Flyover States, page 5
Center Campus, though, is truly beautiful, and allergies aside, May is almost reason enough for moving to the Midwest. Beneath the rows of dogwoods, students who’ve stayed on during summer lounge on blankets, reading for pleasure or just chatting and holding hands in G-rated displays of puppy love. Indiana is utterly different from the East Coast in that the land is flat and the sky is large. I’d never seen landscapes that made me feel so tiny. Skyscrapers have the opposite effect on me. While I might feel small standing next to the Empire State Building, it’s very human and mechanized. Driving through Indiana, certain parts, it’s like people might never have even existed. I like that.
Fifteen minutes later than we’d arranged, Zach arrives. If I didn’t already know Zach, I might almost say that he looks debonair. He has on a nice pair of khaki pants and a crisp, white button-down shirt with a pair of snazzy loafers to pull it all together. I have on a conservative sundress, white with bright red flowers: breezy but with knees and arms securely covered, a frightening match for my clammy white skin and bloodshot eyes.
“You look like someone’s mom,” Zach says.
He sits down beside me on the bench outside the building we’re teaching in, a little too close but I’m not in the mood to make a federal case about it.
“Right,” I say. “That mom who was screwing the lawnboy and getting tanked enough to smile at her husband when he came home from work.”
Zach shakes his head. “The good kind of mom. MILF.”
“MILF?”
“Don’t you even listen to the kids you teach? Mom I’d like to foooornicate with, as is the common parlance.”
“Believe it or not,” I say, “I avoid the frat parties that might make one fluent in drunken-date-rapist, but glad to hear that you’re keeping up. I’ll be sure to call if I ever need a translator.”
“Doris,” Zach says intently. “Lighten up.”
“Zach,” I say. “Could you please speak softly.”
He opens a sack from McDonald’s and pulls out a hamburger and at least twelve packets of ketchup, which he opens in record speed, dousing the burger beyond recognition.
“Rough night?”
“You’ve noooo idea.”
“Dunno,” he says. “I’ve seen you around a box of wine. You get that glazed euphoric look in your eyes.”
He’s trudging straight onto a minefield of things I don’t want to talk about.
“I thought maybe you could do the introduction part,” I say, cleverly changing the subject. “Maybe lead the class in a getting-to-know-you activity after I’ve gone over the syllabus.”
Zach nods his head. I wait for him to finish the bite he’s working on, but he opens his mouth and squirts one of the last remaining ketchup pouches directly down his throat.
“Oh, God,” I say. “That is so completely disgusting. How can you even taste the burger? You might as well just order a bag full of ketchup. You could lick it off a napkin for as much of the food as you’re getting.”
Zach shakes his head. “I’ve tried. No ketchup without an actual order.”
“Vile. Just vile.”
Zach leans in closer.
“And to think, once upon a time, you let this very same…”
“Do not even go there before I have to teach. I do not need my students thinking that I’ve got some weird sexual vibe with their tutor, or that I have some weird sexual vibe with any human being walking this planet, for that matter.”
“Not even Luis?”
At that moment, I cannot say for sure, but I am ninety percent positive that my face goes utterly red. I feel a flush of heat rise and wash over my chest and throat.
“What do you mean?” I ask, measuring every word.
“I just heard that things were getting hot and heavy in the poetry workshop. I mean, everyone knows about the blow-job-in-his-backyard thing, some townie from ages past. I thought he’d crossed over for good, for sure. But word on the street is that he’s got his eye on our little Donna Reed.”
“I do not like Luis,” I lie. “And even if I did, that blow job is strictly hearsay. And I do not look like Donna Reed.”
Zach raises an eyebrow.
“Okay, maybe a little bit—if she had jet-black hair and carried around Kant instead of cookbooks.”
“She’s the original MILF.”
“And you’re the original PIMA—Pain in My Arse.”
Again with the head-shaking.
“C’mon, Doris,” he says. “You’re a poet. You can do better than that.”
Before I can launch into a self-righteous, self-defensive rant that would probably, ultimately, get me absolutely nowhere, Mandy shows up in (again) all but the same outfit that Zach is wearing. She has her hair back in barrettes and looks young enough to be an undergraduate herself.
