“Why?” I asked.
“That’s right, you haven’t seen him lately.” Kathleen shook a pink satin dress, then shoved it back into the rack again. “He’s let his hair grow, and he’s got into some trouble at school. He’s developed a major attitude.”
I wasn’t sure what that meant. “Do you mean he’s a bully?”
“Michael a bully?” She laughed. “No, more kind of uncooperative and intense. He’s reading about politics a lot. He acts mad most of the time.”
That could be interesting, I thought. “What’s he wearing to the dance?”
“Who knows?” She pulled out a tight-fitting black sequined dress. “You are so trying this one on.”
I ended up wearing that dress. Kathleen found one in red satin, vnecked front and back. She said we should wear masks, but I preferred not to.
On Halloween night, Michael showed up at our front door wearing black jeans and a black t-shirt with the word ANARCHY painted across it. He didn’t wear a mask, either. We looked at each other with relief.
His hair had grown past his shoulders, and he was thinner than I remembered. His dark eyes seemed larger and his face smaller. We stayed in the doorway examining each other, not saying a word.
Some movement behind me made me turn around. My father stood by the wall, watching us; on his face was an expression of utter revulsion. I’d never seen that face before. His eyes and mouth turned downward at their corners; his shoulders pulled back, rigid, and his chin jutted forward. I said something inane (“Hello?”), and he twitched — an odd spasm that briefly convulsed his face and chest. I must have blinked, I thought then, because he suddenly wasn’t there.
When I turned back to Michael, his eyes were still fixed on me. “You look,” he said, “different.”
Michael drove us to the school.
In the backseat, Kathleen and her friend Ryan, a short, blond-haired boy I’d met the previous summer, talked incessantly, often at the same time. Ryan wore a devil’s mask.
“Bridget whined all through dinner. She really wanted to come tonight,” Kathleen said from the backseat. “She felt she deserved it. This afternoon, when the school held the Halloween parade, she won a prize for best ghoul.”
Kathleen said that some parents had wanted to cancel the school’s Halloween events, claiming that they celebrated Satan. She and Ryan laughed loudly at that.
“It’s all my work,” Ryan said in a raspy voice, stroking the horns of his mask.
Michael and I didn’t say much. Sitting next to him excited me. I stole glances at his hands on the steering wheel, at his long legs.
I noticed that Kathleen had put on plenty of makeup; her face was white, her eyes were ringed with black, but somehow tonight the makeup made her look younger. I felt I looked much older. The black sequins outlined my body, showing the world a self I’d barely glimpsed before. The previous night, I’d had fantasies of sweeping across a dance floor, enthralling everyone in the room with my presence. The fantasies seemed possible, now.
The dance was held in the school gymnasium, and an enormous statue of Jesus, arms outstretched, welcomed us. As we walked in, everyone did seem to watch us. Michael and I didn’t look at each other.
The room was hot, and the smells of the people in it were overwhelming. It was as if every scent Kathleen and I had ever sampled at the drugstore — the shampoos, the deodorants, the colognes, the soaps — simmered in the dimly lit room. I took shallow breaths, afraid that I might faint if I inhaled more deeply.
Michael steered me toward a row of folding chairs against one wall. “Sit here,” he said. “I’ll get us some food.”
The music boomed from enormous black speakers set in the corners of the gym. The sound was too distorted for me to discern a tune or lyrics. Kathleen and Ryan were already gyrating on the dance floor. Kathleen’s dress picked up the ever-changing glow from a color wheel on the ceiling. The fabric looked as if it were on fire, then doused by blue water, then engulfed again by yellow and red flames.
Michael came back with two paper plates and handed them both to me. “I’ll get us drinks,” he said, shouting slightly to be heard over the music. He went away again.
