by Jo Ann Beard
“By the way,” my mother says, “you can forget seeing any more of Flea.”
“I’m grounded from you,” I tell her when she picks up the phone.
“Yeah, I’m grounded from you too,” she says. “Mick Jaggermeyer told my mother you were a bad influence. We have to meet on the corner because I’m not even allowed to walk by your house.”
“I have to bring the la carte lady a plate of fudge tomorrow.”
“Who’s making it?”
“She is.” Even with my door closed, I can hear the sound of angry candy making going on downstairs.
“What’re you wearing?” she asks.
“I thought maybe culottes and my blue vest.”
“With what?”
“White shirt?”
“Too plain.”
“I know. What about you?”
“That spongy dress with nylons.”
“I never know which one is spongy.”
“Green with gray stripes that have triangles inside them; you think the neck is funny.”
“Oh, right. Listen. No matter what, we have got to talk to those boys tomorrow. Otherwise, we were mean for nothing.”
Instead of yelling at us, the cafeteria lady had stood there stunned, paper hat askew, cheeks aflame.
“It made her feel terrible,” Felicia says in a hushed voice.
I can’t bear to think about it. She somehow thought we were making fun of her. All the fudge in the world isn’t going to fix that.
Next day, three o’clock, we linger in the detention doorway, sizing things up. I went against the culottes at the last minute and am wearing a short wool wraparound skirt instead. While the monitor checks the paperwork of some new recruits, a hoodlum plays with the science skeleton, which has been left out by accident. He puts his hand through the pelvis from behind and turns it back and forth, like a periscope. The boys we’re in love with sit up front on opposite sides of the room, while our table is at the back, in the center. Right before the buzzer, Felicia heads down one aisle and I head down the other.
Just when you depend on time to do its job and keep things moving, it slows down completely.
Mr. Prentiss, hunched over a drawing he’s working on. Glances up. Looks right at me. His eyes are brown and narrow, friendly. There is a small indentation next to his eyebrow, like someone has pressed a star into his temple. He’s wearing some kind of leather string around his neck, inside his shirt, which is not flannel today but corduroy. Green. The drawing is of a lion’s face. It’s good but the nose is like a beagle nose. Lion noses are wider than that. His hand holding the pen is grubby.
“Hi,” I say.
Silence. The wind blows across the barren landscape of my chest. Time reverts to normal and I make my way to our table in the back, hands trembling, and sit.
Well, that’s it, then; all is lost. Why would someone in such a beautiful, soft shirt, with those narrow, clear eyes, ever want to speak to me, with my doughy face and fishing-pole legs? My wraparound skirt is held together with a big, decorative safety pin. I unfasten it and refasten it, taking a moment to stab myself in the thumb.
Hers said hi back; I can tell and I’m not even looking at her. She’s looking at me, though. I dig around in my purse until I locate a nail file, and then in small, jagged letters I carve a thought into the table. When I take my hand away she leans over to read it.
SHITE.
She slumps back in her chair.
A canyon yawns between us now. She has leaped across it, hollering hi and having her hi come back to her. I’m thrilled for her, she deserves it, but I’m alone over here and it’s making me feel wavery and unsound, like I should be home in bed waiting to die.
Instead I do algebra, which I’ve recently started working up to capability in. Poor old Mr. Lepkis, with his speckled head and spidery equations, put a couple of things on the board one day that were first of all readable and that second of all made sense to me. It was like getting the key word in a crossword puzzle, the word that releases all the other words from where they’re hiding in your brain. I would just stare at the board until suddenly I got the key thing, and then the rest of it was easy and satisfying, like tidying up a house—put this over here, put that over there, go like this and you get this, then go like this to get this. I could do the staring part from my seat but had to go to the board in front of everyone for the tidying up. We always thought he was using faulty, squeaking chalk, but I’ve had no trouble with it. And x always ends up equaling something simple, like n to the second, or even one.
