Hearts In Atlantis (15 page)

“Next week. The four of us leave early Tuesday morning and get back Thursday night around eight o'clock. All the meetings are at the Warwick Hotel, and that's where we'll be staying—Don's booked the rooms. I haven't stayed in a hotel room for twelve years, I guess. I'm a little nervous.”

Did nervous make you cry? Bobby wondered. Maybe so, if you were a grownup—especially a
female
grownup.

“I want you to ask S-J if you can stay with him Tuesday and Wednesday night. I'm sure Mrs. Sullivan—”

Bobby shook his head. “That won't work.”

“Whyever
not?
” Liz bent a fierce look at him. “Mrs. Sullivan hasn't ever minded you staying over before. You haven't gotten into her bad books somehow, have you?”

“No, Mom. It's just that S-J won a week at Camp Winnie.” The sound of all those
W
's coming out of his mouth made him feel like smiling, but he held it in. His mother was still looking at him in that fierce way . . . and wasn't there a kind of panic in that look? Panic or something like it?

“What's Camp Winnie? What are you talking about?”

Bobby explained about S-J winning the free week at Camp Winiwinaia and how Mrs. Sullivan was going to visit her parents in Wisconsin at the same time—plans which had now been finalized, Big Gray Dog and all.

“Damn it, that's just my luck,” his mom said. She
almost never swore, said that cursing and what she called “dirty talk” was the language of the ignorant. Now she made a fist and struck the arm of the glider. “
God
damn it!”

She sat for a moment, thinking. Bobby thought, as well. His only other close friend on the street was Carol, and he doubted his mom would call Anita Gerber and ask if he could stay over there. Carol was a girl, and somehow that made a difference when it came to sleepovers. One of his mother's friends? The thing was she didn't really
have
any . . . except for Don Biderman (and maybe the other two that were going to the seminar in Providence). Plenty of acquaintances, people she said hi to if they were walking back from the supermarket or going to a Friday-night movie downtown, but no one she could call up and ask to keep her eleven-year-old son for a couple of nights; no relatives, either, at least none that Bobby knew of.

Like people travelling on converging roads, Bobby and his mother gradually drew toward the same point. Bobby got there first, if only by a second or two.

“What about Ted?” he asked, then almost clapped his hand over his mouth. It actually rose out of his lap a little.

His mother watched the hand settle back with a return of her old cynical half-smile, the one she wore when dispensing sayings like
You have to eat a peck of dirt before you die
and
Two men looked out through prison bars, one saw the mud and one saw the stars
and of course that all-time favorite,
Life's not fair
.

“You think I don't know you call him Ted when the two of you are together?” she asked. “You must think
I've been taking stupid-pills, Bobby-O.” She sat and looked out at the street. A Chrysler New Yorker slid slowly past—finny, fenderskirted, and highlighted with chrome. Bobby watched it go by. The man behind the wheel was elderly and white-haired and wearing a blue jacket. Bobby thought he was probably all right. Old but not low.

“Maybe it'd work,” Liz said at last. She spoke musingly, more to herself than to her son. “Let's go talk to Brautigan and see.”

Following her up the stairs to the third floor, Bobby wondered how long she had known how to say Ted's name correctly. A week? A month?

From the start, Dumbo
, he thought.
From the very first day
.

•   •   •

Bobby's initial idea was that Ted could stay in his own room on the third floor while Bobby stayed in the apartment on the first floor; they'd both keep their doors open, and if either of them needed anything, they could call.

“I don't believe the Kilgallens or the Proskys would enjoy you yelling up to Mr. Brautigan at three o'clock in the morning that you'd had a nightmare,” Liz said tartly. The Kilgallens and the Proskys had the two small second-floor apartments; Liz and Bobby were friendly with neither of them.

“I won't have any nightmares,” Bobby said, deeply humiliated to be treated like a little kid. “I mean
jeepers
.”

“Keep it to yourself,” his mom said. They were sitting at Ted's kitchen table, the two adults smoking, Bobby with a rootbeer in front of him.

