The Wednesday Wars (17 page)

"This is irregular," said Mr. Bradbrook. "Has the new concept affected the cost estimates?"

"Not significantly," said Mr. Kowalski.

Mr. Bradbrook considered. "Well," he said, "if Mr. Hoodhood will agree, then I see nothing wrong with your presentation going slightly longer. Mr. Hoodhood?"

What could the Chamber of Commerce Businessman of 1967 do? He shrugged and nodded. But the back of his neck grew as red as boiling sin, and I knew he
did
begrudge the extra time. He begrudged it a whole lot.

Mr. Kowalski pulled off the sheet from his model of the new junior high school. He cleared his throat again. "As you can see, gentlemen," said Mr. Kowalski, "the design is quite classical, in the best traditions of our national architecture, for a time when our children desperately need to be reminded of our great American traditions."

And it was. It looked like the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Wide steps swooped up past a line of pillars and up to the central doors. Above that rose a steep dome, with thin windows cut all around it. On either side of the dome, the building spread graceful wings—all with thin windows again—and behind, the long gymnasium formed the tail, whose rows of bright windows faced south and north to let in as much light as any gymnasium could ever have.

"But we live in 1968, gentlemen," Mr. Kowalski said. "Just as our children need to be reminded of our great traditions, so, too, do they need to enjoy the advantages of contemporary technology. I think you'll find the new interior design both modern and innovative, a perfect blend of where we have been and where we are going as a nation." He handed out copies of the plans for the new design to all the school board members, keeping his back to my father and me the whole time. Then he took us all through the new interior. Slowly.

No pillars, no straight walls. The roof a series of glass plates above the science and art rooms. The central dome three stories high over the main lobby and clusters of classrooms all looking out into the sunlit space. All as modern as could be.

"I don't believe that anyone has ever come up with this blended concept for a junior high school before," said Mr. Kowalski. Then he sat back down. He did not look over at us. Instead, he lit another cigarette and began pulling at it. He shuffled all of his papers into a folder.

The school board was astounded. Three of them applauded—not Mr. Bradbrook, since God doesn't applaud.

My father turned and looked at me again. His face was very red, and I could tell he was fighting for some kind of control. "Holling, there's something you should have told me, isn't there?" he whispered slowly.

I looked at him.

"Do you think this is a game? This is the future of Hoodhood and Associates. Everything rides on this. My future and your future. So what did you do?"

He used the kind of voice that, in my family, means that a voice a whole lot louder is about to come along in a minute or two, so you'd better start preparing.

But let me tell you, I didn't really care all that much about what he would say or how loudly he would say it. I really didn't.

Because suddenly I knew something a whole lot worse.

Romeo was a genius compared to me.

I hadn't seen at all what Meryl Lee was doing on Valentine's Day, while we were sipping Cokes at the lunch counter at Woolworth's. I hadn't realized how easily she had gotten what she wanted from me: my father's design for the new junior high.

Run me on the dashing rocks and hand me a vial of poison. I'm such a jerk, I'd probably drink it. I'm a bigger jerk even than Mickey Mantle.

I got up before I began to bawl like a first grader.

"Holling," warned my father—a slightly louder slow whisper.

I left the conference room.

My red father never did tell me what he did for his presentation. Probably it began with him demanding to see Mr. Kowalski's plans, and then suggesting that he took these from Hoodhood and Associates—not saying it outright, but just suggesting it, like he knew it was the truth but wouldn't say it—and then arguing that Mr. Kowalski should withdraw his proposal because it wasn't the same one he had submitted and that's not how honest businessmen worked. It would have been something like that, with him getting redder and redder all the time.

I bet if you were watching it, you sure would have seen that architecture is a blood sport, and Macbeth couldn't have played it any bloodier than my father.

February is a can't-decide-what-it-wants-to-be month on Long Island. What's left of any snow has melted into brown slush and runs in dirty ridges alongside the street gutters. The grass is dank and dark. Everything is damp, as if the whole island had been dipped under dark water and is only starting to dry out. Mornings are always gray and cold.

