Читать книгу Object of Desire - William J. Mann - Страница 8

Twenty-Seven Years Earlier

If it weren’t for Chipper Paguni’s underpants, I would have turned around, hurried back along the path, and told my mother that my mission had been a failure. I hadn’t wanted to make the trip at all, so fearful was I of the poison ivy that grew along the path to the pond. The ordeal I’d gone through in the seventh grade, when I’d scratched the skin along the entire length of both legs until it was red and bleeding, had left me forever terrified of that vicious weed. But when I spotted the underpants ahead of me, a bright white pair of Fruit of the Looms shimmering in the midday sun, I knew I had to go on.

A twig snapped. My eyes darted to the left, where a crumpled pair of black parachute pants had been dropped among a patch of ferns. I took another few steps along the path and discovered a trail of discarded clothing. Reebok sneakers. White socks. A lacy pink bra dangling from a wispy branch of a young maple tree.

Another snap. I paused, sucking in my breath. And then, a voice.

“Come on, Becky.”

It was Chipper’s voice, somewhere up ahead in the woods, low and unemotional.

“Come on,” he said again.

I crouched behind a tall fern. As I did, my knees cracked. Mom was convinced I suffered from a calcium deficiency, and made me drink ten glasses of milk a day. Now I feared my knees had given me away. I held my breath. But around me only a heavy, humid silence filled the woods, broken now and then by the noisy squawk of a blue jay somewhere above me in the trees.

Finally I heard a splash. And then another.

Parting the fronds of the fern ever so carefully, I peered out over the water. Languid dragonflies hovered above the murky green surface. Ripples were just now lapping at the muddy shore, where a pair of brand-new Sergio Valente blue jeans, with the red stitching on the pockets, was rapidly turning wet and brown. I could imagine just how pissed Mom would be when she saw that.

Suddenly the surface of the pond was broken. Becky emerged from the depths, shaking her long, dark hair and sending cascades of droplets from side to side. In an instant Chipper popped up in the water in front of her, his glistening back momentarily obliterating my sister from my view.

They were kissing. My eyes grew wide as I crouched in my hiding place, keeping as still as I could. I watched as Chipper maneuvered Becky through the water toward the old wooden dock that jutted into the pond in a triangle. Lifting her up by her armpits, he sat her along the edge. For a moment I glimpsed my sister’s breasts, larger than those of most girls her age, with hard pink nipples that stood up like pencil erasers. I felt my face flush. I watched as Chipper now gripped the dock and hoisted himself up, the muscles in his broad back tensing, his small white buttocks knocking me back onto my heels.

It was my fourteenth birthday. Tomorrow I’d start my first day of high school. All summer long the prospect of my new school had been all I could think about, and as the day had grown nearer, I’d become more and more anxious. When my father, trying to be helpful, had asked me just what it was about high school that frightened me so much, all I could offer was the fact that I’d have to use a locker. I’d spent nine years at St. John’s Elementary School, from kindergarten to eighth grade, and I’d always kept my books and papers in a simple, top-lifting desk. Now there would be a code to remember—and a series of clicks to listen for—and I’d have to stand next to some kid I didn’t know who’d surely had a locker in his public junior high and would look at me as if I were a dweeb. So Dad had gone out to Sears and bought a combination lock for me to practice on. I’d mastered the lock quickly enough, but still my fear didn’t go away.

Behind the fern, I started to shake. I sat on the damp earth and tried to catch my breath. The day was hot and getting hotter. The chattering of the jays had been joined by a chorus of summer beetles, their shrill drone common on scorchers such as this one.

“Come on, Becky,” Chipper was cajoling, and I peered through the fronds as he leaned forward over my sister.

Like my sister, Chipper Paguni was going into his junior year. All last year and the year before, I’d watched him from my bedroom window, emerging from the house across the street and heading down to the bus stop at precisely 6:45 a.m. Usually Chipper wore shiny black parachute pants and an untucked white collar shirt. His book bag would be slung over his shoulder. I imagined that rolled up inside the book bag was the necktie that was required by Chipper’s all-male Catholic high school. The tie remained unworn and unknotted until the last possible moment, when the bus pulled into the school parking lot.

