Part 2 (2/2)

'Be smart, kid. Don't wear the tie. Don't be so... different, right? Kids'll tease you. You know, give you a hard time in school and like that. Don't be so... different.'

I knew he was trying to tell me something important but I didn't really get it. I still hadn't gotten used to the idea of conversation with adults whose first names you knew. I nodded again.

'Thank you.' I got out of the car and carefully shut the door. 'Sorry I was such trouble,' I mumbled into his exhaust.

I didn't go to Boat Safety again. Partly because Father didn't let me and partly because of what happened with the zoo and everything. Most of the other kids got their certificates but I don't think Harry had his mind on the course that summer. He didn't really pay attention 'cause for a while the boys were happy just breathing on Resussa-Annie. Then Harry got caught up in the election and stopped taking the cla.s.ses. The minister took over but he never noticed what was going on. Unsupervised, Nathan discovered he could jerk off in Annie's wide mouth. I learned so many things that summer. Pretty soon all the boys wanted a go. After a couple of months she was full up with s.e.m.e.n and went a strange colour. A kind of black pallor developed all over her, as if it were the plague she needed rescuing from, not drowning. Not surprisingly, none of the girls wanted to save her and there was an almost entirely male pa.s.s rate for Boat Safety in town. Not that it mattered at the certificate ceremony. Reverend Harlon was supposed to call out the successful students, but no one could understand a word he said so in the end a lot more kids got a certificate than should have.

That was my first outing with the Dapolitos. Then there was the time I went to dinner.

'Hey, kid,' Aunt Bonnie yelled as I cycled past for the twentieth time one afternoon. 'You want a meatball wedge?'

I had no idea whether I did or not but I nodded. I just wanted to come inside their house.

'The kids are watching TV ... in the den.' Aunt Bonnie nodded into the dark interior.

I knew it. What a great place. They didn't have a lounge. They had a den. A dark, snuggly place for baby lions. That was the first time I ever saw a colour TV. It was a huge wooden box with a panel of three lights at the front - green, blue and red. We sat on their endless sofa (dark wood with quilt-pattern cus.h.i.+ons from the Pioneer collection - Sears, Roebuck Catalog 1961) and watched Gilligan's Island followed by I Dream of Jeannie. Aunt Bonnie was unpacking things from a large brown cardboard box.

'Donna Marie,' she would call and toss cellophane packages at her daughter. 'Eddie J.' More packages rained down on the sofa. Clothes, endless clothes. Donna Marie opened her packets. Shorts. Shorts in bright colours, and really soft. Not tailored at all. Shorts with pockets. And T-s.h.i.+rts, striped T-s.h.i.+rts to match the shorts. Maybe six or more sets in different colours. It was the most fantastic box of clothes I had ever seen.

'Excuse me, Mrs Dapolito,' I said quietly.

'Mrs Dapolito! For Christ's sake, Aunt Bonnie.' Aunt Bonnie dragged on her Salem cigarette. 'Everyone calls me Aunt Bonnie.'

'Where do you get such a box?'

'Sears, Roebuck. G.o.dd.a.m.n finest store in the country. Here.' She tossed a catalogue the size of a small child at my feet. Then my new-found aunt went into the kitchen. She returned with great submarines of bread overflowing with Italian spiced meatb.a.l.l.s. Wonderful food that you just couldn't eat neatly. Food that you ate with your hands! In the lounge. The den! On the settee. Not at a table. I ate, I looked at pictures of smiling girls in shorts in my catalogue and on the TV Barbara Eden came out of a genie's bottle with a bright green face. I had died and gone to heaven.

Uncle Eddie sat silently in a huge reclining chair with a great footrest. He didn't really watch but occasionally he would click his fingers to show he wanted the channel changed. He was definitely in charge of the TV. Looking back, maybe it was a testosterone thing.

Father rang the doorbell and Aunt Bonnie went to answer.

'Good evening, Mrs Dapolito,' he whispered. 'I was wondering if you might have seen my daughter, Dorothy?'

'You got a problem with your voice?' asked Aunt Bonnie straight out.

'Yes.'

She shrugged. 'Too bad. She's in here.' Aunt Bonnie nodded toward the den. Father was unmoved.

'Perhaps you might call her?' he suggested, it never occurring to him to enter someone else's home without prior arrangement.

'Hey, kid, your dad's here,' Aunt Bonnie yelled with a paint-stripping voice.

'You have been most kind.'

Father was cross. I knew he was. I had eaten between meals. I had red sauce down my tie.

'They have colour TV,' I said as we walked home.

'It is vulgar,' whispered Father, even less audible than usual.

