By Peter Lefcourt
Simon & Schuster. 223 pp. $24
Friday, January 3, 2003

Chapter One

The Hair Job

There was always a Karen, even before the first one. There was a past-life Karen and a prenatal Karen, and a Karen who took me from my mother to lay me down gently in the bassinet in the hospital where I was born.

And there were undoubtedly Karens who took care of me from time to time in my very early years, who spelled my mother when she was tired, who played with me, bathed me with tenderness, took me for walks, holding on to one hand as I tottered along exploring my universe.

But the first Karen in my life was none of these. She has the distinction of being not only the first one I slept with but the first one I married. When I tell you that this Karen was named Karen Shrummer and that I knew her in the fifth grade, you'll accuse me of lying.

Of course I'm lying. Reread the epigraph.

I can see her now, sitting at the desk near the wardrobe, her hands folded in front of her, waiting for Mrs. Murtaugh to dismiss us. Mrs. Murtaugh was red-haired, pallid, a woman whose patience had been honed thin by too many years of teaching the fifth grade in a New York City public school. She slapped me once, good and hard, when I was horsing around with Kenny Birnbaum, my best man, in the back of the class.

Tell you the truth, I don't blame her for whacking me. I can only imagine what a dull headache at 3:20 in the afternoon of a hot early-June day in a school in Queens in the mid-fifties felt like. You're ten minutes from peace and quiet, from a mentholated Salem in the teachers' lounge, and two boys are loudly playing knights on horseback in the back of the classroom.

I took the blow well, managing to stay mounted on Kenny Birnbaum's shoulders. When Mrs. Murtaugh, losing it entirely, started to screech, I calmly dismounted and returned to my desk, running the gauntlet of girls with their hands folded in front of them, hearing a collective intake of breath, a palpable fluttering coming from them.

This incident earned me a bad-boy reputation in the class, a reputation that I did not entirely deserve but one that I was in no rush to disclaim. From that moment on it was clear to the fifth grade girls that I was a threat to civilized society. I would have to be domesticated. I'm convinced that that was the moment in which they decided to marry me off to Karen Shrummer.

Why Karen Shrummer? Why not Denise Demarco? Or Bonnie Baer? Or, for that matter, why not that fetching little strumpet Bertha Haas, who went to parties in costume jewelry and with a dab of her mother's Shalimar behind her ears?

I had dark thoughts about Bertha Haas, but I don't think I would have married her. You didn't marry Bertha Haas. Karen Shrummer, on the other hand, was the girl you took the long walk down the aisle with.

Still, I wasn't envisaging getting married to anyone yet. I had plans. I wanted to be a shortstop for the Dodgers, then maybe go out west and herd cattle in Montana. At that point in my life I didn't see settling down to TV and pot roast with Karen Shrummer or with any other girl.

But it made little difference what I wanted. Once the decision had been made to marry me off to Karen Shrummer, I was a marked man.

The parties we had in the fifth grade were organized by the girls. We showed up, hair slicked back, starched white assembly shirts, in sweat socks and shiny shoes, and hovered around the Cracker Jacks and Pepsi while the girls congregated in the other corner, admiring one another's dresses and occasionally walking over and dragging one of us off to dance.

All of this, of course, was just prelude. Around ten o'clock we got down to business. Business consisted of prepubescent kissing games that were played out in a darkened corner of someone's knotty-pine finished basement to the strains of Johnny Mathis from the portable RCA Victrola.

The two principal games were Spin the Bottle and Post Office. Spin the Bottle was the less interesting of the two. It was played out in public: You had to kiss the girl in front of everybody else, which provided for the girls a sense of collective triumph and for us a sort of collective humiliation. But Post Office was strictly down and dirty. With Post Office you got to do it alone in a closet in the dark.

The way it worked was that somebody would say they had a letter for you from a girl, and then you marched off into the closet with that girl, often taller than you, and either kissed her or stood there counting to sixty. You would have thought that they could have come up with a more imaginative way of getting a boy and a girl alone in a dark space.

I had gotten letters before from Karen Shrummer and had a vague memory of soft lips with a cool aftertaste of peppermint Life Savers. But her letters weren't like the letters you got from Bertha Haas. Those letters left you dizzy. After you got a letter from Bertha Haas you needed a moment to compose yourself before wobbling out of the closet to face the disapproval of the girls.

