The Risk Pool (12 page)

It did not matter that I had not seen him in over five years. The surprise was replaced almost immediately with the same tightness in my chest that I’d felt the afternoon outside school when he’d leaned across the seat of the white convertible to open the passenger-side door. Sam Hall wasn’t in Alaska. He was in Mohawk. I didn’t care what anybody said. I knew my own father.

Off and on for the rest of the summer I returned to the embankment in Myrtle Park, but the shack remained uninhabited, and when I rattled stones off the sheet metal roof, nobody bolted. Occasionally, shabby men appeared in the clearing below to root around in the trash mounds, removing a door handle from a rusted-out car body perhaps, then disappearing back into the trees in the general direction of the highway. I continued to mystify dogs until one day a mangy yellow cur caught sight of me, and the look on his face clearly said, “Aha!” as if my visible presence
resolved an issue that had troubled him for a long time. He would spread the word.

In contrast to the scene below was the white jewel of a house on the other side of the highway. It occupied the whole top of the hill, and on sunny days its whiteness reflected the sun like a tiny mirror directed precisely into my eyes. What would it be like to live in such a house? Though it looked very small in the distance, I knew up close it had to be huge. It drew the sun like a magnet, and I would have liked to see it up close, though I doubted you could get there from where I sat. There were two hundred yards of thick woods between me and the busy highway, then another quarter mile or so of the same before you even got to the vast sloping lawn. There had to be a road, probably on the other side of the hill, and, anyway, I wasn’t permitted to cross the highway on my bicycle.

It occurred to me that summer, from my perch in Myrtle Park, that there might be any number of corrugated shacks in my personal future, but no jeweled houses. I could think of no good reason for my father to be living in such a place, if that’s what he had been doing there, any more than I could think why he had run away. But if my father had ended up in such a place, mightn’t the same happen to me? Until recently, I would have scoffed at such a notion. After all, I was my mother’s son, not his. He drifted into and out of our lives without influencing them unduly. We lived in a clean house on a nice street and we had what we needed. But things were changing, and I knew that they were, even though I could only guess why. Since that Sunday when Father Michaels left church by the side door, my mother had lost ground an inch at a time. When she was finally let go by the telephone company, she appeared almost relieved, and we lived for months on her modest savings account before she even began to look for work. When she came home from interviews, her hands shook so badly she had to sit on them, and there were days when she would not come out of her bedroom until midafternoon. She refused to go back to the doctor for more Librium, and without church to calm her down, she didn’t know where to turn.

When the savings account money was gone and she’d quit making a pretense of looking for work, she telephoned F. William Peterson, who came to see us. His big gray car took up most of the curb outside our house. Before he actually came inside, he walked all around the place, studied the house and shed, the little
yard. When he finally came in, I was sent out and they talked for a long time.

“You’re making a big mistake,” I heard him tell my mother later when they came out on the porch. I was fielding grounders along the side of the house.

“I just need some time,” I heard her say.

“You need help, Jenny,” F. William Peterson said. He had only a few strands of baby-fine hair left on top, and these required constant smoothing.

Then for a while there was money again; I did not fully understand how. There wasn’t a lot, though, and my mother watched what there was carefully, cutting back on the amount we ate and the extras we purchased. Every other week she called the bank with instructions to cash a check I would be bearing within the half hour. She herself never left the house.

That same summer I made a dubious friend. Compared to some of the other dubious friends who followed, Claude was harmless enough. By an odd coincidence, his family had bought Aunt Rose’s old house, and Claude hadn’t had time to make many friends, not that time was the issue. Mohawk was far from friendly to outsiders, and whatever it took to break into clique-riddled Mohawk High Claude didn’t possess, and he gave up after about a week. I was having similar difficulties in my first year at Nathan Littler Junior High. Claude was a big kid, but pear-shaped and soft-looking like his father, whose Connecticut employer had punished him with a transfer to Mohawk, where he supervised the manufacture of small, plastic, lime-green swimming pools in the shape of turtles. Claude’s mother badgered her son about his weight, but Claude Sr. always took the boy’s part. “He’s built like his father,” he told her proudly, not sensing that it was precisely
this that his wife would have prevented if she could. “Going to be a big man.” Then he tousled, or tried to, the close-cropped hair on the boy’s small head. He might as well have tousled a volleyball.

