We left for Plum Island right after the run-through ended—and since Pop and Lori hadn’t been there, Alé and Augie sang them all of the songs in the show during the forty-five minutes it took us to drive north through Massachusetts. I signed as many of the words as I could for Hucky, but they left me in their dust back in Lynn. All I remember is that while I was trying to keep up with “We Open in Venice,” I got confused between the sign for open and the sign for fart, so it came out a whole lot different than Cole Porter meant it to.
When we got to Newburyport, Pop drove us by the house you grew up in and told the story about the first time you introduced him to Grandma and Grandpa Hokenstad. (“She really had me thinking that she’d let them believe I was a gun runner for the Mob. Try meeting your future in-laws with that hanging over your head.”) Remember the coffee shop on Green Street with the Revolutionary War lamps on the outside and the shrimp salad on the inside? Because it’s still there. I even ordered a club sandwich and pretended you were giving me all of your bacon.
After lunch, we split up for the afternoon. Pop and Lori went for a walk along the waterfront with Hucky, Augie and Nehi took off to check out the old firehouse, and Alé and I strolled up High Street to find a shop where we could buy blue glass figurines. Okay, maybe that wasn’t exactly my idea.
“What about here?” I asked, pointing to a window display. Alé was wearing a white zip-up coat with a hood that had piles of fluffy fur around her face, making a fuzzy frame for her frown.
“This is a snowblower store,” she replied, narrowing her eyes.
“Yeah, but maybe they have snowblowers in blue glass.”
“You think?” For the next three blocks of red cobblestoned side-walks, she shot down one suggestion after another: bath and body shops, pharmacies, furniture finishers, even a Ben & Jerry’s. (“Look! Blue glass Oreo cones!”) But finally we stopped in front of a jewelry store that had a teensy glass puppy in the window, sitting between two Rolexes, where it actually looked like it was about to lift up its leg and pee on the left one. So naturally my mind began racing. I mean, I had fifteen dollars in my wallet and I was feeling sporty anyway.
“Let’s go in,” I offered, holding open the door.
That was a mistake.
Clue No. 1
The store had carpets four inches thick and smelled like a bank.
Clue No. 2
The guy behind the counter was wearing a suit and tie on a Saturday.
TIE GUY:
May I help you with something?
ALÉ:
Do you—
T.C.:
My sister is looking for blue glass figurines. Do you carry any of them here?
ALÉ:
I’m not his—
TIE GUY:
Certainly. If you’ll step over to this case, you’ll notice that we have five or six of them in blue.
T.C.:
Excellent. Sis, what about the giraffe?
ALÉ:
Anthony, don’t call me—
T.C.:
Actually, she already has a giraffe. May we see the dolphin?
TIE GUY:
Of course.
ALÉ:
Anthony, you don’t—
T.C.:
I love this. What do you think, sis?
ALÉ:
I’m warning you not to—
T.C.:
We’ll take it.
TIE GUY:
A perfect choice. Cash or charge?
T.C.:
Cash, please.
TIE GUY:
Of course. That’ll be $375.
T.C.:
FOR A LITTLE BLUE DOLPHIN??
ALÉ:
Thank you, big brother.
Alé thought it was a riot. So did Pop and Lori. And Augie and Hucky and Nehi and the server at Tastee-Freez and the pump guy at the Shell station. Doesn’t anybody know how to keep a secret anymore??
“Tony C,” warned Pop. “Never ever play games with girls in jewelry stores. You’re already dealing with a stacked deck anyway.” Lori jabbed him in the ribs with an elbow.
“Nice tip,” she shot back. “I’ll remember that.” We were sitting on the beach at Plum Island after dinner at The Ocean View (Pop and I had the usual honey baked ham and cornbread, and we split a side of yams for you). The moon was bright enough to read those tiny-type yawny books like Pride and Prejudice by—and what you could see in the moonlight was Pop and Lori holding hands, Augie pretending he’d never heard of anybody named Andy Wexler, Hucky next to me with Nehi’s head in his lap, and me and Alé sitting a mile and a half apart like the Monitor and the Merrimac with North Carolina in between them. But for now it was okay, because I had promises to keep. I wrapped my right arm around Hucky and pointed to the sparkly sky—and since this was the whole reason we’d come to Plum Island anyway, everybody was watching me. What does Augie always say? “I’m dead without my audience.”
