“So maybe you could tell us more about Africa,” Peebles said. “Especially Botswana.”
For the rest of the day, while school, where they ought to have been, was in session, they were in Botswana as Sam described it for them from his parents’ letters home, riding in jeeps over the hills and through the shallow rivers, sleeping in tents, run over by elephants, hip-hopping the night away, saving the children from blue scurvy.
The afternoon fell into dusk, and the four truant inmates from the Episcopal Home for Juvenile Delinquents sat on damp logs in the clearing, breathing the heavy, rancid air rising from the molding vegetation of late autumn, listening to Sam.
CHAPTER FOUR
CHARLOTTE HAD a boyfriend.
“He has pimples like Rice Krispies across his chin,” Oliver said. “It’s disgusting.”
“A boyfriend?” Sam asked, a sudden terrible feeling in his stomach. “She’s only twelve.”
“All the girls in the sixth grade have boyfriends,” Oliver said. “He gave her a ring.”
It was Friday, late January, slate gray and cold, too cold for the ice cream they were eating on stools, looking out the window of Gifford’s at the rush-hour traffic on Connecticut Avenue.
“What kind of ring?” Sam asked.
“A cheap ring. It’s green because green’s the color of her birthstone,” Oliver said. “Charlotte told me.”
Sam was not amused. “She has to give it back,” he said. “Tell her she has to give it back.”
“Okay, okay,” Oliver said.
Sam pushed away his chocolate ice cream sundae.
“I mean, they’re not going to get married,” Oliver said. “She’s only twelve.”
“That’s my point.” Sam sunk his chin into his jacket. “Tell her to call me tonight at the Cage.”
“I thought we weren’t allowed to call,” Oliver said.
“In an emergency,” Sam said. “This is an emergency.”
“I’ll tell her,” Oliver said, staring beyond his brother at the street. “But I hope you won’t get mad at her.”
“I’m not mad,” Sam said. He slipped off the stool and zipped up his jacket. “I’m a little annoyed.”
“Sam’s very angry,” Oliver told Charlotte later.
She was lying on the couch in the office behind their house with her eyes closed, imagining Joshua Rubin kissing her on the lips.
“Are you listening to me, Charlotte?” Oliver asked. “This is important.”
“I’m listening,” Charlotte said.
“She’s not listening.” Julia was sitting at the desk in the navy-blue suit her grandmother had worn after her wedding, a very handsome wool suit with a straight skirt and tight jacket—Noli had been thin then—polka-dotted with moth holes. Her small feet were lost in the navy high heels she had borrowed from her grandmother’s closet. “Charlotte doesn’t listen to anybody, especially me.”
“I do,” Charlotte said. “Just not constantly.” She put the couch cushion over her face, shutting out their voices, lost in the dreamy darkness.
“I want to tell you something,” Oliver said, lifting the pillow off Charlotte’s face.
“Don’t,” she said.
“I have to. Sam says it’s an emergency,” Oliver said. “He’s furious about your boyfriend.”
The crosstown bus was late, so Sam walked from the ice cream store to the Cage, grateful for the damp cold, the need in such cold to move with some alacrity because his body had the weight of iron, too heavy to carry. Something terrible was the matter with him since the news of Charlotte’s boyfriend.
When he got back to the Cage, he called home, explaining to Mr. Barringer that there was a family emergency, and because Mr. Barringer was busy with the social worker, he didn’t ask questions.
“You can’t have a boyfriend,” Sam said when Charlotte answered the phone.
“Not ever?”
“Not at twelve,” he said.
“I don’t understand,” she said quietly.
“It’s a betrayal,” Sam said. “You understand betrayal.”
He asked her to bring another packet of James and Lucy’s letters when she met him at the corner of Fessenden on Monday and to check his file for the letter from Rebecca Frankel.
“Have you seen any news reports lately?” he asked.
“Nothing at all,” Charlotte said.
