“Robert,” he conceded.
“Like Robert Redford.” Sharon smirked like she had figured us out, then offered the fake boyfriend a macaroon.
“Aunt Shar, I didn’t know you were a fan.”
“Oh, I had it bad. Your father used to tease me.”
Robert, unaccustomed to the chewy sweets, took a bite, then spit it into his napkin.
“We have fruit salad,” Sharon said. She pivoted and sped toward melon.
“I want to meet Harriet Tieman.” Robert blockaded my ear with his hand, whispered, “Not these amateurs.”
Where was Harriet Tieman? She was surrounded by people reading transliterations of the Mourner’s Kaddish. It was hard to see her in there, five foot nothing, holding a Xeroxed prayer.
I pushed through the throngs of fruit salad makers, fruit basket givers. One woman had brought a fruit platter inside an old Scrabble box, and everyone kept saying, “It’s not Scrabble! It’s not Scrabble!” Was fruit better?
“Ma, this is my friend Robert.”
He stood above her, tall and blond and mostly gay, her new husband’s fake boyfriend. My mother looked up, clutching a lone kiwi, Mourner’s Kaddished out.
“Mrs. Jacobs, so nice to finally meet you.” He shook her hand and tried to make the eye contact they’d taught him at the so-you-think-you-might-go-to-law-school orientation. She looked at his suit. It would have been too big on my father.
“Robert knows your maiden name, too,” I said. “He memorized it.”
“Very nice,” said my mother.
How would she respond if I told her he’d put it in me? That when it was in me the third time, and no longer hurt at all, I understood everything for a second? That it could go back to its life outside me—get blow jobs in Oaxaca, intern at the ACLU—but I’d never go back to not understanding?
This maybe wasn’t the right time.
“He’s thinking about law school,” I said.
“Don’t sue us,” said my mother.
Robert laughed like he was looking for a laugh. She tried to give him her kiwi. It wasn’t nice, just a way for her not to be holding that fuzzy thing anymore. She told him she’d never be happy again, then offered to let him borrow my father’s ties for interviews.
“Who will he give them back to?” I said.
“You.”
He laughed again, declined the ties, squeezed the kiwi. Harriet Tieman was a riot. Harriet Tieman needed to lie down.
“She hates me,” he said. He seemed excited.
I led him by his middle finger to one of the sofas in our living room. Now that the worst was over, everything had gotten festive. The house was snowy bright and swarming with people holding plastic cups, fizzy with ginger ale. The rabbi was in a corner by himself, eating a sandwich. The men had taken off their jackets, leaving a sun-warmed pile, and I nudged it over so Robert and I would have room to sit. I crossed my legs, then wrapped one ankle around the other calf. I wanted the rabbi to think Robert was my boyfriend.
“Where’s the booze?” asked my fake boyfriend, an undergrad who had been away from home just long enough to realize that everything can be made into a joke.
“Ask the rabbi,” I panned. I was also an undergrad. I had pokey nipples and there was no such thing as bisexual.
“Rabbi Irwin says we can’t get drunk,” said Robert, when he got back to our sofa. “It’s not the custom.”
“Irwin? I don’t think that’s his name.”
But I felt drunk. I shut my eyes, leaned into some jacket scratch, slid my fist through a silky sleeve.
“Hey Robby, do you want to watch a video from when I was a kid? Do you want to watch my bat mitzvah?”
“You know that I would pay money to see that, but my French section meets at the butt crack of dawn.”
“I can show you my dirty paperbacks,” I said. “I think some of them were just meant to be educational about puberty.”
“That sounds hot.”
Robert led himself out the front door. He got into his car, turned on the ignition, and, after waiting a few seconds for the engine to warm, backed out of my family’s driveway in one smooth motion, his face already frozen into the terrible mask he wore when he thought nobody was looking.
—
THEN EVERYONE WAS GONE. Susan dust-busted the crumbs. She shook the tablecloth. She wedged herself between sofa legs, sucked away remains. She said, “I’m cleaning up to help your mother.”
The big theme now was helping my mother. All the aunts were saying it.
“I’m staying until Wednesday to help your mother.”