It’s a burden, actually, because poor old Lepkis now keeps saying, “Let’s ask hherr,” whenever there’s an uncomfortable pause; so it means not only that I have to pay attention in class but that class pays attention to me. I’ve had to stop repeating certain clothes; everything has gone into regular rotation.
My favorite clothes are a white shirt with extralong, hand-hiding sleeves, a charcoal gray dickey that I can thrust my whole face into, and two things given to me by a slightly older cousin: a tartan plaid skirt with fringe along the bottom and a long black crocheted vest. That cousin may live in the country and have to take a bus to school, but nobody can fault her taste in clothes. Her dolls even had better clothes than mine, although mine were professionally made by my mother on a sewing machine, while hers were constructed by her, using household materials and a stapler. While my Barbie was wearing a shirtwaist housedress with piping and roomy pockets, hers would be tightly bound into a Japanese kimono made from an old satin negligee and belted with a strip of flocked wallpaper. She once made both of our Barbies reversible rain capes from a plastic tablecloth. The rain side had a latticework theme, with sprigs of cherries; the other side was the white flannel backing, which we thought looked like a fur stole.
Anyway, I have favorite clothes that I like to repeat.
“If I am forced to respond, Mr. Prentiss, you will receive the first of next year’s detentions,” the monitor says without looking up. She now has something angora blooming in her lap, a rainbow-colored scarf with frilled edges. Very pretty, although people don’t actually wear things like that.
He’s waving his arm around.
If x equals zero, then n and p equal zero too. It’s a trick question. You hardly ever see a trick question in a textbook, although it does happen. I check my work, but it appears to be correct.
“Mr. Prentiss, what can I do for you?” she says wearily.
“Thank you! This has to do with homework, which Mr. Bingham—gym—kept us too late last period for me to get to my locker, which I had planned on doing to get homework for in here. We were climbing the ropes and nobody could do it, we were all just hanging there, so Bingham took off his whistle and started showing us!” He pauses to look around. “The Buffalo climbed the rope.”
This causes a stir among the male detainees. When the monitor starts to set her needles aside, Mr. Prentiss hurries on.
“Anyway, can I borrow an algebra book from this person so I can copy down today’s problems? Otherwise I’ll just be sitting here for an hour, wasting time and probably who knows what.”
She squints at him, considering all the angles. “And who has the book?”
“That girl at the last table, with brown hair. I don’t even know her name.”
She looks back at me. “Do you have what he’s talking about?”
I nod.
He starts to get up.
“Oh no, you don’t.” She points at me. “You. I don’t want him walking around.”
I collect my math book and walk up the aisle. He doesn’t look at me and I don’t look at him. I return to my seat and a minute later his hand waves and she nods at me. I go up the aisle, take the book, and return again.
Inside the front cover is a sheet of notebook paper, folded twice. I open it under the table, where Felicia can see. It’s his drawing of the beagle-nosed lion. Below it, floating, is one word in tiny cursive: Hi.
The next couple of days are a whirlwind of sp
eculation and advice, impromptu conventions around my locker, home of the dwindling plate of fudge. The la carte lady had been gone the day I brought it, and by the time she returned, I wasn’t too sure about taking food to someone who spends all day up to her neck in it. Instead, we ironed our sewing projects and gave them to her, a ruffled pillow sham and a smocked apron, both orange and white gingham.
“Well,” she said. “I don’t know what to say.”
We didn’t either.
Mr. Prentiss says hi to me twice more on my way to the back of the room, each time widening his narrow eyes as though he is about to say something else. I can’t stay for it, whatever it is, because I’ve begun to feel weightless and slightly faint. Now that I’m over here on this side of the canyon, everything seems so intensified—his long, expressive feet in their ripped sneakers, hooked abstractly around the rungs of his chair, the way he bounces a pencil, so lightly, against his temple while he reads, the way he raises his head when someone walks past but doesn’t raise his jaw, so his mouth drops open a little bit. Not in a way that makes him seem impaired, but in a way that makes the looking up seem uncalculated. He’s just looking up, is all, because he wants to see who is walking past. He isn’t thinking about his mouth! That’s what’s so overwhelming.
