by Ann Hood
“A huge bug. I mean huge.”
“God! How gross.” Carol turned back around.
“You’re telling me. I thought I was going to barf. I mean this huge bug was right in my face.”
“Carol,” Pogo said, “stop talking and open some brews.”
“Did you get Lite?” she asked.
“I told you before that Lite tastes like piss.”
“God! You got Miller.”
Carol opened the beers and gave everybody one.
“I ask you this one little thing and you can’t do it,” Carol said. “I’m trying to lose weight for the wedding. I want to look good, Pogo, for that one day. It’s only the most important day of my entire life.”
Henry sipped his beer. He wished he had gone straight home. Beside him, Debbie had finished her cigarette and was snapping a piece of gum. She caught him looking at her and smiled.
“That must have been really disgusting,” he said.
She looked puzzled. “What?”
“Those string beans. With the bug.”
“Oh, that. Let me tell you something. That no-name brand stuff always has bugs or hairs in it. I work Customer Service practically every Saturday. I know.” Henry nodded.
“Ooooo,” Carol shrieked. “Back to the Future.”
Henry looked at where she was pointing. They were passing the multiplex cinema. A brightly lit rotating sign listed the six movies that were playing there. Steven Spielberg’s Back to the Future was at Cinemas 3 and 4.
“Let’s go, Pogo,” Carol said in a little girl voice.
“I don’t want to see that shit.”
“Pleeeease.” Then in her normal voice, “Debbie, do you want to see it?”
“I’m dying to see it.”
“See, Pogo.”
“All right. All right.”
As they waited in line, Henry realized that Debbie, who was playing Donkey Kong with Carol, expected him to buy her ticket as well.
“Pogo,” Henry said, “I’ve only got a couple bucks. I didn’t know I was going on a date, for Christ’s sake.”
“That’s okay. I’ll cover you. I’m telling you, she’s hot.”
As they walked into the movie, Carol stopped and pointed to one of the framed prints that lined the lobby’s walls.
“Isn’t that adorable, Debbie.”
Her finger rested on the edge of a Norman Rockwell print of two children and a dog gazing at a huge yellow moon.
Debbie snapped her gum. “Adorable.”
“Pogo, we have to start getting stuff for an apartment. I mean, the wedding’s only four months away.”
“Don’t remind me,” he whispered to Henry.
HENRY HATED THE MOVIE. Around him in the theater, the audience laughed and applauded. He looked at Debbie, smiling and cracking her gum, mesmerized by what was happening on the screen. What am I missing? he thought. Why don’t I understand this movie?
“How can I give you a Tab when you haven’t even ordered yet?” the man in the movie said. The audience roared with laughter.
“God,” Debbie said to Henry, “a Tab. I love it.”
He smiled at her. Stupid, he thought. This movie is so stupid.
“That movie,” Debbie said later as they ate ice cream at Friendly’s, “was really incredible.”
“I want to see it again,” Carol said.
“Definitely.”
“Did you ever see Invasion of the Body Snatchers?” Henry asked Debbie. “What?”
“Invasion of the Body Snatchers. These alien pods—”
“Alien. I saw Alien. That was so great.”
“God!” Carol said. “Remember when that guy’s stomach exploded?”
“That was so gross,” Debbie agreed.
“I’m trying to eat some ice cream here,” Pogo said. “Do you mind?”
After they left Friendly’s, they drove to the old high school football field. Now the town had a new high school and a sports complex. The old school was turned into a home for senior citizens and the football field remained deserted, overgrown with weeds and litter.
Carol and Pogo went behind the bleachers with a blanket, a radio, and a six-pack. Henry and Debbie sat on the ten-yard line.
“Do you want to smoke a joint?” Henry asked after a time.
“Sure.”
As they smoked, Debbie talked about high school. She graduated last year, she told him. “I really miss it,” she said. “It was so great. You know, something going on every night. Of course, I had a steady boyfriend the whole four years. We broke up though. Rick Carrerro? You know him?”
Henry shook his head.
