In Zanesville

by Jo Ann Beard

  “There are ten guys and eleven girls,” I whisper. “I’m the fifth wheel or something.”

  “Why?”

  “Are you listening? I just said why.”

  “I mean, are you sure?” she whispers vaguely, already moving away, the outline of her head joining the outline of Jed Jergestaad’s, and then they’re gone, into the trees, and I’m stumbling along behind.

  The only thing I’m sure of right now is that I hate Felicia.

  Why oh why did I come to this thing? Even in gym class you have the chance of being picked last. It’s not perfect, but at least you have a place. Once, in sixth grade, Becky McGill, as thick and squat as a toad, cried, “Her arms are threads!” when the teacher made her take me on her team. It was volleyball and had come down to me and Beth Fessler, who chewed her fingertips to the point where she wasn’t willing to hit the ball with them. I can still see McGill just standing there on her toad legs, arms folded, jaw set. It wasn’t even that she didn’t like me; she just liked volleyball better.

  Clouds keep going over the moon, making it hard to navigate, and people are stumbling and laughing, boy voices and girl voices, and me way back here, listening to the sound of my own breath as I pant along. As far as I know, it’s never happened in the history of gym that someone was just not chosen, left to sit out the game in front of everyone because they had useless fingers or threadlike arms, were plain.

  ’Tis new to thee.

  A cluster of tiny, perfect words, like a little village inside a snow globe.

  “Hurry up!” Felicia says, pausing in the dark to whisper-bellow back at me.

  Hurry up yourself and plunge down to hell while you’re at it.

  “I am,” I whisper-yell.

  ’Tis new to thee.

  There was something else I heard recently, a word or phrase that I wanted to remember, to think of later. This is later, but I can’t think of it. I need something to hold in my mind, like a doll, just for company. How about those desperate kids in Kentucky or wherever who carry around clothespins for dolls, or the ones who dress up a withered apple. How about the Unicef children with their bare feet, how about people who are hit by cars. How about people who simply disappear, like Kevin Prentiss, leaving everyone wondering what happened to them? The roof of the pavilion comes into view at the top of the hill, silhouetted against the cloudy sky.

  Inside the pavilion it’s even harder to see. People are sitting on picnic tables or wandering around holding hands. I wander too, through and out again, on the side that overlooks the Mississippi. There is a dark shape at the fire pit, but I ignore it and just stare up at the sky. The clouds shift and the moon pushes forward, the river down below glints into view, and the shape is two people, kissing. After a moment one of them says, “Hi,” and I don’t know if she means me, or not. I keep looking out at the view.

  “Um, hi,” the guy says pointedly.

  Oh. They want me to leave.

  I walk around the side of the pavilion and stand where no one can see me. The river has disappeared again but you can sense it down there, black ink rushing along. Above, the sky rushes too, clouds opening and closing the eye of the moon.

  Moonflame. That was the name of the imaginary pony I had when I was a girl. All black with a white mane and tail. My friend had one that was all white with a black mane and tail. She called hers Flameglow. That friend copied everything off me, including arithmetic, but I didn’t care because I was busy copying everything off another girl. If only Moonflame were here! Luekenfelter actually had a real pony, which I never knew about until she told us at lunch. Kept on Jane’s farm until they built a new dairy barn. No stalls, just stanchions.

  Stanchion! That was the word I meant to think about later. Until Luekenfelter said it, I had never heard it pronounced. It’s standing at attention, telescoped into one crisp word, like biting an apple: stanchion. A long row of cow haunches, brown and white, as far as the eye can see.

  I’m just stanchion here alone.

  Two people come around from the side, pushing each other and laughing. The taller one grabs the other from behind, and I fade out, back down the hill toward the trail. In the woods I stand for a minute, trying to think if there’s anything else I can do, and then just walk back to Patti’s house, pretty fast because it’s weird alone in the woods, just me and the trees.

  There’s no moon at all now, and from the back, the house looks like a hacienda, rising three stories from the foundation, its stucco smooth and poreless. Far above is a balcony with a black wrought-iron railing.

