by Tom Perrotta
“Come back after school,” she whispered.
“You'll be at work.”
“I'll take the afternoon off. Darren's with the sitter till five-thirty.”
That's what I was thinking about around two-twenty in the afternoon, when Tammy Warren knocked on my door.
TAMMY WARMEN
MR. M. APOLOGIZED as soon as I sat down.
“Tammy, I want you to know that this isn't my idea. Mr. Hendricks asked me to conduct an investigation into the disappearance of Paul's posters. As far as I'm concerned, this is pure formality. You're under no suspicion whatsoever.”
I was surprised by his kindness. He'd never been nice to me before.
“Thanks,” I said. “Ask away.”
He stared at the wall clock for ten or fifteen seconds, as if fascinated by the concept of time. He seemed jittery, and I wondered if something was wrong in his personal life. Maybe he was a cocaine addict living in a house with no furniture. Maybe he exposed himself to Cub Scouts.
“All right,” he said. “Just for the record. Did you tear down your brother's campaign posters?”
It had been a blue Monday for me. When I got to school that morning, Jason Caputo was waiting by my locker with a bouquet of peach-colored tulips. Seeing him there, looking so lovestruck and pathetic, made me realize how badly I wanted to get out of Winwood. All at once I was sick of everything. I wanted to do something wild—bite the head off a tulip, tell Jason I had a mad crush on his sister. That crazy, desperate feeling had stuck with me the whole day.
“I did it,” I told him. “I tore down the posters.”
MR. M.
I KNEW SHE WAS lying, but I didn't know why. What could Tammy possibly gain by covering for Tracy?
“Come on,” I said. “Stop kidding around.”
“I'm not kidding around.”
“This is serious, Tammy. You know you'll get suspended.”
She nodded gravely.
“This will be the second time in a month. Mr. Hendricks may bar you from the election.”
“I deserve it,” she said. “My conduct's been reprehensible.”
I had no idea what she was trying to pull, and even less interest in figuring it out at that particular moment. It was two-thirty, and I needed to be out of the building by two forty-five. If Tammy wanted to take responsibility for something she hadn't done, that was her prerogative.
“Come on,” I said. “Let's go tell it to the Vice-Principal.”
TAMMY WARREN
THERE MUST HAVE BEEN eight different Styrofoam cups on Mr. Hendricks's desk, many of them imprinted with crescent-shaped bite marks. I'm not sure how he knew which one to drink from.
“Now this is just my opinion, Tammy, but I think you've got some sort of emotional problem. All this hostility seething inside you.”
“It's true,” I said. “I'm a very angry person.”
He brought his wrist to his nose and sniffed at his watchband. He seemed troubled by the odor and sniffed again.
“Maybe you should get some counseling,” he advised. “Find out what's causing you to behave this way.”
The hard part was over. He had just suspended me for five days—I could have kissed him—and banned me from the election. Now we were killing time until the bell rang.
“Mr. Hendricks,” I said, “do you think it would make sense for me to transfer to a Catholic school?”
MR. M.
I RANG THE BELL and pounded on the door, but Sherry didn't answer. In a matter of seconds, desire turned to dread in my veins.
I waited in front of her house for forty-five minutes that felt like four hours, then gave up and drove to the Blue Lantern, an old man's bar about a mile away.
Between sips of warm beer I fed quarters into the pay phone and listened to her voice on the answering machine. When I tried her office, they told me she'd taken a sick day.
After a while I gave up on the phone and settled into my misery. A rational person might not have blamed Sherry for putting the brakes on, but I was in no mood to be rational. My ribs ached with wanting her; my eyeballs throbbed at the thought of going home to Diane. The last thing I needed just then was a hard slap on the back from Walt Hendricks.
“Jim! We've got to stop meeting like this.”
He pulled up a stool beside me and blew a quick kiss to an elderly lady drinking by herself at the other end of the bar. She caught it with one hand and blew him a return kiss with the other. Walt seemed like a different man in the dim, generous light of the Blue Lantern, a dapper gent with an easy charm, no longer the plaid-coated buffoon of the school day.
“I make it a point to be in here by five-thirty no matter what,” he explained. “It's the only thing that keeps me sane.”
He downed a double bourbon in a single swallow, wincing with pleasure. The funereal bartender refilled his glass, then retreated a few steps in the direction of the cash register.
“So what happened?” I asked.
He sighed. “I gave her five days. Banned her from the election.”
“How'd she take it?”
“Fine. Just like last time.”
“She's a strange one.”
He turned to me with a conspiratorial air.
“I was looking at her, Jim. I think she might have a nice little body underneath those baggy clothes. She's gonna give some pimply kid the surprise of his life.”
I shut my eyes and saw Sherry standing in the doorway in that blue shirt, smiling like a bride, her legs lit up by a slanty ray of sunshine. She was moist when I touched her, melting between my fingers.
“Four more years,” said Walt. His voice was tired now, drained of enthusiasm. “Four more years and I won't have to suspend anyone ever again.”
“You don't like that part of it, do you?”
