Giraffe People

by Jill Malone

  A small child shrieks down the metal slide, his arms raised straight up to God. Boys play Nerf football in the field by the bus shed. The bugle blows.

  She has cleared away the empty cartons, and soda cans, and lies now, staring at the sky, her head in her clasped hands. “More,” is all she says. And I obey.

  Seminal. Meghan? Are you kidding me? Seminal? Alright, highly original, and influencing the development of future events sound pretty groovy, but you know people just think semen whenever they hear this word, right? Adjective. And I get the theme of this list, by the way. Subtlety, not what you’re best at.

  Bangs and I watch Charade. Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Walter Matthau, it’s a classic. For most of the second act, Bangs has been sketching in one of his notebooks. We had this idea for altering the photographs—well, Bangs did—he hand-painted the guitars in a shot from the assembly, and in another he painted the microphones and the stage lights. The shots are freaking eerie. You look at them, and aren’t quite sure, at first, what’s wrong with the photos. You just know they’re wrong somehow—sharper and blurrier all at once.

  I came over to see his work, and to eat snacks and watch movies.

  “What are you working on,” I ask. “Your comic book?”

  He winks, then passes his notebook across to me. A girl appears to be playing the clarinet in an orchestra.

  “A mild-mannered musician?” I ask.

  “Aren’t we all?” he says. “Natasha plays the clarinet. And when she plays certain songs, the listeners forget. She makes them forget. She concentrates on whomever she chooses while she’s playing, and her notes bore into their memories and wipe them out.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “Yes.”

  “So she’s a villain.”

  “Well.” Bangs takes his notebook back. “Doesn’t that always depend?”

  “No,” I say. “You’re the writer. You choose the hero and the villain.”

  “I think the characters just happen. I mean, they choose themselves. I draw them, but it’s their story, you know? Is Natasha evil? Is she villainous? Partly. She’s other things too. She’s a really good cook—risotto is her specialty.”

  Even his penmanship is interesting, each letter precisely etched. Natasha looks a little like Meghan. “What if there’s nobody to talk to,” I say. “In Hawaii. What if I don’t meet anyone these next two years—anyone real?”

  “Planes go back and forth between here and there. And the postal service, and telephone lines.”

  “I’ll be so lonely.”

  “Me too,” he says. Someone in the movie screams, probably Audrey Hepburn.

  “I’ll miss all these afternoons when nothing happened.”

  Bangs chews his thumb, nods.

  Germans love parades. When we lived in Mainz, we went to parades or on Volksmarches all the freaking time. During kindergarten, we made paper lanterns for some festival, and returned at dusk with our families, to march around the town in the gathering night. Ancient magic, the shadowed streets lit with our own delicate contraptions, the excitement of the late hour, and the cold. For some reason, standing on my porch, watching our parents prepare the tables for the garden party brings our lantern walk to mind. My parentss and Jeremy’s parents have combined forces. They’ve unfolded tables between the houses, and piled summer food for the party. Dad has grilled burgers and hotdogs, and we have salads, deviled eggs, watermelon, cantaloupe, ears of corn, potato chips, sodas and juice, baked beans, fried chicken, cobbler, pies, and homemade ice cream.

  Nate and Nigel have Frisbees, hacky sacks, soccer and footballs in a bin behind the garage so we’ll have our options readily at hand. Mom has asked twice if I’m sure I don’t want to wear a summer dress. Ancient magic. The final party. A kind of wake. Goodbye to this life we have known. And though it’s barely noon, I wish for paper lanterns, for something to glow.

  Gabby and Bangs stock the coolers with ice and drinks, and fetch and carry with Meghan. The requisite checkered tablecloth, the children’s table, benches, blankets, folding chairs; we might be at the beach, or a church picnic. Trevor, his girlfriend—her bangs teased high enough to qualify as antennae—Joe, and Ernie arrive together in Trevor’s van. They’ve all promised to watch their language, and remain sober. Trevor carries a hand drum.

