The Hotel New Hampshire (9 page)

The 1953 football team went 1-9 for the season; Coach Bob thought that the school couldn’t wait for him to retire so that they could drop football altogether—it was too costly, and the alumni, who had once supported it (and the entire athletic program), were too ashamed to come back and see the games anymore.

“It’s the damn uniforms,” Iowa Bob said, and Father rolled his eyes and tried to look tolerant of Bob’s approaching senility. Father had learned of senility from Earl. But Coach Bob, to be fair, had a point about the uniforms.

The colors of the Dairy School, perhaps modeled on a now-vanished breed of cow., were meant to be a deep chocolate brown and a luminous silver. But with the years, and the increasingly synthetic quality of the fabrics, this rich cocoa and silver had become dingy and sad.

“The color of mud and clouds,” my father said.

The students at the Dairy School, who played with us kids—when they were not showing Franny their “things”—informed us of the other names for these colors, which were in vogue at the school. There was an older kid named De Meo—Ralph De Meo, one of Iowa Bob’s few stars, and the star sprinter on Father’s winter and spring track teams—who told Frank, Franny, and me what the Dairy School colors really were. “Gray like the pallor of a dead man’s face,” De Meo said. I was ten and scared of him; Franny was eleven, but behaved older with him; Frank was twelve and afraid of everybody.

“Gray like the pallor of a dead man’s face,” De Meo repeated slowly, for me. “And brown—cow-brown, like manure,” he said. “That’s shit to you, Frank.”

“I
know
,” said Frank.

“Show it to me again,” Franny said to De Meo; she meant his thing.

Thus shit and death were the colors of the dying Dairy School. The board of trustees, laboring under this curse—and others, going back to the barnyard history of the school and the less-than-quaint New Hampshire town the school was plopped down in—decided to admit women to the student body.

That, at least, would raise admissions,

“That will be the end of football,” said old Coach Bob.

“The
girls
will play better football than most of your boys,” Father said.

“That’s what I mean,” said Iowa Bob.

“Ralph De Meo plays pretty good,” Franny said.

“Plays with
what
pretty good,” I said, and Franny kicked me under the table. Frank sat sullen and larger than any of us, dangerously close to Franny and across from me.

“De Meo is at least fast,” Father said.

“De Meo is at least a
hitter
,” Coach Bob said.

“He
sure is
,” Frank said; Frank had been hit by Ralph De Meo several times.

It was Franny who protected me from Ralph. One day when we were watching them paint the yard-line stripes on the football field—just Franny and I; we were hiding from Frank (we were often hiding from Frank)—De Meo came up to us and pushed me into the blocking sled. He was wearing his scrimmage uniform: shit and death Number 19 (his age). He took his helmet off and spit his mouthpiece out across the cinder track, letting his teeth gleam at Franny. “Beat it,” he said to me, still looking at Franny. “I got to talk to your sister in the worst way.”

“You don’t have to push him,” Franny said.

“She’s only twelve,” I said.

“Beat it,” De Meo said.

“You don’t have to push him,” Franny told De Meo. “He’s only eleven.”

“I got to tell you how sorry I am,” De Meo said to her. “I won’t still be here by the time you’re a student. I’ll be graduated already.”

“What do you mean?” Franny said.

“They’re going to take in girls,” De Meo said.

“I know,” Franny said. “So what?”

“So, it’s a pity, that’s all,” he told her, “that I won’t
be
here by the time you’re finally
old
enough.”

Franny shrugged; it was Mother’s shrug—independent and pretty. I picked De Meo’s mouthpiece up from the cinder track; it was slimy and gritty and I tossed it at him.

“Why don’t you put that back in your mouth?” I asked him. I could run fast, but I didn’t think I could run faster than Ralph De Meo.

“Beat it,” he said; he zipped the mouthpiece at my head, but I ducked. It sailed away somewhere.

“How come you’re not scrimmaging,” Franny asked him. Behind the gray wooden bleachers that passed for the Dairy School “stadium” was the practice field where we could hear the shoulder pads and helmets tapping.

“I got a groin injury,” De Meo told Franny. “Want to see it?”

“I hope it falls off,” I said.

