The Orphan (17 page)

“Yeah, her and her family and their Packard,” Kick said.

“They got a Packard?” Charles said absently.

“Yeah, and Betty says they might get a sho-fur,” Kick said in disgust. “Geeze, they ain’t that rich. My dad says Ed Bailey has got bills all over the state that he can’t pay.”

“Well, who cares,” Charles said, stuffing a sardine into his mouth. “She doesn’t need money. Wow, she’s really something.”

“You better not look at her crosseyed,” Kick said. “Alfred’ll turn you inside out. She’s his girl.”

“Oh, who’s thinkin’ about stuff like that,” Charles said. “I just think she’s a real knockout. Who wants a girlfriend anyway?”

In the days before Halloween, Charles made a few dollars husking corn for some of the local farmers so that he could buy a new shirt for the Bailey party. And then, like a giant distorted mirror image of the elegance the Baileys were to have on the night of the thirty-first, came the annual PTA Halloween party held on the preceding Wednesday night. School was dismissed at noon on Wednesday so the school room could be got ready with streamers of orange and black, arched black cats pasted on all the windows, orange witches on the blackboards, and crude skeletons on strings hung from the ceiling lights. There were also tubs of water to be brought in for apple ducking, the desks to be moved down to the basement so ring dances and games could take place, and a little stage with curtains prepared in the front of the room so that the third, fourth, and fifth grades could act out the ghost story chosen for the occasion. Costumes were optional now, since the party three years ago when the teacher who had retired before Miss Wrigley came demanded costumes and got a schoolhouse full of old sheets of various sizes and degrees of yellowness. Even the poor little Ricci boy whose family lived in an abandoned clapboard church building two miles down the highway was wearing a sheet. The scene had produced a ghostly effect all right, but in the course of the evening all the sheets had been shredded, and the families had complained of the expense. Now it was thought funny to come in a sheet, but the joke was getting old and few families had the imagination or drive to produce their own costumes. Store bought costumes were, of course, out of the question.

The play turned out to be an elaborate farce involving a knight, a witch, a bumbling king, and his silent (forgot her lines) queen, and any number of retainers dressed in pointed hats and cued for movement by a laughing and harried Miss Wrigley who prompted, pushed, pulled off stage, and supplied props from the wings at stage right. In between times she played appropriate ghostly music at the piano while the witch’s cornsilk hair fell off, the king’s crown came unpasted and drooped into his lap, and the knight kept knocking people on the head with his lance (the window stick). Just as the witch seemed about to triumph, partly because she had remembered all her lines and most of her costume had held together, the knight stepped forward and threatened her with his lance, a not altogether idle gesture, since he punched Mary Mae Martin (the witch) with considerable force in her plump stomach while he rendered his victory lines. Mary Mae retired defeated with a vindictive look at Harry Bennett (the knight) and a muttered threat about what he was going to get for hurting her with the lance. Harry was victorious, nervously, for a threat from Mary Mae was not brushed off lightly when one was six inches shorter and two years younger than she was. And so, virtue triumphed as Miss Wrigley played a victorious march on the old upright and the audience clapped and laughed appropriately.

Then the chairs were cleared away and the stage dismantled for the games, the traditional ducking for apples, blindfold games, and string chewing contests where each of a pair of players tried to get the candy tied in the middle, and the flirting game called “wink ’em.”

Charles was having the time of his life, laughing so hard at the play that he and Douglas knocked their chairs over and were reprimanded by the elder Bent. During the pairing for the string chew, Charles didn’t watch what he was doing and got paired with Mary Mae, still in her witch hair and costume. Her eyes were bright as she grinned widely at Charles, now considered a “catch” at parties and box suppers. Charles took the other end of the string in his teeth, looked into Mary Mae’s little round blue eyes beneath the gray frizzle of cornsilk Witch wig and smiled.

“I liked the way you did in the play,” he said around the string.

“Thank you, Charles,” Mary Mae said around her end of the string.

