The Pinballs (3 page)

“Oh.” Thomas J waited, watching Harvey, but Harvey had no more to say. After a moment Thomas J withdrew to his bunk.

On the bottom bed, Harvey lay without moving. Harvey had not seen his mother in three years. She had gone to Virginia to live in a commune with nineteen other people and find herself by getting back to nature.

Harvey could still remember the last terrible quarrel between his parents.

“I
know
you cannot understand my having to leave,” his mother had said. Harvey had crouched on the stairs, peering around the corner from time to time at the twisted angry faces. Their faces looked gnarled enough to put on a cathedral. “But I have to find myself. I—”

“Find yourself! What does that mean? The man who invented the term ‘find yourself' ought to be locked up in a mental hospital.”

“It means I don't know who I am anymore. I have no identity.”

“You're my wife, isn't that identity enough? You're Harvey's mother! And remember, you were the one who wanted a kid so much. I said ‘Let's wait,' but, oh, no, you—”

“I want to be
me
.”

“Well, be you! Be anything you want to be! Just don't go running off to some fool place in Virginia where people run around naked.”

“They don't run around naked. They're very caring people. They— Oh, it's just no use trying to make you understand.” His mother was talking through clenched teeth now. “We cannot communicate. We never could.”

“I knew this would happen when you started those yoga lessons.”

“The yoga classes had nothing to do with this. I'm just trying to—”

“And that Maharishna, or whatever he called himself—I suppose he had nothing to do with it either!”

“It's no use talking to you. You could never understand in a million years.”

Harvey had crept back up the stairs then. He couldn't understand either. He just hoped that his mother would return in a week or two, having found herself. He imagined her floating in like Mother Nature with daisies in her hair and peace in her heart.

She had never come back. The only thing he had seen of her was a picture in the
New York Times Magazine
. She and some of the other people had been pictured on their Virginia farm. His mother had been weaving a hammock with two men. They had looked so much alike, the two men and his mom, that Harvey had had a hard time picking her out.

His father had thrown the whole
New York Times
in the fireplace when he saw it and had drunk martinis until he passed out on the sofa.

On the upper bunk Thomas J finished his prayer. He lay down on the stiff, clean sheet. “Well, good-night,” he called down.

“Good-night,” Harvey answered.

It was
morning, and Harvey's legs hurt. He didn't feel like getting out of bed, and so Mrs. Mason sent Carlie in with a breakfast tray.

“I wish someone would bring
me
a tray,” Carlie said as she entered. She set it on his bedside table. She stood staring down at him.

Harvey looked at the tray.

“It's Little Crunchies,” Carlie said. “They'll make you big and strong.” She looked at him. “Although in your case it's going to take more than Little Crunchies, if you ask me. I wonder if they make Big Crunchies.”

Harvey said nothing.

She put one hand on her hip. “Whoo,” she said, “if someone brought me a breakfast tray I wouldn't just lie there like a rope.”

Harvey said nothing.

“If somebody brought me a breakfast tray I'd drop over dead.”

She waited.

Then she said, “You don't get anything, do you, Harvey? I just gave you the perfect chance to insult me. I just said, “If somebody brought me a breakfast tray, I'd drop over dead.' Now you should say, ‘Is that a promise?'”

Carlie waited. Then she said, “I give up. You're hopeless.”

She started from the room. “When you get through eating—if you ever do—call and the slave of the world will come back for your tray.”

Carlie was all the way out the door when he said, “Thank you, Carlie.”

Carlie stopped. She stood motionless in the hall for a moment. Then she said, “No need to thank
slaves
.”

She kept standing there. She felt Harvey had only thanked her to make her feel bad. And he had succeeded. For some reason, insults didn't hurt her. People could insult her all day long, and she would insult them right back. But let somebody say something polite or nice to her—it made her feel terrible.

Carlie looked across at the opposite wall. The phone was there, and she walked over slowly. Suddenly she wanted to make a long-distance call. Not to her mother, she decided. She wanted to call somebody like Cher or Rhoda or Mary Tyler Moore.

“Hi,” she would say, “this is Carlie. Let me tell you the rotten thing that happened to me.”

She was staring at the phone, wondering how you called a star, when Mrs. Mason appeared in the doorway. “Did you take Harvey his tray?”

“Yeah, but he didn't eat.”

Mrs. Mason wiped her hands on her apron. “We're going to have to be especially nice to Harvey these next few weeks.”

“To
Harvey
?”

“Yes, he's having a rough time of it.”

“Well, how about me?” Carlie said. “Why doesn't anybody ever think of being especially nice to me? What do I have to do to get some attention around here—break both
my
legs?”

“Now, Carlie—”

“Would a wrist be enough?”

Mrs. Mason put her hand on Carlie's shoulder. “I just have the feeling you can help Harvey.”

“Whoo, are you off base.”

“You're a very strong girl, Carlie, whether you know it or not.”

“If Harvey's depending on me for help, he is going to go down the drain.”

“Listen, Carlie—”

“No,
you
listen. Harvey and me and Thomas J are just like pinballs. Somebody put in a dime and punched a button and out we came, ready or not, and settled in the same groove. That's all.” She looked at Mrs. Mason. “Now, you don't see pinballs helping each other, do you?”

