I just can’t, Archie.
Does that mean you have a boyfriend I don’t know about?
No, there’s no boyfriend. I just can’t.
But why? If you’re not busy that night, what’s the problem?
I’d rather not say.
Come on, Rhonda, that’s not fair. This is me, remember? Your old friend Archie.
You’re smart enough to figure it out for yourself.
No, I’m not. I can’t even begin to guess what you’re talking about.
Because you’re white, that’s why. Because you’re white, and I’m black.
Is that a reason?
I think it is.
I’m not asking you to marry me. I just want to go to a concert with you.
I know, and I appreciate your asking me, but I can’t.
Please tell me it’s because you don’t like me. That I can accept.
But I do like you, Archie. You know that. I’ve always liked you.
Do you realize what you’re saying?
Of course I do.
It’s the end of the world, Rhonda.
No, it’s not. It’s the beginning — the beginning of a new world — and you just have to accept it.
Whether it was the end of the world or the beginning of the world, Ferguson would never bring himself to accept it, and he walked away from that conversation feeling both sucker-punched and angry, appalled that such a conversation could still have been possible one hundred years after the end of the Civil War. He wanted to talk to someone about it, to pour out the thousand reasons why he was so upset by what had happened, but the only person he had ever been able to open up to about such things was Amy, and Amy was the one person he couldn’t talk to now, and as for his friends at school, there was no one he trusted deeply enough to confide in anymore, and even Bobby, who still rode to school with him every morning and continued to regard himself as Ferguson’s staunchest pal, wouldn’t have had much to contribute to a discussion of that sort, and besides, Bobby was having problems of his own just then, love problems of the most devastating adolescent variety, an unrequited crush on Margaret O’Mara, who herself had had a crush on Ferguson for the past six years, which was now causing no end of trouble and consternation for Ferguson, since immediately after his post-Thanksgiving talk with Amy he had toyed with the idea of asking Margaret out on a date, not that he had any burning desire to become entangled with Margaret, who was a dull, friendly girl with an uncommonly attractive face, but after Amy had declared her interest in kissing other boys Ferguson had wondered, not without some bitterness, whether he shouldn’t respond by going out to look for other girls to kiss, and Margaret O’Mara was a prime candidate because he felt almost certain she would want to be kissed by him, but then, just as he was preparing himself to call her, Bobby had confessed how enamored he was of the same Margaret O’Mara, who was the first monumental love of his life, but she seemed to have no interest in him, she barely even listened when he talked to her, and would Ferguson kindly intercede on his behalf and explain to Margaret what a good and worthy fellow he was (shades of Cyrano de Bergerac, a film that Ferguson and Margaret had seen together in their tenth-grade French class), and so when Ferguson went to Margaret and tried to put in a word for Bobby (instead of asking her out himself), she laughed at him and called him Cyrano. The laugh was the end of it — resulting in a double washout, failure on both fronts. Bobby was still pining for her, and even though Margaret would have leapt at the chance to go out with Ferguson, Ferguson had resolved not to ask her out because he couldn’t do that to his friend. Which led to no dates with anyone for the next two months, and then, when he did ask someone out, it was Rhonda Williams, who politely kicked him in the face and taught him that the America he wanted to live in didn’t exist — and probably never would.
Under different circumstances, he might have gone to his mother and talked out his frustrations with her, but he was feeling too old for that now, and he didn’t want to depress her with a long emotional rant about the bleak future he envisioned for the Republic. His parents’ future was already bleak enough, and with income dwindling from both Roseland Photo and Stanley’s TV & Radio, and with the supplemental fifteen thousand all but exhausted now, drastic changes were imminent, it was only a matter of time before the family would have to rethink how it lived and worked and perhaps even where it lived and where it worked. Ferguson felt especially sorry for his father, whose small retail business could no longer compete with the large discount stores that were popping up in towns such as Livingston, West Orange, and Short Hills, and why would anyone want to buy a television from Ferguson’s father when the same set could be found for forty percent less at E. J. Korvette’s just a few miles away? When Mike Antonelli was let go in the second week of January, Ferguson understood that the store was on its last legs, but still his father persisted in maintaining the old routine, arriving at nine sharp every morning to install himself at his workbench in the back room, where he continued to repair broken toasters and badly functioning vacuum cleaners, more and more reminding Ferguson of old Dr. Manette from A Tale of Two Cities, the half-deranged prisoner of the Bastille who sat at the bench in his cell cobbling shoes, year after year cobbling shoes, year after year fixing damaged household appliances, and more and more Ferguson came to acknowledge the incontestable fact that his father had never fully recovered from Arnold’s betrayal, that his faith in the family had been destroyed, and then, in the ruins of his crumbled certainties, the one person in the family he still loved had crashed her car into a tree and maimed his son for life, and even though he never talked about the accident, both Ferguson and his mother knew that he rarely stopped thinking about it.