Everyone but You

by Sandra Novack

  In Morty’s house, a well-kept two-story duplex on the east side of town, there had often been, over the years, dissenting opinions regarding issues of faith and fate. His mother had come from a long line of God-fearing souls, those who attended mass not only every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation but also the occasional Wednesday, hump-day, service. If his mother would have had her way, had it not caused the first fight of her and Morty Sr.’s marriage so long ago, she would have wanted her boy to be named Matthew or John, men who were in God’s grace and names that ensured, in her Irish way of thinking, that young Morty would not only be blessed but also lucky. Morty’s father, however, believed a person made his own fate. He’d descended from a long line of miners, those who worked the bowels of the earth and who were born with nothing and died with nothing. Morty Sr. often said he’d eluded that particular sentence by choosing to drive across the country. It was a job that, for him, was proof a man made his own fortune. Anyway, such disparate views collided in the birth of young Morty, to the point where the boy remained nameless for three days and even the nurses had privately waged bets on the outcome. Morty was finally given a name that was seen as a compromise by his parents, but one that proved to be a curse of grade school, ensuring that he’d spend years being dubbed Morty the Morbid; Morty the Mortician; Hey, Morty, El Morto; and for those with a less developed sense of word play, just Mort-y, said with a face. It was Aggie Tuft who first started the name-calling years before on the playground—smart-ass Aggie, whom Morty did not have a crush on and whom he only once imagined naked. It was a brief fantasy that triggered a sneezing fit during fourth-period algebra class.

  LATER, THEY SHOVELED the steps and front walk and Morty watched as his father, red-faced, dug into the ice-crusted snow. When he stopped to rest, his father squinted blindly up at the sky and cursed under his breath. “Snow, Morty,” he said. “Unlike your religion, you can test snow, test the roads, the tread on tires. I don’t know what your mother was thinking taking you out that day.”

  “I know,” Morty answered. He wiped his brow. He scraped the last of the snow from the bottom porch step, but a moment later it was dusted again. His jeans were soaked. The wind bit into him, and he pulled his skullcap over his ears.

  His father waved him off. “I got the rest,” he said. “No worries.”

  Morty nodded to his father before climbing the drifts in the yard. With every step his feet sunk deep into the snow. He walked unsteadily to the back of the house and retrieved his sled from the shed. He dragged it past the duplexes where dogs had already yellowed the snow around the shrubs and trees, past the brick houses that sprung up a few bocks later, and past the tree-lined streets that led to Main, where the large houses each had antique lamplights and wreaths hung on the doors. A plow drove by, scraping snow and ice and spewing salt out its back end. Morty smelled exhaust. Beyond that, the streets were still empty, the sidewalks slick in places, despite being salted.

  “Morty, El Morto!”

  He turned. Of course it was Aggie Tuft. She sprinted down the front steps of her house. Her plastic sled bounced behind her. Her checkered coat flipped open, and, under a red beret, her dark hair fluttered about. Before this moment, Morty was concentrating on the snow, how the cold hurt his lungs when he breathed, how the snow filled the sky, and how, each time he looked up, everything was so white it blinded him. Before this moment, he was trying to remember what his mother had worn the day of the accident; he was trying to remember what errand they had to run that seemed so pressing. But now as Aggie neared him, she blinked back snowflakes, and he thought only of how dark her lashes were, and how they made her blue irises more pronounced. Morty suddenly felt underdressed without Our Lady of Perpetual Misery’s standard slacks and shirt. He pushed a piece of polyester fill back into the tear at his elbow and hoped Aggie wouldn’t notice.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “What do you think?”

  She didn’t answer. She ran from him instead. Her boots scrunched the snow, her own grip on the ground noticeably shaky. “Can’t catch me, El Morto,” she taunted, glancing back.

  “Smartass!” But despite himself, Morty ran after her. He pulled his sled harder, ran faster. Sweat formed under his coat. The wind stung his face. When, a half-block later, he finally passed Aggie, he tapped her shoulder and grinned feverishly, revealing the gap between his teeth. He stopped at the intersection, even though the sign read WALK.

  “Loser,” he said, when, breathless, Aggie caught up to him. He looked away, determined to ignore her.

  “I never said it was a race, El Morto.”

