Lydia and my grandmother stared at me, as if only my Mends would be uncouth enough to make a call after dinner, uninvited.
'Heavens, who is that?' Grandmother asked, and she and Lydia both took a pointed and overly long look at their wristwatches-although it was not even eight o'clock on a balmy spring evening; there was still some light in the sky.
'I'll bet that's ton!' my mother said, getting up from the table to go to the door. She gave herself a quick and approving look in the mirror over the sideboard where the roast sat, growing cold, and she hurried into the hall.
'Then you did make a date?' my grandmother asked. 'Did you invite him?'
'Not exactly!' my mother called. 'But I told him where I lived!'
'Nothing is exactly with young people, I've noticed,' my grandmother said, more to Lydia than to me.
'It certainly isn't,' said Lydia. But I'd heard enough of them; I had heard them for years. I followed my mother to the door; my grandmother, pushing Lydia in her wheelchair in front of her, followed me. Curiosity, which-in New Hampshire, in those days-was often said to be responsible for the death of cats, had got the better of us all. We knew that my mother had no immediate plans to reveal to us a single clue regarding the first man she'd supposedly met on the Boston & Maine; but the second man-we could see him for ourselves. Dan Needham was on the doorstep of Front Street, Gravesend. Of course, my mother had had 'dates' before, but she'd never said of one of them that she wanted us to meet him, or that she even liked him, or that she knew she'd see him again. And so we were aware that Dan Needham was special, from the start. I suppose Aunt Martha would have said that one aspect of my mother being 'a little simple' was her attraction to younger men; but in this habit my mother was simply ahead of her time-because it's true, the men she dated were often a little younger than she was. She even went out with a few seniors from Gravesend Academy when-if she'd gone to college-she would have been a college senior herself; but she just 'went out' with them. While they were only prep-school boys and she was in her twenties-with an illegitimate child-all she did with those boys was dance with them, or go to movies or plays with them, or to the sporting events. I was used to seeing a few goons come calling, I will admit; and they never knew how to respond to me. They had no idea, for example, what a six-year-old was. They either brought me rubber ducks for the bath, or other toys for virtual infants-or else they brought me Fowler's Modern English Usage: something every six-year-old should plunge into. And when they saw me-when they were confronted with my short, sturdy presence, and the fact that I was too old for bathtub toys and too young far Modern English Usage-they would become insanely restless to impress me with their sensitivity to a waist-high person like myself. They would suggest a game of catch in the backyard, and then rifle an uncatchable football into my small face, or they would palaver to me in baby talk about showing them my favorite toy-so that they might know what kind of thing was more appropriate to bring me, next time. There was rarely a next time. Once one of them asked my mother if I was toilet-trained-I guess he found this a suitable question, prior to his inviting me to sit on his knees and play bucking bronco.
'YOU SHOULD HAVE SAID YES,' Owen Meany told me, 'AND THEN PISSED IN HIS LAP.'
One thing about my mother's 'beaus': they were all good-looking. So on that superficial level I was unprepared for Dan Needham, who was tall and gawky, with curly carrot-
colored hair, and who wore eyeglasses that were too small for his egg-shaped face-the perfectly round lenses giving him the apprehensive, hunting expression of a large, mutant owl. My grandmother said, after he'd gone, that it must have been the first time in the history of Gravesend Academy that they had hired 'someone who looks younger than the students.' Furthermore, his clothes didn't fit him; the jacket was too tight-the sleeves too short-and the trousers were so baggy that the crotch napped nearer his knees than his hips, which were womanly and the only padded pans of his peculiar body. But I was too young and cynical to spot his kindness. Even before he was introduced to my grandmother or to Lydia or to me, he looked straight at me and said, 'You must be Johnny. I heard as much about you as anyone can hear in an hour and a half on the Boston and Maine, and I know you can be trusted with an important package.' It was a brown shopping bag with another brown paper bag stuffed inside it. Oh boy, here it comes, I thought: an inflatable camel-it floats and spits. But Dan Needham said, 'It's not for you, it's not for anyone your age. But I'm trusting you to put it somewhere where it can't be stepped on-and out of the way of any pets, if you have pets. You mustn't let a pet near it. And whatever you do, don't open it. Just tell me if it moves.'
Then he handed it to me; it didn't weigh enough to be Fowler's Modern English Usage, and if I was to keep it away from pets-and tell him if it moved-cleatly it was alive. I put it quickly under the hall table-the telephone table, we called it-and I stood halfway in the hall and halfway in the living room, where I could watch Dan Needham taking a seat. Taking a seat in my grandmother's living room was never easy, because many of the available seats were not for sitting in-they were antiques, which my grandmother was preserving, for historical reasons; sitting in them was not good for them. Therefore, although the living room was quite sumptuously arranged with upholstered chairs and couches, very little of this furniture was usable-and so a guest, his or her knees already bending in the act of sitting down, would suddenly snap to attention as my grandmother shouted, 'Oh, for goodness sake, not there! You can't sit therel' And the startled person would attempt to try the next chair or couch, which in my grandmother's opinion would
