The World of Normal Boys

by K. M. Soehnlein

  “Thanks. I’ll take it.” Flat heat settles on his palms. Larry is standing behind her, nearly hidden, looking over his shoulder at . . . what? Robin follows his glance for a moment—Corinne’s tan Vega parked halfway up the drive, the row of hedges between his place and the Delatores’, a yellowed copy of the Community News at the curb. He quickly gathers that Larry is probably staring at anything but him.

  “Hey,” Robin says to Larry. Their eyes hold for a moment, and Robin imagines that the wide, empty look he sees there could just be another version of what he and Ruby are feeling. But then Larry squints and curls his lip in a way that makes Robin feel as if he’s just been told to shut up.

  “Here,” Larry says, dropping a red-and-blue can on top of the casserole. Robin tilts his right hand up to keep the onion rings from rolling off as Larry shoves his way inside.

  Nana Rena and Aunt Corinne hug each other. “You’re looking good, Mother. That’s a very nice dress. And how are things at Smith?”

  “Except for the Hitler I work for, just fine, just fine. We’ve got a lovely crop of girls in this year’s house. They know how to be ladies at the dinner table. I think the unrest of the past few years is over and done.”

  Corinne laughs, “Oh, you know, young people and their self-expression.”

  “The time comes to settle down—that’s the truth. Have your fun and settle down. Of course, Dottie’s fun came after she left Smith. She didn’t get to be so wild, what with me working there.”

  Robin leaves the two women to their small talk. Larry follows him to the kitchen, maintaining his hands-in-pockets silence.

  “Where’s Ruby?” he asks finally.

  Robin looks around. “I don’t know. She was just here.”

  Larry absorbs this information without a word. Robin goes back to the table to munch on some potato chips. The clock says 1:30. He’s already wondering how long they’ll stay.

  “So you been to the hospital?”

  “Last night, but I didn’t see Jackson.”

  “He’s pretty messed up?”

  “What do you think? He took a bad fall.”

  Larry stares at him, his face set in a challenge. “I don’t know about you, but I think he jumped. I mean, he went over the bar.”

  Robin studies Larry’s face to figure out how serious he’s being. “No way,” he says. “He got knocked off.”

  “Bullcrap,” Larry says. “He was always doing that shit: jumping out of trees and running in front of cars and all. He’s crazy.”

  Jackson does have that streak to him. Robin remembers the time they went to Howe Caverns in upstate New York and Jackson, who was about five at the time, sneaked off the trail and got lost somewhere deep inside the damp, unlit corners. When the guide found him he was high up on a ledge; he said he’d been playing Tom Sawyer. But something about this doesn’t seem right. “If he jumped, he wouldn’t have landed on his head,” he says. “Maybe he would’ve broke his leg or something.”

  “Well, it’s not my fault,” Larry says, grabbing a fistful of chips from Robin’s plate, shoving half of them into his mouth.

  “Yeah, that’s what my mother said,” Robin says, watching as the chips turn into golden mulch between Larry’s lips, remembering Stan devouring lasagna the night before. “She told me I’m supposed to tell you that it’s not your fault.” He sours his voice so that Larry understands that he’s repeating something he doesn’t believe.

  Larry lowers his voice. “Listen to this: just say he jumped. Otherwise they’ll try to pin it on us. I’m telling you, we should stick together.”

  “You’re mental,” Robin says, but he finds something powerful, self-protective, in Larry’s words.

  Larry pulls a carton of milk from the fridge. “What’s this ‘two percent’ mean?” he asks. “Is it skim?”

  “It’s for people on a diet,” Robin says. “Like my mother.”

  Larry pours some in a glass. “I should give some to my mother. All she ever talks about is Weight Watchers.” He raises the pitch of his voice. “‘Myrna said I can eat anything I want as long as it’s in small portions.’ I said, ‘Yeah, Mom, except some of us around here are already skinny.’ ”

  “You’re a growing boy,” Robin says, putting on his own fake-mother voice.

  “That’s right,” Larry says and chugs the milk. He wipes his mouth on his jacket sleeve and then leans closer to Robin. “I’m growing hair near my dick,” he says, his voice lowered. “Wanna see?”