“I’ll put coffee on to help your mother.”
“It’s good that you’re here to help your mother.”
Did reading on the couch count as helping?
Dr. Alan Jacobs loved to lie on couches and read and ignore his family sometimes. He loved to mop the floor vigorously and ask, “Could you please hang up the phone? I’m on call.” But the man could be gentle. Cooking was something he liked to do.
Someone had mashed cake into the carpet and Susan plowed into it. Her legs stuck out behind her, stiff shins in poofed jeans. At some point she had changed—clamped her skirt to a hanger, flogged her jacket with a lint brush. I avoided her with a book about nocturnal emissions at tennis camp. I didn’t want to watch her struggle with a suitcase zipper or sink-wash her underwear, all of the ways she kept staying.
“I wish you could stay longer, for your mother’s sake,” she bellowed over the buster. “But your father wouldn’t want you to miss too much class.”
“I’m not sure he cares anymore,” I said.
She frowned. Of course he still cared. A father is a father. She went deeper with the little vacuum, pushing her divorced torso into its vrooms, over the sofa cushions, near my legs, through the cracks. Had she ever considered a fake boyfriend? I glanced at the stereo, at the white box parked in front of it. It looked like another cake.
“Lift your feet,” she said.
—
I WATCHED the bat mitzvah video late that night, sans Robert. If he had been in my French class in junior high, the teacher would have pronounced his name “Roh-bear.” I had been, for no reason, “Rosalie.”
Bonjour, Rosalie. Comment allez-vous?
Mal. Très mal. Mon père est mort.
Oui? Quel dommage!
That’s all the French I could remember. Not the girl in the video. The girl in the video knew French, and, apparently, Hebrew. Enough Hebrew to bleat out a passage about cleansing your house of leprosy, after a leper has lived in your house. First, you scraped the afflicted stones. If that didn’t work, you had to take the whole house apart. My parents and I met with the rabbi the week before to discuss my passage—poof, he was a rebbe and I was a scholar, not a flat-chested, staticky-haired midget. We were in the Talmud. My parents, in their work clothes, didn’t seem to fit.
The rabbi stood behind a giant mahogany desk. He lit a pipe and explained that cleansing the house of disease was really a metaphor for cleansing the self of moral decay.
“That plague does sound pretty nasty,” said my father, with a wink to remind anyone watching that he may have been in temple, but he loved knowing religion was irrational. He had a beeper, a teenage daughter, a wife batting pipe smoke away from her own face.
“Then someone from the Board will say a few words,” said the rabbi.
“Don’t be heartbroken,” said my father on the drive home, “but I think we’re going to quit the temple after your bat mitzvah.” I had the backseat to myself and was frantically trying to memorize the opening prayers.
“It’s very expensive,” said my mother.
“Why am I doing this, then?”
“That rabbi is so pompous,” said my father. “People kept getting sick, and someone had to tell them how to clean and quarantine so they would stop transmitting disease. It’s not moral decay, it’s common sense!”
My father snorted, and I sort of understood, but only enough to
wish I had gotten a passage about miracles. The garage door rolled open. He dragged the garbage to the curb. She boiled water. I trudged up to my room, where I conjugated, masturbated. It wasn’t hard. The young adult books were crisper then, their pages unbent, promising girls reflected in mirrors, girls with scoliosis, girls looking forward to the kind of loss that only hurt a little.
Sports Night
SPORTS NIGHT practices in the lobby. I watch them from the hall. They practice next to trophies from real sports. They practice, and detention lets out, and they are still practicing. Sports Night has no sports, only dance moves that require a thousand afterschools of practice. It’s a lot of practice for one night, a lot of crying. Someone’s always getting paper towels for them to cry in. I never see them be done practicing. I have to go back down the hall. I’m on Newspaper. We get out later than detention, Sports Night, Abstinence, and every real sport.
Abstinence inflates balloons for when they throw the worst party of the year. Newspaper reports on it.
“Proud virgins,” we caption them.
We are ashamed virgins. We own condoms for no reason. We get As on our Sex Ed quizzes, the ones Abstinence is petitioning to get rid of. I pen an op-ed saying the school should keep the quizzes. While we’re taking them, I watch girls who do Sports Night remember blow jobs they gave down by the quarry, if this town even has a quarry. I don’t know where the blow jobs are. They could be anywhere.
