“Helen?” he said.
“Brice,” she said, “it’s so dark here.” She was quiet again and he waited for her to say that she was afraid. “It reminds me of that time in the mountains, you remember?”
“Yes,” he said.
“It was very dark there, too, just like this, with no streetlights anywhere, and we opened the windows to let the fresh air in and you could hear the wind come down the mountains through the trees.”
They had taken a vacation in the Adirondacks one year, and it had seemed to relax Helen. They’d stayed in a cabin. It was for the most part a good memory.
“I remember it exactly,” he said. “Just the way you describe.”
He heard her sigh again. “I know I’m a lot of trouble,” she said.
“You’re no trouble,” he said.
“I’m a lot of trouble,” she said.
“I don’t think of it that way.”
“I’ll get well and then I won’t be so much trouble to you,” she said. Silence again. “Do you hear it?” she said.
“No,” he said. “What?”
“The dogs stopped barking,” Helen said.
“Good.”
“I think I can sleep now,” she said. “I feel tired.”
“Good.”
“Stay as long as you need to,” she said.
“I won’t need to stay too much longer,” he said.
“I can sleep,” she said. She was quiet for a moment. “But come home soon,” she said.
They said good-bye and he looked out toward the mountains for a moment and walked back in the bar and began to practice his throwing again, and as he fell into the rhythm of throwing and retrieving, he found himself thinking, as he did occasionally, of Ellen Murchison, a girl from his hometown in Indiana, and what had happened to him a long time ago during a party at her house one afternoon.
He was fourteen and small for his age, late in developing, and had just reached the time when he had begun to feel a sexual urge toward the girls he knew, Ellen Murchison especially. Her parents were away for the weekend, and had left Ellen in the care of her older brother Ken, a senior. No sooner were the parents out the door than Ken had abdicated his responsibilities, leaving the house to Ellen so that he could go camping with his friends and rendezvous with some girls from school. It was summer, and there was not much to do in the small Indiana town, and naturally enough Ellen Murchison had organized a party, calling her friends to come over, asking them to stay the night if they could fool their parents. Brice Habersham knew that he had probably been the last of Ellen’s phone calls. His popularity had slipped steadily from the time he had begun to
wear glasses, from the time that the other boys had begun to mature without him, from the time that his painful awkwardness at sports had become apparent, and from the time that he had begun to grow shy as a result of all these inadequacies. Ellen Murchison had felt just barely enough of her old loyalty to him, as a neighbor and a childhood friend, to invite him along with the others.
It didn’t help matters that his father had just taken him to the local barber for his annual summer crew cut. This time he had howled in outrage, but there was no way to resist his father ultimately. This was the year the Beatles came to America, and he hadn’t exactly wanted a mop-top, which would have been a little too defiant for his sensibilities, but he didn’t want to look like Johnny Unitas, whom he’d just seen on
Toast of the Town
the week before, either. And so he prepared himself for Ellen Murchison’s party by donning a tight white T-shirt, Levi’s with the cuffs rolled up, and his black Chuck Taylors, and he tried to disarrange his hair, but without visible effect. It was the best he could do, and he knew it wasn’t enough. There was no chance that he would be one of the cool kids at the party.
Telling his mother he was going fishing with Tommy Linden, he left the house with his tackle box and fishing pole and made sure to go all the way around the corner in the direction of the creek before doubling back and cutting through the school yard, where he left his things behind the hedge that circled the gymnasium. Ellen Murchison’s house was just on the other side of the school yard, and he walked there humming “Love Me Do.” Not a musician himself, Brice Habersham nevertheless was an authority of sorts on the latest hits, listening assiduously late at night to the Top 40 radio station out of Indianapolis, carefully
shifting the dial when the radio faded or squawked. He was always the first to learn the new songs and the new performers, and he had an uncanny knack of predicting which ones would rise to the top of the charts. He was known at school, insofar as he was known at all, as “the music kid.” Secretly, though, he grew bored with the music easily, its simple arrangements and rhymes, and would have preferred listening to his father’s Beethoven records, or maybe nothing at all.