  Robin looks away and then back. Larry’s holding out his jeans from the waist with his thumb. He raises his eyebrows twice. Robin shrugs, then leans forward. Larry takes a step toward him, then another, then unhooks his thumb and bops Robin’s nose with it.

  “I bet you do!” He howls contemptuously.

  “You reject!” Robin hisses. He grabs Larry’s shirt with one hand and tosses him aside, harder than he thought he could, into the countertop. Larry’s elbow sends the casserole skidding into Nana’s plate of sandwiches.

  Corinne’s voice from the living room: “What’s going on in there?”

  “Cool out, man,” Larry demands.

  “I’m going up to my room,” Robin says.

  “Hey, man,” Larry says. “Remember, we gotta stick together. And tell your sister, too!”

  Corinne is suddenly there in the doorway. “Tell your sister what?” she asks.

  “Nothing,” Larry says.

  Robin looks from mother to son and back again. “Yeah, nothing. Just, you know, hope she’s doing OK.”

  Corinne smiles. “Well, Robin, you can tell her that from me, too. We’ve got to get going now. Tell your mother I’ll call later. Maybe we’ll stop by tonight with Stan.”

  “Sure.” Robin follows them back to the living room, where Nana Rena is holding out Corinne’s coat.

  “Maybe there’ll be some good news, P.G.,” she says.

  Larry gives Robin a punch on the shoulder as he heads toward the front door. “Later, man.” He adds a final nod—a reminder of the new game plan.

  In his room with the door closed, Robin replays the scene with Larry over in his mind. He slams his fists into the bed—enraged at how Larry just gets to him every time. What if Larry’s right? What if there is trouble ahead for all of them and they really ought to blame it on Jackson? No one would question that Jackson gets himself into trouble over and over again. Why should this thing be any different? Still, the image that remains from the day before is of Larry turning Jackson over on the ground, the noise of Jackson’s bones cracking. Whose fault was that?

  Jackson’s just got to get better, he’s just got to be all right and then none of this will be a problem. Robin hasn’t been able to think about this with any outcome except Jackson dying or Jackson being retarded, but maybe . . . maybe the doctors will figure something out. They’re doctors after all. That’s what they’re supposed to do. And why haven’t his parents called? He wishes now that they had woken him up this morning and taken him along. Then he wouldn’t have had to deal with any of this . . . Ruby being weird, and Larry being . . .

  He lays on his back and pushes down his pants. He’s got hair growing around his dick, too—seems like more every day. Each one is curvy and long. They start in one direction, then twist around like question marks. Darker than on his head or legs, more like the few brownish hairs starting to poke out from his armpits. He wishes he did get a look at Larry’s, and Larry knew it, too. That’s the worst of it. He wishes he got to see Larry again like on Sunday night, naked and shaking it around. He wants to compare, and he wants to know if Larry knows how to jerk it off like he’s discovered. It feels perverted to think this way, but he starts getting hard, pushing his penis up toward his belly, tangling it up with his pubic hair. He lets the heat of his hand increase the stiffness. He does this until he can’t think of anything else, all the pressures of the world lining up behind this one pressure from the core of his body: shuddery, rough, soundless. He closes his eyes and concentrates on himself,
just himself getting crazier and stronger at the same time, stronger than anyone, definitely stronger and tougher and bigger than Larry.

  Nana Rena is sleeping on the couch in the living room, her feet, misshapen from years of serving meals to rich college girls, propped on a pillow. Ruby crouches on the carpet. A sketchbook she’s been drawing in rests open on the floor, a shock of black and red streaked across it. The TV glows blue-gray from the wall, the volume low, a soap opera sending out images of intrigue and heartache.

  When the phone rings, both Ruby and Nana Rena stir, but Robin leaps to his feet first, dashing to the kitchen. “Hello?”

  “Hey, champ.” A very deep man’s voice, almost no emotion.

  “Dad?”

  An attempt at an offended chuckle. “Who’d you think?”

  “You sounded different.”

  Ruby’s at his side, waiting.

