“Ha, we’re a
pair of bloomers,
” I say. “Late and crusty.”
In our weakened state, this sets us off. We laugh hyenically, rolling around on the terrace, slapping weakly at the grass.
Suddenly the boy materializes in the window.
He must have been in bed, reading. We can see only his back at first, and a froth of bushy hair, as he roots around at his
dresser for something, then sidles to the window, lifting what looks like a pirate’s telescope to his eye. He turns slightly,
focusing it… where? On the upstairs window of the house next door? No, that house is completely dark. He continues to turn,
inch by inch, until the telescope is pointing in our direction.
“Uh-oh,” Felicia says.
We freeze against the grass, our white tennis shoes throbbing in the darkness, as the boy stands still for a long moment,
a pirate looking for land. He seems to be seeing us seeing him, but we aren’t sure. Suddenly, he holds the telescope as though
it’s part of his anatomy and starts yanking on it.
Now we’re sure.
We scramble back up the terrace and then crawl through some shrubbery, dust off our shorts, and wander down the alley toward
the camper.
“Ee ain too noice,” Felicia says at some point.
“Ee ain,” I agree.
O
ver the past summer while we were distracted by Kozaks and kittens, Felicia has grown even taller, causing her to feel towering
and uncertain and me to feel like it isn’t so much that one of us is growing but that the other is shrinking.
We were supposed to try on our band uniforms a week ago, after school, but the music room was crammed to the hilt with folding
chairs and music stands and there was nobody to guard the door. Just holding them up over our clothes, it was hard to tell
how they’d fit. Now we know.
“Do I look like Uncle Sam in this?” Felicia asks.
The jackets are thick blue wool with bright brass buttons and yellow braiding; the pants are white with knifelike creases
down the front and adjustable waistbands. The hats are hard blue cylinders with a short white brim, on top of which a hunk
of braiding is secured by two brass buttons; a white strap buckles under the chin. You’re allowed to wear your own shoes,
but there’s a black felt flap that buttons over the instep, creating the illusion of spats.
First problem: the hat is resting on my ears, which means they are exposed. Second problem: the entire uniform is too large
and too stiff for me—it looks like the person has withered away and the outfit is there on its own. Third problem: Felicia
looks like Uncle Sam.
“Do I?” she asks again.
The hats are at least eight inches tall. There is a spot on the top for a metal-tipped plume to be inserted; it will be worn
by the first-chair band members and the band teacher, who marches ahead of the whole pack, setting the pace by raising and
lowering a gilded scepter. Since we have neither talent nor leadership capabilities, we weren’t given a plume.
“At least you don’t have to wear one of their ratty feathers, which would make it even taller,” I say, and we stare at ourselves,
standing on my parents’ bed, looking in their big vanity mirror.
Raymond follows us downstairs and partway down the street. He’s starstruck and imagines he’s going to the parade. “I’ll go
like this when I see you,” he tells us, chopping the air in front of him and kicking sideways.
We’ve both been in band for as long as we can remember—fourth grade for me, third for her—but we’re in ninth grade now, and
neither of us has risen through the ranks at all. Instead we’ve each maintained a spot somewhere in the middle of our respective
rows, neither first chair nor last. Felicia plays clarinet, an instrument my mother wanted me to play because Old Milly had
one in her attic, but I couldn’t play an instrument with a reed—anything soaked with spit made me gag. Also, the clarinet’s
case was too heavy; the flute was the only instrument I could carry to school when I was nine.
I like the way the clarinet sounds, like a clear cellophane ribbon unfurling, better than the flute, which has a narrow, harassed
sound. I do enjoy the flute itself, the beautiful silveriness of it and the fact that it goes against your lip instead of
inside it, the brown leather case with the velvet-lined depressions where the separate pieces are laid to rest, the flexible
stick with a wooden handle that you wrap a rag around and run through the tubes to clean them. Altogether, band is a pleasant
experience—Mr. Wilton, the teacher, pays attention only to the first-chair musicians and the percussionists, a gang of unruly
thick-waisted boys wielding drumsticks, gongs, and triangles. Everyone else comes under the category of Others and gets to
follow.
