by John Fulton
“Signal at least five seconds before turning,” Mr. Bobs told Rachel, who had just made a sloppy turn in front of a tailgating Mustang. She saw his foot poised over the brake pedal on his side of the car. He was cautious, maybe even scared when she drove now.
“I’m out of it,” Rachel said. “I’m a little sleepy today.”
“Well then,” Mr. Bobs said, “you’re on your way to becoming a statistic.”
“Sorry,” Rachel said, feeling satisfied that she had annoyed him a little and feeling also the unfamiliar power of her secret over him, even imagining it as he sat next to her reciting his stupid platitudes: Mr. Bobs making the sounds of a sick animal as Julie Turly blew him, as Julie Turly reached up and grabbed the little silver whistle around his neck and pulled on its yellow cord until he came.
“Signal. Check your blind spot. Observe the five-second rule.” They were driving toward Rachel’s home now, up her quiet street. “A little sloppy today, Ms. White.” She hated the fact that he’d just used her last name, the implication of her smallness ringing in the tone of his voice. She stepped out of the car and Jason Brown took her place. “See you on Monday.” The stupid man didn’t even look at her as he said this, as the car pulled away and Rachel thought about going inside, though she didn’t. She couldn’t sit at her sick mother’s bed just then. So she stood on the curb and watched the blue Ford Taurus with the funny yellow beacon on its cab that said STUDENT DRIVER turn the corner and drive out of sight. Male slut. She’d heard a girl say that in the hall at Our Lady once. Mr. Bobs is a male slut. She thought about crying till exhausted and then writing those words on the dirty bathroom wall in letters so large and crooked that they’d make the bathroom scream with what Rachel felt inside her now. But everything was silent. It was four o’clock and the sun was full in the sky and Rachel’s neighborhood was sleeping. The houses were shut up behind their lava-rock front yards and no one walked on the sidewalks. Rachel had a secret. At least she had that. She wondered, though, when Mr. Bobs might drop her off last again, when he might ask her about her taste in music, her quietness, her loneliness. She almost hoped he would ask her these things. And if he did, Rachel would be ready for him. She’d be ready for him because she hated Mr. Bobs, every disgusting, horny inch of him.
* * *
One day after school, Rachel went to Rand’s house for dinner without telling her parents. Rand’s mother and father talked rapidly to each other and to Rand in German, and it was a disappointing discovery for Rachel to hear Rand speak so easily, so proficiently in a language she could not understand. She missed his accent, his awkward speech rhythms, his dependency on her as a sort of dictionary. Now she was dependent on him. “What’s that word mean?” she asked him.
“Kartoffeln,” he said, “means ‘potatoes.’ Reichen Sie mir bitte die Kartoffeln,” Rand said, trying to teach her how to ask for the potatoes to be passed.
But Rachel didn’t want to learn. She wanted to understand things. “I can’t say that,” she said.
Rand’s parents didn’t look foreign at first. They just looked like people, like Americans to her. Mr. Taub still wore his work suit with his tie loosened, just as Rachel’s father did after work, and a pair of fine wire spectacles that made his face appear angular and refined, maybe a little more European than American. Mrs. Taub wore blue jeans and a funny T-shirt with a pelican on it saying something in a language Rachel didn’t recognize. “What’s the pelican saying?” Rachel asked.
“That’s Arabic,” Mrs. Taub said. “It’s saying ‘Learn languages so that you can learn the world.’” Her accent was very strong and Germanic, as if the vowels were climbing up little slopes in each word she said. “It’s an advertisement for the private language school I worked for in Tunis some years back.”
“Oh,” Rachel said. She’d never heard of Tunis and felt very alone and ignorant in her inability to see that strange city where Rand had once lived, when something terrible happened at the table. Mrs. Taub reached over with her napkin and wiped a bit of food from the corner of Rand’s mouth—a typical motherly gesture. All at once, Rachel could not help but imagine this woman broken down and crying over her son’s urn, his little jar of ashes. It would be raining, drizzling on two very old ladies. And there would be no flowers. Just Rand’s jar. Mrs. Taub and all she knew would count for nothing then. Rachel looked at Rand, his soft, smart eyes, wet and bent funnily beneath the lenses of his glasses, as he forked a bite of potatoes into his mouth. She mourned a little bit for him. She wanted Mr. Bobs and his darkness out of her head.
