Winning the City Redux

by Theodore Weesner

  # # #

  CHRISTMAS DAY, WHEN it arrives, is hardly different from a Sunday or any other holiday. Dale has a gift for his father, a Zippo lighter, and (forgoing Christmas decorations in their apartment as always) their plan is to have the Christmas dinner his father usually fixes on such occasions at around six p.m., a roast chicken with cranberry sauce from a can. What if Miss Furbish also serves roast chicken? He’ll have to get through one bird and another, he thinks, and make believe—by the time he eats with his father—that his appetite is strong. Cleaning up at midday, telling his father he needs to see a friend and may be a little late for dinner (he hopes!) he slips out with his wrapped present in his jacket pocket. Off to kill some time—as his father is coming around and sipping whisky as on any other day of sleeping in—before making his way to Secret Flame’s apartment at three p.m.

  It’s on approaching the stairs to her landing (in another state of disbelief) that he suddenly decides to be daring and address her as something other than Miss Furbish! Have her know at once that he feels more like her boyfriend than her pupil! Something suggestive. Romantic. Intimate. So it is, tapping on her door, seeing her approach through glass and being let—with smiles—into her golden-lighted kitchen with its rich aroma, yes, of a roasting chicken, that, he says, however awkwardly on surrendering his jacket, “Thank you, my Secret Flame.”

  “What did you say?” she says in sudden shock, while also laughing.

  “Well . . . I wanted to call you something special, like a secret nickname.”

  “You wanted to give me a nickname? Why would you want to do that? I’m your teacher.”

  “I don’t know. Just to be friendly.”

  “Well, not only is a nickname not necessary, Dale, it’s inappropriate. You shall call me Miss Furbish, as always! I can’t believe—after all I’ve said—that you would violate the terms of our student-teacher relationship right out of the gate!”

  “I just wanted to make it special.”

  “It is special . . . as a friendship between a teacher and a pupil! What you called me . . . as you surely know . . . I know you’re bright. What you called me is over the line and disappointments me a great deal! I’m tempted to ask you to leave right now!”

  “I can see that you’re not going to like my present . . . that’s what I can see.”

  “What about your present? What does that mean?”

  “You don’t have to like it. I just wanted to be better friends, is all. Closer. The nickname . . . the present . . . if you don’t like one, I don’t think you’re going to like the other. I only meant to be more like . . . real friends. More personal!”

  “Let’s see the present. You said it was a trinket you made in metal shop . . . not something personal. Let’s see it.”

  Retrieving the package from the pocket of his jacket where Miss Furbish placed it on the back of a chair, he hands it over and watches as she unwraps the wrinkled gift paper. The bracelet out and in hand, she keeps her eyes down and remains silent, looking at it.

  “You see, if you hold it to the light . . . the name becomes visible. Like a secret.”

  At last she says, “Dale . . . I’m sorry, but I don’t know what to say. I’m afraid this gift is just as inappropriate as the last gift you gave to me. You shouldn’t be using my first name. I can’t have that. Inside a heart? This is what you give to a girlfriend, not to a teacher! You know what? I’m going to ask you to leave right now. It’s clear that you’re still thinking of our friendship, our relationship, in an inappropriate way! I can’t have that! I thought I made myself clear . . . that you understood . . . but I can see that I was wrong.”

  “You don’t have to accept the bracelet . . . if it’s so wrong.” Stung by her rejection, Dale cannot keep the hurt he is feeling entirely out of his voice.

  “It’s okay. I’ll keep it. It’s a lovely bracelet. I’m pleased that you made it. It’s just that it’s too personal! You have to understand that ours is a teacher-pupil friendship! That’s all! You’re making me see again what a mistake it was to have you in my apartment in the first place. Dale, I’m so sorry but you need to go now. And you need to keep all of this to yourself, like everything else that’s happened between us. I’m sorry if I’m hurting your feelings . . . but please. Put on your jacket and have a nice Christmas. Forget this happened. I’ll keep the bracelet. Thank you for the nice gift. Now, go. Please.”

