8 Plus 1 Read online

  PRAISE FOR ROBERT CORMIER

  “These slice-of-life vignettes … demonstrate Cormier’s accessibility to young adult readers.… A strong collection … that probes the emotions of adults and young people with equal sensitivity.”

  —Booklist

  “Vivid characterizations.… 8 Plus 1 is a pleasurable experience which the reader is reluctant to end.”

  —Journal of Reading

  “These are stories to savor.… The finest writers write for all of us, without respect to age, and Cormier again demonstrates his mastery of the art.”

  —Voice of Youth Advocates

  NOVELS BY ROBERT CORMIER

  After the First Death

  Beyond the Chocolate War

  The Bumblebee Flies Anyway

  The Chocolate War

  8 Plus 1

  Fade

  Frenchtown Summer

  Heroes

  I Am the Cheese

  In the Middle of the Night

  The Rag and Bone Shop

  Tenderness

  Tunes for Bears to Dance To

  We All Fall Down

  Published by

  Bantam Doubleday Dell Books for Young Readers

  a division of

  Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  Text copyright © 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1971, 1973, 1975, 1980 by Robert Cormier

  Cover illustration copyright © by Victor Stabin

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Convention. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.

  The trademark Laurel-Leaf Library® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-83425-6

  RL: 7.1

  Reprinted by arrangement with Pantheon Books

  v3.1

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “The Moustache,” “A Bad Time for Fathers,” and “Mine on Thursdays” were originally published in Woman’s Day.

  “President Cleveland, Where Are You?” and “Bunny Berigan—Wasn’t He a Musician or Something?” were originally published in Redbook.

  “Another of Mike’s Girls” was originally published in McCall’s Magazine.

  “My First Negro” was originally published in Sign.

  “Protestants Cry, Too” was originally published in St. Anthony Messenger.

  “Guess What? I Almost Kissed My Father Goodnight” was originally published in The Saturday Evening Post.

  A NOTE BY THE AUTHOR

  The stories in this collection were written between 1965 and 1975. They were written at a time when my wife and I were involved in bringing up three teenagers. The house sang those days with the vibrant songs of youth—tender, hectic, tragic, and ecstatic. Hearts were broken on Sunday afternoon and repaired by the following Thursday evening, but how desperate it all was in the interim. The telephone never stopped ringing, the shower seemed to be constantly running, the Beatles became a presence in our lives.

  As our son and two daughters went through those lacerating adolescent years, I recalled my own teenage era and realized that my children were reenacting my own life and the lives of friends I had known. It struck me that fashions change along with slang and pop tunes and fads, but emotions remain the same. A bruised heart is a bruised heart no matter what year it is.

  My memory may falter when it comes to facts and figures, but I have almost total recall of my emotions at almost any given moment of the past. Thus, I began to write a series of short stories, translating the emotions of both the present and the past—and finding they were the same, actually —into stories dealing with family relationships, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons. I wrote about growing up, and the parents in the stories grow up, too, to the knowledge, often bittersweet, that the passing years bring.

  Three stories deal with the days of the Great Depression or immediately afterward while the remainder are set in scenes contemporary with the time in which they were written. I didn’t edit the stories or alter them. It is my hope that the emotions ring true; if they do, then I have done my work properly.

  A few years ago, I spoke at a seminar at Simmons College in Boston, one of my favorite stopping places for seminars. A woman approached me timidly after I had talked to the participants. She said that she had almost not attended my particular segment of the program because she had recently read my novels The Chocolate War and I Am the Cheese and feared she would encounter a monster. She told me that she was glad she came, however, because she had met “another Robert Cormier.”

  I hope readers of my novels will meet that other Robert Cormier in these stories.

  Contents

  Cover

  Novels by Robert Cormier

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  A Note by the Author

  The Moustache

  Mine on Thursdays

  Another of Mike’s Girls

  President Cleveland, Where Are You?

  A Bad Time for Fathers

  Protestants Cry, Too

  Guess What? I Almost Kissed My Father Goodnight

  My First Negro

  Bunny Berigan—Wasn’t He a Musician or Something?

  About the Author

  The Moustache

  INTRODUCTION

  The question I hear most often when the subject of writing comes up is “Where do you get your ideas?” No doubt that’s the question all writers hear most frequently.

  Every writer has his or her own answer, of course. I tell people that my ideas usually grow out of an emotion—something I have experienced, observed, or felt. The emotion sparks my impulse to write and I find myself at the typewriter trying to get the emotion and its impact down on paper. Out of that comes a character and then a plot. The sequence seldom varies: emotion, character, plot. Each element contributes to the whole.

  Which brings up further questions. Where do the characters come from? Are they made up? And where do you get your plots?

  Perhaps the best way to answer the questions is to explain the genesis of “The Moustache” because it follows almost perfectly the method I have applied throughout the years, showing how a strong emotion caused me to use real people and situations to produce a short story that is entirely fiction.

