I was lying on the rope carpet with my feet up on an old streamer trunk the Hrens used as a coffee table. I was studying Harriet, trying to see her through the eyes of Lauralei Rabinowitz, who kept returning to my mind like mildew you can’t get off a suitcase no matter how often you set it out in the sun and purge yourself of it. Maybe she was more a disease than simple mildew, a disease so far unrecorded in the annals of medical history. Years hence I would be told, “It’s Rabinowitzitis, all right, you’ve been suffering from it since before your marriage. You have all the symptoms. I’m surprised you didn’t notice a certain apathy alternating with periods of deep depression.”
Harriet was prettier than Lauralei—Lauralei would have to give her that. She was petite and Lauralei was built like a phys-ed teacher; she was blond and hairless and Lauralei shaved every other day. She was blue-eyed and pug-nosed and Lauralei was brown-eyed and longing for a nose job. . . . But Harriet was a math lesson, and Lauralei was a whole course in chemistry, and it was Lauralei I wished I was trying to get out of buying a ring for.
“Harriet,” said my mother, “is a nice girl and she’ll be an asset in the business.”
“That girl,” said my mother some time back about Lauralei, “will never settle for Seaville. You think she’ll come back to you after she goes to Ohio State?”
“Why do I have to think about those things now?” I used to say.
“Because now is when you’re going to get in trouble if you don’t get control over yourself. Stay out of the hearse, too, or I’ll tell your father you’ve been in there with her.”
Lauralei Rabinowitz did not come into my life until the middle of my junior year, when her family moved from New York City to Seaville. Before she first bumped up against me in the hall, laughing at me with her dark, sexy eyes and letting me have my first whiff of Arpege, the French perfume she touched to her ears every morning before she left the house, I was a simple son of an undertaker, the brunt of many jokes and used to it, a bookworm for compensation. My only accomplishment B.R. (Before Rabinowitz) was to win an essay contest in Mr. Sponzini’s English class.
My composition was called “Evasions” and it was inspired by my mother’s habit of refusing to say that anyone died. Someone “crossed over,” “went to her reward,” “passed on,” “drew his final breath,” on and on. I spent hours in the library elaborating on my theme, working myself into a sweat over the discovery that the Malays have no name for tiger, lest the sound of it might summon one; that in Madagascar the word “lightning” is never mentioned for fear it might strike; that Russian peasants have no name for their enemy, the bear (they call him “honey eater”); and that in Hungary the mothers of new babies were once told “What an ugly child,” to placate evil spirits and make them less jealous.
“Brilliant work, Wally!” Mr. Sponzini wrote across the top of my essay, but it did nothing to stop Duffo Buttman from following me home singing to the tune of “Home on the Range” “Oh give me a home, where the corpses all roam, and the ghosts in the caskets do play . . .” and it did nothing to prevent Miles Wills from calling across a classroom, “What are you going to undertake today, Witherspoon?”
Before Rabinowitz, I consoled myself with the idea that one day every one of them would be wheeled Mr. Trumble’s way. He was my father’s assistant, in charge of receiving. But that was not a lot of consolation, considering the fact that Mr. Trumble was in his late sixties, and I was in line for Mr. Trumble’s job, and even if Duffo Buttman himself were to arrive stiff and white and ready for the grave, I would rather die myelf than be a party to the necessary embalming.
“You’ll get over it,” my father would tell me.
“Oh no I won’t,” I’d say emphatically, “ever!”
“Wallace!” my mother said then, raised eyebrow, eyes narrowing to caution me not to get my father excited, his heart was weak.
Then Lauralei Rabinowitz came and did battle with my badly battered ego, suggesting the back of the hearse herself one night, and we fell in love the way a storm rages, or a rock number builds, the way you fly in dreams all by yourself, or go down a roller coaster smiling while you’re screaming, with the wind trying to push you back and the earth turning before your eyes.
“Where is love?” I argued with her our last night in the hearse. “Where is love in all this talk of height and religion and profession?”
“Listen, Wally,” she said, “Maury Posner’s coming by my house in an hour to borrow my notes from Earth Science, so I can’t continue this discussion.” She was still combing her hair.
“Maury Posner’s shorter than I am!” I yelled.
“He’s Jewish, though,” she said, “and he’s already got a bid for the Zebe House at Ohio State.”
“It’s over,” Harriet said. For a second I thought she was reading my mind (only my mind always shouted it: RABINOWITZ IS OVER!), but she was talking about the soap. It was all over except for a last tease, a brief look at the next day’s episode.
On the screen was Sabra St. Amour. She played a teenager on the soap, this tall, green-eyed girl with very light blond hair spilling down to her waist. The same way The Fonz was always saying “H-eee-EEY” on Happy Days or J.J. said “Dy-no-mite!” on Good Times, Sabra St. Amour’s trademark was “Tell me more.” She’d milk those three words for all they were worth, and around school you’d hear kids saying “Tell me more” the same way she said it. There were “Tell me more” T-shirts with her face on them. There was a song called “Tell Me More,” recorded by The Heavy Number. She’d done a T.V. special last winter called “Tell Me More,” which was a series of really bad comedy skits, but it didn’t matter because all she had to say was “Tell me more,” and everybody would fall apart.
During the tease, Sabra St. Amour was hanging up a poster in her bedroom. She’d just moved to another town to start over, after her movie-star mother had shot another woman’s husband in their love nest. The poster was an ocean scene, not unlike the one Harriet and I could see from the Hrens’ beach-house window. There was surf washing up on the beach. Sabra was reading something printed on the poster while the crawl of credits was passing across her face.
“Accept me as I am,” said Sabra in a slow, wistful voice, “so I may learn what I can become.”
Then the music began to swell, and the theme of Hometown sounded on the organ, while the camera did a slow fade-out.
“I can lend you a hundred dollars toward the ring,” Harriet said, punching the Off button on the remote control.
“Nobody else in the senior class is going to have a ring, Harriet,” I said.
“My mother had hers by her senior year,” she said. “She had a half-a-carat Keepsake.”
“Why don’t we take a walk on the beach?” I said.
“You wouldn’t have to pay back the hundred till after we were married.”
“It’s a beautiful day,” I said.
“I don’t want to miss Star Trek,” Harriet said. “Mr. Spock is going to desert the Enterprise for a strange, female creature from an alien colony.”
“Do you mind if I take a walk?” I said.
“Alone?” Harriet said.
“Alone,” I said, but it didn’t turn out that way, even though Harriet stayed behind.
I never like to watch our show on tape,