Читать книгу Two Rivers - T. Greenwood - Страница 16

I was the only one outside Betsy’s family who knew what really happened to Mrs. Parker. The official explanation for her absence was that she was suffering from a mysterious respiratory ailment and had been sent to see specialists somewhere in the Midwest. But everyone had their speculations, the most popular being that Mrs. Parker had run off with another man. A photographer , some said. From New York City . My mother, who was nobody’s fool, said, “Phooey. That poor woman is probably frosting cupcakes in the sanitarium as we speak.” My mother, who was also a self-proclaimed champion of all women (both meek and strong), offered, “I’d lose my marbles too, what with nothing to do all day but dust my husband’s bowling trophies.” (Mr. Parker was a local bowling phenom, having rolled a half-dozen 300 games in his lifetime.) Of course, I didn’t tell her that she was right. I only shrugged and said I bet Betsy missed her. Betsy and I never spoke about what happened that snowy day on her kitchen floor. But there was an understanding between us afterward. We shared a secret both terrible and sacred.

At Two Rivers Graded School, there were rules for boys and girls. Rules that were handed down from the older kids to the younger ones like commandments. Only these statutes were not etched in stone but whispered conspiratorially on the playground. If you had a mentor, an older sibling or friend, you might be privy to the secret order of things. But most of us learned the rules the hard way: by breaking them. The rules for boys were different than the rules for girls (much as they are for men and women). Boys should like girls or else they were pansies. Boys should not, however, let said girls know they liked them. In fact, the more ambivalent and cold you were to the object of your affection, the better. As a boy who carried his heart on his sleeve, I learned this one early on. It only took one longing glance in Betsy’s direction during lunch to earn me a cuff on the ear from Brooder. A conversation during recess resulted in a stern admonishment behind the gym after school.

“What the hell’s the matter with you, Montgomery?” Brooder asked. He had a wad of tobacco tucked in his cheek, making him look remotely like a chipmunk. He’d been stealing his father’s chewing tobacco since the fourth grade.

“Nothin’,” I said, though I could feel my ears red-hot still from the brief encounter with Betsy.

“You look like you got goddamned beets on the side of your head,” he said. “Over Betsy Parker?”

Just hearing her name made my stomach flutter. “Shut up,” I argued meakly.

Brooder smacked my back and spit a long black stream of tobacco on the ground next to my feet. “Don’t be such a pussy.”

And so, I kept my feelings for Betsy as quiet as I could bear. The rules for girls (and women I suppose) remained (and continue to remain) a mystery to me. There were intricacies to the girls’ rules. Nuances that escaped me. All I knew was that even after Betsy kissed me on the Parkers’ kitchen floor, she still pretended that she and I weren’t friends when we were at school. This was a charade I was willing to act out, however, because as soon as school let out, the world started spinning in the right direction again. When the last bell had rung for the day, and we made our way across the playing fields toward home, Betsy’s affectations of cool ambivalence toward me disappeared, our friendship restored in an instant.

It was fun breaking the rules. As far as we knew, we were the only boy and girl in our grade who were carrying on such an illicit relationship. If I’d been older, I might have compared our after-school trysts to the kinds kept by married men and their mistresses. But I was thirteen, and it just felt like we were doing something dangerous. Every cold shoulder in gym class, every snide remark, every snub was simply part of a necessary performance. It was okay, because I knew that it was just pretend and that out of sight of the school, as we ran across the expanse of wet green grass, she would reach out for my hand, dragging me behind her terrific strides. Home again. Where Betsy and I were best friends.

And then in the spring of 1959, Mindy Wheeler moved to town, and all of the rules (for both boys and girls) flew out the proverbial window. Mindy Wheeler was fourteen; rumor had it she’d been kept back at her old school, which was either in North Carolina or North Dakota—no one knew for sure. She had hair the color of hay, and boobs. Big ones. She was also almost six feet tall, a better basketball player than anyone in our whole school. Mindy Wheeler had the mouth of a sailor and the body of a goddess. She was the source of great confusion for all of us (boys and girls). What was one to do with someone like Mindy Wheeler?

