Within a year and a half of his mother’s marriage to Gil, Ferguson had gathered enough information about the Schneidermans to have reached some definitive conclusions about his new family. In the left-hand column of his mental ledger he placed the names of three duds and one semi-dud: the unmentionable uglies (2), the demented patriarch (1), and the well-meaning but inconstant and overwrought Aunt Liz (½). In the right-hand column were the names of the four others: admirable Gil, amiable Dan, ardent Jim, and increasingly attractive Amy. In sum, he counted three and a half negatives as opposed to four positives, which mathematically proved that there was more to be thankful for than to grumble about, and with the Adlers all but gone from the land of the living and the Fergusons entirely absent now (Uncle Lew in prison, Aunt Millie somewhere in Florida, Uncle Arnold and Aunt Joan in Los Angeles, cousin Francie in Santa Barbara — married, the mother of two kids — and his other cousins scattered across the country and no longer in touch), the four good Schneidermans were essentially all Ferguson had left, and because one of those Schneidermans was married to his mother and the other three lived just minutes away on the same Riverside Drive where he lived, Ferguson grew ever more attached to them, for the positives in his family ledger were far more positive than the negatives were negative, and even though his life had been diminished in some ways, it had been greatly enhanced in others.
Amy was the Schneiderman bonus, the birthday present hidden under a pile of bunched-up wrapping paper that doesn’t get found until after the party is over and all the guests have gone home. It was Ferguson’s fault for not paying more attention to her, but there had been so many things to adjust to in the beginning, and he hadn’t known what to make of the gawky, grinning creature who waggled and flung out her arms when she talked and couldn’t seem to sit still, such an odd-looking girl with those braces on her teeth and that head of tangled, dirty-blond hair, but then the braces came off, her hair was cut into a short bob, and by the time Ferguson turned thirteen he noticed that breasts were beginning to grow inside Amy’s formerly useless training bra and that his already thirteen-year-old stepcousin no longer resembled the girl she had been at twelve. A week after the move from Central Park West to Riverside Drive, she called him up after school one day and boldly announced that she was coming over for a visit. When he asked her why she wanted to see him, she said: Because we’ve known each other for six months, and in all that time you haven’t said more than three words to me. We’re supposed to be cousins now, Archie, and I want to find out if it’s worth the trouble to be friends with you or not.
His mother and stepfather were both out that afternoon, and with no snack material in the cupboard beyond a half-eaten box of stale Fig Newtons, Ferguson felt at a loss, uncertain how he should handle this abrupt intrusion. After Amy hung up the phone in her apartment, it took just eighteen minutes before she was pushing the downstairs buzzer of his apartment, but in that interval Ferguson toyed with and discarded at least half a dozen ideas about what he could do to entertain her (watch television? look at family photo albums? show her the complete thirty-seven-volume set of Shakespeare plays and poems Gil had given to him for his birthday?), then decided to haul out the movie projector and portable screen from the utility closet and set them up for a viewing of one of his Laurel and Hardy films, which was probably a terrible mistake, he realized, since girls didn’t like Laurel and Hardy, at least none of the girls he had ever known, starting with the beautiful Isabel Kraft two or three years earlier, who had made a face when he asked her what she thought of them, a sentiment that had been echoed just recently by his current number one, Rachel Minetta, who had called them juvenile and idiotic, but then in walked Amy on that cool afternoon in March 1960, dressed in a white sweater, a gray pleated skirt, saddle shoes, and white cotton socks — the ubiquitous bobby socks of the moment — and when Ferguson announced his intention to show her Blotto, a Laurel and Hardy two-reeler from 1930, she smiled and said: Great. I love Laurel and Hardy. After the Marx Brothers, they’re the best team ever. Forget the Three Stooges, forget Abbott and Costello — Stan and Ollie are the cheese.
No, Amy wasn’t like any of the other girls he knew, and as Ferguson watched her laughing at the film, heard her laughing at the film for a good fourteen of the twenty-six minutes it lasted, he concluded that it would indeed be worth the trouble to try to become friends with her, for her laugh wasn’t the squealing, out-of-control noise of a child, he noted, but a succession of gut-deep, resonant guffaws — merry yaps, to be sure, but at the same time thoughtful, as if she understood why she was laughing, which made her laugh an intelligent laugh, a laugh that laughed at itself even as it laughed at what it was laughing at. Too bad that she went to public school and not the Riverside Academy, which eliminated the possibility of daily contact, but in spite of their involvement with their separate friends, and in spite of their various after-school activities (piano and dance lessons for Amy, sports for Ferguson), they managed to get together once every ten days or so following Amy’s impromptu visit in March, which worked out to three or four times a month, not counting the additional times when they saw each other for joint family outings, holiday dinners, trips to Carnegie Hall with Gil, and special events (Jim’s high school graduation party, the old buzzard’s eightieth birthday bash), but for the most part they saw each other alone, walking through Riverside Park when the weather was good, sitting in one of their two apartments when it was bad, occasionally going to the movies together or working on school assignments at the same table together or hanging around together in one of their apartments on Friday night to watch the new television program they were both so keen on (The Twilight Zone), but mostly when they were together they talked, or Amy talked and Ferguson listened, for no one he knew had more to say about the world than Amy Schneiderman, who seemed to have an opinion on every subject and knew so much more than he did about nearly everything. Brilliant, obstreperous Amy, who teased her father and joked with her brother and warded off her mother’s perpetual fussing with acerbic, know-it-all put-downs that she somehow managed to get away with without being scolded or punished, most likely because she was a girl who spoke her mind and had trained the people in her family to respect her for that, and not even Ferguson, who had rapidly become her new ace copain, was altogether immune from her insults and criticisms. No matter how vociferously she claimed to like him and admire him, she often found him lazy in the head and was continually appalled by his lack of interest in politics, by how little thought he was giving to Kennedy’s presidential campaign and the civil rights movement, but Ferguson couldn’t be bothered, he said, he hoped Kennedy would win, but even if he did become president, things wouldn’t get any better than they were now, they just wouldn’t get a whole lot worse, and as for the civil rights movement, of course he was in favor of it, how could anyone be against justice and equality for all, but he was only thirteen years old, for heaven’s sake, no more than an insignificant speck of dust, and what the hell could a speck do about changing the world?