Hugh turns around, so that his back is to his father, and he rows toward the Hasselbachers’ dock, hearing, from time to time, his father’s words of thanks and encouragement. The words push themselves into Hugh’s body, giving him strength, so that by the time they reach the dock, he feels capable of rowing his father across any river, anywhere.
17
In the summer between her sophomore and junior years, Dorsey finds it difficult to get her mother’s attention. When she isn’t reading in the cane chair out on the porch, Mrs. Welch stands at the kitchen counter in front of the south window with her FM radio tuned to the classical music station in Saginaw. She cuts and peels and seasons the ingredients for the evening’s meal while she hums along with the music, whether she knows the piece or not. She can hum along to anything, even Webern: quiet little twelve-tone squeaks. If she’s not in the kitchen, she’s outdoors pottering around in the vegetable garden, and if she’s not on the porch, or in the kitchen, or out in the garden, she’s working as a clerk at the Five Oaks City Hall. “If I were to come down here for breakfast with my blouse on backwards,” Dorsey tells her, “you wouldn’t notice.”
“Your father would notice,” her mother says, gazing out the south window as she washes her hands.
“That’s what I mean. You wouldn’t.”
“Why should I, when he would?” Mrs. Welch asks, and Dorsey is for a moment stumped and syllogized. She hands the breakfast dishes to her mother, who rinses them dreamily. Whenever Dorsey’s mother has her hands in running water, she is deaf to most human concerns.
“Mother, listen. I want a telephone in my room.”
“You’ll get over it.”
“I don’t want to get over it. I want to make my own calls. In private.”
“In private? There’s no privacy here. This is a family. We all snoop. Besides, you don’t have that many friends, and the friends you do have are all decent people. I don’t see the point.”
“I’m going to be a junior,” Dorsey says. “I’ve got my own social life. People are going to call, and I don’t want all of you keeping track of me.” She has her right hand in a fist on her hip, and her left arm crosses her waist so that she stands in a combative position, although her mother doesn’t appear to notice.
“We can’t afford it,” Mrs. Welch says.
“What if I wired it myself?”
“Cass, that’s illegal.”
“There’s that old junk telephone in the basement that’s not connected up. How about if I tap into the telephone lines in the house and wire that telephone into my room?”
“They’ll charge us for it,” Mrs. Welch says, scrubbing a plate. “They have machines to check.”
“Not if I wire it,” Dorsey says, already out of the room.
First she bicycles down to Our Own Hardware for the wires. Her next stop is Knapp Radio and TV, where she buys a high impedance resistor. Back at home, she removes the plate from her parents’ bedroom wall, taps into the wires, and runs her extension line along the floorboards, down the hallway and into her room. Before she connects the telephone she’s brought up from the basement, she puts the resistor on the line and then connects the wires to a trip relay and a battery-powered buzzer in a box, so that her phone will buzz, not ring, on incoming calls. With the resistor on the line preventing a voltage drop, the sleuths at the telephone company will never know that there’s an additional phone hooked up in the house. She feels quite pleased with herself, sitting there in her room, her new junk telephone on her desk, and she decides to make her first call.
“The time,” the recording says, “is eight twenty-three, and twenty seconds.”
She hangs up and calls her brother at his apartment. “Halloo,” he says.
“Guess who?”
“Hi, kid. How the hell are you doin’? What’s up?”
“My new telephone, that’s what.”
“What telephone? They didn’t get you a phone, did they? Jeez, Cass, you get everything. They never got me a telephone.”
“No. I took that old phone from the basement and wired it myself, and this is my first call to someone who isn’t a recording. Can you hear me all right?”
“You sound as if you’re next door. You sound …” She waits while her brother searches for the word. “You sound intimate. No, that’s not what I mean. I mean you sound close. Kid, you are a goddamn genius, pardon my language. Listen, I’ll be seeing you in a few days. I’ve got a friend here right now, a lady friend, so I’ve gotta go. You take care of yourself, okay? And congratulations on your new phone. Don’t spend all your time on it, okay?”
