Call me Jane (The Oshkosh Trilogy)

by Anthea Carson

  “Goddamn it!” I shouted.

  I threw the bottle of wine on the parking lot and it shattered, shards of glass flying toward the wheels of his car. He stared blankly at me and then, zombie-like, climbed into his car and drove away.

  “He’s going down a wrong-way street!” Lucy shrieked. “We have to stop him.”

  “I’m nauseated,” Krishna yelled, “take me home.”

  “No,” Lucy yelled, screeching out of the parking lot to follow him down the one-way street. “I have to follow him!”

  We started following him to Ziggy’s house, but then Krishna wanted out of the car.

  “Let me out; I’m going to throw up,” Krishna yelled from the back.

  “No,” Lucy hollered. “I have to catch up with Paul. He will go to Ziggy’s house.

  “Ugh,” Krishna said. “What is your fucking problem?”

  “Let’s just get to Ziggy’s, and then Jane can take you home,” Lucy said.

  But when we reached Ziggy’s, Paul’s car wasn’t there. We opened the door and pulled over so Krishna could puke into the grass. Gay had been so quiet I turned around to check on her. She was just staring peacefully out the window, as if she were on a Sunday drive. We drove Krishna to her house, and all the way there Lucy hammered the steering wheel. Finally she just drove to her house, left the car and said, “I’m nauseous. I’m going to just go home. I’m gonna kill that fucker when I see him.”

  I let her out and drove back over to Ziggy’s. Gay and I went upstairs. When we arrived, Paul actually was there. He had hidden his car several blocks away. He asked me if I could give him a ride to it; he said he needed to go.

  THIRTEEN

  When I reached his car, he asked me if I wanted to smoke a bowl with him. He had some great stuff in his glove compartment. We climbed in, and within seconds he leaned over, grabbed me, and I felt the heat of his lips on mine. I saw the windows fog up. It was so cold we could both see our breath.

  “I drove down a one-way street,” he said, practically panting, rushing to push the words out, “and I knew it. I knew I drove the wrong way, but that’s not what I was thinking. Do you know what I was thinking?”

  “No,” I said between kisses.

  “I was thinking, ‘my God, she looks so beautiful in that hat.’”

  “Wow,” I said between kisses, “really?”

  “And then when you threw that bottle on the pavement, I should have been thinking about how I might get a flat tire on the cut glass, but I wasn’t. Do you know what I was thinking?”

  “What?” I asked between kisses.

  “I was thinking, ‘wow, she looks so beautiful when she gets angry in that hat.’ And that coat looks great on you, too. Where’d you get that coat?”

  “It’s imported seal,” I said. “It really belongs to Glinda. See here, I got five tiny driplets of red wine on it.” I was only thinking that last part. I didn’t say it out loud. Or did I?

  It was midnight; we’d left Ziggy’s about a half hour ago for me to give him a ride two blocks away where he had parked his car. He kissed just like that pitcher of honey dripping. He was good at it. I knew he was good at it, because I’d kissed one other boy, so I knew. Paul knew how to kiss.

  “You and Paul,” Gay whispered, and winked, when I returned to Ziggy’s.

  “What took you so long?” Ziggy asked. “It should have only taken you ten minutes. You’ve been gone forty-five.”

  “What?” I asked. “Are you keeping tabs on me?”

  “You should have been back here a half an hour ago. Did you get lost driving two blocks?”

  “What is this,” I asked, taking a toke from the passing pipe, “the Spanish inquisition?”

  Someone made a joke about the Spanish inquisition, and then Ziggy continued, “You’ve been inconsiderate.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “You got red wine on my sister’s white-seal coat.”

  Well, what could I say to that? Number one, I was sitting on the floor and he was on the couch, and I may not have realized this consciously but he seemed above me. Number two, nobody rushed to my defense, they either seemed to be listening passively or talking amongst themselves and barely aware of my time on the witness stand, and number three, it was true. It was white, imported seal, it was his sister’s coat, and I did drip five red-wine droplets on it.