  “It never is when you lose it.” He turned toward her then and noticed how her cheeks, which were pale even in the springtime, had bloomed berry splotches. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He tried to think of something to say, but what? “No religion test,” he declared finally, though he seldom studied and still did well. “No Sister Agatha today, either.”

  “God, I wish she’d just die,” Aggie moaned. “ ‘A Knyght ther was, and that a worthy man …’ She’s like an assault on my brain.”

  Morty didn’t believe Aggie’s Middle English sounded any better than Sister Agatha’s, really, but he let the point slide. When the light turned, they walked.

  “That’s just about the oldest wooden sled I’ve ever seen. In. My. Life,” Aggie said. She brushed a strand of wet hair from her cheek. “My sled is brand new, ‘state-of-the-art engineering,’ my dad says. The circular shape decreases drag and makes it go faster, the plastic keeps it light and aerodynamic. My dad would know, of course, because he’s an engineer.”

  It was this facetiousness that made Morty hate Aggie, and why last week, in Sister Biology’s class, he’d thrown a frog at Aggie and then watched as its rubbery body landed directly in her lap, causing her to scream and making the class bubble up with laughter. Did he regret that action? Did he regret her tears, her yelling that it wasn’t funny? When he heard her brag like this, he didn’t regret any cruelty inflicted on Aggie Tuft, at all. This was true despite the fact that Sister Biology had chastised him, reminding Morty that every creature, large and small, was a creature of God, and she added that each frog cost the school four dollars and that was four dollars he wasn’t paying.

  “An engineer. So?” Morty hocked a loogie into the snow. He grinned, happy with both its speed and distance.

  “Oh, really juvenile,” Aggie said. “If I spit like that my dad would have an absolute conniption.”

  “You couldn’t spit like that if you tried,” Morty said. “And like your dad would care. Isn’t he away all the time? I bet he never talks to you about velocity and aerodynamics. I bet you don’t understand what any of that actually means.”

  Aggie shot him a look that was very similar to the one issued after the frog incident—indignant, the start of tears visible. Her face grew redder. “My dad works for NASA, I’ll have you know. He does very important and highly classified experiments, ones that you and your dad couldn’t even comprehend.”

  “Really? Well, you know what they say about engineers, don’t you?”

  “No, what do they say about engineers, Mort-y?” She made a face.

  Morty had absolutely no idea what people said about engineers. He wanted to crack a joke about how they couldn’t even change a lightbulb, but all he could think of was what his mother had said after meeting the Tufts at a school function: That Aggie’s mother seemed like the type of woman who put up with a lot of shenanigans, and Aggie’s father seemed exactly like the type of man who slept around a lot. “A nice man, but all that polish,” she told Morty Sr., speaking not only of Mr. Tuft’s hair but also of his demeanor. “Ssss-lick.”

  “I figured you wouldn’t have a comeback,” Aggie said. “You with your half wit.”

  “Oh, I do,” Morty assured her. “Engineers are slick.”

  “Slick? Slick? What does that even mean?”

  “Oh, I’d tell you. But I don’t want to make you cry
.”

  “Right, like your father does,” Aggie said smugly.

  Morty resisted the urge to punch her then. He would have tackled her if she were a boy, but he refrained. If she weren’t a lady, he thought. Not that Aggie Tuft was a lady, mind you, by any stretch, but still. He reached down, scooped up snow, and packed it into a ball. He threw it at Aggie but she dodged it.

  They crossed the street. At the school Aggie continued: “You know, even if I’d wait a year for you, you wouldn’t have a good comeback. So typical of boys, really. If you’d spend more time thinking and less time playing with yourselves, your brains wouldn’t freeze up on you all the time.”

  “Right,” Morty said. “You don’t know what you’re even talking about.”

  Aggie raised her eyebrows. “Really? Oh, p-lease, like we all can’t hear you. If any of you boys knew how to whisper in gym class it would be a miracle.” They were approaching the church now, with its old stone exterior and wide steps, its large, beveled window that formed the image of the Virgin, etched in pink and blue glass. “A MIRACLE!” Aggie exclaimed. She held both arms up in the air.

  “Indeed!” Father Bastian said when he stepped outside from the church’s vestibule. He looked to Morty like an old Irish immigrant bundled up in his black coat, a fur derby hiding most of his thick white hair and bushy eyebrows. “It is beautiful,” Father Bastian agreed. “And it makes me so proud that the students of Our Lady of Perpetual Help like to discuss miracles, even on their day off from school.”