I set the plates on the chair next to me. Then I began to look around. Everyone in the room — even the teachers and chaperones — was disguised. Their costumes ranged from the hideous (Cyclops, demons, mummies, zombies, and other assorted freaks, sporting gashes and gouges and severed limbs) to the ethereal (fairies, princesses, goddesses of all sorts draped in shimmering fabric). Two boys with scars and blood etched on their faces stared at me.
They all looked terribly eager and naïve. Again, I was glad that Michael and I hadn’t worn masks.
By the time he returned, I felt well enough to take a bite of the pizza he’d brought. A mistake, as it turned out.
The food in my mouth tasted strong and bittersweet, like nothing I’d ever eaten before. I swallowed it as quickly as I could and at once felt a swell of nausea. My face burned. I dropped the plate and ran toward the door, and I managed to make it to the edge of the parking lot before I fell to my knees and vomited.
When I’d stopped heaving, I heard someone laughing — a mean-sounding laugh — not far away. A few seconds later, I heard voices.
“What was it?” Kathleen was saying.
Michael said, “Pizza. Just pizza.”
“The pizza has sausage on it,” Kathleen said. “You should have known better.”
She knelt beside me and handed me tissues, and I dried my face and mouth with them.
Later, Michael sat with me on the cold grass and said he was sorry.
I shook my head. “Normally I would have noticed the sausage. But it was dark, and all the smells confused me.”
Michael hadn’t seemed at all “grossed out,” as Kathleen would have phrased it, by my nausea. “I should be the one apologizing to you,” I said.
He put his hand awkwardly on my shoulder, then took it away. “Ari, you don’t need to apologize to me,” he said. “Not ever.”
And later that night, after I’d cried a little in bed about the disappointments of the evening, Michael’s words came back to me and gave me unexpected comfort. But I wished I had someone to tell about the evening. I wished I had a mother.
“You said Poe was ‘one of us.’”
Next day we sat as usual in the library. My father wore a dark suit that made his eyes seem indigo blue. I felt light-headed, but otherwise well. We didn’t talk about the dance.
My father opened a book of T. S. Eliot’s poetry. “Back to Poe, are we? Does that mean you’ve acquired the taste?”
I opened my mouth to reply and closed it without speaking. He would not deflect me today. “ ‘One of us,’ you said. Did you mean that in the sense of being a bereaved child? Or in the sense of being a vampire?”
There, I’d said it. For a moment the word seemed to hang suspended in the air between us — I could see the letters, floating and twisting like crimson dust motes.
My father tilted his head back and gave me a long look. His pupils seemed to dilate. “Oh, Ari.” His voice was dry. “You know the answer already.”
“I know the answer?” I felt like a puppet, responding on cue.
“Your mind is a fine one,” he said, not pausing long enough to let me bask. “But it seems more comfortable with the prosaic than the profound.” He laced his fingers. “Whether we read Poe or Plutarch or Plotinus, we find meaning not on the surface, but in the depths of the work. The function of knowledge is to transcend earthly experience, not to wallow in it. And so, when you ask me simple questions, you’re limiting yourself to the most obvious answers — ones you already know.”
I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”
He nodded. “Yes, you do.”
Someone began to bang on the library door. Then it opened, and Mary Ellis Root’s ugly face appeared. She looked dismissively at me. “You’re wanted,” she said to my father.
Then I did someth
ing I hadn’t planned, something I’d never even imagined. I ran to the door and slammed it shut.
My father stayed in his chair. He didn’t even look surprised.
“Ari,” he said. “Be patient. When the time is right, you’ll understand.”
Then he rose and left the room, closing the door so lightly that it didn’t make a sound.
I went to the window. The Green Cross courier van was in the driveway, its engine idling. I watched as the driver carried boxes out of the basement and loaded them into the van.
Chapter Five
Do you ever have the sense that your mind is at war with itself?
