by Alan Cumyn
Trumpets were blowing in the back of his head. He wanted to be at the dance right now.
To hell with varsity.
But biology wasn’t over. Stan was in his seat. Janine Igwash was still across the room.
He had to wait while Mr. Stillwater filled the board with the definitions of the ciliary muscle, the optic chiasm, the lens, the iris, the fiber radiations.
Stan poked Jason Biggs on the shoulder.
“What do you mean she’s tilted?” he whispered.
Stan borrowed some colored pencils from the twins. Pink for muscle. Yellow for ligaments. Blue for the iris, gray for the lens.
“She’s a gwog,” Biggs whispered harshly. Stan wasn’t sure he had heard properly.
“A what?”
Janine’s neck was white now, her face red.
“Tilted,” Jason Biggs said again. “She’s a tilted gwog.”
Mr. Stillwater stood beside both their desks, looking with too much interest at their diagrams.
“Mr. Dart,” he muttered eventually. “Did you never learn to color inside the lines?”
—
“So you’re an idiot?” she said an eternity later, when they were outside biology.
“Total.”
She smiled. God. How had he ever stood up in class like that?
“The dance is at eight o’clock. My parents are driving. You’re going to have to meet them. They’re, like, organizing the whole thing. Unless you have your license?” Her voice held a hopeful note.
Stan had his learner’s permit. That was all. Why didn’t he have his license yet? He’d been sixteen for almost three months. Every couple of weeks his mother took him out in the back lot and ground her teeth while he wrestled with the gearshift. He had a lot of trouble balancing between the clutch and the gas. He’d be a snap with an automatic, but they didn’t own an automatic. Why didn’t they own an automatic? They owned a rusting old stick shift because they were poor, poor because of the divorce.
Because of the weirdness of his family he didn’t have his license yet, and so he was embarrassed in front of Janine Igwash.
“I don’t have mine, either,” she said. “But we have to go early because of my parents. Why don’t you come by at a quarter after seven?”
Stan nodded. Why couldn’t he speak around her? He tried to smile but it felt as if his face was cracking. He was holding his jaw in the wooden way of everyone in his family.
All the others were gone from biology now. Stan needed to go somewhere else, too. Where? He hadn’t the slightest idea.
Why didn’t he have his license?
“You know where my house is?” Janine Igwash said.
Stan nodded. Then she was gone and he was standing on his own with the whole world swirling around him. What day was it? Nothing was in his head, so he had to look it up. This was Day Five and he had just finished biology — he was doing the hell out of biology — and so the next period was . . .
A note fell out of his grasp.
Why was he grasping a note?
The ringers rang. The hallway was empty. He was alone with his empty head, reading a note that said in Jason Biggs’ stupid handwriting: tilted=GWOG=goes with other girls=Janine Igwash=everybody else knows, ok?
5
Tilted. Janine Igwash liked girls. Nothing wrong with that. Stan liked girls, too. He liked Janine. Girls with soft secret flesh, half-hidden tattoos. Visions of them roaming around his head.
Tilted.
She wanted him to go to the dance with her. As a front. An untilted front for her parents. That’s as much as he could make out.
Tilted tilted tilted. All the way home.
Where he met Gary lying in the dirt of the driveway scratching something on the underside of his silver Audi with his fingernail. His beige jacket had fallen open, as had his light blue shirt — it looked like Mr. Stillwater’s shirt. Buttons were open where his pink belly peeked out like mushroom flesh starved for the sun. Shroomis gigantis.
In private his mother pressed herself against this man’s skin.
Gary twisted on his back, rubbed his elbow into the dusty asphalt.
“Hey, Gary.” Stan stepped around his mother’s boyfriend.
“I caught something on that speed bump near the auto wash,” Gary said.
The car was gleaming even more than usual. Another stick shift. Stan wouldn’t be able to drive it very well, either.
“I think my strut got bent,” Gary said.
