The Most Dangerous Thing (9 page)

Chapter Twelve

Summer 1979

I
n the spring of the year she would turn fourteen, Gwen did a very odd thing: she asked her parents to take her to visit a classmate, Chloe, who had been stricken with mononucleosis. That was not the weird part, although the two were more friendly than friends, but their school was small enough that Gwen’s parents did not question her suddenly fervent desire to visit this particular girl. No, the weird part was when Gwen, after spending a polite twenty minutes chatting with Chloe and catching her up on class gossip, asked to use her bathroom and then stuck Chloe’s toothbrush in her mouth, praying that there were still germs on it and she, too, would get mono. We all found out, too, because Gwen told Mickey and Mickey told Tim, who told Sean and Go-Go.

It was an article of faith at the time that mono was a good way to get skinny. We all knew some girl who had lost weight that way. Chloe was already skinny, but another girl at the Park School had caught the so-called kissing disease and appeared six weeks later, suddenly slender, her eyes now huge in her face, cheekbones and collarbones sharp. Gwen was desperate for a similar transformation, but her parents refused to let her diet. That is—they would not let her try Scarsdale, very trendy at the time, or any of the strict, rigid diets that approached religions, with their arbitrary lists of things allowed and things forbidden. The Robisons were happy to make healthy meals for her, to substitute fruit for dessert, to fill the refrigerator with cut-up carrots and celery and hummus, quite avant-garde at the time. Go-Go took a mouthful once and spat it out on the refrigerator door. But Gwen was not allowed to diet. Her mother said that Gwen would come into her height, and the pounds would fall away. Miller and Fiona had gone through similar transformations. Gwen, however, did not believe Tally Robison. She was desperate for her own cure, and Chloe’s toothbrush was her best bet.

Yet mono never did come for Gwen. Instead, things happened as her mother had prophesied. She added three inches to her height in three months, and what had been an extra fifteen pounds became just right. Her mother let her buy new clothes, dropping her off at the mall with an allowance and no rules. Gwen bought gauzy, “ethnic” things, long and floaty. She clearly thought she looked a little bit like Stevie Nicks, and she wasn’t entirely wrong. She would have looked more like her if her mother had let her get a perm, but that was another one of those odd lines that Tally drew. She, with her long, straight hair, couldn’t bear the idea of her daughter having a curly mane.

The rest of us never commented on the change, no matter how Gwen preened and waited for the compliments she believed she deserved. Oh, we noted her clothes, but only to mention how impractical they were. “Those blouses will get caught on tree branches,” Mickey said. Tim said he could see her underwear through the thin material of the skirt. Sean told her that she was going to slow us down in her stupid new sandals—that’s exactly what he called them, stupid new sandals.

Only Go-Go reached a dirty hand toward her draped arm, eager to feel the material, and she let him. He rubbed it between forefinger and thumb, curious. “Kind of scratchy,” he said. Then: “Can boys wear shirts like that?” How Tim and Sean hooted at him, but Go-Go, for once, was not the naif. Lots of boys, other boys, were wearing clothes very much like Gwen’s that summer. Even Mickey’s stepfather, Rick, wore a linen shirt that made us think of medieval days, peasants toiling the land. It was off-white, with a slit that showed lots of his dark chest hair. And Rick wasn’t someone that the Halloran boys could mock. He knew how to fix engines, he had a motorcycle. He really did look like Tom Selleck.

It was the Halloran boys who were out of step with the times, with their short hair and plain white T-shirts. Their summer clothes were what they used to wear to summer camp, but there was no summer camp for them this year. Something had happened. Mr. Halloran had lost his job, which wasn’t new. Mr. Halloran was rather famous for losing jobs. He had a temper, he liked to tell the boss what was what, as he said, and that usually ended up with him leaving. It was a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg question whether Mr. Halloran was asked to leave his jobs because he told the boss what was what, or whether he sensed the end was near and decided he had nothing to lose by making such a speech. He had lost enough jobs so that he kept his workplace possessions to a minimum. The difference, in the summer of 1979, was that he was having trouble finding a new one. We didn’t talk about it and we didn’t know why we didn’t talk about it. Over time, there would be more and more subjects like that, things we didn’t talk about, for reasons we couldn’t identify. Gwen’s new appearance. Mr. Halloran’s job situation. How good-looking Rick was. Go-Go’s increasing craziness, the things he was rumored to do to cats and small animals. But that came later, when we hardly spoke to each other at all.

