In school, the morning passed slowly. The classrooms were all too hot. I leaned my head on my hand. I couldn’t remember why I had been so agitated, so feverish with excitement. I drew rows of little cups across a piece of paper and wrote CHOCOLATE PUDDING, shading the letters carefully.
In the cafeteria at lunch time the menu featured sloppy joes and chocolate pudding. I ordered four chocolate puddings and took the cups on a tray to a table in the corner of the lunchroom. I said hello to the others at the table and skinned the top off my first pudding. Slowly I ate the soft insides, cleaning out the little brown dish thoroughly. The kids were talking about Mrs. Fannon, the Latin teacher. “God, she’s fierce,” Melissa Maguire said. “You have her, don’t you, Chrissy?”
“Doesn’t everyone?” I said. They laughed. It was a saying in Peter V. Newsome High that you hadn’t been educated till Margaret Fannon had called you a nincompoop, a mental incompetent, and utterly beyond redemption.
Saving the chocolate skins in my empty dish, I continued working on the puddings. I had gone through a phase a few years before when I had knocked myself out smiling at Melissa and Debby Pearce, joining their conversations and finding clever things to say about teachers and other kids. I walked in the halls with them, and played on their teams in gym. Once or twice Melissa—or was it Debby?—said something about calling me up. But of course we had no phone. After a while, without anything being said, without anything having happened, one way or the other, I again went my own way.
“I hear Fannon never gives anything over a B,” Debby said. “I don’t see why anyone takes her classes. A B! That would ruin my average.”
“Oh, you only have to know how to get around her,” Neil Rosencranz said, winking at me. “It’s a challenge.”
I went on eating my chocolate pudding. Far back in my mind, behind the chatter, the scrape of dishes, the crinkling of sandwich wrappers, I heard the fierce moaning of the wind as it gnawed at the trailer, and I thought of Dad and Uncle sleeping on the pullout couch, their boots tumbled together, safe in the trailer, enclosed, protected. But at the same moment, perhaps for the first time, I thought how frail the trailer was, how weather-beaten the boards, how flimsy the putty that held the windows in place, and I imagined the trailer crumpling in on itself like a deflated paper bag.
Carefully I took the chocolate skin off the last pudding and added it to the others. Two more boys sat down at the table. One of them, Teddy Finkel, had six chocolate puddings on his tray. “Look at that,” Debby Pearce said. “Everyone! Look at Teddy Finkel’s tray!” Everyone did. “Now look at Chrissy’s tray. Isn’t that unbelievable?”
“Weird,” Melissa said. “It’s a convention of chocolate pudding freaks.”
Teddy Finkel looked over at me with interest. He had a long bony face and dark hair parted in the middle. “Are you that way about chocolate pudding, too?” We had gone to the same schools for years, but rarely spoken to each other.
“Yes, I like chocolate pudding,” I said. I still hadn’t eaten the chocolate skins.
“We chocolate pudding freaks don’t like chocolate pudding, we revere it,” Teddy Finkel said, digging into a pudding with gusto. In two seconds he’d cleaned it up and started on another. I kept my head down. When I glanced up, his eyes were on me. His expression was mild, playful, curious. He seemed to be asking me a question, or was that my imagination? I felt stifled, breathless. I wanted to throw off my sweater and push away the tray. I ate the last of the chocolate skins and left the cafeteria.
Later that afternoon I saw Teddy Finkel coming toward me in the hall near the science room. He raised his hand and, as he passed, said, “The secret word is chocolate pudding.”
I thought of him as the bus jogged me homeward. Again that curious, stifling heat rose behind my ribs. When I got off the bus I cut across the fields toward the trailer. The sun had warmed our road and turned it to muck. The fields were soggy on top, still frozen beneath.
In the trailer I kicked off my drenched shoes and sang one of the old World War II songs Dad and Uncle liked. “When the lights go on again all over the world, when the boys come home again all over the world …” I looked out the window for Dad and Uncle, wondering if they were working today.