  “I didn’t mean to make you mad. I only wanted you to like me.”

  “Dale, I do like you. When you said . . . that I was human, too, it was one of the nicest things I had heard from anyone in twenty years. Now you have to go,” she adds. “Have a nice Christmas at home. I’ll continue to like you . . . we just have to return to being teacher and pupil. Go, Dale. Do as I say. I’ll see you in school after the holidays. Please don’t make me worry about you, Dale,” she adds as he takes up his jacket to pass through the door.

  “You don’t have to worry . . . I won’t tell anyone,” he adds on re-entering the brisk air. There is hurt in his tone, and he’d like to say more, but there he is, going down the stairs. However hurt he may be in his heart, he can see that he has no choice but to take the steps one at a time and walk back into who he is, to cry later . . . if crying is what he’s going to do.

  CHAPTER 7

  FOLLOWING ANOTHER GAME WITH HIS SCHOLASTIC LEAGUE teammates, an urge rises in Dale to light up in the locker room. What it is, he knows, is his ongoing desire to be like the Little Ms. Rough and tough and hard to bluff. Proud and confident. He has never bought cigarettes but is high on defiance and wants to possess the trait as his own. Orange and black, take no flak! Always show up, always fight back! Creative thinking is an athletic trait, too, he thinks, if one, like courage, that is always scorned by overbearing coaches . . . a trait that is possessed by real stars, no matter narrow-minded coaches leaving locker rooms strewn with the bodies of countless cowardly might-have-beens who buckled in the face of authority.

  To Dale, cigarettes mean the Little Ms, mean pride and toughness. Smoking implies imagination and independence. A cigarette in your lips conveys confidence. You know what you know.

  Smoking had been a question/accusation down through Dale’s basketball life, certainly to goody-two-shoes kids whose parents are involved in every thought and action of the day. Do you smoke? Does he smoke? Who smokes? How long has he been smoking? Goody-two-shoes kids, players of a kind Dale has been tough enough to lead to countless wins and titles (before being squeezed out for possessing that very trait!) never smoke. Replaced by the coach’s immature son, no matter having worked ten times as hard and understanding ten times as much about winning! All the more reason, Dale thinks, to shock them in the way the Little Ms shocked him on his first visit to Emerson Junior High. And gained his respect and admiration. Lighting up in the locker room. Taking no flak.

  # # #

  ON A SATURDAY in late January, the Little Ms win again, moving them closer to becoming a lock for the playoffs. Winning their district, and getting past the winner from Lowell in the quarters, will have them facing none other, of course, than the Flintstone Mother Truckers in the semi-finals. Dale has known it to be a possibility, and here it is coming into view like a headon collision, like a game of chicken. So it is (as with sex and girls) that the Little Ms post-game chatter on showering and dressing, buttoning up and puffing smokes, begins including the playoffs, and into which, that Saturday in January, Lucky bellows, “OCKIE? WHERE IN THE WORLD IS OCKIE? OCKIE, WHERE ARE YOU!?”

  The others, Dale notices, began smirking and glancing up the aisle as they comb wet hair, puff cigarettes, and continue packing gym bags. Ockie, the locker room man—a thin-haired sixty-something custodian who drags a club foot as he walks—appears in the main aisle with a broom and dustpan, answering the call.

  “Ockie, would you look at this floor!” Lucky inquires as if outraged himself with young people today.

  Ockie glances along an aisle lined with butts, ashes, burned matches. />
  “Isn’t this a mess?” Lucky says in his Andy Griffith drawl. “Shameful is what it is . . . has me wondering if you can’t get that broom of yours moving to clean it up? Can you do that? This here, by the way, is Flying Wheel, bringing some talent from Walt Whitman to the Little Ms. None of us wants Flying Wheel going to Walt Whitman and saying there’s a mess on the floor at Emerson . . . do we? Don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t.”

  Ockie, inching into the aisle, appears perplexed though maybe amused, uncertain how to handle the mocking cruelty being visited upon him. While the Little Ms keep biting their tongues not to laugh, Lucky adds to Ockie, as if to a close friend, “We’d better get it cleaned up, don’t you think?”