“Okay. Thanks. ’Bye. See you later.” Dorsey always has trouble ending telephone conversations; often she must say “good-bye” in four different ways before she feels that the conversation has been properly concluded.
She hangs up, pleased with herself, and looks at the poster over her desk of Bob Dylan, the side-view Milton Glaser graphic, the singer’s hair sprouting flowers. At this moment she feels a sense of intimate … yes, that’s the word, she thinks, intimate communion with Bob Dylan, a man who has beaten the system in his own way, using creativity and mother-wit.
If Dorsey’s parents notice the wires tucked along the edge of the hallway, they don’t mention it, and when Mr. Welch one Saturday morning comes in to find Dorsey talking on her telephone, his reaction is so blatantly calm that she thinks he must have believed that the telephone had always been there. After she’s finished, he says, “When I saw you talking on the phone just now, you reminded me of my mother.” Then he turns to walk down the hallway.
With the telephone on her desk, Dorsey expects things to change: more calls, more invitations. But usually when her phone buzzes, it’s for her mother or father. When it’s for Dorsey, it’s nearly always from someone who needs help on a math problem. As the months pass during her junior year, the books and papers and catalogues from colleges pile up on her desk around the telephone, so that by January she can hardly see it, sometimes just the black curve of the receiver edged above a pile of papers, and often for days at a time she forgets that it’s there.
18
During his second year at Holbein College, when he knows with a sickening certainty that he is flunking out, Hugh shares an apartment with another hockey player, Billy LaMarque, who hardly studies at all, but who waves his B– and C+ papers and tests in front of Hugh to demonstrate that this is not a serious place, anyone can do all right here. “This stuff is one hundred percent bullshit, man,” Billy says, referring to his English and history papers, and to the chem and econ exams that the oddball professors force their students to take.
Billy sits in front of the television set, a big bowl of popcorn to his right, his textbooks opened up and piled on the floor to his left. He leafs lackadaisically through the required reading as if he were shopping in sporting goods catalogues. Sometimes his girlfriend Linda comes over, and they party in Billy’s bedroom. He goes off to tests in the morning hung over, unshaven, unrested, smelling of Linda. Whatever tests he takes, he always passes. “Absolutely nothing fucking to it,” he says, tossing a biology exam (B+) onto Hugh’s desk as proof. “I’m a fucking moron, and if I can do this, so can you.”
Hugh can’t. The world has opened up its small details to Hugh in these courses, presenting him with a night parade of details and facts that march by on the page and then vanish, unretrievable, into his brain, and no matter what Hugh does, he can’t remember the material. He believes that it is his role—his job—to flunk out, just as it is always Dorsey’s role in life to succeed. When he can remember the assigned material, he can’t make sense of it. He is immersed, he thinks, in the thick helpless experience of being stupid. The aptitude tests that showed him to be above average were cruel hoaxes, he thinks. His mind feels like a kitchen sieve. As a favor to his kid sister, he takes a course in astronomy, but he falls asleep during the 8:30 A.M. planetarium lectures, and he can’t remember the plane of the ecliptic or what parsecs are or the
classification system of stars or the difference between the temperature of the nucleus of a planetary nebula and the temperature of the exciting star of a diffuse nebula. In his European history class he can’t remember Chartism well enough to “define it, using specific examples”; he can’t remember how Louis Napoleon became president of the republic, or why; he can’t remember why Metternich resigned and fled to England.
Hugh sits at his desk in the apartment day after day, positioned in front of the window, looking straight out at the residential street, waiting for a car to go by so he can check its licence plate and take his mind off his own mind. He’s been slapped with academic probation. One more semester of serious screwing up and he’s out of here. His pride has kept him away from physical education courses and speech classes and other dumb-jock specialties. He has a right, he thinks, to learn something about the world, the way it really is and has been. He has a right to know why the Frankfurt Assembly met from 1848 to 1849 to bring a unified Germany into being, even if he can’t remember the reasons, after being told.
