Эд Макбейн - Love, Dad

When the cabdriver saw them lighting up on the back seat, he asked, “Your parents allow you to smoke?”

“Oh, sure,” Jenny said, dragging on the joint.

“You sure?” the cabbie said.

“Positive,” Lissie said.

“Cigarettes are bad for you,” the cabbie said.

Mildly aglow after the grassy ride to the town’s only decent restaurant, giggling over the driver’s assumption that they’d been smoking cigarettes , they took a corner table in the almost deserted room, and each ordered a glass of white wine before lunch. The legal drinking age in Connecticut was twenty-one that year, but the law was rarely enforced except in package stores. Even there, a phony I.D. card was never looked at askance, and most of the Henderson kids had learned that restaurants in Shottsville wouldn’t ask for identification if you simply ordered a glass of wine and not any hard liquor. Drinking wasn’t a problem at Henderson, anyway. In fact, from what Lissie could gather — dancing at school mixers with boys from Choate or Kent or Taft — drinking wasn’t a problem anywhere. Marijuana was the big menace, marijuana was the Brown Gold Peril, marijuana was the evil weed the authorities everywhere were trying to stamp out before it polluted the young, which, of course, she knew was a lot of bullshit. If Lissie had to take a guess, she’d have said that 40 percent of the kids at Henderson were regularly smoking pot, with another 10 percent trying it every now and again. The only thing that amazed her was why she herself had waited so long.

Sipping at their wine, enjoying the supposition that they’d both looked old enough to be served without challenge, toasting their release from bondage, they looked over the menu, gave the waitress their order, and then began commiserating over the fact that they’d be separated from each other for eighteen whole days during the spring break.

“Be great if we could spend some time together,” Jenny said.

“Maybe I could come into New York for a few days,” Lissie said.

“No, I mean, you know, more than just a few days.”

“What do you mean?”

“Get in a car, just go drive someplace,” Jenny said.

“Yeah, that’d be great,” Lissie said. “Like where?”

“California,” Jenny said.

“Never make it to California and back in eighteen days,” Lissie said.

“Sure, we could.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Denver then. How about Denver? Catch some spring skiing out there.”

“Yeah, that’d be great.”

“Are you a good skier?”

“So-so,” Lissie said. “My parents used to take me a lot when I was little.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Bromley, Stratton, Mount Snow. Like that.”

“But never out west.”

“No.”

“Me, neither,” Jenny said. “Be great to do some skiing out there, wouldn’t it?”

“Be terrific.”

“You think your parents would let you go?”

“Oh, sure,” Lissie said.

“Trouble is, we’d need a car.”

“My parents have two cars.”

“And somebody to drive it.”

“Why couldn’t I drive?”

“You mean you have a license?”

“Sure.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“What kind of cars?”

“My dad has a Corvette. Mom drives a station wagon.”

“Think she’d let us use it?”

“You mean to go to Denver?”

“Yeah. Well, to Aspen. If we’re gonna ski, we should go to Aspen.”

The waitress came back to the table with their meals.

“Plates are very hot,” she said, “be careful. Would you care for more wine?”

“Yes, please,” Jenny said.

“Uh-huh,” Lissie said, and nodded.

“What we could do,” Jenny said, “is you could pick me up in New York, and then we’d take the tunnel to Jersey, and head across through Pennsylvania and Ohio...”

“Then Indiana,” Lissie said, “and Illinois...”

“Like the fuckin’ pioneers,” Jenny said, and laughed.

“Across Iowa to Nebraska...”

“And then into Colorado...”

“And on to Denver!”

“We’d have to check out all those states,” Jenny said, “make sure your license is good there.”

“Oh, sure,” Lissie said. “How many miles you think it’ll be?”

“Maybe two thousand, something like that.”

“How long do you figure? To Aspen, I mean.”

“Let’s say we average sixty miles an hour, okay?” Jenny said. “You’d need, say, six, seven hours’ sleep a night...”

“So what does that come to?”

“Seventeen hours of driving every day...”

“We’d better make it six teen,” Lissie said, “just in case I need eight hours a night.”

“No, you can do it on seven,” Jenny said.

“Well, just in case.”

“Okay, sateen hours a day times sixty miles an hour...”

“Better make it fifty,” Lissie said. “Let’s say we’ll average fifty.”

“Okay, sixteen times fifty is eight hundred miles a day. Divide that into two thousand miles, and we get... let’s see... about two and a half days to Colorado. Let’s say three days to play it safe.”

“Three days, right,” Lissie said. “So we’d leave when?”

“The twentieth.”

“Right, which would get us to Aspen on the twenty-third.”

“Jesus, it sounds terrific! You think your mom’ll let us have the car?” Jenny asked.

“Oh, sure.”

“When will you ask her?”

“When I get home Wednesday.”

“The day before we leave?”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“That’s too late, Liss.”

“It’s just I wanted to ask her face to face.”

“Yeah, but we can’t wait till the day before ...”

“Yeah.”

“Why don’t we call her right now?”

“Now?” Lissie said.

“Sure, what’s wrong with now?”

“Well...”

“Let’s,” Jenny said.

There were three eight-year-olds in Connie’s last class at the rehab center. All three were stutterers (“Experiencing dysfluency problems,” as Connie might have put it to a colleague), all of them exhibiting only primary characteristics, none of them having yet been submitted to the terrible advice of teachers or parents to “stop and think so it comes out right.” She had tested each of the three individually for diagnosis using the Goldman-Fristoe articulation test, and then had asked the center’s audiologist to run an audiometer test on each of them. None of the three had any hearing problems.

Today, she was playing with the children a card game in which she’d dealt four picture cards to each of them and herself, the idea — premised on Go Fish — being to call for a card in another player’s hand, and if the player could not match that card, to keep drawing cards from the deck until the correct matching card appeared. She was using the So Sorry deck for the game, the cards showing pictures only of words beginning with the S sound — sun, saw, seal, sack, soap, sink, sign, socks, suitcase, sailboat, scissors and saddle. She had deliberately chosen this deck from the many Go-Mo speech materials available because both Mercy and Mark sometimes experienced difficulty getting the S sound out without a stutter, but primarily because she wanted to encourage Sean to forget the difficulties he was having with his “th” for “s” substitution.

“D-d-d-do you h-h-h-have a soap?” Mercy asked Mark, stumbling on the “d” and the “h” but getting out the “s” without a trace of hesitation.

“So... s-s-s-sorry,” Mark said.

Mercy fished in the deck until she found the card picturing a bar of soap. It was Mark’s turn.

“Do you have a... s-s-s-sink?” he asked Sean.