Empire Falls (41 page)

As a cripple, of course, Cindy Whiting
had
no friends, thus romance could not begin. Had she not been run over by a car as a little girl, she might have been at or near the top of the social pyramid, her parents being rich and her pedigree beyond question, but while no one wished to be unkind, facts were facts and Cindy
was
a cripple. It wasn’t as if anyone was
glad
she was a cripple, simply that it was impossible to pretend she wasn’t when she was. Without a second, she had no choice but to speak on her own behalf, which she did one day in the cafeteria when Miles stopped at her table to carry her lunch tray up to the window. “I love you,” she said without preamble
.

Miles had a procedural predicament of his own, aside from Cindy Whiting. He did have friends—boys like Otto Meyer Jr., whose pedigree, like Miles’s own, was dubious but not impossible—who might successfully, if clumsily, mediate an emotional attachment, but Miles had made the mistake of falling in love outside the system, with a girl named Charlene Gardiner, who worked as a waitress at a greasy spoon downtown and was three years his senior. The system simply wasn’t designed to lend assistance to anyone foolish enough to fall in love outside its clearly defined parameters, which meant that Miles Roby, like Cindy Whiting, was on his own
.

He knew that Charlene Gardiner was no more in love with him than he was with Cindy Whiting, but that did not stop him from seeking out her company, even if that meant merely watching her forlornly from a booth at the Empire Grill, so nearly every day, he’d convince Otto Meyer Jr. to meet him there after school. Thus he knew that havoc would be wreaked if he
accepted Mrs. Whiting’s offer of after-school driving lessons. He’d be swept out of Charlene Gardiner’s orbit and drawn into Cindy Whiting’s. And once in her gravitational pull, he knew he’d be on his own, adrift. His mother would be no help at all. The cutthroat savagery of high school romance inspired in nearly all adults a collective amnesia. Having survived it themselves, they locked those memories far away in some dark chamber of their subconscious where things that are too terrible to contemplate are permanently stored. The more skilled you were at the game in high school, the more deeply your guilty recollections were buried. This was the reason parents so often worried vaguely about their high school children, yet balked at inquiring after the details of their social lives. Heartbreak, they reassured themselves, was “all part of growing up.”

Grace Roby was an exception to this rule. For some reason she seemed to have forgotten exactly none of high school’s horrors. By this time she’d been working for Mrs. Whiting for several years, and seeing that woman’s daughter when she came home from school every day only intensified her natural sympathy. “I can’t bear it, Miles,” she confessed one evening. “I can’t stand to see the way that child has been ostracized, the way her heart is broken each and every day. We have a duty in this world, Miles. You see that, don’t you? We have a
moral duty!”

Miles could not disagree with his mother’s conclusion, though he favored the widest possible definition of the pronoun “we.” He was willing to do his share, but according to his calculations, the obligation that was Cindy Whiting, divided among all the citizens of Empire Falls, amounted for each individual to a manageable moral task, one that could be dispensed with by means of the occasional kind word or gesture. He suspected, however, that his mother had something else entirely in mind. Though they never discussed it, he was pretty sure she wouldn’t think much of his willingness to shoulder his “share” of the Cindy Whiting burden and leave the remainder to others. The majority, she would remind him, never do their share. Grace believed that those who could see their duty clearly were required by God to do the heavy lifting for the morally blind. Where Cindy Whiting was concerned, when his mother said “we,” she really meant “he.”

During this same period, something else was also troubling Miles, something he would’ve been hard-pressed to articulate. Since losing her factory job and going to work for Mrs. Whiting, his mother seemed different, as if she had crossed over into some new place in life. There were few outward signs of this transformation, nothing he could really put his finger on, and though the change had evolved gradually, he sensed it all the same. Grace had come back
from Martha’s Vineyard heartbroken, and for a time it seemed to Miles she might never get over Charlie Mayne. But since going to work for Mrs. Whiting his mother had seemed to emerge from her sadness and to inhabit instead some new terrain. She didn’t seem happy so much as content, yet that wasn’t quite it, either. Nor was “resigned” an adequate description, though she did seem to suffer less now. Rather, it was as if she’d been let in on a secret she’d spent her whole life struggling to understand, and this knowledge, while changing little, made things more bearable. At home she appeared less fretful, both with Miles and with his father (on those occasions when Max graced them with his company)
.