“We are hearing many good things about you from Rand,” Mrs. Taub said. “You are a photographer, Rand is telling us.”
“No one likes my pictures,” Rachel said. It somehow made her feel more secure to demean herself in front of Rand’s European parents.
“Art is a matter of taste,” Mr. Taub said. “There will be some who like your pictures, I’m sure.” He spoke perfect English, with a surprisingly crisp British accent.
“Thank you,” Rachel said, though she wasn’t sure why she’d said that. To make things worse, she repeated it in German. “Danke,” she said.
“Very good,” Mrs. Taub said, and Rachel felt incredibly stupid.
After dinner, Rachel called home and her father answered. “It’s Rachel,” she said.
“Hi,” he said. He sounded tired and far away, as if he’d forgotten to speak directly into the receiver. Behind her, Rachel heard the clattering of plates and the strange sounds of German being spoken, and right then she felt that she was thousands of miles away in a foreign country; she missed her father, missed him terribly. “You don’t know where I am,” she said.
“I thought you were working on the yearbook or having your driving lesson.”
“It’s almost nine o’clock,” Rachel said.
“Yes, it is,” he said.
“Are you there?” Rachel actually said this, and it confused her, the way it had just come out like that. “Dad?” she said, and she felt her throat choking, her eyes tearing up, thinking about how, years ago, they used to play a game called Mr. Boo, a silly version of hide-and-seek. “Where is Mr. Boo hiding?” she’d call out as she searched for her father in the closets, under beds, in bathtubs, until she’d find him and scream, “There’s Mr. Boo!”
“What?” her father said. “Sure I am.” Then he finally realized what he should have already asked, “So where are you?”
“I’m at Stephanie’s,” Rachel said, feeling immediately disappointed by her lie. She’d wanted it to feel deceptive and maybe even a little malicious. But it was a useless lie. Rachel had nothing of any value to conceal from him, nothing that could make her seem as remote as her father now seemed to her. “Stephanie’s a friend of mine,” she said, though Stephanie didn’t exist and her lie was clearly pointless. “What are you doing now?” she said. “Are you still in your work suit?”
He seemed to take a minute to look at himself. “I guess so,” he said. “I’m just sitting here.” Then he added, “Your mother’s sleeping. She’s fine.”
“Yes,” Rachel said, “I know. I’ll be home soon.” And then they hung up.
* * *
On the walls in Rand’s bedroom were pictures of Rand at various ages and in various parts of the world. Working in some capacity for the German government, Mr. Taub had taken his family everywhere, it seemed. In one of the pictures, Rand, a bare-chested toddler with huge blue eyes, played with two older black boys on the dirt ground in the African Congo. In another, as a little boy, he wore a funny-colored hat and sat on a camel in the Sahara Desert. In another, Rand, older now, brought a piece of octopus to his mouth with a pair of chopsticks. Aside from the part of Mexico that bordered Tucson, Rachel had never been outside her country, and she found the images on Rand’s walls overwhelming in the unexpected vastness of the world they showed. She hoped she would never have to eat octopus. She hoped she would never be half-naked in the Congo, surrounded by other half-naked children. But Rand
had done these things. He seemed to know a great deal that she did not, and maybe somehow his knowledge could protect her.
But when she asked him one afternoon in his bedroom, “What’s the world like, Rand?” he looked at her as if he were totally stupid, as if he knew nothing about the smart, quick-learning boy she had always believed him to be.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Yes you do,” she said. “You’ve lived everywhere.”
