Empire Falls (42 page)

Even waiting inside the building did not inoculate Miles and Cindy Whiting against ridicule, of course. One afternoon the entire varsity baseball team—trailed by a grinning Mr. Brown—trotted out of the locker room, chanting “Go, Roby, go! Go, Roby, go!” all the way out to the baseball diamond
.

In truth, this jeering had a more profound effect on Miles than on Cindy Whiting, who either didn’t understand its import or was pretending not to. “What do they mean, ‘Go, Roby, go’?” she wondered innocently, causing Miles, who’d flushed crimson when the varsity trotted by, to glow even more hotly
.

Miles, hoping to keep Cindy from reiterating her declaration of love, took
to directing their conversations to neutral academic subjects and often helped her with her homework, especially English, which happened to be his best subject and her worst. To Miles, her incomprehension had less to do with stupidity than with stubbornness. For some reason she angrily blamed each and every author in their literature text for her inability to deduce their intention and meaning, and when Miles tried to explain a troublesome passage or concept, her face became a mask of resentment and frustration. Poetry in particular infuriated her. To her way of thinking it was like pig Latin, designed for the sole purpose of allowing those in the know to enjoy the discomfort of those who weren’t. Miles suggested that poems weren’t really written in code, and that they weren’t nearly as difficult as she was making them, but in fact even simple, obvious metaphors threw her for a loop, and more sophisticated forms of figurative language filled her with angry indignation
.

“It’s simple,” Miles said one afternoon. “It’s called personification. The speaker of the poem is comparing death to a coachman. ‘Because I could not stop for Death, / He kindly stopped for me.’ ”

“If that’s what she means, why doesn’t she just say it?”

“She
is
saying it,” Miles said, pointing to the line. The girl’s failure to grasp something so simple mystified him. If anyone might be expected to have a feeling for Emily Dickinson, he’d have bet it would be Cindy, but she refused to even look at the page. The poem had made her feel inferior, so she wanted nothing more to do with it. Staring at the line in question would only deepen her conviction that there could be no justification for this or any other poem. “Why doesn’t she say it so
I
can understand it?” she insisted
.

Miles thought it might be wise not to answer this question, and so he said, trying to keep the exasperation out of his voice, “Well, do you understand it now that I’ve explained it?”

“No,” she assured him mulishly and, as if to dissuade him from any further attempts at enlightenment, she emphatically closed the book, shoved it into her canvas bag, struggled to her feet, took up her cane and hobbled across the hall to the lavatory
.

In her anger and haste, however, she hadn’t completely closed the bag, and Miles noticed a thin paperback that didn’t look anything like a schoolbook wedged sideways among the texts. He had no business going through her things, but he couldn’t help wondering what sort of reading might appeal to someone so militantly resistant to the subtleties of language. The cover, depicting a summer camp setting with two giggling teenage girls sneaking off into the woods after a pair of beckoning teenage boys, looked innocent enough. It resembled those books aimed at seventh-grade girls, the kind read aloud at slumber parties, so Miles was surprised to discover that its contents
,
at least on the page whose corner was turned down, were mildly pornographic. The passage his eye fell on had two girls, presumably the same ones depicted on the cover, secretly watching half a dozen boys roughhousing in the river. The boys were all naked, and one of them, Jules, was particularly worthy of their attention. “
The thing between his legs, so strange and so thrilling, made Pam’s pussy pucker,”
Miles read
. This
sentiment certainly required no gloss. He managed to slip the book into the canvas bag just as Cindy stepped back into the hall
.

“And what’s more,” she said, apparently taking up the discussion right where they’d left off, “I don’t believe you really understand those poems either. I think you’re just pretending.”

