Skipping School

by Jessie Haas

  “How much are the handkerchiefs?” he asked when it was his turn.

  “Dollar.”

  “I’ll take …” He paused and checked his pockets. “Five. I’ll put the soup back.”

  “Can’t eat a bandanna, kid,” the man said, winking at the next person in line. But he brought out five new bandannas, neatly folded, and when Phillip couldn’t find enough change to pay the sales tax, the man shooed him away. “I’ll get it from the next guy!” Wink.

  Phillip put the soup back on the shelf, only briefly giving any thought to stealing it. He had no can opener anyway, and he’d probably just lose it all if he chopped the can open with the hatchet.

  At the edge of the woods he tied the bandannas on himself, making a skimpy vest which covered only the upper third of his chest. He blushed even to think of a hunter seeing him and had to remind himself that to be brought low by a bullet, all for the sake of vanity, would be even more ridiculous. But he walked quickly, eager for the shelter of the gray house.

  The kittens weren’t around. Of course, on a morning like this, they had to disappear. He called a couple of times, then kept himself busy laying a fire and getting his pan of water. When he went to the door again, ready to take to the woods and start calling in spite of the potential embarrassment, they were coming around the corner, blinking. They must have been asleep in the foundation.

  “Hi, guys!” He picked them up. One squeaked in faint protest. The other looked straight into his eyes, in a drowsy, intimate way.

  “Why don’t you have names?” he asked them. The sleepy one put a soft paw to his lips, then stretched against him and yawned widely. “Hi,” he said to it again.

  The other one struggled out of his arms, landed on the floor with a solid thump, and stretched. The stretch was audible, a distinct shudder on the air. Phillip had always known that you could hear a cat stretch, but for the first time it struck him as strange. What was he actually hearing? The muscles? The hairs, shivering against one another?

  Everything was strange. He fed the kittens, lit his fire, and put the pan of water on to heat. As the tiny flames and smoke curls twined up through the branches, the hurt came out where he could see it.

  He was a fool, he told himself, and selfish. He had imagined his father had something to say to him that he could say to no one else.

  It was true. What his father had to say was, “I want to be alone.”

  Phillip tried to feel honored by this. He knew it was an honor. Masks were slipping. They were all starting to say true things to one another, and this is what his father said to him. Him, and no one else. “I want to be alone. You are the one I can ask. You are the one who is strong enough.”

  Yet his heart swelled with hurt, and though he told himself that he was doing a good thing, that he was brave and strong and generous, that was only a thin voice speaking from beyond the edge. Hurt ballooned bigger in his chest with every breath. He took a kitten on his lap, hoping that might help, and stared at the flames for a long time, until the fire had burned down to a heap of gray ashes, and it was time to go home.

  When Phillip swooped into the driveway, the kitchen door was open. The side door of the garage was open, too, and between the two, down the steps and across the concrete pad, ran the oxygen line. It wasn’t moving.

  “Dad?” Phillip dropped his bike in the driveway. “Dad?”

  The line stirred. Now he saw Thea, sitting gravely at the top of the steps. As the line moved, she regarded it for a moment and then softly poked it with her paw.

  His father was standing in the garage doorway. He glanced around as Phillip came in, his face slightly strange, like the face of a person you haven’t seen for a couple of months.

  “Um …” said Phillip. “Ah, it’s pretty cold out here. Don’t you think …” His words made no contact and thinned out into nothingness.

  His father turned slightly, looking into the far back corner of the garage. His shoulders seemed to sag. Finally he said, in a soft, husky voice, “Phillip, what the hell can I do?”

  It was the kind of question Phillip’s mind went blank on. What can I do? About what? In the still garage he could hear his father’s breathing. A number of horrible possibilities presented themselves, but he felt entirely bereft of words.

  “There’s nothing to do,” his father said. He turned now to Phillip, lifting his big, empty hands in a way that suddenly made everything clearer. “I wanted to think, but … I can’t think if I’m not doing anything.”