That's what it was like between Meryl Lee and me the next day at school. Slushy, damp, dirty, dark, gray, and cold. We didn't look at each other. At lunch, we ate about as far away from each other as we could, and she went outside early—even though Meryl Lee hardly ever went outside. She didn't come to Chorus, so I sang the soprano part for Miss Violet of the Very Spiky Heels alone at our stand. When Mrs. Baker asked if I'd like to partner with Meryl Lee on the sentence diagramming exercise in the afternoon, I told her I'd rather do it with Doug Swieteck.

On Friday, things were still slushy, damp, dirty, dark, and cold. Meryl Lee wore sunglasses to school, even though it was gray like always. When Mrs. Baker asked her to remove them for class, she said that her doctor had asked her to keep them on. That she was supposed to keep them on for, maybe, the rest of the school year.

I was the only one in class who didn't laugh at that.

I looked out the window.

For the next Wednesday, I wrote an essay for Mrs. Baker about what Shakespeare wanted to express about being a human being in
Romeo and Juliet.
Here is the first sentence in my essay:

What Shakespeare wanted to express about being a human being in
Romeo and Juliet
is that you better be careful who you trust.

Here is the last sentence:

If Romeo had never met Juliet, he would have been all right. But because he was star-crossed, he did meet her, and because she came up with all sorts of plans that she didn't bother telling him about,
he ended up taking poison and dying, which is an important lesson for us to learn in life.

I had Meryl Lee to thank for this, you know. If she hadn't done what she did, I never would have figured out what Shakespeare was trying to express in Romeo and Juliet about what it means to be a human being.

When I handed the essay in, Mrs. Baker read it through. Twice. "So," she said slowly, "do you think Juliet was right to stab herself at the end of the play?"

"Yes," I said.

"I see," she said, and she put the essay in a manila folder and left it on top of her desk.

But unlike Juliet, Meryl Lee didn't stab herself. In fact, that afternoon she was waiting for me outside the gates of Camillo Junior High, standing beside a ridge of crusted snow that she had stamped down flat.

"It wasn't my fault," she said.

"Aren't you supposed to be at Saint Adelbert's?"

"I just showed him your drawing, because it was so good. I didn't know he would use the same design."

"Sure, Meryl Lee."

"It's true," she said.

"All right, it's true. Whatever you say, Meryl Lee. You told him everything about my father's design. Everything. And then a few days later, he draws up new plans so that the inside of his school is just like the inside of my father's school. You had nothing to do with it."

"I didn't say I had nothing to do with it," said Meryl Lee. "I said I didn't know he would use the same design."

"I'd keep the dark glasses on, Meryl Lee. It's easier to lie to someone if they can't see your eyes."

A long moment went by. Then Meryl Lee took off the glasses and threw them past my head.

I think she was trying to throw them
at
my head.

Then she turned and walked away—but not before I saw why she'd been wearing them.

I picked up the glasses and put them in my pocket.

That night, I saw those glasses flying past my head again and again and again. And I saw Meryl Lee's red eyes. Again and again and again.

Meryl Lee wasn't in school the next day. I kept looking over at her empty desk.

At lunch recess, I wrote a new
Romeo and Juliet
essay in the library. Here is the first sentence of the essay:

What Shakespeare wanted to express about being a human being in
Romeo and Juliet
is that it's hard to care about two things at the same time—like caring about the Montague family and caring about Juliet, too.

Here is the last sentence:

If Romeo had never met Juliet, maybe they both would have still been alive, but what would they have been alive for is the question that Shakespeare wants us to answer.

I handed the essay in to Mrs. Baker at the end of the day. She read it through. Twice. Then she took my old essay out of the manila folder—which was still on top of her desk—and put in the new essay. She dropped the old essay into the trash, put the folder with the new essay into her desk, and then she looked up at me. "So what will you do now?" she said.

