Christine Recaps: Part Seven
by thethreepennyguignol
It’s spooky season (which is to say, mid-August), which means it is more time than it has ever been for me to get back into my Christine recaps! Catch up on my last one right here, and let’s dive into some more King-caps!
Let’s kick things off with some Chuck Berry for chapter seventeen!
The chapter starts with Dennis heading off to another football game, which he’s feeling less than confident about, when he realizes that Arnie has driven Christine up to join him – and she’s not the only woman he’s with. No, he’s also driving Leigh Cabot (in a pair of “clinging” woollen slacks, which, again, I’m just struggling to picture as a sexy item of clothing), which leaves Dennis baffled and more than a little jealous.
But he soon brushes it off, and, before the game, Arnie shows him the work he’s done on Christine:
“Arnie touched it possessively, and the touch turned in a caress.
“Yeah. I put that on myself.”
Something about that jagged me. He had done it all himself, hadn’t he?”
This is such a great little detail, though it doesn’t stick around for longer than a sentence or two – Arnie has to specify the work he’s done himself on Christine, because, of course, she’s been doing a lot of it for him.
Dennis notices that Leigh seems less bright when Christine is the focus of the conversation, taking from it that she feels off about the car too. But that might just be wishful thinking on Dennis’ part, because, as he admits, this is when he starts developing feelings for her (and yes, he’s still got his cheerleader girlfriend, but, when compared to Leigh, she’s a “tree-sloth taking a nap” – which might actually be the nicest thing he’s said about her in the entire book so far).
Dennis’ team wins the game, and he visits Christine afterwards. And, look, I truly do not go into any of these chapters looking for something with the vague whiff of inter-teen-boy homoeroticism, but I’m also not going to pretend I don’t notice the Implications of stuff like this:
“I touched Christine. I tried to caress it as Arnie had done, to like it for his sake as Leigh had done…Leigh had only known Arnie a month. I had known him my whole life.”
Dennis tries to imitate Arnie’s previous sensual touch of the car, in the hopes of mirroring the attitude that Arnie’s love interest has towards it – he compares Arnie’s relationship with Leigh to Arnie’s with him, wanting to prove himself as equal to Leigh in his affections towards Arnie. I think Leigh adds a really interesting wrinkle to the relationship between Arnie and Dennis, and not just in the direct sense that she comes between them as a romantic prospect for them both, but rather because she presents the first real outside threat to Dennis for Arnie’s attention.
Anyway, Dennis continues to feel up the car, unable to shake the sense that it doesn’t like him. I find it really interesting how King describes the underside of the car, with regards to some of the other themes we’ve seen in the story thus far –
“There were three new Pleasurizer shocks, but the fourth was a dark, oil-caked ruin…the exhaust was so new it was silvery, but the silencer looked at least middle-aged.”
With so much of Dennis’ fears about ageing soaking in to his POV so far, I love how King extends the discomforting contrast of new and old, young and ancient, even to the work done on the car – like Dennis narrating his own teenage years as an adult, the contrast between his eighteen-year-old self and the one with hard-earned grown-up perspective.
When Arnie finds Dennis at the car, he confronts him about being asked to keep an eye on him by Arnie’s parents, which Arnie is less than impressed about. Dennis protests, but things soon take a turn for the worse:
“He was almost sneering. “Really all they’re interested in is making sure I’m still hobbled…They don’t want me to grow up because they’d have to face getting old”.
Because if there’s one thing everyone in this book is terrified of, it’s getting old, right? Anyway, Dennis and Arnie have a pretty heated confrontation (“I could feel someone upstairs in the brain-room starting to pull those red switches”) where Dennis points out that Will Darnell has given Arnie an improper plate, and insists he’s just looking out for Arnie. Both Arnie and Dennis know that’s not true, though – Dennis wants Christine out of his friend’s life, and he’s searching for any way to make that happen.
The return of Leigh diffuses their argument before it can go any further, and Dennis notices the way Arnie looks at Leigh – and he’s glad that he seems to be, for the time being, more interested in her than Christine. And also thinks about how good-looking he’s become since his skin cleared up, but you know, that is what it is.
The next chapter starts with two of my favourite things – Janis Joplin and fallin’ in love:
And, of course, the couple falling in love are none other than Leigh and Arnie, at least to Dennis’ eyes. They start mooning around each other during school, holding hands in the corridors, and Dennis is sure that Arnie is falling in love with her. Arnie and Leigh have become the focus of the school’s gossip circles, but Arnie doesn’t seem to care – even about Christine, who hasn’t been seen around for a while either.
Arnie and Dennis have lunch together, and goof around in the way they did when they were kids – I think it’s interesting that Arnie seems so much more childish around Dennis now, perhaps because he’s putting up a bit of a grown-up front for Leigh as their relationship develops.
“He swallowed mightily, then belched.
“You’re so fucking gross, Cunningham.”
“I know.””
Dennis ponders on how much he’s missed Arnie over the last few weeks – and yes, that means it’s time for another one of Dennis’ Barely Concealed Disdain for Women Who Touch His Penis monologues!
“…a new girlfriend who would (I hoped) consent to giving me a handjob before drive-in season ended. I had little hope of getting her to do more than that; she was a little too enchanted with herself. Still, it was fun trying.”
Forget Christine, I’m going to drive down Dennis with a car myself if he keeps thinking about women like this. She doesn’t even get a name (again – I guess we’ll have to wait for another date night with Arnie for that one), who Dennis intends to try to push to do more than she’s comfortable with sexually. Truly, and I am asking this in all honesty: “too enchanted” with herself to do more than a handjob? That if she were less self-confident she would be willing to give Dennis more sexually? What does that mean? Just say you want Arnie to give you a handjob and go, Dennis! Enough of this! I’m begging!
Anyway, Arnie describes the process of asking Leigh out and falling in love with her, and it’s actually pretty sweet – a good contrast to how obsessive and controlling his love of Christine has been since he got hold of her.
The chapter ends with Dennis having a nightmare about Christine, Arnie, and LeBay, and then we’re on to the final (very short) chapter of this recap and this section, starting with some Beach Boys:
This chapter opens, not by coincidence, with Dennis talking about being hurt – so close to his nightmare about Christine’s malevolence, I think it’s a deliberate connection. Anyway, Dennis is playing football, when he gets seriously injured by three defensive players on the opposing team.
After an “instant of terrible pain”, he falls unconscious for just over two days, and when he wakes up, his family are by his bedside, Arnie and Leigh in the waiting room. And his coach soon turns up to let him know the bad news – he won’t ever play football again. With two broken legs and a broken arm, he is stuck in the hospital for months, only emerging again at Christmas after a long period of therapy.
This chapter really is just a couple of pages long, and it’s a bit jarring for something so huge in Dennis’ life to take up such a tiny chunk of the book. I’m interested to see how the change in Dennis’ ability and physical health impacts his character over the rest of the book, but there’s not much to say about this, except that he’s falling in love with Leigh. I think it was a mistake to keep most of his interactions with Leigh off-page – the few interactions they have are pleasant enough, but I’d like to see a bit more life given to this relationship, especially since Leigh must usually be seeing Dennis only when she’s around Arnie.
But anyway, that brings us to the end of the first section of the book, and brings us to part two – Arnie, and Teenage Love Songs. This first section, while I do think it’s a little overlong, is a really good one, and I do find Dennis fascinating as a character – that constant anxiety over ageing and his intense relationship with Arnie is an interesting mix, especially given that Dennis is telling this story as a slightly older man. What did you think of this first part? Let me know in the comments!
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