Dancing Girls and Other Stories Part 9

"You go up the big one?"

"Not on your life. I made Alf go up, I took a picture of him at the top."

"What beats me is why they built all those things in the first place."

"It was their religion, that's what he said."

"Well, at least it would keep people busy."

"Solve the unemployment problem." They both laughed.

"How many more of these ruins is he gonna make us walk around?"

"Beats me. I'm about ruined out. I'd rather go back and sit on the bus.""I'd rather go shopping. Not that there's much to buy."

Sarah, listening, suddenly felt indignant. Did they have no respect? The sentiments weren't that far from her own of a moment ago, but to hear them from these women, one of whom had a handbag decorated with tasteless straw flowers, made her want to defend the well.

"Nature is very definitely calling," said the woman with the handbag. "I couldn't get in before, there was such a lineup."

"Take a Kleenex," the other woman said. "There's no paper. Not only that, you just about have to wade in. There's water all over the floor."

"Maybe I'll just duck into the bushes," the first woman said.

Edward stood up and ma.s.saged his left leg, which had gone to sleep. It was time to go back. If he stayed away too long, Sarah would be querulous, despite the fact that it was she herself who had sent him off on this fool's expedition.

He started to walk back along the path. But then there was a flash of orange, at the corner of his eye.

Edward swiv-elled and raised his binoculars. They were there when you least expected it. It was an oriole, partly hidden behind the leaves; he could see the breast, bright orange, and the dark barred wing. He wanted it to be a Hooded Oriole, he had not yet seen one. He talked to it silently, begging it to come out into the open. It was strange the way birds were com-pletely magic for him the first time only, when he had never seen them before. But there were hundreds of kinds he would never see; no matter how many he saw there would always be one more. Perhaps this was why he kept looking. The bird was hopping further away from him, into the fo-liage. Come back, he called to it wordlessly, but it was gone.

Edward was suddenly happy. Maybe Sarah hadn't been lying to him after all, maybe she had really seen this bird. Even if she hadn't, it had come anyway, in answer to his need for it. Edward felt he was allowed to see birds only when they wanted him to, as if they had something to tell him, a secret, a message. The Aztecs thought hummingbirds were the souls of dead warriors, but why not all birds, why just warriors? Or perhaps they were the souls of the un-born, as some believed. "A jewel, a precious feather," they called an unborn baby, according to The Daily Life of the Aztecs. Quetzal, that was feather.

"This is the bird I want to see," Sarah said when they were looking through The Birds of Mexico before coming down.

"The Resplendent Quetzal," Edward said. It was a green and red bird with spectacular iridescent blue tail plumes. He explained to her that Quetzal Bird meant Feather Bird. "I don't think we're likely to see it," he said. He looked up the habitat. " 'Cloud forests.' I don't think we'll be in any cloud forests."

"Well, that's the one I want," Sarah said. "That's the only one I want."

Sarah was always very determined about what she wanted and what she didn't want. If there wasn't anything on a restaurant menu that appealed to her, she would refuse to order anything; or she would permit him to order for her and then pick around the edges, as she had last night. It was no use telling her that this was the best meal they'd had since coming. She never lost her temper or her self-posses-sion, but she was stubborn. Who but Sarah for instance would have insisted on bringing a collapsible umbrella to Mexico in the dry season? He'd argued and argued, point-ing out its uselessness and the extra weight, but she'd brought it anyway. And then yesterday afternoon it had rained, a real cloudburst. Everyone else had run for shelter, huddling against walls and inside the temple doorways, but Sarah had put up her umbrella and stood under it, smugly. This had infuriated him. Even when she was wrong, she always managed, somehow, to be right. If only just once she would admit... what? That she could make mistakes. This was what really disturbed him: her a.s.sumption of in-fallibility.

And he knew that when the baby had died she had blamed it on him. He still didn't know why. Perhaps it was because he'd gone out for cigarettes, not expecting it to be born so soon. He wasn't there when she was told; she'd had to take the news alone.

"It was n.o.body's fault," he told her repeatedly. "Not the doctor's, not yours. The cord was twisted."

