Monkey Boy by Francisco Goldman (best self help books to read .TXT) 📕

says. He could be depressing to be around and vindictive with my mom, but he was terrified of her too, she could shut him up with a look. Did you forgive your father or at least make peace with him?

We got along better, I answer. A few years before he died, Bert tried to make a big apology for beating the shit out of me so much, but it was comically lame.

Well, at least he tried. That’s good, right? She puts on a sort of sad smile.

So why did you come looking for me at my house that day?

To talk about Ian, she says. I wanted to tell you I was going on a date with him. I wanted you to hear it from me. Even if your father hadn’t come home, I think I would have chickened out. One of the worse decisions of my life, going out with Ian. You remember what happened, don’t you?

This must be what she wanted to talk to me about. This is why we’re having dinner.

When I got to school that Monday morning, the idiotic horde was abuzz. Saturday night, Ian had picked up Marianne in his mother’s car, and they must have ended up doing the usual things teenage couples do when they’re not going all the way yet. But only Ian had ever come to school boasting about it in such an explicit manner, putting on an obscene show, provoking shrieks and blasts of laughter. I plotted routes through the corridors to avoid him, but I avoided Marianne too. It was all more about drawing attention to Ian than to Marianne, of course, but what he set loose took on a fiendish force of its own. Marianne was easily one of the most well-liked girls in our class, so friendly and kind to everyone, never a phony. Now they were calling her Piggy. Piggy Lucas they wrote in lipstick on bathroom mirrors. Marianne Lucas is a slutty pig! Someone even stole a fetal pig from the biology lab and put it inside Marianne’s locker. Between classes, kids milled nearby, excited, waiting. Just before the lunch period Marianne stopped at her locker, opened it, and found herself face-to-face with the pig fetus, pink and glazed, oversized eyes, propped like a Play-Doh idol on the edge of the shelf. She lifted her hands to her face. Everybody watching was silent. She took her winter coat out of the locker, put it on, and turned to go. By then, Lana Gatto had reached her. Marianne calmly told her that she was going home. She walked down the corridor to the nearest exit in her red wool coat, pulling its hood up just before pushing out the door. Lana told me she started to cry, because suddenly she felt sure she was never going to see Marianne again. I remember that coat and its hood; on its front Marianne had pinned a small wooden brooch of a red-eyed squirrel eating an acorn.

Of course I remember what happened, Marianne, I tell her. How could I forget?

I was cold to her, of course, avoided her, didn’t phone. Meanwhile I waited for her to come to me for the sympathy and forgiveness she knew I wouldn’t be able to hold back. But she didn’t. She missed only a few days of school, but when she returned, it was like an inner light had been snuffed out, her gaze rowing through the fog in front of her feet. At lunch, she sat with her closest friends, all looking moribund, as if they didn’t know what to say to her. I wished they would talk her into dumping a lunch tray on Ian’s head the way that senior-class girl had done to that hockey star who was so obviously full of himself. If Marianne had done that to Ian, it might have provoked his downfall. The Christmas break came and when school started up again she was going out with Jimmy Gleason. I heard later from Lana Gatto that Marianne was out ice-skating with her little sisters on Sarah Hancock Pond when he skated over to join them, a scene out of Little Women. No wonder the pond was a special place to them.

Those first few months of tenth grade had been like a miracle for me, playing football, belonging to a group of friends, having Mr. Brainerd for a teacher, talking to Marianne on the telephone nearly every night. Everything had coalesced around her and was all part of the case I was making for why she should love me. When that was gone, the emptiness that replaced it stunned me.

We order a nightcap, a bourbon for me. Marianne says she really shouldn’t but orders a Ketel One on the rocks, twist of lemon. After she’s taken a sip she looks directly at me in a way that alerts me that something important is coming. She says:

Frank, I know all our high school memories aren’t that great, and I don’t deny that at fifteen I was confused and could be an idiot. But just that we’re here together now shows how much our friendship really did mean to me.

A speech she’d prepared for tonight, that sounded like.

What seems hard to believe is that my hands, as if leading their own bewildering lives apart from me, have begun to shake. But I say it. Marianne, do you remember a telephone conversation we had one night, a long one, maybe the last time we ever spoke, just before what happened with Ian?

Marianne looks like she’s thinking it over and finally says, Tell me more.

The part I remember is hard to describe, I answer, because I felt sure you wanted to tell me something but couldn’t bring yourself to. You kept saying things like: Frank, why can’t we—Then you’d stop. Or: Why can’t I— Or: Frank, why can’t they be— But you’d stop. Why can’t you or we or they be what? Marianne is watching me intently. I tell her: