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For the first time she wondered with some unease who would help her have her baby.
From behind the Lauder house there came a steady ratcheting clickclickclick of a hand mower, and when Fran came around the corner, what she saw was so strange that only her complete surprise kept her from laughing out loud.
Harold, clad only in a tight and skimpy blue bathing suit, was mowing the lawn. His white skin was sheened with sweat; his long hair flopped against his neck (although to do Harold credit it did appear to have been washed in the not-too-distant past). The rolls of fat above the waistband of his trunks and below the legbands jounced up and down wildly. His feet were green with cut grass to above the ankle. His back had gone reddish, although with exertion or incipient sunburn she couldn’t tell.
But Harold wasn’t just mowing; he was ru
“Huh!” Harold said—squeaked, actually. She had startled him out of some private world, and for a moment she feared that the startle on top of his exertion would give him a heart attack.
Then he ran for the house, his feet kicking through drifts of mown grass, and she was peripherally aware of the sweet smell it made on the hot summer air.
She took a step after him. “Harold, what’s wrong?”
Then he was bounding up the porch steps. The back door opened, Harold ran inside, and it slammed behind him with a jarring crash. In the silence that descended afterward, a jay called stridently and some small animal made rattling noises in the bushes behind the stone wall. The mower, abandoned, stood with cut grass behind it and high grass before it a little way from the summerhouse where she and Amy had once drunk their Kool-Aid in Barbie’s kitchen cups with their little fingers sticking elegantly off into the air.
Fra
“Harold?”
No answer. The weeping went on.
She let herself into the Lauders’ back hall, which was dark, cool, and fragrant—Mrs. Lauder’s cold-pantry opened off the hall to the left, and for as long as Fra
“Harold?”
She walked up the hall to the kitchen and Harold was there, sitting at the table. His hands were clutched in his hair, and his green feet rested on the faded linoleum that Mrs. Lauder had kept so spotless.
“Harold, what’s wrong?”
“Go away!” he yelled tearfully. “Go away, you don’t like me!”
“Yes I do. You’re okay, Harold. Maybe not great, but okay.” She paused. “In fact, considering the circumstances and all, I’d have to say that right now you’re one of my favorite people in the whole world.”
This seemed to make Harold cry harder.
“Do you have anything to drink?”
“Kool-Aid,” he said. He sniffed, wiped his nose, and still looking at the table, added: “It’s warm.”
“Of course it is. Did you get the water at the town pump?” Like many small towns, Ogunquit still had a common pump in back of the town hall, although for the last forty years it had been more of an antiquity than a practical source of water. Tourists sometimes took pictures of it. This is the town pump in the little seaside town where we spent our vacation. Oh, isn’t that quaint.
“Yeah, that’s where I got it.”
She poured them each a glass and sat down. We should be having it in the summerhouse, she thought. We could drink it with our little fingers sticking off into the air. “Harold, what’s wrong?”
Harold uttered a strange, hysterical laugh and fumbled his Kool-Aid to his mouth. He drained the glass and set it down. “Wrong? Now what could be wrong?”
“I mean, is it something specific?” She tasted her Kool-Aid and fought down a grimace. It wasn’t that warm, Harold must have drawn the water only a short time ago, but he had forgotten the sugar.
He looked up at her finally, his face tear-streaked and still wanting to blubber. “I want my mother,” he said simply.
“Oh, Harold—”
“I thought when it happened, when she died, ‘Now that wasn’t so bad.’” He was gripping his glass, staring at her in an intense, haggard way that was a little frightening. “I know how terrible that must sound to you. But I never knew how I would take it when they passed away. I’m a very sensitive person. That’s why I was so persecuted by the cretins at that house of horrors the town fathers saw fit to call a high school. I thought it might drive me mad with grief, their passing, or at least prostrate me for a year… my interior sun, so to speak, would… would… and when it happened, my mother… Amy… my father… I said to myself, ‘Now that wasn’t so bad.’ I… they…” He brought his fist down on the table, making her flinch. “Why can’t I say what I mean?” he screamed. “I’ve always been able to say what I meant! It’s a writer’s job to carve with language, to hew close to the bone, so why can’t I say what it feels like? ”
“Harold, don’t. I know how you feel.”
He stared at her, dumbstruck. “You know… ?” He shook his head. “No. You couldn’t.”
“Remember when you came to the house? And I was digging the grave? I was half out of my mind. Half the time I couldn’t even remember what I was doing. I tried to cook some french fries and almost burned the house down. So if it makes you feel better to mow the grass, fine. You’ll get a sunburn if you do it in your bathing trunks, though. You’re already getting one,” she added critically, looking at his shoulders. To be polite, she sipped a little more of the dreadful Kool-Aid.
He wiped his hands across his mouth. “I never even liked them that well,” he said, “but I thought grief was something you felt anyway. Like your bladder’s full, you have to urinate. And if close relatives die, you have to be grief-stricken.”
She nodded, thinking that was strange but not inapt.
“My mother was always taken with Amy. She was Amy’s friend,” he amplified with unconscious and nearly pitiful childishness. “And I horrified my father.”
Fran saw how that could be. Brad Lauder had been a huge, brawny man, a foreman at the woolen mill in Ke
“He took me aside once,” Harold resumed, “and asked me if I was a queerboy. That’s just how he said it. I got so scared I cried, and he slapped my face and told me if I was going to be such a goddamned baby all the time, I’d best ride right out of town. And Amy… I think it would be safe to say that Amy just didn’t give a shit. I was just an embarrassment when she brought her friends home. She treated me like I was a messy room.”