The facts from French, calculus, English, chemistry, and all the other classes Hugh has taken and mostly failed rise up to the surface of his mind for a few moments, like drowning swimmers, and then disappear again. Wordsworth was born in 1770 and saw the French Revolution … La neige qui n’a pas cessé de tomber depuis trois jours, bloque les routes … Prove Cauchy’s inequality:
[Hint: use Theorem 2] … the battle of Caporetto resulted in the defeat of the Italian forces in Venetia during World War I … a magnesium salt of acetic acid is CH3CO2MgBr … “A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,/A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief” … the red shift indicates that a stellar entity is speeding away at such-and-such a speed … the Peace of Westphalia was … the golden crescent of Islam means hheshoom … ammo aldehydes …
His girlfriend of three weeks, Tracey Donaldson, calls and in a light tone of pure seduction asks him out to lunch. “We’ll pretend it’s Sadie Hawkins day,” she says, and when Hugh turns her down, her voice drops half an octave in anger. He offers to take her out to a movie on Sunday night, the night before a big test in English. What the fuck. At the kitchen table, in the light of day, he plays solitaire, then opens a can of tuna and eats the whole thing, twenty-four grams of protein. He returns to his bedroom, rolling up his sleeves, to the desk in front of the window, to the books full of their teasing facts and opinions, a mess of weighty unabsorbable information. He holds his inadequate head in his hands. When he first looks at his watch the time is five minutes past twelve o’clock; then it’s two. He reads assignments, returns to them the next day, and remembers nothing at all, not a word. Inside his gut is a glowing ball of tension. He’s never had to consider before the power of any one mind to think, to combine a set of ideas into a new idea, and he feels at these moments when he lies on the bed staring at an oblong crack in the ceiling that he doesn’t belong here because he’s been cheated out of having a mind because Dorsey got it all, because that was how it was arranged; that was the plan.
Hockey practice is from three until five. Hugh is a defenseman, and the worse his studies are, the more he enjoys breaking plays, checking, and working up a sweat. He outplays his own teammates so hard that the coach chews him out for being a solo artist. “This is a team sport, Welch,” the coach yells. “I’d like to see an occasional pass.” Afterwards, in the locker room, Hugh congratulates himself for not having been faked, deked, or tripped. He’s blocked more shots than he could count. He’s had the right spirit and has tried to charge up the other guys. With the hot water in the shower scalding over him, Hugh closes his eyes and for once knows that he belongs here. He’s one of these guys. They need him. He can skate into a shitstorm and come out owning both sides of the puck.
But after dinner he’s back at his desk in front of the window, studying Riemann sums, working on problems, getting nowhere. The telephone rings and it’s his mother, telling him again of how proud they all were to see him in the game two weeks ago, how excited Dorsey was to see him in action. While he’s talking on the phone, Billy and Linda come into the room, six-packs of beer weighing down a brown paper bag that Billy’s carrying, and, yes, some girl trailing behind the two of them, giving Hugh the once-over. Hugh’s trying to tell his mother why he’s having so much trouble with school, but the strange girl is sitting down with Billy and Linda and they’re popping tops, flipping on the stereo, so Hugh has to get off the phone.
The girl’s name is Christy or Chrissie, Hugh doesn’t quite catch it, and she’s Linda’s friend, and she, too, has seen Hugh in action. In fact they’ve met at a couple of parties. In the kitchen, out of earshot of Chrissie and Linda, Hugh tells Billy that he’s got to study, but Billy says Hugh should thank him. Almost three six-packs later, the apartment’s in a gray-out from the cigarettes the girls have smoked, and Chrissie closes the door to Hugh’s bedroom with Hugh in it, and she woozily takes off her sweater and jeans and puts them on Hugh’s desk, over the pages of calculus, over the Norton Anthology, the dittoed syllabus from chemistry class, the blue book with the flailing answers on European history. The skin all over her body is pale and smooth and she says she never wears a bra. “Oh, yeah,” she says, looking down at a green book on the floor near the dresser. “Calculus. I took that. It was neat.” He would like to get her to leave, but he has an instant thick hard-on and the day hasn’t gone well. He takes his clothes off with the giddy excitement of a drunken nonswimmer standing on the edge of a diving board. She traces her fingernails over the scars on his forehead where hockey pucks have hit him, and she lowers her other hand to his cock, and after she says his name it’s hopeless, he plants his mouth on hers and they move together immediately, experts in this. Deep in bed, later, while Chrissie or Christy is sleeping, Hugh thinks: I’m going to flunk out of here. All these women are going to go away, and I am going back to Five Oaks, and that’s where I’ll have to live my life, always, until the day I die. She shifts in the bed so that she’s comfortably against him, and he puts his arm around her, this woman whose name he’s not even sure of; as she wakes, wanting him again, her hair crosses his chest like a broom of silk, brushing him softly out of school, expelled.
