By the time we stepped back into the Civic Center my stomach hurt so bad I wasn’t sure if I could sit. It didn’t help matters that I’d forgotten to call Emily to warn her of what to expect when she arrived downtown. After walking a few languid laps around the circular hallway, Smitty and I took to the stands to join the rest of our teammates who didn’t make state. Hadley’s dad and a few others gave me big pats on the back and stern Be strong words of encouragement as they climbed up to their seats. A few friends bought me candy bars and nachos. I nodded to everyone, trying my best to smile and thank them but barely letting go a word, afraid of the emotions that might let loose if I did.
When the Schell girls finally found me, Katie drew all sorts of attention to the both of us by standing at the bottom of the bleachers waving her arms and pointing her crutch at the electronic tournament board that had mysteriously omitted my name. This did little to improve my mood, which grew worse when she kept up the charade during her excruciatingly protracted ascent that involved stopping every few steps to stare up in wait for an explanation—all this in front of a match tied at nine points in the third period. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I marched down the steps and scooped her up like sack of potatoes, a gesture I suspected she wouldn’t appreciate. It turns out I was wrong.
“Holy smokes, George! You could stab someone with these muscles. What did you do, spend the last month with the American Gladiators?”
“I didn’t make weight,” I said, heading back up the steps, clenching my jaw at the sensation of my face growing flush. Emily was still waiting below, watching the match, probably having figured out what happened and now trying to decide what to say.
“So you didn’t even wrestle?”
“You didn’t miss a thing, except the heavyweight whose coach slapped him when he started crying.”
“You’re not going to start crying, are you?”
“No,” I said, as a slight shiver ran through me.
“All right. Set me down next to Smitty.”
Smitty happily scooted over. As soon as I set her down he started updating her on the match in progress. I sat a few rows back and waited for Emily, knowing that as soon as I stepped away Katie would ask him for all the details. Emily sat next to me and shot me a quick smile and didn’t say a thing. She probably guessed that if she kissed me again, like she did after the freestyle tournament over the summer, I wouldn’t let her get away without kissing her back. Then she’d have a decision to make that she probably didn’t feel like making. (The fact that I didn’t receive another kiss only further encouraged my remembrance of every athletic letdown I’d ever experienced, not to mention every heroic Peyton Chambeau slam dunk I’d ever seen. Before long my thoughts sank so deep into the gutter that I found myself imagining the uncovered footage of Peyton and Emily frolicking under the sheets in the master bedroom at Heidi Sneed’s.) The next hour of the tournament proceeded in grand style, the crowd roaring at the sight of hip tosses and last-second escapes. Colin Franzen pinned his first three opponents. I kept waiting for Emily to nod off, like she usually did at some point during all-day tournaments, no matter the noise level. After a long bout of waiting and watching, I let her know I was ready to talk with a snide remark about the Catholic school from Mar shalltown whose team name was the Maroons, despite their school colors of navy and gold.
“A maroon is a slave warrior fighting for his freedom,” she said. “They still exist today. Whenever regular people come around, they just keep moving deeper into the jungle.”
“Did Katie tell you that?”
“She’s not the only source of information around here. I occasionally read, I hope you know.”
“I occasionally streak across stadiums during wrestling tournaments, I hope you know.”
“This is an interesting change. I’m usually stuck in the stands with a bunch of boring old men talking business.”
“I wish I was a Maroon.”
“Some of the Maroons were cannibals, George.”
“Great,” I said, like we were making perfect sense. “Maybe we should try that sometime. Maybe we should find someone who can afford to give up a few fingers, or an arm—”
“Fine by me.”
“Like a kid or something. Somebody who’s not really contributing anything.”
“Whatever you say. I came here thinking it was your day today, and I still haven’t changed my mind. Let’s just do whatever you say.”
“That could be anything.”