  Aggie stopped long enough to tsk this. She brushed snow from her coat sleeves. “Not the kind of miracles that Jesus likes, that’s for sure.”

  “Is that so?” Father Bastian asked.

  “Trust me,” Aggie said. She squinted at Morty and smiled. He shot her a dirty look. “Anyway, we were just saying … we were just talking about … Morty was just saying how he wishes school would be canceled tomorrow, too, so we could have a long weekend. I was telling him, Father, that I’d hate to miss Sister Agatha’s English class.”

  Father Bastian nodded. He rocked back and forth slightly, as if he were considering the merits of Aggie’s statement. He ran a gloved hand over his face. “And does Sister Agatha inspire you to such adoration, Morty?”

  “I guess,” Morty said. “In her own way.”

  “Well, I love the snow days, myself,” Father Bastian replied, looking around in an amused, thoughtful way. “As for school tomorrow, I’ll put in a word upstairs. But the nuns hold a lot of sway up there, too, and if Sister Agatha has it in mind to read from The Canterbury Tales tomorrow, I doubt even the heavens could stop her.”

  WHEN THEY ARRIVED at what the students at Our Lady of Perpetual Misery referred to as Camel Toe Hill, with its dimpled impression at the peak, Aggie didn’t want to be bothered with Morty at all. She ran off when she saw her two best friends, the two Marias. They stood by the cemetery wall, talking. Both were blond and stocky, though one Maria now had breasts that Morty fantasized about grabbing whenever she walked by him. “Brand new,” Morty heard Aggie say, and he caught the gist again of state-of-the-art engineering.

  The snow pounded down, obliterating the line between the earth and sky. Morty climbed the hill. He headed toward the long line of trees that stretched over the hillcrest, interrupting the monotonous whiteness. He could barely make out the blurred shapes of other students as they ran in the distance. He heard muffled shouts, taunts, laughter. There were at least twenty students from Our Lady who hurtled down the hill, screaming as they whizzed by and veered off in various directions, toward the right, where the hill leveled out in a benign way, or toward the left, where the slope was steeper and the path longer, the walk back up the hill backbreaking and where, on the way down, you’d have to maneuver over several moguls before stalling out at the cemetery wall that rose between the convent and the rectory.

  When he reached the summit, Morty blinked hard. He studied the terrain, trying to figure out how to best execute his run. Eric Brumble and John Warner called to him from the woods. When Morty turned, he saw them marching out of the brush. They were both flushed. Eric wore a peacoat and high boots. He punched at the air in a playful, defiant way. John followed, his face so obscured by a scarf that only his glasses were visible. Both grabbed the sleds they had abandoned under the tree. “I got bets on getting down first,” Eric yelled, and he hopped on his racer. John followed suit, as did Morty. He cut a new path. The cold punched Morty as he picked up speed. The wind tunneled through his coat. He lowered his head to shield his face from the ice. Halfway down the hill he veered left, toward the cemetery wall. He hit one good bump, and two, and three. The sled lifted in the air, came down hard. He veered left again, toward the grassy area where icy yellow stalks pushed through the snow and cushioned his sled’s speed. Victorious, Eric was already waiting at the bottom. John followed behind both boys. “I knew I’d win!” Eric exclaimed. “Beat your asses.”

  “Head start,” Morty said. “Rematch!” Breathless, they ran up the hill and then raced down again. After more than an hour passed, Eric, bored and exhausted from the climb, started a snowball fight that sent all three boys scattering into the woods. They pummeled one another’s backs and legs. They hit tree trunks. The wind loosened the snow from the branches and sent it swirling down around them.

  Finally, Eric said, “Come on, Morty. There’s more to do than this. I’ve got something for you to see.”

  “Show him, Eric,” John said.

  “I’ll show him,” Eric said, motioning. He led the way along a trail already thick with footprints. He snapped low twigs and branches. When they reached a dense area of brush, Eric pulled out a Playboy that he had stuffed inside his jacket. The pages were damp and wrinkled from the snow. John pushed his glasses higher on his nose and smacked his mittened hands together. Eric paged through the magazine, while Morty and John huddled close, staring at photographs of naked women. “Holy shit!” John mused. “I’d do that one.”

