Joy School (17 page)

“I’m selling it.”

“Why?”

He walks past me into his office, slumps into his desk chair. “My wife found out about it. We really can’t afford it. She’s right, I never should have bought it. Guy’s coming tonight to pick it up.”

“But you really like it.”

“I know. But it was wrong. I shouldn’t have kept it from her, that I had it.”

“Jimmy?”

“Yeah.”

“I think you should keep that car.”

“I know you do.”

The bells rings, and he gets up to take care of a pickup truck, which takes about a hundred years, I hate when trucks come. “How you doing?” I hear him say friendly to the driver, even though his heart is plumb breaking. I watch him, my forehead up against the glass. I will someday buy him two Corvettes. One exactly like the one he is selling and one of whatever else he wants. “Go ahead,” I’ll say, waving my arm out over a sea of Corvettes. “Pick whatever you want.” “Katie!” he’ll say. Although by that time it will be Katherine. “Katherine!” he’ll say. “No,” I’ll say. “I mean it.” “Well, all right,” he’ll say, “but then I’
m
going to buy
you
something.” “Never mind,” I will say. “I don’t need a thing.”

When Jimmy comes in, he is different. “Tell you what,” he says. “After I get the money, I’ll take you out for a Coke. Hell, I’ll take you out for a whole dinner.”

Well, look what has dropped right here.

“I… Okay.” I always thought it might happen when I was not expecting it, that it would all of a sudden just be here. I will wear something very simple, but tasteful.
A whole dress, not a skirt and sweater. The pearl earrings, of course. I will order something easy to eat and with no garlic. Diane told me shrimp was good, fried shrimp, you can just daintily pick it up, give a little dip in the catsup and put it quietly in your mouth. We will have a long, serious talk. “It’s all right,” I will say about how guilty he feels about leaving his wife. “You didn’t plan it.” I will put my hand lightly over his,
I am here for you
. I have to get some lotion.

“I should tell you, too … I’m going to be moving.”

“When?” Things are going fast. He is getting his own place, which will have things like only two towels and he will have to make scrambled eggs in a pot.

“In about three weeks.”

“Where?” Maybe close to my house!

“Up to Iowa. My wife has a brother there, willing to hire me. He’d pay more than I can make here.”

Oh, now, No. No.

He is looking at me like he expects me to say something.

“Well… do you like Iowa?” I ask.

Where is Iowa? Where is Iowa? How far?

“I don’t know,” he says.

I know that feeling, of moving somewhere you know nothing about, where you don’t really want to go.

I am in a kind of panic. He is looking down in the defeated way. His eyelashes make little shadows on his cheeks. He is a beautiful man, fit to be used as a model
for the artist Michelangelo. I don’t think he has any idea. And now he is leaving.

“You are a very handsome man.” My voice is wearing boots and marching.

He looks up, smiles. “Well, thank you. And you are a very attractive young lady.”

“I think I love you.”

His look freezes.

“No. I do. I can tell.”

“Oh, Katie. I didn’t know … I didn’t mean to—”

“You didn’t do it. You didn’t do it. It just happened by its own self.”

We stare at each other, still as stone. And then I leave. I walk home somehow. Somehow, I do. On the way I am thinking, he loves his wife. He wants so much to please her. He will do anything to please her. He told me that she was in love with his best friend, Chris, who broke up with her when they were all seniors in high school, and she went out with Jimmy just to get back at Chris. She did everything with Jimmy to get back at Chris. At the time I thought Jimmy was saying, See how I got roped in? But he wasn’t saying that. He was saying God, I love her, I wish she loved me. I didn’t want to see that then, but I see it now. It was in his voice every time he talked to her on the phone. It was in the way I saw him kissing her. His love is pure and direct and longing and the beam goes straight to her. As mine goes to him. I think, all in the whole world, there
are just lines of people with the one in front never turning to see the one behind, and the one behind too shy to give a small tap on the shoulder. Well, at least I did that. At least I told.

Ginger knocks at my door.

“Not now,” I say.

She doesn’t come in, but she doesn’t go away.

I raise my head off the pillow. It is heavy with the snot of crying. “Not
NOW!”
I say.

