Object of Desire

by William J. Mann

  Next to arrive was Theresa Kyrwinski, tall and gangly, followed by Theresa Dudek, with the lazy eye. The phone rang suddenly: Joanne Amenta’s mother calling to say that Joanne had a stomach bug and so she wouldn’t be coming. Mom breathed fire through her clenched grin as she gave the news to the rest of the party: “What a shame for poor Joanne to get a stomach bug so quickly that they weren’t able to call and let me know earlier so I wouldn’t have wasted time wrapping Hershey’s Kisses for her.”

  Finally, at exactly one minute to four, came Katie.

  “Sorry,” she said, trudging up the walk, a present under her arm. “I tried to get here sooner but—”

  “Whatever,” I said, annoyed.

  Katie went on. “My mother took me to the mall after Sears, and we—”

  “I said whatever.”

  But I couldn’t stay mad at Katie. This might be the last time I saw her. I took the gift from her hands.

  “Shouldn’t you wait?” she asked.

  “It’s a tape. Who is it?”

  “Wait until you open the others,” Katie protested.

  I didn’t listen. I tore off the silver wrapping paper and laughed out loud. “Meat Loaf!”

  Katie was grinning.

  “I want you,” I sang.

  “I want you,” Katie echoed back, the way we did on the bus.

  “I need you.”

  “I need you.”

  “But there ain’t no way,” we both chimed in, “I’m ever gonna boink you!”

  “Danny!” Mom shouted. “Stop that!”

  “Danny off the pickle boat!” Nana called over, laughing.

  Across the room Aunt Patsy and the two Theresas were blushing. Desmond seemed oblivious. And Dad was on the phone, talking with the balloon store.

  Becky, he was told, had never shown up.

  And so the party went on without balloons. And without Mom, who was on the phone, calling every one of Becky’s friends.

  Aunt Patsy and Nana took over, pouring Kool-Aid and cutting cake. Without Mom to direct the proceedings, I was able to veto any singing, but Aunt Patsy still lit the candles, and I leaned over the cake to blow them out. Scrunching up my face and closing my eyes, I wished that tomorrow morning the headline of the newspaper would report that St. Francis Xavier High School had burned to the ground—but, in case the birthday gods found that just a little too extreme, I offered an alternate wish: that tomorrow would simply go by really, really fast.

  “Not at Pam’s, either,” Mom reported to Dad.

  The kids around the birthday table sensed the party wasn’t destined to last long. They made little conversation, eating their cake in silence, listening to the adults in the other room, dialing phone numbers. Aunt Patsy, looking even more gray than she had earlier, suggested I open my gifts right there in my seat. I agreed, and my self-conscious friends all quickly pushed their offerings across the table. From the first Theresa, I got a St. Francis Xavier sweatshirt (which I knew I’d never wear); from the second Theresa, I got a mug with my name printed on it (which I knew I’d never use); from Desmond, I got a Silver Surfer Versus Captain Marvel board game (which I knew I’d give back to Desmond someday).

  The table settled into an awkward silence, broken only by the sound of the rotary dial from the living room and my mother’s monotonous questioning of Becky’s friends, asking if they had seen her.

  Finally, Katie turned to Theresa Kyrwinski and asked her what classes she was in at St. Clare’s.

  “Do you have Sister Eileen?” Katie wondered. “She’s supposed to be really mean.”

  “No,” Theresa said. “I heard that Sister Agnes is even worse.”

  “I have her for social studies,” the other Theresa piped in.

  “Agnes or Eileen?”

  “Agnes.”

  “Then we must be in the same class!”

  “Cool!”

  Katie was suddenly grinning. “Do you want to meet, all three of us, outside the front doors tomorrow morning?”

  “Yeah, let’s do that!”

  “Excellent!”

