Christine (27 page)

— Chuck Berry

Arnie Cunningham's 1958 Plymouth became street-legal on the afternoon of November 1, 1978. He finished the process, which had really begun the night he and Dennis Guilder had changed that first flat tire, by paying an excise tax fee of $8.50, a municipal road tax of $2.00 (which also enabled him to park free at the meters in the downtown area), and a license-plate fee of $15.00. He was issued Pennsylvania plate HY-6241-J at the Motor Vehicle Bureau in Monroeville.

He drove back from the MVB in a car Will Darnell had loaned him and rolled out of Darnell's Do-It-Yourself Garage behind the wheel of Christine. He drove her home.

His father and mother arrived together from Horlicks University an hour or so later. The fight started almost at once.

"Did you see it?" Arnie asked, speaking to them both but perhaps a little more to his father. "I registered it just afternoon."

He was proud; he had reason to be. Christine had just been washed and waxed, and she gleamed in the late afternoon autumn sunlight. There was still a lot of rust on her, but she looked a thousand times better than she had on the day Arnie bought her. The rocker panels, like the bonnet and the back seat, were brand new. The interior was spick and span and neat as a pin. The glass and the chrome gleamed.

"Yes, I—" Michael began.

"Of course we saw it," Regina snapped. She was making a drink, spinning a swizzle-stick in a Waterford glass in furious counter-clockwise circles. "We almost ran into it. I don't want it parked here. The place looks like a used-car lot."

"Mom!" Arnie said, stunned and hurt. He looked to Michael, but Michael had left to make a drink of his own perhaps he had decided he was going to need it.

"Well it does," Regina Cunningham said, Her face was a trifle paler than usual; the rouge on her cheeks stood out almost like clown-color. She knocked back half of her gin and tonic at a swallow, grimacing the way people grimace at the taste of bad medicine. "Take it back where you had it. I don't want it here and I won't have it here, Arnie. That's final."

"Take it back?" Arnie said, now angry as well as hurt. "That's great, isn't it? It's costing me twenty bucks a week there!"

"It's costing you a lot more than that," Regina said. She drained her drink and set the glass down. She turned to look at him. "I took a took at your bankbook the other day—"

"You did
what?
" Arnie's eyes widened.

She flushed a little but did not drop her eyes. Michael came back and stood in the doorway, looking unhappily from his wife to his son.

"I wanted to know how much you'd been spending on that damned car," she said. "Is that so unnatural? You have to go to college next year, So far as I know they're not giving away many free college educations in Pennsylvania."

"So you just went into my room and hunted around until you found my bankbook?" Arnie said. His gray eyes were hard with anger, "Maybe you were hunting for pot, too. Or girlie books. Or maybe come-stains on the sheets."

Regina's mouth dropped open. She had perhaps expected hurt and anger from him, but not this utter, no-holds-barred fury.

"Arnie!" Michael roared.

"Well, why not?" Arnie shouted back. "I thought that was
my
business! God knows you spent enough time telling me how it was my responsibility, the both of you!"

Regina said, "I'm very disappointed that you feel that way, Arnold. Disappointed and hurt. You're behaving like—"

"Don't tell me how I'm behaving! How do you think I feel? I work my ass off getting the car street-legal—over two and a half months I worked on it—and when I bring it home, the first thing you say is get it out of the driveway. How am I supposed to feel? Happy?"

"There's no reason to take that tone to your mother," Michael said. In spite of the words, the tone was one of awkward conciliation. "Or to use that sort of language." Regina held her glass out to her husband. "Make me another drink. There's a fresh bottle of gin in the pantry."

"Dad, stay here," Arnie said. "Please, Let's get this over."

Michael Cunningham looked at his wife; his son; at his wife again. He saw flint in both places. He retreated to the kitchen clutching his wife's glass.

Regina turned grimly back to her son. The wedge had been in the door since late last summer; she had perhaps recognized this as her last chance to kick it back out again.