I may not be an expert in local geography, but I do know local history. Sports Night was invented in 1948, when girls weren’t allowed to play sports. Sepia-toned girls ran relay races and dodged balls in skirts past the knee. We’d beaten the Nazis. The town needed its girls to prove they could pass a baton fast enough to birth an empire. When the daughters of those girls started competing in real sports, Sports Night became more of a pageant, but kept the name that had given the town so much joy.
Sports Night has dances. It has skits. Last year’s theme was Underwater Enchantment. The whole town came to see lip-synched ballads about mermaids who resented their fathers. Spandexed, bejeweled sophomores showed off months of choreography, flicked their hair around shell bras, lowered themselves into splits between legs coated with glitter. Every character was sexy. It wasn’t just the mermaid. They had sexy lobsters, sexy squid. They keep one character not sexy to cover up the few fat girls who don’t know they’re not supposed to audition for Sports Night.
I know I’m not supposed to audition. I don’t know how I know—nobody tells you you can’t—but there are conflicts. Newspaper, for instance, and a club where kids without friends meet with the principal to discuss how to improve the school. Why students of different races sit separately in the cafeteria is one of our concerns, as well as Abstinence being mad that the cafeteria windows get decorated every Christmas for HanuKwanzaa but we leave out the infant Jesus. Sports Night gets a window, too. They stand on cafeteria chairs in leggings they don’t mind getting paint on, and reveal their theme the first Monday of every December.
This year’s theme is the decade when their moms were pretty. The costume is easy if the mom kept her clothes, if she was the same size as the girl. My mom was pretty, too, then, but I’m not pretty this decade. I thought about doing a skit about it, a dance. One of the colleges I’m applying to lets you do dances about your mom for credit. It lets you do dances about the girls who did dances in your high school. That’s why I’m watching them. I’m going to need their moves later, when I’m taking Interpretative Dance II with people like me.
—
SOMEBODY set off the smoke alarm and now all the clubs are waiting on the field behind the school—Chess, Newspaper, Suicide Awareness. Sports Night keeps practicing. They lunge, clutch grass. Editors nudge me, as if I made this happen. The editors look worse outside. At Newspaper, they’re in charge, ordering pizza, editing last year’s Band trip article to fit this year’s Band trip needs. Out here, they’re just a group of kids who brought their backpacks in case there was really a fire.
Chess brought their chess sets with them. During a smoke alarm last May, somebody moved a rook and disrupted a championship game. Now they bring the sets outside, balance them like pizzas while they wait on the grass. I’m impressed by Chess, the interracial makeup of its nerds. I like their little timers.
“Should we do an article about Chess?” I ask a Josh with a backpack. The Josh’s backpack has his initials on it—JAG—so he doesn’t get mistaken for any of the other nerds of his race. “They seem ignored.”
“Chess doesn’t want not to be ignored,” he says.
Textbook corners frame his initials from inside his backpack. He carries all his textbooks with him at all times, like he was never assigned a locker. I have the same textbooks—AP Physics, AP American, AP Foreign-Language-Not-Spoken-Since-Ancient-Times.
“We did a double issue for Sports Night,” I say. “We had pictures of all those lobsters. You interviewed Lindsay.”
“She was a captain,” he says.
“Well, she’s a captain again, but I’m not interviewing her,” I say. Sports Night is doing rib isolations. “Fuck it, I’m interviewing Chess.”
“We can’t put pawns on the front page!” he yells after me.
“Can we put suicide?”
JAG’s the reason I’m not editor in chief this year. Around the time of last year’s Band trip, he and I interviewed for the same job. He wore a tie. I found my evaluation sheet after, and it said, “Leaves the pub shop during production and we don’t know where she goes.” I could have told them if they had asked. I break into the Abstinence office and spray it with contraceptive foam. I practice Sports Night moves in an empty classroom. I watch the sun set out a suicide-proof window and remain firmly inside what’s supposed to be my life.
