We Others (10 page)

When I drove over to the Hohns’ on Saturday evening, Emily opened the door. Her parents had already left. For a while we sat on the faded pink cushions of the glider, in the warm dusk. It was the time of day when leaves are dark and the sky is watery pale. The world seems unable to make up its mind, as if at any second it might become deep night or a new day. Suddenly the streetlights came on. “I’ve never seen that before!” Emily cried. I said, “I can’t really remember whether I have or not. It’s strange. Wouldn’t I remember something like that?” “When I was little,” Emily said, “I once saw it raining on one side of the street—right over there—and not on this side. It was magical. I ran over to touch the rain and then I ran back into the sun. And then, a few years later, maybe seventh grade, when I remembered it, I couldn’t be sure it had really happened. I couldn’t
feel
the memory, you know what I mean? And I still can’t be sure, even though”—she waved her hand rapidly in front of her eyes—“oh, let’s go inside, I hate these idiotic bugs.”

I followed her into the living room and sat down next to her on the dark blue couch beside Mr. Hohn’s armchair, with its slightly sagging cushion and its yellow hexagonal pencil lying on one arm. On the coffee table stood the little accordion player. His head was tilted to one side and he was looking at me with a mad grin. I leaned back, but Emily stood up and said, “Let’s go upstairs!” I followed her up the carpeted stairs, sliding my hand along the dark banister. At the landing I glanced at the painting, but it was hidden behind the glare of its glass. For some reason I thought: Now I will never know. In Emily’s room I pulled out the wooden desk-chair and sat with my arms crossed on the back. Emily sat on the side of the bed. Her feet hung just above the floor. The gloved hand lay in her lap.

She patted the bed beside her and said, “Sit over here.” Carefully I made my way to the bed and sat down. “There’s no use waiting,” she said. Her voice sounded excited and weary at the same time.

She lifted the gloved hand slowly from her lap, as if it weighed a lot, and turned her forearm so that the two white buttons were exposed.

“All I ask,” she said, “is that you promise me one thing.”

I thought about it. “All right, I promise.” I looked at her. “So what do I have to—”

“That you won’t hate me.”

“Hate you!” It struck me that I shouldn’t be having this conversation, that things were taking a wrong turn. “Why would I—”

“Because it’s bad. It’s not what you think. It’s—wrong.”

“Wrong? That’s a strange thing to—”

“I didn’t want you to know. But you want to. You want to.”

“But not if—”

“You’re always thinking about it. Judging me. Holding it against me.”

“That’s not—I’m not holding—”

“Always looking. Making it worse.”

“But that’s—”

“Promise.”

“I promise—I promise—but listen—Emily—” I stood up and began pacing up and down in front of her, like a man in a hotel room in a movie. “You don’t—not if you—I mean, I don’t have to—”

“But you do. You do. You have to. I know you. That’s—who you are. You have to. Everything was so fine, and now—”

“It’s still fine. And you’re bound to get better, I’m sure the doctor—”

“It’s not like that—you don’t know. You want everything to be a certain way. But it isn’t. It isn’t. Look. Look. I’ll show you.”

Swiftly, angrily, she undid one white button. The glove seemed to expand slightly, as if it had been closed very tight. She began fumbling with the second button, the one closer to her hand. “Don’t just stand there,” she said fiercely. “Help me.” I sat down next to her and began working the button through the hole, which was stretched to a thin line. The glove was bound so tight that it must have chafed her wrist, which looked a bit red, unless it was my tugging and pulling that was bringing the blood to the surface.

“I think I’ve got it—wait—Emily—just a—there!” The glove was now open at the wrist, though I could see nothing of the hand itself. “That must be a relief. Do you want me to—”

“Just help me get this—”

The glove seemed to be moving, rippling a little, as if, released from the buttons, it was stretching its muscles. I grasped the edge near the bottom, while Emily pulled at the fingers. The glove seemed stuck, and I imagined that it would always be like this—the glove on the hand, the frantic tugging and pulling, Emily and I on the edge of the bed, day after day, forever—but all at once something gave way and the glove slipped quickly from the hand.

“See!” she said, holding her head away, as if her hand might do something to her.