I didn't think so but I didn't say anything. I thought I'd never seen anything more exciting in my life, but I knew Father wanted me to stay away. He never banned me, or anything as straightforward as that. I just knew I wasn't to go to the Dapolito family. At home Father sat reading at the dining-room table. Mother's door was closed and the air was thick with silence. My tie was ruined. In my room I took it off and put it in the bin.

Chapter Four.

The dead end that we lived in had five houses. Ours was next to the stop sign on to Amherst. Next to us, on the same right-hand side of the street, lived Sweetheart, Harry Schlick's mother. Next to her and at the head of the close were the Dapolitos. Next to them was the drive to the Yacht Club. Then on the left side were Harry and Judith and next to them Joey Amorato, the dog catcher, who lived alone.

The Schlicks invited us for a barbecue as part of the Welcome Wagon's welcome to the neighbourhood. I guess it was the barbecue which started everything rolling but I didn't pay that much attention to the invitation. I was still obsessed with the idea that, like the spider, Father and Mother might be harbouring a rich, internal emotional life about which I knew nothing. I hadn't been up to the Burroughs House again after that first time. I spent most of my time hanging around our road, improving on the number of things my bike could be. Whatever the bike was, a horse, a pioneer wagon, I was mostly alone. Cherry Blossom Drive was not a great address for activity. Rich people mainly used it to get to the back entrance to the Yacht Club.

At weekends Father was home but he spent most of his time sitting at the dining-room table working on his project. Our family, the Kanes, came originally from a small village in England called Ickenham. Father had been researching the town's history for some time. This was difficult as Ickenham was pretty much the sort of English town which history had entirely pa.s.sed by. It was not mentioned in the Domesday Book and no one of any consequence had ever thought it was a good place for a battle. It suggested somewhere not worth fighting over. However, Father had a trump card. While examining the guest register of the Ickenham Arms he had discovered the signature 'ER 1598'. He was convinced that Elizabeth I had once slept there en route to whatever it was she was en route to. Consequently he was in endless correspondence with specialists in the field. Father always meant to be nice. If I came in he would look up from his work and I always felt I had to stop by the table. Neither one of us could ever think of a suitable subject for conversation.

'How's school?' he would whisper.

'It's the holidays.'

'Absolutely.' He paused. 'When it was school, how was it?'

'Fine. We did World War One.' I searched around in my mind for a fact. 'It was a terrible war.'

'Second one was better. I fought in the Guards, you know.'

'Yes.'

Father nodded. We had done enough bonding and I would go to my room. There I pulled out my secret weapon from Aunt Bonnie. I spent even more hours with it than my Chinese present, until at last I felt ready. The night of the barbecue, I wandered down the corridor with it to Mother's room. I thought she might be up as she would need to get ready for the outing. I knocked and heard her light, 'Come in.'

Mother was sitting in a white slip and stockings at her vanity table. She stared blankly in the mirror. Small bottles from the drugstore littered the gla.s.s top among an array of powders and puffs. Mother took a lot of pills. They all came from the doctor so I guessed she needed them.

'Mother, can I speak to you about something?' She nodded but never swayed her attention from the mirror. 'I want to get some new clothes.' For one brief second we had a mother-and-daughter moment. Mother smiled in the mirror. I smiled back. In her mind I think she had leaped with me to the finest stores in New York. In mine, my Sears, Roebuck catalogue purchases had already been delivered. Then we looked each other in the eye and the moment was gone. She was so beautiful and I was so strange-looking. I put the catalogue which I had borrowed from Aunt Bonnie on the vanity table.

'They're in here.'

'What are, darling?'

'The clothes I want. Some shorts and some s.h.i.+rts. Maybe...'

I don't think a stray dog relieving itself in the bedroom could have had a worse effect.

The barbecue hadn't really started by the time we got there. Father always got us too early everywhere. He had a dark suit on and held Mother's arm as we crossed the empty road to the Schlicks' house. Mother was wearing her cream Jaeger suit. I didn't think either one of them was really in barbecue mode. We walked slowly and carefully. No one ever said there was anything wrong with Mother. I just knew we were always careful. The Schlicks' house was clapboard like ours, but it was two stories high and made of real wood painted a dark grey. A large bra.s.s eagle flew over the front door with a Stars and Stripes clenched in its beak. On the front lawn, a small cannon stood sentry. We knew the barbecue would be in the backyard and we could easily have just gone round but Father insisted on ringing the front doorbell. We stood waiting on the step. Mother looking lovely but smiling vacantly, Father's neck twisting like the clappers against his collar, and me. Funny old me. Mrs Schlick took some time to open the door. We could see the handle being wrestled long before it opened.

'Come on, Rocco. You have to move, sweetheart.'

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