In Zanesville

by Jo Ann Beard

  “How I talk? You just called me ridiculous!” I say to my book.

  “I did not,” she answers. “Look at me.”

  I look up at her. She has rollers in her hair.

  “I did not. I said it might be a bit ridiculous to be jammed in there like that when there are plenty of other places you could read in this house.”

  “That’s not what I heard.”

  “I actually don’t give a shit what you heard, and I’m not going to stand here arguing with a teenager about what I did or didn’t say.” And with that, she wanders away, because she knows she’s in the wrong.

  I’m sick of being a teenager. Being a teenager so far hasn’t gotten me anything beyond period cramps and nameless yearning, which I had as a kid too, but this is a new kind of nameless yearning that has boys attached to it. And one thing is for sure: there are boys close behind wherever cheerleaders are, like wolves following the campfires. What if they show up at Patti Michaels’s grandmother’s house tonight, what will I do then? What if there are popular boys there, ones who aren’t used to being around uncute girls? I think about getting up to call Felicia to see how nervous she is, but the register is pouring out heat, and the dog and I have melted together.

  “Ray?” I call.

  No answer. Everyone is somewhere else.

  “Raymond!” I call again.

  A moment later his face appears over the top of the chair. “I found a harpoon in the alley,” he says.

  “What?” I ask. “Would you get me the phone?”

  “Okay,” he says. “It’s a harpoon, for whales, that I found in the alley.”

  He stretches the phone from the hall as far as its cord will allow and then brings me the receiver.

  “How will I dial?” I ask him.

  “I can,” he offers.

  I tell him the number and he dials. Stephanie answers.

  “Flea is not allowed to talk on the telephone for more than two minutes,” Stephanie says severely. “My mother asked her to do things that have to be done by the time she gets home from work, and she’s getting home in”—she leaves the phone and comes back—“forty-seven minutes.”

  “I doubt if you know the exact minute she’s walking in the house,” I say.

  She drops the phone.

  “Hi,” Felicia says.

  “How does thy bounteous sister?” I say in a British accent.

  “Hey, that’s what I’m reading too—a tempest in a pee-pot,” Felicia says. “How’re the tampons working out?”

  “Fine, if you don’t mind sitting on a spatula.”

  “It means you’re doing it wrong, but I know,” she says, sighing. “So, are you getting nervous about tonight?”

  “Are you?” I ask. “I mean, it was your idea to go, so I think you probably know it will be okay.”

  “No! Are you kidding—I just said to go see what it was like, but it wasn’t my idea. You’re the one who brought the whole thing up. If it was anyone’s idea, it was yours!”

  “Really, it was her idea. Patti Michaels.”

  “Patti Michaels,” Felicia repeats.

  We think for a minute.

  “I have to clean my stuff and Stephanie’s before my mother gets home, otherwise the little skrizz is gonna tell on me,” she says finally. “And I washed my hair at eight A.M. and it still looks like a wad of hay.”

  “Your hair is pretty,” I say.

  “Yours is,” she says, yawning.

  “What’s Stephanie telling on?”

  “We were fighting and I threw a bowl of macaroni out the upstairs window.”

  “Ha.”

  “My mom wouldn’t care about the macaroni, but the bowl went too.”

  “Don’t let her tell,” I say nervously.

  “Okay, I’m hanging up.”

  Now I have the phone receiver and no brother. When I yell for him, Tammy’s eyes fly open for a second, and then she burrows deeper.

  “Let me see your harpoon,” I say, handing Raymond the receiver. He disappears and reappears a moment later with a rusted fireplace poker.

  “This is it,” he says.

  One of the more memorable things I ever read back here were the Cliff’s Notes for Moby-Dick, which I found in a box of old comic books my mother brought home. It was a gripping story, but also sickening. Mostly what I took from it was that nobody on a whaling ship has much sympathy for a whale.

  “Don’t let Mom see it,” I say.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it actually is a harpoon. I thought it wasn’t.”

  “It is?” he asks incredulously. “It’s a harpoon?”

  “Hey,” I ask him, “how do you think I look?”

  “Okay,” he says uneasily, looking not at me but around. “I don’t know. I have to go hide this harpoon.”

