barely acknowledging her as we entered the rooms. She glanced up with low expectations, her sharp features shrouded in smoke, caught between the cheap theatrics of her novels (even at twelve, I knew what was cheap and what was literature; John Steinbeck was literature, The Carpetbaggers was not) and the presence of two remote, silent boys who would give her, she seemed to know, very little. “The scholars,” she would always say upon our entrance. “And here I am, reading trash.”
From my first appearance, she looked upon me in a gauging, deeply focused way that let me know Andrew did not often bring friends home, and certainly not friends who were the epitome of regularity, such as I was in those days. “Who’s this?” she asked, and if I’d been older, I’d have read seductiveness in the “this.”
In his room, Andrew required no help at all in writing “The Athenian Character.” The first day, he went to his desk, opened the Ancient History text, and began writing. I sat on his bed. His walls were bare except for a Winslow Homer print. On the floor was a small record player and a stack of 45s. When Andrew caught me gazing at them, he suggested maybe I wanted to listen to a couple. “Go ahead, it’s okay,” he said. “Take advantage of my good taste.”
Then he looked at me there on the floor a second longer than he needed to, as if the sight of me in the midst of this perfectly ordinary pastime had leaked out a small but vital piece of information he was snatching up.
On his way out of the shower room, led by Mr. McCluskey, Andrew had held his head in the firm, tilted manner one held one’s head to staunch a nosebleed. But he had not cried. In the office, waiting with Mr. McCluskey, he affected the look of a boy who had already entered into some new compact with life.
As for me—as with the others, the larger group—we had made our own compact. We were not to speak of this, but it was okay to look at each other and raise our eyebrows and giggle. When the giggling grew too loud, Mr. McCluskey sent us a punishing look through the Plexiglas. Andrew stared ahead of himself, scratching his nose, waiting for his mother.
On the floor of his room, I listened to records. “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” by the Highwaymen. “Loco-Motion,” by Little Eva. Andrew’s taste was like anyone else’s. His mother knocked on the door and asked if we were hungry. “How about a snack?” she asked. Andrew didn’t even condescend to answer. She opened the door and gazed inside, at me on the floor, Andrew at his desk. “He’s a one-man band,” she said, and smiled in a way that inquired: she may be stuck with him, but what was it in me that found no more suitable outlet than a friendship with Andrew Weston?
It was a good question. Even after I’d begun to understand how precise a characterization of Andrew his mother’s had been, I continued to follow him to his house two afternoons a week, to sit on the floor and listen to records while he scratched away at the table. In his room, I half-listened for his mother outside. The phone did not ring, no one came to the door. If there was a father, his presence had become as ghostly as my own father’s was in the house he had built and abandoned. Andrew had taken a volume of Thucydides out of the town library. “Listen to this,” he’d announce gleefully, coming upon certain details of the plague at Athens. “ ‘Externally the body was not very hot to the touch, nor pale in its appearance, but reddish, livid, and breaking out into small pustules and ulcers.’ ” He made a face, and then seemed thrilled when he came to Thucydides’ descriptions of the afflicted Athenians’ diarrhea. At such moments it was like he was vaunting the deepest of his secrets, the utter boy-ordinariness of being thirteen.
We turned in the report and got an A. On the afternoons we’d set aside to write the report—Tuesdays and Thursdays—Andrew continued to ask me if I was coming to his house. He phrased it less in the manner of an invitation than like some burdensome obligation he had taken on. I went. It seemed easier than saying no, than making an excuse, than going home to my mother’s smiling, beautifully maintained catatonia. She sat in rooms, she watered plants (I thought of her and Mrs. Weston as engaging in a kind of war of plants, with my mother the clear victor), she watched mid-afternoon television. Somewhere I wondered how long this could be sustained: our lives had become like still lifes, like fruit on a table, spoiling in the light.
From my other friends I’d begun a long separation. My father’s leaving had done that. I couldn’t tell them about my father; that act of his had cleared out an area of experience, made it “the past.” There was a barrier now around all the things I used to do. Only Andrew asked no questions, offered me the floor, his record player, the new records he bought, the quiet of the room, and his mother outside, smoking and wondering, vaguely, if we were hungry.
My only other social obligation that fall had to do with my cousin George. I was twelve, would be thirteen in November. I was tall for my age; still, twelve is young. But I had also always been known as the smart one in the family. How merited this was I am not sure. But it was enough for Uncle John.
With the building of the house, the settling of the new neighborhood, there was a new obligation for John’s sons. They were to be like the others, the Meola and Semenza boys who were headed for college. It was all-important suddenly that they meet the new standard.
Bobby and George were both unprepared for this. They had planned on futures as advanced thugs: physical labor, caked grime under their fingernails, gray uniforms with their names stitched above their breast pockets in red, all that would be enough. But John kept looking at them as if they were made of wet clay, as if he could not hurry quickly enough to realize the vision that had come to him, I always suspected, too late. On Thursday nights he insisted I come and tutor George in English. “Straighten him out,” John said, as if I were capable of doing that. Into my palm, he folded ten dollars a week.
What these evenings consisted of was sitting in George’s room while George perched at his desk, or lay on his bed, thrumming any hard surface he could find with his thumb, while humming one of the songs then popular (though not the songs Andrew bought at Record Mart, which tended to be softer, whiter, more mainstream). George favored songs with heavy guitar lines he could mimic by forcing his lips together and letting out an “mmm” sound. He was seventeen, a senior in high school. The Great Gatsby lay on his desk, an old copy that had served maybe ten years’ worth of seniors in the General class. George was supposed to read it and write a paper. I was to help him, but I had a larger task as well.
The high school had offered an informational night for parents, and John had come back from it with a fixed idea in his mind—the “College Essay.” The guidance counselors had convinced Uncle John that whatever unimpressive record George had toted up in the previous three years, all could be rescued, his future assured, if he could only write a “College Essay” good enough. That was the core of my assignment.
But in George’s room, we barely spoke. We were waiting for Bobby to come home.
Bobby, sixteen, had been “laying” Joanne Lacosta since early summer, since one night she had surprised him, when he slipped his fingers into her panties, by not stopping him. Then Joanne Lacosta had gotten “wet,” and excited, bucking a little in her lower parts, until she’d said, “Please don’t stick it in me,” and Bobby had known, through some weird teenage intuition, that this was a signal to, indeed, stick it in her. Which he had done. All this he relayed to George and me behind a rock at Nahant one Sunday, the day after it happened. I had not been meant to hear, but I was with them, and George was crazy for the details: once Bobby had offered the first one, George’s hunger couldn’t be contained. So Bobby had to describe what it felt like to go all the way in, and what happened to Joanne while he was doing that (no, she hadn’t screamed; her body had instead, and astonishingly, seemed to be inviting him), and what he had done when he came (nothing, but only that first time; afterward, he was smart enough to buy rubbers). And since then, the affair had gone on, continued through the summer and into the fall. In August, Joanne Lacosta had begun accompanying us to the beach on Sundays; she and Bobby were shy around one another, though she sent him certain secret-sharing looks. She wore two-piece bathing suits—green and black—around the bottom of which I could sometimes see little hairs coming out, little hairs that seemed to contain the carnivorous secret essence of shy, pretty Joanne Lacosta.
Bobby’s room became, to