“She has to calm down,” Dunk advises Felicia.
“I know, but she can’t,” Felicia replies.
This delirious, buzzing feeling is neither unpleasant nor unfamiliar—I used to get it lying in the mildewed hammock in my grandmother’s backyard, utterly relaxed in body if not in mind, the tops of the trees moving back and forth across the sky, the rope creaking, the peeling paint on the garage coming into view and then leaving again, slower, slower, slower, until I had to reach out with my stick and give another push. I do miss childhood: one long trance state, broken only by bouts of sickening family discord.
What if this guy actually wants to talk to me?
“Don’t worry,” Felicia says soothingly. “He won’t.”
“This is clinically depressing me,” Gina Maroni, Duncan’s best friend, says. She’s a tall, graceful girl with a large nose and silky black hair who used to be a figure skater until her butt grew—as she puts it—and threw everything off. She’s outgoing, which means she doesn’t really belong with us, but we like having her. “Not talking to someone is snotty. Why would you want to be snotty to him?”
This kind of psychology never works on me.
“You ought to give him a piece of this fudge,” Dunk suggests. “Just go, ‘Want some fudge?’ and then hold out a little piece of this.”
“What if he says no and I’m just standing there with fudge in my hand? Or what if he asks where I got it?”
“Then you tell him. Go, ‘I brought it from home.’ ”
“Then he’ll think I’m someone who’s making fudge and bringing it to school. He’ll think I’m Amish.”
“No!” Felicia says. “Say you made it in home ec. Go, ‘I made this in home ec.’ This shows you’re being nice, yes, but it doesn’t look like you’re offering him fudge. It just looks like ‘I have to get rid of this fudge I made in home ec; I’ll give some to a kid in my detention.’ ”
“How can she be giving him fudge when she can’t even look at him?” says Jan Larson. Her parents call her Yawn. White blond hair and a round face, braces, also has a bird, but hers talks. After it bites you, it says it’s sorry in a flat Norwegian accent. “Too complicated. Why not just have her go—”and she shrugs, does a Mona Lisa, braces-hiding smile.
“She needs to do both,” Maroni says definitively. “Fudge, then smile. Or maybe smile, then fudge. And while he’s eating it, ask him if he’s going to the game.”
They’re giving me a drowsy, moth-headed feeling, as though I’m in a beauty parlor, being turned this way and that, a plastic sheet snapped around my neck, under which my hands are nicely folded in case it’s whipped off unexpectedly. Snip, snip.
“Look, she can’t even listen to this,” Felicia says.
“So do it with yours,” Maroni says. Felicia’s hasn’t been saying hi to her, but he’s been veering into her when they pass in the halls. “Smile, fudge, game.”
“Okay,” Felicia says agreeably.
This kind of psychology does work with me.
“Wait,” I say.
“Don’t try to tell me you’re going to a football game and it isn’t with Flea, because I know better,” my mother says. “You are not to be seeing her whatsoever.”
“I’m going to a football game with Dunk and Maroni,” I say patiently. “And maybe Yawn and maybe Luekenfelter, if her mom says.”
“Why wouldn’t her mom say? Is there something I don’t know about these football games?”
“No. God. It’s a game, people throw a ball around; it’s exciting. If I can’t go, just tell me, and I’ll get someone else to use my ticket.”
“You have a ticket?”
“You can’t go to a game without a ticket! God!”
There’s a long wait as she reads her newspaper and smokes.
“Be home by nine,” she says.
“The game begins at eight! God!”
“Be home by ten,” she amends it. “And if I hear the word God again, you won’t know what hit you.”
“There’s pizza afterward!” God.
She reads and smokes, turns a page. “Eleven,” she says finally.
