Oddballs (6 page)

We did have a sort of playground in the backyard, a paved area where there had once been a garage. On the left was a great mound of sand, where we made miniature cities and used the hose to create lakes and rivers.

The neighborhood cats and dogs loved the sand, too, but for a different reason. Once Dad's boss and his wife came to dinner, and the wife, a sweet elderly lady, said gushingly to Vicky and me, “Oh, what a lovely sand pile you two children have to play in!”

“That's not a sand pile,” said Vicky, who was five. “It's a shit pit.”

Next to the shit pit was a 500-gallon army water-storage tank, which was our swimming pool. It was a hideously ugly round black rubber container about ten feet in diameter and three feet high. You couldn't exactly swim laps in it, but we weren't into swimming laps; we were into cooling off in the hot summers, splashing each other, doing underwater somersaults, and skinny-dipping with our friends when our parents weren't home. The water froze in the winter. Before sliding around on it ourselves, Vicky and I would plop Danny or Tycho down on the ice first, to see if it was strong enough. In spring we would watch with fascination the thousands of mosquito larvae floating just below the surface, breathing through their tiny proboscises, soon to leave this ideal breeding ground and take over the neighborhood.

There was nothing in the large space to the right of the swimming pool until the day before Vicky's sixth birthday, when she found Dad's present to her there—a pile of lumber. He was going to build her a playhouse, he told her, the best playhouse in the world. “Oh, how wonderful! Can I have my party in it tomorrow?” she naively asked him. He cautioned her that it might not be finished by then.

Eight years later, he had completed the foundation, the floor, and three walls. It wasn't only that he was the world's greatest procrastinator. He also did everything with extreme thoroughness. The playhouse foundation alone, Mom used to say, would support the Empire State Building. Dad never finished it, but what there is of that playhouse will probably still be standing long after the house itself has collapsed.

Vicky never did have a birthday party in the playhouse. Instead, it was the setting for the séance I conducted the summer after ninth grade.

When I was in grade school, Mom had organized many creatively weird parties for me, the best ones being Halloween parties. These parties took place in my room in the refinished attic on the third floor. It was the perfect setting for a Halloween party because Mom had allowed my friends and me to paint a mural on one entire wall. Several of us participated, but the most gruesomely effective sections had been done by my friend Nicole. She was a shy, plump girl who was a brilliant artist. The central figure was a rather glamorous witch standing behind a bubbling cauldron. She was surrounded by all manner of grotesque creatures—bats, demons, imps, octopus-like things with claws.

For the Halloween parties, the rest of the house would be darkened; no one would be at the front door to greet the guests. Instead, there was a series of posters to show the guests the way up, painted by Nicole. They weren't grade-school work; they were very professional. We used the same posters at every Halloween party for years, and they are probably still somewhere in the house. The first one, posted beside the front door, showed a man hanging from a noose, obviously dead because the angle of his head indicated his neck was broken. But one of his bony hands was pointing inside the house. And written underneath in scraggly letters was the instruction:
Walk in. Follow the spooks
.

The only lights inside illuminated Nicole's other posters, located at strategic intervals to indicate the way up the creaky stairs. One showed a Frankenstein monster, holding a dead child in one hand and pointing with the other. The next was a hideously decayed corpse, rotten flesh dangling from its face as it rose from a coffin, one arm outstretched. Finally there was a leering skeleton in a moonlit graveyard, gesturing at the flight of steps up to the attic.

We did some of the conventional Halloween things, like bobbing for apples and carving pumpkins. Nicole's pumpkins were always the most unusual and the most intricately and delicately executed.

Then, with the candlelit pumpkins arranged around the room, Mom would read aloud a couple of truly horrifying ghost stories about haunted houses, nightmares coming true, people being followed by ghouls. Often a terrified guest or two would call their mothers to be taken home at this point, which was too bad because the best part came next—fortune-telling.

