No excuses, Amy said. You’re not going to be thirteen forever — and then what happens to you? You can’t spend your life thinking only about yourself, Archie. You have to let something in, or else you’ll turn into one of those hollowed-out people you hate so much — you know, one of the walking dead from Zombieville, U.S.A.
We shall overcome, Ferguson said.
No, my funny little speck-man. You shall overcome.
It was odd being so close to a girl, Ferguson discovered, especially a girl he had no desire to kiss, which was an unprecedented form of friendship in his experience, as intense as any friendship he had ever had with a boy and yet, in that Amy was a girl, there was a different tonality to their interactions, a girl-boy buzz just below the surface that was nevertheless unlike the buzz he felt with Rachel Minetta, or Alice Abrams, or any of the other girls he had crushes on and kissed when he was thirteen, a loud buzz as opposed to the soft buzz he felt with Amy, since she was supposed to be his cousin, a member of his own family, which meant he had no right to kiss her or even think about kissing her, and so great was the interdiction that it never once crossed Ferguson’s mind to go against it, knowing that such an act would have been highly improper, if not deeply shocking, and even though Amy was becoming more and more attractive to him as he watched her body unfurl into the high bloom of her early adolescent womanhood, not pretty in the way Isabel Kraft was pretty, perhaps, but arresting, alive in her eyes as no girl had ever been for him, Ferguson continued to resist the urge to break the code of family honor. Then they turned fourteen, first Amy in December, followed by Ferguson in March, and suddenly he found himself inhabiting a new body that was no longer under his control, a body that produced unbidden erections and much shortness of breath, the early masturbation phase in which no thought that wasn’t an erotic thought could fit inside his skull, the delirium of becoming a man without the privileges of being a man, turmoil, consternation, relentless chaos within, and whenever he looked at Amy now his first and only thought was how much he wanted to kiss her, which he sensed was beginning to be true for her whenever she looked at him. One Friday evening in April, with Gil and his mother off at some dinner party downtown, he and Amy sat alone in the seventh-floor apartment discussing the term kissing cousins, which Ferguson admitted he didn’t fully understand, since it seemed to conjure up an image of cousins politely kissing each other on the cheek, which didn’t seem right, somehow, since that kind of kissing didn’t qualify as genuine kissing, and therefore why kissing cousins when the people in his head were just normal cousins, at which point Amy laughed and said, No, silly, this is what kissing cousins means, and without saying another word she leaned toward Ferguson on the sofa, put her arms around him, and planted a kiss on his mouth, which soon became a kiss that was traveling into his mouth, and from that moment on Ferguson decided they weren’t really cousins, after all.
2.4
Amy Schneiderman had been sleeping in his old bedroom for the past four years, Noah Marx had vanished for a time and then resurfaced, and the thirteen-year-old Ferguson, who had just entered the eighth grade, wanted out. Since he wasn’t in a position to run away from home (where would he have gone, and how could he have lived without money?), he asked his parents for the next best thing: Would they please ship him off to a boarding school the following September and allow him to spend his four years of high school in a place far from the town of Maplewood, New Jersey.
He wouldn’t have asked unless he had known they could afford the expense, but life on a grander scale had continued to flourish at ever more exalted heights since the family moved into the new house in 1956. Two more stores had been added to his father’s growing empire (one in Short Hills, the other in Parsippany), and with local consumers now splurging on two and three television sets per household, with dishwashers, washing machines, and clothes dryers now considered standard equipment in every middle-class home, with half the population sinking money into voluminous deep-freeze receptacles to store the frozen foods they now preferred to eat, Ferguson’s father had become a wealthy man — not yet a Rockefeller, perhaps, but a king of suburban retail, the renowned prophet of profits whose low prices had killed off the competition in seven counties.
The spoils from this expanding income now included a pistachio-green four-door Eldorado for Ferguson’s father, a snappy red Pontiac convertible for his mother, membership at the Blue Valley Country Club, and the demise of Roseland Photo, which marked the end of his mother’s brief career as independent breadwinner and artist (the fad for painted-over photographs had run its course, the studio was just barely breaking even, so why bother to go on when sales at the five stores were stronger than they had ever been?), and with all this getting and spending, all this jitterbugging opulence, Ferguson failed to see how boarding school could possibly be a burden to them. And if they happened to object to his plan (meaning if his father happened to object, since he had the last word on all matters concerning money), Ferguson would counter by offering to give up Camp Paradise and work summer jobs instead, which would help reduce their share of the costs.
He had been researching the matter for several months, he told them, and the best schools seemed to be in New England, mostly in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, but also in Vermont and Connecticut, with some good ones in upstate New York and Pennsylvania, and even a couple in New Jersey. It was only September, he realized, twelve whole months before the start of the next school year, but applications had to be sent in by mid-January, and unless they began narrowing the list of potential schools now, there wouldn’t be enough time to make an informed decision.
Ferguson could hear his voice trembling as he spoke to them, he and his smug, unknowable parents sitting around the dining room table on a Tuesday night during the fall of the Kennedy-Nixon campaign, a family dinner for once, something that happened less and less often now because of the late closings of the stores and his mother’s newfound passion for bridge, which kept her out of the house two and three nights a week, and there they were in the dining room as Angie Bly shuttled back and forth between the kitchen and the table, bringing in the dishes for each new course and removing the ones from the old, vegetable soup to begin with, followed by thick slices of roast beef with mashed potatoes and a mound of buttery string beans, such excellent food cooked by the brusque and capable Angie Bly, who had been cleaning house and cooking meals for them five days a week for the past four years, and now that Ferguson had swallowed his last morsel of roast beef, he finally spoke up, finally found the courage to talk about the thing that had been burning inside him for months.