by Tom
Monteleone
"A
round It Still the Sumac Grows" is special because it plays across that great and wondrous keyboard of classic themes, leaning on several emotional chords and spanning more than few octaves of unease. Wolf's "You can't go home again" riff has nothing on going
back
to high school. A scant few of us actually had fun during those four long years, while the rest of us spun down the circles of hell where getting an "F" was the least of our worries. To imagine that time and place as some staging ground for Il
Purgatorio
(at best) is a brilliant touch, but the real power of this tale reveals itself in Tom's seamless prose–he makes something so painful seem almost lyrical.
–Tom
Monteleone
, author of
EYES OF THE VIRGIN
and
FEARFUL SYMMETRIES
S
omehow, you never made peace with ordinary, familiar dread.
The many everyday weaknesses continue to prod at your conscience.
How you can't hit a curve ball and flubbed every lay-up shot.
How you can't hammer a nail in straight or spackle a hole properly.
Your father's toolbox is a well of shame and remorse.
You're nearly forty and have never figured out how to change a tire.
There are things you can't let slide anymore.
Life is a desperate undertaking now, and it doesn't allow for naiveté once you've turned twelve.
After that you're just inept and absurd.
It's the working of the world.
You can't sit back and enjoy the day while there are kids nearby.
Not in the park and definitely not on school grounds.
This is the modern age.
Security guards buck up and give you the killer glare as if daring you to make a play for one of the children.
Jesus, you're not doing anything except sitting here.
Everybody wants an easy excuse for murder.
You can imagine them hauling one of the teenage girls off the bus and waving her at you like bait.
Here, you want to try for it?
Come on, come get some candy.
With the safety off, hands at their gun belts.
The lunacy of ninth grade never leaves.
Overwhelming delight, guilt, duty, the bitter embrace of adulthood.
It's set the tone for the rest of your life, and you judge everything based on what you knew at that time.
No cars have the same muscle or style as a '79 Mustang.
No laughter as ugly as that of Mr.
Vulatore
, sophomore biology.
No dog as friendly or smart as Hercules, who followed you to the bus stop every morning until your father backed over him.
Twice.
No smile as perfect as Linda
Abutti's
, with her eyes crinkling at the corners, the grin igniting every nerve ending in your pudgy, pale, underdeveloped flesh.
Maybe you've committed a crime by surviving this long, and that's why you feel the need to return to the scene over and over.
Or perhaps the crime has been perpetuated against you, and it's grown too hazy to understand anymore.
Did somebody tug on your tinkle in the boys' shower room?
Did you get your nose shoved down into dog shit at recess?
One tiny torture is as good as another.
Anyway, you're here, and you've got to get back in, take a look around.
You are fairly certain that you left your soul in the utility closet of seventh period study hall.
Busloads of kids are arriving, and the noise is much louder than you remember.
Near deafening, ear-splitting.
Christ, you drop your forehead to the steering wheel and hug your arms over your ears.
So much talking, the blaring of ghastly music, and boys skateboarding in the lot, grinding down the curbs and sidewalks.
Sparks splash and skitter.
One bad oil leak under any of the cars and the whole lot will go up in an inferno. The skaters fall and tumble with a stuntman's coordination, boards scudding wildly and spinning on until they weakly bump into a tire.
Girls are screaming, yelling about homework, make-up, cheerleading.
The guys answer with their own love calls, screeches and caterwauls.
It gets your pulse ticking harshly in your neck, all this action.
You've lived in a lonely room for too long, reading books you can't remember.
Kids are smoking, necking, eating the last remnants of their breakfasts, and piercing each other with freshly sharpened pencils.
You didn't think things would change so much, but maybe it's just you who's forgotten.
You aren't old but you feel old.
No, you are old.
A glance in the rearview mirror confirms your fears.
Look at all that pink scalp showing through.
The crow’s feet wrinkles and channels writhing across your face.
So, it's like that.
You used to keep count of your dead former classmates until the number broke fifty, then you quit. Drug deals gone bad, a murdered gas station attendant, two drownings, with so many others going to AIDS and cancer.
Don't people live to the average age of 72 anymore?
You look down at your wrist and see your blood still hammering, and you wonder when it's going to quit and whether you'll have any warning at all.
What do you do with the last fifteen seconds of your life?
Whenever you missed the bus your mother would drop you off right out front, give you a kiss that got the tough kids rolling.
You'd walk away in shame with the fuckers shoving at your back, knocking your books away.
Kid games that skewered.
And you'd turn to watch your mother's car drive off, abandoning you to the nexus of dismay and insanity.