  “Hell, yeah,” Eric agreed. He pointed out those women he thought had perfect bodies, and Morty, his heart racing, his cheeks flushed in an embarrassed way, agreed. The boys discussed melons and puckers and fun bags, bare pussies and hairy monsters. “I can’t wait to do it,” Eric said, though Morty sensed it would be a long time coming. He shivered, balled his fingers together for warmth. He noticed the snow, dirtied from his boots.

  “Look at that one!” John exclaimed, stopping Eric’s paging. “Oh yeah, I’d do that.”

  “Me, too,” Morty said, though he was beginning to feel ashamed, dirty, even, like he did in gym class when all the boys measured themselves to see whose pecker was the longest. There were some things that were best left to the privacy of one’s bedroom, he thought, and he wondered if, when he returned home, he should say a rosary or pray to the statue of the Holy Family that he had stored in the closet after his mother’s funeral. His mother would be so disappointed in him if she could see him now, gawking over these women. Once, last year, when his jiggling off had begun in all its complicated rigor, she’d found some nude photographs that Morty had printed off the Web. “Morty,” she’d said disappointedly. His mother was a modest woman, all in all, and she was sensitive about things pertaining to sex. She sat down on the edge of his bed and held the pages he’d printed. To his embarrassment, she leafed through them, and then she looked out the window for a long time and was silent. “I’ll have to talk to your father about this when he gets back from his trip,” she said finally. But before such a discussion could occur, she and Morty were in the accident—the icy roads, the metal guardrail. Thinking about this and studying the Playboy, something came over Morty unexpectedly, something confusing and sad.

  “How about her, Morty?” Eric asked. He licked his lips suggestively.

  “Ah, they aren’t that great,” Morty told him. “I’ve seen better.”

  “Sure you have,” Eric said.

  “Sure,” John chimed in. “Whatever, Mort-y.”

  “I’d whack of
f to this brunette,” Eric added. “Hey, bet I could get off faster than either of you could, to this hot tamale right here.”

  “I’d get off faster,” John says. “My pecker is bigger than yours.”

  “The hell it is,” Eric replied.

  “Well, I’m not freezing my pecker off,” Morty said. He wanted to leave. “My hands are numb. I’m heading home.”

  “Suit yourself,” John told him.

  “Wuss,” Eric called.

  Morty flipped them the bird and walked through the woods. He was thinking about the photographs, of course, and desperately wishing his erection away. When he reached the clearing and grabbed his sled, Aggie Tuft was there, standing, surveying the hill. The two Marias were gone. Morty called to her and she turned and waved him on.

  “I was wondering where you were,” she said. She pushed away hair that whipped in her face and hopped onto her sled. She sat, cross-legged, before catapulting herself forward. “Can’t catch me, Morty!”

  Morty ran after her, set his sled down, and leapt onto his racer. The waxed blades caught in the icy snow at first but quickly gained speed. He propelled himself toward Aggie. He thought, fleetingly, that her sled wasn’t so fast, not as fast as his old wooden one. There was something about it all that thrilled him—the snow whipping about, the cold air, the knowledge that somewhere ahead of him Aggie was there, at first a blur against the whiteness but then gradually sharper in his line of vision as he neared, her red beret, her checkered coat.

  Morty felt, at this point, not a terrible tension in his arms and legs but only the cold wind, the blades atop the ice. He gained more speed and approached Aggie’s right. She turned. A flash of nervous, excited energy came across her face. He thought, I’ve got you now, and Aggie yelled to her own sled, “Faster, faster, faster.” He reached out and pushed her, hard, as he might push Eric or John when they roughhoused. Her sled wobbled, and, off balance, she hit a mogul hard before she veered left again, not toward the grassy area at all. Her sled seemed to fly in the air and Aggie moved faster and faster, until it was obvious to Morty that she wouldn’t be able to steer away from the cemetery wall, and he imagined the unevenness of the wall and the unyielding quality of it, and how he couldn’t do anything to save Aggie from hitting the wall, hitting it hard, slamming into it and catapulting forward. Aggie was blurry again by now, lost in the whiteness, her dark hair whipping around her. Her red beret flew from her head as she disappeared over a bumpy crest, and then Morty heard her scream. He raced past the beret, and he swore for a moment it was a puddle of blood, blood and not wool, and that if he touched it, it wouldn’t be soft, but warm and tacky. His muscles tensed. He felt as if his heart might explode in his chest. His eyes welled up, though Morty was a boy who seldom cried.