In Zanesville

by Jo Ann Beard

  “Please?”

  “Okay,” she says.

  The bite is blue and icy, so refreshing that I suddenly like everything: the night, the weather, the crowd, my girlfriends. I like Luekenfelter’s cousin, a pretty girl who is sent to stay with Luek on the weekends because of a sick mother.

  “How’s your mother?” I ask her.

  She shrugs. “Sick but not too sick—she sits up during the days. They’re thinking about doing one other surgery, which we hope they will. It all depends on certain things, but we think they’ll go ahead. If she continues to sit up on her own… that’s what will tell.”

  Silence. Maroni chews ice; everyone else nods thoughtfully.

  The cousin clears her throat. “I could have stayed back there this weekend but I heard you guys were meeting up with boys.”

  “These are the two who are,” Luek explains, pointing to me and then Felicia, who puts on her glasses so we can see her.

  Suddenly a wave of Kevin Prentiss washes over me. Detention hallway, his hand, warm and golden looking, with a pencil wart on one finger, hanging there next to my hand.

  “I-I-I,” I say.

  “It’s just sitting with a guy, it’s not marrying him,” Felicia says nervously.

  “Who are you—Maroni?” I ask her.

  Maroni laughs.

  The only way to get to section C is to walk the narrow gauntlet down in front, between the first row of packed, people-watching bleachers and the cinder track where the cheerleaders perform. We’ll have to enter at G, walk along the chain link past F, E, and D, then head up into the stands at C, climbing until we get to the empty seats. At which point we can finally sit and survey the situation without the situation surveying us.

  “I can’t do it unless I’m holding on to her,” Felicia says, taking off her glasses and gripping my sleeve.

  I can’t have anyone holding on to me; I’m too tense.

  “You’re not the only one!” Felicia hisses. “I’m supposed to be meeting up with what’s his name.” She looks around blindly. “What’s his name?”

  “Jeff Nelson,” Dunk says patiently.

  “You’re Flea,” Maroni adds.

  Duncan leads, with Felicia attached to her sleeve, then Yawn, then me, then Maroni, then Luek, then Luek’s cousin.

  When walking in front of fifteen hundred spectators, it’s best not to do it in one’s normal hunching and scuttling style, but instead to think of the shoulders as a coat hanger and the body as a chiffon dress hanging from it. Unfortunately, the gauntlet is narrow and people in the front row aren’t good about retracting their feet, so right out of the gate we have a stumble and a pileup. I get a mouthful of Yawn’s platinum hair, and Maroni walks up my ankle.

  People are really getting on my nerves.

  Single file, past sections F, E, and D, then up into the stands at C. It’s hard to be chiffon climbing bleachers, but I do all right until Maroni yanks at the hem of my jacket, holding me fast. Foot groping for the next bleacher, I see him, amid the undulating ocean of faces and Windbreakers. Out here in the great, dark night, Mr. Prentiss looks more like a hoodlum than he ever has before, dark bangs falling across his eyes, coat open, no gloves. He raises one hand and cups it against his mouth and yells something at someone behind me, people’s knees turn sideways like pinball flippers, and I’m shoved down the row of seats toward him.

  I’m the person he was yelling at behind me.

  “I saw you down there,” he says by way of greeting, nodding at the gauntlet below. At the bottom of the sloping bank of bleachers, a steady current of kids moves past, like a river. There are spots where if you step into the Mississippi it will pull you away from the bank before your feet even touch. You have to think of yourself as a bottle, inanimate and buoyant, and simply bob on the current. Don’t open your mouth or water will get in and the bottle will sink.

  “Mm-hmm,” I murmur.

  Below, the two teams move across the field a yard at a time, arranging and rearranging themselves kaleidoscopically. Who knows what they’re doing down there—it seems remarkable that they can do anything at all, given the circumstances up here in the stands. Eventually, a lone Central Valley Vole breaks loose from the pack and runs, his white jersey and helmet bobbing above the churning orange of his legs. The crowd roars to its feet. Mr. Prentiss squints at the running Vole and then swears self-consciously. I squint too and sit back down when everyone else does. On the cinder track, a teetering hive of Zanesville cheerleaders forms—Hey, hey, that’s okay, we’re gonna beat ’em anyway— and then collapses. One girl takes a running start and does a series of increasingly sagging backflips, spelling out Z-e-p-h-y-r-s. By the end she is nearly landing on her head.