The hand was thickly covered by crinkly dark hair, which grew more sparsely on the fingers and the palm. Through twists of hair, the skin on the back of the hand looked raw and shiny, as though it were wet. Smaller, tightly curling hairs grew in the spaces between the fingers and in the grooves of the finger joints. An ointment or secretion glistened on the thumb knuckle. Not far from the hand, the glove lay on the bed, its bottom wide open, like a mouth.

“Now you’ll never—” she cried. For a moment I thought she was going to swing her hand against my face. I leaned away from her, keeping my eye on the glove, in which I could see bits of hair and wet-looking stains. “You hate me!” she said bitterly, and when I raised my eyes I saw in her face an appalling sweetness, as if she were asking me to forgive her.

10

I woke late Sunday morning with a tickle in my throat; by mid-afternoon my eyes were burning and I had a temperature of 102. All that week I stayed in bed, shivering and sweating. Through heavy-lidded eyes I saw my mother’s delicate fingers holding before me a glass thermometer with a silver tip. Worst of all was a sensation of itching all over my body, as if clumps of hair were growing. Then it was over, through my window screens I could hear the sound of two separate lawnmowers, and I returned to school on Monday, nine days after my visit to Emily. When I entered homeroom I saw her sitting there the way she always did, staring straight ahead. Her gloved hand rested on the desk. I tried to catch her eye but she did not turn her head. In English I kept looking over at her, but she was always turned away; at the lockers I started toward her but stopped. In her room that night I hadn’t known what to do. After a while I’d helped her on with her hideous glove and buttoned it tight. My hands itched, and I had the sensation that my fingertips were cracking apart, bursting with hairs. “I have to go,” I said suddenly, and didn’t move, then abruptly left. At home I took a shower and rubbed my hands and body hard with a scratchy washcloth. When I looked at myself in the mirror, my chest was red and raw-looking.

School was nearly over. For the next week and a half I saw her always partly turned away, as if she’d become a profile. At home I studied intensely and without interest for final exams. I was tired of my room, tired of the town, sick of everything—I wanted high school to end. One hot night I woke suddenly in the dark. It was nearly two in the morning. I dressed quickly, crept out of my room and into the attached garage, and slowly raised the door. At Emily’s house all the windows were dark. They shone like obsidian in the glow of a streetlight. Had I expected her light to be on, had I wanted her to be waiting for me? I thought of the night when I’d broken into her house and entered her room, and as I watched the front porch from my father’s car I understood that this time I had come out only to sit awhile, as if I were looking for something that had once been there.

One afternoon in August I emerged from a new bookstore in the center of town and saw Emily across the street. I stepped back into the shade of the entranceway. She was walking with a girl I knew. They were wearing jeans rolled up to mid-calf, low white sneakers without socks, and plaid shirts with the sleeves rolled up above the elbows. Emily had on a straw sun-hat I had never seen before. She was laughing—a carefree, easy laugh. On her left hand she wore the white glove. I wanted to run across the street and shout at her that everything was all right, she could stop hating me now, things were still the same, weren’t they, we could walk along the sidewalk under the maple trees through spots of sun the way we always did and sit on the glider in the warm shade of her front porch forever, but Emily and her friend turned under an awning and entered a store, and later that afternoon, as I leaned back on my elbows at the beach and stared out at a sandbar with a white-and-red beach ball on it, I felt that I was about to understand something of immense importance, everything was about to become clear to me, but a boy came running along the sandbar and kicked the beach ball and I watched it fly lazily into the blue air, rising slower and slower until it stopped and seemed to float there before falling toward the shallow green-brown water.

