Expensive People (9 page)

And now I could make out the first question: “The word closest in meaning to
syzygy
is …”

Off and on, as I sweated my way through the exam, I glanced out the window in the hopes of seeing that white-and-caramel coat waiting for me bravely in the snow. But I saw only the figures of a few boys walking fast across the campus. It was the midterm break now, January 20, and they had a week or so off before the spring semester began. Seeing those boys, who looked older but not much healthier than I, gave me a shock because until now I hadn't really thought of this place as a school—that is, a place where children would be found. It had seemed to me an elegant nightmare concoction made by adults for adults, to further the aims and fantasies of adults, and what have children to do with such things?

I plowed through the first section testing “verbal skills” and leaped into “reasoning skills,” and, famished, ravaged with thirst but afraid to ask Farrel for permission to get a drink of water, I plunged into the thick “achievement” pamphlet, and my eyes bulged at the diagrams, tiny drawings, and graphs that awaited my strained brain. It was one
o'clock by now and my body was pounding with hunger, with thirst, and a kind of slow, seeping terror, but I would no more have indicated my discomfort when Farrel peeped in to say in a bored voice, “Any questions? Problems?” than Nada would have talked of Thomas Mann to the village ladies she meant to befriend and win.

And where was Nada? I paged through the pamphlet desperately, trying to find a question I could answer, and at the back of my brain was the thought of Nada, my mother, and where she might be, and what might be happening, for it was often because of me, somehow, that those things happened. (My dentist in Wateredge, who kept calling me back in order to check my cavities, my gums, who knows what, and to discuss me in detail with Nada, in his private office; a handsome hairy artist had sketched my face in charcoal one Sunday, in a public park in Chicago; and others, many others, had looped their snaky necks around me to see past me and ogle my mother.) I stared for two minutes at a diagram of a cylinder with its various dimensions indicated and gradually a sensation of disgust and horror rose in me, mysteriously, until my trembling hand moved over the thing to hide it.

When Farrel came in at two to collect the test he seemed to have split slightly—two Farrels, a confusion of eyes and arms. I rubbed my own eyes and breathed hoarsely through my mouth, making a sound like the one I had made when I had bronchitis. Did I mention that I had thrown up my breakfast that morning? Yes, Nada had made a lovely mother's breakfast for her son, who was going to please her so that day: pancakes, orange juice, milk, tiny sausages. My stomach had cringed wisely at the smell, but eat everything I did while my mother watched over me, a little prisoner gorging himself on a final meal. As soon as she disappeared I dashed to the back bathroom and relieved myself of it, a big, hot, steaming mass of slop that had no resemblance to anything my mother could have prepared with her delicate hands. Then I trotted back into the kitchen, every nerve in my body ringing as if in sympathy with a ringing telephone in the other room, and sat panting and sweating at the table until Nada should return. So now at two o'clock I was starved. I watched the two Farrels—not quite two, just one and a half—sort out the many papers I had smudged and sweated upon, slap down another pamphlet, and turn to go. He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul.

I think this experience was the beginning.

Shall I be so blunt? The obvious beginning, yes. Nada brought me there, Dean Nash led me to it, but for some reason it was Farrel, that small and indeed insignificant man, who made me realize a dizzying truth about human beings: they don't care.

No, they don't care, and it means something irreparable to know that. Not just to be told it casually, or to be shouted down by a playmate, “Drop dead, will you?” No, I mean
knowingit,
feeling it, tasting it with all your insides.

So I wrote on, dazed and swaying in my rock-hard little desk, in the midst of the “Attitudinal Testing” and such questions as:

“Which would you rather do? 1) Hit your mother 2) Hit your father 3) Burn down your house 4) Eat a worm”

And: “If you came upon two cows mating, which would you do? 1) Hide your eyes 2) Take a picture 3) Call your friends to look 4) Chase the cows away”

Ah, old familiar questions! I'd taken this part of the exam before, many times, and though I never knew what the answers might be there was a kind of comfort in recognizing the questions. And while I did this (as I was to learn) Nada was treated to an excellent luncheon by Dean Nash and his wife, a tall, husky, athletic person, the well-preserved golfer type who always came, in various forms, to my parents' social events. And innocently treated by the dean, yes. My fears turned out to be crazy. Nada was to declare to Father that evening, “They're both such wonderful people!” with the special glittering look that meant They had money and charm and taste and education, They (whoever they were) were to be added to the catch if it killed Nada, and Father had better help her if he wanted peace.

