City of Boys Page 5

  —Jesus, my mother says. —Who would come so early? She clips her earrings on, and with a long, pink fingernail traces the line of lipstick around her mouth.

  —Won’t this be fun, honey? she says to me.

  By the time I follow her downstairs, more guests have arrived. Annie’s parents stand quietly by the coffee table; they hold their drinks uncomfortably and only taste at them with their tongues as they look around our house.

  —You have a very lovely home, they both say, separately, to each of my parents as my mother smiles and my father gently removes their drinks from their hands to make fresh ones. I help carry them back and Annie’s father beams at me.

  —Anne is a very good girl, he says to my father, who looks at him blankly, until he remembers that this is Annie’s father.

  —Yes, he says, —she certainly seems to be.

  —You must be very proud of her, Annie’s mother says, and my father looks around, confused, then realizes that they are talking about me.

  —Yes, he says and looks at me oddly, as if it is possible that my name actually could be Anne and he has been getting it wrong all these years.

  —Yes, he says again, —I suppose we are.

  They smile uneasily at me and at each other, and my father cannot stop himself from reaching for the drinks he has just given them, to freshen them up. I wander around the party holding out little plates of crackers and cheese to the party guests, who look down at me and smile briefly, then go back to their conversations. When I return to the coffee table, Annie’s parents have moved to the couch, where they sit side by side, eating the peanuts and potato chips from the bowls on the table. Annie’s mother bends to look at the olives, and touches one warily with the tip of her finger, then pulls her hand back. They hold their drinks carefully, still hardly touched, and as they eat, they look up and around them at the other guests, all of whom are standing, laughing and talking to each other as though they have all been friends for years. Annie’s parents must wonder where all these people live, and why they’ve never seen them at the grocery store, or the gas station. Under the clatter of ice and glass and talk, there is music playing, something quiet and easy to listen to. A few women sway to it gently. Although there is never any real dancing to speak of, occasionally, as the party wears on, one or two couples will lean close together and move around in little circles in the corners, while their husbands and wives watch from the couch, making loud, bitter comments as my father freshens their drinks. These are usually among the last guests to leave. My mother passes Annie’s parents and smiles graciously down at them. —It’s so nice to have you here, she says to them. —I hope you’re having a good time.

  Annie’s mother opens her mouth to answer, but my mother has turned away before she’s gotten a word out. She turns to her husband, but he has filled his fist with peanuts, which he pops into his mouth one by one. She takes a sip of her drink and watches my mother talk to a man in a black suit. He takes her hand and his thumb catches on her ring.

  —It’s very nice to have you in town, he says, and my mother smiles and begins to look away, but he keeps hold of her hand.

  —Really, he says. —I mean it.

  This gets her attention and she slowly turns her head and looks directly at him. My father is in the kitchen making drinks, and when I go in to watch him, he smiles happily at me.

  —Isn’t this great? he says. —Aren’t these people great?

  He brings the bottle he is pouring from to his lips and closes his eyes as he drinks. He winks at me when he puts the bottle down, then leaves with a tray full of fresh drinks.

  —Sally, my mother says when I walk by her. She takes my shoulder and turns me to face the man in the black suit. —This is Mr. Wheeler.

  I hold a plate of crackers out to him and he smiles nervously at me.

  —Well, he says. —You fit right in, don’t you?

  My mother smiles proudly. —When Sally was little, she says, —she loved our parties. She used to kiss all the guests good night.

  Mr. Wheeler nods politely, but it is true: I remember shuffling from one guest to the next like a little pet, the brush of their cheeks across my lips, the smell of smoke and perfume, and the warm scent of bourbon on their breath.

  My mother looks down at me with the fondness of a stranger, running her hand over my hair. —She couldn’t go to sleep without kissing them all, she says.

  —Like mother like daughter, says someone behind us, and my mother’s face freezes for a moment; then she turns her smile in the direction of the voice.