Gwen and Sean, falling in love, then out. We
never
spoke of that. They held it close, like a secret, but the kind of secret that you were dying for others to ask you about. The rest of us refused to acknowledge it.

Perhaps we should have spoken about that because that was what killed us, as an us. We couldn’t be we anymore, not in the face of that impenetrable twosome. We had been a we, and our mathematics teachers, different as they were—the nuns and priests of St. Lawrence and Cardinal Gibbons, the beaten-down old crone at Mickey’s public school, the love-is-all hippie type at Park—agreed that a subset of a group could not be greater than the group itself. Venn diagrams proved it. Yet Gwen and Sean were. They formed a group within the group, and it swamped us like a wave, we couldn’t escape it. All because of the damn clothes, which were the result of Gwen getting thin, which we still trace back to Chloe’s toothbrush, even if it didn’t give Gwen mono, as she had hoped. It began with the toothbrush, with moon-faced Gwen sneaking into some girl’s bathroom sucking on her red-handled Oral-B. Some girls aren’t very good at being pretty. There, it’s been said. Gwen became very pretty, very fast, and she didn’t know how to handle it. She was as destructive as Go-Go, running through the woods with a pointed stick or tossing rocks in the air, heedless of where they might land. But everyone knew to get out of Go-Go’s way when he was acting crazy. Gwen tore through us with no warning.

I
t was late July, that point on the calendar where summer has gotten a little old, boring. After two days of heavy rains, the stream was wide and fast in places. Emboldened by our friendship with Chicken George, we had been pushing deeper and deeper into the woods each day, taking sack lunches prepared by Mrs. Robison or Mrs. Halloran. We found what appeared to be a broken concrete dam, most of it submerged in the rushing brown stream, but with a few jagged pieces above the waterline. Tim insisted on crossing there. Mickey scrambled behind him, sure-footed as ever in anything that wasn’t an athletic contest.

Go-Go went next, forever indifferent to the water, no matter how many times we had been told it was polluted and deadly, and his very indifference somehow kept him safe. Sean waited for Gwen to go. She clearly didn’t want to cross, but it was too late to argue against Tim’s plan, and she would have been shamed if she didn’t try. She lost her footing on her second or third step, and although she righted herself, the sleeve of her filmy, flimsy blouse caught on something in the water. If she had pulled back sharply, she would have been fine, but she didn’t want to tear the blouse. She reached down, determined to gently extract the material from whatever had snagged it—and that was when she fell into the water. The horrible, murky water, which we had been told countless times could kill us, the water whose merest contact required tetanus boosters.

She didn’t come up.

In water that brown, it would have been impossible to see blood, but Go-Go pointed, screaming in that way he had, so we couldn’t tell if he was happy or scared. “Blood! Blood!” Gwen bobbed to the surface, floated, like the Lily Maid of Astolat. Not that we knew the poem, but Gwen had read
Anne of Green Gables,
in which Anne has to be rescued after attempting to re-create the maiden’s fate. We knew a lot of stuff in that secondhand, watered-down way, through cartoons and books and television shows. Which, perhaps, is a way of saying we knew nothing.

Those of us who had crossed to the other bank froze, but Sean plunged into the water. Gwen’s body kept moving away from him, almost as if it were a game.
Catch me if you can
. The others ran down the bank, shouting contradictory instructions. “Shut up,” Sean shouted through gritted teeth. “Shut up.” He was wading, the water up to his waist, reaching for her, but she kept slipping from his grasp. Gwen might have eluded him forever, but a stick saved her this time, catching her skirt just long enough to give Sean time to catch up to her. He gathered her up in his arms and carried her to shore, then began giving her mouth-to-mouth, which he had learned in swimming classes at the camp the Hallorans could no longer afford.

“She’ll be brain damaged,” Mickey said. “She was unconscious too long, she took in too much water.”

“Shut up,” Tim said.

Go-Go jumped up and down, chanting: “Out goes the bad air, in goes the good air.” That’s how it worked in cartoons. We had all seen it ourselves on the old
Captain Chesapeake
show. In cartoons, the characters pushed on each other’s stomachs with great force and manipulated their arms.

In cartoons, the people always woke up. Gwen was not waking up.

But after what seemed an eternity, she coughed, spitting up a little water before vomiting a violent brackish stream. Sean sat back on his haunches, but he ended up catching some of it on his ankles.

“Are you OK?”

Tim stood over her. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

Sean swatted at his leg. “Don’t be stupid.”

“Three,” Gwen said. “What happened?”

“You fell,” Sean said. “You hit your head, you almost drowned.”

