Call me Jane (The Oshkosh Trilogy)

by Anthea Carson

  CALL ME JANE

  Book Two of

  THE OSHKOSH TRILOGY

  BY

  ANTHEA CARSON

  © 2012 Anthea Jane Carson

  ONE

  Back in 8 grade we used to go to the Y dance every Friday night.

  Lynn Bonner was my best friend. She would come to my house and bring a duffel bag containing the clothes she planned to wear.She could never borrow any of my pants or shirts, because she was so tall. She loved to do my hair and makeup and talk about the cool kids who went to Webster.

  Webster was the public middle school down on Hazel Street, about one block from Menomonee Park. St. Mary’s, where we went to school, was only about four blocks away on Baldwin Street, but it seemed like miles. And once we started high school, those middle-school Y dances seemed like they had happened years ago, even though it had only been a couple of months.

  Lynn still did my hair, but we weren’t preparing for Y dances anymore; we were preparing for parties.

  “There,” Lynn said, and stood back to admire her work. She had applied blue shadow over my eyelids, and black eyeliner and thick mascara, which made my upper eyelashes stick to my lower lids. Her own mascara was always smudged all over her cheeks.

  “Who is the most popular girl at Webster?” I asked.

  It would be years before I realized how ridiculous this question was. And yet there would always be a part of me that wanted to be one of the popular girls too.

  “Glinda. She really takes the cake,” Lynn said, shaking her head as she dabbed my face. “She dresses so cool.”

  “And she is really coming here tonight?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I heard. And Gay too, she’s coming. Actually, Gay is probably the most popular, but Glinda is the prettiest. She’s so pretty. And she dresses really cool. Nobody can imitate her style,” she continued. She had finished my makeup and was working on her own hair, touching up one of the curls with that hot, clumsy curling iron, its cord bulky, stiff, and awkward. It kept knocking over vials of nail polish and bottles of foundations that were always two shades too dark for my skin color. It was the 1970s. Disco, feathered hair, and dark tans were cool. I could never admit how pale my shade actually was.

  “They all have such weird names,” I observed. “Like that girl Krishna? What do you know about her?”

  “She is really popular.” She finished one curl and went on to the next, eyeing it in the mirror from a strange angle. This next curl was farther back, on the top of her head. It’s what gave her hair lots of volume. She didn’t always do those top curls. “She hangs out with Carly Carter. Maybe Carly is the most popular. Even more than Gay. But they don’t hang out together.”

  A question was forming in my brain. Didn’t all the popular people hang out together in one big popular group? But I didn’t ask her this. Instead I said, “Are those guys coming here tonight too?”

  “Everyone is. At least that’s what I heard. They all found out we had booze, and that your parents are going to be gone all night,” said Lynn.

  “What about Lucy? How popular is she?” I asked.

  “She is really cute. She hangs out with Krishna. But Krishna is super-cute because she’s so dark. Actually Lucy’s pretty dark too. I would love to be that dark, and not have to lay out all the time.” It was brushing time. And she always loaded on the hair spray right about now. It choked me till I had to leave my bathroom, and back out into my wooden back room. It wasn’t really my bedroom. It was the den, and even when I tried to turn it into my bedroom, it still looked like the den.

  She brushed and brushed, and then put her thick mess of hair down and shook it and brushed it forward. Then stood up, sprayed some more, and brushed it back. Then she shook it side to side and gave it a wary-eyed inspection.

  “Sit down,” she said, closed the green toilet lid, and pointed to my toilet. She loved to work on my hair.

  “You are so cute,” she said.

  “No I’m not,” I said. It didn’t mean I didn’t think I was cute, although I didn’t. It was just the standard thing you said when someone told you that you were cute. If you said nothing, you received a reputation for being stuck-up.

  When she was done, she said, “Is that what you’re going to wear? That?” Pointing at the outfit I had laid out on the bed. “You are not going to wear that.” She tossed it aside and began poking through my things.

  I had no built-in closet for my clothes like I would in a real bedroom. My dad bought me this wardrobe thing and we set it in the corner by the door. It worked, but it looked weird and temporary, and if you pulled the doors too hard it tipped over. And it was metal. And yellow. There was a narrow mirror on one of the two doors on it. Next to it was the big, old fold-out couch. I never slept on it since I had my army cot. There was a big picture window that looked out at my backyard. I loved to stare through it. I was staring through it now, while I listened to Lynn rattle off the names of the popular kids I could never hope to be one of.

  The doorbell rang.

  “Someone’s here,” Lynn said, her voice containing a note of panic. “I’ll go let them in.”

  TWO

  I began drinking early in the evening. I can’t remember how we had the booze, or how everybody found out we had it. I think it was John Malone’s idea though. He went to St. Peters. He was one of those guys who was so ugly he was cute somehow.

  Anyway, we had booze. Sitting on the couch in my living room, it didn’t take long for the cheap wine we had to hit me. That buzzed feeling always fascinated me. I mean it. I always used to think about how long it took for the alcohol to take effect. There was a transitional moment. You didn’t just slip into your drunken state unnoticed. At least I didn’t. And I was fascinated too by the different way different drinks hit you. I hated beer because you had to drink so much of it before it hit you, and it tasted nasty. I liked wine the best. But I didn’t like the wine I was drinking that night. It was that Mad Dog stuff. Honestly, it tasted like cough syrup—cherry cough syrup.

