Home from the Vinyl Cafe (31 page)

Last year, when he was in grade three, Dave’s son, Sam, had his own meeting with the unflinching eye. After Christmas each student in Sam’s class was assigned a pen pal from a school in the suburbs. Sam was assigned Aidan. Most of the letters written back and forth between the classes were stiff and a long way from real, but somehow the stars were aligned when Sam and Aidan were paired. They developed that most rare of modern relationships—they became correspondents.

Through the mail, Sam and Aidan learned they liked the same television shows, played the same video games, read
the same books, and felt the same way about much of it. They even had the same birthday.

“Maybe,” said Sam, “Aidan is my twin brother. Maybe there was a mistake at the hospital or something.”

At the end of May, the two schools arranged a field day so they could bring all the pen pals together. Everyone knew the highlight was going to be the moment when Sam met Aidan. Everyone knew how excited Sam was about the meeting, and about the plans he and Aidan had made.

“I’m going up to his cottage,” said Sam. A statement of fact, not a question.

They met on the sidewalk beside a large yellow school bus.

“I’m Aidan,” said the skinny, freckled eight-year-old girl holding out her hand. She had stringy straw-colored hair that hung down to her shoulders. She was wearing a grubby T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. She looked as if she could throw a ball. She also looked undeniably like a girl.

“I’m Aidan,” she said again.

“No, you’re not,” said Sam.

“Aidan is a girl,” sang Lawrence Hillside. “Aidan’s a girl.”

It was a fact beyond Sam’s comprehension; outside his realm of the possible. His friend Aidan was a boy. His friend Aidan could not be a girl.

“Yes, I could,” said Aidan, holding her ground.

There was a circle of kids around them.

Sam was dumbfounded. He said, “I have to go.” He turned and pushed desperately through the crowd, pain on his face. He never mentioned Aidan again. Dave knows this much because he heard it from Sam’s teacher.

“We had a fat boy in our class,” said Morley. “His name was Norman Minguy. Did I ever tell you about Norman? He got along better with the girls than the boys. But he didn’t get
picked on. Probably because he always had lots of money. He used it to buy penny candy. The year we were in grade four, we had Mrs. Merrill, who was strict but nice. Norman sat in the middle of the class, and when Mrs. Merrill was writing on the blackboard and her back was toward the class and the room was quiet because everyone was copying what she was writing on the board into their exercise books, sometimes Norman would reach into his desk and take a handful of penny candy and toss it in the air. It was like someone had lobbed a grenade into the class—one minute dead silence and the next, bedlam. Kids on the floor, kids under desks, everybody fighting for candy. Mrs. Merrill would turn around, mystified, because except for these unexpected explosions, we were a well-behaved class. She would put her hands on her hips and ask what was going on, and of course no one would tell her. No one would turn Norman in, because no one wanted him to stop. It was too good to be true.”

In the middle of her second week of early mornings at work, Morley dreamed she was sitting on a bench in a crowded waiting room.

“All the parents were there,” she said to Dave on the telephone the next morning. “Everyone looked so worried. I was sitting right across from Ted and Polly Anderson. But they wouldn’t look at me. No one would. Polly was wringing her hands like something awful was about to happen. It felt like we were there because we had done something terribly wrong. Do you think it means I shouldn’t have gone back to work?”

Sam had never been so far out of her orbit. He was moving into a universe that soon she would hardly be allowed to visit. And he was moving so fast. Morley began to think more and more about her own childhood—to compare her experiences
to her son’s. It was dangerous ground: Even the happy memories could make her sad. She was feeling guilty that she was not walking Sam to school, that he was eating lunch in the cafeteria for the first time.

She kept coming back to Norman Minguy and the utter joy of those classroom scrambles. Morley wanted the same thing for Sam. And that was what led her into the school yard at six
A.M.
on a Monday in September with two rolls of quarters and a roll of dimes and nickels. If she couldn’t lob candy around Sam’s classroom, she could scatter change around his schoolyard. Morley imagined that a schoolyard full of coins—like pirate’s treasure—would create the same joy for her son as Norman Minguy’s penny candy had for her.

