The Soho Press Book of '80s Short Fiction

by Dale Peck

  On vacations, we went skiing, or you’d go south if someone invited you. Some people had apartments in New York that their families hardly ever used. Or summer houses, or older sisters. We always managed to find someplace to go.

  We made the plan at coffee hour. Simon snuck out and met me at Main Gate after lights-out. We crept to the chapel and spent the night in the balcony. He tasted like onions from a submarine sandwich.

  The boys are one of two ways: either they can’t sit still or they don’t move. In front of the TV, they won’t budge. On weekends they play touch football while we sit on the sidelines, picking blades of grass to chew on, and watch. We’re always watching them run around. We shiver in the stands, knocking our boots together to keep our toes warm, and they whizz across the ice, chopping their sticks around the puck. When they’re in the rink, they refuse to look at you, only eyeing each other beneath low helmets. You cheer for them but they don’t look up, even if it’s a face-off when nothing’s happening, even if they’re doing drills before any game has started at all.

  • • •

  Dancing under the pink tent, he bent down and whispered in my ear. We slipped away to the lawn on the other side of the hedge. Much later, as he was leaving the buffet with two plates of eggs and sausage, I saw the grass stains on the knees of his white pants.

  Tim’s was shaped like a banana, with a graceful curve to it. They’re all different. Willie’s like a bunch of walnuts when nothing was happening, another’s as thin as a thin hot dog. But it’s like faces; you’re never really surprised.

  Still, you’re not sure what to expect.

  I look into his face and he looks back. I look into his eyes and they look back at mine. Then they look down at my mouth so I look at his mouth, then back to his eyes then, backing up, at his whole face. I think, Who? Who are you? His head tilts to one side.

  I say, “Who are you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing.”

  I look at his eyes again, deeper. Can’t tell who he is, what he thinks.

  “What?” he says. I look at his mouth.

  “I’m just wondering,” I say and go wandering across his face. Study the chin line. It’s shaped like a persimmon.

  “Who are you? What are you thinking?”

  He says, “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Then they get mad after, when you say enough is enough. After, when it’s easier to explain that you don’t want to. You wouldn’t dream of saying that maybe you weren’t really ready to in the first place.

  Gentle Eddie. We waded into the sea, the waves round and plowing in, buffalo-headed, slapping our thighs. I put my arms around his freckled shoulders and he held me up, buoyed by the water, and rocked me like a sea shell.

  I had no idea whose party it was, the apartment jam-packed, stepping over people in the hallway. The room with the music was practically empty, the bare floor, me in red shoes. This fellow slides onto one knee and takes me around the waist and we rock to jazzy tunes, with my toes pointing heavenward, and waltz and spin and dip to “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” or “I’ll Love You Just for Now.” He puts his head to my chest, runs a sweeping hand down my inside thigh and we go loose-limbed and sultry and as smooth as silk and I stamp my red heels and he takes me into a swoon. I never saw him again after that but I thought, I could have loved that one.

  You wonder how long you can keep it up. You begin to feel as if you’re showing through, like a bathroom window that only lets in grey light, the kind you can’t see out of.

  They keep coming around. Johnny drives up at Easter vacation from Baltimore and I let him in the kitchen with everyone sound asleep. He has friends waiting in the car.

  “What are you, crazy? It’s pouring out there,” I say.

  “It’s okay,” he says. “They understand.”

  So he gets some long kisses from me, against the refrigerator, before he goes because I hate those girls who push away a boy’s face as if she were made out of Ivory soap, as if she’s that much greater than he is.

  The note on my cubby told me to see the headmaster. I had no idea for what. He had received complaints about my amorous displays on the town green. It was Willie that spring. The head- master told me he didn’t care what I did but that Casey Academy had a reputation to uphold in the town. He lowered his glasses on his nose. “We’ve got twenty acres of woods on this campus,” he said. “If you want to smooch with your boyfriend, there are twenty acres for you to do it out of the public eye. You read me?”

  Everybody’d get weekend permissions for different places, then we’d all go to someone’s house whose parents were away. Usually there’d be more boys than girls. We raided the liquor closet and smoked pot at the kitchen table and you’d never know who would end up where, or with whom. There were always disasters. Ceci got bombed and cracked her head open on the banister and needed stitches. Then there was the time Wendel Blair walked through the picture window at the Lowes’ and got slashed to ribbons.