“Hey. Where did you go to school? I don’t remember you at all.”
“I didn’t go.” Henry shifted uncomfortably, avoided Debbie’s question, Didn’t go to school?
Henry could accept the oddities of his family: a silent father who spent many nights away from home, a mother who escaped into near lunacy in order to avoid the guilt she felt over the death of her first son, a decade ago; a younger brother, Johnathan, who was a mnemonic genius, rattling off entire Shakespeare plays and Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” It was this brother who almost got the entire family on That’s Incredible. The Boston Globe story about them had carried a line about Johnathan’s talent and caught the attention of the show’s producer. However, his mother had backed off at the last minute in one of her more lucid moments, telling the show’s representatives: “We’re not freaks, you know.”
Pogo never asked about the eccentricities of Henry’s family. The two could sit in near silence, breaking the quiet sporadically to make observations about love or life while avoiding the step that would have them cross from pals to great friends. Other friends had stared at Henry’s mother’s two-foot-long hair and curled fingernails in horror. Once, a boy had actually run away screaming as Henry’s mother groped at him, calling for her dead son. But Pogo, who rarely visited the farm at all, never asked Henry about her or stared. He sometimes asked Johnathan to recite something and would sit listening in awe.
And, Henry knew, perhaps part of his love for Rebekah could be attributed to her familiarity with all of these things. She was one of the few people who remembered his mother from before Simon died, from the nearly idyllic time their two families shared life together on the farm. No one else could recall with him a time when his mother had been the best Nerf-ball pitcher around or the day she had jumped into the pond fully clothed for a swim with all the kids.
Suddenly, thinking of Rebekah, Henry had the urge to talk to her. He wished she were with him now instead of this gum-snapping, large-breasted girl. He looked at Debbie. She seemed to be waiting for something. An answer? A question? A kiss?
“That’s pretty weird,” she said. “I mean, not going to school.”
He kissed her in hopes of silencing her. Debbie’s lipstick was sweet, flavored strawberry, or cherry, perhaps. He couldn’t decide which. She thrust her tongue into his mouth immediately. It darted back and forth, scraped against his teeth, and pushed against his gums. Inside, beyond the berry-flavored lips, there was the taste of spearmint gum and stale cigarettes. Pogo had told Henry that she was hot. They kissed in this manner for a few minutes, and then he touched her breast. She pushed against him. She is hot, he thought, and tugged at her T-shirt. Her breasts fell loose from it. Just as he began to kiss them she shouted and pulled away from him.
“Jesus! What the hell do you think you’re doing? What exactly did Pogo say about me?”
Henry stared at her.
“I thought you were different. Sensitive. I mean, I opened up to you. Do you think I tell everyone about missing school and stuff? Jesus!”
Debbie walked quickly back to the car and Henry followed close behind. When they reached the Mustang, she leaned on the horn, some secret signal that called Carol to her rescue.
HENRY ENTERED REBEKAH’S KITCHEN. She and her mother were making a salad.
“Hi!” her mother said to him. “Grab a knife and st
art chopping. We put everyone who walks in here to work.”
“I brought these,” he said, and handed the bouquet of wild-flowers to no one in particular.
Elizabeth took them. “Aren’t these pretty, Rebekah?”
Rebekah looked up for the first time and Henry’s breath caught in his throat. Her black hair was frizzy from the humidity. She was wearing a baggy blue plaid jumper. It was cotton and, despite its size, stuck to her because of the heat.
“Gorgeous,” she said sarcastically.
You, too, he thought. You are gorgeous too. He picked up the knife her mother was using and began to cut some cucumbers.
“Can you stay for lunch?” Elizabeth asked.
“Sure.” He smiled at Rebekah. “Howard said I could borrow a couple of books.”
“He’s not here, but go on and poke through the bookshelves.”
“I’ve been reading a lot of Fitzgerald lately. Have you read The Great Gatsby, Rebekah?” “Seventeen times.”
“Rebekah’s in her Judith Krantz phase,” Elizabeth said.
