Edge (3 page)

But I am drifting in my thoughts to future Fridays, traditional and loving, donning a wet suit for a rendezvous in the deep blue sea. Keeping my date with that warm fish I married.

SON OF A ONE EYE

E
very fall, when it's still hot and people are wearing their summer clothes because the weather hasn't snapped yet, I think of the day we dropped Denny off in the freshman dorm.

My dad wanted to march him right into the Phi Deke fraternity house and say, “Here's your new pledge!”

My mother is the one in the family blessed with some sense of reality, despite the fact that she read us Stephen King as bedtime stories when we were kids. My mother said Denny should stay in the dorm. She said that the fraternity knew about him and they'd invite him over when they were ready. Denny, you see, was a legacy.

What made him a legacy was that Dad had been a Phi Deke when he went to college. If your father was a Phi Deke, the fraternity had to take you. It didn't matter what a legacy looked like, what his grades were, or if he was a dud.

Dad felt good after we left Denny. He said college would teach Denny to assert himself, and the fraternity would make a man out of him. Mom raised her eyebrows and gave me a look. She'd sneaked some of her Crushed Walnut Cake into Denny's garment bag, so I think she knew he was going to need some comfort. Denny had never wanted to go to college, much less join a club there. The poor guy had no defense against Dad's wishes. He never had. To me, a fraternity would seem like a house full of real big brothers. But to Denny, they would be grown-up versions of the ones who'd pushed him around in all the recess yards of his youth.

My heart ached for my big brother, who wasn't big but my size and skinny. A nailbiter, a nerd. Denny was a babbler. People made him so nervous that when he was around them, he described the plots of movies and TV sitcoms. He gnawed at his nails or rubbed one eyebrow so hard with his finger that little hairs fell out.

Dad said he'd outgrow it.

Mom said it was better than the way he was when he was little. Back then, he wouldn't talk at all.

“I can't imagine Denny not talking,” I said.

“There was a time,” said Dad, “when Denny would only talk to Skipper.”

I never knew Skipper well. He'd been Denny's dog. There was an eight-year age difference between Denny and me.

Denny said Skipper wasn't his real name, anyway. His real name was Misery, and he was from the planet of Perfecto, same as Denny.

“Don't laugh, because this is true,” Denny would say. He always had something new to add to his story of coming from outer space.

On Perfecto, said Denny, everything was so perfect that people forgot how to cry. They even had to be reminded there was such a thing as unhappiness. They wore yellow buttons with black sad faces painted on them. And there were crying clubs, something like our comedy clubs. There were tragics performing in them. They'd tell stories that would leave people crying in the aisles.

“You know how here on earth we might name a girl Felicity or Joy?” Denny said. “On Perfecto, they'd call her Sorry or Dismal.”

There were times I almost believed Denny's story that he'd invaded my real brother's body before birth. Why
couldn't
there be other forms of life doing research on us? And wouldn't that explain why Denny was so different?

Anyone could tell that Denny wasn't one of the crowd, and it didn't matter what crowd you were talking about. He didn't fit in anywhere, except in his room, where he spent most of his time. There, or in the kitchen watching Mom bake. She made our bread, and our cakes, cookies, and breakfast muffins. He liked watching and thinking up names like Crushed Walnut Cake and Downhearted Doughnuts, Heartsick Cinnamon Rolls, and Weeping White Chocolate Bars. Perfecto names, he told me … Shhh—don't tell Mom.

I'd tell Mom anyway. At times I'd get to thinking it would all add, up if there really was a place called Perfecto and Denny was from there.

Mom would say something like, “You go back and tell Denny he'll have a
very
sad story to take back there if he doesn't get his bike out of the driveway before his dad … excuse me,
your
dad gets home!”

When Denny wasn't around, our father used to say, “Joey, you got the looks in the family. You're the spitting image of your mom.”

Once, I asked him, “What'd Denny get?”

“Hmmm? What'd you say?”

“You heard me,” I said. I knew he was stalling, crossing out brains, brawn, and personality. None of it applied to Denny.

