Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

So when Metz came into the sixth-grade room one dark November afternoon when Mrs. Hollander seemed to have given her desk lamp and the two ceiling lights a narrower, more glowing brightness, and Gordon had finished his homework and was reading a library book that he must have wanted to finish before the bell rang, he was aware of Metz and looked around at the clock above the blackboard and looked at Bill Bussing, who squinched up his face and was greeted by an outbreak of snickers.

It came back to Gordon. It was three of them. Dick Phillips, who made incredible maps and had a handshake buzzer attached to his middle finger and hidden in his palm so you got a tickly shock that bored right into your hand. And Phoebe McGinnis, who played the violin, was blonde even to her thick eyelashes and seemed not all there but would kiss and had also given Dickie a bloody nose. And Jim Gurley, who played quarterback on the Lower School football team with a tendency to hog the ball, and lived with his mother who was divorced.

Gordon stared at Dick Phillips. "He can’t help it if his glasses slip; you shouldn’t laugh at him, you shouldn’t do that, he can’t help it if he does that stuff with his face."

"What stuff?" Bill Bussing asked.

"You were laughing yourself," said Dick Phillips.

"Hell I was," said Gordon, looking away into Bill Bussing’s eyes. But Gordon was already hearing Mrs. Hollander call out that if they had something to say they should tell it to the rest of us — and study hall had fifteen minutes to go, and it could go on longer if "you people" couldn’t tell time — and if we couldn’t tell time maybe some of us shouldn’t be in sixth grade.

Mayn said, "This is the lady whose daughter…"

"Yes," said Gordon; "Mrs. Hollander." Who, hearing Gordon’s last words, said, "Gordon, what did I hear you say?" but so that Gordon knew that he wouldn’t have to repeat it. Furthermore, she was talking to Maurice Metz, who stood at gangly parade rest, hands clasped behind his back, and when she got up he was taller than she; she took Maurice Metz to the bulletin board and together they looked at the clippings tacked there — white land, black sea, cross-hatched no-man’s lands. Metz’s hands were still clasped behind his back. Bussing was still looking at Gordon and now went back to his book but looked up at Gordon once more and did a squinch with nose, mouth, cheeks, and forehead to end all squinches, simultaneously turning the page.

It’s the war movies I remember, Mayn said.

Gordon and Metz might speak in the playground, but they did not speak during their tacit race to school in the morning. Some mornings, that is. If Gordon happened to be with Patti Galdston or Dickie, it was no race; same if Gordon and Metz came in sight of each other beyond a point three-quarters of the way down the block of Livingston Street which Gordon entered from the Courthouse he used as a shortcut from Court Street rain or shine.

And like the rule of walking, they seemed to agree not to communicate, not to acknowledge what was going on. Which made the race more urgent but less official as if, being separate, they could not estimate each other’s position but raced nonetheless, increasing the pace, leaning forward, so Gordon might feel his feet quick and fast as hands, as though his feet were connected to his shoulders.

"Who won?" asked Mayn, interested.

Sometimes — well, Gordon and Maurice Metz wouldn’t have a dead heat, so what happened was that at some point in the home stretch one or the other would withdraw. That is, by doing the last thirty yards at a run — say, to greet a friend coming from the other direction. Or being hailed from behind or looking back to see a friend who had not hailed him — once, in Gordon’s case, Dickie; once, Straussie; and so on. But these endings were still victory or defeat, and there came a day when both boys went right to the gate of the school which was parallel to the sidewalk, and, being on the outer curbside, Gordon had to find an extra couple of steps turning right in order to tie Metz; but knew at that instant that he wanted to hit Metz with a right-arm sweeper, sweep him away with the longest arms ever seen. And, abreast at the gate, the two looked at each other and, once inside the gate and going up the stone steps, Metz said breathlessly to Gordon, "I have played chess with Bussing yesterday. He is pretty good."

"You remember that?" said Mayn.

Yes, Gordon thought he did. He’d played chess only a few times with his father, who spotted him a queen, and yet he at once without thinking offered to beat Metz.

"Spotted you a queen?" said Mayn.

"I’m afraid so," said Gordon.

By now it was December. Gordon and Chick still played touch in the street and blew on their fingers when they were going to pass. Gordon spent a lot of time in Chick’s basement practicing passing the basketball behind their backs. Gordon saw Dickie in the cafeteria and said he would meet him after school. It was one of the days they didn’t take the blue-and-gray bus out to the school athletic field in the afternoon. It was a Wednesday. Dickie said he had pageant rehearsal. Gordon forgot after school and gave Patti Galdston the slip and waited for Dickie.

Then Metz came out with little Margie who was eating something, a juicy pear, some cookies, and was not hunching up her shoulders and giggling; and when Gordon said, "They had pageant practice, didn’t they?" Margie said, "Who said?" and Metz remarked that there was no pageant practice today.

"All this—" said Gordon—"I want to think that the last event here was my father suddenly, or fairly suddenly, dying, you know? but that’s not true."

Maurice Metz had been invited by Mrs. Hollander to visit the sixth grade and give a talk on his home in Alsace-Lorraine. Dickie appeared with Metz one day at Chick’s house when Chick and Gordon were shooting baskets under the low ceiling of the basement playroom. Chick said, Let’s go outside, and Metz, who seemed to have met Chick already though Gordon didn’t ask, and who laughed at his own inability to throw a football without it wobbling all over the place, kicked it halfway down the block where it bounced with a sonorous, metal-bending blat off the top of a parked car. They played soccer in Europe. Metz had to go home to take care of his baby sister. Dickie said Maurice had told Miss Gore he was ready to bow out of the pageant if the first Joseph recovered. Chick and Gordon shot baskets and played Monopoly upstairs on the living-room rug with Chick’s sister until Gordon’s mother called up to say dinner was on the table and where was Gordon?

Gordon — could he have some more water? — did avoid his friends in order to intersect with Metz en route to school. (Was there any water in there the first time? said Mayn.)

But Gordon spent the night at Dickie’s and walked to school with Dickie the morning Metz was due to speak to the sixth grade on Europe where he had recently come from with his baby sister and his father who according to Gordon’s mother had been a lawyer and was starting all over, and his mother, who made Metz eat lots of apples and oranges which he put into his lunch box which was the heaviest in school.

That night Gordon’s mother called home from Manhattan and called Chick’s and reached Gordon at Dickie’s. She and Gordon’s father had been to the doctor and would be having dinner in Manhattan and might be a little late. Gordon said he’d stay overnight at Dickie’s. This was before the wholesale domestic use of sleeping bags, but Gordon distinctly recalled telling his mother before asking Dickie if it was O.K. — having at once decided he would stay — then putting it to Dickie’s mother.

So Gordon stayed there. So he didn’t hear the news until he got to school the next morning, when he and Dickie parted company in the hall outside the fifth- and sixth-grade rooms.