Call me Jane (The Oshkosh Trilogy)

by Anthea Carson

“Jack Lemon died,” was the answer.

  “Jack Lemon?” I stopped in my tracks and turned around. “Jack Lemon? It’s John Lennon.”

  The two girls just stood and stared at me. Then more gathered round in a group to look at the spectacle.

  “Who’s John Lennon?” said Jill.

  “How can you not know who John Lennon is?” I shouted. More gathered round me as I went on, “Have you ever heard of the Beatles?”

  No one said anything; they all just stared at me. Finally a kid named Doug told me to calm down. He had already nicknamed me “Skitz” so he said, “Calm down, Skitz.”

  “I don’t want to go to that school anymore; I’d rather just go to North.” I told my mom when she picked me up in the round drive-through area.

  She didn’t put up any fuss whatsoever. She said, “Why don’t we go over and register you right now then.”

  I wasn’t surprised. My mom was pretty unpredictable, which made her oddly predictable. We registered, and I started the next day. I did one more thing. I asked her to let me borrow the car. I drove to Appleton, taking the back roads, and went to an Army surplus store and bought a combat outfit. I wore it the first day. And on the first day, for some reason, she let me drive there myself.

  I parked in the big lot and walked into the school, dressed for combat. This time I was going to focus on my grades and my future, not on my hair and makeup. In fact, I deliberately left it alone. I just wanted to look like me. I just wanted to be myself, to be myself, to be the girl who cried when John Lennon died. To be “Skitz.”

  That’s exactly how I felt. Like I was going into combat. I didn’t need any friends; I didn’t even want any. When I walked down the halls, I carried my books in front of me like a shield. I marched through the dimly lit hallway just like that, just like I was oblivious to anyone.

  That’s why I was surprised when Krishna Vedanta jumped out and grabbed me by the arm. She grabbed my army jacket and pulled me toward her little group of people. She said, “It’s Janey Lou! You’re going here now? How great! Look everyone; it’s Janey Lou, from the party!”

  “Just call me Jane,” I said.

  “We’re going to have to get you some friends, Jane, now that you’re here,” Krishna said, and she began introducing me around. I found myself standing in a little group of people. She introduced me to a dark-haired, pretty girl named Lucy Bacchus, who said, “Why did you decide to leave St. Peters and come here?”

  “Because yesterday John Lennon died, and nobody there knew who he was.”

  Most of the kids just looked at me weird, but Krishna immediately cracked up laughing, gave me a big smile and said, “That’s great! Just like Siegfried.”

  “Who?”

  “Siegfried. We call him Ziggy. He was running up and down the halls yesterday screaming, ‘Why did it have to be John Lennon? Why couldn’t it have been anybody else, even my mom, but not John Lennon?’” Krishna told me. Several of them laughed at this and nodded, and said they remembered. One of them said, “Wasn’t he the one who got Sid Vicious elected homecoming queen?”

  Suddenly I felt a hand on the top of my head. It covered the top of my head, and the fingers gripped it softly, but firmly. It spun me around.

  It was Glinda Sinclair. She didn’t look at me at all, but rather was looking across the hall at someone who stood staring at me. He was dark like Krishna.

  “Here she is, Raj,” said Glinda, “here’s Blondie.”

  FOUR

  “Come on,” Glinda said as I was leaving school, “you’re coming with me to a party,” and she grabbed me by the arm and pulled me along all the way to my car. “You’re driving.” We drove somewhere near the university, and entered a large old house. It seemed I had been in this house before, a long time ago.

  Glinda’s name was really Sieglinda, but who could blame her for not wanting to go by that? She had curly, brown hair that was cut in some strange style, I couldn’t figure out what it was. It was long at the bottom, short right around the face, asymmetrical around the ears. She wore the strangest clothes. Pleated balloon pants made with extra-thin corduroy, only it wasn’t corduroy.

  I reached out and felt the material. “What is that material?” I asked her. It turned out she had made it herself. “Made it yourself? How do you even do that?” I asked. “It’s easy,” she said, but she didn’t elaborate.