“How many stars do you think are out there?” I asked. Hucky’s head instantly turned eyes-up before he wrinkled his forehead.
“A thousand and six?”
“Right! And which one’s your favorite?” After hardly a second’s hesitation, he pointed to the brightest twinkler he could find.
“That one.” It was actually the North Star, but he definitely didn’t need to know that.
“Wow!” blurted my hands. “That one doesn’t even have a name yet! Why don’t we call it ‘Hucky’?” Hucky was a little tougher to convince than I was. What I got at first was his you’re-being-spurious-again face.
“Are you allowed to do that? What about the police?”
“The police name stars too. It’s the same as calling dibs on the Slinky before Mateo does.” That seemed to do the job. Sort of. Because first we needed to agree on terms: It had to be a wishing star, it had to be named “Hucky Evan Harper and Shut-the-Door,” nobody else could wish on it but him, and he wanted to color it blue. Normally his last condition would have been the deal-breaker, but all I had to imagine is what you would have said.
“Okay,” I told him. “But you have to be in fourth grade before you can color it. That’s in the rules.” If he hadn’t been yawning already, it might not have gotten off the ground. Instead, he just nodded, picked up Shut-the-Door, and leaned against me with his eyes half-closed.
“Can we stay a couple of whiles so I can show Shut-the-Door our star?” I promised that we could stay for all the whiles he wanted—but by then he was out cold. That’s when I suddenly remembered the song you used to sing to me while I was falling asleep.
Now run along home and jump into bed.
Say your prayers and cover your head.
The very same thing I always do,
You dream of me—and I’ll dream of you.
A long time ago I learned how to cry without making any noise so nobody would know when I was doing it (which is strictly a guy thing). But Alé must have sensed a disturbance in the Force because she automatically reached for my hand. I figured she was just feeling sorry for me, but it worked anyway.
So I know it was a present from you.
I love you,
T.C.
P.S. The bad news? Even though Hucky slept through the night, when I woke up at 8:15 this morning, he and Shut-the-Door and Nehi were watching Mary Poppins again. I noticed while I was rubbing my eyes that the two little Banks kids on the screen were singing “The Perfect Nanny,” and Hucky—in his Luke Skywalker pajamas—was lost in that whole other world like he’d never been there before.
This is going to take a little time.
LAURENTS SCHOOL
BROOKLINE, MASSACHUSETTS
VIA E-MAIL
Dear Ted:
Your son is a cross between the Pied Piper and Annie Sullivan. Now I’m beginning to understand why Liz Jordan can only sputter whenever I check in with her. “Lori, until November Hucky hadn’t spoken to anyone other than Mateo for fifteen months! And we have a professional counseling staff here!” Does this sound like the kid who
ran us around the block in Newburyport? Have the Pod People gotten ahold of him? Or is Anthony a miracle worker?
Incidentally, don’t you think Hucky would have had a better time with Augie and Nehi at the firehouse than with a pair of middle-aged farts?
Lori
KELLER CONSTRUCTION
BOSTON • GLOUCESTER • WALTHAM
ELECTRONIC TRANSMISSION
Dear Lori:
Which pair of middle-aged farts? You and the harbor-master?
There’s a second way to look at your last question: “Don’t you think you and I would have had a better time if we’d had a chance to be alone together for at least a few minutes?” In which case the answer is yes.
However, it’s only fair to warn you that small children make their male caregivers appear both sensitive and irresistible to single women. So you might have been falling for a ruse.
Ted
LAURENTS SCHOOL
BROOKLINE, MASSACHUSETTS
VIA E-MAIL
Dear Ted:
Get over yourself.
And don’t be too impressed with the hand-holding on the beach. You could have been just about anybody. I have a problem with vertigo.