  When my son, Peter, was a teenager, his maternal grandmother became a resident in a local nursing home. The victim of an accident from which she never really recovered—she was struck by a car as she crossed a street—she had more recently suffered the terrible onslaught of arteriosclerosis. Those were shattering days for us all, particularly my wife, who visited her daily but found little comfort because her mother often did not recognize her.

  Her mother had been a handsome, vigorous woman, capable of operating a drugstore for many years following the early death of her husband. It was cruel to see her diminished as a person. It was sad to have her grandchildren witness her deterioration from the “Mémère” they had known as youngsters.

  One Saturday, Peter visited her in the nursing home. He returned visibly moved, shaken. Her condition had affected him greatly. His grandmother had been uncommunicative, ravaged by the disease, only a dim echo of the Mémère he had known and loved throughout his boyhood.

  I remembered my own maternal grandmother, a lively, lovely woman who had died suddenly while I was in high school. I had been stunned by the way she had looked in her coffin. Her lips were two thin straight lines. She looked grim and forbidding, nothing at all like th
e vibrant Nana I had known. I left the funeral parlor in anguish. Those lips haunted me.

  Now, almost thirty years later, Peter’s emotion had merged with mine and I found myself struggling to express it at the typewriter.

  What emerged was “The Moustache.”

  These were the realities: Peter’s grandmother was in a nursing home. He had visited her. He was a teenager and had recently grown a moustache. His grandmother had had little recognition of him. He had been shaken by the visit.

  Here is what happened in the story that grew out of these elements and emotions: A boy who had recently grown a moustache visits his grandmother in a nursing home. Because of the moustache, she mistakenly thinks he is someone else. As a result, the boy sees his grandmother as a person, not simply the grandmother figure he’d always known. The moment also caused him to grow a bit and to make him look at his world and his parents in a different way.

  Thus, the stuff of actuality is transformed into the stuff of fiction.

  The underlying problem, of course, is to have the characters appear as distinct personalities of their own and not carbon copies of the actual people. In effect, I have used real emotions but the people are real only on the printed page—the boy in the story is not Peter and the woman is not his grandmother.

  One note: My wife’s father, who died at an early age, was a man of magnificent gestures. In the heart of the Depression while he was struggling with a new business and bringing up a family, he bought his wife—my children’s Mémère—a baby-grand piano. This marvelous gift in the bleakest of times has never failed to arouse my admiration for that man. The piano is now in our living room, and I have used the incident twice in short stories, one of them “The Moustache.”

  The Moustache

  At the last minute Annie couldn’t go. She was invaded by one of those twenty-four-hour flu bugs that sent her to bed with a fever, moaning about the fact that she’d also have to break her date with Handsome Harry Arnold that night. We call him Handsome Harry because he’s actually handsome, but he’s also a nice guy, cool, and he doesn’t treat me like Annie’s kid brother, which I am, but like a regular person. Anyway, I had to go to Lawnrest alone that afternoon. But first of all I had to stand inspection. My mother lined me up against the wall. She stood there like a one-man firing squad, which is kind of funny because she’s not like a man at all, she’s very feminine, and we have this great relationship—I mean, I feel as if she really likes me. I realize that sounds strange, but I know guys whose mothers love them and cook special stuff for them and worry about them and all but there’s something missing in their relationship.

  Anyway. She frowned and started the routine. “That hair,” she said. Then admitted: “Well, at least you combed it.”

  I sighed. I have discovered that it’s better to sigh than argue.

  “And that moustache.” She shook her head. “I still say a seventeen-year-old has no business wearing a moustache.”

  “It’s an experiment,” I said. “I just wanted to see if I could grow one.” To tell the truth, I had proved my point about being able to grow a decent moustache, but I also had learned to like it.

  “It’s costing you money, Mike,” she said.

  “I know, I know.”

  The money was a reference to the movies. The Downtown Cinema has a special Friday night offer—half-price admission for high school couples, seventeen or younger. But the woman in the box office took one look at my moustache and charged me full price. Even when I showed her my driver’s license. She charged full admission for Cindy’s ticket, too, which left me practically broke and unable to take Cindy out for a hamburger with the crowd afterward. That didn’t help matters, because Cindy has been getting impatient recently about things like the fact that I don’t own my own car and have to concentrate on my studies if I want to win that college scholarship, for instance. Cindy wasn’t exactly crazy about the moustache, either.

  Now it was my mother’s turn to sigh.

  “Look,” I said, to cheer her up. “I’m thinking about shaving it off.” Even though I wasn’t. Another discovery: You can build a way of life on postponement.

  “Your grandmother probably won’t even recognize you,” she said. And I saw the shadow fall across her face.

