After Eli

by Rebecca Rupp

  The first I knew anybody was living there was when I was riding my bike past the house like I always did, and there were these two little kids running around in the hay that used to be a lawn with swords. Not real swords, but they looked pretty good for fakes. They had cross-shaped hilts trimmed with gold paint, and some kind of padded blades that were wrapped with duct tape.

  “Have at thee, miscreant!” one of the kids screeched, lunging and slashing down a lot of hay. “Lay down thy arms and kneel! Know me for thy rightful lord!”

  “No way!” the other one screeched back. “I am the rightful lord! Kneel down your stupid self! Or die!”

  Then they both screamed “AARGH!” and started whacking each other.

  So I stopped pedaling because in this neighborhood a hayfield sword battle with possible death involved is not something that you see every day.

  They whacked each other back and forth for a while, yelling stuff like “Vile knave!” and “Cowardly churl!” and “Poltroon!” and then the first one turned and caught sight of me, and pointed a sword, and yelled “Hold! An enemy spy!”

  Which gave the second one a chance to lay a pretty impressive whack across his back.

  “OW! Lay off, Journey!” he said. “I said ‘Hold!’ Didn’t you hear me say ‘Hold’?”

  “No,” the second one said.

  “Well, I did,” the first one said, rubbing his back.

  Then they both came up to the edge of the road, and I figured right then that they were twins because they looked almost exactly alike. They both had the same short dark hair, though the girl’s was a little longer, and the same pointy chins and the same blue eyes with little flecks of gray and the same hard evil stare. The girl was wearing a Hello Kitty outfit that didn’t go very well with the sword. The boy was wearing a T-shirt that said MWAHAHA!

  The boy leveled his sword and pointed it at my chest.

  “Cavalier or Roundhead?” he said.

  “Oh, come on, Jasper,” the girl said disgustedly. “Roundhead. Look at his hair. And his pants.”

  We all looked at my pants. As far as I could see, they were pretty much like everybody else’s pants. Except Walter’s, which are always too short due to his abnormal height and his tendency to wear his belt up around his chest.

  “What’s wrong with my pants?” I said.

  “They’re Roundhead pants,” the girl said, staring at a point embarrassingly below my belt buckle.

  “They’re Levi’s,” I said. The staring was making me nervous. But when I looked, nothing was unzipped.

  “It’s just a game we play about people,” the boy explained. “We decide what kind of dinosaurs they’d be if they were dinosaurs or what kind of dog they’d be if they were dogs or what side they’d fight on in different wars. Like would they be Yankees or Confederates.”

  He gave the girl an accusing look.

  “If Journey was a dinosaur, she’d be a velociraptor. You can tell by how she scorns fair play.”

  “I didn’t hear you say ‘Hold,’” the girl said.

  Journey. What kind of a name is that? I thought. Like naming your kid Trip. Or GPS.

  “If Jasper was a dinosaur, he’d be a stegosaurus,” Journey said. “It had a brain the size of a Ping-Pong ball.”

  “What’s a Cavalier?” I said hastily.

  “The Cavaliers fought for the king in the English Civil War,” Journey said. “They wore plumes in their hats and gave parties.”

  The twins, even though they were only nine, knew a lot about the English Civil War due to their father, the professor, and his monograph about Oliver Cromwell, who won it. Isabelle told me later that the English Civil War was the world’s most tedious topic of dinner conversation, but was good for the figure since after twenty minutes on the political implications of the Long Parliament, you’d do anything to get away from the table, even give up banana cream pie for dessert.

  “The Roundheads fought with Oliver Cromwell against the king,” Jasper said. “They were Puritans.”

  “The Roundheads had stupid haircuts and never had any fun,” Journey said. “Jasper would have been a Roundhead.”

  “The Cavaliers all ended up exiled in France or with their heads chopped off,” Jasper said. “Have you ever been to France?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Je parle français,” Journey said. “That means ‘I speak French’ in French. I have an unusual aptitude for languages.”

  “No, you don’t,” Jasper said.

