by Lisa Levchuk
“Smiley,” he says, “people think I look like that Presley fellow.”
“You mean Elvis,” I say.
Emory calls me Smiley even though my real name is Edna. As you can imagine, I don’t mind being called Smiley, as almost any name is better than Edna. Emory claims I am smiling at all times, even when I am doing mundane tasks like stocking shelves or counting pills. I never realized I was constantly smiling until Emory pointed it out to me. Now, when I catch Emory looking at me, I try to look serious. Whether it is cold or hot outside, Emory sets the thermostat inside the pharmacy at about forty-five degrees. He keeps the temperature so frosty cold, I think, to prevent the black shoe polish he puts in his hair from running down his neck in watery streaks, which it does anyway, and staining the collars of his white or pink oxford shirts. Though I don’t have any proof, I suspect that Emory is having an affair with at least two of the women who shop in the pharmacy. It would be difficult to say which women, because every attractive woman gets an equal amount of Emory’s time and attention. The other night he spent an entire hour helping a gorgeous brunette in a tennis outfit pick out a birthday card for her husband.
About once a week, Emory gives me twenty bucks and sends me down to Cumberland Farms for cans of V8 to mix with the vodka that he keeps in the insulin refrigerator, and he never remembers to ask for the change. Emory drives a gigantic maroon Lincoln Continental that is dented and smashed in—he won’t fix it because he believes his car has special lifesaving powers. My personal theory about why he has survived so many crashes is that, when he hits something, he’s usually had a few Bloody Marys and his body is completely relaxed. Emory is good evidence that intoxicated people are survivors. It’s the sober people who get killed.
Emory is obviously not a perfect person, but he is not a pervert. Many of the men his age I have spent time with have said something weird to me or even tried something perverted with me. At my last job, the two guys who ran the delicatessen were always asking me to come over and watch videos with them. I was only fifteen, but I knew what they meant. I even had a priest massage my neck at a church social and sort of kiss my shoulder. Not Emory. Emory has some sort of internal moral code, and even if I don’t understand what it is, I believe it is similar to my own.
I steal stuff from the pharmacy, and I do feel bad about it, but as far as I can tell, Emory is not going to take inventory any time soon. Needing the things I take is not the issue, and Emory would most likely give me the stuff I steal if I bothered to ask. There is something about the butterflies I get in my stomach as I shove those two packs of Marlboro Lights in my tan Le Sportsac that is motivating me. It is a pretty addictive sensation. In addition to the packs of smokes, I take batteries for my radio from behind the counter, but I never take anything expensive. Besides, the expensive stuff in the pharmacy is not anything I’d ever want. Who would want a carved wooden statue of a druggist or a doctor? Maybe my father, though his collection of wooden creatures is made up primarily of Chinese people and small animals, so I don’t even go into the gift section unless I am pretending to dust.
The biggest thief, however, is Mrs. McDevitt herself. About a week before Mr. Howland’s kiss, when I was working the register by the front door, she walked in wearing a sequined dress and gold high-heeled shoes and headed down the antacid aisle. I could see the top of her curly red hair as she hurried to the pharmacy counter, where Emory, sporting the official white pharmacy coat that he almost never wears, was filling a prescription. Because of the light FM station that plays the same five songs on a continuous loop and the fact that they stepped into the office, I could not hear what they were saying. She was definitely shouting. After she came out, I heard the unmistakable ding of the pharmacy register and then seconds later watched Emory’s wife make a beeline for the front door. It was not surprising when she didn’t wave goodbye to me because she doesn’t acknowledge my existence. I received a “come back here” buzz from Emory, and when I got to the pharmacy counter, Emory’s pink shirt was turning black. Black droplets were running down his neck and collecting in a big dark stain on the edge of his collar.
“That son of a bitch,” Emory hissed. “She’s going to goddamned Atlantic City.”