“I’m not in the mood to argue,” she said, pointing at the names of the advancing winners just listed on the tournament board. She leaned back and looked around, pretending to soak in the various expressions of the surrounding fans. She didn’t meet my eyes until her old friend from elementary school called her name and hiked up the bleachers toward us, fake panting along the way. Emily turned and touched my shoulder. She sighed and dropped her shoulders in a way that made me feel I wasn’t harboring my loss alone. A few minutes later, after she and her friend went for snacks, Katie scooted down next to me, demanding play-by-play recaps of all the matches she’d missed while listening to Smitty describe biological-attack training procedures in the gas chambers at Fort Leonard Wood.
“Now tell me what the heck’s happening with Saunders,” she said. “Is he as tough this year as everyone says he is?”
“You don’t even know Saunders.”
“But he’s tough, right? I heard he had a wrestling mat in his basement and a bunch of scouts from Arizona State following him around.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Pretzel line.”
“Yeah, he won pretty quick. He’ll probably win it all.”
“Good ol’ Saunders,” she said, as she drew her focus on the beginning of the next match, which from the first whistle was dominated by a wrestler from Cedar Rapids I’d beaten two weeks before. He earned a solid lead and was soon dancing around, locking up for as long as possible, wasting time instead of going for the pin. I decided I was better off not giving the match my full attention. It was only making me more upset.
“So, you’re not going to say I told you so?”
“About what?”
“Wrestling at one-forty instead of one-forty-five.”
“You m ean one-fifty-two?”
“Sure.”
“What do I know,” she said. “I guess you’ll just have to leave your mark on the world in some other way. If you were state champ, you’d probably be talking about it for the next fifty years, and that’s all you’d be doing for the next fifty years.”
“You know Saunders isn’t the only one who’s gotten a few phone calls from recruiters.”
“Whoop dee doo,” she said, going for an unclaimed bag of peanuts on the bench in front of us. “You planning to starve again in college?”
“I didn’t say I returned any calls. Anyway, how are you planning to make your mark on the world? Ever send your comics out?”
“I’m not sure I’ll make any mark on the world, George. Maybe I’ll leave it unmarked. But I’ll tell you this, someday long after I’m gone, while a bunch of kids are building a sand castle, or digging up the forest for a new dirt bike path, they’re going to discover something truly amazing, and that something is gonna be my time capsule. Have you ever heard of someone finding a time capsule? It happens every once in a while, and when I hear about it, I get so jealous I could scream.”
There was only a minute left in the match. I was glad when Katie started shouting out for the underdog, even if the kid from Cedar Rapids was still looking to stall long enough to win. “What are you planning to hide in your time capsule?”
“Just a few mementos of the age. You know, for the historians and ethnographists. There’ll be some predictions for the future of the Schell family, America, the human race. A few secrets revealed, a few questions posed. A map. Maybe none of those things. Maybe all of them. It wouldn’t make much sense to be exact about what I’ll put in there. The whole thrill of dis
covering what’s inside is what it’s all about.”
“But I’ll be long gone,” I said, already thinking of where I might bury my own time capsule. (I can’t reveal the location I eventually chose, knowing that one of you might be tempted to search along every train track beneath every arrow-shaped and dynamite-blasted boulder in Davenport.) During the next round of matches Katie and I started betting quarters on the outcomes. Of course I was familiar with most of the wrestlers and didn’t think there was any way she’d take my money. But it turns out Katie had a knack for choosing the winners, apparently based on the way they walked onto the mat. By some strange luck she was able to separate the phony talents from the real fighters, judging instinctively the mere musclemen from the scrappers who’d rather see their arm snapped off before turning their back to the mat. By the time Emily returned, my teammates were huddled all around us, having a big laugh at Katie’s spot-on guesses that made me wonder how serious she was about the predictions in her time capsule. The confluent thrill of gambling and wrestling reached a climax during Colin Franzen’s final match, which took place on the mat closest to our section.