  Sometimes the drink would hit you as you were walking across the room. One minute, nothing—you were perfectly sober, drinking your drink—and the next minute the room would start to look just a little different. Then you would notice it and say to yourself, “I’m buzzed.” If you were walking with somebody else, you would say it to them.

  That night, sitting on the couch, it happened in a different way. I didn’t have that moment where I realized I was buzzed. I had been slowly noticing the number of people increasing in the room. I hadn’t seen much of Lynn because she was running around, leaving them laughing wherever she went. Lynn had a great sense of humor and could be really funny. So at that moment, when I normally would have noticed that I was drunk, I noticed something else instead, something bizarre that I had certainly never seen before.

  At first I thought I was seeing things.

  Then I heard the sound of laughter rolling through my party like a wave. Then I saw the people pointing. That’s when I looked at them. So instead of experiencing that moment when I knew I was drunk, instead there was nothing but confusion around me, and the shock of seeing those unspeakables hanging there dripping red from my chandelier.

  I heard everyone whispering.

  They were saying, “What is that?” and then they were shouting, “Oh my God, she’s so funny; Gay is the funniest person in the world.”

  “What is that?” I asked. I could not figure out what was going on. Everyone was laughing. Lynn Bonner looked over at me with a face that looked concerned for me, embarrassed for me.

  “Dracula’s Teabags!” Gay shouted, running through the living room, giggling. She had a hyena laugh. She hung some more of the
m up, as if she were passing out party favors.

  I didn’t know what to do.

  So I stood up. Face-to-face with her.

  I had met Gay before. Well, I had sort of met her. It was at one of the Y dances.

  Gay had somehow poured peppermint schnapps into a lip-gloss container. Everyone was whispering that time, too. Lynn had been giggling about it. “She’s so cool,” she kept saying. But of course it was rather ridiculous; after all, no one was becoming drunk from putting on ‘schnapps lip gloss.’ That was another thing. The cool kids called it schnapps.

  She still had that same bad-boy haircut. In fact, she still looked exactly the same, except back then she wore glasses. I never saw her with glasses again, but I know she wore them; that’s absolutely clear in my mind, because when she came up to me with the lip gloss and attempted to put it on me, I came out with my standard, “You’re so cute!”

  She stopped dead in her tracks when I said that.

  I stopped too. I stopped because she was Gay Gallagher and I had heard all about her since I was in fifth grade. I’d heard all about how popular and cool she was. So I knew her by reputation. She didn’t know me at all.

  We had a short, tense staring contest, and then she lifted her glasses up briefly to reveal sarcastic eyes. Eyes with lids half closed. Large, brown, mocking eyes. Then she snapped her glasses back over them, having reached her conclusion.

  “You looking at your reflection in my glasses?”

  Then she moved on. She painted my lips quickly. It sure did taste like peppermint, but not very good. I felt stupidly flattered.

  I didn’t understand it with all the other girls. I thought it was the right thing to say under all circumstances. Most girls were charmed and flattered by this no matter how insincere, but not her.

  I thought about this memory as we stood face-to-face now at my party. But before I could say anything, she continued her assault on my house.

  I looked up at the chandelier. There they hung, dripping red over my carpet. Everyone pointed at them. Lynn Bonner could barely contain her laughter, though she shot looks of concern in my direction. Gay had left the living room, and the party continued on, with its small groups of excited teenagers laughing, and the loud music of the Rolling Stones blaring from my speakers. The song was “Get off my Cloud”, and in my drunken state I became confused about the song, and the words to the song, because they seemed so relevant; they seemed to have a particular meaning in this strange position in which I found myself. It was the odd and inexplicable position of feeling I had to defend a house I hated, or at the very least cared nothing about.

  Once again the odd combination of the confusion of what she had just done at my party and the overshadowed sensation that the alcohol had kicked in sent me reeling. In my drunken stupor, the unspeakable things hanging from the chandelier looked like tiny white mice with blood dripping from their tails. I looked at the carpet. Sure enough, several droplets of red dotted the carpet underneath them in a pattern that looked like it came from a Spirograph, falling from the wobbly circles above. They dangled and swayed because, after she hung them there, the chandelier kept spinning and swaying. It was made of wrought iron and hung by a thick, black chord. It held dark, gold-rippled glass cups that contained the light bulbs that shone and threw moving shadows on the ceiling. I stared up at them. I didn’t know what to do.

  So I followed her.

  I went through the living room, and the guests parted for me as I passed through.

  “Great party, Janey Lou,” said someone as I passed. I looked to see the face. It was Krishna Vedanta, giggling and holding a drink. She stepped aside for me to exit through the door. The smile on her face indicated that she seemed to know for whom I was looking, and why I was so confused.

  Then I reached the hallway. I noticed on my left that Chrystal Summers was there; she was another girl I remembered from the Y dances, and she too had a big laughing smile on her freckled face and pointed toward the kitchen. “She’s in there,” she said.

