by Joshua Furst
ALSO BY JOSHUA FURST
Short People
I'm a blank spot in a hectic civilization. Im a dark smudge in the air that dissipates without notice. I feel like a window, maybe a broken window. I am a glass human. I am a glass human disappearing in rain. I am standing among you waving my invisible arms and hands. I am shouting my invisible words. I am growing weary. I am growing tired. I am waving to you from here. I am crawling around looking for the aperture of complete and final emptiness. I am vibrating in isolation among you. I am screaming but it comes out like pieces of clear ice. I am signaling that the volume of all this is too high. I am waving. I am waving my hands. I am disappearing. I am disappearing but not fast enough.
—DAVID WOJNAROWICZ
The passion for destruction is a creative passion too.
—MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
THESE THINGS ARE HARD TO SAY. I'm not sure what's true and what isn't. My experiences don't even make sense to me, so I can't imagine they'll make sense to anyone else. What I can promise is that I'll be sincere.
Here's what I know:
On May 24, 2004, my daughter, Cheryl, locked her bedroom door and blasted the angriest, most frantic hardcore she owned. She changed out of her little pink and green bikini into a pair of black cutoff cargoes and a t-shirt she'd worn so hard that the fabric had begun to disintegrate and the Tori Amos tour dates on the back had cracked and flaked into a ruin of crusty nubs. Then she stuffed a pair of jeans, two more ratty t-shirts, a red hooded sweatshirt, a bra and a handful of panties into her backpack. She zipped her Discman—that embarrassing outdated device which we'd refused to upgrade to an iPod—into the pack's front pocket, grabbed a case of CDs off the dresser and scanned the room, wondering what else she'd regret leaving behind.
If she'd glanced out the window, she would have seen me, still in my bathing suit, sitting in the Adirondack chair on the deck Robert had built around the pool. The glass of Crystal Light was still cradled in my lap, but I hadn't sipped from it since she'd run inside. My eyes were closed to help me concentrate. If she'd bothered to look, she would have seen that I'd managed to remain calm despite her tantrum.
She didn't look, though. She fished a half-empty bottle of spring water out from under her bed, dropped her cell phone in the pocket of her shorts and balled the cord into her backpack, then laced up the Doc Martens she'd spent so many hours defacing with Wite-Out and silver paint. She pounded the off button on the clock radio, grabbed the Camel Lights she thought I didn't know about and left.
On her way down the hall, she ducked into the bathroom to grab a handful of tampons. Then, pausing in the kitchen, she stood like a ghost at the sliding door, one hand lightly pressed against the fluttering screen, her fingers curling slowly in on themselves.
What she was doing was cursing my existence.
When I opened my eyes and peeked toward the house, I saw her in the living room walking away from me. Her shoulders were hunched, her pack covered in graffiti and safety-pin starbursts. The fuzzy scruff of her hair glowed white as the glass door hissed shut behind her.
“Where you off to?” I called. “Cheryl?”
By the time I'd made it to the front yard behind her, she was clomping down the middle of the street, nearing the corner where Jonquil Court opens onto Jonquil Way, angling south, headed toward East Fish Lake Road. She wasn't running. She wasn't even walking all that quickly.
“Wait a sec, Cheryl. When will you be home?”
As she hit the far curb, she picked up her pace.
“Cheryl!”
My weight is a problem. I walk slow. I get tired. But I tried to follow as best I could.
Our neighborhood only has so many streets and all of them loop around to Hemlock Lane, the road no one lives on, the one that links our cell to the rest of Plymouth and connects us to the highways and superstores. Pausing there to catch my breath, I leaned on a tree, barely more than a sapling, held upright by wooden rods and wires. It gave slightly under me but didn't fall.
“As your mother, I'm saying stop. Now, stop. I can't go any further.”
And she did. She stopped. She turned and glared at me. “Then quit following me, Mom. Jesus!”