Aunt Rose’s little house had always been one of the prettiest on the block, with bright green shutters and window boxes, and a small white fence, the sort you can easily step over, bordering the front and back yards. Claude’s parents immediately set about improving the property, even as their neighbors looked on malevolently. The two-story addition nearly doubled the size of Aunt Rose’s modest little dwelling, making it the biggest house on the block. But when the heavy machinery arrived a second time and began to scoop out large hunks of earth for what could be nothing but an in-ground swimming pool of immodest proportion, the neighbors circulated a petition to prevent its completion, claiming that it would be a hazard to the neighborhood children, who often cut cross-lots when they played. The real reason was that such ostentation had never been permitted in our neighborhood. The only pools in Mohawk were over on Kings Road by the golf course, and the wealthy Jewish section on the northwestern slope of Myrtle Park.

Claude’s parents were Jews, as I later discovered, though so thoroughly reformed as not to practice their religion at all. Indeed, Claude’s father had expressed thoroughgoing distaste for Judaism’s more orthodox adherents, a sentiment he had hoped in vain might circumvent the covenants and restrictions of the Kings Road neighborhood. Anyone could have told him that wasn’t likely, but he didn’t ask anyone. The new in-ground pool was combined recreation and revenge, and the neighborhood petition lost momentum when in place of Aunt Rose’s little picket fence a five-foot-high chain-link fence went up around the entire property, undercutting the sole rational basis for objection, and refocusing the object of resentment from the big hole in the ground to the fence that surrounded it. There would be no cross-cutting this particular lot. “Good fences make good neighbors,” Claude Sr. often remarked with satisfaction and without attribution. It certainly was a fine fence, and when completed, the pool was fine too, along with the ramada and gas grill, all firsts in our neighborhood and all regarded with distaste.

I was Claude Jr.’s only friend, perhaps the only friend of the family. And never was the term friend more qualified. As I remember
it, I can honestly say that back then there was never an ounce of honest affection between myself and any of the Claudes (their name was Schwartz, but I always thought of them as the Claudes after discovering that the mother’s name was, incredibly, Claudine). Mrs. Claude and Claude Sr. were clearly disappointed that I was the best their son could do. After all, I was two years younger than he, and undistinguished to boot, though I overheard Claude Sr. once remark that at least I wasn’t “typical Mohawk,” which I took to be a compliment. And while they treated me well enough—I was practically a fixture at their dinner table (they ate abundantly, wonderfully) that summer the pool went in, I cared for the Claudes no more than they cared for me. Claude Sr.’s sarcastic and condescending manner made me feel ridiculed, and his wife’s constant lament about Mohawk’s not being able to support a single top-notch hairdresser I took to be somehow my fault.

My relationship with Claude Jr. was strangest of all, predicated entirely on competition, or, more precisely, the lack of it that I could provide. Claude insisted that everything we did be a contest. Swimming, throwing, running, eating—it did not matter. He loved to win at anything, and the two years he had on me pretty nearly always ensured success. I have since heard of psychological profiles done on children that illuminate, to some degree, Claude’s character. A child is given a beanbag and invited to toss it into a circle. From close up, the task is easy enough, but as the child, on succeeding tosses, is backed farther and farther from the circle he inevitably encounters more difficulty. From across the room, the circle is pretty tough to hit and the child’s chances of success are diminished. When the child has tossed the beanbag from each varying distance, he is told he can have one more toss from anywhere he likes. Relatively few will grasp that success from the nearest stripe is a rather qualified affair and these will go directly to the farthest. Others, caring only for the assurance of success, no matter how qualified, indeed never suspecting that success could
be
qualified, will stand at the lip of the circle, plink the bag down, and be enamored of themselves for so doing.

Claude Jr. was just such a boy. His appetite for victory was insatiable. If he beat me ten times in a row swimming freestyle laps in the pool, he’d immediately lobby for an eleventh race under the pretext of giving me another chance. If I demurred, he would lecture me that I’d never get anywhere if I was just going to give up.

