And who are you?
I’m you, of course. Who else do you think I am?
The one constant in his world that wasn’t shit were his nightly talks on the phone with Amy. Her first question to him always was How are you doing, Archie?, and every night he would give her the same answer: Better. A little better than yesterday—which was in fact true, not only because his physical condition was slowly getting better as time went on but because talking to Amy always seemed to give his old self back to him, as if her voice were the snapping fingers of a hypnotist ordering him to come out of his trance and wake up. No one else had that power over him, and as the weeks passed and Ferguson continued to recover, he began to suspect it had something to do with Amy’s reading of the accident, which was unlike anyone else’s, for she refused to regard it as a tragedy, and therefore, among the people who loved Ferguson, she was the one who felt least sorry for him. In her view of the world, tragedies were reserved for death and ravaging disabilities—paralysis, brain damage, brutal disfigurement—but the loss of two fingers was no more than a trivial matter, and given that a car smashing into a tree should have led to death or brutal disfigurement, one could only rejoice that Ferguson had survived the accident without any tragic consequences. Too bad about baseball, of course, but that was a small debt to pay for the privilege of being alive with only two missing fingers, and if he was having trouble writing poems just now, then give poetry a rest for a while and stop worrying about it, and if it turned out that he never managed to write another poem, that would only mean he hadn’t been cut out to write poetry in the first place.
You’re beginning to sound like Dr. Pangloss, Ferguson said to her one night. Everything always happens for the best—in this, the best of all possible worlds.
No, not at all, Amy said. Pangloss is an idiot optimist, and I’m an intelligent pessimist, meaning a pessimist who has occasional flashes of optimism. Nearly everything happens for the worst, but not always, you see, nothing is ever always, but I’m always expecting the worst, and when the worst doesn’t happen, I get so excited I begin to sound like an optimist. I could have lost you, Archie, and then I didn’t. That’s all I can think about anymore—how happy I am that I didn’t.
For the first weeks after he came home from Vermont, he wasn’t strong enough to travel into New York on Saturdays. Going back and forth to school from Monday to Friday was just barely feasible, but Manhattan would have been too hard on his aching, stitched-together body, the jostling bus to begin with, but also the long climb up subway stairways, the crowds of people bumping into him in the pedestrian tunnels, and then the impossibility of walking for any length of time through the cold winter streets with Amy, so they reversed the process for all of February and halfway into March, and for five Saturdays in a row Amy visited him in Montclair instead. The new arrangement was short on outward stimulation, but it also had several advantages over the old routine of wandering in and out of bookstores and museums, of sitting in coffee shops, of going to films and plays and parties, the first one being that Ferguson’s parents worked on Saturday, and because they worked the house was empty, and because the house was empty he and Amy could go upstairs into his room, shut the door, and lie down on the bed with no fear that anyone would discover what they were doing. But still there was fear, at least for Ferguson, who had convinced himself that Amy would want no part of him anymore, and the first time they went into his room in the Montclair house, his fear was no less great than it had been the first time they went into Amy’s room in the New York apartment, but once they were on the bed and their clothes began to come off, Amy surprised him by taking hold of his wounded hand and kissing it, slowly kissing it twenty or thirty times, and then she put her mouth against his bandaged left forearm and kissed it a dozen times, followed by another twelve kisses on his bandaged right forearm, and then she pulled him down against her chest and began kissing the small bandages on his head, one by one by one, each one six times, seven times, eight times. When Ferguson asked her why she was doing that, she said it was because those were the parts of him she loved best now. How could she say that? he replied, they were disgusting, and how could anyone love what was disgusting? Because, Amy said, those wounds were a memory of what had happened to him, and because he was alive, because he was with her now, what happened to him was also what hadn’t happened to him, which meant that the marks on his body were signs of life, and because of that they weren’t disgusting to her, they were beautiful. Ferguson laughed. He wanted to say, Pangloss to the rescue again!, but he didn’t say anything, and as he looked into Amy’s eyes, he wondered if she was telling the truth. Could she possibly believe what she had just said to him, or was she only pretending to believe it for his sake? And if she didn’t believe it, how could he believe her? Because he had to believe her, he decided, because believing her was the only choice he had, and the truth, the so-called almighty truth, meant nothing when he considered what not believing her would have done to them.
Sex for five straight Saturdays, sex in the early afternoon as the thin February light wrapped itself around the edges of the curtains and seeped into the air around their bodies, and then the pleasure of watching Amy climb back into her clothes, knowing that her naked body was inside those clothes, which somehow prolonged the intimacy of sex even when they weren’t having sex, the body he carried around in his mind as they went downstairs to fix themselves some lunch or listened to records or watched an old movie on television or took a short walk around the neighborhood or he read out loud to her from Pictures from Brueghel by William Carlos Williams, his newly anointed favorite, who had pushed Eliot off the throne following a bloody skirmish with Wallace Stevens.
