Things You Should Know Read online

  Baby June took the gun, raised the barrel to her eye, looked inside, and simultaneously pulled the trigger, shooting herself in the face, no joke.

  “I don’t get it,” she said. “It doesn’t do anything except make noise.”

  “It kills people,” Henry said.

  “Oh.”

  Mrs. arrived home hours later, white as rice. She locked the sliding glass door, the front door, and turned out the lights while Henry, baby June, and I sat silenced by her strangeness in the sudden dark of their living room. We watched her go wordlessly up the stairs and heard the bedroom door shut.

  “The hamburgers are still in the sink,” I said to Henry, who didn’t get it. “Your mother has never gone to bed leaving the kitchen dirty. She doesn’t do that. She always wipes a damp sponge across the counters, turns off the light over the stove, and wraps her dishrag through the refrigerator handle before going upstairs.”

  “What are you?” Henry asked. “A pervert?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Six burgers are drowned,” I said, emphasizing the sinking sensation of the word drowned.

  Henry went up the stairs, stood outside the door of his parents’ room, and said in a loud, demanding voice, “When’s Dad coming home?”

  “Sometime tomorrow” was the muffled answer.

  The fact that she’d answered at all compelled Henry to push the questioning further.

  “Are you getting a divorce?” he asked in a loud booming word-by-word voice you’d use to speak in the face of a tidal wave.

  From the bottom of the steps, I saw Mrs. open the door in her robe.

  “This isn’t about Daddy and me,” she said. “Your father had a problem with the car. He’s trying to straighten things out.”

  “There are dishes in the sink—it’s gross.”

  Mrs. adjusted her hair, pulled her robe tighter, put one fuzzy pink slipper in front of the other, and marched into the kitchen. She snapped on her rubber gloves, reached deep into the muck, pulled out the macaroni dishes, the frying pan, and, one by one, with the expression of a woman changing diapers, plucked hamburger after hamburger out of the water, held each up in the air for a few seconds to drain, and then dropped the remains into a trash can. She brushed her hair back with her elbow, shook Comet over everything, and went to work under hot water. The steam and Comet mixed to form a delicious noxious cloud-o’-cleanliness that drifted through the house. Whatever had happened hours earlier, the moment that caused dinner to drown, had been a kind of lapse, a seizure of sorts, but now with the green cellulose sponge in hand, everything was all right.

  Mrs. Henry turned on the floodlight by the kitchen door, so I could see my way home. A three-foot path of white light cut through the darkness and lit up the grass green and bright.

  There was a hill between the houses. A five-foot bump of dirt that changed things. The adults in either house didn’t know each other well; it was too much work. To say hello they had to go around the long way, out the front door, down the flagstone blocks to the sidewalk, up the next driveway, up the flagstone blocks to the three steps, to the front door, and ring the doorbell, ring, ring. Hi, just thought I’d stop over. It didn’t happen. If the land had been flat, if geography had been on their side, everything would have been easier. But the way it was, the Henrys were trapped. On the right edge of their property was a high homemade fence and on the left was this grass-covered tumor-o’-land that may as well have been Mount Baldy.

  “Good night,” I said and ran up the mountain toward the house on top of the hill. Mrs. turned the floodlight out behind me.

  Using my key I opened the door to the house that would never be my own. The clock in the front hall banged out ten chimes.

  My father and Cindy were sitting at the dining-room table, gnawing like rabbits on the remains of a huge salad—my father’s evening grazing, as always, supplemented by a microwaved Lean Eating entrée, parked by his plate like someone’s morning vitamin pill. Every night after their evening meal my father and Cindy disappeared into the “master bedroom suite.” I could hear the click of the door locking. Buried in the “suite” was a custom-crafted tub big enough for six people, a cross-country ski machine, an exercise bike, VCR, twenty-six-inch TV, king-size bed, and even a small fridge. In case of nuclear attack, close bedroom door and wait for the next generation to save you.

  What annoyed me the most was the locking of the door. Who did it? Cindy or my father? And how could they think that I, Mr. Privacy himself, was going to come busting in on them? It was infuriating. The other possibility was that they were really doing something in there, something I couldn’t even begin to imagine, although I did imagine.