“Okay,” he said. “You are familiar with that song ‘It’s a Small World’?” Rachel nodded her head, thinking about that song, the chorus of children’s voices that always sang it. “That,” Rand said, “is a stupid song. It’s not small. It’s big. It’s bigger than you could ever imagine. Nothing’s the way you think.”
“I didn’t really want to hear that,” Rachel said. Rand shrugged his shoulders and Rachel wished he were less truthful and more generous, more deceptive.
“It’s a good kind of big, though,” he said. “It shows you things you would never expect.”
“I know that already,” Rachel said.
That same afternoon, Rand and Rachel exchanged E-mails with a girl named Lisa who was spending the year with her family on a small island near the North Pole. Rand had a computer in his room and liked to E-mail German friends and other kids he’d met while living in far-off places. “E-mail,” Rachel said. “I didn’t know they had E-mail on the North Pole. Ask her what she did over the weekend. Ask her about polar bears and the animals there.”
Five minutes later, they received her response: “We saw the polar ice caps yesterday and even had a freezing-cold picnic on one. The seasons are way extreme here. Right now, it’s eleven o’clock at night and the sun is still shining bright. But in about a month, it will be pitch-black all day long. There are no penguins or white bears here. All that stuff’s a lie.”
“Oh,” Rachel said. “I was sure there were at least penguins.”
“I think that is the South Pole,” Rand said.
“Maybe,” Rachel said. She was picturing now the vast white emptiness in which Lisa and her family had picnicked, the plane of ice as far as you could see, the dead, colorless space there, and was realizing that Rand would eventually, sooner than later, leave again and live somewhere else, maybe even the North Pole. He would be swallowed up, and Rachel hated the world.
* * *
In the late fall, Rachel combed the sidelines at a football practice one day with her camera. The boys on the Our Lady football team had names like Billy Bat, Rat Swank, Bob Knight, Mark Sword—names of animals and weapons and warriors. She expected to laugh at them in their funny tight pants. But she was awed instead by the persistent, repetitive violence they endured as they grouped off in separate packs along the field and ran what were called drills—passing drills, blocking drills, tackling drills, formation drills—most of which consisted of sprinting and footwork, and ended with one boy or several boys obliterating another. Leading these strange exercises, coaches in red pants shouted at the top of their lungs. At the end of one side of the field, Rachel was surprised to see Mr. Bobs not merely shouting but screaming, haranguing his group. “Ladies!” he shouted at them. “A bunch of ladies!” His boys faced off and exploded into one another. “Hit him! Hit him good! I want to hear it when you hit one another.” Their helmets cracked again and again, and some boys tumbled backward and wriggled grotesquely in the grass before getting to their knees, then crouching and colliding again. Rachel prepared herself to see another accident, a boy who would not rise, a bloody nose, a pinched nerve, though none of this happened. Finally, it was Mr. Bobs who fascinated Rachel most—Mr. Bobs, who had spent, in his other capacity, most of the semester warning them against collision and who now blew his whistle to send whole columns of boys into a strange, controlled orgy of brutality. “Get down! Get down! And explode out of it!” His face was red and scribbled with bright streaks of sweat. Veins popped from his throat as he clamped down on the whistle, and Rachel turned her camera on him, thinking about how Mrs. Judy Bobs, a pretty blond woman who had taught Dickens and Jane Austen and Shakespeare in Rachel’s English class last year, had driven off to California with Mr. McGuan, a better-looking man than Mr. Bobs, how she had left this poor furious man to grow a stupid little goatee, to stare at his girl students, and to scream at his football players. He was alone now, alone and yelling into thin air at the top of his lungs. Rachel wanted to do that. She wanted to scream like that at the top of her lungs. Scream and scream and scream. She snapped his picture again and again. She didn’t know at first what she felt then for Mr. Bobs, this helpless grown man raging into nothing, though she thought it might be pity.
