John Irving - The Cider House Rules

The night after Grace Lynch attacked him, Homer had his first date with Debra Pettigrew; it was also the first time he went to the drive-in movie with Candy and Wally. They all went in Senior's Cadillac. Homer and Debra Pettigrew sat in the splotched back seat where only a couple of months ago poor Curly Day had lost control of himself; Homer was unaware that the purpose of drive-in movies was, ultimately, for losing control of oneself in the back seats of cars.

'Homer's never been to a drive-in before,' Wally announced to Debra Pettigrew when they picked her up. The Pettigrews were a large family who kept dogs-many {316} dogs, mostly chained; some were chained to the bumpers of the several undriven, believed-to-be-dead cars that so permanently occupied the front lawn that the grass grew through the drive shafts and the axle bearings. As Homer stepped gingerly around the snapping dogs en route to Debra's front door, the dogs lunged against the unbudging cars.

The Pettigrews were a large family in both numbers and in flesh; Debra's fetching chubbiness was but a slight reminder of the family's potential for girth. At the door, Debra's mother greeted Homer massively-she of the monstrous genes responsible for the likes of Debra's sister, Big Dot Taft.

'De-BRA!' shrieked Debra's mother. 'It's your BEAU! Hi, sweetie-pie,' she said to Homer. 'I've heard all about how nice you are, and what good manners you've got- please excuse the mess.' Debra, blushing beside her, tried to hurry Homer outside as forcefully as her mother wished to usher him in. He glimpsed several huge people -some with remarkably swollen faces, as if they'd lived half their lives underwater or had survived incredible beatings; all with wide, friendly smiles, which contradicted the untold viciousness of the dogs barking in such a frenzy at Homer's back.

'We have to go, Mom,' Debra whined, shoving Homer out the door. 'We can't be late.'

'Late for what?' someone cackled from the house, which shook with heavy laughter; coughs followed, which were followed by labored sighing before the dogs erupted in such force that Homer thought the noise of them would be sufficient to keep him and Debra from ever reaching the Cadillac.

'Shut up!' Debra yelled at the dogs. They all stopped, but only for a second.

When Wally said, 'Homer's never been to a drive-in before,' he had to shout to be heard over the dogs.

'I've never been to a movie before,' Homer admitted.

'Gosh,' said Debra Pettigrew. She smelled nice; she {317} was much neater and cleaner than she looked in her apple-mart clothes; Debra dressed with a certain pert orderliness for working, too. Her chubbiness was restrained, and as they drove to Cape Kenneth, her usual good nature emerged so warmly that even her shyness disappeared-she was a fun girl, as they say in Maine. She was nice-looking, relaxed, good-humored, hardworking and not very smart. Her prospects, at best, included marriage to someone pleasant and not a great deal older or smarter than herself.

In the summers, the Pettigrews occupied one of the new houses on the overcrowded, mucky shore of Drinkwater Lake; they'd managed to make the new place look lived-in-on its rapid way to ramshackle-almost instantly. The lawn had appeared to grow its dead cars overnight, and the dogs had survived the move from the Pettigrews' winter house in Kenneth Corners without losing a bit of their territorial savagery. Like all the cottages around Drinkwater Lake, the Pettigrews' had been named-as if the houses themselves were orphans, delivered incomplete and in need of further creation. The Pettigrews' house was named 'All of Us!'

'The exclamation point is what kills me,' Wally had said to Homer when they pulled up at the car-and-dog lot. 'As if they're proud of their overpopulation.' But Wally was very respectful once Debra joined them in the car.

This mannerism of what he'd seen of society struck Homer Wells quite forcefully; people, even nice people -because surely, Wally was nice-would say a host of critical things about someone to whom they would then be perfectly pleasant. At St. Cloud's, criticism was plainer-and harder, if not impossible, to conceal.

The drive-in movie in Cape Kenneth was nearly as new to Maine as the Haven Club's heated pool and was a lot less practical. Drive-in movies would never be a great idea for Maine; the night fog along the coast lent to many {318} a joyful film the inappropriately ghoulish atmosphere of a horror movie. In later years, people groping for rest rooms and the snack bar would fail to find their cars when they attempted to return to them.

The other problem was mosquitoes. In 194-, when Homer Wells went to his first drive-in movie, the hum of the mosquitoes in the night air of Cape Kenneth was far more audible than the sound track. Wally was relatively successful in preventing the mosquitoes from taking over the. car because he always brought with him an aerosol pump sprayer with which he frequently doused the car -and the air surrounding the cars. The pump can was loaded with the insecticide they sprayed the apples with. Thus the air in and surrounding the Cadillac was rendered poisonous and foul but fairly free of mosquitoes. The hiss and stench of the spray aroused frequent complaints from Wally's fellow moviegoers in the cars nearest the Cadillac-until they were being bitten so badly by mosquitoes that they stopped protesting; some of them politely asked if they could borrow the device for the purpose of poisoning their own cars.

There was no snack bar at the Cape Kenneth drive-in in 194-, and there were no rest rooms. The men and boys took turns urinating against a dank cement wall at the rear of the drive-in pit; atop the wall were perched several small and uncouth boys (Cape Kenneth locals, too young or too poor for cars), who used the wall to watch the movie even though they were well beyond the possibility of hearing it. Occasionally, when the movie was dissatisfying, they peed from the top of the wall onto the luckless people who were peeing against it.

Girls and women were not expected to pee at the drive-in, and consequently were better behaved than the men and boys-the women drank less, for example, although their behavior inside the cars could not be monitored.

It was wondrous-this whole experience-for Homer Wells. He was especially acute at noticing what human {319} beings did for pleasure-what (there could be no mistake about it) they chose to do-because he had come from a place where choice was not so evident, and examples of people performing for pleasure were not plentiful. It amazed him that people suffered drive-in movies by choice, and for pleasure; but he believed that, if he failed to see the fun in it, it was entirely his failure.

What he was most unprepared for was the movie itself. After people honked their horns and blinked their headlights and exhibited other less endearing forms of impatience – heard what was, unmistakably, the sound of someone vomiting against a fender-a gigantic image filled the sky. It is something's mouth! thought Homer Wells. The camera backed, or rather, lurched away. Something's head-a kind of horse! thought Homer Wells. It was a camel, actually, but Homer Wells had never seen a camel, or a picture of one; he thought it was a horribly deformed horse-a mutant horse! Perhaps some ghastly fetus-phase of a horse! The camera staggered back farther. Mounted by the camel's grotesque hump was a black-skinned man almost entirely concealed in white wrapping-bandages! thought Homer Wells. The ferocious black Arab nomad brandished a frightening curved sword; whacking the lumbering camel with the flat of the blade, he drove the beast into a faulty, staggering gallop across such endless sand dunes that the animal and its rider were soon only a speck on the vast horizon. Suddenly, music! Homer jumped. Words! The titles, the names of the actors were written in the sand by an invisible hand.