One September day after lunch, he emerged from the house with three large bags of Oreos. He carefully arranged the cookies in three equal columns, one group before me, the other before himself. I was extraordinarily fond of Oreos, but the long phalanxes—eight cookies deep, three high—were discouraging to look at, as was Claude, whose greedy eyes had already begun to devour his. His thick stomach hung out over his bathing suit, and his chest looked vaguely feminine. It did not take a genius to figure out what he had in mind.

We ate Oreos.

I scarfed the first half dozen or so happily, the second six without serious misgivings, except when I contemplated how many remained. Before long, however, it became obvious I wasn’t going to win, though Claude was slowing down too. He kept a comfortable half-dozen lead at all times, and at the end of my second dozen I attempted to concede. I could tell he was gravely disappointed in me. “Come on,” he said. “You can do it.”

When I refused, he ate one more and proclaimed that under no circumstances could he eat another Oreo. This was an opportunity to show what I was made of, he said. I was six (count ’em) cookies away from victory. He separated them from my phalanx and returned all but the remaining six to the package. Suddenly I felt like I was all throat, throbbing and full, but I was even more full of defeat than cookies, and awash in black, desperate determination. Incapable of swallowing normal mouthfuls, I nibbled, birdlike at the dry crust of the cookies. It took me half an hour to dispatch four more. Another would give me a tie, and I realized as I stared at it that a tie would have to do. I didn’t need to say I won, provided Claude couldn’t either.

It is difficult to describe the quality of Claude’s excitement as I approached the final cookie. I was terribly ill and my head was pounding savagely from the chocolate. I don’t think I could have stood. But strangest of all, and I remember this quite vividly, was the feeling I had that Claude was feeling what I felt—that each new wave of nausea somehow registered in his being as well as my own. He was pulling for me. He wanted us to be equals. Perhaps that was what he had wanted all along, I thought. He was giving me a chance.

I picked up the last Oreo.

I don’t know how long it stayed in my cheeks before I swallowed, but when I did I kept my hand up to see what would
happen. My stomach churned, but to my surprise did not immediately rise. I was afraid to breathe, except through my nose, and then not deeply.

Claude was grinning at me. I did not notice at first that he was holding another cookie. He held the Oreo elevated with two hands, thumb and forefinger each, like a priest at high mass, but instead of offering it to me (I recall sliding away from him on the bench), he placed it on his own tongue, and I watched with horror as the cookie disappeared, whole, into his mouth. His heavy jaws worked methodically, and soon his Adam’s apple bobbed.

As the winning Oreo descended into Claude, the losing one began to rise in me, along with all its brothers. They surged upward angrily, and the black, impotent self-contempt that accompanied them made a pretty awful mess of the Claudes’ redwood picnic table.

The following weekend we had a heat wave, the intensity of which took everyone by surprise, coming as it did in the first week of October. On Friday when the temperature hit 90, the windows of the Nathan Littler Junior High were flung open, but even then a tiny rivulet of perspiration disappeared down the open neck of Miss Devlin, the new English teacher, whose breasts were the subject of considerable admiration among us seventh-grade boys. We envied the perspiration. At night, things cooled off, but Saturday morning dawned with a low, white-gray sky and the sun, a magnified white ball, burned through by nine and an hour later the tar on the streets was shimmering. The Russians were using Sputnik to screw around with the weather, people said. Russians weren’t too popular in Mohawk anyway, and we certainly didn’t appreciate their mucking up autumn.

Around midmorning on Saturday the telephone rang and it was Claude. He wondered if I’d like to go to the beach. I had not seen the Claudes since messing up their redwood picnic table. I consulted my mother through her bedroom door—it would be hours before she emerged for the day—and she seemed relieved at the prospect of not being required to deal with me until dinner time. The Claudes picked me up in their brand-new Pontiac station wagon (according to Claude, they’d had a Jaguar sedan when they lived in Connecticut), the backseat of which I shared with young
Claude and several bags of groceries. I must have gone very pale when I saw the big package of Oreos sticking out of one.