Everybody Loves Somebody (21 page)

“Nora...” It was the first time I’d spoken her name aloud.

“I’m just looking for someone to take care of it. Not just anyone. Someone who can buy it stuff and take it on vacations.”
She spoke as if she were recounting a dream. “And give it the kind of bed with a canopy or maybe bunk beds, depending, you
know, and a pool in the backyard, and on visits to the city you can eat those little tea cakes and take carriage rides and
see a show. This is why...why...” She inhaled, drew back her head, squeezed her eyes shut. I thought she was going to vomit
all over the counter. Instead she sneezed violently. Once she recovered, she said in a quavering voice, “This is why I’m here.”

A
LTOGETHER
, Nora and I spent about an hour in the Automat. Only an hour—the brevity still amazes me. I’d gone in to have lunch, and
I’d come out with the prospect of adopting the child of a child. How could I accept? How could I refuse? I wanted to help,
and at the same time I felt the need to protect myself. Although I wouldn’t have been willing to admit it at the time, an
awful part of me still distrusted Nora Owen and wanted nothing more to do with her.

But I was twice her age, I reminded myself, and I could show her the proper concern. Yet she didn’t seem to want my concern
and made it clear when she’d finished her appeal that she preferred not to return to the subject, at least not right then.
We exchanged phone numbers and addresses and parted with the ease of strangers who had become acquainted under more typical
conditions. At no time did I actually agree to Nora’s proposal, but neither did I directly refuse. We would continue to talk,
we promised each other. I gently suggested to Nora that she see a doctor. I didn’t offer to give her money or even to return
the change from her twenty, and she didn’t ask.

I told no one—not even Paul, my fianç—about meeting Nora Owen. In the weeks that followed, weeks I spent privately struggling
to come to terms with my responsibility to the girl I’d met at the Automat, she called me three times: once to say that she
was doing well, though she hadn’t made an appointment with the doctor yet, and once to say that she’d had an episode of bleeding.
It was then, during this second phone conversation, that I asked her whether she’d ever had a test to confirm the pregnancy.
She said she didn’t need any test. The third time she called she asked to see me in New York. We made plans to meet at the
Automat again, and there she told me that she was no longer pregnant. Or perhaps—a suspicion I kept to myself—she’d never
really been pregnant.

Nora refused to speak about what had happened to her and brushed off my suggestions that she talk with a doctor. She insisted
that she was fine. Better than fine, she assured me. She readily accepted when I offered to buy her lunch—though not tuna,
I promised. Roast beef, I offered. Cheese, she said, and with that she began to laugh.

We stayed in touch through the next couple of years, meeting once in a while for lunch or a walk in the park. It was during
these subsequent conversations that she offered, in bits and pieces, a more extensive explanation of what had happened.

Her story turned out to be a familiar one. She’d been drinking rum and Cokes at a party and ended up in bed with a boy she’d
been infatuated with for months from afar, a high school senior. Nora was so disoriented from the liquor that afterward she
hardly remembered the experience. Word, though, traveled quickly around school—what she’d done came back to her in the gossip
of her friends, whose disapproval made it impossible for Nora to confide in them or anyone when she began to suspect that
she was pregnant.

She didn’t know what to do. The days passed, she said, like pages she was turning without actually reading. She forgot to
wash her hair or do her homework. Afternoons she hung out in the cemetery adjacent to her school, smoking cigarettes, watching
the squirrels and birds, sometimes alone and sometimes in the company of a neighbor, an older boy she’d known for years, a
boy of sixteen with the mind of a seven-year-old who, she felt a need to add, had a talent for catching frogs in the cemetery
pond. He was a gentle kid nicknamed Little John, though according to Nora he was more than six feet tall. Believing him to
be her only true friend, she finally confessed that she was going to have a baby. He explained that the best baby stores were
only a train ride away, in the city. He offered to help her choose a good baby.

She left the cemetery when a younger boy named Larry came along to catch frogs with Little John. Nora went on her own to New
York. Somehow her path led her to the Automat on Forty-second Street. I regret that I was initially so resistant to her, though
she never seemed to hold this against me. I tried to find ways to repay her for the twenty-dollar advance she’d paid for my
confidence.

