Electric City: A Novel (6 page)

She was wearing cutoff denim shorts and had a streak of grease on her right calf from the bicycle; a faded red bandanna tied back her hair, which Henry figured would have otherwise gone wild and tangled while riding. The day was hot and humid, already oppressive by 11
AM
. Henry saw how Sophie’s T-shirt stuck to her lower back, and almost-invisible rivulets of sweat ran behind her knees. He was embarrassed to feel relatively cool in his pale blue T-shirt and khaki shorts, as though he’d been recently washed and pressed.

“The dentist was air-conditioned, I bet,” Sophie said, looking up to catch him taking a few steps toward her.

Henry gave her an affirmative with a lopsided grin, then pointed to his mouth. “Novocain,” he slurred.

She nodded back. “Not a good time for conversation,” she said, and he shook his head. Sophie’s eyes were green, a new discovery.

He looked at his watch. “Ice cream?”

Sophie held two packages in her arms, and Henry found himself resisting the urge to wipe away the moisture pooling at the hollows of her elbows.

“I just have to mail these for my father,” she said. “And then we can walk to Friendly’s?”

Henry grinned again.

“By then your Novocain will wear off. And the ice might make you feel better.”

Sophie looked at him gravely, as though she wanted to interview him for a job, then blushed while bending down to retwirl the combination on her lock.

Something about her hands fascinated him. It was the first time he’d ever felt that way—that looking at someone’s hands could be like looking at their entire being.

Inside Sophie’s packages were books intended for some unrelated Levines who lived in Chicago, people with apartment building addresses in a city she’d never seen. Henry waited outside, having found a patch of shade in which to lean against a tree and massage his numb jaw with his unplastered hand. Sophie stole a few glances in his direction while the postal clerk weighed the books, hoping Henry wasn’t aware of her gaze.

When the clerk—whose receding hairline and acne-marked skin made her feel sorry for him—took her money, he raised an eyebrow. She guessed he had noticed her watching the boy outside. Embarrassed again, even though nobody said a word, Sophie stashed the change in her pocket and practiced acting casual on her way out the door.

“All done,” she called out to Henry and bent down to untwist the bike cable, glad to have something to take her attention away from Henry’s sky-blue eyes. He had his cast and now his slightly swollen jaw, and still Sophie thought he was the most handsome boy she’d ever seen. Their conversation at the picnic had stopped abruptly when the softball game ended, neither of them quite knowing how to say goodbye. Now that he was standing near her again, she decided his legs were exactly right for a pair of legs, lean and sturdy and just shapely enough to be compelling. His skin was just a little tan, with fine golden hair gleaming, and she surprised herself by wanting to touch him.

Far enough from the more exhausted and decaying parts of town, Friendly’s was packed. Everyone was inside to escape the swelter, which meant no room to sit down, even on the red vinyl stools at the counter. Henry and Sophie ordered cones from the takeout window. When he opened his wallet to pay for their ice cream, she caught a glimpse of his driver’s license with the Dutch last name.

Sophie couldn’t help asking, “Isn’t it strange that our families came from the same place in Europe?”

“Your family came from Holland too?” Henry said, worried he was about to lose his temporary anonymity. “I guess history has a sense of humor.”

“I hardly ever think history is funny,” she said. “Not ha-ha funny, that is.”

“Good point. Religious freedom was a serious enough reason to cross an ocean.”

They had found a small bench alongside the pharmacy, with a place to lean her bike against a brick wall. A sign said
NO LITTERING
, but someone had scribbled a
G
into the message.

Henry laughed. “What’s wrong with glittering?”

Maybe it was the echoes of the picnic, and all the chatter about who worked where—maybe it was the word
glittering
that prompted Sophie to tell Henry that her father worked with magnets. He listened while she described her father’s visit to her fourth-grade classroom, how he had accidentally-on-purpose spilled metallic shavings onto the floor. “I thought he was kind of a magician,” she said, as proud and shy as she remembered feeling all those years ago. “He waved a magnet in the air and all the scattered pieces danced into place.”

“Does he work at the research lab?” Henry asked.
Dangerous territory now
, he thought. But he felt unable to change the subject, not yet.