  Well, no wonder you couldn’t copy her style. Even the material, the designs couldn’t be found anywhere. Certainly not in those pattern packages in the fabric stores or magazines or anywhere like that.

  Glinda spoke in an infuriatingly soft voice, even when she yelled.

  “Hey Paul,” she yelled across the room. “Look at this one,” pointing at me. I turned to see Paul. He was up on a stage near the back of the party.

  The party was in a basement with rectangular rooms going every direction. The ceiling seemed to be held up by wooden beams. We stopped at a keg near the front. “Have a beer,” Glinda said, and handed me a foaming cup.

  Then she pulled me by the hand over to someone dressed like a garage mechanic, who stood leaning against the wall, with his arms folded, staring at the band. “This is my brother Ziggy,” she said. He didn’t look at me. He made me feel as if I weren’t there.

  “Come on, play,” he said, and then leaned toward Glinda, and with his eyes still on the band he said, “Punk bands need to play their songs back to back. There should be less than one second between the songs. That’s how they need to play. They need to speed it up. Go tell them to speed it up.”

  I looked up at the band. There was Raj, the dark-skinned guy to whom Glinda had pointed me out in the hall. There were several other very unique and interesting-looking guys on that stage, each one holding his instrument, one holding a microphone. The one holding the microphone looked Asian. The one named Paul, at whom Glinda had shouted, looked like a very young Paul McCartney. He was gorgeous, needless to say.

  Standing near him, talking to him, was Lucy Bacchus; the girl Krishna introduced me to that afternoon.

  Lucy watched Paul intently all night. If he stopped playing his guitar between songs, she ran to find him a beer. If he looked around as if he were confused, she rushed over to find out what he needed. Then she bullied anyone near her to help her find it for him, “Right now!”

  Krishna milled around her occasionally, drinking her beer, watching the band, yelling a comment into my ear from time to time, but Lucy just sat and stared daggers at Paul, like a cat with a mouse. Her black hair was cut in a low-key punk style, and while her clothes were punk, it seemed her clothes were the least of her concerns. Krishna came over to me at one point and told me Walt had been looking at me. She leaned way over me and breathed the alcohol into my face when she said this.

  Everyone was slam dancing, so I tried it. There wasn’t much to it. The worse you were at it, the better you were at it.

  The band played songs I’d never heard before, fast songs, with insistent rhythms. Raj never moved, except his wrist over the bass. The drummer slammed on those drums all night, and smiled, and man did he have a workout. Sweat rolled down his face. He stood up every now and then for just a brief second to drink something, probably beer, though you’d think he just needed water.

  Ziggy also rarely moved from his spot, leaning against the wall with arms crossed. I slammed out on the dance floor, which really just meant jumping up and down. Rather silly if you asked me. You couldn’t talk except to yell something right in someone’s ear.

  At one point Lucy screamed in my ear, “Paul needs a new guitar pick! Go find him one!”

  “Why don’t you get it yourself?”

  “I can’t!”

  “Why not?”

  “Just go get it,” she screamed and stomped her feet.

  “Where do I look?”

  “I don’t know, go ask Ziggy, he’s the band manager,” Lucy screamed over the music.

  You really needed to stay away from her if you didn’t want to be sent out o
n a mission.

  I approached Ziggy, feeling the way you would feel upon approaching a bear in a cave. As I came closer to him, the room behind me began to recede.

  I moved up, within about two feet of him, and just stood there. I was afraid to move closer. I just waited for him to look at me, but he wouldn’t look. He just stood there with his arms folded, watching the band. I moved a foot closer.

  Finally he completely startled me. He turned his face toward me suddenly and barked, “Okay, what?”

  I couldn’t answer for a moment. I stood there with my mouth open like an idiot. Then I said, “Paul needs a guitar pick.”

  At this, all he did was crack up laughing, so I walked away embarrassed, and ran right into Jenny and Crystal, two of the punkest looking girls I’d ever seen. They started talking to me while I was burying my face practically to hide the feeling of shame and embarrassment that I had. But after a while I focused my attention on them. They really should be applauded. They should have won some kind of award. They really looked punk.