  When Monica Prader arrives, we’re midway through a game of Ultimate Frisbee, and the girls are decimating the boys—Alicia is a Frisbee god, her passes arc out like a boomerang and wing back to our waiting fingertips—and Monica joins, despite the fact that she’s attired in a billowing summer dress decorated with little cherries.

  “A dress?” I say by way of greeting.

  She kicks a glossy, black-booted leg up. “I’ve got shorts on underneath.”

  “Of course,” I say. “Frisbee?”

  “Totally,” she says.

  Every kid in the neighborhood has cruised by on a bike or skateboard, and ended up joining our party. The Thorns bring Annie and Karen, and Karen wants me to run with her as we dash up and down the lawns tossing the Frisbee. She squeals with delight, grabbing at anyone near us, laughing harder when we tumble. The day’s fiercely bright, humid, and riddled with bugs.

  Jeremy and Mike intercept impossible passes—their arms tip tip tipping the Frisbee up, and then snagging it. Trevor and Joe collide so often we’ve stopped checking to ensure no one’s broken anything.

  We take frequent breaks to eat. We’re like locusts, alighting to devour before collectively moving elsewhere.

  Chaplains come from the school—some bring their families—and stand around in bunches telling classic stories. “Oh, he was a wild one. Wasn’t he one of the Three Amigos?” “What do you mean you’ve never heard about the Three Amigos? Brother, you haven’t lived!”

  Miss Jensen arrives with an ice-cream cake, and—what could I have been thinking?—the woman’s old enough to wear garters, sasses everybody, and could never have had an affair with my father. “Well, now, you must be KNEEcole. It’s a pleasure to meet you, KNEEcole. The stories your daddy tells about you would light you up. What’s the one about the bomb in the girls’ locker room? I know I’ve got it right, now, just by the look on your face.”

  Jeremy, Meghan, and Ernie crash into a bush, and have to be helped upright. I have Meghan’s hands in mine, and pull her up, and into my arms, her laugh like cannon fire. I pick evergreen needles from her hair. I’ve had it so wrong.

  We break for dinner, and the adults have replenished the coolers and the platters. The dads want to play football with us.

  “Touch,” one of them says, in case we might have mistaken them for athletes.

  We play heavy-handed touch. Trevor tackles me into Stacy Masteller, and she drops a knee into him on the next play. Even Nate hasn’t lost his temper. The bugle calls, and the sun drops, and the dads light a fire in a pit, and the littlest kids sleep on blankets, or against their mothers.

  “Grab your ax,” Trevor tells me.

  Meghan comes upstairs with me. The room emptied except for a suitcase, a duffel, a sleeping bag, and my acoustic guitar. Even the carpet’s gone.

  She stands beside me, the edges of our hands touching. From the opened window, I hear shouts and laughter. School is over. We leave in two days for the West Coast, for a family reunion in Seattle; and then, Hawaii. My atheist will meet us at the Honolulu Airport. He’s promised to give me a tour of the island. I’m going to live on an island you can drive around in a single day.

  We kiss until I’m not afraid. I slide two fingers inside her. Oh! That’s the sum of my technique, but she grabs onto me and kind of thrashes, and I can feel her entire body. Her throat tips back, and her feet press against mine like I’m a ladder. Her face. I can see inside her.

  With a hand on my wrist, she whispers, “I’m done.”

  “Already? Do you want to go again?”

  “Yes.”

  God loves me more than I ever imagined.

  I have my guitar in my hands, b
ut I already hear it. Without strumming, I hear a new sound.

  “What is it?” she says.

  “Do you know what giraffe nurseries are called?”

  “No.”

  “Crèches.”

  “I love that word. Crèches,” she whispers into my hair.

  “Say it again.”

  She does. I imagine I can hear Trevor’s hand drum. Ernie and Joe and Bangs will have their guitars out as well. We’ll play late into the night, but at some point the party will disband. Disband.

  Meghan takes my hand, and leads me down the stairs. Mom and Dad make s’mores—they are marshmallow-toasting experts—and the boys are seated in a row with their instruments. Jeremy eases my guitar from my hands, and takes the open seat beside Ernie.

