Calamity and Other Stories (4 page)

After the afternoon that I walked in on Dad and Shirley, I tried to convince Valerie to let us spend less time at my place and more at hers—a one-story house with a porch behind it that looked onto a small grassy area. The house was bigger and sturdier than our rented cottage, since Valerie’s family lived there year-round. They didn’t have a lot of money, Valerie often reminded me. She said this was because her father was a poet.

I had never met a poet before. After knowing Valerie’s father, I was under the impression, for years to come, that poets were unconditionally cheerful people. “Hey-hey!” he always greeted us, swooping Valerie up in his arms. “Still a lightweight,” he would say, putting her back down and pretending to be disappointed. “You’ve gotta put some meat on your bones.”

He filled in silences with jolly talk. “Geoff, Valerie,” he might say in mock seriousness, “I want each of you to eat one of these nectarines. And then I want you to tell me: is life good?” And he would hand us each a perfectly ripe nectarine. His jovial face seemed to be a balance against Mrs. Darden’s, which had something sad about it. When Mr. Darden joked, she gave wistful smiles.

“I just met your parents downtown,” she said to me one hot afternoon as the four of us lounged on their porch. I was in my swim trunks, concentrating on not raising my arms too high; overnight, it seemed, the hairs there had thickened into a patch of dark-brown fur.

“You mean my dad and Shirley,” I corrected. “My mother’s in Fenton with my grandparents.”

“Recovering,” Valerie added, and I wished I hadn’t confided in her.

Mrs. Darden turned and surprised me with a flicker of something in her eyes. But it quickly subsided, and she said, “Oh.” She put her hand on my back and said softly, “We all recover at some point.”

“Listen to this,” Mr. Darden said, almost impatiently, adjusting himself on the wicker recliner. “Some Robert Lowell for your listening pleasure.” And he read:

“O to break loose. All life’s grandeur
is something with a girl in summer . . .”

The rest of the stanza didn’t make much sense to me, even though Mr. Darden read it in a clear, triumphant tone. Then he slapped the book closed and laughed. “You’ll read the rest later. Crazy genius.” He shook his head, and Mrs. Darden went quietly back inside.

When I arrived back at the cottage later that day, Shirley, tanned and blonder than ever, said, “Mrs. Bloor who runs the bakery told me that Valerie’s parents lost a child last summer. Valerie’s brother. He drowned when Valerie and her parents were in town one day.”

I pretended not to hear. I still felt distant enough from Shirley not to have to speak to her. But she went on. “He and two of the sons from the Live Bait store were out in a summer boy’s sailboat. The weather got rough, and the boat capsized. Valerie’s brother must have hit his head. The other boys lived. It was just one of those freak accidents.”

“So it’s a good thing you’ve been playing with her,” my father added. “I’m sure it takes her mind off things. You keep it up.”

I was old enough to resent a father’s orders. I wanted to tell him how Valerie pocketed candy without paying, how she threw firecrackers at the Arno house. I wanted to remind him that if it weren’t for him and Shirley I could have been home with kids my age, with Mack who understood me, with my mother who loved me more than anyone else and certainly more than some blonde smiling woman with painted toenails and her hand on my father’s butt.

My days with Valerie now felt even more like a responsibility. I couldn’t help running through my head, daily, that stormy scenario: a sailboat tossed by wind and waves, rain pounding water, three boys thrashing, maybe yelling, maybe not. It wasn’t something I wanted to think about, but Valerie was a constant reminder. I resented her misfortune, and her eleven-year-old-ness. Where were those carefree teenage girls that I now, more than ever, felt ready to take on?

By late August I no longer thought twice about the hair under my arms, was no longer ashamed of my autonomous erections. I even convinced myself I’d grown bigger biceps. I was looking forward to getting back to school, to Mack and our Red Sox bets, to girls with hips, away from Dad and Shirley, home to my mother, who—according to a call from my grandmother—was “doing a little better.”