“Tilted?” Stan kneeled down but he couldn’t see anything.
“It might affect the alignment,” Gary said. He brushed himself off and for a moment the two were uncomfortably close.
Did Stan’s mother really like that aftershave?
“How’s school going?” Gary asked.
“Just great,” Stan said.
—
Stan was helping Lily with her homework before dinner. She was adding columns of numbers:
28
+17
3051
“I don’t know how you’re getting that,” Stan said.
“I’m just following,” Lily said.
“Following what?”
“Two plus one is three,” Lily began. “Carry the zero —”
“Wait, wait, wait! First of all, you start on the right, not the left. Eight plus seven is what?”
“That’s not what Ms. Hennigan said!”
“You probably weren’t listening. The column on the right is the ones column.”
“Eight plus seven isn’t ones at all!” Lily said.
Gary and his mother were downstairs in the kitchen getting dinner together. Stan heard Gary say, “I’ve never seen anybody slice tomatoes that way.” Stan’s mother said, “What way?” and Gary said, “Like you’d rather be squashing grapes.”
It was a Gary joke. Stan didn’t hear his mother laughing.
“On the right is the ones column, and on the left is the tens column. What’s eight plus seven?” Stan asked.
“Fifteen! But then you carry the one to the other side of the five.” She traced over the 51 she’d written on the page.
Stan took the pencil from her. “Don’t make stuff up. You carry the one up to the tens column, up here.” He made a mark by the two. He was trying to stay calm.
“Ms. Hennigan has a different way. Just leave me alone!” She grabbed back the pencil and started an elaborate doodle on the edge of her page.
“You’re going to burn the garlic!” Gary said down in the kitchen.
“No, I’m not,” Stan’s mother snapped. Something smelled like it was burning.
“You are, you are!” A pan clanged and hissed.
“I wonder how old he is now?” Lily murmured, almost to herself.
“Who?”
“Feldon!”
Stan’s palm hit the desk. Lily jumped in her seat.
“Don’t mention his name!”
“Feldon Feldon Feldon Feldon!” Lily said. “The baby!”
Quiet down below. Not even cupboards banging. Stan remembered when his mother and father fought. The silence was the worst. His father had a volcanic temper.
“Feldon is five years old by now,” Stan said. “He’s not a baby. Don’t even think about him, or Dad, or anybody. All right?” Stan took his sister’s head in his hands and turned it back to the figures in the notebook. “You start on the right, carry the one up here to the tens column, add one plus two plus one. What’s it come out to?”
As soon as he let her go, Lily’s doodle turned into a swirly F on the side of her paper. Her elbow nudged the textbook and a folded letter stuck out.
“What’s this?” Stan said. He grabbed the paper and held it high so Lily could not reach it.
Dear parents/guardian. It was from the school. It has recently come to our attention that your son’s/daughter’s academic standing has slipped below the acceptable school board standard . . .
“What have you done now?” Stan asked.
“Nothing,” Lily
said.
Stan scanned the rest of the letter. The principal was asking for a meeting.
“Is this about marks or something else?”
Lily laid her face on the open book now, clasped her hands over her head as if expecting bombs.
Still not another sound from the kitchen. Stan got up and listened by the bedroom door.
Silence was the very worst. He remembered his father with his fists doubled . . .
“Mmm,” his mother sighed.
Great. Stan clomped down the stairs with the letter in his hand.
The air was thick with the smell of something burnt. Garlic? A stove element glowed red with nothing on it. Smoke curled up from the blackened pan that was resting in the sink.
His mother and Gary stood guilty, clenched in the middle of the kitchen, his upper lip and part of his chin smudged with her lipstick.
“Did you see this?” Stan handed the letter to his mother, whose face blanched. From upstairs he could just hear a tiny muffled voice, Lily singing, “And little baby Feldon was his name.”
“Shit for crackers,” his mother said.
