by Terry Reed
“Well, I was thinking of having a smoke.”
A smoke? I looked around. “Here?”
She jerked her head, meaning, Outside, jerk. “Want to come? I’ll teach you how to light them.”
“I know how to light matches,” I said, somewhat offended by now. I thought Mary Parker thought I was such a moron slash little loser I didn’t know how to light matches. Here I had kind of done her this favor by asking her to walk into class with me, as probably no one in school had ever done before, and this was the thanks I got. I was somewhat offended.
“Bet you can’t with one hand.”
Oh. With one hand. That was different.
“You ride horses, don’t you? I heard you’re pretty good.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
“Well, say you want a smoke while you’re riding your horse. For your own safety, you should know how to light up with one hand. Like the cowboys do.”
I mean, this is not why I call Mary Parker a genius. But then she huddled close to my locker and showed me how, using a pencil and a pack of matches, saying if you do it right, you don’t get badly burned.
I said, “Cool.”
The bell rang. Mary Parker glanced at the Assembly door. “Anyway. I’ll go in with you. Sure.”
So for the first time ever, we walked into Assembly together. We took our seats alphabetically, me behind her as always, which was just one of those accidents of birth.
• • •
I guess it was because of that cowboy thing that, after ten whole years, decided to take a chance on Mary Parker. So later that day, during afternoon Assembly, I passed up a note asking if she wanted to do something together out of school.
This was taking a chance, because, if you didn’t notice before, doing something with Mary Parker out of school just wasn’t something that was ever done. The other girls claimed she was simply too smart for the rest of us, but probably the truth of it was she was simply too poor. Other kids took ski trips together, or met at the club in summer and signed out golf carts at the pro shop and rode across the back nine over to someone’s house so we could hang out there until the pro shop would close. And sometimes we even golfed, or played tennis, or had swim meets at the pool. But Mary Parker went home every day at three, never was seen on a Saturday, and all summer, just disappeared.
She sent the note right back. I figured this meant, Return to Sender or, at best, Address Correction Requested, and so I thought that that was a pretty dumb chance I took, and I slipped the note into my book, planning to keep it for life, but only as a reminder not to take dumb chances anymore. But later that hour I opened my book and glanced at the note anyway. Mary Parker had scribbled, A movie. Downtown. I wasn’t allowed to go downtown, but I still wrote back, Sure. She wrote back, Then I’ll teach you how to knock off a store.
I was to meet her on the last car of the Rapid Transit at around noon.
All that Saturday morning I lurked in my room. Cars began whizzing up and down the driveway. Mother left for golfing in her Buick. Clarine left for Getting and Spending in her Buick, but came home all too soon. Mr. Carter, Dad’s friend who played the saxophone, arrived in his old Ford. Once they got started, once the music was filling the house up, I slipped down the back stairs and ran out the sunroom door, calling to anyone who could hear me over the music I’d be at the movies. You had to say where you were going. Nobody had ever said it had to be heard.
At the platform, I stood leaning out, watching for the white headlamps in the taxi-colored train.
The plan was that I would dial Mary Parker’s number from the Shaker Boulevard stop as soon as I saw the Rapid, and by the time the train arrived at the edge of Cleveland near Mary’s house, she’d be waiting by the tracks. I saw the first car poke through the mist, hurriedly dialed and hung up, and ran down the long wooden stairs.
Dropping my fare into the box, I remembered loving the Rapid, back when it cost less than fifty cents. To us, a ride on the Rapid was the only alternative to a ride on the roller coasters Mother had banned, and we used to beg Dad to let us do it. Even though he was partial to blue Buicks as his means of transportation, he’d sometimes take us on the train, take us off at Shaker Square, buy us toys at FAO Schwarz, call a car to take us home. But the train seemed newer then. Now it seemed clanking and slow, and seemed to labor under the weight of unfulfilled promise, like, say, if The Little Engine That Could never had.
