I'll Love You When You're More Like Me (9 page)

“That's right, ladies and gentlemen, we have a celebrity in our midst this evening, Miss Sabra St. Amour. Tell us more, honey. Stand up and tell us more!”

Mama and Lamont beamed and the man who was glad he'd married Pearl Cohen took the cigar out of his mouth, leaned forward and stared at me.

“Give 'em a thrill, baby!” Mama called across the table to me.

“Tell me more!” people began calling out.

“Come on up here to the bandstand and take a bow, Sabra!” said the bandleader.

After the first punch of fear, I felt the familiar cool flooding through me, and the little kick. I was on my feet, all smiles.

9. Wallace Witherspoon, Jr.

I guess there's a Deke Slade in every high-school graduating class. He's the jock and the bully and the one about fourth from the bottom scholastically. Deke was the son of the leading florist in Seaville, so I knew him pretty well. Our fathers did a lot of business together.

I suppose someday Deke and I will be working out the same little deals. I'll be asking relatives of the deceased if they want me to make the floral arrangements (discouraging the idea of a Please Omit funeral), then getting Deke on the phone, throwing the business his way for a small cut. (Our slogan is “Death Is Just Another Tomorrow.” Theirs is “Don't Wish Tomorrow You'd Sent Flowers Today.”)

If it wasn't for this future collusion Deke and I had to look forward to, I'd have been a perfect target for Deke. At school, I'm not part of the gang that piles into cars to cruise around during lunch hour, nor one of the bunch that loafs around in the hall getting off hilarious one-liners that the others all crack up over. In that great High School Filing Cabinet where every one of us is typecast, I'm under G for gross.

I figure no matter what becomes of Charlie, years and years and years from now, there's one name he'll never forget: Deke Slade. Of all the “outies” Deke had to choose
from, he chose Charlie to torture. Through four years at Seaville Senior High, Charlie was the mouse and Deke was the cat playing with the mouse.

Deke began making cracks the moment we arrived at The Surf Club. We were all drinking beer—Charlie had to go to the bar and get them for us, because he was the only one with a driver's license proving he was eighteen. When Charlie got up from the table, Deke would swagger over and make cracks about Charlie to Ethel. He'd ask Ethel things like who was the girl she came with and did they wear each other's clothes?

When Charlie'd come back carrying a tray of beer, Deke would call out, “Waitress, will you take my order, dear?”

Charlie and I tried to ignore Deke, the same way you try to ignore black clouds that suddenly appear out of nowhere on a sunny day at the beach, or a crazy who gets on the same bus with you and starts yelling that you killed God. Harriet had no love for Ethel, but her back was up because Deke was causing a scene, so she came back with a few remarks of her own. “Oh boy, Deke, are you insecure!” and “How come you don't have a date tonight, Deke?” It was like an assault on the Rock of Gibraltar with a feather duster. Deke just blinked at Harriet and got his mouth in gear for another series of insults aimed at Charlie.

Ethel couldn't take it. She became tongue-tied and red-faced. She moved her chair a few inches away from Charlie, and stared down at her beer, periodically bursting into nervous giggles. Finally, while Charlie was up getting another round of beers, Ethel just took off with Deke.

Charlie pretended he couldn't care less. For a while we sat around talking about what he was going to do with his
life. College was out; the Gilhooleys barely afforded their weekly supply of SpaghettiOs, beer and gunshot. Charlie said he'd hate leaving Seaville but he'd have to, because there was no way he could ever be anybody in Seaville.

“It is a real pity that you chose to make yourself conspicuous,” said Harriet.

“I don't mind being conspicuous,” Charlie said, “I mind being poor.”

“This town is dying,” I said, and Harriet said, “Then we can't complain, honey.”

While Harriet and I danced, Charlie sat by himself nursing a draft beer. “I hate to leave him sitting there alone,” I said, and Harriet said, “I hope he won't go early and leave us without transportation.”

Harriet watched over the money as though we were already married.