"This July you had almost four thousand dollars in the bank," she said. "About three-quarters of all the money you've made since ninth grade, plus interest—"

"Oh, you've really been keeping track, haven't you?" Arnie said. He sat down suddenly, gazing at his mother. His tone was one of disgusted surprise. "Mom—why didn't you just take the damn money and put it in an account under your own name?"

"Because," she said," until recently, you seemed to understand what the money was for. In the last couple of months it's all been car-car-car and more recently girl-girl-girl. It's as if you've gone insane on both subjects."

"Well, thanks. I can always use a nice, unprejudiced opinion on the way I'm conducting my life."

"This July you had almost four thousand dollars. For your
education,
Arnie. For your
education.
Now you have just over twenty-eight hundred. You can go on about snooping all you want—and I admit it hurts a little—but that's a fact. You've gone through twelve hundred dollars in two months. Maybe that's why I don't want to look at that car. You ought to be able to understand that. To me it looks like—"

"Listen—"

"—like a great big dollar bill flying away."

"Can I tell you a couple of things?"

"No, I don't think so, Arnie," she said with finality. "I really don't think so."

Michael had come back with her glass, half full of gin. He added tonic at the bar and handed it to her. Regina drank, making that bitter grimace of distaste again. Arnie sat in the chair near the TV, looking at her thoughtfully.

"You teach college? he said. "You teach college and that's your attitude? "I have spoken. The rest of you can just shut up." Great. I pity your students."

"You watch it, Arnie," she said, pointing a finger at him. "Just watch it."

"Can I tell you a couple of things or not?"

"Go ahead. But it won't make any difference."

Michael cleared his throat. "Reg, I think Arnie's right, that's hardly a constructive atti—"

She turned on him like a cat. "Not one word from you, either!"

Michael flinched back.

"The first thing is this," Arnie said. "If you gave my savings passbook more than a cursory look—and I'm sure you did—you must have noticed that my total savings went down to an all-time low of twenty-two hundred dollars the first week of September. I had to buy a whole new front-end kit for Christine."

"You speak as if you're proud of it," she said angrily.

"I am." He met her eyes levelly. "I put that front-end kit in myself, with no help from anybody. And I did a really good job. You wouldn't"—here his voice seemed to falter momentarily, and then firmed again—"you wouldn't be able to tell it from the original. But my point is, the total savings are back up six hundred dollars from then. Because Will Darnell liked my work and took me on. If I can add six hundred dollars to my savings account every two months and I might do better if he puts me on the run over to Albany where he buys his used cars—there'll be forty-six hundred dollars in my account by the time school ends. And if I work there full-time next summer, I'll be starting college with nearly seven thousand dollars. And you can lay it all at the door of the car you hate so much."

"That won't do any good if you can't get into a good school," she countered, shifting her ground deftly as she had in so many department committee meetings when someone dared to question one of her opinions… which was not often. She did not concede the point; she simply passed on to something else. "Your grades have slipped."

"Not enough to matter," Arnie said.

"What do you mean, "not enough to matter"? You got deficient in Calculus! We got the red-card just a week ago!" Red-cards, sometimes known as flunk-cards by the student body, were issued halfway through each marking period to students who had posted a 75-average grade or lower during the first five weeks of the quarter.

"That was based on a single examination," Arnie said calmly. "Mr Fenderson is famous for giving so few exams in the first half of a quarter that you can bring home a red-card with an F on it because you didn't understand one basic concept, and end up with an A for the whole marking period. All of which I would have told you, if you'd asked. You didn't. Also, that's only the third red-card I've gotten since I started high school. My overall average is still 93, and you know how good that is—"

"It'll go lower!" she said shrilly, and stepped toward him. "It's this goddam obsession with the car! You've got a girlfriend; I think that's fine, wonderful, super! But this car thing is insane! Even Dennis says—"

Arnie was up, and up fast, so close to her that she took a step backward, surprised out of her anger, at least momentarily, by his. "You leave Dennis out of this," he said in a deadly soft voice. "This is between us."

"All right," she said, shifting ground once more. "The simple fact is that your grades are going to go down. I know it, and your father knows it, and that mathematics red-card is an indication of it."

