A prayer for Owen Meany (8 page)

"What props?" my grandmother asked.

"Yes, what props ?" Lydia said. And Dan Needham said
that a "prop" could be anything; once he'd used a tennis ball-and
once a live bird in a cage. That was it! I thought, feeling that whatever it
was in the bag was hard and lifeless and unmoving-and a birdcage would be all
that. The bird, of course, I couldn't touch. Still, I wanted to see it, and
with trepidation-and as silently as possible, so that the bores in the living
room would not hear the paper crinkling of the two bags-I opened just a little
bit of the bag within the bag. The face that stared intently into mine was not
a bird's face, and no cage prevented this creature from leaping out at me-and
the creature appeared not only poised to leap out at me, but eager to do so.
Its expression was fierce; its snout, as narrow as the nose of a fox, was
pointed at my face like a gun; its wild, bright eyes winked with hatred and
fearlessness, and the claws of its forepaws, which were reaching toward me,
were long and prehistoric. It looked like a weasel in a shell-like a ferret
with scales. I screamed. I also forgot I was sitting under the telephone table,
because I leaped up, knocking over the table and tangling my feet in the phone
cord. I couldn't get away; and when I lunged out of the hall and into the
living room, the telephone, and the phone table, and the beast in the bag were
all dragged-with considerable clamor-after me. And so I screamed again.

"Goodness gracious!" my grandmother cried. But Dan
Needham said cheerfully to my mother: "I told you he'd open the bag."

At first I had thought Dan Needham was a fool like all the
others, and that he didn't know the first thing about six-year-olds-that to
tell a six-year-old not to open a bag was an invitation to open it. But he knew
very well what a six-year-old was like; to his credit, Dan Needham was always a
little bit of a six-year-old himself.

"What in heaven's name is in the bag?" my grandmother
asked, as I finally freed myself from the phone cord and went crawling to my
mother.

"My prop!" Dan Needham said. It was some
"prop," all right, for in the bag was a stuffed armadillo. To a boy
from New Hampshire, an armadillo resembled a small dinosaur-for who in New
Hampshire ever heard of a two-foot-long rat with a shell on its back, and claws
as distinguished as an anteater's? Armadillos eat insects and earthworms and
spiders and land snails, but I had no way of knowing that. It looked at least
willing, if not able, to eat me. Dan Needham gave it to me. It was the first
present any of my mother's "beaus" gave me that I kept. For
years-long after its claws were gone, and its tail fell off, and its stuffing
came out, and its sides collapsed, and its nose broke in half, and its glass
eyes were lost-I kept the bony plates from the sheD of its back. I loved the
armadillo, of course, and Owen Meany also loved it. We would be playing in the
attic, abusing my grandmother's ancient sewing machine, or dressing up in my
dead grandfather's clothes, and Owen would say, out of nowhere, "LET'S GO
GET THE ARMADILLO. LET'S BRING IT UP HERE AND HIDE IT IN THE CLOSET."

The closet that housed my dead grandfather's clothes was vast
and mysterious, full of angles and overhead shelves, and rows upon rows of
shoes. We would hide in the armpit of an old tuxedo; we would hide it in the
leg of an old pair of waders, or under a derby hat; we would hang it from a
pair of suspenders. One of us would hide it and the other one would have to
find it in the dark closet with the aid of only a flashlight. No matter how
many times we had seen the armadillo, to come upon it in the black closet-to
suddenly light up its insane, violent face-was always frightening. Every time
the finder found it, he would yell. Owen's yelling would occasionally produce
my grandmother, who would not willingly mount the rickety staircase to the
attic and struggle with the attic's trapdoor. She would stand at the foot of
the staircase and say, "Not so loud, you boys!"

 
 
And she would
sometimes add that we were to be careful with the ancient sewing machine, and
with Grandfather's clothes-because she might want to sell them, someday.
"That sewing machine is an antique, you know!" Well, almost
everything at  Front Street was an antique, and almost none of it-Owen and
I knew perfectly well-would ever be sold; not, at least, while my grandmother
was alive. She liked her antiques, as was evidenced by the growing number of
chairs and couches in the living room that no one was allowed to sit on. As for
the discards in the attic, Owen and I knew they were safe forever. And
searching among those relics for the terrifying armadillo . . . which itself
looked like some relic of the animal world, some throwback to an age when men
were taking a risk every time they left the cave . . . hunting for that stuffed
beast among the artifacts of my grandmother's culture was one of Owen Meany's
favorite games.