"I know," she said, and she had never accused him; nevertheless he could feel the reproach, hanging around her like a fog. As if there was anything he could have done.

"I wanted it as much as you did," he told her. And this was true. He hadn't thought of marrying Sarah at all, he'd never mentioned it because it had never occurred to him she would agree, until she told him she was pregnant. Up until that time, she had been the one in control; he was sure he was just an amus.e.m.e.nt for her. But the marriage hadn't been her suggestion, it had been his. He'd dropped out of Theology, he'd taken his public-school teaching certificate that summer in order to support them. Every evening he had ma.s.saged her belly, feeling the child move, touching it through her skin. To him it was a sacred thing, and he in-cluded her in his wors.h.i.+p. In the sixth month, when she had taken to lying on her back, she had begunto snore, and he would lie awake at night listening to these gentle snores, white and silver they seemed to him, almost songs, mysteri-ous talismans.... Unfortunately Sarah had retained this habit, but he no longer felt the same way about it.

When the child had died, he was the one who had cried, not Sarah. She had never cried. She got up and walked around almost immediately, she wanted to get out of the hospital as quickly as possible. The baby clothes she'd been buying disappeared from the apartment; he never found out what she'd done with them, he'd been afraid to ask.

Since that time he'd come to wonder why they were still married. It was illogical. If they'd married because of the child and there was no child, and there continued to be no child, why didn't they separate?

But he wasn't sure he wanted this. Maybe he was still hoping something would happen, there would be another child. But there was no use demanding it. They came when they wanted to, not when you wanted them to. They came when you least expected it. A jewel, a precious feather.

"Now I will tell you," said the guide. "The archaeologists have dived down into the well. They have dredged up more than fifty skeletons, and they have found that some of them were not virgins at all but men. Also, most of them were children. So as you can see, that is the end of the popular legend." He made an odd little movement from the top of the altar, almost like a bow, but there was no applause. "They do not do these things to be cruel," he continued. "They believe these people will take a message to the rain G.o.d, and live forever in his paradise at the bottom of the well."

The woman with the handbag got up. "Some paradise," she said to her friend. "I'm starting back. You coming?"

In fact the whole group was moving off now, in the scattered way they had. Sarah waited until they had gone. Then she opened her purse and took out the plaster Christ Child she had stolen from the creche the night before. It was inconceivable to her that she had done such a thing, but there it was, she really had.

She hadn't planned it beforehand. She'd been standing beside the creche while Edward was paying the bill, he'd had to go into the kitchen to do it as they were very slow about bringing it to the table. No one was watching her: the domino-playing boys were absorbed in their game and the children were riveted to the television. She'd just suddenly reached out her hand, past the Wise Men and through the door of the stable, picked the child up and put it into her purse.

She turned it over in her hands. Separated from the dwarfish Virgin and Joseph, it didn't look quite so absurd. Its diaper was cast as part of it, more like a tunic, it had gla.s.s eyes and a sort of page-boy haircut, quite long for a newborn. A perfect child, except for the chip out of the back, luckily where it would not be noticed. Someone must have dropped it on the floor.

You could never be too careful. All the time she was pregnant, she'd taken meticulous care of herself, counting out the vitamin pills prescribed by the doctor and eating only what the books recommended. She had drunk four gla.s.ses of milk a day, even though she hated milk. She had done the exercises and gone to the cla.s.ses. No one would be able to say she had not done the right things. Yet she had been disturbed by the thought that the child would be born with something wrong, it would be a mongoloid or a crip-ple, or a hydrocephalic with a huge liquid head like the ones she'd seen taking the sun in their wheelchairs on the lawn of the hospital one day. But the child had been perfect.

She would never take that risk, go through all that work again. Let Edward strain his pelvis till he was blue in the face; "trying again," he called it. She took the pill every day, without telling him. She wasn't going to try again. It was too much for anyone to expect of her.

What had she done wrong? She hadn't done anything wrong, that was the trouble. There was nothing and no one to blame, except, obscurely, Edward; and he couldn't be blamed for the child's death, just for not being there. In-creasingly since that time he had simply absented himself. When she no longer had the child inside her he had lost interest, he had deserted her. This, she realized, was what she resented most about him. He had left her alone with the corpse, a corpse for which there was no explanation.