  I’ve never seen that look on Felicia’s face before, like she wished I would disappear. It’s like you’re a balloon and somebody just lets go.

  Inside, the basement is dim and strange without the people, and has sleeping bags and stray clothes kicked everywhere. I tidy it up so it looks more like something out of a magazine again. The only sound is the low fluorescent hum of the aquarium, where the molly swims laps in her hostess pajamas—around the diver and his bubbles, through the ceramic archway, inside the shipwreck and back out, around the diver again. Destined to be lonely, because she eats other fish.

  I’m famished all of a sudden. I ravage around the bar and find an unopened can of filberts and an open can of Spanish peanuts. I eat a few of those, but the skins wreck them. What else. A jar of olives, a jar of little white onions. Four cellophane packages of cocktail napkins in geometric patterns. If I thought for one second the grandmother was asleep, I’d creep up the basement stairs and see if there was any cake left.

  The stairway is sleek and modern and open, each step individually carpeted, and at the top, the lock is the kind in the doorknob. I turn it and push; all is quiet and dark except for a light on the back of the stove.

  The cake plate sits in the dish drainer, washed. In the refrigerator, nothing. Totally empty except for bags of vegetables and things like milk and lunch meat. A package of something that looks promising but turns out to be some kind of foreign cheese. Now what? Hasn’t the old girl ever heard of Jell-O? Then suddenly it comes back to me—out there somewhere, in the front hallway, is a big silver bowl filled with malted milk balls, my favorite food.

  Surely the grandmother is asleep by now, somewhere up the curving staircase with the gold railing. Though what if she isn’t? It wouldn’t be like sneaking into somebody’s garage or eating grapes off their fence; this I could get caught for, discovered in a rich person’s house, trying to steal their candy. But now that I know it’s out there, I’m helpless, like Superman in the presence of kryptonite.

  The kitchen has a swinging door, which leads into the dining room, still and dark, the white upholstered chairs sitting around the table like a silent committee. At the other end are French doors opening onto a hallway with a thick strip of carpet running down the center. I think at the end of this hallway should be the foyer, with the checkered floor and the marble-topped table and the glowing chandelier, but I’m no longer sure. There was a big tree- and piano-filled room off to the left—which would be the right coming from this end—but instead there is a dark library room, with tall shelves and a built-in ladder, and a little alcove with nothing in it but a stationary bike facing a window.

  I can’t believe I’m in these people’s house in the dark, creeping along their corridor. This is just the kind of ill-advised behavior Nancy Drew was known for—poking around with her flashlight, turning corners, and coming face-to-face with exactly who she was trying to avoid. I could barely breathe while I was reading her books, and now I’m in one: The Secret of the Cheerleader’s Mansion. The carpeting ends in a right turn, which I take, dumping me out into the living room, with the gleaming black piano, the potted trees, and the couches, one of which has the grandmother on it.

  I feel weirdly dreamy all of a sudden, like I’ve done this before, been caught robbing a house.

  “Hello, shiest of the girls,” the grandmother says with surprise. “Are you well, darling, or are you in need of something?”

 
I can’t think of what to say. She’s reading The Love Machine, my second-favorite book. It’s embarrassing to think of her, basically an old woman, reading some of the things in there.

  “If you’re just haunting the halls, I don’t mind at all,” she says, sipping her drink. She’s wearing a dark, silky robe over a dark, silky nightgown, and her voice is slightly thicker, less precise than it was a few hours ago. Bare, bony feet with high arches, like Felicia’s.

  “They’re all asleep,” I offer.

  “Asleep!” she exclaims. “This is what we can expect from our younger generation? They can’t wait out the old dame with the snifter of brandy and the trash novel?”

  “I read that book,” I tell her.

  “No!” she says. “If this is true, I won’t be able to read another word, for sheer horror. Darling, trust me—make-believe, all of it!”

  “I know,” I say.

  “Now, you’re a friend from the new school?”

  I nod. “But not a cheerleader,” I clarify.

  “There are other things, aren’t there?” she asks kindly. “Cheering is one thing, but there are many others. Many.”

  “Yep,” I say.

  “And may I ask what your father does, my dear?” She sips again, holding the stemmed glass by its bowl, her eyes large and pale above the rim.