Standing next to me was Dale, the other clerk at the pharmacy, who is somewhat younger but seems much older than I am. Dale wears round wire-rimmed glasses and has hair so blond it looks white. He could almost be cute in a nerdy John Denver sort of way if he weren’t so serious all the time. Dale is planning to go to Georgetown University when he graduates a year early from high school. Dale may know more about and is definitely more responsible about being a pharmacist than Emory.
“If you see that witch within one hundred yards of this store, I want you to call the goddamned police,” Emory said.
He walked into his office, probably to make himself a vodka and V8.
“What happened?” I asked Dale, who had been stocking shelves in the pain relief section and had a better angle to watch the fight.
“She took a full bottle of ten-milligram Valiums and emptied the register,” Dale said.
When Emory emerged from the back office about an hour later, he was in a much better mood. The light from the phone had been on the whole time, so I figured he was talking to either one of his girlfriends or Oliver, his wife’s country-singer father, who seems to like Emory a lot better than he likes his own daughter. Emory was carrying a beach chair still wrapped in plastic that he’d found in the closet, and he told us to leave him alone because he was on vacation in the tropics. He unfolded the beach chair and set it up behind the counter. After removing the plastic covering, he placed his drink in the circular drink holder and sat down. He closed his eyes, stretched out his long legs, and kept sort of chuckling to himself. I began to ask him a question about a prescription, but he waved his hand.
“God damn it, Smiley, don’t bother me,” he said. “Can’t you see I’m on goddamned vacation?”
“Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” came on, and Emory jumped up, ran to the radio, and turned the volume so loud that the few customers still in the store put down whatever they were looking at and left. After I locked the front door, but before the official closing time of nine o’clock, the phone rang, and of course all three of us knew who it was because Mrs. McDevitt called up and made phony suicide threats at least once a week. She and Emory have an exciting relationship.
“Suicide Time,” Emory yelled from his beach chair. “Don’t you touch that damn phone, Dale.”
Emory knew from past experience that it was almost impossible for Dale not to answer the phone, him being so conscientious and responsible. We knew Emory’s wife was on the other end of that line. And we knew that Emory would not go home or return the call—he would go to the Foxy Hound Bar to get loaded and then, most likely, crash his car without getting injured. I left that night while the phone was ringing.
My School
MY SCHOOL IS AN INTERESTING PLACE despite the fact that most of the kids don’t want to be here and have no desire to learn anything. The first thing you should know is that Bruce Springsteen, a.k.a. the Boss, practically comes from my town. I wasn’t going to mention his name; I was simply going to describe his music and let you figure it out, but it would have been obvious anyway. As I said, he is the Boss, and everyone in this school except for Mr. Howland, the older teachers, and the black kids, who are more into soul and R & B, pretty much worships him. Mr. Howland, however, insists the Boss actually has little or no talent. He goes on and on about a singer from the 1960s, a guy who would have been much, much better than Springsteen, but he killed himself. I always think blah, blah, blah when Mr. Howland begins his rant, because it seems to me that he is more than a little bit jealous of Bruce Springsteen. Mr. Howland normally has outstanding taste in everything, but it can get rather tiring to hear him go on and on about how popular music has degenerated since the sixties. He thinks there hasn’t been any good music since then and that most everything has gotten corrupt
and meaningless. I’m not saying he is completely wrong, because people who were teenagers in the sixties did care about politics and the environment a lot more than kids my age do. Still, it gets annoying to have the flaws of your generation constantly thrown in your face.
A few of the teachers in my school are still acting and dressing like hippies, wearing bell-bottoms and army jackets and round John Lennon glasses even though it is 1980. Quite a few of them either were in Vietnam or protested against it. It can be confusing trying to sort through it, as you can imagine.
What Mr. Howland doesn’t understand, not having grown up in this town, is that the Boss’s music does reflect both the bad and the good about this place in an honest way. Of course, a lot of the songs are about sad kids trying to get the hell out of here any way they can—on motorcycles or in cars or even on the backs of other people’s motorcycles. Truthfully, I wonder how bleak times and places like this one can exist, times and places where no one seems to care much about anything. The Boss’s music captures the black hole feeling that comes from living in a town where most people are bitter and disappointed about how things turned out in their lives. Patty’s mom is bitter for several reasons. Patty’s dad had a heart attack about five years ago, and Patty and her mom had to move from a pretty nice town near Philadelphia to this place. Now, Patty’s mom has to teach at a school where kids don’t really want to learn. Mr. Howland is bitter about being married and not being a famous artist or critic.