It grew dark and still they hadn’t come home. I had a pot of coffee ready for them on the stove. I did my homework. The clock ticked louder than necessary. Finally I thought of checking the tomato juice can. It was empty, except for a five-dollar bill. So they were gone. Drinking. For a moment my face felt encased in ice, like a spring puddle covered with a skin of ice that wrinkles and crackles at the touch of a foot. The touch of Uncle’s voice calling “Chrissy,” the sound of Dad’s terrible cough outside in the wet darkness, and my ice, too, would crack.
There now, Chrissy, the world is a foolish place. Don’t try to figure it out.
Yes, Uncle.
I thought of the wind last night, the frozen fields, that pale burning sun, the tense anticipation that had gripped me like a fever. How sure I’d been that something was going to happen! Yes, and this was it. I poured a cup of coffee and drank it down.
The next day, as I was leaving school and heading for the bus, Teddy Finkel caught me by the arm and said in my ear, “Chocolate pudding.” I looked at him, unsmiling. I felt wintry, frozen.
On the school bus I heard the laughter and jokes of the other kids as if from a distance. I thought of nothing, as if I were half asleep. Perhaps I was. I had slept poorly the night before, jerking awake many times, listening, listening, listening to the darkness and the night. When I got off the bus I walked slowly down the muddy road, my booksack slung over one shoulder. Suddenly I started running, and I banged on the side of the trailer the way I used to do, calling “Dad? Uncle?” I knew, however, that the trailer would be empty.
Several days passed. Each afternoon when I returned from school I felt first sick with disappointment, then fiercely glad they hadn’t come back. They would be weepy with remorse, ill, weak, bruised, smelling of vomit. All the money would be gone. I would have to make them food, heat water for them to wash, and take their stinking clothes to the laundromat. Dad would cry day and night, tears would leak from his very pores. Forgive me Chrissy forgive your old father he’s no good no good do you forgive me Chrissy Chrissy I’ve hurt you …
Oh, I knew it all. I knew just how it would be. How they would smell. How they would look. How the sight of them would make it difficult for me to breathe.
“Stay away,” I raged aloud one night, pacing up and down the trailer, reaching out to bang my fists against the walls. “Stay away, both of you! Do you think I want you back, smelling of vomit? Stay away, I tell you,” I screamed. “Do you hear me, you two?”
I slept well that night. I woke up once and listened to the quiet of the trailer, the quiet outside. Quite near, an owl hooted, the one that sounds like a horse whinnying. I breathed easily, in and out, in and out, and stretched my legs till my toes touched the bottom of the bed. My head was muzzy with dreams and I fell asleep again, at once.
In the morning, rain drummed lightly on the tin roof of the trailer and smeared the windows. Crows cawed far away.
When I arrived at school, Teddy Finkel was at the water fountain on the first floor. Straightening, he saw me and said, “Chocolate!” Later, we passed each other again in the hall near the gym. Almost simultaneously,. we both said, “Pudding.”
He reversed himself to walk with me. “I guess we’ve worn that joke out,” he said.
“Why do we keep bumping into each other?” I said. He followed me into the library and sat down where I did, at one of the long tables under a window. I took out my biology notebook.
“You going to work?” he said.
“That was the general idea.”
“A better idea is to talk to me. Tell me what you like besides chocolate pudding.”
“Oh—” I shrugged. I didn’t know what to say. Did he mean what other foods I liked, or what else I liked to do besides eat c
hocolate pudding? I flipped open my notebook.
“Nice neat work,” he said, leaning over to look. “You like bio?”
“Yes.” I started drawing an amoeba in pencil, just lightly, till I felt I had it right.
He pulled a book off a shelf behind him, opened it, and stared straight into it. “You’re not really very friendly, are you?” he said.
“Because I don’t flirt?”
“I don’t think smiling is exactly flirting,” he said. “I mean, we had a little joke going, a little thing between us, the chocolate pudding, and you never once smiled.”
I bent my head over my notebook. I felt something fasten itself, like a bone, or a hook, in my throat. I made another little squiggly line on my amoeba.
“Listen, you know what my whole name is?” he said. “Theodore Roosevelt Finkel. My mother named me after him. She really did. Listen, I don’t tell that to everyone. It’s an offering, a friendship offering.”