"I CAN'T FIND IT," he would call out from the closet.
"I HOPE YOU DIDN'T PUT IT IN THE SHOES, BECAUSE I DON'T WANT TO STEP ON IT
BEFORE I SEE IT. AND I HOPE YOU DIDN'T PUT IT ON THE TOP SHELF BECAUSE I DON'T
LIKE TO HAVE IT ABOVE ME-I HATE TO SEE IT LOOKING DOWN AT ME. AND IT'S NO FAIR
PUTTING IT WHERE IT WILL FALL DOWN IF I JUST TOUCH SOMETHING, BECAUSE THAT'S
TOO SCARY. AND WHEN IT'S INSIDE THE SLEEVES, I CAN'T FIND FT WITHOUT REACHING
INSIDE FOR IT-THAT'S NO FAIR, EITHER."

"Just shut up and find it, Owen," I would say.

"NO FAIR PUTTING IT IN THE HATBOXES," Owen would say,
while I listened to him stumbling over the shoes inside the closet. "AND
NO FAIR WHEN IT SPRINGS OUT AT ME BECAUSE YOU STRETCH THE SUSPENDERS IN THAT
WAY . . . AAAAAAHHHHHH! THAT'S NO FAIR!"

Before Dan Needham brought anything as exotic as that armadillo
or himself into my life, my expectations regarding anything unusual were
reserved for Owen Meany, and for school holidays and portions of my summer
vacation when my mother and I would travel "up north" to visit Aunt
Martha and her family. To anyone in coastal New Hampshire, "up north"
could mean almost anywhere else in the state, but Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred
lived in the White Mountains, in what everyone called "the north
country," and when they or my cousins said they were going "up
north," they meant a relatively short drive to any of several towns that
were a little north of them-to Bartlett or to Jackson, up where the real skiing
was. And in the summers, Loveless Lake, where we went to swim, was also
"up north" from where the Eastmans lived-in Sawyer Depot. It was the
last train station on the Boston & Maine before North Conway, where most of
the skiers got off. Every Christmas vacation and Easter, my mother and I, and
our skis, departed the train in Sawyer Depot; from the depot itself, we could
walk to the Eastmans' house. In the summer, when we visited at least once, it
was an even easier walk-without our skis. Those train rides-at least two hours
from Gravesend-were the most concrete occasions I was given in which to imagine
my mother riding the Boston & Maine in the other direction -south, to
Boston, where I almost never went. But the passengers traveling north, I always
believed, were very different types from the citybound travelers-skiers,
hikers, mountain-lake swimmers: these were not men and women seeking trysts, or
keeping assignations. The ritual of those train rides north is unforgettable to
me, although I remember nothing of the equal number of rides back to Gravesend;
return trips, to this day-from anywhere-are simply invitations to dull trances
or leaden slumber. But every time we rode the train to Sawyer Depot, my mother
and I weighed the advantages of sitting on the left-hand side of the train, so
that we could see Mt. Chocorua-or on the right-hand side, so that we could see
Ossipee Lake. Chocorua was our first indication of how much snow there would be
where we were going, but there's more visible activity around a lake than there
is on a mountain-and so we would sometimes "opt for Ossipee," as
Mother and I described our decision. We also played a game that involved
guessing where everyone was going to get off, and I always ate too many of
those little tea sandwiches that they served on board, the kind with the crusts
cut off; this overeating served to justify my inevitable trip to that lurching
pit with the railroad ties going by underneath me, in a blur, and the whoosh of
rank air that blew upward on my bare bottom.

 
 
My mother would
always say, "We're almost at Sawyer Depot, Johnny. Wouldn't you be more
comfortable if you waited until we got to your Aunt Martha's?"