Especially bitter and angry is my history teacher, Mr. Sikorsky, who marks me late most days because his class comes after Mr. Howland’s and I always hang around Ceramics for as long as I can. Every day Mr. Sikorsky stands outside his room as the hall empties out, his fat stomach hanging over his maroon polyester pants. “You’ll be late to your own wedding, Edna,” he says as I run past him flashing my late pass. Mr. Howland has always been pretty liberal about giving passes, but since the kiss, I’ve been late every single day.
Mr. Sikorsky brags about wearing the same jacket for seventeen years of teaching. The class is supposed to be American History, and it would be nice if we learned about anything other than the Great Depression, but we don’t. He once spent an entire period describing in gruesome detail how the economy in the 1920s festered until it finally burst. He said the stock market was like a boil filled with pus. As you can imagine, Mr. Sikorsky is firmly in the non-hippie camp. In fact, other than the Great Depression, the only thing he seems interested in is how, in a general sense, hippies and protesters destroyed America. A kid in my class told me that Mr. Sikorsky’s son killed himself after he came home from Vietnam, but I’m not sure that it’s true. The fact remains: I haven’t learned one single important thing about history all year.
When you think it over, it is kind of strange how we never use our class time to examine the most important aspects of history. If I were a history teacher, I’d want to discuss why the black kids and the white kids in my school never talk to one another or sit together or go to any of the same parties. I might investigate why a rumor that Black Panthers were coming to our town several years back to protest got everyone so scared they canceled the Memorial Day parade. I’d try to figure out why the great leaders from the 1960s, like JFK and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, got assassinated and why people are still so pissed off about Vietnam and why the first president I remember had to resign from office. I might even spend a few class periods trying to figure out how a guy as talented as Bruce Springsteen could even come from a place like this. Those seem like interesting topics—but all we get is the Great Depression.
Cancer
WHAT I THINK when I think about cancer is yikes. Most people who know that my mother is in the hospital treat me differently now. Though I haven’t specifically told anyone about it except Patty and Mr. Howland, in a town like this, bad news travels fast. At school, if I fail a test, like I did in Latin a while back, I get sympathy instead of scorn. In fact, Ms. Clewell made a point of keeping me after class to talk with me. From the look on her face, I could tell she knew all about my mother.
“I’m not sure what happened,” I told her.
She stood there looking at me, holding the paper with the big red “56%” written across the top in red pen.
“Daphne,” she said, “you usually score somewhere in the nineties.”
It’s true. Latin is my best subject. And Ms. Clewell may be one of the best teachers I have had in this otherwise crummy school. We complained to her that the kids in French class got to pick French names, so she let us pick Latin names. She let me pick Daphne even though the name comes from a Greek myth; the story is one of my favorites because in it a young girl begs Zeus to turn her into a tree. You might think being completely immobilized doesn’t sound like much fun; however, I have always felt I wouldn’t mind being a tree. The kid who sits next to me is a senior named Craig. He is only about four and a half feet tall, and his translations are almost always wrong, but he picked the name Nero, another impressive selection.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Ms. Clewell asked.
Whenever I’m asked how I am, especially when I am not that hot, I almost pass out. I don’t like it when people inquire into my well-being, especially not people who actually seem concerned, the way Ms. Clewell seems concerned. Everyone in the class likes her; the boys have crushes on her because she is younger than the average teacher and she has very straight auburn hair and doesn’t try to seem as though she is cool, which many younger teachers do. It made me particularly sad to see I had written veni, vidi, vici, another favorite Latin saying of Ms. Clewell’s, at the bottom of the paper. We were both clear I hadn’t conquered anything on that particular test.
