The Vast Fields of Ordinary (2 page)

“I’m going to start seeing a psychiatrist,” she said. “I just wanted everyone to know. It’s no one’s fault. I’m not blaming anyone. It’s just something I need to do.”

My father stopped chewing his veal cutlet for a few seconds and studied my mother’s face, maybe waiting to see if this was some sort of joke. My mother looked over at me and gave me as warm a smile as she could muster.

She said, “How’s the veal, honey? Is it good? Do you like it?”

The doctor prescribed her some pills, and over the next few months it seemed like she was refilling her prescription as often as the pool guy was stopping by. She’d spend hours on the sofa watching old movies on cable. Other times she’d lock herself in her meditation room with an expensive merlot and play Fleetwood Mac albums all day, “Everywhere” and “You Make Loving Fun” at hostage situation levels.

“Life is good at the capitalist compound,” she said one day on the phone to her sister in Phoenix. She was standing at the kitchen sink and looking out the window at our yard. “The garden’s in bloom, the sprinklers just kicked on, and the pool boy will be over any minute. Oh, and I just took a Klonopin. So yes, life is good. Life is very good.”

She started lying by the pool during the summers like some zoned-out starlet. She went unconscious in the sun and then murmured things that didn’t make any sense. At dinner she sometimes talked about adding on to the house, but suggestions like these always had an edge, like she was trying to spite her former self, the one that never wanted to move there in the first place. But soon her feelings about our new life faded, or at least moved beneath the surface of it all, and she and my father began to fight over stuff like why she bought Mountain Mist scented detergent instead of the Spring Breeze my father preferred and whether a lawn should be watered in the daylight or the dark.

My parents were always going on about wanting me to have a good work ethic, so we spent the day after my fifteenth birthday driving around and getting applications from every fast-food joint, movie theater, and grocery store in town.

“It’ll be good for you to make your own money,” my father said. “And when you get your first paycheck, I’ll take you down to the bank and we’ll open you your own checking account.”

I nodded and stared out the window at the passing strip malls and restaurants. I found the idea of work terrifying and depressing. I saw the way my father sometimes looked when he came home from the work at night. He’d shuffle into the kitchen with tired eyes and a loosened tie. He’d grab a beer from the refrigerator and lean against the counter as he downed it, as if each drop of beer went toward erasing his day and put something better in its place. Then there was me sitting at the kitchen table, eating potato chips and flipping through a music magazine, the idea of going to my room and downloading porn a vague notion in my mind as always.

“How was your day?” my father would ask me.

“Fine,” I’d say. “How was yours?”

“Oh, fine. Some private school girl threw a fit when her dad wouldn’t buy her the Mercedes she wanted and I thought I was going to have to call the cops, but other than that it was fine.”

I tried not to look at him as he finished his beer. Sometimes I’d get up and go out to the pool and leave him alone. Other times I’d put on my headphones, turn up the volume, and hope that the music leaking out of them would be enough to send him to another room.

My dad was a loner. It was one of the few things we had in common. He golfed alone, went to movies alone. He had colleagues at the dealership, people that could probably be considered friends, but he rarely associated with any of them outside of work. He stayed at the edges of parties, blank-faced and silent with a sweaty glass of scotch, but ready with a smile and a line about the weather whenever someone approached him. He was handsome enough, an ex-jock who’d somehow held on to his solid physique and unremarkable charm. You could tell that somewhere inside him was the genuine desire for a connection, something to pull him out of his self-imposed isolation, but the fishing trips and tennis games he suggested to other husbands always went unfilled in the end.

I ended up getting a part-time job at the Food World supermarket by the mall. I started out as a grocery bagger and by senior year I was working as a stock boy with my friend Pablo and a few other guys that went to my high school. We spent most of our time smoking cigarettes in the milk cooler and talking about how we were underpaid or pretending to be interested in the twins—Jessica and Fessica Montana—that worked in the video rental department.

The twins were a year younger than us in school. They were both just five feet tall, with chipmunk cheeks and wide blue eyes. Jessica had a smile so constant that after the senior play my father asked me if the girl who played Ophelia had some sort of personality disorder. She kept her hair dyed a sunny blond and enjoyed a status at our high school as one of the minions of Pablo’s hyperpopular girlfriend, Judy Lockhart.

Her fraternal sister, Fessica, wasn’t quite as pretty. Her real name was Francesca, but sometime during her time in the Cedarville Public School System some smartass had started calling her Fessica as joke and it stuck. She had a nose that reminded me of a deformed mushroom and a mouthful of blue braces (“They’re not blue. They’re sapphire.”). She always wore her dull brown hair in a ponytail and slouched through the aisles of Food World or the halls of Cedarville High as if she’d just been resurrected that morning and in her death haze had forgotten to shower. She wore what Pablo called “typical nerd gear,” stuff like really tight stonewashed jeans and T-shirts with airbrushed horses bucking dramatically across her chest. Pablo liked to stop by the video department where she worked and tell her how unusual her name was.

“What is it?” he’d ask. “French? Canadian? French-Canadian?”

“I’ve told you,” Fessica would reply. “Fessica is not my real name.”

“Well, Fessica is a very special name,” he’d say, taking her hand and bringing it to his mouth, “and you are a very special girl.”