“Franzen’s gonna chomp this Wilson guy up,” Katie said. “See the way Wilson’s rolling around that one shoulder? He didn’t start doing that until a minute ago, when he first saw Franzen. I’ll bet you an extra quarter that Wilson’s first move is a step backward.”
“I’ll take that,” Smitty said, tossing a quarter on her blanket cum bookie’s stand, trying to talk the same game as Katie. “Guys with braces never take a step back. Braces in this sport make you look meaner.”
More quarters started piling up on the blanket. Almost everyone on our team was in, as well as a few wrestlers from other schools.
“Okay, boys,” Emily said. “I hope you’ve got rolls for all that change. We didn’t bring our piggy banks.”
“We?” Katie scoffed. “I’m the one doing all the work here. And if it’s legal tender, it’s good enough for me.”
The gamblers cursed with amusement. Emily pinched my arm and whispered, “Think anyone’s getting a little big for her britches?”
“It’s a cocky sport,” I said, just as the referee chopped his hand and Wilson took a step back. Katie clapped and collected her coins. It was a close match, but Colin scored two takedowns in the final round and won by three points. We stayed for the closing ceremonies when he climbed the pyramid to receive his trophy. Coach Grady called a brief team meeting to congratulate Colin and remind us of his unsated appetite for three or four individual titles and a team championship. Most of the seniors didn’t give a shit—he’d used us and we’d used him and that was it. While exiting the arena, when it was clear I had a responsibility to get wasted with my teammates, Emily patted my chest and stomach (perhaps trying to sway me toward another plan, though this is hard to say), urging me not to drink too much or let my figure go too quickly. During this hypothetically decisive moment Smitty tossed me a set of stolen wrestling room keys and I stepped back to catch them and we all shouted and were soon jumping into cars and speeding across town like loosed devils toward the familiar stink of two wrestling mats that were less alive than the day before, already dusty and stale like an ancient armpit. We uncorked six jugs of team cider we’d been fermenting all winter. We tag-team wrestled. We bare-knuckle boxed. We climbed the ropes with jugs tied around our waists and cigarettes in our mouths and chugged at the top like possessed half-wits. I woke the next morning overcome by the sense of being trapped in a foul and long-neglected gerbil’s nest, soon asking myself if Emily was serious about whatever I wanted. At this point at least thirty state champions glared down at me from their victory pyramids within their plastic frames, shaking their heads, some shielding their medals, others turning their backs, all of them pinching their noses.
Fifteen
I shudder to admit it, but this past October I was arrested. Beyond the speeding tickets I inevitably fall prey to every three or four years, it’s the only time I’ve ever found myself at odds with the law. I spent a night in jail and very nearly lost my job. The arrest came after a party hosted by a fellow teacher that ended in my keys being taken from me after I downed a near fifth of whiskey of a brand previously unfamiliar to me. I can’t remember ever drinking so much, so fast, in all my life. But that night while making small talk about this fellow teacher’s satellite, his dog’s foul breath, his brother’s new telescope, etc., I knocked back drink after drink with the ease of a lifelong drunkard who had no interest in humankind beyond their capacity for the production of white noise chatter as a pleasant backdrop during a binge. For the entire night I found myself incapable of focusing on anything other than my relationship with the Schell girls and the possibilities of the lives originally intended for us. These thoughts were obviously triggered by my pre-party viewing of the local six-o’clock news, when I’d caught Emily interviewing a relationship author for a human interest report on how to understand men through their dogs. At some point in the night I blacked out, to say the least, and can only guess that after falling into a card table adorned with casserole dishes of artichoke and spinach dips, I was belligerent enough about the decision to walk home that no one insisted on stopping me.
