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By the time the boy turned seven, his mother decided that he could be left home alone and that it was time for him to make his way through the world unaccompanied. She wanted to ensure that he would not go astray and would grow up to be a manly man like his famous namesake. She also wanted to spare herself from the daily annoyance of conversing with a child of somewhat high but not exceptional intelligence. Therefore, Britta provided a hundred-page notebook filled with rules and expectations. Ernie was required to memorize all entries whether he understood them or not. Over the years that followed, he was regularly quizzed as to his compliance.
When he was fourteen and warmed by the company of his amigos, in the year of Hornfly, there came a four-day Thanksgiving weekend of terror and revelation that had subsequently been expunged from his memory. Now, cosseted in the space behind the foldaway bed but unaware that his body had been stashed in Spencer’s empty house in the last block of Harriet Nelson Lane, in the neighborhood of the Nelsoneers, who were even at that moment preparing for a community barbecue with lawn bowling and badminton, Ernie was on the brink of remembering the fateful events of that long-ago turkey day and what followed, but not quite yet.
At this juncture, you might be marveling at how neatly all the disparate elements of this book seem to be knitting togethertoward a satisfying and convincing ending. Others of you, though perhaps entertained, might find the tale too fantastic to be true, although I have assured you it is as true as anything you will read in the papers or see on the evening news. I take no offense at your doubt. However, I commend to you the quotation from the great novelist Thomas Hardy, which serves as the epigraph at the front of this volume and which, for your convenience, I repeat herewith:Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
35Driving to the Hospital, Spencer Recalls the Night Rebecca Emerged from Her Unlovely-Person Cocoon
Following Hornfly’s consumption of Björn Skollborg in Liberty Park pavilion on Halloween night, through the first seventeen days of November, the young amigos made no progress in their quest to learn the truth about Maple Grove. They discussed ways they might intimidate Pastor Larry into explaining the ten incompletely formed humans arranged like a chain of paper dolls in the church basement. Also, why did he allow a hulking orange-eyed monster with weird hair to lounge around, reading for pleasure, in the rectory library? Why did the collection of books therein apparently contain so many novels featuring great quantities of blood, pain, mayhem, cruelty, murder, and mass death, which was just the kind of entertainment a human-eating monster would enjoy? And did his sister in fact have serious dental surgery, and did he really travel upstate to look after her for a few days—or was he elsewhere, conniving with malevolent forces to destroy humankind? Whatever the answers might be, one thing was already clear: Pastor Larry was not really a man of God.
On the Sunday evening before Thanksgiving, Spencer and Ernie and Bobby were in the back booth at Adorno’s Pizzeria, unaware that it would become a ristorante in less than twentyyears; unaware that major cities would literally become cesspools with widespread public defecation and legions of drug addicts dying in the gutters; unaware that an engineered virus would kill millions and that no authorities would care enough to discover its source; unaware that David Letterman would retire from TV and grow a strange Gabby Hayes beard, leaving late-night comedy to die; in short, unaware that the future would fail to be like the world in which the Jetsons had lived and would become a place that alarmed even the Addams family. The amigos drank their cherry Cokes, their vanilla Cokes, their chocolate Cokes, as they anticipated a future without war, without disease, without the annoyance of unsolicited phone sales. They refrained from choosing and ordering pizzas until the fourth amigo arrived, for theirs was an association rooted in democracy; furthermore, Spencer and Bobby and Ernie were not misogynists.
The night was chilly. When the front door opened, a cold draft briefly fanned through the pizzeria, bringing with it a fragrance as pleasantly picturesque as the town through which it had blown to get there. A remarkably pretty girl entered and stood just inside the door as it closed behind her. She wore pink sneakers, fitted jeans, and a tan jacket over a pink sweater and white blouse.
As this marvelous apparition unzippered her jacket, shrugged it off, and unwound a scarf from around her neck, the three amigos in the back booth goggled at her, though only for three seconds, after which they glanced at one another and then turned their attention to their Cokes.
Although they never discussed the protocols of girl watching, the three friends conducted that activity in precisely the same fashion. If an attractive girl appeared within your line of sight, you could look at her for three seconds, maybe four if you happenedto be in a bold and reckless mood, and then you must redirect your attention. To stare longer would be to risk that the girl would become aware of your interest and make eye contact with you, which was a thrilling prospect but also one certain to lead to disaster. If she made eye contact, the chances that she would approach and say something became intolerably high. If it was going to be one of the worst days of your life, she would actually speak to you. Then what?Then What? Then, inevitably, you would stammer incoherently or say something so stupid that you would die a little while you listened to yourself say it. Then a blank look would come into her eyes, as though you had become invisible, so that she wondered whatever had possessed her to speak aloud when no one was there to be spoken to. Your friends—if you had any friends and they were with you—would regard you with abject pity, though they could not have thought of anything better that you could have said, that anyone could have said in the history of the world, under such perilous circumstances.
So after Spencer, Bobby, and Ernie briefly goggled at the girl who came in from the November night, they stared at their Cokes, heads lowered as if they were saying grace for the blessing of cola-flavored sodas. Although they were usually talkative, they were at the moment bludgeoned by beauty into a state of stupefaction. They were not the kind of boys who made crude or even suggestive remarks about girls; as certified nerds, they regarded sex and voodoo as equally mysterious territories, where the wrong words could bring a hideous curse down on them.
When the blonde in the pink sweater crossed the pizzeria to their booth, they did not see her coming even with their peripheral vision. They expected her to take a table as far away from them as the layout of the premises allowed. When she threw herscarf and jacket into the booth, they reacted as if she had lobbed a grenade among them, and when she sat beside Ernie, across from Spencer and Bobby, their collective gasp sucked a significant portion of the air out of the room.
Only when she said “Hey, guys” did they recognize her from her voice. On being struck by the realization that this was Rebecca, they found speech impossible. They stared at her, their expressions like those of frogs gazing in wonder at the moon, until Spencer heard himself say, “What’s happened to you?” in a tone of voice and with an emphasis that made it sound as if he were saying,Dear God, girl, you were once presentable, but now you’re a beast. How have you let yourself go?
On the last word of Spencer’s question, Ernie pointed at Rebecca with a trembling finger. “You’re moving on!” Heartbreak shivered through his voice. “You’re moving on, aren’t you?”
Clearly puzzled, Rebecca said, “Moving on from what?”
“From us.”
“From you? Why would I?”
“Look at us,” Bobby said.
Spencer said, “And look at you.”
“I’m dying inside,” Ernie said, having always been the most sentimental of them.
“Thanksgiving’s coming and nothing to be thankful for,” said Spencer, because he was years away from having his special hat to comfort him. “Nothing, nothing.”
Bobby asked, “Why? What did we do? We deserve to know why.”
Rebecca made eye contact with each of them in turn and then squinted like Clint Eastwood conveying keen impatience. “Listen up, dudes. Are we amigos or are we amigos?”
“I thought we were,” Bobby said.
And Spencer said, “I hoped we were.”
“But now it comes crashing down,” said Ernie.
Gia Adorno arrived at the table. The boys ordered as if they had nothing to live for but food.
To Rebecca, Gia said, “I’m happy to see you stopped with the Bride of Frankenstein act.”
The boys at once rebelled at Gia’s implied approval of the new Rebecca:
“Ilikedthe way you looked before.”
“Ilovedthe way you looked before.”