“Then you tell him. Go, ‘I brought it from home.’ ”
“Then he’ll think I’m someone who’s making fudge and bringing it to school. He’ll think I’m Amish.”
“No!” Felicia says. “Say you made it in home ec. Go, ‘I made this in home ec.’ This shows you’re being nice, yes, but it doesn’t
look like you’re offering him
fudge.
It just looks like ‘I
have to get rid of this fudge I made in home ec; I’ll give some to a kid in my detention.’ ”
“How can she be giving him fudge when she can’t even look at him?” says Jan Larson. Her parents call her Yawn. White blond
hair and a round face, braces, also has a bird, but hers talks. After it bites you, it says it’s sorry in a flat Norwegian
accent. “Too complicated. Why not just have her go—”and she shrugs, does a Mona Lisa, braces-hiding smile.
“She needs to do both,” Maroni says definitively. “Fudge, then smile. Or maybe smile, then fudge. And while he’s eating it,
ask him if he’s going to the game.”
They’re giving me a drowsy, moth-headed feeling, as though I’m in a beauty parlor, being turned this way and that, a plastic
sheet snapped around my neck, under which my hands are nicely folded in case it’s whipped off unexpectedly. Snip, snip.
“Look, she can’t even listen to this,” Felicia says.
“So do it with yours,” Maroni says. Felicia’s hasn’t been saying hi to her, but he’s been veering into her when they pass
in the halls. “Smile, fudge, game.”
“Okay,” Felicia says agreeably.
This kind of psychology does work with me.
“Wait,” I say.
“Don’t try to tell me you’re going to a football game and it isn’t with Flea, because I know better,” my mother says. “You
are not to be seeing her whatsoever.”
“I’m going to a football game with Dunk and Maroni,” I say patiently. “And maybe Yawn and maybe Luekenfelter, if her mom says.”
“Why
wouldn’t
her mom say? Is there something I don’t know about these football games?”
“No.
God.
It’s a game, people throw a ball around; it’s exciting. If I can’t go, just tell me, and I’ll get someone else to use my
ticket.”
“You have a ticket?”
“You can’t go to a game without a ticket! God!”
There’s a long wait as she reads her newspaper and smokes.
“Be home by nine,” she says.
“The game begins at eight! God!”
“Be home by ten,” she amends it. “And if I hear the word
God
again, you won’t know what hit you.”
“There’s pizza afterward!”
God.
She reads and smokes, turns a page. “Eleven,” she says finally.
Friday afternoon detention. Smile, fudge, game. Smile, fudge, game. I tried to do it yesterday but couldn’t get started. Now
the fudge is on its last legs when I carry it in and hand it to him, frozen faced.
He looks at me first, then at the fudge, resting on a brown paper towel. The buzzer goes off and I make my way back to my
seat. When Felicia asked hers if he was going to the game, he pointed at her and then mimed laughing, holding his stomach.
For some reason, we’ve taken this as a positive sign.
After class, Mr. Prentiss waits instead of racing out. I collect my things slowly and then walk up the aisle.
“That was good,” he says.
I nod.
“You got any more?”
I shake my head.
We walk out together and stand waiting to see which way the other will turn. His green army jacket is slung over his shoulder,
held by one crooked finger.
“Game?” I say.
“What?” he asks.
“Tomorrow night’s game,” I say.
“Oh,” he answers, nodding.
We look down the hall in opposite directions. In my direction, Felicia stands at a respectful distance, staring at the floor.
In his direction is the door whose crash bar he likes to kick.
“Yeah,” he says, stepping on his own sneaker, where a piece of rubber is coming loose. He pulls the stepped-on shoe out from
under the other shoe, thereby tearing off the strip of loose rubber. He kicks it thoughtfully into the center of the clean,
empty hall. “I’m usually either sitting in C or standing under it.”
“Oh,” I say.
“Yep,” he answers, looking at the crash bar.
“Well,” I say, looking at Felicia.
“Finally get to go home,” he says.
“Yep,” I say.
He shifts his jacket to the other finger and I shift my books to the other arm. His free hand is six inches away from my free
hand. I feel breathless and unstable, like we’re standing on the wing of an airplane.
Felicia clears her throat, still staring at the floor.
