Gwendy's Button Box Read online

  “Just remember,” he continues, “the red button is the only button you can use more than once.”

  “What about the black one?”

  “It’s everything,” Farris says, and stands up. “The whole shebang. The big kahuna, as your father would say.”

  She looks at him, saucer-eyed. Her father does say that. “How do you know my fath—”

  “Sorry to interrupt, very impolite, but I really have to go. Take care of the box. It gives gifts, but they’re small recompense for the responsibility. And be careful. If your parents found it, there would be questions.”

  “Oh my God, would there ever,” Gwendy says, and utters a breathless whisper of a laugh. She feels punched in the stomach. “Mr. Farris, why did you give this to me? Why me?”

  “Stashed away in this world of ours,” Farris says, looking down at her, “are great arsenals of weapons that could destroy all life on this planet for a million years. The men and women in charge of them ask themselves that same question every day. It is you because you were the best choice of those in this place at this time. Take care of the box. I advise you not to let anyone find it, not just your parents, because people are curious. When they see a lever, they want to pull it. And when they see a button, they want to push it.”

  “But what happens if they do? What happens if I do?”

  Richard Farris only smiles, shakes his head, and starts toward the cliff, where a sign reads: BE CAREFUL! CHILDREN UNDER 10 UNACCOMPANIED BY ADULT NOT ALLOWED! Then he turns back. “Say! Why do they call them the Suicide Stairs, Gwendy?”

  “Because a man jumped from them in 1934, or something like that,” she says. She’s holding the button box on her lap. “Then a woman jumped off four or five years ago. My dad says the city council talked about taking them down, but everyone on the council is Republican, and Republicans hate change. That’s what my dad says, anyway. One of them said the stairs are a tourist attraction, which they sort of are, and that one suicide every thirty-five years or so wasn’t really so terrible. He said if it became a fad, they’d take another vote.”

  Mr. Farris smiles. “Small towns! Gotta love them!”

  “I answered your question, now you answer mine! What happens if I push one of these buttons? What happens if I push the one for Africa, for instance?” And as soon as her thumb touches the dark green button, she feels an urge—not strong, but appreciable—to push it and find out for herself.

  His smile becomes a grin. Not a terribly nice one, in Gwendy Peterson’s opinion. “Why ask what you already know?”

  Before she can say another word, he’s started down the stairs. She sits on the bench for a moment, then gets up, runs to the rusty iron landing, and peers down. Although Mr. Farris hasn’t had time enough to get all the way to the bottom—nowhere near—he’s gone. Or almost. Halfway down, about a hundred and fifty iron steps, his small neat black hat lies either abandoned or blown off.

  She goes back to the bench and puts the button box—her button box—in the canvas drawstring bag, then descends the stairs, holding the railing the whole way. When she reaches the little round hat, she considers picking it up, then kicks it over the side instead, watching it fall, flipping over all the way to the bottom to land in the weeds. When she comes back later that day, it’s gone.

  This is August 22nd, 1974.

  2

  Her mom and dad both work, so when Gwendy gets back to the little Cape Cod on Carbine Street, she has it to herself. She puts the button box under her bed and leaves it there for all of ten minutes before realizing that’s no good. She keeps her room reasonably neat, but her mom is the one who vacuums once in a while and changes the bed linen every Saturday morning (a chore she insists will be Gwendy’s when she turns thirteen—some birthday present that will be). Mom mustn’t find the box because moms want to know everything.

  She next considers the attic, but what if her parents finally decide to clean it out and have a yard sale instead of just talking about it? The same is true of the storage space over the garage. Gwendy has a thought (novel now in its adult implications, later to become a tiresome truth): secrets are a problem, maybe the biggest problem of all. They weigh on the mind and take up space in the world.

  Then she remembers the oak tree in the back yard, with the tire swing she hardly ever uses anymore—twelve is too old for such baby amusements. There’s a shallow cavern beneath the tree’s gnarl of roots. She used to curl up in there sometimes during games of hide-and-seek with her friends. She’s too big for it now (I’m thinking you might top out around five-ten or -eleven before you’re done, Mr. Farris told her), but it’s a natural for the box, and the canvas bag will keep it dry if it rains. If it really pours, she’ll have to come out and rescue it.