—
MY MOM picked me up the night I found out I didn’t get chief. I was crying. I would have to be on Newspaper another year, taking orders from someone my own age with a giant backpack.
“Did you put the paper to bed?” she asked. She liked to picture me tucking the newspaper in.
“They can burn in hell,” I said.
“Just being on the masthead of a respected weekly is enough, Li,” she said. “You can still put Argus on your applications without the headache of being in charge.”
“I would have taken the paper in a new direction,” I said.
“Maybe people like the old direction,” she said. “Why don’t you drive home?”
Her offer let me know she was sorry. My driving skills were not getting me into college. I had crept up many curbs practicing my K turns, had gone down one-way streets in a new direction. My parents took turns not taking me out.
Now I drive fine. Not everyone on Newspaper can say the same. Some of their moms still pick them up on Production Night, though they hold the title of chief.
—
“LINDSAY,” I ask Lindsay, with Newspaper’s tape recorder, “how are you deciding team costumes this year in the absence of clear characters like enchanted fish and turtles?”
“We have characters,” she says. “From that decade.”
“You mean famous people? Like Valerie Solanas?”
“We’re not doing her,” says Lindsay. “Mrs. Spumondi says it has to be inclusive for everyone. The whole town comes.”
“Yes, the whole town came last year. Male attendance was especially high. How did you feel about your friends’ fathers and the guy from the post office seeing you in those sexy lobster costumes?” This is my hardball.
“We’re proud of our bodies,” she says.
I hadn’t thought of that, but Lindsay is well versed in defending Sports Night from a short-lived club that formed in opposition to Sports Night. Nobody remembers them now. Abstinence came and stole their thunder by being opposed to sex overall.
“Okay, Lindsay. Thank you for your time.”
“Thanks for watching us practice.” She smiles at me like I’m one of the male teachers who also watches them practice
.
“I need to watch for the article.”
The truth is that I’m not sure I would have passed Driver’s Ed last year if Mr. Hinkle and I hadn’t spent so much time together watching Sports Night practice in the lobby.
“No DUI fatalities this weekend,” I’d say, disappointed. You needed to hand in thirty DUI fatalities from local newspapers in order to pass the class.
“How do they kick so high?” he’d wonder.
“Maybe I’m not looking in the right papers.”
“Someone will drink and drive soon,” promised Hinkle. “Birds gotta swim. Are you thinking of trying out for this?”
I kicked to show him that my heel hardly cleared the floor, forcing the reluctant, throat-driven laugh of a man who must occasionally use an emergency brake. Mrs. Spumondi told us we were free to leave if we didn’t respect the practice. Mrs. Spumondi’s not a teacher or anybody’s mother. She’s old. She just runs Sports Night. She may have invented Sports Night.
She at least kept it going, long after we had girls dribbling balls, swinging bats, and kicking something other than the air. Now Mrs. Spumondi delegates. She selects the teacher-judges, assigns formerly hot moms to a committee that decides if the basketball hoop is a decent place to hang balloons.
Newspaper wants me to find out what else the mom committee does, but I tell the editors I’m busy with suicide now. I’m quitting Newspaper. They don’t know yet, but my article on Suicide Awareness will be my last—in effect, my suicide note. I’ve realized I don’t like reporting on the school.
The school shouldn’t blame itself. It’s just a school, the kind that bans glue sticks and hats. I’m tired of having opinions about the bans. I never sniffed a glue stick. I never wore a hat. I tried to sniff a glue stick once and nothing happened. Maybe you need to eat them.
Also, the acceptance letters from colleges should be here any day now, the decal for my mother’s car. So she doesn’t get mistaken for the other moms of her race.
—
THIS YEAR Hinkle acts like he doesn’t know me anymore. Kids come out of detention, hug him, go back in detention. He’s kind of their mascot. It has to do with that the kids who get detention are also the best drivers. I’ve ridden in the backs of the Ed cars when they’re at the helm, and the ride is smooth. Hinkle never uses the brake with them, never says, “Pull over immediately, or I will have no choice but to use the emergency brake.” They hand in fifteen fatalities, and he’s fine with it. He lets them smoke in the cars.
The Bed Moved Page 8