  They had the colors, the clothes, the hair spray sticking their hair up, the zippers, the spikes, the pins, the attitude.

  “Oh my God!” A scream in my ear from my left side.

  “What?” Good God, I had ended up back over by Lucy again somehow.

  “He’s hot!” screamed Lucy.

  “Yeah he’s pretty cool,” I screamed.

  “No, I mean he’s hot! Look at him sweating! Run and get me some beer to give him! Right now!”

  So with fury—partly built of the embarrassment I was feeling from being laughed at after the last errand that she sent me on—I ran upstairs and grabbed a pitcher. I had to go all the way upstairs and hunt around in cabinets to find it. I filled it up at the keg and the froth spilled over the sides.

  I stormed over to Paul on the stage. Walked right up next to him, under some red lights.

  “You’re hot!” I said.

  “What?” he shouted, staying focused on his guitar.

  “Lucy says you’re hot!” I shouted.

  Paul moved over toward me to hear me better and leaned toward me, still looking at his guitar. Lucy stood up from where she sat on the tiny little stand and leaned in, observing us closely.

  “You’re hot!” I screamed one last time and I then poured the entire pitcher of beer over his head. He didn’t seem upset at all about it; in fact he laughed. The crowd cheered. Lucy glared at me while I walked back to where the keg was, my combat pants dragging and soaking in the beer puddles and cigarettes.

  “Did you just do that?” Glinda said from right behind me. “That was pretty funny!”

  Everyone was laughing and high-fiving me; even Ziggy from the wall finally looked away from the band and over at me. Raj, who never smiled, looked up from his bass guitar for the first time and smiled.

  “That was great!” Krishna said, laughing.

  FIVE

  I woke up in a strange room. I sat up and looked around. As soon as I sat up, I regretted it. My head felt like a balloon. No, no that’s not right. It felt like it was split in half. The walls were grey-blue. I had been sleeping on a white futon mattress at the side of the room, and on the other side Glinda slept, her mouth open, drooling in her sleep. She also slept on a mattress on the floor.

  There was a window that was only about six inches from the floor. I crawled over to it and lifted it five inches. The cold Wisconsin air cleared my head enough for me to think. I could see my car parked in the street. We were up on the second floor; otherwise I might have just crawled out the window and driven home… that is, if I could find my keys.

  I looked around for my purse and couldn’t find it. I couldn’t find my combat pants either. I was sleeping in the white T-shirt I’d worn yesterday. I couldn’t find the camouflaged jacket I’d been wearing either.

  Great, I couldn’t find anything, and Glinda was so sound asleep she was drooling.

  “Glinda,” I whispered.

  Nothing.

  “Glinda,” I reached over and tapped her shoulder. She mumbled an incoherent apology, and still had that soft voice, even in her passed-out, drunken state. Infuriating.

  I decided to hunt around her room, lifting this and looking under that. She had a lot of interesting things in her room. Odd things. Things you wouldn’t see anywhere else. Things you had to stop and look at, and turn over in your hand, and examine from odd angles. She had a starfish. I had one of those in my room too. I had found mine a long time ago at the beach in Florida, walking with my dad, holding his hand. I was five or six, maybe seven. I had also found a sand dollar on that beach too. I remember being fascinated with it, mainly because it looked nothing like a dollar. I looked around to see if she had one of those too. Oddly enough, she did.

  It was on top of her vanity, along with a lot of other things: unfinished sewing projects, woven baskets full of needles and thread, a beautiful gold pair of scissors, tons of miniatures.

  Fascinating as the room was, and much as I tried to focus on finding my pants, jacket, purse, and keys, the desperate need to vomit rose up in me and sent me heading through the heavy drapes that substituted for a door. If a door had been there, it would have had to be double doors, because that’s how wide the entrance to her room was.