  Alone, I did the dishes, mine and theirs, flipped through the mail, pretended to read the paper, and then, suffocating in boredom and frustration, turned on the eleven o’clock news.

  “Early this afternoon, a Philadelphia boy was struck and killed by a car as he was crossing the street on his way home from a program for gifted and talented youth at Herbert Hoover Junior High. Thomas Stanton the Third, who had just turned thirteen earlier this week, was taken to University Hospital where he was pronounced dead. According to police reports, the car was traveling at substantial speed. The driver, forty-three-year-old John Heffilfinger, also of Philadelphia, was arrested at the scene.” A picture of Mr. Henry flashed on the screen—Heffilfinger, no wonder I called them all Henrys—I truly almost didn’t know who it was. I’d never seen him as anything other than Mr. Henry until that moment, when he was plucked out, taken from the Henrys, and put in a whole new category, John “Henry” Heffilfinger, Killer.

  When Mr. Henry seemed to be late getting home, I didn’t even think twice about it. Sometimes when fathers are late it’s a good thing. Sometimes they’re buying things, surprises you’d asked for but never thought you’d get—snorkel mask, fins, a better bike.

  At thirteen, Thomas Stanton III had enough names and numbers behind his name to sound old enough and scary enough to run a bank. Poor Mr. H., was all I could think. Poor all the Hs. Did Henry even know? After turning out the floodlight behind me, did Mrs. call him into the kitchen for a long sit-down? Or was he alone up in his room, discovering this for himself on his private thirteen-inch Sony?

  “Early this afternoon,” the newscaster had said. It hadn’t even happened at night, or at twilight when darkness and light mix together like spit in a kiss. It didn’t happen at some forgivable moment when Mr. Henry could claim the sun at the horizon line blotted out everything, and he and the boy had dipped into darkness. In the middle of a perfectly good afternoon in the end of June, with a breeze that tickled the air like fingertips, he’d become a killer.

  News travels fast. “Stay home today,” my father said, ducking his head into my room before he left for the office. “Mr. Heffilfinger has a problem and should be left alone.”

  I didn’t say anything. After he and Cindy were gone, I got up, got dressed, ate breakfast, and sat looking out the front window at all the houses just like my father’s, every single one pressed out of the same red brick Play-Doh mold. The ones across the street didn’t come face to face, eye to eye, with ours, they looked into a small half court of their own. I saw those neighbors only in profile, coming and going, carrying bags of groceries up the sidewalk, watering the lawn, pounding a rug, or tending a failing barbecue. They were all Flat Stanleys. Human Colorforms, flat slices of bright, shiny, plastic laid down on a prepainted cardboard world—they could be peeled up and put down again and again, in any order or combination.

  With nothing better to do and no options, I started putting wood-grain contact paper in all my dresser drawers. Halfway through, Henry rang the doorbell.

  “Can I come in?”

  I nodded and stepped back. Henry followed me upstairs to my room.

  “I’m just gonna sit here,” he said, patting the edge of my bed.

  I didn’t say anything. It was one of those times when clearly no one should talk. I finished cutting,
peeling, laying the paper in the drawers, and then put my clean clothing back into the dresser much more slowly, more carefully than a normal person would. When I finished, and Henry still hadn’t talked, I started cleaning, dusting, polishing, rearranging. I was on the verge of remodeling the whole house before he said anything.

  “I guess you found out why dinner got wrecked,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “My father killed a kid,” he said and then stopped. “I guess you know that,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “That’s why dinner got wrecked.”

  I nodded again and thought I’d never be able to eat hamburger again, macaroni and cheese, either. I’d end up becoming a vegetarian like my father and Cindy, eating rabbit-food dinners at midnight, then locking myself in my room.

  “He’s coming home this afternoon,” Henry said. “Why? Why are they letting him out?”

  He looked up at me; I looked away.

  I shrugged and shrugged and shrugged, and Henry shrugged, and then finally we went downstairs, ate all the decent things we could find, and sat looking out the front window, waiting for Mr. Henry to be brought back.

