The Alligators

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 564.

J. Updike

Joan Edison came to their half of the fifth grade from Maryland¹ in March. She had a thin face with something of a grown-up's tired expression and long black eyelashes like a doll's. Everybody hated her. That month Miss Fritz was reading to them during homeroom about a girl, Emmy, who was badly spoiled and always telling her parents lies about her twin sister Annie; nobody could believe, it was too amazing, how exactly when they were despising Emmy most Joan should come into the school with her show-off clothes and her hair left hanging down the back of her fuzzy sweater instead of being cut or braided and her having the crust to actually argue with teachers. "Well, I'm sorry," she told Miss Fritz, not even rising from her seat, "but I don't see what the point is of homework. In Baltimore we never had any, and the little kids there knew what's in these books."

Charlie, who in a way enjoyed homework, was ready to join in the angry moan of the others. Little hurt lines had leaped Up between Miss Fritz's eyebrows. "You're not in Baltimore now, Joan," Miss Fritz said. "You are in Olinger, Pennsylvania."

The children, Charlie among them, laughed, and Joan, blushing a soft brown color and raising her voice excit­edly against the current of hatred, got in deeper by try­ing to explain, "Like there, instead of just reading about plants in a book we'd one day all bring in a flower we'd picked and cut it open and look at it in a microscope."

Miss Fritz puckered her orange lips into fine wrinkles, then smiled. "In the upper levels you will be allowed to do that in this school. All things come in time, Joan, to patient little girls." When Joan started to argue this, Miss Fritz lifted one finger and said with the extra weight adults always have, "No. No more, young lady, or you'll be in serious trouble with me." It gave the class courage to see that Miss Fritz didn't like her either.

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After that, Joan couldn't open her mouth in class with­out there being a great groan. Outdoors in the play­ground, at recess² waiting in the morning for the buzzer, hardly anybody talked to her except to say "Stuck-up"³ or "Emmy". Boys were always flipping little spitballs into the curls of her hanging hair. Once John Eberly even cut a section of her hair off with a yellow plastic scissors sto­len from art class. This was the one time Charlie saw Joan cry actual tears. He was as bad as the others: worse, be­cause what the others did because they felt like it, he did out of a plan, to make himself more popular. In the first and second grade he had been liked pretty well, but somewhere since then he had been dropped. There was a gang, boys and girls both, that met Saturdays in Stuart Morrison's garage, and took hikes and played football together, and in winter sledded on Hill Street, and in spring bicycled all over Olinger and did together what else, he couldn't imagine. Charlie had known the chief members since before kindergarten. But after school there seemed nothing for him to do but go home and do his homework and go to horror movies alone, and on weekends nothing but beat monotonously at marbles or Monopoly or chess Darryl Johns or Marvin Auerbach, who he wouldn't have bothered at all with if they hadn't lived right in the neighborhood, they being at least a year younger and not bright for their age, either. Charlie thought the gang might notice him and take him in if he backed up their policies without being asked.

In Science, which 5A had in Miss Brobst's room across the hall, he sat one seat ahead of Joan and annoyed her all he could, in spite of a feeling that, both being disliked, they had something to share. One fact he discovered was, she wasn't that bright. Her marks on quizzes were al­ways lower than his. He told her, "Cutting up all those flowers didn't do you much good. Or maybe in Baltimore they taught you everything so long ago you've forgotten it in your old age."

Charlie drew; on his tablet where she could easily see over his shoulder he once in a while drew a picture titled "Joan the Dope": the profile of a girl with a lean nose

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and sad mouth, the lashes of her lowered eye as black as the pencil could make them and the hair falling, in ri­diculous hooks, row after row, down through the sea-blue cross-lines clear off the bottom edge of the tablet.

In the weeks since she had come, Joan's clothes had slowly grown simpler, to go with the other girls', and one day she came to school with most of her hair cut off, and the rest brushed flat around her head and brought into a little tail behind. The laughter at her was more than she had ever heard. "Ooh, Baldy-paldy⁴!" some idiot girl had exclaimed when Joan came into the cloakroom, and the stupid words went sliding around class all morning. "Baldy-paldy from Baltimore. Why is old Baldy-paldy red in the face?"

Charlie's own reaction to the haircut had been quiet, to want to draw her, changed. Halfway across the room from him, Joan held very still, afraid, it seemed, to move even a hand, her face ashamed pink. The haircut had brought out her forehead and exposed her neck and made her chin pointier and her eyes larger. Charlie felt thank­ful once again for having been born a boy and having no sharp shocks, like losing your curls. How much girls suf­fer had been one of the first thoughts he had ever had.

That night he had the dream. He must have dreamed it while lying there asleep in the morning light, for it was fresh in his head when he woke. They had been in a jungle, Joan, dressed in a torn sarong, was swimming in a clear river among alligators. Somehow, as if from a tree, he was looking down, and there was a calmness in the way the slim girl and the green alligators moved, in and out, perfectly visible under the water. Joan's face some­times showed the horror she was undergoing. Her hair trailed behind and fanned when her face came toward the surface. He shouted silently with grief. Then he had rescued her; without a sense of having dipped his arms in water, he was carrying her in two arms, and his feet firmly fixed to the knobby back of an alligator which skimmed upstream, through the shadows of high trees and white flowers and hanging vines. They seemed to be

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heading toward a wooden bridge arching over the stream. He wondered how he would duck it, and the river and the jungle gave way to the sweetness and pride he had felt in saving and carrying the girl.

