Here my father halted. In the brittle air his shoes scratched on the cement and his mouth moved like a puppet’s. “O.K., Peter,” he said. “You go into Minor’s and I’ll come back and pick you up when Doc Appleton’s done with me.”
“What do you think he’ll tell you?” I was tempted. Penny might be in the luncheonette.
“He’ll tell me I’m as healthy as a dumb old horse,” my father said, “and he’s as wise as a dirty old owl.”
“You don’t want me to come with you?”
“What can you do, you poor kid? Stay away and don’t depress yourself. Go see your friends, whoever the hell they think they are. I never had any friends, so I can’t imagine it.”
My conscience and my father were rarely on opposite sides; I compromised. “I’ll go in here,” I said. “For a minute, then I’ll catch up.”
“Take your time,” he said, with a sudden sweeping motion of his hand, as if remembering that unseen audience before which he was an actor. “You got lots of time to kill. At your age I had so much time to kill my hands are still bloody.” His talk was unreeling wider and wider; I felt chilled.
Walking off alone, he seemed lightened and looked thinner. Perhaps all men look thinner from the back. I wished that for my sake he would buy a respectable coat. As I watched, he took the knit cap out of his pocket and put it on his head; pierced by embarrassment, I ran up the steps, bucked the door, and plunged into the luncheonette.
It was a maze, Minor’s place. So many bodies: yet only a tiny section of the school ever came here. Others had other places; the set at Minor’s was the most criminal and it thrilled me to be, however marginally, a part of it. I felt in this clouded interior a powerful secret lurking, whose nostrils exhaled the smoke and whose hide exuded the warmth. The voices jostling in the stable-warmth all seemed to be gossiping about the same thing, some event that had happened in the minute before I arrived; I was haunted at that age by the suspicion that a wholly different world, gaudy and momentous, was enacting its myths just around the corners of my eyes. I pushed my way through the bodies as if through the leaves of a close-set series of gates. I picked my way past one, two, three booths and there, yes, there, she was. She.
Why is it, love, that faces we love look upon each re-meeting so fresh, as if our hearts have in this instant again minted them? How can I describe her to you justly? She was small and not unusual. Her lips were too plump and irksomely self-satisfied; her nose rather cursory and nervous. Her eyelids were vaguely Negroid, heavy, puffy, bluish, and incongruously worldly-wise when taken with the startled grassy innocence of her eyes. I believe it was these incongruities-between lips and nose, eyes and lids-these soft and silent clashes like the reticulating ripples hinting in the flow of a stream of irregular depths, that made her beauty for me; this delicate irresolution of feature held out the possibility of her being worthy of me. And made her seem always a bit unexpected. She was occupying one side of a booth and there was space beside her. Across the table, two ninth-graders she dimly knew, a girl and a boy, were tugging at each other’s buttons, blind to everything. She was gazing at them and did not see me until my body, easing in, pushed hers. “Peter!” I unbuttoned my pea jacket so the devil-may-care flame of my shirt showed. “Give me a cigarette.”
“Where have you been all day?”
“Here and there. I’ve seen you.” Nicely she tapped one of her Luckies from her purple-and-yellow plastic case, which had a little sliding door that opened and shut. She looked at me with flecked green irises whose perfect circles of black seemed dilated. I did not understand my ability to dissolve her composure and in my heart honestly took no credit for it. But her dissolution was welcome to me; it couched a kind of repose I had never known before. As a baby wishes to be put to bed, my hand wished to be between her thighs. I dragged and in haled. “I had a dream about you last night.” She looked away, as if to give herself space in which to blush, “What did you dream?”
“Not quite what you think,” I said. “I dreamed you turned into a tree, and I called ‘Penny, Penny, come back!’, but you didn’t, and I was leaning my face against the bark of a tree.”
She took it a bit dryly, saying, “Why how sad.”
“It was sad. Everything around me is sad these days.”
“What else is sad?”
“My father thinks he’s sick.”
“What does he think he has?”
“I don’t know. Cancer?”
“Really?”
My cigarette was stirring in me its mixture of nausea and giddiness; I wanted to put it out but instead, for her sake, inhaled. The booth partition across from us leaped a foot closer and the girl and the boy had fallen to bumping heads, like a pair of doped rams.
“Sweetie,” Penny said to me. “Your father’s probably all right. He’s not very old.”
“He’s fifty,” I said. “He just turned fifty last month. He always said he’d never live to be fifty.”
She frowned in thought, my poor dumb little girl, and tried to find some words to comfort me, who was so in finitely ingenious at evading comfort. At last she told me, “Your father’s too funny to die.” A ninth-grader, she only had him as a teacher in study-hall; but the whole school of course knew my father.
“Everybody dies,” I told her.
“Yes, but not for a long time.”
“Yes, but at some point that time has to become now.” And with this we carried the mystery to the far rim, and could only return.
“Has he seen a doctor?” she asked, and, as impersonally as an act of weather, her thigh under the table had become tangent to mine.
“That’s where he is now.” I shifted my cigarette to my right hand and casually dropped, as if to scratch an itch, my freed left hand onto my thigh. “I should be with him,” I told Penny, wondering if my profile looked as elegant as it felt, jut-lipped under a plume of smoke.
“Why? What could you do?”
“I don’t know. Be of some comfort. Just be there.” As naturally as water slips from higher to lower my fingers moved to her thigh from my own. Her skirt had a faunish weave.
This touch, though she did not acknowledge it, interrupted the flow of her thought. She brought out jaggedly, “How can you? You’re just his child.”
“I know,” I said, speaking quickly lest she think my touch was more than an accident, an incident of innocent elements. Having gained my place, I expanded it, fanning my fingers, flattening my palm against the yielding solid. “But I’m the only kid he has.” My using my father’s word “kid” brought him too close; his wrinkling squint, his forward leaning anxiety seemed to loom in the unquiet air. “I’m the only person in the world he can talk to.”