  A smile is coming to Ockie’s face as he readies his dustpan and broom. Glancing at Dale, he confides, “That’s some moniker,” while Dale’s teammates pause not to miss whatever the old custodian may have to say. Leaning toward Dale, Ockie nods at Lucky and whispers in pure hillbilly, “Little sumbitch hain’t half as smart as he thinks he is,” which has the Little Ms exploding with laughter that Dale cannot help joining by way of restrained tears of his own. Giving Dale a wink, the white-haired man proceeds to sweep butts into his dust pan while the teenage hoopsters struggle to contain their cascading laughter. For his part, Dale forgets for the moment what it is to be without a team of the kind to love.

  CHAPTER 8

  IN LOWER DOWNTOWN, IN FRESHLY FALLING SNOW, DALE walks along between buses. As he pauses for a light at a busy corner, a man in factory clothes and his metal lunch bucket up under his arm—like Dale’s father—notes to him, “Shore coming down, hain’t it.”

  “Shore is,” Dale says, though rather than mocking the hillbilly factory worker his thought is of being one with him, as he is with his father. Hillbilly Heaven, Dale thinks, walking on. Being who you are. Accepting who you are. That worker, and his father—both of whom had to believe in their children getting on in school—they’d be blown away if they knew how well fourteen-year-old Dale had gotten on with his thirty-six-year-old teacher.

  Pausing for another light to change in the face of pedestrian traffic, another voice speaks beside him: “Kid, tell me something, will ya?” Dale turns to a soldier in a dress uniform with bloused boots, a paratrooper with airborne wings and overseas ribbons, just then lighting up and offering a smoke to Dale.

  “No thanks,” Dale says.

  “Where’s the action in this town, got any idea?” The soldier, grinning, cigarette centered in his mouth, looks as cool as a movie star.

  “Action?”

  “Wine, women, and song, son. Gotta be places where the ladies stray to play.”

  “Is that what they do?” Dale says, getting a laugh from the soldier.

  “You’ll find out . . . probably when it’s too late,” the soldier says as they laugh along.

  “The only places I know,” Dale says, pointing ahead. “Some joints up here, in the alleys . . . bars and cafes where you see women come and go a lot, mostly at night.”

  “That way? Point out these alleys to me.”

  Dale hunches, indicating, why not? They walk on in the lightly falling snow, and Dale feels self-conscious walking with a soldier in a decorated uniform all but blinking like a Christmas tree with its ribbons and colors.

  “Saturday daytime is when the ladies are on the make,” the soldier confides. “Take that as a tip for when you’re older.”

  “Cool,” Dale says, thinking he could tell this soldier a thing or two about the ladies.

  “Old man believes they’re at Sears shopping for pillow cases instead of in a hotel room using ’em. Women like it too, ya know.”

  There is the soldier’s cigarette-centered grin, and Dale feels further temptation to let him know that the teenager he’s talking to isn’t as naïve as he thinks. At the same time, it isn’t just sex for him but excited love, even in this moment, and Dale checks himself against ever trying to share something so sublime with anyone. Pointing down an alley that offers four, five bars beneath neon lights beckoning through the snow, Dale says, “First place, I think, is sorta fancy. Other places are more honky-tonk. Like home,” he adds, getting a laugh from the soldier.

  “Home for me,” the soldier says. “Let me give you a buck for your trouble,” he adds, shifting the cigarette to one side of his mouth as he removes his wallet.

  “That’s all right,” Dale says.

  “You sure?”

  “Sure. Good luck with the ladies.”

  “Luck’s something I could use,” the soldier says as, replacing his wallet, he gives a wave and heads into the neon-draped alley.

  Going on, Dale thinks, well, the temptation to tell had risen but in the end (on everything with Miss Furbish seeming to be over) was a test he passed easily. Of the soldier, Dale thinks the guy looked cool, which has him wondering how Miss Furbish would react if he went off and came back at eighteen looking like that. Or would she be old news by then? Was it common sense that had her breaking up with him . . . while his impulse continues to be to lie with her and drink in her wisdom? Isn’t her wisdom (then her body) what he wants above all else?