Dennis had taught me about the brain stem — the oldest, smallest region in the human brain, lying at the base of your skull. It’s sometimes called the “lizard brain,” or “reptilian brain,” because it’s similar to the brains of reptiles; it governs our most primitive functions — breathing and heartbeat — and the base emotions of love, hate, fear, lust. The lizard brain reacts instinctively, irrationally, to ensure our survival.
Slamming the door in the face of Root? That was my reptile brain at work. Yet, I was ready to argue, it was provoked by a rational desire for knowledge — a desire that my father had dismissed as “prosaic.”
I spent the morning trying to read the poetry of T. S. Eliot with half my mind, the other half struggling to understand what my father had told me and why I needed to know it.
After lessons that day, my father went down to the basement, and I headed upstairs. In my room, I avoided the mirror. I looked suspiciously at the bottle of tonic on my dresser and wondered at its contents. I sensed the presence of an other in the next room, and I told it to leave me alone. I picked up the telephone to call Kathleen and put it down again.
Then I called the same number and asked for Michael instead.
Michael picked me up in his father’s old car, and we headed west. For half an hour or so we drove aimlessly, talking. Michael’s hair looked even longer than on Halloween, and he wore old jeans and a black t-shirt under a moth-eaten sweater. I thought he looked wonderful.
Michael said he hated school. He hated America, too, but he also loved it. He talked on and on about politics, and I nodded from time to time, secretly a little bored. He handed me a paperback copy of On the Road by Jack Kerouac and said I must read it.
Finally he pulled the car into an old cemetery, the Gideon Putnam. “This place is supposed to be haunted,” he said.
I looked out the car window. It was a bleak November day, the sky an opaque mass of gray clouds. The cemetery grounds were covered in dead leaves, interrupted by mausoleums, crosses, and statues. An obelisk served as monument for one grave, and I wondered idly who might be buried under such an imposing object. Who chose burial monuments? Were the wishes of the deceased taken into consideration? It was a subject I’d never considered before, and I was about to ask Michael’s opinion when he leaned over and kissed me.
We’d had kisses before, of course. But today his lips felt unusually warm, and he held me harder and closer. It’s not easy describing kisses without sounding soppy or stupid. What I want to convey is that this kiss was important. It left me feeling out of breath and dizzy (another stupid word, one that I use too often). When he initiated a second kiss, I had to pull away. “I can’t,” I said. “I can’t.”
He looked at me as if he understood. I didn’t know why I’d said it, actually. But he held me not so tightly for a minute or so until we’d both calmed down.
He said, “I love you, Ari. I love you and I want you. I don’t want anyone else to have you.”
From reading, I knew that the first time someone declares love is meant to be special, almost magical. But in my head, a voice (not my own) was saying, “Ari, the whole world is going to have you.”
“Someone is watching me,” I told my father the next day.
He was wearing a particularly beautiful shirt, the color of smoke, with black enamel buttons and onyx cuff-links. It made his eyes seem gray.
He looked up from the physics book he’d opened, and his gray eyes looked shy, almost embarrassed, as if he’d heard my thought. “Someone is watching you,” he said. “Do you know who it is?”
I shook my head. “Do you?”
“No,” he said. “Are you able to define chromism and isomerization?” In this way he changed the subject, or so I thought at the time.
The next morning I awoke from another crossword-puzzle dream with two clues — “sea cow” (seven letters) and “snakebird” (seven letters). I shook my head, trying to recover the grid, but I couldn’t visualize it. So I dressed and went down for breakfast with a familiar sense of frustration at the limits of my intelligence.
For weeks I’d noticed that Mrs. McG seemed distracted. The morning oatmeal was more burnt than usual, and the evening casseroles some nights were inedible.
That morning, as she was taking a saucepan of oatmeal from the stove, she dropped it. The pan hit and bounced, and the glutinous cereal splatted against the linoleum and spattered her shoes. Aside from a quick inward breath, she barely reacted. She simply went to the sink and came back with towels.
“I’ll help,” I said, feeling guilty at my glee that I wouldn’t have to eat the stuff.
