Look at me: (2 page)

Grace visited that night, pulling a chair between the twin beds where Mary Cunningham and I were ensconced as usual, watching
NYPD Blue.
When a man was pummeled in a restroom, his face beaten bloody, Grace covered her eyes and begged me to change the channel. “You change it,” I retorted. “I’m the invalid.”

“Sorry,” she said, going sheepishly to the TV—apparently one of the last in the world to be controlled manually. “I shouldn’t be the one crying.”

“You’re crying for both of us,” I said.

“It just seems bizarre that you would come to Rockford without telling me,” she fretted, flipping channels. She’d said this a dozen times, apparently in the belief that, had she but known I was on my way, I would have arrived without incident. And much as I disliked this line of questioning (or any line of questioning, for that matter), I vastly preferred it to the topic Grace didn’t dare broach: What would I look like when all this was done? And what would become of me?

“I wanted to surprise you,” I said.

“My, and you still don’t remember what happened!” Mary Cunningham marveled. “Was it an animal in the road, dear, or were you feeling sleepy? Could you have dropped off at the wheel for a minute?”

“I don’t remember. I don’t remember,” I said. For some reason, I covered my ears.

“Her memory’s always been lousy,” Grace said.

It was true—my memory was lousy, and Rockford was the place I remembered least. And yet the boredom and stasis of my present circumstances were driving me to retrospect in the desultory way that a person cooped up in an old house will eventually make her way to the attic and upend a few boxes. In moments, I found myself drenched in early childhood impressions of Rockford: a lush, sensuous world of sticky green lawns and violent thunderstorms, mountains of glittering snow in winter. In early adolescence, I’d done a school report on Rockford’s industrial achievements, reading at the public library about a self-tying attachment for grain binders, a knitting machine that made seamless socks, the oil-lubricated “universal joint,” whose purpose I’ve forgotten; the “side by side,” a bookcase-and-desk combination; about lathes, reapers and their component parts. I remembered reading in a state of keen anticipation, awaiting the moment when Rockford would burst forth in triumph, the envy of the industrial world. I sensed this glory approaching with the invention of cars, for eleven Rockford companies had designed them, and one, the Tarkington Motor Company, built a prototype that was warmly received at an auto show in Chicago in the twenties. But no—the investors backed out, the car was never produced, and with this failure, my excitement began to congeal into something heavier. There was to be no limelight; Rockford remained a city known for its drills, transmissions, joints, saws, watertight seals, adjustable door bumpers, spark plugs, gaskets—“automobile sundries,” as such products are known—and for its agricultural tools; in short, for dull, invisible things that no one in the world would ever know or care about.

After two days of reading, I had tottered from the library into the empty husk of “downtown,” across the river from our house, nearly all of whose commerce had been leached away by malls far to the east of the river, out by the interstate. My mother beeped her horn from the parking lot across the street. But I held still for a minute, clutching my bookbag, letting the smallness and meagerness of this forgotten place pour in around me. Rockford, I now saw, was a city of losers, a place that had never come close to being famous for anything, despite the fact that again and again it had tried. A place revered among mechanics for its universal joint was not a place where I could remain. This was clear to me at age twelve: my first clear notion of myself. I was
not
Rockford—I was its opposite, whatever that might be. I decided this while standing in front of the public library. Then I crossed the street and got in my mother’s car.

Our father owned a wholesale electrical supply company; he was a man who could push through walls to the hidden circuitry behind, who braided wires between his fingers and made the lights turn on. As a child, I had ascribed magical powers to his work, and arrayed myself in necklaces he made me from bolts and washers and colored wire. But after the library, I began to imagine a perspective from which my father’s life—and my mother’s, too—were small, earnest, and futile, too deeply touched by this place where they both had spent their lives. I grew up waiting to leave. And Grace grew up cleaving to me, knowing that I would go and she would stay.

Now here I was, back in Rockford, fighting with my sister over who should change the TV channel, my head full of titanium bolts and screws invented here, for all I knew. I found this funny in a dark way, one of life’s little ironies.

“The girls are dying to see you,” Grace said, reviving our ongoing debate over my nieces. “Please let me bring them.”

“They
think
they want to see me,” I said.

“Charlotte, get over it,” she said, and pressed my hand. “They love you so much!”

