If Jack's in Love

by Stephen Wetta

  I found it odd. I wasn’t all that comfortable with the man.

  I pointed at the mirror. “I can watch from here,” I said, wanting him to know so I wouldn’t seem rude.

  “You’re following her!”

  “Yes sir. She doesn’t like me,” I explained.

  “Have you told her so? Why play these games?”

  His smile carved thinly between his fat cheeks. It was unsettling that a face should be so sharp and fat and crafty and stupid. And his smile made it kindly and malevolent, too. I wasn’t sure I liked him, although I had no reason to not like him. He seemed to appreciate what I was up to. He was getting a kick out of me.

  I shrewdly formed a strategy to make him my confidant so he wouldn’t run me out of his store.

  “She thinks I’m not good enough for her. But one time she told me she was proud of me ’cause I make good grades.”

  “You make good grades, do you?”

  Gladstein’s cartoon smile etched across his fat jinni’s face. And yet his voice was too deep and booming to be playful. It put me on guard. Something about his shop wasn’t quite right. It was quiet as a tomb. It lacked the hum of air-conditioning. It was humid. And it smelled.

  “You’re a lover, not a fighter, right?”

  “I fight when I have to.”

  “A lover and a scholar,” he boomed.

  I shrugged. Let him talk, if that’s all he wanted.

  “Would Myra accept a ring from you?”

  “I don’t know.” I swiveled towards the mirror. The sewing shop door had swung open, but it wasn’t Myra, it was only a pleasant-looking lady calling farewells.

  “You can’t spend your life following her like a mooncalf,” he said.

  “No sir.” That was self-evident, but I couldn’t figure out how to approach a girl whose superiority to me was practically a family catechism.

  “You can’t be timid, you have to show women who’s boss. That’s what they like. They’ll boss you if you don’t.”

  I checked the mirror and glanced back at him.

  “You’re Margaret Witcher’s boy.”

  That caught me off guard. His knowing my mother wasn’t surprising (he’d repaired her watch a few times) but his gift for genealogy was. Apparently he noticed more about our world than we believed.

  “How much money do you have to buy a ring?”

  “Now? I don’t even know how much they cost. How much is a diamond ring?”

  “Diamonds run high. That’s what the business is about, diamonds.”

  I wondered if the stories I’d heard about Jews were true, and I formed a resentment against him for putting it in my head that I might have a chance with Myra. He wanted to sell me a ring, that’s all.

  “How much you have on you?” he said.

  “Fifty cents.”

  “Fifty cents. Well, let’s see.”

  He wiggled his finger for me to come close. I wandered unenthusiastically towards him, which meant leaving off my observation of the mirrored column.

  Gladstein was on a three-legged stool, his pallid bulk spread under him. He tugged on a fabulous drawer that opened across his lap.

  “How old is this Myra whom you admire?”

  “My age, twelve. I’m gonna be thirteen in a month.”

  “So that makes you what, a Gemini, a Cancer? Plus you make good grades in school!” He seemed to find something comical about such slight accomplishment. He kept smiling, demonic and fat behind the goatee. There was a brand of canned sausages with a demon on the label whom Gladstein could be a standin for, except he was fatter. And yet he seemed a nice man, for all that…. He confused me. I needed time to think about him.

  He held forth a silvery ring with a blue agate stone in its center. It wasn’t the prettiest jewel I’d ever seen, but at least it was a ring. And who knows, it might give me a new lease with Myra.

  “You think this would win her heart?”

  “How much does it cost?”

  “I can let it go for fifty cents.”

  “Is that really what it’s worth?”

  “Kid, this ring is worth nothing. Except it might fit Myra’s finger. That’s worth fifty cents, don’t you agree?”

  I slid it up and down my pinkie.

  “I might have to hold her down to get it on her, though.”

  Gladstein roared. He thought that was funny.

  “Keep studying!” he bellowed. “Make those grades!” He broke into a fit of coughing, which put the brakes on his laughter.