Sex for five straight Saturdays, but also the chance to talk face to face again after the long-distance phone conversations during the school week, and on three of those Saturdays Amy hung around long enough to be there when his parents came home from work, which led to three dinners with just the four of them sitting together in the kitchen, his mother so much happier now that he was with Amy and not that drunken Belgian girl and his father amused by her volubility and offbeat remarks, as when, to cite one example from late February, which had been the month of the Beatles’ conquest of America and Cassius Clay’s triumph over Sonny Liston, the two big subjects everyone was talking about, Amy made the nutty but insightful comment that John Lennon and the new heavyweight champion were one and the same person divided up into two different bodies, young men in their early twenties who had captured the attention of the world in precisely the same way, by not taking themselves seriously, by having a gift for saying the most obnoxious things with a boldness and theatricality that made people laugh, I am the greatest, We’re more popular than Jesus Christ, and when Amy repeated those ridiculous but unforgettable statements, Ferguson’s father suddenly started to laugh, not only because Amy had done spot-on imitations of Lennon’s Liverpudlian burr and Clay’s Kentucky drawl, but because she had imitated their facial expressions as well, and once Ferguson’s father had stopped laughing, he said: You’ve got a good point there, Amy. Wise guys with fast tongues and even faster minds. I like that.
Ferguson had no idea if his parents were aware of how he and Amy spent those Saturday mornings and afternoons alone in the house. He suspected his mother might have been onto them (she had come home unannounced on the second Saturday to retrieve a sweater and had caught them smoothing out the covers on the bed), which could have meant she had discussed it with his father, but even if they did know, neither one of them said a word about it, since it was manifestly clear by then that Amy Schneiderman was a positive force in their boy’s life, a one-girl emergency team who was single-handedly nursing him through the agonizing adjustment to his post-accident world, and therefore they encouraged them to be together as often as possible, and even though money was particularly tight just then, they never objected to the high cost of the long-distance calls, which had more than quadrupled their monthly telephone bill. That girl
is good stuff, Archie, his mother said to him one day, and as she watched her ex-boss’s granddaughter minister to her son, she herself was ministering to her niece Francie by going to the hospital every afternoon at four o’clock for a one-hour visit, where she steadfastly carried on with her all-love-and-nothing-but-love treatments. Ferguson paid close attention to her nightly reports about Francie’s progress, but he kept worrying that his cousin would say something to his mother about the squeaking bed and how angry she had been at him on the morning of the crash, which could have led to some unpleasant questions from his mother that he would have been compelled to lie about in order to cover up his embarrassment, but when he finally found the courage to raise the subject himself, asking his mother what Francie had told her about the accident, his mother claimed that Francie had never mentioned it. Was that true? he asked himself. Could Francie have blanked out the crash, or was his mother merely playing dumb about the argument because she didn’t want to upset him?
And what about my hand? Ferguson asked. Does she know about that?
Yes, his mother said. Gary told her.
Why would he do that? It seems rather heartless, don’t you think?
Because she has to know. She’ll be getting out of the hospital soon, and no one wants her to be shocked when she sees you again.
She was discharged after three weeks of rest and therapy, and although there would be further breakdowns and hospitalizations in the years to come, she was back on her feet for now, still wearing a sling around her left arm because the clavicle had been slow in mending, but altogether radiant as Ferguson’s mother said after her final visit to the hospital, and when the sling came off a week later and Francie invited Ferguson and his parents for Sunday brunch at her house in West Orange, he found her looking radiant as well, fully restored, no longer the harried, spooked-out woman she had been during that catastrophic weekend in Vermont. It was a fraught moment for both of them, facing each other for the first time since the accident, and when Francie looked at his hand and saw what the accident had done to it, she teared up and threw her arms around him, blubbering out an apology that made Ferguson understand, for the first time since the accident, how much he secretly blamed Francie for what had happened to him, that even if it wasn’t her fault, even if her final glance at him in the car had been the glance of a mad person, someone no longer in control of her thoughts, she was the one who had smashed the car into the tree, and while he wanted to forgive her for everything, he couldn’t quite do it, not all the way down in the deepest part of himself, and even as his mouth was saying all the right words, assuring her that he didn’t hold it against her and all was forgiven, he knew that he was lying and would always hold it against her, that the accident would stand between them for the rest of their lives.
* * *
HE TURNED SEVENTEEN on March third. Several days after that, he went to the local branch of the DMV and took the road test for his New Jersey driver’s license, demonstrating his skill at the wheel with his smoothly negotiated turns, the steady pressure he applied to the gas pedal (as if you were putting your foot on an uncooked egg, his father had told him), his mastery at braking and driving in reverse, and last of all his understanding of the maneuvers involved in parallel parking, the tight-squeeze operation that was the downfall of so many would-be motorists. Ferguson had taken hundreds of tests over the years, but passing this one was far more important to him than anything he had accomplished at school. This one was for real, and once he had the license in his pocket, it would have the power to unlock doors and let him out of his cage.