Getting Closer

He’s nine going on ten, skinny-tall, shoulder blades pushing out like things inside a paper bag, new blue bathing suit too tight here, too loose there, but what’s all that got to do with anything? What’s important is that he’s here, standing by the picnic table, the sun shining on the river, the smell of pine needles and river water sharp in the air, somewhere a shout, laughter, music from a radio. His father’s cleaning ashes out of the grill, his mother and sister are laying down blankets on the sunny grass not far from the table, Grandma’s carrying one of the aluminum folding chairs toward the high pine near the edge of the drop to the river, and he’s doing what he likes to do best, what he’s really good at: standing around doing nothing. Everyone’s forgotten about him for a few seconds, the way it happens sometimes. You try not to remind anybody you’re there. He loves this place. On the table’s the fat thermos jug with the white spout near the bottom. After his swim he’ll push the button on the spout and fill up a paper cup with pink lemonade. It’s a good sound:
fsshh, psshh
. In the picnic basket he can see two packages of hot dogs, jars of relish and mustard, some bun-ends showing, a box of Oreo cookies, a bag of marshmallows which are marsh
mel
lows so why the
a
, paper plates sticking up sideways, a brown folded-over paper bag of maybe cherries. All week long he’s looked forward to this day. Nothing’s better than setting off on an all-day outing, in summer, to the park by the river—the familiar houses and vacant lots no longer sitting there with nothing to do but drifting toward you through the car window, the heat of the sun-warmed seat burning you through your jeans, the bottoms of your feet already feeling the ground pushing up on them as you walk from the parking lot to the picnic grounds above the riverbank. But now he’s here, right here, his jeans tossed in the back seat of the car and his T-shirt stuffed into his mother’s straw bag, the sun on one edge of the table and the piney shade covering the rest of it, Grandma already setting up the chair. And so the day’s about to get going at last, the day he’s been looking forward to in the hot nights while watching bars of light slide across his wall from passing cars, he’s here, he’s arrived, he’s ready to begin.

Though who’s to say when anything begins really? You could say the day began when they passed the wooden sign with the words
INDIAN COVE
and the outline of a tomahawk, on a curve of road with a double yellow line down the middle and brown wooden posts with red reflectors. Or maybe it all started when the car backed up the slope of the driveway and the tires bumped over the sidewalk between the knee-high pricker hedges. Or what if it happened before that, when he woke up in the morning and saw the day stretching out before him like a whole summer of blue afternoons? But he’s only playing, just fooling around, because he knows exactly when it all begins: it begins when he enters the water. That’s the agreement he’s made with himself, summer after summer. That’s just how it is. The day begins in the river, and everything else leads up to it.

Not that he’s all that eager to rush into things. Now that he’s here, now that the waiting’s practically over, he enjoys prolonging the excitement of moving toward the moment he’s been waiting for. It isn’t the swimming itself he looks forward to. He doesn’t even swim. He hangs on to the inner tube and kicks his legs. He likes it, it’s fine, he can take it or leave it. No, what he cares about, what thrills him every time, is knowing that this is it, the beginning of the long-awaited day at the river, as agreed to by himself in advance. Everything’s been leading up to it and, in the way of things that lead up to other things, there’s an electric charge, a hum. He can feel it all over his body. The closer you get, the more it’s there.

Julia, thirteen, isn’t like him in that way. Soon as she’s finished laying out the three blankets, she’ll run over to the edge of the drop, scamper down, and cross the short stretch of ground to the river. She’s always been like that, throwing herself into things—piano lessons, blueberrying, hiking a trail, the bumper cars at Pleasure Beach. She thinks he’s cautious, too held-back, timid even, and it’s probably true, but it’s also something else: he likes things to build up slowly, because when it happens that way, everything feels important. Does this mean there’s something un-grown-up about him, something that’ll go away one day, like his stick-out shoulder blades and his knobby anklebones?

“Come on, give us a hand, Cap’n,” Julia says. He’s not invisible anymore. Julia doesn’t like people standing around doing nothing. He takes a blanket corner and before he knows it she’s off around the table toward the pine where Grandma’s sitting, she’s scrambling down the drop and out of sight. A second later her head appears, then she’s all there except for her feet, then she’s got heels, toes. She doesn’t stop, goes right in past her knees, bends to splash water on her arms. He can see the reflections of her red suit broken up in the water. The river has little ripply waves, maybe from a speedboat out beyond the white barrels. His father once told him the Housatonic’s a tidal river. He remembers the word: tidal. Could that be the tide he’s looking at, those ripples? The Housatonic. He likes saying it, likes leaning into that “oooo” sound, which reminds him of a train coming around a bend at night in an old movie. Julia throws herself in, begins swimming out to the barrels.