The carbon copy of his story had been sent back by Noah as promised, and since it showed up in Maplewood before his father left for California, Ferguson had given it to him on the off chance that he might read it on the trip. His mother had read it weeks earlier, of course, on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, curled up on the couch in the living room with her shoes off and smoking half a pack of Chesterfields as she worked her way through the fifty-two typed pages, telling him afterward that she thought it was just wonderful, one of the best things I’ve ever read, which was to be expected, he supposed, since she would have delivered the same verdict if he had copied out last month’s shopping list and passed it off as an experimental poem, but far better to have your mother on your side than not, especially with a father who seemed to be on no side at all. Now that Sole Mates had passed through the hands of Aunt Mildred, Uncle Don, and Noah, he figured it was time to screw up his courage (a phrase he loved for its double, contradictory meanings) and show it to Amy Schneiderman, the one person in Maplewood whose opinion he could trust — and therefore the person he had been most terrified to approach, since Amy was too honest to pull any punches, and a punch from her would have flattened him.
In some ways, if not in many ways, Ferguson thought of Amy Schneiderman as a female version of Noah Marx. A more attractive version, to be sure, in that she was a girl and not a bug-eyed, muscleless boy, but she was smart in the way Noah was smart, the same kind of lit-up person he was, all ablaze and crackling with spirit, and over the years Ferguson had come to realize how much he depended on them both, as if the two of them were a pair of butterfly wings he wore on his back to keep himself aloft, he who could be so heavy at times, so earthbound, and yet, in the case of the more attractive Amy, the physical attraction was not so great as to plant any amorous thoughts in Ferguson’s head, and therefore she was still just a friend, albeit an essential friend, his most important comrade in the ever-expanding war against suburban dullness and mediocrity, and how fortunate it was that she, of all the people in the world, should be the one to occupy his old room, a narrative caprice in the story of their lives, perhaps, but it had formed a bond between them, a peculiar kind of closeness that they both took for granted now, for not only did Amy breathe the same air he had breathed in that house, she spent her nights in the same bed he had slept in when he lived there, a bed his mother had deemed too small for his room in the new house and had consequently given to Amy’s less than wealthy parents before they moved in. That was more than five years ago now, late summer 1956, and although Amy was supposed to have started the fifth grade in September, two days before the school year began she fell off a horse on a riding trail in the South Mountain Reservation and broke her hip, and by the time the injury healed, it was already the middle of October, and so her parents decided to have her repeat the fourth grade instead of plunging her into a new school six weeks behind the other children in her class. That was how she and Ferguson wound up in the same grade together, the two of them born just three months apart but destined to have slightly different trajectories in school, but then the broken hip intervened, and their trajectories became identical, beginning with that first year when they were fellow members of Miss Mancini’s fourth-grade class and continuing on through their last two years at Jefferson Elementary School and then all three years at Maplewood Junior High — always in the same classes together, always competing against each other, and because there had never been any romantic entanglements to divide them with the inevitable misunderstandings and hurt feelings that come with romance, always friends.
The morning after Ferguson’s father left for California, Sunday, December twenty-fourth, the day before the holiday neither one of their families celebrated, Ferguson called Amy at ten-thirty and asked if he could come over to her house. He had something to give her, he said, and if she wasn’t too busy, he would like to give it to her right away. No, she said, she wasn’t busy, just lounging around in her pajamas reading the paper, trying not to think about the essay they were supposed to be writing over winter vacation. It was a fifteen-minute walk from his house to her house, a trip he had made on foot many times in the past, but the weather was ugly that morning, a fine drizzle falling with the temperature at thirty-one or thirty-two degrees, snow weather without any snow, but foggy, windy, and wet, so Ferguson said he would ask his mother to drive him there. In that case, Amy said, why didn’t they both come for brunch? Jim had bagged out on them about ten minutes earlier and was still in New York with friends, but the food had been bought, there was enough to feed ten starving people, and it would be a pity to waste it. Just a minute, she said, as she put down the phone and yelled out to her parents, asking if Archie and Mrs. Ferguson could come over and share our grub with us (Amy had a weakness for quaint idioms), and twenty seconds later she picked up the phone again and said: It’s fine. Come between twelve-thirty and one.
Thus, the manuscript of Sole Mates was finally put in Amy’s hands, and as Ferguson sat in his old room with the girl who spent her nights sleeping in his old bed, the two of them talked while the adults prepared the meal in the kitchen directly below them, first of all about their current love dramas (Ferguson pining for a girl named Linda Flagg, who had turned him down when he’d asked her out to the movies on Friday, and Amy pinning her hopes on a boy named Roger Saslow, who had yet to call her but had hinted he would, assuming she had read the hint correctly), then about big brother Jim, an MIT freshman who had been one of the stalwarts of the Columbia High School basketball team in his junior and senior years, and how upset he was, Amy said, about Jack Molinas and the college point-shaving scandal, dozens of games fixed over the past few seasons by bribing players with a few hundred bucks while Molinas and his gambler pals cashed in big with tens of thousands a week. Everything in this country was fixed, Amy said. TV quiz shows, college basketball games, the stock market, political elections, but Jim was too pure to understand that. Maybe so, Ferguson said, but Jim was pure only because he saw the best in people, which was a good quality, he felt, one of the things he most admired about Amy’s brother, and no sooner did Ferguson say the word admire than the conversation shifted to another subject — the essays they had to write for the school-wide competition in January. The topic was The Person I Most Admire, and everyone had to participate, every seventh, eighth, and ninth grader, with prizes going to the best three essays in each of the three grades. Ferguson asked Amy if she had chosen anyone yet.
Of course I have. It’s getting late, you know. We have to hand them in on January third.
Don’t make me guess. I’m bound to get it wrong.
Emma Goldman.
The name rings a bell, but I don’t know much about her. Just about nothing, in fact.