  I handed him two quarters and held the blue stone to my eyes. Never before had I owned anything as precious and grown-up as a ring. That it was associated with Myra made it mystical to me.

  Gladstein seemed to be enjoying the enchantment of his profession. “I can give you a charm to go with that if you’d like.”

  “Sir?”

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. But he must have thought better of it. He frowned and examined the jewels in the drawer.

  Meanwhile I was balancing the ring on the tip of my thumb, upping it into the air. Gladstein ran his hand over his mouth to hide his amusement. Then he got distracted by something behind me.

  “She just went by.” He jerked his chin.

  “Sir?”

  “Your girl just went in that direction.”

  I bolted to the door, hollering my thanks, while he shouted some obnoxious encouragement I couldn’t catch.

  Myra was heading back the way she had come, descending the steps with her pogo-stick bounce.

  5

  I DON’T HAVE the faintest notion what I’d have done had she discovered me behind her. But I had a trinket, a gift to offer, and that was as good as a purpose.

  She passed the Ben Franklin, and fifty feet later I passed too (keeping my head rigidly advanced, lest Mom see through the window and distract me). Alas, she turned into the A&P, which forced me to cool my heels in the Hallmark shop next door.

  The truth is, very few ties of fate bound me to Myra. One: my father and her father hated each other. Two: my brother and her brother hated each other. Three: she had once been kind to me. Four: we had been on the same honor roll during the previous school year.

  And look at what kept us apart. She was a Joyner. Her father was a model of square-jawed integrity, her mother the spit and image of Betty Crocker on the packages. Duke University, that Alexandria and Oxford and Weimar of the Carolinas, had spread wide-open arms of welcome to her brother, and probably would do the same for Myra in years to come. And she lived next door to the Kellners. Whereas I was a Witcher. My father was a hillbilly, my mother looked like an Okie, and my brother would soon be commuting to a state school on a municipal bus solely to avoid the draft (he was precisely the kind of redneck the politicians liked to pack off to sweltering jungles). We lived in a shack that lacked not only screens and shingles but grass in the yard. And now the word TRASH was painted across it.

  Yet within me dwelled an indefatigable optimism. My angel of self-love kept whispering encouraging words in my ears. Had I not caught Myra staring at me in class? Had she not told me with her own lips that she was proud of me for making the honor roll?

  That had happened the very day of my humiliation in Mrs. Carter’s class, when she touched my arm as I was escaping into the hallway. Think of it, Myra Joyner touching me! That alone might have sufficed to make the day miraculous. And then she actually deigned to speak.

  “Benny Fisher is a moron,” she said when we made it out to the hall. “I hate it when they make fun of people.”

  What could I say? I’d assumed Benny was the spokesman for everyone, including her.

  “I just want you to know you’re the smartest person in class, next to me. Mrs. Carter told me herself. I heard you made the honor roll.”

  “I always make the honor roll,” I said.

  “I’m really proud of you. Benny and his friends are idiots. We’re not all like that. A lot of us think you’re really neat.”

  “You do?” Wher
e would I find this committee of wellwishers? She never told me and I never found out.

  “Yes. And you know the paper Mrs. Carter read in class, the one on Profiles in Courage? That almost made me cry when she read it. And when I got home that day I told my parents about it and they think you’re really smart.”

  It was a scene I’d later exert my imagination uselessly to construct: Mr. and Mrs. Joyner listening enthralled while their daughter enumerated the scholastic accomplishments of a Witcher. In that case, why did her parents still not wave to me when they passed in their car? Oh well, at the time it didn’t seem important: what was important was Myra’s lopsided nose, the down on her cheeks, her sloe eyes warm as charcoal embers.

  What was I supposed to do now? Should I invite her to my house so we could study together? Shame alone would never permit it, not as long as Pop’s junk was in the yard. Should I walk with her, carry her books, offer her a stick of gum? All I could do was gawk, and not twitch.

