by M. E. Kerr
Together we concocted a story to explain how I got beat up, and how I’d connected with Marty.
I said there was a fight at the Ring Dance, caused by some drunken kids from Holy Family High, who’d crashed it. I said I’d chased them all the way out to Kingdom By The Sea in the SAAB. Then I’d found Marty, who’d come in by train and taxied out there without a reservation, only to find them all booked.
“I didn’t even know that tacky place was still in business!” Mom said.
Marty said, “Well, it was its name that attracted me to it. I wrote my masters on symbolism in Poe. When I saw the place, it looked like it was right out of Poe, too!”
Then Marty went up to see Pete and Jim, in Pete’s apartment, and Mom insisted on cleaning up my face with a warm, wet washcloth.
Dad was in his study, on the telephone with Dr. Kerin. Pete had reacted badly to his last round of chemotherapy.
“What happened to Dill?” Mom wanted to know.
“She’s sort of mad at me, Mom.”
“I can hardly blame her. Since when do you go looking for a fight?”
“It’s a long story, Mom. I’ll tell you someday, okay?”
“Why didn’t Jack help you? Oh, I forgot. He doesn’t like dances.”
“Ow!” I complained. “That hurts!”
“Sorry…. Do you really think Shawn went to his family’s?”
“Why wouldn’t he?”
“I’m just oversensitive, I guess. Something about the way Marty’s eyes blinked fast when he said Shawn couldn’t come. When I talked to him on the phone, he said they wouldn’t miss it for anything. He said Shawn and he had just finished discussing what they’d do for Thanksgiving, and they hadn’t made any plans.”
“It doesn’t matter, Mom.”
“It matters—but I’m going to try to put all that out of my mind. Something happened tonight that’s upset us all.”
“I know. Grandpa Rudd said he’s not coming for Christmas.”
“Not that, honey. I hired two women from All Jobs to help me tomorrow. The manager called tonight to say Mrs. Tompkins had applied there, saying she quit here after twenty years because there was someone living here with AIDS. Mrs. Tompkins wanted it kept confidential, but the manager felt he couldn’t send anyone out to us…. Pete took the call.”
“I thought Mrs. Tompkins was going to Ohio to live?”
“Apparently she decided against it…. Poor Pete took the call.”
“You said that. Well? What did Pete say?”
“He looked crushed. Then Jim arrived. We haven’t had time to discuss it…. Your right eye looks just awful, Erick!”
“I’ll be fine.”
“So I suppose word is out now. It was bound to happen eventually. I’d hoped we’d have more time before it all came down on us. You should have seen Pete’s face.”
“I’m glad I didn’t.” I kept seeing the look on Nicki’s face when I told Cap that yes, Marty was visiting us—it was my brother who had AIDS.
It was a strange look, almost like the expression that would come on her face when you were telling her something and she was trying to listen to a song at the same time, eyes sort of glazed over, not responding to what you were saying. I kept watching her while Cap said how sorry he was to hear about my brother, but I could understand his position, couldn’t I?
I don’t know what I answered. Marty said something in an angry tone, but it didn’t register with me. I kept trying for eye contact with Nicki. She wouldn’t look at me until I started toward the door, turned around, and said I’d call her when I got home.
“Yes,” she said. She sounded dazed, distant.
After Mom finished going over my face with the wet washcloth, I went up to my room and dialed Nicki’s number.
She was crying.
“Daddy doesn’t want you here,” she said. “He says you never should have gone in the pool with something like that in your family.”
“It’s not in my family,” I said. “Just my brother has it.”
“Why didn’t you tell me, Eri?”
I couldn’t think of an answer.
“Daddy says if anyone ever found out you went swimming in City By The Sea, we’d be ruined!”
“I don’t have it!” I said. “Nicki?”
“What?”
“I don’t have it, for God’s sake!”
“You could have it without knowing it, and give it to someone else. Daddy read that in a newspaper.”
“That’s not true, Nicki. I can show you that in black and white!”
“Maybe I could get it now.”