  Gay leaned over, pressed against my shoulder, and whispered in my ear, “At least it wasn’t blood. I need a ride home.”

  I drove Gay home. She needed a ride, and had been over at Glinda’s so long she said she was starting to call Mrs. Sinclair Ma. On the way home, she told me a story about Glinda.

  “They did this thing in class when we were in 6 grade,” she said. She lived at least twenty minutes out of town, so we had time for a lot of stories. “Where they were trying to make a point about abortion. They told us a story about a woman who’d already had like thirteen miscarriages, right? And that if she had another miscarriage, she would most likely die. Then they asked us would we vote for an abortion? Yes, the class voted. ‘Well,’ the teach said, ‘you just killed Beethoven!’ The next day Glinda asked permission to address the class,” Gay continued, and at this part of the story she really began to light up, “the teacher said yes, and Glinda got up and told the class about a woman who’d had thirteen miscarriages. With the next one she will surely die. What do you vote for: an abortion, or force her to carry it to term? ‘Force her!’ they shouted. ‘Well,’ Glinda said, ‘you all just saved Hitler!’”

  “That’s genius!” I said. Then she gave me directions to Lake Street, which was right off Bowen, which turned into Highway 45 at the edge of town.

  “You like Paul, don’t you?” Gay asked.

  Gay didn’t smoke. But she asked me for a cigarette, and I gave her one and lit it for her because, of course, since she didn’t smoke, she would probably not be carrying a lighter, and she never carried a purse. And the lighter lit up her face, which, for all the world, should have been a boy’s.

  “You want him, don’t you? Turn here,” she said, and managed somehow to point with her stream of smoke.

  I turned right toward the lake, in the middle of a sentence in which I floundered around for an answer.

  “Fuck Lucy,” she said. “Do what you want to do.”

  The road wound around to the left and became narrower and narrower. Trees hung over us on each side, scraping the windshield and nearly making the road into a tunnel. We had the windows open. The branches came into the windows and scraped the sides of our cheeks. We could hear every sound from the lake and the thick woods around us, around the tiny cabins and houses. Some of them were okay, but many of them looked like hers. Like neglected shacks overgrown with weeds and moss and wild, out-of-control bushes that covered up windows so that if anyone lived there, they couldn’t see out, and we couldn’t see in. Then we began to hear the croaking. And worse. Something much worse. It was thick, it was everywhere. It was so loud we slowed down and looked at each other. Her eyes were a question.

  “You’ve never heard this before?” I asked.

  “No!”

  I turned on the brights so I could see them. Hundreds of them. That explained the sounds we were hearing under the wheels. It was the sound of bodies being smashed and popped and spurting their liquids all over the road. It was the sound of slippery frog blood under the tires. So thick and viscous it could have caused my car to spin out just like the ice would in the winter when I was speeding.

  They jumped onto the windshield and slid down. I watched the body of one slide right in front of my face. It was ghastly.

  “Roll up the windows,” I said, quickly turning to Gay, who stared with her mouth open at the horror show. I wasn’t driving fast, yet they were still being squished against the glass.

  It was too late to stop them from hopping into the car. I don’t know how many made it inside, but one was enough to have us panicking and screaming, “Get them off me! Get them off me!”

&
nbsp; I skidded to a stop, nearly hitting a tree. I started to open the door, to leave the car, to force them out of my car. Gay waved her arms and flung some out the window, shouting, “Don’t open the door! You’ll let more of them in!”

  As we both rolled up our windows as fast as we could, the inevitable happened.

  “Oh God, that’s so gross!”

  A part of the frog’s leg was sliced off. It dripped down both the outside and the inside of the door. Gay screamed in terror, wiping as much of it away from her and onto the floor as she could.

  “What do we do?” I screamed. “I can hear them inside the car! I can’t drive home like this.”

  “Drive to my house. Maybe it will be better there.”

  “Why would it be better there?”

  “I don’t know. There are more trees here.”

  I drove the rest of the way through those creepy woods till I came to her yellow house, and pulled into the long drive that ran alongside it, my car facing Lake Winnebago. It was better there.