“She’s waiting for me,” I say.
“See you, then,” he says.
Once outside, he jumps all the way down the steps, landing
in a crouch. We watch him through the door as he lopes across the lawn, dodges a car, waves at the driver, and disappears
down the street.
We’re speechless.
“That was a million times better than somebody holding their stomach and laughing,” Felicia says finally.
My sister will let me wear her peacoat to the game only if I tell her what’s going on. After an hour or so, I give in.
“There’s a guy I might talk to,” I tell her. She stares at me for a full minute. I try to stare back but I can’t.
“And are we thinking our sister’s peacoat will make him fall in love with us?” she asks gently.
“No,” I say miserably. Why did I even start this? “I like it, is all. And I get so cold, I’m just sitting there shivering.”
“And what about our CPO jacket that we thought was the way to go?”
During our family coat-buying expedition, instead of a peacoat, I asked for what is known as a CPO jacket, which is styled
like a shirt and made of heavy plaid wool, to be worn over a hooded sweatshirt. I have no idea what CPO stands for, but cold
has to be the first word. My mother let me get it because I already had the sweatshirt and she was broke, walking around the
store staring at price tags and getting more and more upset.
“I’m sick over this!” she said at one point, looking at Raymond in a warm zip-up jacket with padding and attached mittens.
She took it off him and hung it back up. “Half the price of this is the mittens, and we don’t even want them.”
“I want them,” Ray admitted.
“You do?” she cried. She stood there in the little-kid aisle and we stood there with her.
“No,” Ray said.
“He doesn’t,” I said.
“He liked the other one,” Meg said.
“He did?” my mother asked.
“I did,” Raymond agreed. “Which one?”
“That one,” Meg said, pointing at a jacket with an emblem on the arm.
“That has that goddamned emblem,” my mother said.
“I like an emblem,” Ray said. “What is it?”
“It’s just a thing,” I told him.
So, that was coat shopping. Every month we have less and less money. My mother made all three of us kids go to the bank with
her last Saturday, to sit quietly in chairs while she spoke with a woman about the house payment. The woman had a large, friendly
face and short, iron gray hair with a fringe of bangs, like Captain Kangaroo. She fiddled with her wristwatch the entire time
she was listening to my mother, winding it on her wrist, lifting it to her ear, winding it again.
“You are not the kind of person we worry about,” she said reassuringly as they walked over to where we were sitting. “It’s
the
others
that we worry about—things you would not believe.”
“I’ll bet,” my mother agreed vaguely.
The woman went behind the counter where the tellers were and came back with an all-day sucker for Ray, a set of knives for
Meg, and a manicure kit for me.
“Free gifts,” she told my mother. “For when they open a checking account some day.”
While Meg considers the peacoat request, I clean her half
of the room, hauling clothes out from under the bed and folding them. It’s incredible what’s under there, stuff from summer,
plates my mother has been looking for, makeup, curlers, and way in the back a really cute shirt all balled up with the tags
still on it.
“That’s for you,” she says quickly.
It’s a dark, rich burgundy, fitted at the top and loose at the bottom, gathered right under the bodice with a narrow black
ribbon. Meg jumps up from her bed, yanks off the tags, and puts them in her pocket.
“It looks big but it isn’t,” she explains, holding it up to me. “See?”
It’s true, and when I try it on, something amazing happens—boobs appear out of nowhere, nestled right above the black ribbon.
No matter which way I turn, they’re still there. It’s a dazzling, expensive shirt, given to me by my sister for unknown reasons.
I yawn casually, take it off, and stow it in my dresser.
Once her side of the room is as clean as mine, she lets me try on her peacoat, which doesn’t fit. At all.
This puts her in a genial mood. “So, what’s that kid’s name?” she asks.
“Prentiss,” I tell her after a long pause.
“What’s his first name?”
“Kevin,” I say after a longer pause.
“And what do we like about Kevin Prentiss? Is he cute?”
I try staring at her the way she stares at me. Both of us have brown eyes. Brown eyes staring at brown eyes. Still staring.
Brown eyes like pools of muddy water, seeping toward one another. Still staring. Water, seeping toward other water, getting
ready to merge. I blink.
“He’s okay,” I say.