It started when Howie Burke invited her to play a game of three-on-three during recess. Invited probably isn’t the right word; allowed might be better. When she grabbed the ball off the court midgame, dribbled it down to the rusty hoop, and made an easy layup, of the six boys, myself included, who had been arguing over whether or not a noogie constituted a foul, no one made a move to stop her. And Howie, perpetrator of the aforementioned noogie, said, “Okay, sub-in The Girl. Gauthier, you’re out.” And with that, everything I had come to accept as proper behavior became meaningless.

Boys openly fawned over Mindy Wheeler. She rendered poor Ray speechless. Even Brooder softened around her. On any given day, any one of my peers could be found stumbling and stuttering before her. We both feared her and worshipped her. And the girls, surprisingly, adored her. You’d have thought that a girl of Mindy’s stature, of her power to subvert an entire set of established social mores and, if nothing else, of her mere pectoral endowment, would have been more intimidating to the girls of Two Rivers Graded School. But instead, they fawned over her as well. They stumbled and stuttered. They feared and worshipped. Betsy Parker included.

Still, I didn’t see it coming.

I lived for the last bell. Usually after school, Betsy was mine again. After school, we could give up the pretense. Feigning indifference for six straight hours was a certain kind of torture for me. After school, at Betsy’s house, we spent hours going through her mother and father’s drawers, looking for forbidden things. We looked at her father’s dirty magazines, filled condoms with water and threw them over the fence into Mr. Lowe’s yard. We studied the complicated lingerie her mother left behind and her father’s jock straps. We once found a douche bag on the top shelf of a closet, and when Betsy explained what it was used for, I found myself so flustered I could barely speak. On less mischievous days, we mostly hunkered down in Betsy’s room listening to records, eating peanut butter straight out of the jar, and planning the next adventure. But after Mindy’s arrival, I couldn’t count on anything. Sometimes instead of racing home with me, Betsy would linger after school with Mindy, doing penny drops on the monkey bars or playing H-O-R-S-E. On those days I’d shove my hands in my pockets and kick dirt all the way home. Resign myself to another afternoon spent watching Brooder terrorize the little kids who were just trying to get home too. Betsy would always catch up with me later, but by then I was sunk so deep in self-pity even Betsy couldn’t pull me out.

It was spring then, and Betsy’s latest scheme was a complex one aimed at framing Howie Burke in an April Fool’s prank. Howie was notorious for his own annual April Fool’s high jinx. He bragged endlessly about the rotten eggs he had thrown, the houses he had toilet-papered, the tires he had flattened. His crowning achievement (and the source of Betsy’s greatest fury) being the shaving cream fiasco of 1957, when he broke into Betsy’s father’s barbershop and stole a case of Barbasol, which (to add insult to injury) he used to write “Besty Praker Eats Boogers”(Howie was likely dyslexic, though back then we just thought he was stupid) in the windows of Two Rivers Graded School. Betsy and Howie had been sparring since the second grade, when Betsy started the war by beating Howie in a recess footrace. Sometimes her passion for getting back at Howie verged on the manic, and I found myself feeling jealous. I never seemed to incite much of anything in Betsy; even when she and I were pretending to dislike each other at school, I got little more than a tongue stuck out. Eyes crossed.

Howie had a crush on our English teacher, Miss Bean. (The rules were different when it came to boys and pretty teachers too. We all loved Miss Bean. We all openly adored her.) However, of all of us, Howie’s infatuation was the most intense, and Betsy Parker knew it.

“I’ve got it,” Betsy said one Friday afternoon when Mindy was occupied with something, or someone, else and I was contentedly playing second fiddle. We were sitting on Betsy’s bedroom floor drinking our third and fourth Cokes respectively. (Betsy’s dad had a refrigerator in the basement, which was always stocked with extra sodas.)

“Got what?” I asked.

“We’re going to TP Miss Bean’s house,” she said.

“Why?” I asked. Though my heart sang every time Betsy spoke in the plural, the thought of doing anything like this to Miss Bean seemed like sacrilege.

“We’re going to TP the house, put eggs in the mailbox, AND shaving cream her car.”

I shook my head. “We can’t.”

“Yes, we can,” she said. “If you wear this Superman mask,” she said, raising a lone eyebrow and reaching under her bed. She pulled out a plastic mask identical to the one that Howie Burke had worn for the last three consecutive pranks. (He was known to work in disguise.)

