The Beginners Read Free Page B

which broke up with her because she wouldn’t do more than kiss, and then instantly started going out with this other girl Barbara, who is called Barbie by everyone. We make bitter fun of Barbara for this. Cherry stopped eating for three weeks when this happened, which made her a very delicate creature indeed, on top of her usual condition, which is diabetes, and for which she must inject herself, and take unusually good care of herself, and monitor her blood sugar by pricking her finger three times a day. For weeks she had to be physically restrained—and she counted on me to restrain her—from placing herself in the traitor’s path like a forlorn doe in the sightline of a hunter whose gun is pointed at bigger game, or like one of those political activists you read about who tie themselves to a beloved tree and wait for the chain saws. Now she seems to have transcended her anguish, although she walks the other way when she sees them, and there is this older guy, my brother’s age, Randy Thibodeau (Tib-a-doe), who works at the auto-body shop and who has stopped her on the street several times just to talk to her about the weather or something. And he showed up one time at a school dance, with one of his younger brothers, and lurked around in the bleachers, while a lot of the boys gathered around him, listening to stories about the girls who dance at the Lamplighter. Jack used to hang around with Randy in the woods behind the high school sometimes, listening to music and laughing about escape. He always planned to escape.
     
     
    THERE IS NOT MUCH TRADE, and no industry at all, in my small town in the middle of Massachusetts. A few working farms are hanging on in the hilly, rocky, but rich country around us, mostly dairy farms. Otherwise we just service the town. Electricians, plumbers, roofers, morticians, teachers, nurses, shopkeepers. We have no hospital but there’s a clinic where you can get your blood pressure checked or a prescription for antibiotics.
    Wick is a drive-through town. From a car, it is picturesque. It is the kind of town that makes you gawk a little. Who in the world lives here. Heading south on Route 7, a sharp bend in the old two-lane blacktop gives you the feeling that you might tilt, as the road slopes downhill at the same time. There, on your right, you’ll see the Wick Social Club. This is a place for men—an unwritten law, but the men of the town do gather there, including the selectmen of the Town Hall and a lot of the business owners, and then some of the men who are just fathers and mechanics or work in the post office. My own father was, still is, one of the few who does not spend a fair bit of his free time, after work, before supper, after supper, Saturday afternoon, even Sunday, at the Club. It used to be closed on Sundays, in deference to some stern, long-standing bylaws, but that policy long ago shifted to one of compromise: on Sundays the Social Club serves as a sort of informal Town Hall, a place where men can meet and do their business, or discuss important matters, such as zoning laws or budgeting for the new fiscal year, with a beer in one hand and a pen in the other. My father liked to keep to himself, as he put it, meaning he did not meddle in town politics, nor did he rely on drunken pledges to keep his business afloat on the waters of Wick’s small economy. Instead, he and my mother chose to provide an indispensable service.
    Now you’re on the outskirts and you pass an old barn on the left that advertises a Polish bakery in three-dimensional lettering on its side. The sign gets repainted every few years. We have a lot of Polish families in our town, and Ukrainians. They came in the middle of the century, fleeing persecution of some sort, settled right down with their families and began doing business. My father’s parents were some of these. The dry cleaner is Perchik’s, the Shell station is owned by Mr. Kosowski, and the Qwik-Go franchise was purchased by the