by John Irving
The board that Frank had found with the paw prints on it and the Sorrow holes in it, looking like the abandoned crucifix of a four-footed Christ, seemed ominous to me. I talked Franny into a bed check, although she said Frank and I were nuts -- Egg, she said, had probably wanted to keep the board and had thrown the dog away. Of course the intercom revealed nothing, since Sorrow -- whether he was thrown away or hidden -- was no longer breathing. There was a strange blowing sound, like the rushing of air, from 4A -- at the opposite end of the hall from Max Urick's static -- but Franny said there was probably a window open: Ronda Ray had made up that bed for Bitty Tuck, and the room had probably been stuffy.
'Why are we putting Bitty way up on the fourth floor?' I asked.
'Because Mother thought she'd be here with Nasty,' Franny said, 'and that way -- stuck up on the fourth floor -- they could have some privacy from you kids.'
'From us kids, you mean,' I said. 'Where's Junior sleeping?'
'Not with me,' Franny said crisply. 'Junior and Sabrina have their own rooms on the second floor.'
'Sa-bree-na?' I said.
'That's it,' Franny said.
Sabrina Jones! I thought, and experienced a catacylsmic closing of the throat. Seventeen and six-foot-six, I imagined; goes about 185, stripped and towel-dried -- and she can bench-press 200 pounds.
'They're here,' Lilly came and told us at the switchboard, in her wispy voice. The sight of the size of Junior Jones always took Lilly's breath away.
'How big is she?' I asked Lilly, but of course everyone looked enormous to Lilly; I would have to see Sabrina Jones for myself.
Frank, indulging in a moment of overt self-consciousness, had dressed himself in his bus driver's uniform and was playing doorman at the Hotel New Hampshire. He was carrying Bitty Tuck's luggage into the lobby; Bitty Tuck was the kind of girl who had luggage. She wore a sort of man's suit, but it had been tailored for a woman, and even a sort of man's dress shirt, with a button-down collar and tie, and everything -- except the breasts, which were extraordinary, as Junior Jones had observed: they were impossible to conceal even in the most mannish costume. She flounced into the lobby behind Frank, who was sweating with her luggage.
'Hi, John-John!' she said.
'Hi, Titsie,' I said, not meaning to let her nickname slip out, because only Junior and Franny could call her Titsie and not receive her scorn. She looked at me scornfully and rushed past me, embracing Franny with the strange shrieks her kind of girl seems to have been born making.
'The bags go to 4A, Frank,' I said.
'Jesus, not now they don't,' Frank said, collapsing with Bitty's luggage in the lobby. 'It will take a team effort,' he said. 'Maybe some of you fools will get excited enough to actually have fun doing it, during the party.'
Junior Jones loomed in the lobby, looking capable of hurling Bitty Tuck's luggage up four floors -- including Frank with the bags, I thought.
'Hey, the fun is here,' said Junior Jones. 'Here's the fun, man.'
I tried to see past him, or around him, to the doorway. For a terrified second I actually looked above him, as if his sister, Sabrina, might be towering there.
'Hey, Sabrina,' said Junior Jones. 'Here's your weight lifter.'
In the doorway was a slender Negress, about my height; her high, floppy-brimmed hat perhaps made her appear a little taller -- and she wore heels. Her suit -- a woman's suit -- was every ounce as fashionable as Bitty Tuck's attire; she wore a cream-coloured silky blouse with a wide collar, and it was open down her long throat to just a glimpse of the red lace of her bra; she wore rings on every finger, and bracelets, and she was a wondrous bitter-chocolate color, with wide bright eyes and a wide mouth smiling, full of strange but handsome teeth; she smelled so nice, and from so far away, that even Bitty Tuck's shrieks were diminished by the scent of Sabrina Jones. She was, I guessed, about twenty-eight or thirty, and she looked a little surprised to be introduced to me. Junior Jones, who was awfully quick for his size, moved far away from us fast.
'You're the weight lifter?' said Sabrina Jones.
'I'm only fifteen years old,' I lied; I would be fifteen very soon, after all.
'Holy cow,' said Sabrina Jones; she was so pretty I couldn't look at her. 'Junior!' she yelled, but Junior Jones was hiding from her -- all the many pounds of him.
He had obviously needed a ride from Philadelphia, and not wanting to disappoint Franny by not showing up for New Year's Eve, he had acquired his older sister, and his sister's car, under the pretense of getting her a date with me.