She wanted to tell him she hadn’t been reading the paper since she’d fallen in love with Joshua Rubin, that she hated to look in the paper for stories of terrorists, and hated to read them.
“Another thing,” Sam said, hurrying to get off the phone because the bell for dinner had rung. “Give him back the green ring, since he’s not your boyfriend any longer.”
Peebles had saved Sam a place at dinner.
“Trouble?” he asked when Sam came back from speaking to Charlotte.
“No trouble,” Sam said.
“I hate Tuesdays. Kraut and watery mashed potatoes,” Peebles said.
Sam didn’t reply. He wasn’t hungry, taking only bread, passing on the sausage and potatoes.
“What’s up, man?” Peebles asked. “You seem low.”
“I’m thinking,” Sam said.
“About family night?” Banana asked. “We have a rehearsal after dinner, right?”
“I don’t know,” Sam said. “I have a lot of homework.”
“Homework?”
“I’m flunking math.”
“You said we’d be doing my family tonight,” Banana said. “The Joseph, alias Banana, Stern family.”
“I plan to do your family next,” Sam said. “I just don’t know about tonight.”
“I’m playing the bulimic sister, what’s her name,” Reggie said. “It’s a nonspeaking role.”
Banana laughed.
“Peebles can play my father.” Banana twisted his face into an expression of exaggerated rage. “Peebles knows him. It’ll go like this: ‘Where the fuck are my blue silk socks, Margery? Where the fuck is the pinstriped shirt my mother gave me for Valentine’s Day. For chrissake, Margery, get out of bed and deal.’ ”
“Sweet,” Pebbles said. “I look forward to this opportunity.”
“So, Sam, what d’ya think?” Bird asked.
Evenings, when Mr. Barringer was in his room drinking vodka and watching the news, the boys at the Episcopal Home for Juvenile Delinquents who were supposed to be doing their homework rehearsed Family. Family was Sam’s idea. He wrote the stories, cast and directed them, but the idea had its beginnings on the first day he’d spent at the Cage, when he’d met Peebles and Banana and Reggie and Bird and they’d spent the afternoon imagining Africa.
Family was a different kind of game. They would choose a family of one of the residents of the Cage, the Banana Stern family, for example—and then Sam would write a play around the stories that Banana told him. The dictatorial father, Bernard, with his habit of kicking the dog when the dog was eating; the bulimic sister, Lola, who shoplifted food from the Safeway and then stuffed herself in the privacy of her closet and threw up in the bathroom next to Banana’s room; the tranquillized mother, Margery, sleepwalking through the day in her nightgown; and baby Brian, sitting on the floor of his bedroom tearing off the arms and legs and heads of his action figures, screaming, DEAD, YOU’RE DEAD. DEAD. DEAD. DEAD.
“I want to do my family next,” Peter Tripper said. “My aunt committed suicide in our house. I saw her dead on the floor of the bathroom before the medics arrived.”
“She was depressed,” Bird said. “That’s what Peter says.”
“My father’s in jail,” Reggie said.
“Then how come your mother can afford a BMW?” Bird asked.
“I didn’t say we were poor,” Reggie said. “We’re middle-class criminals in my family, bitch. He’s in jail for emb
ezzling.”
“I thought you told me he was out of jail now,” Peter said.
“He’s out,” Reggie said. “But he was in for nine months. We’re doing plays, right, Sam? They don’t have to be absolutely factual.”
“Right,” Sam said. “Emotional truth is what we’re after in these plays.”
“Whatever,” Bird said.
“Sam’s right,” Peebles said. “Some things you have to invent.”
Sam got up from the table.
“You know,” Peebles said, following Sam from the table. “This place was dead until you came here.”
“Thanks, Peebles,” Sam said, motioning to Banana. “We’ll rehearse tomorrow, Banana, but you’ve got to find some guy to play your mother. Maybe Reggie. I’m headed upstairs.”
“See you, Sam,” Peebles called after him.