  He scared me. In bed, I didn’t dare look at him. I lay back with my eyes closed, luxuriating because he knew all sorts of expert angles, his hands never fumbling, going over my whole body, pressing the hair up and off the back of my head, giving an extra hip shove, as if to say There. I parted my eyes slightly, keeping the screen of my lashes low because it was too much to look at him, his mouth loose and pink and parted, his eyes looking through my forehead, or kneeling up, looking through my throat. I was ashamed but couldn’t look him in the eye.

  • • •

  You wonder about things feeling a little off-kilter. You begin to feel like a piece of pounded veal.

  At boarding school, everyone gets depressed. We go in and see the housemother, Mrs. Gunther. She got married when she was eighteen. Mr. Gunther was her high school sweetheart, the only boyfriend she ever had.

  “And you knew you wanted to marry him right off?” we ask her.

  She smiles and says, “Yes.”

  “They always want something from you,” says Jill, complaining about her boyfriend.

  “Yeah,” says Giddy. “You always feel like you have to deliver something.”

  “You do,” says Mrs. Gunther. “Babies.”

  After sex, you curl up like a shrimp, something deep inside you ruined, slammed in a place that sickens at slamming, and slowly you fill up with an overwhelming sadness, an elusive gaping worry. You don’t try to explain it, filled with the knowledge that it’s nothing after all, everything filling up finally and absolutely with death. After the briskness of loving, loving stops. And you roll over with death stretched out alongside you like a feather boa, or a snake, light as air, and you . . . you don’t even ask for anything or try to say something to him because it’s obviously your own damn fault. You haven’t been able to—to what? To open your heart. You open your legs but can’t, or don’t dare anymore, to open your heart.

  • • •

  It starts this way:

  You stare into their eyes. They flash like all the stars are out. They look at you seriously, their eyes at a low burn and their hands no matter what starting off shy and with such a gentle touch that the only thing you can do is take that tenderness and let yourself be swept away. When, with one attentive finger they tuck the hair behind your ear, you—

  You do everything they want.

  Then comes after. After when they don’t look at you. They scratch their balls, stare at the ceiling. Or if they do turn, their gaze is altogether changed. They are surprised. They turn casually to look at you, distracted, and get a mild distracted surprise. You’re gone. Their blank look tells you that the girl they were fucking is not there anymore. You seem to have disappeared.

  Pretending to Say No

  by Bruce Benderson

  I’m not shitting you, man, and why should I be? She came, she came to our house! No, really, the buzzer rings a
nd I tell myself, I’m not answering that shit cause if somebody wants to see me they call first. I only answer that bell when I know who it is! But the bell keeps ringing and ringing and Tito, that’s my uncle trying to sleep, says, Answer the fucking bell and tell them if they touches it one more time I’m going to blow ’em away! Me in my drawers yet. Who’s going to run downstairs five flights to give ’em that message? So I press the buzzer, listen for the door and shouts, You got the wrong place whoever you fucking are, stop leaning on that bell unless you want to get blown away! Let me in, a white-lady voice calls up the stairwell, It’s me, Nancy Reagan.

  No shit, man. It was the President’s wife coming to see us. So I ask Tito, Quick, you know Nancy Reagan? ’Cause since he got involved with those Colombians and started to deal the crack he has contact with some very swift people. They got limousines and everything. And he half asleep saying, Sure, I used to fuck her but her ass was too tight. No, I says, the President’s wife.

  Yes, it’s the President’s wife, comes the white-lady voice right at the door this time, Would you please open up for a minute? And my uncle, hearing it too, sits right up in the bed: I gonna knock that damn fool head right off those shoulders if you brought that white drag queen up here, what’s her name. No, I says, I didn’t tell no drag queen to come up here! I didn’t bring no drag queen up here except maybe once. And it was Tito got me to know them, always running crack for him to this bar near the Deuce, and some of those queens, really, listen, if you was standing right next to one of them you might think she was real.