  I can’t say Mr. Henry came home from the police station a different man. He was exactly the same the day after as he was the day before. There were no signs of him having snapped out of himself for the instant it took to kill, no indication that all the badness, the frustration, the lifetime buildup of a man’s anger, had risen up through his gut, through his blood like a whirling dervish, like the man out of the Mr. Clean bottle, and that all the swirling whirlingness had forced his foot to the floor and hurled the car forward over Thomas Stanton III. I looked for that but saw nothing except dull gray around the eyes from too little sleep, too much fear, and stubble from a day’s missed shaving.

  “I’m being used,” Henry said two days later as he was putting on the clothes his mother had laid out for him: gray pants, striped shirt, tie, blue jacket, hard shoes. The Henrys were going to court. A skinny lawyer with teeth so rotten they smelled bad had shown up the night before and explained to all the Henrys that they had to “dress up and put on a show, featuring Mr. Heffilfinger as father, provider, and protector.”

  In the hall all the Henrys went by, ducking in and out of the bedrooms, the bathroom. There was the hiss of aerosol spray, the dull whir of the hair dryer. All the running around and good clothes would have been festive if it wasn’t ten A.M. on a weekday, liable to be the hottest day of the year so far, and if the destination weren’t the county courthouse.

  As soon as the lawyer pulled into the driveway, Mr. Henry went out, got into the back seat of his car, and closed the door. The rest of the Henrys were all downstairs, ready to go, except for Henry himself.

  Mrs. Henry came upstairs. “We’re ready to leave,” she said.

  Henry was lying down on the bed. He didn’t move.

  “Henry, we can’t be late. Come on now.”

  Still nothing. His mother took his arm and began to pull. Henry pulled in the opposite direction.

  “I don’t want to fight with you,” she said, leaning back, using her weight and position to good advantage. “It’s for your father. Do this for your father.”

  Henry stopped resisting and was pulled off the bed and onto the floor.

  “Stand up or you’ll get dusty.”

  The lawyer came into his room. “Get up. We have to go.”

  Henry lay flat on the floor in his coat and tie. The back of the blue blazer picking up lint balls like it was designed to do that.

  “I’m not going,” Henry finally said.

  “Oh yes you are,” the lawyer said.

  Together, the lawyer and Henry’s mother lifted him to standing. I was sitting in the corner, in the old green corduroy chair that used to be in the living room. For the first time ever I felt like I didn’t belong there, I felt like I was seeing something I shouldn’t, something too private.

  “Unless you plan on dragging me the whole way, leave me alone,” Henry said to the lawyer.

  The lawyer pushed him back onto the bed. “Do you want me to tell you something?”

  Henry shook his head.

  “If you don’t sit in that courtroom and act right and if your daddy gets sent to jail, I don’t want you to ever forget that it might be your fault. Just because you felt like being a bogey little brat. Think on that,” the lawyer said, checking his watch.

  Henry looked at me, then stood and dusted himself off. Mrs. turned and went out of the room. Henry tipped his head toward the lawyer and said, “You’re the biggest fucking asshole in the world.”

  The lawyer didn’t respond except to look down at Henry like he wanted to kill him.

  “And your fly is open, fuckwad,” Henry said and then marched out of the room on his mother’s heels, not staying to see the lawyer’s face flush red, his hands grab at his crotch.

  From Henry’s bedroom window I watched the rest of them get into the lawyer’s Lincoln. You could tell it was going to be the kind of day where the heat would raise people’s tempers past the point of reconciliation. After they left, I left, pulling the door closed behind me and crossing the grass to wait in the air-conditioned silence of the house next door.

  Later that afternoon, when I was back at the Henrys’, their phone began to ring. It started slowly and then rang more and more, faster and faster, until it seemed to be ringing nonstop. Strangers, reporters, maniacs, guys Mr. had gone to junior high school with, lawyers offering to consider the case for a fee, someone from a TV show in New York City.

  “You really should call the TV people back,” Henry said to his parents.

