Criss Cross (8 page)

?: It does help to wear nice clothes and comb your hair, though.

?: Then you can be a neat ugly person.

?: I like Miss Epler. She’s so different from other people in Seldem and Birdvale.

?: I want to be different from people in Seldem and Birdvale, too. I wonder how you get that way.

?: You have to come from somewhere else.

?: Oh. Is that the only way? Couldn’t you
go
somewhere else?

?: Then you’d still be like someone from Seldem, but maybe nobody there would know what that was.

?: Because for them, you’d be from Somewhere Else.

?: I guess so. I guess that would work.

?: Have you ever been somewhere, and it hit you that if you lived there instead of where you do, your whole life might be really different?

?: It probably wouldn’t be that different, if you’re still the same person.

?: I think it could. I think if you wear different socks, your whole life can be different. It’s like that thing of, if a butterfly flaps its wings in Indonesia, it can cause a tidal wave in Florida. Or maybe it’s Africa, I forget. But that’s not really what I was thinking about. It was more like, if Albert Einstein had grown up in, maybe an Eskimo village, would he still have been brilliant?

?: He would have had brilliant Eskimo thoughts. He would still have done something amazing with, like, blubber and ice, but maybe we wouldn’t all know about it. I think it makes more difference where you are if you’re not Albert Einstein. I mean, more difference to you. To the world, it probably makes more difference where Albert Einstein is.

?: Do you think that Dan Persik might like me?

?: Why would you want him to?

?: His locker is next to mine, and he always says “Hi” to me in a really nice way, it’s like a teasing way, and then I get all stupid and I don’t know what to say back, besides, “Hi.”

P: That seems like an okay thing to say back.

D: But I want to say something more. I mean, do you think—

P: No.

D: Why not?

P: It wasn’t meant to be.

I
t was just the refrain, and it was actually more spoken than sung, but it had a universal theme and a good beat. You could dance to it. It went like this:

The first part would be sung by a female voice, the second by a male; that’s how Hector heard it in his head. It was kind of a Motown thing. He only needed the three chords they had already learned.

But he might need more chords once he thought up some verses.

O
ne Saturday only Debbie and Lenny showed up. They were both early, and they sat in companionable silence waiting for the others.

“Where’s Phil?” asked Debbie, after thirty seconds or ten minutes, she wasn’t sure which.

“At a wedding reception,” said Lenny. “His cousin Carol got married today.” A few minutes passed, then he asked, “Is Patty coming?”

“No,” said Debbie. “It’s her great-grandma’s ninetieth birthday.”

“Wow,” said Lenny. “That’s pretty old.”

“I know,” said Debbie. “Really old.”

A few more minutes or half an hour passed. Then they both started to speak at once, and what each of them had been about to say was “I wonder where Hector is.”

They laughed, then Debbie said that Hector could be anywhere, and they laughed about that. There was a pause, then they both chuckled as if they were still thinking about Hector and where he might be.

Finally Lenny turned the key, and the radio became the third person, filling up the middle section of the wide, blue, vinyl seat. Debbie and Lenny each leaned up against their doors to make room.

It was a pretty good episode, with some new stuff and some that they had heard before. The hour went by.

“Crisscross,” said the old movie voice, and then there was the sound of the train wreck.

Lenny turned the key to the completely off position. The other keys on the ring slid down with a slight ching. Probably they always made that ching, but normally it would have been swallowed up in the sounds of conversation. Now it was all by itself:

ching

Debbie found herself wishing that one of the others was there. Or that some other sound would puncture the quiet before it grew too large. The quiet had come out of nowhere; it surprised Lenny, too. Their heads were suddenly empty of the usual easy conversations, their eyes looked through the windshield into the backyards, touching on all the familiar objects, none of which were doing anything worth commenting on, none of them were doing anything at all. Everything was just sitting there.

Some birds began chirping, but it wasn’t enough.

They were alone, no one at all was around. He was a boy and she was a girl. Debbie was thinking she might go home and see what was on TV.

Then without exactly knowing why, Lenny did what any (red-blooded? American?) boy would do. He asked her if she wanted to learn how to drive the truck.

It was an idea that had never been in even the same neighborhood as Debbie’s mind. It took her by surprise, so that while her instincts told her the right answer would be “No,” they couldn’t think right away of why not.

“Are you kidding?” she said. “What if I wrecked it?” This seemed like a pretty obvious reason why not.

“We’ll just go back and forth in the driveway,” said Lenny. “First and reverse.”

“I bet I could still wreck it,” said Debbie. She was sticking to this while she waited for reinforcement reasons to arrive.

“You won’t wreck it,” said Lenny. “I’ll show you how. It’s not that hard.”

He had been surprised by the idea, too, at first, but it was making a lot of sense to him now. It was something he knew how to do. And it was fun. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it sooner.

“Your dad doesn’t want me driving his truck,” said Debbie. She was pretty sure about that.

“He won’t care,” said Lenny. “But I’ll ask him.” He got out of the truck, walked over to the screen door, and called in, “Hey Dad, is it okay if I teach Debbie to drive the truck, just in the driveway?” He put his ear to the screen door.