Three boys sat ahead of me, blond kids in Cleveland Indians caps wearing baseball mitts. I felt like asking them if they were on their way to sit in the bleachers at a game. My brother Luke, who was always telling me things I didn’t necessarily need to hear about professional sports, had assured me the thing to do was call the Cleveland Indians “The Tribe,” and now I felt like pretending I knew a lot about baseball, and asking the three kids if they were going to see The Tribe this afternoon, or what they thought of The Tribe this year, and what did they think about the old pitching on The Tribe. I just felt like letting them know I knew the Cleveland Indians were called The Tribe, don’t ask me why. I bet because they were boys.
But I eavesdropped first, to see if they even knew the Cleveland Indians were called The Tribe. They weren’t talking about baseball, though. One of the boys was telling about something he’d seen when riding in a car one evening with his dad. A green pickup truck with a big dog on its roof. But when his dad pulled alongside the pickup, it turned out that the dog wasn’t a real dog, but a huge cardboard sign in the shape of dog. An advertising dog.
“I really wanted it to be real,” the kid kept saying, over and over, switching his baseball cap so the visor was first in the front, then in the back, getting so worked up about it I felt sorry myself the dog was a fraud.
The other two boys felt sorry too. One of them said, “Maybe it was real and you just thought it was cardboard, just like when you thought it was real, it was really cardboard.”
The three of them were making plans to go play on the highway and look for the green truck with the fake dog when I gave up on my plans about The Tribe and started looking out the window for Mary Parker.
As the trained slowed up, I saw her waiting on the platform. It was the first time I’d ever seen her out of uniform. She was dressed all in black. Black, boys’ clothes. Boys’ black high-top sneakers. Big black baggy pants. Long black turtleneck. Mary Parker looked cool. She walked unhurriedly, if not reluctantly, toward me and the last car.
I looked down at myself. Just as I had suspected after I’d already left the house and couldn’t go back, I should have worn something else. I was dressed too clean and too like I was going for a ride. Not like a ride on the Rapid, a ride like on a horse. I had old jeans, which was fine, but my black jacket and my good boots Mother had brought home from a Parisian riding apparel store, and they were kind of crisp and polished, which looks good on a horse but this was the Rapid, and I had the feeling Mary Parker might think I didn’t know how to ride the Rapid right.
The train stopped and she got on. I gave her a lamo high sign, and she started slowly toward me down the aisle.
The Rapid Transit ran aboveground all the way to downtown, then gained speed and hurtled under Terminal Tower, the main station in Cleveland. It took about half an hour. Except some half hours seem longer than others. Everything I might have normally just blurted out didn’t sound all that smart in my head, so then I started trying to sound smart in my head, and that slowed everything down.
But then after the three kids in the Cleveland Indians caps got off, I gave up on sounding smart and told Mary Parker about the green pickup and the advertising dog, the news of which she received thoughtfully. I told her the Cleveland Indians were called The Tribe, as I wasn’t sure whether the stuff Luke knew was the type of thing a genius would know, or what. She just nodded her head again though. Finally, I said, “We’re just going to the movies, right?” I was a little worried about that reference she’d made in her note to robbing a store.
Mary Parker said, “
Yeah. To the movies.”
Other than that, we rode in silence most of the way.
At Terminal Tower I told Mary Parker she should choose the movie, because I figured she was the genius and all. I mean I didn’t say that, naturally, I just figured it is all. But then when we bought The Plain Dealer at the newsstand, the movie she picked was a double feature called Curse of the Werewolf and Shadow of the Cat.
She looked up from the paper. “You’re not scared, are you?”
“No, I’m not scared of a movie.” So after I said that, then it was obviously too late to back down.
“Fear is the opposite of love,” Mary Parker said, folding the newspaper and placing it on a wooden bench directly next to the pale hand of a little old man in a worn overcoat.
I turned my head to nod at her for more.
“And love is only knowledge.”