“Hey, babe,” Zach says. “You ready for me to come by later this afternoon? Doris and I are just hashing out the next two hours for her class. I’ll have a half hour between to get to yours. We could get coffee.”
And I’m thinking that it’s odd for Zach to be calling Mandy “babe,” and that he’s being awfully nice in an awfully non-Zach kind of way, when he stands up and gives Mandy a light kiss on the lips. A sweet but decidedly heterosexual kiss, and then he smoothes his hand down the back of her hair.
“Okay,” Mandy says.
I am speechless.
“C’mon,” Zach says to me. “Duty calls.”
I cannot tell him how totally depressing it feels to know that even the lesbians now have boyfriends.
Bowling and lonely, misguided women do not mix. Thursday night, Ronnie and I meet up at Winchester Lanes, an alley about a mile north of Langsdale that sponsors “midnight bowling” on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I have on white socks and a white shirt, all of which glow an eerie iridescent green beneath the fake moon and stars plastered across the walls of the bowling alley. Blue jeans cuffed at the ankles for a 1950s date-night vibe, minus the date. Paolo is meeting us later, since he refuses to wear bowling shoes and refers to Winchester Lanes as one of the many “townie” places that Ronnie and I have “normalized” since moving to Langsdale. There are a lot of pickups in the parking lot, and a statistically high number of mullets per male, but Ronnie and I have never been bothered. We bowl under fake names, “Ruby” for me and “Magnolia” for Ronnie. Since I learned bowling from watching The Flintstones and Ronnie played at maybe two birthday parties when she was a kid, we nurse our Mountain Dews and consider ourselves regular aces when we break a hundred on our scores.
“How’s teaching?” Ronnie asks. She’s poised to pick up a spare, holding a marbled-purple bowling ball in front of her face and concentrating on the two remaining pins.
“Good,” I say. “For the first week.”
Week one of teaching went fair-to-well. In terms of exotic subjects, I have a farm boy named Will who has yet to say a word, just glares at the rest of the classroom like he’s waiting to get assigned to his real classroom. I also have our one Iraqi student, Ali, who after a mere three years in the United States already has a better command of English grammar than most of the kids who went through Indiana public schools. There are three young women, Linda, Tina and Sharelle, who come to class dressed so well they make us all feel ashamed. Tina is my current favorite, as she’s this sweet, sweet girl whose family is originally from Peru who looks as if she’d never say a bad word about anyone: all dimples and big smiles, yet she wears shirts that say things like “Fallen Angel,” and “I want your BOYFRIEND.” And then there’s Claus, a large black kid who looks like a M-A-N, wants to be a pediatrician, and is of the disposition that if I say the sky is blue, he’ll look out the window and say, “That’s your opinion.”
Ronnie’s beating me by seven, and our scores are an abysmal twenty-five to thirty-two going into the fifth frame. I cross my right leg behind my left, wind up the ball and launch it gracefully into the gutter.
“Nice,” I hear from behind me. “Good form. You look like you’re getting ready to do a cartwheel, not hit some pins.”
I turn to face Chris, grinning a Day-Glo smile, dressed in a baby-blue bowling shirt that reads “Herman’s Hampsters” and cutoff jeans. His right sock glows brighter than his left, and he’s trying not to laugh at Ronnie’s and my scores.
“‘Ruby’ and ‘Magnolia’?” he says. “I hope they’re in the bathroom, because if those are your scores, you ladies need help. Which of you is next?”
“Me,” Ronnie says. Chris moves up beside her, and I watch him take Ronnie’s arm and move it back into a perfect arc. When he moves, his shirt unbuttons, and I see a hint of his stomach. His skin is lightly tanned and there’s a trail of blond hairs leading to his belly button. It’s all I can do not to reach out and touch it.
“Damn,” Ronnie says, watching the bowling ball clear out every one of her pins. “Strike.”
Chris looks around, glancing in the direction of four other computer geeks (his team, I’m guessing) in baby-blue bowling shirts, then pulls up a chair beside us.
“So what are you ladies doing here? Doesn’t seem like your style.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask.
Chris points at Ronnie and then at me, making the sort of face I associate with watching really bad television in groups.