  “Do you still hear them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Turn on the dope light,” Gay said.

  She inspected the disgusting mess, took off her jacket, opened the door, and flung the thing outside.

  “Open your door and get some of them out. I will run into my house. I will try not to let anymore in when I shut the door,” she said. She took a deep breath, opened the door, and flew out, slamming it behind her. I knew there still might be some frog’s body in the car, but I would just have to drive anyway.

  It didn’t matter if I sped up or slowed down, I killed the same number of them either way. I drove out of the creepy woods, hearing them pop and seeing them land on my windshield. I turned left onto the highway and sped up, driving as fast as I could away from that memory, pushing it down as far as I could into my subconscious.

  As I drove away from her house, I remembered something Krishna once said. “Have you ever been inside her house?” she had said.

  I said, “No, have you?”

  “Yeah, once,” she said. “There was trash all over the place. I mean a lot of trash. Up-to-your-ankles type thing. It was gross.”

  “Wow, really?” I said, and tried to imagine it in there.

  Gay always ran in, she never walked. And she never entered by her front door. She went up the unkempt, gravel drive, turned the corner, and was gone. The house was a long, yellow, one-story rectangle, with the square end facing the street and disappearing into the distance, into the lake. Lake Winnebago, which encircled all of our properties, or, I should say, we encircled it.

  FOURTEEN

  Gay and I sat, stoned in the afternoon as usual, at Krishna’s coffee table and stared out at the beautiful backyard. Things always looked so much prettier when you were stoned.

  Krishna put on a Beatles album, for once. We were all singing along.

  “I just don’t understand,” I said. “How can anybody say that anyone is better than the Beatles?”

  “Of course the Stones are better,” she said matter-of-factly. “In fact,” she continued, “why are we listening to four mop-topped morons?” Whenever she used this imitation of what Raj said, she giggled. She reached for a Stones album instead, and fairly tore the Beatles off the stereo.

  “Hey,” yelled Gay. “Watch it! Don’t destroy a Beatles album.”

  Gay grabbed for it and put it away. Krishna put on “Sympathy For the Devil”. “Ahh,” she said, “much better.”

  I was very stoned, so I started to think maybe this was a hidden reference to me. Maybe I was a mopped-top moron.

  “I don’t even know why I am over here,” I said.

  “Ugh!”

  “You couldn’t possibly hate the Beatles and like me.”

  “Oh God!” and then she started giggling.

  “Smoke another bowl,” Gay said. “Let’s get a little more paranoid.”

  “No! It’s true! The way you feel about the Beatles is the way you feel about me!”

  “You’re insane.”

  “You use me for my car.”

  The phone rang. It was Lucy, and she needed me to pick her up from her house and take her over to...

  I couldn’t even hear Raj yelling up the stairs over Krishna and Gay’s laughter. It was loud. It was rude. I picked up my purse and my keys to go.

  “Hey wait a minute,” I heard on my way down the stairs. No way. I wasn’t waiting. I was getting out of there before they could jump in my car. At least Lucy loves the Beatles like I do.

  I passed right by Raj in the living room. I could hear Krishna’s mom in the kitchen putting away dishes. Krishna’s dad was home; he was in the back office, or was it a bedroom? I must have looked upset because Raj made a comment about how maybe the dope wasn’t working. “Isn’t that stuff supposed to mellow you out?” Oooh, how I hated Raj sometimes.

  “I heard a rumor that you like Paul. Do you like Paul?” Lucy asked as soon as she was in my car. She didn’t insist on driving, so I should have known something was up, and she had no particular destination.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “The truth is, Lucy,” I was quick on my feet when I wanted to be, “I’m a little freaked out by this, but the person I keep thinking about is–you’re never going to believe this.”

  “Tell me!” Her big eyes grew bigger.

  “It’s kind of embarrassing.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “It makes me wonder what’s wrong with me.”

  “Tell me.”

  “You promise not to tell anyone?”

  “I swear.”

  “You promise not to think I’m weird?” Was this believable yet?