  I leaped into a rather drably decorated sitting room, with a dilapidated couch and TV sitting on a wobbly table over by a set of windows, in which were set in a kind of trapezoid shape. If I didn’t make it to the restroom soon, I was going to throw up in that drab living room. I made a guess to go straight ahead into an open space just past the living room. There was no door on this room, so somehow I assumed that was the right way to go. To my left I saw a large, white freezer, and past that, thank God, the bathroom. I dived into it and lay my arms across the toilet seat, feeling its cold, comforting presence as I heaved into the bowl.

  Once it was over, I lay on the floor between the toilet and the antique bathtub. I’m not sure how long I slept there, maybe just a few minutes. Maybe just long enough to find my bearings and realize where I was again. I tried to make it back to Glinda’s room, but now I couldn’t walk; I had to crawl. No, make that slither. As I slithered, I made it only about a third of the way back through the sitting room and collapsed again.

  My eyes were glazed over, but open enough to see these big feet walking toward me. They stopped, stood there a minute, and then stepped over me. I looked up. It was Ziggy, Glinda’s brother.

  All I could see were his feet. He was still wearing his shoes. Tattered Converse high tops with holes in them, and Band-Aids on the front to hold them together. I tried to lift my head. He still wore the green army outfit, or garage mechanic suit, or whatever it was he had been wearing last night. My head fell back to the carpet, scratchy on my face. I could feel the cold that comes from being drenched in sweat. I fell into a bleak state where all you can do is stare with your eyes open.

  I couldn’t feel his presence anymore, so I assumed he’d left. I’m not sure if I fell back into a dream state, but after a few minutes I heard Glinda mewling from behind the curtain saying, “I’m not much of a host,” so quietly I wondered if she were talking in her sleep.

  A cold wet cloth was placed on the side of my face. It felt so soothing. Ziggy said, “Is the room spinning?”

  I tried to answer him, but all that came out was a croaking sound. A few minutes later he spoke again. I must have fallen asleep again. This time he sat on the chair near the corner, so that I could now see his face if I lifted my head, which I tried to do.

  Last night I could barely make out his face. It was just a silhouette in the dark. Now I could see that he looked sort of like Glinda, but not at all like Glinda. He was like an ugly version of her.

  “Here, smoke this, it will make you feel better,” he said.

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “It’s not a cigarette. It’s medicinal. It will stop the nausea, I promise.”

  He handed me the joint, which he’d already lit and taken a
hit off. I was willing to do just about anything to feel better. I took a hit off it and started coughing immediately.

  “Try to hold it in your lungs.”

  I tried again, tried to hold it in my lungs, but I couldn’t; I coughed it all out again.

  “Try this,” he said, and gave me a glass of tomato juice.

  I sat up and took a sip.

  “Oh yuck,” I exclaimed. “Not more alcohol.”

  “It’s the hair of the dog that bit you,” he said, chuckling a little. “Trust me, it will help you feel better.”

  I drank a few sips more and lay back down on the carpet. After a few moments, I fell back to sleep, and when I woke up again he was gone. I felt good enough to stand and go back into Glinda’s room to look for my things. I was able to walk instead of slither. I found my purse and combat clothes rather easily. I put them on and left through the wooden stairway, which formed a square spiral just outside the sitting room.

  SIX

  My bedroom door opened and my mom leaned her head in the door. “Telephone’s for you,” she said.

  I walked all the way around to the kitchen. I really needed a door to my bedroom from the outside, and I wished they’d put one in. Even though I could talk to my mom from the bathroom window in my room when she was in the kitchen, it was the longest walk in the house for me to reach there.

  Turned out the call was from Raj. He wanted to know if I wanted to go to an imitation Beatles concert with him. I said yes, of course, anything to do with the Beatles. But as far as Raj was concerned, I wasn’t sure how I felt about him.

  So I called Lynn Bonner to find out what she thought about him.

  “He’s really cute!” she said.

  “I said I’d go with him to a Beatle’s thing.”

  “You and your Beatles,” she said. “Do you like him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He’s really cute, and he dresses really cool. He has the coolest clothes.”

  “What do you think about Siegfried Sinclair? Glinda’s brother.”