  “So you’d be a Roundhead,” Journey continued, still disturbingly eyeing my pants, “because your hair is short and you have plain clothes and stuff. If you were a Cavalier, you’d be fancier. Like you’d have an earring.”

  She gave Jasper a dirty look and whacked some hay viciously with her sword.

  “And I do so speak French.”

  “If Journey was a mechanical device,” Jasper said, “she’d be a Kalashnikov automatic rifle.”

  He glared at Journey.

  “And you don’t.”

  These kids should be in an institution, I thought. The kind with padded walls where they don’t let you use anything but plastic knives and forks.

  “We play Cavaliers and Roundheads all the time,” Journey said. “Except when we’re doing the Crusaders and the Saracens or Attila the Hun and the barbarian hordes. When we do the Crusaders, Jasper is always Richard the Lionheart. He doesn’t like being a Saracen because then he has to have a harem full of wives. Would you want to have a harem full of wives?”

  “No,” I said feelingly. I remembered what Peter Reilly went through with his first five serious girlfriends.

  “Nobody would,” Jasper said to Journey. “I told you.”

  “If Jasper was a blanket,” Journey said, “he would be a cold wet blanket.”

  “So where did you move here from?” I said.

  “Jasper says he is a member of an alien race,” Journey said. “He is from a galaxy far far away and is only here observing this planet until the mother ship comes to take him home.”

  It made me nervous how much sense that made to me.

  “But Isabelle says that’s crap,” Journey said cheerfully.

  Which was the first time I heard Isabelle’s name.

  I said, “Who’s Isabelle?”

  Here’s something Isadora Duncan once said: “Don’t let them tame you.”

  Isadora was a dancer, but she hated classical ballet. Instead she invented modern dance, which involved barefoot people wearing togas and pretending to be the wind. When she wasn’t wearing her toga, she wore long flowing silk scarves.

  She was wearing one of those scarves in 1927 when she leaped into a car, made a grand gesture, and cried, “Good-bye, my friends, I am off to glory!” When the car started up, the scarf somehow got tangled up in the wheel, yanked tight, and broke her neck.

  I could see Isabelle dying like that. Wild and beautiful and kind of crazy, but untamed. And making a grand gesture. That’s something Isabelle would do.

  By the time I met Isabelle, it was the second week in June and school was just out for the summer. The lilacs had come and gone by then, the blackflies had come and stayed, and the temperature had gone so fast from cool to hot that Corrigan’s Hardware Store had to scramble, setting out window screens and ice-cube trays and fans.

  On the last day of school we all got rowdy on the back seat of the bus on the way home, yelling and laughing and shoving each other around. Partly it was because it was just a great day outside and there was a whole summer in front of us, and partly, at least in my case, it was because I knew that for two whole months now I wouldn’t have to worry about my untapped potential and my crappy grades and how disgusted my dad was going to be when I got like a 10 on the PSAT. So we were whooping and hollering like idiots, and punching each other in the arm, especially Peter Reilly with his Bowflex biceps.

  When Walter got off the bus at Cemetery Hill Road, we yanked the window down and started throwing Ryan Baker’s gourmet jelly b
eans at him, pinging them off his shoulders and the back of his head, the ones with flavors nobody liked, like mango and grape jelly. Walter didn’t even look up, just hunched over and trudged off down the road, lugging his funky briefcase.

  Peter Reilly yelled after him, “Hey, Wally! What are you going to do this summer? Read Play-Doh?” and Mickey Roberts yelled, “Say hi to the Living Dead!” and all the rest of us went, “Woo-oo-oo-oo!” like horror-movie noises, but Walter didn’t so much as turn around. I thought for a minute how he looked sad and lonely there, scuffing along in the dust where the county hadn’t come out yet to put calcium chloride down on the dirt road, but then Ryan Baker got up in the aisle and started playing air guitar and Earl Keever bellowed at him to set his scrawny rump back down, and I didn’t think about Walter anymore.