But that was to take place at dinner, and I knew nothing of her happy, joyful, innocent luncheon, in an English Tudor home with pegged floors and two grand pianos and two Turkish rugs, having the usual flattering, mutually assuaging, affirmative conversation such people have. I was still taking my examination and I felt as if I were trying to fly with wings soaked in sweat, feathers torn and ragged, falling out, and on my shoulders Nada rode with triumphant, impatient enthusiasm, her high heels spurs in my ribs—me, the child, the shabby angel pumping his wings furiously and weeping with shame; Nada, the mother, digging in her heels and cursing me on. I kept struggling
up into the sky, my eyes bloodshot and my heart just ordinarily shot, waiting for the end …

I threw up what remained of that breakfast between question nine and question ten of “Conceptional Coordination Skills Testing” but kept on bravely, trying to grind the mess away to nothing beneath my feet before Farrel noticed. The smell was bad but I was writing too fast, reading and gasping too fast, to move to another desk. Onward, onward! My blood vessels were singing in a chorus, like aged radiator pipes. I ground my heels into the floor in a kind of rhythm: in comes a breath, in comes a question, and around in a counterclockwise motion go my anxious feet; out goes a ragged breath, down goes a fast-scrawled answer, and back in a clockwise motion go my feet. In a while the vomit was gone, worn away or just plain evaporated, though there was an oval stain down there that keen-eyed Farrel might notice, and on I went to the last three pages, the last two pages, finally the last page, until I came upon a question dealing with the speculative coordination of conceptions: “X is related by blood to C, but C'is a relative by law. The relationship of X to the social unit MDJ is approximately that of the relationship of C to C' though the MDJ unit is a temporary crystallization. If X …” My mind bulged and nearly burst at this, seized control of itself again and read the question over, and over, until nothing at all was coming through and I began to weep, miserable failure that I was. I lowered my head to the desk and wept. My tears burst out onto the pamphlet, and everything would have been lost, drowned and smudged away by my incontinence, if Farrel hadn't come in. He walked softly, on ripple-soled shoes, and I could sense the awful embarrassment in the air before I even knew he was staring at me.

“Are you finished?” he asked.

And did I get into Johns Behemoth? Yes indeed, as you already know. And did I get kicked out again? Yes, sad to tell. But my expulsion belongs to the merry month of May and my memoir is still, more or less, on January 20.1 want to preserve a phony but convincing chronology, so that there is the impression of development—wrong word:
degeneration—in the child-hero. So let's arbitrarily fix the date as January 20, 1960, when I began to disintegrate.

So I began life as a student at Johns Behemoth, and life back at Burning Bush Way moved a little out of focus. Nada joined the Village Women's Club, under the sponsorship of Hattie Nash (“Such a wonderful person,” Nada said), and Father and Nada joined the Vastvalley Country Club under the sponsorship of a business associate of Father's, so they were happy. Nada began going out to lunch every day, and at dinner she would tell us about the Gorgen clan's plans for an Oriental trip, what Thelma Griggs wanted to do with her living room (her husband was in the antique business, what a surprise!), and what she, Nada, had planned by way of a dinner party two Saturdays away— nothing big, just eight couples, and Ginger would help. (Ginger was our maid, who had orange hair with black roots.) Father, chewing candied midget gherkins cheerfully, grunted agreement to all this.

“And I heard the strangest story about that big house up on Epping Way,” Nada said, slitting her eyes. “They say those people have no furniture, not even beds, just mattresses. The rooms are practically all bare, but they belong to the Fernwood Heights Country Club, can you imagine? They … they're trying desperately to …” She paused.

Father, chewing, let his jaws grind on for a moment or two before he caught on to the silence. He said, “Yes, dear? Eh?”

“Nothing,” Nada said.