19
Dorsey’s parents keep their voices down so much that she doesn’t know if they’re capable of shouting. Their quietness annoys her. Other kids get yelled at. Their family lives are noisy and dramatic and violent, busy with slaps. She’s heard about parents who break dishes and tear up lampshades and threaten their children with belts. But her own parents keep their silences to themselves.
She sits in the back seat of the car on a Friday night on the way to the hockey game between Holbein College and its opponent for this week, North Central State College, and as she watches her father smoke and her mother twiddle the radio dial, she wonders how they’re going to manage some enthusiasm for the Holbein team once the game starts. Her father has an alert, tense look, and his face is tinted a light green from the dashboard lights. He and Dorsey’s mother speak to each other quietly, but Dorsey can’t quite make out what they’re saying. The subject is Hugh’s bad grades, academic probation, and Dorsey doesn’t want to hear about it. She settles down into the seat. She thinks there’s something too genteel about her parents, something that’s been held in the familial cage for too long.
At the ice arena, they sit down on the third row on the Holbein side in the middle of a clutch of students. The Holbein hockey team has three cheerleaders in red H letter sweaters and short red skirts, who are trying to rouse the crowd into some kind of enthusiasm. They aren’t getting any out of Mr. and Mrs. Welch. Dorsey’s mother is knitting. It’s some kind of baby sweater for some kind of baby, Dorsey doesn’t know who. And her father is still wearing his hat and coat; he looks … Dorsey can’t think of the word, and then she can: wry. Her father looks drily humorous as he gazes up at the scoreboard to check out the amount of time left before the first period begins.
From the entryway to
her left, the Holbein team takes the ice, warming up by skating in a fast counterclockwise circle, while the North Central team skates clockwise down at the other end of the rink. Dorsey’s mother looks up from her knitting to see Hugh, number twenty, flashing by quickly, a red blur, quick ice-metal strokes. She looks down again. On one of his passes along the Holbein side, Hugh sees Dorsey and winks. He’s padded all over except for his face, which looks hard and aggressive. Dorsey’s father has started to hum what sounds like “Blue Moon.” He makes occasional nervous throat clearings, and Dorsey offers him a Smith Brothers cough drop, which he chews instead of sucks.
They’re so close that once the game starts Dorsey experiences it as a blur of young men in different colored uniforms ramming into one another, shouting and grunting and calling out encouragement and advice—the Holbein bench is only fifteen feet to Dorsey’s left—and the noise and animal energy excite her. In the noise of the shouting she can still hear the flat smack of the puck as it hits the boards, almost a gunshot. In the first period Dorsey yells so loudly she can feel her throat growing hoarse. Hugh is checking and blocking shots, dropping to his knee and sometimes sliding into the shot, a rush of energy. She cheers for him whenever he’s anywhere near the puck, and when one of the North Central men manages to get by him and score a goal, she feels humiliated and sick.
By the second period, when Holbein has tied the game, she has calmed down and isn’t taking things personally. Still trying to scream, and losing what’s left of her voice, she notices how intuitive Hugh is on the ice, how he anticipates moves by the forwards and defends against them before those moves have actually been made. On the ice, Hugh maintains his balance, the peculiar physical equilibrium of his body’s force, no matter at what angle he hits or is hit by the other men. When Hugh is checked by another accelerated body using him as its unmoving object into which all its forward energy is thrown and absorbed, he doesn’t even wait for the shock to dispel; he lets the shock inhabit him. He expects to be hit. He expects to hit back. His body thrives on these impacts.