Boys Life

really the only night kids our age could go. Saturday morning and afternoon was when the black people went, and Saturday night belonged to the older kids. Then by ten o’clock on Sunday morning the park area was clear again except for a few scatters of sawdust, crushed Dixie cups, and ticket stubs the cleanup crew had left like a dog marking its territory.
    The day passed in a slow crawl of anticipation. Leatherlungs called me a blockhead twice and made Georgie Sanders stand with his nose pressed against a circle on the blackboard for smarting off. Ladd Devine went to the office for drawing a lewd picture on the inside cover of his notebook, and the Demon swore she’d fix Leatherlungs’ wagon. I sure would’ve hated to be in Leatherlungs’ clunky brown shoes.
    From my house, as the blue twilight gathered and the sickle moon appeared, I could see the lights of the Brandywine Carnival. The Ferris wheel was turning, outlined in red. The midway sparkled with white bulbs. The sound of calliope music, laughter, and joyous screams drifted to me over the roofs of Zephyr. I had five dollars in my pocket, a gift from my father. I was wrapped up in my fleece-lined denim jacket against the cold. I was ready to roar.
    The Glass sisters lived about a half mile away, on Shantuck Street. By the time I got there on Rocket, near quarter before seven, Davy Ray’s bike was parked next to Ben’s in front of the house, which looked like a gingerbread cottage Hansel and Gretel might’ve envied. I left Rocket and went up on the porch. I could hear piano notes being banged behind the door. Then the high, fluty voice of Miss Blue Glass: “Softly, Ben. Softly!”
    I pressed the doorbell. Chimes rang, and Miss Blue Glass said, “Will you please answer that, Davy Ray?”
    He opened the door as the banging continued. I could tell by his sick expression that listening to Ben try to hammer out the same five notes over and over again wasn’t good for your health. “Is that Winifred Osborne?” Miss Blue Glass called over the racket.
    “No ma’am, it’s Cory Mackenson,” Davy Ray told her. “He’s waitin’ for Ben, too.”
    “Bring him in, then. Too cold to wait outside.”
    I crossed the threshold into a living room that was a boy’s nightmare. All the furniture looked like spindly antiques that wouldn’t bear the weight of a starved mosquito. Little tables held porcelain figures of dancing clowns, children holding puppies, and the like. A gray carpet on the floor appeared to indelibly remember footprints. A glass curio cabinet as tall as my dad held a forest of colored crystal goblets, coffee mugs with the faces of all the presidents on them, twenty-odd ceramic dolls clothed in lace costumes, and maybe another twenty rhinestone-decorated eggs each with its own brass four-footed stand. What a crash that thing would make if it went over, I thought. A green-and-blue-streaked marble pedestal held an open Bible as big as my gargantuan dictionary, the type in it large enough to be read from across the room. Everything looked too frail to touch and too precious to enjoy, and I wondered how anybody could live in such a state of frozen pretty. Of course, there was the gleaming brown upright piano, with Ben trapped at its keys and Miss Blue Glass standing beside the bench holding a conductor’s baton.
    “Hello, Cory. Please have a seat,” she said. She was wearing all blue, as usual, except for a wide white belt around her bony waist. Her whitish-blond hair was piled up like a foamy fountain, her black glasses so thick they made her eyes bug.
    “Where?” I asked her.
    “Right there. On the sofa.”
    The sofa, covered in velvety cloth that showed shepherds playing their harps to prancing sheep, had legs that looked about as sturdy as rain-soaked twigs. Davy Ray and I eased down into the sofa’s cushiony grip. The sofa creaked ever so slightly, but my heart jumped in my throat.
    “Now! Thinkin’ cap on! Fingers flow like the waves! One, two, three, one, two, three.” Miss Blue Glass started motioning up and down with her baton as the pudgy fingers of Ben’s right hand tried to play the same five notes with some resemblance to rhythm. Soon enough, though, he was pounding those notes as if trying to crush fire ants. “Flow like the waves!” Miss Blue Glass said. “Softly, softly! One, two, three, one, two, three!”
    Ben’s playing was less wavy and more sludgy. “I can’t do it!” he wailed, and he pulled his hand away