Lori
KELLER CONSTRUCTION
BOSTON • GLOUCESTER • WALTHAM
ELECTRONIC TRANSMISSION
Dear Lori:
When you’re sitting??
Ted
From:
[email protected] To:
[email protected] Dear Augie,
I’m not writing this because of the cold shoulder I’ve gotten from some of our friends or because of the talk your brother had with me or even because of the way you almost beat the shit out of me during “Tom, Dick, and Harry” at rehearsal. The reason I’m writing this is because of an e-mail I got from Alé a couple of days ago that didn’t have anything in it except an attachment that turned out to be a song called “If You Were the Only Boy in the World.” Which actually sucked, but I listened to it anyway.
Spidey, ever since I heard it I haven’t been able to stop remembering things I never paid attention to before. Maybe that’s because I’m still figuring things out and don’t have it zipped in the back pocket the way you always do. But I wish you didn’t have a whole different smile that you only use on me, and I wish you hadn’t invented the every-other-finger thing that always happens when we’re holding hands, and I REALLY wish there was at least one other guy whose hair sticks straight up when it gets snowed on and who always makes me glad that he’s with me and not with somebody else. But there isn’t. And the reason is because maybe you are the only boy in the world. Even when you’re Gypsy Rose Lee.
I’m sorry if I didn’t see that before, and I’m even sorrier for hurting your feelings. That’s something I can promise won’t ever happen again, because I also figured out that I love you. I wish it hadn’t taken me so long.
Andy
Dear Jutes,
I’ve been through a broken heart, I’ve survived the grieving process, and I reclaimed the fragmented pieces of my life better than Fanny Brice did after Nicky dumped her. But then he sends me a forgive-me e-mail quoting Barbra Streisand—and instead of melting again, all I want to do is kick his ass. What’s up with that? I’m so not cut out for love. The rules are too complicated. No wonder Romeo and Juliet killed themselves after one night together.
I used to think I was a pushover, but you’re the one who taught me the ground rules. Remember how you stood up to John Truitt when you thought he was a bully, even though you loved him? I probably should have made you my guardian diva right from the beginning, but somehow it seemed so retro. These days gay kids are a lot more worldly. We don’t get points for knowing the date of your Carnegie Hall concert (April 23, 1961), when you were born (June 10, 1922), or what you said to Betty Hutton when she replaced you in Annie Get Your Gun (“You goddamn son of a bitch”). And we need to rewrite some of the rules together, because Meet Me in St. Louis doesn’t play the way it used to.
The Word Shop
BROOKLINE’S FAVORITE BOOKSTORE
E-Memo From the Desk of
Phyllis Bryant
Augie, I just watched Meet Me in St. Louis again. Do not go there yet, you understand what I’m saying? That boy needs to sweat for a while. After what he put you through, it’d serve him good and damned right if you waited for a world’s fair to come to Boston before you even thought about kissing him.
We’ve got underground trolleys on the Green Line. For the time being, let him get somebody else to sing to him there. “Clang, clang, clang” my ass.
Andy came over on Sunday to check out a Patriots game from 1999 that Dad had taped but never seen. This is how my father gets through the off-season without going into withdrawal. He has a whole library of unwatched videos that go back to the ’80s. At the rate of one every two weeks from February through July, he’s okay until the spring of 2012. Then he needs to start worrying.
It was the first time Andy and I were going to be together since that harrowing Thursday at The Word Shop Café, and because it was supposed to begin snowing later in the afternoon, Dad lit a fire while Mom made popcorn. Normally I’d have made sure to squeeze myself into the love seat next to Andy, but he wasn’t getting off that easy. (When Dad saw me considering an armchair next to the front door, he said, “Why don’t you just sit in the chimney? I can pipe a speaker up there if you want.”) Coming over to our house was always a special occasion for Andy, but this wasn’t going to be one of those days.
www.augiehwong.com
PRIVATE CHAT
AndyWexler: It’s the way your parents know we’re boyfriends and we never had to tell them. And they’re happy about it. Even after what I pulled.
AugieHwong: That’s because you’re already part of our family. We’re easy that way. (Pregnant pause.) At least, some of us are.
