by Robert Maxxe
"You see!" Nick shouted with an odd mixture of triumph and despair. "You don't understand. It's important to go as far and fast as I can!"
Carrie noticed Nick's emphasis: important Peer pressure again? Grace had mentioned groups, or teams. Nick must be determining the size of his commitment according to what they expected of him, all the spacies. And one other person.
"Is that what Dana thinks, too?" Carrie said. "That the game is so . . . important?"
Nick gave her a wary glance. "Yes."
Carrie paused. This was where Mike could have done it better, she thought—given Nick a wink and a nudge, made a pitch for some inside "info," man-to-man. Quite a girl you got there, kiddo. Hey, what's the real story on you and this knock-out?
"Nick, about Dana . . . since that first time she came here, I've wondered about her. . . ."
"Wondered what?"
"Well, I like to know about your friends. . . ."
"What do you want to know?"
Carrie took a breath. "What I think I ought to know, I suppose, is how much there is between you."
Nick's brow furrowed. "She's my friend, that's all."
"Is it just that simple? I mean, Dougie's a friend. But with a girl like that—well look, Nick, as you get older I know you're going to have different kinds of friends. You should. But right now you're at an age when I can still give you some guidance. And if there's anything between you and Dana that's, well, more than friendship, I think we should talk about it."
Nick had pulled himself forward on his chair, his expression darkening all the while she groped through her speech. "What is it you want to talk about? You think I'm fucking her, is that it?"
The word went through her like an electric shock. High voltage. Her body tensed, muscles contracting so much they hurt. She felt herself teetering on the edge of control, fighting the urge to spring at Nick and strike him hard across the face.
Until, in the next moment, she realized that no matter how crudely he had put it, that was exactly what she did want to know.
But there was no way to admit that. They went on glaring at each other through a long silence.
Finally, Nick's defiance fizzled. "Hey, I'm sorry," he moaned. "That was dumb. I'm sorry, Mom. Really. Okay? But I know it looks weird about Dana and me, and I get so much flak about it from other guys. It's just kind of a sore point now. She just likes me, though. That's all. Okay?" He shrugged apologetically, then quickly added, "But Jesus, she is peachy, isn't she?"
Carrie nodded forgiveness and smiled at his slang, obsolete but perfect.
"She's real nice, too," Nick raced on. "Not stuck up or anything. I'm really lucky she got put with me."
"Put with you?"
"Yeah," Nick said. "In my zal. That's how we met."
Carrie thought she'd heard it wrong. "In your cell?"
"Zal," Nick repeated. "Z-a-l. It's what we call a bunch of us, spacies, all the ones assigned to the same flight on a certain level." He spoke eagerly, with that special relish the young took at being able to educate their elders.
Flights. Levels. Zals. How much was there to the inside jargon of the spacies? Carrie wondered. Not that it was necessarily a bad thing; there was a playful creative aspect to inventing a language. And at least Nick was sharing it with her now, she wasn't being locked out.
She decided it was time to make her summation; a few final words on the virtues of honesty, then she could let him off the hook. "All right, Nick," she began. "I guess you can go—"
He jumped straight up from his chair.
"Hold on," Carrie flared. "I haven't finished."
He froze like a soldier at attention.
"The main thing is," she continued, "I'd always rather know what you're involved with and where you are than not know. If it's something you can't tell me about, maybe it's something you shouldn't be doing. So I'll expect you to level with me. Okay?"
Nick nodded and moved to break ranks, but Carrie went on.
"As for how you spend your time, I understand wanting to be with Dana and your friends. But a game can't be allowed to dominate your life. If I see any sign that you're giving up other activities, or that your schoolwork is going down—"
"You won't, Mom," Nick insisted, his body tilted forward by the thrust of his sincerity.
"That's it, then." She held out her arms, invitation to seal their pact with a kiss.
