“Guarding the car. I’m parked in a terrible place.”
While I stood by the carousel, hoping my suitcases would home in and find me, Mrs. Henry took my luggage checks and went off in search of information.
If you’re wondering what the point is calling Henry by his own name and then calling his mother Mrs. Henry, well what can I say, all the Heffilfingers were Henrys to me. Mr., Mrs., baby June, and Henry himself.
I rolled my eyes in a full circle counting the brown-and-yellow spots that made up the tortoiseshell rims of my glasses. They were new glasses, my first glasses. No one in Philly had seen them yet except Mrs. Henry, and she was sharp enough not to say anything.
A couple of months ago my school borrowed vision machines from the motor vehicle department and lined us all up. I looked into the viewfinder and said to the school nurse, “I can’t see anything, it’s pure blackness.”
“Press your head to the bar, wise guy,” she said.
I pressed my forehead against the machine and the screen lit up, but all that light still didn’t do much good. The nurse sent me home with a note for my mother who simply said, “You’re not getting contacts; you’re too young and too irresponsible.”
I thought of not taking the glasses to Philly, of going through one more blind, blurry summer, but the fact was they made a real difference, so I wore them, and kept the unbreakable case and a thousand specially treated cleaning sheets jammed into my carry-on bag.
Four-eyed, but alone in the Philadelphia airport, I may as well have been a boy without a brain. Like a sugar doughnut, I was glazed. Stiff.
It was the day after school ended. My mother had put me on the plane with a list of instructions/directions for my father, written out longhand on three sheets of legal paper, stuffed into one of Dr. Frankle’s embossed envelopes. I was to be returned on or by the twenty-first of August, in good time for the usual back-to-school alterations: haircut, fresh jeans, new sneakers, book bag. I was only just becoming aware of how much everything was the product of a negotiation or a fight.
“Let’s find Henry,” Mrs. Henry suggested.
Let’s not, I thought.
We were at the age where just showing up was frightening. You never knew who or what you might meet, a twelve-foot giant with a voice like a tuba, or Howdy Doody himself. Without warning, a body could go into spasm, it could stretch itself out to a railroad tie, it could take someone familiar and make them a stranger. A whole other person could claim the name, address, phone number, and fingerprints of a friend. There was the possibility that in those ten missing months a new life had been created, one that intentionally bore no relation to the past.
“Don’t worry, they’ll find your luggage,” Mrs. Henry said. “They’ll check the airport in Boston and the next plane coming in, and when they’ve got it, they’ll deliver it out to the house. You’ll have it by suppertime. Let’s go,” she said. “Makes no sense to wait here.”
The automatic doors popped open. Henry stood there, arms open, exasperated.
“What the hell is going on?” he screamed. “They’re about to tow our car. They asked me for my license!”
Mrs. Henry turned red. She tugged on the strap of my shoulder bag. We ran forward.
“I’ve never heard of anything taking so long,” Henry said when we got outside.
There was no tow truck. There was nothing except a long line of cars dropping off people, and men in red caps going back and forth from the cars to the terminal wheeling suitcases that weren’t lost yet. There wasn’t even a ticket on the Henrys’ windshield.
And Henry wasn’t a giant. He wasn’t six feet tall, either. He was skinny, with shoulders that stuck straight out of him like the top of a T square.
“What happened?” he asked.
“The airline has misplaced your friend’s luggage.”
He turned to me, finally noticing I was there, I existed. “Why’d you get glasses?”
“Blind,” I said.
Five years ago, before I ever met him, Henry was offered to me by my father as a kind of bribe.
“Philadelphia will be fun,” my father had said. “We bought this house especially for you. There’s a boy your age living next door; you can be best friends.”
My first day there I stood three-foot-something, waiting smack in the middle of the treeless, flowerless, nearly grassless front yard as nonchalantly as a seven-year-old could. I knew no other way of announcing myself. When the sun had crossed well over its midday mark, when what seemed like years had passed, a station wagon pulled into the driveway just past me and the promised boy jumped out and without stopping ran toward the kitchen door of his house. The screen door opened, but instead of admitting him, a yellow-rubber-gloved hand pushed the boy out again. The body attached to the hand followed and Mrs. led Henry to the edge of their yard and nodded in my direction.