Dick and Monica Bowden had twin beds, separated by a nightstand with a pretty imitation Tiffany lamp standing on it. Their room was done in genuine redwood, and the walls were comfortably lined with books. Across the room, nestled between two ivory bookends (bull elephants on their hind legs) was a round Sony TV. Dick was watching Johnny Carson with the earplugs in while Monica read the new Michael Crichton that had come from the book club that day.
‘Dick?’ She put a bookmark (THIS IS WHERE I FELL ASLEEP, it said) into the Crichton and closed it.
On the TV, Buddy Hackett had just broken everyone up. Dick smiled.
‘Dick?’ she said more loudly.
He pulled the earplugs out. ‘What?’
‘Do you think Todd’s all right?’
He looked at her for a moment, frowning, then shook his head a little. lJe ne comprends pas, cherie.’ His limping French was a joke between them; he had met her in college when he was flunking his language requirement. His father had sent him an extra two hundred dollars to hire a tutor. He had gotten Monica Darrow, picking her name at random from the cards tacked up on the Union bulletin board. By Christmas she had been wearing his pin… and he had managed a C in French.
‘Well… he’s lost weight.’
‘He looks a little scrawny, sure,’ Dick said. He put the TV earplugs in his lap, where they emitted tiny squawking sounds. ‘He’s growing up, Monica.’
‘So soon?’ she asked uneasily.
He laughed. ‘So soon. I shot up seven inches as a teenager — from a five-foot-six shrimp at twelve to the beautiful six-foot-one mass of muscle you see before you today. My mother said that when I was fourteen you could hear me growing in the night’
‘Good thing not all of you grew that much.’
‘It’s all in how you use it.’
‘Want to use it tonight?’
‘The wench grows bold,’ Dick Bowden said, and threw the earplugs across the room.
After, as he was drifting off to sleep:
‘Dick, he’s having bad dreams, too.’
‘Nightmares?’ he muttered.
‘Nightmares. I’ve heard him moaning in his sleep two or three times when I’ve gone down to use the bathroom in the night. I didn’t want to wake him up. It’s silly, but my grandmother used to say you could drive a person insane if you woke them up in the middle of a bad dream.’
‘She was the Polack, wasn’t she?’
‘The Polack, yeah, the Polack. The mockie, why don’t you say? Nice talk!’
‘You know what I mean. Why don’t you just use the upstairs John?’ He had put it in himself two years ago.
‘You know the flush always wakes you up,’ she said.
‘So don’t flush it.’
‘Dick, that’s nasty.’
He sighed.
‘Sometimes when I go in, he’s sweating. And the sheets are damp.’
He grinned in the dark. ‘I bet.’
‘What’s that… oh.’ She slapped him lightly. “That’s nasty, too. Besides, he’s only thirteen.’
‘Fourteen next month. He’s not too young. A little precocious, maybe, but not too young.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Fourteen or fifteen. I don’t remember exactly. But I remember I woke up thinking I’d died and gone to heaven.’
‘But you were older than Todd is now.’
‘All that stuffs happening younger. It must be the milk… or the fluoride. Do you know they have sanitary napkin dispensers in all the girls’ rooms of the school we built in Jackson Park last year? And that’s a grammar school. Now your average sixth-grader is only ten. How old were you when you started?’
‘I don’t remember,’ she said. ‘All I know is Todd’s dreams don’t sound like… like he died and went to heaven.’
‘Have you asked him about them?’
‘Once. About six weeks ago. You were off playing golf with that horrible Ernie Jacobs.’
‘That horrible Ernie Jacobs is going to make me a full partner by 1977, if he doesn’t screw himself to death with that high yellow secretary of his before then. Besides, he always pays the greens’ fees. What did Todd say?’
‘That he didn’t remember. But a sort of… shadow crossed his face. I think he did remember.’