“Mr. Corps,” I said, “it is a depilatory.”
At that moment I saw Adam Blessing.
He was sitting by himself in the very last booth, in the back of the store. He was writing in a notebook, but he stopped writing and looked up. Our eyes met, while Mr. Corps said to me, “Did you say you wanted a depilatory?”
“Yes, I said that was what I wanted,” I answered. “I have a great deal of unsightly hair to remove from the soles of my feet.”
I faced away from Adam because I knew that he was listening.
“You have hair on the soles of your feet?” Mr. Corps said.
My face felt hot and red, and my stomach was knotting up in panic, but my mouth went right on with the act. As far as my mouth is concerned when it comes to an embarrassing situation, there is no business like show business.
I can’t even remember my next wisecrack . . . but that was the first day I ever spoke to Adam. That was A-Day.
“You have hair on the soles of your feet?” the druggist said.
“Doesn’t everyone?” this girl said.
“I don’t,” the druggist said. “I don’t know anyone who does.”
“Do you have to know someone who does to sell Hairgo?”
“No,” the druggist said. “Just a moment and I’ll see if I carry it.”
There was something really dizzy about her. I mean that in a nice way. She had this way of scrunching up her shoulders which made it look like she was hiding inside her parka. She kept glancing back at me, and she was blushing—I guess because she’d asked for a depilatory before she knew there was someone else in the store. (She should only have known how often I used to help Billie Kay, my ex-stepmother, remove the hair from her upper arms.)
What I liked most about her was her voice. It was this low, husky voice. It was the way Billie Kay’s voice sounded over the telephone if you called her when she was just waking up in the morning. In fact, it was the way Billie Kay’s voice had sounded just a week before that Wednesday, when I called her around noon to give her the latest bad news about yours truly. “Oh, no, honey,” she had said sadly in that throaty tone. “No, baby. They made a mistake, didn’t they? You wouldn’t do a thing like that.”
This girl in the drugstore had black hair and brown eyes, my favorite combination . . . and she was very skinny, though I couldn’t tell that on that first afternoon, since her body was camouflaged by her coat.
Before I’d overheard her conversation with the druggist, I’d been writing down my impressions of one Christine Cutler. She was the kind of girl I’d always been attracted to. She could have been enrolled at Miss Porter’s School, at the Spence School, Miss Hewitt’s, any one of those schools that turns out a certain kind of self-assured girl who knows what to wear and say, how to toss back her hair and look slightly bored, how to meet your eye and make you look away first—there is a certain privileged air about her. I had never had trouble getting a date with such a girl, once they knew who my father was, but I had always had difficulty maintaining the relationship once they discovered I was certainly not exactly a chip off the old block. Far from it.
The girl in the drugstore buying the depilatory was not that sort, so I wasn’t afraid of her or in awe of her. The druggist was back in the Prescription Department for quite some time, and I finally spoke up, because the silence was too heavy.
I said, “I thought most people with hair on the soles of their feet were born without bones and only lived five hours.”
She was very good at keeping a straight face. She said, “Who said I have bones? Who said I was alive?”
“I’m Adam Blessing,” I said. My first name really was Adam. My mother’s name had been Annabell Blessing. I doubt that anyone in the town of Storm remembered who she married, but I was playing it safe by dropping my father’s name altogether.
“I know your name,” this girl said.
“That’s the thing about a small town,” I said.
“What is?”
“Everyone knows everyone else’s business,” I said.
“You know I’m buying a depilatory for my hairy legs,” she said, “and all I know is your name. Is that fair, even or equal?”
I laughed. I like funny girls. I always have. I sit beside most girls without being able to think of anything to say but what my father would classify under the heading “manifest knowledge.”
“A.J.,” my father likes to instruct me, “never discuss manifest knowledge. Never comment on the weather, or the news of the day, or anything generally known, obvious and unnecessary to mention. If you can’t be original, be silent.”
Usually I am silent around girls. Billie Kay was a rare exception, but she was not a girl, she was a woman, and she was hilarious. . . . Maybe too hilarious for her own good. My father said he wanted a wife, not a performer. That was one of his excuses for ditching Billie Kay, anyway. Billie Kay’s version of their breakup was that my father would never love a woman because my mother’s death had made him too guilty. That was probably true. In his cups, my father often said, “I should have loved your mother more. She loved me with a passion, A.J.—an unbelievable passion.”
I smiled at this girl in the drugstore and said, “Life isn’t fair, or even, or equal, but I’ll pretend it is and give you one of my secrets.”
“I’m waiting,” she said.
I put away my journal and walked toward her. “You have to remember, it really is a secret,” I said.
She said, “So is the fact I have hairy legs.”
“A lot of girls do,” I said.
“But this is the first time I’ve ever bought anything to remove it,” she said.
“My secret is a first, too.”
“What is it?” she said.
“I was expelled from school,” I told her, not even knowing why I was telling her. I hadn’t planned to ever tell anyone in that town. “Usually I’m just suspended, or asked not to come back the next year. This time I was shipped out in midterm—pfffft, fini!”
“Was it a private school?” she asked.
“Yes. Choate.”
“Never heard of it.”
I shrugged, even though I was a little disappointed that she’d never heard of Choate. “Well, I can’t impress you then.”
“Is it a fancy school?”
“Most people think so.”
“Why did you get expelled?”
“For cheating on an English exam,” I told her.
“You really cheated?”
“Yes. I really cheated,” I said. “But the thing is, I knew the poem by heart. I just blocked during the exam. I copied from the guy in front of me. But I really knew the poem. I still do. I can recite it right now.”
At that point the druggist appeared carrying a small green tube and reading the print on it. “Remove facial hair with soft cream care,” he recited. “Hairgo.”
It was obvious the hair she wanted to remove was no more on her legs than on the soles of her feet. I hadn’t noticed a mustache on her face. I used to help Billie Kay remove hers when she was doing her upper arms. Perhaps I’d spent too much time with an older woman who treated me like her buddy instead of her stepson; all I knew was it