* * *
For a boy who had sat on camels in Tunisia and ridden on the roofs of train cars in India, for a boy who was supposed to know the world and would, Rachel knew, leave Tucson behind, Rand was terrible at love. He was slow and uncomprehending when Rachel finally made him sit on his bed, then bent over him and kissed him on the lips. He wouldn’t close his eyes and he wouldn’t take his glasses off, the cold, thick rims of which gouged at Rachel’s cheeks. “I need them to see,” he said, holding them on with both hands. When she blew in and nibbled at his ears, he could only giggle and squirm and struggle out of her arms. And he seemed completely baffled by Rachel’s tongue. “It’s what you do,” she tried to explain to him. “People kiss with their tongues.”
“I don’t know,” Rand said.
“Of course you do. Everybody knows that.”
These were Rachel’s first kisses, her first embraces, and she wanted them to count. She wanted to feel desired, ravished, and one afternoon, sitting Indian-style opposite Rand on his bed, she finally insisted. She pulled her T-shirt off and lifted Rand’s hands to her breasts and put them over her bra. “Go ahead,” she said. “Do it.”
“Do what?” he asked. He didn’t move his hands. They seemed stuck to her smallish breasts, glued there.
“Feel me up,” she said.
“Feel up?” he said.
He didn’t even understand the English, so she had to make it simple. “Love me,” she said, after which Rand went mute and just stared at her. “Take your glasses off, Rand.” His eyes looked so pathetic and worried behind his thick lenses that she finally reached over and removed them herself and hid them under the bed. He must have been frozen with fear, because he’d been unable to take his hands from her and defend himself.
“Please,” he said. “I can’t see.” He squinted at her and finally did lift an arm and touch her face, softly, the way the blind do, trying to see with his fingers. “Where are my glasses, Rachel?”
“Kiss me,” Rachel said, leaning into him, digging into his lips with hers, pushing a hand down and beginning to pull his belt loose.
“No please,” Rand said. Spit came from his mouth, and when she kissed him now, she felt only his teeth. But her eyes were closed and she was reaching for his crotch, his cock, when he put his hands down and pushed her so forcefully away that she hit the wall behind her with a thud. Her chest felt hollow, as if the force of the impact had emptied her. He shouted out a word in German, a word full of panic and shock. His blond hair was a mess now, as if he’d come in from a windstorm, and his eyes shone with rage and tears and blindness. “Where are my glasses hiding? My glasses!” he shouted.
She got them for him, and when he put them on and could see her again, he seemed to hate her. “Leave,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” Rachel said.
“Out,” he said. “Out.”
When she got up to leave, he threw something at her. It was her shirt, and she picked it up from her feet, put it on, and left.
* * *
In the weeks before Christmas, Rand did not speak to her or even look at her at school. In the yearbook office, he’d sit staring at the computer screen even when she would pull a chair up next to him and say, “Hi, Rand. It’s me, stupid. It’s Rachel. Remember?” He’d just type away or maneuver the mouse. “How’s
Lisa on the North Pole?” she asked him. When he said nothing, she just sat there and noticed how the chilly blue light from the monitor seeped into Rand’s face and made him look frozen and cruel, as if he’d already gone to one of the poles, to the farthest Arctic regions. “Happy holidays and stuff,” she said before going away.
III
One evening Rachel fell asleep in the dark of her room, feeling sick to her stomach, feeling that she’d lost everything, feeling that hunkering down into darkness, into sleep, was her only way to find comfort now. When she woke the next morning, she looked out her window and saw what seemed to be a storm of purple confetti falling from the dark sky. She walked outside in her T-shirt and bare feet, shivering, seeing her breath turn to smoke in the cold air and tasting a crystal of ice on her lip. Snow. Snow in the desert. She’d never seen it, not in Tucson, and she ran down the hall to her mother’s bedroom and woke her. “It’s snowing,” she said. Her mother, dressed in a simple white nightgown, woke very slowly, as if even this simple act hurt her, and Rachel seemed to have to wait a long time before her mother was ready to hear and understand what she now said again. “It’s snowing outside. Look.”
When Carol turned around and looked out the window behind her, she said, “Am I dreaming?”
“Do you want me to pinch you?” Rachel asked.
