That was the last summer we were allowed to sleep out with the Ellison girls. Both sets of parents exchanged looks, but Mr. Ellison said, ”Aw, hell, the kids just like to sleep out under the stars,” and since he was the father of the girls, it was OK. The following summer Phil Belton fell off the Ellison porch roof and broke his wrist while straining to see in Meredith`s bedroom window. It was worth it, he told us. She had turned around for about three whole seconds, front-lit by the little movie-star lights around her dressing- table mirror, and she was, well, Phil made a gesture of magnificence with both hands.
I hated sleeping under the stars. The mosquitoes arrived while shades of pale violet still hung in the west, and even when I was completely hidden under the old Navy blanket I could hear them buzz like divebombers peeling off to assault a defenseless carrier. One would always find a toe or the whorl on the crown of my head, or worse yet manage to get under the cover and attack hidden places susceptible to sharp and peculiar itches and inconvenient to scratch. Around 1 or 2 in the morning you could hear the whine of the spray truck as it approached from the center of town, and within an hour the DDT began to choke your lungs, though without notable abatement of the mosquito assault. An hour or two later a thin mist always began to fall, even when the sky was clear, as if the Carolina humidity crystallized at nose and mouth level before working its way down to the grass and kudzu. If I had dozed off by then I woke up choked with it.
We slept in our clothes, my younger brother Eben and I and the two Ellison girls, one for each of us though a year younger. We did not actually remove their pants or fondle them. We played Doctor, we played House, we played roughhouse games, wrestling, grabbing one of the girls by a pants leg and dragging her across the grass, all the while receiving glimpses of splendor far more splendid than splendor itself. Deeply complicit, the girls at first pretended to resist then caved in, their eyes fixed steadily in the middle distance as if submitting with resignation to female fate.
Sometimes that summer I wondered if the long adjoining back yards were a cosmic sign that we were meant to marry the Ellison girls, one or both. I mentioned this to my father, who appeared to take it under advisement. The following summer, however, Meredith, the one who would have been for me, met an unsuitable boy at a party where spin-the-bottle was played and there was dancing to Elvis records. The bottle spun and settled on her. She kissed the unsuitable boy in the closet and went steady with him through eight years of high school and college, married him over all adult wisdom, and vindicated the wisdom of rock lyrics and teenager rock movies by living, to all appearances, happily ever after. Ellen Sue, more conventionally and less happily, married first a marginal pro football player who caught a touchdown pass on TV and flew back that night to court her, then two businessmen, one in real estate and the other in securities. The bottle always knows.
That night, however, both the boy from the mill and the wide receiver from the L.A. Rams were in the future. We dragged Ellen Sue across the yard until she was grass-stained and flushed, dizzy and half-drunk from it. When the stars popped out we lay on our backs on the army cots, and I explained what a light-year was and how many light-years away the nearest stars were and how they were moving rapidly away from us and that what we were seeing had all happened years before.
”It must be wonderful to think like that all the time,” Ellen Sue said. My parents had left around 6 and driven across the North Carolina line to a restaurant where my father could get frog legs. We lived in a one-horse town, my father would say, where he had to drive two hours to get food fit to eat. There were plenty of frogs in the creek where Maple Street turned into a red dirt path. My friends and I went gigging for them with sharpened sticks, hunting along the creek bed, pinning them cruelly to the mud, then throwing away the carcasses. They were supposed to taste a little like chicken, the way everything peculiar, from rabbit to rattlesnake, was supposed to taste like chicken. I didn`t see the attraction. The world was full of grownup things, acquired tastes like Jim Beam and Budweiser from a can, that tasted strange and a little bitter. You were supposed to grow into a taste for them, but I had serious doubts.
I must have been just drifting off when I felt a hand gently shaking my shoulder. I looked up straight into Ellen Sue`s face. ”I heard thunder,” she said.