On the way to the Ascott Theatre with Valerie two days before I was to leave, I stopped into Reed’s grocery to buy my usual Charleston Chew. They froze them for you there, if you liked them that way. When I came back outside, I saw Valerie staring at Arno’s Live Bait across the street, her head tilted shyly down. I walked over to watch the Arnos in action. It was the usual—the young ones fighting, playing, and eating sandwiches, their grimy fingers leaving dirt marks on the cheap white bread. All of it was what I, an only child, had never had the opportunity to experience: brothers stealing pickles out of sisters’ hands, the littlest boy carelessly knocking into an older sibling’s calf, one girl leaning against another, who braided the filthy hair of a third. Sweaty young bodies, stomachs peeking out from handed-down hand-me-downs. The pregnant girl was there, fanning herself on the front stoop. She waved at us. An older brother sat down next to her and, seeing us nearby, called, “Hi, Val,” in a shy voice.

“Hi,” Valerie called back, and then, turning to me, said, “Let’s go.” When we began walking away, she said, “I hate them. I hate them more than anything.”

“Why? What have they done to you?” I said this despite what I knew—that they had done nothing other than continue to live.

And, as if she too knew this, Valerie said, head down, “Nothing.”

But when we entered the old theater she still seemed angry. The Doberman growled at us. Valerie said, “Let’s go up to the balcony and spit on people.”

It wasn’t anything I felt like doing. To divert Valerie, I went up to the fishbowl, which had gradually produced a small pile of business cards, and said, “Who will it be today?” I picked out a card and read, “Alida Hayes.
Total Body Beauty.
Hair, nails, waxing, European facials.”

Valerie looked up and let her shoulders unhunch. “Let’s call her,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Let’s call her up. On the phone.” She grabbed the card from my hand. “Her number’s right here: 489-7623.”

“Why do you want to call her?”

“To tell her she
won,
stupid.”

“You mean prank her?”

“You’ll have to do it,” Valerie said, suddenly businesslike. “Since your voice sounds older.”

It seemed like it could be funny. Like when we’d call up random numbers and ask whoever answered what they wanted on their pizza. I laughed. “Sure.”

There was a pay phone in front of the theater, and we did it right there. When I told her she’d won, Alida Hayes started screaming. It was a long, multi-toned scream interspersed with the words “thank you” and lasted a good forty-five seconds. I’d never had anyone thank me so heartily, so gratefully. Then Alida Hayes said, “For once I can finally go on vacation!”

I hadn’t expected this. I felt my heart drop the way it had the night my mom found out about Dad and Shirley. Of course I hadn’t known what Mom had found out, but I’d known something was wrong, just as I did right now.

Alida Hayes asked, “When should I come pick it up—the check, I mean? It’s a check, right? I hope so, because I’d like to reserve a ticket—”

“We’ll bring it over to you,” I said quickly. Valerie was tapping me on the shoulder, mouthing, “What’s she saying?”

“Oh, great!” Alida Hayes was saying. “Wonderful! Will the paper be covering this? I mean, will there be a photograph or anything?”

“Uh—yes, ma’am.”

“Well, oh my—could you possibly wait a half-hour or so? Because I’d like to do my hair.”

“N-no problem,” I stuttered. Valerie stuck her ear next to the receiver.

“Oh, wonderful,” said Alida Hayes. “Thank you, thank you so much!”

“You’re welcome.” I hung up, my hands shaking.

“What’d she say?” Valerie asked quickly. “What’d she do?”

“Oh—nothing really,” I managed to say.

“What do you mean?” Valerie sounded annoyed.

“It didn’t really work.”

That was enough of an explanation for Valerie, who tossed Alida Hayes’ business card on the sidewalk, saying, “Race you to Reed’s—winner buys FireBalls!”

When Valerie came by the cottage the next day, I couldn’t look at her. I stared out at the river, where sea scum basked on the surface. There had been a morning storm. “I’m not feeling well,” I told Valerie, until she went home. I was trying not to picture Alida Hayes, what her hair looked like after she had fixed it up and waited for the newspaper crew to show. I supposed that after a long enough time she would have called the theater and learned the truth. Valerie didn’t come by again until that evening. “C’mon, let’s make a bonfire,” she said, when I’d been ignoring her for an hour. I told her I had to do family things with my dad. Of course, he just spent the night rubbing Shirley’s feet, and I played battleship against myself, which, for the record, doesn’t work.