She sat back on her heels and looked up at me. “Ari,” she said, “I do need your help. But not with this.”
She cleaned up the mess and came to sit with me at the kitchen table. “Why don’t you spend time with Kathleen these days?” she said.
“She’s too busy,” I said. “With school stuff — you know, the play, and the band, and all.”
Mrs. McG shook her head. “She dropped out of the play,” she said. “And she quit her flute lessons. She’s even stopped nagging me to buy her a cell phone. She’s changed, and she makes me worry.”
I hadn’t seen Kathleen since Halloween. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”
“I wish you would call her.” Her hands scratched her forearms, on which I noticed a reddish rash. “I wish you’d come and spend the night. Maybe this weekend?”
I agreed to give Kathleen a call.
“Mrs. McG, have you ever seen a photo of my mother?” I hadn’t planned to ask that question, but it was something I’d been thinking about.
“No, I never have,” she said slowly. “But there might be something in the attic. That’s where they put all her things. When I first started working here, Miss Root and Dennis were gathering them up for storage.”
“What sorts of things?”
“Clothing and books, mostly. Your mother apparently was quite a reader.”
“What sorts of books?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She pushed her chair back away from the table. “You might want to ask your father about that.”
I excused myself and headed upstairs. The staircase to the third story was uncarpeted, and my footsteps sounded loud as I went up. But the attic door was locked.
So I went on up the final set of stairs, the air growing colder with each step. The top of the house was uninviting, always too hot or too cold, but today the cold didn’t bother me.
Inside the cupola, I sat on a tall stool set before the oculus window — my round eye on the world — and looked out, over the rooftops of our neighbors and across the gray sky into the blue beyond. Beyond the houses, beyond the city of Saratoga Springs, lay a vast world, waiting to be explored.
I thought of the great-grandmother in The Princess and the Goblin, who lived in a rose-scented, transparent-walled room lit by its own moon, set high above the world. She gave her great-granddaughter, the Princess, a ball of invisible thread that led her out of peril, away from the goblins, back to the rose-scented room.
Like me, the Princess had lost her mother. But she had the thread.
“Do you ever dream crossword puzzles?” I asked my father when we met later that day.
For a second his face froze — the numb expression it normally wore when I tried to talk about my mother.
<
br /> I answered my own question. “She did, didn’t she? My mother. She dreamed crosswords.”
“She did.” He said such dreams were signs of an “overactive mind.” He advised that I massage my feet lightly before retiring.
And then he launched into another physics lesson.
We were deep in a discussion of electromagnetic radiation phenomena when someone knocked on the door, then opened it slightly. Root’s ugly face appeared in the crack.
“The delivery man needs to talk to you,” she said. She kept her eyes on my father, not even glancing at me.
“Excuse me, Ari.” My father rose and left the room.
When he didn’t return, I went to the window and pushed aside its heavy drapes. A black car was parked in the yard near the house’s rear entrance. On its side were the words “Sullivan Family Funeral Home.”
About ten minutes passed before I heard the door open again. I was standing before a brass-framed oval Victorian shadowbox that hung on the wall. Inside it, encapsulated for eternity, were three brown wrens, a monarch butterfly, and two sheaves of wheat. But I wasn’t looking at them — I was studying my wavy reflection in the convex glass that held them in.
Root’s voice came from behind me. “He says to tell you he won’t be back today,” she said. “He says he’s sorry.”
As I turned around I thought that I should apologize to her, but her tone of voice was so contemptuous that I knew I never would. “Why can’t he come back?” I asked.
“He’s needed downstairs.” Her breathing made a raspy sound.
“Why? For what?”
Her small black eyes flashed at me. “That’s Seradrone’s business. Why do you ask so many questions? Don’t you realize the trouble you cause?” She moved toward the door, but as she opened it, she turned her head. “And why waste your time looking at your reflection? You know who you are.”
The Society of S Page 7
