In the meantime, he had his eye on Gloria Dolan, who was prettier than Susie Krauss but not as exciting to be with, a gentle, plodding soul when compared to the sprinting, spitfire Susie, and yet Ferguson had his eye on her because he had discovered that Gloria had her eye on him, quite literally she was looking at him when she thought he wasn’t looking at her, and how many times in the past month had he caught her staring at him in class, sitting at her desk as Mr. Blasi turned his back to the students and worked out another math problem on the blackboard, no longer paying attention to the white chalk numerals but studying Ferguson instead, as if Ferguson had become a subject of intense interest to her, and now that Ferguson had become aware of that interest, he too began turning his head away from the blackboard to look at her, and more and more often now their eyes would meet, and every time that happened they would smile at each other. At that point in his journey through life, Ferguson was still waiting for his first kiss, his first kiss from a girl, a true kiss as opposed to the fraudulent kisses from mothers, grandmothers, and female first cousins, an ardent kiss, an erotic kiss, a kiss that would go beyond the mere pressing of lips upon lips and send him flying into hitherto unexplored territory. He was ready for that kiss, he had been thinking about it since before his birthday, in the past few months he and Howard Small had discussed the matter repeatedly and at length, and now that he and Gloria Dolan were exchanging secret smiles in class, Ferguson decided that Gloria should be the first one, for every signal pointed to the inevitability of her being the first one, and so it was, on a Friday night at the end of April, during the course of a gathering at Peggy Goldstein’s house on Merrywood Drive, that Ferguson took Gloria into the backyard and kissed her, and because she kissed him back, they went on kissing for a good long while, far longer than he had imagined they would, perhaps ten or twelve minutes, and when Gloria slipped her tongue into his mouth after the fourth or fifth minute, everything suddenly changed, and Ferguson understood that he was living in a new world and would never set foot in the old one again.
BEYOND THOSE LIFE-ALTERING kisses with Gloria Dolan, the other good thing about that dismal year was his deepening friendship with the new boy, Howard Small. It helped that Howard had come from somewhere else, that he had entered the scene on the first fateful morning of the new school year without prejudices or preconceptions about who was who or who was supposed to be what, that he had bought the third issue of the Cobble Road Crusader within minutes of reaching the playground and was happily scanning its contents when he saw the boy who had just sold it to him being attacked by Timmerman and the others, and because he was a person who knew right from wrong, he immediately took Ferguson’s side and then stuck with Ferguson from that day forward, and because he too occasionally came under attack for the crime of being Ferguson’s friend, the two boys grew close, since each would have been entirely alone if not for the existence of the other. Sixth-grade pariahs — and therefore friends, within a month the best of friends.
Howard, not Howie, emphatically not Howie. Small by name but not in size, just a fraction of an inch shorter than Ferguson and already beginning to fill out, no longer a scrawny child but an ever more robust preteen, solid and strong, physically unafraid, a kamikaze sportsman who compensated for his mediocre abilities with relentless enthusiasm and effort. Wit and kindness, a fast learner with a talent for performing well under pressure, surpassing even Timmerman in one hundred percent test scores, a reader of books, as Ferguson was, a developing student of politics, as Ferguson was, and a boy with a wondrous gift for drawing. The pencil he carried around in his pocket churned out landscapes, portraits, and still lifes of near-photographic precision, but also cartoons and comics, which largely derived their humor from unlikely puns, words yanked out of their familiar roles because their sounds were congruent with the sounds of other, unrelated words, such as the drawing entitled He Flies Through the Air with the Greatest of Ease, which showed a boy propelling himself across the sky with a large capital E in his outstretched hands, while other boys in the background struggled along with diminutive lowercase e’s, or else Ferguson’s favorite, the one in which Howard turned the word toiletries into a new form of vegetation, a drawing that bore the title Pinsky’s Fruit Farm, with a row of cherry trees on top, neatly labeled Cherry Trees, and a row of orange trees in the middle, neatly labeled Orange Trees, and a row of toilet trees on the bottom, neatly labeled Toilet Trees. What a fine and funny idea, Ferguson thought, and what a good ear to have broken apart the original word and changed it into two words, but even more than the ear it was the eye that counted, the eye in conjunction with the hand, since the result wouldn’t have been half as effective if the toilets hanging from the branches hadn’t been drawn so well, for Howard’s toilets were nothing less than sublime, the most faithful and accurately rendered toilets Ferguson had ever seen.
Howard’s father was a math professor who had moved the Smalls to New Jersey because he had been offered a new post as dean of students at Montclair State Teachers College. Howard’s mother worked as an editor for a women’s magazine called Hearth & Home, which meant that she commuted to New York five days a week and seldom returned to West Orange before nightfall, and because Howard had a twenty-year-old brother and an eighteen-year-old sister (who were both off at college), his circumstances were remarkably similar to Ferguson’s — a de facto only child who mostly came home to an empty house after school. Few suburban women had jobs in 1959, but Ferguson and his friend both had mothers who were more than just housewives, and consequently they had been forced to become more independent and self-reliant than the bulk of their classmates, and now that they were twelve and careening toward the gate of adolescence, the fact that they had large swaths of unsupervised time to themselves was proving to be an advantage, since at that stage of life parents were surely the least interesting people in the world, and the less one had to do with them the better. They could therefore go to Ferguson’s house after school and turn on the television to watch American Bandstand or Million Dollar Movie without fear of being reprimanded for squandering the last precious hours of daylight by sitting indoors on such a beautiful afternoon. Twice that spring they even managed to talk Gloria Dolan and Peggy Goldstein into going back to the house with them for four-person dance parties in the living room, and because Ferguson and Gloria were old hands at kissing by then, their example inspired Howard and Peggy to attempt their own initiation into the complex art of tongue-bussing. On other afternoons, they would go to the Smalls’ place instead, secure in the knowledge that they would not be interrupted or spied upon as they opened the bottom drawer of Howard’s brother’s desk and pulled out the pile of girlie magazines he kept stashed in there under the innocuous decoy of a high school chemistry book. Long conversations would follow about which naked woman had the prettiest face or the most attractive body, comparisons would be made between the models in Playboy and the ones in Gent and Swank, the slick, well-lit color photos of the quasi-unreal-looking Playboy women as opposed to the cruder, grainier images in the cheaper magazines, the glossified all-American young beauties and the older, more lascivious tramps with their harsh faces and bleached-blond hair, the point of the discussion always being which one was the most arousing to you and which woman would you most like to make love to when your body was ready to engage in real sex, something that for the moment was still not possible for either one of them, but it wouldn’t be long now, maybe another six months, maybe a year, and finally they would go to sleep one night and wake up the next morning to discover they were men.