  Final exams had been pretty excruciating, though a bright spot was that we’re allowed to wear anything we want within reason to school in exam week, and Amanda Turner showed up in a halter top and a pair of little shorts that barely covered her rear end. Peter Reilly said at lunch that it was her fault if he flunked ninth grade because every time he looked up from thinking about algebra or American history, there was that halter top across the aisle and then everything would go right out of his head. Peter said he’d heard somewhere that men think about sex every ten seconds, but he figured Amanda in that halter top brought it down to five.

  The teachers must have realized this too, because Amanda got called to the office, and when she came back, she was covered up from neck to knees in one of those baggy white coats from the chemistry lab.

  I ended up with one B, four C’s, and one A, which was in physical education, which yet again dashed my dad’s hopes of me ever making something of myself someday. I knew he looked at my report cards and thought what a waste I was, and how Eli could have been out of medical school by now, with a profession and a title. That’s what Eli was going to be, a doctor. Except he decided to go to Iraq and be a combat medic first.

  “Yeah,” my dad said, looking at my card like it was an HIV-positive blood test. “You know, I don’t think Eli ever got less than a B in high school, and he only got one of those.”

  He dropped my report card on the coffee table.

  “It was in German,” he said. “He got a B in German. From that bald guy who didn’t like him. The one who looked like a Nazi.”

  “Mr. Trossel,” I said.

  “Those A’s in phys ed, I read they don’t mean anything when it comes to getting into college,” my dad said. “Colleges want the kids to play some sport, sure, but when they look at a GPA, all they want is the academics. The academics, that’s what counts.”

  By which time I felt lower than a worm’s belly. He never said I was a failure straight out, but it didn’t take a genius to see what he was thinking. Like those canaries that can sense poisonous gases in coal mines, I could sense the condemnation in the air.

  So that afternoon I took my bike out and went for a ride.

  Walter says the only way to solve problems is to think them through in logical sequence, but I know that if you go far enough and fast enough on a bike, you can leave them all behind, at least for a while. I used to pedal and pedal until the muscles in the calves of my legs burned and my eyes teared up from wind, and then I’d feel things sort of loosen up inside, like they didn’t matter so much anymore. I always thought that maybe Lance Armstrong is such a great racer because he had a crappy dad and this terrible cancer and he knew what it was like to have problems to outrun.

  I had two or three different favorite rides. One went up over the top of Turkey Hill, and that was the hardest, because it’s really steep, and when I first started riding there, I used to have to stop in the middle and get off and push my bike for a while. It was always worth it though, because coming back down was wild, as good as a roller-coaster ride, with the bike going about a hundred miles an hour and me feeling like I wasn’t on earth at all but was some kind of supermagic creature flying on the wind. Then the road levels out past the Monroe place and through the back end of the Pilcher property, where Jim has his blue-potato farm, and then out to the Fairfield Road and back home.

  Or I’d ride out past the old Sowers place and take a left onto Scrubgrass Creek Road, which goes back through the woods and across this rickety little bridge over the creek. That was prettier, with dogwood and crab-apple flowers in the springtime, and all the leaves red and yellow in the fall, and it smelled better too. The Monroes have pigs, and those can be pretty repulsive if the wind is blowing the wrong way.

  Anyway, that afternoon I rode out past the old Sowers house. Already it was looking different, now that it was being lived in again. There was a Volvo parked in the driveway, and furniture on the porch, and a hanging basket with a pink geranium. A lot of the hay had been cut down too, to make what was starting to look like a lawn.

  Then I saw that right in the middle of the lawn was this girl lying flat on her back with her arms stretched out and her eyes closed, and next to her, flat out too, were the sword-fighting twins. Right off I thought of a horrible murder scene like in CSI, with bodies scattered around. I could imagine them all outlined in chalk, with one of those yellow-tape things that the police put up that says DO NOT CROSS THIS LINE.

  But then the twins jumped up and came running over. Jasper was wearing a purple T-shirt that said I AM THE EVIL TWIN. Journey was wearing a purple leotard and one of those little ballet skirts and a pair of purple Crocs. It wasn’t often that I saw so much short purple all in one place.