  I looked at them with envy. How apart I felt. How alone, after nine years together, nine years of shared classes, shared teachers, shared experiences: The time in second grade when Katie and Theresa D. and I got locked in the janitor’s room and had to crawl out through the window. The time in fifth grade when we put on a variety show, when Katie forgot the lyrics to “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” and I had to whisper them to her offstage. The time last year when all of us—me, Katie, both Theresas, Joanne and Desmond—held a séance among the crumbling gravestones of the cemetery behind the school and were scared shitless by the sudden appearance of a squawking crow. For nine years together, we’d endured Fun with Phonics, Reading is Fundamental, and Davey and Goliath. We’d survived clumsy slide shows about good nutrition, the dry twang of Miss Waterhouse, the nasal incantations of Father Drummond from the pulpit, and the ruler-wielding of Sister Mary Kathleen.

  Now, after all that, I was being ripped out like a flower from its bed, torn from the rest and planted elsewhere, while the others could continue to bloom together and grow ever closer. I had been forcibly separated from my little community because of one fundamental, absurd reason: I had a penis, and the girls didn’t. Arm in arm would Katie and the Theresas waltz through the front doors of their new school, while I was forced to trudge on alone. I looked across the table at Desmond, staring mindlessly down at the crumbs on his plate. No hope there. Desmond wasn’t going to St. Francis Xavier. His parents couldn’t afford it, he’d told us, so off he was heading to the public school, the dreaded East Hartford High.

  “Mother of God, where the hell could she be?”

  Mom’s voice cut through the room as she slammed down the phone.

  “Maybe I ought to drive you kids home,” Aunt Patsy whispered, looking around the table. My friends all nodded gratefully, frightened by Mom’s outbursts. Standing dutifully, they dropped their crumpled American flag napkins onto their plates. Only Desmond stuffed the Hershey’s Kisses into his pocket; the rest left the little chocolate candies unopened in their tulle.

  “Happy birthday, Danny,” Theresa Dudek said from across the table. “Have fun at school tomorrow.”

  I said nothing. I watched as my friends filed out through the door, behind Aunt Patsy.

  “Happy birthday, Danny,” Katie said, coming up to me.

  I looked into her round blue eyes. This was it. The last time I’d see her. Any of them. I just knew it.

  I started to cry.

  “Danny,” Katie said.

  “I’m okay. I’m just…”

  “Worried about Becky?” Katie smiled. “I’m sure she’ll be home soon. She’s probably just lost track of the time.”

  “Yeah.” I stopped crying.

  “Good luck tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  Katie hesitated a moment, then turned to follow the rest.

  “Where is she?” Mom was screeching from the living room. “I’ll throttle her neck for making me so worried! I’ll throttle her!”

  I headed out the back door and sat on the steps. I wiped my eyes, embarrassed that I’d cried in front of Katie. The sun was dropping low in the sky, turning the afternoon red. The backyard was filled with long shadows across the grass. Near the rusted old swing set, unused for years, stood Becky’s easel. Becky wanted to be an artist; as a kid, she’d finger paint for hours, and Mom would cover the refrigerator with her creations. I thought finger painting was messy, and wanted nothing to do with it. But Becky lost herself in it, as she did with her crayons and pastels and, finally, oil paints. A little more than a year ago, with money Mom had given her, Becky had gone out and bought the easel and some paints and a whole shitload of brushes. Now, when she wasn’t with Chipper, Becky could usually be found at her easel, facing the cornfield behind the house, painting the long rows of corn or the houses up on the hill. After high school, she announced, she would attend the Pratt Institute i
n New York. Mom asked her how she thought we’d be able to pay for that, and Becky replied she’d get a scholarship. She was pretty serious about her painting. A few nights ago, it had started to rain, and Becky had jumped out of bed, rushing outside to save her precious work of art. She’d replaced it on the easel a few days later, adding a few touches here and there. Her painting of the white house on the hill remained unfinished.

  The sun was turning the cornstalks pink. The field stretched on for a mile, all the way to the dark green woods. I could barely make out the trees from where I was sitting, but I could hear the owls. For some reason, this time of day, as the sun started to drop in the sky, the owls always began hooting, long, mournful sounds, like horns on a ship, I thought, even though I’d never heard a ship. I rested my elbows on my knees and my chin in my hands, staring out across the pink cornfield. I tried to tell myself that there was nothing to fear, nothing to worry about, that it was just school. Why did I feel as if everything I had ever known, everything I had ever counted on, was about to disappear? High school was just school, and I wasn’t a bad student. I’d go to classes and take tests, just like always—even if there were things like lockers, and required intramural sports, and kids from the public schools I’d never met. Not to mention no girls—and girls had been pretty much my only friends up until this point. How was I going to survive in a world of only boys?

