Page 125

“I’ll be out in a minute,” Hester said.

Owen returned to the kitchen and sat down at the table with me.

“It’s just a dream, Owen,” I said to him. He folded his hands and regarded me patiently. I remembered that time he untied the safety rope when we’d been swimming in the old quarry. I remembered how angry he was—when we hadn’t immediately jumped in the water to save him.

“YOU LET ME DROWN!” he’d said. “YOU DIDN’T DO ANYTHING! YOU J

UST WATCHED ME DROWN! I’M ALREADY DEAD!” he’d told us. “REMEMBER THAT: YOU LET ME DIE.”

“Owen,” I said. “Given your sensitive feelings for Catholics, why wouldn’t you dream that a nun was your own special Angel of Death?”

He looked down at his hands folded on top of the table; we could hear Hester’s bath emptying.

“It’s just a dream,” I repeated; he shrugged. There was in his attitude toward me that same mild pity and mild contempt I had seen before—when The Flying Yankee had passed over the Maiden Hill trestle bridge, precisely as Owen and I had passed under it, and I’d called this a “coincidence.”

Hester came out of the bathroom wrapped in a pale-yellow towel, carrying her clothes. She went into the bedroom without looking at us; she shut the door, and we could hear her shaking the chest of drawers, the coat hangers protesting her roughness in the closet.

“Owen,” I said. “You’re very original, but the dream is a stereotype—the dream is stupid. You’re going in the Army, there’s a war in Vietnam—do you think you’d have a dream about saving American children? And, naturally, there would be palm trees—what would you expect? Igloos?”

Hester came out of the bedroom in fresh clothes; she was roughly toweling her hair dry. Her clothes were almost an exact exchange for what she’d worn before—she wore a different pair of blue jeans and a different, ill-fitting turtleneck jersey; the extent to which Hester ever changed her clothes was a change from black to navy blue, or vice versa.

“Owen,” I said. “You can’t believe that God wants you to go to Vietnam for the purpose of making yourself available to rescue these characters in a dream!”

He neither nodded nor shrugged; he sat very still looking at his hands folded on top of the table.

“That’s exactly what he believes—you’ve hit the nail on the head,” Hester said. She gripped the damp, pale-yellow towel and rolled it tightly into what we used to call a “rat’s tail.” She snapped the towel very close to Owen Meany’s face, but Owen didn’t move. “That’s it, isn’t it? You asshole!” she yelled at him. She snapped the towel again—then she unrolled it and ran at him, wrapping the towel around his head. “You think God wants you to go to Vietnam—don’t you?” she screamed at him.

She wrestled him out of his chair—she held his head in the towel in a headlock and she lay on her side across his chest, pinning him to the kitchen floor, while she began to pound him in the face with the fist of her free hand. He kicked his feet, he tried to grab for her hair; but Hester must have outweighed Owen Meany by at least thirty pounds, and she appeared to be hitting him as hard as she could. When I saw the blood seep through the pale-yellow towel, I grabbed Hester around her waist and tried to pull her off him.

It wasn’t easy; I had to get my hands on her throat and threaten to strangle her before she stopped hitting him and tried to hit me. She was very strong, and she was hysterical; she tried to demonstrate her headlock on me, but Owen got the towel off his head and tackled Hester at her ankles. Then it was his turn to attempt to get her off me. Owen’s nose was bleeding and his lower lip, which was split and puffy, was bleeding, too; but together we managed to take control of her. Owen sat on the backs of her legs, and I kneeled between her shoulder blades and pulled her arms down flush to her sides; this still left her free to thrash her head all around—she tried to bite me, and when she couldn’t, she began to bang her face on the kitchen floor until her nose was bleeding.

“You don’t love me, Owen!” Hester screamed. “If you loved me, you wouldn’t go—not for all the goddamn children in the world! You wouldn’t go if you loved me!”

Owen and I stayed on top of her until she started to cry, and she stopped banging her face on the floor.

“YOU BETTER GO,” Owen said to me.

“No, you better go, Owen,” Hester said to him. “You better get the fuck out of here!”

And so he took his diary from Hester’s bedroom, and we left together. It was a warm spring night. I followed the tomato-red pickup to the coast; I knew where he was going. I was sure that he wanted to sit on the breakwater at Rye Harbor. The breakwater was made of the slag—the broken slabs—from the Meany Granite Quarry; Owen always felt he had a right to sit there. From the breakwater, you got a pretty view of the tiny harbor; in the spring, not that many boats were in the water—it didn’t quite feel like summer, which was the time of year when we usually sat there.

But this summer would be different, anyway. Because I was teaching ninth-grade Expository Writing at Gravesend Academy in the fall, I wasn’t going to work this summer. Even a part-time job at Graves-end Academy would more than compensate for my graduate-school expenses; even a part-time job—for the whole school year—was worth more than another summer working for Meany Granite.

Besides: my grandmother had given me a little money, and Owen would be in the Army. He had treated himself to thirty days between his graduation and the beginning of his active duty as a second lieutenant. We’d talked about taking a trip together. Except for his Basic Training—at Fort Knox or Fort Bragg—Owen had never been out of New England; I’d never been out of New England, either.

“Both of you should go to Canada,” Hester had told us. “And you should stay there!”

The salt water rushed in and out of the breakwater; pools of water were trapped in the rocks below the high-tide mark. Owen stuck his face in one of these tide pools; his nose had stopped bleeding, but his lip was split quite deeply—it continued to bleed—and there was a sizable swelling above one of his eyebrows. He had two black eyes, one very much blacker than the other and so puffy that the eye was closed to a slit.

“YOU THINK VIETNAM IS DANGEROUS,” he said. “YOU OUGHT TO TRY LIVING WITH HESTER!”

But he was so exasperating! How could anyone live with Owen Meany and, knowing what he thought he knew, not be moved to beat the shit out of him?

We sat on the breakwater until it grew dark and the mosquitoes began to bother us.

“Are you hungry?” I asked him.

He pointed to his lower lip, which was still bleeding. “I DON’T THINK I CAN EAT ANYTHING,” he said, “BUT I’LL GO WITH YOU.”