"Lost," people called it. They spoke of her as having lost the child, as though it was wandering around looking for her, crying plaintively, as though she had neglected it or misplaced it somewhere. But where?

What limbo had it gone to, what watery paradise? Sometimes she felt as if there had been some mistake, the child had not been born yet. She could still feel it moving, ever so slightly, holding on to her from the inside.

Sarah placed the baby on the rock beside her. She stood up, smoothing out the wrinkles in her skirt. She was sure there would be more flea bites when she got back to the hotel. She picked up the child and walked slowly towards the well, until she was standing at the very brink.Edward, coming back up the path, saw Sarah at the well's edge, her arms raised above her head. My G.o.d, he thought, she's going to jump. He wanted to shout to her, tell her to stop, but he was afraid to startle her. He could run up be-hind her, grab her... but she would hear him. So he waited, paralyzed, while Sarah stood immobile. He ex-pected her to hurtle downwards, and then what would he do? But she merely drew back her right arm and threw something into the well. Then she turned, half stumbling, towards the rock where he had left her and crouched down. "Sarah," he said. She had her hands over her face; she didn't lift them. He kneeled so he was level with her. "What is it? Are you sick?"

She shook her head. She seemed to be crying, behind her hands, soundlessly and without moving.

Edward was dismayed. The ordinary Sarah, with all her perversity, was something he could cope with, he'd invented ways of cop-ing. But he was unprepared for this. She had always been the one in control.

"Come on," he said, trying to disguise his desperation, "you need some lunch, you'll feel better." He realized as he said this how fatuous it must sound, but for once there was no patronizing smile, no indulgent answer.

"This isn't like you," Edward said, pleading, as if that was a final argument which would snap her out of it, bring back the old calm Sarah.

Sarah took her hands away from her face, and as she did so Edward felt cold fear. Surely what he would see would be the face of someone else, someone entirely different, a woman he had never seen before in his life. Or there would be no face at all. But (and this was almost worse) it was only Sarah, looking much as she always did.

She took a Kleenex out of her purse and wiped her nose. It is like me, she thought. She stood up and smoothed her skirt once more, then collected her purse and her col-lapsible umbrella.

"I'd like an orange," she said. "They have them, across from the ticket office. I saw them when we came in. Did you find your bird?"

Training

It must have taken Rob several minutes to notice that the sun was in her eyes. When he did notice, because she was squinting, he moved her sideways a little so she could see better. He felt the padded arms of the chair, where her thin bare arms were kept at rest by the leather straps, to make sure they were not overheated. She should have a hat, they were always being warned about sunburn. So far it had always been sunny during the day, though there had been a thunderstorm the night be-fore. But no hat had been wheeled out with her.

"They forgot your hat," he said to her. "That was stu-pid of them, wasn't it?" Then he offered her another piece of the wooden puzzle, giving her time to consider it and to look also at the half-finished puzzle on the tray.

"This way?" he said. He watched her left hand for the slight movement towards him that would say yes.

It was one of the few controlled movements she could make.

He also watched her eyes and face. She could move her eyes, though her head jerked around if she tried to swivel it too fast. But she had little control of the muscles of her face, so he could never tell if she was trying to smile or whether the contortion of her mouth was caused by the spontaneous knotting and unknotting of her jumpy flesh, the body that would not respond to the enormous will he saw, or thought he saw, sealed up in her eyes like some small fierce animal captured in a metal net. She couldn't get out! She was strapped into the wheelchair, prisoned in her cage of braces, trays, steel wheels, but only because she was strapped into her own body as into some b.u.mpy, sickening carnival ride. Let out of her chair, she would thrash, topple, flail, hurtle through s.p.a.ce. It was one of the worst cases they'd ever taken, Pam the physiotherapist had told him.

But everyone agreed she was bright, very bright; it was amazing really what she could do. She could say yes by moving her left hand, and therefore she could play games, answer questions, indicate what she wanted. It just needed more work than usual on the part of the counsellor, and you had to do a lot of guessing. It took time, but after she had beaten him twice in a row at chequers, with no collu-sion on his part, Rob was willing to spend the time. He wondered about teaching her to play chess. But there were too many pieces, too many moves, a game would take weeks. He thought of her, sitting impatiently inside her body, waiting for him to get to the piece she wanted to move and figure out where she wanted to move it.