But Dad came up with something. “Why, he got that beautiful name,” he said. “Dennis Guilder Smith—that's got a ring to it!”

He was right about that. My mother had named Denny. I was named by my father. I was just plain Joe Smith. Not even a middle name. Dad thought middle names, were phony. Thanks, Dad, for all the choices.

Our dad was not imaginative, and he didn't read Stephen King. Dennis Guilder was a character out of a King story about a 1958 Plymouth named Christine.

If Denny had been a girl, guess what name he would have?

Is it easier to be different if you're a boy, or a girl? Would Christine Smith have found people backing away from her as she gave detailed descriptions of
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
or
Repo Man
?

Postcards from Denny early that autumn were actually Mom's. She had made them out for him ahead of time.

I am feeling a) okay, b) awful, c) in between.

Denny would check all three.

Soon I began wearing sweaters to school, and slipping a blanket over me nights in the top bunk. With Denny gone, I was sleeping up there. I could touch the stars he had pasted to the ceiling so he wouldn't be too lonesome for Perfecto. On Perfecto, the stars were an arm's length away, said Denny, soft as rose petals and the only light.

At the end of September, Dad got tired of postcards that carried no news. He called Denny at college.

“Great! Great!” we heard him say. It was already a suspicious beginning to any conversation between Dad and my brother. When Dad glanced across the room at Mom and me and said, “Denny's got a girlfriend,” we both ran for the extensions.

Dad was asking, “How do you like living at Phi Deke?”

“I'm still in the dorm, Dad, until I'm an active member. But I'm treasurer of my pledge class. And I'm taking Mildred to the house for the big Halloween dance.”

“Dennis, you don't dance!” said Mom.

“Mildred says dancing bores her anyway, so we'll sit it out in the TV room.”

“Where did you meet Mildred?” Mom said. Dad was shouting over her that a man had to learn how to dance and Denny should take lessons.

“The guys fixed me up with her,” said Denny. “She was a blind date.”

After that, if we wanted to communicate with Denny, we had to call him. All he wanted to talk about was Mildred. Mildred looked like a young Madonna. Mildred was brilliant. Mildred wanted to be a scientist. Mildred believed that our planet was situated in the black hole. Etcetera, etcetera … Dad was delighted. He said we could thank the Phi Dekes that finally Denny was finding his way in this world. That's what fraternities were all about, Dad claimed. They gave you confidence, and pointed you where you wanted to go.

The one time Denny did make a call, it was after the Halloween dance.

There wasn't time, he said, to go into detail. But it was a nice dance, he supposed. It had just cost more than he thought it would, which was why he was calling.

I'd never heard Dad okay a request for money so casually. “I bet you all went out to eat, hmmm, that place on the lake costs an arm and a leg, what's the name?”

Denny didn't come up with the name.

Dad said, “A chip off the old block, Den, that's you. When I'd call home from college, you know how my father'd answer the phone? He'd say, ‘How much?'”

The night we met Denny at Islip airport for Thanksgiving vacation, he was too tired to talk. Some airline foul-up had made him five hours late. Before we went to bed, he got out this picture of Mildred. It was an 8x10 in an old silver frame. He took the bottom bunk so he could look up at it. He didn't seem to mind that he couldn't reach out and touch the stars. All Denny wanted to talk about was Mildred. He said she looked like a young Madonna.

“How do you like the Phi Dekes?” Dad asked him at breakfast.

“They aren't going to make me an active, Dad.”

“They have to, Son, like it or lump it.”

“Not if you break a trust. Just listen, Dad. Okay?”

Denny told us that Mildred had been workings her way through college. She clerked at a mall just outside Ithaca. She had some scholarship money, too, but everything was more expensive than she'd thought. She was struggling to survive at all.

“She was very impressed that I was a Phi Deke pledge.” Denny said. “So the night of the dance I bragged about being treasurer of the pledge class. While everyone was dancing, I showed her the president's suite, where the safe was. I told her the combination was the date that Christopher Columbus discovered America.”

“1492,” I said. I was pleased that I could remember any date, since I'd never gotten higher than
C
in history.

