The next morning, I am awake early enough to hear Larry’s alarm go off, and to listen to him through Butch’s and my closed door while he goes through his morning routine: shaving with his electric razor, then showering and dressing in his uniform, then slurping down a bowl of corn flakes before having a cup of coffee (heavy, I remember, on the milk and sugar) while he thumbs through the sports and comics sections of the Union. Just listening, I can see in my mind’s eye every move he makes. More than once, he pauses at our bedroom door on his way to this or that thing, and I worry that he might come in. But he never does, and when I hear him finally go out the front door and start up the car and drive away, I breathe easier.
In the gathering light I can see the bag of seventy-five marbles (which I’d carefully counted the night before) on my dresser; and just thinking about them makes me feel a little sick to my stomach. I tell myself it’s only because I have way too many—more than half—cat-eyes (which, as everybody knows, are cheaply made and not as pretty to look at as the agates or the purees), or that the bag, which I had thought was real leather, is actually some sort of naugahyde, and has loose threads hanging from its seams—some of which are already coming apart—like on some cheaply-made shirts I’ve seen. Then I tell myself that I feel crummy because I know I’m not as grateful as I should be, Larry bought these marbles and this bag for me because he likes me, and isn’t it the thought that really matters? And yet, when I tell myself these things, I know there’s something else about them that——bothers me. Something I can’t——or won’t——bring myself to even think.
I must have slept, then: the next thing I know, it’s seven thirty, and Charlotte is rousting Butchie and me up for breakfast. “We have oat-mew?” says Butchie, groggily.
“Cream of Wheat,” says Charlotte, throwing open the curtains and opening a window, and I know she’s made it just for me, because it’s my favorite cooked cereal. Butchie whines about this, and Charlotte tells him we can have oatmeal tomorrow, and to put a sock in it.
I’m really not all that hungry this morning, which is unusual, but I eat my Cream of Wheat anyway, just so Charlotte won’t think something is wrong. Charlotte turns on the kitchen radio while we’re eating and starts cleaning up the breakfast dishes, and Butch and I laugh while she sings along to “Flying Purple People Eater.” And by the time I am dressed in my school clothes and ready to leave, and Charlotte combs my hair and give me fifty cents for lunch and hugs me, I’m not feeling quite so low.
But just as I’m opening the front door, Charlotte asks me if I’m not forgetting something, then goes to my bedroom and comes back out with the bag of marbles. “You don’t want to go to school without these, do you?” she says.
I force a sheepish grin onto my face and roll my eyes as if I’m a stupid idiot. “No way!” I say.
She hands me the bag and looks at me quizzically. “Well, okay. Just be careful. And have a good day in school.”
When I get to the school, and in the few minutes before the opening bell, Mikey DeAngelo, a rough-looking kid who sits a couple of desks away from me, and one of the more avid marble players in the class, comes over to my desk and nods appreciatively at my overstuffed naugahyde bag of marbles. Mikey’s own bag, which looks like it was made from a chamois, hangs heavily from the side belt loop on his pants, and looks to have in it twice as many marbles as I have in mine. Nonetheless, Mikey seems impressed. “Cool bag,” he says. “Looks brand new. Whatcha got inside?” And when I pull open the bag just wide enough for him to see the layer of good marbles at the top, he raises an eyebrow and nods even more appreciatively. I don’t tell him that it’s mostly cat-eyes. He looks at me warily. “So. You pretty good?”
I shrug and try to look nonchalant. “Not bad,” I say.
The bell rings then, and Miss Sterling tells Mikey to get back to his seat for the Pledge of Allegiance. “We got a big game at lunch,” he says over his shoulder. “You wanna play?”
“Yeah, sure,” I say, as casually as possible. “Why not?”
As it turns out, I’m lousy at marbles, though I’m blissfully unaware of this tragic fact as I hit the playground (after a tasteless, hastily-devoured cafeteria lunch of chicken pot pie) with my marble bag hanging, à la Mikey DeAngelo, like a misplaced, monster-sized scrotum from my side pants belt-loop. The bag is so heavy with marbles that I have to hold it up with my hand to keep it from pulling my pants down altogether. The big bag (cheap or no) makes me feel big, powerful. I know, of course, that it might be smarter to start off by playing with the fourth, or even the third graders, who are themselves just learning to shoot marbles. But, no. For some reason, I’m feeling reckless. I tell myself: I’m in the fifth grade. I’m a big boy. It’s a matter of pride. And so, foolishly, I snub the multitude of smaller, little-kid games scattered here and there around the playground, looking for the real competition, which I easily locate at a far corner of the schoolyard, where a crowd of maybe thirty kids—including Mikey—is gathered, watching what looks like the World Series of marble games. I saunter over, trying to look cool, but no one is looking at me.
