“Do you want to come?” I asked.
“Me? Run?” She shook her head. “I can’t run. I never learned.”
“Everyone can run. You don’t learn it.”
“So you say.”
I had found Mr. Carpenter in the phone book the night he kissed me. Carpenter, S. I had never called him and never gone by his house, but I’d looked it up on the internet and scrolled around and even looked at the satellite pictures, at his blurry roof. He lived in a cul-de-sac three miles away. I had his address written on a tiny piece of blue paper, which I’d tried to fold an infinite amount of times before stuffing into a pair of socks in my drawer.
Since it was so warm outside I got into my summer running clothes, shorts and my sports bra, and I put the tiny paper in my pocket, and I looked in the mirror, proud of my stomach, proud I was not my mother and able to run, and to prove the point I blasted down the stairs and out of the back door and through the yard and down the Parsons’ driveway and was three hundred yards from the house before she knew I was gone. I didn’t hate her so much as I hated the idea that I had to play any role in any story—the story of her and my father, the story of how she was old and I wasn’t. The story that made me need my biology teacher for whatever stupid thing I thought he had. It was anger, but I just wanted it to end, too. It would have been easier for him to have never done anything at all. Or to have been married. Or to have been successful. To have somehow been able to better take care of himself. He had just enough imagination to make great failure possible. I was what could make him work.
My hair got all kinked and curled after the first mile. I took the longest route I could think of, through all the neighborhoods, away from any of the bigger streets, away from downtown, as though it mattered whether or not I was seen, as though people, when they saw me, would know where I was going and what I planned to do based on gait.
Mr. Carpenter’s cul-de-sac was called Warren Way. I never needed my piece of paper. When I got to the intersection I stopped running and put my hands on my hips to catch my breath. I could see him.
He was outside, in his front yard, talking to a dark-haired guy who looked around the same age, both of them standing beside a pickup truck. Mr. Carpenter’s clown-car was pulled all the way up in front of the garage. I looked down at the ground and breathed hard.
When I looked up he was staring at me.
“Hey,” I said, and half-waved.
There was no way he could hear me from this far away. He motioned and I started walking over, hands still on my hips.
He was shaking the dark-haired guy’s hand when I got to the driveway. I heard the guy say, “Okay, peace my friend,” before he turned. He nodded at me and got into the truck.
“Courtney,” Mr. Carpenter said, watching his friend reverse away. Finally he turned to me, once the truck had left the driveway. “Running?”
“Not right now.”
“Right. Standing.”
“I can’t believe how hot it is,” I said. I thought maybe he would say something about the greenhouse effect.
He just said, “Yeah,” and put his hands in his pockets.
“Who was that guy?” I asked.
“A friend.”
“He said peace my friend.”
“Yes he did.”
“So weird.”
“Not really.”
“I thought you didn’t have any friends.”
“What?”
“You told me that.”
“Right,” he said.
“No, I know,” I said. “No one has no friends.”
“I think I said many.”
“No. You said any.”
This made him look at me and raise his eyebrows. He looked skinny, and I almost said, “Have you been eating?”
“So you want some water?” he asked. “You look like you just jumped in a lake.”
“I sweat a lot,” I said.
“I’ll get you some water.”
He walked up the stairs to his front porch and I followed him in without asking. He looked over his shoulder when he heard my footsteps, but he didn’t say anything, he just kept going. His house looked just like I would have expected it to look; in the living room there was a big wooden table with a hundred books on it and a laptop crammed into the one open spot. There were chairs here and there, but they didn’t look very well-used. I heard jam-band music. I smelled pot and kitty litter. There was no TV.
“Nice house.”
“I rent,” he said, continuing on into the kitchen. “Hey, why don’t you just wait out on the porch? You want any food or anything? I have some, ah, squid.”
“No,” I said. “I’m running.”
He disappeared into the other room. Outside I sat down on the porch-swing; I finally had stopped breathing hard. I leaned back and let myself sway, just a little. I could see a bucket full of suds and a sponge next to his car. I thought it was funny that he did everyday things.
“What’s all that stuff on your table?” I asked him, when he came back out and sat down. He was a few feet from me, on a plastic chair. “Is that for your book?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Kind of. More Krueger stuff.”
“Krueger’s in your book?”
“Kind of. I’ve been trying to interview people out there. Call it a summer project.”
“The Terminus,” I said. “The Terminal Line.”
I thought he’d tell me more about it then, but he didn’t say anything else.
“I’m so excited for the semester to be over,” I said.
“Courtney.”
He leaned forward, put his elbow on his armrest and his hand on his chin and mouth. “Listen. Don’t take this the wrong way, but can I ask you something?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you here?”
If I took every moment he had looked at me and spoken to me directly, I would not have been able to find one when he looked so adult. He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, but I could see the little signs; I could see that he had the beginning of pits under his eyes, I could see that one day, maybe in twenty years, his legs would become spindly and hairless, and that they would awkwardly support the gut that he would grow. He would have two children and would care about his pension, and how the teacher’s union had made poor decisions regarding his 401K. He would sometimes look sadly at the cobwebby kayak that was up in the rafters of his garage.