“Not yet.”

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see Allison and Pammy. In fact I hungered to snuff their mussed-up hair and feel them bump against me the way kids do without thinking. But to them, I was Glamorous Aunt Charlotte, the fashion model whom they sometimes found grinning, hand on hip, inside catalogues that arrived on their doorsteps unwanted (for that was the level I’d sunk to) or wandering through the background of a Tam-pax commercial. That was me hawking deodorant on the Coney Island Cyclone (“Now this. Is stress.”); that was me in waders, wielding a fishing rod and declaiming the merits of antifungal foot powder. That pixie-faced brunette sprawled atop a Buick as if she’d fallen from a tree? The one in glasses, blushingly recounting the trauma of passing gas during a board meeting? Urging fortified granola on her freckled son? Those were me, too. It was far short of the transcendent existence I once had envisioned. But to my young nieces, I embodied a mythical ascension.

I would let them believe in me in peace, I told myself, unencumbered by my present grotesqueness. I was ashamed to be seen.

One afternoon, I walked to the Cedar Bluffs Cemetery and parked my rear end on a gravestone that was as near as I could recall to the spot where I used to sit with Ellen Metcalf. I lit up a Merit, my first since the accident, thus flouting Dr. Fabermann’s warning that smoking impeded the healing of bone. Before dinner and after, too, sometimes, Ellen and I would lean against these stones among the legions of dead Swedes, Olsens, Lofgrens, Larsens, Swensons like myself, and smoke Kools, which we believed were a cure for the summer heat. We talked about losing our virginity—not losing it, though, with all the haplessness that word implied, but yielding it up in a blaze of ecstasy that would leave us permanently altered.

I tried to recall the sound of Ellen’s voice. I couldn’t, as if she’d been an imaginary friend, a projected figment of myself. Once, we had walked from East High School all the way to the pharmacy beside the Piggly Wiggly, then stopped before the section of plastic children’s toys. Only to find, as we looked at each other inquiringly, that neither one of us knew what we were doing there; we had each been following the other.

After my next doctor’s visit, I asked Grace to drive past East High School. A rather grand building, it seemed to me now, large and mustard-tinted, hundreds of canted windows juggling the sunlight. As I stood before its broad, empty steps, I had another jab of memory: seeing Ellen Metcalf for the first time outside that school, an olive-skinned girl with long black hair. Watching her there, exotic, alone, and wanting to become her—the feeling sprang from my fingers to my throat. Later, Ellen said, of spotting me that day, “I could tell you didn’t belong here.” The highest compliment.

Her father owned a large fertilizer business, and her mother was a quasi-invalid, cloistered in a darkened master bedroom, consumed by some malady whose exact nature no one seemed sure of. They lived in a copious house just a few blocks from my own much smaller one. Ellen existed in a state of lonely hauteur, like the last surviving member of a royal family; her brother, Moose, had departed the previous year for the University of Michigan. I knew about Moose. He was one of those high school boys whose athletic and romantic feats inspire the teenage equivalent of epic poetry, recited longingly in their absence. I had encountered him once, briefly, thrillingly, on a summer afternoon when I was practicing my golf swing on our front lawn and nicked a sprinkler head, sending a geyser of water into a red Mustang convertible that happened to be driving past. The driver got out, shaking water from his longish hair: an older boy, tanned in a spotless white T-shirt, ambling over the grass like a person who had never hurried in his life. As I stammered my apologies, struggling to tamp the foaming crescendo of water with my foot, he scanned our yard and said, “Handle’s where, behind that hedge? Turn it off and I’ll take a look.”

By the time I’d returned from that errand, he had removed the sprinkler head and was rattling its rusted parts in his hand like dice. His absorption allowed me to study him; a charmed, confident boy whose appeal was compounded, somehow, by the Neanderthal cast of his head. Twenty minutes later he had repaired the sprinkler, sauntered back to his car and driven away with a wave, and it was only then that an older girl from across the street stampeded over to tell me, breathlessly, in whose rarefied presence I had found myself.

But Moose was gone. Ellen was alone, marooned in a place that felt as bankrupt to her as it did to me. Everything good was gone from this crummy city, this home of reapers and ball bearings, and there was nothing for it but to plunder what few excitements remained. We talked about our lust—where exactly it resided within us; our stomachs, we thought, though Ellen said she felt it, too, in the back of her mouth.