But as it turns out, I didn’t walk home right away. After hearing a metallic banging in her backyard, a housewife a few neighborhoods over stepped outside to find me severely hunched over and howling through the freshly broken window of her husband’s toolshed. Then she grabbed her video camera and filmed me. I saw her footage for the first time in court. I was not only hunched over, but hooked sideways with my head somewhere near my right elbow, which explained why my back had been so mysteriously sore for such a long time. I still wonder how many copies of this video exist and into whose hands it has passed. I wonder what my students would think if they saw me looking like a mad trapper who’d finally ensnared a moose only to realize he’d lost the key to his room-sized trap. I ask myself what I was so hungrily seeking on the other side of that toolshed door that wouldn’t give way and I can only guess it had something to do with the answer to the existential question of how Emily, Katie, and I would ever find our way back to our proverbial Garden.
But I’m getting ahead of myself and would be better to return to the spring of my senior year during a strange spell of heat waves, heavy downpours, and foul moods in reaction to speculations of a summer flood that would wipe out all the farmers who’d barely found their feet. Emily was wait-listed at Yale, which caused a new set of complications in her relationship with her mother, despite offering me a sinister hope that Emily would find herself rejected from all her prospective colleges, in which case I’d renounce my letter of intention to the University of Iowa, then rent a high-ceilinged apartment south of Grand with French doors and a freestanding bathtub—with brass legs ending in eagle’s claws—where we’d comfortably conduct organic dialogue exercises and I’d discover my innate skills as a theatrical director. This fantasy only intensified during a two-week run of Othello at the Public Playhouse, where Emily’s coquettish but chaste Desdemona was better publicized and reviewed than the entire cast combined. The storms continued through the first half of April, which I remember based on my dramatic curbside reading of a wet, semi-translucent letter, lacking a return address, but stained with a scent I can only describe as heart-shaped and unmistakably Emily’s. It read simply, in breezy cursive:Dear George, you are formally requested to accompany me at 7:00 on the evening of Friday, April 12th, to the Iowa Theatre Winterset for the nationwide premiere of The Bridges of Madison County. E
In order to avoid hurting Katie’s feelings, and out of respect for her father’s longtime crush on Meryl Streep (a dear friend from Yale, he used to tease, I imagine whilst propping a patched elbow upon the hearth) and her mother’s fanaticism for Robert James Waller, Emily told her family that the production company had allowed only one ticket per extra, just the same as for the locals whose shops and houses were featured in the film. While this disallowed the pos
sibility of picking her up in my dad’s double-waxed Taurus like a respectable theatergoer on an official date, there was little to complain of when the time arrived to meet her in the parking lot at Valley West Mall. It goes without saying that Emily was in rare form, light as a feather in a swaying skirt and low-cut blouse, legs and shoulders ashine as she strode in the waning twilight from her car to mine. I’d been waiting for twenty minutes listening to smooth jazz in a pair of thin corduroys and a yellow oxford cloth shirt, untucked, loosely buttoned at the top and bottom, sans T-shirt. (I’ve accepted that a good woman should arrive late. What sort of desire can a man possibly muster for a prompt date? A couple of months ago I signed up for an Internet matchmaking service, but can hardly remember a thing about my past few dates other than the fact of their apolitical postures and sugary small talk and their promptness.) We were late and Emily was perfectly unrushed. I stepped outside and walked around to open the door.
“Good evening,” I said.
“Good evening,” she said. She leaned inside to take a deep whiff of the freshly cinnamon-scented upholstery. “I was serious about probably being cut out.”
“I know,” I said, shrugging, like it wouldn’t be the end of the world. She stepped inside and we set out for the interstate and Madison County.
“Did you read the book yet?”
“Are those new shoes,” I asked, checking all my mirrors. “Don’t think I’ve seen those before.”
“You’re pathetic, George. Did you know that Bridges of Madison County sold more copies than the Bible?”
“With that kind of money, you think they’d just rebuild Iowa out in Hollywood.”
“You really didn’t read it?”
“I didn’t want to ruin the movie.”
“Oprah’s already seen it and she loved it. She filmed a TV show from one of the bridges, she loved it so much.”
“Oprah’s from Mississippi. What’s a Mississippi girl doing shooting a TV show on our goddamn bridge?”
Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter Page 10