A gray sedan, its headlights on despite the sun, slowed and turned the corner. The driver was a woman I knew from the neighborhood. Mrs. Konrad. She dressed her dachshund in stupid little sweaters and when she was out walking with it in the morning, she'd peer around haughtily, making sure everyone saw her from their windows and understood what an exemplary citizen she was. We avoided each other. She wasn't my people.
“You know?” Cheryl said, once the car was gone. She held an emptiness between her open palms, and when I didn't answer, she shoved it toward me like I was supposed to know how to catch it. Then she turned her back on me.
All I could do was watch her recede, running now, her backpack bouncing against her shoulder, her shorts slipping in increments down her hips. She was pulling away, willing herself toward a placeany placewhere I'd no longer be able to infect her. She dipped into the ditch along the edge of the road and all I could see was her shoulders, her head. Then she was up again, crunching through gravel, running with traffic, pacing herself to veer and lunge through it. Across six lanes and she was still running, slower now, jogging. She landed wrong on her heel, almost collapsed. Her knee buckled, and then snapped back into place, but she shook it off, kept going, ran toward the highway, raced across intersection after intersection, not looking, not caring if she got hit. At the cloverleaf she turned down under the entrance ramp and disappeared into the shadows below I-169.
From there she forged through the waist-high crabgrass and leapt into the dry culvert where her skater friends hung out, followed it, not really sure where she was going, away from me, further away from me. Names had been sprayed across the culvert's rough surface, crude hearts and curses and dripping phalluses. She took a swig of water and slowed her pace.
First standing, then leaning against the green power box jammed into the edge of the block, I waited on the corner and gazed off at the place she no longer was, past this place, trying, still, struggling to keep up.
She walked through the trash, through bleached chip bags and ziplocks and faded beer cans, hunks of pink deteriorating Styro-foam, shards of glass and scraps of colorful plastic, twisted rags, broken mops, petrified children's briefs. She walked through tunnels that took her under access roads, then up, eventually, miles from home. She followed a chain-link fence past loading docks, past the whitewashed backsides of unfriendly box stores, Family Dollar, Km art, Menards, Staples, an AMC 16 Multiplex. And when Plymouth finally bled into New Hope and the fence veered north, she pulled herself over it and dropped the twelve feet to the other side. She needed to hew east. Away from the sun.
Padding through the New Hope Village Green Golf Course, she nabbed a ball she found submerged in the rough. A lawn mower had sliced a smile in its casing. Taking a running start, she whipped it sidearm at the clubhouse up the hill in hopes of breaking a window. The ball didn't even make it to the next hole. She found another one and tried again. Then, laughing, she gave up. There'd be things to break later.
Back on the corner, I continued my vigil. I lowered myself to the ground and sat, my legs out straight in front of me on the grass. I waited.
Rush hour had finally trickled out to us. I could just imagine what my neighbors streaming past must have been thinking: That freaky fat woman's on the loose again and this time she's wearing a swimsuit. It probably pleased them to see me like this, confirmed their beliefs, gave them more evidence against me. One of the cars would eventually be Robert, and when it was, he'd stop and he'd take me home. I'd have to come up with something to tell him then. Right now, though, he was still at the offi
ce, working late—or more likely, staying late, trolling Westlaw for reasons to stay later. I couldn't rely on him for a thing.
As the sun set and the shadows compounded, I kept thinking I saw her coming back to me. But no. Each time, it was a squirrel, a crow, a shift in the darkness brought on by a turning car. It was always something else, never her.
Around ten thirty, the temperature dropped and I started to shiver and my bones began to bounce. There was nothing else I could do. I hobbled home.
And Cheryl kept moving. Every step she took was one more away from me, but however far she walked, she couldn't escape. I lived inside her, just as she lives inside me. In the distance, she could make out downtown Minneapolis: skyscrapers, looming pink; the silence of city lights. As good a place as any to try to become lost.
Plus, she already sort of knew her way around.
I SHOULD EXPLAIN what Cheryl was like before she left, and how we ended up living in Plymouth. To do that, I have to go back to Will-mar, the town out in Middle-of-Nowhere, Minnesota, where I was born and where I grew up. I have to talk about my sister, Sarah, who died in 1980.