  What my father does?

  I have the prickling, zooming-upward feeling that I get whenever anyone asks me that, like somebody has cut the sandbags loose and I’m no longer Dorothy in the menstrual shoes but the Wizard being yanked out of Oz.

  “Hmm?” I ask, squinting into the dark hallway beyond her. He doesn’t sit at our kitchen table all day with a bottle of vodka in a paper sack, if that’s what you’re thinking.

  “What your father does,” she repeats, setting the glass down again on its coaster. She’s barely made any headway on it.

  He was sick all week, something with his jaw, the side of his face swollen and tender. He is seeing a dentist now, getting it taken care of. The best lies are as close to the truth as possible, the ones where you only change a word or two. He’s seeing a dentist.

  “He’s a dentist,” I say.

  “Ah!” she says, relieved. “And may I say this? Such a brilliant one—allowing his daughter to keep her charming smile! We’ve straightened our children’s teeth into veritable piano keys, and it’s just terribly, terribly sad. Your father seems to be one of the few who knows that. Your little space, my little overlap, which I’ve defended bitterly over the years!” She gives me a fixed smile, and there it is. Slight overlap.

  “Yep,” I say. Help, get me out of here.

  “So. Can I send you back down now, or shall I get you something?” She looks exhausted suddenly.

  “You can send me back down,” I say.

  “All right then. But our secret from your wonderful father? Go through that way,” she says, pointing behind her, toward the front hall, where the chandelier is glowing faintly. “And take some candy along with you.”

  They troop back in twos and threes, over the crusted snow and onto the patio, where they slide the door open, the beige curtain billowing out for a second as they disappear inside. Billow is to bellow as hiding is to hating. I’m outside, sitting on a brick ledge behind one of the hulking pieces of covered lawn furniture, eating malted milk balls out of my coat pocket. Pocket is to picket as hating is to hitting.

  Gretchen and Cathy are the first ones back, then Kathy, Cindy, and Deb, then a while later Felicia and the Hayley Mills girl, who is smoking and who takes a last puff before dropping her cigarette on the ground and following Felicia inside. I stand and stretch, pick up the lit cigarette, and hold it for half a minute, until the friends of the Hayley Mills girl come out of the woods, crunch along the strip of snow, and walk across the grass to the patio.

  “Hi,” I whisper, tapping the cigarette with my index finger, the way my mother does. Off drops the ash, just like that, simple physics.

  “Hi,” they whisper back.

  I like holding the cigarette, but I have no desire to get it near my mouth.

  “We have to go in, our feet are freezing,” one of the girls whispers.

  “Yeah, I just got back and was finishing this,” I whisper, flicking the cigarette out into the darkness.

  Inside, any pretense of tidiness has gone by the wayside. There are coats and shoes dropped, clothes scattered, and girls sprawled everywhere, Felicia sitting off to the side atop a beanbag again. I look at her the same way I look at everyone else, and then sit where I’d have to turn my head to see her.

  Cathy and Gretchen are in matching nightgowns and kneesocks, Deb Patterson is in a sweatshirt and kneesocks, Kathy Liddelmeyer is kneeling next to her gym bag, changing into a nightgown and crying.

  “Poor Liddelmeyer,” Cindy Falk says lightly, sorting through records and dropping them on the floor, one by one. She’s wearing a hockey jersey as a nightgown, and over-the-knee socks, her black hair in a bun, making her look even taller than she normally does. “She keeps building up, building up, his buttercup, buttercup.”

  “I do not,” Liddelmeyer cries. “And you know it!”

  “And then he lets her down.”

  “I do not,” Liddelmeyer bursts out, and then sobs into the sweater she just took off.

  The girls from the other school are over at the bar, whispering and dealing out cards.

  Gretchen looks around with wide, worried eyes. “Liddy-biddy cry,” she says.

  Liddelmeyer laughs, sniffling, and pulls a peasant-style nightgown over her head. Her feet are bare, but she’s digging for something, most likely kneesocks. So far nobody is wearing pajamas.

  “Hey, I never saw you,” Cathy says to me. “Who were you with?”

