CHAPTER 4

It isn’t very often that just me and my father are alone together. My father and I, I should say. I like it when we are. We talk about things we don’t talk about when it’s the four of us: the whole family. For one thing, we don’t have to stop all the time and explain things to Teddy. Teddy needs a lot of things explained to him. When I said that to my mother once, she said, “You did, too, when you were his age. How else do you expect to learn things if they’re not explained?”

It was a hot, sticky night. We had air conditioning only in the bedrooms. I opened the living room window. Even when the city is very hot, the street noises go on. As a matter of fact, there are more of them in the summer because everyone who can’t afford to go to an air-conditioned restaurant or an air-conditioned movie is out on the street trying to get cool. I hoped my father would take me out to an air-conditioned movie. Or a restaurant. I doubted the restaurant, though. We almost never went out for dinner. It was too expensive. And as my father invariably said, “I like the groceries right here much better than in any restaurant.” My father is a very smart man.

On second thought, I wasn’t sure about meat loaf. The thought of turning on the oven made me sweat more than I already was sweating. Maybe we’d have hamburgers instead. Hamburgers are always good. There isn’t too much you can do to ruin a hamburger.

I turned on the radio and danced around the kitchen. “Glide, glide,” I said aloud. Mr. Richards. One point for me. Al and I have this routine. Every time one of us says something Mr. Richards used to say, we get one point. That’s what Mr. Richards used to say when he was trying to teach us to polish the kitchen floor the way he did. “Glide, glide,” I shouted above the noise of the music. If anyone had heard me they’d have thought I was losing it.

I like being alone, but I wouldn’t like to be alone all the time. I wouldn’t like to come home alone to an empty house every day, the way Al did. But once in a while being alone is a luxury. For one thing, if I didn’t know that Teddy was safely up in Connecticut, I wouldn’t be dancing around the kitchen. Because he’d catch me at it and start imitating me. I can’t stand it when he imitates me.

I took out an ice cube and ran it over my forehead and my wrists, the way my mother did. It didn’t cool me off much. I hoped, for my mother’s sake, not for Teddy’s, that it was cooler in Connecticut. My mother was visiting her sister Tess up there. Tess has two boys, one almost exactly Teddy’s age. Tess just got a divorce. She and my mother are two years apart. My mother is older, but as far as I’m concerned, my mother looks about ten years younger than Tess.

My mother has a cow if anyone makes a long distance phone call except on Saturdays and Sundays, when the rates are down. Once in a great while—a real emergency—she forces herself to call during the day when the rates are at their highest. Before Tess and my uncle got their divorce, I caught my mother calling her sister in the middle of the day. Quite a few times. Well, that’s when I knew something serious was going on.

“Why is Tess getting a divorce?” I asked my mother.

“Because he fell in love with another woman,” my mother told me. I’ve thought about that a lot. And wondered if my father would ever fall in love with another woman. Once I asked my mother if she thought he would, and she said, “He wouldn’t dare.”

I guess my mother and father will hang in there. I hope so. I know a lot of kids whose parents are divorced. I’m practically the only kid in my class whose parents aren’t divorced—or at least separated. That used to embarrass me a little. I felt as if I had to explain why my parents were still married to each other. That was when I was much younger, of course, when I didn’t like being different. I’ve matured since then. But all these kids would come back to school on Monday or after vacations and tell these fantastic tales about where their father had taken them. I knew this one girl who said she and her father had flown to Bermuda. Just for the weekend. Well, she wasn’t even tan.

“How come you’re not tan?” I asked her. She said, “It rained.” This girl has a reputation for not telling the truth. Still, she showed me the shells she’d picked up on the beach they’d walked on during a downpour.

Another kid I know said her father took her and his new girl friend—who was named Clorinda, of all things—to Lake Placid to ski. She said her father and Clorinda stayed on the novice slope while she skied the intermediate ones and that Clorinda twisted her ankle first crack out of the barrel and spent most of the day sitting in front of the fire, drinking hot toddies. And holding hands with my friend’s father.

Boy. If I get to go to Barnes & Noble to buy a discounted book, it’s a red-letter day. Big deal. I’ve decided it cuts down a lot on the excitement of your life-style when your parents stay married to each other.

I guess you can’t have everything.

I heard my father’s key in the lock.

“Hi, Dad,” I said. He was carrying his jacket. He’d opened his tie and undone the first button on his shirt. That showed it was really hot out. My father is quite a tidy man. His sleeves were also rolled up. He has very muscular forearms, which he got from piloting a gigantic plane when he was in the Air Force.

“How about a shooter of Coke?” I asked him. That’s another of Mr. Richards’ sayings.

“No, but I’ll accept a shooter of beer if you have one handy,” my father said. He really looked wilted.

“Coming right up.” He went to take a shower. I got him his beer. When he came out he looked much better, much less wilted. My father is not exactly handsome. He’s not very tall, and he’s going bald. But if we passed on the street I think we would smile at each other even if we were strangers. He has very nice manners, and his eyes are a beautiful shade of gray-green. I asked my mother once what made her fall in love with him, and she said it was the way his hair grew on the back of his neck. And also the way he smelled. I think the best thing about him is that he can laugh at himself. He doesn’t take himself very seriously. The worst thing about him is that he puts too much importance on getting good marks in school. When I bring home D’s in my report card, he always says, “You can do better.” How does he know? I’m doing the best I can.

When I first met Al, she said she had a very high IQ but that she didn’t work to capacity. She used to freak me out talking like that. A lot of the time I didn’t understand her. She also told me she was a nonconformist, as if that were something very special to be, something that set her apart. She was probably right. There aren’t too many nonconformists running around these days. That I know.

I don’t work to capacity either. I don’t know anyone who does. Except maybe the infamous Martha Moseley. She’s a girl in my class who is not to be believed. In addition to all her other charming idiosyncrasies, Martha has a habit of flashing her report card in people’s faces so they can’t miss the tidy rows of A’s and B’s she’s racked up. You should hear her carry on when she gets a B-minus. It’s enough to make a person retch.

My father and I sat in the bedroom with the air conditioner on high and watched the evening news. Watching the evening news with my father is not the most restful thing in the world on account of he doesn’t happen to agree with anything the President says or does. He talks to the screen the entire time the President comes on the telly. Or the Secretary of State. He really has it in for the Secretary of State. This was going to be one of those nights.

“Oh, yeah,” my father said in the special voice he reserves for talking to the President. “That’s your story. Just go on the way you’re going and you’ll be out on your ear. Just continue robbing the poor and handing the money to the rich. Then try to get re-elected. Just try.” My father chortled at the mental picture of the President trying to get re-elected. I went to the kitchen and started making the hamburger patties. I make a very neat patty, with no uneven edges, if I do say so. I could hear my father talking a mile a minute, as if he had several guests.

As I took out a package of frozen broccoli from the freezer, I decided I would find out what my IQ was. By hook or by crook. I hope it doesn’t turn out to be a disappointment.