She hadn't said anything. He turned the puzzle piece around. Yes, her hand said immediately, and he fitted it in. It was a giraffe, two giraffes, a funny-animal picture, a cari-cature. It struck him that she might not know what a giraffe was; she might never have seen a real one or even a picture of one."Is this puzzle boring?" he asked her. Yes, she said.

"How about a game of chequers?"

That was fine with her. "Okay, killer," he said, "but this time I'm going to beat you." Her blue eyes stared at him; her mouth wavered. He wished she could smile. He wheeled her off to get out the chequers and return the puz-zle.

It was her brightness that fascinated him. It was amaz-ing, but it was horrible too, that mind trapped and stran-gling. Maybe she was a genius; who could ever tell? Surely she knew things and could sense things that would escape other people. When she looked at him with her ice blue eyes, clear and cold, hard like mint candies, it was as if she could see into him, past the desperately cheerful kind-uncle act he knew was only an act. He had to be careful what he thought about when he was with her. She would pick it up, and for some reason it mattered what she felt about him.

Sometimes he thought she would be better off if she were like some of the others. The hydrocephalics, for in-stance, with their watery pumpkin heads and infant's bod-ies; there were three of them at the camp right now, and they could all talk, but they weren't very bright. Or the muscular dystrophy cases, who looked so normal the first time you saw them, slumped in their wheelchairs, wan and limp as orphans. They would be dead soon; some of them would be dead even before the next summer. Rob found the camp song so painful he could not bring himself to sing it.

Where do you find the girls and boys Who grow to be women and men?

Eff ay eye ar

EE-ee-dee-ee en!

The tune was the Mickey Mouse song, which made it worse for Rob by conjuring up an image of the Mouseketeers, those plump, pert children with functional arms and legs who had chosen to use their normal, beautiful bodies for that, for prancing and jiggling and acting on television. He would stand looking down, looking away, looking any-where but at the rows of doomed children ranged in the auditorium, brought there so Bert the a.s.sistant Director could finger his accordion and generate what he called "camp spirit." But the children sang the song with gusto. They liked to sing. Those who could clapped their hands.

Jordan could not clap. But on the other hand, she would live a long time. You didn't die from what she had. She was only nine years old.

GAMES was in the right-hand half of the cabin nearest the main house. The front window had been enlarged and fitted with an awning, a wooden shutter for when it rained, and a counter. Jo-Anne Johnson, who had the s.h.i.+ft this week, was sitting behind the counter on a high stool, read-ing a paperback. She was wearing a white terry T-s.h.i.+rt with an anchor on the left breast and red short-shorts, and she had her legs crossed. Rob looked at the line on her thigh where the tan ended, then switched to the shelves behind her where the volleyb.a.l.l.s and baseball bats were stored. She had brown hair, in a pony-tail held with a gold clip, and tortoise-sh.e.l.l sungla.s.ses. When she walked she limped a lit-tle. She was one of the former campers who had come back as a counsellor. Rob thought of her as a nice girl; at least she was always nice to him.

"We'd like to exchange this puzzle," he told her. "We'd like to get out some chequers."

"Chequers again, eh?" she said. "You must be sick of chequers. That's the fourth time this week."

Rob didn't like the way some people talked in front of Jordan as if she couldn't hear. "Oh no," he said.

"I'm play-ing Jordan. She's beaten me twice."

Jo-Anne smiled at him as if they shared a secret. Then she smiled down at Jordan, who stared back at her, not moving much. "Yes, I've heard she's a real whiz," she said. She crossed out the puzzle in the lined notebook on the counter and wrote in the chequer set opposite his name. "See you later," she said. "Have a good game."