  She tucks it away there, starts back to the house, then remembers the silver dollar. She returns to the tree and slips it into the bag with the box.

  Gwendy thinks that her parents will see something strange has happened to her when they come home, that she’s different, but they don’t. They are wrapped up in their own affairs, as usual—Dad at the insurance office, Mom at Castle Rock Ford, where she’s a secretary—and of course they have a few drinks. They always do. Gwendy has one helping of everything at dinner, and cleans her plate, but refuses a slice of the chocolate cake Dad brought home from the Castle Rock Bake Shop, next door to where he works.

  “Oh my God, are you sick?” Dad asks.

  Gwendy smiles. “Probably.”

  She’s sure she’ll lie awake until late, thinking about her encounter with Mr. Farris and the button box hidden under the backyard oak, but she doesn’t. She thinks, Light green for Asia, dark green for Africa, yellow for Australia…and that’s where she falls asleep until the next morning, when it’s time to eat a big bowl of cereal with fruit, and then charge up the Suicide Stairs once more.

  When she comes back, muscles glowing and stomach growling, she retrieves the canvas bag from under the tree, takes out the box, and uses her pinky to pull the lever on the left, near the red button (whatever you want, Mr. Farris said when she asked about that one). The slot opens and the shelf slides out. On it is a chocolate turtle, small but perfect, the shell a marvel of engraved plating. She tosses the turtle into her mouth. The sweetness blooms. Her hunger disappears, although when lunchtime comes, she will eat all of the bologna-and-cheese sandwich her mother has left her, plus some salad with French dressing, and a big glass of milk. She glances at the leftover cake in its plastic container. It looks good, but that’s just an intellectual appreciation. She would feel the same way about a cool two-page spread in a Dr. Strange comic book, but she wouldn’t want to eat it, and she doesn’t want to eat any cake, either.

  That afternoon she goes bike-riding with her friend Olive, and then they spend the rest of the afternoon in Olive’s bedroom, listening to records and talking about the upcoming school year. The prospect of going to Castle Rock Middle fills them with dread and excitement.

  Back home, before her parents arrive, Gwendy takes the button box out of its hiding place again and pulls what she’ll come to think of as the Money Lever. Nothing happens; the slot doesn’t even open. Well, that’s all right. Perhaps because she is an only child with no competition, Gwendy isn’t greedy. When the little chocolates run out, she’ll miss them more than any silver dollars. She hopes that won’t happen for a while, but when it does, okay. C’est la vie, as her dad likes to say. Or merde se, which means shit happens.

  Before returning the box, she looks at the buttons and names the continents they stand for. She touches them one by one. They draw her; she likes the way each touch seems to fill her with a different color, but she steers clear of the black one. That one is scary. Well…they’re all a little scary, but the black one is like a large dark mole, disfiguring and perhaps cancerous.

  On Saturday, the Petersons pile into the Subaru station wagon and go to visit Dad’s sister in Yarmouth. Gwendy usually enjoys these visits, because Aunt Dottie and Uncle Jim’s twin girl
s are almost exactly her age, and the three of them always have fun together. There’s usually a movie-show on Saturday night (this time a double feature at the Pride’s Corner Drive-In, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, plus Gone in 60 Seconds), and the girls lie out on the ground in sleeping bags, chattering away when the movie gets boring.

  Gwendy has fun this time, too, but her thoughts keep turning to the button box. What if someone should find it and steal it? She knows that’s unlikely—a burglar would just stick to the house, and not go searching under backyard trees—but the thought preys on her mind. Part of this is possessiveness; it’s hers. Part of it is wishing for the little chocolate treats. Most of it, however, has to do with the buttons. A thief would see them, wonder what they were for, and push them. What would happen then? Especially if he pushed the black one? She’s already starting to think of it as the Cancer Button.

