by Jo Ann Beard
“Awful sorry, but she’s not taking calls this afternoon,” she says, hanging the receiver back up.
“Who was that?” I ask her.
“Made by a blacksmith, every one of them a little bit different. He’ll see it, boy, if he likes metal,” my father says, holding up one of the l’s to show my mother.
“Who was that?” I ask again.
“Get those off my table,” she tells him.
The next day, Monday, instead of going to the cafeteria, I go to the art room over lunch to work on my chicken. Ringgold is excited by this, and even though it’s his free period and he’s cleaning out the still-life closet, he brings me a stack of books to look at.
“You’re going to see some things in here that will blow your mind,” he predicts.
The chicken can’t be made to stand up straight on its own two hands, because one of its wrists is cocked at a strange angle. I tried to tell Steve this when I was doing the casting, but I couldn’t get a word in—he spent the whole time telling me all about how he pretended that he’d severed his index finger once, arranged it in a box with cotton, and thrust it at people. Just as I open one of the books, Maroni pokes her head in; behind her is Felicia.
“Hi,” they say from the doorway.
“Hi,” I say.
“Aren’t you eating?” Maroni asks.
“I needed to finish my project,” I say.
“So are you done?” Maroni asks.
“With the chicken, but now I have to go through these books,” I say.
Ringgold backs out of the closet, hair astray, lugging a marble bust that he sets on a bench. “Greco-Roman,” he says before ducking back in. “Look at the expression.”
It has a faraway gaze.
“Well, bye,” Maroni says.
“Yeah, bye,” Felicia says.
“Bye,” I say.
The books are in fact blowing my mind. Everything from a cup, saucer, and spoon covered in some kind of animal fur, like coyote or maybe bobcat—the hairs are tricolored and fairly long, as though whatever it was were shot in the winter—to a big pair of lips floating across a sky, to a train coming through a fireplace, to a red rubber glove nailed to a wall, to a child in a pinafore chasing a hoop with a stick through an abandoned city.
“De Chirico,” Ringgold says over my shoulder. “It’s that beat of time between postindustrial and pretechnological. Stark and empty, yes, but pulsing with what has been and what is to come, as indicated by the looming shadow, just around the corner. Not true for Magritte—his vision is something else entirely. De Chirico is emotion, Magritte logic; it’s like the mother and the father.”
I turn back to the cup and saucer. “What kind of fur do you think this is?” I ask Ringgold.
He considers it. “Silver fox maybe?”
He’s right, it’s the winter coat of a fox. Now I wish I hadn’t asked.
“We’re starting 2-D next week, but I won’t impose that on you, if you want to stay 3-D,” Ringgold tells me. He’s setting up a still life on a rolling cart, using yards of striped sailcloth which he drapes artfully around and over two blocks of different heights before arranging the objects: a marble bust, a bowling ball, a plastic rose, a brass doorknob, a shard of beveled mirror, and an hourglass. He stands back to look at it, first chewing on his thumb and then holding it straight out in front of him.
“Wait,” he says, suddenly going back into the closet.
Why does he think I would want to do a different project than everyone else? In the stack is a big, thin book of paintings, all by the same guy, Max Ernst, each page stranger than the last. In one painting a trick bird figure drawn in chalk presides over a ponytail attached to a hubcap, which is connected in turn by a string to a bottle containing a red blob, and then to an egg. Loplop Introduces a Young Girl. What could it mean? Around this tableau are various objects, some painted and some real: a frame, a tree frog, a blue necktie, a cameo, a spidery letter E. The hank of hair is real—dark and slightly scraggy, not unlike my own.