That was my last full day at the cottage. The next morning Valerie came to say goodbye and found me again sitting on the edge of the dock. Wisps of seaweed nodded in the water. “You’ll be starting school next week, huh?” Valerie asked.

“Yup,” I said. “I don’t mind.”

“Will you miss me?” she asked. “Will you think of me?”

“Sure,” I said. But the summer was already taking the shape of a degraded memory, to be pushed aside and back. I said, “I hope I make the soccer team.”

“I’ll think of you,” Valerie said. “You’ll ask your dad to come back here next summer, right?”

“I just remembered something I forgot to pack.”

“Well, let me give you my address and phone number.” Valerie took a little pink address book from her pocket. She had already written her information on a piece of paper, which she handed to me, and then had me fill mine in on a page in her little book. “Well, I guess this is so long, for now,” she said.

“So long,” I said, as she opened her arms wide. It was not a gesture I was prepared for; the girls I knew didn’t hug. Valerie stepped back when she noticed my hesitation, but she didn’t lower her arms. I stepped into them, and we hugged each other goodbye, but all I could think was that here I finally had a chance to touch a girl and she was only eleven.

Valerie turned to leave. “I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you to make the soccer team,” she said as she walked away.

Back home, I forgot all about Valerie. There were more important things to attend to: soccer, schoolwork, masturbation. I spent a lot of time in my room rather than face my mother, who, as evidence of her recovery, smiled extremely at all times. It was a tight, frightening smile that she had never had before, and it was accompanied by spurts of enthusiasm for the minutest activity. “The
weather
was so
beautiful
today, I just had to pull
weeds
!” she would say when I returned on a Sunday night after spending the weekend with Dad and Shirley. That choke-hold grin. She would answer the phone, prepare dinner, clean the kitchen with ferocious glee.

I stopped inviting friends over. To me it was the ultimate betrayal, my mother having replaced herself with this grinning dull-eyed woman. My father told me it must be medication, and when I asked her point-blank, my mother confirmed it. “The medicine fixes my
mood
so that I can find the energy to deal with the
problem,”
she explained brightly. “How can I fix the
problem
if I’m in a bad
mood
?”

In November she checked herself into The Hillsbrook Retreat, and I went to live with my father and Shirley and Shirley’s son, who must have worn out his welcome in Schenectady. It wasn’t until December that I received a letter Valerie had written over a month earlier, telling me about her school and asking if I’d made the soccer team. The very concept of mail being forwarded was nothing I’d ever had the opportunity to consider. The fact that the letter managed to find me—and at such an improbable location, the house where my father and Shirley cohabited—seemed meaningful, ominous. The whole glum summer, which I had successfully forgotten, came back to me. Not the big things, like the reason for Mrs. Darden’s weak smile or Valerie’s loneliness, or the fact that I would never write her back. But everything else: the Arno clan, the Doberman, Mr. Darden reading poetry aloud. I even dreamed that I ran into Alida Hayes. She was crying, her hair in a stiff bouffant, saying, “They never showed up.” Then she turned into my old third grade teacher and yelled at me for cheating on my math test, which really happened, even though I hadn’t cheated. Then I woke up and promised God I would somehow call Alida Hayes back in the morning and apologize, but I didn’t.

Anyway, it may not sound so important now, but it’s why, when my father pulled me aside one evening during my mother’s months away and said, “I’m sorry, so very sorry, to have put you through this,” I forgave him. “You don’t know what it feels like,” he said to me. “You don’t know the guilt.” I thought of Valerie— who had, despite her youth, known this adulthood before me— and said, “I know.”

