"Do you think they do it bare-assed? Or some quicker way?"
"Shit, John Reddy wouldn't do quick." Boys, aroused and anxious, tried to hide their gigantic erections with notebooks, or textbooks, which occasionally slipped from their clammy fingers and clattered to the floor. Girls, short of breath as if they'd been running, a faint flush in their cheeks, dabbed at their eyes with tissues and sat very still, feet flat on the floor and legs uncrossed. Our most innocent, unknowing teachers like Mme. Picholet and Mr..
Sternberg were observed mysteriously agitated, a glisten of sweat on their brows. The throb! throb! throb! of furnaces was reportedly felt as far away as the music practice room on the third floor of the annex. In Mr.. Alexander's fifth-period physics class, always a drowsy class, dazed eyes blinked rapidly to keep in focus.
"Excuse me? Is this class awake?" Mr.. Alexander inquired in his hurt, chagrined way, staring at us with his hands on his hips. "Peter Merchant! --how would you approach this problem?" Petey Merchant's physics text crashed to floor.
His cheeks flushed crimson. Yet there were those, among them Myers, who vehemently denied that John Reddy and "that Calvo girl" were lovers at all. Nor had she believed that there'd ever been a baby--"That's sick." In time, Verrie's view prevailed. More disturbing tales were being spread of John Reddy on those evenings when his windows were darkened down on Water Street, when the girls of the Circle, or any other girls sought him, discovered he was gone. At such times John Reddy was cruising in his funkysexy Mercury in Cheektowaga, Tonawanda, Lockport or Buffalo, restless and looking for action. "Even on probation, John Reddy's set for action." Often he was seen with a glamorous girl, or an adult woman, up close beside him, head on his shoulder and fingers, though not from the street, caressing the inside of his thigh. John Reddy gone out with Mr.. Stamish's youngest, pretty secretary Rita, that seemed be a fact.
Scottie Baskett came to school pale and haggard and stunned by an experience he could bring himself to share only with his closest buddy, Zwaart, and that after several days, Scottie had returned home a little early from swim practice to discover his own mother, her hair damp from shower, in slacks and a sweater clearly thrown on in haste, no beneath, and, of all people, John Reddy Heart! --"In my own house. He was there laying tile, supposedly, in our guest-room bath.
Farolino's truck was out front, I don't pay much attention to what my folks do so I was surprised to see it there, but, O. K. , I walk in, and there's--tohn Reddy. We're tile in the guest-room bath, Mom says. She's trying to sound cool but she's trembling, I can see her hands. Her face is all pale--no makeup. And you see my morll without makeup. They must've heard me come in so John's hammering away innocently in the bathroom like somebody on TV and Mom's rushing at me in the kitchen, her boobs bobbing, asking if I'd a snack? chocolate milk? butter-crunch cookies? Iike for Christ's sake I'm ten years old and fucking blind." Two days later, Art Lutz had a similar experience, returning home after school to discover John Reddy on the premises, and
"My mom acting wound-up and hysterical, saying We're having these new cabinets put in, Art, see? --aren't they beautiful? and there's Reddy on a kitchen stool hammering away, in a sweaty T-shirt and jeans, his prick practically hanging out. And fuck-smell all over the house like steam from a shower. He looks at me with this shit-eating and says, "How's it going, kid? and I realize I got to get out of there before I get violent. So I slammed out again, climbed into Jamie's car and floored er." Bibi Arhardt was wakened in the middle of the night by gravel against her second-floor bedroom window. Frightened, she knelt by windowsill without turning on the light and saw, below, the of a man, or a boy, signaling impatiently to her. Though I couldn't see his face clearly, I knew it was him--John Reddy. And there was the Mercury out on street. At once, I had no will to resist. I knew it might be a mistake, but--" Bibi hurriedly dressed, and slipped out a side door into the night, which was a bright moonlit gusty night smelling of damp, greening earth--for it was late March by this time, and the long winter was ending. There Reddy, his eyes burning, to seize Bibi in his arms and bear her, protesting, to his car. In silence they drove to Tug Hill Park which was larger, more desolate and wild than Bibi remembered. How many hours passed there, in John Reddy's car, Bibi could not have said, how many hungry kisses passed between them, how many caresses, how many times, with and sweetness, yet control, John Reddy made love to her, her to tears of ecstasy--"It wasn't like you would think! It wasn't like you would imagine any guy could do." A few nights later, in her bedroom on the second floor of the Zeiglers' Georgian colonial on Castle Creek Drive, Suzi, though wearing Norm Zeiga's onyx signet ring on a chain around her neck, was wakened by a sound in her bedroom and looked up to see a tall over her bed--"I was too scared to scream. I seemed to know, even before he knelt beside me, and kissed me, who it was. Don't be afraid, Suzi, I won't hurt you, John Reddy whispered. And if I do, forgive me." Evangeline Fesnacht came to school pale, moist-eyed, strangely silent. When Mr..
tried to engage her in their customary witty banter, as the rest us looked on, Evangeline sighed, lowered her gaze meekly and made no reply.