  “Don’t let Benny and his friends bother you,” she said. “It really doesn’t matter you’re a Witcher, not to anyone that counts.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  She swallowed her lack of conviction and nodded. Perhaps that was going too far. But she had followed me into the hall to reassure me, and Myra Joyner did nothing by halves.

  “Would you like to get together sometime?” I said.

  “Maybe we’ll talk later,” she said. “I have to go now, Kathy is waiting.”

  “Have you read Fahrenheit 451?” I said.

  “That’s on the summer reading list, have you read it already?”

  “I read most of those books a long time ago.”

  “Wow Jack. Listen, we should talk more someday. I’d like to talk about books.”

  “Why not now?”

  “I can’t, Kathy is waiting.”

  “Myra,” I said, to make her stay.

  She placed her palm against my chest and stared deeply into my eyes; and then she left.

  What the hell did that mean?

  All night I tossed and turned with those sloe eyes still staring at me. When morning came I headed to the schoolyard early, hoping to speak with her. But she had reasserted her usual reserve. She was standing next to the Coghill girls, and she waved only when they became distracted by something. It was a wave that said she saw me, felt me and acknowledged me; and managed to add, Not now.

  Now, in the Hallmark store, my angel of self-love was whispering once more, encouraging me gently to hubris. If only I could make Myra see me for what I was, she would appreciate me, she would accept me, she would want me… .

  Her head went bobbing over the top rack of the greeting cards and I sped out of the store to tail her.

  At the other end of the shopping center, when you hung a left, was a brief mall of office fronts (insurance, dentistry) that formed a blind. Behind them ran the alleyway.

  Myra crossed and mounted the steps that led to the street, still without the slightest idea that a boy just behind was monitoring her pogo-stick progress with love-swollen eyes. Coincidentally, the sloped street that the steps led to was called Myra Street. I have never figured out why the developers christened it that. All of the other streets in the subdivision were named after famous explorers. Maybe in the old days, when bulldozers were uprooting the farmland so the developers could append our cracker suburb to the expanding town, someone had had a premonition of the brainy bobbing goddess whose feet now were tripping happily along its paved cultivation.

  She swung left and right, taking me past the woods behind Dickie Pudding’s house and onto a street that eventually curved northwards and plunged downhill to Stanley. In other words, we were drawing close to our separate blocks, and our paths must soon diverge.

  Realizing I was about to lose her, if only from a distance of fifty feet, I recklessly called out her name.

  She turned, smiling benignly, but quickly knit her brow as I drew closer and she realized who it was. (I hadn’t yet garnered the automatically hostile expressions reserved for my father and my brother. Instead I received looks of dismay, of social concern.)

  “Yes, Jack,” she said, patiently.

  I caught up.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi.”

  “How’s your summer so far?”

  “Fine,” she said.

  I stood blankly. What was there to say?

  “I have to go,” she said.

  “Wait. How come you don’t talk to me anymore?”

  “I should think you know why.”

  “I don’t.”

  She regarded me with a raised eyebrow, tapping her foot.

  “Perhaps you don’t remember what happened at the drainage ditch the other day?”

  “You mean Pop and Kellner? What’s that got to do with us?”

  “I can’t be seen with you now.”

  “Why not? It wasn’t me who punched Kellner. I can’t help it what Pop does.”

  “You were with him.”

  “Of course I was, he’s my father.” I didn’t want to defend him at this crucial juncture, but I couldn’t exactly deny the obvious.

  “Fine. I have to go.”

  “Wait, I have something to show you.”

  “What?”

  I nudged my head towards the woods.

  “Let’s go over there.”

  “Where?”

  “In the woods, I don’t want people to see.”

  “I am not going in the woods with you, Jack Witcher.”

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out the ring.

  “I want you to have this,” I told her.

  Myra stared. And then her face changed. She looked up with a softened expression.

  “Whose is that?”

  “It’s for you. I got it at Gladstein’s, I was just there.”

  “You bought this for me?”

  “Try it on,” I said.