To Miles, his mother was no less loving than she’d ever been, but something had changed between them as well. Her hours at the Whiting household were long, and when she finally returned home in the evening, she arrived as if from another universe, sometimes just sitting at the kitchen table for half an hour, looking around their little house, as if life there were completely strange, mysterious and unaccountable. Sometimes Miles caught her regarding him as if he, too, were a mystery, or a stranger, someone she’d once known well but who had undergone plastic surgery so skillful that she could no longer be sure he was who he claimed to be
.

That she should regard him curiously was natural enough, he supposed. During his junior year he’d shot up several inches and was now taller than both his parents, so perhaps it was his becoming physically a man that confused her. Whereas his boyish, tree-climbing stage had terrified her, she now seemed less afraid for him. Sometimes, though, her expression suggested an ability to foresee some unalterable destiny, one she herself wouldn’t have chosen, and the calmness with which she acquiesced to whatever it was she saw struck him as a little frightening
.

If she regarded her family’s future with greater equilibrium—Grace no longer fretted about money, even though Max’s continued unreliability guaranteed a week-to-week existence—she became consumed with the Whiting family’s affairs. Her concern about Cindy, especially, bordered on obsessive, and she questioned Miles every day about how the girl had seemed at school, though she was aware they had only one class together. Over and over she made Miles promise never to allow Cindy to sit alone at lunch, even though he explained there were days that Cindy never appeared in the cafeteria, or came in late in the company of a teacher, or after Miles had already found a seat and eaten half of his lunch. Sometimes, too, she sat with Mr. Boniface
.

What he didn’t tell his mother was that Cindy often sat by herself at one
end of a table designed for twenty students or more, the other end overcrowded with laughing, boisterous kids who seemed purposefully unaware of her existence. To a stranger entering the cafeteria for the first time, it would have appeared that Cindy Whiting was made of different, heavier materials from those that formed her classmates, as if twenty of them were required to balance their end of a teeter-totter. Nor did Miles inform his mother of his own ingenious methods of keeping his promise to her, of leaving the table where he’d eaten lunch with his friends a few minutes before the bell to stop by Cindy’s table for a minute or two; sometimes he timed it so that he arrived just as the bell rang and there was nothing to do besides carry her tray. The terrible truth was that such slender gestures seemed even to Miles, at sixteen, both too much and too little, more than just about everyone else was willing to do but far less than conscience dictated. For he did have a conscience. He became painfully aware of it—a dagger through his stingy heart—each time Cindy beamed her hopeful smile up at him
.

But it wasn’t just Cindy Whiting his mother was obsessed with. Gradually Grace came to dwell on everything that transpired in the Whiting household. She came home worried about bagworms spinning their silky pouches in the hydrangeas. Worried that the shrimp from the supermarket would not be fresh for Saturday’s gathering with the hospital planning board. Worried that the house itself was too isolated across the river, where its inhabitants might prove vulnerable to all manner of miscreants sneaking over the Iron Bridge
.

Though at times vague and abstracted, his mother was doubly grateful to Miles for being such a help to her. He’d learned to cook dinner for himself and his little brother, and she trusted him with enough money to buy such basics as toilet paper, laundry detergent and milk. “I don’t know why I can’t seem to focus anymore,” she confessed to him, when she forgot something at the store or failed to pay the phone bill. “I swear I don’t know where my mind is half the time.”

Miles knew exactly where it was, though he loved her too much to point out the obvious: his mother had found another family
.

