"The girl of my dreams," said Homer Wells.
It was crazy enough, in Homer's opinion, that the girl of his dreams had two people who loved her.
And so he went early to Senior Biology to request either a fresh rabbit or a replacement for the obsessed boy named Bucky.
There was a geography class in progress when he got there; and when the class was released, Homer saw that the large maps of the world were still pulled down, covering the blackboard. "May I just look at the maps for a moment, before my next class?" Homer asked the geography teacher. "I'll roll them back up for you."
And so he was left alone with his first accurate view of the world--the whole world, albeit unrealistically flat against a blackboard. After a while he found Maine; he regarded how small it was. After a while he found South Carolina; he stared into South Carolina for a long time, as if the exact whereabouts of Mr. Rose and the other migrants would materialize. He had heard all the talk about Germany, which was easier to find than Maine. He was surprised at the size of England; Charles Dickens had given him the impression of something much bigger.
And the ocean that seemed so vast when you looked at it off Ray Kendall's dock--why the oceans of the world were even more vast than he'd imagined. Yet St. Cloud's, which loomed so large in Homer's life, could not be located on the map of Maine. He was using the geography teacher's magnifying glass when he suddenly realized that the entire class of Senior Biology had filled the seats behind him. Mr. Hood was regarding him strangely.
"Looking for your rabbit, Homer?" Mr. Hood asked. The class enjoyed this joke enormously, and Homer realized he had--at least for that day--lost the opportunity to rid himself of Bucky.
"Look at it this way," Bucky whispered to him, near the end of class. "If Debra Pettigrew had two twats, she might let you in one of them. You see the advantages?"
Unfortunately, the idea of paired vaginas troubled Homer throughout his Friday evening date with Debra Pettigrew. There was a Fred Astaire movie in Bath, but that was almost an hour-long drive, each way, and what did Homer Wells know or care about dancing? He had declined several invitations to attend Debra's dancing class with her; if she wanted to see the Fred Astaire movie, Homer thought she could go with someone who was in her dancing class. And it was getting too cold simply to drive down to the beach and park there. Olive was generous about letting Homer use the van. Soon there would be gas rationing, and a welcome end, in Homer's opinion, to all this restless driving.
He drove Debra Pettigrew out to the carnival site at Cape Kenneth. In the moonlight, the abandoned, unlighted Ferris wheel stood out like scaffolding for the world's first rocket launch, or like the bones of some species from dinosaur times. Homer tried to tell Debra about the knife work of Mr. Rose, but she had her heart set on Fred Astaire; he knew better than to waste a good story on her when she was sulking. They drove to the Cape Kenneth drive-in, which was "closed for the season"; they appeared to be reviewing the scenes of a romance that had happened to other people--and not just last summer, but to another generation.
"I don't know what you've got against dancing," Debra said.
"I don't know, either," said Homer Wells.
It was still early when he drove Debra to her winter home in Kenneth Corners; the same ferocious dogs of the summer were there, with their coats grown thicker, with their hot breath icing on their muzzles. There had been talk between Debra and Homer, earlier, about using the summer house on Drinkwater Lake for some kind of party; the house would be unheated, and they would have to keep the lights off, or someone might report a breaking and entering; but despite these discomforts, surely there was a thrill in being unchaperoned. Why? wondered Homer Wells. He knew he still wouldn't get to Debra Pettigrew--even if she had two vaginas. With the dull Friday evening they had spent together, and with the dogs' breath crystallizing on the driver's-side window of the van, there was no talk about such a tempting party this night.
"So what are we doing tomorrow night?" Debra asked, sighing.
Homer watched a dog gnaw at his side-view mirror.
"Well, I was going to see Candy--she's home from Camden," Homer said. "I haven't seen her on a weekend all fall, and Wally did ask me to look after her."
"You're going to see her without Wally?" Debra asked.