  “Ha, that’s sick,” Mr. Prentiss says to the field.

  The side of his face is soft and faintly fuzzed. Not like one of the man-boys with their strange sad sproutings of facial hair, and not like one of the maiden-boys with the opposite problem, but somewhere in between. Broad shouldered and mysterious, wearing desert boots instead of his bandaged sneakers; they look new, but his jeans are very old, with a series of overlapping patches on one knee and a fringed rip on the other, through which I can see long underwear.

  Right while I’m looking, the ripped knee moves about an inch in the direction of my knee but then shifts back to where it was. He was just stretching.

  I shiver involuntarily.

  He glances over at me and then back at the game. “Your lips are sort of blue,” he says.

  What?

  “Oh,” I say. “Sno-Kone.”

  “Yeah?” he says lightly, leaning forward to look back over his shoulder at me, tucking a strand of hair behind his ear the way he does when hassling the detention monitor. His eyes at close range are brown green hazel, and not all that narrow. “You like blue Sno-Kones?”

  The sly, teasing grin, the shaking of the hair back over the ears, and the clear-eyed gaze, all directed at me—it’s as disconcerting as having my name suddenly announced over the loudspeaker. A guy who isn’t one of my uncles is teasing me, and it calls for something other than sidling out of the room backward—it calls for a teasing answer. You like blue Sno-Kones?

  “They’re raspberry,” I say eventually.

  Silence. We watch the field, where nothing is happening.

  Raspberry. Raspberry. Razz-beery. A word designed to make you feel like an idiot. His leg is closer to mine now, and his hand rests on his knee, just above where the fringed rip and the slice of long underwear are.

  A blast of wind hits the bleachers, and people put their mittens to their faces.

  My teeth make a chattering noise.

  “I was boiling,” I explain. “That’s why I’m only wearing this coat.”

  “I’m always boiling,” he says. “Here.” And he takes off his green army jacket and puts it over my shoulders. It’s heavy, heavier than a girl’s coat, and it has a frayed, body-heated aspect to it that makes me feel relaxed and sleepy. When I was very little, I used to curl up on the coat bed at family gatherings, wind someone’s satin lining around my thumb, and suck on it until I fell asleep. Something about the strange, borrowed fabric enhancing my old familiar thumb, and about burrowing into the lumpy mound of coats, knowing that my parents couldn’t get out of there without running across me—that’s the feeling I have now, resting against Mr. Prentiss’s arm, which is behind me.

  A Vole takes off running, darting in and out of confused Zephyrs, and the crowd rises to its feet again. We don’t move, but continue staring ahead, into the matching Windbreakers of the couple in front of us. When they sit back down, it looks like the green board has been tipped and all the players have slid down to one end.

  “Ha,” Mr. Prentiss says. “They’re smoking us.”

  “Yep,” I say.

  His hand is on my waist now, resting lightly against the fabric of my shirt. It’s the same hand, the left one, that I always stared at in detention, the nervous-energy one that drummed his hip, felt aroun
d on his head, pulled the leather string out of his shirt, and then dropped it back in. That hand.

  “Yep,” I say again, sitting up straighter.

  The girl cousins I played with at those long-ago family gatherings all turned out boy crazy, and I see now why, leaning against this kid while he slowly bunches my shirt up, an eighth of an inch at a time. There’s something delirious and drowsy about the whole endeavor—the term sleeping together is starting to make more sense, because that’s what I feel like doing. Just curling up on the coat bed and taking a nap.

  My father would never make me wake up and walk, but would carry me to the car for the ride home. Borne aloft by my tall dad through whoever’s house it was, aunts reaching out to shake my foot as they said their good-byes, the night feeling of the family in the car on the highway. It’s night right now, vast and beautiful, and the boy I nearly traded for my father’s life has his fingers hooked in my belt loop while the thumb moves back and forth along a shoreline of skin.