“Percussionists will
listen
and will
count,
” he says to the ceiling, arms raised. “Miss Chambers:
tenderly.
Mr. McVicken:
crisply.
Mr. Waddell:
lilting.
Others: follow.”
He closes his eyes and begins pawing at the air, and suddenly the sound of “Greensleeves” is rising up and wheezing around
us as we labor along. I like to play hunched over, with one elbow resting on a knee, the flute pointed down at the floor.
Not everyone gets into marching band, and we have no idea why we were chosen.
“You two are the long and short of it,” Wilton said one day after the bell rang and people were shuffling out of his cluttered
room, trying not to knock things over. Later that day he posted a list for marching band and our names were on it. Even though
Wilton is well known for his high-strung personality and depressing body malfunctions—platter-size armpit rings, foam collected
at the corners of his mouth, dandruff—he’s right now our favorite teacher.
The annual Zanesville parade is always in mid-October and
always has a Halloween theme. It’s a hectic, gargantuan affair, fifteen blocks of Elm Avenue devoted to it and people standing
ten deep all along the way. This time, instead of watching from the sidelines, we’ll be marching in formation, behind the
majorettes and in front of the football players and the floats.
“I can’t play and walk at the same time,” I confess to Felicia.
“Ha, me neither,” she says.
Wilton’s wife is there in the John Deere Junior High School parking lot, helping people fasten their top coat buttons and
referring to Wilton as Jim. She’s blond, friendly, and pregnant, wearing a big black wool tent and a pair of nurse’s shoes.
When we walk up, she tries to give us each a plume, sorting through a flat decaying box to find two that aren’t bald.
“No, thanks,” Felicia says, alarmed.
“Jim?” the wife calls, pointing at us.
Wilton shakes his head and she smiles warmly. “You’re fine just how you are,” she says.
It feels very strange being in the dark with people from school when it isn’t schooltime. Wearing the uniforms has pried us
all loose from our normal selves and we’re wandering around disoriented. Some people are randomly blowing into their instruments,
creating an angular, cacophonous noise that is causing my heart to pound.
“People, people, people,” Wilton calls tonelessly from the bumper of a pickup truck. “Please, people. People, please.”
Off to the side, things are quieter. The float looks like a giant sheet cake on wheels. All those Kleenexes stuffed into all
those holes. A skeleton is working on a special effect while a
witch hands him tools. They have the overcheerful, pious look of involved parents, trying to make a cauldron belch smoke.
A group of cheerleaders walks past, followed by a group of football players, one of whom is Danny Powell, who lives in my
neighborhood and was my friend when we were five. He and I used to play a game under the picnic table where we pretended to
be Vic and Gin, friends of my parents who hosted my family’s yearly fishing vacations. The real Vic and Gin owned a motel
in the Wisconsin Dells and once gave me something off the check-in counter in their lobby—a black plastic thing that held
a card for the vacationers to fill out when they registered. Attached to the black plastic thing was a chain and a pen, which
had run dry. Danny and I used it in our game of Vic and Gin, which consisted of one of us pretending to be a traveler and
the other pretending to be a motel owner. The game gradually devolved into Gin making Vic plates of food out of sticks, grass,
and maple seeds, which he would then pretend to eat. Eventually we drifted apart. Now he’s become suave and massive, his head
sitting like a pea atop his shoulder pads.
He nods as he passes.
“Hi,” I say.
The cheerleaders are their usual glossy selves, wearing letter sweaters over turtlenecks, short pleated skirts, and leg-colored
tights. They stretch and mill around, talking to one another while absentmindedly doing the semaphore signals that go along
with their cheers. Two of them move off the gravel into the grass and spot each other doing backflips.
The football team has momentarily turned its attention from the cheerleaders to the band’s majorettes, who just took off their
coats, unveiling sequined leotards, fringed wrist cuffs, and white ankle boots. They are all ninth graders, like the rest
of us, but the whole corps seems to have developed quite graphically overnight: they look middle-aged and lewd, parts of them
drifting out of the packed leotards.