  Of course, Phillip thought, remembering his own need, in all the beautiful solitude of the gray house, to do some work and thinking of the two armfuls of duck pillows in the closet.

  But everything here was finished and put away. In the house everything was cleaned, polished, new.

  “I don’t know, but come inside. You’ll catch cold.”

  His father didn’t move. “I’ll get pneumonia. You know what they … used to call pneumonia, Phillip? The old man’s friend.”

  “Come on!”

  After a long moment his father turned and heavily climbed the steps. The oxygen cord dragged behind, and Thea followed, poking it. Phillip pushed it the last couple of inches with his toe and closed the door. His father stood in the kitchen now, hands at his sides, gazing blankly at the spotless countertop.

  “You could sharpen the splitting hammer and the wedges,” Phillip offered.

  “Hmm? Oh …” His father looked around, in vague interest. It was enough. Phillip went back to the garage.

  The hammer and wedges were still in the grain bag, where he’d left them. He rummaged through the toolbox and found the file, then brought them inside, where his father had already spread a newspaper on the table.

  “How about the ax?” he asked, sitting down.

  “Aah …” said Phillip.

  His father looked up.

  “I’ve got it,” Phillip said. “Out in the woods.” His father’s face remained calmly curious, unthreatening, and essentially unreadable. “Hatchet, too,” Phillip said.

  “They need sharpening?”

  “Well, yeah, I s’pose they might, by now. I’ll—” His father terminated the babble by looking down again and picking up the file.

  “Why don’t you bring in the chain saw, too?” he suggested after a minute. “Can’t remember how we left it.”

  “Okay.” Phillip went out the door again. The air looked strange, like water with clear oil swirled through it, the air of unreality. His father would never use the chain saw again, never raise the splitting hammer over his head and swing it down on a chunk of wood. But to sharpen these tools was useful work, the last work he would do with them.… It was all too bewildering for tears. He picked up the heavy chain saw and the little tool kit that went with it and carried them inside.

  “Thanks,” his father said.

  “Um … you had lunch?”

  “Don’t want any.”

  Phillip stood a moment, watching his father stroke the file over a wedge, straightening its curled and crumpled edge. “So … you want me to leave?”

  His father looked up again. His eyes seemed unfocused. This must be very strange to him, too. Never mind the fear and the anger at being wrenched away from everything. At some deep level it was all just strange. Too strange for the conventional emotions …

  “Yes,” his father said. “If you wouldn’t mind.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I do mind, thought Phillip. He was on his bike again, moving, with no place to go.

  He turned down Kris’s street and went through the motions of inquiring for her at home. Of course, she was at Aunt Mil’s. He and she agreed about weekends: too much opportunity for closeness with your family.

  It was one thing to escape from your home and quite another to be pushed out. It was …

  “Oh, crap!” he said aloud. The one thing his father had asked of him, since the beginning of his illness, and here he was dissolved in self-pity.

  It would have been nice if h
is father had wanted to talk.

  Well, he doesn’t. He has somebody trying to talk with him twenty-four hours of the day, and he can’t ask her to get out. For this very reason.

  Still …

  Oh, gimme a break!

  He found himself outside Aunt Mil’s picket fence, leaned his bike against it, and went up the path. His knock went unanswered, but he heard voices, and cautiously, wondering whether he should, he opened the door. “Hello?”

  Kris was on her knees in the pantry, scrubbing. Hot pine cleaner smell boiled up around her. Aunt Mil stood on a chair, reaching something down from the top shelf. They looked around at him, and Aunt Mil said, “Good! Stop right there, take off your shoes, and come take these things from me.”

  “These things” were glass cake and cheese covers, sherbet glasses, a punch bowl, and a small tea set, all covered with a thin film of dust.

  “No, we’re not having a party,” Aunt Mil said. “Come here, lend me your shoulder.” She leaned one bony hand on him, not heavily, and stepped down from the chair. “There, Kris, I’ll get this out of your way. Now that the garden’s put away for the year, it’s time to clean all the things I never use. Have to make work for this girl, so her father won’t think she comes just for the subversive talk.”

