“TV is your best friend,” I said.
“No, yours,” Henry said.
“No,” I said. “Yours. We don’t have a TV.”
“God, how depressing,” Henry said.
There was a moment of silence while everyone—even Mrs. H.—reflected on the idea of life without television.
“That was great, thank you,” I said to Mrs. when we were finished.
“It was baloney,” Henry said.
I carried the plates to the sink.
“You’re so considerate,” Mrs. said, staring Henry down.
I try, I said to myself. I try so hard.
“Come on,” Henry said. “Hurry up.” He pushed me out the screen door.
From the edge of their backyard, if I listened hard, I could hear the deceiving rush that five years ago I thought was water. From the end of this block that went nowhere—dead-ended three houses away into a thick wood—I’d heard a clean whooshing sound that I thought was a lot of water. A waterfall maybe. A paradise on the other side of something. An escape from the starkness of this street. Before I knew better, I went charging off into fifteen feet of thick woods, the kind of woods bogeymen come from, woods where little kids playing find a human hand poking through the leaves, the nails long from the inattentions of the not-so-recently dead, the kind of place where animals crawl off to die. I punched my way through only to find that what whooshed and roared was an eight-lane highway where a hundred thousand cars sliding by in both directions had the nerve to sound like a waterfall. Hearing it again on this first afternoon depressed me.
“Give me your glasses,” Henry said, kneeling down.
I handed them over, imagining Henry slipping the frames under the ball of his foot, and then leaning full forward, laughing at the snap-crackle-pop sound of two hundred and fifty dollars shattering.
“They’re very expensive,” I said.
“I’m not buying them.”
He used the glasses to catch the sun and burn holes through an old dead leaf.
“Handy,” he said, giving them back to me. “I guess you can keep them.” He stopped for a second, then looked at me. “So, what’s wrong with you, how come you’re not talking? Brain go blind, too?”
“Trip,” I said. “I don’t like to fly.”
“Wouldn’t know,” Henry said. “Pool’s open. We can go tomorrow.”
In Philadelphia there was a community pool, long and wide. All you had to do was show up and sign in. Henry and I ruled it in the summer. We never took showers before entering. We stepped over the vat of milky green below the sign ALL BATHERS MUST IMMERSE FEET BEFORE ENTERING WATER. Whatever disease we might have had, we thought it better than the lack of disease we saw around us, we wanted to infect everyone, anyone, we wanted everything about ourselves to be contagious, we were dying for someone to be just like us. We were the boys who only got out of the water when the guard blew his whistle fifteen minutes before the hour—every hour—and announced, “Adult swim. Eighteen and under out of the pool.” Those words were mystical, almost magical. We’d crawl out and sit by the edge watching, as if adult swim meant that the pool would become pornographic for those fifteen very adult minutes just before the hour. But nothing ever happened. The only pornography were the old women with breasts big enough to feed a nation and old men with personal business hanging so far down that it sometimes fell out the end of their bathing suits.
Every day we stayed at the pool until Henry’s mother called the office and had us paged and ordered home. Then waterlogged, bloody-eyed, bellies bloated from the ingestion of too much chlorinated water, cheap snack-bar pizza, and too many Milky Ways, we walked home, wet towels around our necks, our little generals shriveled, clammy, and chafing under our cutoffs. We bore it all proudly, as though it were the most modern medical treatment, the prescription guarantee for a better life, a bright manhood. Our flip-flops slippery wet, heels sliding off and into the dirt, strange evening bugs and twigs snapping at our ankles, we wound down the long hill onto the road, and then across the road, through some yards, through the short woods between developments toward the light in the Henrys’ kitchen window.
As the days stretched out to full length, Mrs. Henry always started talking about where she wanted to spend her summer vacation, two golden weeks she’d suffered the year for. She’d talk about going to Rome to see the pope or to Venice to ride in a gondola or even off to Australia to see koala bears, but in the end the Henrys always ended up going somewhere like the nearest beach, toting me along because it was easier to bring an extra kid to entertain Henry than to try to do it themselves.