* * *

On the Saturday night in June after I got slugged by Mrs. Murtaugh, there was a party at Denise Demarco's. I wound up getting more letters from Karen Shrummer than I had ever gotten before. We marched off together to the closet and locked lips for sixty seconds at a time. A minute is a long time to stand there with your lips pressed against someone without doing something with your hands, but your hands would get slapped down if they wandered. And forget doing anything with your tongue. If you got cute with your tongue, they'd bite it off.

Nevertheless, that night, after getting the third letter from her, I found my hands wandering a little up her back, if only to break the monotony of what was degenerating into a simple act of physical stamina. She didn't stop me. Instead she put her hands on the back of my neck and did the hair thing.

Remember the hair thing? Movie actresses would run their hands through the back of a man's hair. Your mother would be watching Million Dollar Movie on television and break into a hot sweat when Loretta Young would run her hands through Jeff Chandler's hair.

I walked out of that closet a little wobbly, not unlike like the way I walked out after getting a letter from Bertha Haas. This wobbliness, however, was clearly acceptable to the other girls. They had baited the trap, and I had bit hard.

From that point on, I was a dead man.

In the cafeteria at lunchtime there seemed to be an inordinate amount of attention directed at me. I'd be about to blow my straw into Larry Burkhardt's face when I'd notice the girls watching me from the next table. I'd look over and see them, with their neatly wrapped Velveeta-cheese sandwiches, surrounding their candidate, Karen Shrummer, who sat there with a self-satisfied look on her face.

Then there was the school bus. I found that there was usually only one seat available, the one beside Karen Shrummer. So we rode home together, silently, eyes straight ahead. In retrospect I can see the inexorability of the series of events that unfolded that June which would lead me to the altar. But at the time I was clueless.

One day I had the following conversation with Kenny Birnbaum. We were in his basement playing Ping-Pong when he suddenly asked, "You like Karen Shrummer?"

"Uh-uh," I protested.

"So how come you're getting married to her?"

"What are you talking about?"

"After school ends. In Bonnie Baer's garage."

"Get out of here."

"It's not true?"

"Kenny, don't you think I'd know about it if I was getting married? I mean, I'd have to get a suit."

"But if you were getting married, I'd be your best man, right?"

"Yeah. Sure."

"I was the best man at my brother Nathan's wedding last summer. I got to hold the ring."

"There's not going to be any wedding, okay?"

I served, low and hard, with a lot of topspin.

"Three serving zero..."

* * *

That week was the annual class trip to the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. There was an hour bus ride from Queens, and I found myself, big surprise, beside Karen Shrummer.

We rode in silence till we got to Queens Boulevard and she offered me a Life Saver. I took it, noncommittally, like Rory Calhoun accepting a cup of coffee from the schoolmarm, and went back to staring at the back of the seat in front of us.

She broke the silence just before we went through the Midtown Tunnel. "I'm going to Howe Caverns with my family on Saturday."

"Oh."

"What are you doing on Saturday?"

"Nothing."

"You ever been to Howe Caverns?"

"No."

We entered the dark, vaginal interior of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, and I looked out the window at the cops sealed in the glass booths and thought they had great jobs. Which will give you some idea of where my mind was at the moment.

We were still in the tunnel when she said, "My sister can't go because she has hives, so my mother said I could bring a friend."

"Oh."

"So do you want to go?"

She had me. I had already admitted to never having been there and to having no plans for Saturday. So I nodded, said something vague, which I thought had been, at best, noncommittal. But by the time we got to the museum the assignation had been communicated to the other girls. There was more than the usual amount of whispering among the Sisterhood as we trudged past the big birchbark canoe and the other American Indian exhibits.

In the cafeteria, Kenny Birnbaum sat down next to me and said, "So you're going to Howe Caverns with Karen Shrummer Saturday?"

"Who told you?"

"Everybody knows."

"Her sister has hives."

* * *

The Shrummers picked me up in their new 1956 Chevy Impala at 8 o'clock Saturday morning. Gordon and Marilyn Shrummer sat in the front in Bermuda shorts, smoking Old Golds with the windows open, and Karen Shrummer sat in the back, burrowed into a corner, wearing dungarees with the cuffs rolled up, a sweatshirt, and sneakers.

