dan fuchs

The Perfect Friend

Go ahead. Judge me. Yes, I’m a gal who likes my gin and tonics. Yes, I like my cigarettes. And yes, at forty years of age, I like to watch Chiller Theater and Creature Features in the dark with my ten-year-old son Jimmy every Friday and Saturday night. I imagine I’d be hard pressed to find other mothers doing the same with their kids here on our block, in our comfy little suburban neighborhood, but I don’t care. Hank, my husband, is a good man who works hard and is well-respected in his field. He’s an early riser and gets the kids ready for school before playing a set of doubles with his early morning “tennis buddies” at Rye Racquet Club and then catching a train to Grand Central. So by the time he gets home, has his John Begg on the rocks, some dinner, and a quick tuck-in for the boys, he’s asleep on his feet.

I have never been an early riser. Even back in my days as a young art director, before deciding to stay home and have my two kids, I got up reluctantly each morning despite loving the work. Staying up late is something I’ve always adored, even as a young girl in Little Rock, listening to our old house on North Main Street settling in the dark. I’d get up and fix myself a cup of warm milk and honey and sit at the small kitchen table, just thinking about marrying Van Johnson, or whatever my thoughts were back then. And if ever I was offered the opportunity to sleep in late, I’d do it gladly. I was Daddy’s only daughter, so he spoiled me even though I’m sure it was at odds with his work ethic, which, after all, kept us clothed and fed during the Depression. Mother scoffed at me when she’d find me there, in her path to the icebox, where she chipped away at the block in order to fix herself a “toddy,” as she called it.

“Christ Almighty, you scared the dickens out of me,” she’d say every time she saw me there. And that’d be that. She never scolded me or threatened licks if I didn’t get to bed. She’d go about the business of fixing her toddy and then shuffle off to the bedroom, leaving me happy and alone in the dimly lit kitchen.

“Mom,” Jimmy calls from the playroom downstairs, “it’s about to start!”

“Be right there!” I shake the bulbous foil container of Jiffy Pop in order to get the last few kernels.

“Hurry!” he cries, the urgency rising in his voice. He has a thing where, if I’m not there with him in front of the set when the six-fingered hand comes rising out of the goo in the animated opening of Chiller Theatre, something terrible will happen to him. I flick off the burner, open the foil carefully with a fork, and pour the steaming popcorn into a bowl, mixing it quickly with some butter I’ve melted and some salt.

“Mom!”

I bound toward the staircase as he’s bolting up and we collide, spilling a few kernels on the way. We both laugh and our mop of a mix-breed, Sweetie, hoovers the popcorn up with abandon, her collar rattling as she does so.

We snuggle into the couch, making sure all lights are off, save for the peppery, black-and-white glow of the Zenith TV we stare at, sitting like a fat, self-important Buddha in the corner of the room.

“One,” Jimmy begins to count––as he always does, the fingers on the creepy hand as it snatches up the letters of the title, eventually reaching six––and looks up at me, “Six, Mom! It has six fingers!”

“That’s right,” I say, every time. “Six fingers.”

Jimmy snuggles in closer; he smells like the bubble bath he took after dinner. His younger brother, Nathan, is asleep in bed. Unlike the feigned fear his older brother puts on, Nathan is genuinely terrified by this sort of thing. About a year ago, I made the mistake of having him join us for a TV movie starring Olivia de Havilland and Joseph Cotten called “The Screaming Woman,” about a woman who has been buried alive. Unlike the schlocky stuff we usually watch, this one scared me, too, and it took a good week or more to get my then seven-year-old to fall asleep on his own. Since then, Nathan has happily gone to bed on weekend nights, his father reading him a story, tucking him in and saying his goodnights to all.

Tonight’s movie is called “The Tingler” and is one we’ve seen before.

“This is the one with the crazy doctor who gives people drugs to make them have nightmares,” Jimmy says.