AndyWexler: Why did you watch the game from the kitchen? And how long are you going to stay ticked at me?
AugieHwong: Why did you have to say I embarrassed you?
AndyWexler: I’d never say you embarrassed me. I said you intimidated me. Why did you have to stop talking to me? Why didn’t you just tell me to piss off and we could have duked this out already?
AugieHwong: Okay. Piss off.
AndyWexler: You too.
***SORRY! USER AUGIEHWONG HAS LOGGED OFF***
***SORRY! USER ANDYWEXLER HAS LOGGED OFF***
***USER AUGIEHWONG HAS LOGGED ON***
***USER ANDYWEXLER HAS LOGGED ON***
AugieHwong: Another thing. If I’m in the mood to be Pat Suzuki in Flower Drum Song for five minutes and you even think of blushing, it may be the last thing you ever do.
AndyWexler: I can live with that.
AugieHwong: The same goes for Kate Hepburn in A Lion in Winter. “I dressed my maids as Amazons and rode bare-breasted halfway to Damascus. Louis had a seizure and I damn near died of windburn. But the troops were dazzled.”
AndyWexler: I have lived with that.
AugieHwong: Oh. Right.
AndyWexler: Are we okay now?
AugieHwong: Dude, I don’t even know what okay is anymore.
On the other hand, finding something new to be pathological about is what keeps me in business, and I’d been worrying ever since Sunday when I watched him and my father test each other—from the tat soi right up through Mom’s orange cakes—on statistics like 1993 yardage and 1998 point spreads and players with long names that didn’t have any vowels in them. Maybe Andy was right after all. Look how much fun Dad is having. Does he wish he had a son who understood football? Sure he does, you gink. Watch the way they’re challenging each other about pass protection—whatever the hell that is. Did Dad ever have a conversation like that with you? Oh yeah, right. I can practically hear it. “Hey, Dad—whose idea was Bette Davis’s party dress in All About Eve?” “Edith Head, you dope!” No wonder he’s so animated. He’s finally got a kid he can talk to on his own terms. I’m like SO use
less!!
I made it through the rest of the week on the snake-pit side of gloomy, wondering whether or not they let gay kids in the Peace Corps. (“Why do you want to join, son?” “Because I embarrass my father, sir. I don’t know what a down is.” “Then why the hell would we want you either??”) By Saturday night I was about as well put together as Shirley MacLaine at the end of The Children’s Hour, lying in my bed and staring at the walls like one of those cable ads for Paxil. Of course, it helps to have a dad who can read you like a book, even if it gets a little irritating once in a while. A guy’s got to have some secrets.
“Aug,” he asked, tucking me in. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” I shrugged, so obviously not fine. Why are you wasting your time with me? Your son wouldn’t know a lateral pass if he was sitting on one.
“You sure nothing’s the matter?” he repeated. The sigh that shook my whole body was actually a little much—even for me.
“I’m positive.” That was when he knew it was time to sit down on the edge of my bed and think for a really long minute. Which is what he did. And suddenly his eyes arched up like he had it all figured out, so he kind of half smiled and leaned in to kiss me good night.
“Don’t worry,” he promised confidently, reaching for the lamp on my night table to switch it off. “Boyfriends and girlfriends fight all the time. It’s part of being in love.”
“That’s not it,” I blurted. Dad’s hand froze in midair and the lamp stayed on.
“Oh. Uh, well—” He sat up straight again and tried another road. “‘Stage fright is normal when you’ve got a big part’?”
“Nope.” Well, by now he knew he was really stuck between a rock and a hard place. Usually he gets it on the first whack, and once in a while it takes two. But this was a whole other solar system. So he stood up and began pacing back and forth in front of my All About Eve action figures. The way his eyes were lowered and his forehead was concentrating, you could tell that he was replaying everything that had happened since just before I started acting weird. Meanwhile, I was getting sleepy. Being neurotic takes a lot of hard work. I really needed him to wrap up his performance so I wouldn’t zonk out in the middle of my finale. Then on the third lap he stopped dead in his tracks and frowned.