Getting the Important Things Right

by Padgett Gerler

  Since the guys had eaten all our fries, they said they’d pay for our tickets. We were with some high rollers! We found a space near the concession stand, and Greg reached for the speaker and hooked it over the edge of the window. Before he could get the sound turned on, the two couples in the back seat were necking.

  I must have looked uncomfortable seeing my brother kissing my best friend, so Greg said, “You want some popcorn?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Then, walk up to the concession stand with me.”

  So we got out of the car and went to the concession stand, leaving our friends to fog up the windows.

  When Greg and I got back to the car, we found that the others hadn’t come up for air. We put the popcorn between us and shared it while we tried to watch the movie.

  At one point Greg leaned over and whispered in my ear, “I’d like to kiss you, but Percy has told us he’d kick our asses if we ever laid a finger on you.”

  When Percy saw our heads together, his face appeared between ours, and he said, “Okay, what’s going on up here?”

  We told him that absolutely nothing was going on.

  He said, “All right, then. Let’s keep it that way.”

  And he went right back to kissing Suzanne.

  I didn’t understand Percy’s reasoning, but I wasn’t going to question it as long as he was kind enough to let me tag along on his dates.

  After a while Greg inched his hand over and wove his fingers through mine. We sat through the rest of the movie, holding hands and sharing our box of popcorn.

  It wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but it would have to do—as long as Percy was standing guard.

  Twelve

  Suzanne is the smartest person I have ever known. She is a pediatrician. When we were in high school, though, she played the airhead to the hilt. And I just couldn’t understand why. If I’d been as smart as she was, I’d have wanted everyone to know.

  She, Mary Sue, and I always studied together. Well, we did everything together. Studying just happened to be one of those things we did—occasionally. Mary Sue and I were pretty good students, but we just didn’t hold a candle to Suzanne. We’d get stuck on a math problem, and Suzanne would help us work our way out of it. She wouldn’t just give us the answer; she’d teach us how to figure out the answer. Then the next day in class the teacher would ask her to work the same problem on the board, and she’d get all flustered and act as if she had no idea how to do it. Her behavior baffled me.

  After class I’d say, “You knew the answer to that problem as well as the teacher. Why did you pretend you didn’t know how to solve it?”

  She’d duck her head and say, “Oh, shit, you know how it is in a crowd of people. You get all screwed up and forget what you’re doing.”

  I wasn’t buying that crap for a minute. Suzanne loved being on stage, being the center of attention. I’d seen her stand on a table in Buddy & Sonny’s and sing along with the juke box, a bottle of catsup posing as a microphone. I wanted to press the issue, but I could tell by Suzanne’s pinched-lip look that this topic of conversation was dead.

  Suzanne is the only person I’ve ever heard of who turned down an invitation to join the National Honor Society. She told the committee that she just didn’t have time, what with cheerleading and homework and all. But she could always find time to decorate a float for homecoming or plan a prom.

  When our teachers chose her to represent our school at Girls’ State, she told them that her family was going to be at the beach the week of Girls’ State. Girls’ State came and went, and Suzanne and her family never left town.

  When I asked her why she hadn’t wanted to go to Girls’ State, she said, “I’d much rather hang out with y’all than study government with a bunch of eggheads.”

  That just didn’t sound like Suzanne. Perhaps she hadn’t wanted to study government over the summer, but I had never heard her say an unkind word about anyone. She was nice to everyone and would never think of labeling someone an egghead. My friend just wasn’t acting like herself.

  I did well enough on my SAT’s to gain early admittance to the University but not great enough to shout about it. Mary Sue was in a glee that her score was eleven-ten. Suzanne couldn’t remember exactly what her score was, but she thought it was a thousand-something. Once again, I just wasn’t buying it, but how could I prove that she did, in fact, remember her SAT score?

  One afternoon we were planning to go to Buddy and Sonny’s for a hot dog, so I stopped by Suzanne’s house on the way.

  She answered the door in her sock feet and said, “Hold on while I go get my shoes.”

