Getting Nowhere Read online

  Rain was pelting down like a son of a gun, which spoiled my plans for playing hooky. Usually Tony and I walk to school. The junior and senior high schools are separated by the athletic field. I could pretend I was going inside, then slip away and he’d never know the difference. The rain finished that plan. Pat insisted on driving us. Anyway, I’d had so much trouble in the past few days I didn’t have the strength to cope with a day in a deluge. Besides, what would I do? Huddle under an awning, get my feet wet, and wind up with pneumonia. It wasn’t worth it.

  Biology was the first class of the day. Lisa was in her seat when I got there. She also pretended not to see me. Today was obviously not my day. She was bent over so far it looked as if she’d dug a hole in the top of her desk and planted her head in it.

  All right. That’s O.K. If that was her father’s way of doing things, she couldn’t help it. Could she? She could’ve at least said something to me besides, “Oh, hi,” as if I were some kind of an awful creep who frequently molests girls and goes to parties that aren’t. She could’ve at least said something to her old man that might’ve made things better. But no. All I got was an “Oh, hi.” Who needs it?

  When the period was over and Mr. Adamson had given out the assignment for the week, the way he does, I waited until everybody had left. I figured if I played my cards right, the guys who’d pulled such a lousy trick on me would tip their hands and I’d hit ’em in the jugular. There was some way to get even and I was going to find it.

  Lisa was waiting for me at the door.

  “Mark,” she said, head down, “about the other night. I told my father—”

  “Listen,” I said, “your old man must’ve been a big wheel in Hitler’s SS troops. I can see him now, pounding on the doors at three a.m., dragging the little kids to the gas chambers. He must’ve got his kicks from things like that.”

  My ears were red. I could feel them firing up. Her ears got red too. Her hair was shorter than mine and I could see them. At least she finally looked at me.

  “You don’t have to be so mean,” she said fiercely. “How’d he know who you were?”

  “Because I told him, see? But he’s your father. You have to live with him. I feel sorry for you, toots,” I said and took off.

  “Slow down, buster,” a guy on hall patrol said. “I’ll slap a demerit on you if you keep on running like that.” I already had seven demerits for misbehavior in the halls. Ten and I’d get suspended. Big deal. If they suspended me, I’d take off like a rocket. I’d pack a lunch and build myself a raft and go down the Mississippi. Look around for Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, one of those guys. They really knew how to live.

  The day dragged like a turtle out for a walk. A fat, old turtle. It was exhausting, always being on guard. In the cafeteria at lunch, I kept watching guys’ faces, wondering if the kid sitting across from me or down at the end was the one.

  “What’d you do Saturday night?” my friend Ken asked me.

  “What’s it to you?” I snarled.

  He almost dropped his sandwich and backed off. “Wow, what’s eating you?” he said. “You got a toothache or something? I only asked because I called you up to come over on account of my father made us a pizza, from scratch with his own hands, and I figured you might want to get in on it. It was the best pizza I ever ate. Anyway, I called up your house and nobody answered so I figured you had to be somewhere else.”

  “Sorry,” I mumbled. “It was my father’s anniversary. We went out for dinner.” That was a white lie. A lie but one that doesn’t hurt anyone. If you have to lie, it’s the only kind.

  By the time the bell rang at three o’clock, I was ready for the booby hatch and the loony bin, rolled into one. I decided I couldn’t keep it up, looking for the bad guys. I’m not naturally a suspicious person. Which is a good thing. It takes too much out of you.

  “Take my books home for me?” Tony came to my locker. “I’ve got fencing practice. Tell Pat I’ll be late.”

  I fooled around for a while, cleaned out my locker, shot a couple of baskets, killed time like it was a mortal enemy. I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t want to go home and face Pat. On the other hand if I went to see Mrs. Baumgartner, she’d begin to think I was a pest.

  Then I remembered it was Monday. Pat took piano lessons over in White Plains on Monday. She was learning to play jazz piano. A middle-aged woman shouldn’t play jazz. If she’s going to play at all she should stick to the classics.