“I don’t have it, Nicki! Pete has it, and I can’t catch it from Pete! Do you think I’d do that to you?” I asked her. “I love you. Do you think if I could give it to you I’d—”
She didn’t let me finish. “You should have told me, Eri.”
“I didn’t tell you anything about my family. You don’t like all that family-around-the-table crap. You told me that yourself.”
“This isn’t family-around-the-table. This is something in your family I have a right to know about, Eri. Eri? Do you know what I think?”
I didn’t want to hear what she thought. I had a dread of what she’d say next.
She said, “I think you chose me so you could hide out from all of them.”
“I did what?” I’d heard her.
“You chose me so you didn’t have to ever talk to Jack again, or tell Jack and Dill about your brother. They don’t know, do they?”
I pressed the mouthpiece of the phone to my chin without saying anything into it. I started a cut by my mouth bleeding again, I did it so hard.
Nicki said, “None of them know, do they? That’s why you chose me.”
“I thought you chose me,” I said. There were tears rolling down my cheeks.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” she said. “Once.”
“Nicki?” I tried to keep my voice level. “I’d like to bring out a pamphlet about this thing. It explains that you can’t get it from casual contact.”
“Casual contact,” she said sarcastically.
“I don’t have it!”
“Does that, pamphlet explain why you didn’t tell someone you supposedly loved that it’s in your family?”
“No,” I said, “it doesn’t explain that…. I’ll try to explain that.”
“I don’t see how you can,” she said. “I want to hang up, Eri.”
I knew she was crying, too.
“Can I come out later tomorrow?” I asked her.
“Daddy doesn’t want you here.”
“Can we meet somewhere?”
“Not tomorrow, Eri.”
Then she said, “I loved you.”
Love in the past tense. Then the click, and the dial tone.
I don’t remember much about that Thanksgiving dinner.
I do remember Jim Stanley hitting the side of his wine glass with his knife, at the start. “I want to propose a toast!”
He stood up. “Let’s be thankful for all the good times—they were the best of times! Let’s be thankful for all the good friends—they are the best of friends! I drink to sweet memories and to today! I drink to the Rudds! I drink to Pete’s friends: Marty and Stan and Tina … and I drink to Pete! … Oh, and let’s be thankful that Pete’s kid brother isn’t in top form this Thanksgiving dinner, because I’ve seen him eat, and forget second helpings for the rest of us if Erick was himself today!”
Everyone laughed and raised their glasses to clink them together.
And I remember the point when Dad spoke up. “Erick’s little run-in last night reminds me of an Irish joke your friend, Shawn, would have appreciated, Marty.”
Dad must have gotten his Irish jokes out of mothballs the moment he’d heard someone named Shawn was invited to dinner.
I said, “Oh, he’s not going to tell a joke, Pete! Oh, it’s going to hurt more than my poor bones do!” I was forcing myself to get into the spirit of things, remembering Mom’s sayi
ng earlier that it could be Pete’s last Thanksgiving.
“How does a newspaper story about an Irish social event begin?” Dad persisted.
“How does a newspaper story about an Irish social event begin?” Marty said.
“It begins, ‘Among the injured were …’”
Dad followed that with a joke about how tough Malone’s wife was (she could knit barbed wire with two crowbars!) and another about an Irish psychiatrist who used a Murphy bed instead of a couch.
I looked down at the end of the table where Pete was sitting. Our eyes met, and he rolled his to the ceiling. I wondered if he was remembering the night on the beach long ago, when we talked together about why Dad always told jokes in social situations—the same night Pete made that kite that took off in the darkness, blinking out over the ocean, its phosphorescent tail glowing under the stars.
My last memory of that Thanksgiving meal is Pete standing to make a toast at the end.
It came after the dessert course, for which Mom had opened another bottle of champagne.
Pete wasn’t drinking, but he stood up with a full glass, thin and pale in his navy-blue suit, white shirt, and blue-and-white-striped tie. He held the glass up, and the light from the chandelier and the candles sparkled against the crystal.