By October, Dr. Pine had removed the last vestiges of plaster from my body. As Mary Cunningham raked her yard, I trailed behind her with a tube of green poison whose proboscis I shoved into the eye of each weed I spied, and pumped. Rockford was in the grip of a mania for jack-o’-lantern leaf bags; at least one grinning orange sack squatted on every lawn, fat with leaves. Stalking weeds, I tried to recall each one of my sexual quarries that sophomore year with Ellen. Jeff Heinz: a shy and statuesque football-playing senior, the sheer grace of whose movements set him apart from the sludge of players on the field. Jeff and I were in chemistry together, and I managed to insinuate my way into the role of lab partner, standing close, brushing his wrist as we puzzled over beakers full of colored liquid. Nothing. Meanwhile, Ellen had a boyfriend, Michael Ippen, with whom she expected to do it shortly. So I relinquished Jeff Heinz, who proceeded on to Brown University (an unusual step for a Rockford boy), whence filtered back the electrifying news, a year or two later, that he was a fairy. I would have loved to snicker over that one with Ellen, but by then we were no longer speaking.

Benji Gustafsen: blond, sweet, rippled muscles on his belly, the whole of whose intelligence, it seemed, was compressed into a knack for restoring small antique appliances: can openers, toaster ovens, vacuum cleaners. This was a boon for Benji’s friends and neighbors; less so for anyone trying to hold a conversation with him. But conversation wasn’t my goal, either, and I lost my virginity to Benji in his squalid basement workroom only two days after Ellen lost hers to Michael Ippen on his older brother’s squishy bed.

We brushed snow from our respective gravestones and perched in the early dark, down parkas pulled tight around us, looking west toward the lights of the expressway that snaked alongside the Rock River.

“The bed had a scratchy blanket on it,” Ellen remarked.

“There were tons of McDonald’s wrappers on the floor,” I said. “It smelled like catsup.”

“Did it hurt?”

“Killed. Plus I bled.”

“With all the catsup around,” she said, “he probably didn’t notice.”

We passed our last Kool back and forth. Ellen slipped off the gravestone and lay on her back in the snow.

“Doesn’t that freeze your head?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said, “but the stars.”

I lay down beside her. She was right, the stars. After I’d done it with Benji, an awful sensation had come open in me—who was this guy, stretching like a dog so his spine cracked? But then I’d thought of Ellen, telling it to her, strategizing, and the feeling had melted into a kind of sweetness.

Marcus Sealander: a tattooed motorcyclist whose menacing black leather vest concealed, of all things, a potbelly. We did it standing up. Marcus had a nasty habit of shoving my shoulders against the wall as if it excited him to think of snapping my spine, so he got no second chance. Meanwhile, Ellen did it twice with Luis Guasto, a strange boy who’d pasted hundreds of beer cans to the walls of his parents’ rec room with a glue gun. They did it downstairs, among the cans, and the first time Ellen thought she might almost, just barely feel something, but then Louis rolled off her and moments later was in the bathroom pissing loudly, so that was that. The second time was even worse—over in four minutes flat.

Tom Ashlock. Lenny Bergstrom. Arthur Blixt. Stephen Finn. By spring we were sluts, sirens, alarming to girls and boys alike as we scoured in vain for someone to satisfy us. When Moose came home at Christmas, Ellen abandoned me for his sacred compass; a brutal disappointment, since I’d counted on being included. For three lonely weeks I hardly saw her. Moose’s departure left her listless, but soon the alchemy of our union was back at work, plotting our rescue from the crushing banality that surrounded us like those shrinking rooms full of water from which TV heroes must escape. The streets, the sky, the lousy moon. What was wrong with these boys?

Boys. We rolled onto our sides, staring at each other amidst the gravestones. The snow had melted, exposing a papier-mâché of last year’s soggy leaves. A revelation was upon us: the problem was boys—too young, too inexperienced to make us feel what we longed and deserved to feel, whereas men, with their years of practice—men would know exactly what to do! And finding men wouldn’t be so hard; Mr. Polhill, Ellen’s driver’s ed teacher, was constantly leaning over her desk and sniffing her hair, and as for me … how old did he have to be?