She scattered twenty dollars in loose change around the yard. Under the play structure and in the sandbox and by the toolshed and under the stairs where the little kids gathered. She felt wonderful and light and alive. It didn’t matter, she thought, if Sam didn’t get any of the money—although she was planning to head home as soon as she finished and do her best to get him to school early. But it didn’t matter, because school yards exist in stories as much as real life, and Sam would be part of the story, and the story would become a legend, and it would grow in the telling. Before long it would be hundreds of dollars—they would talk about the morning when there was hundreds of dollars in the school yard. Kids would be at school early for weeks in the sure knowledge that it would happen again.

It did not, of course, work out like that. After she finished spreading the money, Morley went for coffee and a roll at a little place run by a Portuguese baker from Argentina. It was a happy little spot where you poured your own coffee from a pot on the counter and sat, if you felt like sitting, at one of the two tables in the rear of the store. Morley liked it there because
everything was made of wood and you still got your bread in brown paper bags.

On her way home, she detoured by the school to savor the sheer recklessness of what she had done. As she pulled up to the school fence, she saw a tall, bony man with a goatee standing by the swings, wiping his brow. It was Floyd, the school janitor, who was never seen within an inch of the school yard whenever there was broken glass to be picked up. As Morley watched, Floyd bent over and began plowing around the yard like a Zamboni, sucking up every coin she had dropped. Instead of going home and waking up her son, as she had intended, Morley went to a phone booth and called her husband.

“Why didn’t you stop him?” asked Dave. “Why didn’t you tell him it was for the kids?”

“I was too embarrassed,” said Morley. “It was too silly. I’m going to walk to work. The car is parked by the field. Will you pick it up when you take Sam?” And she hung up.

All morning Dave imagined, with growing regret, what might have happened had Floyd not stumbled upon Morley’s money. By midafternoon he had worked himself into such a state that he was having trouble concentrating. He spent fifteen minutes sticking twenty-dollar price tags on a stack of albums he meant to label with two-dollar tags. It took him half an hour to peel the labels off and reprice them. When he caught himself filing
The Best of Herman’s Hermits
under soul, he knew it was time to stop. It wasn’t until he was almost home that he knew what to do about Morley—he was going to finish what his wife had started. But he wasn’t going to fill the school yard with spare change for Floyd to scoop. Dave had a better idea. He was going to fill it with frogs.

“Catching frogs,” he said to Morley that night, waving his arms as he walked around the kitchen, “is the essence of childhood.”

It had taken Dave only two phone calls to find frogs.

“I called a pet store first,” he said, “but all they had was green tree frogs. For, like, pets.”

“How much,” said Morley, “is a green tree frog?”

“Nine ninety-nine each,” said Dave. “Fifteen dollars for two.”

As she stared at her husband in trepidation, Morley did the math in her mind—six frogs … forty-five dollars. Surely he wouldn’t spend forty-five dollars on frogs. There wouldn’t be more than six.

Dave was somewhere else. Going too fast to notice Morley’s growing apprehension. He was full steam ahead.

“Anyway,” he said. “I had a better idea.”

“
Different
idea,” said Morley. “You had a different idea.”

“Bait store,” said Dave.

“Bait store?” said Morley.

“Leopard frogs,” said Dave. “The frogs we caught when we were kids.”

“When
you
were a kid,” said Morley.

There was silence. Morley and Dave in their kitchen looking at each other. Dave holding a dripping dish towel, beaming and proud. A little nervous. A
lot
excited. Morley, her hands up to the wrists in a bowl of raw hamburger, fearful of what she had created.

“How much,” said Morley, “are leopard frogs?”

“Only six ninety-nine a dozen,” said Dave.

“How many are you getting?” said Morley, wiping meat off her fingers.

“Three dozen,” said Dave.

“Three dozen,” said Morley, walking toward the sink.

“Maybe four?” said Dave. He said it like a question. Like he was asking permission. But he wasn’t asking permission. He had already been to the bait store. He had already bought the frogs. They were out in the garage in five large plastic boxes. Ten dozen of them. One hundred and twenty leopard frogs Dave intended to set loose in the morning.

Morley might have stopped him then—should have stopped him—but he hadn’t stopped her. Dave imagined the school yard full of fast-moving children; imagined boys with frogs in their pockets, girls crouched in secret councils. If she had known how it would work out, Morley would have said something. But she didn’t. She was trying to be supportive.