“I see you ladies sitting outside the ice-cream shop. You watch everyone walk by and tear ’em to shreds. This isn’t even real ice cream. The ice cream in New York City is made by Gucci cows. The cows in L.A. are tough enough to milk themselves.”
“What’s the matter with the cows out here anyhow?” Ronnie asks.
Chris laughs.
“Yet here we are,” I say, attempting to assure Chris of my commitment to non-regionally-biased sexual activity. “Having a great time with you, at this fabulous recreational activity in Langsdale, Indiana. And it’s a beautiful evening, and bowling is bowling wherever you go.”
“Truly,” Ronnie says. “We’d play just as bad in L.A. or New York.”
“You’ve got us completely wrong. All of Ronnie’s boyfriends hang out here.”
Ronnie gives Chris a big smile and playful series of nods.
“Bring me my Billy Ray,” Ronnie says. The great thing is, she’s serious. In addition to black men and Italians, the move to Langsdale revealed Ronnie’s true penchant for homegrown made-in-Indiana menfolk. We call all of Ronnie’s potential Langsdale boyfriends Billy Ray after she admitted to thinking Billy Ray Cyrus was cute: tight jeans, mullet and all. There are always locals aplenty at Winchester Lanes, making sure that John Cougar Mellencamp loops an infinite repeat on the jukebox, with the occasional Lynyrd Skynyrd or Tom Petty interlude. Ronnie says the Billy Rays can look country, but can’t look mean—like they long for the days when the States were Confederate.
“Speaking of Billy Rays,” I say, picking up my bowling ball and concentrating hard on hitting at least six pins. “I have an actual student named Claus this summer, and it’s not even some Teutonic homage to white supremacy. He’s this huge black kid who, I am positive for sure, does not think that I have the sense God gave an ant.”
“And why would he think that?” Ronnie asks, holding her Mountain Dew like it’s some chichi martini. “Did you make the mistake of telling them about your shoe collection?”
“Not even,” I say, backing up and positioning myself for an effortless strike. “It burns me to no end. If I give an answer to some kind of question, he’ll literally turn around, just crane his head in the direction of Zach to see what he thinks. I loathe it. Zach. A manifest moron in at least half his daily life.”
“Damn,” Chris says. “Wouldn’t want to be Zach. Man can’t catch a break with you two.”
“You don’t know Zach.”
Chris moves in beside me, takes my arm and holds my wrist in his one hand, the bowling ball in his other. His hands are warm, and his breath smells faintly of alcohol.
“Doris,” he says. “Tell me this is not how you hold the bowling ball.”
“What do you mean?”
I have my thumb in the big hole, and my index and middle fingers in the two smaller holes, with my remaining two fingers curled underneath the edge of my fist.
“You’ll kill yourself like that,” he says, removing my index finger, moving my middle finger down, and placing the finger next to my pinkie into the last hole instead. “Feel better?”
I hold the ball close. It feels lighter, more secure. I’m not even going to tell Chris how many nails I’ve broken bowling in my usual style. Something tells me he wouldn’t sympathize. When I finally let the ball roll, all but one pin goes down.
“Brilliant,” I say. “This is genius.”
“Not genius,” Chris says. “Normal. That’s how normal folks bowl.”
“You two can figure out what’s normal at Winchester Lanes,” Ronnie says. “Time for me to move on over and see what’s playing at the jukebox, if you know what I mean.”
Although I cannot see his face, there’s a promising Billy Ray in tight jeans with curly brown hair hanging over the back of his collar and a torso thick as a tree trunk, leaning hard against the jukebox and puzzling over the song selection like it’s page one of Finnegan’s Wake.
“I do indeed,” I say.
Chris rolls his eyes as Ronnie stands up, adjusts her shirt and jingles her coins at us like they’re dice, before heading over.
“You ladies are trouble.”
“Uh-uh. We’re just angels in disguise.”
Unfortunately, Paolo arrives at exactly this moment. He’s highlighted the tips of his hair a golden-blond, and looks fabulous, as always, in a tight black T-shirt and perfectly fitting jeans. I give him a kiss, exaggerating my happy-happy at seeing him, to prove to Chris that I am, indeed, a fabulous and generous babe with loads of friends of every kind who looooove to hang out with me.
