The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (123 page)

1969

Dell Weeks never drank before noon and usually not before the middle of the week. But by Thursday or Friday, he’d start sipping from his pint bottle of Seagram’s at lunch and be wasted by midafternoon.

Dell was a Jekyll and Hyde drunk. Sometimes alcohol made him everyone’s best friend. “No sense killing yourself for minimum wage,” he’d say, his arm around your shoulder, his sweet, boozy breath in your face. Other times he’d needle and harass—start mouthing off about “lazy spooks” and “dumb-ass college faggots” who didn’t know which end of the shovel did the work. It was during one of his mean drunks that Dell started calling my brother Dickless.

If we got lucky on the afternoons he was drinking, Dell would curl up and doze in the shade of some tree or alongside or even under the city truck. He’d tell us to just get lost somewhere if we finished the job early—to leave him alone and not bother him unless we saw Lou Clukey’s truck coming. At first, Leo and Thomas and I would just sit around and bullshit and Ralph Drinkwater would park someplace
nearby—far enough away to be antisocial but close enough to listen in on the conversation. If one of us had remembered a deck of cards, we’d play pitch or setback. A couple of times we were so bored, we even played tag—keepaway or whatever—as if we were all nine instead of nineteen.

Sometimes when the rest of us were killing time, Ralph would take out a joint and sit there, toking away and smirking at us as if there was some joke that went over everyone’s head but his. As if Thomas and Leo and I
were
the joke. It was that same smirk he used to wear in Mr. LoPresto’s history class. “Nope,” Ralph would say whenever we’d asked him if he wanted to join us in some cards or whatever. “Not interested.” I kept waiting for him to return the invitation and pass around one of those joints of his—I’d gotten high a couple of times at school and liked it—but Ralph didn’t offer and I wasn’t about to beg.

“Graveball” was what eventually got Drinkwater to let down his guard and join us. One day out at the Boswell Avenue cemetery, Leo ran his mower over something that made a loud thump and then shot out sideways. It was a Wiffle ball, nicked and battered up a little, but still serviceable. Leo invented this game where you had to hit the ball with a pair of hedge clippers, then run the bases—designated gravestones. The catch was, you had to roll your lawnmower along with you from base to base.

We started off with Leo on one team and me on the other. Thomas pinch-hit and ran bases for both of us and we cooked up a bunch of rules for “ghost runners.” We’d been at it for half an hour or so when Drinkwater just couldn’t stand it anymore. He stood up. Ambled over. “What are you jokers playing, anyway?” he asked. He’d been pretending not to watch us.

Leo named the game on the spot. “Graveball,” he said. “Wanna play?”

Even stoned, Drinkwater was great at graveball. You just wouldn’t suspect how far a Wiffle ball could travel after a collision with a pair of hedge clippers.
Thwock!
That thing would go flying the width of the cemetery and into the woods. Half the time Ralph got his at-bats, we ended up having to stop and hunt for the damn ball. He
could fly around the bases, too, lawnmower and all. The guy was
fast.
But anyway, it was graveball that broke the ice with Ralph.

I’d started dating Dessa by then. The Constantines lived in a sprawling three-story house up in Hewett City, a sixteen-mile bike ride due north from Three Rivers. They had an in-ground pool out back and a tiled patio and these fancy flower gardens. The double doors in front opened to a foyer with a marble floor. Just inside the living room, with its velvet sofas and chairs—its oil paintings of Dessa and her sister—there was this massive grandfather clock. The size and workmanship of that thing—the
tone
—put to shame that sorry-ass clock down at the S&H Green Stamp store that Ma had loved, saved for, and never even gotten. Whenever I walked into the Constantines’ house, I felt my own family’s smallness.