* * *
Once Whinny collects my sister, I put a mud mask on my face and talk on the phone to Felicia while it dries. Then I scrub
it off and get out my manicure kit and use all the tools in order, even the one I don’t know what to do with, which looks
like a miniature shovel. Then I get the shirt out and try it on again, with various pants. Then I look at the CPO jacket and
try to figure out how to make it warmer. Then I go downstairs in my nightgown and make popcorn.
Everybody is gone but me.
The dog and I go back up and get in bed to read with our bowl of popcorn. We’ve got two books going at once—
David Copperfield,
which we know by heart, and
Look Homeward, Angel,
which we don’t altogether understand. A stone, a leaf, an unfound door… that’s the underlying theme. My mother got it at
a yard sale.
I read a few random chapters about David C., just for the simplicity of it—“I Am Born,” “I Fall into Disgrace,” “I Have a
Memorable Birthday,” et cetera—and then switch for a while to reading about Eugene, the fellow in the other book. Tammy curls
up beside my knees and stares at me for popcorn, which she doesn’t like. I hand her several pieces, which she takes and then
sets down on the bedspread.
“No, eat them,” I urge her, and my voice sounds really, really loud and strange. What size stone? What kind of leaf? What
color door? Usually I see the stone as smooth and weighty, like a river rock; the leaf slender and serrated, like an elm leaf;
and the door as the door to the old chicken shed behind my grandmother’s house, dark flaking green with a rusted latch. Right
outside that chicken shed was a thick stump with two nails pounded into it about an inch and a half apart. My cousins and
I used to climb a trellis onto the roof of the chicken shed and then jump from the peak onto a pile of loose dirt. I liked
the old stump and would lean on it, touching the nail heads lightly, while I waited for my turn to climb, until one of my
cousins told me that between those nails was where the chickens’ necks were laid while they were getting their heads chopped
off.
I suddenly don’t feel that well.
My book is full of long, bulbous passages describing things I don’t want to know about Eugene and his demented, vain family.
The whole thing is florid and thick, too heavy to rest on my chest without hurting.
I feel like I might throw up.
One of Eugene’s older brothers, the sweet, melancholy one, dies of typhoid and they put his body on something called a cooling
board. Eugene has managed to forget this brother during the short course of his illness, but it all comes back to him—the
soft eyes, the strange, delicate demeanor, the birthmark—when he sees the brother laid out on his cooling board. He misses
him suddenly with the kind of terrible intensity people in his family are known for: “O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost,
come back again!”
I sob, ill.
Tammy hops down off my bed and walks over to Meg’s bed, jumps up, scratches the bedspread into a heap, and settles down again,
black nose nestled into her side.
There might have been something wrong with the popcorn.
My own brother is at a Cub Scout sleepover in his school’s gymnasium; the last time I saw him he had on his dark blue Cub
Scout shirt and a bright yellow neckerchief, held in place with a Webelo clasp. I creep over to the desk and upend the plastic
wastebasket to dump out its contents, then carry it back
to my bed. After a few minutes I retch into it, and a lava flow of dinner comes up, with kernels of popcorn here and there.
The dog jumps down and leaves the room.
Help, I’m sick.
My mother is over at Tuck’s, the neighborhood tavern. “I guess I’ll go have one,” she said after the dinner dishes were done.
“I’m too tired to do anything else.”
On nights like this, when my dad is missing, she sits with other couples and with her best friend, Kay, a small woman with
a gravelly voice and a similarly drunk husband. It’s a mysterious, damp cave over there at Tuck’s. No kids are allowed, but
they can peer in from the propped-open door during daylight hours and see the dark wood, a glimpse of mirror, and every kind
of liquor possible, lined up on shelves behind the bar, like a library, only booze. There are usually one or two people sitting
on stools with an ashtray and a glass in front of them. You can order cheese sandwiches there; I’ve had them brought home
to me.
More retching, more molten lava.
I grab the phone cord and reel it in from my bed, dial the number to Tuck’s and Tuck answers. Ten minutes later she’s coming
up the stairs. I feel better, but not that much. I can’t stop shivering.
“I-I-I-I c-c-c-c-can’t st-st-st-stop sh-shiv-shiv-shivering,” I tell her.