“It's just not the right idea,” Ted told him. “You're a good kid, Bobby, responsible and levelheaded, but eleven's too young to be on your own, I think.”

Bobby found it easier to be called too young by his friend than by his mother. Also he had to admit that it might be spooky to wake up in one of those little hours after midnight and go to the bathroom knowing he was the only person in the apartment. He could do it, he had no doubt he could do it, but yeah, it would be spooky.

“What about the couch?” he asked. “It pulls out and makes a bed, doesn't it?” They had never used it that way, but Bobby was sure she'd told him once that it did. He was right, and it solved the problem. She probably hadn't wanted Bobby in her bed (let alone “Brattigan”), and she
really
hadn't wanted Bobby up here in this hot third-floor room—that he was sure of. He figured she'd been looking so hard for a solution that she'd looked right past the obvious one.

So it was decided that Ted would spend Tuesday and Wednesday nights of the following week on the pull-out couch in the Garfields' living room. Bobby was excited by the prospect: he would have two days on his own—three, counting Thursday—and there would be someone with him at night, when things could get spooky. Not a babysitter, either, but a grownup friend. It wasn't the same as Sully-John going to Camp Winnie for a week, but in a way it was.
Camp Broad Street
, Bobby thought, and almost laughed out loud.

“We'll have fun,” Ted said. “I'll make my famous beans-and-franks casserole.” He reached over and ruffled Bobby's crewcut.

“If you're going to have beans and franks, it might be wise to bring
that
down,” his mom said, and pointed the fingers holding her cigarette at Ted's fan.

Ted and Bobby laughed. Liz Garfield smiled her cynical half-smile, finished her cigarette, and put it out in Ted's ashtray. When she did, Bobby again noticed the puffiness of her eyelids.

As Bobby and his mother went back down the stairs, Bobby remembered the poster he had seen in the park—the missing Corgi who would bring you a
BALL
if you said
HURRY UP PHIL.
He should tell Ted about the poster. He should tell Ted about everything. But if he did that and Ted left 149, who would stay with him next week? What would happen to Camp Broad Street, two fellows eating Ted's famous beans-and-franks casserole for supper (maybe in front of the TV, which his mom rarely allowed) and then staying up as late as they wanted?

Bobby made a promise to himself: he would tell Ted everything next Friday, after his mother was back from her conference or seminar or whatever it was. He would make a complete report and Ted could do whatever he needed to do. He might even stick around.

With this decision Bobby's mind cleared amazingly, and when he saw an upside-down
FOR SALE
card on the Total Grocery bulletin board two days later—it was for a washer-dryer set—he was able to put it out of his thoughts almost immediately.

•   •   •

That was nevertheless an uneasy week for Bobby Garfield, very uneasy indeed. He saw two more lost-pet posters, one downtown and one out on Asher
Avenue, half a mile beyond the Asher Empire (the block he lived on was no longer enough; he found himself going farther and farther afield in his daily scouting trips). And Ted began to have those weird blank periods with greater frequency. They lasted longer when they came, too. Sometimes he spoke when he was in that distant state of mind, and not always in English. When he did speak in English, what he said did not always make sense. Most of the time Bobby thought Ted was one of the sanest, smartest,
neatest
guys he had ever met. When he went away, though, it was scary. At least his mom didn't know. Bobby didn't think she'd be too cool on the idea of leaving him with a guy who sometimes flipped out and started talking nonsense in English or gibberish in some other language.

After one of these lapses, when Ted did nothing for almost a minute and a half but stare blankly off into space, making no response to Bobby's increasingly agitated questions, it occurred to Bobby that perhaps Ted wasn't in his own head at all but in some other world—that he had left Earth as surely as those people in
Ring Around the Sun
who discovered they could follow the spirals on a child's top to just about anywhere.

Ted had been holding a Chesterfield between his fingers when he went blank; the ash grew long and eventually dropped off onto the table. When the coal grew unnervingly close to Ted's bunchy knuckles, Bobby pulled it gently free and was putting it out in the overflowing ashtray when Ted finally came back.

