Wilde Lake(22)

“Noel.” A slamming sound. The window shutting? The volume on the record player was lowered, because if it were too loud, Teensy might storm upstairs. Whatever they were doing, they didn’t want anyone in there. Not Teensy, not me. A smell of smoke, sweet and strange. The sound of the window creaking open.

“Do you think they do it?” That was Noel.

“Who?”

“Kim and Carson.”

“Probably. I don’t know. I don’t care.”

“He says they do.”

“I don’t care.”

“Didn’t you ask Kim to homecoming?”

“No.”

“You said you were going to.”

“I said that if I wanted to go to a dance, she’d be okay. Obviously, she’s going with Carson.”

“I don’t think they do it. They’re all over each other at school. Between classes—it’s like he was going off to war instead of French II. Heh, French II. Based on what I’ve seen, Kim could teach AP French. She goes for it. Right there in the hall.”

“Noel, I don’t want to talk about Kim and Carson.”

The window closed again.

“What does your dad think?”

Why, I wondered, would my father care about these people named Kim and Carson, and whether they’re going to the dance together?

“I told you—he doesn’t want me to smoke, but he all but said that if I do smoke, do it at home when he’s not here. I mean, I’m pretty sure that’s what he was saying, between the lines. Can you imagine if Andrew Brant’s son got busted for grass?”

I sat there, trying to figure out how one smoked grass. I assumed that Noel and AJ were making fake cigarettes out of grass clippings. Maybe they were watching Miss Maude in hopes of stealing some grass from her yard. Smoking was bad. Smoking killed you. I had nagged my father until he gave up his pipe and now it sounded as if I was going to have to start in on my brother.

“We’re not stoners,” Noel said. “We can take it or leave it.”

My six-year-old brain turned that over, too. Did Noel mean they wouldn’t throw rocks at someone? Were they going to throw rocks at Miss Maude? Or was he talking about stonemen, like the ones in the B.C. comic?

“We’re not really anything,” Noel continued. “We’re sort of a group unto ourselves. We do the theater stuff and singing, we dominate the productions, but we’re not the theater group. That’s, you know, Sarah and that boy Mark, the ones who are always drawing attention to themselves, breaking into musical numbers in the hall. We’re athletes, but we’re not jocks, not even Bash or Lynne. I play tennis and you’ll probably make JV for both basketball and baseball this year. You might even be varsity for baseball, as a freshman. We get good grades.”

“You have to be pretty lame not to get good grades at a school where there’s no failure and they let you retake tests.”

“Less and less,” Noel said. “Some of the classes are like normal classes anywhere now. Anyway, we’re, like, I don’t know—the Bloomsbury Group of Wilde Lake High School. I’m going to start calling you Leonard.”

“Does that make you Virginia?”

They laughed very hard at this. I guessed Leonard and Virginia were really weird. Then, Noel again: “Come away from the window, you pervert, Lawdy, Miss Maude-y. If I were your dad, I’d be over there with, I don’t know, what does the Welcome Wagon actually bring? Is there still a Welcome Wagon?”

“I think that’s in The Music Man,” AJ said. “I hope they put that on when we’re juniors or seniors. I want to play Harold Hill.”

“No, that’s the Wells Fargo wagon, you doofus.”

The music stopped and it was evident that AJ was changing records. He put the Music Man soundtrack on his stereo, and the two of them sang along to the train rhythms of the opening song. As the record continued, they laughed hysterically at things that didn’t seem that funny to me. I could tell from the timbre of their voices that they were lying on the wooden floor, singing to the ceiling. I lay down on the floor in the spare room, wondering what made the ceiling so hilarious. It was plaster, in need of repair, and if you squinted hard enough, you could find shapes in the stains and cracks. But unlike clouds, they were always the same shapes, and I had identified them long ago. A rabbit. A rose. A cow head. Trouble, AJ sang, Trouble. And Noel sang back: Right here in Wilde Lake. The kids in their—what? For years I thought it was their “double backers,” not that I knew what a double backer was, but it made as much sense as knickerbockers would have. Then again, it was only this year, listening to Sirius radio in my car, that I found out that I had gone my entire life thinking that the nice man who sang “More I Cannot Wish You,” was not, in fact, hoping that the young woman found a man with the “licorice tooth.”



A week or two later, our father paid his respects to our new neighbor, taking her a bottle of wine, the kind that had straw on the bottom and, once empty, could be used as a candleholder. He was the one who reported back that she was only thirty, despite the shock of white hair, and really quite friendly, if particular about her lawn and plantings. She was originally from South Carolina, but her husband had been assigned to Fort Meade before he was sent to Vietnam and she came to like Maryland. She wasn’t sure why she had bought a three-bedroom house in a suburb. Maybe, she told my father, it was because she still kept thinking she was going to have a family.