"Right," Homer said. The van was so snub-nosed that the dogs could hurl themselves directly against the windshield without having to clamber over the hood. A big dog's paws raked one of the windshield wipers away from the windshield, releasing it with a crack; it looked bent; it wouldn't quite touch the surface of the glass anymore.
"You're going to see her alone," Debra said.
"Or with her dad," Homer said.
"Sure," said Debra Pettigrew, getting out of the van. She left the doo
r open a little too long. A dog with the spade-shaped head of a Doberman charged the open door; it was half in the van, its heavy chest heaving against the passenger-side seat, its frosty muzzle drooling on the gearshift box, when Debra grabbed it by the ear and yanked it back, yelping, out of the van.
"So long," said Homer Wells softly--after the door had slammed, after he had wiped the dog's frothy slobber off the gearshift knob.
He drove by Kendall's Lobster Pound twice, but there was nothing to tell him whether Candy was home. On the weekends when she came home, she took the train; then Ray drove her back, on Sunday. I'll call her tomorrow--Saturday--Homer thought.
When Candy said that she wanted to see the Fred Astaire movie, Homer had no objections. "I always wanted to see him," he said. Bath, after all, was less than an hour away.
On the bridge across the Kennebec River, they could see several big ships in the water and several more in dry dock; the Bath shipyards were sprawled along the shore--a rhythmic hammering and other metal sounds audible even on a Saturday. They were much too early for the movie. They were looking for an Italian restaurant that Ray had told them about--if it was still there; Raymond Kendall hadn't been in Bath in years.
In 194_, especially to an outsider, the city seemed dominated by the shipyards, and by the ships that stood taller than the shipyard buildings, and by the bridge that spanned the Kennebec River. Bath was a workingman's town, as Melony soon discovered.
She found a job in the shipyards and began her winter employment on an assembly line, working with other women--and with an occasional, handicapped man--on the second floor of a factory specializing in movable parts. The movable part to which Melony would devote her energies for the first month of her employment was a hexagonal-shaped sprocket that looked like half a ham, split open lengthwise; Melony did not know the whereabouts of the assembly line that dealt with the other half of the ham. The sprocket arrived on the conveyor belt in front of her, pausing there for exactly forty-five seconds before it was moved on and replaced by a new sprocket. The joint of the sprocket was packed with grease; you could stick your finger in the grease, past the second knuckle. The job was to insert six ball bearings into the grease-packed joint; you pushed each ball bearing into the grease until you felt it hit the bottom; all six fit perfectly. The trick was to get only one hand greasy; a clean hand had an easier time handling the clean ball bearings, which were the size of marbles. The other part of the job was making sure that the six ball bearings were perfect--perfectly round, perfectly smooth; no dents, no jagged metal scraps stuck to them. The odds were that one out of every two hundred ball bearings had something wrong with it; at the end of the day, you turned in the bad ball bearings. If you had a day with no bad ball bearings, the foreman told you that you weren't looking each ball bearing over carefully enough.
You could sit or stand, and Melony tried both positions, alternating them through the day. The belt was too high to make sitting comfortable and too low to make standing any better. Your back hurt in one place when you stood and in another place when you sat. Not only did Melony not know who did what, where, to the other half of the sprocket; she also didn't know what the sprocket was for. What's more, she didn't care.
After two weeks, she had the routine down pat: between twenty-six and twenty-eight seconds to insert the ball bearings and never more than ten seconds to pick six perfect ball bearings. She learned to keep a nest of ball bearings in her lap (when she sat) and in an ashtray (she didn't smoke) when she stood; that way she always had a ball bearing handy in case she dropped one. She had a twelve-to-fourteen-second rest between sprockets, during which time she could look at the person on her left and at the person on her right, and shut her eyes and count to three or sometimes five. She observed that there were two styles of labor on the line. Some of the workers picked their six perfect ball bearings immediately upon finishing a sprocket; the others waited for the new sprocket to arrive first. Melony found faults with both styles.