  On my way to the kitchen I nearly bumped into her, hanging them from the chandelier in there.

  She still giggled with a sound like a nervous banshee as she hung them one by one from the spindles, and shouted, “Dracula’s tea bags.”

  Then she saw me.

  I started to say something, but before I could form the words right, she said, “This party bites.”

  Everyone heard her. It was completely silent for a moment in the room.

  I said something. I have no idea what it was, but it must have been funny, because I heard everyone laugh. Then Gay, who for a moment looked ready to fight me, turned to the rest of the people in the room and said, “Hey everybody, let’s go somewhere else. This party is boring.”

  I turned and went back into the living room. I was looking for Lynn. I couldn’t find her. I crossed the living room, but this time the crowd didn’t part for me like they did before. I had to bump into people and spill their drinks. I opened the door to my bedroom and looked into the darkness. A blue hat with a wide brim hung on a hat rack right inside the door and I grabbed it, and stuck it on my head because I loved that hat. It looked just like the one worn by Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca.

  I felt a moment of calm and a cold draft from the room as I closed the door and turned back to the party and the noise. I could see Lynn now, over by the fireplace. She was talking to Glinda Sinclair. Glinda was beautiful. She really was. I thought about what Lynn said—that she was the most beautiful and the most popular—but that didn’t matter to me anymore. All the feelings about having the popular kids in my house were gone. They were replaced with confusion, and a need to find Gay.

  I didn’t know what I would say to her when I found her. I wanted to confront her, but I didn’t know what I wanted to say. Then she appeared again near Lynn. I moved toward them, through the people. The music was so loud you couldn’t hear anything else.

  Once I came up close to them, I heard Lynn talking. She was saying that she needed to go home. She was supposed to have been home by ten.

  I thought she was staying longer. Then I heard Gay say, “You’re leaving? You’re the only reason I’m even at this stupid party.”

  Someone behind me tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned around to talk to them. They started telling me something but I didn’t know who they were or what they were saying.

  I turned around again and now Gay was lying facedown on the beanbag chair by the wall. I glanced back over at the chandelier, and sure enough, the dripping things still hung there, one from each spindle.

  When I turned back, I was looking straight into Glinda Sinclair’s face.

  “What happened to her? Did she pass out?” I asked her and pointed at Gay.

  “You look beautiful in that hat,” Glinda said. She had a very soft voice, and put no effort into raising it, but somehow you could still hear it over the pounding music. The song playing from the stereo was “Time Is On My Side.”

  “I think maybe you could be a model,” Glinda continued.

  I was stunned to hear her say this. I looked back over at the heap that was Gay. She still held a beer in her hands, though it was tilted and spilling on her shirt, which was a shirt only a boy would wear: only a boy. I moved closer to her, because I wanted to confront her, but I still didn’t know what to say.

  Then she did something I didn’t understand. She raised her wrist and pointed to her watch. Then she put her wristwatch to her hip and hit it three times. She repeated this three times, and while she did she looked me in the eye, as if she were trying to convey something, only I couldn’t figure out what.

  Somehow we were all now out on the front porch, though I remember hearing Gay say in the living room that if Lynn went home, she was leaving too, because Lynn was the only reason she was even here at this stupid party. But she didn’t go home when Lynn left, she just stood yelling on the porch, something about where they could all go next.

  And all the cool ones, the popular kids,
did traipse out of there with her. There were a few stragglers, but they were passed out on the floor, and though I was talking to someone, I don’t know who it was. I just started to feel sick then, and went to my little gold bathroom, which oddly matched the living room, although it was a whole room away. In between them was the back room, which only seemed black, where I slept. There I found a whole box of tampons that had been rifled through, the contents strewn about the floor. So that’s where she found them.

  The bottle of Mad Dog red wine we’d been passing around lay dripping on the floor next to the box.

  It felt nice to go to sleep, even if the room was spinning, with Mick Jagger singing in my ear ... time, time, time, is on my side, yes it is.

  THREE

  Music was very important to me. I was very particular about what I liked. Everyone seemed to like certain songs just because they were popular. I couldn’t understand that. I became very attached to the musicians I liked, felt like they were members of my own family. My favorite band was the Beatles, and my favorite member was John Lennon.

  So the morning my dad opened the door to my back bedroom, letting in the cold morning light, and said in a quiet, respectful voice, “John Lennon is dead,” I sat up on my fold-out bed and said, “No.”

  We picked up Lynn Bonner every day for school. When we picked her up that morning, she climbed in the car cautiously, eyeing me warily, sitting next to me in the backseat. I wouldn’t even look at her. My eyes were all red.

  We arrived at school, and I still couldn’t stop myself from openly weeping.

  “What’s her problem?” I would hear them say behind me and around me. Lynn did her best to warn people ahead of me about it so they wouldn’t say the wrong thing.

  It was useless, though. They did say the wrong thing. I sobbed my way through the first period, and later—on my way to second—I heard two girls, one of whom, Jill, I’d known since St. Mary’s. The other girl said, “What’s wrong with her?”