It would have been different if Amy had loved him in the way he had come to love her, if they had taken advantage of their new circumstances to indulge in various sorts of carnal mischief, impromptu hanky-panky sessions when their parents’ backs were turned, secret lust frolics and midnight assignations in either one of their adjacent bedrooms, culminating in the mutual sacrifice of their two virginities to the cause of love and greater mental health, but Amy wasn’t interested, she really and truly just wanted to be his sister, and the sex-mad Ferguson, whose primary goal in life was to stick his penis into a naked girl’s body and put his virginhood behind him forever, had to go along with it or else explode from the continual agitation of wanting what he couldn’t have, for thwarted desire was a poison that seeped into every part of you, and once your veins and inner organs were fully saturated with the stuff, it traveled upward toward your brain and burst right through the top of your skull.
The early weeks in the new house were the most difficult for him. Not only did he have to suppress the urge to grab hold of Amy and smear her face with kisses every time they were alone together, and not only did he have to tamp down the nighttime erection reveries of slipping into bed with her in the room next door, but there were numerous practical adjustments that had to be made as well, which largely revolved around the question of how not to infringe on each other’s privacy, and until they established a set of hard-and-fast rules about how to coexist in the spaces they shared (knock first, tidy up the bathroom before leaving it, wash your own dishes, don’t crib the other’s homework unless the answer is freely given to you, and no snooping in the other’s room, which meant that Ferguson couldn’t peek at Amy’s diary and Amy couldn’t peek at Ferguson’s work notebooks and stories), there were several awkward moments and a couple of downright embarrassments, as when Amy opened the bathroom door and saw the freshly showered Ferguson sitting naked on the toilet jerking off—I didn’t see that! she yelped, as she slammed the door shut — or when Ferguson popped out of his room at the precise instant Amy was walking down the hall trying to adjust the towel that was wrapped around her body, and when the towel suddenly fell off, unveiling the whiteness of her bare skin to the startled Ferguson, who was looking at the small-nippled breasts and curly brown pubes of his stepsister for the first time, Amy let out a loud Fuck!, which Ferguson answered with an almost witty retort—I always suspected you had a body, he said. Now I’m sure of it—and Amy laughed, then raised her arms in a mock-cheesecake pose, and said, Now we’re even, Mr. Dick, which referred not only to the funny character in their beloved David Copperfield but to what she had seen in the bathroom several days earlier.
It was true that Ferguson had a girlfriend, but it was also true that he would have dropped her in an instant if Amy’s Barkis had been willing, but it wasn’t, and now that Ferguson had seen the body that would never be given to him, he no longer had to torture himself with trying to imagine what it looked like, and that was a small step forward, he felt, a way to begin curing himself of an unhealthy obsession that would never take him anywhere except into the Bottomless Well of Eternal Sadness, and by way of recompense he tried to fix his thoughts on his girlfriend’s body, which he had seen naked only from the waist up so far, but their explorations were becoming bolder and more reckless now that they had been reunited at the start of their junior year, which meant there was cause for hope, and after a rough summer of not knowing where he stood with Amy or how he should act with her, Ferguson decided to capitulate, to burn his arsenal of weapons and sign a mental treaty of absolute surrender, and from that moment on he began to settle into his new job of acting as a brother to Amy’s sister, knowing that was the only way he could go on loving her and still be loved in return.
Sometimes they fought, sometimes Amy shouted and slammed doors and called him names, sometimes Ferguson hid in his room and refused to talk to her for entire evenings, entire blocks of ten or twelve uninterrupted hours, but mostly they made an effort to get along, and mostly they did get along. In effect, their friendship returned to what it had been before Ferguson got it into his head that they should be more than just friends, but there was an added intensity to the friendship now that they were living with their newly married parents in the house on Woodhall Crescent, with longer, more intimate conversations that sometimes lasted three or four hours and at some point always managed to come around to Amy’s mother’s death and Artie Federman’s death, with more hours of studying and preparing for tests together (which pushed Ferguson’s grades up from B+’s and occasional A−’s to Amy’s level of all A’s and A−’s), more cigarettes smoked together, more alcohol drunk together (almost all of it beer, cheap Rolling Rock in long green bottles or even cheaper Old Milwaukee in the stumpy brown ones), more old movies watched on TV together, more records listened to together, more games of gin rummy played together, more trips to New York together, more joking, more teasing, more arguing about politics, more laughing, and no more inhibitions about picking noses and farting in each other’s company.
THE SCHOOL HAD more than twenty-one hundred students, just over seven hundred per grade, and in that factory of secondary public education that served the towns of Maplewood and South Orange, there was a mix of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, a largely middle-class population with a chunk from the blue-collar laboring class and another chunk from the upper strata of white-collar wealth, boys and girls whose families had come to America from England, Scotland, Italy, Ireland, Poland, Russia, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Greece, and Hungary, but not a single Asian family and only twenty-four students of color in the entire school, making it one of the many one-color high schools in Essex County, and even at that late date, nineteen and twenty years after the liberation of the death camps at the end of the Second World War, traces of anti-Semitism lingered on in the two towns, mostly in the form of whispers, silences, and unwritten exclusions at places such as the Orange Lawn Tennis Club, but sometimes it was worse than that, and neither Ferguson nor Amy ever forgot the cross that was burned on the front lawn of one of their Jewish friends from Maplewood the year they turned ten.
More than two-thirds of the seven hundred — plus students in their class would go on to attend college, some at the best private colleges in the country, some at mediocre private colleges along the eastern seaboard, some at state-run colleges in New Jersey, and for the boys who didn’t attend college there was the army and Vietnam, and after that, if there was an after that, work as mechanics and gas pumpers at garages and filling stations, careers as bakers and long-distance truck drivers, fitful or steady employment as plumbers, electricians, and carpenters, twenty-year stints in the police department, the fire department, and the sanitation department, or else shooting for the jackpot in high-risk trades such as gambling, extortion, and armed robbery. For the girls who didn’t attend college, there was marriage and motherhood, secretarial school, nursing school, beautician school, dental technician school, work in offices, restaurants, and travel agencies, and the chance to spend the rest of their lives within ten miles of the town where they were born.