“A taxi will cost us four dollars!” she shouted across the floor at me while we did the boogie. “My father can't come and get us tonight, either. Hector has one car and Harvey has the other!”

“I've got the four dollars, Harriet!”

“Then we won't have enough to get hot dogs at Dunn's later!” Harriet complained.

“Let's not go to Dunn's tonight,” I said.

“Oh, Wally!” She gave me one of her looks, because Dunn's was the place where everyone went at the end of a Saturday night, and Harriet was a girl who went to the place where everyone went at the end of a Saturday night.

“Where's all
your
money then?” I said. Harriet was the cotton-candy maker afternoons at the Seaville Soda Shoppe, but her salary was never part of “our” money, as mine was.

“You know I'm saving for my trousseau,” she said. “You know Daddy's got to spend his savings on my brothers' educations.”

We began having what Harriet liked to call later “a tiff” right there on the dance floor. It wasn't that I wanted her to spend her money. It was just that the whole idea of Harriet's trousseau sent me off into fantasies of shipping out for any destination on tramp steamers and banana boats. A year away didn't seem a lot like a year away when all Harriet seemed to do was talk about our wedding as though it was tomorrow. Out of all of Seaville High School, why had I picked the one Junior Ms. with antediluvian ideas like becoming engaged and saving for a trousseau? Charlie said it was because I was on the rebound and desperate, that when he'd been on the rebound from Bulldog Shorr he'd sent away for “So You Want to Be a Priest,” published by The Junior Jesuit Society. (“How can you be on the rebound from somebody you were never even with?” I argued. “Try it sometime,” he said. “It hurts worse.”)

The set ended and the bandleader said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a celebrity in our midst this evening! Miss Sabra St. Amourl Tell me more, honey! Stand up and tell us more!”

“Don't tell me
she's
here?” Harriet said. “She must be slumming.”

“
We're
here,” I said.

“We don't have anyplace else to go,” said Harriet. “We don't make forty to forty-five thou a year and could go anywhere in the world.”

They threw a spotlight on her and she stood up in this pale yellow pants suit with her yellow hair spilling past her
shoulders. She was smiling, and now there was no doubt who she was: She was made up; she looked the way she did on the tube, confident and beautiful, tossing out kisses through her fingertips while the piano player and the saxophonist tried to work out a few bars of her theme song.

It was Harriet's idea to get me to go over and ask her for a dance. I'm not sure whether Harriet wanted to impress other people with the fact I'd met her, or whether she wanted to sit out a set with Charlie so he wouldn't leave us without wheels.

Sabra introduced me to her mother, first, and her mother wanted to know how we knew each other. How in hell we knew each other. Mrs. St. Amour was this husky-voiced, big blonde with a bright red chiffon scarf tied around her neck. She was holding a long gold cigarette holder with one hand, a long, brown, unlighted cigarette attached to it. With her other hand she slapped her thigh hard and said at the top of her lungs, “Get this! She's got friends out here I don't know anything about!”

“We met briefly on the beach the other day,” Sabra said.

“So briefly you didn't even think to mention it, hah?” her mother said. “Okay, little Miss Keep Things to Yourselfl! What are you, a closet extrovert?” She slapped her thigh again and laughed very hard at her own joke. Then she grabbed my hand, gave it a squeeze, pointed her cigarette holder at the man beside her and said, “This is Mr. Orr.”

“Glad to know you, Witherspoon,” he said.

“You're the kid from Current Events,” said the man wearing “A
M
I G
LAD
I M
ARRIED
P
EARL
C
OHEN!
” He turned to his wife and said, “Pearlie, this is the kid who
printed my shirt.”

“You put the P on crooked,” she said.

“Get up and dance, Sabra,” said Mr. Orr. He had rust-colored, tight curly hair, and a shirt the same color. He was stirring a swizzle stick around in his scotch, smiling up at me.

“Would you mind?” I asked him.

Mrs. St. Amour gave my arm a punch. “I'm the one you ask that.”