M
RS
. W
HITING SEEMED
genuinely fond of him from the start, which surprised Miles, given her views on youth. The woman made no secret of her opinion that teenagers belonged in institutions for the criminally insane, from which they should not be released until the word “cool” had been purged from their vocabulary. She made no secret of her other forceful opinions either. Each afternoon, she pulled up in front of the high school in her Lincoln
at precisely 3:35. Classes let out at 3:20, but then all the school buses lined up outside and students from all four grades stampeded out the quadruple doors—a crush of inconsiderate humanity that an unsteady girl had no business in the middle of. By this point in her life Cindy was accustomed to waiting for crowds to disperse. When she traveled anywhere with her mother, they remained with the frightened elderly, the parents with small children, and the emotionally timid, while the strong and swift cleared the aisles. They avoided sales in department stores, queues for ice cream and popcorn at the lake, anything at all that might involve jostling. Over the years Cindy had come to understand that if she was patient, there would be plenty of popcorn and ice cream left over. She could enjoy the same treats that the fleet and well balanced enjoyed. Just not
with
them
.

So, only after the phalanx of buses departed, crammed with their cargoes of Empire Falls’s Vandals and Huns, Goths and Visigoths, did the Lincoln pull into one of the spaces marked
FOR SCHOOL BUSES ONLY
.
Though grateful to Mrs. Whiting for helping him learn to drive, Miles immediately understood the cost of the instruction. Now, in addition to any lunchtime kindnesses, he was required to spend another ten or fifteen minutes with Cindy after school, as they waited for her mother. Though both were juniors, they had different homerooms, so Miles, after the first wave of students had left, helped Cindy carry her things to the front entrance. In warm weather they sometimes waited outside, until they discovered they would have to endure less ridicule if they stayed indoors
.

Ridicule was nothing new to Cindy Whiting, of course. During grade school, her classmates’ cruel pantomimes of her lurching gait resembled that of the monster in the old Frankenstein movies, holding his arms out from his sides for balance. The Whiting Walk, they called it, and there were contests to judge whose rendition was best. During recess it was not unusual to see three or four boys practicing at the same time, stumbling into the slide or the swing set, bouncing off any objects at hand. The Whiting Walk was such soul-satisfying fun that it carried over into junior high, until the day a girl from the high school, Charlene Gardiner, who was there because her little brother had forgotten his lunch money, came upon a group of boys following the Whiting girl down the corridor, all of them doing their Whiting Walk. When Cindy turned around, they pretended awkward innocence. Seeing this, Charlene Gardiner had become furious and asked the boys in a tone of withering contempt whether they thought they’d
ever
grow up
.

Among the boys at the junior high there was no one whose disapproval carried greater weight than Charlene Gardiner’s, since she possessed the choicest set of melons in all of Empire Falls, no contest. One of the boys in the
hall that day, Jimmy Minty, having seen her in a bikini at the lake the previous summer, had spent the whole fall semester recounting the experience of watching her bend over to pick up her tube of suntan lotion. To have your maturity questioned by Charlene Gardiner was definitely a scrotum shrinker, and from that moment on, the Whiting Walk became uncool and all its former practitioners were convinced that they
had,
as requested, grown up
.

Which perhaps explained why it came as such a tremendous relief that first spring afternoon when Cindy Whiting and Miles Roby were observed together as they waited for her mother to rescue them. Sure, it was still uncool to make fun of Cindy Whiting by herself, but as part of a couple she was again fair game, even though Miles was the ostensible object of this new derision. Boys who already had their driver’s license would roar out of the parking lot, honking their horns and leaning out their windows to shout sexual encouragement to him, as he sat there with Cindy Whiting on a stone bench gifted to the school by the class of ’43
.

Even more satisfying was to moon them, though this happened only once because the mooners themselves were victimized by bad luck and poor timing. Their intention had been a limited, tactical strike against the two losers on the bench, but no sooner had they framed their pimply asses in the windows of a speeding car than Mr. Boniface emerged unexpectedly from the building, his attention drawn by the honking horn. The view he was treated to stopped him in his tracks, and he watched until the car careened around the corner and out of sight. The wiggling asses might have belonged to anyone, of course, but Mr. Boniface recognized the car and thus quickly identified and suspended the appropriate scholars. Their bad luck was exacerbated by the principal’s assumption that he was their intended target, a misapprehension they were hard-pressed to correct. There didn’t seem to be an adequate way of explaining that they hadn’t meant to moon him, but rather a crippled girl
.