  Then again, who really cares? Somebody has to be the sidekick. Somebody has to be Ringo. Without him, no Beatles, and I hope these people know that.

  “I wish I had this house and they had a better one,” my mother says, taking a right turn into the circular drive at Patti Michaels’s grandmother’s house. There are lights shining from under the bushes, lanterns hanging on the carriage house, and a stone bench and table with a spotlight on them. She drives up to the stone archway and stops.

  “Don’t stop here!” I say. “This isn’t where you stop!”

  In the backseat, Felicia peers out, chewing the inside of her lip.

  “Yes, it is,” my mother says, leaning over me to look at the front door. Actually two doors, painted dark green, with a brass knocker and a medieval-looking latch. On either side of the steps are the cement lions, who tonight have birthday hats on, set at a rakish angle. “Ooh, those are cute.”

  “This isn’t where you stop,” I insist.

  “You better notice everything they’ve got,” she says. “Because your mother is going to want to hear about it. Now get out, because somebody’s coming up behind me.”

  We crawl out with our gear and stand there between the lions. As my mother pulls away and the other car pulls up, the green doors open and there’s Patti and several girls. Behind them is a large space with black-and-white flooring at the bottom and a huge chandelier at the top. Somewhere in the middle is a blur of curving staircase and gold railing. The girls with Patti we’ve never seen before; the girls coming up behind us are our own cheerleaders.

  Help.

  I step back, pressed against a lion, while everyone surges together, sleeping bags are being dropped, people are saying things, somehow Felicia is standing on the black-and-white floor with the rest of them, but I’m still out here with the lion, whose back I’ve momentarily sat down on. Directly below the sparkling chandelier is a round, marble-topped table, in the center of which sits a big silver bowl filled with malted milk balls. Hundreds of them. The grandmother walks into the room, tall, with a cloud of white hair and high cheekbones: a wealthy person who has somehow gotten old.

  “Come in, come in!” she calls gaily. “Don’t be a stranger, my dear.”

  Everyone turns to peer out the door. Oh. They mean me. There’s nothing to do but go inside with my stuff, letting them close the door.

  “Lovely, girls!” the grandmother cries, clapping her hands and looking around animatedly. “You’re all just the loveliest things!” And with that, she walks suddenly out of the room, as though summoned.

  Patti must have just taken her curlers out—her hair is so soft and bouncy, making her more like Gidget than ever. There’s a girl who looks vaguely like Hayley Mills as well—she’s not one of ours, but a small, doll-like girl with a thick cap of yellow hair—and one that looks like Patty Duke, only slightly chubbier. The Patty Duke one seems like the ringleader of the other girls, while the ringleader of our girls is and always has been tall, black-haired Cindy Falk, who looks like an unsmiling version of That Girl. She stands now, staring around at the room thoughtfully. Finally she glances at me.

  “I knew somebody who had a house like this,” she
says. “Only it was bigger.”

  “Really?” I answer, flooded with gratitude. Everyone says Cindy Falk is a huge stuck-up snot, but here she is, talking to me right off the bat.

  “Mm-hmm,” she says, looking over my head.

  After a moment I slide my sleeping bag across the gleaming floor until it’s next to Felicia’s. “Hi,” I say.

  “Hi,” she says back.

  “This house is just like one Cindy Falk’s friend or somebody used to have,” I say so it looks like we’re talking.

  “Really?” she says.

  “Only bigger, I guess. The friend’s house was.”

  “Really?” she says, her eyes swiveling.

  “Yeah.”

  “Really?” she says, still not looking at me.

  “Why do you keep saying ‘really’?” I ask her.

  She blinks. “Because I’m just trying to keep talking here.”

  “Oh. Yes, we’re talking away. Talking, talking.”

  “Happy and laughing,” she murmurs, “because what we’re saying is really good.”

  “What you’re saying is so funny,” I tell her, and then laugh.

  She laughs too. “I’m saying something very true and funny and then I’m listening to the funny, true things you say back.”

  “And yes, blah-blah, what do we do if someone wants to know what’s so funny and true?”

  “Then we’re up shit creek, so disperse,” she says, turning away to look at a painting on the wall. The painting is a mishmash of blue, green, and yellow blobs connected up with spidery black lines. Here and there, little crimson worms inch their way across the blobs. It might be something Ringgold would like.