“I can catch you, Johnny,” he said, still looking at Franny. Nobody called me “Johnny.”

“Not with a groin injury you can’t,” I said.

I was wrong; he caught me at the forty-yard line and pushed my face in the fresh lime painted on the field. He was kneeling on my back when I heard him exhale sharply and he slumped off me and lay on his side on the cinder track.

“Jesus,” he said, in a soft little voice. Franny had grabbed the tin cup in his jock strap and twisted its edges into his private parts, which is what we called them in those days.

We both could outrun him, then.

“How’d you know about it?” I asked her. “The thing in his jockstrap? I mean, the cup.”

“He showed me, another time,” she said grimly.

We lay still in the pine needles in the deep woods behind the practice field; we could hear Coach Bob’s whistle and the contact, but we were hidden from all of them.

Franny never minded when Ralph De Meo beat up Frank, and I asked her why she minded when Ralph beat up me.

“You’re not Frank,” she whispered fiercely; she wet her skirt in the damp grass at the edge of the woods and wiped the lime off my face with it, rolling up the hem of her skirt so that her belly was bare. A pine needle stuck to her stomach and I picked it off for her.

“Thank you,” she said, intent on getting every last bit of the lime off me; she pulled her skirt up higher, spit in it, and kept wiping. My face stung.

“Why do we like each other more than we like Frank?” I asked her.

“We just do,” she said, “and we always will. Frank is weird,” she said.

“But he’s our brother,” I said.

“So? You’re my brother, too,” she said. “That’s not why I like you.”

“Why
do
you?” I asked.

“I just do,” she said. We wrestled for a while in the woods, until she got something in her eye; I helped her get it out. She was sweaty and smelled like clean dirt. She had very high breasts, which seemed separated by too wide an expanse of chest, but Franny was strong. She could usually beat me up, unless I got completely on top of her; then she could still tickle me hard enough to make me pee if I didn’t get off her. When she was on top of me, there was no moving her.

“One day I’ll be able to beat you up,” I told her.

“So what?” she said. “By then you won’t want to.”

A fat football player, named Poindexter, came into the woods to move his bowels. We saw him coming and hid in the ferns we’d known about for years. For years the football players crapped in these woods, just off the practice field—especially, it seemed, the fat ones. It was a long run back to the gymnasium, and Coach Bob harangued them for not emptying their bowels before they came to practice. For some reason the fat ones could
never
get them entirely empty, we imagined.

“It’s Poindexter,” I whispered.

“Of course it is,” Franny said.

Poindexter was very awkward; he always had trouble getting his thigh pads down. Once he had to take off his cleats and remove the entire bottom half of his uniform, except his socks. This time he just struggled with the pads and pants that bound his knees precariously close together. He kept his balance by squatting slightly forward with his hands on his helmet (on the ground in front of him). This time he crapped messily on the insides of his football shoes and had to wipe the shoes as well as his ass. For a moment, Franny and I feared he would use the ferns for this purpose, but Poindexter was always hurried and panting, and he did as good a job as he could with the handful of maple leaves he’d gathered on the path and brought into the woods with him. We heard Coach Bob’s whistle blowing, and Poindexter heard it, too.

When he ran back toward the practice field, Franny and I started clapping. When Poindexter stopped and listened, we stopped clapping; the poor fat boy stood in the woods, wondering what applause he had imagined—
this
time—and then rushed back to the game he played so badly and, usually, with such humiliation.

Then Franny and I snuck down to the path that the football players always took back to the gym. It was a narrow path, pockmarked from their cleats. We were slightly worried where De Meo might be, but I went up to the edge of the practice field and “spotted” for Franny while she dropped her pants and squatted on the path; then she spotted for me. We both covered our rather disappointing messes with a light sprinkling of leaves. Then we retreated to the usual ferns to wait for the football players to finish practice, but Lilly was already in the ferns.

“Go home,” Franny told her; Lilly was seven. Most of the time she was too young for Franny and me, but we were nice to her around the house; she had no friends, and she seemed entranced by Frank, who enjoyed babying her.

“I don’t have to go home,” Lilly said.

“Better go,” Franny said.

“Why’s your face so red?” Lilly asked me.

