Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter

by Michael J. White

  It seemed our entire student careers had led to that moment of careening down a wooded country road in the back of Hadley’s truck with four kegs and a dozen classmates, laughing and shouting and holding on for dear life. Speakers blared and kegs tipped over and rolled and attacked. We gathered smoke and dust on our tongues as our eyes rattled and our faces blurred. Frightened bullfrogs leapt into a mangy stream, splashing in sequence as we blew past. The gravel road dead-ended somewhere out in Adel. Hadley slammed the brakes and Nat Fry fell out the side and landed in a bush with his beer can still upright in his hand. The ensuing caravan of seniors made the forest make room.

  It was a long day of sport drinking and all the games that end in painful drunkenness. By noon Hadley found out that Tino went skinny-dipping with his younger sister, which Tino attempted to rationalize as “legitimate campsite bathing.” This was followed by a shoving match and several Mexican insinuations, then a rollicking old-boy wrestling match that Smitty and I felt it our drunken duty to complicate. Around sunset I witnessed our valedictorian puke on her bare feet and wash them while dancing in the stream. The bonfire was burning out of control, its sparks a constant threat to forest and drunkard alike. Caught making out behind the picnic pavilion, Emily and I were outed, cheered, and finally designated the royal couple of the day.

  “Can you do me a favor?” she asked, tugging at the purple string of Mardi Gras beads around her neck.

  “Anything. You want my shoes? I got them on sale, direct from the warehouse.”

  “Shut up, George. I’m going to walk over to that bonfire and I want you to shove me backward into the middle where it’s good and hot.”

  “Are you drunk, finally? I’m a little drunk, but not nearly as bad as I was at noon.”

  “I’m bored. Is college going to be like this? All blood and puke?”

  “Looks like it,” I said, as Tino swerved his way over waving a lighter that he thought was still lit. When I clinked his cup it fell out of his hand and spilled. After staring at the confounding sight of foam melting into dirt, he sadly stumbled away.

  “Let’s go,” Emily said, taking my hand. She led the way through the zigzag parking lot of cars and trucks, toward the bike path and the darkness on the other side of the road. A group of classmates with hoarse voices stumbled onto the path farther down, pissing and lighting cigarettes. We started the three or four miles back to West Des Moines as if answering the far-off call of traffic barreling down Interstate 80. A few times I fell a half step behind, just enough to view the back of Emily’s legs, her neck, the sideways sway of her breasts. We hadn’t exactly been taking things slow, but I’d yet to see her fully naked and still had a hard time believing this was all really happening. The increasing noise of motors and speeding cars against the wind sounded somehow pleasant and sparkling with life. Emily finally grabbed my hand and pulled me along.

  “Katie says you’re taking us fishing. Apparently you promised her.”

  “I was thinking Sunday at Saylorville.”

  “All right. I’ll tell her.”

  “Think she knows?”

  “There’s very little Katie doesn’t know,” she said, like it wasn’t as big a deal as I was making it out to be. “Excited about all the girls you’re going to meet in Iowa City?”

  “I don’t think she knows,” I said.

  “That was evasive.”

  “I’m not sure about Iowa City girls. If I meet one with cute little feet just like yours, maybe I’ll want to photograph those feet. But I wouldn’t go any further than that.”

  Emily smirked and slightly swerved. At this pace it would’ve taken all night to get home. There were geographical dilemmas to overcome and pressing decisions to make, but we were content walking and putting them off for another night. Emily was my girlfriend and for the moment that’s all that mattered. We were more or less sober by the time we hopped the fence into her neighborhood, setting off motion detectors that triggered security lights yard by yard as we strolled up her street. We plopped down in the driveway by the side of her garage and laughed off alcoholic classmates, bitter wrestling coaches, lazy French teachers, and unsolved stranglings. When the security lights had all clicked off we started kissing. For the last kiss Emily held my face and licked a slow line up my neck. We whispered our good nights and I watched her hurry across the lawn to the front door. She waved before covering her mouth and smelling her breath and slipping inside. Hiking the rest of the way home took almost two hours but she was with me and still there on my lips when I fell into bed, believing she was mine.