  “What are you two supposed to be?” I said. “Grapes?”

  Journey shot me a look that said that if I was a fruit, I’d be a poison apple.

  “Purple is our favorite color,” said Jasper. “People who like purple are witty and sensitive.”

  “I used to like pink,” Journey said. “But Isabelle says that pink is a color stereotype. You know, like blue is for boys and pink is for girls. If Isabelle ever has a baby boy, she’s going to dress him in pink because she thinks color stereotypes are stupid.”

  I thought that if she really carried through with that, she’d also better get the kid a set of brass knuckles and a crash course in karate.

  “Right now we’re listening to the earth hum,” Journey said. “It’s Isabelle’s idea. She read about it in Scientific American. She read that the earth hums all the time like a giant bumblebee.”

  “Like this,” Jasper said, making a repulsive noise through his nose.

  Then Isabelle sat up and I forgot about the twins.

  What I knew by then about Isabelle, due to the twins’ having no sense of privacy or discretion, was that she was fifteen and went to some fancy school for the arts back home, which was in New York City, where she had a boyfriend named Simon Dewitt Paxton, who was presently spending a multiculturally enriching summer living with a family in France. I also knew that if she were a bird, she’d be a vicious parrot; that when the twins were three, she’d talked them into eating a bar of Ivory soap; and that she disapproved of cowboy hats.

  What I didn’t know, because the twins hadn’t bothered to say in spite of the fact that they have the verbal version of diarrhea, was that she was beautiful. Beautiful was not a word I usually used about girls, but it was the only word for Isabelle.

  Walter says that we are attracted to potential mates because of large differences in our major histocompatibility complexes, which are a bunch of genes that have something to do with making us immune to disease. Attraction is purely genetic and instinctive, Walter says, though I can tell you that if Walter does not learn to shut up about this, he will never have a potential mate.

  Anyway, I did not think about disease genes right then. What I thought about was how I’d never seen anybody as beautiful as Isabelle. And how Isabelle made Amanda Turner and her halter tops look too bright and loud, like those plastic dolls you win for throwing baseballs at ducks at the Fairfield County Agricultural Fair. She had straight, silky dark hair and skin like cream and
these blue, blue eyes, the color the sky gets on a really perfect October afternoon. Everything about her was slim and crisp and elegant. If you’ve ever known a truly beautiful girl, you’ll know what I mean, and if you haven’t, I can’t explain. It was just everything that Isabelle was.

  That day she had on a white skirt and an old soft blue shirt and she wasn’t wearing any shoes. And she had this beautiful smile that just sparkled at you, that made you feel special, as if you were the person she’d been most hoping to see.

  And there I was, all sweaty from riding my bicycle, and a pimple starting on my nose, and I probably smelled.

  “You must be Danny,” Isabelle said.

  She patted the grass next to her and said, “Come listen with us,” and where I would ordinarily have thought about the red ants and deer ticks and Lyme disease, right then I didn’t. For a chance to be next to Isabelle, I would have laid down on a bed of nails in a crocodile swamp.

  “It’s a very low-pitched hum, so you have to be quiet,” Isabelle said. “It’s like a giant heartbeat. The heart of the planet.”

  “Babies inside their mother can hear their mother’s heart,” said Journey. “They can hear their mother reading to them too. When Jasper and I were inside, our mother used to read to us, which is why we are so intelligent. She read us poetry and philosophy and Winnie-the-Pooh.”

  “Hush,” Isabelle said.

  “I don’t hear anything,” Jasper said, squirming.

  “That’s because you’re talking,” Isabelle said. “Close your eyes and hold your breath and listen. Concentrate.”

  So we all closed our eyes and held our breath and listened, though I couldn’t concentrate very well, being so close to Isabelle. I hoped right then that Simon Dewitt Paxton would never come back from France. I’d read somewhere that there were wolves in France. Maybe he’d get eaten by wolves. Or run over by a taxi on the Champs Elysées, which Walter told me later was a lot more likely.