Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter

by Michael J. White

  “Oh come on, George. She might pretend to be pissed off, but if you think that means she doesn’t like you, then you’ve got a lot to learn about Katie Schell.”

  “Why don’t we pick some B-Bop’s?” I said, pointing at the sign, at which time she made another seat-belt-locking stop, flipped her turn signal, and proceeded for the drive-through.

  Just for kicks we strolled into the hospital through the emergency entrance, which proved even more exciting than we expected. At the triage counter a half-crocked fisherman was barking at the nursing staff, waving a right hand dangling with a treble-hooked bass lure. “Ya want me to lose ma thumb!” he shouted. “Gimme some attention! This boiy here with the busted nose, you ain’t gonna fix that. Boiy needs a plastic surgeon!” “Dang straight,” Emily said, cocking her head back and motioning to spit. “Boiy needs a dang boxing coach, too.” After receiving our visitor wristbands we took the elevator to the eighth floor, where the walls were lined with bubble-lettered quotes like “If I’d known I was going to live so long, I’d have taken better care of myself.” A diminutive nurse in a cubicle waved to Emily, then sneered in mock jealousy at my B-Bop’s sacks. We found Katie in bed propped up on two pillows, static haired and pale but contentedly absorbed in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. Before troubling to acknowledge our interruption she continued reading to the end of the page, then replaced her bookmark and tenderly pivoted and looked up. Then she whipped the bedsheet over her face and shrieked.

  “Em-Ma-Lee!”

  Without the slightest pause Emily plopped herself onto the edge of the mattress and tugged the bedsheet from her sister’s hands. While Katie might’ve taken charge on the ride home from school, it was now clear that Emily held the reins and wasn’t looking to give them up.

  “What are you doing! You could’ve at least warned me. Like there aren’t enough people around here already invading my privacy.”

  “Sue me,” Emily said, straightening her shoulders, sexier than ever as she laid down the law. “George wanted to hang out with you last week and the week before and the week before that. Today he insisted and I was too tired to fight him.”

  “You’re too tired. That’s a good one. I about had a hernia lifting the fork to eat a bunch of mushy green beans.” She made a nasty green bean face, then shaded half her face as she pretended to barf over the side of the bed. Next she shook a clenched fist in my direction. “So it’s you stinking up the whole hallway.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Emily caught me just after a hockey game.”

  Katie burst into laughter. She laughed almost as convulsively as Emily, only it came out in two high-flung hoots instead of one, and didn’t embarrass her at all. “I’m talking about the B-Bop’s. I smelled it a mile away and wanted to kill whichever little piggie was so selfish that he didn’t care about torturing the whole eighth floor. But if it’s for me, well, that’s a different story.”

  She threw a nod at the dinner tray and its mechanical arm that was stretched out against the wall. Emily cleared her throat, subservi ently bowing as she swung it over Katie’s lap, then passed the burgers around, setting each of them up with drinks and napkins. After eating half of her fries, Katie started telling us about My Ántonia, which she claimed as the fortieth book on her fifty-book reading list for a city-wide competition called the “Literary Olympics.”

  “My favorite scene so far is when Jim and Ántonia go on a picnic where they run around playing ‘Pussy Wants a Corner’ and eating pickles and getting real worn out. Weeeeell, according to Mr. Manrique, a boy narrator is not always a boy narrator, and a simple country picnic isn’t always so simple because a pickle’s not always a pickle. So the question is, do you, George Flynn, eat pickles?”

  “She’s gunning for your sliced pickles,” Emily said, cutting her burger into neat halves, then quarters. I lifted the top bun and handed them over. Emily pushed the slices to the outer edges of the wrapper, then emptied three ketchup packets in the open space in the middle. (My last girlfriend, on our second date, cut her burger in exactly the same way. Perhaps it’s the reason I was initially drawn to her. Over the following two years I only witnessed her repeat the gesture once, which I find extremely odd.)

  “Where’s Mom?” Emily asked, cupping her ear toward the sound of high heels clicking down the hallway.

  “Don’t worry. She called an hour ago telling me if I’d ever seen how nasty Mrs. Amato’s kitchen was, I’d know why she had to retrieve her casserole dish this very minute. She’s not coming till the afternoon.”