Arnie smiled confidently, and Regina looked wary.

"Good," he said. "I tell you what. Let me keep the car here until the marking period ends. If I've got any grade lower than a C, I'll sell it to Darnell. He'll buy it; he knows he could get a grand for it in the shape it's in now. The value's not going to do anything but go up."

Arnie considered.

"I'll go you one better. If I'm not on the semester honor roll, I'll also get rid of it. That means I'm betting my car I'll get a B in Calculus not just for the quarter but for the whole semester. What do you say?"

"No," Regina said immediately, She shot a warning look at her husband—
Stay out of this.
Michael, who had opened his mouth, closed it with a snap.

"Why not?" Arnie asked with deceptive softness.

"Because it's a trick, and you know it's a trick!" Regina shouted at him, her fury suddenly total and uncontained. "And I'm not going to stand here any longer chewing this rag and listening to a lot of insolence from you! I—I changed your dirty diapers! I said get it out of here, drive it if you have to, but don't you leave it where I have to look at it! That's it! The end!"

"How do you feel, Dad?" Arnie asked, shifting his gaze.

Michael opened his mouth again to speak.

"He feels as I do," Regina said.

Arnie looked back at her. Their eyes, the same shade of gray, met.

"It doesn't matter what I say, does it?"

"I think this has gone quite far e—"

She began to turn away, her mouth still hard and determined, her eyes oddly confused. Arnie caught her arm just above the elbow.

"It doesn't, does it? Because when you've made up your mind about something, you don't see, you don't hear, you don't
think."

"Arnie, stop it!" Michael shouted at him.

Arnie looked at her and Regina looked back at him. Their eyes were frozen, locked.

"I'll tell you why you don't want to look at it," he said in the same soft voice. "It isn't the money, because the car's let me connect with a job that I'm good at and will end up making me money. You know that. It isn't my grades, either. They're no worse than they ever were. You know that, too. It's because you can't stand not to have me under your thumb, the way your department is, the way
he
is"—he jerked a thumb at Michael, who managed to look angry and guilty and miserable all at the same time—"the way I always was."

Now Arnie's face was flushed, his hands, clenched into fists at his sides.

"All that liberal bullshit about how the family decided things together, discussed things together, worked things out together, But the fact is,
you
were always the one who picked out my school-clothes, my school-shoes, who I was supposed to play with and who I couldn't, you decided where we were going on vacation,
you
told him when to trade cars and what to trade for. Well, this is one thing you can't run, and you fucking hate it, don't you?"

She slapped his face. The sound was like a pistol-shot in the living room. Outside, dusk had fallen and cars cruised by, indistinct, their headlights like yellow eyes. Christine sat in the Cunninghams' asphalted driveway as she had once sat on Roland D. LeBay's lawn, but looking considerably better now than she had then—she looked cool and above all this ugly, undignified family bickering. She had, perhaps, come up in the world.

Abruptly, shockingly, Regina Cunningham began to cry. This was a phenomenon, akin to rain in the desert, that Arnie had seen only four or five times in his entire life and on none of the other occasions had he been the cause of the tears.

Her tears were frightening, he told Dennis later, by virtue of the simple fact that they were there. That was enough, but there was more—the tears made her look old in a single terrifying stroke, as if she had made a quantum leap from forty-five to sixty in a space of seconds. The hard gray shine in her gaze turned blurry and weak, and suddenly the tears were spilling down her cheeks, cutting through her make-up.

She fumbled on the mantelpiece for her drink, jogged the glass instead with the tips of her fingers. It fell onto the hearth and shattered. A kind of incredulous silence held among the three of them, an amazement that things had come this far.

And somehow, even through the weakness of the tears, she managed to say, "I won't have it in our garage or in this driveway, Arnold."

He answered coldly, "I wouldn't have it here, Mother." He walked to the doorway, turned back, and looked at them both. "Thanks. For being so understanding. Thanks a lot, both of you."

He left.

21 ARNIE AND MICHAEL

Ever since you've been gone

I walk around with sunglasses on