—
At dinner Stan pushed creamy linguine, only some of the garlic blackened, around with his fork. Gary wiped his plate with the white Italian bread Stan’s mother never bought unless Gary was coming. Lily slurped the noodles until creamy sauce caked the wispy edges of her dangling hair.
“Well, it’s not the end of the world,” Stan’s mother said. “We’ve met with the principal before.”
“It’s a different one,” Lily said. “It’s a she.”
“Stanley will come with me,” his mother said. She didn’t have to say, Stanley keeps me from weeping on principals’ desks. She didn’t have to say, Stanley makes the family appear reasonable.
Stan’s mother lunged across the table and wiped Lily with her napkin. Lily squirmed — Stan knew she would — and got even more of her hair in the sauce. Water splashed from two or three glasses but Gary managed to catch the wine bottle before it tipped.
“I just want to keep your hair out of dinner,” Stan’s mother said. She smiled at Gary — a frantic sort of near-mad gesture — and Gary reached across and touched her hand. That was all. Somehow because Gary touched Stan’s mother’s hand, Lily stayed still long enough to be wiped.
“You should wear your barrettes,” Stan’s mother said to Lily.
“Rachel Edmundson has them,” Lily said.
Stan’s mother didn’t take the bait.
“Then just tie your hair back.” She slid her glass over a few inches and Gary topped it up.
Stan had a memory of his father pouring wine, and then he and Stan’s mother got up and danced slowly in the middle of the living room still holding their long-stemmed glasses. His mother’s face fit perfectly into his father’s shoulder.
They were happy sometimes. It wasn’t all scream and sulk.
“She’s a girl principal,” Lily said.
“That doesn’t mean you can just go along making up answers to all your assignment questions,” Stan said, unable to hold himself back. “At some point you have to deal with reality.” Stan looked to his mother for support, but she seemed to be at the end of her energy for coping with Lily.
“Sometimes reality is overestimated,” she sighed. She could go that way, become limp and unparental in the flick of a moment.
Stan studied his plate and decided to stay quiet. They ate in unbearable silence until finally Gary made a point of asking Stan what was happening at school. So Stan told him, in as few words as possible, about the cancellation of JV.
“So you’re a basketball player,” Gary said.
Stan’s mother chimed in. “Stanley used to play hockey but then suddenly that was all over. Now it’s basketball.”
She said it as if she’d really forgotten why he gave up hockey.
“I used to play basketball,” Gary said improbably. “I did, I did! We should play horse sometime. I’ve got a wicked jump shot.” Gary stroked the air with his meaty hand. His belly rubbed against the table, and Stan grabbed two of the water glasses before they could spill again.
“You two should play!” Stan’s mother said. She pressed Stan with her eyes, the way that she did now a hundred times a day over everything from wiping up the kitchen to taking out the garbage to helping Lily wrestle with the world.
Stan and his father used to play hockey. After school in the winters, out on the frozen rink in the park in the next neighborhood over.
Stan had not played hockey, had not skated, in five years.
But now Stan allowed that he would play Gary at horse any time. Gary said that he would like that, and Stan’s mother’s eyes said that she would like that, too.
Then Lily said, “Feldon is coming next week!”
Silence. Lily’s eyes gleamed the way they did when she’d just scored big at crazy eights.
“Lily,” Stan’s mother said. Her eyebrows flattened. “Lily.”
“It’s true! Daddy told me!”
His mother twirled her fork, wound nothing on her plate.
“He called me and he told me!”
“Feldon is not coming. Your father is not coming,” his mother said icily.
“He talked just to me and he said how would you like to meet your younger brother, sweetie? And I said he could stay in my room and Daddy said that would be fine!”
Silence, like after the ship has sunk and water is rushing in and you are going down and down to the bottom.
Gary got up suddenly and started stacking plates. Stan’s mother hated anyone stacking plates at the table. Stan got up then too and carried away a serving dish. Soon Gary had the water running in the kitchen sink so it was hard to hear. But not impossible.