  “It’s technically the afternoon right now,” Emily said, picking up one of her burger quarters. “Okay, George, time to chomp down.”

  Katie kept steadily at her fries. Already her cheeks seemed to have brightened and she tossed her pillows aside to sit upright with her legs crossed, soon giving me the scoop on Mrs. Amato’s neighbor, who she introduced as a “formerly esteemed mother of six” married to a “sacrosanct back surgeon” named Roland Hathaway.

  “About a week ago,” she continued, half whispering to invoke an element of suspense, “a vagabond named Pike showed up at the Hathaways’ doorstep, claiming to be Mrs. Hathaway’s first husband. Apparently he was all bearded and sunburned, with homemade boots cut out of tire treads. I don’t need to say it was a little shocking, especially for the kids, who all sung in the church choir at one time or another. But the strange thing is that, according to Mrs. Amato, Mrs. Hathaway took it all in stride. She called a family meeting and pretty much told her family the whole story from the beginning. She didn’t apologize even, but just told them what happened, like it was no big deal. Maybe she didn’t call it a hippie phase, but you know, that’s basically what it was. When she was eighteen she moved to a commune near a big Indian reservation in South Dakota. Long story short, she married this Pike guy, who was like the founding father of the group. I think they called themselves the Strike Out commune.”

  “Strike Three,” Emily said, unable to hold her tongue, despite appearing to have heard the story enough times to want to see it hurried along. “And the marriage wasn’t official.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Katie admitted. “You want to finish the story?”

  “Go ahead. You’ve got George on the edge of his seat.”

  “What’s the holdup?” I said, perhaps pouring it on a little heavy considering that I was already leaning on my forearms against the railing at the edge of the bed.

  Katie went on to describe Jonathan Pike’s three-week stay at the Hathaway house, which, despite his passivity, resulted in a host of domestic disentanglements. (Mrs. Hathaway must have convinced her husband to let Pike stay with them, at least initially, though this was never clearly stated.) But as soon as Katie started describing Dr. Hathaway’s increasingly erratic behavior, which she’d witnessed firsthand in the hallways of Mercy Frederick, she not only lost the thread of the story, but appeared suddenly oblivious to the topic altogether. There was nothing casual about it. While in one second she was relating details down to units of obsessive hedge-trimming and deliberately off-key renditions of “Gentile or Jew,” in the next she was panning back and forth between Emily and me as though straining for the answer to a question that neither of us had asked. I was positive I would soon witness a second outbreak of hives, even in the face of Emily playing off the lapse as minor and mundane.

  “What I want to know,” she said, poking Katie in the thigh, “is where you got all these specifics about this Pike character’s big night camping in the backyard with the twins. Did you say that happened last night?”

  “He’s been eating them out of house and home for two weeks. Ask Mrs. Amato. Ask anyone.”

  Emily balled up her fry container and swiped a napkin across her mouth, appearing to transition from acting agitated to being agitated. “It makes me sick. The whole parish is eating it right up. They love it that Dr. Hathaway’s become some kind of depressive jerk, and they love it even more that Jonathan’s a drifter who can’t even afford a room at the Days I
nn. If anyone deserves to be judged, it’s Roland Hathaway.”

  “His friends call him Rollie,” Katie said, smirking slightly, but shoving her tray away and reaching for her pillows again like a cynical soldier sick of his own war stories. “He’s telling nurses and patients and everyone else he meets about how his whole life is a sham.”

  “And that he can never trust his wife again!” Emily said, slapping the mattress. “He’s acting like she’s a complete stranger, as if all that Christian volunteer work she does is so different from what she was doing back in the day on the reservation.”

  I thought about it, not wanting to align myself with Dr. Hathaway, but knowing that a certain amount of jealousy would be impossible to avoid. “Maybe Rollie just wishes he was the one sleeping on a buffalo mattress with sweet young Sharon.”

  “Obviously,” Katie said. But Emily was already shaking a raised index finger like a master debater about to prove that we were all missing the main point.