“Amitié, doux repos de l’âme,” Pete said. “Friendship, sweet resting place of the soul … I love you all.”
Monday morning in the hall outside homeroom, Nicki returned my ring with a note.
Now, don’t try to start up something again when it’s all over, Eri. Please. Let me alone. N.
It was the same morning the S. A.T. scores came in, mine lower than the earlier ones.
So I told myself I would let her alone until she couldn’t stand it anymore. I wouldn’t make the first move.
I stayed close to home, following bursts of studying with long daydreams of her up in my room, my mind torturing me with all the old snapshot memories of us. I played R.E.O. Speedwagon’s “Can’t Fight This Feeling” over and over, and thought of making love in Dream Within A Dream, High Horse on its side on the rug, Scatter watching us cross-eyed from the bureau. I saw us riding Kevin Cronin in the pool with the daffy New York skyscrapers lit up around the walls, rock music blasting in City By The Sea. I remembered her coming toward me in the halls of Seaville High in her fishnet stockings with the porkpie hat tipped over one eye, while my blood jumped, and I could hear the husky voice start a sentence, “See,” … and I could remember helping her out of that crazy jacket with the traffic accident on the back, a moment before she turned around and put her arms up behind my shoulders. Through it all, there was the scent of First, enveloping the memories like a sweet fog moving in to wrap us in our own cocoon.
Several times I’d see her ahead of me at school, and once, impulsively, I made a move, walked fast, and heard her tell me “No!” over her shoulders. And there were all the notes I wrote and never sent, one fifteen pages long. She must have known, too, that the calls she got, when no one spoke, but only listened to her say, “Hello? Hello? Hel-lo,” were all from me.
Times I saw Dill and Jack, neither of them looked into my eyes.
I grew accustomed to being the loner, going home at noon for lunch, making no attempts to hang out before or after school.
In all my talks with Pete I never brought up Nicki, told him only that the thing with Dill had run its course.
“Where’s Jack?” he asked me once.
“I think that’s run its course too. We’re not getting along.”
“Is it because of me?”
“Not at all, Pete. It’s school stuff.”
“Does he know about me yet?”
“No.” I didn’t know who at school knew, or if anyone besides Nicki did. I didn’t know who outside school knew either. Mom and Dad said that it was just a matter of time before all Seaville would hear the news.
“Maybe you should tell Jack,” Pete suggested. “Maybe whatever’s going down between you two really does have something to do with me. Did you ever think about that?”
“Next thing you’ll say is Mom says I’m handling all this too well,” I teased him.
“I just hope we’re all strong enough for whatever comes, when it comes, Ricky,” Pete said.
“Well, we’re going to hang together,” I said. “Family is first.”
“Why the hell do all of Dad’s old chestnuts suddenly sound good to me?” Pete said.
“I hope you’re not going to join The Hadefield Club,” I told him. “I hope you’re not going to start telling corny jokes.”
“Maybe this thing’s affecting my brain.” Pete laughed.
Then one morning at the beginning of Christmas week, I saw her look up as I was passing her in the hall. She was opening her locker, dressed in some sort of very long white coat, with white boots on, and a white scarf around her neck.
She was smoking, getting ready to drop the cigarette and step on it, something I’d seen her do so many times, and then she’d pick up the butt, with the smoke still streaming out of her nose, and she’d stick it into a Kleenex, to throw away.
I said, “No smoking, lady, you’re on school property.”
“Are you going to tell on me?” It was the first thing she’d said to me in weeks, and she was smiling, with one eyebrow raised.
“Maybe,” I said. My heart was pounding. I kept on going, though, and she called after me, “Don’t tell everything, though, Eri!” I heard the old, familiar laughter, triggering all the things I still felt, making my blood rush again the old way. I was smiling, walking off the ground, high, climbing.
It was all I needed.
I couldn’t find her in the crowd after school. I figured she’d gotten out of there fast, the way she always did, and I knew where I was going, even though I was due at the bookstore. It was a Tuesday.
