by Jo Ann Beard
“I’m dead if that door opens,” she says.
“We’ll cover you,” I tell her.
“If that kinky-haired bitch walks in here, stab her,” she answers.
That gets a moment of respectful silence, and then we hop down and address the mirror. One of my ears constantly pokes through my hair, possibly because it’s bigger than the other, just like one of my eyes is slightly higher than the other. No matter how I tilt my head, everything is off-kilter.
“I look like modern art,” I say.
Patti snorts.
“Girls, I’m going back,” Luek says. She scans the corridor on her way out, looking for whoever is in pursuit of Patti. “Empty,” she reports.
“Don’t leave yet,” Patti says to me. “What do you have?”
“Shop.” I need to go back and finish my hinges, but this girl has a certain authority, being a cheerleader standing on a toilet.
“Rangel or Dim-dick?” she asks. Mr. Dimmek is the wood-shop teacher.
“Rangel,” I say. I show her the hall pass, a flat piece of metal with a room number painted on it. “This is the plate out of his head.”
Patti snorts again, dropping her cigarette in the toilet and giving it a flush.
“You hang around with that girl Flea, right?” she says. “You and her should come to my slumber party this Saturday. It’ll be Cindy, Gretchen, Kathy, Cathy, Deb, and then three friends from my old school. My grandmother said I could have ten.”
Crap! The problem with Patti Michaels is that she not only doesn’t know she isn’t cheerleader material, but she doesn’t know who should and shouldn’t be invited to one of their parties. This is a disaster.
“Well, what do you think?” she demands.
“Fun,” I say.
We open the door and peer up and down the hall, which is empty except for a desk that has been pulled out of the sewing classroom. In it, a banished kid is bent over a needlework project. He has Mr. Prentiss’s same hair.
“So come to my locker after school,” Patti says, and sashays past the boy, who looks up from his tea towel to watch.
“Wait—how many cheerleaders?” Felicia asks suspiciously.
“A lot,” I tell her.
“Yeah, but how many?”
“All of them,” I confess, “and a couple people from another school.”
“And this is Patti Michaels, right? Not Patty Jackson and not Patty what’s her name?”
“I know those Pattys—this is Michaels. She was in the third-floor bathroom when I went in there, and she invited us to her slumber party.”
“And did she say me, or did she say you, and you said me?”
“She said, ‘Flea.’ ‘You hang around with that girl Flea,’ or something like that,” I tell her. “You’re actually in this more than I am. She never called me by my name.”
“Does she know she looks like Gidget?” Felicia asks.
“Probably. So, do you think we should go?”
“I agree with you about Shakespeare,” she says suddenly, as the shadow of a teacher looms over us, listening. This is gifted English, which means we work at our own pace, learning about literature through interaction with our peers. “The tempest he’s referring to is actually a storm. At sea, it looks like.”
“It’s where the old saying of a tempest in a teapot comes from,” I tell her.
“We have to think about how the ship is like a teapot,” Felicia suggests.
“Don’t worry about that now, okay?” Miss Van Leuven interjects. “I’m asking people to read this with the idea that they’re listening to the music of Shakespeare. Think of it—and hear it, if you can—as mellifluous. It will help if you read passages aloud to one another. Try closing your eyes while you listen!” She pauses, chewing on a hangnail. “Or, I don’t know… does that seem silly?”
“No,” I say.
“It’s a good idea,” Felicia says.
Van Leuven continues on her lonely way, drifting and prodding. She is the youngest of all the teachers and somewhat of an outcast. She showed up this year from Minneapolis, bringing the gifted program with her. This happened to occur at the same time the Annex arrived—a trailerlike structure pulled up and parked behind the real school, containing three new classrooms, a science lab, and a closet filled with vented plastic boxes full of rodents and frogs—and the same time the mandate came down about girls in shop and boys in home ec. So poor Van Leuven is forever linked with progress, and when you see her with the other teachers, no one is ever talking to her.
The first day we had her, she wore a windowpane-patterned dress with a vinyl Carnaby Street hat, the second day she wore a denim jumper over a black leotard, the third day she wore a Mexican dress with a rope belt, the fourth day she wore a granny dress and granny glasses, and the fifth day she wore a pink suit with a too-short skirt and got sent home, like a student. When she came back, it was in a dirndl skirt and a white blouse, which she has worn some variation on ever since.
Felicia thumbs through her book. “Close your eyes,” she says, and recites:
O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in’t!
’Tis new to thee.
What is this maid with whom thou wast at play?
Van Leuven is right: when you close your eyes, certain words bloom out. Hollyhocks in a field of soybeans: goodly, beauteous, wast at play. The simplest, most unadorned words—’tis, new, to, and thee—become ’Tis new to thee, a perfect little phrase.
’Tis + new + to + thee = ’Tis new to thee. I’ve been put in gifted math too.
“You can open your eyes,” Felicia says.
When I do, we’re still in the Annex. Across the hall is the closet where the rodents and frogs are being held, waiting to take part in experiments. “So, what about the party?” I ask.
“I think we should just go and see,” she says, handing me the book and closing her eyes.
She wants to go! I was afraid of that.