  The house was empty again. I seem to spend a lot of time in an empty house. Maybe somebody was trying to tell me something. I ate a can of spaghetti so I wouldn’t be too hungry for dinner. Maybe they’d think I was sick. My father might start to worry about me. Who was I kidding? If I fell down on the floor and my face turned blue and my eyes bugged out, he’d say calmly, “That’s perfectly normal for a fourteen-year-old hoodlum. Don’t disturb yourself. Just let him lie there and he’ll be all right in three or four days.”

  The air in the empty garage was heavy with new car smell. All of a sudden I slammed my hand into the wall. It hurt something fierce. Talk about being a glutton for punishment. I slammed it again. The pain in my hand made the rage inside me seem a little less.

  I went upstairs, turned the radio on full blast, put the pillow over my head. My hand throbbed. I got up and took an aspirin, then went back and crawled under the pillow again. After a while I thought I heard the telephone ringing. Let it go. I turned down the radio. Sure enough.

  I ran down the hall and stubbed my toe on a chair. I cursed a lot and picked up the receiver. It was dead.

  I just got back under my security pillow when the phone rang again.

  Let it, I told myself. I nearly broke my leg getting to it this time.

  “Hello,” I shouted.

  I could hear breathing on the other end. “Hello,” a voice said. “Is this Mark? Mark Johnson?”

  I closed my eyes to clear my head of the blackness that filled it. When I opened them, the voice said sweetly, “Is this Mark baby? I’m having … a … party …” and then the giggling began. There must’ve been four of them at least. They were busting their guts laughing. I hung up quietly so they wouldn’t know I’d hung up. Then I took the receiver and threw it against the wall. It bounced and landed on the floor where it lay, humming at me, endlessly, filling the whole house with its sound.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  When I got to Jeff’s house next day I could hear his mother yelling at him.

  “I don’t care who’s coming over, you’re not going anywhere until you pick up those records. All, not half. All.” She came to the door and let me in.

  “Mark Johnson.” She caught my name on the tip of her tongue and tossed it in the air. “Get in there and help Jeff clean up that mess. I don’t care if you helped make it or not. There are plenty of times you have helped and then skinned out scot free.”

  “Old turkey,” Jeff muttered as we went to work.

  “I’d like to see you call her that to her face,” I said.

  The blood drained out of his face and he put up his arm to ward off an imaginary blow.

  “Hey, you want me to wind up mince meat? You want me to get myself beat up by a dame? My mother is some strong bimbo. And you know what?” He sat back on his heels. “She’s starting to take a karate course at the Y next week. Everyone around here is walking softly, I can tell you. My father, my brothers and sisters, even Amy.” Amy was the baby. She was ten and almost as big as Tony. She got away with murder. “I bet if they ran a Powerful Mom contest, she’d win hands down.”

  Mrs. Fields put her head in to observe our progress. “You missed one. Under that chair. And when you finish, there are some brownies in the kitchen. Mark, I met your stepmother in the store last week. She’s a lovely woman. You’re lucky your father married such a nice person.” She sat down on the bed and watched us work. “If there’s one thing that gladdens my heart,” she said, “it’s seeing young folks working their fingers to the bone. She said she an
d your father play golf. Maybe we could play together sometime.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Mom,” Jeff’s sister Amy hollered, “I can’t find my catcher’s mitt. I need it right now. Have you seen it?”

  “It’s either under your bed or in the refrigerator,” Mrs. Fields yelled back. “Wherever you left it.

  “And she’s lucky to get such a nice pair of stepsons.” Nothing ever stopped Mrs. Fields from completing a thought once she’d begun. “I told her I thought you were a fine boy. Your father did a good job of raising you boys. Now it’s nice he’s got someone to help him,” she said, peering at me.

  Amy saved the day. She bounced in, brandishing her mitt. “You’ll never guess where it was! Under my pillow. I hid it there last night. We have quite a few light-fingered people in this house. Hi, Mark. I’ll be home for supper, Mom. ’Bye.”