  When her mother says she wants to leave early on Sunday (there’s going to be a Ladies Aid meeting, and Mrs. Peterson is treasurer this year), Gwendy is relieved. When they get home, she changes into her old jeans and goes out back. She swings in the tire for a little while, then pretends to drop something and goes to one knee, as if to look for it. What she’s really looking for is the canvas bag. It’s right where it belongs…but that is not enough. Furtively, she reaches between two of the gnarled roots and feels the box inside. One of the buttons is right under her first two fingers—she can feel its convex shape—and she withdraws her hand fast, as if she had touched a hot stove burner. Still, she is relieved. At least until a shadow falls over her.

  “Want me to give you a swing, sweetie?” her dad asks.

  “No,” she says, getting up and brushing her knees. “I’m really too big for it now. Guess I’ll go inside and watch TV.”

  He gives her a hug, pushes her glasses up on her nose, then strokes his fingers through her blonde hair, loosening a few tangles. “You’re getting so tall,” he says. “But you’ll always be my little girl. Right, Gwennie?”

  “You got it, Daddy-O,” she says, and heads back inside. Before turning on the TV, she looks out into the yard from the window over the sink (no longer having to stand on tip-toe to do it). She watches her father give the tire swing a push. She waits to see if he will drop to his knees, perhaps curious about what she was looking for. Or at. When he turns and heads for the garage instead, Gwendy goes into the living room, turns on Soul Train, and dances along with Marvin Gaye.

  3

  When she comes back from her run up the Suicide Stairs on Monday, the lever by the red button dispenses a small chocolate kitty. She tries the other lever, not really expecting anything, but the slot opens, the shelf comes out, and on it is another 1891 silver dollar with nary a mark or a scratch on either side, the kind of coin she will come to know as uncirculated. Gwendy huffs on it, misting the features of Anna Willess Williams, then rubs the long-gone Philadelphia matron bright again on her shirt. Now she has two silver dollars, and if Mr. Farris was right about their worth, it’s almost enough money for a year’s tuition at the University of Maine. Good thing college is years away, because how could a twelve-year-old kid sell such valuable coins? Think of the questions they would raise!

  Think of the questions the box would raise!

  She touches the buttons again, one by one, avoiding the horrid black one but this time lingering on the red one, the tip of her finger circling around and around, feeling the oddest combination of distress and sensuous pleasure. At last she slides the button box back into its bag, stashes it, and bikes to Olive’s house. They make strawberry turnovers under the watchful eye of Olive’s mom, then go upstairs and put on Olive’s records again. The door opens and Olive’s mom comes in, but not to tell them they must lower the volume, as both girls expected. No, she wants to dance, too. It’s fun. The three of them dance around and laugh like crazy, and when Gwendy goes home, she eats a big meal.

  No seconds, though.

  4

  Castle Rock Middle turns out to be okay. Gwendy reconnects with her old friends and makes some new ones. She notices some of the boys eyeing her, which is okay because none of them is Frankie Stone and none of them call her Goodyear. Thanks to the Suicide Stairs, that nickname has been laid to rest. For her birthday in October, she gets a poster of Robby Benson, a little TV for her room (oh God, the joy) and lessons on how to change her own bed (not joyful but not bad). She makes the soccer team and the girls’ track team, where she quickly becomes a standout.

  The chocolate treats continue to come, no two ever the same, the detail always amazing. Every week or two there’s also a silver dollar, always dated 1891. Her fingers linger longer and longer on the red button, and sometimes she hears herself whispering, “Whatever you want, whatever you want.”

  Miss Chiles, Gwendy’s seventh grade history teacher, is young and pretty and dedicated to making her classes as interesting as possible. Sometimes her efforts are lame, but every once in a while they succeed splendidly. Just before the Christmas vacation, she announces that their first class in the new year will be Curiosity Day. Each pupil is to think of one historical thing they wonder about, and Miss Chiles will try to satisfy their curiosity. If she cannot, she’ll throw the question to the class, for discussion and speculation.