“Me too,” I say, turning pages. “Listen to this. Trinculo: I shall not fear fly-blowing.”
“What’s fly-blowing?” she asks.
“Self-explanatory,” I say. “Listen to this, it’s about your sister: I am not Stephano, but a cramp.”
“Ha, she is a cramp,” Felicia says, eyes still closed. “Are the friends from the other school cheerleaders too?”
“Probably,” I tell her, turning pages. “Listen: Monster, I do smell all horse-piss, at which my nose is in great indignation.”
“Ha, horse-piss!” Felicia says, this time too loudly, her voice carrying across the room.
Van Leuven makes her way toward us through the tangle of displaced desks and chairs, drawing nigh just as the bell tolls. She stands aside then, a pale, pretty woman in a Dacron blouse, as students scramble over one another to get out of her classroom.
As we pass her, she says, hopefully, “He’s funny, isn’t he, girls? Shakespeare.”
* * *
Patti Michaels is standing at her locker, waiting, at three o’clock.
“Hi,” she says to Felicia.
“Hi,” Felicia answers.
She hands over two invitations with our names scrawled on them.
“Where do you live?” I ask.
“You know that house that looks like a plantation, on Twelfth?” Patti asks. “That’s my grandma’s house, where I now live. We get the whole basement and she’s ordering us pizzas delivered. All anyone needs to bring is a sleeping bag—it’s my birthday but I’m not asking for presents.”
The plantation house! A wide, sloping terrace, lions on either side of the front door, a circular drive with a stone arch, a carriage house. We stand for a moment, uncertain what to say next. Halfway down the hall, three boys are horsing around, two of them swinging notebooks at each other’s heads while the third tries to trip them.
“We might have to do something else that
night,” Felicia barely audibly tells Patti. “We aren’t sure.”
“This party is better,” Patti says definitively. “Ask anyone who ever knew me before I lived here: you’ll have fun.”
Suddenly one of the notebook boys hits the other one broadside in the head, causing him to stop for a moment in astonishment before swinging back, very hard and wide, missing the first kid, who ducks, but slamming the notebook into the metal lockers. The first kid then uses his notebook like a shield, forcing the second kid into walking backward, red faced and laughing. The third kid follows them around in circles, putting his foot out to trip whomever he can.
The detention buzzer goes off and they light out down the hall. That’s where I remember the second kid from.
“Hey, why did you say you look like modern art?” Patti asks me.
“My features are asymmetrical,” I explain.
She looks at me keenly. “They are?”
“She thinks they are,” Felicia says.
“Do you think they are?” Patti asks Felicia.
“If you measure them, yes,” Felicia admits, “but if you just look at her, no.”
“She thinks she has a bubble butt,” I tell Patti.
“Turn around,” Patti says.
“No,” Felicia says.
“Don’t worry,” Patti says. “I wouldn’t have invited you if you did.”
Sometime midweek, while the rest of us were bending steel and taking math tests, Luekenfelter’s cousin’s mother died. It happened during the afternoon, while the cousin was at school and one of the neighbors was over, keeping an eye on things. The mother and the neighbor were watching a series of soap operas over the course of the day, the mother taking one pain pill after another, trying to get some relief, until the whole bottle was gone and the neighbor was watching the soap operas alone, without knowing it.
For some reason, instead of going to glee club after school, the cousin got on the early bus and went home, where the neighbor lady was upstairs running the sweeper. She actually sat in the chair next to the sofa where her mother was and ate a Pop-Tart before figuring it out.
“How could they not know?” I ask.
“I guess the eyes were open,” Luekenfelter says, and then starts crying. “This is my aunt we’re talking about, and she wasn’t supposed to even have the bottle of pills, but the neighbor didn’t know that.”
We’re in the cafeteria, but no one is eating. Poor Jane, the cousin.
“She’s acting like nothing happened!” Luek says. “We were out there last night, and if I started to cry, Jane would go”—Luek demonstrates, opening her gray eyes wide with a look of annoyed surprise—“and at one point when someone hugged her and then stared at her, like, Why aren’t you crying? Your mother is dead, she goes, ‘I’m not sentimental, I guess.’ Her dad sat in an old Firebird the entire time we were there, parked in one of the Quonsets.”
“She’s probably in shock,” Yawn says. “I’ve seen her cry before—when her mother had surgery and it didn’t work, she cried when she told me about it.”
“She did?” Luek says.
“Remember when we were at your house and we were watching the show where the woman who wore all the scarves was dying and no one could help her? When you went upstairs to get pillows, your cousin rolled over on the couch and was crying. I asked her if she was okay, and she said that her mother had surgery and it didn’t work.”
At this, Luekenfelter puts her head in her arms and sobs, right at the lunch table.
Felicia walks up to the counter, gets a handful of napkins, and brings them back.
“You should be able to go home from school,” Maroni says.
“Really?” Luekenfelter asks her, pressing the napkins to her face. “If it’s my aunt?”
“In this case, yes,” Maroni assures her. “Because your cousin is like a sister to you, which means your aunt was like your mother, in a way.”
