8 Plus 1 (6 page)

“How long have you been going out with her?”

“Four months and three days,” he said.

“That’s some kind of record for you, isn’t it?” I asked.

“She’s keeping score,” he said. “She reminds me every day.” Although we were in touching distance, he was suddenly far away. “That Jane. She’s really something …”

I had an opportunity to see her through Mike’s
eyes one Sunday afternoon when she poked her head into the den, blinked her eyes, smiled tentatively and said, “Hi, Mr. Croft.”

I gave up my struggle with the newspaper and let the various sections fall like collapsed tents to the floor.

“May I come in?” she asked.

We had never exchanged more than pleasant greetings, and I studied her as she entered and then sat, Buddha-like, on the floor. Her long hair sparkled with cleanliness. As she pushed it back, I saw a constellation of acne on her forehead, but this only made her seem more human and less a model for shampoo on a television commercial. At Mike’s age, I could have been dazzled by a girl like her.

“Well,” I said, noticing finally that she carried a loose-leaf binder in her hands.

“Wow,” she said, drawing out the word, like a sigh. “Mr. Croft, I know I shouldn’t be bothering you, but …”

I tried to disguise my own sigh: I knew what she wanted. Although the company that employs me deals with art objects, and although I was an art major in college years ago, I am now involved in administrative affairs and have not touched brush or crayon for years.

She held out the binder. “I’ve got to show these to someone. Someone who
knows
, who’s heavy in art. Like, my art teacher is a spaz.”

“A spaz?”

“You know. Hopeless, a wipe-out.”

And anyway, I thought, whether your teacher is a spaz or not, the way to a boy’s heart is probably
through the approbation of his father. I looked at her sketches. Landscapes. The same tree in every sketch. And everything perfect. But too perfect. The trees as alike as strings on a harp. Like painting by numbers. Yet she was obviously talented. Like thousands, millions of others. We talked awhile about her work, and I was encouraging, of course. It was a pleasant conversation. Her
wows
and
heavies
weren’t as irritating when she flashed that smile at the same time.

“I really appreciate this, Mr. Croft,” she said, getting up. “How can I thank you?”

By letting Mike get his mind back on algebra. But I said nothing, merely nodded at her appreciation.

Later, passing the kitchen doorway, I saw her with Ellie. They were discussing recipes. Jane was wowing all over the place as Ellie described her special coffeecake recipe: The way to a boy’s heart is also through his mother’s kitchen.

But apparently Jane encountered a detour. At dinner a few nights later, Mike announced that he had volunteered to become photographer for the school yearbook.

“You actually volunteered for something that’s got nothing to do with girls or basketball?” Julie asked.

Mike ignored her. “It’s going to take up a lot of time, but my counselor at school thinks the extracurricular activity will help my scholarship chances.”

“How about algebra?” I asked.

He had anticipated the question. “I got an A
minus
in this week’s test and a B
plus
last week,” he said.

“How about Jane?” Julie asked round-eyed. Nobody had yet asked her for a date, and she lived vicariously, following Mike’s romances the way some housewives watch soap operas.

“What’s Jane got to do with it?” Mike asked.

“Well, with basketball practice and this picture-taking stuff, when are you going to see her?” Julie asked, in a mild state of shock.

“Look, kid.” He always called her kid when he was annoyed with her. “Jane’s got her own life to lead. And anyway, I think a relationship needs room to breathe.”

Julie had difficulty swallowing. “Boy, I never heard that one before.”

Ellie came to the rescue: “Didn’t Gibran say, ‘Let there be spaces in your togetherness’?” With two teenage girls in the family,
The Prophet
is well-thumbed and much-quoted.

Ellie and I were familiar with Mike’s pattern with girls, but in this case Julie had been the first to see it emerge. The process, however, is highly visible when his intentions become clear. Besides the new career in photography, Mike suddenly became very conscientious about homework. In addition, the basketball team became a possible entrant in the District Championship, which meant extra practice on weekends. “Can you imagine that, Jane? A chance to be the top team of all,” I heard him telling Jane as I went by the telephone. There had been a time when all their phone conversations had been intimate, when he’d snake the cord into his room and close the
door. Now he didn’t mind standing in the front hallway in sight of anyone going by.

