It’s going to be big, Archie, she said, bigger than Korea, bigger than anything since World War Two, and just be glad you won’t be part of it.
And why is that, Dr. Pangloss? Ferguson asked.
Because one-thumbed men don’t get drafted. Thank God.
3.2
3.3
Amy didn’t like him anymore, at least not in the way Ferguson wanted her to like him, and after the splendid days of last spring and summer when the kissing cousins had left behind their cousinhood for a stab at true love, they were back to being just plain cousins. Amy was the one who had called off the romance, and there was nothing Ferguson could do to change her mind, for once a Schneiderman mind was made up, it was unbudgeable. Her chief complaints about Ferguson were that he was too self-involved, too pushy with his embraces (the persistent assaults on her breasts, which she wasn’t ready to bare to him at age fourteen), too passive in all other matters not related to her breasts, too immature, too lacking in a social conscience for them to have anything meaningful to talk about. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel a great and enduring fondness for him, she said, or that she didn’t enjoy having the movie-crazed, basketball-playing, lazy-boned Ferguson as a member of her newly expanded family, but as a boyfriend he was hopeless.
The fling ended a couple of weeks before the end of the summer (1961), and when school started again after Labor Day, Ferguson felt bereft. Not only would there be no more kissing rampages with Amy, but their pre-fling camaraderie had been smashed as well. No more visits to each other’s apartments to do homework together, no more Twilight Zone episodes on TV, no more games of gin rummy, no more listening to records, no more outings to the movies, no more walks in Riverside Park. He still saw her at family gatherings, which tended to occur two or three times a month, the dinners and Sunday brunches at the two Schneiderman apartments, the excursions to the Szechuan Palace on Broadway and the Stage Deli on Seventh Avenue, but he found it painful to look at her now, painful to be near her after being cast aside, rejected because he didn’t measure up to her standards of what constituted a worthy, dependable human being, and instead of sitting next to her at those meals as he always had in the past, he now positioned himself at the other end of the table and tried to act as if she wasn’t there. In the last week of September, midway through a dinner at Uncle Dan and Aunt Liz’s place, with the old goat blathering on about the poisonous radium the East Germans had planted in the Berlin Wall, Ferguson stood up in disgust, mumbled an excuse about having to visit the bathroom, and left the table. He did go into the bathroom, but only to hide from the others, since it was all getting to be too much for him, the obligation to maintain a mask of politeness in front of Amy at these family events, the still fresh wound reopening each time he saw her again, not knowing what to do or say in her presence anymore, and so he ran the water in the sink and flushed the toilet a couple of times to make the others believe he had gone in there to empty his bowels rather than to indulge in the miserable pleasure of feeling sorry for himself. When he opened the door three or four minutes later, Amy was standing in the hall with her hands on her hips, a defiant, combative posture that seemed to demonstrate that she too had had enough.
What the hell is going on? she asked. You don’t look at me anymore. You don’t talk to me anymore. All you do is sulk, and it’s getting on my nerves.
Ferguson looked down at his feet and said: My heart is broken.
Come off it, Archie. You’re disappointed, that’s all. And I’m disappointed, too. But at least we can try to be friends. We’ve always been friends, haven’t we?
Ferguson still couldn’t bring himself to look her in the eyes. There’s no going back, he said. What’s done is done.
You’re joking, right? I mean, tough titties and all that, but nothing is done. Nothing has even started yet. We’re fourteen years old, schmuck-face.
Old enough to have our hearts broken.
Toughen up, Archie. You’re talking like a pathetic little child, and I hate that. I just hate that. We’re going to be cousins for a long, long time, and I need you to be my friend, so please don’t make me hate you.
Ferguson tried to toughen up. Hard as it was to listen to Amy tear into him with those scolding remarks, he understood that he had allowed his soft-minded, self-pitying impulses to get the better of him, and unless he put a stop to it, he would turn into Gregor Samsa and awake one morning from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic bug. He was in the ninth grade now, the first year of high school, and although his academic performance at the Riverside Academy had always been respectable, his marks had slipped a little in the seventh and eighth grades, perhaps from boredom, perhaps from an overreliance on his natural abilities to carry him through with less than an all-out effort, but the work was more demanding now, and it wouldn’t be possible to answer test questions about how to conjugate irregular French verbs in the passé simple or put dates on things such as the Defenestration of Prague and the Diet of Worms (the Diet of Worms!) if he didn’t put in the study time to master those abstruse particulars. Ferguson resolved to lift his grades to the highest level he could imagine for himself — nothing less than A’s in English, French, and history, and nothing less than B+’s in biology and math — a stringent but realistic plan of action, since striving for A’s in the last two subjects would have taken so much extra work that basketball would have been pushed out of the picture, and when tryouts began after the Thanksgiving break, he was determined to make the freshman team. He did make it (as a starting forward), and his course work met expectations as well, although not precisely in the way he had predicted, for the A in French wound up as a disappointing B+, and the B+ in biology evolved into a miraculous A−. But no matter. Ferguson made the honor roll for the first semester, and if Amy had been a student at the Riverside Academy, she would have known how well he had done. But she wasn’t, and therefore she didn’t, and because her angry, heartsick cousin was too proud to tell her that he had toughened up, she never knew how deeply she had shamed him into trying to prove her wrong about who he was.