Will liked the sirens; for him, the potential for disaster was exciting. In his experience toppled soldiers shed no blood, and he had not been present when G.I. Joe got his cheek wound.
His own experience of pain had been the result of falling on the blacktop in back of the school, or being stricken with a sore throat or an earache, and without Jody’s telling him to be brave, he had learned that he should not cry unnecessarily. The other boys had taught him that, the way they had taught him to use a slingshot and to call breasts hooters. Recently, Mel had been trying to teach him to whistle through a piece of grass held between his thumbs. Will’s progress so far was what it would have been if he had been instructed to whistle through pudding. The nicely shaped little-boy hands, when the grass blade was clamped between the sides of the thumbs, suddenly looked boneless, molded from clay, and as he frowned at the blades of grass Jody had an inkling of what it would be like if she lived to see Will an old man, myopically staring at objects held close to his eyes. Mel felt that if Will could master whistling through grass, that would be a good preface to his calling “Hooters!” That was what he had said lying in bed the week before, trying to get a rise out of her. It amused Mel to pretend that he intended to corrupt Will — that he was her enemy, as was the passage of time, which would change her baby soon enough anyway.
Will and Wagoner were climbing the ladder to go down the slide, “the up-down” in Will’s baby parlance, shooting to the bottom, racing around the side to climb the ladder again. Mary Vickers pretended to be an announcer telling the audience, sotto voce, about an upcoming show, in which Will ’n’ Wag, as she called the performers, would be seen doing various amusing stunts sure to strike fear into their mothers’ hearts. Sounding like an excited sports announcer narrating a batter’s triumphant trot around the bases, she crossed her arms and whispered to Jody: “Now Wag’s in the lead, coming down the slide, and we can see on the sidelines that the squirrel who’s been watching is scared. Not so his sidekick, Will, who’s four for four in successful rides to the bottom. Wag’s dusting the slide — time out — and we can expect that the next ride down is going to be a particularly fast one. You know, our audience out there might be interested to know that part of the success of sliding depends on a slick slide that does not have a residue of sand. But back to the main action, and then at our station break, folks, an ad for Valium.”
The summer before, Mary Vickers had had her first affair, with a playwright who had moved to town to team-teach a drama course at the university. Mary did not meet him there but ran into him by chance, at the all-night drugstore, where he was buying 3-D postcards of hawks floating over Skyline Drive at sunset. She had stopped at the bulletin board by the Kong game inside the sliding glass doors to see if anyone was advertising to do lawn work. The playwright came out then, slightly high on a few shots of Cuervo Gold, holding one of the postcards and snorting with appreciation. He showed her the card, as if she had been there waiting for him to exit. “Is this really out there?” he had asked. He had come to Virginia from New York for the summer. Walking to the parking lot, she suggested he take 29 south to North Garden, then cut through to route 250, as a good way to get to the mountains. Jody supposed, when Mary first told her these things, that it must have been obvious to Mary that she and the man would become lovers. It had happened between one visit Mary and Jody made to the playground and the next visit, so that when Mary sat on the bench and toed the dust like a sad horse, Jody had not been surprised — only perplexed that neither Mary nor the man thought it would last. It didn’t last past the end of the semester, but during the period when they were meeting for clandestine pepper vodkas and holding hands early in the morning at Spudnuts, eating doughnuts and licking the sugar from each other’s lips in the parking lot before going their separate ways, Jody had taken a photograph of Mary Vickers, naked to the waist, with a feather boa wrapped around her neck. Mary later mailed it to New York so it would be waiting for him when he went home. It was a soft-focus glamour-girl shot that Jody had sepia-toned, in which Mary — except for her sad, expressive eyes — looked like a little girl masquerading in her mother’s clothes.
Not long after she photographed Mary Vickers, she had taken the boa from the shelf and shot a roll of color to explore its other possibilities. In a decorative way, it could make anything it was draped over look humorous, so she had let herself take a few of those shots, trying to work her way toward something more interesting. She coiled it so that it made a fuzzy turban on top of a melon. She photographed it weaving through her fingers. She photographed it stretched out, bouncing light off a reflector. Then she tried a twenty-second exposure, using only candles for illumination. When she studied the contact sheets later, she saw her inclination had been right. With a starburst filter, the tips of fur narrowed into threads that flashed to the top of the photograph like a spiderweb gleaming in sunlight.
On the bench near the fence, two mothers were ignoring their children and talking animatedly. The subject was former surgeon general C. Everett Koop, who, one of the women said, had apparently crept around his neighborhood with his mother when he was a child, carrying a garbage can that contained an ether-soaked rag; they would capture a cat, and the surgeon general would take it home to operate on. Whether Mary Vickers was paying any attention to the conversation was unclear, but the woman hearing it looked frightened to death. Mary Vickers was looking at the spot where Will and Wagoner crouched, studying something in the grass. Then she looked at her watch. She shrugged, because she knew Jody had seen her checking the time, and wound the scarf around her throat and pulled the end, pretending to hang herself. Jody knew that Mary Vickers envied her because she didn’t have to go home and cook a meal. Will was always happy to eat cereal with fruit, or the two of them would have what Jody called a many-colored meaclass="underline" She would arrange side by side on a plate a hot dog, a narrow squirt of mustard, a slice of avocado, a wedge of tomato, a carrot, a piece of green pepper. She and Will said nothing about their secret meals when Mel was there. Either they ate proper dinners she or Mel cooked, or they went out.
“It’s time to go,” Jody said as Wagoner ran by, arms stretched out like airplane wings. Will ran behind him, tilting his own arms and humming. Jody and Mary Vickers might as well have been monsters who had risen from the ground to claw in the boys’ direction. Please. Go back to the underworld. Don’t be our mothers. No surrender to hooter monsters with grabby hands and obsessive ideas about the necessity of sleep. Just die! Begone! Let us live free!
Across the playground the pilots were giggling, ready for lift-off, eager to leave the grassy runway behind.
“Maybe I should get on a plane and go to New York to visit him,” Mary Vickers said, shrugging again and getting up to stare at the two boys in the distance. She plunged her hands into the pockets of her coat. “I have to admit that I envy you,” she said. “Being able to plan your life so you can be gone when you want to. Being in love with somebody you can actually go and stay with.”