“It all started with Judas Iscariot,” she announced, choosing a bout of downtime in the shade of the technology tent to slyly broach the dilemma behind the blowup just described. “He was a redhead. It’s proven. That’s why the older generations are so reluctant to accept them. There was a time when people were so ashamed of redheads they’d keep them locked up in the attic, tell their neighbors they only had two kids when they really had two kids and a redhead.”
Emily twirled her ice cream cone, licking it contemplatively and looking pretty upset about the whole nasty phenomenon. A group of inventors lined up onstage, one by one announcing their discoveries and groundbreaking gadgets to the sparsely peopled stands.
“Yeah, redheaded men really don’t make the grade in a lot of circles. Probably the reason why there’s never been a redhead on the Hollywood A-list. Not a guy, at least.”
“John Wayne was a redhead,” I said. “Hard to tell with all those black-and-white films and cowboy hats, but it’s true.”
“John Wayne’s real name was Marion,” Emily joked.
Katie balled up in laughter. A feisty woman with oversized glasses pointed at the slide-show screen, listing the technical components of her biological food spoilage indicator. We watched a few more presentations, during which time I decided it best just to forget what Lauren had told me about Marcus Panozzo. There was no telling if the rumor was even true, or if there was any logic at all behind Mrs. Schell’s negative opinion of me. Soon enough Katie was bored again and making her wobbling descent down the metallic steps, drawing the unabashed distraction and shameful stares of the inventors. Back on the midway Emily joined the serpentine line for the Bungee Rocket. In the meantime Katie requested I push her to the nearby Butter Cow, which she explained was sculpted every year by a lady named Elesia Ellington, an artist from Riceville who worked her way up from papier-mâché and epoxy clay to dairy butter. (Her masterwork was a butter interpretation of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper.) I leaned down over Katie’s shoulder so she didn’t have to yell. She asked about Zach’s living arrangements in Iowa City, predicting that if he could keep himself in line, he’d provide the exact spark the Hawkeyes defense so desperately needed. I knew we’d end up discussing my troubles with Emily without discussing them directly.
“Talk about macho,” Katie said, chuckling at two shirtless body-builders strutting down the midway. “What kind of girls actually end up with these guys?”
“No idea. Whenever I see guys like that, they’re always walking around with other guys.”
“Reminds me of my uncles in Bolivar. Not that they’re big studs or anything, but my oldest uncle, he walks as big as a brick shit house. Speaking of which, did Emily ever tell you that when my mom used to visit her grandpa, and he had to take a crap in the middle of the night, he’d send her to the outhouse to plop her buns down to warm the seat!”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Hey, what’s the hurry? I’m here to soak in the atmosphere.”
“And people tell me I’m from the sticks.”
“You mean to say you didn’t have an outhouse in Davenport?”
“Oh yeah, Zach used to warm it for me all the time.”
“I have a feeling you’d be warming it for him,” she said, chuckling and covering her mouth. “Would you slow down!”
A minute later she was ordering me to speed up toward a shaded set of railroad ties facing the Bungee Rocket, where Emily was only halfway to the front of the line. The bungee jumpers were being catapulted from two cords attached to tall metal beams, slinging at least sixty feet up. When they launched, their faces went gaunt and ghoulish. “Tell me more about Bolivar,” I said, still considering Mrs. Schell’s unlikely path to the Wakonda Country Club elite.
Katie pushed herself onto the railroad ties. I sat down next to her as she rested her feet on the side of the wheelchair. “My grandpa was the big-time judge in town,” she said. “He was always talking about the importance of education . . . for men. The stupid thing is that everybody loved him, even though he covered the tuition for my uncles and didn’t pay a penny for my mom. Her younger brother, my uncle Steve, he went to college before she did, and he probably never read a book in his life. My mom was the salu-da-dicatorian!”
“Salutatorian?”
“Yeah yeah yeah,” she said. “So you know what my mom did then?”
“Picked up her gee-tar and went a-wanderin’?”
Katie pointed a strict finger at my face. “She got a job at the local café while she applied for scholarships to every college in the state. It took two years to get the hell out of Bolivar. And the only tip she got at that crappy café she worked at was, Don’t get too big for your britches.”
Katie slapped the railroad tie. She stared me in the eyes and scrunched her forehead and seethed. Despite myself, I was starting to like Mrs. Schell. “You’re passionate women,” I finally said, in a voice much more emotional than I’d intended. But I wasn’t joking and Katie knew it. She nodded to the bungee platform, where Emily was now taking her turn. Her spotter was a middle-aged guy, bald and musta chioed. He led her to the catapulting position and attached the cord to her harnessed vest.
“Do you mind me saying something, George?”
“What’s that?”
“You show your affection too easy.”
“I know.”
“But it puts you in a bad position.”
“Maybe you’re right,” I said, just as Emily shot into the sky, her body floating in a zero-gravity standstill before making its flailing earthbound descent. They shot her up three times, the third of which she looked like she could’ve easily done without. After thinking it over, I decided to take Katie’s criticism for what it was worth, a simple piece of advice on how to achieve a better balance of respect with her sister. (This turned out to be the last we ever spoke of such matters behind her sister’s back.) By the time Emily came stumbling our way and pressed a hand to my knee as she hopped onto the railroad ties, whatever tension that remained between us was washed away.