  Dear God, I give up Kevin Prentiss.

  Back and forth.

  Forth and back.

  I don’t believe, even if there is a God, that he could have saved someone retroactively; and yet what if there is one, and he did? This is what’s so confusing about religion—it’s all based on trying to make you believe in ghosts. If you accept that idea, then anything is possible.

  My father, rising from the coal cellar to walk into Tuck’s five minutes before.

  O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

  I shrug off the coat and the hand, standing up.

  “I have to go,” I say.

  On my way out, I get momentarily hung up on the gauntlet while the junior all-city marching band passes through on its way to the halftime show, a plumed and confused caterpillar running into itself. The flute is a tall, slouching girl who is fingering the keys with her head angled so her flute points to the ground, the way I used to do it.

  Come on, come on.

  Then they’re gone and the current surges forward again, carrying me along until I cut behind the hot dog hut and pass through the side gates, where a man sits on a stool with a hole puncher and a transistor radio.

  “You don’t want to watch them lose, do you?” he says to me.

  “Nope,” I answer.

  “He better wake ’em up when they’re in that locker room!” he calls.

  “Yep,” I call back, over my shoulder.

  I’m warm again, and my head is throbbing. The gravel path is still washed with stadium light, but now the inky shadows are as scary as they are beautiful, like a black-and-white movie where somebody is going to get killed. At the end of the path, I take the dark way, over the Knoll.

  Once, I watched a movie on TV after everyone else had gone to bed, an old western where a group of men are discovered by another group of men, and the second group decides to hang the first group, unless they can talk their way out of it. I was falling asleep the whole time but couldn’t go to bed without seeing how the first group, who were innocent, talked their way out of getting hanged.

  Running footsteps. Coming up behind me. My heart begins galloping around in circles. I have no idea what to do. There’s nothing up here but trees.

  Help.

  “God!” Felicia says, panting. “I was yelling, ‘Wait up,’ and you just kept going.”

  Anyway, the movie has a surprise ending: they hang them.

  “We were watching you from the top, with that kid’s arm around you,” she says, falling into step, “and then all of a sudden you got up and left. I thought you might be going to the bathroom, so I decided to go to the bathroom too, and then when you didn’t, I just kept following you.”

  “Where was yours?”

  “Sitting four rows down and about ten seats over with some blond-headed girl. I had a perfect view of him.”

  We drop down and circle behind the Fertilizer Home, where we can see into a rec room of sorts, lighted but empty, with folding chairs set in a circle. That old cotton-haired woman who once came to our door is probably dead by now; if she isn’t, I don’t want to think about it. Years now, that she would have been in there, thinking they’re trying to kill her.

  “Did you ever see that movie, The Something-Something Incident, where they thought those guys had stolen the horses?”

  “I saw it with you, and we fell asleep,” she says.

  “I woke up just when they were hanging them,” I say.

  “I know,” she says.

  I’ve got my coat unbuttoned and my hands in the pockets, fanning myself. There’s going to be a certain amount of yelling when I get home, but it’s dark and quiet out here, under the winter stars. The air feels metallic.

  Up close, Mr. Prentiss had seemed so real he was almost surreal—like having a character in your dream show up when you aren’t asleep and suddenly put their hand in your shirt.

  A boy put his hand in my shirt! I feel strangely elated, even though it didn’t work out.

  “We thought that guy was going to kiss you,” Felicia says. “Right there in the bleachers, in front of God and everyone.”

  “There is no everyone,” I tell her.

  We are required to take a shop class instead of home ec the second half of the year, starting right after Christmas. I get metal shop, where I’m making a tackle box for my dad, and Felicia gets wood shop, where she’s burning a design into a step stool with a branding iron. You get a choice of two patterns; one is foliage with your father’s name in the center, and the other is a farm scene.