Nick came to her and leaned down. His face nestled for a sweet moment into the curve of her neck. The skin of his cheek and the slight gust of his warm breath felt no different to Carrie than when he had been a baby. She clung tightly, moved by a sudden intuition that it was the last time she would ever feel that little-boy softness.
"Gotta run," he said, pulling away.
As he grabbed the handle of the back door, she had one more thought. "Oh, Nick . . ."
He turned, eyes rolling in exasperation.
"About Dougie . . . he feels very bad that you gave up on the band. It might help if you included him when you go down to the arcade."
"Can't, Mom," Nick said.
"Just ask him—"
"He's been to the arcade. But he was torped."
This time she didn't have to ask. He saw her bafflement.
"He didn't make it with the game," Nick explained. "Couldn't even handle the first level."
Carrie recalled Bev Marwick saying that her son, Jeff, hadn't gotten into the game for some reason—that the kids had a word for it.
"Have a lot of kids been . . . torped?" she asked Nick.
"Yeah," he said. "Pretty many."
Then, before any more questions could be asked, he snapped out "See ya later," and was gone.
Carrie cleared the table, wrapped the leftovers for the refrigerator, and finished loading the dishwasher. All the while she reviewed her exchange with Nick. Had she been too timid in the end, let him off too lightly? Perhaps she should have imposed some stated limits on his involvement with Dana, or the game. But what would have been gained? He was doing well in school, seemed to have all his priorities in order.
She turned on the dishwasher, but remained standing idly by the machine as it started the pre-wash phase.
Important. The word replayed in her mind as Nick had said it—with such a curious underlying intensity.
And then Grace's proviso: ". . . as long as a child doesn't become obsessed." Was there, in Nick's emphasis, a hint of obsession?
The dishwasher gurgled and swished and Carrie's thoughts drifted to other sounds. Zal. Torped. (As in torpedoed, maybe?) She had to smile. The words were a little comical. She remembered times when she was a little girl, and she and her friends would talk in some made-up language, gobbledygook. Words not so different from zal and torped.
Or was that being too lenient again—accepting the language as merely a cute invention? There was another aspect to language; it could be a code that bonded together a chosen group, closed out the unwanted. Those who were torped.
And what was it Nick had said about Dougie . . .? "He didn't make it with the game." As though the machine itself put its stamp of approval on the player. Thinking of it in those terms was probably just the children's way of evading moral responsibility for ostracizing the undesirables.
There was another odd phrase Nick had used, too. "We were assigned to the same flight." Assigned by whom? The game again? Or did the spacies have some sort of rules for making such decisions?
All of it, of course, might be nothing more than children at play—a bit carried away by a new fad.
Yet all of it still worried her.
Emily called out, interrupting her thoughts. The Muppet Show was over and she wanted permission to watch the next program for half an hour. Carrie turned out the light in the kitchen and went to join Emily in the den.
"Sorry, miss," Carrie said firmly. "You've had enough of this stuff for one night. Hop into your pj's and I'll read you something from Arabian Nights."
Emily scampered from the room without complaint. Carr
ie's eyes lingered on the television screen, a commercial for some aperitif showing a man and woman at separate café tables, flirting: full-screen close-ups of gorgeous eyes, dewy lips and sparkling teeth, a crystal glass filled with an amber liquid . . . ending with the two strolling off together by a Venetian canal. Carrie switched off the television.
Walking away from the dead screen, she felt very virtuous. At least one child had been saved tonight from the clutches of the evil electronic monsters.
15
"I don't know if I want to answer," Lon Evans said, looking very uncomfortable as he sat across the table from her. "That happens to be the darkest secret in my life."
They were having dinner at The Laundry in East Hampton. The region's "in" spot, in summer it was always noisy and crowded with weekenders gawking at vacationing celebrities, no place for intimacy. On this wintry November night, however, it was just comfortably filled, and Lon had been able to get a table with a view of the fireplace, where a big log flamed and crackled. The mood was right for sharing confidences, and over dessert and coffee Carrie had finally thought to ask a question that had puzzled her on and off since meeting Lon. She ignored his attempt to evade an answer.
