“I guess Major Ray was right,” said Eleanor. “It wasn’t such a hot idea.” She cackled nervously, and it was a relief to Nathan to see that she also felt that something weird was happening — such a relief that he began to cry, although he hated crying more than anything else in the world.
“Oh, Jesus, does it hurt, honey?” Eleanor said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Does it hurt?”
This expression of concern made Nathan inordinately happy, and he tried to tell her it didn’t hurt a bit, but he was too miserable to speak. He was frightened by the zeal of his crying, but it felt too good to stop. So he covered his face and hee-hawed like a child.
Eleanor stopped ministering to his wasp stings and sat back on her heels, regarding Nathan. A different kind of concern entered her face, and all at once she looked very sad. “What’s the matter, Nathan?” she said.
But Nathan told no one, not even Edward, to whom he generally confided all his ludicrous amours. The two boys had supported and amused one another through a long series of fanciful loves, but until now the objects of their affections had always been unattainable, unlikely, and laughable: a prom queen, a postwoman, the earth-sciences teacher Miss Patocki, or the disturbing Sabina McFay, Edward’s nineteen-year-old neighbor, who was half Vietnamese and rode a motorcycle. Not so Eleanor Parnell; she was unattainable and farfetched, but she was not at all laughable, and Nathan said nothing to Edward about her.
When he learned, from his mother, that he had been invited to the Parnells’ Halloween party, he was flattered and struck with fear, and during the abject, optimistic weeks that followed he resolved to declare his feelings to Eleanor Parnell once and for all at this party. For ten days his head was filled with whispered, intricate repartee.
At dusk on Halloween, just as the youngest and most carefully chaperoned of the demons and nurses and mice were beginning to make their rounds, Nathan and Edward were standing in the living room of the Shapiros’ house, drawing pictures with colored pencils onto Mrs. Shapiro’s arms, back, and shoulders. Nathan’s mother sat on a horsehide ottoman, in blue fishnet tights, blue high-heeled shoes, and a strapless Popsicle-blue bathing suit, laughing and complaining that the boys were pressing too hard as they drew anchors, hearts, thunderbolts, and snakes across her skin. The boys dipped the tips of the pencils into a jar of water, which made the colors run rich. As the drawings began to predominate over unmarked patches of skin, Nathan put his crimson pencil down and stepped back, as if to admire their handiwork.
“I think that’s enough tattoos, Mom,” he said.
“Is that so?” said his mother.
“Personally,” said Edward, inspecting her, “I think a big, you know, triumphant eagle, with a javelin in its claw, right here under your neck, would look really cool, Mrs. Shapiro. Rose.”
“That sounds fine, Edward,” said Mrs. Shapiro.
Nathan looked at his friend, who began to paint a gray, screaming eagle. Nothing about his voice or studious little face indicated that he felt anything but the enthusiasm of art. As a matter of fact, his drawings were much better than Nathan’s — bold, well drafted, easily recognizable; the snakes Nathan had drawn looked kind of like sewing needles, or flattened teaspoons.
“If you think about it,” said Edward, in the careful but dazed way he had of propounding his many insights, “the symbol of our country is a really warlike symbol.”
“Hmm,” said Mrs. Shapiro. “Isn’t that interesting?”
When her costume was finally complete, and Nathan regarded her in all her fiery, gay motley, his heart sank, and he was seized with doubts about the costume he’d decided on. After much indecision and agonized debate with Edward, whose father was an avant-garde artist, Nathan had decided upon a conceptual Halloween costume. He had made a coat hanger into a wire ring that sat like a diadem on his brow, bent the end of it so that it would stand up over the back of his head, then made a small loop into which he could screw a light bulb. When he wore this contraption the light bulb seemed to hang suspended a few inches above him, and the wire was, in a dim room, practically invisible. He was going to the Parnells’ Halloween party, in Edward’s excited formulation, as a guy in the process of having a good idea for a costume.
The whole notion now struck Nathan as childish, and anemic, and it bothered him that the light bulb would never actually be lit up, and would just bob there, gray and dull, atop his head, as though he were really going to Eleanor’s party as a guy in the process of having a bad idea for a costume. The truth was that Nathan felt so keenly how plain, how squat and clumsy he had become — his belly had begun to strain against the ribbed elastic of his new gym shorts, and his mother had received his last school pictures with a fond, motherly, devastating sigh — that he regretted having passed up the opportunity of concealing himself, if only for one night, in the raiment of a robot or a king.
“Cool,” said Edward, standing up straight and blowing gently on the eagle tattoo.
Mrs. Shapiro rose from the Ottoman, went to the chrome mirror that had been one of his parents’ last joint purchases, and seemed greatly pleased by the apparition that she saw there. She hadn’t wanted them to illustrate her face, and now it rose pale and almost shockingly bare from her shoulders. “You did a great job,” she said. “I like the hula girl, Edward,” she added, looking down at her right biceps.
“Make a muscle,” he said. He went to the mirror and took hold of her right arm and wrist. Nathan followed.
“Flex your arm,” said Edward.
Mrs. Shapiro flexed her arm. Nathan leaned over his friend’s shoulder to watch the hula girl do a rudimentary bump and grind. He looked around for something to stand on, to get a better view, and his glance fell upon the matching chrome wastebasket, which stood beside the mirror, but when he balanced himself on its edge and peered down at the dancing tattoo the wastebasket immediately gave way. Nathan’s eyeglasses, which for weeks he’d been meaning to tighten, slipped from his face, and when he fell he landed on them with a gruesome crunch.
“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Shapiro. “Not again.”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” said Nathan.
“Are you all right? Did you hurt yourself?”
Edward, laughing, held out his hand to Nathan to pull him to his feet.
“You’re insane, Dr. Lester,” he said.
“You’re deranged, Madame LaFarge,” said Nathan, automatically. He looked at his friend and his tattooed mother gazing down upon him with a kind of mild, perfunctory concern. They turned to one another and laughed. A barrage of miniature-demon knocks rang out against the front door of the house. Nathan passed a hand before his eyes, blinked, and shook his head.
“I can see,” he said flatly.
After Edward went home, he and his mother sat down at the kitchen table that smelled of 409 and called Ricky in Boston, to find out how his trick-or-treating had gone and to tell him that Nathan could see without his glasses. This was a development that ophthalmologists had been calling for since Nathan was five and had donned his first little owlish pair of horn-rims. Though its coming to pass was certainly something of a shock, it did not surprise him, especially now, when the behavior of his body was so continually shocking, and when so many of the ancient fixtures of his life — his slight form, his smooth face, his father and brother — were vanishing one by one.
Anne, his stepmother, answered the phone but went immediately to find Ricky, as she always did, and it occurred to Nathan for the first time that he was never particularly kind to her. He looked at the receiver, wishing he could run after her, and waited for Ricky to pick up his extension. His brother had just come in from trick-or-treating and was almost delirious with sated greed.