Dessa’s father had had a security system installed before their trip to Greece and had exacted promises from his brother Costas to call and check in on Dess. Daddy had made his daughter promise she wouldn’t entertain male company alone while they were gone, especially that good-for-nothing musician who had manhandled her. Julian, his name was. She had made a mistake, Dessa told me, and her father probably wasn’t going to let her forget it for the rest of her life. Mrs. Constantine assured Dessa that her father trusted
her.
It was all the hippies and lunatics running around these days that he didn’t trust. Look what had just happened out in Hollywood with that poor movie director’s wife. And six months pregnant, no less! Anything could happen these days, especially to a girl who was too trusting for her own good.
Anything.
Dessa should be going with them to Greece instead of working as a barmaid at that kooky dance place with the telephones. She should be relaxing and soaking up the
sun and meeting some nice young Greek men.

Dessa had shared all this over the phone before my first visit, so there was something sexy and defiant about pedaling my Columbia three-speed up the U-shaped driveway and into the Constantines’ backyard, into the garage where I tripped the kickstand and parked next to Dessa’s mother’s dormant Chrysler Newport. Sexy, too, to peel off my sweat-soaked clothes after those long bike rides, drop
them onto the mosaic floor in Dessa’s bathroom, and lather up under her oscillating showerhead. The first time I visited, Dessa stayed downstairs while I showered and changed. The second time, she was a talking blur in cutoffs and a bikini top on the other side of the glass doors and I had to wait out my erection before I could shut off the water and emerge. By my third visit, Dessa and I were showering together, washing away the sex we’d just made, passing the soap over each other’s body in ways that fired us up all over again.

Before Dessa, I had never felt that kind of fire. Had wondered sometimes if I’d ever feel it. In
Newsweek
and on TV, they were always talking about the sexual revolution—spouting some jaw-dropping statistic about how the majority of young American males had experienced umpteen partners by the time they were my age. Maybe that had happened to Leo and every other guy, but not to me. Before Dessa, the sum total of my sexual experience had been my episode out at the Falls with Patty Katz and the time during a dorm party the semester before when a drunk girl had laughed in the dark at my confusion over her pantyhose and then stuck it inside her and said, “There.
Go.
”

Dessa was the experienced one—the one with “two serious relationships” behind her. Both the dulcimer player and the antiwar organizer had been older than she—had sometimes made her feel, she said, like a foolish little girl. And although her parents only knew about the incident with Julian—she’d called them from the Brighton police station the night he’d slammed her against the wall and broken her wrist—she’d been roughed up by both men. She told me she appreciated my inexperience. My shyness. She said she felt safe in my arms.

“That’s what I hate about waitressing,” she told me one afternoon. “The fact that, some nights, I just don’t feel safe.” The two of us were lying on her bed, listening to music and just holding on to each other. “Most guys get so hostile when they drink. I hate the way they egg each other on.” She shifted around on the bed so that she could look at me. “What are you guys so
angry
about?” she said.

I rubbed my hand up and down her leg, kissed her temple, kissed
the corner of her mouth. “I’m not angry,” I said. “I come in peace.”

“But seriously, though,” she said. “Sometimes at work, even with the bouncers and the bartenders keeping an eye on us, I just don’t feel safe.”

“Then quit,” I told her.

“I can’t quit.”

“Sure you can,” I told her. “How do you think
I
feel knowing that every guy at that bar is checking you out? If you quit, we could see each other on weekends. Go to the beach. Spend whole days together.”

“Dominick, I have to work,” she said.

“You’ve got your Head Start job. That’s work.”

She laughed. “You know what I clear at that job, Dominick? Thirty-six dollars a week. I make double that—
triple
that some nights—bringing drunken jerks their beers down at the Dial-Tone.”

“Hey, it’s not as if you
need
the money. Your tuition’s probably, what? Seven or eight car sales down at your father’s place?”

“But that’s not the point. I need to prove something to myself.”

I stifled a smile, swallowed a little bit of resentment. I wished
I
had the luxury of working for something other than the money. “You need to prove
what
?”

“Dominick, my father is the most generous man in the world, okay? He’d give my sister and me anything we asked for. But that’s the problem. You pay a price by being on the receiving end of that. You give up your independence.”