“Lily, darling,” his mother said. “I want you to listen carefully. I know people in your head tell you things. That’s fine. It happens to all of us.” Stan went back into the dining room to pick up glasses. His mother had taken Lily onto her lap, was holding her gently.
“But he calls me!” Lily said.
She stroked Lily’s hair. “I’m here, or your brother’s here. We would know if your father —”
“But he gave me my own phone!”
Lily was crying, the way she always cried about her most ridiculous tales.
“I’ve been too indulgent with you, and I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry, Lily. You can’t keep —”
“He came to my school! He —”
“Stan doesn’t have a cellphone. You don’t have a cellphone. We can’t afford it, and your father certainly can’t afford —”
“He gave me one! My own, he did! He told me not to tell you!”
Stan’s mother’s face was washed-out white. “If he gave you one you go upstairs right now and get it. All right?”
Lily gulped, then climbed down and clomped off. Her footsteps resounded up the stairs. Two doors slammed — her bedroom, then her closet.
Gary stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room. He had tied on a red and white apron that read, I lost my ~ in Sam’s Deli Disco!
“Maybe he did give her a phone,” he said.
A gaze like smoke from Stan’s mother.
“She’s going to be up there fiddling in her closet for the next three hours. And when I ask her, ‘Lily, honey, where’s the phone your father gave you?’ she’s going to tell me something about a rhinoceros in the park.”
Gary scratched the Deli Disco part of his belly.
Welcome to the nut house, Stan thought. It’s not too late to save yourself.
But Gary didn’t seem to be going anywhere.
“I’m not sure where the noodle strainer goes,” he said finally, before heading back into the kitchen.
6
In the shadows near the fence from an angle slightly behind the backboard, Stan watched Gary sink a fadeaway leaner — it couldn’t really be called a jump shot since he hardly got off his toes — that looked as probable as bird splatter landing straight i
n your eye. It hit the front rim, the backboard, whirled around twice, stopped again on the front rim, thought about falling out, then slumped back and in.
The night air was chilly. The glow from the auto-glass lights at the front of the building seemed far away.
Stan’s turn. Winter is coming, he thought.
Winter is coming and there is no way I’m going to sink this shot.
He didn’t even hit the rim.
“H,” Gary said.
He moved like a penguin. How could he even stay upright much less bounce the ball and shoot it almost gracefully? His feet looked dainty, like Babe Ruth’s rounding the bases in old newsreels, a large man tottering.
“On this one you have to be falling forward, like this, and it’s a scooping shot.” Gary ducked his head as if sliding under someone’s outstretched arm, fell forward awkwardly and then scooped the ball underhanded way into the air — a pathetic excuse of a shot that would never work, not in a million years.
Except it did. Swish.
Stan bounced the ball, ducked, leaned, lost his grip, scooped with his fingertips up, up . . .
“O,” Gary said.
Now he stood at the foul line — the crack where the foul line would be — with his back to the basket. The ball arced in the darkness . . . swish!
Stupid game, all about trick shots. Nothing to do with . . .
Janine Igwash cut through the shadows past the auto-glass sign and headed straight toward him.
“Any time tonight,” Gary said.
She was watching as Stan leaned back and tried to see the basket before he flung the ball hopelessly backwards.
“R,” Gary said.
“Hey,” Janine said. She had a knapsack on one shoulder and she was wearing boots with heels — heels! — so she towered over him.
Stan whirled, stole the ball from Gary — bounce bounce — twisted in a layup, got the rebound —
bounce bounce — sank a jumper, got the rebound, dribbled around Janine, and sank another jumper.
She wasn’t looking at him like she was tilted. Whatever that might look like.
“We’re playing horse,” Stan puffed. He fired the ball at Gary too hard. It went through Gary’s fingers. Stan chased down the ball — bounce bounce — then handed it back to Gary, who introduced himself to Janine and asked if she wanted to play.