That night, with 79 cents left over from Valentine's Day and $1 from Monday's allowance, I bought two Cokes and a rose with a ribbon. I took them over to Meryl Lee's house and rang the doorbell. Mr. Kowalski answered it.

"You're the Hoodhood boy," he said.

"Is Meryl Lee home?" I said.

He opened the door further and I came in. He hesitated. Then, "Her room is the one at the top of the stairs," he said.

I went up the stairs slowly. I felt his eyes on my back, but I didn't want to turn around to let him know that I felt his eyes on my back.

I knocked at Meryl Lee's door.

"Go away," she said.

I knocked again. I heard her chair scrape against the floor, and her footsteps stomping across the room. Her door opened. "I told you—" Then she stopped. Her mouth was open.

"I thought you might be thirsty," I said.

Her mouth was still open.

"Are you?"

"Am I what?"

"Thirsty."

She looked at the Cokes in my hand. "Yes," she said.

I handed her a bottle and pulled the opener out of my pocket. I love the sound of a brand-new bottle of Coke when you pry the lid off and it starts to fizz. Whenever I hear that sound, I think of roses, and of sitting together with someone you care about, and of Romeo and Juliet waking up somewhere and saying to each other, Weren't we jerks? And then having all that be over. That's what I think of when I hear the sound of a brand-new bottle of Coke being opened.

On Thursday, before the school board met to decide on its new architect, Kowalski and Associates withdrew its bid for the new junior high school. Hoodhood and Associates was given the contract.

"What chumps," said my father. "They were going to win hands down. What chumps." He shook his head. "They're bound to go under now, but if you can't play for keeps, you shouldn't be in the business in the first place. And Kowalski never could play for keeps. And Hoodhood and Associates can." He rubbed his hands together like Shylock onstage.

And that's when something changed. I suddenly wondered if my father was really like Shylock. Not because he loved ducats, but because maybe he had become the person that everyone expected him to become. I wondered if he had ever had a choice, or if he had ever felt trapped. Or if he had ever imagined a different life.

With this new contract, he was a sure bet for the Chamber of Commerce Businessman of 1968. It's probably what everyone expected.

For the first time, I wondered if it was what he wanted—or if there was a time when he might have wanted something else.

Or if I wanted something else.

Or if we were both only Fortune's fools—like Romeo.

Meryl Lee and I were partners on Friday for sentence diagramming. We ate together at lunch. And we decided to be partners for Mr. Petrelli's next geography assignment, which was on "The California Gold Rush and You." "Make it relevant," said Mr. Petrelli. We sang together in Chorus for Miss Violet of the Very Spiky Heels, and when it came time at the end of the day to clean the board, we did that together, too.

And that's why we were at the board together when Mr. Guareschi came into the classroom to give Mrs. Baker a yellow telegram—a telegram that she took out of the envelope, then read, then dropped onto the floor as she rushed out, leaving Mr. Guareschi standing in front of the class without any idea what to do.

When we picked up the telegram to put on her desk, Meryl Lee and I could hardly not read it ourselves. Or at least the words that mattered:

DOWNED HELICOPTER TRANSPORT STOP KHESANH STOP LT T BAKER MISSING IN ACTION STOP

The news from Khesanh that Walter Cronkite reported each night kept getting grimmer. The five thousand marines there were cut off and could get supplies only by air, even though any helicopter that flew over took a lot of enemy fire from the twenty thousand surrounding Vietcong troops. Meanwhile, the marines were dug into bunkers covered with three feet of earth to protect them from the mortar shells that the Vietcong were lobbing into the camp—about five hundred mortar shells a day. And when they weren't lobbing shells, the Vietcong were digging tunnels that they could use to put explosives beneath the marines. Some reports said that the tunnels were only a hundred yards away from the barbed wire around the Khesanh base. The marines had started to use stethoscopes and divining rods to see if they could find them.

You know things are bad when the United States Marine Corps is using stethoscopes and divining rods.

Still, the White House announced that the enemy offensive was running out of steam, that casualties at Khesanh were light, that we would never give up the marine base there.