The Risk Pool

attempted to concede. I could tell he was gravely disappointed in me. “Come on,” he said. “You can do it.”
    When I refused, he ate one more and proclaimed that under no circumstances could he eat another Oreo. This was an opportunity to show what I was made of, he said. I was six (count ’em) cookies away from victory. He separated them from my phalanx and returned all but the remaining six to the package. Suddenly I felt like I was all throat, throbbing and full, but I was even more full of defeat than cookies, and awash in black, desperate determination. Incapable of swallowing normal mouthfuls, I nibbled, birdlike at the dry crust of the cookies. It took me half an hour to dispatch four more. Another would give me a tie, and I realized as I stared at it that a tie would have to do. I didn’t need to say I won, provided Claude couldn’t either.
    It is difficult to describe the quality of Claude’s excitement as I approached the final cookie. I was terribly ill and my head was pounding savagely from the chocolate. I don’t think I could have stood. But strangest of all, and I remember this quite vividly, was the feeling I had that Claude was feeling what I felt—that each new wave of nausea somehow registered in his being as well as my own. He was pulling for me. He wanted us to be equals. Perhaps that was what he had wanted all along, I thought. He was giving me a chance.
    I picked up the last Oreo.
    I don’t know how long it stayed in my cheeks before I swallowed, but when I did I kept my hand up to see what wouldhappen. My stomach churned, but to my surprise did not immediately rise. I was afraid to breathe, except through my nose, and then not deeply.
    Claude was grinning at me. I did not notice at first that he was holding another cookie. He held the Oreo elevated with two hands, thumb and forefinger each, like a priest at high mass, but instead of offering it to me (I recall sliding away from him on the bench), he placed it on his own tongue, and I watched with horror as the cookie disappeared, whole, into his mouth. His heavy jaws worked methodically, and soon his Adam’s apple bobbed.
    As the winning Oreo descended into Claude, the losing one began to rise in me, along with all its brothers. They surged upward angrily, and the black, impotent self-contempt that accompanied them made a pretty awful mess of the Claudes’ redwood picnic table.
    The following weekend we had a heat wave, the intensity of which took everyone by surprise, coming as it did in the first week of October. On Friday when the temperature hit 90, the windows of the Nathan Littler Junior High were flung open, but even then a tiny rivulet of perspiration disappeared down the open neck of Miss Devlin, the new English teacher, whose breasts were the subject of considerable admiration among us seventh-grade boys. We envied the perspiration. At night, things cooled off, but Saturday morning dawned with a low, white-gray sky and the sun, a magnified white ball, burned through by nine and an hour later the tar on the streets was shimmering. The Russians were using Sputnik to screw around with the weather, people said. Russians weren’t too popular in Mohawk anyway, and we certainly didn’t appreciate their mucking up autumn.
    Around midmorning on Saturday the telephone rang and it was Claude. He wondered if I’d like to go to the beach. I had not seen the Claudes since messing up their redwood picnic table. I consulted my mother through her bedroom door—it would be hours before she emerged for the day—and she seemed relieved at the prospect of not being required to deal with me until dinner time. The Claudes picked me up in their brand-new Pontiac station wagon (according to Claude, they’d had a Jaguar sedan when they lived in Connecticut), the backseat of which I shared with youngClaude and several bags of groceries. I must have gone very pale when I saw the big package of Oreos sticking out of one.
    Only the Claudes would have thought of the beach in October. After the Mohawk Fair, convention strictly forbade summer amusements until the following Memorial Day, at which time swimming would be permissible, though far too cold to be enjoyed. When we pulled into the state park, the large parking lot was virtually abandoned and the man in the guard shack who was supposed to be collecting the parking fee was sleeping far too blissfully to disturb, at least in the opinion of Claude Sr., who was in rare good spirits. During