“Right. Vincent Price,” I answer, eating the popcorn and holding onto my son, who snuggles in close and will soon be asleep. He only makes it all the way through if it’s one he’s never seen or really holds his attention. “The Tingler” is one I enjoy, but it’s got some stuff about LSD that’s a little hard to explain to a ten-year-old. I stick with it as long as I can, but my eyes are tired from too much television. Between my weekend horror movies and the Watergate Hearings, which I’ve been watching obsessively for over a month, my head aches. Jimmy is too heavy for me to carry anymore, so I give him a piggyback ride up the two short flights of stairs in our split-level and wake him up long enough to get him to brush his teeth and wash his face. As I pull his covers up over his chest, he squints and says, “How did the movie end?”

“You’ve seen it already.” I smile and then kiss him on his cheek. “You know how it ends.”

“Good night, Mom.”

“Good night, sleep tight,” I rhyme, ready to finish it, but he’s already out.

When I return downstairs, I straighten up the playroom, picking up the stray popcorn kernels Sweetie has somehow missed, wiping away rings left by our water glasses on the end tables. The air of the house is so still it’s almost loud, and I imagine I can hear atoms and molecules bouncing off of one another.

Aside from a wonderful week’s vacation on Fire Island, where there is no TV, this is how the rest of the summer goes. Hearings all day long, horror movies on the weekends. Creature Features has more of the classic Universal monster flicks from the 30s and 40s like Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, and The Wolfman.  Chiller can be counted on for weird stuff like Night of the Blood Beast and those fabulous, technicolor Hammer films starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Jimmy and I spend those nights eating popcorn and sometimes fudge, and it’s pure joy.

      *   *   *       *   *       *   *

I receive the first note from Jimmy’s fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Brown, after the first week of school. I’m initially charmed by it; I’ve met Mrs. Brown before at some school function or another, back when she was Miss Hill before marrying Mr. Brown, the other fourth-grade teacher whose classroom is just across the hall from hers. She can’t be more than twenty five years old, but there’s something genteel and old-ladyish about her. I told my husband after meeting her that she felt like she came from another time, with her gingham dresses and her sandy blonde hair held back by matching bands. “She would’ve fit right in at the teacher’s lounge in my high school back in the fifties,” I said to Hank at the time.

The note is written in a lovely cursive hand on personalized stationery that reads, “Andrea Hill, Proud Educator of Tomorrow’s Leaders.” Elaborate curlicues and little, multi-colored flowers dance around the words. The name Hill is struck through, and “Brown” appears in the same studied hand as the rest of the note. A little heart stands like punctuation after her new name. I appreciate the gesture, this note of introduction, which reads:

Dear Mrs. Kerr:

I’m so delighted to have the pleasure of calling your son James my student this year.
This is my pledge to you that I will honor James as a young person and do everything in my power
to nurture in him a love of knowledge and learning, so that he is prepared not only for his schooling, but for his life ahead.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions you may have for me, and I look forward to partnering with you this year.

Warmly,

Mrs. Andrea Brown

4th Grade Teacher, Virginia Road Elementary School

Charming. It is a lovely, charming note from start to finish––that is until I read the post-script, which she’s added in what looks like slightly smaller lettering, though this could be my imagination:

PS: James is quite the imaginative writer. We’ll keep an eye on that!

There’s something in the tone of this final thought that doesn’t sit right with me. It makes me turn the stationery over to look for more, but there’s nothing on the other side of the sheet. I shake my head and chide myself, then put the note with all my other mementos in a strongbox I keep in my closet.

“I just can’t stop thinking about it,” I tell Hank. He’s wanting to go to sleep and pats me on my shoulder in a condescending way, the way you might pat a restless puppy. “Why would she say, ‘keep an eye on him’?  You keep an eye on things because you think they might become a problem. She’s an English teacher, right? So, she chooses her words with a purpose.”

“Actually,” Hank says sleepily. “She’s a proud educator of tomorrow’s leaders.” 

“You’re an asshole,” I say, slapping his large rump through the covers.