  “I already know you are weird.”

  “It’s just that he’s so ugly. I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”

  “Ziggy?”

  I nodded. And it wasn’t a total lie. I did think about him.

  “Let me drive, you drive like shit,” she said, so I pulled over. We had only gone about three blocks past her house. And once she was in the driver’s seat, we had some very clear destinations. One was Bill Taylor’s house. He had apparently called her up with an urgent request to pick him up. And plus, he had dope.

  It was almost sunset, and by the time we reached his house, it was dark. He lived in a two-story, dark-green house by the railroad tracks toward the south end of town. I know it was south, because Lake Winnebago was on the north. Lake Winnebago was not in the middle of town; the town stopped right at its tiny shores. There were towns all around the lake though, and I’ve heard that Oshkosh is really now called the Fox River Valley, and that all those little towns have merged.

  This wasn’t the first time we’d gone to Bill’s house by any means. We drove by there several times a day for Lucy to beep the horn. She always smiled when she did that. There was a little hill near his house; the hill went right over the railroad tracks, and sometimes we just went around and around his house, beeping the horn. She would speed up so that we could all have that little thrill when the car went over the hill. Sometimes Krishna would be in the backseat, and what she at first thought was funny would become so annoying that she would insist on either being dropped off at home, or at Adam’s, or Ames’ house. But everyone was used to this, and knew right away what she was planning the minute she went south on New York Street.

  Only once or twice before had we left the car or actually picked him up for any reason.

  Bill was short, only about an inch taller than Lucy. He had dark, wavy hair and really nice green eyes. He was kind of quiet. He wasn’t a punk;he was a freak. He wore things like black T-shirts with REO Speedwagon or Led Zeppelin—only he didn’t call them Led Zeppelin.

  They talked a lot about Freddy whenever they were together: Lucy and Bill. Bill was really proud of him. He made lots of comments about how this or that wasn’t going to happen to his son, and this or that wasn’t good enough for his son. He had a very slight mustache just beginning to form.

  Whenever
Bill was in the car, Lucy insisted I ride in the back. Once we had taken a car trip out to some beautiful quarry in a forest, and Bill had blown the cigarette lighter out. He was using it for a charger and plugging a huge, loud boom box into it.

  “What happened to my cigarette lighter,” my mom might have asked, had she smoked. She might have been furious, except I doubt she ever knew.No, but she did blow a fuse when we completely lost the part that plugged in and with which you lit your cigarette.We didn’t know where it was. It had lit its last cig anyway, since Bill blew the thing out. So who cares? My mom just didn’t like anything incomplete. It drove her nuts, and she would nag you about it until it drove you nuts too.

  We waited a few minutes, and honked the horn a few times until Bill finally came out the front door. He was carrying something folded up in a black sweatshirt or coat or something. I moved to the back; he crawled in and shut the door, looking all around.

  “Drive!” he shouted.

  “Where?”

  “I don’t care! Anywhere! Drive to the lake! No, not a left here, not that lake. Go to the other one!”

  Lake Oshkosh, where there was a bridge with a stone railing. I remember as a kid we used to see groups of men at night fishing over the side of that bridge all the time, and the sidewalk would be lined with buckets.

  “Pull over!” he screamed.

  Lucy screeched to a halt.

  He threw something off the bridge that was folded up in that sweater, and then asked to be dropped off at a Pat’s Tap on Main Street.

  FIFTEEN

  There was a girl in my pot throwing class. I nicknamed her Potty Mouth. Potty Mouth was a freak, not a punk. Freaks and punks had a crossover section, if you imagine a Venn diagram. She wore REO Speedwagon tees, and tried to convince me to name a shipwreck scene I’d painted “Riding the Storm Out.” This was every freak’s favorite song. I nicknamed her Potty Mouth because of a joke she told me one day while I gave her a ride home from pot throwing class. It was the filthiest joke I’d ever heard.

  Potty Mouth had long straight dark hair and a Kewpie-doll smile that didn’t go with her freak T-shirts.