“And you ?” I asked.

“Lois Lane?” she said, smiling in the way that made my knees feel like oatmeal. The idea of sneaking around in the dark with Betsy was almost more than I could stand.

“We can’t,” I said then, laughing and shaking my head. “Miss Bean didn’t do anything. That’s just mean.”

“ You like her too ?” Betsy asked, accusingly.

“No,” I said, reaching for the mask, wondering if Betsy was jealous. Hoping Betsy was jealous. But I did like Miss Bean. I liked Miss Bean in her sweater sets and pastel pumps that matched. I liked the way she smelled like toothpaste and patted the top of my head when I said something insightful in class.

“She’ll know it’s not Howie,” I said.

“How?”

“Because Howie’s like six feet tall,” I said. (I was a late bloomer. I wouldn’t see six feet until I was sixteen. And then, as if my bones were making up for lost time, I would grow another four inches between my junior and senior years in high school.)

“True,” she said sadly, and hung the mask on her bedpost.

Relieved, I picked up my Coke and drained the last few sweet drops. “We’ll get him back someday,” I offered, closing my lips tightly around we .

I figured out what happened during English class when Miss Bean slammed her books down on her desk and said, “Well, I hope you enjoyed your little prank. Very funny.”

I heard giggles. Girl giggles.

I turned around and saw that Betsy was sitting next to Mindy, who was whispering something in her ear. Betsy was smiling. My heart dropped with the realization of what happened. Of course, Mindy. Mindy who was almost six feet tall. I felt like I was melting into my seat.

Howie sat in the front row as he always did, eyes wide and full of love.

“ Very funny,” Miss Bean said again, her voice shaking now. She looked out over us and frowned, her eyes teary. Then she opened her desk drawer and pulled out a shoe box. She took the lid off, and the smell of rotten eggs filled the room. She went to Howie’s desk and set the box down. “I just got a letter from my fiancé,” she said. “He’s in the service. He’s stationed in Germany. I haven’t seen him in almost six months.”

Howie looked confused as he peered into the box. When he reached in and pulled out the dripping wet letter, I heard Betsy gasp.

“April Fools,” Miss Bean said, crying now, and then she rushed out of the room.

Howie sat there, dumb. We all sat there, dumb.

After school, Betsy came running up to me as I made my way across the soccer field. “I should have listened to you,” she said, reaching for my hand.

I nodded my head. “Yeah.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t tell you, because I know how much you like Miss Bean. We didn’t know there was a letter from her boyfriend in there,” she said, running after me as I quickened my pace. “We did it because of Howie.”

I kept walking as fast as I could.

“I’m sorry, Harper,” she said. “We didn’t do it to be mean to Miss Bean.”

I stopped and looked at her. She had two braids and both of them were coming undone.

“It was stupid,” she said. “Really stupid.”

And she had no idea that though I felt bad for Miss Bean and her stinky, soggy letter, I felt worse for me. Because Betsy had picked Mindy Wheeler as her coconspirator. Because she and Mindy had their own secret, and that it had nothing to do with me. I went home sulking and mad. I didn’t answer the phone when she called, and didn’t answer the door when she came over.

But the next day when we got to school, Betsy was sitting at her desk, crying into her hands, and my heart sank. “Mrs. Praker’s in a nuthouse,” was scrawled across the chalkboard in Howie’s backward script.

And even though we were at school and everybody was watching, I went to her. I put my arm over her shoulder and hugged her. In front of the entire eighth-grade class, I held her. And in the crook of my arm, she shook with a sadness I knew I would never be able to understand or share.

“I told Mindy not to tell anybody,” she cried, wiping furiously at her tears. “She was supposed to be my friend. She promised . Why would she tell him?”

Mindy’s motives became clear that afternoon when instead of playing basketball, she and Howie disappeared behind the school and came back five minutes later with leaves in their hair, looking both guilty and proud. (Howie said later that her boobs felt like peaches, an observation we all believed since none of us yet had evidence to the contrary.)

Mindy Wheeler moved away before school let out for the summer, and everyone in the whole school seemed to mourn her passing except for me. I was glad she was gone. But thanks to Mindy, at least I’d found my purpose. I had been put on this earth to protect Betsy. To keep her secrets and to keep her safe.