“Loplop is the artist’s alter ego,” Ringgold explains from atop a ladder above me, where he’s tying fishing line to an eye hook in a ceiling tile. It looks like he’s going to fall, and his pants have rucked up so that an inch or so of leg is showing above each blue sock. I keep my eyes on the book until he climbs down and gets himself situated. A lot of the pictures have a bird theme of some sort. In one, parts of a cage have been attached to the canvas; in another, a bird in the sky has caused pandemonium among two girls and a man who looks like Mr. Pettle, the gym teacher. Its real objects are an open gate, a little outhouse, a butter knife, and a doorbell. It’s called Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale. I feel uneasy all of a sudden, too aware of the lights buzzing overhead and the sound of Ringgold going about his business. What am I doing, hanging around here with a teacher? I’m supposed to be wherever Felicia is, doing whatever she’s doing.
Help. Where am I.
“We’re going to add an element of mystery to our setup here,” Ringgold calls from the closet.
Please shut up.
He comes out with a large, tarnished skeleton key, which he ties to the fishing line. Then he pushes the still-life cart around until the key is hovering, invisibly suspended, in front of the bowling ball and above the reclining plastic rose. When he switches on the spotlight to the right, stark, purplish shadows leak out from the left of everything. It’s beautiful and mysterious, yes, but what will I do if my whole life is like this, watching some adult tie a skeleton key to fishing line while everyone else is having boys like them?
“What do we think?” Ringgold asks, stepping back.
“Good,” I say in a tinny, strange voice.
* * *
My next class is physics, where the teacher makes me stand up in front of everyone and put my hand on a silver globe to demonstrate static electricity. As soon as I touch it, the globe creates some kind of phenomenon that makes my hair rise up in the air, apparently, all around my head. It causes a sensation, everyone hooting wildly, to the point that the teacher makes me do it again. It feels like when you do a handstand and your hair all falls toward the floor, except you’re upright and it’s falling toward the ceiling. It’s like the paintings I was looking at, surreal, especially if you think about what your face looks like with no hair around it, your ears just sticking out.
Tim Benchfield, my lab partner, blows up a balloon for us to use in our own experiment. “You should have seen your hair, man,” he says, pausing to rest. “It made your face look about the size of a nickel or something. Really dinky.”
He puts one more deep breath into the balloon and then lets go, sending it fizzling through the air and causing everyone else to do the same thing. In the commotion, I walk out of the room, down the hall, and into the bathroom.
A girl named Jackie Lopez is standing there in a bra, washing something out of her shirt.
“I got thrown a pie at,” she explains, “walking out of the cafeteria, and then they just sat there, looking the other way.”
“There was pie today?” My hair is still perfectly straight, but lifted off my scalp in a weird way, as though it had been rolled up on soup cans all night. “I missed lunch.”
“Blueberry. It wasn’t good, though—it was sticky or something—so people were throwing it instead of eating it. Do you know that kid Denny?”
“Denny the Menny, or Denny the one who wears the white shirts?”
“The Jehovah’s Witness one! I should throw a pie at him so he can’t try to convert people on the way home from school.”
“Was that other Denny sitting there, by any chance? Because I don’t think Jehovah’s Witnesses are allowed to throw things at people.”
“Alls I know is one second I had pie on my boob and the next second everyone on the bench was pointing to that kid Denny, who just looked the other way.” She puts the shirt back on, flinching at the cold wet fabric.
I’m noticing in the mirror that my face does look a lot
dinkier than Jackie Lopez’s, which is wide and flat and has a few extra zits, which is probably why she got food thrown on her. Welcome to divinity school.
Felicia is standing outside the physics room when I go back, holding a stack of construction-paper valentines, a tape dispenser, and a chocolate long john in a waxed paper sleeve.
“Thanks,” I say.
“I was going to leave it in there, but then I thought that kid Timothy would eat it,” she says.
“My money’s in my locker,” I say.
“It’s all right—Step On Me stayed home today, so I got her lunch money.”
Normally I would ask whether Stephanie was faking it or truly sick, but somehow I can’t. I move so I’m standing just inside the classroom, where there’s no teacher, just students milling around, rubbing balloons on one another.
She nods at the long john. “I hope you like it, anyway.”