I was still trying to figure it out as we went into the basement of Higbee’s and bought a chocolate Frosty, then went up on the escalator in Terminal Tower and came out into Public Square.
The movies didn’t start until three o’clock, so we had a couple of hours to kill. Mary Parker said she’d give me a tour of downtown. “I’ve been here,” I said. “A lot.” I hadn’t, not a lot, really not much at all, even including Easter Sundays, but I said it anyway, don’t ask me why.
“Have you seen the lake?”
“Seen it. I’ve sailed on it.”
“Oh.”
I hated when I said it, though. I hate it when people say they’ve sailed on a lake when all they were asked was if they’d seen it before. After that, I decided not to talk for a while.
We walked toward Fred’s Fish Market on the pier, where Dad had done the high-speed drive-by that Easter I was talking about before. I thought as we walked that nobody in the cars going by would know I was walking around town with a genius. The only reason I even knew was because Mrs. Closky had once sent Mary Parker down the hall on a bogus errand to get her out of the room. Then Mrs. Closky told us Mary Parker would be classes ahead of students such as ourselves, except the school genius so often skipped school. It was one of those morality tales, I guess, except all it really taught us was that the teachers were mad that they bored Mary Parker to tears.
“Were you born here?” she asked me.
“No, in New York.”
“Oh. I was born here.”
“My dad was born here,” I told her.
“Mine too.”
I thought maybe now Mary Parker would say something about her father, the bus driver, and maybe even explain how she got so brilliant, like which side of the family did the geniuses come from and was her father a brilliant bus driver and so on. But she didn’t say anything like that, and I didn’t ask.
We crossed the highway and started walking up the long wooden pier. The restaurant at the end was closed. We looked in the windows. There were captain’s chairs turned upside down on round wooden tables, and bare wooden floors. It didn’t look like the type of place I would want to eat in, but I didn’t say so, because I was afraid that maybe Mr. Parker had once taken Mary Parker to dinner here.
Out past the restaurant, thick wooden dock posts marked the end of the pier. Mary Parker and I each held on to one and leaned out over the water. Far below, the lake looked as if it had been bombed. The water was bleak with muck, odd pieces of driftwood, or just wood, or just garbage, floated around. About a hundred yards out to the left, a rusted old barge lay swamped like a beached iron whale. “They don’t call it ‘Erie’ for nothing,” she said.
Even so, after standing there a while, I began to like the way it looked. It was so bleak and forlorn, it was almost beautiful. Out by the horizon, the gray of the water merged with the sky, making the desolation complete. I began to think it was good that something so weak in its individual parts could impress you so powerfully as a whole. All told, it was some strange lake. Of course, what did you expect from a body of water that was famous for tributaries that burned?
We both hung there on our dock posts, sometimes shaking our heads, as if the sight of the Great Lake was unspeakably sad. Then, when the feeling was over, we both turned at the same time and walked in silence back up the pier.
We went by Public Square again, and I wondered where the Half Shell was, a concert stage that was sometimes used for choirs at Christmas. “I sang a solo here with the Glee Club when I was little,” I found myself telling Mary Parker. “The piano lady chose me because she said I looked like a choirboy. My mother tried to put a red bow in my hair so I’d look like a girl, but she couldn’t get it to stick. So I guess everybody thought I was a boy when I sang.”
I remembered how frightened and cold I’d been when I stepped forward to sing a Christmas carol alone in front of the hundreds of people in Public Square. But then I had seen my father in the gray felt hat in the first row, and I wasn’t so cold and afraid anymore.
“You still look like a choirboy.”
I didn’t mind the truth, coming from her.