  She took the stairs to her bedroom two at a time, and I wandered around downstairs while I waited for her. I passed the dining room and saw a stack of mail on the table. Protruding from the bottom of the pile was Suzanne’s SAT score sheet. I tiptoed in and tugged at it until I could see that she had scored fourteen-ninety, not a thousand-something.

  I didn’t hear her come back down the stairs and was startled to find her standing at my elbow. She knew that I had seen her score, but she never mentioned it. I knew that she knew that I had seen her score, but I never mentioned it either. There had to be some reason she hadn’t wanted me to know.

  Not long after the peeking incident, Suzanne and I were hanging out at her house. Mary Sue’s family was out of town, so it was just the two of us.

  We were watching American Bandstand and eating Fig Newtons and drinking Dr. Peppers when Suzanne said, “I had a brother.”

  Chubby Checker was singing and Arlene and Kenny were doing the pony, so I wasn’t paying attention to what Suzanne was saying. Without taking my eyes off the TV, I said, “Huh?”

  When she repeated, “I had a brother,” I quickly forgot about Kenny and looked at her in surprise.

  I said, “Where is he?”

  She answered, “He died.”

  I had known Suzanne for six years, and not once had she mentioned a brother. I had always assumed she was an only child.

  I was so taken aback, that I didn’t know how to respond to “he died”, so I just said, “Oh,” hoping that she would tell me more.

  And she did.

  “Alex was eight when I was born, and he loved me just like Percy loves you. He always called me Zannie, instead of Suzanne. He never treated me like a bratty little sister, never pushed me away or banished me from his room. If he was studying and I intruded, he’d give me something to color or draw until he was through and could play with me. We liked playing Scrabble, like you and Percy. I was so little that he’d play his tiles and then help me play mine. He’s the reason I was able to read before I started school and have always had a good vocabulary.”

  “What happened?”

  “He was smart, Sis, really smart. But kids are mean. They don’t like smart, and they ridicule smart. My sweet brother was tormented his entire short life by bullies, just because he was smart. Every school day the bullies would meet him at the door, just to give him a wedgie. It was a part of Alex’s morning, and he accepted it.”

  “But why didn’t your parents do something about it?”

  “Alex didn’t tell our parents. He never told a soul. He just kept it to himself.”

  “The tormenting escalated, and soon the bullies were stealing his glasses and leaving him standing alone in the hall, nearly blind. They’d shred his term papers, throw his books in the trash. They even held him by his feet once and stuck his head in a toilet. He was so kind and so painfully shy that he just couldn’t fight back. And, remember, there was just one of him and so many of them.”

  “Oh, Suzanne, that’s so sad.”

  “To escape the bullies he hid in his lab—our basement. He had his chemistry set and microscope and models and books down there. The older he got, the more time he spent alone downstairs.”

  “Like I said, he was so shy, didn’t have friends because no one spoke his language. Of course, he never had a date. Then a new girl named Amelia came to school
and joined his science club. And Amelia smiled at him. For three months he tried to get up the nerve to ask her out. One day he saw her standing at her locker. He walked up to her and said, ‘Amelia, would you like to go to the movie with me this Friday?’ And you know what she did, Sis? She laughed at him. She laughed in his face in front of a crowd of people and said, ‘You must be kidding,’ and then she turned and walked away, leaving my brother alone and mortified.”

  “That afternoon he came home from school, just like any other day. He went down to his lab, just like any other day. But this day he looped a rope around an overhead pipe and hanged himself.”

  “It wasn’t until Alex died that my parents found that he had been keeping a journal for as long as he had known how to write. He had chronicled each moment of torment he had endured since his first day of school—torment my parents had no idea existed.”

  “Sis, his final entry said: ‘I could live with the bullies’ torment, but I just couldn’t live with Amelia’s laughter.’”

  Suzanne cried and cried at the telling of her brother’s tragic life and death, and I cried for her sadness.

  Before I left for home that afternoon, I stopped by Mrs. Webb’s kitchen to tell her bye. She was commandeering her stove as if it were some huge, intricate control panel. Steam was pouring out of pots, fogging the windows, and some wonderful casserole aroma was seeping from the oven. When Mrs. Webb heard me, she turned, dropped her spoon, wiped her hands on her apron, and gave me a huge smile and a pat on the back and said, “Bye now, Sugah.”