“How’s Jane these days?” Julie asked, carefully casual at dinner that evening.

“Great,” Mike answered. “Pass the potatoes, will you?”

“I haven’t seen her around here lately,” Julie persisted.

“We’re going to the movies tonight,” Mike said.

“Big deal,” Julie snickered.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mike asked.

But nobody answered. Everyone was busy eating, although I noticed that Mike didn’t finish the steak that he usually devours, and he passed up dessert.

“What movie are you going to see?” Julie asked.

“I don’t know,” he said morosely, toying with his food. Ellie shot Julie a quick glance that said, Drop the subject.

Mike was still morose when he stalked into the house from the movie. He was early, which was unusual. Julie fluttered down the stairway, anticipating his return. “Mike …”

He held up his hand like a traffic cop, but she pressed on. “Did you and Jane have a good time?”

“I had a rotten time,” he said.

“What happened?”

“Hey, Julie, lay off, will you?” he said.

Surprised at the anguish in his voice, I interrupted, reminding Julie that it was past her bedtime for a school night. She ascended the stairs with reluctant steps, muttering something about missing all the drama.

There was not much drama, really. Ellie had
gone to bed early with a headache, and I had a data report to complete, and Mike banged around the kitchen, making the usual noise that accompanies his late-evening sandwich productions. After a while he emerged, carrying a sandwich in one hand and a quart of milk in the other. He sat down on the floor in the same Buddha-like pose Jane had assumed.

He took a bite of the sandwich and chewed without appetite: the condemned prisoner having his last meal.

“Know what’s the matter with girls, Dad?”

“What?”

“They get on your nerves. Like Julie—poking her nose in everybody’s business. And Jane. She’s just great, but …”

“But what?” I asked, laying down the pencil.

“I don’t know. Like, she combs her hair about a million times a day. Every time I turn around she’s running a comb through her hair. And she’s the kind of a girl that, if a song is playing on the radio, she sings along with it. And you can’t really hear the song.”

“She seems like a sweet girl,” I offered.

“She is,” Mike admitted. “She’s just great, but …”

But.
That monster of a word.

He pushed the sandwich aside; it was intact except for the half-moon that represented his only bite.

“It’s all over between Jane and me,” he said, finality in his voice like the slam of a door. “She wanted to know what had happened between us.
And what could I say? I don’t
know
what happened, Dad. I just …”

“You just don’t feel the same way toward her,” I said, trying to be helpful.

“Right,” he said. “I feel like a rat …”

“You should feel like a rat,” I said.

When he looked up in surprise, I said, “You can’t help what happens to your emotions, Mike. Not at your age. Not at any age, I guess. It would be terrible to fake it with Jane or anybody else. If you didn’t feel bad about it, you’d really be a rat.”

He looked at me, and I felt again that fleeting moment of sharing. It wasn’t triumphant this time, like the basketball sinking through the hoop, but it was a sharing, anyway.

“Poor Jane,” Ellie said later when I had brought her up to date.

“It was inevitable.”

“I wonder what the next one will be like,” she said.

“Like all the others,” I said. “Except the next one will probably have another word instead of
wow.
”

I heard that
wow
again a week or so later when I stopped by a downtown drugstore for an evening newspaper.

“Hi, Mr. Croft. Wow! It’s cold, isn’t it?”

I didn’t spot her at first. My glasses were fogged. And the stools at the soda fountain were occupied by teenagers wearing the same navy-blue jackets and faded jeans. But I’d have known that
wow
anywhere, and then I saw her waving.

Someone abandoned the stool next to her, and I
sat down. “Hi,” I said, groping for her name and then pinning it down: “Jane.”

A sundae, strawberry apparently, stood before her; it looked regal and frigid and gaudy. I shivered from the cold that had followed me into the store, and she sat there, spooning ice cream into her mouth.

“How’s your sketching going?” I asked, signaling the clerk for a cup of coffee.