Her eyes had an expectant look. I wondered how long she had been watching before she shook me awake. Her head was ringed by stars, but there were clouds gathering in the west. As I lifted my head to see better, our cheeks brushed. ”Do you think it`s going to rain?” Her voice was husky and portentous, as if she had asked whether God really existed.
”Let`s go see,” I said.
I pulled the Navy blanket around the two of us and guided her to the far side of the juniper bushes that divided the back yard proper from the tool storage area. We leaned over the north fence and, anchoring the blanket, I slid my arm around her shoulders.
”Look,” she said. ”Do you see that light? What do you think it is?”
”Actually it`s probably the lights at the mill. Actually,” I said.
”Sometimes I can see it from my bedroom window. I used to think it was northern lights. From above the Arctic Circle. But I think we`re too far south. And it`s there a lot of the time.”
”It`s pretty,” she said. ”It`s like there`s a secret world over there. A big party, with firecrackers.”
”When I was really little I thought it was New York,” I said. ”The first time I saw it, I thought it might be a nuclear attack. I woke my father and said I didn`t want to worry him, but I thought there might have been a nuclear attack.”
”What did he say?”
”He said not to worry, that if there had been a nuclear attack he would have known. The TV would have gone off the air. He said go back to sleep. Before I went back to sleep I went in and turned the TV on, though. It was OK.”
”You get the strangest things in your head,” she said. ”Nobody thinks things like you.”
I let go of the blanket and stroked her cheek with my hand. I kissed her then. It was a light, brief kiss, but full on the lips. I pulled my head back, and after a moment`s hesitation she reached up and kissed me back. There was a rumble of distant thunder.
”There. You see,” she said. ”It is going to rain.”
”If it does, I guess we`ll just move onto the porch,” I said. My voice was shaking. I thought how odd it was that simple contact with her skin, no different, really, than the skin on my own arm, could make my voice sound that way.
When I woke up again, a fine mist was tickling my nostrils. It awakened an ancient mildewy odor buried deep in the Navy blanket, which now smelled like a wet dog. Both girls had already pulled their cots onto the porch. I woke Eb, who sleepily dragged his cot onto a free corner of the porch. I was starting to drag my own cot when I heard what sounded like a dog getting after one of our cats. The dog bolted as I burst through the gate, leaving Little White up the cherry tree. I reached up and smoothed the hair on her back, stroked her neck until she retracted her claws, and lowered her to the ground. I was about to go back to the cot when I noticed that our car was not in the driveway.
To make sure, I ran around to the front yard and checked the street. The car was not in front either. I walked around to the back door and checked the time on the kitchen clock: a quarter past 1. Tryon was 90 miles away. I did some quick arithmetic, and realized that even with a leisurely dinner, my parents were two hours overdue. They could be lying out on the side of the road anywhere between home and Tryon. I thought for a minute and called Tubba. Tubba was what we called my father`s mother. A year before she wouldn`t have been able to come over, but my uncle, who played the stock market, had bought her a car. ”Oh, God,” my father had groaned, ”John has put mother on wheels!” Now she came puttering right over in her new black Plymouth, delighted at the prospect of catching my father in mischief.
”They left you alone?” she asked. ”With the Ellison girls?”
”Yes ma`am.”
She shook her head sadly. The corners of her eyes were hooded by drooping eyefolds. Was it the effect of gravity or the consequence of focusing narrowly for 40 years? She had been a handsome woman once, perhaps even beautiful if very old pictures were to be believed.
”I am very afraid your father drinks beer,” she said. ”Do you suppose your father has been drinking beer tonight?”
It was exactly what I supposed. ”I don`t know,” I said. ”I hope not.” ”You have seen him drinking beer at other times?”
”He drinks something from a can,” I said. ”I think maybe it`s grapefruit juice, though. Shouldn`t we call the state police?”
We were standing in the middle of the front walk. The mist was slowly building into a true rain, with actual droplets that caught and hung on her hairnet the way they did on a spider web.
