old DIAL HELP, where people thinking about suicide could call up and listen to a sympathetic voice say don't do it, buddy, you have a social commitment to Spaceship Earth. Twenty or thirty years of university teaching and you're prepared to run your gums the way Pavlov's dogs were prepared to salivate when the bell rang. I guess you can even get to like it.
Regina (they insisted I call them by their first names) was forty-five and handsome in a rather cold, semi-aristocratic way - that is, she managed to look aristocratic even when she was wearing bluejeans, which was most of the time. Her field was English, but of course when you teach at the college level, that's never enough; it's like saying 'America' when someone asks you where you're from. She had it refined and calibrated like a blip on a radar screen. She specialized in the earlier English poets and had done her thesis on Robert Herrick.
Michael was in the history biz. He looked as mournful and melancholy as the music he played on his recorder, although mournful and melancholy was not ordinarily a part of his makeup. Sometimes he made me think of what Ringo Starr was supposed to have said when the Beatles first came to America and some reporter at a press conference asked him if he was really as sad as he looked. 'No,' Ringo replied, 'it's just me face.' Michael was like that. Also, his thin face and the thick glasses he wore combined to make him look a little like a caricature professor in an unfriendly editorial cartoon. His hair was receding and he wore a small, fuzzy goatee.
'Hi, Arnie,' Regina said as we came in. 'Hello, Dennis.' It was just about the last cheerful thing she said to either of us that afternoon.
We said hi and got our cake and milk. We sat in the breakfast nook. Dinner was cooking in the oven, and I'm sorry to say so, but the aroma was fairly rank. Regina and Michael had been flirting with vegetarianism for some time, and tonight it smelled as if Regina had a good old kelp quiche or something on the way. I hoped they wouldn't invite me to stay.
The recorder music stopped, and Michael wandered out into the kitchen. He was wearing bluejean cutoffs and looking as if his best friend had just died.
'You're late, boys,' he said. 'Anything going down?' He opened the refrigerator door and began to root around in it. Maybe the kelp quiche didn't smell so wonderful to him either.
'I bought a car,' Arnie said, cutting himself another piece of cake.
'You did what?' his mother cried at once from the other room. She got up too quickly and there was a thud as her thighs connected solidly with the edge of the cardtable she did her jigsaws on. The thud was followed by the rapid patter of pieces falling to the floor. That was when I started to wish I had just gone home.
Michael Cunningham had turned from the refrigerator to stare at his son, holding a Granny Smith apple in one hand and a carton of plain yoghurt in the other.
'You're kidding,' he said, and for some absurd reason I noticed for the first time that his goatee - which he had worn since 1970 or so - was showing quite a bit of grey. 'Arnie, you're kidding, right? Say you're kidding.'
Regina came in, looking tall and semi -aristocratic and pretty damn mad. She took one close look at Arnie's face and knew he wasn't kidding. 'You can't buy a car,' she said. 'What in the world are you talking about? You're only seventeen years old.
Arnie looked slowly from his father by the fridge to his mother in the doorway leading to the living room. There was a stubborn, hard expression on his face that I couldn't remember ever having seen there before. If he looked that way more often around school, I thought, the machine-shop kids wouldn't be so apt to push him around.
'Actually, you're wrong,' he said. 'I can buy it with no trouble at all. I couldn't finance it, but buying it for cash presents no problems. Of course, registering a car at seventeen is something else entirely. For that I need your permission.'
They were looking at him with surprise, uneasiness, and - I saw this last and felt a sinking sensation in my belly - rising anger. For all their liberal thinking and their commitment to the farm