"Let's find some shade," Rob said to Jordan. He wheeled her along the cement pathway, beside the row of cabins. The cabins were white, neat, identical. Each one had a front ramp instead of a doorstep; inside them were the special beds, the special toilets, and the curious smell that was not like the smell of children but was sweeter, heavier and more humid, and reminded him of a greenhouse. A smell of warm earth and baby powder, of things mouldering slightly. Of course there was always a lot of laundry, sitting in bags, waiting to be taken away. Some of the children wore diapers, grotesque when you saw them on a twelve-year-old. In the mornings, before the beds had been changed, the smell was stronger. It took a long time to get everyone ready for the day. The girl counsellors were for-bidden to lift the children out of the beds or out of the wheelchairs; only the boys could do that. Rob lifted his own cabin and two girls' cabins, Number Seven and Num-ber Eight, Jordan's cabin. With her Dutch-boy haircut and tough wilful little face, she looked out of place in the frilled pink nightgowns they put on her. He wondered if she were ever allowed to help choose her own clothes.They reached the corner of the walk and turned left. From the open windows of the auditorium, which doubled as a gym, came the sound of recorded music and a woman's voice: "No, back to your places and try again. You can do it, Susie." Now they had reached the end of the boys' side. The girls' side was across the central field, where there was a baseball game going on, as there had been the day he had arrived. The camp van had stopped in the circular driveway. From the front, the main house could have been a rich man's mansion, and in fact it once had been. Some figures that looked at first like grandmothers in rocking chairs were placed at intervals along the wide verandah. The Director had greeted them and had deputized Bert to give them the tour for new counsellors. Around the corner was the base-ball game, and Rob had thought, Well, it's not going to be so bad, because from a distance, on the green field, in the full sunlight that seemed to have been s.h.i.+ning ever since, the game had seemed almost normal.

The strange thing about it was the silence. Boys that age ought to be shouting, that was part of the game; but games here were played with quiet concentration. These were mostly children who could walk, with the aid of braces or crutches; some could even run. But a few of the players were double, one boy being pushed around the bases in a wheelchair by another. Rob knew from having played that the games were conducted with a politeness and consider-ation that he found eerie. During baseball games these chil-dren behaved as adults were always telling children to behave. The only noisy one at the moment was Bert, the umpire, who was waving his arms and yelling encourage-ment as Dave Snider, paralyzed by polio from the waist down, knocked the ball straight out past second base. Two outfielders on crutches hobbled after it while Dave spun onto first.

Rob knew he should be volunteering for more sports and supervision, but he wanted to spend the time with Jor-dan. Besides, he hated baseball. It was his family's game, the one he was expected to excel at as a matter of course, just as he was expected to become a doctor. His father was the one who insisted on the games, with some echo in his mind perhaps of the golden Kennedys, as featured recently in Life magazine playing touch football. Joseph Kennedy and his three fine boys. His father wore a T-s.h.i.+rt with CHAMP on it, given to him by his mother. His two older brothers were good players, and so were the Miller boys. Dr.

Miller was a surgeon too, like his father; they had the place next door. His father did hearts, Dr. Miller did brains, and both of the Miller boys were going to be doctors, too.

They played on the beach, and for Rob the sense of hopelessness and failure that went with these games went also with blue skies, full sunlight and waves breaking on sand. These things, that for other people meant carefree va-cations, meant for him an almost intolerable bondage. To refuse to play would have been unthinkable. If he'd been a better player, he would have been able to say he didn't feel like a game, but, as it was, the cries of spoilsport and poor loser would have been too truthful. No one held it against him that he was so wretched a player, that he could barely hit the ball, because of his bad eyesight perhaps, the sun-light glinting into his eyes from the frames of his gla.s.ses, that he would not see the ball when it came hurtling to-wards him out of the sizzling blue sky like an a.s.sa.s.sin's bomb, numbing his fingers when he raised his hands to fend it off, knocking him on the head or neck, or, even more humiliating, ignoring him so completely so that he had to run after it, chase it down the beach or into the lake. His family treated him as a joke, even, and especially, his mother. "What did you hurt today?" she would ask him, as she doled out the snacks afterwards on the patio deck above the boathouse, sandwiches and c.o.kes for the boys, beers for the men. In the city his father drank Scotch, but at the cottage, which he called his "summer place," he drank beer. The others would tell funny stories about Rob's blunderings, his losing duels with the demonic white ball, while he would grin. The grin was obligatory, to show he was a good sport and didn't mind. "You have to be able to take it," his father was fond of saying, without being too specific about what it was. He also said, after almost every game, that compet.i.tive sports were good for you because they taught you how to handle failure. Rob knew his father was only trying to make him feel better; nevertheless, he felt like an-swering that he'd had enough practice at that and he wouldn't mind being taught how to handle success.

