Linger (14 page)

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him you’re the only thing that isn’t human anymore, Mr. D. Don’t worry, we’re not going to rain on your parade. There won’t be any publicity pictures captioned
WAR WRECKS LUNCH AT LINGER
!”

It was then that we saw Betty Chayka across from us in the parking lot.

She was in blue Spandex pants, and a red-white-and-blue shirt. She had on white high, high, heels with stars and stripes painted on them.

“Hey, Bobby! I been looking for you!”

“Later!” he called back.

I shouted across, “When we get back.”

She was holding her bag under one arm, and the hand holding the American flag dropped so the flag hit her shoes. Even from that distance I could see the smile on her face disappear.

When we got inside the car I said, “We
are
coming back, aren’t we?”

“You think I’d come back here?”

“Bobby, this whole damn day is about you. Mom and Dad—”

He cut me off. “If this whole damn day is about me, why isn’t my best buddy invited?”

“What are you going to tell Sanchez?”

“What
can
I tell him? He’s going to know.”

“You’re right…. You’re right about everything, Bobby.”

“Bobby, he said to me, I planned this entire thing for you. Now don’t spoil it, he said…. I said you fucking planned this for yourself, Mr. Dunlinger. You know what he said?”

I said, “He probably said don’t say that word in Linger.”

“Close. He said don’t stoop to gutter language, Bobby, not in Linger!”

We got Sanchez and Amy into the back, and we were ready to roar out of the parking lot when Bobby said, “Wait! Stop!”

Then Bobby rolled down the window and called out, “Chike? Chike? Want to come to a party?”

She came running toward us, as fast as she could on gravel, with heels that high.

W
ORD GOT OUT WHEN
Bobby didn’t show up that day. It got out over our telephone, where Chike sat for hours while Amy opened cans of Bud in the kitchen and passed them from Sanchez to Bobby to her.

Bobby couldn’t hear well on the phone, so he sat on the plastic hassock near Chike, declaring that public relations made everyone so thirsty, copying down the names of newspapers and radio stations from the county yellow pages.

When Chike finished the area calls, Amy started calling the 212 numbers she got from New York City information.

Mr. Dunlinger had a lot of coverage in the weeks to come, not quite the kind he’d planned.

One article in a national magazine was called “Shame on Linger,” and when Sanchez appeared on
Oprah,
someone called in comparing Dunlinger to Hitler.

After that Fourth of July in Berryville, Linger was blackballed by most of its best customers.

Even Sloan’s father wouldn’t patronize the place.

I spent the summer on roller skates, with Sloan, in white pants and yellow shirts with waffles stamped all over them, hustling Waffleburgers down to parked cars.

Sloan kept a scrapbook called Playing Gulf. She collected all sorts of news clips: a picture of General Norman Schwarzkopf singing onstage in Disneyland with Mickey Mouse, and being interviewed with a stuffed bear by Barbara Walters.

There were photographs of the oil-well fires still raging, and one of the emir’s triumphal return to Kuwait when it was finally safe. There were reports of the thousands of new Mercedeses shipped there, and of the Egyptians and Asians cleaning Kuwait up, since no Kuwaitis did manual labor. Soldiers from Bangladesh were assigned to seek out dangerous mines, and U.N. troops from thirty-three countries guarded the borders.

“It’s a chicken book, though,” she said. “I don’t have anything in here about how many Iraqis were killed or what the place is like now.”

“All the attention’s on the Kurds, anyway.”

“I know it. Why is that?”

I quoted a favorite poet:

“Silly old Iraqis, dish towels on their heads, tackiest of tackies.”

My father stayed on at Linger.

What do you expect me to do, he said, you want a fifty-five-year-old man who’s never done any other kind of work to quit his job in the middle of a recession on principle?

Is that what you and your brother want me to do, he said, put principle over mortgage payments, car payments, and what it’s going to cost for Gary to go to college in two years?

I knew he wouldn’t be able to resist bringing my college into it.

But nobody asked him to quit.

Even when my mother decided to take a bookkeeper’s job at Scheck Fuel, nobody suggested he should look around, too.