  On my way home I thought, “Guess I was wrong. Comfort food does not guarantee a happy family.”

  Thirteen

  When Colonel Tom moved his family to Waynesville and bought a permanent home, he decided that the Lord of the Manor needed a dog. He came upon a man who was trying to unload a dog. Perfect match!

  The dog was a fully-grown, overweight, slobbering, asthmatic bulldog with an under bite even larger than bulldogs usually have. Colonel Tom loved that dog from the moment he laid eyes on him because it reminded him of UGA, the mascot of the University of Georgia. The Colonel had absolutely no ties to the University of Georgia or even to the state of Georgia, for that matter, so I don’t know why this had any bearing whatsoever on his choice of dogs.

  Colonel Tom named his dog Snorts, for obvious reasons.

  Ma’am insisted that Snorts be an outdoor dog, which suited me just fine; but, somehow, the dog managed to find its way into Ma’am’s kitchen every afternoon.

  She would wave her hands frantically and raise her voice—as much as Ma’am was capable of raising her voice—and say, “You children get that disgusting creature out of my home. This is not a barn! Allowing animals to roam a home is so uncouth.”

  Ma’am found lots of things uncouth.

  And, day after day, Snorts would wander into the kitchen as if it were the first time he had ever done it, and Ma’am would flail her hands and raise her voice and call Snorts disgusting and tell us the house wasn’t a barn and animals in the house were uncouth, as if it were the first time she had ever uttered those words. The ritual just became a part of our daily lives for as long as Snorts was a member of the Albemarle family.

  Colonel Tom talked to Snorts as if he were his baby, something he had never done with his real babies. He would roll around the lawn with that nasty old dog and talk baby talk to it, and Snorts worshipped The Colonel.

  Snorts helped The Colonel grill the family’s supper every night. He’d stand at attention by the grill, staring up at the meat as the drool ran out the corners of his mouth and onto the ground. He knew that if he were patient, The Colonel would eventually pinch off a bite of hamburger or chop off a corner of a steak and toss it to him.

  Snorts loved riding in the car with The Colonel, and Colonel Tom had trained Snorts to head for the car when he’d yell, “Road trip!”

  The Colonel thought his dog was so smart to understand what road trip meant. Snorts would climb into the back seat of the car, rest his hind legs on the back seat and his front paws on the front seat, right behind The Colonel. Then, for the entire road trip, Snorts would slobber down The Colonel’s back. We thought it was disgusting, but The Colonel didn’t budge or reprimand his hairy child. If any of his human children had slobbered down his back, he’d have done a number on our asses.

  Snorts had an internal Colonel clock, and every afternoon he’d head out to the sidewalk in front of our house about two minutes before Colonel Tom was due home from the University. By the time The Colonel pulled into the drive, Snorts would be sitting at the curb like a sentinel. And the moment Colonel Tom got out of his car, Snorts would be all over him, licking and snorting and wheezing his hellos.

  It took me a while, but I finally figured out why The Colonel loved that nasty old dog so much. Snorts was the child his own children just couldn’t be. He loved The Colonel unconditionally, never talked back to him, didn’t cost anything more than cheap dog food, and would follow The Colonel to the ends of the earth. And he asked absolutely nothing of The Colonel, except an occasional attaboy.

  Snorts loved chasing cars, but a car could outrun him in a couple of feet because his legs were only about eight inches long. Every night after supper when the weather was nice, we’d sit out on our front porch—Ma’am’s veranda—and Snorts would entertain us with his car chasing.

  Once the car had passed on by, Snorts would prance back into the yard as if saying, “Guess I showed him who’s boss!”

  And every night The Colonel would say, “What do you suppose Snorts would do if he ever caught one?”

  And we’d all laugh like we’d never heard that remark before.

  One night we found out what Snorts would do if he ever caught a car.

  Snorts was chasing and barking and wheezing, as usual, and he got a little too brave. He waddled too close to his nemesis, and he was sucked right underneath a moving vehicle. Before the driver could stop, he had rolled Snorts for about a block.