"Have I, Miss Fesnacht," Mr.. Lepage said in a voice heavy with sarcasm, "a rival for your thoughts this morning?" In the backseat of his brother's Castille, as Art Lutz kissed her eagerly with his opened mouth, awkwardly tried, with his left hand, to unhook her bra beneath sweater, Tessa Maypole burst into guilty tears, saying, "Oh, Artie, I can't.
I can't. I'm in love with someone else, it wouldn't be fair to you." Lee Ann Whitfield, our fat girl, was observed in the school cafeteria pushing around, on her plate, a large portion of macaroni and cheese, with the look of who has lost her appetite, or her soul. Ritchie Eickhorn noted in his journal, under the new, heady influence of Pascal, We yearn tor eternity--but inhabit only time. Miss Flechsenhauer noted with suspicion an unusual number of asking to be excused, with "cramps" or "migraine," from gym, class, team practice. "What is this, girls, an epidemic?" Miss O'Brien, our school nurse, a chesty, dour woman with a perpetual sinus snuffle, noted, with suspicion, an unusual number of girls requesting Bufferin and and to be allowed to lie, with heating pads on their lower abdomens, on in the peaceful, darkened infirmary." What is this, girls, an epidemic?" John Reddy Heart was said to have been seen at a nine a. m. Sunday church service at the United Methodist Church on Haggarty Road. "But nobody goes there, would've seen him?" John Reddy Heart, as spring progressed, was looking, at school, more and more exhausted, as if he no longer slept at night.
His eyelids drooped as our teachers droned on, he was having trouble, it seemed, staying awake in his classes. His left eye was bloodshot and tears. His jaws were sometimes stippled in tiny cuts from careless or hurried shaving.
Some mornings, he didn't shave at all, evidently. His longish hair, in greasy quills, exuded a frank, pungent odor, sharp as that of his body. Girls swooned if they passed too close to him. It was known to be particularly dangerous to pass close by John Reddy on the stairs, several sophomore nearly fainted. In fourth-period English, Miss Bird, leading a discussion of Robert Frost's
"After Apple-Picking," stared at John Reddy Heart who was gripping his textbook and frowning into it as if the secret of life might be located there, in a few teasing lines of poetry, she sniffed his scent, and for a long embarrassing moment lost the thread of her thought. We'd realized for some time, uneasily, that Miss Bird no longer wore her hair from her face in that unflattering style but curled and fluffed out, "feminine" in the way that women are "feminine" in late-night movies of the forties. Her small, pursed lips were a savage red. Her slightly bulgy brown eyes, fixed on John Reddy, who may have been glancing shyly up at her, to be shifting out of focus. "Miss Bird? I'll open a window," Fischer said quickly, leaping to his feet. "It's kind of stuffy in here." It in such abrupt and seemingly unpremeditated gestures that Ken Fischer, blond, handsome, a "nice" guy, would continually surprise us, we'd his gallantry in coming to Miss Bird's rescue many years later when came forward suddenly to ki
ss, in homage, our drunken Verrie's tattooed breast. For a precarious moment--"I held my breath, oh God, she's going to faint! "--Miss Bird swayed groggily in her spike-heeled shoes. Then she smiled warmly at Ken, touching the back of her thin hand to forehead, and the sinister spell was broken. Yet the following morning in Mr..
Dunleddy's biology class, where John Reddy sat in his prescribed corner, first row, extreme right, Sandi Scott, usually so poised and droll, us by bursting into tears in the midst of a recitation of the steps of mitosis, "'Prophase'--'metaphase'--'anaphase'--'telophase'--oh God, it's so relentless! So cruel." Mr.. Dunleddy, short of breath even sitting, overweight by fifty pounds, who would be the first of our teachers to die, a years later, of a stroke at the relatively young age of fifty-six, stared at weeping girl with middle-aged eyes of dolor and regret. That night, Evangeline typed the first line of what would become, eventually, after numerous metamorphoses, her first published novel ("wild, dithyrambic, dark, riddlesome") I woke from a dream so vivid I would search the world tor its origin--in vain.
Ritchie Eickhorn noted in his journal We inhabit time but remember
"eternal moments." God's mercy. Dexter Cambrook impulsively Pattianne Groves. He was flooded with excitement as with an in his normally calm veins--"My acceptance just came from Harvard!" He with sweaty palms, pounding heart for Pattianne's kid brother to call her to the phone and asked her point-blank if she'd go with him to the senior prom and was met with, after a moment's startled silence, "Oh, Dexter?