  “Isn’t it possible to love someone and not tell them everything about your life before you met them? Is that what marriage is, an agreement to confess every mistake we ever made, every thought or memory that passes through our heads? I don’t think it’s fair to call Sharon a liar because she never told Roland about her time at the reservation. She’s always been a dedicated mother and wife, and I don’t see any reason to complain.”

  “How long did the marriage last?” I asked, turning to Katie.

  She yawned and mentioned something about how Sharon and Rollie first met. In the middle of the comment her voice trailed off and she closed her eyes. I repeated the question, but Katie only rolled to her side and tucked her hands under her head. I’d never seen fatigue happen so fast. Emily walked over to the fuchsia plant on the windowsill and pruned a few dead leaves. A minute later she removed one of the pillows from under Katie’s head. I gathered the fast-food trash and pushed my chair back. It was strange just leaving without saying goodbye.

  “Is she really sleeping?” I asked on the way to the elevator.

  “Maybe. Sometimes she loses it pretty fast.”

  Emily shrugged and left it at that. I wasn’t sure whether our visit had ultimately succeeded or not, but took it as a sign that it hadn’t a few minutes later when Mrs. Schell marched into the first-floor elevators as we were about to march out. (She was, however, wearing a silky yellow skirt and thin-strapped sandals that offered a perfect display of her waxy tennis legs and rose-painted toes.) She pressed the button for the eighth floor, failing to notice us as she reproached her husband for dillydallying when he was only waiting for an elderly patient to get a grip on his oxygen tank before his nurse wheeled him out. Mr. Schell was a thin guy with an intelligent oval face, looking tidy and somewhat childish in a pair of suave dock shoes and a powder blue Polo. He’d obviously seen Emily and me, but respectfully avoided any gestures that would give us up.

  “Hell-oooo?” Emily said, surprising me by quitting the game so quickly.

  “Oh, Emily. Good. Is your gown in the car? I don’t know how we’ll shop for heels with you in nothing but jeans and a T-shirt.”

  Mrs. Schell flashed me a smile that dropped off as fast as it came up. Her cheap politeness reminded me of the bitter insurance customers who occasionally showed up at my dad’s office thinking it the perfect venue to unleash the frustrations of their less-than-inspired lives. In noticing the grease streaks across my shin, she scrunched her nose as though she’d just become stuck in an elevator next to a patient with a rare, infectious rash. This made it all the more pleasurable when I stepped forward for a handshake, not even for a second acknowledging my dried-sweat presentation. Since Mrs. Schell was pressing the HOLD elevator button with her right hand, she ended up giving me her left, all the while smirking uncomfortably, as though under such circumstances this formality was not only silly, but dangerous. The buzzer went off just as Mr. Schell stepped inside, grinning as he reached and rattled my hand.

  “Richard Schell. You’re George from Davenport, right?”

  “Yes, sir. Nice to meet you.”

  “Who won the game?” he asked, also noticing the grease mark.

  “The other guys,” I lied. “Barely got us by one goal.”

  “Roller hockey,” Emily said, helping him out.

  “Sure, sure. I’m more of a quad skate kind of guy, but those Rollerblades are pretty slick.”

  The elevator lurched into action. Mrs. Schell remained face forward, anxiously awaiting the blinking floor numbers on the digital display. “I didn’t know you and Katie were acquainted,” she said.

  “We’ve only met once,” I told her, a moment too late to notice Emily’s attempt to sway my answer. “But we were going to B-Bop’s and thought it would be nice—”

  “I’m sure she enjoyed the visit, even if you’ve only met once,” she said, giving me the feeling that she was sure Katie wouldn’t enjoy a visit from someone she’d only met once. Mr. Schell reached into his front pocket, soon producing a leather business-card holder.

  “Oh, my God,” Emily said, burying her face in the corner.

  “Hey, you never know. This guy’s an athlete.” He chuckled and handed me the card, acting as if he was only doing it to tease his first daughter. “Did Emily tell you that I had an uncle from Davenport? One time he took us to the Wharton Field House to see Red Auer bach’s Blackhawks during their first season in the NBA. Of course, the Blackhawks didn’t stay in Moline very long.”

  Mr. Schell slapped me on the back. Apparently he thought the mention of such a place as Moline was a joke in itself. I smiled, but made a point of not laughing.

