Zodiac Pets, page 8
Leather chaps loosely fixed, Ms. Devlyn Pierce raised her shotgun and told me I had something else.
“A built-in, shock-proof, shit detector.”
BANG!
She lowered the shotgun and looked downrange. “That’s what Hemingway called it. Have you considered writing?”
“I don’t know. Isn’t it all made up?”
That seemed hardnosed but I was already a Nibblers addict and my diary overflowed with entries that hopped off like bunnies to the tall grass of make-believe.
She squinted down at me. “Think about it.”
“I will,” I promised, and I did.
But this spring I struggled with my college thesis about the Pennacook Dome scheme, and I wasn’t even sure I could finish. Lena Ko, my girlfriend, was all encouragement, and during spring break, she agreed to drive me down the long coast (the more dramatic one, for human variety) for my field research. Our first day took us from Worcester to Independence, Va. We tossed our bags in the tent-cabin and stepped outside, where Lena showed a great gift for filling me up with her love’s reassurance. (I’m evading with a five-syllabled euphemism; we are talking about a picnic table, pleasingly hard, on New River.) Then she took a walk.
The walk worried me. She did not like to take them alone. But I needed—wanted—to be alone myself, with the pen, and she let me.
Southern Virginia in late March is like Pennacook in May: warm and teeming. I wrote for three hours and then the sun dipped and the river roiled like melting gold. The bugs came. I grew hungry. Lena was our cook. Where was she?
I played calm. It was okay to. If I was that way, or could play like it, then I was more likely to find her than if I panicked. I ducked into the latrine. I circled back to the general store. She had been there for crackers (a good sign).
I jogged to the river and then up the path to a diving rock, where I scanned the rapids and calm pools for lumps. I went back. As I neared camp, I issued a direct order to all systems: Imagine Lena cooking. She will have backed the car up to the tent-cabin with the trunk open to get to our supplies. The gas grill will be out and she might even be done, and I will be the one who has some explaining to do.
She wasn’t there. I dashed downstream and heard a screech.
“Art bum! Get in the water!”
Lena was splashing like a kid. In her view, that’s what water is for.
I scanned for peepers, then stripped to join her. The coldness shocked me. It was too early to be doing this. The water had not caught up yet with the air and it was at the level where the bones ache. But I liked indulging Lena.
We met sophomore year, on a meaningless quintuple non-date to the movies. She happened to sit next to me, and it was a hot night in May and the air conditioner was busted, and she wore a plaid skirt and thin leather sandals that made her feet seem bare. The next time I saw her was months later, just before Christmas, at the Christian choral concert. She was in the choir. I went only to see her, perhaps to claim her. She was all in white. I watched her face and her thick lips moving. We locked eyes and she held me that way till the end. I used the excuse of our damaged brick sidewalk to take her arm by its crook and we walked to a room under the college bell tower where we drank red wine—tardily supplied by the Beaujolais Day Society—until, with the help of another girl, she hauled me back to her friend’s room for water.
The room was spinning so I lay on the bed. Lena stroked my forearm and in her trained, sweet voice said that at another friend’s urging she had applied to transfer to her dorm, which also happened to be mine.
“I’d like that,” I said, and that’s the last I remember of that night.
She said transfer but she meant move in. She lived with her family in Grafton Hill and hiked three-plus miles down grim commercial streets to classes. Senior year would be her first time on campus, which was somewhat rare: most of us lived in the dorms.
We must have said more that night because the next morning she showed up at my room in her swimsuit and flip-flops, goggles pressed back on her hair. Over this, she wore an unbuttoned parka with her arm raised and a towel folded neatly over it like a butler. There was something blunt and erotic about all this, even more so because she didn’t know it—I think.
“Where’s your stuff?” she asked.
“What stuff?”
“We’re going to the pool!”
I felt begged, as if I had promised (I may have).
“I can’t believe you trooped all the way from Grafton Hill in this getup,” I said as we crossed the highway footbridge.
Lena shrugged.
“That must hurt.”
“I don’t mind. I like walking.”
“Me, too. But what about blisters? Aren’t you frigid?”
I was establishing a compassionate but medicalized distance. I didn’t know how I felt about her yet.
We reached the gated athletic complex and worked our way to the pool for Free Swim. If I had asked Lena, I meant laps. That’s what you did in a college pool (or any pool, really, at our age). Lena’s frame of reference was different: day trips to Lake Quinsigamond with the Christian camp. All they did was splash and play. While I logged my half-mile, Lena lurked at one end of the pool like an anarchic water-troll. She seemed determined to disrupt me so that I’d join her in breath-holding, the “rocket,” something she called Water Sumo, and hand-squirt tricks. I didn’t. We tried Free Swim once more a week later and I gave up. She was water silly.
On the walk back to my dorm from the second pool trip, she told me about her film-studies documentary about her deconversion. She still admired and pitied Jesus the man but said she was done with the supernatural Jesus and with all versions of St. Paul the prig. This “freed” her, she added, and she held my eyes again. I suppose those smoldering looks will seem comically extended to some readers. My advice? Try it.