  She squeezed dish soap into one half of the sink and turned on the hot water. “Do you want to wash or dry?”

  Phillip realized she was speaking to him. “Uh, wash.” He tested the water with one finger. Too hot. His hands were frozen to the marrow, and in very hot water they would feel as if they were splitting. He ran some cold, filled the other sink with rinse water, and plunged in his hands. They burned coldly for a few moments and turned lobster red. He started on the sherbet glasses.

  They were all silent, working. The sun came out weakly, veiled by a thin overcast. Suddenly Phillip remembered Aunt Mil picking him up on the road, only yesterday. Walking out of school. Mr. Peabody.

  And the playground last night, swinging and holding Kris’s hand.

  The air was full of the things they all knew and hadn’t told, or wouldn’t tell, as well as the things they wondered. It made a pressure, which somehow accentuated the quiet. With his hands in the dishwater, and the sun pale on the fuzzy cactus over the sink, all at once Phillip felt happy and peaceful, as if he had an untouchable stillness walled within his heart.

  He washed the cake covers and the cheese covers. He could see himself on their surfaces, transparent and distorted, the small spontaneous smile on his face turned to a Howdy Doody grin. He stopped smiling, but the cake cover made him smile anyway, now a secretive smirk. He looked up at the window.

  There he was again, this time reflected accurately. He was still transparent, though, and through himself he could see the brown November yard and the white picket fence.

  “What do you see?” asked Aunt Mil. He realized he had been standing still, looking, for a noticeable amount of time.

  After work they sat down to tea and gingersnaps and talked about adopting greyhounds. Kris’s father had given his firm and absolute no: no fostering, no kennel in his backyard, no more pets of any kind.

  “Well, I’m not going to volunteer,” Aunt Mil said. “At my age I don’t think a greyhound is what I need.”

  “It’s all right,” said Kris confidently. “I’ll work it out with Dr. Franklin. The first one will be just overnight, so it’ll be gone before he can do anything. The next one will be longer, and before you know it, he’ll be forcing me to build a kennel!”

  “You understand him all too well,” said Aunt Mil dryly.

  Then she thought of Phillip’s father. He could almost hear the click as the association slid into place, and even before she spoke, even before her eyes turned toward him, he felt a thrill of alarm. But it was too late.

  “Did you speak to your father, Phillip?” she asked.

  A bubble of air seemed to rise in Phillip’s throat. He had to swallow it before he could speak. “Um, no. Actually my—my mother’s away, and … he wants to be alone. He hasn’t been alone in six months, he said.”

  Her eyes sharpened on him, alarmingly. “And where does that leave you, Phillip?”

  Phillip didn’t know how to answer. They were both looking at him now. “I—I just went out.…”

  “Have you been out of the house all day?”

  “Um … no. I was back at lunchtime.…”

  Aunt Mil closed her mouth abruptly, and it made a long, firm downward curve across her face. She looked out the window at the cold gray day. “You are always welcome here,” she said, after a moment.

  Phillip should say something, he knew, but he felt stuck inside. He just sat. The silence lengthened, until Kris suddenly glanced at the clock and said, “Oh, Lord, I’ve got to go!”

  Phillip made his escape then, and they walked together. He wheeled his bike, putting it and Diana between himself and Kris. They were a whole sidewalk apart and didn’t speak for a long time.

  “Derek dumped Carrie,” Phillip said at last. “Now he’s going out with a bathroom mirror.” He waited; she didn’t laugh. “That’s where Mom went.”

  “To see Carrie?”

  “Yeah.”

  Silence again. The cold had sharpened, and a wind was blowing. Diana, with her short, thin hair, huddled miserably and shivered. She was the kind of dog that ought to have a coat, Phillip thought, and he thought out a couple of neat, witty ways to say so to Kris. But he didn’t. Her profile looked stern, forbidding speech, especially anything witty and frivolous. They approached his street, the parting of ways.

