You’re joking, of course, she said.
Why would I joke?
It’s just that … well, never mind, it’s not important.
Well?
Yes, I’m free. Both this Saturday afternoon and next Saturday afternoon.
Let’s say this Saturday.
All right, Archie, this Saturday.
He met her at Grand Central Station, and after not having seen her in the past two and a half months, he was encouraged by how pretty she looked, her smooth maple-syrup skin a shade darker from a summer’s worth of sun in New Rochelle, where she had worked as a junior counselor and swimming instructor at a day camp for small children, which made her teeth and the whites of her eyes shine with an enhanced clarity, and the simple white blouse and flowing azure skirt she had put on for the afternoon suited her well, he thought, as did the pinkish-red lipstick she was wearing, which added one more dab of color to the overall picture of whites and blues and browns, and because it was a warm day, she had put up her dark, shoulder-length hair in a dancer’s knot, which exposed the back of her long, graceful neck, and so impressed was Ferguson by that overall picture as she walked toward him and shook his hand, he had to remind himself that she was still too young for him, that this was nothing more than a friendly get-together, and that beyond their initial handshake and the one they would give each other at the end of the day, he must not, under any circumstances, even think of putting a hand on her.
Here I am, she said. Now tell me why I’m here.
As they walked uptown from East Forty-second Street toward the block between Sixth and Seventh Avenues on West Fifty-seventh, Ferguson tried to explain what had prompted him to call her out of the blue, but Celia was skeptical, unconvinced by the stories he told about why he had wanted to see her, shaking her head when he came out with nonsense such as, I’m going off to college soon, and there won’t be many chances to see each other this fall, to which she replied, Since when has seeing me ever been important to you? such as, We’re friends, aren’t we, isn’t that enough? to which she replied, Are we friends? You and my parents are friends, maybe, or sort of friends, but you’ve spoken a grand total of about one hundred words to me in the past four years, and why would you want to hang out with a person you barely even know is alive?
The girl had spirit, Ferguson said to himself, that much was clear, and that much was settled. She had evolved into a proud, smart girl who wasn’t afraid to speak her mind, but with that newfound assertiveness she had also acquired a talent for asking questions that had no answers, at least none he could give her without sounding like a crazy person. No matter what, he would have to keep Artie out of the discussion, but now that she had challenged his motives, he understood that he would have to give her better answers than the lame ones he had given so far, truthful answers, the whole truth about all things and every thing except her brother, and so he started again by saying that he had called her the other night because he had honestly wanted to see her, which was in fact the case, and the reason why he had wanted to see her alone was because he felt it was time they established their own one-on-one friendship, independent of her parents and the house in New Rochelle. Still reluctant to accept any of his statements as even remotely or possibly true, Celia asked him why he would bother, why he would want to spend a moment of his time with her, a mere high school girl, when he was already on his way to Princeton, and again Ferguson gave her a simple, truthful answer: Because she was a big person now, he said, and everything was different and would go on being different from now on. She had fallen into the erroneous habit of looking up to him as a much older person, but the calendar said they were only two years apart, and before long those two years would cease to count for anything and they would be the same age. To give her an example, Ferguson started talking about his stepbrother Jim, who was a full four years older than he was and yet one of his closest friends, someone who regarded him as an absolute equal, and now that Jim had flunked his army physical because of a falsely diagnosed heart murmur and had chosen to do his graduate work at Princeton, which would put them on the same campus at the same time — what luck that was — they were planning to see each other as often as they could and were even mapping out a trip together for sometime in the spring or early summer — going from Princeton to Cape Cod on foot, all the way to the northernmost tip of the cape without once stepping into a car or a train or a bus or, perish the thought, mounting a bicycle.
Celia was beginning to relent, but still she said: Jim’s your brother. That makes it different.
My stepbrother, Ferguson said. And only for the past two years.
All right, Archie, I believe you. But if you want to be my friend now, you’ll have to stop acting like my big brother, my pretend big brother. Do you understand?
Of course I do.
No more fake-brother stuff, and no more Artie stuff, because I don’t like it and never have. It’s sick and stupid and doesn’t do either one of us any good.
Agreed, Ferguson said. No more of that. Ever.
They had just turned west off Madison Avenue and were beginning to walk down Fifty-seventh Street. After fifteen blocks of doubt, perplexity, and contentious wrangling, a cease-fire had been declared, and Celia was smiling now, Celia was listening to Ferguson’s questions and telling him that of course she knew what an automat was, and of course she had heard of Horn & Hardart, but no, she admitted, as far as she could remember she had never set foot in the place, not even as a little girl. Then she asked: What is it like, and why are we going there?
You’ll see, Ferguson said.
He was willing to give her every benefit of the doubt now because he wanted her to pass the test, even to the point of bending the rules and allowing indifference to count as much as all-out, passionate enthusiasm. Only antipathy or scorn would disqualify her, he said to himself, something equivalent to the disgust he had seen in Linda Flagg’s eyes when she looked over and saw the three-hundred-pound black woman muttering to herself about the dead baby Jesus, but then, before he could take that thought any further, they had already come to the automat and were walking into that nutty glitter-box of chrome and glass, and the first words that came out of Celia’s mouth put an end to his worries before they even had a chance to turn their dollars into nickels. Holy moly, she said. What a weird and nifty place.
They sat down with their sandwiches and talked, for the most part about the summer, which in Ferguson’s case had been spent moving furniture with Richard Brinkerstaff, traveling to cemeteries to bury his grandmother and Jim and Amy’s grandfather, and writing his little saga, Mulligan’s Travels, which was going to have twenty-four parts in all, he said, each one about five or six pages long, each one an account of a voyage to another imaginary country, Mulligan’s anthropological reports for the American Society of Displaced Souls, and with twelve of those pieces now written, he was hoping the work at college wouldn’t be too crushing for him to go on with it after he moved to Princeton. As for Celia, not only had she been splashing around in pools with children during the day, she had been taking night classes at the College of New Rochelle in trigonometry and French, and now that she had earned those additional credits, she would be able to finish high school after her junior year by taking one extra course a semester, which would mean she could start college next fall, and when Ferguson asked her Why the big rush? she told him she was fed up living in that dinky suburban town and wanted to get out and move to New York, either Barnard or NYU, she didn’t care which one, and as Ferguson listened to her enumerate the motives behind her early jailbreak, he had the sudden, vertiginous feeling that he was listening to himself, for what she was saying and thinking about her life sounded almost identical to what he had been saying and thinking for years.