“I’m filling my mind with trash. Torrid sex scenes, breasts like rosebuds, his manhood throbbing—”
Elizabeth laughed. “She’s impossible, Henry.”
“Impossible, yes. Hungry, no. Everything’s ready for you. I’m going for a walk.”
Henry’s heart collapsed as he watched her walk out the door.
“I JUST DON’T SEE what you see in her. She looks like she just wandered out of an old attic or something.”
Pogo and Henry were at the quarry, lying naked on the rocks that surrounded the water.
“And what about Debbie?” Pogo continued.
“What about her?”
“She likes you. She told Carol she really likes you.”
“I want Rebekah.”
“But she doesn’t want you. And believe me, you don’t want her to want you. Do you know that I spent the entire night last night listening to Carol and her mother talk about color schemes. It was so fucking boring. You know, Henry, I wish I had the balls to leave.”
“Leave? Leave Carol?” Henry sat up.
“Leave this whole fucking town. I don’t know. I lived here my whole life. I mean, where else is there to go? Shit. I’ve known Carol since I was fourteen.”
Henry didn’t answer. This didn’t seem right. How fragile was love, he thought, that someone can want to leave the girl he’s been with since he was fourteen years old?
“I heard,” Pogo said, “that in Hawaii all the girls are hot. You know, begging for it. There are palm trees and like fruit growing everywhere. You can walk down the street with a little hula dancer on your arm and pick like a peach or something right there.”
It sounded to Henry like the thought of palm trees and peaches was more exciting to Pogo than Carol. Pogo had never sounded quite this way before.
“Hey,” Pogo said as he sat up, “you want one of those bears?”
“What bears?”
“One of the fancy teddy bears. For Rebekah. I mean, those things sell for like fifty bucks.”
“The bears from where you work?”
“Yeah. Those bears. Like, there’s one dressed in a trench coat and he’s called Humphrey Beargot after some old actor. And there’s another one in a ballet suit named Bearishnakov after some fag Russian ballerina. So what does she like? Movies? Dancing?” Henry shrugged.
“I’m telling you, she’ll love it. There’s all kinds too.”
“I don’t have fifty dollars.”
“Did I say I wanted fifty bucks?” Pogo lay back down. “Man, can you imagine being in Hawaii? I’d get a surfboard and catch a wave and ride to all the islands there. Or Australia. Like in Endless Summer.”
What about Carol? Henry thought. What about the Norman Rockwell picture of the boy and the girl and the dog?
On the way home, in the Mustang with the top down and Pogo tapping on the steering wheel in time with the Talking Heads, Henry began to feel guilty. Hell, he thought, maybe Pogo doesn’t love Carol at all. Why should Henry be upset if all Pogo wanted to do was go to Hawaii and surf?
“You know what?” Henry blurted out. “When I was six my big brother died. We were swimming and he drowned. Right there beside me.”
When he said this they had reached the farm. He pointed in the direction of the pond. “We were swimming right down there.”
“No shit,” Pogo said.
They sat in the car, in front of the house. Henry’s heart was racing. Right after Simon died, Henry would walk up to people and say, “My brother died, you know.” But it had been years since he had said those words to anyone. Sometimes at night he woke up from a dream in which he was the one drowning and Simon was drying off on the grass, his image growing more and more blurry as Henry sank deeper into the sand.
He looked over at Pogo now. This former All-State wrestler who loaded boxes of well-dressed bears was a most unlikely confidant. Perhaps, Henry thought, he had said too much. He had spent so much time surrounded by silence and dreams, he was not sure what to say or when to say it.
His mother opened the door. She was very thin. From here, with her hair all around her, she looked like an oversized Raggedy Ann doll.
“Henry?” she called.
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“Who are you sitting with in that car?”
“Pogo. Remember Pogo?”
“Well, why don’t you come in?”
Pogo touched Henry’s arm. He was surprisingly gentle for someone so large. “Is that why she’s that way?” he asked. “Because of your brother?” Henry nodded.
“Let’s go inside,” Pogo said. “I’m pretty thirsty.”