Now I would be joining Chipper at that same school, wearing my own tie as I trooped in for my first day tomorrow morning as a geeky, green freshman. I had heard the stories of how the upperclassmen taunted the new boys. St. Francis Xavier was a hotbed of testosterone. Its slogan, “Be a man,” was enshrined over its front doors and embodied by its strutting, title-holding football team. This year, as a defensive linebacker, Chipper would probably see his first real action on the field, and I’d be required to sit in the bleachers and cheer him on. It was called school spirit. Whether Chipper would turn out to be a tormentor or a friend remained to be seen. I was hoping that his interest in Becky would work in my favor. But one could never count on such things.

Holding my breath, I watched as Chipper’s white buttocks rose in the air from on top of my sister.

I leaned in for a better view, but as I did so, my knees cracked again. I let the fronds swing shut but too late. I heard Becky ask, “What was that?”

My armpits suddenly poured sweat. Then I heard a splash.

I bolted. But not before, without even thinking about it, I snatched up Chipper’s underpants in my hand.

I was stuffing them up my shirt as I came skidding back into the house, the screen door slamming behind me. Suddenly my mother was two inches from my face, her hair wrapped around huge orange curlers.

“Did you find your sister?”

“No.”

“Mother Mary! One simple favor I ask of her and she disappears on me!”

I knew it wasn’t one simple favor. It was more like five or six or thirty. Ever since Becky had gotten her driver’s license three months ago, she’d been forced to act as Mom’s personal chauffeur, driving her to the grocery store, to the hairdresser, to the Wednesday night meetings of the Rosary Altar Society. That was the whole reason Dad had bought that used mustard-colored Vega, so that Becky could drive Mom around on her errands, freeing him from the chore. See, Mom didn’t know how to drive a car. “In my day,” she explained whenever someone expressed surprise at the fact, “not every lady got her driver’s license.” The truth was, Mom didn’t do well with technology, whether it was driving a car or adjusting the antenna on top of the television set or resetting the clock after a power outage. All those things she left up to my father. Once, when I was eight, Dad had tried to teach Mom how to drive. She’d stepped on the gas instead of the brake and charged straight over the sidewalk into Flo Armstrong’s peony garden, tires spitting soil. Never again did Mom get behind the wheel.

Margaret Joan Cronin Fortunato, better known as Peggy. Five feet four, big hands like a man’s, and breasts so large they sometimes made her seem as if she’d topple over frontward. It was easy to see where Becky got her measurements.

“She’ll remember,” I said, assuring my mother of my sister’s promise as I pulled off my muddy sneakers on the mat inside the front door. “The party’s not until four o’clock.”

“Well, it’s already twelve thirty and—Danny! Look at that mud! Were you at the pond? I told you not to go up there. Do you want to get poison ivy again?”

“I wasn’t at the pond,” I said quickly.

“Well, if you were looking for Becky, you should have gone to the pond. You know she’s always sneaking up there.”

I just sighed as my mother made the sign of the cross. She always did this when she was anxious, which meant she was crossing herself a couple hundred times a day. Ever since Becky had turned sixteen, Mom had been even more anxious, it seemed. She’d always doted on Becky. Becky was her little angel, whose annual dancing school recitals had always reduced my mother to a puddle of tears. “Isn’t she the most beautiful child ever?” she’d repeat over and over to herself, watching Becky pirouette on the stage. Mom always went easier on Becky than she did on me; on snow days when school was canceled, Becky got to sleep in, but I had to get up and shovel the driveway. “Because you are the boy,” Mom would say, and boys shoveled driveways and cut the grass and raked the leaves. Becky just dried the dishes after dinner. I didn’t think it was a fair balance.

When Becky turned sixteen, Mom freaked. Her little angel now had ideas of her own. Becky was getting “too serious” with Chipper Paguni, Mom argued. She had quit dancing lessons and spent all her time with Chipper. I always believed that Mom’s demands that Becky drive her everywhere were part of a strategy to keep her close at hand. And I suspected Becky thought so, too. Hence their arguments.