There was Ellen Murchison’s house, bright, white, the first in the neighborhood with a new invention called vinyl siding, also boasting an expanded garage that housed the Murchison’s second car (since they’d bought their Lincoln Continental), a Chrysler New Yorker station wagon that Brice Habersham had actually ridden in many times when he was younger, on the way to the municipal swimming pool, with Ellen in her bathing suit. Approaching the house of the wealthy Murchisons, looking at their old car, he felt a curious mixture of past and future pleasure, a feeling that he would never experience in quite the same way again. He connected the innocent happiness of riding with Ellen in the station wagon, noticing even at that age that she was pretty but not feeling any anxiety or passion at the sight of her prepubescent body in the swimsuit, blue with a daisy pattern just above the right hip, he remembered, with the not-as-innocent pleasure of seeing her at the party, perhaps wearing a skirt that showed her leg above the knee, a tight blouse that exposed her round arms and her white throat, and he could see ahead of him the possibility of enjoying the charms of Ellen Murchison or another girl much like her, the possibility that he would grow out of his awkwardness and his perturbation, maybe even on this very afternoon or evening,
though he would have to make sure it happened before dark, when he had to be home. Looking back on it now, releasing the dart yet again from his hand, noting carefully the flash from the candlelight and attempting to compensate with a tilt of his head, he could see opening Ellen Murchison’s front door and going inside as his last real moment of hopeful anticipation—even his wedding night with Helen was not the same, encroached upon as it was by the knowledge of past defeats, half expecting the defeat in the midst of his anticipation.
There were junior varsity football players at the party. That was the first sign that made his heart sink. Fifteen and sixteen years old, muscles bulging from their T-shirts, surrounding Ellen Murchison and her friend Patty Mooney. They were drinking beer. Ellen waved at him and smiled, but he was shunted as if by a conveyor belt off to the other side of the living room, near the record player, where he talked to Tommy and his friend George Halbert and a kid he knew named Mikey and two girls with glasses and flat chests, Alice Atterburn and Gloria Penfield. That was what he had known it would be like, really, before the brief fantasy he entertained while approaching the door.
Then one of the football players, raucous and backslapping, took it upon himself to bring the group by the record player a round of beers. Brice and Tommy and George and Mikey and the girls had accepted them without comment, reluctantly, playing the role that they seemed to be required to play, the hangers-on who benefited from the football player’s largesse. The beer was in a squat brown bottle, rather warm, and Brice Habersham drank it trying to keep down the bile in his throat and a sense of dread. By the time he had nearly finished,
another was placed in his hand, and by the time that was nearly gone, the scene had been magically transformed. The sunlight through the window imbued the Murchisons’ living room with a yellow glow and a pleasant heat, a moistness he could feel on the skin of his forearms and the space between his toes, a sleepy, languid feeling of romance. Ellen Murchison was beautiful there across the room, and it didn’t seem impossible that he would talk to her. Out the window, the houses of the Indiana town hummed their way across the flat land to the cornfields, which Brice Habersham could imagine if not actually see. Even Alice and Gloria were part of the new mood, fun girls whom you could talk to, who laughed and made you feel good. The only wrong note came from the record player—Tommy had, in his ignorance, put on an old Elvis Presley tune.
Downing the last of his beer in two big swallows, Brice Habersham stepped confidently toward the record player and the stack of records next to it, mostly Ellen’s brother’s, he suspected. It was a smorgasbord of the latest songs, all the music he listened to when he was supposed to be asleep.
He knew all of these—the Beatles, of course, and Paul Revere and the Raiders, and the Beach Boys, and the Supremes, and the many dozens of others. What must it be like to be Ken Murchison, who obviously received an allowance large enough to buy whatever records he liked? Brice Habersham got only enough each week to buy one or two records, if that’s how he chose to spend his money.
One after another, he placed the records on the turntable until there was a fat stack of 45s waiting to drop. He hit the switch, and the player arm rose slowly and tapped the bottommost record, which fell into place and commenced spinning.
Then the song was playing—“Deadman’s Curve” by Jan and Dean. “Hal Hartman Plays the Hot Hits,” Brice Habersham said out loud, to no one in particular, in the voice of the crazy nighttime DJ from Indianapolis, which he could bring off almost perfectly.
He was surprised to hear someone behind him laugh. “Hey, that’s pretty good,” he heard one of the football players say, the same one who had distributed the beers.
“This one’s so hot it sizzles, gang—
ssssst!