I knew then but still did nothing. It took the ethical strain of an autumn rager to match us. By then we were seniors and she had moved to my dorm. A boy was after me too that night. I danced with him but when I saw Lena, I cast him aside and clung to her. The boy peeled me off and we danced more in a wild way, and then I found Lena again and flew to her. Then the whole cycle repeated. Later the boy pinned me to the wall of this illogical back-alley part of the suite that our hosts used for plastic bowling. He had my wrists up against the wall and pressed in for a kiss. My friend Aaron Tenenbaum saw this and somehow knew it was wrong. He leapt in between us and tore me off and shoved me back to the party’s hot mass. “Go!” he shouted behind me. I searched out Lena, and we hurried off to her cramped hot room with the skylight. She stood at the end of her bed. I cradled her face with my hand and kissed her. It was a hard and impassioned kiss, which I modeled after George Emerson kissing Lucy Honeychurch in the fields above Florence in A Room with a View, a favorite scene from a favorite film.
Things aren’t the same between Lena and me anymore, but every time I think of our kiss (which is often) I hear Puccini. I suppose I always will.
Later that night in Independence, Va., we were lying in our pushed-together tent-cabin beds. We had showered and were toweled off, fed and fresh. She once more filled me up with her love’s reassurance and I rolled over to turn out the lamp. The sheets were cool, I thought, and then my mind roamed to that liminal world between wakefulness and sleep. Great-seeming ideas for my thesis bubbled up. I was too lazy to wake myself to write them down and let them die, telling myself they were so good that they’d come to mind again when I next touched those pages (they wouldn’t). My mind went on planning but the plans became absurd. I was touching up a scene—coincidentally, the one I just revised once more, where Graham rejects my story idea about Lion Diner—that morphed to me standing before Graham at the Resolute Desk. I was trying to ram our gun bill through Congress while President Bundt insisted that our only hope was to tie it to a manned Europa mission.
“We gotta crack that ice,” he said. “It could be whale cities down there!”
“But I want to focus on this.”
“Not now, cub.”
“Thank you for bringing me on this trip,” Lena said.
President Bundt dissolved.
“What?”
“It’s very hard sometimes to be home with my mother.”
Though she lived in the dorms now, she was often drafted home and held there for days.
“I know.”
“I don’t think you know how bad it is.”
I had an idea. Once I had borrowed my mother’s car for a Saturday trip to the region’s last Friendly’s, and when I was driving Lena home to visit her mom in Grafton Hill—as her father had demanded—we found her roaming in a lot. Plastic trash bags floated. She followed one, lost interest and drifted. I offered to pick her up but Lena said no, let her out: thanks for the partial ride, see you at brunch, good night. Lena had told me once that her mother blamed her for how her life turned out, though I don’t know how you blame someone for paranoid schizophrenia, and it seemed so illogical that I didn’t understand why Lena couldn’t just write it off. Another night not long after that, I rode with Lena in her own ambulance to Saint Vincent, because of how she’d been talking.
“It is nice to be out,” Lena said.
“Are you thinking about it?”
“Just ideations.”
“Which.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Then why’d you wake me up.”
“The station.”
“What station.”
“Union Station—the train. It’d be easy. You crouch in a nook and slip under. I shouldn’t say such horrible things. It’s sick.”
I liked to think that because she said it some pressure had been relieved and it wouldn’t happen. Though I wasn’t sure.
“Don’t do it. If you think you might, go to the ER. Call me, and I’ll find you. Then ask me what you should do. I’m good at telling people what to do. I think you know that.”
She made a smile.
“Just ask, ‘Wendy, should I do it?’ You have to agree to do what I say before I will answer you. Will you do that?”
“Yes.”
“The answer will be ‘no.’ No matter what happens to us.”
“Is something happening to us?”
“It doesn’t matter. No, let’s sleep.”
The next day, we ventured into town to dig up Delmore for his interview. On the way we passed a gas station that looked more closed than open and a barbecue restaurant whose literature said they were part of a chain you’d never heard of. It was emptier, in its way, than Pennacook.
I liked, though, the small, very Southern enterprises by the roadside. A guy was selling barbecue out of a charcoal grill in his yard, and the principles keeping me away from beef ribs collapsed at the sight. Lena and I delightedly indulged, lolling around after like sated cave dwellers, on a picnic blanket littered with sucked bones. For $50, a woman offered plane rides in the plane she sat next to in a beach chair. I didn’t trust her. Such details, fresh to me, belied snobs’ claims that Pennacook was “a little piece of Alabama” (or Mississippi or Virginia—take your pick) “right here in Massachusetts.” No, it was something else. Its own thing, just like Independence.
At first I thought our visit a bust. Delmore didn’t show up at Aunt Vera’s Bar-B-Que, our agreed meeting place. Rib-gorged, we were forced to eat the hushpuppies we’d ordered as a surprise for him (following my mother, I don’t waste, and neither does Lena). We tracked him to Food Town, where he was serving the first of two years as a clerk in the supermarket’s pharmacy to establish in-state residency for a pharmacy program. He was but one year ahead of me but seemed to have already entered middle age, or at least its steady glidepath.