“Love you too, honey,” he says and then begins his loud snoring.

The second note comes in mid-October when, I suppose, things are falling into place in Mrs. Brown’s classroom and the kids are making themselves known to their teacher, and vice versa. It’s the pretty stationery again, but this time I notice there’s a coffee ring on the bottom right-hand corner. The handwriting looks more rushed, less formal, and she has skipped the strike-through of her maiden name, leaving it as “Hill.”

Mrs. Kerr:

While I am a steadfast advocate of creativity and creative freedom, I feel it is important I share with you a piece of writing James recently turned in. We do need to address certain specific learning standards, which means I sometimes need to guide my pupils to write about more specific themes and topics. The prompt for this writing sample was “Friends and family are very important in our lives.” As you can see, James took his imagination in another direction––a direction that concerns me.

Please contact me once you’ve read the piece, so that we can discuss it.

Thank you,

Mrs. Andrea Brown

The story, called “The Perfect Friend,” features some original artwork colored in crayon in which Jimmy has worn out the red crayon with the various spurts and pools of blood that occur throughout. The basic premise is a boy who likes certain things about members of his family and friend group, and he decides to dissect their brains in order to isolate those aspects he prefers about each one in order to fabricate “the perfect friend.”  He ends up inadvertently creating a legion of monsters who come after him and then unleash havoc throughout the town, maiming and killing––in vibrant red crayon––as they go.

I put down the lined composition paper once I finish the story. For a moment, I don’t think anything at all about it, as if searching for an appropriate response. Then I feel a smile forming, and I laugh––not because what I’ve just read is funny but because of how proud I am of my ten-year-old son. Yes, it’s derivative of the Universal Frankenstein flicks we’ve watched again and again during our weekend viewing parties together, but all in all “The Perfect Friend” is an impressive, well-written, and original narrative. In a word, I’m impressed.

Hank has a different reaction to “The Perfect Friend.” His is more in line with what Mrs. Brown was expecting to elicit. We’re sitting at the dining room table, the two of us, after the boys have excused themselves to go shower before bed. “Should we talk to him about it?” he asks.

“It’s okay. I mean, yes, we’ll talk to him about it. But you know Jimmy. He’s not expressing anything other than a good imagination.”

“Well, okay, but all that blood. It’s pretty disturbing to think that a ten-year-old boy is thinking about that sort of thing.” 

“He’s not thinking about anything. He’s just having fun,” I argue.

“Still. It’s a little troubling.”

“Oh, come on, Hank,” I say. I’m beginning to feel defensive, probably because I know where this conversation will inevitably head.

“I’m just saying.”

“What? What are you saying?” I ask, folding my arms and looking him straight in the eye, ready for battle. Hank has half-heartedly expressed his disapproval once or twice in the past.

“The horror movies. Maybe it’s too much. Maybe this is a sign that he shouldn’t be watching that kind of thing.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I say.

“Let’s just discuss it with him,” Hank says, reaching his hands across the table, taking hold of and uncrossing my arms and grasping my hands in what I feel is a forced, inauthentic way.

“Fine,” I say. “Fine.”

“And honey?” he adds.

“Yeah.”

“I really need us to be on the same page with this,” he says with a little squeeze of my hands for emphasis.

“Right,” I answer. “Same page.”

That night, we tuck Jimmy in together, which is unusual, and he knows it. He’s looking at us with a sideways glance, suspicious. “What?” he asks.

“No, nothing,” I say.

“Why?” Hank asks. He’s using some type of psychology here. I wonder what he’s been reading.

“You guys never tuck me in together.”

“Well, we need to talk to you about something, buddy,” Hank says.

“Knew it,” Jimmy mutters, pulling his covers up over his mouth and nose.

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” I say, tussling his hair. “You’re not in trouble.”

Hank shoots me a look.

“Is it about the story?”

“What story?” Hank asks before I can say anything.

“The friend one.”