He traced the rim of his glass with his fingertip, first one way, then in reverse.
“I was a shop teacher for twenty years. The kids loved me. I was Mr. H., just like you. Now they hate my guts. I know what they call me. Styrofoam Walt. Coffee Man.” He polished off the rest of his drink and laid a fatherly hand on my shoulder. “Don't believe it when they tell you Administration's the way to go. The classroom, Jim. That's where the magic happens.”
He slapped a ten-dollar bill on the bar and told me he had to run.
“Peg's got me on a short leash these days.” He blew another kiss to the lady across the bar, then gave a sad laugh. “You know how it is.”
Walt's departure had a strangely sobering effect on me. As soon as he was gone, I understood it was time for me to go home too. Diane was waiting, probably starting to worry. I felt tenderly toward her, as if my relationship with her were completely independent of my affair with Sherry.
Twilight had set in by the time I pulled into the driveway. I wasn't really paying attention to the world around me, just trying to screw up my courage for the moment when I walked through the door, back into the life that suddenly seemed bleak and inadequate, a half-decade mistake. If I'd noticed the old Corolla parked in front of our next-door neighbor's house, I might not have been so shocked to see Sherry sitting on my living room couch with a box of Kleenex in her lap, and Diane sitting right next to her with the baby in her arms. All three of them were crying, and my arrival didn't seem to comfort anyone.
TAMMY WARREN
I WAS WATCHING my yoga program when Mom got home from work. She shot me a dirty look, then stormed into the kitchen. It was hard for me to imagine my heart as an unfolding flower with her slamming cabinets, banging pots, and heaving those bottomless sighs of exasperation.
She opted for the silent treatment when we sat down to eat. Paul was dining elsewhere, so the meal was quiet as a chess match, two grand masters puzzling over a chicken casserole. After a while I got tired of listening to myself masticate.
“I didn't do it,” I told her.
She stabbed angrily at a little green brain of broccoli.
“Mr. Hendricks said you admitted it.”
&nbs
p; “I lied.”
Confusion softened her features.
“Were you covering for someone?”
“Nope.”
“Then why would you lie?”
“Because I felt like getting suspended.”
I'd underestimated my power to shock my mother. I thought she'd be happy to know I hadn't destroyed images of her son's face.
“But why?” Her question was barely audible, her eyes big and pleading.
A strange pressure gathered in my throat. I shut my eyes and searched for the unfolding flower, but all I came up with was that weird illustration in my Biology textbook, the one that makes the human heart look like a cleanly plucked chicken.
“Because,” I told her.
That was the best I could do.
MR. M.
SHERRY NEVER CAME HOME that night. I know this for a fact because I spent something like seven hours in her driveway, waiting like a dog for a glimpse of her.
No words had passed during our brief encounter in the living room. I stared at Sherry and Diane for a couple of seconds and they stared back, puffy-eyed and hostile. Then I turned around and walked back out to my car.
Desolation gave way to numbness as I drove, and the numbness began to feel oddly like optimism. I headed south on the Parkway for about an hour, stopped at a diner, than turned around and headed back. It's hard to imagine at this remove, but by the time I pulled into Sherry's driveway around ten o'clock, I was fairly certain we'd end up spending the night together. She'd have to come home at some point, I reasoned, and when she did, she'd have to let me in.
How could she not? We were lovers now; the thing that had happened to us was too real, too powerful to deny. It was the kind of miracle you could build a life around, or so it seemed to me then, perched on the ledge of what looked like a new beginning, but turned out to be a long way down.
PAUL WARREN
TAMMY KNOCKED on my door around midnight.
“You up?” she whispered.
“Yeah.”
I couldn't see much of her as she moved toward the foot of my bed, just a white nightgown floating on grainy blackness.
“Did Mom tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“I got suspended. Five days. I'm out of the election.”
“What happened?”
“I told M. and Hendricks I ripped up your posters.”
“Did you?”
“No.” It offended her that I even had to ask. “It must have been Tracy.”
“That's what Lisa thought, too.”
“Not that I blame her,” Tammy continued. “They were pretty gross.”
I didn't argue. By that point I was pretty much sick of them myself. It was Lisa who insisted on going to Hendricks and making a big deal out of it. Of course, she'd done all the work in the first place, so I figured she had the right.
“I don't get it,” I said. “Why would you take the fall for Tracy?”
My eyes had partly adjusted to the darkness by then. I could barely make out the pale oval of her face.
“I was serious yesterday. I want to transfer to Immaculate Mary.”
It was hard for me to imagine anyone, even devout Catholics, actually wanting to go to a school like that—single sex, with dorky uniforms and nuns for teachers. No football team or marching band or senior prom. For a smart-ass atheist like my sister to volunteer for that world seemed totally perverse.
“Come on,” I said.
“Go ahead and laugh.”
“I'm not laughing. I just can't imagine why you'd want to do something like that.”
Her face snapped into focus just then, wide eyes, a mouth set hard with determination. A whitish hand cast a faint glow against her darkly gleaming hair.