But all that was not to say that Mom paid no attention to me. On the contrary. Becky might have been her favorite, but I received my share of Peggy Fortunato’s extravagant solicitude. My fourteenth birthday party, for example, had turned into a state occasion. Mom had been up at five, washing the floor, vacuuming the drapes, wrapping Hershey’s Kisses in blue tulle, setting—and then resetting—the table. Just so five of my friends, plus Nana and Aunt Patsy, could sit around drinking Kool-Aid and eating chocolate cake.

“Well,” Mom said, throwing her hands in the air, “if you don’t have any balloons for your birthday party, Danny, you’ll know who to blame. Not me!”

She disappeared down the hallway.

From the kitchen I could smell my cake baking—yellow Duncan Hines, my favorite. Peering around the corner, I spied the jar of chocolate frosting waiting on the table, and beside it a bag of M&M’s, with which Mom would spell out my name across the top of the cake. The candles had already been laid out and counted. Fourteen of them.

I was really too old for kiddie parties like this. I’d tried to protest, but Mom had insisted. Only with great effort had I been able to persuade her not to drag out the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game. Certainly next year there would be no birthday party like this. High school kids didn’t have parties with Hershey’s Kisses wrapped in tulle. Next year my birthday party would be very different.

That was, if I survived high school to make it that far.

I dialed a number on the beige phone mounted to the kitchen wall.

“Katie?”

“Danny?”

“What time are you coming? Come early, okay? We can hang out.”

The girl on the other end of the line sighed. “I can’t. My mom is taking me shopping.”

“Tell her you can’t go. You can’t be late to my party, Katie. My mom is already having a bird. You said you’d help us set up.”

“I know, but I’m going clothes shopping for school tomorrow.”

“Clothes shopping? You’re going to be wearing a uniform!”

Katie Reid, my closest friend since kindergarten. Short, chubby, with a blond Dorothy Hamill wedge cut. The worst thing about high school—worse than having to use a locker, worse than fearing the taunts of upperclassmen—was being separated from Katie. I was being sent one way, and Katie another. She was heading to St. Clare’s, the all-girl sister school to St. Francis Xavier. Unlike their male counterparts, whose only dress code was a collar shirt and a necktie of choice, the St. Clare girls wore white blouses and pleated plaid skirts. So what kind of clothes shopping could she possibly do?

“Shoes, socks, sweaters,” she told me, as if reading my mind. “And underwear.”

I suddenly became conscious of Chipper’s underpants bunched up near my armpit. “You can’t be late,” I told Katie again. “After this who knows when we’ll see each other again.”

“Don’t say that, Danny! We’ll see each other every week!”

I grunted. “I hate high school.”

“You haven’t even started it yet.”

“I know, but I still hate it.”

“Danny, I have to go. My mom is calling me.”

“Okay. Don’t be late.”

“Good-bye, Danny.”

I hung up the phone. The timer over the stove pinged.

“Cake’s done,” I called to my mother as I ran upstairs to my room, pulling Chipper’s underpants out of my armpit and stuffing them into my drawer. I threw myself onto my bed and lay there with my hands behind my head, staring up at the ceiling. On my wall were posters of Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. On my floor was a pile of nearly one hundred record albums, which had tipped over, sending Andy Gibb, Hall & Oates, and Peter Frampton sliding across the orange shag carpet. Orange was my favorite color. I’d chosen it because no one ever picked orange.

The window was open, and there was a slight breeze moving the flimsy brown and white checked curtains. I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew a car door was closing, and I could hear my aunt Patsy’s voice in the driveway.

I sat up, rubbed my eyes, and headed back downstairs.

Mom was propping an electric fan on the windowsill to cool off the room as Nana and Aunt Patsy came through the front door.

“Danny off the pickle boat,” Nana said when she saw me.

It was what she’d always called me. I had no idea what it meant, but ever since I could remember, Nana had been calling me “Danny off the pickle boat”—just before she’d grip my shoulders and leave a big, wet red kiss on my cheek. It was no different today. Her perfume, as ever, was heavy and spicy. Nana’s scent would often linger for hours after she left. Mom sometimes had to open a window.

Adele Mary Horgan Fortunato, better known, to me, anyway, as Nana. Stout and silly, a crazy little jingle perpetually on her lips. Danny off the pickle boat. Here comes Becky in her BVDs. Sing a song of six-packs and a pocket full of beer. Nana often made no sense at all, but she always made me smile.

