🎧 114: Matthew and I were . . .

8

MATTHEW AND I WERE THE BEST READERS in Mrs. Castile’s class, and she let us gallop through all the anthologies that the school had on hand. When reading time came around, Matthew and I would go down to the boiler room, where we had a couple of chairs and desks set up, and read together. At that time, it must have been the fashion to think of reading—or at least of learning to read—as a journey, judging from the great number of anthologies with titles derived from roads, features of roads, and roadside attractions. Matthew and I read our way through Bridges and Tunnels, Highways and Byways, Detours and Roadblocks, Culverts and Sewers, Sidewalks and Gutters, Crosswalks and Stoplights, and Motels and Diners.
     At first, the atmosphere at these boiler-room sessions was tense. Matthew and I faced each other across our desks and read at each other. We spat out the answers to the questions, and we disagreed on the answers to all but the most trivial of them. But as the year wore on, I developed a grudging admiration for him, admiration that was mixed with pity and a strong desire to make him laugh, or at least smile. For his part, Matthew actually seemed to like me, though he continued to shake his head at some of my ideas. Matthew and I, I realized sometime in the spring, had become friends, after a fashion.
     At the end of the school year, on the last day, when Matthew and I were carrying our chairs up from the boiler room, he said to me, “Peter, I want to ask you something, and I don’t want you to laugh.”
     “All right,” I said.
     “Are we friends?” he asked.
     “Yes,” I said. “I think so.”
     “Then tell me something.”
     “Yeah?”
     “Why are you happy all the time?” he asked.
     “I’m not happy all the time,” I said.
     “Well then, why are you happy most of the time?”
     “I don’t know,” I answered. It was an honest answer.
     “Do you think I’ll be happy someday?” he asked.
     I looked at him. He wasn’t looking at me. I thought of lying, but I didn’t.
     “No,” I said.
     We didn’t say anything more to each other that day, and I didn’t see Matthew again until September. I discovered, however, that he had infected me with a sympathetic melancholy that lasted well into the summer.

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