“Smoking?” he asked with a frown. “Hell, Bobby, you're too young to smoke.”

“I was just putting it out for you. I thought  . . .” Bobby shrugged, suddenly shy.

Ted looked at the first two fingers of his right hand, where there was a permanent yellow nicotine stain. He laughed—a short bark with absolutely no humor in it. “Thought I was going to burn myself, did you?”

Bobby nodded. “What do you think about when you go off like that? Where do you go?”

“That's hard to explain,” Ted replied, and then asked Bobby to read him his horoscope.

Thinking about Ted's trances was distracting. Not talking about the things Ted was paying him to look for was even more distracting. As a result, Bobby—ordinarily a pretty good hitter—struck out four times in an afternoon game for the Wolves at Sterling House. He also lost four straight Battleship games to Sully at S-J's house on Friday, when it rained.

“What the heck's wrong with you?” Sully asked. “That's the third time you called out squares you already called out before. Also, I have to practically holler in your ear before you answer me. What's up?”

“Nothing.” That was what he said.
Everything
. That was what he felt.

Carol also asked Bobby a couple of times that week if he was okay; Mrs. Gerber asked if he was “off his feed”; Yvonne Loving wanted to know if he had mono, and then giggled until she seemed in danger of exploding.

The only person who didn't notice Bobby's odd behavior was his mom. Liz Garfield was increasingly preoccupied with her trip to Providence, talking on the phone in the evenings with Mr. Biderman or one of the other two who were going (Bill Cushman was
one of them; Bobby couldn't exactly remember the name of the other guy), laying clothes out on her bed until the spread was almost covered, then shaking her head over them angrily and returning them to the closet, making an appointment to get her hair done and then calling the lady back and asking if she could add a manicure. Bobby wasn't even sure what a manicure was. He had to ask Ted.

She seemed excited by her preparations, but there was also a kind of grimness to her. She was like a soldier about to storm an enemy beach, or a paratrooper who would soon be jumping out of a plane and landing behind enemy lines. One of her evening telephone conversations seemed to be a whispered argument—Bobby had an idea it was with Mr. Biderman, but he wasn't sure. On Saturday, Bobby came into her bedroom and saw her looking at two new dresses—
dressy
dresses, one with thin little shoulder straps and one with no straps at all, just a top like a bathing suit. The boxes they had come in lay tumbled on the floor with tissue paper foaming out of them. His mom was standing over the dresses, looking down at them with an expression Bobby had never seen before: big eyes, drawn-together brows, taut white cheeks which flared with spots of rouge. One hand was at her mouth, and he could hear bonelike clittering sounds as she bit at her nails. A Kool smoldered in an ashtray on the bureau, apparently forgotten. Her big eyes shuttled back and forth between the two dresses.

“Mom?” Bobby asked, and she jumped—literally jumped into the air. Then she whirled on him, her mouth drawn down in a grimace.

“Jesus
Christ!
” she almost snarled. “Do you
knock?
”

“I'm sorry,” he said, and began to back out of the room. His mother had never said anything about knocking before. “Mom, are you all right?”

“Fine!” She spied the cigarette, grabbed it, smoked furiously. She exhaled with such force that Bobby almost expected to see smoke come from her ears as well as her nose and mouth. “I'd be finer if I could find a cocktail dress that didn't make me look like Elsie the Cow. Once I was a size six, do you know that? Before I married your father I was a size six. Now look at me! Elsie the Cow! Moby-damn-
Dick!
”

“Mom, you're not big. In fact just lately you look—”

“Get out, Bobby. Please let Mother alone. I have a headache.”

That night he heard her crying again. The following day he saw her carefully packing one of the dresses into her luggage—the one with the thin straps. The other went back into its store-box:
GOWNS BY LUCIE OF BRIDGEPORT
was written across the front in elegant maroon script.

On Monday night, Liz invited Ted Brautigan down to have dinner with them. Bobby loved his mother's meatloaf and usually asked for seconds, but on this occasion he had to work hard to stuff down a single piece. He was terrified that Ted would trance out and his mother would pitch a fit over it.