk, even if there weren't many people there. Like the Texan said, everyone had to speak up if they were going to sit so far apart.
And even after the Hotel New Hampshire, had been open long enough so that we recognized many of our customers, from the town, as 'regulars' -- those who were at the bar every night until closing time, just before which old Iowa Bob would appear for a nightcap before he turned in -- even during those familiar evenings, with those familiar few, Bob could still pull his favourite trick. 'Hey, pull up your chair,' he'd say to someone, and someone would always be fooled. For a moment, forgetting where he or she was, someone would give a little lift, a little grunt, a little perplexed strain would pass across a face, and Iowa Bob would laugh and cry out, 'Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here -- for life!'
That opening night, after the bar and restaurant was closed and everyone had gone to bed, Franny and Frank and I met at the switchboard and did a bed check on each of the rooms with the unique squawk-box system. We could hear who slept soundly, and who snored; we could detect who was still up (reading), and we were surprised (and disappointed) to discover no couples were talking, or making love.
Iowa Bob slept like a subway, rumbling miles and miles underground. Mrs. Urick had left a stockpot simmering, and Max was playing his usual static. The New Jersey couple was reading, or one of them was: the slow turning of pages, the short breaths of the nonsleeper. The Connecticut pair wheezed and whinnied and whooped in their sleep; their room was a boiler room of sound. Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New York, and Maine all gave off the sounds of their various habits of repose.