Charles looked down the double line of kids with strings in their mouths, boys on one side, girls on the other, strings hanging in a V shaped canyon between them with a piece of homemade taffy at the vertex of the canyon. Charles vowed he would play the game fair and try to get the candy, even if it meant meeting Mary Mae in the middle, for she was no slouch as a competitor. Tenison mounted as last-minute adjustments were made, hands were placed behind backs, somebody’s string got tangled and Miss Wrigley had to undo it, and finally she cried out, “Go!” and everyone began eating string furiously.

Paul Holton was disqualified for illegally pulling the string in his teeth, thus pulling the whole wad out of Sally Marshall’s mouth, little Joe Ricci was winning until he choked and Miss Wrigley discovered to her horror that he had swallowed all the string on his side of the candy, Douglas Bent and Martha Portola got to their candy at the same time and Douglas got a bitten lip, and Charles found himself nose to nose with Mary Mae as they came down to the candy exactly together. He did not flinch but pushed on bravely as Mary Mae’s lips had almost closed on the prize and got his teeth in the taffy. He and Mary Mae had their faces mashed together, spit on their cheeks, Mary Mae’s red blushing face panting with excitement, her blue eyes crossed, Charles’s panting breath whistling through his teeth that were locked on the taffy, sounding like a stud horse (as Paul Holton later said), until Mary Mae in a frenzy gnashed her teeth against Charles’s teeth, and in surprise he let go. The string came reeling out of his mouth as Mary Mae straightened up and pulled back with the prize. The candy piece, with Charles’s tooth marks in it, was hers. And only then did they realize that the rest of the contestants had finished and everyone had been watching them and cheering.

While the apple bobbing was going on, Charles and Douglas and some of the other boys walked out into the dark playground. Paul Holton had a cigarette and lighted it and passed it around. When it came to Charles, he took it, dragged the smoke in and choked so badly he thought he would vomit. The other boys laughed tolerantly but did not make fun. It was too easy to do the same thing, and besides, Charles was almost above being laughed at for something like that. On the other hand, he was vulnerable where girls were concerned.

“I thought old Mary Mae was gonna eat your face off,” Paul Holton said, dragging expertly on the cigarette.

“They was tradin’ spit,” said Carl Bent, at fifteen the oldest boy in the school.

“Oh come on,” Charles said, wiping his face again. He had ducked it in the first apple tub before he came out just to clean himself up.

“I didn’t know you was so bad off for a piece ... of candy,” Kick Jones said, making an allusion only he and Carl knew. They laughed nastily, making Charles feel stupid.

Charles thought about going out into the dark and shifting and coming back as if he were in costume. That would be funny, he thought, smiling, but then I’d have to show people the costume. He giggled involuntarily, and Douglas said they’d ought to go back in before they all got caught. Charles said that was okay if someone would lend him a sheet so he could hide from Mary Mae, and they all laughed.

In the wink ’em game, Charles began to feel good again, and found himself forgetting the leers of Mary Mae who tried to get into his chair even though he had not winked at her. His chair was empty. He looked around the circle of girls, big and small, pretty, not pretty, fat, bony, all looking expectantly while their guards held their hands at the ready like Western gunfighters waiting to shoot it out with a faster gun. Betty Bailey sat almost directly across from him looking rather bored with half shut eyes and her hair curled perfectly. She wore a jumper that emphasized her precocious bust development, and Charles thought he had never seen a more beautiful person in his life. He looked along the line to distract Kick who was her guard, and suddenly glanced back at her and winked. She tried to get up, but in a slow and genteel way so that Kick had her by the arms before she could even lean forward. Charles looked along, passing over Mary Mae, Kick’s twin sister Carol, little Ellie Gustafson a second grader, came to Brenda Gustafson, her older sister, a sixth grader, and winked. Brenda lunged forward and bashful Kenny Grattan missed her completely. Brenda eased into Charles’s chair as if she felt at home, looking around with quiet triumph. She was a calm, plain faced girl who was good at sports and sometimes got chosen to play softball with the boys. Charles liked her in a comradely way and managed to hold her while the battle raged around them. Part of the game, of course, was to offer an excuse for boys and girls to make some physical contact. Dancing was practically unknown except for formalized round dances and an occasional square dance formation, so there were hardly any legitimate ways boys and girls could touch each other without being teased for having romantic inclinations. When a boy and girl did decide to be “together,” they had to put up with a withering round of teasing that often went on for weeks.