  “Well, it’s been a rough day.” Quick sigh. “You holding down the fort?”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Robin catches Nana Rena making her way drowsily into the kitchen. “Is that your mother?” she asks. Her wig has slid backward and sideways; wispy white strands poke out at the ears. She shuffles closer to him to take the phone.

  He steps away, stretches the cord toward the basement door, and curls more tightly into it. “Wait, Dad. What’d you say?”

  “Listen, we’re going to hang around for a couple more hours. They’ve just done some tests and we want to wait for the results.” A pause, a sniffle. “So your mother and I will be here for a while. Waiting.”

  “What kind of tests?”

  “Oh, you know, to . . . uh ... assess the situation. The brain and all that.” There’s a kind of a choke that gets covered up, a hand over the receiver. Somewhere back there Robin guesses the tears are starting again. He hands off the phone to Nana Rena.

  “Hello? Hello?” She has raised her voice as she always does on the phone, forever living in the old days of weak, staticky connections. “Clark?”

  Ruby is curling her sketchbook into a tight tube with both hands. “What did he say?” she asks Robin.

  “They’re doing tests.”

  “What tests?”

  “How should I know?” Now his voice is raised.

  Nana Rena is waving at both of them, trying to quiet them down. “Dottie? Dottie, what have you got to tell me?” Robin tries to read her face, which reveals only her attentiveness. She nods as she listens, interjects “Mm-hmm” and “Yah” every few seconds, her eyes cast downward.

  When Robin senses the conversation winding down, he says, “Let me talk.”

  She hands the phone to him with the receiver covered up. “Now don’t trouble her,” she commands.

  Robin grabs the phone and stretches the cord past the basement door, closing himself into the darkness. “Mom?”

  “Hello, darling. How are you holding up?” He immediately wishes he were with her.

  “Fine, you know. I mean, I’m really bored here.”

  “Yes, well, the waiting will do that. But it’s best for you to be there for now, with your sister.”

  “She’s kind of bugging me.”

  “Robin, honey, please. I need you to—”

  He cuts her off. “I know, I know. So I told her what you said, about it’s not her fault.”

  “That’s very good of you.”

  “And I told Larry, so, you know, mission accomplished. So what are these tests?”

  “Modern medicine. More tests than you ever imagined.” She says this lightly. He can feel her needing him to take on this same tone but he remains quiet. After a tiny cough she says, “I don’t want to upset you, Robin.”

  “I’m already upset.”

  “I know, honey. I know. It’s just a bunch of complicated medical hoo-hah. They have to scan the brain to see how well he’s responding.”

  “Did Jackson’s brain get smooshed when he fell?” He pictures a mass of scarlet jelly in his brother’s head, bone chunks and brain matter suspended within.

  Another sigh. “It’s the spine, the point at which the spine enters the brain. There’s a question about motor skills.”

  “Oh, yeah, that.” He’s not sure what this means exactly but waits until she continues.

  “There are different parts of the brain that do different things and some of them don’t seem to be working right and some of them they can’t really tell, so the tests will continue until we know everything we can.”

  The operator’s voice intrudes suddenly: nasal, impersonal, looking for more money.

  “Oh, Christ,” Dorothy says. “Clark? Give me another nickel.”

  There’s a knocking on the door behind Robin. It’s Ruby. “I want to talk to her, too.”

  “Hold your haystacks,” he shouts and pounds back.

  In his ear, he hears the metallic drop of the coin. “What’s going on? Are you still there?” Dorothy asks.

  “Can I come to the hospital?” he asks her.

  “Maybe tomorrow.”

  “This sucks.”

  “Robin, I’m going to get off the phone now. I can’t have you come here. It’s just too chaotic. Why don’t you do some reading or help your Nana cook dinner?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Put your sister on the phone and say good-bye, OK?”

  He is silent. Along the gray staircase, he can see the lines of wood paneling, line after line like jail bars. His father put up the paneling himself. Robin and Jackson held it in place while his father hammered in skinny nails and the smooth board shuddered under their palms. He recalls laughing with Jackson, the two of them sharing a joke at their father’s expense. The memory confuses him.

  “Robin? I love you, dear.”