  She blinked in astonishment. The flattery implied by my gesture had made her forget her station. The air between us became charged with meaning. I noticed the down on her tanned cheeks softly quivering.

  “No one has ever given me a ring, this is my first.” She seemed already to understand how fraught with sentiment this moment would be in the future.

  “Daddy would never let me wear a boy’s ring,” she said, “especially not yours.”

  “Just keep it in your pocket.”

  Myra kept staring into the blue agate, wrestling with the temptation.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “Sure you can.”

  “What would it mean if I did?”

  “That we’re friends.”

  While she struggled with the burden of that, I decided to go for broke. “Plus we’d be going steady…. If you want,” I threw in.

  “Jack, are you crazy? I can’t be your friend, and I will certainly never go steady with you.”

  “Come on, you’re always staring at me in class, I’ve caught you before.”

  Tears filled her eyes. “I do not stare at you! Go away, leave me alone.”

  “You know you like me.”

  “I can’t believe how conceited you are.”

  “Just take the ring.”

  She turned and ran.

  “Chicken!” I called.

  I don’t think she heard me, and later I was glad. That would have marred our first romantic moment, for which I’d spent my last fifty cents; and even though the ring still lay in my palm, I can’t say I’d been crushed by her. I had seen the tears in her eyes, and my angel was quick to reassure me.

  I was ready to cut through the woods to call on Dickie Pudding, the only boy willing to claim me as a friend. But the emotion of the day was too much, so I went home and watched soap operas with Pop. Yet even with Pop I was restless. I’d had my first romantic encounter with a girl! I couldn’t stop reliving it.

  Somehow I wound up in the front yard kicking tufts of dirt and thinking about Myra. It must have been close to suppertime. Mom was due h
ome any minute and I kept debating whether I should tell her what had happened.

  Then I heard a car turn on our road. A horn tapped and a black Continental cruised past, driven by Gladstein. His fat, hot-sausage-demon grin was going a mile a minute. He swung his head to look as he passed and I took a step forward, thinking he was about to stop. But he didn’t. He just grinned and waved and stared in the mirror.

  Three fluffy dogs were yapping faintly through the rear window.

  6

  MY BROTHER WAS TALKING to himself, laughing out loud, swaggering about with the plug from the portable radio in his ear. He’d bought a pair of sunglasses that he rarely took off, and sometimes he wore them in the bathroom. We’d hear the toilet flush and out he would spring, grinning behind the shades. Then he might snatch the book I was reading and fling it across the room: Rush to Judgment, Tai-Pan, The Source, The Fixer, A Texan Looks at Lyndon—paperbacks my mother would buy at the drugstore rack and leave unfinished for me to pick up. He would accuse me of being a square. He laughed at my music. He assured me cool things were happening in the world, psychedelic things, and told me what a drag it would be if I missed out on them.

  One day I went to the living room and found him silhouetted in the doorway. “Jack,” he said. He jerked his head towards the yard and we went outside. Silently he motioned me to hop on the back part of the banana seat of his Sting-Ray, and I was happy that my brother was being a brother. How rare that was these days. But it was a fact. Stan Witcher had once been a sweet boy. We had laughed and conspired; he had defended me, amused me.

  We sailed along to the woods beside Clark Lane and then shouldered through some brush for about fifty yards, to a small trickling creek. The little patch of woods was well shaded and hard to reach, and if you were willing to brave the ticks and mosquitoes you might find some sylvan privacy there.

  We sat at the edge of the creek. My brother took off his sunglasses, set them on the ground and pulled a box of Marlboros from his pocket. Then we lit up.

  I was fairly new to cigarettes, maybe a year in. Smoking was an event during which I liked to meditate authoritatively on the relative merits of different tobacco brands while practicing my talent for smoke rings. Stan was diligent about introducing me to new vices, and he always seemed genuinely interested in how I was getting along in them. But now he had no regard for my ruminations. He kept cracking his knuckles and staring back in the direction of the street. Did he have some ulterior reason for bringing me to the creek?