I wend my way through the crowd and discover that they’re still setting up: scratching out the circle in the dirt, picking out the marbles they’ll be playing for, throwing them into the center. So far, there are six players in the game, all fifth and sixth graders, including Mikey. I call out, “Hey, Mikey!” and he looks up and grins and says, “Hey, it’s the new kid!” and I ask him if it’s still okay to join in. Before he can say anything, one of the other players, a scary-looking bruiser with a flattop I recognize from the school safety patrol, looks at me and growls, “Get lost, punk!” But then Mikey says to him, “Aw, come on, Martin, let the new kid in. He’s okay.” He looks at me then and grins, and says, “Besides, it’ll just be that much more for the rest of us to win.” Martin chews on this for a second, and then shrugs. “Well, alright,” he says sullenly. “We’re playing keepsies. Ten in. And no cat-eyes!”
“No cat-eyes?” I say, clutching more tightly my bag that is chock-full of cat-eyes.
“We don’t play for cat-eyes,” Mikey says.
“No,” says another kid I don’t know. “Cat-eyes are ugly. Cat-eyes ain’t worth nothin’!”
“I won’t even use a cat-eye as a shooter,” says yet another kid. “They keep breaking on me.”
Despite this setback, I’m still determined to play. I untie my bag from my belt loop and, grateful that my best marbles are all at the top of the bag, pull out ten, a good mixture of agates and purees, and add them to the pile in the center of the circle. Then I take out an eleventh marble, a steely-boulder, to use as a shooter.
The rules for playing marbles are simple enough. Each player throws an agreed-upon number of his own marbles (usually ten) into the center of a ring which is three feet in diameter drawn onto the ground; seven players, then, means a pile of seventy marbles. Then you each take turns shooting at this pile of marbles with your ‘shooter’, by nestling it in the crook of your index finger and then flicking it off with your thumb, as hard as you can. You get to keep any marbles you knock outside the ring, and you keep on shooting until you miss or don’t knock something out with your shot. Then the next player has a go at it. Everyone takes turns shooting until the last marble is knocked from the ring.
Most of the kids here, I notice, are using small steelies or even cat-eyes as shooters, but I don’t yet see the logic of that: instead, I’m using the only steely-boulder I have, because it’s the largest and heaviest available (it’s really just a large ball bearing), and I figure it’ll pack the biggest wallop.
The tragedy begins even before we start playing the game, while we’re “lagging” to determine the order of play: someone draws a straight line in the dirt about six feet away from a nearby wall, and then the players squat down behind the line and shoot toward the wall: the one whose shooter comes to rest closest to the wall gets to go first; the second-closest goes second, and so on. My steely-boulder is so bulky and heavy in my small hand that I can barely flick it at all; instead, it seems to sort of dribble off my finger, causing a few of the kids to snicker and my face and neck to feel suddenly hot. “Stupid marble slipped,” I mumble aloud to no one in particular, though I’m not willing to look even stupider by saying I want to lag again. Of course, I get to shoot last.
Martin the Terrible, as it turns out, gets to shoot first, and it’s then that I figure out just how horribly out-classed I am. His first shot blasts squarely into the pile of marbles, scattering them as if Martin were shooting with a cherry-bomb instead of an ordinary marble. Naturally, four or five of them land outside the circle. Martin smirks and gathers up his winnings and throws them into his bag, then knocks another easy one out before finally missing one requiring more finesse.
The other kids in the game are pretty average, as far as marble players go, though they’re still far better than I am. Thankfully, Martin’s bombshell shooting has spread the pile of marbles pretty evenly throughout the circle, like a solid break on a pool table, so everyone has a pretty easy time knocking out one or two marbles before missing. Everyone, that is, except me.
