LATER THAT EVENING, just after Lonnie left and before the bats came out to chase the last of the mosquitoes, I rode to Laurice’s house to watch her in her window. Thinking about it now, I can’t recall if I realized how creepy and desperate it was—to leave my bike in the hedges near her mailbox and belly-crawl through the azaleas to a low spot in her yard, where I could see everything I needed and not be spotted in the shadows. I spied for the reason anybody spies: to find out something nobody knows you know. Secret information is the best kind. It gives you an upper hand, even if you never play it. Spying on Laurice wasn’t sexual. I was more curious than anything. I wanted to catch her in a moment that might be described as intimate, without her realizing I was right there with her.
Laurice’s parents watched television. They didn’t move their heads or their mouths, the screen’s glow shifting across their faces like an eclipse. Laurice, on the other hand, was all energy and movement in the bedroom above them. She sang, she danced, she called people on the white phone in her room. Once her father yelled toward the ceiling, to tell her to quiet down or quit doing the Pony on her floor, I guess, but she didn’t stop until Lonnie came to the door.
I knew what carpe diem meant, even if Lonnie Tisdale didn’t. It meant not wasting time. It meant doing things without thinking too much about them. It meant calling Laurice Reeves and showing up at her doorstep the day you got out of the hospital. Laurice was one of the things Lonnie thought about while the buttock cheek on his face quit swelling and his stitches dried up. Lying there in the pine straw, with no doubt a few hundred families of red bugs invading my waist, I learned that just because you love somebody secretly, she doesn’t go off the market. This knowledge continues to sledgehammer me about twice a year, not matter how old I get.
They sat on the porch like high school kids on a date, the only light from the closest windows and the streetlight at the curb. I could see Laurice’s mother spying on them from the den window, which I thought was pretty awful and deceitful, until I remembered I was no better. When Laurice wasn’t giggling or pointing at Lonnie’s face, she covered her cheeks, probably in horror from the stories he told her, stories about sunken Kenmores and black water and fake eyes. She didn’t seem to act quite like herself.
After a bit, Laurice stood up. I thought she was leaving him, but instead she ducked inside the door and turned on the harsh overhead porch light. Though I couldn’t make out what they said to each other, I could see better now. Lonnie popped out his fake eye and rolled it in his palm. With his other hand, he pointed to his empty socket. Laurice peered closer, then suddenly shrieked. Lonnie laughed. Laurice leaned in a second time and Lonnie repeated the show more than once. I could tell—Laurice loved seeing whatever might show up in the eye socket. From where I lay, she didn’t appear to be a girl who would puke. I saw Lonnie reach in his pocket. He opened his wallet and took out a bill. I’m guessing it was a five to cover a bet he just lost.
LIVE LONG ENOUGH. You’ll look back and regret your collection of tiny moments when you turned left and should have gone right, when events—cosmic or otherwise—conspired for or against you. (If I’d caught one more light, I would never have been t-boned by that pickup at Main and Stone Avenue…) I had one of those with Lonnie. I avoided him for a week. It was easy. He was, as I mentioned, a local hero, and he had no time to wonder why I didn’t call him to go fishing, or why I never rode my bike to his house. His picture was in the Kingstree Times. Boy Scout Troop 17, under the leadership of Mr. Sprinkle, created a special merit badge honoring Lonnie (which was, incidentally, in the shape of a fiery eyeball.) I was easily forgotten for a week.
But I was there every night, lying in the pine straw, watching Laurice’s mother watch her daughter and Lonnie. Every night, he showed her the empty orbit of his eye. Every night, she shrieked and asked for more. Then one night, when Laurice’s mother finally gave up her spot at the den window and Lonnie put his eyeball back in the socket, Laurice leaned over and kissed him. Lonnie ran his hand up Laurice’s t-shirt and she didn’t move an elbow to block him. She didn’t seem to mind where his hands were going or where his tongue had been.
I wanted to leave but they would have heard me rustling through the azalea bushes. And I wanted to yell at Lonnie, wanted to say that just because he only possessed a single eye, he was nothing special. But he was. He was a boy who gave Death the finger, and women will always love men who defy mortality. But I didn’t realize that then. I only knew that I felt cheated by a boy with one eye.
When the lights went out and Lonnie left for home, I pedaled through the neighborhood. I had no concept, at thirteen, of therapy, yet I somehow sensed talking to another person would be healthy. My father was the smartest person I knew. He could help me. I needed explanations, and he never lacked for answers to anything, unless my mother asked the questions. When I got home, I found my mother sitting in the dark in the living room. The only time anyone went into our living room was at Christmas (because that’s where we put the tree) or when my father left. This was August. He’d gone again, chasing his appetites.
I should have been smart enough to recognize this wasn’t a good time. In the half-light from the hall, I could see she had a glass, and I smelled the orange Tang. My mother only drank when my father left and then, only Tang and Smirnoff. Now, she sat, staring, as if she were trying to figure out a math problem in her head.
“He’s gone again,” I said, making sure it didn’t sound like a question.
“Naturally,” she said. I heard ice cubes crackle in the glass.
I told her I needed to ask her something and she didn’t answer. “It’s important. I would’ve asked Dad, but—,” I said. I heard her let go of a breath. She rarely cried. I blamed that on her job at the hospital. She probably saw enough crying there. Instead of tears, my mother sighed when she was upset, letting air and a tiny moan escape her mouth at the same time.
“Well, asking your father for help,” she said. “Not such a good plan, eh, hon?”
“I like Laurice,” I said. Now that I think of it, she was already aware of this. I wasn’t giving her anything new. Down the hall, I heard the television break into music of some kind, something loud my brother was watching.
“Congratulations,” she said, “your medal is in the mail.” I heard the ice in her glass shift. Her sarcasm increased with every sip of Tang and Smirnoff.
“Never mind,” I said and started to walk toward the hall.
“Wait,” she said quickly. “I’m not good with boy stuff. I’m probably not the one to give you ideas right now. They’ll be bad ones.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t think she likes me anyway. She likes Lonnie. He keeps showing her his eye. And they kiss a lot. I don’t get it.”
My mother appeared at the edge of the shadows and stood in front of me. She still wore her nurse’s whites, but her shoes were off. She looked like a ghost, a very tired one. She reached forward with her hand, the one without the glass and patted me on the head like I was the family dog. It’s one of the few times I remember her hand on me.
“I don’t know whether this will make you feel better or worse,” she said, “but here’s the deal. You will never get it. Ever. So if you give up trying, nobody will blame you.” She took a step toward the hall, into the brighter light, then stopped when an idea struck her. “Or,” she said, “or it could be that you can’t trust a man who’s missing something.” She sighed right when she said that.
I’VE NEVER FIGURED out what it was about being thirteen, the way you think you’re the core of every existing universe, the way any event that happens to you is epic and mythic, the most important thing that will ever occur. My father was off again, drinking or scrapping and telling Vietnam stories about sipping bad water from a rice paddy and losing half a stomach—and he’d be back only when he was too hungry or too lonely. My mother was mixing astronaut juice and vodka in the kitchen