Pablo’s family had moved to Cedarville from Arizona at the end of our freshman year. By junior year he was student council secretary and the Cedarville Warriors’ star quarterback. Girls tended to swoon over him. A few even lamely referred to him as the Sexican. He was six feet tall with skin the color of a dirty penny and hazel eyes that were the main focus of my jack-off fantasies. He was dark and broody, not at all like the other jocks that ran around tackling each other and screaming each other’s bizarre nicknames down the hall. I saw him in the halls at school and occasionally we passed each other in the aisles at Food World, but we didn’t become friends until driver’s ed class when we were paired up for a presentation on centrifugal force. We worked on the project all night and then smoked a joint in his bedroom while listening to the Mexican hip-hop he was obsessed with. We were stoned and spacing out on his bed when he reached over and started fondling my crotch. I was sixteen at the time, and I knew I wasn’t straight. I’d known that for a fact since I was ten and my babysitter Kendra Kaufman let me stay up late and watch
Night of 1,000 Werewolves
, one of Johnny Morgan’s first films.

“I want to marry Johnny Morgan,” I told her when the credits were rolling.

“Kid,” Kendra said, “don’t tell your parents I let you watch that movie, and
definitely
don’t tell them what you just told me.”

I always thought there was the distant possibility that I could maybe sleep with a girl, but I never found myself staring at them the way I stared at the guys running around the track at school or the shirtless models in my father’s issues of
GQ
. I practiced saying I was gay to inanimate objects around the house. I told the soap dish in my bathroom, the ceiling fan above my bed, the blue drinking glass I favored above all the others simply because over the years its entire family had perished one by one during various interactions with hard surfaces around the kitchen and I’d convinced myself our solitude was linked.

“I’m gay,” I told these things. “I’m a homo.”

I would then wait for the orphaned drinking glass to shatter, the ceiling fan to drop, or for the soap dish to let out a bloodcurdling scream. But nothing ever happened. The world went on as ever.

“We don’t tell anybody about this,” Pablo said when we were finished. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, slipping a worn green T-shirt over his head. “Especially not Judy.”

I never allowed myself to call him my boyfriend even in the silence of my own mind. Our sexual encounters always lasted less than five minutes and ended with him looking even more depressed and pissed off than usual. Afterward we’d lie there in silence and I’d wonder what would happen if I asked for something more even though I wasn’t exactly sure what more was. Despite it all, there were days when I entertained the idea of him and me somehow getting away from Cedarville and being together in some weird vacuum where the cigarettes I bummed him and the doors I held open were enough to make him love me.

I didn’t have many friends at school. I spent most of my time in my room writing and listening to music. I wrote weird little stories and poems, pieces where boys floated out the windows of their houses and hovered over their neighborhood. If I hung out with anyone, it was with Pablo and his jock buddies, but it was an unspoken rule between us all that if Pablo wasn’t around, then I shouldn’t be either. I was the odd man out, the one that was only spoken to when someone needed to copy my algebra homework or borrow a dollar for the pop machine. When they did speak to me, they always called me Dave to piss me off. Sometimes they made fun of me for wearing polyester pants and T-shirts I’d found at thrift stores around town. They told me my hair was too long, that I tossed it like a girl. I was never allowed to say anything because then I was the crybaby, the one who couldn’t take it, and that would only prove a terrible point. It all came to a head one day during lunch when Bert McGraw, one of the line-men for the Cedarville Warriors, was going on about how, Mr. Stone, the art teacher, had given him a D.

“That white-haired faggot,” Bert said. “What a frickin’ perv. I should go to Dugan’s office and tell him that his homo ass tried to fondle me in the darkroom.”

A series of caveman chuckles rippled up and down the lunch table, and Bert high-fived the player sitting to his right.

And then without thinking I said, “Mr. Stone is a decent guy. Go talk to him. He’ll figure out a way to help you raise your grade.”

Bert stopped chewing and dropped his shredded beef sandwich onto his plate.

“Who is this kid?” he asked the table like he’d never seen me before. His voice got louder as he spoke. “You think Mr. Stone is cool? You think that hippy piece of turd is cool? What, fag? Did you blow him after class or something?”

At this point, he was yelling. The lunchroom went from midday pandemonium to complete silence in five seconds flat. Everyone stared over at the table in the center of the Cedarville High lunchroom, stared at the table of blue-and-red-uniformed football players and the one outcast at the end in the brown plaid pants and the slim-cut cowboy shirt whose silver threading screamed queer louder than Bert’s booming apeman voice ever could. People at our school stopped everything to witness a good fight, and Bert McGraw raising his voice during lunch was a good sign that shit was about to go down. A few of the other players were red-faced trying to contain their laughter. One let out a sort of choking grunt of a laugh. Pablo glared at Bert from his place beside me.

“Are you a faggot, Dave?” His voice echoed throughout the cafeteria. “It’s what everyone wants to know. Let’s clear it up once and for all. Are you a homo, homo?”

His cheeks puffed with half-chewed bites of food. His eyes were crazed. Jessica Montana and Judy Lockhart and all the rest of the mall girls were craning their necks from a couple tables down. There were scattered whispers, muted giggles. Fessica stood up from the nerd table in the far corner of the lunchroom and stared. I looked down at my plate, at the undercooked fries and gray cottage cheese.