“See you later, Sam.”
“Bye, Sam.”
“Hasta la vista, Sam.”
And the sound of his own name followed him up the stairs and down the corridor to his room.
As usual, he couldn’t sleep. He sat up in bed, in the dark, with his flashlight, reading the dictionary to take his mind off breathing. He had been reading the dictionary since he moved into his room at the Cage. He liked the simplicity of it, especially at night, when he was afraid of sleeping with his door unlocked, worried that Mr. Barringer would come in and look at him.
He was fearful that if he lay down on his back or turned over on his stomach, the breath would go out of him and his lungs would fill with fluid. He thought about Charlotte, wondering had she called her boyfriend, wondering why the presence of a boyfriend in her life mattered enough to him to cost him his breath.
“Jealous” was a word he had looked up once in the dictionary after he had seen one of the letters his father had written to his mother confessing that he was a jealous man.
Jealous: intolerant of rivalry or unfaithfulness, vigilant in guarding a possession. Sam particularly liked the rare Old Testament definition of a jealous God: …requiring complete devotion. He understood that definition exactly.
He was fond of the derivation of words, the way one led to another. He’d follow the synonyms. The word “jealous” derived from zealous or zeal. He looked up “zeal,” whose synonym was passion: strong or violent emotion. Or: an outburst of intense emotion at fever pitch. An internal combustion. A bomb.
And as he read the definitions of “jealous” and the synonyms and the derivations with their satisfactory exactness, as he went over and over them, each time sounding like the first, his own feelings began to dissipate. He found himself breathing more easily.
He got out of bed, opened his bookbag, and took out the latest packet of letters between his parents, which he had already read, but it didn’t matter. He would read them again and again.
Julia lay on the trundle bed and watched Charlotte throw page after page of her letter to Joshua in the trash.
“Are you mad at Sam?” she asked.
Charlotte didn’t answer.
“Are you so scared of him you’ll dump your boyfriend because he says you have to?”
Charlotte sat on her knees, leaning over her desk, writing in her best handwriting.
“Well, sometimes I am,” Julia said, examining her face close up in a hand mirror. “Are you listening, Charlotte?”
“No, I’m not listening,” she said. “I’m writing.”
Dear Joshua Rubin,
I am returning the beautiful emerald ring you gave me because I can’t be your girlfriend any longer for personal reasons. But I am enclosing my favorite poem as a going-away present. “The Song of Wandering Aengus” by William Butler Yeats. I especially like the last lines, which I dedicate to you: “And pluck till time and times are done, The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun.”
Love forever,
Charlotte McWilliams
It was nearly midnight, the halls of the Cage empty except for Mr. Barringer doing his last walk of the evening, sniffing for smoke, putting his ear against the doors, listening for conversation. Sam turned off the flashlight until Mr. Barringer had walked by his room and he heard the muffled footsteps on the carpeted stairs. Then he turned the flashlight on and opened the packet of letters between Lucy and James.
Edinburgh, July 18, 1961. Wet.
Dear Plum,
It’s bear cold here with rain day after day, the color of slate. That’s Scotland. I’m ready to leave behind this dreary place with its black castle hanging over the end of town where I live.
I have plans. Bombay now, and later everywhere. I want to know the world first and then DO something in it. What to do is not clear, but I have a sense of destiny and I know you do, too, or there wouldn’t have been that noisy CLICK when we met. All parts in place.
Love,
Jaggers
P.S. You asked about Jaggers. My mother called me that after a first-form teacher reported: “James has jagged edges and can’t settle down and sit in his chair.” Thus—
Dear dear Jaggers,
I’m fighting with my father, who wants me to go to medical school. Silent fight. He doesn’t do the noisy kind.
And Mother, who doesn’t want me to follow you to Bombay because of the bacteria and worms. She’s particularly concerned about the worms and has described them and what they will be busy doing in my intestines in some detail.