  I shrug.

  “Second-to-last one back,” she says knowingly.

  “Who?” Cindy demands.

  Who?

  “Horton,” I blurt out. “Was that his name? Tall, with sort of long hair?”

  I can feel Felicia staring at me keenly from the orange beanbag.

  “He could have been the kid who came with Jed, maybe,” Cathy Olessen offers.

  “Wait—who was with Jed?” Cindy interrupts.

  “Just a kid staying with him for the weekend,” Cathy says. “He kisses like a sponge.”

  “No, what girl was with Jed?” she asks, looking carefully at everyone but Felicia. “I hope nobody, since he’s still technically with Martha Van Dalle.”

  Jed and Martha were voted king and queen of our homecoming dance and liked each other halfheartedly afterward. Cindy Falk and Tommy Walton came in second. Martha has kinky hair and is slightly tubby, but we all voted for her anyway because she has such a good personality. She’s wild, but not like a hood—wild like she doesn’t care about public opinion. For a long time everybody thought she had a retarded sister, a girl named Petie, who she tows around everywhere, even to games and parties, but then people found out that Petie was her neighbor, not her sister. That’s basically what got her homecoming.

  “Did you see she wore her candy-striper uniform to school again yesterday?” Deb Patterson asks.

  “I go, ‘Martha, why don’t you just change on the way?’ and she goes, ‘Don’t worry, Olessen, it doesn’t have bedpan juice on it,’ ” Cathy reports.

  “Yucky,” Gretchen says.

  “Wait, look at this doll baby,” Cindy interjects, holding up an album cover of a woman in a beehive with a big flat flower behind her ear and a beauty mark. Behind her is a beach and above her are the words Bossa Nova! We all watch obediently as Cindy puts the record on the turntable, with the sound low, and sits on the floor to do stretches. Legs apart, eyes closed, she bends her topknot all the way over to one side, gracefully, like a dying, black-haired swan. “Patti’s party and where is she?” she says to her knee. “With Galen Pierce.”

  The thing is, if you didn’t know Galen Pierce, you might mistake him for someone cute, with his blond ponytail and sharp, fine features. H
e’s weird, though, and not part of any group, just joining up with whoever will let him, eventually offending people and being driven off again, like a rogue elephant. It’s said he carries a steak knife in his sleeve.

  “She picks the worst people,” Deb Patterson agrees, glancing pointedly in Felicia’s direction.

  Cindy straightens, reaches her arms as high as they will go, and bends to the other side. “And where’s her mother?” she asks.

  The question hangs in the air for a moment as she straightens again, reaches her arms up, and then stretches forward, somehow flattening her torso until her chin is resting on the carpet. She opens her eyes, looks expectantly at us, and then closes them again.

  “Yeah,” Deb agrees.

  “Yeah,” Kathy says. “I wonder that too.”

  “Where Patti mommy?” Gretchen tries, looking around, but everyone is staring at Cindy, waiting for more.

  “Maybe she died or something,” Cindy says, making it sound faintly disgusting.

  “I mean, otherwise, why live with your grandmother?” Deb says.

  “Well, I sort of liked her grandmother,” Cindy counters. “That’s not what I mean.”

  “No, I know,” Deb says quickly. “It’s not her grandmother.”

  “It’s Patti I wonder about,” Cindy says, sitting up finally and reworking her topknot.

  “I went to a funeral home last night for a girl’s mom,” I offer.

  “Ooh,” Kathy says.

  Gretchen flaps her hands.

  “Whose?” Cindy demands.

  “Do you know Ellen Luekenfelter? Her cousin,” I say.

  “Her cousin’s mom,” Felicia clarifies.

  Everyone turns to look at Felicia and then back to me.

  “Ellen Luekenfelter is that girl with red hair?” Cathy Olessen asks.

  “No, she has light brown hair. The red-haired one is Dunk Duncan,” I say.

  “Whose mother died?” Cindy demands.

  “This girl named Jane, Ellen Luekenfelter’s cousin, who lives out in the country,” I say.

  “Oh,” Cindy says dismissively. “Out in the country.”