At the very end of August Lynn Dunlinger came home. Sloan and I saw her one Friday night, coming out of the movies with Mrs. D. She said that after Le Soleil closed, she went to Montauk to visit her roommate from Faith Academy. She looked pale and she didn’t smile. Mrs. D. said, “Well? Tell them who you saw in Montauk!”

For a crazy moment I thought she was going to say she saw
him.

But she said, “I saw Billy Joel. There was a fundraiser and he was there with Paul Simon and Foreigner.”

“How about
that
?” said Mrs. D., all smiles herself.

But Lynn’s expression didn’t change, and she didn’t meet our eyes.

“Are you home for good now?” Sloan asked.

“I got into Dartmouth,” she said. “I’m leaving next week.”

Then her mother said, “We miss you, Gary,” and steered her away, waving a good-bye.

I thought Mr. Dunlinger would never live down that day he turned Gus Sanchez away. But by the time fall rolled around, the traffic was picking up on Highland Hill. And the weekend they televised the Clarence Thomas nomination hearings for the Supreme Court, the bar and The Grill were jammed with after-dinner drinkers hanging around to watch Anita Hill and him on the giant screen.

Mr. Dunlinger hired a young Vietnamese music student to play in The Regency Room. The Linger ads boasted of her awards and her talent, and that she was attending college on a Linger scholarship.

Linger … Linger. It was hard to escape the place as I went back to school and picked up the old routine. At Christmas, when Berryvillers hiked up the hill for carol singing under the trees, I could hear them from our front porch, and I could see the tiny, twinkling colored lights in the distance.

At Easter the children rolled their eggs on the lawn, and Friday evenings a Teen Night was instigated in a community effort to stop drugs and drinking among high school kids. Rock stars were invited to play in the new Young Adult Room, and early dinner was included in the price. I’d hear glowing reports from my dad, and finally from Dave and Ollie—everyone was heading up to Linger.

Always the giant American flag waved in the breeze on top of Highland Hill, and again Linger became the focal point for Berryville.

I knew my mother missed being there terribly, and in time my dad began telling her the gossip, recounting stories of the regulars, and Mr. and Mrs. D. And if my mother wasn’t there, she
was,
in spirit anyway, at the cocktail hour when my folks would fill each other in on their days…. I’d hear the old familiar sounds from my mother: “He said
what
?” and “What did Mr. D. say about that?”

And it was good to hear them laughing and talking together as they always had.

Sloan turned Playing Gulf in for a Current Events project and got a B minus, with a note reading
Provocative but dated, don’t you think? We’re Current Events, not History.

The “current” was underlined.

Bobby is in New York City now, looking for work, hanging out with Sanchez and Amy. He left his journal and his letters and tapes with me. He said he didn’t care what I did with them. He’d remember, he said, what he’d remember.

When we talk to Bobby on the phone, we don’t mention Linger or Mr. Dunlinger.

I say things like How’s Chike and he says Well, she misses
you,
how’s Sloan?

I say She doesn’t miss me, Sloan’s fine.

And then he usually asks, “What’s going on?”

“Not much,” I say. “Things are the same around here.”

And most things are.

Sometimes I catch myself singing Mr. Raleigh’s song—snatches of it:

So linger awhile, let’s see that smile,

Secrets are mysteries still….

There is no word of Jules Raleigh. I still see him in my mind’s eye, that afternoon he stood looking down at Lynn in the snowstorm, evenings he’d tuck the violin under his chin and play “Claire de Lune” or sit at the piano to do Simply Red’s “Something Got Me Started.”

And I see him in class, bobbing toward the chalkboard to write something, underlining it sometimes so hard the chalk would break:

DO SOMETHING ORIGINAL!

SAY SOMETHING PROVOCATIVE!

WAKE UP YOUR PASSIONS!

CHANGE!

And:

FEEL FOR OTHER PEOPLE!

My real name is Marijane Meaker.

