Ferguson’s mother laughed, laughed hard and long at the memory of those words, but Ferguson only smiled, a weak excuse of a smile that quickly vanished from his face, for few things gave him less pleasure than hearing about the idiotic shenanigans of his early childhood. He said to his still laughing mother: You like to tease me, don’t you?
Only sometimes, she said. Not so often, Archie, but sometimes I just can’t resist.
An hour later, Ferguson went out into the yard with his book of the moment, Journey to the End of the Night, and sat down in one of the Adirondack chairs he and his father had repainted earlier in the summer, dark green, dark, dark green, but rather than open the book and learn more about Ferdinand’s adventures at the Ford Motor plant in Detroit, he just sat there and thought as he waited for the first guests to arrive, marveling at the fact that he had once romped on a bed with a naked girl, had once been naked himself as he romped with the naked girl, and how perfectly comical it was that he should have no memory of having done that, whereas now he would give almost anything to be with a naked girl, to be naked in bed with a naked girl was the single most important aspiration of his lonely, loveless life, not one kiss or embrace in more than five months, he said to himself, a full spring and almost an entire summer of mourning for the absent, half-naked Anne-Marie Dumartin, and now he was about to meet the unremembered naked girl from his distant past, Amy Schneiderman, who no doubt had developed into a normal, healthy girl, boring and predictable as most girls were, as most boys were, as most men and women were, but that couldn’t be helped, and given that he hadn’t even met her yet, he would just have to see what he would see.
What he saw that afternoon was the person who became the next one, the successor to the crown of his desires, a girl who was neither normal nor not normal but burning, unafraid, aware of the exceptional self she had been born with, and some weeks after their first encounter, as summer dissolved into autumn and the world around them suddenly turned dark, she became the first one as well, meaning that naked Amy Schneiderman and naked Archie Ferguson were no longer jumping on the bed but lying in the bed, rolling around under the covers, and for years after that she would continue to bring him the greatest joys and the greatest torments of his young life, to be the indispensable other who dwelled inside his skin.
But back to that Monday afternoon in September 1963, the Labor Day barbecue in the Fergusons’ backyard, and the first glimpse he had of her as she stepped out of her parents’ blue Chevrolet, the head of dirty blond hair emerging from the backseat, and then the surprising fact of how tall she was, at least five-eight, perhaps five-nine, a big girl with an impressively handsome face, not pretty or beautiful but handsome, solid nose, forthright chin, large eyes of still undetermined color, neither heavy nor slight of build, smallish breasts under a blue short-sleeved blouse, long legs, round ass encased in a pair of tight-fitting tan slacks, and an odd sort of galumphing walk, torso pitched forward ever so slightly, as if impatient to be barreling forward, a tomboy’s walk, he supposed, but fetching and unusual, signaling that she was someone to be reckoned with, a girl different from most sixteen-year-old girls because she carried herself without the slightest trace of self-consciousness. His mother presided over the introductions, a handshake with the mother (slightly tense, a brief smile), a handshake with the father (relaxed, amiable), and even before he shook hands with Amy, he could sense that Liz Schneiderman didn’t like his mother because she suspected her husband was half in love with her, which might have been true, considering the protracted hug of greeting Schneiderman gave the still beautiful forty-one-year-old Rose, and then Ferguson was shaking Amy’s hand, her long and remarkably slender hand, determining that her eyes were dark green with some flecks of brown in them, observing when she smiled that her teeth were a bit too big for her mouth, a fraction too big and therefore arresting, and then he heard her voice for the first time, Hello, Archie, and at that moment he knew, knew beyond any doubt that they were destined to be friends, which was a ridiculous assumption to make, of course, since how could he have known anything at that point, but there it was, a feeling, an intuition, a certainty that something important was happening and that he and Amy Schneiderman were about to set off on a long journey together.
Bobby George was there that day along with his brother, Carl, who was about to begin his sophomore year at Dartmouth, but Ferguson had no desire to talk to either one of them, not to the swift-thinking Carl nor to the bird-brained, ever-joking Bobby. What he wanted was to be with Amy, the only other young person at the party, and so within forty-five seconds of shaking her hand, as a strategy to avoid having to share her with the others, he invited her up to his room. It was a somewhat impetuous thing to do, perhaps, but she accepted with a willing nod of the head, saying Good idea, let’s go, and up they went to Ferguson’s second-floor refuge, which was no longer a shrine to Kennedy but a place crammed with books and records, so many books and records that the overcrowded shelves could no longer contain the collection, which was continuing to grow in piles stacked up against the wall nearest to the bed, and it pleased him to watch Amy nod again as she entered the room, as if telling him that she approved of what she saw, the scores of sanctified names and hallowed works, which she then proceeded to examine more closely, pointing to this one and saying, A hell of a good book, pointing to that one and saying, I still haven’t read it, pointing to a third and saying, Never heard of him, but before long she sat down on the floor at the foot of the bed, which prompted Ferguson to sit down on the floor as well, face to face with her from a distance of three feet, leaning his back against the drawers of his desk, and for the next hour and a half they talked, stopping only when someone knocked on the door and announced that food was being served in the backyard, which propelled them downstairs to join the others for a while as they ate hamburgers and drank forbidden beer in front of their parents, all four of whom failed to blink at this flouting of the law, and then Amy reached into her bag, pulled out a pack of Luckys, and lit up in front of her parents — who again failed to blink — explaining that she didn’t smoke much but loved the taste of tobacco after a meal, and once the meal and the cigarette had been taken care of, Ferguson and Amy excused themselves and took a slow walk around the neighborhood as the sun began to go down, eventually landing on a bench in the same small park where he had kissed Anne-Marie for the last time before she disappeared, and not long after Ferguson and Amy arranged to see each other again in New York on a Saturday later that month, they too began to kiss, an unplanned, spontaneous leap as one mouth latched onto the other, a delicious slobber of flailing tongues and clanking teeth, instant arousal in the rambunctious nether zones of their postpubescent bodies, kissing with such abandon that they might have eaten each other up if Amy hadn’t suddenly pulled away from him and started to laugh, a spurt of breathless, astonished laughter that soon had Ferguson laughing as well. Good grief, Archie, she said. If we don’t stop now, we’ll be ripping off our clothes in a couple of minutes. She stood up and extended her right arm to him. Come on, crazy man, let’s go back to the house.