He knew his parents were struggling, that business was down for both of them and the family’s resources were pinched—not yet hard times, perhaps, but getting close, getting closer by the month. Blue Cross/Blue Shield had covered the bulk of the costs for his stay in the Vermont hospital, but there had been some cash expenditures as well, out-of-pocket deductibles and sundry long-distance telephone charges, along with the money spent on the motel room and his mother’s rented car, which couldn’t have been easy on them, walking out into their rainy day with torn umbrellas and no shoes on, and so when March third came around and the only birthday present he received from his parents was a toy car—a miniature replica of a white 1958 Chevy Impala—he interpreted it as a kind of joke present, at once a good-luck charm for the driving exam he was about to take and an admission from his parents that they couldn’t afford anything better. Oh well, he thought, it actually was rather funny, and since both of his parents were smiling, he smiled back at them and said thank you, too distracted to pay attention to what his mother said next: Fear not, Archie. Out of little acorns do mighty oaks grow.
Six days later, an oak appeared in the driveway in the form of a full-sized car, a mammoth replica of the acorn that now sat on Ferguson’s desk as an all-purpose paperweight, or almost a replica, since the white Chevy Impala parked in the driveway had been built in 1960, not 1958, with two doors instead of the four doors in the model, and both of Ferguson’s parents were sitting in the car and honking the horn together, honking and honking until their son came down from his room to see what the commotion was about.
His mother explained that they had been planning to give it to him on the third, but the car had needed some work, and the repairs had taken a little longer than expected. She hoped he liked it, she said. They had thought about letting him choose one on his own, but then it wouldn’t have been a surprise, and the fun of giving a present like this was the surprise.
Ferguson said nothing.
His father frowned at him and asked: Well, Archie, what do you think? Do you like it or not?
Yes, he liked it. Of course he liked it. How could he not like it? He liked the car so much he wanted to get down on his knees and kiss it.
But how did you come up with the money? he finally asked. It must have cost a lot.
Less than you’d think, his father said. Only six-fifty.
Before or after the repairs?
Before. An even eight hundred after.
That’s a lot, Ferguson said. Way too much. You shouldn’t have done it.
Don’t be ridiculous, his mother said. I’ve taken a hundred portraits in the past six months, and now that the book is finished, what do you think is hanging on the walls of my famous men and women?
Ah, I see, Ferguson said. Not just the grant, but bonus money, too. How much did you charge them for the pleasure of looking at themselves?
A hundred and fifty a pop, his mother said.
Ferguson made a little whistling sound, nodding his head in appreciation.
A cool fifteen grand, his father added, just in case Ferguson was having trouble with the arithmetic.
You see? his mother said. We’re not going to the poorhouse, Archie, at least not today, and probably not tomorrow either. So shut up, get into your car, and take us somewhere, all right?
Thus began the Season of the Car. For the first time in his life, Ferguson was the master of his own comings and goings, the sovereign ruler of the spaces that surrounded him, with no god before him now but a six-cylinder internal combustion engine, which asked nothing more of him than a full tank of gas and an oil change every three thousand miles. Throughout the spring and into the early days of summer, he drove the car to school every morning, most often with Bobby George next to him up front and sometimes with a third person in back, and when school let out at a quarter past three, he no longer went straight home to sequester himself in his small bedroom but climbed back into the car and drove, drove for an hour or two without purpose or destination, drove for the pure satisfaction of driving, and after not knowing where he wanted to go for the first minutes or quarter hours of those drives, he often found himself meandering up to the South Mountain Reservation, the only patch of wilderness in all of Essex County, acres and acres of forests and hiking trails, a sanctuary that harbored owls and hummingbirds and hawks, a place of a million butterflies, and when he reached the top of the mountain he would get out
of the car and look down at the immense valley below, town after town filled with houses and factories and schools and churches and parks, a view that encompassed more than twenty million people, one-tenth of the population of the United States, for it went all the way to the Hudson River and across into the city, and at the farthest limit of what Ferguson could see from the top ledge of the mountain, there were the tall buildings of New York, the Manhattan skyscrapers jutting out from the horizon like tiny stalks of grass, and once, as he looked at Amy’s city, he got it into his head that he should go see Amy herself, and suddenly he was in the car again, impulsively driving to New York through the mounting rush-hour traffic, and when he arrived at the Schneidermans’ apartment an hour and twenty minutes later, Amy, who was in the middle of doing her homework, was so surprised to see him when she opened the door that she let out a shriek.