Prom Season

In French class their teacher, Madame Lipsky, made an announcement: “Prom is one and a half months from today, and I want you boys to ensure that every girl in this room has a date. None of this ‘I’m going stag’ garbage. No more ‘I’m too cool to go to the prom’ baloney. I don’t want a single girl telling me she hasn’t been invited just because you boys are too wimpy to pick up the phone, dial a number, and ask her.” Madame Lipsky peered gravely over the broad plastic rims of her glasses. “It’s your duty.
Entendu
?”

The boys nodded sullenly and gave her their word. From his seat in the back row, Mack felt, already, the heavy weight of an unfinished task. Though he regularly left assignments until the last minute and rarely felt pressure to do well on any of them, what Madame Lipsky wanted was greater than just Mack and his report card; suddenly there were all these girls—and not just his mother—to disappoint.

“So much for our plans,” Geoff, Mack’s best friend, muttered, though they’d made no plans. At least, Mack hadn’t. They spent after-school hours eating bubbly slices at Palazzo Pizza, stealing dumb things from the Woolworth’s, thumbing through used albums at J.J.’s Records & Cassettes. Though their town was a mere subway line away from Cambridge and downtown Boston, they were perfectly comfortable just loitering at the deli or smoking pot and playing video games at Carl Loam’s house. Theirs was a school full of people who seldom rode anything other than a car or bicycle, who spent weekend hours in back-yards and malls and multi-screen cinemas. Some of the kids might go to Harvard Square to hang out at the Pit, but Mack and Geoff mostly did things like play Frisbee with whoever happened to be at the park. None of these things required planning. In fact, the only thing Mack had ever done that took any serious attention was write his application for college—a small, nondescript one in Connecticut, to which he had since been accepted.

A note, crumpled into a stiff ball, landed on Mack’s little kidney-shaped desk. He knew it was from Tilda and unfolded it with mild curiosity.

“DO YOUR DUTY, BOY!”

It would never have occurred to anyone to not do what Madame Lipsky had asked. For one thing, she was sure to be grading them on it. That was the way her classes worked, and it was the reason students liked her. Her system made it possible to succeed simply by volunteering for the multiple-sclerosis walk she organized each autumn, or by being nice to Jessica Schneck (who had tried to commit suicide two years ago and, unfortunately for everyone else, failed). This system was to everyone’s advantage. On the broadest level, it fostered an aura of good will that radiated from Madame Lipsky’s French classes to permeate the rest of the high school. Administrators sometimes said that there was more humanity in Madame Lipsky’s classroom than in the rest of the world—which was probably why they kept Madame Lipsky on even though no one from her classes had ever even attempted to take the Advanced Placement exam.

That was because, on a more basic level, Madame Lipsky’s system meant that you needn’t actually speak any French. Madame Lipsky didn’t. She passed class time letting her students watch videos that had anything French in them—a character with a French name, say, or a scene in a French restaurant—and for every film of the students’ choosing she would retaliate with a selection of her own. Since she was the teacher, her choices didn’t even need to have a French element. After the students selected
The Pink Panther,
for instance, she had them watch
Legal Eagles
because, she said, “I just love how they’ve done Debra Winger’s hair.”

To Mack and the others, this was all part of a public school education, and they were grateful for Madame Lipsky’s straight talk. It was refreshing to be treated like mature beings, if not full-fledged adults. Most of the other teachers had given up long ago and greeted each incoming class as though witnessing an influx of carpenter ants. Either that or they were young and overeager, composed rhyming ballads about math formulas, made profuse apologies for ungraded exams—were embarrassing in their enthusiasm for things that surely meant nothing in the greater world. Mack and the others couldn’t help assuming that what they learned in Madame Lipsky’s class was of more use than the usual high school fare. There was little doubt that the way Madame Lipsky ran things was the way the real world worked.

Madame Lipsky’s announcement marked the official start of prom season. Within days students were discussing cummerbunds and boutonnieres and whose house to escape to afterward. To Mack it felt like an approaching storm, or an exam or a trial. He had attended two school dances before, the kind where the girls asked the boys, and both times it had been an ordeal, dressing up in rented suits that made him feel like someone in a play, meeting the parents of a girl he barely knew and didn’t really want to go out with again, while his mother laughed at him and at his crooked bow tie and snapped photographs that were sure to be used in some sort of blackmail years and years from now.