  “Danny.”

  Nana had come up behind me. She startled me slightly. I turned around and looked up at her. She was holding a small wrapped gift in her hands.

  “I had something else I wanted to give you.”

  I stood, accepting the present.

  “Thanks, Nana.”

  I tore open the blue tissue paper. Inside was a framed black-and-white photograph of several people from the old days.

  “Who are they?” I asked.

  Nana pointed with her crooked finger, its knuckles enlarged from arthritis. “Those are my grandparents there,” she said, indicating a couple of small, white-haired people in dark clothes. “David and Honora Horgan. They came from County Cork, Ireland.” She laughed. “They weren’t too happy that I ended up marrying an Eye-talian. Next to them are my parents, Daniel and Emily Horgan. That’s who your father named you after. His grandfather.”

  I nodded. I’d been told that, but I’d never seen a picture of my namesake. Daniel Horgan was a tall man in a dark suit and a vest buttoned nearly up to his chin. He was looking directly into the camera without smiling. He wore a short white beard.

  “And finally,” Nana said, continuing to point with her finger, “that’s your grandfather and me, holding the baby.”

  Nana looked very young in the photograph, slim, dark haired, wearing a polka-dotted dress. She was holding a baby wrapped in a long white christening robe.

  “Who’s the baby?” I asked.

  “Can’t you guess?”

  “My Dad?”

  Nana smiled. “We took it the day of his christening, to get four generations in the picture. I’m giving it to you so that someday, when you have a baby, we can do the same pose, you and your wife and baby and your parents and me.”

  I was staring at the photo. I could barely make out Dad’s face, so bundled was he in the white robe. It seemed strange that Dad was ever so small. I imagined having a baby like that myself someday. It made me happy to picture it, me and my baby and Mom and Dad and Nana—though the part about a wife just felt too weird. But the baby—a son—that I liked.

  “Thanks, Nana.” I kissed her on the cheek. She pulled me in to her plump bosom for a quick hug. Her perfume was heavy and sweet.

  “Now where’s Patsy?” she asked.

  “She took my friends home,” I reminded her.

  “Oh, that’s right. And did Becky go with her?”

  I sighed. “No, Nana. That’s what my mom and dad are having a bird about. Becky hasn’t shown up.”

  “Oh, right.”

  We headed back into the kitchen. With some difficulty Nana sat at the table, the same place where Katie had been sitting a short time ago. The kids’ plates, some with half-eaten slices of cake, were still arranged around the table. I began cleaning up, scraping the cake into the trash and setting the plates in the sink. I knew my mother would want to reuse the plastic plates. In the living room she was still on the phone, talking to someone, her voice alternating between a whisper and a shout.

  “Who are they looking for?” Nana asked.

  “Becky,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s right.”

  Mom slammed down the phone. “Carol Fleisher hasn’t seen her, either.”

  “Look, Peggy,” came Dad’s voice from the other room, “just calm down. There’s going to be a rational explanation. Let’s not panic—”

  “Panic! I’m not panicking! I’m furious!” Mom shouted. “The rational explanation is that girl has gotten high and mighty since she turned sixteen and has been acting all Miss Independent, and I’m going to throttle her! Throttle her!”

  “Who’s she going to throttle?” Nana whispered.

  “Becky,” I told her.

  I dried my hands on the dish towel hanging from the refrigerator door.

  “Nana, I’m going to go across the street for a minute,” I said as my mother began dialing another phone number. “I’ll be right back, okay?”

  “Okay, Danny.”

  Of course, she’d probably forget, and if Mom or Dad asked where I was, she’d say she didn’t know, and then they’d go even more ballistic. But I didn’t want to interrupt them, and besides, I would only be gone a moment. I was just going across the street.