The snotty laughter.
Even your hatred is cliché.
You, like everybody, can blame the smallest drama for your inability to cope.
A failed math test and you can't form a solid relationship with a woman.
A missed foul shot and you've never earned over twenty-one grand a year.
A redhead turns you down for a prom date and for the rest of your life you whine about your incapacity to look a luscious lady in the eye without blushing.
No strangers are allowed on school property, but you're no stranger.
You ease up to the security booth–they've actually got the black and white semaphore arm now that comes down in front of the hood of your car.
The symbolism can't be overlooked.
This is a toll booth, you've got to pay just as heavy a price to get back as you paid to get out in the first place.
The security guard is short and hairy, with the lines of a perpetual scowl seared into his features.
It takes a few seconds but you finally recognize him:
Vinny
D'Angelis
.
A year or two older than you, he used to steal your lunch box and liked to smear your glasses with his plump, greasy thumbs.
You heard he got one of his professors pregnant while he was failing at the community college.
The kind of thing that should've been a disgrace but must've just made him feel proud when he had a beer with the boys.
The professor left in the midst of a media blitz, had the kid, and moved back in with her parents.
Sometimes your life moved backwards like you were on a conveyor belt.
The dead are always nearby, ready to dive.
Teachers move toward the front doors like a SWAT team: edgy, wary, and checking every angle for danger, but still somehow in control.
They look up to see what might be falling down on them from the sky.
Somebody's throwing red viscera against the clouds.
You recognize at least three gray countenances.
Without quite realizing it, you begin to tug at the front of your receding hair, which started turning silver a couple of years back.
At first it was a touch distinguishing, but now it scares the shit out of you.
The thatch keeps growing and the damn thing just won't stop.
D'Angelis
glowers.
His sneer is twenty years older but no more refined than it was the last time you saw it.
A part of you very much wants to surge through his little toll gate and smash his face into the Plexiglas windows, but you know he thinks exactly the same thing of you.
Fate would almost be satisfied with some kind of crazed animal struggle between the two of you, but there's something else waiting inside.
You've got to get it, and it has to be now.
They've given
D'Angelis
a badge that he's kept polished like he was a real cop.
He probably practices ninja rolls in there, diving in and out of his little both when no one's watching.
You can tell by his eyes that he's never seen his own kid and is terrified of the day when his child will come find him.
He knows you, of course.
He's been waiting for you, and everyone else like you, to return, and prove to him that you've never become any better than him and everybody like him.
The circle was never very large to begin with and it only becomes smaller.
You have no plan, but suddenly a lie is on your lips.
You've got to get back to your soul.
"I'm here for the reunion committee."
Whoever's really on the council should be planning the event and tracking down former classmates, but they aren't.
The ten year never happened and the twenty won't either.
Nobody cared.
Nobody's left.
You see each other on street corners all the time, shielding your eyes and pretending not to recognize one another.
"What reunion?"
"'83."
"Who's the advisor?"
You don't have any idea, but you think about the teacher least likely to ever participate in that sort of thing.
He was ancient back then but those are the ones that never die.
They just petrify in their seats until they're hard as stone, and then they're used for bricks to build another hallway.
"Mr. Samuelson."
"Room 214."
"Thanks."
You drive on and park in field two, which was always off limits to students.
A sixteen year old girl–luscious, mystical, with a whirlwind of raven's hair swirling in the breeze–knocks you aside like you're the transparent, middle-aged creature that you are.
You're an affront to her existence and she understands this implicitly.
A wash of impotent anger fires through you and tension momentarily makes you feel strong and effective.
It lasts for perhaps four steps.
You're on her heels, the hair snapping into your face like a bullwhip.
You almost welcome its painful touch, hoping it will leave scars.
She wheels and spits.
"The fuck are you?
The fuck are you doing? You fuckin' chasing me?"
"No."
"Good."
"Sure."
She wears her derision like a tiara.
Another man would've broken her will to him.
Or made a friend.
Or acted paternal and offered sage advice.
She walks to the front doors and you notice that, alongside the ivy growing against the harsh brick face, there's poison sumac in the same place it's always been.
The school is venomous.
You used to try to stay away from the shrubs, but somehow you still wound up with their yellowish plant oil streaked across the tops of your forearms.
You recall being covered with rashes and having your mother swathe you with ineffective, over-the-counter hydrocortisone creams.
The redness and swelling would soon be followed by blisters and severe itching.
Within a few days the blisters became crusted and scaly.
The girls would grimace and cut a wide path.
Even the lunch ladies would cringe.