“I know you’re back there.” I pounded the plexiglass.
“Listen, Wendy, I have some things I need to do here at my desk and I just think it would be easier if we do this from a professional distance.”
“We could have done that from Worcester.”
“Not my fault.”
“Look, I’m sorry I punched you in the nose in middle school. Really sorry. Not just because they made me say it.”
“Finally we talk.”
“But you were being a racist jerk.”
“I should’ve known better.”
Things loosened after that and he agreed to come out. It was the same small boy. He gave his angle on Graham and the Pennacook Dome, which was much like my own. He also talked of his home life. His parents had opposed his getting mixed up with the Beat. They called Graham unstable and said writing for his paper was a radical act that courted family trouble. All of this in a sense proved true.
“That place was a war zone. I have nightmares and it’s like I’m right back in it.”
“Pennacook?”
“Pennacook. My house. Everything. Even band. I wanted to get as far away from all that as I could. Did you know my dad joined MGOP? And he says I’m a radical.”
MGOP—Machine Gunners of Pennacook—was the local sportsmen’s club-cum-seething militia.
“It isn’t over.”
“It’ll never be. I still play, though. Right here, after work.” Registering my incomprehension, he added: “The piccolo?” He lifted the petite case, which he’d been holding all along.
The store was shutting down and a security guard stepped off the escalator and stomped toward us, passing stocker-bots that briefly dimmed in deference. He swayed and leaned like a hockey player readying a check, though with a machine gun instead of a stick. His eyes clouded as he folded his arms and planted his feet.
“Where y’all from.”
“They’re my friends.”
“Massachusetts.”
“Massatusits! I bin up there. Kennedys. Clams.”
“Please, Larry. We were talking.”
Larry nodded, all grins. “Roger, Mr. Hines. Far be it for me to chime in on a chin wag.”
“Or cut off a cordial,” Delmore said.
“Or interrupt an interlocution,” Lena added.
I was pleased to see Delmore carried weight and that Beat-style wordplay had gained some traction in Independence, even serving as a kind of social lubricant with Larry, who chuckled, gave us a long, slow scan, and marched away.
Delmore was alerted. “We don’t have a lot of Asians down here. People can stare. It’s like they’re all me in middle school.”
Except for the possible Asian-fetish component (some of the college boys have it so bad they think Yoda’s mouth is sexy) it wasn’t all that different from China, during the one trip I took to Shanghai as a girl. People stared without shame and reached out to caress me, saying “this child has foreign blood.” It was a familiar culture, almost like a family, at least on the surface (which is where I engaged with it). Maybe the South was like that, too, I thought, choosing to see Larry’s gaze in the best light—though I was grateful to Delmore for the genial push-off.
“By the way, I did sort of like you.”
“Often it is this way,” I said, thinking of all the misfiring boys.
He waited until Larry turned the corner, then unpacked his piccolo and played the “Navy Hymn.” It was more solemn than I remembered from the Pike Middle Band.
“It sounds like a lot of kids were sad in your town,” Lena said.
We were back on the highway. A night drive, headed south.
“It didn’t seem that way at the time,” I said (a half-truth). “We were heroes,” I added (there’s another).
Water in the Basement
The Beat wasn’t the only thing going in our middle-school lives. A week or so before I pitched Graham on my stories, I had purchased my ticket to the Pike Middle Dance, which was the social event of the year and had a strange pull on us all, even a spiny newcomer like me.
The ticketing itself held drama. Each homeroom had an elected student rep who served as exclusive vendor for the dance’s impressive tickets: firm, canary-yellow cards that cost $7 and quickly sold out. I bought mine from our rep, the Beat’s very own Denise Zywicki. Like most homeroom student reps, Denise had run unopposed, and her tenure was running out. And yet she had none of the sloth that one associates with lame-duck incumbency. I watched with approval her handling of the cards and cash and the careful way she recorded each transaction on her green ledger with a golf-pencil, then slid the form into the long manilla envelope and pressed the clasp shut at the end of every homeroom. She was the same way at the Beat: graceful and precise.
The source of the drama was this: I liked her. I wouldn’t call me lovesick, but in our terms, I like liked her, and I was fairly sure that she like liked me, too.
Mom paid for my dance ticket and threw me a blank check for the dress, but she didn’t see what all the fuss was about. I think my so-called lost potential was what irked Mom the most A.D.D. With my earlier passions dwindled, I was either doing nothing or spending too many hours on things she could not imagine brought me joy or had value. Honking my horn. Reading about rodent-pest clans. Tickets to child-dances. And now I had another to discuss: my assignment for Graham.
“How much do they pay you for this non-stop activity?”
“Nothing. I need five bucks.”
“For what?”
“Copies at the city clerk’s.” (Alas, my extended tour of Pennacook’s pu pu platters had drained the Beat’s petty cash.)
She snorted, but I knew I’d get it. What little we had meant nothing to her anymore, which scared and thrilled me.
“It’s for a piece I’m doing on water prices. I may not need all of it. Did you know the town’s for sale? I’m trying to cover that, too.”