  “We’ve arranged one for you,” Ernie says.

  He strums the opening measures of This Flight Tonight, and five teenaged boys sing Joni Mitchell in falsetto, and for the final chorus, which they play ten or fifteen times, they call for us to join them, and we do, the chaplains and their families, the neighborhood kids, and Nigel’s chess club buds, and Kelly with her head rested on Nate’s shoulder, and the Thorns, and Gabby and Stacy Masteller, and Monica Prader in her cherry dress, Trevor’s antennaed girlfriend, and Alicia and me as well.

  When I look for Meghan, she’s beside the fire, and if I wanted a lantern, I had only to ask.

  Aver. State confidently, declare as true. Verb.

  Bangs altered his photograph for our final project by hand painting masks onto each of us. Afterward, I scratched the negatives, and ended up with some really cool effects. My photographs looked like they’d been recovered from a bombed house or something, like reels from old movies with a stray hair flitting through them. Mr. Pang thought both of our results were way groovy.

  I kept Bangs’ photograph, and he kept mine. And the night of the garden party, I also got a comic book he made me. He signed it and everything.

  Joe and Trevor and Ernie gave me a sweatshirt with a Doggy Life logo on it. “For Hawaiian winters,” Joe said.

  And then, suddenly, it’s ten o’clock on Monday morning, the cars packed, and Mom and Dad and Nigel and Pepper pull away in the van, and Nate and I have promised we’ll be right behind them in the hatchback, but Kelly won’t stop crying, and Mike and Jeremy and Meghan and I stand by the hatchback, and don’t say anything.

  I wish I had a photograph of the last minutes: Mike’s Venus Girl Trap t-shirt, and Jeremy with the light washing his face, and Meghan tucking her hair behind her ears. We already know the old stories, and can’t tell the new ones yet. We’ve promised about letter writing, phone calls, Christmas.

  I don’t remember how long we stood there, waiting to part. I remember Kelly cried for a long time, and Nate wouldn’t leave until she’d stopped. I remember Jeremy and Mike ran inside to help their mother with something, and Meghan stared at her shoes until they’d returned. I remember worrying Nate and I would get lost, and have to pay for our own hotel room. I remember the sentry saluted when we left the base.

  Nate and Nigel swear I didn’t quit basketball until senior year. And Jeremy claims he wrote the letter that got us back together—not Mike. He didn’t make this claim until I admitted I didn’t have the letter anymore.

  When I talked the whole thing over with Meghan, she laughed, and said, “Oh, Cole, you know it wasn’t like that at all. We had sex all the fucking time.”

  But that was later. She’s thinking of later. The truth is it happened exactly like this. Every word.

  About the Author

  Jill Malone grew up in a military family, went to German kindergarten, and lived across from a bakery that made gummi bears the size of mice. She has lived on the East Coast and in Hawaii, and for the last fifteen years in Spokane with her son, two old dogs, and a lot of outdoor gear. She looks for any excuse to play guitar. Jill is married to a performance artist and addiction counselor who makes the best risotto on the planet. Giraffe People is her third novel.

  Go to jillmalone.com to read her idiosyncratic and candid blog.

  Acknowledgments

  I'm grateful to the U.S. Army for 18 years of military bases and unlikely friendships; I'd never have made it to Hawaii without you.

  Thanks to Erin Culver, Shelly Wilson, Bett Norris, Mary Malone, Kelly Smith, and Caroline Curtis for your tireless support and encouragement.

  Fort Monmouth, I loved you more than I realized at the time.

  Bywater Books

  RED AUDREY AND THE ROPING

  Jill Malone

  Winner of the Bywater Prize for Fiction

  “A wonderfully impressive writing debut.”

  —Sarah Waters

  Fight or flight? Jane Elliott has tried both. Surfing, letting the waves take her. Teaching Latin, clutching at its rules to feel safe. Safe from a lover, safe from her friends, safe from her mother’s death—and her guilt. And now she lies in a hospital bed, alone.