But none of those past dances could match the Senior Prom, which at this point in the year was the only thing to hold the seniors’ attention. They were about to graduate and already knew where they’d be going to college or working. Their grades barely mattered anymore. Nothing could match the drama of who had found a dress and who almost had but it wasn’t the right size, of who would carpool with whom, and who was spending the weekend at the Cape afterward. But Mack found the hype off-putting—and so Mack put it off.

Geoff, on the other hand, immediately took Madame Lipsky’s order to heart and, in typical fashion, asked Leslie Murphy, the one girl you could safely take to a dance without being suspected of having a crush on her. Leslie was extremely smart and perfectly fine-looking without being pretty and wore skirts only three times a year, for the choral concerts in December and May and for the annual awards ceremony, where she tended to win all the prizes. Mack could almost see Geoff—who in all three of his college letters of recommendation had been described as “responsible”—checking her off some mental list. Geoff always completed his objectives swiftly and smartly, which was why the teachers loved him and how he had gotten into Pomona.

The teachers loved Mack, too, but in a slightly exasperated way that Mack found comforting. He used to think that their affection for him was due to his mother, who everyone knew had raised him on her own yet attended parent-teacher conferences with none of the belligerence or accusatory concern of so many other parents. Geoff said that Mack’s mother was especially great because even though she made it clear Mack ought to be working harder and getting better grades she actually just let him do whatever he wanted (which meant that Mack had never been particularly rebellious at all).

As for the prom, Mack supposed he should ask Tilda. She often spent time with him and Geoff at Carl Loam’s house, and he was used to her sarcasm and her long spurts of laughter. She was basically one of the guys, except that she wasn’t. She was a girl, and this was impossible to ignore, especially when she wore that green knit sweater that was just slightly too small. Tilda was tall, like Mack, with a big, somewhat horsy smile and a mess of reddish hair that she barely bothered to comb. Now that the weather was hot, she kept wearing shorts to school. There had been one steamy day, a year before, when Mack looked over and saw she’d hiked her rayon skirt up above her knees, onto her thighs.

That image returned to him often, the fabric piled there lightly across her freckled flesh. There were plenty of other images around to tantalize him—the postcards in Carl Loam’s room, for instance—but it was the memory of Tilda with her skirt piled up that always set Mack off.

Plus, he liked Tilda, truly—more than any other girl. The problem was, she had an even bigger crush (it was obvious) on him, and that was always a bit of a turnoff.

Each afternoon, during seventh period, in Fourth Year French, Madame Lipsky held an update. She looked at everyone through those huge, tinted glasses, from under her huge, tinted hair, and said, Whoever doesn’t have a date yet, raise your hand. She was in her forties and wore shoulder pads in all of her blouses, which usually tied in floppy bows at the neck. Her skirts were always long, and her leather boots scrunched down around her heels like the skin on a bulldog’s face. She wore bright rouge and eyeshadow and slightly purple lipstick. Somehow, on Madame Lipsky, this combination looked perfectly acceptable.

Already people were pairing off. Bernard Leeson, who would do anything for an A, within a week had asked Jessica Schneck. Even girls who hadn’t yet been asked were spending hours after school at Nancy’s Look Great! Shop, examining rainbows of eyeshadow, requesting special antiperspirant for delicate fabrics, researching nail polish and face powder and adhesive cups that could keep anyone’s breasts perky under a strapless dress for up to eighteen hours. There were lipsticks that doubled as blush, and hair rollers you heated up before clipping them in. Mack heard all about these innovations during gym class, where, adorned in team pinnies soaked with the previous classes’ sweat, the girls formed little gangs in the outfield to discuss whether they wanted baby’s breath or ivy in their corsages.

When it came to boys like Mack, Madame Lipsky appeared to expect them to take their time. But one Friday she told the class, “We have a problem.”

The students braced themselves for another assignment.

Carmine Bocchino, Madame Lipsky explained, had asked five girls and still didn’t have a date.