"I'll never tell another soul," she coaxed, raising her palm as if to take an oath. "Scout's honor."
He paused for a deep, fortifying breath. "All right," he relented. "It's . . . Alonzo." He peered up from under his brows with a mock appeal for sympathy and kindness.
"Oh, you poor dear," she said. "A family name, was it? Some revered ancestor being commemorated?"
"Not exactly. My father was one of the halfbacks on the College of the Pacific football team in 1937 and '38."
"Aha!" she put in, seemingly bursting with comprehension. "That explains it."
Lon smiled and went on to tell her that the coach of the team in those years was Amos Alonzo Stagg, already known to football aficionados of the time as "the Grand Old Man of Football." Stagg had coached continually at the University of Chicago for forty-one years even before moving on in 1933, at the age of seventy, to the College of the Pacific; and after leaving there in 1946, he had coached yet another six years at Susquehanna. "My dad admired that kind of commitment and never-give-up spirit. So when I was born in 1941, he named me in tribute to Amos Alonzo Stagg. I guess he thought he was doing me a favor."
"Ever straighten him out on that?"
"Never had the chance. After Pearl Harbor he enlisted, became a Navy flyer, and was lost with the carrier Yorktown at the battle of Midway."
"I'm sorry," Carrie said.
Lon shrugged. "One of those things. Anyway, maybe he did do me a favor. At least he didn't name me Amos. I'd much rather be a Lon than an Amy or a Mo."
She laughed, as a waiter came over to see if they wanted anything else. Lon asked Carrie if she'd care for a liqueur; a brandy, perhaps.
Of course she did. She wanted the dinner to go on and on, the mood to last and last, the backdrop to change only when they were ready to play the love scene. It had been so perfect up to now. They ordered two brandies.
He had, as planned, brought her back to his house to start the evening. The caviar and a bottle of Dom Perignon in a silver bucket were waiting on the coffee table in a living room nicely decorated with modern furniture and cozily lighted. She sensed that he had brought her there not essentially for drinks and hors d'oeuvres, but because he was anxious for her to know him, to judge him well, and that he understood seeing his home would be a major part of the process. He apologized that both the children were out for the evening, saying he wanted her to meet them, too, as soon as possible.
Seated side by side on his sofa, they started out with stiff pleasantries—his remarks on how delicious the caviar was, her compliments on how nicely the house was furnished. But soon, prompted by his earnest questions and the way he listened with such intent sympathy, she found herself saying things she had bottled up for years. She told him about the mess Mike's death had left her in, the resulting rage she had felt, and also how very much she had loved Mike.
Finally she heard how maudlin and self-indulgent it all sounded. "This isn't a date at all," she protested, "it's a therapy session. Maybe I should go home, cry my eyes out, and we can start fresh on another night."
"Are you kidding? When will I get a better chance to cheer you up?"
They took his car and drove to East Hampton. (Lon had a Mercedes coupé, she couldn't help noticing; obviously he did well.) On the way and continuing into the restaurant, they told each other about their childhoods—his in a small New Hampshire town, hers in a Philadelphia suburb—and laughed about their painful teens, first dates, first loves, college years.
After the plates from their entrees had been cleared, Carrie's hand was resting on the cloth beside a vase of flowers when Lon reached out and covered it with his own. She didn't pull away, only looked carefully into his eyes. There was so much she wanted to know about him, though she no longer felt doubts attached to her ignorance. She liked him enormously, and he made no attempt to hide how much he liked her. Could it happen again so quickly, she wondered, as it had with Mike? Could lightning strike twice?
It was then, as if to slip easily into the vault of his secrets, that she had thought to ask about his name.
Over brandy, Lon filled in the background of his marriage. One of the things Carrie learned was the explanation for his short eyebrow. Apparently, the wife's temper had been horrendous. Lon had come home from work one day to find her beating their son, then a toddler, because he had spilled some food. When Lon intervened, the woman had turned on him, swung a skillet at his head, and the resulting gash over his temple had required sixty-odd stitches. Where part of the eyebrow had been shaved before suturing, it had never grown back.