  CHAPTER 9

  AT HOME, WHERE HIS FATHER IS DRINKING AND DRESSING before going carousing, he asks Dale to give his shoes a ‘two-dollar shine’ and Dale readily agrees. Polishing his father’s shoes is a ritual he has performed throughout his growing-up years, and only now does it occur to him that he might be outgrowing the childhood task. Or is it that he is young for the role of his dreams, of which his father remains ignorant? Polishing his father’s shoes, in any case, is a job that always has his father praising him with an extravagant tip, usually a fiver (once, bombed and staggering, six twenties, which, on sobering up a day or so later, he asked to have back) and is a satisfying occasion for them to play their roles as father and son.

  While polishing and brushing, Dale considers showering (years removed from shaving) and going out, too, not to carouse like his father or the soldier, but—if only it were possible—to slip once more, under cover of darkness, into his Secret Flame’s apartment, her dark living room, her passionate embrace.

  As he is making the wingtips glisten, his father appears overhead with a drink in hand. “Been meaning to tell you something I heard at the plant,” he says. “Cheating’s the thing at these Soap Box Derbies. Someone saw in the paper that kids are supposed to make the cars but the cars that do the winning are made by the fathers.”

  “Makes sense,” Dale says.

  “Sure does . . . you think about it for two seconds.”

  “Think the Bothners cheated?”

  “Nothing I know for sure,” his father says. “All I know is the father is a engineer who likes prizes for his sons. Do I think he cheated? Course I do, though it ain’t nothing I could prove. Kids mounting wheels and axles in a garage don’t stand a chance against a automotive engineer with a pocketful of money, I know that much.”

  “Makes me sick thinking about it,” Dale says. “Like it did when they stole my team.”

  “I worried over telling you that, maybe I shouldna’,” his father says. “What’re you up to, goin’ to the movies?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe watch TV at somebody’s house.”

  “You guys chasing with the girls these days?”

  “Oh, some guys are,” Dale says.

  “No need to rush it,” his father advises. “You’ll have lotsa time for women when you get older. Invest in your school work, and your sports, you’ll be better off.”

  CHAPTER 10

  AN ALARMING MOMENT OCCURS AT SCHOOL. CARRYING HIS gym bag at the end of the day, Dale spots his Secret Flame approaching her car in the parking lot and is taken with an urge to speak until he hears her whisper under her breath: “Turn and walk away right now, right now!”

  Dale does as he is told. “G’night, Miss Furbish,” he says, catching a glimpse of Mrs. Marr and Mr. Plourde walking a carrow away. He considers telephoning her later but is certain he’
ll upset her all the more and have her chewing him out again.

  # # #

  SEVERAL EVENINGS LATER, when he does allow himself to telephone—no matter how angry he fears it may make her—she surprises him by being friendly. “I was certain they saw us and I wanted to stop you from saying anything revealing,” she explains. “I think it’s clear from what he said to you last semester that he’s suspicious. I’m sorry, but the worry I keep experiencing over what happened between can drive me to distraction.”

  “You don’t have to worry. I am in your homeroom!”

  “Dale, you were fine . . . the way you said good night and walked on. But if Mr. Plourde says anything, gives any sign, you tell me right away.”

  “You think I was fine?”

  “I do, yes.”

  “I like the things you let me be,” Dale says.

  “You tell me, in any case, if either of them gives any sign. He’s always giving me looks. I suspect he has his eye on more, behind those metal shop glasses, than his little wife at home.”

  “He better not mess with my girlfriend . . . I’ll beat him to a pulp,” Dale teases, pleased to have Miss Furbish being congenial with him again.

  “Will you now?” she remarks, unable not to laugh a bit.

  “I will.”

  “Enough of this, in any case. And no more phone calls, please. I wish I could talk with you like an equal . . . but that’s what got us into trouble in the first place. Nor do I want you feeling rejected . . . and angry. I worry about it all the time.”