  Eighteen

  I overslept the Sunday morning of our fishing jaunt to Saylorville Lake, waking to the slow groan of the garage door as my parents returned from my mom’s bell choir performance at the seven-o’clock Mass. This implied not only a partially broken promise to Katie Schell, who’d insisted we set out like professionals at the crack of dawn, but also a reduced probability of stealing away in Zach’s car, which was already outfitted with rods and reels after his trip to Petoka the day before. But it turns out Zach had the day off at Gordo’s and had therefore spent the previous night drinking himself authoritatively retarded among a group of bartenders and servers behind the locked doors of any number of closed-for-the-night restaurants or bars in the greater Urbandale-Windsor Heights areas. He didn’t bat an eye when I entered his room to search every floor-strewn pair of pants for his keys. I returned upstairs to find my dad attending to a spitting slab of bacon whose prolific grease would soon be put to the task of frying eggs (this was five or six years before his first heart attack, which would prevent any such indulgences thereafter). “If you catch anything impressive,” he advised, “throw it back. Shows respect. And keep your shirt on, all right? Girls don’t like a show-off.”

  It was still only eight-fifteen when I set off for the Schells’ house with the wind dragging my hair, grooving side to side on hot vinyl seats as I constructed the colors and smells of a summer love affair at an isolated cabin up north. Ours would be a laissez-faire love with speed options, each yearning squelched in a fleshy performance designed specifically to fit the need. I arrived at the Schells’ doorstep bursting with a potency that felt like knowledge. This feeling was somewhat diminished when Mrs. Schell arrived covered in sweat with an unsheathed tennis racquet in her right hand, displaying the sort of disbelief of a national champ who’d just been cheated on a line call. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out she’d dashed off the court in the middle of league play, outsprinting the cars on the highway just to give me the third degree before I took her daughters out fishing.

  “It’s Sunday, George. Kind of early, don’t you think?”

  I mumbled an apology, even knowing this was all an act. Katie assured me she’d covered all the bases, leaving nothing to chance—her mom had been aware of our plan for at least a week. “Actually, I’m late. Katie wanted me here at seven. Today’s our big day out at Saylorville Lake.”

  Mrs. Schell smirked, unhappily, offering nothing more than a prolonged gaze of disapproval, apparently expecting that under its influence I might confess whatever perverted scheme I’d expected to disguise by throwing a few fishing rods in the backseat. Our stare-down ended with a phone call that prompted Mrs. Schell to withdraw, but not before closing the door in order to remind me that her air-conditioning system wasn’t designed for strays hanging out on the front porch. In her absence I entertained myself with the notion of swinging her onto the lawn for an impromptu tango, which would have ended with me dashing for the front door to lock her out of her own house.

  A minute later Mr. Schell appeared in Hitchcockian distortion through the panels of his leaded-glass windows. A sip of coffee splashed onto his slipper as he stepped outside in a thick white robe with oversized pockets that made him look like some kind of Beverly Hills imp. Even the gray in his hair was babyish against the thick white cotton.

  “Well, shoot,” he said, casting me and the coffee stain equally inquisitive grins. He patted
my shoulder, careful to avoid spilling any more coffee but clearly attempting a masculine exchange that would allow me to understand something he was feeling. “Sunday is THE DAY,” he said. “The DAY of the week. So how goes it, George? Katie’s been up since cock-a-doodle-doo. Where’re the big dogs bitin’ today?”

  “Hopefully at Saylorville Lake.”

  “What are you going after?”

  “Northern, mostly. Walleye, too, if we can find the right spot.” Mr. Schell nodded, centering the welcome mat with his foot. “Don’t know if you’ve heard, but Emily’s girlfriend Mel, from the volleyball team, she’s moving into the ranch at the end of the block. She’s a real sweet gal. Single, too.”