  “Stay away from it,” Mrs. Henry said when the ringing started again. She held her arms down and out like airplane wings. “Don’t touch.”

  “Are you going to work tomorrow?” Mrs. asked Mr.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have you spoken to your office?”

  “No,” he said.

  “You don’t have to be afraid. Accidents happen,” Mrs. said.

  “You shouldn’t say that,” Mr. said.

  Mrs. pointed her finger at Mr. “You have to stop acting like a guilty man,” she said. “Did you wake up that morning and say to yourself, ‘I’m going to kill a little boy today’?”

  “I have blood on my shoes,” Mr. shouted, “I feel like my feet are dripping in blood.”

  “It’s your imagination,” Mrs. said.

  “I killed someone,” he said, pushing his face close into Mrs.’s.

  She pushed him away. “Stop acting insane.”

  Henry sat on baby June’s swing set in the backyard, waiting for time to pass, for everything to return to normal, but Thomas Stanton III was ahead of Henry, six months ahead. He was already across the border of thirteen when he died, and he stayed there like a roadblock, a ton-o’-bricks, like all the weight in the world. Without seeming to know what he was doing, Henry started combing his hair that same certain way that Stanton’s was in the newspaper photo. He started wearing clothes a gifted and talented type would wear: button-down shirts with a plastic pen protector in the pocket, pants a size too small. He started trying to look like a genius and ended up looking like a clown, like someone permanently dressed up for Halloween.

  “Henry,” I said, sitting facing him on the double horse swing. “It has to stop. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  He brushed his hair back with a whole new gesture, just the way the dead kid would do it.

  “Henry, you’re making me hate you.”

  “Go home. Get your own life. Leave me alone,” he said.

  And so, with nothing else to do, with no other options, I did exactly that. I went to the pool alone.

  Without Henry I was too intimidated to step over the pool of muck by the door. I dipped my feet in, and in a split second the milky white wash cauterized the summer’s worth of cuts and scratches and I was sanitized for sure.

  I unrolled my towel down on a lounger just at
the edge of the tetherball court and next to a group of kids my own age. I watched a boy smack the ball so hard I could feel the stinging in my palms. The ball spun fast, its rope winding quick and high over the head of the other boy. I saw the smacker jump up and hit it again. The ball spun harder, faster, in tighter circles, until all the rope was wound and the stem of the ball itself smacked the pole, froze a second, and then slowly started to unwind.

  “Thomas was my boyfriend,” I overheard a skinny girl with blond hair hanging down the sides of her face like wet noodles say. “No one was supposed to know, but since he died, the secret came out. It was the single most horrifying experience of my life.” She adjusted and readjusted the empty pink-and-white top of her bikini, pulling on the bottoms where they would have latched onto her butt if she’d had a butt. “The car stopped only after Thomas was sucked under and came out the other side, with grease smears down his body.” She took a breath. “My mother tried to hold me back, but I touched him. ‘Thomas,’ I said. ‘Thomas, can you hear me?’ He lifted himself off the street and walked himself over to the grass, then crumpled like when you pull the middle out of a stack of things and it all falls down. He opened his mouth and a brown nutty thing they said later was his tongue fell out. ‘Thomas,’ my mother said. ‘Thomas, everything is going to be all right. You’ve been in a little accident. These things can happen to anyone.’”

  “What about the guy who did it?” the girl she was talking to asked.

  “He sat in his car until the police came, and then jumped out and started to run. They chased after him and dragged him back so we could identify him.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, interrupting, without even knowing what I was doing.

  “What does that mean?” the girl asked.

  “It was on TV,” I said. “I don’t think he tried to get away.”

  “So what if he didn’t, what do you care,” she said. “He wasn’t your boyfriend. And you’re not even from around here anyway.”

  I shrugged and looked evenly at her. Without a word, I got up. As I walked, the rough cement around the pool sanded the soles of my feet. At the edge of the water, I threw myself forward, hoping that when the water caught me, it would not be hard, it would not be icy cold, it would be enveloping like Jell-O. I broke the surface for air and went under again. Without Henry, with nothing to do, I swam laps, back and forth a thousand times.