I count the days until you’re back—46 and a half. By hours, by minutes. When you return, we will never separate again.
And so
Forever, Plum
P.S. Please help me explain to my parents what you’re like. They’re wrecks about us. Especially my father. He calls you Loose Cannon as if it’s your Christian name.
Dear Plum,
I’ve sent you a painting I made this summer on the river where my uncle has a cottage. I’m hopeless with words, but perhaps this painting will help you describe me to your father.
Love, Jaggers
Dear Jaggers,
My father, whom I love—don’t get me wrong—is an artist of sorts as well, doncha know.
And so he asks, “Why does Loose Cannon have all of these paintings of shorelines?”
“Why do you think?” I ask him.
“It feels like bad news to me,” he says.
I wish they had less time to worry. Shorelines make perfect sense.
Love, Plum
Dear Plum,
Goodbye.
Hello.
I’ll be the one with the shoe-polish hair and wire-rimmed glasses. You can’t miss me.
August 31.3 p.m. Flight 31 BOAC from London. Idlewild Airport, NYC. Don’t dress for the occasion.
Love, Jaggers
CHAPTER FIVE
ON A Thursday afternoon in late January, six months after he’d been released from the Cage and the day after his physics exam, which he had flunked, Sam arrived home early just after lunch with a letter to his grandparents in his pocket announcing his suspension from high school.
He unlocked the door to the garage office and opened the windows; although it was midwinter, the air had a spring sweetness and the afternoon was golden yellow.
Last night’s Monopoly game was still set up at the table and he pushed it aside, opened his math notebook to a page entitled Aunt Marty’s Missing Breasts, and took out his pen. From the open window he could see Noli across the garden in the kitchen at the sink and, just beyond her, the shadow of Julia. Looking directly at the kitchen window, he saw in his peripheral vision the first of his father’s shoreline paintings described on the back of the canvas as Loch Lomond Shoreline, 1959. JMcW. Something about the way Sam’s eyes took in the whole, capturing a fraction of his life in a frame which did not include him, translated like language inexactly to a picture in which he saw himself from a place outside. He
was sitting at the table alone, a Monopoly game in the center, and underneath the table a rug, and underneath the rug the loosened floorboards, which concealed a small pipe bomb.
Julia interrupted the moment, flying in the side door.
“The principal’s on the phone.”
“I spoke to him earlier,” Sam said.
“But he wants to speak to you now,” she said.
He looked up from the table where he was reading his script about Aunt Marty.
“I can’t speak to him now,” he said.
“I’ll tell him that,” she called over her shoulder, running back to the house. “I’ll tell him you’re too busy.”
When Julia returned to the office, Sam was reading the letter the principal had given to him for his grandparents.
“The principal called to tell Noli you’ve been suspended for writing plays during class,” she said.
“He told me the same thing,” Sam said.
“Bummer,” Julia said. “Maybe you should write about us instead of the creeps at the Cage.”
“I might,” Sam said. “I’ve thought about it.”
It was true. He had been thinking about a family without parents—although in the play he would write, the parents are missing, not dead, the children at risk, although they don’t know it.
“The McWilliamses in living color,” Julia said. “It could be a very funny play.”
After the Cage, Sam had gone to a small Quaker school willing to take on difficult problems.
Sam was their first failure.
“He’s unreachable,” the principal had told William Lucas, his frustration bordering on anger. “Polite, always polite, as if those of us in authority are objects of mockery, but he does exactly what he wants to do, which is to sit in the back of the classroom and write plays.”
“I know he writes plays,” William had said. Sam had given his grandfather one of the plays, a weird sort of story about a boy called Banana, but William was pleased that he had substituted writing plays for building the bomb shelter. Somehow just the act of writing plays was optimistic. “Aboveground,” as Noli said.
“We’ve read the plays. He keeps them in a notebook, and they’re quite crazy,” the principal told William. “I really hate to tell you this, but they are.”
Plum & Jaggers (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 7