“Tell us about the friend story,” says Hank. He’s appointed himself the Grand Inquisitor, and I can feel my anger towards him starting to bubble up inside my gut.

Jimmy glances over at me and says “Mom?” in a way that makes me look away.

“Jim,” Hank says. He uses this version of Jimmy’s name not when he’s in trouble, but when he wants to appeal to our older son’s wish to be treated as a young adult. When he wants to speak to the boy “man-to-man.”

“What?”

“Tell us about the friend story,” Hank repeats.

“It’s a story,” he says in a whinier register. I want to sarcastically applaud my husband for the tack he has taken which is so obviously backfiring.

“We know it is, sweetheart,” I say as Jimmy scrunches up his face in disgust at the word and Hank squeezes my hand to remind me, I suppose, to stay “on-script.” “It’s just that you have to realize––”

“I know,” he whines.

“What do you know?” Hank asks.

“Mrs. Brown already told me.”

“What did Mrs. Brown tell you?” says Hank. I can’t help but think if I were Jimmy, I’d feel I was being interrogated by him. I might plead the Fifth at this point.

“That you have to be careful to write things that are ‘school appropriate.’”  He says this last bit in a voice that suggests he’s heard the words a million times and that they’re ridiculous to him.

“And did you think your friend story was school appropriate?” asks Hank.

“No,” he says in the same mocking tone he used to bring up the term. “But it was just a story. Just a made up, silly story.”

“What else did Mrs. Brown say?” Hank continues his line of questioning. I’m not sure where he’s going; haven’t we got what we came for?

“What do you mean?”  Jimmy pulls his cover over his eyes, and Hank pulls it down with a little more force than I’m comfortable with. It occurs to me that he has become annoyed by the conversation and that he is weary and a little drunk.

“Hank,” I say aloud.

“About answering your writing prompts,” he says, ignoring me.

“That you have to stay on the topic of the question.”

“And? Did you do that?”

“No sir,” my son says in a tiny voice.

“I’m sorry?”

“No sir!” he says loudly. He rolls his eyes and pulls his blanket over as he turns to the side.

“There will be no more stories of this kind anymore. Do you understand me?”

“Hank,” I say. I want this to stop. I’m afraid he’s doing damage that won’t be undone. He holds his finger to his lips in a way that feels threatening to me.

“Do you understand?” he repeats.

“Yes sir! Yes sir! Yes sir! Yes sir!” yells Jimmy. He burrows in under his covers and is done.

Hank stands up and takes a deep breath. He’s standing over me and Jimmy, and I’m afraid of him for the first time in the twelve years I’ve known him.

“Good. Now go to sleep!”

   *        *   *   *       *   *   *

No matter how many parent-teacher conferences I attend––and I’ve attended quite a few at this point––I always feel odd sitting in the tiny chairs, my knees doubled up in front of me. The princess treatment I received from my father as a girl followed me to school each day when I was a student, and I enjoyed pleasing my teachers. When I disappointed them for whatever reason in whatever way, I was crestfallen, almost heartbroken at the prospect. And I always felt that very same way when I sat in the tiny chair, speaking with one of my sons’ teachers, even if it was just for the purpose of hearing how well they were doing.

Today’s meeting takes place at the very strange hour of 10:23 a.m., her “conference period,” apparently, when her class goes to recess. Mrs. Brown is in red gingham this time, and I cannot help thinking she looks like a picnic blanket.

“Mrs. Kerr,” she says in a smiling voice that sounds like she’s recording a voice-over for one of her charming letters. We shake hands and hers is warm and doughy, and something about the way it feels makes me glance down to her midsection and I realize, for the first time, that she is pregnant.

“Hi, Mrs. Brown. Congratulations. I had no idea. Your first?” I ask, motioning with my eyebrows to her belly.

“What? Why, yes. Yes, it is,” she smiles and blushes. “You’ll have to forgive me. I’m still getting used to all the attention. The children want to touch my belly all the time.”

