City of Boys by Beth Nugent Page B

so far, because of my father’s constant spraying, only the grape arbor in the back yard has withstood them, but that will go too, eventually. Every tree and bush is covered with the abandoned shells shed by the locusts; transparent brown and intricately limbed, they are far more frightening than the insects themselves, which are slow and pathetically graceless. They seem capable of little other than eating, and don’t even bother to fly away when approached, as though survival is not a concern for them; they simply continue to eat until caught or killed.
    At lunch one day, I sat at a table across from a boy who ate his entire meal with a brown paper bag quietly buzzing and shifting at his elbow. Every now and then the boy looked at it with a kind of grim satisfaction, but it was only after he’d wadded the remains of his sandwich and its wrapping into a tight little ball that he opened the bag to show me about twenty locusts, their wings torn off, stumbling over and over each other in helpless dumb confusion.
    —These bastards won’t be eating any more trees, the boy said. —That’s for goddamn sure.
    They’ll be gone by the end of summer, and by next spring the leaves will come back, the bushes will bloom again, and everything will be as it was before. We’ll forget they were ever here, my father says, but I think I will never forget the sound they make. It is an incessant humming, a whirr that goes all the time, day and night, and won’t stop until thelocusts have eaten all the leaves on all the trees and at last laid their eggs and died.
    One night my father put his tape recorder on the windowsill and let it record the locusts until the tape ran out.
    —That’s crazy, my mother said. —Isn’t it bad enough we have to listen to them all the time without having them on tape, too?
    My father paid no attention to her; he rewound the tape and played it back. Even though it was only a cheap tinny echo of the sound outside, there was something terrible about hearing it like that. For the first time I realized what it was that we were listening to every minute of every day, with no change in pitch or intensity, and for a few hours I could hear nothing else—not the voices of my parents, not the television or the shouts of children outside, only the fevered drone of the locusts inside my head.
    I point out a bush covered with locust shells to Francine; she thinks they are ugly and is afraid of them. I tell her not to be, that when one of them flies into her hair, all she has to do is shake it out gently. She quivers delicately. She is disgusted.
    —Helen’s in the bathroom, my father is saying to Aunt Louise and Uncle Woody. —A bug.
    He ignores Aunt Louise’s meaningful look, and begins to manage the luggage with Uncle Woody. They make great show of carrying the suitcases inside and upstairs. Women, they are saying, can’t go anywhere without a closetful of clothes. Aunt Louise examines me carefully.
    —Well, she says, —you’ve certainly gotten thin.
    —Yes, I answer, —I guess so.
    —Are you all over that trouble?
    I look at the bathroom door and wonder how long my mother can stay in there. I admire her determination; surely she knows there will be consequences.
    I nod to my aunt. —All over it, I tell her.
    —Still, she says, —it’s a shame you had to miss so much of your first year of school. I suppose you didn’t get much chance to meet many boys.
    She is right, I didn’t, but I don’t want to talk about it, and I am trying to think of a lie about a handsome tutor, or a hospital intern, when a little bubble of cruelty rises to her surface.
    —Francine has lots of boyfriends, she says. —All the boys at Cross want to take her out.
    All the boys at Cross fuck her, I would like to say, although I am sure this is not true. But I can see them, crowded around her, darting quick looks at her breasts, while she sends out gracious, smug smiles to the other girls passing by unnoticed. —Where is