The morning after Halloween, I watched the early light fall in Elliot Park. There’d been a frost, and through the frozen rinds of someone’s mangled pumpkin I saw Frank trudging to the bio lab with Sorrow in the trash bag over his shoulder. Father saw him out the same window.
“Where the hell is Frank going with the garbage?” Father asked.
“He probably couldn’t find the trash barrels,” I said, so that Frank could make good his escape. “I mean, we don’t have a phone that works, and we were out of electricity. There probably aren’t any trash barrels, either.”
“There are so,” Father said. “The barrels are out at the delivery entrance.” He stared after Frank and shook his head. “The damn fool must be going all the way to the dump,” Father said. “Jesus, that boy is queer.”
I shivered, because I knew that Father didn’t know that Frank really was queer.
When Egg was finally out of the bathroom, Father went to use the facilities and found that Franny had beaten him to the door. She was drawing another bath for herself, and Mother told Father, “Don’t you say a word to her. She can take all the baths she wants.” And they went away, arguing—which they rarely did. “I told you we’d need another bathroom,” Mother said.
I listened to Franny, drawing her bath. “I love you,” I whispered at the locked door. But—over the sound of the healing water—it is unlikely that Franny ever heard me.
5
Merry Christmas, 1956
I remember the rest of 1956, from Halloween to Christmas, as the length of time it took Franny to stop taking three baths a day—and to return to her natural fondness for her own good, ripe smell. Franny always smelled nice to me—although at times she gave off a very strong smell—but from Halloween to Christmas, 1956, Franny did not smell nice to herself. And so she took so many baths that she did not smell at all.
In the Hotel New Hampshire, our family took over another bathroom and sharpened our skills at Father’s first family business. Mother took charge of the cranky pride of Mrs. Urick, and the plain-but-good production of Mrs. Urick’s kitchen; Mrs. Urick took charge of Max, in spite of his being well hidden from her, on the fourth floor. Father handled Ronda Ray—“not literally,” as Franny would say.
Ronda had a curious energy. She would strip and make up all the beds in a single morning; she could serve four tables in the restaurant without botching an order or making anyone wait; she could spell Father at the bar (we were open every evening, except Monday, until eleven) and have all the tables set before breakfast (at seven). But when she retired, to her “dayroom,” she seemed either in hibernation or in a deep stupor, and even at the peak of her energy—when she was getting everything done, on time—she looked sleepy.
“Why do we say it’s a dayroom?” Iowa Bob asked. “I mean, if Ronda goes back to Hampton Beach, when does she do it? I mean, it’s all right that she lives here, but why don’t we say she lives here—why doesn’t she say so?”
“She’s doing a good job,” Father said.
“But she’s living in her dayroom,” Mother said.
“What’s a dayroom?” Egg asked. It seemed everyone wanted to know that.
Franny and I listened to Ronda Ray’s room on the intercom for hours, but it would be weeks before we learned what a dayroom was. At midmornings we would switch on Ronda’s room and Franny would say, after listening to the breathing for a while, “Asleep.” Or sometimes: “Smoking a cigarette.”
Late at night, Franny and I would listen and I would say, “Perhaps she’s reading.”
“Are you kidding?” Franny would say.
Bored, we would listen to the other rooms, one at a time, or all together. Checking out Max Urick’s static, over which we could—occasionally—hear Max’s radio. Checking the stockpots in Mrs. Urick’s basement kitchen. We knew that 3F was Iowa Bob, and we would tune in the sound of his barbells every once in a while—often interrupting him with our own comments, like: “Come on, Grandpa, a little quicker! Let’s really snap those babies up—you’re slowing down.”
“You damn kids!” Bob would grunt; or at other times he would slap two iron weights together, right next to the speaker-receiver box, so that Franny and I would jump and hold our ringing ears. “Ha!” Coach Bob would cry. “Got you little buggers that time, didn’t I?”
“Lunatic in 3F,” Franny would broadcast on the intercom. “Lock your doors. Lunatic in 3F.”
“Ha!” Iowa Bob would grunt—over the bench presses, over the push-ups, the sit-ups, the one-arm curls. “This hotel is for lunatics!”
It was Iowa Bob who encouraged me to lift weights. What happened to Franny had somehow inspired me to make myself stronger. By Thanksgiving I was running six miles a day, although the cross-country course at Dairy was only two and a quarter miles. Bob put me on a heavy dose of bananas and milk and oranges. “And pasta, rice, fish, lots of greens, hot cereal, and ice cream,” the old coach told me. I lifted twice a day; and in addition to my six miles, I ran wind sprints every morning in Elliot Park.
At first, I just put on weight.
“Lay off the bananas,” Father said.
“And the ice cream,” said Mother.
“No, no,” said Iowa Bob. “Muscles take a little time.”
“Muscles?” Father said. “He’s fat.”
“You look like a cherub, dear,” Mother told me.
“You look like a teddy bear,” Franny told me.
“Just keep eating,” said Iowa Bob. “With all the lifting and running, you’re going to see a change in no time.”
“Before he explodes?” Franny said.
I was going on fifteen, as they say; between Halloween and Christmas I gained twenty pounds; I weighed 170, but I was still only five feet six inches tall.
“Man,” Junior Jones told me, “if we painted you black and white, and put circles around your eyes, you’d look like a panda.”
“One day soon,” said Iowa Bob, “you’re going to drop twenty pounds and you’ll be hard all over.”
Franny gave an exaggerated shiver and kicked me under the table “Hard all over!” she cried.
“It’s gross,” Frank said. “All of it. The weight lifting, the bananas, the panting up and down the stairs.” In the mornings when it rained, I refused to run wind sprints in Elliot Park; I sprinted up and down the stairs of the Hotel New Hampshire, instead.
Max Urick said he was going to throw grenades down the stairwell. And on a very rainy morning, Ronda Ray stopped me on the second-floor landing; she was wearing one of her nightgowns and looking especially sleepy. “Let me tell you, it’s like listening to lovers go at it in the room next to mine,” she said. Her dayroom was nearest the stairwell. She liked to call me John-O. “I don’t mind the sound of the feet, John-O,” she told me. “It’s the breathing that gets me,” she said. “I don’t know if you’re dying or trying to come, but it curls my hair, let me tell you.”
“Don’t listen to any of them,” said Iowa Bob. “You’re the first member of this family who’s taken a proper interest in his body. You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed,” Bob told me. “And we have to beef you up before we can strip you down.”
Thus it was, and so it is: I owe my body to Iowa Bob—an obsession that has never left me—and bananas.
It would be a while before those extra twenty pounds came off, but they would come off, and they have stayed off ever since. I weigh 150 pounds, all the time.
And I would be seventeen before I finally grew another two inches, and stopped for life. That’s me: five feet eight inches tall and 150 pounds. And hard all over.