But he had to be careful about saying things like that. "He's the sensitive one," his mother was in the habit of telling her friends, half proud, half rueful. Her favourite pic-ture of him was the one in his choirboy surplice, taken the year before his voice cracked. His oldest brother was sup-posed to be the handsome one, his middle brother was the smart one, Rob was the sensitive one. For this reason it was necessary, he knew, to appear as insensitive as possible. Lately he had begun to succeed, and his mother was now complaining that he never talked to her any more. He found even her moments of solicitous interest painful.

She trusted the others to make their own way, but she didn't trust him, and secretly Rob agreed with her estimate. He knew he could never be a doctor, although he felt he wanted to. He wanted to be good at baseball too, but he wasn't, and all he could see ahead for himself at Medical School was catastrophe. How to confess that even the draw-ings in his father's medical books, those interiors of bodies abstract as plaster models, made him queasy, that he'd actu-ally fainted-though no one knew, because he'd been lying downanyway-when he'd given blood this year at the clinic and had seen for the first time the hot purple worm of his own blood inching through the clear tube across his bare arm? His father thought it was a great treat for his boys to be allowed into the observation bubble at the hos-pital while he was doing open heart surgery, but Rob was unable to turn down the offer or admit his nausea. (Red rubber, it's only red rubber, he would repeat to himself over and over, closing his eyes when his brothers weren't watch-ing.) He would come away from these ordeals with his knees jellied and his palms scored with the marks of his jagged, bitten nails. He couldn't do it, he could never do it.

James, the handsome one, was already interning, and the family made jokes at the Sunday dinner table about pretty nurses. Adrian was cleaning up the top marks in third year. Both of them fit so easily into the definitions that had been provided for them. And who was he supposed to be, what had been left over for him when they were dis.h.i.+ng out the roles? The b.u.mbling third son in a fairy tale, with no prin-cess and no good luck. But friendly and generous, kind to old women and dwarves in the forest. He despised his own generosity, which he felt was mostly cowardice.

Rob was supposed to go into Pre-Meds in the fall, and dutifully he would do it. But sooner or later he would be forced to drop out, and what then? He saw himself on top of a boxcar like some waif from the thirties, penniless, flee-ing his family's disappointment, heading for some form of oblivion so foreign to him he could not even picture it. But there was no one he could talk to about his knowledge of his own doom. A year ago his father had taken him aside for the pep talk Rob was sure he'd had with both of the others.

Medicine wasn't just a job, he told Rob. It was a calling, a vocation. One of the n.o.blest things a man could do was to dedicate his life selflessly to the saving of others. His father's eyes gleamed piously: was Rob worthy? (Speedboat, Rob thought, summer place on the bay, two cars, Forest Hill house.) "Your grandfather was a doctor," his father said, as if this was the clincher. His grandfather had been a doctor, but he'd been a country doctor, driving a sleigh and team through blizzards to deliver babies. They had often heard these heroic stories. "He wasn't very good at collecting his bills," Rob's father would say, shaking his head with a mixture of admiration and indulgent contempt. This was not one of his own weaknesses.

"During the De-pression we lived on chickens; the farmers gave them to us instead of money. I had only one pair of shoes." Rob thought of the shoe rack that ran the length of his father's triple-doored closet, the twinkling shoes arranged on it like testimonials.

He would not be able to take the scene when they found out, he would just disappear. He thought of the final catastrophe as happening in a cla.s.sroom. They would all be dissecting a cadaver, and he would suddenly begin to scream. He would run out of the room and down the corri-dor, reeking of formaldehyde, he would forget his coat and the galoshes that were a fetish of his mother's, it would be snowing. He would wake up the next morning in a green-ish-grey hotel room, with no recollection of what he had done.