“I will,” I say.
“I’m supposed to be putting up hearts,” she says. Then, after a moment: “What were you doing?”
“Talking to Jackie Lopez in the bathroom.”
“Are you still mad at me?”
“I never said I was.”
“You’re something.”
“Well, so are you.”
“No, I’m not,” she insists. “I’m being regular and you’re being something.”
Just then the teacher walks up, Mr. Margolis, waves of cigarette smoke rolling off him. “Where do you belong?” he asks Felicia.
“School Beautification wonders if we could put a valentine on your door,” she whispers.
He looks at me.
“I said you’d be right back,” I say.
“Are you supposed to have food in here?” he asks.
“No,” I say.
“Then deposit that.”
I pretend to put the long john in the wastebasket as he bangs the door shut and strides to the front of the room, clapping and coughing, scattering people. During the dismal lecture that follows, I glance back once and see, faintly visible through the frosted glass, a red heart taped to the door.
After school, I find myself unable to go home, and just hang around the building, walking the corridors and stairwells, peering into trophy cases and barren classrooms while the school slowly empties, past miles of lockers, army green and expressionless, like dead, propped-up soldiers. Past detention and then double detention, past the Spanish Club having a long meeting and afterward getting its picture taken while crowded into a stairwell, past an abandoned mural-painting project, with folded drop cloths and sealed jars of tempera, past the special combined Presidents’ Day and Valentine’s Day bulletin board, where Lincoln stares out, hollow eyed and unsmiling, paper hearts stapled all around him like red badges of courage.
At some point I follow the sound of music—literally—up to the third floor, where a girls’ chorus is singing the Raindrops on Roses song. Now for the rest of the night I’ll be saying to myself the tedious and compelling line Brown poop in packages tied up with string. Back down on second, I nod at the janitor’s assistant, a deaf guy who goes to the chiropractic college across the river. From having a deaf girl in my grade school, I actually know how to spell “hi” in sign language, but I’m too embarrassed to try it, so I just wave.
Every once in a while you’ll see a locker crammed so full that stray notepaper is coming out the air vents. There are one or two on each floor, and it’s somehow disturbing, like seeing pubic hair poking out of a swimsuit. If people can’t do any better than that, why even have a locker?
The mural-painting project is by seventh graders and shows Chief Illini and Chief Black Hawk looking out over the river toward Missouri. Both chiefs have miniature hands and feet, and the river is painted a flat, illustrious blue with squiggles of white here and there to show the current. A passerby has penciled in a tiny drowning man, with the usual ripples and a plea for help.
One floor up, I run into the janitor again, who gives me a quizzical smile and then mimes putting a key into a lock and turning it. A pack of cigarettes is just visible in the pocket of his shirt. On the way out, I stop at my locker, and on the shelf, right under the vent, are three notes, shoved in there since sometime after lunch.
Purple felt-tip:
Is this your locker??? Patterson said it was!! I called you yesterday about 3 times—is your mother wierd??? (Mine is!!) Call me tonite and I’ll tell ya something!
Signed Cindy, with a flourish ending in a flower, and her number.
P.S. If this isn’t you, please ignore!!
Green ink:
Hi! I didn’t see you at all today!!!!! But saw Flea and she said she was w/ JED JERGESTAAD!!! No one believes her, but I do, because she’s cute!!!!! If you get this call me tonite??? I have to ask you something and your Mom ain’t letting calls thru!
Signed Dunk, with a cartoon face wearing granny glasses.
The third is in red colored pencil, from Luekenfelter.
Hey Chick!!!! Where are you today Jane might be moving to this school! Next year but wants to come this weekend & there’s supposed to be a big party at Prospect. Are you going if there is???? Call me tonite I have to ask you something about Aljer Algerbra, which we have a test on Wed.!!!!
Signed Ellen, with a banner under it crossed with two lines.