I hear her walk away. There is a slice of me saying, Oh now don’t. The rest of me is saying, Who cares when I know now, I can’t ever see him again. And he was the one. He was. It is the truest thing about me. It will never change. When I am fifty, I will say fast and automatic, “Jimmy.”

I
clear my throat so Mr. Spurlock will look up from his newspaper and see my raised hand.

“Yes, Katie?”

“I can’t read what you wrote.”

He stands up, walks over to his chicken scratches on the blackboard. “Which part?”

I am really so sick of him and his half-bald head, which he tries to disguise by combing long sides over the top, but it does not work at all because the sides slip down. Mostly he looks like Clarabelle.

“See the first line?”

“Yes, that says, ‘The New Deal—’”

“No,” I say. “I mean, if you take the first line and go all the way to the last line, that is what I can’t read.”

He stands there, blinking. He reminds of a chimpanzee I once caught the glance of. We stood there staring at each other. “Yes?” we were both thinking.

“So what you are saying, Katie, is that you can’t read any of this.”

“Yes, sir.”

A king-sized miracle has happened. The students in Mr. Spurlock’s class are sitting up, interested and alert.

“Well, do you need glasses?”

“No. A teacher would do.”

“Pardon
me
, young lady?”

I say loudly, “I said, ‘A
teacher
would do.’ All you are is a newspaper reader. You don’t teach anything. All you do is put Sanskrit on the board.”

He is not listening. He is over at his desk writing out the hall pass. Guess where I am going. Well, bingo, it’s exactly what I wanted.

“Your school called,” Ginger says, when I get home.

I say nothing, head out to the kitchen to fix a snack.

In a minute, she comes in, leans against the door-jamb, watching me. “I said that I would take responsibility for relaying the message to your father.”

I pour a glass of milk, sit at the table, bite into my sandwich.

“You got sent to the principal?”

I chew and chew.

“For talking back to a teacher?”

Peanut-butter and jelly. It’s good.

“Katie?”

“What?”

“You want to tell me what happened?”

“If you want to tell my father, tell my father.”

“I won’t tell your father.”

I stare at her and my eyes start to cry, which is very odd since my insides are stone-cold concrete and do not care about one single thing.

“You want to talk, honey? You want to tell me?” I nod, my throat gulping like a bullfrog.

It is midnight and I am not even faintly tired. I am sitting at the window in my desk chair, wide awake and looking out at nothing. If I were a man I would go out right now and get a big bottle of whiskey and sit in a chair with my legs stuck out straight and get good and stinking drunk. I sigh, lean forward, put my elbows on the windowsill. There’s a little draft leaking through, the cold feels good against my face.

Ginger was so nice. It seemed for awhile like her heart was breaking right with mine. But then she said there would be others. And she said you never know, you just never know when you will meet them. She said that the men she had cared most for in her life, why, it had been an accident that she met them. One she met taking out the garbage! At first I thought she meant she’d loved a garbage man, which I guess is fine, but she said, Oh no Stanley was walking his dog and I was taking out the garbage. What happened to Stanley I asked and she said, Well it just didn’t work out, which I guess means he dumped her. She said you wait, you’ll see, there is not just one person in the world to love, it would be terrible if that were true. I did not nod yes. I just don’t know. Life is full of surprises, Ginger said. That’s what makes it fun.

I hear a yowling noise and see a cat at the door of Greg and Marsha’s house. I didn’t know they had a cat.
I think, well, there is a surprise right there. Maybe this is a sign that she’s right.

I am sitting in my room, ready for date number two. Double date number two. This time, Taylor and the boys are coming to the house to pick me up. It is Michael again, so I did not make him puke so bad after all and Taylor has told him none of that attack stuff anymore. We are going to eat. I don’t really know why you make a whole date out of eating, but everyone does. We are going to a place called Steak and Shake. You get the onion rings and the steak burger. It’s a hangout for kids who go to schools other than mine. Better kids, Taylor said. I got my makeup on just right, probably because I don’t really care how it goes on, this evening is not that.

The doorbell rings, and I go out into the living room, introduce everyone. My father is not so bad. Not that he smiles or anything, but when Michael calls him Mr. he does not say,
“Colonel.”
But I know he is thinking it. You can tell by the way he feels his keys in his pocket that he is holding his rearing self back. “Be home on time,” he tells me.

“I know.”