  So I walk real quiet to the door, on tippytoes, and take a good look through the peephole. It’s a white lady for sure, it ain’t no drag queen. For one things this one’s too old, and real skinny. She’s not wearing no coat and she’s got a red dress on. What you want? I call through the door. I just want to come in for a moment, she says and sticks her hand in her purse, pulls out bills and waves them at the peephole. She got money, I tell my uncle. Oh shit, says he, some white bitch coming in the middle of the night to buy crack. But don’t let her in now, say I ain’t got none. Come back tomorrow, I call through the door. Please, she says. We ain’t got nothing, lady, go away.

  Then she starts banging on the door real loud, louder than Mr. T. can hit a door, so my uncle gets really pissed and telling China Sue his Chinese chick that he in bed with, Mama, you roll yourself up in this quilt here, and cover your head, ok? ’cause I going to open the door, and he went and got the shotgun. Ok, he goes. Now when I give the sign, you throw the door open, one, two, three, go! He aims the gun and I throw open the door. Wait! goes the white lady, don’t do it! I come as a friend. I ain’t going to shoot you if you moves your ass out this building now, lady, I ain’t got no scotty and I don’t want no trouble from the super. Hear me, please, for a second, says she. Who sent you here? says Tito. I just rang any bell. What you doing that for? I need help . . . Now wait a minute, lady, if I let you in, what you going to do? I’ll even pay you. She waves the bills at us again, and the top one at least, well that’s a twenty. Tito keeps the gun on her but motions with his shoulder. Get in here and put the money on the table.

  Nancy Reagan gives a sigh of relief, comes in and puts the money on the table. Tito picks it up. Now what else you got in that purse? Give it here. Oh there’s no need for that, she says, your kindness will be rewarded. I’ve just come from Odyssey House. Do you know what that is? The drug program? I says. Nancy Reagan smiles and at that moment I know it’s her.

  So I tell Tito, Yo, Man, this ain’t no crack head, this be Nancy Reagan. Tito looks at her close and says, C’mon, man, I told you before if you be bringing those drag queens here from the Deuce you got to tell me first. You can’t trust a drag queen, they into stealing and acting like some kind of grand lady, that’s what they are all about. Now you got to go ’cause I don’t want my nephew hanging out with drag queens.

  Yo, man, this ain’t a drag queen, you be making a big mistake.

  Tito takes another look at her and then he calls Suzy. Tito trusts her about some things. So China Sue comes out and Tito says, Suzy, this a drag queen? Oh my god, Suzy goes, and runs back to the bedroom and puts a sheet on.

  So Tito puts down the gun and he kind of bows to her and says, How you doin’, Nancy Reagan?

  Not so well, says she, since you ask. Maybe you happened to watch TV tonight? Yeah, I did, says Tito, what that got to do with it? Well, says Nancy, didn’t you notice what happened to me? Oh, I saw it, pipes up Sue, coming back with the sheet wrapped around her. You were at the drug program and you put your arm around this little black kid and he told the TV audience how he used to take angel dust and how much you helped him? Nancy Reagan listens real careful to every word China Sue says, and then looks her straight in the eye and says, Is that all you saw?

  Yes, Mrs. Reagan, you were wonderful, oh, and then you said that this was only one of many young lives that had almost been ruined by the insanity of drugs. But tell me, dear, Nancy says, was it all in closeup? I don’t know. Well, would anybody happen to have a needle? Nancy says. Tito’s mouth drops open, my eyes bug out. And a little bit of thread? Nancy goes on. You see when the reporters left and I went into the ladies’ room, I bent down to fix my hose and saw that the hem of my dress had come undone. In front. And here we were supposed to go right on to a midnight supper to discuss the fund-raiser and I was stuck in the ladies’ room with a sagging hem. So I went out another entrance hoping to find somebody who could help me fix the thing before I had to face another reporter. I was so terribly embarrassed, I just couldn’t go back, and when I realized there wasn’t anywhere to find a needle and thread this time of night, I panicked and began ringing doorbells and now I’m at wit’s end . . .

  She keeps going on like that while she parks her ass right at our kitchen table, and puts her purse down so I can take a good look at it. Genuine alligator. Well, I says to myself, too bad I didn’t noticed that before, Nancy Reagan, when I was trying to figure was you shitting us.

  So I go over to her, and real polite and everything says, You want a Bud? I’d love one, says Nancy. Well give her a glass, barks Tito. A glass will not be necessary, Nancy tells him.