Taking only my jacket and the big thin book of paintings that Ringgold lent me, I head for the side door, where the janitor is waiting, and then I’m out in the February cold. Somehow I only have one mitten. A big party at Prospect? A pitch-black game of musical boys where one lone girl is left standing? This is what I mean by being frightened of the universe: it can do anything, even things you haven’t bothered to imagine—like make the worst thing that ever happened to you happen again, one week later.
Around the corner, across a patch of lumpy ice, past the gym, where there are still lights on, over the front steps, along the bike rack and the flagpole, around to the back, through the lighted space between the Annex and building, under the delivery dock and trash area, and then again past the door I left out of. The deaf janitor is halfway down the hall now, following a machine as it glides along, polishing the floor.
Alone in the universe, he is.
A surge of adrenaline propels me out of the school’s atmosphere and onto the street. Whatever they did to me in that physics class is still happening—I feel strangely light, but slow, like I’m walking through water, my hair floating around my head. All the houses are black, and then there’s one with lights, then another, then another. People eating dinner, watching TV. The Melchers’ house, at the end of our street, is getting new siding, sold to them not by my father but by someone else from Dick Best Home Improvement. They’ve chosen a kind that makes it look like their house is made of piled rocks, like something out of The Flintstones. Next door down, the Robileskys are eating dinner on TV trays; I can see Mr. Robilesky’s bald dome and all the stuff they have stacked on their dining room table. Old Milly’s house is dark because she’s in California helping out her sister-in-law, who just had both legs removed below the knee. Our house is going strong, lights upstairs, downstairs, and in the backyard, where Tammy is standing at the end of her chain, waiting for someone to remember her. Next door, the dirt circle is empty, Curly’s chain disappearing into the black rectangle of his doghouse.
Through the kitchen window Meg is visible, washing dishes alone, shoulders hunched the way she carries them at home, where she’s free to stop being so tall. Through the dining room window my mother is at the sewing machine, guiding fabric along with one hand and smoking with the other. She also seems to be talking. In front the living room drapes are closed on the picture window, but the birdcage is visible on the side, the bird sitting on his perch, head tucked into a wing. Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale.
At least there were two of them.
Felicia is the only person I never felt nervous around, the only person I could do certain things with—shoplift, look up at the stars wit
hout feeling dread—the only person I could go call right now and just start talking like everything was okay and everything would in fact be okay.
Pick up the phone, is all. Go back to being who you were before everything became like this. Nothing happened! You were just at a party and boys chose everyone else, and your best friend stared at you with flat eyes and you walked in the woods and talked to a grandmother. Nothing happened, and yet it feels like something did, because things aren’t the way they were before. It’s like when you come home and your mother has changed the furniture around, and for one instant it’s like you’ve entered the next dimension over: it’s your living room but it’s not your living room. That’s how this feels, like if you tried to sit down, you might find out that the chair is over there.
I do a few turns around the house, holding the wafer of book with my one mitten. Every corner has a downspout, every downspout has a blob of rutted ice around it, and every time I go around, the ice blobs seem to get bigger. Or else I’m getting smaller. In fact, I’ve been feeling smaller than usual ever since I left the school, but I thought it was an illusion caused by carrying such a big, thin book. Inside it, the artist’s alter ego is introducing a young girl to an egg, a string, and a hubcap with a ponytail coming out of it. My own alter ego is in one of the other books—the girl in a pinafore, chasing a hoop through a city everyone else has moved out of.
I let Tammy off her chain and she runs away from me, to the back door. Inside, the kitchen is clanging with brightness.
“She’s grounding you unless it’s really good,” Meg says, pointing the spray nozzle at me.
I go to the dining room doorway and wait to be yelled at.
“Nobody gives a shit one way or the other what I go through,” my mother says, not looking up from her sewing. “Between you and your dad, I’m a wreck.”
“I had Yearbook,” I say.
“You had what?”
“I’m on Yearbook, and you already knew that. I told you but you didn’t listen.”