“Carlie—”

“They can't. They're just things. They hit this bumper, they go over here. They hit that light, they go over there.”

“Carlie—”

“And soon as they get settled, somebody comes along and puts in another dime and off they go again.” Carlie was standing by the phone. She reached up and dialed zero. “I can't help Harvey and I can't help myself.”

“I think you can,” Mrs. Mason said.

“Take a good look at a pinball machine sometime,” Carlie said. “You might learn something about life.”

In his room Harvey lay without moving. He had heard every word of the conversation. He wished his father had heard it too.

“You kids today got it easy,” his father was always saying. “It was tough when I was a kid—none of this five dollars here and ten dollars there.”

Harvey, who asked for money only when he needed it for food, always waited in silence.

His father would rave some more about how easy Harvey had it, and then he would pull some bills from his pocket. He would toss them at Harvey so Harvey would have to pick them up from the floor. Then Harvey's father always ended with “Later you'll find out things aren't so easy, and you'll find out the hard way, like me.”

Harvey looked down at his legs. When his father said “the hard way,” Harvey thought, he meant the hard way.

Slowly, as if his arms were broken instead of his legs, he began to eat his cereal.

After supper
the three of them settled in the living room. Thomas J was writing a letter to the Benson twins. It was addressed to Miss Thomas and Miss Jefferson Benson, Sundale Hospital.

It started out:

As soon as Harvey had seen Thomas J writing a letter, he had asked for paper too. He was having a hard time getting started on his letter. He didn't want to write to his father, and he didn't know his mother's address in Virginia, but he felt left out not to be writing. Although he had not put down a word, he kept lifting his head and asking things like “How do you spell ‘wonderful'?”

“I hope you're not describing yourself,” Carlie said without looking up. She was also writing. The letter was to her mother.

“I'm not saying what I'm describing,” Harvey said in a superior manner. His eyebrows were raised.

“Could it be me?” Carlie asked. “Are you by any chance making a list of all the things I am? Wonderful. Exciting. Temptatious. Don't forget to mention that my hair is good enough for a creme-rinse commercial and my skin is so soft no Brillo soap pad can smooth it.”

Harvey tried to think of an answer. He couldn't.

Carlie broke off. She looked down at her letter. She bent over it.

Carlie didn't bother with punctuation when she wrote. Her letter went:

Harvey watched Carlie writing her letter. He was jealous that she had so much to say. He still hadn't written a word. He shifted in his wheelchair. His casts itched and his right leg hurt.

He thought of writing that to his father, but he didn't think his father would care whether his legs itched or hurt or whatever. In the hospital his father had seemed very sorry. He had actually cried. Real tears. He had said, “I didn't know. I thought I was in reverse. I just bought the car, see, and I didn't know.”

The tears were not for him, Harvey had sensed. They were for the doctor and the pretty nurse and especially for the police who were charging him with drunken driving. Harvey had lain there and not shed a tear.

Now suddenly he wished he could cry. Quickly he crumpled his blank paper. “I don't feel like writing letters.”

Thomas J hovered over his paper. He had lived with the Benson twins for as long as he could remember, but he couldn't think of anything to write to them. All he still had was “How are your hips?” He lifted his head. “Can you send off a letter with just one sentence in it?” he asked.

“No,” Carlie said, “you got to have two. We learned that in English.”

“Oh.”

“You can always end by saying ‘There's a wonderful girl here named Carlie who is just like a sister to me.'” She turned to look at him. “Who's this letter going to, anyway?”

“The Benson twins.”

“Boys?”

“No.”

“Oh, wrong sex,” Carlie said, turning back to her letter.

“They're eighty-eight.”

“Wrong age too.”

“Next year, if they live, they may get to be in the
Book of World Records
.”

“Me too,” Carlie said. “If I live I'll be the most shifted around juvenile in the world.” Carlie finished her letter, ending it with twelve “pleases,” all underlined. She put it in an envelope and sealed it. “Well, that's that.” She looked around to see whom she could pester.

Harvey was writing at last. He had given up on a letter, but Carlie had given him an idea when she mentioned a list about herself. Now he was making a list about himself. The list was entitled “Bad Things That Have Happened to Me.”

Number one was “Appendectomy.”

“What are you writing?” Carlie asked, sensing it was something secret. She darted over to take a look. She knew that because of his broken legs, he couldn't get out of the way.

Harvey put the list against his chest. “It's none of your business.”

“Everything I'm interested in is my business.” She snatched the list from his hand. She read it aloud. “Appendectomy.” She looked up. “Hey, have you really had an appendectomy?”

“Yes.”

Carlie's eyes narrowed with suspicion. “How big's your scar?”

“About that long.”

“I knew it!” she cried. “You know what somebody told me one time? He told me that doctors make real tiny slits and then pull all your guts outside and hold them up to the light so they can work better.” She paused. She was delighted. “Which is probably true! And you know how Dr. Welby and all those TV doctors make incisions! The incisions are that long—fourteen, fifteen inches maybe. They ought to talk to this friend of mine.”