Did you say--Dexter? Cambrook? Oh gee, thanks. I mean, that's so you, Dexter. But I'm sorry, I guess I'll be going with--" Verrie Myers and Trish Elders, closest friends since kindergarten, who, in recent weeks, had scarcely been able to look at each other, each feeling a deep physical revulsion for the other, found themselves walking swiftly, then breaking into a run, like foals, onto the vividly green playing field behind school. Each girl grabbed the other's hand at the same instant. Their uplifted faces were luminous, radiant. Their eyes shone. We watched, a haphazard and unknowing trapezoid of (male, yearning) observers, one of us from second-floor window of the school, another from the parking lot and the third was leaving the building at the rear, as the girls in maroon gym shorts and dazzling-white T-shirts ran, clutching hands, at that moment the sun burst through storm clouds, and a diaphanous rainbow appeared in the sky, nearinvisible, an arc of pale gold, rose, seablue shimmering over open fields beyond Garrison Road--"like a wayward, tossed-off gesture of God" (as Ritchie Eickhorn would one day observe). It was John Reddy Heart whom those girls were running, we knew. Yet we were resigned, bitter, philosophical, not raging with testosterone jealousy. He won't them as we love them. One day, they will know. We were hurt, and we incredulous Some of us broken-hearted. Quite a few of us, frankly pissed.
"John Reddy wouldn't just--leave? Would he? Without saying goodbye?
coming to the prom? To graduation? Just--leave? Drive away? Out
lives forever?" Of course we'd believed that John Reddy would attend the senior prom for it was unthinkable he wouldn't. Rumors every clique and seeped down to loners and losers alike that he was "definitely, definitely coming" for he'd purchased two tickets, he'd be Sasha Calvo who was having her wild mane of hair trimmed and styled the occasion, though there was a rumor he might be bringing Verrie whose comment on this rumor was a tight-lipped, "No comment").
realize that you are truly going to graduate from high school noted in his journal with tremulous fingers is to realize that one day, inescapably, you must die. Of course we had less hope that John Reddy attend graduation since you weren't required to attend the actual to get your diploma, it would be mailed to you courtesy of the school district, but, as Dwayne Hewson said, "Not attend graduation? That's like not attending your own funeral." Who was the genius who thought of John Reddy Heart our King of the Senior Prom? Improbably, considering his rabid anti-Heart bias, which he'd claim well into his forties--and fifties! -wasn't based on simple male jealousy, oh no, it was our skeptic, Chet Halloren. His brilliant brain employed in organizing the infamous semisecret campaign to elect our Killer-Boy ex-con classmate King the Senior Prom meaning John Reddy Heart would get his picture in all the again and WHS would leap back into headlines. As Chet chortled, "Hey look, what a fantastic way to burn Stamish's ass. What's he gonna do about it, sprout a hernia?" In fact, Stamish royally fucked our asses.
The shrewd old fart must've learned of the plan, the plot, before we'd got started.
Last week of school he called an "emergency assembly" of all seniors (except John Reddy who wasn't going to vote anyway) and told us, white-lipped, sort of blowing and puffing his cheeks, it'd been called to his attention that "certain of you are contemplating a defiant, self-destructive act." We sat there bug-eyed gaping at him as if we didn't know what the hell he was about. Which, at that point, some of us didn't. Stamish is saying, "Students, this is a sacred time for you. It is a time that will never come again in your lives. It is a time you will revere for the remainder of your lives. You would not wish to sully it for a mere prank. You would not wish to make a mockery of it. You would not wish to call unwanted media attention"--and Stamish paused, puffing, allowing us to know he knew exactly what up--"to your beloved school. Therefore, you must take care to for appropriate individuals in the senior balloting. You must your classmates who have earned certain honors. The Queen and King of the Prom--these are high, high honors. The local papers--" We stared, frowned, we were mightily impressed. You could hear a pin drop in that auditorium. There was Art Lutz sitting on his hands, gravely nodding.
Nosepicker Nordstrom was subdued. Those guys who would've been contenders for King, if we weren't going in an avalanche for John Reddy, Dwayne Hewson, Ken Fischer, Blake Wells sat sort of embarrassed down-looking. So Stamish is yammering away. If they talk long enough, they think you're convinced. And one of the good-girl girls, Millie Leroux, raises her hand and inquires, "Mr.. Stamish? It's a democracy, isn't it?" and there's titters and laughing and Stamish doesn't like it but he likes Millie Leroux who's an officer of Student Council and the daughter of J. Gordon of Leroux, Saxon & Trimme, Inc. He can't figure if she's being ironic or sincere--Millie's got these big beautiful brown cow-eyes to die for.