I turned my head a fraction and looked into his eyes. They were the color of prunes, that shiny soft black of stewed prunes, an amazing color.
“What are you thinking about now?” he said.
“I’m thinking that I promised myself to get this bio notebook caught up, and with you bothering me I never will. And I’m thinking that your eyes are really strange, and how long is it going to take for you to get sick of sitting around getting nowhere with me?”
“But I don’t want to get somewhere with you,” he said “I just want to get to know you.”
“Why?”
“Why?” he repeated.
“Yes. Why?” I really wanted to know.
“You’re not like other girls, are you? I mean, you really aren’t like other girls at all, are you?”
I felt suddenly depressed. It was true. I’d known it for a long time. I wasn’t like other girls, like Melissa or Debby, who knew how to talk to boys easily, how to laugh and say amusing things. “I’m sorry.” I flipped senselessly through my bio book.
“Sorry! Don’t say that. Don’t be sorry, Chrissy.” He put his hand into my biology book, flattening it out. “You’re not a phony, that’s all I meant. God, some of the hypocritical types around here—they make me want to puke.” Two red spots of excitement appeared high on his cheekbones. Then the bell rang, and I started pushing my papers together. I hadn’t done a bit of work, but it didn’t matter, the trailer would be quiet again tonight without Dad and Uncle.
“Well, are we friends?” Teddy said, walking out of the library with me.
“I don’t know.” I hurried up the stairs.
“You mean that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said impatiently. “Why would I say it, otherwise?”
“God, I like you,” he said. “I really like you! We’re going to be friends. Definitely.” He grabbed my arm. “What are you doing after school?”
“Going home.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“I go on the bus, school bus.”
“I know.”
“I live fifteen miles out.”
“Okay.”
I stopped in front of Mrs. Fannon’s classroom. “How will you get back?”
He raised his thumb and jerked it across his shoulder.
A shiver crossed my neck. I shifted my books from one arm to the other. At last I said, “I don’t know if I want you to come home with me. I don’t know, I just don’t know!”
“Listen,” he said. “Listen—” He touched my shoulder. “It’s all right. Really.” He peered into my face seriously and reassuringly. Then he walked down the corridor.
After school he was waiting outside where the buses were lined up at the curb. “Hi,” he said. It was still raining. I felt the other kids looking at us. I climbed on the bus.
“He’s with me,” I said to the driver, tilting my head back at Teddy. We took two seats toward the rear of the bus.
“Hi, Chrissy!” Diane Lucas called in an excited voice, as she stared at Teddy. “Got company?”
“It must be a drag taking the bus every day,” Teddy said. He leaned back in the seat, folding his arms across his chest.
“I don’t mind. I’m used to it.”
The bus filled up. Kids were yelling to each other. Someone blew up a lunch bag and popped it. “All right, you kids, settle down,” Mrs. Johnson, the bus driver, yelled. Nobody paid any attention.
The bus left the school grounds, drove through Middle Square, past the bank with its fluted columns, the supermarket, a dress shop, the laundromat. A few people hurried through the rain, shoulders hunched. I stared at everything through the rain-smeared windows as if seeing it all for the first time, conscious of Teddy looking across my shoulder. On the outskirts of Middle Square, we drove by a set of stone gates with a white arch over them lettered STONY ACRES. Behind the arch I caught a glimpse of big houses, wet clean road, and clipped lawns, soggy and glistening.
“That’s where I live,” Teddy said. “Did you ever hear such a phony name? Stony Acres. Ha!” The bus swept past. “Are you at the end of the line?”
“Not quite. A few kids live farther out than me.”
“Do you usually do homework or something on the ride?”
“Usually.”
“Well, don’t let me stop you. Just do what you usually do, you know?”
I shook my head. I was looking at his eyes again, that strange dark soft color. “It’s okay. I don’t have that much.”
He started telling me about the piano lessons his folks had given him years ago. “It was like I was playing with my feet, I drove my piano teacher crazy. My parents wanted me to have a certain basic musical education. I kept at it for five years. Five years! My parents don’t give up easily. Five years of torture for my piano teacher.”