  To talk to Chipper.

  I found him in the garage, working on his car.

  The Mach 1’s hood was open, and Chipper was leaning inside it, his hands covered in oil. He didn’t see or hear me approach. I was able to watch him for a few moments, the way he leaned over the engine, his parachute pants riding low, exposing the dimples at the base of his spine and just the slightest hint of a crack. He wasn’t, of course, wearing any underwear.

  Did he know I’d been at the pond? Had he and Becky seen me?

  “Chipper.”

  My voice sounded thick and unfamiliar.

  Chipper looked up, dark eyes reflecting the red glow of the setting sun.

  “Did Becky come home yet?” he asked.

  “No. I was just going to ask you if you’d seen her.”

  Chipper made a face and returned his gaze to the engine of his car. “Like I told your parents—three times now—I have not seen Becky. So they can stop calling, and you can stop bugging me.”

  “You haven’t seen her all day?”

  “No!”

  Chipper pulled his body back away from the car and, with one sweeping move, lifted his T-shirt over his head and threw it to the side of the garage. The gesture made me step back in surprise, and I found I couldn’t speak. Chipper stood there in front of me, naked from the waist up, his broad shoulders, sharply defined pectorals and abdominals, sweaty and oil stained, not more than ten inches from my face.

  “What is it?” Chipper asked, glowering at me, moving even closer. “You don’t believe me?”

  He knew. Suddenly I felt certain that Chipper knew I’d been spying on them at the pond. He knew I had stolen his underwear.

  “I haven’t seen her since yesterday,” Chipper insisted, looming over me now. The musky, mingled aromas of boy sweat and engine grease threatened to overpower me. I felt as if I might pass out right there at Chipper’s feet. I tried to say something but couldn’t.

  “What are you looking at?” Chipper asked, pulling back just a bit now.

  I opened my mouth to speak, to tell him I wasn’t looking at anything, but the words that came out startled me. “Will you be my friend at St. Francis Xavier?” I blurted.

  Chipper made a face. “Your friend?”

  I stood there dumbstruck, like an idiot dweeb.

  Chipper laughed. “You’re gonna be a freshman. Juniors aren�
�t friends with freshmen.”

  “But I’m Becky’s brother.”

  Chipper snorted, returning to his car. “When Becky gets home, you have her call me, you understand? Make sure she does.”

  “Okay. I will.” I was backing away now.

  “Make sure she calls me!”

  “Okay, okay, I will.”

  I turned and ran.

  Back home, Dad was on the phone to the police.

  The sun setting had made everything worse.

  Aunt Patsy had returned from taking my friends home. As darkness filled the house, she went around turning on lights. She finished cleaning the kitchen of the remnants of my party, though she left the HAPPY BIRTHDAY sign clinging to the wall. Since her surgery, she couldn’t lift her arms easily, and so the sign remained, absurdly, a reminder that I’d never again have a birthday like this one.

  Nana was getting restless, and her frequent inquiries about just whom Mom and Dad were waiting for made everyone agitated, so finally Aunt Patsy suggested they leave. Mom was obviously relieved. She was far too concerned with running to the front door every time headlights came sweeping down the street to tolerate the mutterings of her forgetful old mother-in-law.

  The police car pulled into the driveway just as Aunt Patsy and Nana were backing out. The officer sauntered in, tall and genial, and Mom immediately launched into a physical description of Becky: tall, pretty, brown hair, blue eyes, and a birthmark like a crescent moon on the inside of her upper arm. “Just like mine, see?” Mom offered her arm up for inspection. The officer leaned forward, squinted, but made no comment.

  In truth, Mom’s birthmark bore only a superficial resemblance to Becky’s, less of a crescent moon than a squiggly line. But both were the same purplish brown color, and I’d always felt a little cheated that I didn’t get a birthmark, too. It was one more connection between Mom and Becky that I didn’t have, and even though Dad had tried to make me feel better by pointing out that he didn’t have a birthmark, either, I still wished I’d been born with one.