  I slide my sleeping bag over to the pile of other sleeping bags and stand there with an interested look on my face until Patti notices me.

  “Hey, what were you laughing about?” she asks.

  “Not really anything,” I tell her.

  “But you were laughing with Flea,” she insists.

  “Oh, that was about something from earlier.”

  “But what?” Patti says.

  “Just something she did today, that was earlier,” I say. “Not about anything here.” The black-and-white tile is creating some kind of optical illusion that’s making me feel like my legs are too short.

  “But what?” Patti persists. Everyone now seems to be listening. Dizzy from the fun-house floor, I put my hand on the marble table beside me. It feels like a cemetery monument, not the sort of thing you want to fall and crack your head on.

  “Uh, she threw a bowl of macaroni out the window,” I say.

  Everyone stares at Felicia as she stares at the blobs. For a few seconds there is a flush-faced silence and then Patti guffaws.

  “I threw half a bag of marshmallows out my bedroom window the other night,” she says. “They were making me sick.”

  Felicia turns from the painting to look at me, swinging her hair back from her face, which is bright with courage. “Now we know why it was taking you so long to come inside.”

  There’s a pause as everyone pictures me out there scrounging marshmallows off the cold ground. I laugh and then everyone laughs.

  Felicia and I don’t look at each other.

  “ ’Za, girls! The ’za has arrived!” the grandmother says, sweeping in to lead us from the hallway, past a living room filled with couches, trees and a grand piano, down a carpeted corridor, into a dining room with a long, quiet table surrounded by upholstered chairs, through a swinging door, and into a big, bright kitchen. A wagon-wheel chandelier with false candles hangs over a long, ranch-style table with benches. On one wall is a display of shining copper pans, and on another wall is a large painting of fruit, a pheasant, and a deceased rabbit. The appliances are avocado and the floor is brown-speckled tile, shining with wax. The pizzas are served on pedestals, three of them, and there are eleven places set around the table, each with two forks and two glasses. I have no idea what two forks could mean in terms of pizza. Everyone crowds around the table, with me on the end of the bench. The napkins match the tablecloth—green, orange, and turquoise plaid—and have been rolled and stuffed into wooden napkin rings carved to look like zoo animals. Mine is a monkey.

  “Do you all love pizza?” the grandmother asks.

  I usually don’t, although I’ve only had the kind my mother makes, which she crumbles hamburger on top of, making it impossible to eat around, and by the time you pick it off, it looks like you’re eating something from out of the trash. The closest thing here to one without meat looks like the pepperoni. Across from me is the Hayley Mills girl, also on an end; we smile at each other.

  “Hi,” she says, rolling her eyes. “God.”

  “Hi,” I say, rolling mine in agreement. We’re referring to how crowded we are on the bench.

  Suddenly the grandmother appears next to me, holding a large wooden bowl in her arms. The bowl is filled with lettuce, and the grandmother just stands there holding it. I look up at her and she nods encouragingly.

  I don’t know what she means. Just set it down.

  “Darling, I’m serving you,” she says gaily. “Take some delicious greens!”

  In the bowl is a large plastic scissorlike utensil that I’ve never seen before. On one side is a big spoon and on the other side is a big fork, hinged in the middle. I don’t know how to use it. Start somewhere else, why don’t you.

  “Don’t you love salad?” she asks, still gay. “I insist!”

  It appears to be a difficult tool, the scissor fork/spoon, and I don’t want to try it—what if it has some other purpose I’m not even aware of, like it’s something that her grandmother has to carry around everywhere for some condition, and I suddenly start trying to use it to serve myself salad?

  I shake my head.

  “None?” she cries. “Even just a tiny taste of something so lovely?”

  She won’t move on; she’s stuck there, cradling the bowl like it’s a dear thing, staring around the kitchen, speaking over our heads to an unseen audience of parents and local officials. “It’s a new era! Let them eat ’za and cake… only!” And with that, she moves on to Cathy Olessen, sitting next to me, who expertly tongs herself out a few leaves, a radish flower, and a slice of cucumber.

  Eventually they all have salad and are eating. The grandmother starts pouring water from a silver pitcher into one of everyone’s two glasses.