As luck would have it, one of the other kids’ shots has left a butterfly agate barely an inch from the edge of the circle. And my heartbeat quickens when I see how ridiculously easy it would be to deliver a glancing blow and knock it out. Even the owner of the butterfly, a smaller kid from one of the fifth grade classes, shakes his head sadly and says “Talk about a freebie…” And I almost laugh when I hunker down to take the shot, realizing I might actually win something in this. But, once again, my shooter drips from my fingers like barely-running water from one of the school water fountains. I might as well be shooting with an iron cannon ball. And no sooner does my shooter hit the dirt before the kids watching the game collectively giggle and point, and I feel suddenly the way I did when I discovered my dick hanging out for everyone to see that horrible day on the playground in San Francisco. I want this to be over quickly, so I can go away and hide.
And so it is. Barely ten minutes later, the marble pot is completely gone, a lot of it residing now in Martin’s and Mikey’s bags, but everyone else (again, excepting me) winning back at least half of what they’d put in. And all the while, they’re looking at me and chuckling to themselves.
I’m tempted to start crying, but I can’t let anyone see how devastating this loss was to me, and so I choke it back. Strangely, it has little to do with the loss of the marbles themselves, which, I can’t help it, mean nothing to me. Even less than nothing. I suddenly hate these marbles, and the cheap bag that holds them. I hate everything about them. And so while the other players are counting their winnings and losses, I take a marble, an agate, out of my bag—and heave it as far as I can across the playground, grunting loudly from the effort so that I’m noticed. The marble bounces off a far cinder-block wall and lies on the ground, a white speck on the brown dirt. It feels good. Then I take out another, a puree, and do the same. It feels better yet. Then another. And another. Pretty soon I’m giggling like a hysterical two-year-old. It’s all so funny.
“Hey!” I hear someone yell, “that kid is throwing his marbles away!”
“You’re kidding!” I hear someone else.
“I swear to God!,” says the first. “Look!”
Behind me, I hear kids ooohing and aaaahing and laughing, which makes me laugh even more, the idea that all these kids are watching me. Now I’m taking four, five marbles at a time and throwing them. And across the yard, off to our left, several kids have seen me and are running over to where I’ve thrown the marbles and picking them up and stuffing them into their pockets, and, farther up, a yard monitor is blowing her whistle and moving in my direction. Everything is so funny, I’m having a hard time breathing, I’m laughing so hard.
“Hey!” says another kid behind me, “don’t throw ’em away, give ’em to me!” And then even some of the kids behind me run past me to the other side of the yard to get at my marbles.
By the time the yard monitor, a large woman with a big whistle hanging by a strap from her neck, gets to us, I’ve thrown the last marble across the playground. “What’s going on here!” she asks, in as gruff a voice as she can muster while still trying to catch her breath.
“Nothing,” I say, still giggling slightly. “We’re just playing marbles.”
“Well, playing marbles,” she says sternly, “does not mean throwing them across the yard like that. You could put someone’s eye out. You think that’s funny?”
“No,” I say, looking at the ground, my face growing flushed again.
“I should hope not,” says the woman. “If I see any behavior like that again, I’m going to have to take you to see Mr. Walker. Is that understood?”
I don’t yet know who Mr. Walker is, but I can tell from her tone that it isn’t someone I want to get to know. “Yes, ma’am,” I say.
Just then, the school bell rings, and the woman toots on her whistle one more time and calls out, “Okay, everyone back to your classrooms!”
While everybody files into the classroom, amid the buzz of kids’ voices, I hear the words ‘crazy’ and ‘weird’ and ‘immature’, and I just know they’re talking about me. I sit down in my chair and immediately shove the empty naugahyde bag inside the desk, to the very back, behind the massive Social Studies book, where it will stay, forgotten, for the rest of the school year. And when I look over at Mikey, he just sits down at his desk and glances back at me and shakes his head with a strange smirk on his face. Even Trisha seems to be looking at me with more disdain than even yesterday’s.
I know I should feel rotten, depressed, whatever—I normally do in situations like this—but I don’t. Instead, I still feel like laughing, though I don’t know why. There’s certainly nothing funny going on. Just like I can never explain how it is I could do such a thing, how good—how freeing—it felt to throw the marbles, the farther, the better; I don’t understand it myself.