“Drowned!” Go-Go said.

She lifted a hand to her head, but there was no cut, there had been no blood, no matter what Go-Go thought he saw. “I feel a bump,” she said. Sean’s fingers followed hers, probing tenderly. It was hard not to notice that the gauzy shirt, the source of all this trouble, was transparent and clinging now, her bra visible. Gwen crossed her arms over her chest.

“The important thing,” Mickey said, “is to figure out what to tell the grown-ups.”

“What do you mean?”

“Gwen’s soaked, her shirt is torn. Her mother will see that and demand an explanation. They’ll know we had to go pretty far downstream to get to a place where the water runs this fast and deep, and we’ll be in trouble.”

“No one said we couldn’t,” said Tim, the master of the loophole, the king of technicalities.

“Mickey’s right,” Sean said. “No one said specifically we couldn’t go this far, but we never ask, because we know they’ll say no, and if they find out where we were, they’ll make rules against it. We have to get Gwen as dry as possible. When did you have your last tetanus shot?”

“Last summer, after I cut myself on that rusty fence.”

Sean said: “It’s been at least a few years for me. How long do the shots last?”

We didn’t know. We knew the horrors of lockjaw, though. Gwen’s father had covered that for us in great detail.

“I don’t have any cuts, though,” Sean said. “And I didn’t swallow any water. I’ll be okay.”

We thought at the time that Sean was taking one for the team, that he was willing to forgo the tetanus shot if it meant that we could continue to roam the park with no boundaries placed on us.

But Sean’s only concern was Gwen. He was making this heroic gesture for her because she had been unconscious during his true heroism and unable to appreciate it. Or had she been? Some of us wondered.

“Chicken George,” Mickey said. “He’ll help us, and he won’t ask any questions.”

“There’s no shower there,” Gwen said. “And I don’t want to wear his dirty clothes.”

“Trust me,” Mickey said.

We made our way back through the woods, to Chicken George’s house. He wasn’t surprised to see us. He was never surprised to see us. Although our comings and goings appeared random to us and therefore unpredictable, Chicken George seemed attuned to our movements the way he was attuned to his chickens, the seasons, the park. He was never caught off guard. He examined Gwen carefully, with those strange hands, so pink on one side, so dark on the other. He produced a Goody comb, still in its plastic wrapper, and worked it carefully through her wet, matted hair. He gave her a sheet from the line, so she knew it was clean and fresh, told her to go inside and change out of her wet clothes, wrap herself in the sheet as if it were a toga, and bring her clothes out. He actually said
toga,
and we were surprised he knew the word.

“To-ga, to-ga,” Go-Go began to chant. We had not seen the movie
Animal House.
We were too young. But it had filtered down into the culture, and we knew the set pieces, some of the lines. It was soon to be the era of trickle-down economics, but if you asked us, we would have said that adulthood, too, was a process of trickling down, that we picked up the scraps of adult life as surely as we went behind our parents at their dinner parties and stole sips from their glasses, bites from their plates. We shook cigarettes free from open packets, took tiny swigs from the bottles in the liquor cabinet. They knew, they had to know, because we know now everything our children do, no matter how sly they think they are. The difference is that our parents approved. They preferred for us to tiptoe into adulthood through these tiny subterfuges. It’s not a rationalization, but a truth: they encouraged us to lie, to keep things from them, to protect them from what we knew. It started small. The forays into the park. Our friendship with Chicken George. Gwen’s near-drowning, the time the truck almost crushed Go-Go. It started small, and then it got so large, so fast, that it swept us all away.

But the real problem was that Gwen and Sean fell in love. As five, we were mighty, the points on a star. Remember learning how to draw a star? When you are little, it seems impossible, out of reach. You draw lopsided, lumpy things. Then one day, someone shows you the secret. Mickey taught it to Go-Go: one line slashing down, a second shooting up in a diagonal. Straight across, diagonal down, diagonal up. A mere five lines, but when you have finished, there are six shapes within the one: five triangles clustered around a pentagon. Yes, there are even more, you can add and subtract lines, creating more shapes. But if you are true to the integrity of the lines you have drawn, there are five triangles and a pentagon. The pentagon was what grounded us, a magnetic field that held us together. Some might say the pentagon was Chicken George, but it was our talent for secrecy, our sense of ourselves as a single community. Once we five joined, truly joined, it was never boys against girls, or Hallorans against the other two families. No, it was Sean and Gwen who destroyed us. Two of our triangles cut themselves off and ran away together, and we were never whole again. Never.