“De Meo put poison on it,” Franny said, “and he’s looking around for more people to rub it on.”

“If I go home, he’ll see me,” Lilly said seriously.

“Not if you go right away,” I said.

“We’ll watch out for you,” Franny said. She stood up out of the ferns. “It’s all clear,” she whispered. Lilly ran home.

“Am I really all red in the face?” I asked Franny.

Franny pulled my face up close to hers and licked me once on my cheek, once on my forehead, once on my nose, once on my lips. “I can’t
taste
it anymore,” she said. “I got it all off you.”

We lay together in the ferns; it wasn’t boring, but it took a while for the practice to be over and for the first football players to come down the path. The third one stepped in it—a running back from Boston who was doing a postgraduate year at Dairy, basically to get a little older before he played football in college. He slid a short ways in it, but caught his balance; then he regarded the horror in his cleats.

“Poindexter!” he screamed. Poindexter, a slow runner, was well to the rear of the line of players heading for the showers. “Poindexter!” screamed the running back from Boston. “You
turd
, Poindexter!”

“What’d I do?” Poindexter asked, out of breath, forever fat—“fat in his genes,” Franny would say, later, when she knew what genes were.

“Did, you have to do it on the path, you asshole?” the running back asked Poindexter.

“It wasn’t me!” Poindexter protested.

“Clean my cleats, you shit-for-brains,” the running back said. At a school like Dairy, the linemen, although bigger, were the weaker, fatter, younger boys, often sacrificed for the few
good
athletes—Coach Bob let the good ones carry the ball.

Several rougher members of Iowa Bob’s backfield surrounded Poindexter on the path.

“They don’t have girls here yet, Poindexter,” said the running back from Boston, “so there’s nobody but you to clean the shit off my shoes.”

Poindexter did as he was told; he was, at least, familiar with the job.

Franny and I went home, past the token cows in the falling-down school barns, past Coach Bob’s back door, where the rusty fenders of the 1937 Indian were inverted on the porch—to scrape your shoes on. The motorcycle fenders were the only outdoor remains of Earl.

“When it’s time for us to go to the Dairy School,” I said to Franny, “I hope we’re living somewhere else.”

“
I’m
not going to clean the shit off anybody’s shoes,” Franny said. “No way.”

Coach Bob, who ate supper with us, bemoaned his terrible football team. “It’s my last year, I swear,” the old man said, but he was always saying this. “Poindexter actually took a dump on the path today—during practice.”

“I saw Franny and John with their clothes off,” Lilly said.

“You did not,” Franny said.

“On the path,” Lilly said.

“Doing what?” Mother said.

“Doing what Grandpa Bob said,” Lilly told everyone.

Frank snorted his disgust; Father banished Franny and me to our rooms. Upstairs Franny whispered to me, “You
see
? It’s just you and me. Not Lilly. Not Frank.”

“Not Egg,” I added.

“Egg isn’t anybody yet, dummy,” Franny said. “Egg isn’t a human being yet.” Egg was only three.

“Now there’s two of them following us,” Franny said. “Frank and Lilly.”

“Don’t forget De Meo,” I said.

“I can forget him easy,” Franny said. “I’m going to have lots of De Meos when I grow up.”

This thought alarmed me and I was silent.

“Don’t worry,” Franny whispered, but I said nothing and she crept down the hall and into my room; she got into my bed and we left my door open so we could hear them all talking at the dinner table.

“It’s not fit for my children, this school,” Father said. “I know that.”

“Well,” Mother said, “all your talk about it has certainly convinced
them
of that. They’ll be afraid to go, when the time comes.”

“When the times comes,” Father said, “we’ll send them away to a
good
school.”

“I don’t care about a good school,” Frank said, and Franny and I could sympathize with him; although we hated the notion of going to Dairy, we were more disturbed at the thought of going “away.”

“ ‘Away’
where
?” Frank asked.

“Who’s going away?” Lilly asked.

“Hush,” Mother said. “No one is going away to school. We couldn’t afford it. If there’s a benefit to being on the faculty at the Dairy School, it’s at least that there’s someplace free to send our children to.”

“Someplace that’s not any good,” Father said.

“Better than average,” Mother said.