The Hotel New Hampshire

“Hey, Sabrina,” said Junior Jones. “Here’s your weight lifter.”

In the doorway was a slender Negress, about my height; her high, floppy-brimmed hat perhaps made her appear a little taller—and she wore heels. Her suit—a woman’s suit—was every ounce as fashionable as Bitty Tuck’s attire; she wore a cream-coloured silky blouse with a wide collar, and it was open down her long throat to just a glimpse of the red lace of her bra; she wore rings on every finger, and bracelets, and she was a wondrous bitter-chocolate color, with wide bright eyes and a wide mouth smiling, full of strange but handsome teeth; she smelled so nice, and from so far away, that even Bitty Tuck’s shrieks were diminished by the scent of Sabrina Jones. She was, I guessed, about twenty-eight or thirty, and she looked a little surprised to be introduced to me. Junior Jones, who was awfully quick for his size, moved far away from us fast.

“You’re the weight lifter?” said Sabrina Jones.

“I’m only fifteen years old,” I lied; I would be fifteen very soon, after all.

“Holy cow,” said Sabrina Jones; she was so pretty I couldn’t look at her. “Junior!” she yelled, but Junior Jones was hiding from her—all the many pounds of him.

He had obviously needed a ride from Philadelphia, and not wanting to disappoint Franny by not showing up for New Year’s Eve, he had acquired his older sister, and his sister’s car, under the pretense of getting her a date with me.

“He told me Franny had an older brother,” Sabrina said, sorrowfully. I suppose Junior might have been thinking of Frank. Sabrina Jones was a secretary in a law firm in Philadelphia; she was twenty-nine.

“Fifteen,” she whistled through her teeth, which were not the bright white of her brother’s gleaming mouth; Sabrina’s teeth were perfectly sized and very straight, but they had a pearly, oyster hue to them. They were not unattractive teeth, but they were the only visibly flawed part of her. In my insecurity, I needed to notice them. I felt cloddish—full of bananas, as Frank would say.

There’s going to be a live band,” I said, and regretted saying so, immediately.

“Hot dog,” said Sabrina Jones, but she was nice; she smiled. “Do you dance?” she asked.

“No,” I admitted.

“Oh well,” she said; she was really trying to be a good sport. “You do lift weights?” she asked.

“Not as much as Junior,” I said.

“I’d like to drop a few weights on Junior’s head,” she said.

Frank lurched through the lobby, struggling with a trunk full of Junior Jones’s winter clothes; he couldn’t seem to navigate successfully past Bitty Tuck’s luggage, at the foot of the stairs, and so he dropped the trunk there—startling Lilly, who was sitting on the bottom step, watching Sabrina Jones.

“This is my sister Lilly,” I said to Sabrina, “and that was Frank,” I said, pointing to Frank’s back as he slunk away. We could hear Franny and Bitty Tuck shrieking somewhere, and I knew that Junior Jones would be speaking to my father—offering his condolences for Coach Bob.

“Hello, Lilly,” Sabrina said.

“I’m a dwarf,” Lilly said. “I’m not ever going to grow any bigger.”

This information must have seemed, to Sabrina Jones, to fit rather perfectly with her disappointment at discovering my age; Sabrina did not appear shocked.

“Well, that’s interesting,” she said to Lilly.

“You are going to grow, Lilly,” I said, “At least, you’re going to grow a little, and you’re not a dwarf.”

Lilly shrugged. “I don’t mind,” she said.

A figure passed swiftly across the landing at the turn of the staircase—he had a tomahawk, he wore war paint and little else (a black loincloth with coloured beads decorating the hips).

“That was Egg,” I said, watching the dazzled eyes of Sabrina Jones, her pretty mouth parted—as if attempting speech.

“That was a little Indian boy,” she said. “Why’s he called Egg?”