Finally their snifters were empty. They gazed at each other silently, tired from all the good talk in the way that you could be tired from lying all day in the summer sun.
"Shall we go?" he said at last.
"Yes," she said.
Both knew all the other meanings in the question and the answer.
A dense fog had rolled in off the Atlantic, blanketing all the roads back to Millport. Lon had to drive extremely slow, which was just as well, since he had been drinking. He turned on the radio and found a station playing "golden oldies." They hummed along, then laughed and joined in when a couple of records from their teen years were played. "Sh-boom, sh-boom," they sang together, da-yadadadadada-yadadadadada . . ." And when Nat King Cole came on with "They tried to tell us we're too young," Carrie and Lon crooned with him and then chuckled softly at the irony. Too young? Not them. Tired and mellow, she rested her head against Lon's shoulder, and he put his arm around her.
As they came into Millport, taking the turn from the state road past the village green onto Elm, the disc jockey was saying the midnight news would be coming up after a couple more records. Then Billy Eckstine came on singing "My Foolish Heart." Carrie raised her head for a look at the town, and her habitual check as they passed her store. The fog had thickened so, the road was visible only as a dark channel between blurred white buildings and the fuzzy glow of street lamps. There were no other cars on the street. The weather seemed to have chased everyone home early. Cloaked in the gauzy mist, the town looked more like an apparition than a reality, some American colonial version of Brigadoon.
Then up ahead Carrie saw the fog glowing with a luminous blue light. She sat up, staring. A supernatural presence seemed to be hovering in the vapor. Shimmering spectral shapes—figures, were they, or some sort of vehicles?—slid through the murky air, appearing for a moment, then vanishing. Carrie strained to see. Then she realized that her mind, tired and muddled by an evening's drink, had been fooled. The arcade was not far ahead, and the effect was simply due to its signs. The blue neon shining from its windows was picked up by the millions of tiny water particles in the fog, refracted and magnified even as the mist swirled about, creating the moving shapes. Illusions.
But her ten
se movement had broken the romantic mood.
"What's wrong?" Lon asked.
"Nothing. I just . . . thought I saw something." Even as she dismissed it, however, her eyes were still focused on the blue glow. Now the arcade was only half a block away.
"Saw what?" Lon persisted.
She smiled at him and tried to make light of it by speaking in a hokey tone. "Ghosts. Visitors from another planet!"
He started to return her smile, then saw that her gaze had shifted back to the light from the signs. He braked the car and pulled over to the curb in front of the arcade.
"This place still bothers you, doesn't it?"
"No," she said, too quickly, then decided the denial was pointless. None of what she felt about Lon was worth a damn if she couldn't be honest, even if it meant confessing her silliest fears. "Yes," she admitted. "Yes, it does."
"There's a line between love and fascination," Billy Eckstine sang, "that's hard to see on an evening such as—"
Lon switched off the radio abruptly, and reached up to switch on the courtesy light in the car. He studied Carrie, evidently gauging the depth of distress in her expression. She looked straight back, letting it show.
"Why?" he asked intently; he had read her face well. "It's something more than what you told me the other night, isn't it? Not just your son coming down here a little too often . . .?"
"I don't know. Outwardly, that's all it is. But . . ." She shook her head, confused.
"But what?"
She didn't know where to begin. It was all put together out of such little things. "It's the way he's tied up in the game, I guess, the way all the kids are hooked into this. There's a kind of fever about it. There's even a special language they talk. Well, I don't have to tell you, do I? You said you knew about the spacies."
"Sure. My own kids come here. I've heard some of the lingo."
"And it doesn't bother you—this stuff about kids getting torped?"
He half smiled. "I hadn't heard that one."
"It's what they say when a kid is ruled out by the game."