But Mom was way ahead of the story. She held her head with her hands and murmured, “Oh, no, Denny.”

“She couldn't help it,” my brother said. “It was like showing a baby where candy was. There was about two hundred dollars cash in the safe. We were watching TV downstairs later and she excused herself to go to the john. That's when she went back up and cleaned us out.”

“Did you pay back the money?”

“Yes. Some of it I borrowed from you, Dad.”

“Then they ought to give you a second chance. You're a legacy!”

“They won't, and I don't want them to,” said Denny. “I didn't think I belonged there and I don't—not in a fraternity, not in college at all. I think I might be a writer.”

“And starve to death,” Dad added. But he wasn't going to give Denny a fight this time. Not even Dad would send Denny back into the fray after he'd made such a valiant effort at college, and romance, and frat life.

Mom just put her arms around Denny and said she was so sorry. Did he know where Mildred was?

Denny said he didn't care. After that, he never talked about her. But for a long time he kept her picture on the bureau. She would smile at us in our room, making me feel sad for my brother.

Maybe Denny listened too well to Dad about starving to death if he became a writer. Instead, Denny got a job in a bakery. By the time I was a junior in high school, he had borrowed enough from the bank to buy the place.

The Perfecto Bakery does okay with its Teardrop Cookies, Heartbreak Bread, and Glum Pudding. And you'd have to say that Denny does okay, too. He lives alone above the bakery in an apartment. He sleeps in our old bunk bed, which Mom gave him after I was graduated. He sleeps in the top bunk, I know, because he has put stars up on the ceiling in his bedroom.

As “D.G. Smith,” he has not written very much. Denny takes a long time getting his ideas down just the way he wants them. Two of his stories have been published in
Fantasy
magazine, and reprinted in anthologies. One was translated into French. He has some small fame because of them, even though he was paid very little.

The first is about Perfecto, as Denny described it to me over the years.

But it is the second one I find most interesting. That one is about a club of the One Eyes. The One Eyes are male inhabitants of Pitch Dark, a place inside the black hole. Any Son of a One Eye is invited to join, unless he is proven to be dishonorable. One of the legacies has two eyes. His name is Guilder. Not only is he ugly with his two eyes, but his mind cannot stay on one subject only, as the minds of Pitch Darks do. His mind runs all over the place, and he is repulsive because of it.

Shortly after he is put in charge of The One Eyes' Heavy Egg, he meets the beautiful Muldred. Unable to believe that this lovely one-eyed female with the narrow mind might find him attractive, he boasts of guarding The Heavy Egg. He tells her how to get it out from the glass case. She takes it from the clubhouse, leaving Guilder to resign in disgrace. When he learns from an enemy of the One Eyes that Muldred was paid six rare scarlet parrot feathers to lure Guilder into disgrace, he still keeps a likeness of her in his locket. Across it he's written ONLY TRUST YOURSELF.

Mom said that Denny's stories always have a kernel of truth in them. She said that Perfecto is really about a kid who's so offbeat he feels as though he's from another planet … And we know who the One Eyes are, don't, we? said Mom. She said that after she read the second story, she had asked Denny if he'd known when he was home Thanksgiving that the Phi Dekes had set him up. My brother told her that Mildred had left him a note confessing everything. At the end, she had written:
I
don't blame, you if you never trust anyone again!

Dad said he didn't believe it. Either the girl was a liar, or Denny was twisting the truth because he was still mad at Phi Deke. “Don't listen to your brother on the subject of Phi Deke,” Dad told me that last summer before I left home.

“Denny never mentions Phi Deke,” I said. He never mentioned Mildred, either.

“Your brother Dennis has a great imagination, I'll give him that,” Dad had said. “But where will that get you in the real world?”

No one at the Phi Deke house remembers hearing anything about a Dennis Guilder Smith. Not even the housemother who remembers pledges from way back in the 1970s.

I took the trouble to find out that the, treasurer of the pledge class that year was not named Smith, but Langhorn … Denny's name isn't on record anywhere. It's as though my brother was never even there.