  Don’t you worry, goes China Sue, I can fix that hem for you pronto. Tito, you got any thread? It’ll have to be scarlet, says Nancy, or at least a magenta. She puts her hand to her ears to see if both earrings is still there and takes a swallow of beer.

  Tito starts running all over the place, opening drawers, cursing, and slamming ’em shut, looking for thread. And I am wishing I’d cleaned up like he wanted me to before China Sue come over so’s the place wouldn’t look so bad.

  Nancy Reagan takes a good look around, checks the place out. Well, look at you, I keep thinking. Here’s the First Lady of our country, but she ain’t wearing no diamonds or Gucci and not even one gold chain. Shit, if I had her money I’d be wearing ten gold chains and mink-lined Adidas.

  So where are your parents this evening? she asks. Oh, they’s out, I answer quick. Out to dinner. And will they be back soon? Nancy says, looking at the lipstick on her beer can and covering it up with her hand. Carlos ain’t got no parents, Suzy pipes up. Everybody has parents, Nancy sasses back. So Suzy wraps the sheet over her head and ranks, Well he don’t, what you think a that? and Nancy stares up at the wall.

  What about him, anyway? I says to my uncle, talking about my father. He dead or what? He ain’t dead, he in jail, says Tito. You know that. And what does your father do? Nancy goes on, like Tito didn’t say nothing. Construction, I tell her. But I lives with my uncle. Uncle here don’t mind my staying here long’s I clean up before he brings girls over. And I do all the laundry for the both of us too.

  Well how about your little sister, says Nancy, can’t she help out too? You mean Suzy? That ain’t a sister. Can’t you see she Chinese? She’s Tito’s wife. Carlos, shut your mouth! Suzy hollers, laughing. They ain’t married and shit, I goes on, she’s ju
st his woman. And how old a woman is she? is Nancy’s next dig. Fourteen, I says. But I’m eighteen. I got ID. You want to see it? I get up to get the proof I bought at Playland but Nancy starts waving me down.

  Now don’t you start giving me that kind of questioning shit in my own house, First Lady, Tito says, trying to sound polite. I wouldn’t do it if I was in yours. Nancy pulls a mean face at him and grabs for the alligator purse, she opens it up. I’m really glad to have met all of you, she tells us in a sweet ho-voice. Did you find the thread? If I did I would a told you, says Tito, getting pissed. That’s strange, she says in a voice gone all cold, that you don’t have any, and she keeps looking through that purse. Come to think of it they said on television something about her having a gun in there.

  Fiddlesticks! she says all of a sudden. Don’t tell me I forgot that beeper? Now how am I ever going to get in touch with Jim? She snaps the purse shut loud and Suzy jumps and starts laughing again. The two of them acting so spooky, it’s starting to scare the daylights out of me.

  Who’s this Jim? Tito’d like to know. We don’t want no Jim up here. Jim’s my bodyguard, and he’s a perfectly lovely fellow, Nancy tells him. Yeah? You got a bodyguard? I says. She just gives me a look like don’t put me on, dude. Shit, I goes on, I bet he gots some fresh weapons, I mean since you rule the country he can get his hands on just about anything. We don’t rule the country, Nancy says, and starts looking bullets at me. Hold on a minute, I says to myself, and if she do got a gun in there? So I tell her how sorry I am about opening the door in my drawers. I really didn’t know you was deciding to come and see us. And anyway, we got plenty of beer, why don’t I put a little music on. That’s sweet of you, she thanks me, and this time it’s that same hooker’s voice. Go ahead and do what you usually do.

  So I put something mellow on. It’s got a good beat. And before I know it I start relaxing and forget all about that we got the First Lady sitting right here. Tito and Suzy are maxing too. Come here, baby, he tells the Chi-nee. They snuggle up and bug out on each other, ’cause to tell the truth they was very high when they went to bed. Suzy got these problems in her pussy, she went to the hospital twice but they didn’t do nothing. They said it was some kind of miscarriage and they sent her home stuffed up with Kotex but still bleeding. That was yesterday, I think, and since it hurt so much Tito give her all the crack she wants, he even put a little bit in her pussy. It was more than the hospital would do.