In the time we spent together after our initial meeting, she interrogated me about my own life. I showed her a photograph
of Paul, and she declared that she approved. In an atlas we found in a bookstore near the Automat, I pointed to the general
location of the town in Ohio where I’d grown up, a town so small it didn’t even merit a dot on the map. I told her that I’d
married my first husband at the age of twenty-two, and we’d divorced three years later. I explained how I’d supported myself
in graduate school with waitressing jobs, and since earning my degree I’d been bouncing from one temporary teaching post to
another.

At one point she asked me about the papers in my briefcase. I briefly described my current research. I didn’t admit that I’d
given up on the project and would never finish it, though I did complain that in the documents I’d been dealing with—old diaries
and letters and odd scribblings in the margins of books—I couldn’t tell the difference between legend and history and wasn’t
even sure if the events I’d set out to describe had ever actually taken place. Nora replied, “So what?”

What Will Happen

O
r else Nora
doesn’t
get hopelessly drunk at a party and lose her virginity to a boy she hardly knows. In this version, the year passes uneventfully,
and in tenth grade she joins the junior varsity basketball team and becomes known in her school as a rising star.

I picture her on the first day of her future, doing what she always does after basketball practice: she puffs rings into the
damp air with the smoke from her cigarette as she walks home along the top of the low stone wall bordering the cemetery. The
Baggley boy is at the pond today, as usual, scouring the mud for frogs. Though he’s known to be a major creep, Nora has always
tried to be friendly with him. But today for some reason she prefers to ignore him; she doesn’t wave back when he waves at
her.

She jumps off the wall into the meadow separating the cemetery from the woods backing up to Willowbend Lane, which leads to
Flanders Street and Nora’s house. She is deep in thought, planning the order of phone calls she will make to friends, when
twelve-year-old Larry Groton lunges from behind the thick cover of a hemlock bush with a roar, shaking what she thinks is
a baseball bat. She’s slow to figure out the joke and staggers back a few steps, causing Larry to double over with laughter.
He thumps his bat against the ground, the hollow sound revealing that it is just a plastic Wiffle ball bat. “Don’t pretend
you weren’t scared, Nora!” he shrieks, delighted with himself. But she’s not scared anymore. She’s only appalled at having
to deal with a stupid little brat like Larry Groton. “Now get out of my way,” she demands, whipping her book bag through the
air and knocking the bat from Larry’s hands. When he bends over to pick up the bat, she hip-chucks him, pushing him to the
ground.

She stomps toward Willowbend Lane while Larry, after scrambling up, takes off in the opposite direction, plunging through
the wet grass and heaving himself onto the wall. Hearing the loose stones clattering, Nora looks behind her to watch Larry
stumbling along the top of the wall, heading in the same direction from which she has just come. “Who’s scared now!” she shouts
after him. In response, he raises the bat and brings it down with a pathetic popping sound, the effort causing him to lose
his balance, and he falls backward into the cemetery, disappearing from sight.

Nora hesitates, suspecting another one of Larry’s tricks, and in the time it takes her to consider that he might be hurt,
she notices that the Baggley boy is loping along the paved path from the pond, heading toward the place where Larry has just
fallen.

Even at a distance, the Baggley boy looks like a creep. His hands are weirdly small for his long arms. His face is a mulish
oval, crowned with brown, stringy curls. Nora even thinks she hears gulps of hee-haws coming from deep in his throat.

Why would the Baggley boy be laughing? There is only one reason Nora can think of, and it has to do with Larry Groton, who
probably isn’t hurt at all but instead is lying behind the cover of the wall waiting for Nora to come help him so he can scare
her again. Whether they are creeps or stupid little brats, boys will go out of their way to torment girls. Larry is probably
preparing to pounce on Nora—that’s why he hasn’t yet clambered to his feet. And if the Baggley boy can’t stop laughing as
he runs along the path, it means he’s in on the joke.

Nora turns and heads away from the cemetery, leaving Larry and the Baggley boy to their idiotic games. At home she takes a
long shower, toasts a couple of frozen waffles, and eats in front of the television. She wants to call someone and tell what
happened, but she’s embarrassed by her own foolishness.