So he says, "Quiet, the rest of you! Millie, yes, it is a democracy. Of course.
I would never interfere with our democratic process. But there is, you know, an old, revered tradition at Willowsville Senior High, a sacred tradition certain of your parents cherish from their days here, too, a sacred tradition of excellence, integrity, honesty, good sportsmanship--" We applauded the old fart and he went away thinking he'd won. Or we thought he thought he'd won.
Then when we voted in the cafeteria on the last day of classes, we the prom committee would count the ballots as usual, but Stamish's oldbiddy assistant from the front office shows up and carries the away. So, though we calculated we'd elected John Reddy our Prom King by a wide majority, at least ninety ballots out of one-thirty, when it time for the announcement, at midnight of the prom, everybody excited, apprehensive, a kind of fever in us, looking for John Reddy (who'd been sighted since nine p. m. every ten minutes entering the dim-lit gym, with his date Sasha Calvo or some other gorgeous girl)--the news is, read off by the prom Pete Marsh from a sheet of paper provided him by Stamish, "Queen-Veronica Myers! King--Ken Fischer!" and we're fucked. And there's we can do but applaud. Because the ballots for John Reddy were destroyed as soon as they were counted. And it's over, it's history. And we're thinking, Well shit, tohn Reddy never showed up, never much he was going to show up at our prom, and Ken Fischer's our friend. In a creamcolored tux and powder-blue cummerbund to match Verrie's powderblue chiffon formal. Ken is blushing like a kid, understands he didn't really win the election--"Hell, I voted for John Reddy myself." Verrie's face is mottled with a kind of complex shame. "What a childish fantasy it was, to think John Reddy would be our King. That one of us would Queen. That John Reddy Heart would show up here--in our 'romantically decora
ted' gym." Cameras flash as Veronica Myers and Ken Fischer, that terrifically good-looking WHS couple, are crowned with silver crowns.
Verrie is given a bouquet of long-stemmed white roses, and Ken a white carnation for his lapel. The girls of the court embrace their Queen, the boys of the court shake hands with their King. One of us, drunk on vodka-spiked punch, slips on the polished floor and falls heavily, amid peals laughter. Bo Bozer, belching toxic beer fumes, growls, "That broad's so sexy want to tear her apart with your teeth," meaning our new Queen. Bo's friends, and Janet Moss who overhears, laugh uneasily. Some old song from our parents' era, or maybe our grandparents', "Tenderly," is being played by band, and the King and Queen, our royal couple, move out onto the dance floor.
We're all dancing, sort of. "What's there to do but fucking dance, it's a dance, Christ's sake," Dwayne Hewson (who'd been given reason to that, if John Reddy was eliminated by Stamish, he'd be crowned King, now he'd be dancing with Verrie Myers instead of who he was stuck with--terrific Pattianne Groves) mutters, mildly drunk. Verrie's face is with tears.
Ken's eyes, too, appear damp. Among the faculty chaperons, Mr..
Lepage is conspicuously absent. It's an open secret--"Verrie had some sort thing going with Mr.. Lepage." It's an open secret--"Verrie had some sort of going with John Reddy Heart. But he dropped her." Girls who'd tender, passionate love with John Reddy Heart would forever bear the scars of his ardor, but invisibly. For even our hymens grew back--"The weirdest thing. That tough little sinewy tissue, he broke and it bled and I cried, cried. But afterward, a few weeks later, I noticed it grown back across the split, sore place, and anatomically I was a virgin again." In the years ahead our lovers would not believe we'd had a high school lover, nor would the numerous gynecologists (exclusively male) who examined us. Our husbands humored us, condescended to us and pointedly changed the subject. We remained confused over the issue of whether John Reddy condoms. In that era, the very word was repugnant. "Oh my God, Connor murmured, fingertips fluttering, "--I'd have been look." Yet not one of us got pregnant. (Sallie Vetch, a junior one knew, certainly didn't count. ) Jenny Thrun reported a "pregnancy scare"--which utterly baffled us since she'd never been singled out by John Reddy Heart for any attention, and the boy she sometimes dated, Chet Halloren, all his worldly-wise poise, was shy and stiff when alone with a girl, and would've had to summon all his courage just to ask Jenny if he could kiss her goodnight. In her flutey reproachful manner Mme. Picholet inquired of us, "Mes amis, will you never wish to think? To slow this mad pace, to inside, to contemplate who you are?" Now the band is playing Lollipop's
Joyce Carol Oates - Broke Heart Blues Page 29