She'd been up in Little Falls, two hours' drive away, taking pictures of the Willmar High hockey team in action against their rivals, the Flyers. Though she wasn't a fan—she hated aggression—hockey was the huge sport at Willmar and she worked for the yearbook; they wanted a picture, so there she was. She'd driven up alone in her green Ford Fiesta in order to avoid riding on the bus with her classmates, most of whom traveled with hidden liquor stashes—Slurpees spiked with vodka, whiskey-filled Pepsi cans—and by the trip home would be violent and cruel. During the game, a blizzard had swirled in.
This is all part of the public record. The next day, the snowplows found her car half submerged in a snowbank out on State Highway 23. It had a broken fan belt and a blown gasket. She wasn't in it. Five weeks later, during the brief January thaw, her body was discovered in a cornfield three miles away. The cause of death was determined to be hypothermia, but internal cuts and bruises implied she'd been raped. No semen was recovered; there was no sign of struggle. The Stearns County sheriffs investigated the case for a year, unsuccessfully, and then they moved on.
Her death became one of those reference points that high schools keep alive through cycles of students, those stories of incomprehensible tragedy that small communities use to scare their children and inspire them into submissiveness, convincing them to cleave close to home and fortify themselves in simple small-town life.
Sarahespecially receptive to the world as she found itwould have been disappointed by this. She had none of the filters most people use to color and distort their sense of others, to stop themselves from recognizing the beauty in eccentricity. And maybe in the long run this was a detriment, maybe this was why she'd gotten in trouble. Our father thought so: what I call faith, he called gullibility; what I call love, he called naiveté. She believed people were either open or closed, that everyone started out open but gradually most of us got scared and closed down. And often, when people saw her sensitivity, they revealed their shrouded selves to her. She was special. It wasn't just me who thought so. At school, she was the star of all the musicals—Babes in Arms, Guys and Dolls, South. Pacific—and the photo editor of both the yearbook and the Willmar Tattler.
Unlike her, I was a melancholy kid, shy and uncertain, ostracized. I had an unconventional mind. What to others was simple common sense was complicated, often unsettling, to me. I seemed to always ask the wrong questions. And when I felt odd and haunted, when no one else would tolerate me, I knew, if I slipped into her room and sat on the little white stool in the corner, she'd take what I had to say seriously. “You know,” she'd say, “everybody has different gifts. Some people are good at doing math, some are good at playing soft-ball. But you, Julia, you're good at turning the world upside down and showing us all a new way of seeing it. That's one of the greatest gifts there is.”
The reason for her death didn't puzzle me at all. Her car had broken down and she'd set the safety flares like our father had taught her. Two young men—friendly, probably farm boys, though they could just as easily not have been—stopped to help her, or that's what she'd thought as she opened the hood for them. Looking over the engine, they teased her: “Yeah, we know how to fix this. We can have this back and running in a jiffy, but first, let's talk. Let's make a deal. You're pretty cute. Come on, let's work something out.” She knew what they meant. It's not like she was stupid. Blushing, she wagged a finger at them. “You guys,” she said. She believed men were harmless if you didn't fear them, if you just kept yourself open. They told her they needed parts. They made her climb into their truck. The snow pushing past in the headlights was a universe of stars with no beginning and no end. Only as they turned into the field where she died did she suspect maybe she'd made a mistake, that people weren't quite as benevolent as she'd hoped. And when she felt herself beginning to close, she couldn't bear the thought of living in a world set up to shatter things like love and joy and faith. She made a choice. She left before her goodness could be taken from her.
I can't explain how I knew this. I just did. She'd shown me. And she wanted me to join her—she'd shown me that too. Which was how, in the summer between freshman and sophomore years, I ended up spending twenty days in Woodland Centers, talking to shrinks about whether or not life was worth the effort.