  My father laughs loudly at whatever jokes he overhears as he moves efficiently in and out of the kitchen, and the party glitters around me like a light I can’t quite catch as it passes on the edge of my vision. My friends who are not my friends are all together at someone’s house, making popcorn and watching movies on television. Later, perhaps, they will gather their courage and wander in a small crowd to the pizza shop where the other children all meet. The bravest among them will insist on going, and the others will follow reluctantly; perhaps, on the way there, they will be attracted by an ice-cream store, or a movie, and stop, relieved to find this distraction; or perhaps they will go and sit in a corner booth, glancing around over their pizza, wondering what is happening. And across the street, Annie sits in a little circle of darkness in front of the television, listening to the hum of Tommy’s nerves as he turns the pages of his comic books. When the phone rings, my mother turns from her conversation with Mr. Wheeler and my father looks up from his tray of drinks. I answer it for them.

  —Oh, Annie says, —I was just wondering if you changed your mind.

  She waits. —You know. About coming over.

  Her voice is high and strained.

  —I can’t, I say. —I have to help.

  —Oh, she says, but she does not hang up. I think I can hear, from the basement below her, the mean laughter of boys as they watch television.

  When I hang up and my mother asks me who it was, I say it was no one.

  Before I am grown, I will live in a dozen more houses, and attend a dozen more schools; soon Annie will be just another face without a name, and I will forget whatever it is that is happening to her right now, behind the dark windows of her house.

  I leave the party without kissing the guests good night. From the top of the stairs I turn to watch them. My mother smiles directly into the eyes of a man she has just met, while my father entertains the man’s wife in the kitchen. Around them move people without faces, speaking in high, excited voices, and in the middle of the room Annie’s parents sit together, staring around them with big haunted eyes. I try to guess what my mother is thinking as she smiles at the man, if in her mind she is groping for a five-letter word for frying pan or mousetrap.

  From my bedroom window, I watch Annie’s house, dark except for the kitchen and the flickering glow of the television downstairs. I turn out my light just as Annie comes out of her house. She sees me and waves me over, but I pull back out of sight. I cannot cross the street to meet her; downstairs is a room full of people I don’t know, and ahead of me there are rooms full of people I don’t know. Under my skin the nerves are moving like tiny people trying to get out. I watch Annie walk around her yard, collecting papers, twigs, early leaves, which she piles in ragged mounds against the brick wall of her house. She turns to me again, and in the darkness her face is a pale little moon, lit by the bleak shining faith that she can somehow cause the dry bricks to burn and save herself in the flames of a fire that can never catch.

  LOCUSTS

  The car is long and black, with fake wooden sides that are peeling away from the body in thin metallic strips. It honks even before it stops in front of our house, but my parents pay no attention.

  The car continues to honk, and finally my mother lifts her head from her book.

  —Jesus, she says, then walks to the bathroom and locks the door behind her. My father rises from his chair, dragging his eyes away from the baseball game on the
television.

  —Helen, he says sharply to her, then notices me by the window. He smiles grimly and wipes his hands across the front of his shirt.

  Francine launches herself from the car first; she is splendid in hot pink, blue designer jeans, and breasts, which are clearly distinguishable from the soft bulk of her back and shoulders and stomach. They are a new addition since her last visit here two summers ago when she and I lay on the hot pavement at the pool spreading our hands flat across our chests, searching for even the slightest swelling in the flat bony shapes of our bodies.

  This summer we will not go to the pool, since I am still recovering from an unusually severe and inexplicably contracted bout of hepatitis that kept me out of school for the first half of the year. I know that Francine will be uneasy about my hepatitis; she will wonder where I got it and how, but she will decide immediately, looking me over, that its origin could not have been in anything sexual. For the first few nights, I know she will lie awake in the bed across from mine and listen to my breathing, trying to detect germs issuing from my mouth in a thin stream, heading relentlessly toward her. There will be some satisfaction for me in Francine’s first few sleepless nights.