I thumbed a ride out to Kingdom By The Sea.
I walked across the drawbridge under a sky as blue as I’d ever seen one, with lush, white, cottony clouds and the sun inching over to change to red and set.
I didn’t care if Cap saw me coming, or if Toledo did, and I wasn’t surprised when no one seemed to be around as I went through the front door, because I had an idea it was the right time for this move.
I went up the spiral staircase, thrilled to be back, and down the carpeted hall I knew like I knew the back of my hand, headed straight for Dream Within A Dream…. All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.
Scatter was curled up on the bed with Nine, and Nicki’s closet door was open, with all her sky-high heels hanging there in bags, the crazy clothes on hangers, the hat boxes stacked on the floor…. I drank it all in, remembering the Sunday afternoon we’d run in there wet, shivering, new from making love, leaping under the covers. (It’s so late…. It’s gotten so dark out…. Have you got a phone I can use? … Erick, not yet … not yet.)
I walked across to the window and looked out.
I saw her. In the distance, on the dunes.
She was all in white, and he was in black, that same long black overcoat he’d worn to the Ring Dance. I watched her take the black cane from his hand, put it up behind his shoulders, then with both hands pull him toward her.
She said something to him before she stood on tiptoe and moved her mouth up to his.
I remembered the time before we’d kissed, she’d said to me, “It’s funny, because I never thought you liked me.”
And I remembered how she’d said once, “See, that sleazeball doesn’t like me.”
When I got home, Pete asked me why I wasn’t at the bookstore. He was in the kitchen, making himself an eggnog.
“I felt like being with you,” I said.
I did.
“I actually finished something today, Ricky,” he said.
“I just finished something, too,” I said. I finally knew it, and I knew that finally I was completely on my own. “What did you just finish?” I asked Pete.
“Remember ‘The Sweet Perfume of
Goodbye’? The world where there’s no fragrance whatsoever until someone starts dying?”
I nodded, wishing I could put my arms around my brother, realizing he was on his own, too, and always had been, even when he was younger than I was.
“Can I read it?” I said.
Pete said he wished I would. “I think there’s still something wrong with the opening paragraph. Do you want some of this eggnog?”
“No. Thanks.”
I followed him up to his apartment. He looked so little to me. I thought of all the times when I was a kid I’d walked behind him, and worried that I’d never be that big or that good.
“Why don’t I read it to you?” Pete said, grabbing the manuscript from his desk and sitting down on the couch.
He said, “Remember, you were the first one I ever tried ‘The Skids’ out on, too? You said it gave you the creeps.” Pete chuckled. “I never forgot that.”
“I liked it, though. I just couldn’t figure out how you’d think up something like that.”
“Mom used to rearrange the furniture when she was unhappy. I’d be upstairs at my typewriter rearranging the world.”
I sat across from him while he began reading.
“‘When I woke up this morning, there was a faint fragrance in my room, so subtle and exquisite, I marvel at it. And I know its meaning, but not its pain yet. That will come, for I am changing.’” Pete stopped and looked up at me. “That’s not quite right. It should probably read, ‘That will come, for I am bound to change.’”
“He isn’t really changed yet,” I agreed. “He only sees the change coming.”
“Exactly,” Pete said. “There’s the sweetness first … and later on, the end.”
A Personal History by M. E. Kerr
My real name is Marijane Meaker.
When I first came to New York City from the University of Missouri, I wanted to be a writer. To be a writer back then, one needed to have an agent. I sent stories out to a long list of agents, but no one wanted to represent me. So, I decided to buy some expensive stationery and become my own agent. All of my clients were me with made-up names and backgrounds. “Vin Packer” was a male writer of mystery and suspense. “Edgar and Mamie Stone” were an elderly couple from Maine who wrote confession stories. (They lived far away, so editors would not invite them for lunch.) “Laura Winston” wrote short stories for magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal. “Mary James” wrote only for Scholastic. Her bestseller is Shoebag, a book about a cockroach who turns into a little boy.