It was his family who had chosen this job, this camp. They felt it would be good practice for him to spend the summer with crippled children; it would be part of the it he had to learn to take. His father knew the Director, and it was all arranged before Rob was told about it. His father and mother had been so enthusiastic, so full of their sense of the wonderful opportunity they'd arranged for him, how could he refuse? "Use your powers of observation," his fa-ther had said to him at the train station. "I wish I'd had this chance when I was your age."

For the first week Rob had had nightmares. The dreams were of bodies, pieces of bodies, arms and legs and torsos, detached and floating in mid-air; or he would feel he couldn't move, couldn't breathe, and he would wake up with his skin wet from effort. He found the sight of the children, especially the younger ones, unbearably painful, and he didn't understand how the other staff members could go around all day with expressions of such bluff pro-fessional cheer. Except that he did it himself. Though appar-ently with less success than he'd thought, since Pam the physiotherapist had come over to sit beside him in the staff lounge after the second-day orientation meeting. She had dull blonde hair held back by a velvet band that matched the blue of her plaid Bermuda shorts. She was pretty, but Rob felt she had too many teeth. Too many and too solid. "It's rough working with kids like this," she said, "but it's so rewarding." Rob nodded dutifully: what did she mean, rewarding? He still felt sick to his stomach. He'd been on s.h.i.+ft for dinner that evening, and he could barely stand the milk dribbling from the bent plastic feeding tubes, the chair trays splattered with food ("Let them do as much for them-selves as they can"), the slurps and suction noises.

Pam lit a cigarette and Rob watched the red fingernails on her strong, competent hands. "It doesn't do them any good for you to be depressed," she said. "They'll use it against you. A lot of them don't know the difference. They've never been any other way." She was going to do this for a living, she was going to do this for the rest of her life! "You'll get used to it," she said, and patted his arm in a way that Rob found insulting. She's trying to be nice, he corrected himself quickly.

"I know your brother James," she said, smiling again with her solid teeth. "I met him on a double-date.He's quite the boy."

Rob excused himself and got up. She was older than him anyway, she was probably twenty.

But she'd been right, he was getting used to it. The nightmares had gone away, though not before he'd aroused the interest of the boys in his cabin. They nicknamed him "The Groaner." They had nicknames for everyone in the camp.

"Hey, ya hear the Groaner last night?"

"Yeah. Uh. Uh. Getting his rocks off good."

"Ya have a good time, Groaner?"

Rob, blus.h.i.+ng, would mumble, "I was having a night-mare," but they would hoot with laughter.

"Oh yeah. We heard ya. Wish I had nightmares like that." They were the oldest boys' cabin, fourteen- to sixteen-year-olds, and he'd had trouble with them from the first. They weren't like the younger children, polite, eager to enjoy themselves in whatever way they could, grateful for help. Instead they were cynical about the camp, about the Director, about Bert (whom they nicknamed "Bert the Nert") and about themselves and their lives. They drank beer, when they could get hold of it; they smoked furtive cigarettes.

They kept girlie magazines hidden under their mattresses, and they told some of the foulest jokes Rob had ever heard. They divided the world into two camps, the "crips" and the "norms," and for the most part they ac-cepted only the crips. The norms were seen as their oppres-sors, the dimwits who would never understand, who would never get it right, and whom it was their duty to war against and exploit. It gave them a bitter pleasure to outrage norm sensibility whenever possible, and they'd found Rob an easy target.

"Hey, Pete," Dave Snider would start. He'd be sitting in his chair, wearing one of the T-s.h.i.+rts with the cut-off arms that displayed his overdeveloped biceps to advantage. He had a Charles Atlas set at home, Rob knew, and sub-scribed to bodybuilding magazines.

"Yeah, Dave?" Pete would answer. They both had clas-sic ducktails, which they wore covered with grease. They found Rob's private-school English-style haircut ludicrous. Pete was paralyzed from the neck down, but he'd somehow gained second place in the cabin's pecking order. Dave combed his duck's a.s.s for him.

"What's black and crawls and catches flies?"

"Roy Campanella!"