We took the Triborough Bridge into Manhattan, then the West Side Highway to the Sawmill River Parkway to the Taconic State Parkway north.

Gordon Shrummer drove with maddening regularity, keeping the speedometer needle right on 50, one hand on the Impala's enamel steering wheel, the other hand holding the Old Gold. Karen Shrummer and I weren't talking until Marilyn said, "Awfully quiet back there."

So we talked about school, running out of gas after a couple of minutes and going the rest of the way in unpunctuated silence.

It was 11:30 when we got to Howe Caverns. The sun had burned off the cloud layer, and it was hot. Still, we were told to bring sweaters with us down into the cavern, where the temperature supposedly went as low as 58 degrees Fahrenheit.

We followed Gordon and Marilyn down the stone stairs into the belly of the cavern. For a while it was single file, and I was behind Karen Shrummer walking down the steps.

At ten and a half Karen Shrummer did not yet have a woman's body. As I recall. There may have been tiny breastlets under the sweatshirt, maybe even a training bra, but that would have been the extent of it. But I have to tell you I can still remember what she looked like from the back in dungarees walking down narrow stone steps into cold weather. That image goes into the Oldies but Goodies Hall of Fame, alongside such early entries as Maria Schell dancing for Yul Brynner in The Brothers Karamazov and Brigitte Bardot sunbathing nude in And God Created Woman.

But the day itself, as far as I was concerned, was a lead balloon. When you've seen one stalactite, you've seen them all. There was an endless geology lecture and a trip through the souvenir shop, where Gordon bought a collection of color slides, which he no doubt showed to captive audiences in his finished basement. We had hamburgers and french fries in a little cafeteria down below, shivering in our sweaters, and then took the long climb back up.

On the way back to the car, Gordon put his arm around my shoulders and said, "Wasn't that great?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Nature made that thousands of years ago."

"Uh-huh."

"It'll be around for your children and their children too, won't it?"

"Sure..."

When we got in the car, Marilyn said, "Now stop chattering away so much back there, you two." Gordon laughed. Karen Shrummer and I didn't.

It was a long drive home. Between the heat, the hamburgers, and the monotonous drone of the Impala's engine locked into its 50 mph cadence, I fell asleep before we reached the city. I reawoke as Gordon handed the guy in the Triborough Bridge tollbooth a quarter, and when I did I discovered Karen Shrummer's head resting on my shoulder. She jerked awake, as if she too had been asleep for a while.

Did her head drift unconsciously onto my shoulder in her sleep? I would never know. We quickly separated, each of us flushed and not risking a look at the other one. But the fact remained that we had fallen asleep together in the back of the car.

Then we heard Gordon say loudly to Marilyn, clearly for our benefit, "Well, Marilyn, it looks like those two are just going to have to get married, since they've already slept together."

"You bet," Marilyn replied, and the two of them had a long, loud laugh at our expense.

I couldn't even look at Karen Shrummer till her father pulled the Impala up in front of our house and I turned and mumbled a hasty "see you." Then I uttered my thank-yous to Gordon and Marilyn and got out of the car. The Impala, already sporting its WE'VE BEEN TO HOWE CAVERNS sticker, backed out of the driveway.

* * *

The first thing that Kenny Birnbaum said to me on the way to school Monday morning was, "You really sleep with Karen Shrummer?"

There was only one possible source for the story, and she wasn't meeting my eyes. Not even in the cafeteria, where I made it a point to stare right at her, as if to say, "Excuse me, it was bad enough having to listen to that cretin of a father of yours in his Bermuda shorts make bad jokes, but must the entire fifth grade of P.S. 26 be in on this as well?"

I was helpless in the wake of the story. She had obviously told everyone about her father's little joke, and it was the joke that created the momentum for the inevitable next step. The marriage. I'm convinced that without the joke the marriage might not have been possible.

The first I heard of the marriage was, once again, from Kenny Birnbaum, whom the girls were obviously using as a conduit to me. I assumed he thought he was being funny when he said to me, "I guess you got to marry her now, huh?"

We were opening bubble gum packages to see what baseball cards we had when he made this bizarre statement.

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