“Hold on,” he said over his shoulder, “he must be watching TV.” He went inside. A minute later he reappeared.

“It’s okay,” he told her. “My dad said as long as we stay in the driveway.”

The pickup had a stick shift. That’s what was so hard to resist. The Pelbry family always had automatics. A stick shift seemed … adventurous. And exotic. Europeans and cowboys (well, at least the ones in Marlboro commercials) and race car drivers (she thought) used stick shifts. Her cousin Dick drove a car with a stick shift, a little sports car with a convertible top.

And it might be an emergency life skill a person should have, along with knowing how to be a waitress or how to resuscitate someone who has been dragged out of a river or a lake. Say, for example, you were riding in a car, a car with a stick shift, and the driver had a heart attack in the middle of nowhere. It would be irresponsible not to know how to drive to a hospital. Especially when someone had offered you the chance to learn.

Maybe she should do it, learn to use the stick shift. If she didn’t, she might be sorry someday when a situation like that came up.

“Are you sure your dad said it was okay?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah,” said Lenny. “He said it was a good idea.”

This wasn’t exactly a fib, he thought. It was more like a loose interpretation of something his dad often said while driving, which was “If God hadn’t meant people to fly, he wouldn’t have invented Chevys.” He glanced at the clock on the dashboard.

“We have to do it now, though, because he said he needs the truck in about an hour.”

So he taught her to drive the truck. Not everything, just first gear and reverse. If she were in the emergency situation with the heart attack-stricken driver now, she could take him slowly, very slowly (forward or backward) to the hospital. With any luck, it wouldn’t be very far away and she could get there by going in a straight line. The picture in her mind was of a desert scenario, with no large objects between her and her destination.

Lenny was a good teacher. First he sat in the driver’s seat, showing her how it was done, the clutch pedal and the gas pedal going up and down like opposite ends of a seesaw. He was good at explaining it. He understood how things worked, and he made it seem simple, so that when Debbie slid across the seat and behind the wheel, the truck didn’t seem any more mysterious than her mother’s sewing machine, which was also operated with a pedal. A large sewing machine moving back and forth in the gravel driveway.

Lenny had demonstrated what would happen if she gave it too much gas or not enough, or let the clutch out too quickly, so Debbie was prepared and didn’t panic. She just tried again and again, and after a while she started to get it. She was driving a truck. With a stick shift. She loved it. She loved the knob with the diagram on it and the molded rubber thing that covered up whatever was really happening at the bottom of the stick, something that you couldn’t see, you just had to picture it in your mind. She loved balancing the movements of the two pedals, up and down, just so.

Lenny kept his hand on the steering wheel, just in case. This was probably a good thing, because Debbie was feeling the urge to turn it. And to go a little faster. She looked over at Lenny. She was lit up from inside. Her mouth was only in a half smile, but the whole rest of her face looked like it was laughing. Lenny had seen her look that way before. She had looked that way most of their childhood, digging up dirt or playing kickball or tearing around on the bikes. But he hadn’t seen her look that way lately.

“This is great,” she said. “I want to go somewhere.”

Lenny’s face was smiling, too. For a minute they were both ten years old. Time travel in real life.

Lenny’s fourteen-year-old self, who was keeping an eye on the clock on the dashboard, said, “We can do that next time. My dad needs to use the truck in a couple minutes.” He didn’t know how that “next time” bit could happen, but he wanted to say it. So he did.

A fact, a feather of knowledge, had been floating around the outside of Debbie’s mind searching for a place to enter, for an opening in the light but unbroken cloud cover that had surrounded it a little while ago. As the clouds began to break up and drift apart, it found a current of air and drifted in. She was glad she had kept it out for a while.

“You know,” she said, “I was just thinking. I know your dad said it was okay, and all we did was go back and forth in the driveway, but I think my mother—”

“I won’t say anything,” said Lenny.

“Do you think your dad might mention it to her?”

“I can tell him not to, if you want,” said Lenny. Not strictly a fib. He didn’t say he
would.

“Okay,” said Debbie. “Thanks. You know my mom.” She wasn’t her ten-year-old self now, but traces of that self lingered behind, little flecks of joy visible somehow on her eyebrow, and her chin.

“Well,” she said. “I better go. See you.”

“See you later,” said Lenny. He watched her go, then slid back over behind the steering wheel, where the seat was still warm. He flipped the key in the ignition again and moved the radio dial back and forth. He listened to a couple of songs without really paying attention. In the rearview mirror he saw his parents’ car pull up the driveway behind him. The tires grumbled over the gravel, the car doors clinked open and thunked shut, their voices, in the middle of some conversation, grew louder as they approached, then stopped.

“Were you just sitting in there by yourself the whole time we were gone?” asked his dad.

“Nope,” said Lenny. “Debbie came over for a while to listen to the show.”

“Oh. Good,” said his dad. “That’s nice. Don’t sit out here all night, all right? You’ll run down my battery.”

“I won’t,” said Lenny.

His parents went inside. He turned the radio off and sat there for a little while longer, watching the backyard dissolve into darkness. And then he went inside, too.