Yes; and no. I could almost always have waited; yet it was not
only necessary to empty my bladder and bowels before encountering my cousins-it
was a needed test of courage to sit naked over that dangerous hole, imagining
lumps of coal and loosened railroad spikes hurtling up at me at bruising speed.
I needed the empty bladder and bowels because there was immediate, rough
treatment ahead; my cousins always greeted me with instant acrobatics, if not
actual violence, and I needed to brace myself for them, to frighten myself a
little in order to be ready for all the future terrors that the vacation held
in store for me. I would never describe my cousins as bullies; they were
good-natured, rambunctious roughnecks and daredevils who genuinely wanted me to
have fun-but fun in the north country was not what I was used to in my life
with the women at  Front Street, Gravesend. I did not wrestle with my
grandmother or box with Lydia, not even when she had both her legs. I did play
croquet with my mother, but croquet is not a contact sport. And given that my
best friend was Owen Meany, I was not inclined to much in the way of athletic
roughhousing. My mother loved her sister and brother-in-law; they always made
her feel special and welcome-they certainly made me feel that way-and my mother
doubtless appreciated a little time away from my grandmother's imperious
wisdom. Grandmother would come to Sawyer Depot for a few days at Christmas, and
she would make a grand appearance for one weekend every summer, but the north
country was not to Grandmother's liking. And although Grandmother was perfectly
tolerant of my solitary disruption of the adult life at  Front Street-and
even moderately tolerant of the games I would play in that old house with
Owen-she had scant patience for the disruption caused in any house by all her
grandchildren. For Thanksgiving, the Eastmans came to  Front Street, a
disturbance that my grandmother referred to in terms of "the
casualties" for several months after their visit. My cousins were active,
combative athletes-my grandmother called them "the warriors"-and I
lived a different life whenever I was with them. I was both crazy about them
and terrified of them; I couldn't contain my excitement as the time to see them
drew near, but after several days, I couldn't wait to get away from them-I
missed the peace of my private games, and I missed Owen Meany; I even missed
Grandmother's constant but consistent criticism. My cousins-Noah, Simon, and
Hester (in order of their ages)-were all older than I: Hester was older by less
than a year, although she would always be bigger; Simon was older by two years;
Noah, by three. Those are not great differences in age, to be sure, but they
were great enough in all those years before I was a teenager-when each of my
cousins was better than I was, at everything. Since they grew up in the north
country, they were fabulous skiers. I was, at best, a cautious skier, modeling
my slow, wide turns on my mother's graceful but undaring stem Christie-she was
a pretty skier of intermediate ability who was consistently in control; she did
not think that the essence of the sport was speed, nor did she fight the
mountain. My cousins raced each other down the slopes, cutting each other off,
knocking each other down-and rarely restraining their routes of descent to the
marked trails. They would lead me into the deep, unmanageable powder snow in
the woods, and in my efforts to keep up with them, I would abandon the
controlled conservative skiing that my mother had taught me and end up
straddling trees, embracing snow fences, losing my goggles in icy streams. My
cousins were sincere in their efforts to teach me to keep my skis parallel-and
to hop on my skis-but a school-vacation skier is never the equal to a
north-country native. They set such standards for recklessness that,
eventually, I could no longer have fun skiing with my mother. I felt guilty
that I made her ski alone; but my mother was rarely left alone for long. By the
end of the day, some man-a would-be ski instructor, if not an actual ski instructor-would
be coaching her at her side. What I remember of skiing with my cousins is long,
humiliating, and hurtling falls, followed by my cousins retrieving my ski
poles, my mittens, and my hat-from which I became inevitably separated.

"Are you all right?" my eldest cousin, Noah, would ask
me. "That looked rather harsh."

"That looked neat I" my cousin Simon would say; Simon
loved to fall-he skied to crash.

"You keep doing that, you'll make yourself sterile,' * said
my cousin Hester, to whom every event of our shared childhood was either
sexually exhilarating or sexually damaging. In the summers, we went waterskiing
on Loveless Lake, where the Eastmans kept a boathouse, the second floor of
which was remodeled to resemble an English pub-Uncle Alfred was admiring of the
English. My mother and Aunt Martha would go sailing, but Uncle Alfred drove the
powerboat wildly and fast, a beer in his free hand. Because he did not
water-ski himself, Uncle Alfred thought that the responsibility of the boat's
driver was to make the skier's ride as harrowing as possible. He would double
back in the middle of a turn so that the rope would go slack, or you could even
catch up to the rope and ski over it. He drove a murderous figure ; he appeared
to relish surprising you, by putting you directly in the path of an oncoming
boat or of another surprised water-skier on the busy lake. Regardless of the
cause of your fall, Uncle Alfred took credit for it. When anyone racing behind
the boat would send up a fabulous spray, skimming lengthwise across the water,
skis ripped off, head under one second, up the next, and then under again-Uncle
Alfred would shout, "Bingo!"