  My little gray monkey has his arms clutched around the cloth napkin; I take it away from him, place it on my lap, and stand the monkey up near one of my drinking glasses. He has a white face, pink lips, and brown eyes, each with a tiny fleck of white paint in the center. I turn him so he’s looking at Cathy Olessen’s tiger, painted in brown and yellow. Again, pink lips and the eye flecks.

  “Can I enlist you, darling nonsalad child?” the grandmother asks me as she refills her pitcher with ice and water. She gestures to the counter, where there are five bottles of pop waiting. I get up but I don’t know what to do with my napkin. I could leave it on the bench or put it next to my plate, but either place, it would look just dumped there. Instead, I slip it into the waistband of my pants.

  The pop is Pepsi, Teem, and Dr Pepper. Two, two, and one. With an opener sitting there. Am I supposed to open them all and leave them there for her to pour, or am I supposed to carry them over to the table and hand them out, one to each two girls? Am I supposed to ask people which they want? If I do that, everyone will say Pepsi and nobody will say Teem, let alone Dr Pepper. Why didn’t I just take salad?

  She’s pouring more water and they’re all eating away. I look at Felicia, who looks back at me, coolly, chewing. I point to my chin, and her eyes bug out in alarm. She takes her napkin and saws away at her own chin, eyes grateful. I give her a slight nod—Yes, you got it— and then glance questioningly at the pop on the counter. She discreetly mimes opening a bottle and then looks back to her plate.

  I open the bottles, put the tops in a little pile, and then stand there until the grandmoth
er says, “Would you be so kind as to serve? And Patti, darling, you help. Pour some icy cold drinks for your friends!”

  “Who wants what?” Patti says, getting up and throwing her napkin down on the bench.

  I take one of the Pepsis and pour half in my glass and then walk down the table, squinting to see who might want it, and pour the rest in Felicia’s. Then I wander around with the last Dr Pepper until somebody accepts it; then I sit back down. Getting up like that really makes you appreciate your spot on the bench. I turn the monkey so he doesn’t have to look at the tiger anymore, and try to figure out how to get the last slice of pepperoni. How are people doing it? It’s too far down for me to reach. I could just ask someone sitting near it, but then they would have to hand this big, limp thing along from person to person. I could send my plate down, but nobody is doing that. Or I could just eat the one I can reach, but pepperoni can be taken off and stacked like tiddlywinks on the edge of the plate, whereas the closest other pizza seems to have sausage on it, which would have to be picked off bit by bit.

  I feel like I might start crying. Not out of hunger but out of sheer exhaustion. The clock says only seven thirty. Seven thirty! Whoever the guy is who Ringgold says turned it around in terms of time should be here for this extravaganza. If I do start crying, I’m ruined unless I can come up with a reason. It would need to be good—like my mother just died. But she dropped us off here! My grandmother then. But how would Patti’s grandmother feel, knowing that another grandmother had just died?

  “Could I have a piece of the pepperoni, please?” I say suddenly, startling myself.

  Cathy Olessen takes my plate and passes it down the table, and the last piece is lifted from its pedestal, slid onto the plate, and sent back to me.

  “Thank you,” I say distinctly. I feel a strange surge of confidence—here I am with pizza and pop, just like everyone else.

  Wait! Where’s my napkin?

  It’s in your pants, the monkey whispers.

  The clock starts moving faster. Cake from a bakery, decorated with white icing and a megaphone that says Zanesville on it in cursive; ice cream; little favors handed out from a basket the grandmother carries around the table—lip gloss and Bonne Bell face soaps; and then adjournment to the basement, a long, open pine-paneled space with green shag and modern furniture. In fact, it looks like my old Barbie Dream House, everything sleek, low, and built in—low plastic chairs around a low glass coffee table, vinyl beanbags slumped here and there, a long hi-fi and TV console in blond wood, two barstools and a bar. The ceiling is low too, and the only lights are a fizzing fluorescent over the bar, a blue green Lava lamp, an array of hanging globes over the coffee table, and, in one dim corner, glowing eerily, an aquarium with a ceramic diver releasing bubbles, some suckerfish, and one lone molly with diaphanous trailing fins.