Beside her stood Aunt Patsy. Her daughter. Dad’s older sister. Patricia Ann Fortunato. Never married. An old maid. And now Aunt Patsy had cancer. When Mom spoke of it to the neighbors, her voice always dropped to a whisper on the word. “Patsy has cancer. They had to take one breast and then part of another. It doesn’t look good.” And she’d make the sign of the cross.

Today Aunt Patsy looked very gray and drawn. She wore a bulky sweater even on hot days so that she could cover up her uneven chest. When she smiled at me, her teeth seemed too big for her face. “Happy birthday, honey,” she said. “Are you excited to be starting high school?”

“Yeah,” I lied, accepting the shirt box she was offering me, wrapped in green and blue paper. I knew what it was even without opening it. A white collar shirt from Sears. Probably a tie, too, for me to wear to school.

“Where’s Becky?” Nana was asking. “Beckadee, Beckadoo?”

“God only knows,” Mom said. “I can only hope she’s downtown, picking up the balloons I ordered for Danny’s party.”

“But her car’s still in the driveway,” Aunt Patsy observed.

“I know, so she must be off with Chipper. Maybe he’s driving her down.” Mom was unfolding a string of silver paper letters that spelled out HAPPY BIRTHDAY. “I haven’t seen her since this morning. I told her not to forget the balloons, and she’d better not! I’ll have her head!”

“Mom, please don’t pin up that HAPPY BIRTHDAY sign,” I said.

Mom looked at me as if I were mad. “Why not? It’s your birthday.”

“It’s dweebish.”

“You can’t have a birthday party without a HAPPY BIRTHDAY sign,” Mom declared.

“It’s for little kids, Mom.”

She sighed dramatically, folding the sign back up. “First, no pin the tail on the donkey. Next thing he won’t want a cake.”

“Where’s Becky?” Nana asked again.

We all looked over at her.

“Mommy, Peggy just told us,” Aunt Patsy said gently. I’d always thought it odd that a grown woman still called her mother “Mommy.” “Becky’s in town, getting the balloons for Danny’s party.”

“Oh,” Nana said. “That’s right.”

Nana had been getting forgetful. She sometimes confused my father with her late husband, Sebastian. Sometimes she repeated herself several times a day, asking the same questions over and over. Dad remembered his own grandmother, Nana’s mother, getting the same way. Eventually, they had to put her in the state hospital, where she died, crazy as a loon. I looked at Nana and felt very sad. I knew she was thinking about her mother, about the state hospital. She wasn’t so forgetful that she’d forgotten about that. She knew what was happening. Nana caught me looking at her and seemed startled. Then she winked at me.

It was getting close to three o’clock. I wished that Katie had been able to come over earlier. I headed back upstairs and sat on my bed, my back against the wall.

“This might be the last time we see each other,” I’d said to Katie almost every day since the end of eighth grade.

She’d always scold me. “Stop saying that. It’s not like we’re moving away. We still live in the same town.”

Should I have asked Katie to be my girlfriend then? If she were my girlfriend, then we’d have a connection, something to really bind us together. I sensed it would be good insurance to have a girlfriend upon entering high school. It would offer some kind of protection, I suspected, but just what kind, I wasn’t sure.

And yet I hadn’t asked her. It would have seemed odd after all these years. She probably would have laughed at me. Now, sitting on my bed, I wished I had.

My eye caught movement outside the window.

Chipper Paguni was pulling into his driveway in his rebuilt, repainted gold metallic 1971 Mustang Mach 1, with the black stripe down the hood. I leaned forward to get a better view. The door on the driver’s side popped open, and Chipper emerged in a white T-shirt and shiny black parachute pants. I knew he wasn’t wearing underwear, and my cheeks flushed a little as the thought crossed my mind. I waited for the passenger’s side door to open and for Becky to get out, but nothing happened. Chipper paused to inspect something on the side of his precious car—a dent? a ding? a scratch?—then headed into the house.

I was scared.

Had he seen me out by the pond?

And what had Chipper thought when he couldn’t find his underwear?

It didn’t even cross my mind to wonder where Becky was.