Deserved or not, the cancer sympathy goes beyond just Ms. Clewell. When the parking lot monitor caught me sneaking out to get sandwiches at lunch, he didn’t give me detention. In a way, my mother’s illness is another kind of pass. Although it has made certain aspects of my life easier, the fact remains she could actually die. And there is no one at home for me to talk with except my father, who isn’t exactly Mr. Chatty. He has his own dark, paneled private study. Sometimes, when I am lonely, I peek at him from around the corner and see what he is doing. Usually he is sitting in his big easy chair with his eyes closed, the television set to sports or history, or else he is wearing half-glasses and looking over a legal file from his office. He never notices me standing there watching him. The biggest difference since my mother left is the quietness. My father and I don’t have much to say to each other.
Mr. Howland’s Wife
IT IS FRIDAY NIGHT, more than a week since the kiss, and we are at Patty’s house. By “we” I mean me, Patty, Patty’s mom, Mr. Howland, and even Mrs. Howland. Patty’s mother is getting drunk on wine and making it impossible for me to talk to Mr. Howland. She and Mrs. Howland are smoking Newport 100s, nasty mentholated cigarettes, while Mr. Howland smokes his Winston Reds. They are smoking and drinking and talking, mostly about teachers and kids at our school. Patty’s mom brings a lasagna and salad out of the kitchen and puts one of the corniest albums ever recorded, The Best of Bread, on the record player. No one knows about Mr. Howland and me except me and Mr. Howland.
“Did you know that Sawyer was a great football player?” Mrs. Howland asks me.
“No,” I answer, “I didn’t.”
“You should see the trophies,” she continues. “He must have about twenty of them.”
“I was a pretty good wide receiver,” Mr. Howland says. “I was recruited to play in college, but I decided to study art instead. Went for the big bucks.” We laugh, knowing that teachers make crappy money.
“You should come to the house sometime,” Mrs. Howland says to me. “Sawyer could show you his trophies.”
Mr. Howland’s wife is staring at me like she too feels sorry for me. She probably imagines me as that confused teenage girl with a bad crush on her teacher. Mr. Howland is giving me looks, raising his eyebrows and grimacing, express
ions acknowledging how weird a situation this is. Patty keeps trying to get me to leave, but I am stuffing lasagna into my mouth and feeling glued to my chair. I can’t stop watching them. Bread is singing a stupid song called “If,” a song about stupid people falling in love.
I imagine myself and Mr. Howland in his office, and for a moment, the whole scene in Patty’s dining room goes into slow motion. Mr. and Mrs. Howland’s words start to run together in my mind, and I have to close my eyes and hold my head because my body feels like it is coming apart while pieces of me float out of my chair. I dig my nails into my palms until the scene returns to normal speed. My body is wet with perspiration, but no one notices. I’m at the point of having to get up and run outside when my body reassembles itself. When I can open my eyes and focus, Patty’s mom is pouring more wine. Mr. and Mrs. Howland are laughing and smoking. When they tip their heads back, I see that both of them, especially Mr. Howland, have silver or gold caps on their teeth. His otherwise straight and healthy-looking teeth are actually in poor shape. I can’t find a single uncapped tooth in his entire mouth. Sitting next to his wife, Mr. Howland looks older than he does at school, possibly because she calls him Sawyer, a name almost as weird as mine, and not Mr. Howland. Mr. Howland’s wife is very attractive in an older-woman way. Her hair is dark brown with a few gray wisps and cut straight across at the chin. She works as a paralegal, Mr. Howland told me, but she’s going to law school at night. She does look tired. Suddenly I get an irresistible impulse to try to make them happy, to make all of them, even Mrs. Howland, feel young and lighthearted again. I start entertaining them, telling funny stories about Tyrone Love and other things from art class. At the same time, irrational as it seems, I want to ruin everything and tell Patty’s mother and Mrs. Howland that I don’t need to see Mr. Howland’s stupid football trophies—that I have something better than a football trophy.