“Fine,” Miles said, no longer interested in arguing the merits of poetry. The dreadful fact of the matter was that the passage he’d read, its ridiculous alliteration aside, had given him an erection, and there was something about knowing that Cindy Whiting read and presumably enjoyed such books that made the situation worse. When she settled onto the bench next to him, it was as if she was suddenly sitting there naked, and he recalled that her expression when they’d been surprised last week by the mooners, their bare asses and dangling genitals framed in the car windows, had not been exactly what he’d expected
.

“I think you’re
all
just pretending,” she continued obstinately. “And why are you looking at me like that?”

But at that moment a horn tooted outside, and they saw the black Lincoln idling at the curb. Miles pivoted when he stood and rearranged himself behind his books, but then a strange thought crossed his mind: what the Lincoln reminded him of was Death’s coach in Emily Dickinson’s poem
.

U
NDER
M
RS
. W
HITING’S TUTELAGE
,
Miles’s driving showed steady improvement, much of which was attributable to his very first lesson. After they switched seats, Miles had just pulled cautiously away from the curb when Mrs. Whiting told him to pull over again. “Dear boy,” she said, “are you always like this?”

The question, compounded by the way she was looking at him, caused Miles to feel an inadequacy that transcended automotive matters, as though her question hinted at some larger character flaw. “Like what?” he heard himself ask
.

“Like paralyzed with fear.”

“This is a very nice car,” he pointed out
.

“Ah
, there
it is,” she replied, pleased with herself for discovering … who
knew what? She was still regarding him fixedly, causing Miles to wonder if the conversation would right itself soon, or just continue to defy his comprehension. His mother had warned him that Mrs. Whiting would be like no one else in his experience, and now he understood her inability to explain in detail
.

Mrs. Whiting was several years older than his mother, he knew, which put her in her mid- to late-forties, but if she
looked
her age, in some hard-to-define way, she didn’t
seem
her age. Miles was aware that Grace had been a very beautiful woman, and at times, though less and less frequently now, he would be reminded of her former beauty. In the years since their return from Martha’s Vineyard she had settled into middle age, as had all the mothers of his friends and acquaintances. Strangely, one had only to glance at Mrs. Whiting to know she’d never been beautiful, probably never even pretty. Her daughter, had she not been crippled as a child and made the transition into young womanhood to the awful cadence of ridicule, would have been far prettier. Yet, from the moment she asked if he’d always been so frightened, what the woman seemed to convey to Miles was a kind of sexuality that, at least in his sixteen-year-old eyes, he’d not witnessed before in any woman her age. It was sexual inadequacy, he realized with a shock, that he’d felt when she looked at him, and that caused his cheeks to burn hot with embarrassment
.

“There
what
is?” he said, regretting the question immediately
.

“Your mother,” she explained. “I didn’t see her at all until you pointed out how nice this car is. Physically you don’t look like our Grace, but you share her timidity.”

Miles registered the “our Grace” but decided to ignore it
.

“It’s your father you’ve got written all over you, of course,” she said, as if she imagined this to be a common pronouncement, which it wasn’t. “Cindy is her father’s daughter too, aren’t you, dear?”

This seemed a rather hurtful thing for a mother to say, and Miles glanced in the rearview mirror to see how Cindy Whiting would react to the observation, but her face couldn’t have been more blank. Whether she looked like her father or not wasn’t a question Miles himself had any opinion on, he supposed, never having met C. B. Whiting. According to Cindy, her father now lived more or less permanently in Mexico, where he oversaw a textile mill like the one that had closed in Empire Falls
.

Empire High might have been lacking in many qualities, but it had plenty of parking. There were about a hundred yards of paved parking lot out back, most of it empty by late afternoon. Mrs. Whiting positioned Miles in such a way that the entire stretch lay before him, free of obstacles, nothing
beyond the pavement but a gentle, grassy slope, at the base of which was the school’s oval, quarter-mile track. “Okay,” she said, “floor it.”

Miles wasn’t certain he heard her correctly. “You want me to—”

“Correct,” she said
.

“I don’t …”

“As in, depress the accelerator all the way to the floor.”