After Miss Sterling tells everyone to settle down, and starts reading from some stupid book about the adventures of a stupid Alaskan bear, and everyone is listening, I finally feel as if I can relax. And later, during the final recess of the day, while most of the boys are headed out to the dirt field for one last game of marbles, I stay on the asphalt and play four-square with the girls and the other boys who I might ordinarily call ‘sissies’. Already their talk has turned to a much more pressing subject than one boy’s strange antics during the lunch period: Christmas, with the usual speculating on what gifts they expect to get, what they hope to never get, and what they absolutely have to get, or else they’ll die. And later yet, when the last bell of the day rings, and we’re tearing out of the auditorium, after having practiced singing “The First Noel” and “Silent Night”, what must be fifty times each, even my own recollections of that day’s lunch period are dimmer, a minor episode in school life, receding into the past, that may or may not have happened at all.
For some reason, when I get home that afternoon, I feel like that guy in the final scene of “It’s A Wonderful Life”, where things are back to normal again, he’s got a life, and he’s happy, no matter the troubles he faces. The house smells of wood polish and scented candles, and Charlotte and Butchie are both in the dining room, listening to “Yakity-Yak” on the radio, Charlotte dabbing red nail polish on her toenails and Butchie drawing on a piece of paper with his crayons. And when Charlotte looks up and sees me, her eyes seem to sparkle and she grins and says “Hiya, Billy! C’mere and give us a hug!”. And when I do, something warm seems to flow from her into me, and I feel full in a way I never felt before.
And if I have any weird feelings at all about seeing Larry that evening, they suddenly and inexplicably melt away the moment he steps from the car and smiles at me. “Well, hi, there, Billy!” he says, and when Butchie whines because Larry hasn’t yet said hi to him, he laughs and tousles his hair and says “Hello, son,” in a way that makes Butchie turn toward me and beam happily, as if he’s something special. But when Larry looks up at me again, it seems as if there’s something else even more special there, behind his smiling eyes, even if he doesn’t call me ‘son’. Maybe it’s the feeling I get from him that he would like to call me son. I don’t know. All I do know is, I don’t want to do anything, think anything, that will make that look go away.
Of course, I worry about what to say if Larry or Charlotte ask about the marbles, and I work out in my head how I’ll tell them that I’ve decided to keep them in my desk at school, and hope that satisfies them. But I needn’t have worried. Miraculously, neither Charlotte nor Larry mentions my marbles at all, and I wonder if they’ve forgotten I had them in the first place. During dinner, we talk about Larry’s day, mostly, about how he had a high-speed chase that ended all the way in El Cajon, and how he nearly ran over an couple of “rubber-neckers” in the process.
Afterwards, Larry piles us all in the car and drives us to a huge Christmas tree lot down on El Cajon Boulevard, and we spend over an hour breathing in the pine scent and looking at this, then that tree, until, at last, we find the one tree that Charlotte announces is perfect for out tiny house (after Larry assures her we can put it into a corner to hide that one bald spot). Larry pays the attendant, who shoves the tree into the car trunk and ties the lid down, the “X” of the stand sticking out the back end like some sort of wooden wind-up key. On the way back to the house, Charlotte and Butchie and I sing Christmas songs: “Jingle Bells”, “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town”, and “Oh, Christmas Tree.” Larry is silent, maybe even a little sullen-looking, and seems to lean in closer to his door while he’s driving, as if he’s somehow trying to get farther away from us; evidently he doesn’t care much for singing. Of course, Butchie doesn’t know the words or the tune to anything we’re singing, but he yells it out anyway, and I wish that Charlotte would tell him to shut up, he’s ruining the songs. But it’s fun. And when we finally get home and Larry puts up the lights and the rest of us hang the ornaments and the tinsel, and Larry puts the red-and-chrome star on top and sprays the tree all over with fake snow, and Charlotte yells at him for not spraying it on before we hung the ornaments, it really is the perfect tree.
When the tree is finished, Charlotte puts on a Christmas music record, then, and we listen to Bing Crosby and Perry Como and Andy Williams, and Larry turns out all the lights except the ones on the tree, and we sit in the living room, just looking at the tree, the colored lights, the tinsel. And then it comes time for Butchie and me to go to bed, and Larry and Charlotte come into the room with us and tuck us both in, and hug us both goodnight, and I sleep, wondering as I drift off how life can be any sweeter.