“Have her back here on time,” he tells Michael.

Well, what does he think, we are deaf?

“Hey,” Taylor says. “Why don’t
you
come?”

My father looks at her, smiles, shuts the door. She
has a power, Taylor. She can snip the line, just like that.

Well, this is it. The end of Taylor and me, because I cannot trust her. We are all of us in a dark place with no houses around. I would say we are not here to play canasta. No, we are parking. We have forty minutes before I have to be home. What better thing to do than to park? is what these three are thinking.

“There was a young lady named Sinn,” John says.

“Shut up, John,” Taylor says.

“Who said ‘Let us do it again,’” he continues.

“Shut
up!”
Taylor looks quick at me, then back at him.

“‘And again, and again, and again and again—’”

“Fuck you,” she says, and her head goes below the seat with his.

I look out the window, see my own eyeliner face looking back. I have chosen door number one and the audience is saying “Awwwwwww!” Yes, this is the end of Taylor and me.

Michael puts his hand on my shoulder. I kiss him for something to do.

In awhile, he starts touching me again. “No,” I say.

“All right, little girl,” he whispers. “I won’t touch you. Why don’t you touch me.”

I swear I can feel my dinner rising in my throat.

“Here,” he says. “It’s nice.” And he takes my hand
and he puts it down his pants to a pile of weird flesh like the insides of a chicken. I yank my hand out and use it to slap him. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care.

I am back at the pond because it was my place first and it still belongs to me. And it still is a soothing place, beautiful and safe, not saying anything about anything.

The water is dark blue and cold-looking, ice only in rare spots at the edges. I look up at the Mobil station only once, to see if he is looking, which he is not.

I use a stick to dig a hole in the earth, think, this is where the sadness goes. I dig it as deep as I can, then cover it up. I wave my hand over it, a slow circle. When I stand up, I check to see if it worked. Nope. My whole self is still heavy.

I bring the stick back with me, use it to touch various things along the way. Magic. “There,” I whisper in my fairy voice to a fence post, a street sign. “There!” It is odd how when you feel like you have nothing, you can act like you have everything.

I
am at Nona’s funeral, sitting by Cynthia. I didn’t want to come, but it must be the height of rudeness to say no to an invitation like that. “Will you come to my grandmother’s funeral?” “Oh, sorry, I’m going bowling.”

Mrs. O’Connell is actually quiet. She nodded at me when my father dropped me off at their house and that is it. She said nothing in the car on the way over. She is wearing a black outfit and a hat with a black veil. You can see diamond-shaped pieces of her grieving face. This is the first time I’ve met Cynthia’s father. He looks jolly, like he works in a candy store, but he doesn’t, he’s a banker.

Cynthia has not cried, but she is so pale I’m afraid she’s going to faint. Nona is the star of the show, of course, lying up there in the open coffin, a rosary wrapped around her hands. It’s a pearly pink rosary with a gold crucifix, very pretty. I knelt by her when it was my turn in the reception line before the service started, and she looked so real. She looked like she was breathing, but of course that always happens, it’s just
your own self moving and you transfer it over. Even looking at Nona lying in a coffin, I couldn’t believe such a fiery person was dead. They put makeup on her and did her hair puffed up. She looks real, but she doesn’t look normal. They should have buried her in an apron, surrounded her with spaghetti and tomatoes and garlic. Like the Egyptians, send her off with what she loves. I’ll tell you one thing, I never saw Nona with a rosary in her hands. I told Cynthia that and she said yes but Nona was very religious, she used to be the president of the Santa Lucia Society. “She kept the banner in her room for a long time,” Cynthia said. “It had a picture of St. Lucy with her eyes plucked out.”

“Why?”
I asked. I couldn’t believe it. Why would someone make a whole banner out of something like that. “Oh, Mrs. Whatever, your daughter has had her eyes plucked out!” “Oh no, well, let’s make a banner out of it!” Cynthia said St. Lucy’s eyes got plucked out because she was a virgin martyr. I have no idea what that means. Those Catholics have strange stories and they love those pictures that make you practically puke. Jesus with His heart all stuck out, for one. And nailed up on the cross, dribbles of blood running down so sickening you can hardly even feel sorry for Him. As if His mother, who was right there, wouldn’t have wiped it off.