To pass the time until I got out, I drew pictures of dogs and cats and rainbows and storm clouds, all sorts of inscrutable pretty things. I made sure to put Sarah in every one, sketched her in white crayon on the white background so nobody but me would know she was there. My plan was to douse the pictures with watercolors when I was released and watch her rise up, glowing, out of all that blank space, but I never did. I decided it was better to keep her floating there, hidden.
Two years later, during Baby Week at Willmar High, I, along with all the other junior girls, learned how to be a mother. For seven days, we nurtured and protected raw eggs, an exercise that was meant to help us appreciate how difficult it was to pay attention to something, anything, other than ourselves. If our eggs cracked, we'd be doused in yolk, and we'd understand, suddenly, that life was fragile.
I named mine Sarah and the first thing I did with it was cart it to the cemetery for my sister's blessing. At school, I positioned the milk-carton crib I'd made on the corner of my desk and carried on long, silent conversations with the egg, tuning out Mrs. Blau's Carl Sandburg or Mr. Loeb's trapezoids or whatever it was, Mr. Anderson's corny filmstrips explaining how atoms move in liquids and gases, all of which, that week, seemed much less important than my silly dreams of domesticity.
Getting our eggs through the day required cunning and vigilance. Dean Swanson and Tim Schreiber—both of whom had made first team All-State in hockey—together with the thuggish boys who emulated them, patrolled the halls on a mission to destroy. They'd steal our eggs during the break between classes and pelt them at the scrawny kids on the forensics team. They'd drop-kick them across the cafeteria and grind the shells under their heels. Poking through those treacherous corridors, we had to be ready at any moment to dodge away, the eggs rattling in Kleenex-lined ziplocks, hidden in our purses or cradled on one arm, just like real babies, while we juggled our Trapper Keepers and everything else, our textbooks, our science projects in the other. And because Sarah was watching over it, my egg survived the week intact, protected from all those bad boys.
Baby Week did just what it was supposed to. It got me longing for a real child to raise, believing, at least for a couple years, that aspiring to anything else was a sacrilege, that there was no higher goal than to marry and have children, bring them up in Willmar and teach them to fear.
The problem was, because I was so freaky, one of the things everyone else feared was me.
As soon as I graduated, I fled to the Twin Cities and started taking classes at the U of M.
When I met Robert, I was surprised by his patience. We got married. I was twen
ty-one and I didn't have many other options at the time. I wanted a daughter. I wanted Sarah back. Not long after I discovered I was pregnant, I told Robert we should name our child after her.
“I don't think that's such a hot idea,” he said.
Months later, as I lay on the couch, my water-swollen feet propped up on pillows, he knelt like a penitent near my head and floated baby names from a book past me. Alcea. Camillia. Dalia. Holly. He liked the ones that had been derived from flowers. “Here's one,” he said. “Roselani—it means heavenly rose.”
“What's wrong with Sarah?”
Stroking his beard, he gave me a second to register the scope of his disappointment. “Don't you think we can do better?”
“No,” I said. “I do not think we can do better.”
He'd spent the last three years perfecting his lawyerly demeanor, and when he argued, he did so defensively, waiting and listening and taking mental notes, preparing himself for the crucial moment when, in a fit of uncontrolled emotion, I gave him the evidence he needed to show me how I'd defeated myself.
“You know what I found out from Debbie Stone?” I said. “The reason to name your children after the dead is so they'll have someone to guard over them throughout their lives. That's why the Jews do it. They've got a rule.”
“We're not Jews,” he said. Then, as an afterthought, “And a lot of good it did them.”
“Don't be obnoxious. You know what I'm saying. A lot of other cultures do it too.”
“We don't even know if it's going to be a girl.” Locking his index finger around mine, he gave a little tug. He was trying to be cute, to convince me to drop it.
“Don't touch me.” I yanked my hand away. “She will be a girl and she wants to be called Sarah.”
He rubbed his right eye, where his headaches often started. “How 'bout we explore all our options first? That way we'll know we've made the right choice.”
Already, then, he treated me like a child. He's a very linear thinker, pragmatic, practical. In his quiet way, he brooks no argument once he decides something.