  Aunt Louise and Uncle Woody follow Francine up the walk, Aunt Louise looking vaguely displeased with the sky and the street and the air, Uncle Woody rubbing his thick palms together as he comes up the path to the door.

  Francine drops her little square night case on the floor and looks me over, then looks outside. —What’s that noise? she asks.

  —Locusts, I tell her. —Seventeen-year locusts.

  The locusts have been here since the beginning of summer; quietly breathing underground for seventeen years, they have emerged to their few months of life, and they are everywhere, eating. It is only the first of August and already the bare branches of trees are beginning to show through; so far, because of my father’s constant spraying, only the grape arbor in the back yard has withstood them, but that will go too, eventually. Every tree and bush is covered with the abandoned shells shed by the locusts; transparent brown and intricately limbed, they are far more frightening than the insects themselves, which are slow and pathetically graceless. They seem capable of little other than eating, and don’t even bother to fly away when approached, as though survival is not a concern for them; they simply continue to eat until caught or killed.

  At lunch one day, I sat at a table across from a boy who ate his entire meal with a brown paper bag quietly buzzing and shifting at his elbow. Every now and then the boy looked at it with a kind of grim satisfaction, but it was only after he’d wadded the remains of his sandwich and its wrapping into a tight little ball that he opened the bag to show me about twenty locusts, their wings torn off, stumbling over and over each other in helpless dumb confusion.

  —These bastards won’t be eating any more trees, the boy said. —That’s for goddamn sure.

  They’ll be gone by the end of summer, and by next spring the leaves will come back, the bushes will bloom again, and everything will be as it was before. We’ll forget they were ever here, my father says, but I think I will never forget the sound they make. It is an incessant humming, a whirr that goes all the time, day and night, and won’t stop until the locusts have eaten all the leaves on all the trees and at last laid their eggs and died.

  One night my father put his tape recorder on the windowsill and let it record the locusts until the tape ran out.

  —That’s crazy, my mother said. —Isn’t it bad enough we have to listen to them all the time without having them on tape, too?

  My father paid no attention to her; he rewound the tape and played it back. Even though it was only a cheap tinny echo of the sound outside, there was something terrible about hearing it like that. For the first time I realized what it was that we were listening to every minute of every day, with no change in pitch or intensity, and for a few hours I could hear nothing else—not the voices of my parents, not the television or the shouts of children outside, only the fevered drone of the locusts inside my head.

  I point out a bush covered with locust shells to Francine; she thinks they are ugly and is afraid of them. I tell her not to be, that when one of them flies into her hair, all she has to do is shake it out gently. She quivers delicately. She is disgusted.

  —Helen’s in the bathroom, my father is saying to Aunt Louise and Uncle Woody. —A bug.

  He ignores Aunt Louise’s meaningful look, and begins to manage the luggage with Uncle Woody. They make great show of carrying the suitcases inside and upstairs. Women, they are saying, can’t go anywhere without a closetful of clothes. Aunt Louise examines me carefully.

  —Well, she says, —you’ve certainly gotten thin.

  —Yes, I answer, —I guess so.

  —Are you all over that trouble?

  I look at the bathroom door and wonder how long my mother can stay in there. I admire her determination; surely she knows there will be consequences.

  I nod to my aunt. —All over it, I tell her.

  —Still, she says, —it’s a shame you had to miss so much of your first year of school. I suppose you didn’t get much chance to meet many boys.

  She is right, I didn’t, but I don’t want to talk about it, and I am trying to think of a lie about a handsome tutor, or a hospital intern, when a little bubble of cruelty rises to her surface.

  —Francine has lots of boyfriends, she says. —All the boys at Cross want to take her out.

  All the boys at Cross fuck her, I would like to say, although I am sure this is not true. But I can see them, crowded around her, darting quick looks at her breasts, while she sends out gracious, smug smiles to the other girls passing by unnoticed. —Where is Francine? I ask.