'He told me Franny had an older brother,' Sabrina said, sorrowfully. I suppose Junior might have been thinking of Frank. Sabrina Jones was a secretary in a law firm in Philadelphia; she was twenty-nine.
'Fifteen,' she whistled through her teeth, which were not the bright white of her brother's gleaming mouth; Sabrina's teeth were perfectly sized and very straight, but they had a pearly, oyster hue to them. They were not unattractive teeth, but they were the only visibly flawed part of her. In my insecurity, I needed to notice them. I felt cloddish -- full of bananas, as Frank would say.
There's going to be a live band,' I said, and regretted saying so, immediately.
'Hot dog,' said Sabrina Jones, but she was nice; she smiled. 'Do you dance?' she asked.
'No,' I admitted.
'Oh well,' she said; she was really trying to be a good sport. 'You do lift weights?' she asked.
'Not as much as Junior,' I said.
'I'd like to drop a few weights on Junior's head,' she said.
Frank lurched through the lobby, struggling with a trunk full of Junior Jones's winter clothes; he couldn't seem to navigate successfully past Bitty Tuck's luggage, at the foot of the stairs, and so he dropped the trunk there -- startling Lilly, who was sitting on the bottom step, watching Sabrina Jones.
'This is my sister Lilly,' I said to Sabrina, 'and that was Frank,' I said, pointing to Frank's back as he slunk away. We could hear Franny and Bitty Tuck shrieking somewhere, and I knew that Junior Jones would be speaking to my father -- offering his condolences for Coach Bob.
'Hello, Lilly,' Sabrina said.
'I'm a dwarf,' Lilly said. 'I'm not ever going to grow any bigger.'
This information must have seemed, to Sabrina Jones, to fit rather perfectly with her disappointment at discovering my age; Sabrina did not appear shocked.
'Well, that's interesting,' she said to Lilly.
'You are going to grow, Lilly,' I said, 'At least, you're going to grow a little, and you're not a dwarf.'
Lilly shrugged. 'I don't mind,' she said.
A figure passed swiftly across the landing at the turn of the staircase -- he had a tomahawk, he wore war paint and little else (a black loincloth with coloured beads decorating the hips).
'That was Egg,' I said, watching the dazzled eyes of Sabrina Jones, her pretty mouth parted -- as if attempting speech.
'That was a little Indian boy,' she said. 'Why's he called Egg?'
'I know why!' Lilly volunteered; sitting on the stairs, she raised her hand -- as if she were in class, waiting to be called on. I was glad she was there; I never liked explaining Egg's name. Egg had been Egg from the beginning, dating from Mother's pregnancy, when Franny had asked her what the name of the new baby was going to be. 'Right now it's just an egg,' Frank had said, darkly -- his wisdom of biology was always shocking, to us all. And so, as Mother grew and grew, the egg was called Egg with increasing conviction. Mother and Father were hoping for a third girl, only because it was going to be an April baby and they both liked the name April for a girl; they were undecided about a boy's name, Father not caring for his own name, Win, and Mother -- despite her fondness for Iowa Bob -- not really liking the idea of a Robert, Jr. By the time it was clear that the egg was a boy, he was -- in our family -- already an Egg, and the name (as they say) stuck. Egg had no other name.
'He began as an egg, and he's still an egg,' Lilly explained to Sabrina Jones.
'Holy cow,' Sabrina said,
and I wished that something powerfully distracting would happen in the Hotel New Hampshire . . . to distract me from my embarrassment at how (it always struck me) our family must appear to outsiders.
'You see,' Franny would explain, years later, 'we aren't eccentric, we're not bizarre. To each other,' Franny would say, 'we're as common as rain.' And she was right: to each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread, we were just a family. In a family, even exaggerations make perfect sense; they are always logical exaggerations, nothing more.
But my embarrassment with Sabrina Jones made me embarrassed for us all. My embarrassment even included people beyond my family. I was embarrassed for Harold Swallow every time I spoke with him; I was always afraid someone would make fun of him and hurt his feelings. And on New Year's Eve at the Hotel New Hampshire, I was embarrassed for Ronda Ray, wearing the dress Franny bought for Mother; I was even embarrassed for the almost live band, the terrible rock group called Hurricane Doris.