  “Well—” he said lightly, and at the same time Kris said, “Aunt Mil told me she picked you up. What happened, with Peabody?”

  With Peabody? How did she know about Peabody? And what could he tell her?

  She was staring at him, her eyes growing brighter and harder, a flush rising to her cheeks. “Thanks, Phillip,” she said abruptly. “Thanks a lot!” And she strode off up the street, Diana trotting effortlessly alongside. Phillip stared at her, still groping for an answer, hardly able to grasp that she was gone.

  His father sat in the living room with no lights on. He turned his head when Phillip came in. Thea was draped across his chest, fast asleep.

  “You want supper?” Phillip asked.

  “No. Fix some for yourself.”

  Phillip left the living room, as he knew he was meant to. The house felt dark and too quiet. He opened the refrigerator. All the containers, which had been so well explained to him, looked blank and sterile. He couldn’t think what was in them, and after all, he wasn’t hungry. He went and took a very long, very hot shower.

  Then he sat on his bed and looked at a book, passed his eyes over the words, gradually easing his attention away from the wounded feeling in his own heart and the little conversations he kept making up to regain people’s attention. Everyone had a fragmented and mistaken image of him. He should have explained himself better.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  When he awoke, the light was still on and he was fully dressed. He glanced at the clock. Three A.M. He didn’t feel aggrieved this time. He felt exceptionally clearheaded, pleased to be awake now, when no one else was. For once he knew exactly what to do.

  He got off the bed, put on a sweater, and stopped at his desk to write a note.

  Dad

  I couldn’t sleep. Went to get the ax and hatchet for you. Back for breakfast.

  Phillip

  He almost expected to find his father still in the chair, but snores came from his parents’ bedroom. Phillip put the note on the counter, got a flashlight and his jacket, and slipped out the door, closing it softly behind him. His bike was on the breezeway. He wheeled it out to the street and mounted.

  Cold. He pushed into it, watching his own shadow lengthen and diminish as he passed from one streetlight to another.

  All day, explaining himself to others or hiding himself; never succeeding. Looking for himself in all those mirrors. Struggling to bring himse
lf into focus. He felt that he had been looking for support, and now he was upright, undivided. He passed out of streetlights and into darkness, his feeble, bobbing headlight probing dimly along the yellow line. There were no cars. Every house was dark. Only an alert dog or two noticed his passing.

  At last he came to the farm, also dark, swooped through the silent yard and out into the frost-rimed cornfield, feeling the immense, empty space around him. What he missed most about their own farm, and about farm country, was the emptiness. That’s what farms are for, he thought, slowing, hitting a hump of manure, getting off to walk. A farm like this was the silent, open heart of the countryside. He was grateful to the unknown people who worked so hard here, perhaps thinking only of the living they were trying to make. If they could not make a living here, they should be given one, so the quiet could endure.

  Somewhere ahead in the black trees he heard the fierce cry of an owl. It made a long, rounded shape on the air, reaching out across the field. His feet crunched on the frosty ground.

  At the edge of the woods he left his bike and started climbing. After a few minutes he turned the flashlight off and waited, balanced lightly on the balls of his feet, until his eyes began to adjust. Then he started on again. He felt that his heart, and not his senses, guided him. He was part of the dark woods, and it was impossible for him to lose his way. The thin carpet of worn and trodden leaves seemed to come up and find his feet at every step. The trees stretched their arms along the road to guide him.

  The brook was loud for a while, and then he came to the house. The roof slates gleamed slightly. His feet found the path down through the silvery weeds. He touched the door latch and remembered his dream—coming to a lonely gray house on a stormy night. Never once had he felt that the dream was a psychic event. Simply it was a part of himself, telling him what he needed. He opened the door on the greater darkness within.

  He waited and eventually could see how the light came in the window: the fireplace, the cross-hatching of the kindling pile, the sharp edge of the kittens’ box. He walked across the floor, hearing his own footsteps and nothing else. The leaves no longer shivered in the corners. The kittens had caught all the mice, or else they were hibernating.