  “Yeah, me, too.” He stands up and kicks back the door. Ruby gasps. The afternoon sun is shining through a window into his eyes.

  “You almost hit me!”

  He holds out the phone. “Here.” He walks past her, past Nana Rena and the humming refrigerator, out the back door to his bicycle.

  Pedaling fast in the fading afternoon sun, Robin is unsure which streets to take to the hospital. He cuts down Schrader and Lewis, which takes him past the shop where his father bought him his bike last winter, past the Episcopal church and the Italian delicatessen. It’s eerie being outside again, because the world is the same as always, yet in some way unfamiliar, slightly shifted, askew. As he speeds by on his bike certain details rise up and surprise him: the sharp angle of the church roof, the gnarly twists of low-hanging tree branches, the broken concrete of sidewalks he’s walked a hundred times but never before studied. He passes a couple of houses where kids he goes to school with live, expecting faces at the window, eyes following his flight. He wonders if the word has gotten out, if people he’ll see in school when he goes back (tomorrow? next week?) will know about the accident. They must know. He can’t imagine that something he’s spent every minute thinking about isn’t already common knowledge. What will they think? They’ll know he caused it all, they’re readying their accusations, it’s only a matter of time. As he comes to a halt at a stop sign, a police car drives across his path, and when the officer in the passenger seat stares his way, he feels his insides tighten up. It’s all in slow motion: the officer’s dark glasses and beaked nose, a finger adjusting the brim of the cap. A touch of breath on the inside of the window. The muffled squawk of the police radio.

  Robin drops all his weight on the pedals; he passes the library, where his mother would be working today, moves toward the center of town. He slaloms around the trunk end of cars pulling out of parking spaces. Up ahead, the siren of the nightly commuter train—the one his father usually rides home from the city—blankets every other sound. Red lights flash at the edge of the tracks. Cars obediently slow down and pedestrians freeze at the corner, but Robin doesn’t want to break his momentum. He gauges that he has enough time to get across the train tracks before the wobbly black-and-white warning arms drop. Someone shouts for him to stop as he mov
es toward the tracks, his wheels slamming over the steel ties, his pelvis vibrating. The train bellows, its dagger of light widening. He sucks in his breath, lowers his head and races under the second descending arm. The train rumbles behind him, squealing to a stretched-out halt at the depot.

  “Are you outta your mind?” A woman in a trench coat, her hair piled under a scarf, a briefcase in her hand: she looks familiar. A teller at the bank where he has his Christmas Club? The mother of someone from school? She keeps her disapproving eyes on him. Keep moving, he tells himself.

  On Tappan Boulevard, the cars rush past his left side in a continuous, menacing whoosh. He keeps his eyes low, measuring the pace of the traffic by the red taillights ahead of him. Every vehicle pumps the fear of the chase into him, each rumbling auto a possible accident—maybe the last sound he’ll hear before being knocked to the pavement. Maybe I am out of my mind. The glare of oncoming cars has quickened the darkening of the sky. It’s the same spooky half-light that surrounded him as he approached the slide last night. He wants to shake it from his head but he can still feel every angry step he took up the ladder. What happened up there? He can’t make any more sense of it now than he did yesterday: the heat coming off Jackson and Ruby and Larry locked in their struggle, the dull steel railing and chute, the final crazy impression of Jackson flying away. Not jumping, not falling, flying.

  At the intersection of Tappan Boulevard and Washington Road he finally stops. Three smaller streets spread out from the two main avenues and drivers are nosing past each other in six different directions. He needs to cross, can’t figure out how. The sensation that an accident is waiting to happen takes over—every car that turns without signaling seems to have his name written on it. For the first time since leaving his house he thinks it was wrong of him to take this trip, that if he gets hurt on his way to see Jackson it would be the absolute worst thing possible, not even for his own injuries but for the proof that he is foolish and can’t take care of himself, much less anyone else. He considers going back but remembers the stifling anxiety of the long afternoon and decides instead to cut through the Shell station at his right. He pedals up a hill that he thinks might get him to the hospital. The traffic here is just as heavy, but the road is only one lane in either direction. There might be a safer chance to cross up ahead.