“Now he works with superconducting magnets,” she said, nodding, realizing how many times she’d heard and even repeated the words without quite knowing what they meant. Her father’s lab, where she had once been allowed to visit, was full of tanks and cylinders wearing stenciled nametags:
LIQUID NITROGEN
and
LIQUID HELIUM
. The gleaming enamel containers were taller than she was. In room after room, sterile and quiet, the shiny reflective walls and doors warned:
DO NOT ENTER WITHOUT PROTECTIVE EYEWEAR
.

Henry cleared his throat as if preparing to make an important announcement. If Sophie was going to dislike him sooner or later, he might as well get the worst over with.

“Here’s the weird thing,” he said, and held up what was left of his cone in an awkward toast to an invisible audience. “Your dad works for my dad.”

Now it was Sophie’s turn to be silent. She envisioned the glowing company logo hovering over the city at Christmas, temporarily red and green in honor of the holiday. It was an image that always reminded her of being one of the “other” residents of Electric City, the ones who didn’t celebrate Christmas, the ones whose parents had audible accents and who were missing grandparents. Then she thought about the team of scientists her father worked with, how he might be withholding details about what he was doing, even from his own family.
Company secrets. Company man
.

“I love magnets,” Henry said, testing the air between them. “I don’t really know why.”

“Opposites attract?”

They both smiled, relieved.

“How is school going?” Sophie asked, sensing that both she and Henry wanted to steer sideways from where they had been headed.

Henry told her about his out-of-state boarding school, saying it was the same place his father and his grandfather went, and generations further back than that.

“I bet some of the same teachers are still there,” Henry said, which Sophie thought was a weak attempt at humor until she saw that Henry’s face was utterly somber. He chewed on a corner of his upper lip. “You have no idea,” he said.

“You’re right,” Sophie admitted. All she knew about private school was what she’d observed in Electric City: the Catholic girls in their plaid uniforms filing their way down Union Street; boys in stiff-looking jackets and ties. She knew of only one Jewish kid sent off to a neighboring town where there was a modified yeshiva.

Then again, she had to endure her own family obligations in Hebrew school. “Two afternoons a week,” she explained to Henry. It
had to do with her father’s fervent commitment to all things Jewish, especially education.

“But you really don’t look Jewish,” Henry said.

She reflexively leaned away, startled by his words. Simon had told her that one of his college roommates had openly searched the back of her brother’s head for horns.
Surely Henry wasn’t
. . .

“Damn,” Henry said, smacking himself surprisingly hard on his forehead. “I can’t believe I just said that.”

“Um,” Sophie managed, getting up from the bench to retrieve her bike.

Henry leaped up too. “Why didn’t you tell me to shut up?” he demanded.

When she reached for her wobbling handlebars, Henry put his hands on top of hers, his good one as well as the one wrapped in plaster. She noticed there was a navy blue drawing of a dog on the cast that hadn’t been there at the picnic. His fingernails were bitten down to the quick.

“I’m not as idiotic as this all the time,” he said. “Crazy from the heat.”

He surrendered the bike to Sophie, and tried shoving his hands into his pockets, except that the one with the cast didn’t fit. The fabric ripped a little but wouldn’t yield.

“It’s okay,” Sophie said. “I figure you couldn’t possibly mean it the way it sounded.”

Henry shook his head, squinting up at the sky with a mournful expression.

“Okay,” she said again, though she was not entirely sure that it was. Her hands tingled where he had touched her.

To Sophie this seemed the right moment to climb back onto her bike and skip past yet another potentially awkward goodbye. She was only half-surprised when Henry continued to speak.

“Hey, there’s a sun dog,” he said. “See?” He pointed to the huge radiant halo adorning the sun.

“Atmospheric ice crystals,” Sophie said in her father’s voice.

Henry exhaled loudly, as though given a reprieve. “Rain tomorrow,” he said.

Instead of returning to the dentist’s office where he’d parked his car, Henry chose a meandering route in the opposite direction. The upbeat mood at Friendly’s yielded abruptly to a grittier scene: pizza parlor with dusty windows; two matching rusted station wagons side by side in front of the liquor store; a bakery with a padlocked front door and a handwritten sign announcing its farewells to the neighborhood:
THANKS FOR YOUR BUSIENESS
.

Though he usually avoided the place, Henry found himself turning several corners in a semiconscious daze, until he slowed down to face the still-majestic ivy-covered brick house where his family had once lived. An enthusiastic sprinkler blasted mist across the wide front lawn, and the spray of water looked so inviting, Henry imagined Sophie beside him, suggesting they make a dash through it.

Oh, I don’t think so
, he would have had to say.