Джон Макдональд - S*E*V*E*N

In all fairness, I know that if she had had any way of knowing what would happen, she would never have said the first word to Paul Warcroft. She feels miserable about it. I guess she always will. I know I will. We seem to have even less to say to each other these days. The days are long and quiet. We’ll never rent the cabin again.

My name is Michael Lewis Henderson, Jr., and I will be nineteen years old next week. I can give myself a good case of the horrors at any moment by just imagining what could have happened to me if I hadn’t been able to prove in a dozen ways that I spent all of last month, the whole month of May, every single day of it, fifteen hundred miles away from that crazy apple farm. I was right there at New College in Sarasota, Florida.

I know that Norrie wasn’t trying to fake them out by swearing that I did it. She really believes it. And I guess it is better for her to believe that than to believe what really did happen.

She has last month all screwed up with the same month two years ago. That was the year I dropped out, in the spring, in April. I was sixteen, about to turn seventeen in June. And it was all two hundred years ago, give or take a decade. I know the sixteen-year-old Mike. He was somebody I knew well, but he wasn’t me. You can say, maybe, he was looking for me. Or, in another context, trying to avoid me.

My people had stuck me in a very, very special school near Chicago called the Haven Institute. They take you if you have a towering IQ, no motivation, a snotty attitude, and a lot of bread. They try to motivate you by pouring it on as fast as the inputs can take it. It is sort of a tutorial system, and they believe in a fantastic amount of outside reading. For a while there they turned me on, and I went charging ahead and had them all smiling at me and patting me. But then I began to wonder if the competitive system isn’t some kind of irrelevant hang up. Look at it this way. What kind of a world do you have if everybody functions up to their peak? You have people slavering and panting to climb to the top of something or other. But in a technological world, with more and more leisure for everybody, if you indoctrinate people with this strive-strive-strive psychosis, what are they going to do with it? Compete to see who uses leisure most constructively? Then it isn’t leisure any more. It is another kind of work. Right?

So my divorcee mother-lady sent me two bills in a letter from Hawaii, and I cashed her check and bought hiking shoes, rucksack, bedroll, camping gear, and took off. I headed for the back country, small roads, farms, and so on, with the idea that I would eventually wind up at Scarsdale, where I have a pretty good uncle who sometimes understands how things are.

Also I was going to make one target along the way, and that was to stop at Ithaca and look up a girl from home going to a small girls’ school there. I was fooling around with compass courses from time to time, and so I decided to head from Watkins Glen right straight across to Ithaca across country instead of following a little state road. I forget the number of the road.

It was a pretty warm day. I crossed the fence that put me onto Turner’s land, though I didn’t know it at that time. I came down into this shallow valley, and I found that deep cold pool under those old willow trees. I don’t think I even noticed the cabin at that time. If I did, I must have decided it had to be empty.

I needed a bath. The water turned out to be twice as cold as I thought water could ever get. I stretched out in the sun after I dried off. And then Norrie stepped out from behind the apple tree where she had been watching me all that time and said, “Hey! You! You want a peanut butter sandwich and some milk, boy?” She seemed to be half-scared and half-laughing. I couldn’t make her out at all. So I said why not, and she went to the cabin and I got dressed and went to the cabin and she told me to come in.

It was what she had decided to fix herself for lunch, so she just fixed more of them. She talked more and longer than any girl I had ever met. Not that I was much of an expert on girls at that time. She was an older woman. We figured it out later. Three years, six months, and nine days older. I know now that it was nervous talk. I didn’t know it at the time. She seemed perfectly at ease, just chattering away.

She rambled so much that it was hard to keep track and put the pieces together. But finally I got it worked out that she’d left school because of a nervous breakdown and she had been treated by a shrink and got well enough to come up and rent the cabin and bring her books and try to catch up enough so she could take her examinations in June.

She laughed a lot, a sharp little bark of a laugh, and it seemed to come in the wrong places. I told her all about me, after she had run out of chatter, where my home was, why and when my folks had split, the kind of school they put me in, and the reasons I’d left. Once we had gotten all the facts and statistics out of the way, we could start to talk about ideas. The things we believed or thought we believed, or wanted to believe, or just wanted to try out on the other person to see if they would believe them or knock them down. We talked all afternoon, there in the cabin and out under the trees, and while we took a walk. Then it started to get dark, and that turned it into another kind of ball game.

We had canned chili for supper, and we drank some supermarket red wine she’d bought. There was good rock on that little radio she had. We sat on the bunk bed in the dark and talked. I had to be careful to keep my voice from cracking. I was terrified, actually. I had touched girls, but I had never made it with one. And this was an older woman, and it had gotten to be sort of obvious that sooner or later we were going to go to bed together. I liked her looks and I liked her body, but I was too scared to feel any heat.

So finally I made the desperation try. I sort of lunged at her and grabbed her and tried to kiss her. She went rigid, and then started to fight, to really fight. She got me one under the eye that hurt. I let her go. She ran out into the night, crying.

It took me a long time to find her. She was all curled up into a ball under a tree, snuffling. It seems so long ago, and so quaint, like the kid story of the two children under the tree, and the birds covered them with leaves.

I sat by her, not touching her. I wanted to get my stuff out of the cabin and get out of there. She was some kind of a flip. But you get a sense of some kind of obligation, I guess. She came around finally and talked, but not like before. Not all the chattering. And not throwing ideas at each other like curve balls over the outside corner. Closer talk.

The thing that happened to her at school was rotten, being held practically a prisoner in some gummy pad by a jock type bombed on speed, humbly servicing the big bastard because of some weird idea on her part that she had to prove she was a woman. When the shrink had started to bring her out of it with medications, she had wanted to blame her breakdown on the bad scene at the jock’s pad, but he wouldn’t let her do that because it was too easy. He said she had to understand that the original emotional damage went way back. Her folks were both cold people in a physical sense, not hugging and touching and holding. So from the beginning she tried to get approval from them, as a sort of a substitute, a next best thing. And they kept setting goals for her just a little beyond her reach. So she had no sense of herself. She was just a thing, trying to perform in such a way she’d get what she’d never had — warmth and love. This is my way of putting together what she said, and maybe if I heard it all now, it would come out different in interpretation.

The shrink told her she was trying to get approval from everybody, including the jock, and the big sex party was another substitution for the physical affection she’d never had and always needed. She had told the shrink that sex with Mush had been like what happened to her at a playground at a private school when she was five years old. She had been on the teeter-totter with a friend, and a fat older kid got on the other end. Big sport. He’d hitch back and let his end bang down on the concrete, nearly tossing Norrie off her end, and then he’d slide forward so far she would go down and hit bottom. It scared her and it hurt her and it went on and on, and she kept smiling and laughing and chortling right along with the fat kid because she knew that if he knew she was scared, he might hop off entirely when she was way up in the air.