“To tell you the truth, I haven’t done much, Mr. Croft. Like, I’m not too ambitious. I guess I lack motivation.” She sneezed and wiped her nose with a tissue.

“Well, you have plenty of time to develop ambition.”

As usual, I burned my tongue on the coffee.

“How’s Mike?” she asked.

“Fine.”

“I hate myself,” she announced, taking a huge bite of ice cream dripping with syrup. “I promised myself I wouldn’t mention his name for at least six months, and here I am, wow, asking about him.”

“Never hate yourself, Jane. You’re too sweet a girl for that.”

“Not many people think I’m sweet,” she said, tossing her hair, revealing again the sprinkle of acne. She sniffed. “And I’ve got a cold on top of everything else.”

I wondered: Where’s the summer girl, the girl who went to the beach with Mike and splashed in the water, bikini clad and tanned and lovely?

“You’re not a mess, Jane. You’re pretty and talented.
And someday you’re going to knock some fellow off his feet.”

She looked up, smiling wanly. “You’re a nice guy, Mr. Croft.”

Not really, I thought. I had been her enemy for a while because she had threatened Mike’s scholarship. And I had gritted my teeth at all her wows. And I felt sad now about it all.

“I wish there were something I could do, Jane,” I said, turning toward her. Despite the eyes that were bloodshot from the cold and the reddened nostrils, she was still lovely, those television commercial teeth and that shining hair. The sadness grew in me because I wished with all my heart that I could make her happy and knew there was no way for me to do so.

“There’s nothing anybody can do, Mr. Croft,” she said, “but thanks, anyway.” She finished the sundae, licking the spoon, and then groped in her handbag for another tissue.

She got up from the stool and looked at me again, almost as an afterthought, as if she had forgotten my presence. And why not? I was Mike’s father, not Mike. “Say hello to Mrs. Croft,” she said, easing herself off the stool. “And to Julie.”

I watched her walking toward the door: the faded jeans, the long hair, the jacket emblazoned with a school name. You couldn’t tell her from a million others. The sadness remained as I finished the coffee. I looked into the mirror and saw my reflection there: Mr. Croft,
you’re a nice guy
, like a million others. I saw the lines like parenthesis marks enclosing the lips, the receding hairline, the small tugs of flesh beneath the eyes. And the
wisps of gray in the hair. If all the young girls looked alike, then all the fathers looked alike too, didn’t they?

I paid for the coffee, bought the evening newspaper on the way out and wondered whether I had been feeling sad all along for the wrong person. And I told myself: Except when you’re shaving, don’t look into mirrors anymore.

There’s a sentence in “President Cleveland, Where Are You?” which is probably the most significant I have written in terms of my development as a writer. The sentence echoes back to a lost and half-forgotten story I wrote in the days when I was scribbling stories in pencil at the kitchen table. The story was about a boy from the poorer section of a town who falls desperately in love with a girl from the other side of town where the people live, or so he thinks, grandly and affluently. The story was told in the first person, the narrator was a twelve-year-old boy.

The problem concerned description. The narrator (and I, the writer) faced the problem of describing the girl’s house, a thing of grandeur and beauty, white and shining, alien to the three-story tenement building in which the boy lived. How to describe such a house? I knew little about architecture, next to nothing at all. The house had an aura of graceful antiquity—was it a relic of some earlier era? It seemed that I had seen such houses in books—but what books? I knew nothing about researching such a subject and, anyway, I didn’t
want to burden the narrative with a long description of the house. In fact, this would not only be fatal to the forward thrust of the story but would not be consistent with what a twelve-year-old boy would know about architecture. Yet, I wanted to describe it as more than just a big white house.

The problem brought the story to a complete halt. I walked my hometown streets, desolated by the thought of all the things I did not know. How could someone so ignorant about so much ever become a writer? Back home, chewing at the pencil, I read and reread the words I had written. The lean clean prose of Ernest Hemingway and the simplicity of William Saroyan had affected me deeply, and I always told myself: Keep it simple, don’t get too technical. So, let’s apply those principles to the girls house. Forget architecture—what did the house look like? Not what did it
really
look like, but what did it look like to this twelve-year-old boy?