The Yashica was gone.
Gift of the Fucking Magi.
The store smelled of acid from the darkroom in the rear. Its owner, a hinily bald man, had an air of irritable oppression, understandable at a time when drugstores and shopping centers were killing his business. It was clear that when he looked up from the lens he was cleaning and saw Perry, a long-haired teenager, his first thought was shoplifter or waster of his time. Perry put his mind at ease by wishing him, with the intonation that bothered Becky, a very good afternoon. “I was hoping to purchase the twin lens reflex Yashica you’ve had in your window.”
“Sorry,” the owner said. “Sold it this morning.”
“That is very distressing.”
The owner tried to interest him in a shitty Instamatic, and then some ugly older cameras, while Perry tried not to show how offended he was by the suggestions. They’d arrived at an impasse when his eye fell on a beautiful thing under the glass-top counter. A compact movie camera, European-made. Burnished solid-metal body. Adjustable aperture. He recalled the old movie projector in the storage room at home, the remnant of a more optimistic era, when the Hildebrandts might still have become a family that watched home movies as a close-knit group, and before the Reverend, set upon by wasps, had lost his camera over the side of a rowboat.
“That’s forty dollars,” the owner said. “It sold for twice that, new, in nineteen-forties dollars. It’s Regular 8, though. You have to load it in a bag.”
“May I see it?”
“It’s forty dollars.”
“May I see it?”
When Perry wound the mainspring and took a peek through the viewfinder’s luscious optics, he keenly wanted the camera for himself. Maybe Judson would share it with him?
Precisely the kind of thought that his resolution insisted that he banish.
And so he banished it. He left the store forty-eight dollars poorer but palpably richer in spirit. Imagining Judson’s surprise at receiving not the camera they’d ogled but something even finer and cooler, he was certain that, for once, he was glad for another person. Snow had started falling from the Illinois sky, white crystallizations of water as pure as he felt, himself, for having parted with the asset. His thoughts had slowed to a happy medium, no slower than that, not yet. He stood for a moment on the sidewalk, amid the melting snowflakes, and wished the world could just stand still.
From the street came the rumble of a familiar engine. He turned and saw the family Fury braking for the stop sign at Maple Avenue. The rear of the car was packed with cardboard boxes. At the wheel was his father, wearing an old coat that Perry hadn’t noticed missing from the third-floor closet. On the passenger side, angled to face his father, one arm draped over the backrest, was Larry Cottrell’s foxy mother. She waved to Perry gaily, and now the Reverend saw him. No attempt at a smile was made. Perry had the distinct impression that he’d caught the old man doing something wrong.
Becky that morning had awakened before dawn. It was the first day of vacation, in past years a day for sleeping in, but this year everything was different. She lay in the dark and listened to the tick and wheeze of the radiator, the struggling clank of pipes below. As if for the first time, she appreciated the goodness of being snug in a house on a cold morning. Also, no less, the goodness of the cold, which made the snugness possible; the two things fit together like a pair of mouths.
Until last night, she’d put make-out sessions in the category of non-obligatory activities. For five years she’d seen people making out all around her, and she knew girls who’d allegedly gone all the way, but she hadn’t felt ashamed of her inexperience. Shame of that sort was a trap girls fell into. Even the really pretty ones were afraid of losing popularity if they didn’t act the way boys wanted them to. As her aunt Shirley had said, “If you sell yourself short, that’s how the world will value you.” Becky hadn’t set out to be popular, but when popularity came to her she’d found she had a native instinct for how to manage and advance it. Being some athlete’s squeeze seemed like an obvious dead end. She wouldn’t have guessed how sweet it was to fall, and how much she would want to keep falling, and how altered she would feel in the aftermath, when she was by herself in bed.
Light grew in the windows half-heartedly, leaving monochrome the poster of the Eiffel Tower above her desk, the original watercolor painting of the Champs-élyseés that Shirley had left her, the pony-themed wallpaper that she’d picked out for her father to hang for her tenth birthday, when she was too young to understand she’d have to live with it forever. In gray light, the wallpaper was more forgivable. An overcast sky was just the weather she would have wished for on the day after the night her life had become more serious. No sun to mark the hour, no change in its angle to take her out of the state of having been kissed.