  I used to love the farms where all my relatives lived, big dark ramshackle houses with boot scrapers set into their stoops. I could make our family a boot scraper, if we wanted one, now that I’m in metal shop. I’ve never used a blowtorch before, but I see why people like it—it cuts metal. I’ve taken to talking about it at the dinner table, which I wouldn’t normally do about anything else, but this is different.

  “You can cut steel?” Raymond asks me, raising his head from a bowl of cornflakes, chewing and dripping on the tablecloth.

  At that exact moment, I remember a dream I had from the night before, where I was at my uncle’s pond watching everyone fish and suddenly there was a moose standing knee deep in the water, moss dripping from its chin. Why was I dreaming about a moose?

  Ray uses both shoulders of his shirt to dry his face and then goes in again. “How can she cut steel?”

  “Close your mouth,” I tell him.

  “You let me be in charge of table manners,” my mother says.

  “It melts the molecules,” I tell him.

  “It melts them?” Ray says incredulously.

  “I wonder if it melts them,” my dad says. “I’m not sure if that’s what a cutting torch does.”

  “That’s what it does,” I say.

  “You’re liable to melt your own molecules,” my mother says, “if you don’t watch what you’re doing. And I’m tired of seeing a book at the table.”

  “We never had shop,” Meg says, closing her book. “We learned how to sew your fingers together and how to make cinnamon toast.”

  “This is what they’re burning their bras for over in Washington,” my mother says. “So these girls can end up in the hospital if they aren’t careful.”

  “Boy, be careful,” my dad says to me.

  “I am,” I tell him.

  I wish my mother wouldn’t mention bras in front of my father; I don’t know how much he knows or doesn’t know about certain matters. My mother’s own bras are large quilted things that I used to think were funny. Now when I see them on the laundry table, one cup folded into the other, I have a sense of impending doom. It’s like being on your way to the Alps and knowing that when you get there you’ll have to wear lederhosen.

  Upstairs right now is another gloomy contraption that was recently bestowed on me—the sanitary belt. This is a piece of elastic that goes around the waist with garters in the front and back, used to strap on a sanitary rag. No matter how
much you scrub it, the belt keeps its pale pink stains from month to month. I wonder what my father thinks of that thing when he sees it hanging from the bathtub faucet.

  My mother serves up bread pudding for dessert, a dish nobody likes. We sort through it with our spoons while she smokes and my dad looks over our heads. He’s been sober now for several weeks, ever since New Year’s, but it’s coming to an end. His resolve cracking is nearly audible in the silence.

  “Why can’t this just be pudding?” Meg asks finally. “Why does there have to be wet bread in it?”

  The best thing about shop isn’t actually the cutting steel, but the fact that all anyone has to do is ask to use the bathroom and Mr. Rangel, the teacher, lets them leave. He’s never taught girls before and it’s making him frantic—the first mistake he made was putting us in pairs on the torch. Within five minutes somebody created a column of fire in the middle of the room, brief but riveting, and Rangel locked the door afterward and explained for about an hour how it happened (lack of safety) and why it would never happen again (he would personally supervise every instance of acetylene use from there on out) and the reason it was never to be discussed outside the classroom (shop would be permanently closed to girls, regardless of women’s lib).

  There’s always somebody you know in the bathroom. This time it’s Luekenfelter, so we sit on sinks and talk for a while about our current topics—what if she tries out for chorus and ends up making a screeching sound instead of singing, and what if my only chance to have a boyfriend has already happened and I ruined it. At this point, all that’s left of Mr. Prentiss is a piece of rubber off his shoe that I’ve been using for a bookmark. He either got sent away or moved away.

  Lately Luek and I have been trying to help each other be more confident but it isn’t working; we’re actually making ourselves more nervous. We joke around about that for a while before we realize Patti Michaels is standing on a toilet, blowing smoke into the ceiling fan and listening to us over the top of the stall. This girl has the distinction of being the only cheerleader who is also a hood—she transferred from another school, and the tryouts took place before anyone knew anything about her, beyond the fact that she looked like Gidget and could do a no-handed backflip from a standing position.