“Don’t you want me to be?” I said.
He leaned back in his chair.
“We kissed,” I said. “You kissed me. Anyway, I’m saying hi and drinking water. I’m a person. Hi.”
“That is not fair.”
“To drink water?”
“Yes, I kissed you,” he said. “Okay. I did.”
“So maybe you did it for no reason at all.”
“That’s not true, either. I didn’t. Don’t think that.”
I shrugged. “I don’t.”
“Don’t think it’s more, either,” he said.
“I was running,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”
“You happened to run right to my house?”
“I run all over the place.”
“Okay. But we need to talk about what happened. After the Community Center. That’s something that really—it needs to be addressed. I had been drinking. Okay. I was out of line. The power differentials—”
“I was just addressing it. I think it’s fine. I don’t think it was out of line. I don’t think you’re a bad person.”
“I have more to say,” he said. “What I did was—”
“Can I ask you a question?”
It didn’t look like he wanted me asking the questions. He wanted to do some long Socratic dialogue on me and show me that he was a moral, adult person, and that I wasn’t.
“Fine.”
“Are you going to be a teacher?” I asked. “The whole time? For your whole career?”
He snorted, then smiled and leaned back in his chair. “Why?”
/> “Sometimes it seems like you love it,” I said. “Then sometimes it seems like you really hate us all.”
“Hate you all?” he said, frowning at me. He shook his head. “That’s absolutely not true. Why would you say that?”
“Or like you wish you were us?”
He just stared.
“Just things you say. When you make fun of us for, like, caring about our futures. Why?”
“I want you to be doing it for the right reason. There are so many ways to get pull—”
“I think we are. Or if we aren’t, I don’t think you know.”
“Look,” he said. “There are other things going on.”
“So?”
“So you being here is not okay,” he said. He stared at me for a second, then looked across the street, at his neighbor’s house, and then back at his own door. “Fuck, man. A girl from my class is not okay. That’s what I mean.”
“Courtney,” I said. “My name’s Courtney.”
“This town,” he said.
“It’s not the town,” I said.
He needed it to be done—I could see the failure already and I had to at least make it real, to make all the ideas exist. There was nothing else to say. I set down my glass and I went in through the door and down the hall and into the bathroom I had seen when he got me the water. It was messy, and small. There was a shag bathmat on the tiled floor and a pile of clothes in the corner, next to the toilet. None of it resembled what I’d pictured. I closed the door.
“Courtney,” I heard him say from in the hall. “Please get out of there.”
“I’m taking a shower,” I said.
I took off my clothes and started the water and was under it with my eyes closed before I could think of my dad, or my mom, or my brother James, or how I wasn’t the person who could be here, or the person who had made this. The tiles were coated in mildew and grime. I imagined a picture of myself in the newspaper, looking young.
I showered there, alone, for fifteen minutes. He was gone—he had fled—when I came outside. His car was gone. I walked halfway home, where my mother was probably still sitting in the same spot in the kitchen, before I started to run.
Class got sad. There was no other way to say it, or to feel it. When he lectured he wouldn’t make eye contact with me. Once he showed up to the lab with a black eye and told us that he’d stood up at a bar and challenged every man there to a one-round boxing match. One week he spent three days showing us the movie Grizzly Man and asked us to think about what it meant in terms of what we’d learned in class. He fell asleep partway in. I fell asleep. A few days later he ended class thirty minutes early and said, “I love you all as friends,” and laughed to himself and walked out the door. The next Monday, the week before winter break, he wasn’t there.
“Mr. Carpenter had a family emergency and will not be back until after the holidays,” said Mr. Robinson, the other biology teacher. He had a beard and a stain on his forehead. “We’ll review for your final. Who can tell me something snappy about ATP?”
“This sucks,” Holly said. “What do you think happened to my husband Shaun Carpenter?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe he disappeared into the wild.”
“Did it seem kinda like he was going crazy?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
We took our finals with Mr. Robinson standing over us, pacing the aisles. I think I got a C. It was cold again, like it was supposed to be, and on that Friday I walked home through the snow, to my mom’s house. I made a sandwich and she came in from the living room and sat down and said, “Your father and I have decided to get back together. It’s official!”
I kept eating my sandwich.
“That’s really good for you,” I said, after a moment. “What happened to the bathtub?”
“What?”
I swallowed my bread. “The bathtub you told me about,” I said.
“I don’t follow.”
“When we were driving to Chicago.”
“What bathtub?”
“You said the water cools off. You explained this huge definition of love. You also used snow.”
“Oh,” she said. “That.”
“You told me that love dies.”
“Did I say that?”
“Yes.”
“Something about this going away,” she said, shaking her head. “I mean he was only down the road, for goodness sake. We worked out many of our difficulties. We needed a break. You wouldn’t—I don’t think you could understand.”