  “Just no questions about the sex lives of the presidents,” she says, which makes the boys roar with laughter and the girls giggle hysterically.

  When the day comes, the questions cover a wide range. Frankie Stone wants to know if the Aztecs really ate human hearts, and Billy Day wants to know who made the statues on Easter Island, but most of the questions on Curiosity Day in January of 1975 are what-ifs. What if the South had won the Civil War? What if George Washington had died of, like, starvation or frostbite at Valley Forge? What if Hitler had drowned in the bathtub when he was a baby?

  When Gwendy’s turn comes, she is prepared, but still a tiny bit nervous. “I don’t know if this actually fits the assignment or not,” she says, “but I think it might at least have historical…um…”

  “Historical implications?” Miss Chiles asks.

  “Yes! That!”

  “Fine. Lay it on us.”

  “What if you had a button, a special magic button, and if you pushed it, you could kill somebody, or maybe just make them disappear, or blow up any place you were thinking of? What person would you make disappear, or what place would you blow up?”

  A respectful silence falls as the class considers this wonderfully bloodthirsty concept, but Miss Chiles is frowning. “As a rule,” she says, “erasing people from the world, either by murder or disappearance, is a very bad idea. So is blowing up any place.”

  Nancy Riordan says, “What about Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Are you saying blowing them up was bad?”

  Miss Chiles looks taken aback. “No, not exactly,” she says, “but think of all the innocent civilians that were killed when we bombed those cities. The women and children. The babies. And the radiation afterward! That killed even more.”

  “I get that,” Joey Lawrence says, “but my grampa fought the Japs in the war, he was on Guadalcanal and Tarawa, and he said lots of the guys he fought with died. He said it was a miracle he didn’t die. Grampy says dropping those bombs kept us from having to invade Japan, and we might have lost a million men if we had to do that.”

  The idea of killing someone (or making them disappear) has kind of gotten lost, but that’s okay with Gwendy. She’s listening, rapt.

  “That’s a very good point,” Miss Chiles says. “Class, what do you think? Would you destroy a place if you could, in spite of the loss of civilian life? And if so, which place, and why?”

  They talk about it for the rest of the class. Hanoi, says Henry Dussault. Knock out that guy Ho Chi Minh and end the stupid Vietnam War once and for all. Many agree with this. Ginny Brooks thinks it would be just grand if Russia could be obliterated. Mindy Ellerton is for eradicating China, because her dad says the Chinese are willing to start a nuclear war because they have so many p
eople. Frankie Stone suggests getting rid of the American ghettos, where “those black people are making dope and killing cops.”

  After school, while Gwendy is getting her Huffy out of the bike rack, Miss Chiles comes over to her, smiling. “I just wanted to thank you for your question,” she says. “I was a little shocked by it to begin with, but that turned out to be one of the best classes we’ve had this year. I believe everybody participated but you, which is strange, since you posed the question in the first place. Is there a place you would blow up, if you had that power? Or someone you’d…er…get rid of?”

  Gwendy smiles back. “I don’t know,” she says. “That’s why I asked the question.”

  “Good thing there isn’t really a button like that,” Miss Chiles says.

  “But there is,” Gwendy says. “Nixon has one. So does Brezhnev. Some other people, too.”

  Having given Miss Chiles this lesson—not in history, but in current events—Gwendy rides away on a bike that is rapidly becoming too small for her.

  5

  In June of 1975, Gwendy stops wearing her glasses.

  Mrs. Peterson remonstrates with her. “I know that girls your age start thinking about boys, I haven’t forgotten everything about being thirteen, but that saying about how boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses is just—don’t tell your father I said this—full of shit. The truth, Gwennie, is that boys will make passes at anything in a skirt, and you’re far too young for that business, anyway.”

  “Mom, how old were you when you first made out with a boy?”

  “Sixteen,” says Mrs. Peterson without hesitation. She was actually eleven, kissing with Georgie McClelland, up in the loft of the McClelland barn. Oh, they smacked up a storm. “And listen, Gwennie, you’re a very pretty girl, with or without glasses.”