“She looked just like my mother,” Luek says, and then stares around at us, red eyed. “I’ve known her my whole life. She made them get a pony for me when I was six. She made them.”
Yawn fiddles with her hall pass. She doesn’t even have lunch this hour, but Luekenfelter is her best friend.
“I never knew you had a pony,” I say.
“It was kept out on their farm but it was mine—I called it Little Brownie and I rode it all during the summers.”
“What happened to it?” I ask.
“They had to tear down that barn, and in the new one there were no stalls; it was one long aisle with stanchions for the milk cows,” Luek explains, accepting the piece of bubble gum Yawn gives her before heading back to class. “Thanks. Ponies can’t be kept outside year-round, so they were sold. Mine went to a man who had a little girl with one leg, but they had rigged up a saddle where she could ride anyway.”
“Really?” Felicia says, picking up her hamburger and looking at it but not taking a bite.
“That’s a good ending for somebody’s pony.” I tear the end off my long john and place it on the waxed paper.
“Jane’s went to people in their town, so she got to see it whenever she wanted to. And ride it.” Luekenfelter shakes her head. Her hair, which is usually bouncy, hangs lankly around her ears, like mine. “To tell you the truth, I never really believed the story of the one-legged girl.”
When she picks up her hot dog and takes a bite, the rest of us quickly stuff our food in our mouths and sit chewing.
“But who would lie about something like that?” I say finally.
“A bunch of A-holes, that’s who,” Luekenfelter snaps. With that, she gets up and walks out of the cafeteria, not taking the side route but going right past the row of boys eating hot dogs and judging girls. Their heads turn as she stomps past, a sturdy, flat-haired girl in a pleated skirt and kneesocks.
We look at one another.
“I’ll do her math homework tonight,” I say.
“I’ll finish her history paper,” Maroni says.
Felicia thinks. “I’ll take her tray back,” she says.
From the dining room table I can see the television in the living room, but I don’t even feel like watching it, it’s such a relief to be doing regular math again—a whole page of Luek’s equations that look difficult but aren’t. It’s like double-Dutch jump rope: from the outside it looks complicated, but once you’re in there it’s just basic. Like so many things, it’s designed to make people seem more talented than they are, which is how I got into my current gifted-math mess.
I’m working far beyond capability now, in a classroom where they roll maps and screens down over the blackboards so regular people won’t have to see what’s up there. I haven’t known what was going on from the first minute I sat down and saw who I was in there with: Velda Burnett, who carries an enormous plastic pocketbook; two twin boys with butch haircuts who are so smart they come across as retarded; Larue Varrick, first flute; Toby Merkel, a kid with a mustache; and then the usual pack of beautiful ones, known for being good at everything from honor roll to hitting a hole in one during golf week to giving a speech to the principal on Turnaround Day to making a soufflé that stays inflated until the teacher sees it. They’re the ones with money, for the most part, the rich cream that rises and is eventually skimmed off and sent somewhere else.
At my house, we’re still the opposite of rich—my mother is sick over the fact that right now all of us kids need things and there’s no money to buy them. She blames my father, who responds by going out to the garage in the dark and staying there.
Which is fine with her if he wants to walk out in the middle of a conversation. And if he isn’t going to work to support this family, then maybe she won’t either. She can sit on her ass as well as he can sit on his, instead of every morning of her life getting up and going to that office and listening to people talk about how they’re doing this and that to their kitchen, how they’re buying a boat for the river, how their kids are going all the way to Spain as part of some sch
ool group. She doesn’t care about herself, she always expected she’d have to work for a living, but what she would like is for her kids to have the things they need. Apparently too much to ask.
“I can’t do homework when people are yelling!” I yell.
Tammy hops up on the dining room chair next to me, puts her chin on the table, and stares at the centerpiece, a long canoe-shaped seedpod filled with plastic fruit. I offer her a tangerine and amazingly she takes it, hops down, and trots away. I have to go after her, right after I finish the problem I’m on.
“That goddamned dog has my fruit!” my mother yells.
“Mom! Shut up a minute, will you?”
This is Meg, trying to watch TV. There’s a pause, and then my mother materializes in the doorway between the dining room and living room.
“I didn’t mean shut up, I mean just be quiet for a minute until this show is over,” Meg says.
My mother walks over and turns the television off.
“I hate this house!” Meg yells. She looks across at me in the dining room. “And she’s laughing at me, the B-hole!”
“I’ve heard enough. Get to your room,” my mother says evenly. She glares at me and I get up and go crawl behind the couch, take the tangerine out of Tammy’s mouth, and bring it back to the seedpod. My mother comes over, picks it up, and looks at the bite marks on it.
“This is ruined,” she says, but puts it back anyway, alongside a pear that also has bite marks—human ones, but she doesn’t know that.
Overhead is the sudden sound of chaos, a shattering noise followed by a series of bellows. Raymond, in the bathtub, has shot at the overhead fixture with his squirt gun until he finally hit the hot lightbulb, causing it to explode, plunging him into darkness and raining slivers of glass down into the bathwater. It’s not the first time this has happened, and my mother hollers at him to stay put while she fishes around in the junk drawer for a flashlight.