When I first came to New York City from the University of Missouri, I wanted to be a writer. To be a writer back then, one needed to have an agent. I sent stories out to a long list of agents, but no one wanted to represent me. So, I decided to buy some expensive stationery and become my own agent. All of my clients were me with made-up names and backgrounds. “Vin Packer” was a male writer of mystery and suspense. “Edgar and Mamie Stone” were an elderly couple from Maine who wrote confession stories. (They lived far away, so editors would not invite them for lunch.) “Laura Winston” wrote short stories for magazines like
Ladies’ Home Journal
. “Mary James” wrote only for Scholastic. Her bestseller is
Shoebag
, a book about a cockroach who turns into a little boy.

My most successful writer was Vin Packer. I wrote twenty-one paperback suspense novels as Packer. When I wanted to take credit for these books, my editor told me I could not, because Vin Packer was the bestselling author—not Marijane Meaker.

I was friends with Louise Fitzhugh—author of
Harriet the Spy
—who lived near me in New York City. We often took time away from our writing to have lunch, and we would gripe about writing being such hard work. Louise would claim that writing suspense novels was easier than writing for children because you could rob and murder and include other “fun things.” I’d answer that children’s writing seemed much easier; describing adults from a kid’s eye, writing about school and siblings—there was endless material.

I asked Louise what children’s book she would recommend, and she said I’d probably like Paul Zindel’s
The Pigman
, a book for children slightly older than her audience. I did like it, a lot, and I decided my next book would be a teenage one (at the time, we didn’t use the term “YA” to describe that genre). I knew I would need yet another pseudonym for this venture, so I invented one, a take-off on my last name, Meaker: M. E. Kerr. (Louise, on the other hand, never tried to write for adults. She was a very good artist, and her internal quarrel was whether to be a writer or a painter.)

Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!
was my first Kerr novel. The story of an overweight and sassy fifteen-year-old girl from Brooklyn, New York,
Dinky
was an immediate success. Between 1972 and 2009, thirty-six editions were published in five languages.

Gentlehands
, a novel as successful as
Dinky
but without the humor, is a romance between a small-town boy and a rich, sophisticated Hamptons summer girl. The nickname of the boy’s grandfather is Gentlehands, but he is anything but gentle. An escaped Holocaust concentration camp guard, he once took pleasure in torturing the female prisoners. His American family does not know about his past until the authorities track him down. Harrowing as the story is, the
New York Times
called it “important and useful as an introduction to the grotesque character of the Nazi period.”

One of the hardest books for me to write was
Little Little
, my book about dwarfs. I kept worrying that I wouldn’t get my little heroine’s voice right. How would someone like that feel, a child so unlike others? After a while, I finally realized we had a lot in common. As a gay youngster, with no one I knew who was gay, I had no peers, no one like me to befriend—just like my teenage dwarf. She finally goes to a meeting of little people and finds friends, just as years later I finally met others like me in New York City.

I also used my experience being gay in a Kerr novel called
Deliver Us from Evie
. I set the story in Missouri, where I had studied journalism at the state university. I had been a tomboy, so I made my lead character, Evie, a butch lesbian. She is skillful at farm chores few females would be interested in, dresses boyishly, and has little interest in the one neighborhood boy who is attracted to her. I didn’t want to feminize her to make her more acceptable, and I worried a bit that she wouild be too much for the critics. Fortunately, my readers liked Evie and her younger brother, Parr, who doesn’t want to take over the family farm when he grows up. The book is now in two thousand libraries worldwide.

When I write for kids, I often draw on experiences I had when I was a teenager living in Auburn, New York—a prison city. All of us were fascinated by the large stone building in the center of town, with gun-carrying guards walking around its stone wall. Called Cayuga Prison (Auburn is in Cayuga County), it appears in several of my books. One of these books is called
Your Eyes in Stars
.

Growing up, I was friends with a boy whose family was in the funeral business. As the only male, he was expected to take over the business when he grew up. Can you imagine looking forward to that in your future? Neither could Jack, who inspired
I’ll Love You When You’re More Like Me
.

My book
Night Kites
is about AIDS. To my knowledge, it was the first print book that featured two gay men who have contracted AIDS, rather than having the illness come about because of a blood transfusion. When we first learned of AIDS in 1981, everyone grew afraid of old friends who were gay males. There was a cruel joke that “gay” stood for “got AIDS yet?” But soon we realized AIDS was not just a gay problem. The book is set in the Hamptons, though much of the action takes place on a Missouri farm.