“Is it all right?”

“Have her in by nine o'clock tomorrow morning,” Mrs. St. Amour said and let out a hoot. “No, no,” she said, “you have my permission. You're a nice young man, aren't you?”

“I'm a nice young man,” I agreed. Sabra was already on her feet.

I could feel everyone watching us. I could hear Mrs. St. Amour shouting, “They met on the beach! That's news to her mother!”

“Is Mr. Orr the one who gave you the gold bracelet?” I said.

“Do I look desperate?” she said.

I was imagining Lauralei Rabinowitz and Maury Posner sitting at a table getting an eyeful of me with her, even though experience and common sense told me that anyone who knew Lauralei Rabinowitz for less than three months was somewhere down in the dunes with a blanket, murmuring “I love you, I love you” into her soft black hair.

“Lamont's out here on business,” Sabra said. “He's a writer for our show.”

“Then who did give you the bracelet?” I said.

“Someone wonderful,” she said.

“Oh I know him,” I said.

Way back by our table I could see Harriet and Charlie standing on chairs so they could get a better look at us. Every few seconds someone glided past us and purred “Tell me more.”

“I suppose this happens to you a lot,” I said.

“I don't go out a lot,” she said. “The only thing that happens to me is the neighborhood hand laundry asks for an autographed picture, to put up beside the sign that says ‘Not responsible for articles of clothing left after thirty days.' ”

“If you don't go out a lot, what do you do a lot?”

“Work,” she said. “I work a lot.”

Duffo Buttman, one of the Seaville High quarterbacks, stopped us so he could get Sabra's autograph on his lobster bib. “Just say ‘To remember a dynamite evening,' ” he said, handing her a Pentel.

After she signed the bib for him, she asked me, “What do you do a lot?”

“I go to school a lot.”

“College?”

“First grade,” I said.

“I just finished high school,” she said. “I don't know if I'm going to take any college courses or not. What are you going to do when you get out of first grade?”

Myra Tuttle and Louise Rand appeared with paper napkins and a ball-point pen. “Just say ‘Loved seeing you,' ” Myra said.

Louise said, “You can say something like ‘Good luck, Louise.' ”

I stood there grateful that they'd come along and interrupted the conversation. I knew where the conversation was
leading. It was leading right toward BEAMS.

My father is a Son of Beams. He has a black-and-white cap up in our attic with SONBEAM stitched across it. Everyone in my father's family for generations has gone to BEAMS. BEAMS is the reason my Uncle Albert ran off to join the Navy, age seventeen.

Albert is my father's older brother. He went from the Navy to working as an apprentice printer, to teaching dancing at Arthur Murray, to managing a McDonald's, to teaching canoe at a boy's camp in the Adirondacks, to exterminating rats in Chicago, to playing at a roadhouse and living in a trailer camp. My mother calls him The Flop of the Two Families, and Uncle Albert signs all his postcards and letters “No regrets, Albert.”

“Everybody makes jokes about BEAMS”—my father had variations on the same remarks five or six times a year—“but I'll bet Albert would give his right arm to be able to do it all over again and go to BEAMS.”

“I doubt that Albert could do it all over again without his right arm,” I said.

“Don't
always
wisecrack, Wallace,” said my father. “I enjoy a good joke or two myself about the profession. Why when we get together at conventions, you should hear the kidding around that goes on. We have picnics with Casket Casseroles and all that sort of thing. But I'm trying to tell you where Albert made his mistake.”

“He always signs his mail ‘No regrets,' ” I'd point out. “It doesn't sound like he thinks he made a mistake.”

“People who have no regrets don't have to sign things ‘No regrets,' ” said my father. “Do I sign things ‘Happily married and settled down?' I know what Albert's life is
like. No security. Living in a trailer camp with the kind of people who live in trailer camps. Albert's been all the way around the world and he ends up playing ‘Blue Moon' in a roadhouse and calling a trailer home. Do you know why?”