Near the end of the afternoon we returned Katie’s wheelchair and ambled happily to the parking lot, all three of us smirking to ourselves, knowing we’d be back the next day, rain or shine, for an afternoon fiddle fest and hoedown. At one point I threw my arms over the Schell girls’ shoulders, promising them a fanciful summer of champagne dinners, country club banquets, and Caribbean cruises. I pulled them close and felt bigger than ever, proudly engaged in a three-way love affair, the biggest man at the Iowa State Fair.
But that wasn’t the official end of our outing. Before we left, Katie directed us to the eastern end of the lot and the statue of historian James Wilson, where she recited his stone-etched quotation in such an instructional way as to confuse the exiting fairgoers into thinking she was performing a daily ceremonial duty. Her voice invoked singers of national anthems, fallen soldiers, the great unseen statesmen of Old Time Radio. Her solemn tribute concluded with the following proclamation:
“No one meets and mingles with twenty thousand Iowa men, women, and children on the fairgrounds—the only place they can be brought together—without growth of sympathy. This is the most valuable effect of the state fair. The fraternizing, humanizing consequences of BRINGING OUR PEOPLE TOGETHER! ”
Twelve
It need not be explained that rising humidity can be cruel to a young man nearing the summit of his physical strength, in love for the first time and desperate for that love to coalesce into a perfectly brazen and impromptu carnal awakening. In Iowa’s golden tassel summer Emily was a squinting cowgirl, deliciously cherry in the shoulders and the very tips of her nose and ears. From time to time she’d search me with her big brown eyes and such guileless affection that I felt on the verge of crumpling to my knees and giving up every aspiration I’d ever known. She’d just stare, sometimes smiling and sometimes not, but in a way that made me feel she could see our entire futures. Then she’d usually say something like, “You know, i
f I wasn’t mooching all your time, you’d probably have a couple of girlfriends by now” or “You wouldn’t run off to some other girl, would you, George? Even Christina Walters?” We still hadn’t kissed or even held hands, but after logging hundreds of circuitous country road miles and exchanging enough bright-eyed glances on dead-end nights beneath the Thirty-fifth Street Bridge, I understood that Emily needed me, even if it wasn’t in the same urgent and blistering way that I needed her. It was a romantic summer if only for the fact that we fell asleep so many times on the beach at Saylorville Lake that we thought nothing of waking to a sky hailing with every tinge of paint on the palette. In greedier moments I overstepped my boundaries. I slipped my arm around her waist in the mall, acting like her long-established lover in an attempt to trick her into making out with me as a mere matter of course. I picked things out of her hair that weren’t there, just to get close, letting my lips hover in front of her face, hoping something might happen. Once I made an obvious assault on her right breast in the complete darkness of a Magic House exhibit where the challenge was to drop to all fours and feel your way through a maze of blind tunnels. It was the greatest goblet of garmented flesh I’d ever known, so warm and vivacious that my palm clung to what it sensed was an essential absorbent force. “That’s not the way,” she’d said, half sniggering and squirming as she delivered my hand back where it belonged.
While these misplays no doubt upset the balance Katie had warned me about, the scale tipped in the other direction at the last moment when the August sun had nearly winked its last and Emily purported her own desire with a series of conciliatory but inarguably amorous kisses on the neck. It happened at a freestyle tournament at Valley High, after I’d been instantly pinned by a five-point throw, my body generating such a resounding smack against the mat that the audiences of all the other matches looked over to mine, reacting with a guttural symphony of “Oooooooh!” and “Ouuuch!” if not merely laughing like cut-rate comedians at my wheezing, breathless embarrassment. While these kisses only piqued my desire and thus sharpened my suffering, in the moment of feeling her lips on my skin I moved from experiencing one of the most emasculating public humiliations to sensing that I’d just struck a debilitating blow to those disgraceful forces of nature that for one reason or another place love in the hearts of those who will never know it requited.
Thirteen
I recall almost nothing of my senior year. Perhaps I recall some things, but only in pieces. I remember Emily telling me she was applying to Yale and other elite institutions out of my academic and financial reach. I remember considering myself an environmental hero because I spent three weekends with my physics teacher in the nocturnal, catch-and-release pursuit of crawfish frogs. I recall a float trip on the upper Iowa, but not much beyond the fact that it rained one night and we all crowded into a domed tent where Ashley kept whining about the hole in her sleeping pad and Hads demanded his money back for Tino’s cousin’s bunk weed and Smitty botched the ending of a long-drawn-out ghost story and when we finally went to sleep the top of Emily’s head was nearly touching the top of mine and her hair smelled like mixed fruit. I remember a reported sighting of Nicholas Parsons that amounted to naught. I remember Zach showing up in our front hallway as forlorn as a forced retiree, leaning against the coat closet while my dad waited at the edge of the kitchen and my mom paused halfway down the steps, admitting that he’d been kicked off the team for “drunkenness and other related infractions.” I remember Emily playing the lead in the school’s rendition of Our Town, a drama involving a marriage between characters named George and Emily. I remember the corporal vibrations of hunger and sexual aggravation rattling me in my sleep. I remember Tino bragging of his senior-year stamina after banging his girlfriend on the stairways and in the basements of half the houses still under construction out in Clive. I remember a stuttering twitch in my left eyelid that followed an unfulfilled evening with Emily Schell. I remember a sharp reduction in my powers of impersonation and concentration, the frightening realism of my dreams. I remember the torturous smell of steak smoke drifting through the back door and up the stairs and into my bedroom, which makes me feel I remember more than I thought.