“What’s with you,” Paolo asks. “They discount the Prozac?”
Chris laughs. Paolo gives him the once-over, up-down-back-again—face utterly neutral.
“This is Chris,” I say to Paolo. “He translates computer wizardry into dumb-English-major.”
“Great,” Paolo says. “Maybe next you can help her stop translating gay Chilean into straight boyfriend.”
I smack him, harder than I should.
“Easy,” Paolo says. “Kidding.”
“Doris is all right,” Chris offers. He stands up and taps playfully on my back. “We’re hard on the gal, but only because she needs a little breaking in.”
“That tickles.”
“Habit,” he says. “I used to do that to my brother every night. He had cystic fibrosis.”
Paolo’s eyes widen sympathetically.
“I’m so sorry,” I say.
Chris shrugs.
“Sometimes I do the tap-tap thing without even thinking about it. It’s like muscle memory. Like I’ll sometimes play scales or ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ on the computer keyboard. Won’t even notice.”
Paolo looks as if he wants to say something, but Chris makes a noise like “aaahck,” to signify it’s game over, don’t want to talk about it with you, silly Gucci-cow lady and your silly gay boyfriend. His friends in the baby-blue shirts are motioning him down to their lane.
“Nice to meet ya,” he says to Paolo, and to me: “Later.”
HOWEVER—I distinctly felt the deft, computer-callused palm of his right hand grace the underexercised, overfed back of my derriere.
“He touched my ass,” I whisper.
“Maybe he confused it for a hard drive.”
“Oh, come on,” I say. “Don’t even try to homosexualize my last chance at a real boyfriend. And why on God’s green and beautiful earth did you bring up Luis? I don’t need my computer-lovah thinking I have some gay boyfriend. Which would be giving your suspicious mind too much credit, since I just got an e-mail from Luis about how he wants to have dinner tomorrow night.”
Paolo cringes.
“I cannot believe that you and Ronnie come here on purpose. Look at that, what is it, a moon? It’s peeling at the edges, and I’m not saying anything about anyone, but it smells a bit like pee in here, don’t you think?”
“Fine,” I say. “Don’t respond about Luis. But do you realize that there are lesbians in this town who are now getting recommended daily allowances of testosterone-based activity?”
“You mean Zach?” Paolo asks. “Sorry, doesn’t count.”
He crosses his arms defensively, like he might catch something from just sitting here.
“Billy Ray wants to take me to his cha-let in Tennessee,” Ronnie says, returning from the jukebox.
“And mail you back in pieces,” I warn.
“Cynical,” Paolo says. “And totally true.” He wags a no-no-no finger at Ronnie. “But maybe that’s your problem, Doris, the lesbians are keeping an open mind.”
That night, home, watching Letterman and plotting alternative lives that do not involve Freud, bowling, nor any form of sexually ambiguous human being, I realize that something terrible has happened with Chris. I have started to like him for real. Not just the performative “Hey, Paolo and Ronnie, isn’t it wacky that I like the computer guy,” nonsense, but a real live legitimate crush. Maybe it’s even more than I feel for Luis?
Women love to bitch about men. How there aren’t any good ones, or they’re all stupid, or some form of married/homosexual/cannibalistic-latent-serial-abuserof-small-animals. While I plead guilty-as-charged to engaging in such ranting, I must also say that when men claim women are crazy, they may have a point I could be proof positive of that. Let’s face it. No truly, deeply, committedly normal woman would even give Luis a second look. Gay or not gay, I’m convinced that he does face masks because every once in a while he’d come to class with little flecks of blue clay ground into the edges of his eyebrows. A serial abuser of women’s beauty products is not exactly my girlish dreams come to life. Add to that my “brief encounter” with Cushion Boy, the latter-day Jeffersonian, whom I tried to excuse to myself every second we dated. He’d talk about his neighborhood back home in Connecticut being “good,” when I knew in my heart he meant “white,” but convinced myself that he just meant “safe.” I tried to be polite about his jingoism and white shoes after Labor Day, but by the end of it, I was just fooling myself for the sake of having someone to believe in. And I wonder why I walk around confused, manwise, at any rate.