—Oww!” Brice Habersham said, still not knowing quite why he did so. “Let me spin this one for you while I go find the Band-Aids,” Brice Habersham said. “Holy smo-o-okes! Where’s the fire extinguisher?”
Now there were more people laughing, almost what you’d call an audience, if you were thinking of it in that way. “That’s pretty good,” the football player said again. “Hey, listen to this!” he called over to Ellen Murchison and her group. “This kid sounds just like Hal Hartman.”
And so they all gathered around Brice Habersham, and each time a new record dropped he did the routine, aping lines he’d heard Hal Hartman use. And everyone laughed, and while the songs played, they danced, and soon he found himself actually dancing with Ellen Murchison, and he regretted that he hadn’t put on any slow ones. The air in the room grew stifling, though, from the summer sun and the exertion, and Brice Habersham’s head felt a little dizzy and he suddenly needed to pee, and he excused himself for the last song and went in search of a bathroom. Going out of the living room and past the front door, swelled with a sense of well-being—Ellen Murchison had danced with him!—he remembered that there
was a small bathroom at the top of the stairs, so he walked up holding on to the banister. He was now feeling almost desperate to relieve himself, so he shut the door without locking it, an oversight that he certainly would not have committed were it not for the two beers. When he finished, he buttoned up his pants and buckled his belt and washed his hands at the sink. Something pink caught his eye, and instead of opening the door he turned to look. There was a bra hanging over the shower rod—a pink, lacy bra, something girlish about it, not a bra, Brice Habersham guessed correctly, that Mrs. Murchison would wear. Imagining Ellen Murchison unhooking the bra before she stepped into the tub, he felt himself stiffening in his pants. Slowly, carefully, he lifted the bra from the rod, examining the padded pink cup that held Ellen Murchison’s tender breast, the strikingly hard wiring underneath—that would be uncomfortable, wouldn’t it?—the complicated mechanism of hooks and straps. Again, carefully, he placed the bra back over the rod as he had found it, but looking down at the floor now he saw a pair of pink underwear, just to the side of the bath mat near the wastebasket. He felt blood rush to his head, and he put one hand on the edge of the sink. Did he dare? The panties had clearly been worn recently, tossed down carelessly in haste—probably when Ellen Murchison took a shower just prior to the party. He could see the panties’ white lining over what must surely be the crotch, and a slight discoloration there. His hands were shaking. He looked quickly around the bathroom. He could still remember to this day the white soap dish on the sink, the blue bath mat and shower curtain, the delicate flower pattern of the wallpaper. He was alert enough to take in all these details and preserve them. But he did not think to lock
the door. Bending over, he picked up the frilly panties and felt the soft fabric in his fingers. Was that actual silk? He closed his eyes and brought the panties to his face and breathed in the tangy scent of Ellen Murchison. Transported, it took a moment for him to realize the door had opened, and when he looked up he saw Ellen Murchison standing over him, aghast, her mouth open to reveal her white teeth, her pretty nose crinkled up and the lines showing around her squinted eyes, so that she looked rather like a pig with fangs. Then she screamed and ran back out the doorway. Brice Habersham dropped the panties and lurched backward, hitting his head on the corner of the sink. Ignoring the pain, he righted himself and rushed out to the staircase just in time to see Ellen turn the corner into the living room, screaming her head off. When he reached the front door he could still hear the screams just as forcefully, as if Ellen’s head had literally become detached, and was still there at the bottom of the stairway wailing piteously while her body went on ahead. Then, finally, staggering to the sidewalk, he heard Ellen’s frantic voice raised against him and a couple of the football players laughing uproariously and the other girls mewling in disgust.
While he ran across the school yard gasping for breath, Brice Habersham quickly ticked through the list of possible excuses, and realized there were none. Even worse, he knew instinctively that Ellen Murchison would embellish the story, and that those who told it afterward would embellish it further. His life was over. He would never be able to hold his head up at school again. He would be an outcast, a pariah. And although, stopping by the hedge to retrieve his fishing gear and then sitting down and letting the tears come, he could not have
predicted the trajectory of his life from that point on, he came pretty close. There was nothing for him to do, he decided, but dig into his studies, use his brain to achieve whatever he could. And when he went to college he would find some field of study that would take him out of his Indiana town forever, and in all matters he would choose safely and correctly, minimizing the chances of anything so horrific happening ever again.