  Mrs. Fields stood up and looked at herself in the mirror. “I look older than I did yesterday and younger than I will tomorrow,” she said. “Catch me next week and you’ll hardly recognize me. Ciao.”

  “What’s ‘chow’ mean?” I asked.

  “It’s Italian for ‘so long,’” Jeff said. “My mother’s taking a crash course in Italian so she can go to Rome and see the Pope.”

  “I didn’t know she was Catholic,” I said.

  Jeff shrugged. “She’s not,” he said.

  We ate some brownies and drank some milk. “Has your father ever hit you?” I asked Jeff. “When he was really angry.”

  “Plenty of times. Once I put a book inside my pants when I’d done something—I can’t remember what—and when his hand came down on that book, you should’ve heard him yell,” Jeff said with a great deal of satisfaction in his voice. “Boy, didn’t he holler!”

  “I don’t mean hitting on your rear end. I mean, you know, sort of on the face,” I said.

  Jeff thought for a minute. “I guess not. Not on the face. Just on the padded areas. My mother hit my brother Bart with Amy’s baseball bat last year. She caught him on the fly. He said something really fresh to her and then ran up the stairs. She caught him halfway, laid that old bat across his behind and broke it. Amy cried and Bart ate his dinner standing up. Want another?”

  “No thanks,” I said. “My father hit me on Sunday.”

  “Yeah? What’d you do?”

  “I gave him some lip about Pat. That and I sort of messed up the car.”

  Jeff’s eyes were round. “The new car?” he said in a whisper.

  “Yeah. I scratched it. It’s going to cost a lot to have it fixed. I said I’d pay.”

  “How’d you scratch it?”

  I told him. He said, “Man! You don’t mess around, do you? That’s pretty heavy, Mark.”

  “I don’t need you to tell me that,” I said. I opened my mouth to tell him about the non-party at Lisa’s, then shut it. The time wasn’t right. Maybe it never would be.

  We fooled around a little bit with Jeff’s brother’s new headset. It was cool. When I put that set on and listened to the music, the rest of the world was shut out. I couldn’t hear anything but beautiful sound. If I could just walk around with a headset on for the rest of my life I’d be in business.

  “I’ve gotta go,” I said at six.

  “See you.”

  Mrs. Fields waved to me from upstairs. She opened the bedroom window.

  “Arrivederci!” she hollered. “Arrivederci, Marco!”

  I waved back. I figure when Mrs. Fields hits Rome, it and the Pope will never be the same.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  My father brought home an estimate for fixing the damage. He handed it to me without comment. $173.84. That was a lot of windows.

  “I’ll get another estimate from the body shop on the Post Road tomorrow morning,” he said, “but I don’t expect it’ll vary much.”

  He headed toward his study. “I’ve got some work to do, Pat,” he said. “Don’t hold dinner for me,” and he went in and shut the door.

  “Mark, what’s bothering you?” Pat asked me.

  “Me?” I looked around to make sure who she meant. “Nothing’s bothering me.”

  “I’d like to talk to you,” she said. “Please sit down.”

  “I can talk standing up,” I said.

  “That’s part of it.”

  “What’s part of what?”

  “What you just said. You can talk standing up. Every time I make a move, you pull back. You put up your guard. Why do you dislike me so much?”

  “I don’t dislike you,” I said, spacing each word carefully, laying emphasis on “dislike.”

  She put her hands in her pockets. “‘Dislike’ is perhaps not a strong enough word for what you feel toward me.” Her voice trembled. “That’s what you meant, wasn’t it?”

  The tomato was sharper than I thought.

  “Your father is miserable about the other day. He won’t tell me what happened, what you said that made him hit you. I know it was something insulting to do with me. He’s too kind, too much of a gentleman to tell me, even if, by telling, I might understand better. He feels terrible about having hit you. He said, ‘I never thought I’d do such a thing to a child of mine. What’s happened to me?’”

  She crossed her arms in front of her. “If you don’t care about what you’re doing to me, surely you must care about him.” She waited for me to say something.