“Well…”
“I’ll leave as soon as I have some soda or something.”
Henry’s mother smiled at them when they came inside.
“You remember Pogo, Ma?”
“No,” she said sadly. “But it’s very nice to meet you.”
“We’re just going to get something cold to drink,” Henry explained.
He led Pogo to the kitchen and was surprised when he saw that his mother had followed them.
“Johnathan made lemonade,” she said. “Minute Maid.”
“Sounds good,” Pogo said as he sat at the table.
Henry was aware of how rundown the house was—curtainless windows and warped linoleum. He got three Flintstones jelly glasses and filled them with lemonade.
“I have never known anyone named Pogo,” his mother said.
Henry was too tense to sit. Instead, he leaned against the sink. His mother seemed more lucid than usual, her eyes only slightly foggy.
“It’s just a nickname,” Pogo said.
She smiled.
“My real name is Ralph.”
“Oh!” she said, as if everything were suddenly very clear.
“Thanks for the lemonade, Mrs. Collier.” Pogo got up, stretched.
“Please,” she said, standing too, “don’t go yet. Stay for dinner.”
Henry flinched. His mother had not made dinner in years. The last time she tried, she had started a fire in the oven. Pogo looked at Henry for his okay.
“Ma,” Henry said, “I don’t think Pogo can stay.”
Her face clouded over. “Please stay.”
“Well,” Pogo said, “well, sure. Okay.”
“Oh, good! Now, you boys sit in the living room while I get everything ready.”
WHEN THEY GOT INTO the living room, Johnathan was there, sitting on the sofa reading The New Yorker.
“Hi, Romeo,” Pogo greeted him.
“You want some Romeo?” Johnathan threw the magazine down and adjusted his thick Buddy Holly glasses. “‘Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright, it seems she hangs upon the cheek of night Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear. Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!’”
“Phew!” Pogo said, and shook Johnathan’s hand. “That was beautiful.”
“I’m learning the histories now,” Johnathan
said.
“I like Romeo best,” Pogo said softly.
Finally, their mother announced that dinner was ready. In the kitchen, each place had silverware and napkins at it but no plates. Henry paused, wondering whether to say something or ignore it.
“Now,” she said, potholders in hand, “we have turkey with giblet gravy, fried chicken, or Salisbury steak.”
Johnathan and Henry exchanged nervous glances.
“Which would you like, Pogo?” she asked.
“The steak, please.”
She opened the oven and revealed four TV dinners. “Here we go.” She placed a steaming one in front of Pogo. “Who wants fried chicken?” Henry accepted the tin plate she offered to him, all the compartments filled with flat food.
“There,” she said smiling. “Now, isn’t this nice?”
THE TOWN WAS HAVING a fireworks display at the new high school. Its parking lot was sandwiched between the town below and the Berkshires above. Henry had agreed to go with Pogo, Carol, and Debbie. Three days before, he had received a card with a picture of a couple holding hands as they walked on a moonlit beach. Inside, in gold and purple ink was a note from Debbie:
Dear Henry,
It’s 1985 so it should be OK for a girl to send a boy a card even if he hasn’t called her or anything. I thought you were nice and I hope we can be friends at least.
Sincerely,
Debbie
NOW THE FOUR OF them sat on a blanket and waited for the fireworks to begin. Debbie was wearing red shorts and a white halter top. “Do I look patriotic?” she had asked Henry as he slid into the car beside her. She snuggled up to him then and had remained close ever since.
Carol kept talking about the wedding. Debbie was a bridesmaid and they described her gown in great detail—the pleats, the fabric, the straps and ruffles and matching headpiece. Pogo looked miserable.
As Debbie was talking, Henry became aware of familiar voices beside him. He turned and saw Rebekah and her family sitting nearby on a large Mexican blanket. What is she doing here? he thought in horror. Debbie was clinging to his arm like a tick, smiling and snapping gum. Perhaps he shouldn’t have thanked her for the card. Perhaps he shouldn’t have told her that of course they were more than just friends.