Regina (they insisted I call them by their first names) was forty-five and handsome in a rather cold, semi-aristocratic way—that is, she managed to look aristocratic even when she was wearing bluejeans, which was most of the time. Her field was English, but of course when you teach at the college level, that’s never enough; it’s like saying “America” when someone asks you where you’re from. She had it refined and calibrated like a blip on a radar screen. She specialized in the earlier English poets and had done her thesis on Robert Herrick.
Michael was in the history biz. He looked as mournful and melancholy as the music he played on his recorder, although mournful and melancholy was not ordinarily a part of his makeup. Sometimes he made me think of what Ringo Starr was supposed to have said when the Beatles first came to America and some reporter at a press conference asked him if he was really as sad as he looked. “No,” Ringo replied, “it’s just me face.” Michael was like that. Also, his thin face and the thick glasses he wore combined to make him look a little like a caricature professor in an unfriendly editorial cartoon. His hair was receding and he wore a small, fuzzy goatee.
“Hi, Arnie,” Regina said as we came in. “Hello, Dennis.” It was just about the last cheerful thing she said to either of us that afternoon.
We said hi and got our cake and milk. We sat in the breakfast nook. Dinner was cooking in the oven, and I’m sorry to say so, but the aroma was fairly rank. Regina and Michael had been flirting with vegetarianism for some time, and tonight it smelled as if Regina had a good old kelp quiche or something on the way. I hoped they wouldn’t invite me to stay.
The recorder music stopped, and Michael wandered out into the kitchen. He was wearing bluejean cutoffs and looking as if his best friend had just died.
“You’re late, boys,” he said. “Anything going down?” He opened the refrigerator door and began to root around in it. Maybe the kelp quiche didn’t smell so wonderful to him either.
“I bought a car,” Arnie said, cutting himself another piece of cake.
“You did what?” his mother cried at once from the other room. She got up too quickly and there was a thud as her thighs connected solidly with the edge of the cardtable she did her jigsaws on. The thud was followed by the rapid patter of pieces falling to the floor. That was when I started to wish I had just gone home.
Michael Cunningham had turned from the refrigerator to stare at his son, holding a Granny Smith apple in one hand and a carton of plain yoghurt in the other.
“You’re kidding,” he said, and for some absurd reason I noticed for the first time that his goatee—which he had worn since 1970 or so—was showing quite a bit of grey. “Arnie, you’re kidding, right? Say you’re kidding.”
Regina came in, looking tall and semi-aristocratic and pretty damn mad. She took one close look at Arnie’s face and knew he wasn’t kidding. “You can’t buy a car,” she said. “What in the world are you talking about? You’re only seventeen years old.
Arnie looked slowly from his father by the fridge to his mother in the doorway leading to the living room. There was a stubborn, hard expression on his face that I couldn’t remember ever having seen there before. If he looked that way more often around school, I thought, the machine-shop kids wouldn’t be so apt to push him around.
“Actually, you’re wrong,” he said. “I can buy it with no trouble at all. I couldn’t finance it, but buying it for cash presents no problems. Of course, registering a car at seventeen is something else entirely. For that I need your permission.”
They were looking at him with surprise, uneasiness, and—I saw this last and felt a sinking sensation in my belly—rising anger. For all their liberal thinking and their commitment to the farm workers and abused wives and unwed mothers and all the rest, they pretty much managed Arnie. And Arnie let himself be managed.
“I don’t think there’s any call to talk to your mother that way,” Michael said. He put back the yoghurt, held onto the Granny Smith, and slowly closed the fridge door. “You’re too young to have a car.”
“Dennis has one,” Arnie said promptly.
“Say! Wow! Look how late it’s getting!” I said. “I ought to be getting home! I ought to be getting home right away! I—”
“What Dennis’s parents choose to do and what your own choose to do are different things,” Regina Cunningham said. I had never heard her voice so cold. Never. “And you had no right to do such a thing without consulting your father and me about.
“Consult you!” Arnie roared suddenly. He spilled his milk. There were big veins standing out on his neck in cords.
Regina took a step backward, her jaw dropping. I would be willing to bet she had never been roared at by her ugly-duckling son in her entire life. Michael looked just as flabbergasted. They were getting a taste of what I had already felt—for inexplicable reasons of his own, Arnie had finally happened on something he really wanted. And God help anyone who got in his way.
“Consult you! I’ve consulted you on every damn thing I’ve ever done! Everything was a committee meeting, and if it was something I didn’t want to do, I got outvoted two to one! But this is no goddam committee meeting. I bought a car and that’s… it!”
“It most certainly is not it,” Regina said. Her lips had thinned down, and oddly (or perhaps not) she had stopped looking just semi-aristocratic; now she looked like the Queen of England or someplace, jeans and all. Michael was out of it for the time being. He looked every bit as bewildered and unhappy as I felt, and I knew an instant of sharp pity for the man. He couldn’t even go home to dinner to get away from it; he was home. Here it was a raw powerstruggle between the old guard and the young guard, and it was going to be decided the way those things almost always are, with a monstrous overkill of bitterness and acrimony. Regina was apparently ready for that even if Michael wasn’t. But I wanted no part of it. I got up and headed for the door.
“You let him do this?” Regina asked, She looked at me haughtily, as if we’d never laughed together or baked pies together or gone on family camp-outs together, “Dennis, I’m surprised at you.”
That stung me. I had always liked Arnie’s mom well enough, but I had never completely trusted her, at least not since something that had happened when I was eight years old or so.
Arnie and I had ridden our bikes downtown to take in a Saturday afternoon movie. On the way back, Arnie had fallen off his bike while swerving to avoid a dog and had jobbed his leg pretty good. I rode him home double on my bike, and Regina took him to the emergency room, where a doctor put in half a dozen stitches. And then, for some reason, after it was all over and it was clear that Arnie was going to be perfectly fine, Regina turned on me and gave me the rough side of her tongue. She read me out like a top sergeant. When she finished, I was shaking all over and nearly crying—what the hell, I was only eight, and there had been a lot of blood. I can’t remember chapter and verse of that bawling-out, but the overall feeling it left me with was disturbing. As best I remember, she started out by accusing me of not watching him closely enough—as if Arnie were much younger instead of almost exactly my own age—and ended up saying (or seeming to say) that it should have been me.
This sounded like the same thing all over again—Dennis, you weren’t watching him closely enough—and I got angry myself. My wariness of Regina was probably only part of it, and to be completely honest, probably only the small part. When you’re a kid (and after all, what is seventeen but the outermost limit of kidhood?), you tend to be on the side of other kids. You know with a strong and unerring instinct that if you don’t bulldoze down a few fences and knock some gates flat, your folks—out of the best of intentions—would be happy to keep you in the kid corral forever.