The Cider House Rules

"Okay," Candy said. She felt so strange: that a boy her own age should know this much about her.

"I've never seen a lobster," said Homer Wells, to change the subject--to allow her to be the authority.

"Then you've never eaten one, either," Candy said cheerfully.

"I don't know if I want to eat something I've never seen," Homer said, and Candy laughed. She was laughing when Wally got back in the car.

"We're talking about lobsters," Homer explained.

"Oh, they're hilarious," Wally said, and all three of them laughed.

"Wait till you see one!" Candy said to Homer. "He's never seen one!" she told Wally.

"They're even funnier when you see them," Wally said. Candy's laughter hurt her; she stopped very suddenly, but Homer laughed more. "And wait till they try to talk to you," Wally added. "Lobsters really break me up, every time they try to talk."

When he and Wally stopped laughing, Homer said, "I've never seen the ocean, you know."

"Candy, did you hear that?" Wally asked, but Candy had released herself with her brief laughter; she was sound asleep. "You've never seen the ocean?" Wally asked Homer.

"That's right," said Homer Wells.

"That's not funny," said Wally seriously.

"Right," Homer said.

A little later, Wally said, "You want to drive for a while?"

"I don't know how to drive," Homer said.

"Really?" Wally asked. And later still--it was almost midnight--Wally asked, "Uh, have you ever been with a girl--made love to one, you know?" But Homer Wells had also felt released: he had laughed out loud with his new friends. The young but veteran insomniac had fallen asleep. Would Wally have been surprised to know that Homer hadn't laughed out loud with friends before, either? And possibly Homer would have had difficulty characterizing his relationship with Melony as a relationship based on making love.

What a new sense of security Homer had felt in that moment of laughter with friends in the enclosed dark of the moving car, and what a sense of freedom the car itself gave to him--its seemingly effortless journeying was a wonder to Homer Wells, for whom the idea of motion (not to mention the sense of change) was accomplished only rarely and only with enormous strife.

"Candy?" Wally whispered. And a little later, he whispered, "Homer?" He rather liked the idea of steering these two through the blackened world, of being their guide through the night, and their protector from whatever lay just beyond the headlights' reach.

"Well, buddy," Wally said to the sleeping Homer Wells, "it's high time you had some fun."

Wilbur Larch, almost a month later--still waiting to hear from Homer Wells and too proud to write the first letter--wondered about the "fun" Homer was having. Swimming lessons! he thought. What does one wear for swimming in a heated pool? How do they heat the pool, and how much do they heat it?

In 194_, the pool at the Haven Club was the first heated swimming pool in Maine. Although Raymond Kendall thought it was ridiculous to heat water for purposes other than cooking and bathing, he had invented the heating system for the Haven Club pool. It was just an exercise in mechanics for Ray.

"If you learn to swim in the ocean," Ray told Homer, "you'll learn the proper response for a body to make to all that water."

"But you don't know how to swim, Daddy," Candy said.

"That's what I mean," Ray said, winking at Homer Wells. "You set foot in the ocean, or fall in, you'll have enough sense never to set foot in it again--it's too cold!"

Homer liked Candy's father, perhaps because surgery is the mechanics of medicine and Homer's early training had been surgical. He made instant identification with the machinery with which Ray Kendall worked, both the apple farm equipment and the mechanisms for hauling the lobsters and keeping them alive.

Contrary to Wally's promise to him regarding the humor of lobsters, Homer was unamused by his first look at the creatures. They crammed the tank in Ray Kendall's lobster pound, crawling over each other, their claws pegged shut so that they wielded them underwater like ineffective clubs. Homer knew he had seen a good reason for learning how to swim. If one ever fell in the sea, one wouldn't want to fall to the bottom where these creatures lived. It was some while before Homer learned that the lobsters did not cover the ocean's floor in such density as they occupied the tank. The first question that leaped to his mind did not concern how a lobster ate or how it multiplied--but why it lived at all.

"There's got to be something that picks up what's lying around," Ray Kendall advised Homer.

"It's the garbage monster of the ocean's floor," Wally said laughing--he always laughed when he discussed lobster.

"The sea gull cleans up the shore," Ray Kendall said. "The lobster cleans up the bottom."

"Lobsters and sea gulls," Candy said, "they take what's left over."