”I think I`ll just wait here a few minutes,” she said.
As she spoke, I realized the enormity of my mistake. Just then my parents` car came rolling up the street, suspiciously it seemed to me, on the far side of the divider. It slowed, briefly, in front of our house, then speeded up again. Tubba didn`t say anything. About a minute passed before the car returned from the other direction. My parents came gliding up the walk with smiles frozen on their faces.
”Why, Tubba,” my mother said. ”What brings you here? Aren`t you feeling well?”
”I called Tubba,” I said, ”I was worried.”
Tubba sprang forward and threw her arms around my father`s neck for the Judas hug of breath inspection.
”Well, you can see that everything is fine,” my mother said. ”I`m sorry you were disturbed. But now you can go home and get a good night`s sleep.”
”James, James,” she said. ”The boy says you drink beer.”
”Christ,” my father said.
”Now Mother, you go home and don`t worry about anything,” my mother said. As the car pulled away, she said to my father, ”Don`t blame him. He was just worried. You should have seen yourself eating that pack of Clorets. Tomorrow we`ll have a good laugh about it.”
”Go inside,” my father told her.
I waited for the blow to fall. As soon as he heard the door close, my father walked over to the shrubbery bed. I heard a hissing sound and realized he was urinating on my mother`s camellia plants. He came back tugging at his zipper. ”Don`t ever pull a stunt like that again,” he said.
Later that summer I gave beer another try and decided, after a brief hesitation, that I liked it. Still later in the summer Tubba was diagnosed with cancer. It was already advanced, the wide-eyed internist told us, a tumor the size of a softball, and was centered in her liver. One morning we all piled into the car and drove to Greenville for further tests and examination by a specialist, but the diagnosis was exactly the same. And, no, she wasn`t a sneak drinker. Two years earlier she had put our church on grape juice for communion. Jesus wouldn`t have been drinking wine, would he? Not when he knew that it would lead his weaker brothers to fall? What the Bible must have meant was not ”wine,” but ”fruit of the vine.” It was one of those difficult problems in translation that came up when you were working with dusty old scrolls. Jesus himself drank grape juice, Welch`s, I didn`t doubt, which was what the elders of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church now solemnly doled out in tiny crystal glasses once each quarter. She had tried to persuade the whole synod to adopt her rule, but someone put his foot down.
Irony seemed to be the principle that lay behind everything. Tubba had devoted her life to bringing up nice boys. She had nearly starved the three of them, my father and his two brothers, using the Depression as her excuse even though her husband, dying young, had left them reasonably well fixed. Once in a fit of rebellion, my mother had promised to cook them all the fried chicken they could eat. She had spent the evening hacking chickens into pieces and delivering steaming platters to the table until Tubba, in a fury of abstemious repression, had hidden the lard. As adults her sons were, all three of them, hellions.
Later that fall I watched with detachment the progress of the tumor from softball to cantaloupe, and finally to basketball. In the basketball phase Tubba came to stay with us, taking the guest bedroom that the following year I would appropriate as my own. The requirements of her illness included a full- time practical nurse who talked constantly and trivially about soap operas and other matters of low-class interest, but who voluntarily gave me extraordinary sensual alcohol back rubs. In the final stages I observed the unfolding illness minutely through the rear door of the guest bath. I noted that the thing doctors called a coma appeared to be a deep wheezing sleep. In early October I came home from school to see parked cars lining the street and realized that Tubba had died. I was only mildly surprised to note that I felt no emotion whatsoever.
That fall I turned 13. I had reached the beginning of that long revisionist period called adulthood. You never felt quite what you expected, or were supposed, to feel. The world was full of unexpected pleasures, and many of the things nice boys were cautioned to abjure turned out to have their points. It seemed that almost everything, from telling lies to the death of a grandmother, was more complicated than it first appeared. Life itself, as the grownups never quite got around to telling you, was an acquired taste.