Carmine wasn’t even in their French class. He had a speech impediment and was in the “slow” track. But the kids in the “slow” track were constantly picking on him, because he was short and scrawny and talked funny. And so he didn’t really have any friends. In fact, no one had ever given him any thought at all until the business about the prom.

Within minutes it was clear to everyone in Fourth Year French what the problem was: Carmine had reached far out of his league. First he had asked Natalie Lopez, the editor of the school paper, who was petite and extremely pretty and not the sort of person even Mack would ever feel comfortable approaching. When Natalie called Carmine the next night to tell him an official No thank you (it had taken her a whole day to formulate a polite, well-worded rejection of just the right tone), Carmine waited approximately two minutes before phoning Trini Prince, who had starred in every single school play except
The Man Who
Came to Dinner
(and that was only because she had mononucleosis that semester). Trini, too, asked Carmine if she could call him back, and, after practicing the lines briefly, delivered her refusal in a kindly and optimistic yet firm manner.

At school the next morning, Carmine had cornered Molly Lang, the star of the girls’ basketball team (and a good foot taller than Carmine); she told him she was waiting for “a special someone.” And so Carmine had moved on to Geraldine Crowley, the head cheerleader, and when she said a flat-out Sorry, no, went straight to Belle Gardner, who was seven months pregnant yet hadn’t lost her habit of threatening to beat up anyone who annoyed her. She told Carmine that if he didn’t get away from her that second she would beat him up.

All of these facts emerged in a matter of minutes, as the girls of Fourth Year French began sharing information they had promised never to reveal to anyone.

“Natalie told me right afterward; she couldn’t believe he had the nerve to ask her.”

“Trini was so shocked, she had to rehearse her lines with me.”

“Geraldine was totally grossed out; we had to go buy her some aspirin.”

“I was right there at my locker when Belle grabbed him by his shirt.”

(No one could figure out, though, who Molly Lang’s “special someone” might be.)

But with Madame Lipsky so concerned, no one dared make fun of Carmine. No one said he had been foolish to ask all the school’s best girls. After all, wasn’t he doing what all the boys wished they could? They forgot that they had ever thought of him as ridiculous. His predicament began to seem, even to them, slightly tragic.

Now the Fourth Year French girls who didn’t have dates were preparing polite rejections, trying them out on one another, since it seemed you never knew when or where Carmine might pop up. Madame Lipsky told them to shush, to listen up, and to think.

“We need to put our heads together,” Madame Lipsky said. “I’m not asking any of you girls to be Carmine’s date, but we need to do some work here. I want you to go home and brain-storm, and let’s see what we can come up with.”

But as quickly as the problem had arisen, it seemed to disappear. The gossip stopped, the chain of proposals ended, and there were no more Carmine-in-action sightings, no more stories of polite, shocked refusals.

Mack supposed Carmine had given up; that was what Mack would have done. But Geoff said someone must have said yes.

“Nah, you think? To Carmine?”

“Someone must have.”

“But
who
?” Everyone wondered. But no one was friends with Carmine, and so no one asked him.

“What about you?” Geoff asked Mack one weekend, when they were out in the woods behind Geoff’s father’s house, smoking Mack’s mother’s cigarettes.

“What about me?”

“Have you asked her yet?”

“Asked who what?”

“Tilda. Don’t play dumb.”

“Should I ask her?”

“Why not? Prom’s in two weeks. We can all go hang out at Leslie’s aunt’s place on the Cape.”

Mack tried to pay attention to the thoughts that came into his head. Some of them were images from when he was with Tilda: making that DNA replica for Mr. Bunuel’s class, or doing disgusting things with the soup at lunch. Some of them were things she had said to him when they were horsing around, and the times when she had made it obvious how much she liked him. There were images of her neck, which Mack sometimes imagined kissing, and her hips, which he sometimes imagined touching, and the way her cotton shirts sometimes clung to her chest. And then there was the rayon skirt piled across her freckled thighs. Not knowing what else to do, Mack said, “Yeah, I’ll ask her tomorrow.”