She’s asleep on the couch by the time her mother returns home, though it’s only 7:15. Her mother, who is lucky to have income
from a family trust fund to compensate for her meager alimony, has spent the day shopping in New York. She wakes Nora to show
her the new navy cardigan she bought at Saks.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, Nora is invited by two friends to skip lunch and join them in the cemetery to smoke cigarettes. On the way they talk about
how to cheat on the state driving test. They talk about diets. They are listing the foods that make them fart when a girl
named Lizzie Marshall comes running across the field to warn them not to go to the cemetery because some kid had been murdered
there yesterday and now the place is crawling with police.

They find out from the group gathered around the tennis courts what Nora has already guessed—that the dead boy is Larry Groton.
Little Larry Groton. He was a good sport, someone says, and someone else agrees: Larry Groton was the kind of kid who just
went along with everything.

For the next two days rumors swirl around the school. Larry Groton had been stabbed in the heart. Larry Groton had been shot.
Larry Groton had been chopped into pieces by one of the cemetery’s walking dead and the police still hadn’t found his hands
and feet. That Nora is more visibly shaken than her friends only confirms her reputation as an acutely sensitive girl. She
keeps her thoughts to herself, reliving the memory in secret. Not even when Lizzie Marshall tells her that the elder Baggley
boy had confessed to killing Larry Groton does Nora speak up.

The teachers explain to the students that after Larry Groton had taunted him and hit him with a Wiffle ball bat, the Baggley
boy fought back. A heavy rock he’d thrown had struck Larry in the head. The local newspaper describes it as an accident. There
is no trial. The elder child in the Baggley family simply disappears from his house. Some say he is hiding in the cemetery,
feeding on corpses. Others say he’s been sent to a maximum-security prison. Lizzie Marshall says he’s in Fairfield Hills,
in the psychiatric hospital.

Though Nora doesn’t admit it to anyone, she is convinced that she, not the Baggley boy, is responsible for Larry Groton’s
death. Little Larry Groton. She can’t stop thinking about him. She no longer trusts herself. She has lived for fifteen foolish
years and doesn’t deserve to live any longer.

Larry Groton Larry Groton Larry Groton. Home after basketball practice, Nora looks into the bathroom mirror that has steamed
up from the shower and imagines Larry Groton’s ghost staring back through the fog.

L
ET’S SAY NORA DOESN’T GO
to college, though not because of Larry Groton. She doesn’t go to college because her father gives her his car and his three-bedroom
house in Providence. He says she can have the house all to herself while he’s in Indonesia, on the condition that she pays
the utilities. The Buick, he tells her, is hers for keeps.

Let’s say she moves to Providence in the summer when she turns eighteen, against her mother’s halfhearted protests. Her mother
has been thinking about putting their Connecticut house up for sale so she can move into an apartment in Manhattan with her
boyfriend, Gus, who has a great proud mane of white hair and only ever wears sandals, even in winter. He tells Nora that she
is always welcome at his apartment—she can consider the sofa bed hers.

She makes new friends quickly—friends who still live with their families and go to high school and who treat Nora as an exotic
creature welcome in their group because she lets them use her house for parties. Nora gives duplicate keys to whoever asks
and encourages them to walk right in whenever they please.

She finds a waitressing job that pays well enough. Her tips, though, don’t come close to covering the utilities bills. She
has lost track of her father’s route in Indonesia, and he is too involved in his work to write. Her mother is devoted to Gus,
and Nora doesn’t want to give the two of them any indication that she is less than self-sufficient. She has no grandparents
living. She has only her ancient great-aunt in New Jersey, who is wealthy enough to give money away.

Great-Aunt Lucy, who was a concert pianist and once performed in New York’s Town Hall, generously sends Nora one thousand
dollars and advises her to go see the world. The recklessness of the idea makes it irresistible. Nora pays the overdue bills,
finds some college students to stay in the house, sells her father’s Buick to a dealer for an ample eight hundred dollars,
and buys a one-way plane ticket to Paris, along with a rail pass and a backpack. The challenge she sets herself is to stretch
the cash in her pocket into a lifetime of adventure.