I recognized Sleazy Wales as a punk who had threatened me, years ago, in the Saturday matinee. He had wadded up a ball of bread, grey with the oil and grime from his auto-mechanic life; he'd stuck the wad of bread under my nose.
'Wanna eat that, kid?' he asked.
'No thanks,' I said. Frank leaped up and ran into the aisle, but Sleazy Wales gripped my arm and held me in my seat. 'Don't move,' he said. I promised I wouldn't, and he took a long nail out of his pocket and drove it through the wad of bread. Then he made a fist around the bread with the nail protruding savagely between his middle and ring fingers.
'Wanna get your fucking eyes poked out?' he asked me.
'No thanks,' I said.
'Then get the fuck out of here!' he said; even then I was embarrassed for him. I went to find Frank -- who, whenever he was frightened at the movies, always stood by the water cooler. Frank frequently embarrassed me, too.
At the Hotel New Hampshire, on New Year's Eve, 1 saw at once that Sleazy Wales didn't recognize me. Too many miles, too much weight lifting, too many bananas had come between us; if he threatened me with bread and nails again, I could simply hug him to death. He didn't seem to have grown since the Saturday matinee. Scrawny and grey-skinned, his whole face the tone of a dirty ashtray, he hunched his shoulders forward in his GULF shirt and tried to walk as if each arm weighed one hundred pounds. I estimated that his whole body, plus wrenches and a few other heavy tools, couldn't weigh more than 130.1 could have bench-pressed him an easy half-dozen times.
Hurricane Doris didn't seem especially disappointed at the absence of a crowd; and perhaps the boys were even grateful to have fewer people staring at them, as they dragged their bright, cheap equipment from outlet to outlet, plugging in.
The first thing I heard Doris Wales say was, 'Move the mike back, Jake, and don't be an asshole.' The acoustic bass (called Jake), another greasy splinter in a GULF shirt, cringed over the microphone as if he lived in terror of electrical shock -- and of being an asshole. Sleazy Wales gave the other boy in the band a lovable punch in the kidneys; a fat drummer named Danny, the boy absorbed the punch with dignity -- but with obvious pain.
Doris Wales was a woman with straw-blonde hair whose body appeared to have been dipped in corn oil; then she must have put her dress on, wet. The dress grabbed at all her parts, and plunged and sagged over the gaps in her body; a lover's line of hickeys, or love bites -- 'lovesucks,' Franny called them -- dotted Doris's chest and throat like a violent rash; the welts were like wounds from a whip. She wore plum-coloured lipstick, some of which was on her teeth, and she said, to Sabrina Jones and me, 'You want hot-dancin' music, or slow-neckin' music? Or both?'
'Both,' said Sabrina Jones, without missing a beat, but I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would still be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.
Doris Wales, some months after the hurricane that was her namesake, first heard Elvis Presley's 'Heartbreak Hotel' when she was actually in a hotel. She told Sabrina and me that this had been a religious experience.
'You understand?' Doris said. 'I was shacked up with this guy, in an actual hotel, when this song comes over the radio. That song told me how to feel,' Doris explained. "That was about half a year ago,' she said. 'I haven't been the same since.'
I wondered about the guy who'd been shacked up with Doris Wales when she had her experiences; where was he now? Had he been the same since?
Doris Wales sang only Elvis Presley songs; when it was appropriate, she changed the he's to she's (and vice versa); this improvisation and the fact, as Junior Jones noted, that she was 'no Negro,' made listening to her almost unbearable.
In a gesture of making peace with his sister, Junior Jones asked Sabrina to dance the first dance; the song, I remember, was 'Baby, Let's Play House,' during which Sleazy Wales several times overpowered his mother's voice with his electricity. 'Jesus God,' Father said. 'How much are we paying them?'
'Never mind,' Mother said. 'Everyone can have a good time.'
It seemed unlikely, although Egg appeared to be having a good time; he was wearing a toga, and Mother's sunglasses, and he was keeping clear of Frank, who lurked at the edge of light, among the empty tables and chairs -- no doubt grumbling, to himself, his disgust.
I told Bitty Tuck that I was sorry I'd called her Titsie -- that it had just slipped out.
'Okay, John-John,' she said, feigning indifference -- or worse: feeling true indifference for me.
Lilly asked me to dance, but I was too shy; then Ronda Ray asked me, and I was too shy to refuse. Lilly looked hurt, and refused a gallant invitation from Father. Ronda Ray swung me violently around the floor.