She laughed to herself, and I could tell that she was far away. She looked at me—I just stared—and she flapped a hand to shoo my irritating skepticism.
“It’s reminded us, I think,” she said. “That’s all.”
I didn’t change my look. It no longer felt natural to abide my mother’s lies, regardless of whether or not she had the energy to perform them.
On Christmas Eve, I was in my dad’s apartment, wearing my favorite brown dress, which was now too short for me—it was as though I was not going to stop growing, ever, and I would be like Alice, shooting up so high that I’d eventually blast through the roof—sitting on his couch, watching the big black TV that would soon be moving home, too. I was helping him get a few more boxes of things, and I could hear him humming “Jingle Bells” in the other room; James and Mom were at the house, waiting for us, but I hadn’t seen James yet. I was excited to hug him. Of course there would be a glazed ham. Grandma and Grandpa were coming to town, and my dad’s brother Stew had flown in from Cleveland for the first time in five years. The family was bonding. The lights were all up and the snow had started at noon. It was freezing.
We loaded up the car in two trips. At the trunk I watched him go back to lock up; I felt the cold against my tights and looked down at my shoes, which were too nice to be here with the exhaust-stained ice. I had always thought there was something unusual, but good, about being dressed up out in the dark cold. I was fancy here alongside the elements and my makeup wanted to freeze into a mask on my face.
When we were driving, Dad said, “This might be the end for you and that dress.” He was looking right at my thighs.
I looked down. Strong but at peace in my black tights, I saw. They looked good. But what I thought was: it must be hard for fathers to see their daughters having passed some Terminal Line of their own.
I pulled at my hem. “This will be fun,” I said.
He said nothing.
I looked up. “Won’t it? Family Part Two?”
“Don’t be sarcastic, Courtney,” he said. “Sarcasm is a small thing for small people.” When I didn’t respond he said, a little softer, “Just please not tonight. Christmas and your mother and everything else.”
“No,” I said, seeing I had hurt his feelings, or at least reminded him of something that did. “I really do think it’ll be fun.” I tried to make it sound real. “James is here, too.”
After a pause he said, “You never know what’s going to happen with your Uncle Stew around.”
“I know,” I said. “Stew’s bananas.”
The snow was fat, the kind that might be good to build a snowman or a fort, and I guessed that later we would see the colored puffballs of children in snowmobile suits working savagely at the new landscape, driven to make all thought-up places real, terraforming for their lives. My dad was squinting at the road and driving slow. I didn’t want to distract him anymore. Besides, what question could I ask? Father, does tepid bathwater eventually become stagnant and unsafe, as we might hypothesize, following a period of conjecture? Father, do you want to be in this car, going in this direction? With me? And if so, will you always love me? Because I am now not so sure, and nor am I a girl. And Father, at what point, precisely, can we recognize a failed life? (I see yours.) And what can we do once we see it? (Little.) These thoughts went through my mind, for real, as I was the empiricist here, but I sensed the wrong word might shatter him. I stayed quiet. I watched the road and tried to help look
out for ice or other spots of danger, knowing he was prone to his own kinds of distraction, which was an unscientific and meddlesome thing to do, I know, but I did it. Because the plows hadn’t been through, which left ruts you had to follow, but they could hurt you. Where was Shaun Carpenter? I wondered it right then.
“I haven’t driven in anything like this,” I said.
“You haven’t had much chance,” he said. “This is your first winter driving.”
I agreed. Based on the math of the birthdays, it was true.
He nodded brusquely, kept his eyes on the oncoming cars, happy now we were on to a certain topic. “Well,” he said. “Give it time. You’ll learn.”
I was glad he said it, but there was sadness to it all. He may as well have said goodbye, then, too.
The Peach
Here’s a story: summer of 1945, on her way to San Diego to get my grandfather, George Glen Huygens, discharged after fighting in the Pacific for a year, my grandmother Beatrice evaporated.
Her car broke down outside Santa Fe; she walked nine miles before another car came, and by the time one did, she lay prone beneath wavy lines of heat on the side of the highway, eyes closed, lips chapped. This happened. The water in her slowly moved up through her supine and half-conscious body, then up into the air, where it became a part of the weather and the sky. The sun pulled her up and the water in turn rained her down later. The man who stopped was a Bible salesman on his way to southern California.
My grandfather almost died too. It was three months earlier. He got shot by a Japanese machine gun as he was climbing over a ridge on the island of Iwo To. At the time, he was trying to multiply 37 by 88 in his head, no saying numbers out loud. Once he told me he felt three of the bullets go into his chest—thumpthumpthump—and pass through the layers of his body, and that he heard two go over his head—tssttsst—as he was falling. He could remember the medic trying to patch him up and another soldier telling him he was going to be fine.
The soldier said, “Hold on, Georgie. It’s not as bad as you think.”
Grandpa, eyes wide, said, “Three-thousand something.”
The Universe in Miniature in Miniature Page 10