Mom wrote the fortunes before the party, typing them on little pieces of paper, and folded them up and placed them in a bowl. Each kid would pick one and read it, and they were all horrible—things like:
You will work hard for many, many years and finally earn a million dollars
—
and then it will all be stolen from you by your children, and you will die penniless
. Or
You will develop an incurable neurological disorder and spend the rest of your life as a gibbering idiot in an insane asylum
. The best fortune, every year, was
I'm sorry, my dear, but you have no future
.… I remember when Nicole got that one. She just smiled and carefully folded it up and kept it.

Naturally, these Halloween parties were a big hit with the kids in fifth and sixth grade, and that meant I was (conditionally, at least) accepted by all. In elementary school, it wasn't social death to be associated with someone, like me, who was a little different.

But things changed in junior high. Suddenly we were surrounded by older kids, teenagers, who had very rigid rules of dress and speech, which were hopelessly confusing to me. Before we became deliberate nonconformists in high school, Vicky had been on the verge of being accepted by the popular kids in junior high. I, on the other hand, never had a chance with those people; I never had the right clothes, I was lousy at sports, I couldn't catch on to the slang, and the tuft of hair on the back of my head wouldn't lie flat. I was always an oddball, a nothing in the eyes of the ruling clique.

I'll never forget the time in seventh grade when I was just getting to be friends with a guy named Dave Solomon. He lived in another neighborhood but one day rode home with me on the school bus. A popular kid named Steve Kamen asked Dave what he was doing on this bus. “I'm going over to Bill's house,” Dave explained. Kamen looked at me, then back to Dave. “You sap,” he told Dave, and walked away.

But despite Steve Kamen's disapproval, Dave became my good friend in junior high. Like me, Dave played the piano and was more interested in music and literature than in sports. Unlike me, Dave had a chance to be popular at the beginning of seventh grade—he was naturally better at sports than I was, despite his lack of interest, and at the start of the year a lot of the girls considered him to be very cute. That changed when he was suddenly struck by virulent acne, which persisted throughout his teenage years and left him with scars that were not merely physical.

I had other friends in junior high, too. We were an extremely disparate group but had certain traits in common that made us comfortable together; we read a lot, we liked being smart, we didn't fit in with the conventional kids—and gradually began to realize that we didn't
want
to fit in with them.

My best friend was still Nicole, who had painted the Halloween posters. She was now a tall, overweight girl, who was generally recognized as the smartest person in the school. In eighth grade, we had an English teacher who was new to the school, and he gave Nicole an F on her first paper. Nicole, in her quiet, self-effacing way, did not protest or even ask the teacher why he had given her the F, as I urged her to do when she told me about it over the phone. “It doesn't really matter,” she said, no particular emotion in her voice, as though she accepted such injustice as a normal part of life.

A few days later, the same teacher had us write an essay in class. When he saw what Nicole came up with, in front of his eyes, he apologized to her privately for giving her the F on her first paper, explaining that it was so well written he had assumed she had copied it word for word from a published article. He changed the original grade, and his opinion of Nicole.

Though Nicole always got very good grades, she claimed she hardly ever studied. Mom didn't believe her—she said
nobody
could do so well without studying. But Nicole was telling the truth, all right. I knew how much of her own study time Nicole spent writing papers for other kids who were not good writers, though of course I couldn't give this evidence to Mom.

Mom also didn't believe what Nicole said about her weight problem. No one ever saw Nicole overeat, and Nicole told me that she really didn't eat much when she was alone either; she said she was overweight because there was something about her metabolism that turned every morsel of food she put into her mouth into fat. Mom said that was baloney; she was sure Nicole overate in secret. On this issue I had no evidence one way or the other—until many years later.

Nicole and I had no romantic interest in each other, but we spent a lot of time every night talking on the phone. We loved discussing the other kids, and Nicole had remarkable insight into human nature. She always seemed to understand
why
people did things—even people who were very different from herself.