  “I heard that,” I said. “But her freckles are pretty intense, and I think she’s too tall for me.”

  “Tall is good. Isn’t she one of the volleyball captains?”

  “Yeah, but she always gets injured, and not during the games, either. Last year she tripped over a dishwasher door and broke her wrist. She’s a serious hazard.”

  Mr. Schell chuckled as he stared absentmindedly around the yard. When he asked about our senior skip day, I told him I’d won some money playing horseshoes. (The last time I played horseshoes was probably in sixth grade, but horseshoes seemed the kind of subject a Wakonda Country Club member out of the loop of manly entertainment might enjoy.) While I wasn’t sure how to interpret his attempt to match me with Mel Gerbeck, I figured it was no more than small talk when he insisted I join him for juice and doughnuts instead of waiting on the porch like a Roto-Rooter salesman. As we passed through the front hallway I overheard Mrs. Schell drawing near the high point of an upstairs lecture related to our skip day and its effect on Emily’s ultimate GPA. Mr. Schell led me to the kitchen, which was sparkling white with lavender napkins that matched the many curtains on its many windows. We sat at a big oak table where he slid me a box of sprinkled doughnuts. He was cutting his and eating it with a fork. The doughnuts turned out to be disappointingly dry.

  “Pardon the mess,” he said, nodding at the Schell’s Shirtworks boxes stacked up beside the door to the garage. “I like to hand-deliver orders for my most important customers. Of course it drives Maureen batty, because I could just as easily leave them in the trunk. But when I bring them inside, at least I feel like I’m treating my product with respect.”

  “That makes sense,” I said, trying my best to swallow my doughnut, the whole time thinking that this man needs a man. (I’ve since come to the conclusion that Mr. Schell was a regular guy once, before he was contained under the feminine authority of a barely legal actress, an anarchistic girl-woman eighth grader, and a castrating wife with tennis legs so sharp he was lucky to wake up with his feet still attached to his legs. Despite the fact that he’d run several T-shirt competitors into the ground, which implied some amount of backbone, I imagined that in private he mostly tiptoed around his wife, whose browbeating nature very likely extended to sex.) Within a minute or two we’d already run out of conversation and were both relieved at the sound of Katie trouncing down the steps. She was gripping the railing with one hand and two crutches with the other. I guessed her symptoms were now advancing from moderate to moderate-severe.

  “You’re late,” she said, sighing in colossal disappointment. “The fish already ate breakfast without us.”

  “I’ve been down here since seven o’clock.”

  “No te creo, amigo. I’ve been up since six-forty.”

  When Katie hit the last step her neck twisted in a way that suggested her head was becoming an increasing heavy load. She swerved her way to her father and hugged him around the neck. I noticed a new charm in the way she surfed her stilted muscles, grooving like a karaoke singer who couldn’t hear how off-key she really was. Maybe she’d learned something from our driving lessons over the winter at the icy Valley West parking lot, when I’d taught her to turn into the spins and ride them out. Her dad offered her the other half of his doughnut, but Katie just made a face. She swung her way over to the chair nearest the windows.

  “What are you girls doing about church?” Mr. Schell asked.

  “Mom said we can go to the short Mass at five o’clock at the hospital.”

  Mr. Schell scratched his chin, acting like he’d never heard of any short Mass at any hospital. “You were born in that hospital. Maybe you should go to the long Mass.”

  “There is no long Mass. They’re all short ’cause there’s no singing. Singing wakes up all the patients.”

  Mr. Schell threw me an amused look of suspicion. Katie started paging through the comics, washing her hands of the matter. Emily came down a minute later tugging on her right ear. The way she winced at the assaulting brightness said all there was to say about the argument she’d just had with her mother. “Bonjour,” she said, hard-heartedly, like we were all in trouble now that she was in trouble. “Katie. Dad. George.”

