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Mr. Vernon had already eaten, but there was a place set for me at the dining room table. Mrs. Vernon set down a huge plate of stew, brimming with chunks of lamb and vegetables. I still wasn’t hungry, and with Mrs. Vernon watching every spoonful, I found it particularly hard to eat. That only made her fret more. “A young girl should have a big appetite,” she said. “It’s only old people like me who stop eating.”
After dinner, I escaped to Sissy’s room, but pretty soon Mrs. Vernon was at the door, asking if I wanted to join them in the parlor. I would have preferred to be alone, but, remembering Mrs. O’Brien’s warning about making progress, I followed Mrs. Vernon downstairs. Her husband was sitting in his chair, reading the Katydid Exponent and listening to the Cubs game on the radio. He looked at me for a second and something flickered over his face—a slight tightening of the muscles around his eyes that passed, apparently, for a greeting. Then he went back to the paper. I sat in a ladder-back chair beside the window. Mrs. Vernon took a pile of old Life magazines off a shelf and dropped them in my lap.
“Sissy used to love to look through Life,” she said. Then she sat down on the sofa and picked up her knitting.
We didn’t talk at all. The only sound in the room came from the radio as the announcer called the game. Mr. Vernon eventually finished the paper and picked up a copy of Popular Mechanics that was lying on the table next to his chair. Mrs. Vernon rocked gently up and back while she knitted. I leafed through the magazines. At one point, when Mr. Vernon got out of his chair to turn up the volume on the radio, I asked, just to be friendly, who the Cubs were playing.
“Pirates,” he grunted.
In fact, I found I didn’t mind sitting there. The wood bookshelves gave the parlor a warm, busy look, and the yellow light from the Declaration of Independence lampshade had a cozy effect at night. I started to think that staying with the Vernons for a few days might not be a bad thing after all. I love Bunny more than anything, but having a little vacation from her would probably be good for me, I thought. In some ways, we may be too close to each other. Even she used to say I should get out more, get to know more people. Leafing through Life, I came upon a story about a girl who was supposed to be a typical teenager, and she wasn’t anything like me. According to the article, she spent all her spare time talking to her friends on the telephone. That’s what made her typical. The magazine was filled with pictures of her with a phone pressed up to her ear. In one long sequence, her side of the conversation had been copied down. She was wearing shorty pajamas and lolling around the easy chair in her family’s living room. The pictures were almost sexy—shorty pajamas don’t hide much. Meanwhile, she was winding the phone cord around her legs and threading it through her toes, twisting herself into all sorts of contortions and all the time keeping the phone clamped to her ear. Her conversation, which was printed in italics, was hard to understand. She talked in half sentences and skipped from thought to thought. She kept saying, “Oh, ish,” and calling people she didn’t like “ishy,” words I’d never heard before. The article said the conversation had lasted for over an hour.
I felt a little funny reading about her. Not that I would have wanted to act like that, but her life seemed so different from mine. Half the time, our phone was disconnected because Bunny had forgotten to pay the bill. And, anyway, I didn’t have any friends to talk to that way. I mean, I had friends, but they didn’t have enough interesting things to say to go on for an hour while I lounged around in a chair and fiddled with the phone cord. Bunny was the only one I could talk to like that. Sometimes, when she came home from work and I was still awake, we’d start talking and stay up until two or three in the morning, even on school nights. We’d just chatter away. The time would disappear. We’d talk about everything. Nothing, really, but everything. Just talk.
I was thinking about that, not paying any attention to what was going on around me, when I started to sense that something was happening in the parlor. I looked around. It all seemed the same: Mr. Vernon was still in his chair and Mrs. Vernon was concentrating on her knitting. But something was happening. Mr. Vernon had set down his magazine and was gripping the arms of his chair. Mrs. Vernon was rocking faster, and every now and then, she’d glance anxiously at her husband. I couldn’t figure it out: Not a word had been said between them, and yet she looked as if she were about to cry and he looked ready to explode. And then he did explode.
“Damn it!” he yelled, pounding the arms of the chair. Thunderclouds of dust rose in the air.
“Ohhhh,” moaned Mrs. Vernon.
He jumped up, ran to the radio, and flicked it off angrily. That was it: the game. Something had happened in the game.
He glared at the curvy, gray Philco for a few seconds and then stomped to the window. Staring into the night, he ran his fingers through his hair, trying hard to settle himself down. After a bit, he came back, looking cooler, and turned on the radio again. A huge, scratchy crowd roar burst out of the speaker. The announcer broke in: “Well, that loads the bases, and Roberto Clemente is stepping to the plate.” The announcer sounded depressed.
“Shaaaaa,” hissed Mr. Vernon. He turned off the radio again. Mrs. Vernon didn’t take her eyes off him. She let her knitting drop to her lap.