Miles considered the request. He was pretty sure there was no possibility of misunderstanding, but still.… He located Cindy’s face again in the mirror, and its expression bore about as much comprehension as he might’ve expected if her mother had recited a line of Elizabethan poetry
.

The only other car Miles had driven was the driver’s ed vehicle, which was underpowered by design, so he was greatly surprised when the Lincoln leapt forward beneath his foot like a suddenly uncaged animal. When he instinctively let off the gas, she barked, “No! All the way down!” above the roar of the engine, and so this time he did as he was told, the long parking lot flying past, the force of their momentum pushing them back into their seats, until Mrs. Whiting said, “Now would be a good time to stop, dear boy.”

She was right, too. Nearly out of parking lot, Miles ran out of still more between Mrs. Whiting’s suggestion and the moment when his foot found and depressed the brake. The Lincoln slowed immediately, its tires squealing horribly. Seeing the car slow was gratifying, of course, but the sound of the tires seemed like a bad thing to Miles, and one the car’s owner would surely disapprove of, so he let up on the brake until the screeching stopped, which meant they were still doing about thirty when the pavement ended and they began to bump down the grassy hill all the way to the edge of the cinder track, where they finally came to a complete halt. Miles looked over at Mrs. Whiting, fully expecting her to concur with his last driving instructor that he was indeed a menace behind the wheel, but if she was upset with him, there was no indication. In the back, her daughter was also silent
.

“It
might
have been preferable to stop back up there,” Mrs. Whiting observed calmly, “but never mind. This will do fine. Now tell me what you just learned.”

“I’m not sure,” Miles admitted. In fact, he was not sure whether or not he had wet his pants
.

“I am,” said Mrs. Whiting. “You learned what would happen if you did something you were afraid to do. You learned how fast the car would go, and then you learned what it would take to stop it again. You were surprised by both, but you won’t be again.”

Miles nodded, feeling the strange truth of this
.

“You can’t possibly judge your ability to control something until you’ve
experienced the extremes of its capabilities. Do you understand?”

He did. Frightened as he had just been, he now felt surprisingly good about sitting behind the wheel of the Lincoln—a different feeling entirely from losing control of the driver’s ed car and ending up in that garage
.

“Power and control,” Mrs. Whiting insisted. “There will be times when you’ll have to put the accelerator down and other times when you’ll have to stand on the brakes. Not very many, but some. Now you know the car, and you know that between those extremes there’s nothing to be frightened of, correct?”

They were, just then, still pointed downhill, on a piece of high school property not designed for motor vehicles. “Now what?” he asked
.

“Now you get yourself out of this situation you got yourself into. Use your best judgment.”

Miles nodded, took a deep breath, removed his foot from the brake and coasted out onto the cinder track. Trying to back up the grassy hill seemed like a dicey enterprise, so he simply steered the Lincoln around the oval track, grateful the track team had an away meet that afternoon. He’d nearly completed the entire quarter mile, spotted the tire tracks in the moist grass where he’d descended a few minutes before and was about to follow them back up to the pavement, when he became aware of a voice outside the car, calling, “Hey!
Hey! Stop,
goddamn it!” and spied in the rearview mirror an apoplectic Mr. Brown chasing the Lincoln on foot. It was hard to know whether he’d been pursuing them all the way around the track or had picked them up at the final turn. In any case, the baseball coach arrived beet-red and winded, and then came around the car and leaned against the hood, blocking Miles’s escape route
.

“Roby!” he wheezed when he saw who was behind the wheel. “I might’ve known.” Miles obliged him by rolling down the window so Mr. Brown could yell at him better. “Goddamn it! What do you think you’re doing? Do you have any idea how much that track cost?”

At that moment Mrs. Whiting leaned across the seat, causing Mr. Brown to start at the sight of her. “I do,” she assured him. “I paid for it. Now get out of the way.”