Friday afternoon detention. Smile, fudge, game. Smile, fudge, game. I tried to do it yesterday but couldn’t get started. Now the fudge is on its last legs when I carry it in and hand it to him, frozen faced.
He looks at me first, then at the fudge, resting on a brown paper towel. The buzzer goes off and I make my way back to my seat. When Felicia asked hers if he was going to the game, he pointed at her and then mimed laughing, holding his stomach. For some reason, we’ve taken this as a positive sign.
After class, Mr. Prentiss waits instead of racing out. I collect my things slowly and then walk up the aisle.
“That was good,” he says.
I nod.
“You got any more?”
I shake my head.
We walk out together and stand waiting to see which way the other will turn. His green army jacket is slung over his shoulder, held by one crooked finger.
“Game?” I say.
“What?” he asks.
“Tomorrow night’s game,” I say.
“Oh,” he answers, nodding.
We look down the hall in opposite directions. In my direction, Felicia stands at a respectful distance, staring at the floor. In his direction is the door whose crash bar he likes to kick.
“Yeah,” he says, stepping on his own sneaker, where a piece of rubber is coming loose. He pulls the stepped-on shoe out from under the other shoe, thereby tearing off the strip of loose rubber. He kicks it thoughtfully into the center of the clean, empty hall. “I’m usually either sitting in C or standing under it.”
“Oh,” I say.
“Yep,” he answers, looking at the crash bar.
“Well,” I say, looking at Felicia.
“Finally get to go home,” he says.
“Yep,” I say.
He shifts his jacket to the other finger and I shift my books to the other arm. His free hand is six inches away from my free hand. I feel breathless and unstable, like we’re standing on the wing of an airplane.
Felicia clears her throat, still staring at the floor.
“She’s waiting for me,” I say.
“See you, then,” he says.
Once outside, he jumps all the way down the steps, landing in a crouch. We watch him through the door as he lopes across the lawn, dodges a car, waves at the driver, and disappears down the street.
We’re speechless.
“That was a million times better than somebody holding their stomach and laughing,” Felicia says finally.
My sister will let me wear her peacoat to the game only if I tell her what’s going on. After an hour or so, I g
ive in.
“There’s a guy I might talk to,” I tell her. She stares at me for a full minute. I try to stare back but I can’t.
“And are we thinking our sister’s peacoat will make him fall in love with us?” she asks gently.
“No,” I say miserably. Why did I even start this? “I like it, is all. And I get so cold, I’m just sitting there shivering.”
“And what about our CPO jacket that we thought was the way to go?”
During our family coat-buying expedition, instead of a peacoat, I asked for what is known as a CPO jacket, which is styled like a shirt and made of heavy plaid wool, to be worn over a hooded sweatshirt. I have no idea what CPO stands for, but cold has to be the first word. My mother let me get it because I already had the sweatshirt and she was broke, walking around the store staring at price tags and getting more and more upset.
“I’m sick over this!” she said at one point, looking at Raymond in a warm zip-up jacket with padding and attached mittens. She took it off him and hung it back up. “Half the price of this is the mittens, and we don’t even want them.”
“I want them,” Ray admitted.
“You do?” she cried. She stood there in the little-kid aisle and we stood there with her.
“No,” Ray said.
“He doesn’t,” I said.
“He liked the other one,” Meg said.
“He did?” my mother asked.
“I did,” Raymond agreed. “Which one?”
“That one,” Meg said, pointing at a jacket with an emblem on the arm.
“That has that goddamned emblem,” my mother said.
“I like an emblem,” Ray said. “What is it?”
“It’s just a thing,” I told him.
So, that was coat shopping. Every month we have less and less money. My mother made all three of us kids go to the bank with her last Saturday, to sit quietly in chairs while she spoke with a woman about the house payment. The woman had a large, friendly face and short, iron gray hair with a fringe of bangs, like Captain Kangaroo. She fiddled with her wristwatch the entire time she was listening to my mother, winding it on her wrist, lifting it to her ear, winding it again.