  The way she said my name betrayed nothing but promised absolutely everything. While sitting next to Mr. Schell, I lost all sense of how much eye contact was considered normal. It was a rare pleasure to catch her just out of bed, still groggy, but I tried not to stare.

  “Good morning,” Mr. Schell and I said, in tandem.

  “Buenos días,” Katie said.

  “If there’s no more doughnuts I’m going back to sleep.”

  “You can sleep once your line’s in the water. Katie and I have big ambitions.”

  “By noon the fish will get too hot and hide way down deep,” Katie said. “When they get hot, they won’t eat a thing.”

  “Hope you’re ready for a whole day of this sort of information. Last night Katie bought about five fishing magazines. I wouldn’t be surprised if she read them cover to cover.”

  “Not true,” Katie argued. “I read one article and it was in a conservation magazine, not a fishingmagazine.”

  Emily picked at a few sprinkles at the bottom of the box. “I hope you’ve got weighters and floaties and all that stuff. We’re not exactly outdoorspeople around here.”

  “We’re set,” I said, thinking Mr. Schell would be embarrassed by the comment, like he was just another coquette in their domestic rendition of Little Women. But he was entangled in a stare-down with the second half of his doughnut, seeming to have a talent for hearing only whatever pleased him, at least on Sunday mornings. Maybe he was devising a plan to calm his wife. Emily lowered her head to drink from the kitchen faucet. I loved watching her drink from the faucet and I wanted to kiss her and drink from the faucet at the same time.

  Mr. Schell brought his plate to the sink and placed his hand on Emily’s shoulder. He spoke softly. “I think Katie’s right. You’d better be off.”

  “Isn’t Katie always right?”

  “She’s hovering around ninety-nine percent.”

  Katie folded the comics and bowed. While she was standing up, her hand slipped from her crutch and she fell hard against the table, sending a mug with her name in big block letters banging to the floor. Orange juice spread across the surface, soaking napkins and place mats. A split second later, while hopping up to block a stream of orange juice from spilling onto the floor, I smacked a knee against the chair next to me. This offered a perfect opportunity to divert the attention from Katie’s blossoming embarrassment. I started hopping around and hollering, “Oooh! Aaah! Oww!” doing my best to convince everyone I’d seriously damaged myself. Mr. Schell and Emily surged forward with mirrored expressions of uncertain worry. As they lowered me to the suspect chair their eyes darted back and forth between my squeezing grimace, the spilled orange juice, the broken cup, and my naked unmarked legs, trying to piece it all together.

  I howled a few more times to work out the imagined pain. “Is there a funny bone in the knee?” I shouted. “Oooh! Ahhh! I think I nailed it!”

  “Okay, okay,” Emily said, attempting to appear calm. I’d clearly convinced her and Mr. Schell that I was the one who’d knocked over the orange juice. It was a much greater performance than I’d int
ended.

  “Don’t worry about the mess,” Mr. Schell said, running a hand over his scalp as he headed for the sink.

  “That was my favorite cup!” Katie shouted, trying to suppress the laughter that inevitably escaped in a burst of pandemic snorting glee. “What was that! Barn dance hip-hop? George! Oh my God! Did you take lessons for that!”

  “He’s hurt,” Emily said, then grew suddenly unsure. She stepped in front of me and stared into my face to make up her mind.

  “I think it’s acute,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?” Emily asked, increasingly leery.

  “You know, the sort of pain that hits hard at first, but then wears off a couple of minutes later?”

  “Katie,” Mr. Schell called out, in warning, looking fearful of an impending lawsuit. Katie couldn’t help herself. She looked away, but kept huffing and puffing until her face was streaked with tears. Emily picked up the broken cup pieces as Mr. Schell wiped the floor, both of them acting as though a quick disposal of evidence was the best way to dismiss their own embarrassment and alleviate my pain.