“Band people!”
From a distance Wilton seems small compared to his wife, and he keeps losing his balance and having to jump down from the
bumper. Felicia is standing in a cluster of clarinets, but so far I don’t see any flutes, just an ocean of ill-fitting wool.
Everyone I look at seems to be scratching their neck.
In the same way people can resemble their dogs, the flutes are a thin and tremulous bunch, led by Larue Varrick, a pale, cautious
girl with red-rimmed eyes. I join them, somewhere in the middle, with the woodwinds right behind us. Felicia reaches over
and taps my shoulder.
“This coat is itching me,” she says.
The cheerleaders and the football players are waiting for the band to take shape so they can get into formation behind us.
They’re standing around, some with arms folded, some with hands on hips, watching the proceedings bemusedly, the same way
grown-ups might stand in a doorway and watch a cartoon.
“What’s wrong?” Felicia asks me.
The giant kid on tuba straggles up, his pants dragging, and stops to apply Chap Stick to the bottom half of his face, chin
and all. Two cheerleaders gape at him and then abruptly turn their backs to compose themselves. When they turn back they’re
poker faced, deliberately not looking at each other. Suddenly I’m flooded with the same feeling of humiliation that I get
when someone from school accidentally sees me with my parents.
“What?” Felicia says curiously. In the hat, she looks as tall as the Empire State Building. I can feel my ears standing out
like tabs on either side of my head.
I hadn’t realized before, but now I do: We’ve made a terrible mistake. Band is weird.
I’d like to be the kind of person who can do something weird and not become weird because of it, but that’s out of reach for
me—I am what I do at this point, and if I do this I’m done for. Once I march in their parade, I will be in it forever, uniform
or not.
Felicia, unaware, has gone back to her spot. She’s been stationed in the very middle like a tent pole, and I’m on an end,
where everyone in Zanesville can get a good look.
Help.
Drum roll.
Help.
Cymbals.
With that, Wilton sweeps his arms upward and then downward, sending the band shuffling forward, out of the parking lot and
into the street, toward Elm Ave and the IGA parking lot, where the rest of the parade is forming.
Right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right,
left, right, left, right, left, right, left.
The neighborhood looks haunted, with wet leaves clumped in the gutters and streetlamps creating cones of light high in the
air. At the corner, instruments are lifted to lips and blown into, and a big misshapen sound comes forth. The song of the
weirdos. Somewhere behind us, cheerleaders and football players follow along wryly.
As doom descends, panic rises, and a vampire motors past in a golf cart, smiling with plastic teeth.
* * *
In retrospect we probably should have quit band after the parade instead of during it.
“In
retrospect,
we never should have been in band in the first place,” Felicia says. “I was only doing it because you said to.”
“You played the clarinet when I met you!” I say indignantly.
“Remember I said, ‘I play the clari
not
’?” she reminds me.
“Remember I said, ‘My playing is
flut
ile’?” I reply.
“That’s when we first knew each other was funny,” she says dispiritedly.
We’re carrying our instruments and our hats. We tried to take the jackets off to be less conspicuous, but it was too cold.
So we’re a block off Elm Ave, where there are no elms and where the parade is roaring along at one mile an hour, thousands
of people lining the route, just as we feared. A car swishes past us and pulls up at the curb, and a man gets out balancing
a pizza box and a six-pack of pop.
“The parade’s thattaway,” he says cordially.
“We know,” Felicia answers.
He stares at us for a moment, resting the pop against his hip.
“Which school is that uniform?” he asks.
“John Deere,” I say.
“I went to Walt Whitman way back when,” he says. “Worst years of my life—just kidding.”
Now that I’m not in the parade, I have nothing against it. We decide to cut over and watch it from the Grassy Knoll, a hidden
spot about ten feet above the sidewalk, where a gently
sloping hill meets an eight-foot retaining wall. From up there, if one were so inclined, cars going by on Elm Ave can be bomped
with soft, rotting vegetables, preferably ones that splash, like tomatoes. We’ve never done it ourselves, but we know of certain
others who have.