I couldn’t understand why this was happening. They were only listening to a baseball game. I wondered if someone had been hurt or if one side had cheated. Was there something wrong with the man at bat? With all the tension in the room, I almost started to feel that I was somehow at fault. “Is Clemente a good player?” I asked Mrs. Vernon, trying to break the mood.
She stopped rocking for a moment. “He’s a Pirate, dear,” she explained, and she gave me a look that said I should never ask another question at a time like this.
Mr. Vernon paced in front of the silenced radio. Finally, he reached out and turned it on again. “Here’s the pitch!” called the announcer. A smack like a cherry bomb going off came over the radio. The crowd started hollering, drowning out the commentary. When the announcer came back, he was screaming: “He’s rounding third … here’s the throw … he’s saaaafe!”
For a few seconds, the parlor was very calm. All the energy was confined to the radio, which just sat there, like a small, gray animal, spitting out its scratchy roar. Suddenly, Mr. Vernon leaned back and lifted his chin. “Arggggg!” he screamed. The noise came from deep within him and overwhelmed the sound of the crowd. But when he ran out of breath, the crowd was still there. So he took a short, fierce swing and smacked the radio with his open hand, knocking it to the floor with a crash. That shut it up instantly, but the blow jarred loose the back cover, and inside I could see the little orange lights of the tubes fading only gradually, as if the old Philco were fighting against giving it up. Meanwhile, Mr. Vernon looked frantically around the room for something else to get mad with. I was afraid he might do something to me. Instead, he grabbed his copy of Popular Mechanics and heaved it against the wall. The magazine hit flat open and fluttered to the ground like a wounded bird.
“I think I’ll go to bed now,” I told Mrs. Vernon.
“Sweet dreams, dear,” she said, trying to give me a smile but not having much luck at it.
I couldn’t fall asleep again that night. The scene in the parlor had upset me and, besides, I had too many other things to think about. Too much had happened, just today, on top of everything else. The news from the lawyer sounded good, but I was a little wary. Bunny had a tendency to be over-optimistic. She wanted something to happen—and therefore it would. Still, having a lawyer had to help, I thought. Maybe he could make it all go away. I knew I was lucky that it had happened during the summer, when school was out. If I’d been in school, with everybody knowing, everybody asking questions—well, it would have been impossible. I just couldn’t have managed. Some people obviously knew already—there’d been that incident with Dwayne and the hoods. The hoods probably learned about it from the cops. The hoods are always talking to the cops. But the hoods don’t really matter, I told myself. I didn’t care what they thought, and, anyway, I hardly knew them. They didn’t really belong in Katydid, I realized. A lot of them moved into town with their parents for a few years and then just disappeared. They dropped out of school and went into the army or something. They just stuck around long enough to cause trouble. A couple of them had even teased me in the past, making remarks about how tall I was. Bunny’s right, I told myself, don’t think about it. Still, it was hard. It’s an awful thing when people talk about you. Sometimes I heard people say things about Bunny. They didn’t know I was there or didn’t know who I was—or sometimes they just didn’t seem to realize that what they were saying was hurtful. They almost expected me to agree with them. Were they cruel, or stupid? I thought of Edith, the old woman in the Buffalo Tavern. The bald man hadn’t even been quiet about it, he’d talked as if she weren’t there or couldn’t possibly hear. Maybe she couldn’t—she never flinched when he called her disgusting. I shuddered at remembering it. That must be about the worst thing a woman can be called. Disgusting. The word almost had an odor to it. She did seem to be in pretty bad shape, though. How did she get that way? I tried to imagine her as a young wom
an. Even now, she had a pleasant, round face, almost childish—she might actually have been pretty once. Didn’t she have a family that cared about her? What had happened?
For a couple of hours, I flopped around on Sissy’s bed, trying out my stomach, then my back, seeing how it felt under the sheet, then on top. Some hot rods chased each other up and down Oak Street for a time. Somebody walked by singing “Que Sera, Sera” to himself. At midnight, the whistle blew over at the KTD.
A little later, I heard a sharp pinging sound at the window. I sat up. The sound came again. Something had hit the screen. I climbed down the bed to look out.
The moon had set, and the street lamps on Oak stretched a few long, faint slivers of light over the lawn. The Potter house across the way was dark, and there didn’t seem to be any light coming from the Vernons’ house. Mr. and Mrs. Vernon must have gone to bed. Looking down through the leaves of the big oak, I stared at a silent black carpet of lawn. Suddenly, a tall figure stepped away from the tree. In my surprise, I thought it was Tom, come back from Sherwood to reassure me.
“Hey,” said the figure, in a loud whisper. It wasn’t Tom, but the voice was familiar.
“Who’s there?” I asked softly.
“Elro.” A pause. “Elro Judy.”
“Elro?” I didn’t understand.
“Yeah.”
“This is Sissy’s old room,” I said, as if to explain to myself why he was here.