'I know I'm losing you,' Ronda told me. 'My advice: when you're going to pull out on someone, tell them first.'
I was hoping Franny would cut in, but Ronda wheeled us into Junior and Sabrina, who were clearly arguing.
'Switch!' Ronda cried, gaily, and took Junior away.
Hurricane Doris, in an unforgettable transition of slopped-together sound, crushed instruments, and Doris's strident voice, switched gears and gave us 'I Love You Because' -- a slow, close-dancing number, through which I trembled in the steady arms of Sabrina Jones.
'You're not doing so bad,' she said. 'Why don't you put a move on that Tuck girl -- your sister's friend?' she asked me. 'She's about your age.'
'She's eighteen,' I said, 'and I don't know how to put a move on anybody.' I wanted to tell Sabrina that although my relationship with Ronda Ray was carnal, it had hardly been a learning experience. With Ronda, there was no foreplay; sex was immediate and genital, but Ronda refused to let me kiss her on the mouth.
'That's how the worst germs get spread around,' Ronda assured me. 'Mouths.'
'I don't even know how to kiss anybody,' I told Sabrina Jones, who seemed puzzled at what -- for her -- was a non sequitur.
Franny, who didn't care for the way Ronda Ray was dancing the slow number with Junior, cut in on them, and I held my breath -- hoping Ronda wasn't going to come after me.
'Relax,' said Sabrina Jones. 'You feel like a ball of wire.'
'I'm sorry,' I said.
'Never apologize to the opposite sex,' she said. 'Not if you want to get anywhere.'
'Get anywhere?' I said.
'Beyond the kissing,' Sabrina said.
'I can't get to the kissing,' I explained to her.
That's easy,' Sabrina said. To get to the kissing, all you have to do is act like you know how to kiss: then someone will let you start.'
'But I don't know how,' I said.
That's easy,' Sabrina said. 'Just practice.'
'Nobody to practice with,' I said -- but I thought, fleetingly, of Franny.
'Try it with Bitty Tuck,' Sabrina whispered, laughing.
'But I have to look like I know how,' I said. 'And I don't.'
'We're back to that,' Sabrina said
. 'I'm too old to let you practice with me. It wouldn't be good for either of us.'
Ronda Ray, cruising the dance floor, spotted Frank behind the empty tables, but Frank fled before she could ask him to dance. Egg was gone, so Frank had probably been waiting for an excuse to go corner Egg alone. Lilly was dancing, stoically, with one of Father and Mother's friends, Mr. Matson, an unfortunately tall man -- although, if he had been short, he couldn't have been short enough for Lilly. They looked like an awkward, perhaps unmentionable animal act.
Father danced with Mrs. Matson and Mother stood at the bar, talking with an old crony who was at the Hotel New Hampshire nearly every night -- a drinking friend of Coach Bob's; his name was Merton, and he was the foreman at the lumberyard. Merton was a wide, heavy man with a limp and mighty, swollen hands; he listened half-heartedly to my mother, his face stricken with the absence of Iowa Bob; his eyes, feasting on Doris Wales, seemed to think that the band was inappropriate so soon after Bob's ultimate retirement.
'Variety,' said Sabrina Jones in my ear. That's the secret to kissing,' she said.
' "I love you for a hundred thousand reasons!" ' crooned Doris Wales.
Egg was back; he was in his Big Chicken costume; then he was gone again. Bitty Tuck looked bored; she seemed unsure about cutting in on Junior and Franny. And she was so sophisticated, as Franny would say, that she did not know how to talk with Ronda Ray, who had fixed herself a drink at the bar. I saw Max Urick gawking out of the kitchen doorway.
'Little bites, and a little bit of tongue,' said Sabrina Jones, 'but the important thing is to move your mouth around.'
'Do you want a drink?' I asked her. 'I mean, you're old enough. Father put a case of beer in the snow, out at the delivery entrance, for us kids. He said he couldn't let us drink at the bar, but you can.'
'Show me the delivery entrance,' said Sabrina Jones. 'I'll have a beer with you. Just don't get fresh.'
We left the dance floor, fortunately just in time to miss Doris Wales's slamming transition to 'I Don't Care If the Sun Don't Shine.' -- the speed of which prompted Bitty Tuck to cut in on Franny for a dance with Junior. Ronda looked sullenly upon my leaving.