Such as Matilda, who was one of our closest friends, but in many ways Nicole's direct opposite. Matilda was quite thin and ate very little in order to maintain her eighteen-inch waist. Today she would have been considered pretty, but her frizzy red hair was unfashionable in those days. (Eventually she learned the trick of ironing it.) She was taller than Nicole and stood in a slouch. Matilda adored books and read more voraciously than any of us. Her grades were even better than Nicole's—her grade-point average of 98.6 was the highest on record in the history of the school system. But unlike Nicole, Matilda's grades were the result of relentless studying. When we did
A Tale of Two Cities
in English class, Matilda read the book so many times that she could recite as much of it as anyone could stand to listen to—“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times …”—from memory. She studied all day on weekends and holidays. She didn't stop when she had completed all the required work; she would then write extra papers that were not even assigned by the teachers.

We all laughed when Matilda told us how her parents tried to bribe her to calm down about schoolwork by offering her twenty-five dollars if she would ever get a B in a course, fifty dollars for two B's, and so on. Matilda was witty, and the way she told the story made it seem very funny. We never found out if her parents would have kept the bargain because she went right on piling up A's in everything.

Nicole and I talked about Matilda a lot. Nicole felt that part of Matilda's problem was that she saw herself as unattractive. She had to excel at something, and that was going to be scholarship—and her eighteen-inch waist.

Bart was another close friend. Because he was regarded as the smartest boy in school, it was assumed that he and Nicole belonged together, and they did sort of go out with each other. Bart was a basically decent guy, but I always thought twice before asking his opinion about anything I had done; he seemed to enjoy expressing unpleasant truths.

I did not have a Halloween party all through junior high. But the summer after ninth grade, I hit on the idea of conducting a séance in the playhouse at the end of the backyard. It was dark out there, and the half-finished wooden building was like something from a ghost town. I planned the séance carefully, with Nicole's help. The only part Nicole didn't help me with was the actual script. I spent several days writing it myself, laughing a lot, and kept the contents a secret from Nicole. Typically, she never tried to coerce me into telling her what was in it.

But Nicole was the brains behind the recording I made on Dad's big, clunky tape recorder. Nicole created sound effects by coaxing weird noises out of various musical instruments and then making them weirder by speeding up or slowing down the tape. Nicole helped me figure out how to disguise my voice by speaking through an electric fan, which gave an effect of windy, echoing distance. But I didn't record the script until Nicole had gone home; I wanted the actual words to be a surprise for her as well as everybody else.

The day of the séance, Dad brought home a big piece of dry ice from the lab, which we kept in the freezer until the last moment. (The dry ice was Nicole's idea, too.) I carried a table out to the playhouse and, with several extension cords, set up the tape recorder under the table. I put a cauldronlike cast-iron pot on the table for the dry ice, and on one side of it I arranged a flashlight so the beam would hit my face from below. Nicole had loaned me some mascara, and I painted wrinkles on my face with it, blackened my lips, and wore a black robe Nicole had found at a junk store. Just before my friends arrived, I put the dry ice in the pot, where it began to generate wafting clouds of vapor.

I was waiting for my friends in the half-lit playhouse as they made their way down to the end of the dark backyard. The idea was that I was a medium, contacting an authority in the spirit world who knew what lay in store for each of my friends. They sat down at the creaking table and joined hands. Mist billowed around my dimly lit, lined, and demonic features. Various wavering hoots and moans floated up from under the table. I sighed and groaned awhile myself and then announced, “The contact is there, I can feel it coming, it's taking over me, it's …” My head lolled forward.

I had seated my friends around the table in the same order as their futures were related on the tape. “And what lies in store for Matilda, Master?” I said dully, as though speaking in a trance. Tall, thin Matilda, with her unfashionably kinky red hair, who spent about 90 percent of her waking hours with a book and already knew more about literature than most of our teachers, was sitting just beside me.