I began stroking the inside of her leg. “If I quit, it would prove
his
point, not mine,” she said. She yanked her shirt up over her head, unhooked her bra. “Daddy would just love it if his little Dessa couldn’t fend for herself. If she was still just Daddy’s little girl. But I’m
not.
I’m my own person. Right?”

“Right,” I said.

She slid out of her panties. Grabbed onto my arm. “Does any of this make sense to you?” she asked. “I mean, you’re saying ‘right,’ but do you really get the point?”

I reached over and kissed her breast. “Yeah, I get the point, all right,” I told her. “I’m pointing all over the place here.”

“Oh, forget it,” she sighed. “I swear, you guys are all alike.”

She was a patient lover. After the first two or three jackrabbit sessions, she showed me the value of taking my time, making choices with her. “Do you like this?” she’d ask. “Does this feel good?” Then she’d take my hand in her hand, guide my fingertips and show me how and where I could return the favor. “Slower, now,” she’d whisper. “That’s it. Nice and slow.” When she was ready, she’d draw me against her, inside of her. I learned how to pace it, how to hold on until I’d feel her whole body tense, close to the edge, and then over the edge, lost in a pleasure that was both ours and hers in private. Sometimes that privacy would worry me a little, make me feel insecure, and I’d think, maybe she’s imagining it’s one of those other guys. Then, as if by instinct, she’d open her eyes and smile at me and touch my face. Say something like “Hey, you?” and turn her attention to me. To
my
pleasure. Until
I was caught up in a release so wild and sweet that it was hard to believe that, oh Jesus, this was real and here and happening to me, Dominick.

One time right afterward, when we were both still catching our breath, I told her I loved her. Watched her face go from peaceful to sad.

“I’ve heard that line before,” she said.

“It’s not a ‘line,’ Dessa. I mean it.”

“Okay,
why
?
Why
do you love me?”

“Because you’re you,” I said, groping. “And because . . . you’re a good teacher.”

She smiled, jabbed me one. “I think you just like the lesson plan,” she said.

On those summer nights alone together in the Constantines’ big house, teasing was part of what was sexy. So was eating. Downstairs, lying on her parents’ beige wall-to-wall carpeting, we’d play Greek music and drink red wine and feast: feta cheese and oily brown olives, tomatoes and basil, crusty bread from Gianacopolis Bakery.
Sometimes Dessa would heat up the food her mother had frozen for her in little foil packages before the trip: spinach pie, moussaka. And afterward, more wine and fruit. Sometimes we’d read to each other, or watch TV, or Dessa would tell stories about when she and her sister Angie were kids. After she got me laughing, she’d say, “Now you tell me about
your
childhood,” and I’d remember nothing but spankings and crying jags—the time Ray caught Thomas and me eating Halloween candy at church, the time he pulled over to the side of the highway and made us get out of the car because we’d been arguing with each other. We were what? Six?
Seven, maybe? We got out, stood on the side of the road, and he drove off. Just drove away and left us there. And by the time he came back, Thomas and I were holding on to each other, crying our fucking heads off. . . . It wasn’t
all
bad. It wasn’t
always
like that. But when Dessa asked about my childhood, those were the only kinds of things I could think of. So I’d just shrug and tell her I couldn’t remember that kind of stuff the way she could. Then I’d look away and change the subject. Wait for her to stop looking at me. Wait for her curiosity to pass.

Sometimes after dark, we’d swim out back in their pool. Or do other stuff out there. Or go back up to Dessa’s room. Once we even made love on the floor of her parents’ bedroom, Dessa on top and me looking past her shoulder, past the bottles of fancy colognes and lotions on her mother’s bureau and into the mirror at the two of us, rocking, joined together. We hadn’t
planned
it. It just happened. I’d gone into Thula and Gene’s room to wait out Uncle Costas’s surprise visit and half an hour later, when Dessa came back upstairs and found me, we just . . .
bam!
It was like we hadn’t seen each other in five years or something. That’s the way it was at the beginning: neither of us could keep our hands off the other. Get filled up. It felt powerful and powerless both—what we kick-started that summer in the Constantines’ big empty house.