One night I stole Zach’s car and arrived unannounced at the Schell house on one of those pre-winter nights when it was only seven o’clock but dark and it seemed like ten.2 By this time I’d made some headway with Mr. Schell, who, when we were able to avoid the topics of Yale or his T-shirt business, proved himself a pretty decent guy. He never treated me like a potential date rapist and always made a point of asking about my parents in a warm way that didn’t strike me as superficial. But Mrs. Schell remained vigilant, even if she’d resorted to such petty insults as refusing to aim her glare at anything below my hairline. On the night in question she answered the door in a velour sweat suit that struck me as the only sweat suit in the world fancy enough to wear to a cocktail party at the Marriott’s revolving restaurant overlooking the river.
“She’s studying, George. She doesn’t have time to fool around this semester.”
“It’s mostly a business meeting,” I said. “Emily and I have a pop quiz tomorrow in economics. Can you just give us a few minutes?”
“How can it be a pop quiz if you know it’s tomorrow?”
“Mr. Dougal calls them pop quizzes, but he works on a kind of unconscious system that I’ve basically figured out. Third week Thursdays are almost a sure thing.”
“Emily’s really got to focus,” she said, like I’d just been yammering on about my disappointment that Guns N’ Roses had never made it to Des Moines. She checked her watch against the clock in the hallway, hinting that I was severely disrupting her night’s entertainment. “This year’s grades are even more important than last year’s. A lot of kids don’t realize that. Some of the colleges will ask for your grades right up to the end.”
“Mornings are the best time to study,” I said, as energetic as an excitable pony. “I read all about it. It’s proven.”
“Uh-huh. Where are you applying?” she asked, crossing her arms and treating herself to a long, histrionic blink.
“Iowa and Northern Iowa.”
“Uh-huh,” she repeated, relishing the thought of my humdrum ambitions.
“Can I just talk to her for a quick minute?”
Mrs. Schell responded by staring like she’d asked me a question and not the other way around. Then she told me to wait while she checked if Emily had a moment to spare. I sat down on the porch steps, watching a pile of leaves roll across the neighbor’s lawn and into the street. A minute later Katie stepped outside in a leather jacket with woolen lapels. It was obviously her dad’s jacket, probably the manliest thing he ever owned.
“What’re you eating these days?” she asked, making a face at the sight of my waistline. She took her time lowering herself down.
“A lot of salads. I can eat real food on Saturday.”
“Who do you wrestle next?”
“Valley.”
“Snobs.”
“They had a ringworm outbreak.”
“Gross,” she said, setting one crutch over her knees. “Every time I hear that word, I picture worms crawling under my skin.”
“You coming?”
“I’ll be there, but you’d better win this time.”
“The last match you watched was against the guy who won the Cedar Falls tournament. His name is Shane Weiss and he’s pretty tough.”
“Shane Wuss. You could’ve beaten him. He just muscled you. Everyone could see that.”
“Maybe. He kind of psyched me out, too. Before the match, he barked at me. He shook my hand and barked, real soft.”
“What a creep.”
“Yeah, but it worked,” I said. Katie nodded along, but she didn’t like it. “I’ll wrestle him again in Ames.”
“You’ll beat him. If you weren’t cutting so much weight, you’d be state champ for sure.”
“A winning record would be a good start.”
Katie leaned back to take in the view of the swaying branches, acting like she didn’t hear me. “Yeah, you could be state champ.”
“Thanks.”
“How’s your brother doing?”
“He’s designing a new bachelor pad in my parents’ basement. He’s working up at Gordo’s again.”
“Ouch,” she said. “Tough break for such a cute guy. I can’t figure out why he never settled down. He could get any girl he wanted.”
“You looking to be set up?”
“Maybe. Got any shower photos?”
“I don’t even have a camera.” Emily came out bundled up in her biggest woolen sweater. She plopped down, hugging herself and rubbing her temples. “Let’s go for a drive,” I said.
She laughed a series of short huffing hoots. (Emily’s laughter had become highly communicative, and was now her most developed theatrical tool. “Wrong button!” it said. “But don’t worry, because you’ve raised the exact issue I was hoping to discuss.”) “Three nights in a row!” she complained. “All I want to do is rent a movie, and each night after dinner she gives me this big sad face and says, Why don’t you just stay home tonight? I don’t like you driving at night. Since when has anyone had a problem with driving at night?”
“Lots of deer accidents,” I said.
Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter Page 8