“I'm like Dad,” she said. “I want to start all over.”
TRACY FLICK
SOMETIMES WHEN I can't sleep and my stomach's all tied up in knots, I think about something I heard on the TV news during last year's presidential election. A panel of experts was discussing the candidates, and one of them said, “The problem with George Bush isn't that he lacks fire-in-the-belly, it's that fire-in-the-belly is all he has.”
I'd never heard that expression before and it jarred something loose in me. I remembered how Jack used to tell me I had “fever skin.” It seemed to him that I was always running a slight temperature, glowing with extra heat.
“My God,” he'd say. “You're burning up.”
So now, when I'm wide awake at three in the morning, wondering why I have no close friends, I comfort myself with the thought that I belong to a secret and powerful club—me, George Bush, Madonna, Dan Rather, plus thousands of people you've never heard of—and we're all lying there in separate beds with our eyes wide open and these tiny bonfires blazing in our stomachs, lighting up the night.
MR. M.
IT'S NOT PLEASANT to wake up in your car like that, cold and confused in yesterday's clothes, some terrible truth swimming up from the deep end of your consciousness. I got out and walked to the bottom of the driveway, ostensibly to check for the Corolla, but really just to stretch my legs and get the blood moving through my system. I knew Sherry hadn't come home. The predawn sky had lightened to a dingy gray and my mouth tasted like despair. I was amazed at the speed with which she'd betrayed me.
It's true: despite the fact that I was an adulterer, a man who'd fallen in love—lust, infatuation, whatever; all the words were true—with his wife's best friend, the mother of our godchild, I felt betrayed, and still do.
Emotions won't listen to reason, especially not at five in the morning when there's a damp chill in the air, when your bladder's full and your head seems to have been put on crooked.
There was no alternative but to go home. I needed to shower, put on some fresh clothes, maybe try to explain myself to Diane. But what was I supposed to say? That our marriage had become a weary farce, our efforts to produce a child heightening rather than relieving the staleness of our union? That making love with Sherry had turned me into a different person, someone endowed with a vision of a new and better life, even if that vision seemed already to have gone up in smoke? My wife wasn't a morning person on the best of days, and I didn't figure she'd be too keen on hearing any of this before her first cup of coffee.
The sky was a little brighter and my head a little clearer by the time I turned onto the tree-lined street I'd once expected to be home forever, but which suddenly felt like history, a place where I used to live. I was startled by the sight of Sherry's Corolla still parked the wrong way in front of our neighbor's house, one wheel perched drunkenly on the edge of the curb. (My erroneous guess was that she'd spent the night at her sister's in Green Brook, where she'd frequently sought refuge during the dissolution of her marriage.)
My red gym bag was resting on the front stoop, one of those sights you know you'll remember for the rest of your life, like fire coming out of an upstairs window of a house down the block, or your mother sobbing in an airport. Inside it were my shaving kit, a towel, a change of clothes, and a note in Diane's handwriting: “Jim—Please don't come inside.”
TRACY FUCK
MY MOTHER GOT UP at five in the morning and helped me ice the two hundred cupcakes we'd baked the night before. I planned on handing them out at the main entrance, along with a smile and a gentle reminder of who to vote for. (There were nine hundred plus students at Win wood, but two hundred strained the limits of our kitchen and our patience. I just hoped that none of the people who missed out would hold it against me.)
I was queasy from the chocolate air and not enough sleep, but my mother seemed happy and well rested, like there was nothing in the world she'd rather be doing before sunrise than icing cupcakes to advance my career. She hummed as she frosted, pausing for occasional sips of coffee.
Besides me, my mother didn't have much of a life. She hadn't dated anyone in years and didn't even seem to be looking anymore. She rarely bought new clothes for herself and we didn't travel except to visit
colleges and museums. Her only real hobby was writing fan letters to successful women, asking if they had any advice for her “college-bound daughter.” We'd received lots of nice responses from people like Pat Schroeder, Anna Quindlen, and Connie Chung, telling me to study hard and dream big dreams, etc. She kept the letters in a file folder, and I sometimes caught her flipping through them with a faraway look in her eyes.
“Mom,” I said, “I think I'm going to lose today.”
She spread the icing with a smooth swirling motion, finishing with an elegant flourish. She poked a toothpick into the summit of the cupcake, then set it carefully inside the cardboard box.
“No you won't, honey. This time tomorrow you'll be President.”
She was always serenely confident of my success, and it never failed to cheer me up.
“You think so?”
She dipped a finger into the icing bowl, then stuck it in her mouth.
“I know so. Tracy Flick's a winner.”
When we were done—the cupcakes filled six boxes—I hurried to shower and get dressed. For luck, I wore my boldest red dress, the one that makes people stare.
It's funny to me that I have a reputation as a sexpot, because I hardly ever feel sexy. My hair is dull and my face is so bland that I stare into the mirror sometimes and feel like bursting into tears. But I have a good body, and in that dress I start to feel like the person everyone seems to think I am, a daring girl with no apologies for anything.