I laughed. I forgot to look out the window. I forgot how disastrous this afternoon would turn if Uncle and Dad were home, needing me to help them sober up. It was only when Teddy followed me off the bus and walked beside me down our road that I remembered. I dodged puddles and approached the trailer slowly. The pickup truck was parked, as always, to one side. That meant nothing. They never took the pickup when they went off.
“What are those TV’s doing outside?” Teddy said, pointing to the two TV sets stacked one atop the other at one end of the trailer. Uncle had thrown a short piece of canvas over the top of them and forgotten them.
“Some people gave them to Uncle and Dad in part payment for work they did. We have no place for them inside.” I opened the door and stood there, listening. The trailer was silent. Everything as I had left it in the morning.
“Can I come in out of the rain?” Teddy said from behind me, and I moved out of the doorway.
“Come in—please.” I put my books down on the table. I saw how shabby everything was. How bare and worn.
“Is this it?” Teddy prowled the length of the trailer in four strides. He reached up and touched the ceiling, then stretched out his arms, almost touching the walls. “This is it?”
“Yes.”
“You do everything right here—cook, eat, sleep, your homework, everything?”
“Yes.” I folded my arms across my chest.
“God!” His eyes were shining. “It’s wonderful. It’s so honest. So essential.” He indicated the door to my room. “What’s that? A bathroom?”
“My room.”
“Can I see?”
“All right.” As soon as I said it, I felt very scared in a way I couldn’t understand.
Teddy put his head inside the door, then stepped in. For a moment there was silence. I felt chilled.
“Chrissy,” he said. “This is great. This is fantastic. You know what, this is exactly like a room I’ve dreamed of having.”
“Don’t—” I said.
“My God, for years I’ve had this dream of a perfect room, just plain, a bed or cot, maybe even just a mattress on the floor, a plain desk, some shelves, a couple drawers.” His hand sliced the air, as if cutting his dream room off before it got
too big.
I sat down on my bed, staring around at everything, as if seeing it for the first time. The same thing that happened on the bus. Teddy sat down next to me. “I’ve always liked my room,” I said.
Our faces were very close. He had a faint mustache growing across his upper lip and he smelled soapy. “Would it be all right—you wouldn’t be mad if I kissed you?”
Our lips touched. I had never known such sweetness. I leaped up, frightened, filled with a crazy happiness. It seemed I might once have felt this way, but when? When? I laughed out loud and pulled Teddy up. “Let’s have some chocolate pudding!”
I got out the cocoa tin, the sack of sugar, the box of cornstarch, and measured the ingredients into a pan. I poured in milk and stirred the mixture over the hotplate. Teddy hovered at my shoulder, watching. As the pudding thickened and came to a boil, I reached into the cupboard over the hotplate for two dessert cups. “Sometimes I eat it straight out of the pot,” I said.
“Why not now?”
“You’re company.”
He put his hand to his chest, pretended to stagger back, knocking against the broom closet. “Ooow! You know how to hurt a man. Company!”
I took the pot off the stove and set it down in the middle of the table. I took two spoons from the pitcher and we sat down across from each other. The chocolate pudding was thick and shiny. Teddy dipped in his spoon and took a taste. He closed his eyes and hummed. “I’ve never had chocolate pudding like this.”
“We should have taken off the chocolate skin,” I said, a bit regretfully.
He dipped up spoonful after spoonful. “You’re a genius, a chocolate-pudding genius. Chrissy, I swear it, after this, never again chocolate pudding in a tin.”
“A tin?” I said. I felt extraordinarily happy.
“My mother the tennis player buys chocolate pudding in little tins,” Teddy said. “You know. They’re in the market. Little tins about so big. Puddin’-In-A-Tin, it’s called. Evil people somewhere have plotted this conspiracy against chocolate pudding lovers of the world. They squeeze something thick, gluey, and brown into little tins and label it chocolate pudding. And to think that, till this moment, I had no idea of the extent of their evil conspiracy! True, I knew tinned chocolate pudding tasted different than school-cafeteria chocolate pudding, but their diabolical cleverness succeeded in making me believe it was chocolate pudding, even if of an inferior grade. But this—” He shook his head and dipped again into the pot.
Dear Bill, Remember Me? Page 11