By the time they were to change the order, with boys sitting and girls winking, Charles was mildly excited by the game and the chance grabs and embraces he had had of various girls. He was finding that girls were interesting, smelled good, felt amazingly soft and alive, and were much more exciting than any sport he had played out on the playground. As they switched positions to music played by Miss Wrigley at the piano, there was little choice of partners. Charles ended with little Lula Bright standing behind him and knew he could get away if he really wanted to. First it was one of the notorious Portola sisters, Charles thought it was Fern, but it could have been Flossie. Whichever one it was, she kept blowing on his neck and tickling his ear until he was so goosepimply that he felt like a cactus. Worse than that, the fifteen-year-old girl was exciting him in a new way. He was getting an erection and was horribly embarrassed that it might be noticed, so that when Mary Mae winked at him, he made a heroic lunge, sliding out of Fern’s grip and half crawling across the circle to Mary Mae’s chair. It looked to everyone as though he must be desperate to get back to Mary Mae, and she got an appropriately smug look when he settled into her chair, sure, he thought, never to get away for the rest of the evening. He was called several times, once by the same Portola twin who gave him an enormously seductive wink that made him want to jump up and do something else suddenly, but he could not get away from Mary Mae’s sure grip. She had a way of pinching into the skin of his shoulder that hurt and made him settle back rather than leave part of his shoulder in her fist. He had just determined almost in anger that such a grip was unfair, even for a girl, when Betty Bailey’s captive got away, Paul Holton getting up slowly enough for her to stop him with one finger, and Betty not seeming to be aware of his leaving until he was in the middle of the circle. It made everyone laugh as Paul ambled over to Fern Portola’s chair, sat down, and put Fern’s hand on top of his head like a cap.

Betty winked at several other boys, Kick, Carl Bent, Runt, while their girls hung on like death, although Carl almost ended on the floor with the other Portola twin. And finally she winked at Charles who had been watching her so closely he felt inside her head and started out of the chair even before her two remarkably pretty eyelashes came together in the signal. But Mary Mae was ready and dug her nails into both of Charles’s shoulders so he felt like he was being bitten. He struggled on, dragging away from her, feeling the nails digging in and getting desperate, pulling harder, watching Betty’s smiling face and additional winks of encouragement as he struggled with the girl on his back. He pulled away from the chair with a new burst of energy, the chair slid to the floor under both of them and folded up with one of Char1es’s fingers in the hinged seat and Mary Mae flopping down on top of him. Charles cried out and pulled his finger free, crawling now across the circle to the screams and laughter of the other kids, the folded-up chair flat behind him and Mary Mae Martin riding his back still clinging with her arms around his neck now, choking off his breath.

And he never got there. Miss Wrigley stopped the game at that point, announcing cake and punch for everyone and the awarding of the prizes for the earlier games. Charles stayed on all fours for a moment as the game broke up and Mary Mae disengaged herself from his back. He looked up to find Betty Bailey, but she was gone in the crowd. He flopped down the floor and turned to look up at Mary Mae’s flushed face. She stood with her hands on her hips looking down at him, her short mousey curls wet with sweat.

“Looks like you win,” Charles said, grinning.

“Oh ha, ha, to you Charles Cahill,” Mary Mae said, her face twisting with anger. To Charles’s intense surprise, she began to cry. And then, shaking her head hard so the tears whipped off her cheeks, she ran toward the girls’ cloak room and disappeared into that forbidden territory.

***

It is no longer strange that Charles can arouse in me emotions of which he is largely ignorant. For the two nights between the party at the school and the one scheduled at the Baileys’ I am in an intense state of frustration that I cannot seem to overcome by any of my usual activities. Even the trickery that is usual and accepted on this holiday has not made me feel better. I have pushed over outhouses with people inside in the dark, listening to their curses as they struggle to get out, thinking it is neighborhood boys; I have put gates on top of barns, and at one farm tossed the two yard dogs to the rooftree of the house where they clung like terrified fledglings unable to walk on the steep pitched roof and howling like a couple of fiends; I have frightened people almost out of their skins and made mysterious noises under windows and eaten three lambs, a dozen ducks and chickens, and a saucy cat that I still regret.