  “Now we’ve got the Quad City Thunder,” I said.

  Mr. Schell pretended to be impressed, but was still chuckling to himself as the elevator doors opened. Mrs. Schell started in long strides down the hallway, allowing an inadvertently generous view of her flexing calves (which, combined with the sight of her painted toes that I imagined stretched out under a cloth-covered banquet table, nudging at my crotch, made it well worth the ride back up).

  “There’s no rush,” Emily complained, hurrying alongside her. “She’s sleeping.”

  “What does your father do?” Mr. Schell asked, hinting that we ought to hang back and chat for a minute.

  “He works at Faith Harvest Insurance.”

  “Terrific. I’m sure we know some of the same people.” Mr. Schell paused and tapped his right temple, taking longer than he would’ve liked to come up with his next line, but giving me a little wink when he finally got it. “Together everyone achieves s’more.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I made the T-shirts for their team-building weekend last spring. It’s a variation on the T.E.A.M. acronym, but with s’mores. I believe there was a big bonfire for the finale. That’s where the s’mores came in.”

  “Oh, yeah. I remember something about that.” (I didn’t remember anything about that. Every once in a while my dad had driven to Des Moines for team-training excursions, but he didn’t feel the need to give us the details. I’m positive he’d never wear a T-shirt that said TOGETHER EVERYONE ACHIEVES S’MORE.) “I heard you make shirts for all the high schools.”

  “Most of them,” he said, clearly wishing he had enough time to explain the reasons why he’d been unable to land the business of the remaining few. But we’d already reached Katie’s door and Mrs. Schell was waiting. “Well, welcome to Des Moines, George. Don’t get discouraged by our big-city ways. Des Moines folks just take a little time to warm up to outsiders. Ask Maureen, she’s from Bolivar, Tennessee.”

  Mrs. Schell shined a final squinty smirk, like wouldn’t she love to tell me all about it, and perhaps even invite me to Bolivar for a bicycle tour around town. I gave Mr. Schell a farewell handshake, then stopped halfway through repeating the gesture with Mrs. Schell, choosing instead to nod and meet her eyes in a way that let her know how obvious it was that she didn’t enjoy shaking my hand the first time, and I didn’t plan to put her through it aga
in. (I couldn’t help it, and for a long time afterward I was convinced that this was her official excuse for disapproving of me.) When we stepped back into the elevator, Emily was already apologizing without actually apologizing.

  “Heels heels heels!” she said, covering her ears. “Here’s an idea, maybe I’ll just go to the wedding on quad skates.”

  I burst into laughter, then reenacted Mr. Schell’s “s’mores” commentary, which was thoughtless and eventually put Emily in an even worse mood. By the time she dropped me off I felt like a complete jerk, especially now that I was considering the parental dialogue that likely followed our exit from the hospital. I knew that Mrs. Schell would accuse me of bald-faced classlessness and I could only hope that Mr. Schell would prove himself magnanimous enough to defend me. Whether this ever happened remains in question, but for the moment it turned out that good fortune was on my side. The next afternoon I received a phone call reporting that Katie had been issued a series of encouraging test scores and an unexpected release from the hospital. According to Emily, her superstitious father, whom I somehow managed to like, despite his Des Moines snobbery and goofball self-promotion, was convinced that this stroke of luck was substantially affected by my surprise visit. What’s more was the jolt I received a few hours later in the form of an express delivery containing a five-page original comic book with cover art centered on a yellowed string of flypaper hung inside a dank sports closet, only the flies glued to the paper were actually prep school students in uniforms. Jackknife Janitor, it was titled, in gooey blood lettering, and signed by none other than Katie Schell.

  I spent at least an hour huddled on the basement steps, paging through what read as the illustrated diary of a misanthropic janitor’s injurious pranks. While none of the drawings met the standard of detail set by the cover, the dialogue was hilariously grotesque, the student characters one-dimensional yet somehow convincingly real. What impressed me most about Katie’s work was the impending doom implied by the angle of the drawings, the point of view often through a missing ceiling tile or a telescope aimed from a duck blind in the woods. It even concluded with a promo for a follow-up series, doubly titled The After-School Incidents, or Wipeout at Whitfield Prep.