  —In the kitchen. She’s hungry. Aunt Louise looks fondly toward the kitchen door. —It was a long drive.

  My uncle and my father come downstairs, dusting off their hands. My uncle looks me over while my father stands tentatively in front of the bathroom door, smiling weakly.

  —Well, my uncle says, —aren’t you becoming a little lady here. How old are you now, Susie?

  —Almost sixteen.

  —Sixteen, he says. —Sweet sixteen. I bet you have a lot of boyfriends.

  —No, Uncle Woody, I say, —not yet.

  —Oh, he says. —Not yet. Well. He leans forward, with a little smile. —I bet you’d like one, he says. —Wouldn’t you? A nice little boyfriend to bring you candy? And take you out in his car?

  —Woody, my aunt says.

  —Well, he says, —I brought you some candy.

  He holds out a bag of candy corns, already opened. He has brought them ever since I snuck into the Halloween candy when I was six or seven; I ate two bags of candy corns and was too sick to go out trick-or-treating the next night. Uncle Woody thinks it is a very funny story. He always brings the candy, but each time he presents it to me as though it is the first time.

  I take the candy from him and put it on the table. When I turn back, he is looking at my legs, my knees.

  —Woody, my father says, —I want to show you the grape arbor. Maybe you can figure out some way to stop these damn locusts. They’re eating everything in sight.

  Francine emerges from the kitchen with a strawberry yogurt in one hand and several cookies in the other. A spoon sticks up out of her back pocket.

  —Let’s go up, she says to me.

  As we walk up the stairs, I hear the bathroom door open and my aunt’s voice. —Well, Helen, she says, —how are you feeling?

  I stop to listen for the answer, but Francine bumps softly into me from behind. —Come on, she says, and we walk slowly up to my room, where she sits on the bed cross-legged and lays her cookies out in a neat row in front of her before she opens her yogurt. She is going to tell me about her boyfriends, about the football games and pep rallies, about cruising McDonald’s with her friends, about the parties. I cannot hear this, and concentrate instead on the tight painful folds of flesh and denim that blossom when she cro
sses her legs. So where does everybody hang out? she will want to know. What does everyone do around here? she is going to ask me. We will spend a long afternoon, at the end of which she will say, So what are we going to do tonight? There is a carnival just outside town, in the parking lot of the mall; I have driven past it with my father once or twice, and I offer it to Francine.

  She looks around my room, which has not changed much since her last visit here, then picks a crumb from her shirt and places it carefully on the tip of her tongue. Boys, her eyes are saying, don’t you know any boys? She will want to hang out and find some. She slides her spoon back and forth across her lips and assumes a look of boredom. This is going to be a long summer, she is thinking already.

  Like the locusts, they will be here until nearly the end of summer, almost three weeks. When I asked my mother why they were staying so long, she looked up from her book and gazed at me.

  —Ask your father, she finally said. —They’re his family.

  He looked away briefly from the television, just long enough to say, —Helen, then turned back in time to watch the next play.

  —Go ahead, she said to me. —Ask him.

  My father got up and walked into the kitchen; the icebox door banged open, ice clattered into a glass, and in a few moments my mother put down her book and followed him in. Their voices were just an angry murmur over the ball game, but after a while the back door slammed and the car started. When my mother came back into the living room, she seemed surprised to see me there.

  —Susan, she said, —it’s late. Why don’t you go to bed?

  I woke up later to hear voices outside, from the back yard. When I went to the window, I saw my mother and her best friend, Carol, sitting close together in a pool of light on the patio below me. My mother leaned against Carol, and Carol ran her hands smoothly over my mother’s hair. It’s all right, she was saying over and over; in the half-light of the moon, all the blue suburban lawns stretched out quietly until they blended into the darker blue of whatever lay beyond us.