“Can I tell you a couple of things or not?”
“Go ahead. But it won’t make any difference.”
Michael cleared his throat. “Reg, I think Arnie’s right, that’s hardly a constructive atti—”
She turned on him like a cat. “Not one word from you, either!”
Michael flinched back.
“The first thing is this,” Arnie said. “If you gave my savings passbook more than a cursory look—and I’m sure you did—you must have noticed that my total savings went down to an all-time low of twenty-two hundred dollars the first week of September. I had to buy a whole new front-end kit for Christine.”
“You speak as if you’re proud of it,” she said angrily.
“I am.” He met her eyes levelly. “I put that front-end kit in myself, with no help from anybody. And I did a really good job. You wouldn’t”—here his voice seemed to falter momentarily, and then firmed again—“you wouldn’t be able to tell it from the original. But my point is, the total savings are back up six hundred dollars from then. Because Will Darnell liked my work and took me on. If I can add six hundred dollars to my savings account every two months and I might do better if he puts me on the run over to Albany where he buys his used cars—there’ll be forty-six hundred dollars in my account by the time school ends. And if I work there full-time next summer, I’ll be starting college with nearly seven thousand dollars. And you can lay it all at the door of the car you hate so much.”
“That won’t do any good if you can’t get into a good school,” she countered, shifting her ground deftly as she had in so many department committee meetings when someone dared to question one of her opinions… which was not often. She did not concede the point; she simply passed on to something else. “Your grades have slipped.”
“Not enough to matter,” Arnie said.
“What do you mean, “not enough to matter”? You got deficient in Calculus! We got the red-card just a week ago!” Red-cards, sometimes known as flunk-cards by the student body, were issued halfway through each marking period to students who had posted a 75-average grade or lower during the first five weeks of the quarter.
“That was based on a single examination,” Arnie said calmly. “Mr Fenderson is famous for giving so few exams in the first half of a quarter that you can bring home a red-card with an F on it because you didn’t understand one basic concept, and end up with an A for the whole marking period. All of which I would have told you, if you’d asked. You didn’t. Also, that’s only the third red-card I’ve gotten since I started high school. My overall average is still 93, and you know how good that is—”
“It’ll go lower!” she said shrilly, and stepped toward him. “It’s this goddam obsession with the car! You’ve got a girlfriend; I think that’s fine, wonderful, super! But this car thing is insane! Even Dennis says—”
Arnie was up, and up fast, so close to her that she took a step backward, surprised out of her anger, at least momentarily, by his. “You leave Dennis out of this,” he said in a deadly soft voice. “This is between us.”
“All right,” she said, shifting ground once more. “The simple fact is that your grades are going to go down. I know it, and your father knows it, and that mathematics red-card is an indication of it.”
Arnie smiled confidently, and Regina looked wary.
“Good,” he said. “I tell you what. Let me keep the car here until the marking period ends. If I’ve got any grade lower than a C, I’ll sell it to Darnell. He’ll buy it; he knows he could get a grand for it in the shape it’s in now. The value’s not going to do anything but go up.”
Arnie considered.
“I’ll go you one better. If I’m not on the semester honour roll, I’ll also get rid of it. That means I’m betting my car I’ll get a B in Calculus not just for the quarter but for the whole semester. What do you say?”
“No,” Regina said immediately, She shot a warning look at her husband—Stay out of this. Michael, who had opened his mouth, closed it with a snap.
“Why not?” Arnie asked with deceptive softness.
“Because it’s a trick, and you know it’s a trick!” Regina shouted at him, her fury suddenly total and uncontained. “And I’m not going to stand here any longer chewing this rag and listening to a lot of insolence from you! I–I changed your dirty diapers! I said get it out of here, drive it if you have to, but don’t you leave it where I have to look at it! That’s it! The end!”
“How do you feel, Dad?” Arnie asked, shifting his gaze.
Michael opened his mouth again to speak.
“He feels as I do,” Regina said.
Arnie looked back at her. Their eyes, the same shade of grey, met.
“It doesn’t matter what I say, does it?”
“I think this has gone quite far e—”
She began to turn away, her mouth still hard and determined, her eyes oddly confused. Arnie caught her arm just above the elbow.
“It doesn’t, does it? Because when you’ve made up your mind about something, you don’t see, you don’t hear, you don’t think.”
“Arnie, stop it!” Michael shouted at him.
Arnie looked at her and Regina looked back at him. Their eyes were frozen, locked.
“I’ll tell you why you don’t want to look at it,” he said in the same soft voice. “It isn’t the money, because the car’s let me connect with a job that I’m good at and will end up making me money. You know that. It isn’t my grades, either. They’re no worse than they ever were. You know that, too. It’s because you can’t stand not to have me under your thumb, the way your department is, the way he is”—he jerked a thumb at Michael, who managed to look angry and guilty and miserable all at the same time—“the way I always was.”
Now Arnie’s face was flushed, his hands clenched into fists at his sides.
“All that liberal bullshit about how the family decided things together, discussed things together, worked things out together, But the fact is, you were always the one who picked out my school-clothes, my school-shoes, who I was supposed to play with and who I couldn’t, you decided where we were going on vacation, you told him when to trade cars and what to trade for. Well, this is one thing you can’t run, and you fucking hate it, don’t you?”
She slapped his face. The sound was like a pistol-shot in the living room. Outside, dusk had fallen and cars cruised by, indistinct, their headlights like yellow eyes. Christine sat in the Cunninghams’ asphalted driveway as she had once sat on Roland D. LeBay’s lawn, but looking considerably better now than she had then—she looked cool and above all this ugly, undignified family bickering. She had, perhaps, come up in the world.
Abruptly, shockingly, Regina Cunningham began to cry. This was a phenomenon, akin to rain in the desert, that Arnie had seen only four or five times in his entire life and on none of the other occasions had he been the cause of the tears.
Her tears were frightening, he told Dennis later, by virtue of the simple fact that they were there. That was enough, but there was more—the tears made her look old in a single terrifying stroke, as if she had made a quantum leap from forty-five to sixty in a space of seconds. The hard grey shine in her gaze turned blurry and weak, and suddenly the tears were spilling down her cheeks, cutting through her make-up.
She fumbled on the mantelpiece for her drink, jogged the glass instead with the tips of her fingers. It fell onto the hearth and shattered. A kind of incredulous silence held among the three of them, an amazement that things had come this far.
And somehow, even through the weakness of the tears, she managed to say, “I won’t have it in our garage or in this driveway, Arnold.”
He answered coldly, “I wouldn’t have it here, Mother.” He walked to the doorway, turned back, and looked at them both. “Thanks. For being so understanding. Thanks a lot, both of you.”
He left.