We crossed Euclid Avenue. It was one of the first cold days of September, and there weren’t many people around. Since now there were so many shopping malls in the suburbs, I guess it didn’t make sense to go downtown just to buy stuff anymore. I could still remember trips here with my mother, getting black patent leather shoes and flared wool coats in a blue like the Buicks, and maybe a velvet dress in dark green with a white pique collar. At the big department stores, Halles and Higbee’s, there was Santa Claus at Christmas, and escalators made with brown wood slats that your mom’s high heel could get caught in if you didn’t pull on her hand and warn her from experience before she got on, and lots of red wall-to-wall carpeting, and nice older women with glasses dangling from their necks on little thin ropes, and men too, who carefully wrote down with pencils where to send our packages, and repaid us for our patience with hard candy. And from the women, sometimes, soft, strange-feeling kisses.
Passing these stores made me feel old.
“Want to rob Woolworth’s?”
Mary Parker had stopped in front of the five-and-dime store.
“Uh. Not really.”
“No?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Ever been in Woolworth’s?”
“Uh. Not really.”
“Well, here’s your big chance.”
The old wooden floorboards knocked loudly under my riding boots as I followed Mary in her silent black high-tops toward a section in the back. “What are we doing?” I whispered. “I’m not allowed to rob stores.”
I guess she didn’t hear me though.
At a counter under a sign that said NOTIONS was a wide woman with a tall, white, beehive hairdo. Mary Parker stopped and stared at her, and I stood behind. “Mary,” I whispered, “what are notions?”
“What do you think?”
“Ideas?”
“Yeah. Bad ones. Look around.”
Mary Parker started walking slowly up and down the aisles, lightly touching the items on the displays. She toyed with a package of one-inch elastic, ran her finger around the circle of a wooden embroidery hoop, fondled a pair of what were called dress shields and passed them all by. Then she stopped at the hair accessories. She reached for a card of bobby pins, deftly folding the edge of it down. Then she passed behind me and said, “Take those.”
“No thanks.”
“Just do it. Don’t be so scared.”
I stood there and watched Mary Parker head for the counter and the clerk with the white beehive under the NOTIONS sign. And I looked back at the bobby pins.
I couldn’t think of one reason to take them. I didn’t want them. Bobby pins wouldn’t even stay in my hair. I could take them for Cabot, the one with the pretty long hair. But Cabot would get confused if I just came home and said, “Here, I brought you some bobby pins.” She’d say, “You brought me some bobby pins?” And I couldn’t explain it by saying they were hot bobby pins, and therefore far more collectible.
Even so, I began
to consider stealing them. I looked over at Mary Parker, who was now ordering black ribbon from the clerk with the white beehive under the NOTIONS sign. I looked back at the bobby pins. They were arranged on the card in four separate fans, and a girl with a bouffant hairdo whom I had no desire to look like smiled out at me from the corner. I scowled back at her, stroking what there was of my hair. I stood there so long that that girl on the card and I entered into a kind of staring contest. Except then maybe I realized. Maybe she wasn’t staring at me at all. Maybe she was trying to tell me something. Save me. Fear is the opposite of love.
I looked toward Mary Parker. The clerk with the white beehive had gone to cut the black ribbon, and Mary Parker quickly waved at me, palm up. I scanned up and down my aisle. Nobody was there. So I grabbed the card with the bobby pin girl and shoved it in my jacket pocket. About one second later, I heard the clerk with the white beehive bellow an obscenity I won’t even mention at Mary Parker. I threw the bobby pin girl into a bin of chiffon scarves and ran for the door, my boots clattering along the floorboards, Mary Parker’s sneakers slapping fast behind.
Outside, we didn’t stop running until we’d rounded three corners. Then Mary Parker emptied her pockets. She had a yard of black grosgrain ribbon, a bright pink polyester chiffon scarf, a spool of cream-colored cotton thread. She reached under her shirt and pulled the last item out. It was the card with the bobby pin girl. “Isn’t this yours?”
I grinned. I was weirdly glad to see her. But when I reached, Mary Parker pulled her away like I didn’t deserve her and put the card in her pocket. “Come on. Let’s bring this stuff back.”
Oh. “But we’ll be returning to the scene of the crime.”
“I know,” she said, somewhat exasperated. “That’s the whole point.”