  Colonel Tom is a fast runner, but he ran faster that evening than we had ever seen him run; and he was bellowing, “Oh, no, oh, no! Oh, Snorts, no! Hold on, Buddy, I’m coming! Hang on there, Fella!”

  Percy, Oops, and I jumped up, ready to follow The Colonel, but Ma’am raised her hand and her eyebrow in a don’t-even-think-of-moving-a-muscle look. We all sat back down and craned our necks, trying to see what was going on down the street.

  Pretty soon The Colonel returned with a limp-as-a-rag Snorts draped across his arms and big wet tears streaming down his cheeks. He strode right past us without even glancing in our direction and headed for the garage to get a shovel. We couldn’t stand it any longer. Ignoring Ma’am’s protests, we jumped off the porch and headed for the edge of the house. Peering around the corner, we saw The Colonel take his dog and his shovel to the back yard and lay Snorts gently on the grass. Then he began digging Snorts a grave in his favorite spot—right beside the grill.

  As Colonel Tom dug, he sobbed, “Oh, Boy, I’m so sorry. I didn’t look out for you. You were a good old friend. You didn’t deserve this. I’m so sorry, Buddy.”

  We stood at a distance, knowing we couldn’t and shouldn’t be a part of this.

  That was the first time I had ever seen my father cry. It would be the last.

  Fourteen

  Percy wasn’t much of a student. In high school he never cracked a book, and his grades were proof of it. Teachers liked him, though, because he was charming and funny and polite. I think he must give off a scent that draws men, women, and children to him but, at the same time, repelled the person Percy wanted most to attract—our father.

  Percy may not have been a student, but he was king of extracurricular activities. He’d have monitored the lunchroom if it could have gotten him out of a class. He was the President of the Key Club, sang in the school choir, performed in plays. But, most of all, he played football. He was our team’s quarterback. He loved the rough and tumble of the game, as well as the attention from his adori
ng fans.

  Did I mention that the girls were wild about Percy? It must have been that scent thing. He had a girl on his arm at all times, with many waiting in the wings to take her place should something go wrong.

  Percy had no plans past high school. He lived from day to day and would figure out something when the time came. Of course, he had no notion of going to college until Colonel Tom strolled in one afternoon and announced that he had gotten Percy an athletic scholarship to play football at Middleburg College, a little school about twenty minutes down the road. Colonel Tom knew somebody who knew somebody who owed somebody a favor; and, just like that, Percy was a college student. Great, Percy would have a whole new set of classes to help him prove to Colonel Tom that he was a failure.

  When the day arrived for Percy to leave for college, the entire family gathered around his little clunker of a car that he had filled to the roof with his belongings. Colonel Tom shook Percy’s hand, told him how proud he was, and began giving him advice about the next leg of his life’s journey. Percy had a quizzical look on his face and later told me that he honestly thought Colonel Tom had had a stroke that morning and thought he was talking to someone else’s kid. Once Colonel Tom finished his long-winded life lesson, Percy took off on his twenty-minute journey to college.

  Saturday afternoons found us—and about two hundred other devoted fans—twenty minutes down the road, watching Percy and his team, the Catamounts, play some other little B team with no devoted fans at all. It was not the way I had planned to spend the Saturday afternoons of my junior year in high school, seeing as how The Colonel had finally agreed to my dating. I needed to spend my Saturday afternoons primping and painting and curling. But Colonel Tom insisted that we support Percy as a family because, remember, Colonel Tom was so very proud of his firstborn.

  We weren’t three months into Percy’s first—and only—semester at Middleburg, when he showed up at the house with that cute little perky majorette with long auburn hair and emerald green eyes we had seen twirling a baton and shaking her pert little ass at football halftimes. Seems she’d been shaking that pert little ass elsewhere because Percy announced that he and Vickie were pregnant and needed to get married. Percy didn’t say they were planning to get married or wanted to get married. He actually said that they needed to get married. Now, I was just a kid, but even I knew, with a remark like that, this union was starting off on shaky ground.