“What were you saying, Tash?”

“Nothing.”

“That big house, the big one? Eh?”

Nada sat dazed and pale, and only after a moment did she recover. She put a cigarette between her lips and Father lit it for her. Father stared at her but she did not seem to meet his gaze.

“Does it upset you, Tash?” Father said. “Don't believe everything you hear, after all. In Chestnut Hill—”

“I'm all right,” Nada said shortly.

After a moment the uneasy burden between them shifted and rolled
down the table toward me. They looked at me and asked about school. What grades today, Richard? Oh, 90, 95. That was good. And how was math? All right. What did Mr. Melon say (history teacher). He said … And Mr. Gorden? Enthusiastic (this about my research project on drumlins in the Midwest). Did I ever happen to see Dean Nash, dear Arnold? Not often. (One of my classmates said scornfully that Nash was a fairy, and I told the group of them in a sad, solemn, unarguable voice, no, indeed he wasn't. They believed me.) French class?
Formidable, rnais Men,
I guessed. (Monsieur Frame, our
professeur,
gave us vocabulary tests daily and wandered out in the hall, smoking, while we wrote. Everyone cheated. On the first day I had shakily begun the test only to notice that the rest of the kids were sliding out their notebooks and opening them skillfully on their knees. Aghast, I waited with pounding heart for Monsieur to rush into the room waving his arms and denouncing us, but though the good
professeur
wandered by the doorway and might or might not have seen us, nothing happened. So I said to the kid beside me, a red-haired, demonic, demented-looking child, “Lend me your notes,” and everyone turned to stare at my effrontery. I managed to carry it off. With dark circles beneath my eyes, two years younger than some of them, physically uninteresting and unpromising, I think it was my simple, bold daring that did it. The boy hurriedly finished his test and slipped the notebook over to me and, though
I'd
studied for hours the night before and did not need to cheat, cheat I did.)

“Mais, qu'est-ce que c'estlegrade?”
Nada said.

Thank God, I was able to tell her 95.

I don't know if I mentioned that Father traveled a great deal. He was in and out of Fernwood, in and out of the house, with a fast chuckle and a fast rumple of my hair. “Off to San Francisco, Buster. It's a hard life!” He'd be rushing into the kitchen for a last doughnut, which he'd stuff in his overcoat pocket so that the white sugar fell everywhere, and if Nada was sitting in the breakfast nook she would very daintily—and I think unconsciously—draw her feet away so that he couldn't step on
them. She wore lovely feathery bedroom slippers. Father would loom down over her for a fast kiss, and if I came up to him I'd get another of his wet enthusiastic kisses spiced with doughnut sugar, and off he'd go.

“Your father is an enormously busy man,” Nada said, and she drew me to her, unhappy, puzzled Nada, and kissed my face. I wanted to throw my arms around her neck and say, “Please be happy! Please stay home this time!”

“Let me tell you a story, Richard. Once I went ice skating. It was at night, out in the country, everything was dark and lonely. I went skating by myself, though that was forbidden. Look, none of this story is true, you must know that, but… On one side of that pond the ice had melted a little that day, in the sun, and when I skated over there the ice cracked and I fell through. Not very far, it wasn't deep, but the ice was cracked and the edges were sharp. Can you imagine that, or don't you have any memories of ice? Ponds? Ponds out in the country? No, I don't either, but imagine what it would be like to be a child skating all alone, and you hear the ice groan and crack, and you feel the water that's warm at first … you would know how alone you were then, wouldn't you? So, Richard, let me be sententious and tell you this: it isn't a question of skating or not skating, but only a question of how safely you're going to skate. You don't want to fall through the ice and drown, do you?”

I didn't know what she was saying. She often talked like this, you see, when Father was gone. She talked to me in a low, fast voice, and like a cat she would stir restlessly under the teasing of her own words. Words to Nada must have been different from everything else in the world—weapons but not just weapons, candies, spices, jabs of pleasure and pain—and it made no difference whether they were about anything “true” or not. I think my own problems about life, about what is real and what is fiction in my own life, in this memoir, might come from her, though I don't want to blame her for anything.