  Set against the landscapes and seascapes of Hawaii, this is a story of one woman’s courage and her struggle to find a balance between what she desires and what she deserves. Gripping and emotional, Red Audrey and the Roping is also a remarkable literary achievement. The breathtaking prose evokes setting, characters, and relationships with equal grace. Splintered fragments of narrative come together to form a seamless suspenseful story that flows effortlessly to its dramatic conclusion.

  Print ISBN 978-1-932859-54-6

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-61294-002-1

  Available at your local bookstore

  or call 734-662-8815

  or order online at www.bywaterbooks.com

  Bywater Books

  A FIELD GUIDE TO DECEPTION

  Jill Malone

  Winner of the Lambda Literary Award

  “A Field Guide to Deception is beautiful, essential reading.”

  — Out in Print

  “Malone is back with another story that takes us deeper into the shadowy depths of the mind and heart with every twist of its plot … keeping the reader rapt all the way to the unforeseeable conclusion.”

  — Jane and Jane Magazine

  The day the kid fell in the river—that was the moment for Claire and Liv. The first inkling of a possibility of something to pull them together.

  But sometimes the possibility of love is too much to bear. As opportunities slowly unfurl like the petals of a flower, Claire and Liv negotiate love’s challenges as well as its rewards. And on one terrible winter night, they confront the true cost of loving.

  Print ISBN 978-1-932859-70-6

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-61294-003-8

  Available at your local bookstore

  or call 734-662-8815

  or order online at www.bywaterbooks.com

  Bywater Books

  LEAP

  Z Egloff

  “This is a talented writer.”

  — Carol Anshaw

  Summer 1979. Rowan Marks is done with high school. Next comes college. And in between there’s a yawning gulf—the last carefree summer vacation.

  At least, it should be carefree. But Rowan’s older brother Ben is smoking way too much pot. Her best friend Danny is in love with her. And Catherine, the new girl in their small Ohio town, rubs her the wrong way. Well, that’s OK. Rowan can deal. She’s got it all worked out.

  Then everything turns on its head. Catherine steals her heart, Danny falls out with her, and Ben crashes the family car, ripping the family secrets bare.

  All of a sudden, Rowan has a stark choice—is she going to grow up or give up?

  Print ISBN 978-1-61294-023-6

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-61294-024-3

  Available at your local bookstore

  or call 734-662-8815

  or order online at www.bywaterbooks.com

  Bywater Books

  ART ON FIRE

  Hilary Sloin

  Winner of the Bywater Prize for Fiction

  “You need characters and plot and tension to drive the reader through the pages. And Ar
t on Fire has these things in spades … But a description of the book really can’t do it justice. Let this one seep into your mind and work its magic on you. It’s the superb craftmanship of a master storyteller at work.”

  —Out in Print

  “love of storytelling is evident in her masterful debut novel”

  —Lambda Literary Review

  Art on Fire is the pseudo-biography of painter Francesca deSilva’s short but colorful life, interspersed with essays on her paintings by critics, academics, and psychologists. These razor-sharp satires on art, lesbian life, and the academic world, puncture pretentiousness with every paragraph.

  Print ISBN 978-1-932859-70-6

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-61294-003-8

  Available at your local bookstore

  or call 734-662-8815

  or order online at www.bywaterbooks.com

  At Bywater Books we love good books about lesbians just like you do, and we’re committed to bringing the best of contemporary lesbian writing to our avid readers. Our editorial team is dedicated to finding and developing outstanding writers who create books you won’t want to put down.

  We sponsor the Bywater Prize for Fiction to help with this quest. Each prize winner receives $1000 and publication of their novel. We have already discovered amazing writers like Jill Malone, Sally Bellerose, and Z Egloff through the Bywater Prize. Which exciting new writer will we find next?

  For more information about Bywater Books and the annual Bywater Prize for Fiction, please visit our website.

  www.bywaterbooks.com