  Let me tell you what the visit to Lawnrest was all about. My grandmother is seventy-three years old. She is a resident—which is supposed to be a better word than patient—at the Lawnrest Nursing Home. She used to make the greatest turkey dressing in the world and was a nut about baseball and could even quote batting averages, for crying out loud. She always rooted for the losers. She was in love with the Mets until they started to win. Now she has arteriosclerosis, which the dictionary says is “a chronic disease characterized by abnormal thickening and hardening of the arterial walls.” Which really means that she can’t live at home anymore or even with us, and her memory has betrayed her as well as her body. She used to wander off and sometimes didn’t recognize people. My mother visits her all the time, driving the thirty miles to Lawnrest almost every day. Because Annie was home for semester break from college, we had decided to make a special Saturday visit. Now Annie was in bed, groaning theatrically—she’s a drama major—but I told my mother I’d go, anyway. I hadn’t seen my grandmother since she’d been admitted to Lawnrest. Besides, the place is located on the Southwest Turnpike, which meant I could barrel along in my father’s new Le Mans. My ambition was to see the speedometer hit seventy-five. Ordinarily, I used the old station wagon, which can barely stagger up to fifty.

  Frankly, I wasn’t too crazy about visiting a nursing home. They reminded me of hospitals and hospitals turn me off. I mean, the smell of ether makes me nauseous, and I feel faint at the sight of blood. And as I approached Lawnrest—which is a terrible cemetery kind of name, to begin with—I was sorry I hadn’t avoided the trip. Then I felt guilty about it. I’m loaded with guilt complexes. Like driving like a madman after promising my father to be careful. Like sitting in the parking lot, looking at the nursing home with dread and thinking how I’d rather be with Cindy. Then I thought of all the Christmas and birthday gifts my grandmother had given me and I got out of the car, guilty, as usual.

  Inside, I was surprised by the lack of hospital smell, although there was another odor or maybe the absence of an odor. The air was antiseptic, sterile. As if there was no atmosphere at all or I’d caught a cold suddenly and couldn’t taste or smell.

  A nurse at the reception desk gave me directions—my grandmother was in East Three. I made my way down the tiled corridor and was glad to see that the walls were painted with cheerful colors like yellow and pink. A wheelchair suddenly shot around a corner, self-propelled by an old man, white-haired and toothless, who cackled merrily as he barely missed me. I jumped aside—here I was, almost getting wiped out by a two-mile-an-hour wheelchair after doing seventy-five on the pike. As I walked through the corridor seeking East Three, I couldn’t help glancing into the rooms, and it was like some kind of wax museum—all these figures in various stances and attitudes, sitting in beds or chairs, standing at windows, as if they were frozen forever in these postures. To tell the truth, I began to hurry because I was getting depressed. Finally, I saw a beautiful girl approaching, dressed in white, a nurse or an attendant, and I was so happy to see someone young, someone walking and acting normally, that I gave her a wide smile and a big hello and I must have looked like a kind of nut. Anyway, she looked right through me as if I were a window, which is about par for the course whenever I meet beautiful girls.

  I finally found the room and saw my grandmother in bed. My grandmother looks like Ethel Barrymore. I never knew who Ethel Barrymore was until I saw a terrific movie, None But the Lonely Heart, on TV, starring Ethel Barrymore and Cary Grant. Both my grandmother and Ethel Barrymore have these great craggy faces like the side of a mountain and wonderful voices like syrup being poured. Slowly. She was propped up in bed, pillows puffed behind her. Her hair had been combed out and fell upon her shoulder
s. For some reason, this flowing hair gave her an almost girlish appearance, despite its whiteness.

  She saw me and smiled. Her eyes lit up and her eyebrows arched and she reached out her hands to me in greeting. “Mike, Mike,” she said. And I breathed a sigh of relief. This was one of her good days. My mother had warned me that she might not know who I was at first.

  I took her hands in mine. They were fragile. I could actually feel her bones, and it seemed as if they would break if I pressed too hard. Her skin was smooth, almost slippery, as if the years had worn away all the roughness the way the wind wears away the surfaces of stones.

  “Mike, Mike, I didn’t think you’d come,” she said, so happy, and she was still Ethel Barrymore, that voice like a caress. “I’ve been waiting all this time.” Before I could reply, she looked away, out the window. “See the birds? I’ve been watching them at the feeder. I love to see them come. Even the blue jays. The blue jays are like hawks—they take the food that the small birds should have. But the small birds, the chickadees, watch the blue jays and at least learn where the feeder is.”

  She lapsed into silence, and I looked out the window. There was no feeder. No birds. There was only the parking lot and the sun glinting on car windshields.

  She turned to me again, eyes bright. Radiant, really. Or was it a medicine brightness? “Ah, Mike. You look so grand, so grand. Is that a new coat?”

  “Not really,” I said. I’d been wearing my uncle Jerry’s old army-fatigue jacket for months, practically living in it, my mother said. But she insisted that I wear my raincoat for the visit. It was about a year old but looked new because I didn’t wear it much. Nobody was wearing raincoats lately.

  “You always loved clothes, didn’t you, Mike?” she said.

  I was beginning to feel uneasy because she regarded me with such intensity. Those bright eyes. I wondered—are old people in places like this so lonesome, so abandoned that they go wild when someone visits? Or was she so happy because she was suddenly lucid and everything was sharp and clear? My mother had described those moments when my grandmother suddenly emerged from the fog that so often obscured her mind. I didn’t know the answers, but it felt kind of spooky, getting such an emotional welcome from her.