  I got myself a glass of water and drank it slowly. When I’d finished, I said, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll only be around a couple more years. Then you can have him to yourself.”

  “I’ll give you credit, Mark,” she said. Surprised, I made the mistake of looking at her. Her eyes were filled with tears. “You’re playing it very smart.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes,” she said. “You know if you cause enough conflict around here, if you make things sufficiently unpleasant, our marriage will suffer. It can’t help suffering. And that’s what you’re really aiming for.”

  She ripped off a piece of paper toweling and blew her nose. “There’s one consolation. If it all blows up in my face, at least I’ll know I tried. I tried my damnedest but I can’t fight forever.”

  She left the room and me, standing there.

  Last year Mrs. Fields told Jeff and me about the son of some people she knew who had killed himself. He didn’t get into his father’s college, although his marks were very good. His father had counted on it, had told all his friends his son was going to his alma mater. He let the kid know how disappointed he’d be if the kid didn’t make it. So when he got the letter telling him “sorry,” he went up into the attic and hanged himself. Mrs. Fields said there must’ve been other reasons, but I’m not so sure. The kid pasted his letter of rejection on his mirror where they found it, after.

  I can see Mrs. Fields’s face when she said, “Imagine having that on your conscience. As if it mattered what college he went to. How awful to be them, that mother and father. They’ll have to live with that for the rest of their lives.”

  I considered knocking myself off. My father would have to live with that for the rest of his life. I could tape up the estimate from the body shop on my mirror for him to find. That’d make him feel pretty bad.

  On the other hand, it might make me feel pretty bad too. If I was dead, I mean. That’s what is known as cutting off your nose to spite your face. I had to take that into consideration. There were quite a few things I wanted to do before I kicked the bucket.

  What was it Mrs. Baumgartner had said? It takes a lot of energy just to stay alive, she’d said.

  Maybe she has something there.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “I’m going to pose a hypothetical question,” Jeff said, gumming his twenty-five-cent cigar like a Hollywood mogul. “If you had a date with a gorgeous bimbo, sensationally gorgeous, and everything goes like clockwork, you use the right fork, the R-rated movie is pretty good, the car doesn’t break down, you pull up in front of her house, her mother and father are out drinking and
her granny is asleep with her hearing aid on the table, what do you do?”

  Tony lay on the floor picking his toenails, transfixed. His beady little eyes traveled back and forth between Jeff and me, waiting.

  “I’d ask her what good books she’d read lately,” I said. “How do I know what I’d do? You been wetting down that cigar for weeks now. Why don’t you light a match to it, smoke it, something? It’s disgusting.”

  The end of the cigar Jeff put in his mouth most often was beginning to fray pretty badly. He’d Scotch-taped the worst of it, but it hadn’t done much good.

  “Don’t avoid the issue,” Jeff said. “You wouldn’t know what to do, right?”

  “Depends whether it was the first date or the second,” I said, stalling. “What would you do?”

  “I’d put my hand on her knee and tell her I respected her, if it was my first date,” he said.

  “What about if it was the second?” Tony asked.

  “Hey, hey,” Jeff chortled, thumbs in the air, “that’s a different story. First, you have to make her trust you. Let it slip that you’re an Eagle Scout, never forget Mother’s Day, help old ladies across the street. Use a potent after-shave and brush your teeth after every meal.”

  “And if all that fails, you can always hit her over the head and, when she comes to, tell her most girls you take out are similarly affected by your charm,” I said. I didn’t like talking about sex with Tony around. He was too young. Let him wait a couple of years.

  “Did you make out with girls at that party you went to Saturday?” Tony asked.

  I flicked a wet towel at his bare legs, hitting him just right.

  “Hey!” He sat up, rubbing the spot, glaring at me. “What’d you go and do that for? That hurt.”

  “It was supposed to,” I said.

  Why did I want to hurt him? He was a good kid. He was my brother and he’d done nothing to me.

  “What makes you so sore at the world?” he wanted to know. “Why are you so angry all the time?”