2.1
For as long as he could remember, Ferguson had been looking at the drawing of the girl on the White Rock bottle. That was the brand of seltzer his mother bought on her twice-weekly trips to the A&P, and since his father was a firm believer in the virtues of seltzer water, there had always been a bottle of White Rock sitting on the table at dinner. Ferguson had therefore studied the girl hundreds of times, keeping the bottle near him in order to look at the black-and-white image of her half-naked body on the label, that enticing, serenely elegant girl with the small bare breasts and the white loincloth draped around her hips falling open to reveal the entire length of her right leg, the foregrounded leg that was curled under her as she leaned forward on her hands and knees and gazed into a pool of water from her perch on the jutting rock, which fittingly bore the words White Rock, and the curious, altogether unlikely thing about the girl was that two diaphanous wings were protruding from her back, which meant that she was more than human, a goddess or an enchanted being of some sort, and because her limbs were so slender and she gave the impression of being so small, she still qualified as a girl and not yet a full-grown woman, regardless of her breasts, which were the tiny, budding breasts of a twelve- or thirteen-year-old, and with her neatly pinned-up hair exposing the bare, luminous skin of her neck and shoulders, she was just the kind of girl a boy could entertain serious thoughts about, and when that boy turned a little older, say twelve or thirteen, the White Rock girl could easily evolve into a full-blown erotic charm, a summons to a world of fleshly passion and fully awakened desires, and once that happened to Ferguson, he made sure that his parents weren’t looking at him when he looked at the bottle.
There was also the kneeling Indian girl on the box of Land O’Lakes butter, the adolescent beauty with her long black braids and the two colorful feathers sticking out of her beaded headband, but the problem with this potential rival to the White Rock nymph was that she was fully clothed, which greatly lessened her allure, not to speak of the further problem of her elbows, which were thrust out stiffly from her sides because she was holding up a box of Land O’Lakes butter, identical to the one sitting in front of Ferguson, the same box but smaller, with the same picture of the Indian girl holding up another, smaller box of Land O’Lakes butter, which was an intriguing if perplexing notion, Ferguson felt, an infinite regress of ever-shrinking Indian girls holding up ever-shrinking boxes of butter, which was similar to the effect produced by the Quaker Oats box, with the smiling Quaker in the black hat receding to some distant vanishing point beyond the grasp of human vision, a world inside a world, which was inside another world, which was inside another world, which was inside another world, until the world had been reduced to the size of a single atom and yet was still somehow managing to grow smaller. Interesting in its way, but hardly the stuff to inspire dreams, so the Indian butter maiden continued to run a distant second to the White Rock princess. Not long after he turned twelve, however, Ferguson was let in on a secret. He had gone down the block to visit his friend Bobby George, and as the two boys sat in the kitchen eating tuna fish sandwiches, in walked Bobby’s fourteen-year-old brother, Carl, a tall, chunky fellow with a good head for math and a face spotted with pimples, who sometimes bullied his younger brother and sometimes talked to him as an almost-equal, but on that rainy Saturday afternoon in mid-March the unpredictable Carl was in a generous mood, and as the boys sat at the table chewing their sandwiches and drinking their milk, he told them that he had made an astonishing discovery. Without mentioning what the discovery was, he opened the refrigerator and pulled out a box of Land O’Lakes butter, extracted a pair of scissors and a roll of Scotch tape from a drawer by the sink, and then carried the three items over to the table. Look at this, he said, and the two boys watched as he cut apart the six-paneled box and set aside the two large panels with the picture of the Indian girl on them. He cut into one of the pictures, removing the girl’s knees and the bare skin just above the knees, which were sticking out from under the edge of her skirt, and then taped the knees over the butter box in the other picture, and lo and behold, the knees had been turned into breasts, a pair of large, naked breasts, each one with a red dot in the center of it that for all the world could have passed as a perfectly drawn nipple. The prim Lakota squaw had been transformed into a luscious sexpot, and as Carl grinned and Bobby squealed with laughter, Ferguson looked on without making a sound. What a clever bit of business, he thought. A few swipes from the scissors, a single strip of transparent tape, and the butter girl had been undressed.
There were photographs of naked women in National Geographic, a magazine Bobby’s parents subscribed to and for some reason never threw away, and every so often during the spring of 1959, Ferguson and Bobby would come home from school and head straight for the Georges’ garage, where they would comb through stacks of the yellow magazines searching for images of bare-breasted women, anthropological specimens from primitive tribes in Africa and South America, the black-skinned and brown-skinned women from warm-weather places who walked around with little or no clothing on their bodies and weren’t ashamed to be seen like that, who displayed their breasts with the same indifference an American woman would feel in exposing her hands or ears. The photographs were distinctly unerotic, and except for a rare young beauty who popped up in every seventh or tenth issue, most of the women were not attractive to Ferguson’s eyes, but still, it was exciting and instructive to look at those pictures, which if nothing else demonstrated the infinite variety of the female form, in particular the multitudinous differences to be found in the size and shape of breasts, from the large to the small and everything in between, from buoyant, surging breasts to flattened, sagging breasts, from proud breasts to defeated breasts, from symmetrical breasts to oddly matched breasts, from laughing breasts to crying breasts, from the thinned-out dugs of ancient crones to the bulging enormities of nursing mothers. Bobby snickered a lot during these foraging expeditions through the pages of National Geographic, laughing to cover up the embarrassment he felt for wanting to look at what he called dirty pictures, but Ferguson never thought of the pictures as dirty and never felt embarrassed by his desire to look at them. Breasts were important because they were the most prominent and visible feature that distinguished women from men, and women were a subject of great interest to him now, for even if he was still just a prepubescent boy of twelve, enough was stirring inside him for Ferguson to know that the days of his boyhood were numbered.
CIRCUMSTANCES HAD CHANGED. The warehouse robbery of November 1955, followed by the car crash of February 1956, had removed both of Ferguson’s uncles from the family circle. The disgraced Uncle Arnold now lived in far-off California, the deceased Uncle Lew had left this earth for good, and 3 Brothers Home World was no more. For the better part of a year, his father had struggled to keep the business going, but the police never managed to recover the stolen appliances, and because he had forfeited his claim to the insurance money by refusing to press charges against his brother, the losses incurred by this act of mercy were too great to be overcome. Rather than go further into debt, he paid off the emergency loan from the bank with help from Ferguson’s grandfather and sold out, unburdening himself of the building, the warehouse, and whatever stock remained, fleeing the ghosts of his brothers and the ruined enterprise that had been his life for more than twenty years. The building was still there, of course, standing in its old spot on Springfield Avenue, but now it was called Newman’s Discount Furniture.