He loved Joan Edison. The morning was rainy, and un­der the umbrella his mother made him take this new knowledge, repeated again and again to himself, gath­ered like a bell of smoke. Love had no taste, but sharp­ened his sense of smell so that his oilcloth coat, his rub­ber boots, the red-tipped bushes hanging over the low walls holding back lawns all along Grand Street, even the dirt and moss in the cracks of the pavement each gave off clear odors. He would have laughed, if a wooden weight had not been placed high in his chest, near where his throat joined. He could not imagine himself laughing soon. Yet he felt firmer and lighter and felt things as edges he must whip around and channels he must rush down. If he carried her off, did rescue her from the oth­ers' cruelty, he would have defied the gang and made a new one, his own. Just Joan and he at first, then others escaping from meanness and dumbness, until his gang was stronger and Stuart Morrison's garage was empty every Saturday. Charlie would be a king, with his own football game. Everyone would come and plead with him for mercy.

His first step was to tell all those in the cloakroom he loved Joan Edison now. They cared less than he had ex­pected, considering how she was hated. He had more or less expected to have to fight with his fists. Hardly any­body gathered to hear the dream he had pictured him­self telling everybody. Anyway that morning it would go around the class that he said he loved her, and though this was what he wanted, to in a way open a space be­tween him and Joan, it felt funny nevertheless, and he stuttered when Miss Fritz had him go to the blackboard to explain something.

At lunch, he deliberately hid in the store until he saw her walk by. The homely girl with her he knew turned off at the next street. He waited a minute and then be-

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gan running to overtake Joan in the block between the street where the other girl turned down and the street where he turned up. Coming up behind her, he said, "Bang, Bang."

She turned, and under her gaze, knowing she knew he loved her, his face heated and he stared down. "Why, Charlie," her voice said with her Maryland slowness, "what are you doing on this side of the street?" Carl, the town cop, stood in front of the elementary school to get them on the side of Grand Street where they belonged. Now Charlie would have to cross the avenue again, by himself, at the dangerous crossing.

"Nothing," he said, and used up the one sentence he had prepared ahead: "I like your hair the new way."

"Thank you," she said, and stopped. In Baltimore she must have had manner lessons.

"But then I didn't mind it the old way either."

"Yes?"

A peculiar reply. Another peculiar thing was the tan beneath her skin; he had noticed before, though not so closely, how when she colored it came up a gentle dull brown more than red. Also she wore something per­fumed.

He asked, "How do you like Olinger?"

"Oh, I think it's nice."

"Nice? I guess. I guess maybe. Nice Olinger. I wouldn't know because I've never been anywhere else."

She luckily took this as a joke and laughed. Rather than risk saying something unfunny, he began to balance the umbrella by its point on one finger and, when this went well, walked backwards, shifting the balanced umbrella, its hook black against the patchy blue sky, from one palm to the other, back and forth. At the corner where they parted he got carried away and in imitating a suave gent leaning on a cane bent the handle hopelessly. Her amaze­ment was worth twice the price of his mother's probable crossness.

He planned to walk her again, and further, after school. All through lunch he kept calculating. His father and he

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would repaint his bike. At the next haircut he would have his hair parted on the other side to get away from his cowlick. He would change himself totally; everyone would wonder what had happened to him. He would learn to swim, and take her to the dam.

In the afternoon the momentum of the dream wore off somewhat. Now that he kept his eyes always on her, he noticed, with a qualm of his stomach, that in passing in the afternoon from Miss Brobst's to Miss Fritz's room, Joan was not alone, but chattered with others. In class, too, she whispered. So it was with more shame—such shame that he didn't believe he could ever face even his parents again—than surprise that from behind the dark pane of the store he saw her walk by in the company of the gang, she and Stuart Morrison throwing back their teeth. Charlie watched them walk out of sight behind a tall hedge; relief was as yet a tiny fraction of his reversed world. It came to him that what he had taken for cruelty had been love, that far from hating her everybody had loved her from the beginning, and that even the stupidest knew it weeks be­fore he did. That she was the queen of the class and might as well not exist, for all the good he would get out of it.

NOTES:

¹ Maryland — штат США

² recess — большой перерыв

³ Stuck-up — "задавала"

⁴ Baldy-paldy — кличка (от слова "bald")

⁵ throwing back their teeth — громко смеясь

Comprehension:

1) Who was Joan Edison and where had she come from?

2) How did the children treat her?

3) Why was she different from the others?

4) What was Charlie's role in the girl's prosecution?

5) Why did Charlie do it?

6) What was Charlie's dream one night?

7) What happened when Charlie revealed his feelings to
Joan?

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