Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

No, Gordon said, social studies.

His father said Gordon’s school had always had a good reputation.

Gordon didn’t tell his father sixth grade was pretty much the same only more interesting.

Yet the girls, who were nice to him, were not the same. He liked them more. More than Sue in fifth grade, who smelled of banana one day and orange another; more than Margie, with little pigtails, who giggled a lot, giggled up and down the scale every time no matter what.

The sixth-grade girls giggled too. But had more to giggle about, he thought. He looked at them across the room when they went to get help. They helped him catch up on fractions, which were magical, and decimals, which seemed ominous and larger. The girls and he still compared handwriting scripts and when he read a story in class about a plane that crashed and the pilot walked through the steaming jungle for days and met up with a tribe that rode on crocodiles and ate flying fish that flew from vine to vine and had a medicine man that predicted the future when the jungle would be cleared for an airfield, the girls said it was the best anyone had written in the class, the natives would travel around the world to America, China, or Paris, and as for the pilots who flew into the new airfield, before landing they would have to learn the laws of the natives, especially if, as a new friend Bill Bussing pointed out, they were faking their own death to disappear and then collect the insurance.

Gordon’s father said it was good, and asked if he’d written his book report on Kipling’s Kim. The answer was Yes, and Gordon said Kim wasn’t interesting. Gordon really liked Penrod and Penrod and Sam, they were easy to get into, you wanted the book not to end. Gordon said he wouldn’t have minded living in a small town like Penrod’s.

Gordon remembered his drink. Mayn lighted a cigarette, inhaled, and said that he had grown up in a town in New Jersey and couldn’t wait to get out.

Gordon said one spring he and his mother and father went to a hotel in the country for a week where they had horses and a pool table, and Gordon who was always a ravenous eater hadn’t eaten for five days, more or less, while they were there and recalled no more about it except the place was nice and he couldn’t eat when he got to the table and the night they got home to Brooklyn his mother bought him a Virginia-ham-on-rye sandwich at the delicatessen the minute they got home to the city and he ate it as if he hadn’t tasted food in a week.

What was going on? Mayn wanted to know, but Gordon said he didn’t know — maybe something with his parents.

Penrod’s small town was a lot of fun, Gordon was saying, but the school Penrod went to wasn’t a good one, which reminded Gordon that his parents had proposed to him once that he go to boarding school. At boarding school you could smoke, but Gordon could smoke in Dickie’s backyard in Brooklyn Heights behind two old abandoned doors that leaned against two oil drums. Gordon went to Friends School. Mayn had known an ambulance man who was a Quaker, and his own father was thinking of buying into a very ritzy retirement home — actually he’d been retired for twenty-five years, in Mayn’s opinion — run by the Quakers near Wilmington. Gordon said that his school had had a Quaker meeting sometimes on one of the assembly days. A girl in seventh grade got up and recited a poem about humans that turned into deer and Miss Gore surprised Gordon and Dickie by standing up in the side aisle and, with a lot of emphasis, reciting a poem by Walt Whitman, who had used to live right there in Brooklyn Heights as Gordon’s father said when Gordon told him. And in between were the silences when you looked into space and tried not to catch the wrong eye and were supposed to be sitting silently and thinking. You were on your own, but that wasn’t what it felt like. Gordon learned years later that Quaker meeting was non-hierarchical — no leader.

All in all, the girls were different in sixth grade. Sixth grade was more interesting. He asked Mayn what he was doing telling him all this, and Mayn in a friendly way didn’t know. One day when he went home with the sixth-grade brain, Bill Bussing, who had the Erector Set that came with the motor, Gordon realized that Dickie hadn’t been in the downstairs hall when school let out because much later when he came down his street Dickie was playing football with the other guys including Chick. Chick went to public school and was Gordon’s best friend. Chick organized things but never said much. He was tall and rough but a peacemaker, and when they stopped for a car to come by, Chick nodded to the driver. The public school in the Heights was P.S. 8 and it was a joke in those days.

Gordon got onto Chick’s side; Straussie, who was small but murder on defense, went home; the game went from manhole to manhole, and once Dickie slammed Gordon like a hammer in the ribs when it was two-hand touch supposedly, and, a moment later, Gordon threw a bullet right at Dickie, who shied, and the football bounced off Dickie’s back and somebody else grabbed it and Chick, who was tall for his age, called for it before Dickie could do anything. A play or two later Dickie said he had to go, he was going to get killed when he got home.

When it was dark and Dickie had gone in and so had Jim and Chick’s sister Jennifer and Frankie, who could walk on his hands on the sidewalk, and two more cars had parked along this old street of brownstones where houses on one side backed onto the harbor, Gordon threw a pass too high that grazed the globe of the streetlamp — they were lower in those days — but Chick, who was gangly but could stop and go the other way in a second, managed to hold up and catch the ball, sensing where the parked car was.

Chick asked if Gordon would be home after school the next day and Gordon said yes, knowing if he wanted to he could stop over at Bill Bussing’s to look at two model planes that were suspended from the ceiling and actually were no longer of interest to Bill.

Chick started to pass and stopped. ‘‘Dickie said you skipped a grade."

Mayn said, "You mean you hadn’t told him?"

Chick never asked about Gordon’s school.

"Yeah. I’m in sixth now."

Chick aimed his left shoulder toward Gordon and threw a low bullet which Gordon caught at his knees, a perfect spiral.

"Is it hard?"

"Medium."

"Oh yeah?"

"I got to catch up on fractions."

"We’re starting on fractions."

Chick was adopted, and his father, who made a lot of money at the Squibb Company plant right down the hill next to the Brooklyn Bridge, believed in public schools.

"I think it’s just more of the same old stuff," Gordon told Chick.

Chick never had as much homework as Gordon. They did not discuss school. Chick got strapped by his mother once in a while and his mother gave him orange juice for supper instead of milk. (The Squibb Company made tooth powder, said Mayn. That’s right, said Gordon.) Chick was faster and stronger, but Gordon liked to think he could catch a fly ball better and pass a football more accurately, neither of which might be true he also realized. They hung around Chick’s basement, where there was a basketball basket just under the low ceiling. Chick was nice to his sister Jennifer and the three of them often went to the movies on Saturday at the St. George Playhouse on Pineapple Street where the matron in a white, nurse-like uniform didn’t give them any trouble if they sneaked into the center section and didn’t sit in the children’s section on the right. (Ah yes, said Mayn.) Chick and his sister were allowed to go on Sunday.

Gordon’s mother took him to buy a new pair of corduroy trousers because she said he needed them but really, Gordon thought, because he’d just gone into sixth grade. The Fox movie theater beyond their Heights neighborhood up near the Manhattan Bridge was around the corner from the department store, so they went to the movies and when they got home Gordon’s father who was sick wasn’t home in bed. But he could not have gone to the office because it was Saturday. When he did come home, it was just as the cream of spinach soup his mother made was beginning to smell sweet. His father had been to see Judge Hume, who was also sick, and he arrived home saying with a smile and a pat on the shoulder that they had decided that Gordon ought to study law. Gordon had never seen his father like this, alone and in a sport jacket, a gray-and-blue-checked soft cashmere he had bought when he and Gordon’s mother were in Bermuda.