We chit chat about her pregnancy for a bit: safe, appropriate questions and answers about baby showers and diaper services. Then we get to the subject at hand. I’m the one who brings him up, actually.

“Funny that Jimmy has never mentioned your being with child,” I say. I feel ridiculous about my word choice. It’s as if I’m trying to match my language to her gingham dress.

“No, he’s not really one to dote on me much,” she says. I get the impression she’s put off by my son in some way. Before I can say anything about it, she adds, “He’s very much in his own little world, as they say.”

“Really? I’ve never heard that about him,” I answer.

“Oh, I don’t mean it in a bad way. He’s got his group of friends, of course. I just mean, well, there’s that vivid imagination up there, isn’t there?” she says. She points at her temple, meaning to emphasize the up there, but it looks more like she’s put an imaginary pistol to her own head.

“Listen, Mrs. Brown,” I say. “About his writing. I have to tell you, I’m partially to blame. You see––”

“I know about the movies,” she interrupts, “and I understand.”

“I didn’t realize he’d told you about them.”

“Oh, no. He didn’t. Your husband, Mr. Kerr, told me.”

“Really,” I say, confused. “When would he have told you this?”

Mrs. Brown gathers some papers in her doughy little hands, considering her next words with care, apparently. “You see, Mrs. Kerr, after the latest story, I decided to call you, rather than send another note. When I couldn’t get you at your home number, I called your husband at his job.”

“I see,” I answer. I’m stunned, not only by the fact that she called, but that Hank hasn’t mentioned it.

Mrs. Brown slides the construction paper over to me, and I can already see the familiar red crayon splashed and splayed across the page. There’s a small figure that could be a baby who’s not faring any better than any of the other characters in my son’s macabre stories.

“Mr. Kerr and I discussed perhaps not allowing James to view the movies for a bit. Maybe just till he’s a bit older? Just to see if it improves his situation a bit?”

She’s saying everything as if it’s a question, needing my approval, but I know she and Hank have already decided to forbid Jimmy from watching Chiller Theatre and Creature Features with me ever again. They did this during their secret phone meeting. I want to shower her with expletives the likes of which she’s never heard before in her gingham-wearing life. Instead, I shake her plump hand once more and thank her, assuring her she’ll have no more trouble from my boy.

      *   *   *       *   *   *       *

Friday evening comes and it’s one of those spectacular, Indian-summer twilights we sometimes have here in the northeast. Despite the fallen leaves, the air is warm and the day seems to be struggling, unwilling to give up its place to the coming night. I find a dress I haven’t worn in years––a checkered pattern––along with a matching hairband.

I cook pork chops with red cabbage and apple sauce, a family favorite. It puts the three of them into a light-hearted jolly mood. Combined with the lovely weather and the simple fact that it’s Friday, things could be no better.

“You seem…different,” Hank says with a flirtatious pat on my fanny as I serve him a glass of whiskey and pour myself the first gin and tonic of the evening.

“How so?”

“I don’t know. But I like it,” he says. He’s getting tired; I can see that already.

We tuck both boys in, then go into our bedroom together. I shower, asking him to wait for me in bed. When I come out, he’s fast asleep. I consider waking him, but the picture of the young Mrs. Brown in her ridiculous, anachronistic clothing comes to mind and I don’t. Instead, I go downstairs to the playroom and open up the TV guide. When I find what I want, I walk back up the stairs to my son’s bedroom, knocking on the door before entering.

“Hey, buddy,” I say to my weary, disoriented firstborn son.

“Mom?” he says, glancing around as if he expects someone else to have come with me.

“Hey. We’re in for a treat tonight. Do you remember me telling you about a movie called Night of the Living Dead?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, they’re showing it on Chiller in about twenty minutes. You game?”

“Can you make popcorn?” Jimmy says, his eyes wide with excitement.

“Of course I can make popcorn. What kind of question is that?” I answer as he makes his way out from under the covers and our night begins.