“I know why!” Lilly volunteered; sitting on the stairs, she raised her hand—as if she were in class, waiting to be called on. I was glad she was there; I never liked explaining Egg’s name. Egg had been Egg from the beginning, dating from Mother’s pregnancy, when Franny had asked her what the name of the new baby was going to be. “Right now it’s just an egg,” Frank had said, darkly—his wisdom of biology was always shocking, to us all. And so, as Mother grew and grew, the egg was called Egg with increasing conviction. Mother and Father were hoping for a third girl, only because it was going to be an April baby and they both liked the name April for a girl; they were undecided about a boy’s name, Father not caring for his own name, Win, and Mother— despite her fondness for Iowa Bob—not really liking the idea of a Robert, Jr. By the time it was clear that the egg was a boy, he was—in our family—already an Egg, and the name (as they say) stuck. Egg had no other name.

“He began as an egg, and he’s still an egg,” Lilly explained to Sabrina Jones.

“Holy cow,” Sabrina said, and I wished that something powerfully distracting would happen in the Hotel New Hampshire... to distract me from my embarrassment at how (it always struck me) our family must appear to outsiders.

“You see,” Franny would explain, years later, “we aren’t eccentric, we’re not bizarre. To each other,” Franny would say, “we’re as common as rain.” And she was right: to each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread, we were just a family. In a family, even exaggerations make perfect sense; they are always logical exaggerations, nothing more.

But my embarrassment with Sabrina Jones made me embarrassed for us all. My embarrassment even included people beyond my family. I was embarrassed for Harold Swallow every time I spoke with him; I was always afraid someone would make fun of him and hurt his feelings. And on New Year’s Eve at the Hotel New Hampshire, I was embarrassed for Ronda Ray, wearing the dress Franny bought for Mother; I was even embarrassed for the almost live band, the terrible rock group called Hurricane Doris.

I recognized Sleazy Wales as a punk who had threatened me, years ago, in the Saturday matinee. He had wadded up a ball of bread, grey with the oil and grime from his auto-mechanic life; he’d stuck the wad of bread under my nose.

“Wanna eat that, kid?” he asked.

“No thanks,” I said. Frank leaped up and ran into the aisle, but Sleazy Wales gripped my arm and held me in my seat. “Don’t move,” he said. I promised I wouldn’t, and he took a long nail out of his pocket and drove it through the wad of bread. Then he made a fist around the bread with the nail protruding savagely between his middle and ring fingers.

“Wanna get your fucking eyes poked out?” he asked me.

“No thanks,” I said.

“Then get the fuck out of here!” he said; even then I was embarrassed for him. I went to find Frank—who, whenever he was frightened at the movies, always stood by the water cooler. Frank frequently embarrassed me, too.

At the Hotel New Hampshire, on New Year’s Eve, 1 saw at once that Sleazy Wales didn’t recognize me. Too many miles, too much weight lifting, too many bananas had come between us; if he threatened me with bread and nails again, I could simply hug him to death. He didn’t seem to have grown since the Saturday matinee. Scrawny and grey-skinned, his whole face the tone of a dirty ashtray, he hunched his shoulders forward in his GULF shirt and tried to walk as if each arm weighed one hundred pounds. I estimated that his whole body, plus wrenches and a few other heavy tools, couldn’t weigh more than 130.1 could have bench-pressed him an easy half-dozen times.

Hurricane Doris didn’t seem especially disappointed at the absence of a crowd; and perhaps the boys were even grateful to have fewer people staring at them, as they dragged their bright, cheap equipment from outlet to outlet, plugging in.

The first thing I heard Doris Wales say was, “Move the mike back, Jake, and don’t be an asshole.” The acoustic bass (called Jake), another greasy splinter in a GULF shirt, cringed over the microphone as if he lived in terror of electrical shock—and of being an asshole. Sleazy Wales gave the other boy in the band a lovable punch in the kidneys; a fat drummer named Danny, the boy absorbed the punch with dignity—but with obvious pain.