The Cider House Rules

When Wally said, "Homer's never been to a drive-in before," he had to shout to be heard over the dogs.

"I've never been to a movie before," Homer admitted.

"Gosh," said Debra Pettigrew. She smelled nice; she was much neater and cleaner than she looked in her apple-mart clothes; Debra dressed with a certain pert orderliness for working, too. Her chubbiness was restrained, and as they drove to Cape Kenneth, her usual good nature emerged so warmly that even her shyness disappeared--she was a fun girl, as they say in Maine. She was nice-looking, relaxed, good-humored, hardworking and not very smart. Her prospects, at best, included marriage to someone pleasant and not a great deal older or smarter than herself.

In the summers, the Pettigrews occupied one of the new houses on the overcrowded, mucky shore of Drinkwater Lake; they'd managed to make the new place look lived-in--on its rapid way to ramshackle--almost instantly. The lawn had appeared to grow its dead cars overnight, and the dogs had survived the move from the Pettigrews' winter house in Kenneth Corners without losing a bit of their territorial savagery. Like all the cottages around Drinkwater Lake, the Pettigrews' had been named--as if the houses themselves were orphans, delivered incomplete and in need of further creation. The Pettigrews' house was named "All of Us!"

"The exclamation point is what kills me," Wally had said to Homer when they pulled up at the car-and-dog lot. "As if they're proud of their overpopulation." But Wally was very respectful once Debra joined them in the car.

This mannerism of what he'd seen of society struck Homer Wells quite forcefully; people, even nice people--because, surely, Wally was nice--would say a host of critical things about someone to whom they would then be perfectly pleasant. At St. Cloud's, criticism was plainer--and harder, if not impossible, to conceal.

The drive-in movie in Cape Kenneth was nearly as new to Maine as the Haven Club's heated pool and was a lot less practical. Drive-in movies would never be a great idea for Maine; the night fog along the coast lent to many a joyful film the inappropriately ghoulish atmosphere of a horror movie. In later years, people groping for rest rooms and the snack bar would fail to find their cars when they attempted to return to them.

The other problem was mosquitoes. In 194_, when Homer Wells went to his first drive-in movie, the hum of the mosquitoes in the night air of Cape Kenneth was far more audible than the sound track. Wally was relatively successful in preventing the mosquitoes from taking over the car because he always brought with him an aerosol pump sprayer with which he frequently doused the car--and the air surrounding the cars. The pump can was loaded with the insecticide they sprayed the apples with. Thus the air in and surrounding the Cadillac was rendered poisonous and foul but fairly free of mosquitoes. The hiss and stench of the spray aroused frequent complaints from Wally's fellow moviegoers in the cars nearest the Cadillac--until they were being bitten so badly by mosquitoes that they stopped protesting; some of them politely asked if they could borrow the device for the purpose of poisoning their own cars.

There was no snack bar at the Cape Kenneth drive-in in 194_, and there were no rest rooms. The men and boys took turns urinating against a dank cement wall at the rear of the drive-in pit; atop the wall were perched several small and uncouth boys (Cape Kenneth locals, too young or too poor for cars), who used the wall to watch the movie even though they were well beyond the possibility of hearing it. Occasionally, when the movie was dissatisfying, they peed from the top of the wall onto the luckless people who were peeing against it.

Girls and women were not expected to pee at the drive-in, and consequently were better behaved than the men and boys--the women drank less, for example, although their behavior inside the cars could not be monitored.

It was wondrous--this whole experience--for Homer Wells. He was especially acute at noticing what human beings did for pleasure--what (there could be no mistake about it) they chose to do--because he had come from a place where choice was not so evident, and examples of people performing for pleasure were not plentiful. It amazed him that people suffered drive-in movies by choice, and for pleasure; but he believed that, if he failed to see the fun in it, it was entirely his failure.

What he was most unprepared for was the movie itself. After people honked their horns and blinked their headlights and exhibited other less endearing forms of impatience--Homer heard what was, unmistakably, the sound of someone vomiting against a fender--a gigantic image filled the sky. It is something's mouth! thought Homer Wells. The camera backed, or rather, lurched away. Something's head--a kind of horse! thought Homer Wells. It was a camel, actually, but Homer Wells had never seen a camel, or a picture of one; he thought it was a horribly deformed horse--a mutant horse! Perhaps some ghastly fetus-phase of a horse! The camera staggered back farther. Mounted by the camel's grotesque hump was a black-skinned man almost entirely concealed in white wrapping--bandages! thought Homer Wells. The ferocious black Arab nomad brandished a frightening curved sword; whacking the lumbering camel with the flat of the blade, he drove the beast into a faulty, staggering gallop across such endless sand dunes that the animal and its rider were soon only a speck on the vast horizon. Suddenly, music! Homer jumped. Words! The titles, the names of the actors were written in the sand by an invisible hand.

"What was that?" Homer asked Wally. He meant: the animal, its rider, the desert, the credits--everything!

"Some dumb Bedouin, I think," Wally said.

A Bedouin? thought Homer Wells.

"It's a kind of horse?" he asked.

"What horse?" asked Debra Pettigrew.

"The animal," Homer said, sensing his mistake.

Candy turned around in the front seat and looked at Homer with heartbreaking affection. "That's a camel, Homer," she said.

"You've never seen a camel!" Wally shouted.

"Well, where would he see a camel?" Candy snapped at him.

"I was just surprised," Wally said defensively.

"I've never seen a Negro, either," Homer said. "That was one, wasn't it?--on the camel."

"A Negro Bedouin, I guess," Wally said.

"Gosh," said Debra Pettigrew, who looked at Homer a little fearfully, as if she suspected him of simultaneously existing on another planet, in another life-form.

Then the credits were over. The black man on the camel was gone and would never be seen again. The desert was also gone; apparently, it had served its uncertain function--it would never be seen again, either. It was a pirate movie. Great ships were blasting each other with cannons; swarthy men with uncut hair and baggy pants were doing terrible things to nicer-looking men, who were better-dressed. None of the men was black. Perhaps the camel's rider had been a kind of omen, thought Homer Wells. His exposure to storytelling, through Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte, had ill prepared him for characters who came from and traveled nowhere--or for stories that made no sense.

The pirates stole a chest of coins and a blond woman from the ship of pleasanter aspect before they sank the ship and sailed away in their own foul vessel, on which they coarsely attempted to make merry with drunkenness and song. They appeared to enjoy leering at the woman, and taunting her, but some mysterious and totally unseen force kept them from actually harming her--for a whole hour, during which they harmed nearly everyone else and many of themselves. The woman, however, was reserved for more teasing, yet she protested her fate bitterly, and Homer had the feeling that he was supposed to lament for her.

A man who apparently adored the complaining woman pursued her across the ocean, through burning harbor towns and charmless inns of suggested but never visualized lewdness. As the fog rolled in, there was much of the movie that was never visualized, although Homer remained riveted to the image in the sky. He was only partially aware that Wally and Candy were uninterested in the movie; they had slumped from sight in the front seat and only occasionally did Candy's hand appear, gripping--or lolling on--the back of the seat. Twice Homer heard her say, "No, Wally," once with a firmness he had never heard in her voice before.

Wally's frequent laughter continued at intervals, and he whispered and murmured and gurgled in his throat.

Homer was occasionally aware of Debra Pettigrew being less interested in the pirate movie than he was; when he looked at her, he was surprised to find her looking at him. Not critically but not very affectionately either. She appeared to be more and more amazed to see him, as the picture went on and on. Once she touched his hand; he thought she wanted something, and regarded her politely. She just stared at him; he looked back at the movie.