by Jo Ann Beard
She squints at me, lips pressed together.
“If you don’t want me to be on it, that’s fine. Just say and I’ll be happy to quit.”
“I don’t care what you’re on or not on—I just want to know ahead of time not to sit here worrying about whether you’re alive or dead or sitting in a goddamned detention hall for behaving over there the way you do over here.” She tugs on a thread, gathering the waistline for a peasant skirt that I had started and abandoned. “What were you doing for the yearbook?”
“Following some kid around while he took pictures, writing down people’s names and stuff like that.”
“All right,” my mother says, holding up the peasant skirt and admiring it. “See? It’s just running a seam and then pulling on the thread—not crazy, but carefully—and there you have it.”
“I have to call somebody,” I say, heading back into the kitchen to the telephone.
Meg has preemptively grabbed the receiver. “First dry the pans,” she says.
I dry them while she watches. The towel is wet but neither of us cares.
“Now scrub the floor,” she says.
I can either beat her brains in with the black skillet or plead. “Give it,” I whimper.
She throws the receiver in my direction but it misses, hits the cupboard, and bounces around on its cord, making a clatter.
“What was that?” my mother calls.
“Meg throwing the phone,” I answer.
“You girls have managed to ruin that telephone,” she yells, “by stretching the cord and throwing the receiver.” We can’t keep anything decent around here. “We can’t keep anything decent around here.” Because of you kids. “Because of you girls.” Hey, but what about Raymond? “Your brother is the only one who listens to me.” Is Dad somehow involved? “And your father doesn’t help matters either—he would never have dreamed of correcting you.” Is it all your job? “I’m the one who’s been expected to do everything from discipline to sitting here on a Monday night after working all day, putting a goddamned waistband on a skirt for someone else.”
“Is she crying?” Meg mouths to me.
“I think so,” I mouth back.
We go stand in the doorway. She lights a cigarette and takes an angry puff, looks away from us.
“We’re sorry,” I say.
“We are,” Meg says.
“We weren’t fighting, we were having fun,” I lie.
“Yeah,” Meg says.
“Don’t have fun with my telephone,” she says wearily. “In fact, stay off it altogether.”
“Mom, I have to make a call! Make me stay off it later, but not right now!” I feel weightless all of a sudden, like there’s no gravity in the dining room. I grab hold of the doorframe and pull myself, hand over hand, back through into the kitchen side of the doorway.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” my mother asks, narrowing her eyes.
“Nobody will let me call somebody I need to call!”
She turns back to her project. I realize now that the problem with the peasant skirt isn’t that the waistband wouldn’t gather right; the problem is that I no longer want to be a peasant.
I grope my way across the kitchen to the phone and dial.
Five rings, and then two people answer at the same time.
“Hello, is Cindy there?” I ask.
“Hang up,” Cindy tells the mother, and the mother hangs up. “God, when I put that note in your locker, these three girls were standing there. Really—do they stare much? That red-haired girl with the little glasses?”
“Debbie Duncan,” I say. “Her locker is by mine.”
“Well, she should stare less, and so should Gina Maroni and that other one, with the really blond hair.”
Dunk, Yawn, and Maroni, all standing at my locker after school when Cindy Falk put a note through the vent. I’m ruined in a thousand different ways now.
“Can you meet us after school tomorrow?” Cindy asks. “We all have to figure out about going to Prospect on Saturday.”
“Oh yeah, I heard about that.”
“Galen Pierce said he’s paying off the cops—he’s rich enough to do it, his dad invented some big thing Caterpillar bought off him for their tractors. Rubber or something.”
Meg is trying to put Saran Wrap around a plastic bowl half-filled with corn. It won’t stick to the bowl at all but sticks to itself completely.
“Wow,” I say.
I try to help by holding one corner of the Sarah Wrap, like a bedsheet. Meg peels another corner off itself and we try to stretch it over the top of the bowl.
“So meet us after cheerleading, and you and me and the other people we want to come will talk about it.”
Please don’t let the other people be Deb Patterson. We try pressing the Saran Wrap edges to themselves, but now they won’t stick. Meg yanks the whole thing off there, wads it up into a ball, and throws it at me.
“Come to the gym, but don’t let Cling see you—anyone she sees waiting for us she gives detention to. Wait behind the tree.”
“What tree?” I grab the Saran Wrap and tear off a piece, which instantly gets tangled. How are we supposed to cover this stupid corn?
“Ha,” Meg says.
“I don’t know—the tree tree. We come out at five. Now I have to go.”
I wad up my Saran Wrap and throw it at Meg just as my mother walks into the kitchen. She picks the ball up and patiently unwads it, stretches it over the bowl, tacks the ends down tightly, opens the refrigerator, rearranges, and sets the bowl on a shelf.
“Saran Wrap is expensive,” she says.
I need to stay home for part of the next day, just until after Shakespeare class is over. I accomplish this by coming downstairs in my nightgown and standing over the heat vent in the kitchen, next to the refrigerator, while my parents make breakfast.
“I don’t feel good,” I say, wrinkling my face.
“Uh-oh,” my dad says, turning the eggs.
“Don’t feel good how?” my mother asks.
“Dizzy,” I say. The heat kicks on, inflating my nightgown.
“Come here,” she orders me, and I go over briefly so she can feel my forehead and stare penetratingly at me. Then I return to the vent. If she believes me, she’ll send me back upstairs to bed; if she doesn’t, she’ll send me to school; if she isn’t sure or if I haven’t tried this for a long time, she’ll put me on the couch and then go to work. My nightgown flares while she considers.
“All right. Go in on the couch.”
Yippee.
I watch Captain Kangaroo with Raymond until he has to leave, and then Tammy and I watch Romper Room, which seems to have a substitute who is sterner and more teacherlike than the other one. Jack LaLanne comes on next and I fall back to sleep so as not to have to look at what happens to his one-piece bodysuit when he does the exercises, and wake up sometime later, when an episode of Lassie is on. This is the original version, which didn’t have Timmy but had Jeff, a tall, fatherless boy with dark circles under his eyes who called his dog with a shrill bird cry: Kee-ah-kee. In the kitchen, my dad clears his throat, stirs his coffee, then gets up and washes the spoon.
In this old version of Lassie, the mother had dark, frizzy hair and the crises were wrenching—farm accidents, twisters, copperheads slithering toward babies. Help, girl, Jeff would cry, wringing his hands. Get help! I close my eyes as my dad goes past me and up the stairs. I hear the attic door open. The old version had a better ending too—instead of lifting her paw and whining at the credits as they roll past, this version shows Lassie bunching up some sheep and moving them down a hillside. Why would he be going up to the attic?
I tiptoe into the kitchen and grab a sweet roll out of a package on the counter and scamper back just as the next show is coming on—Password, which I don’t like, too much tension over things that don’t matter. No reason for him to be going into the attic when the bottle is down here, standing alongside his chair in the kitchen, a paper bag twisted aro
und it. Although he hasn’t hunted for years now, the gun is still up there, hanging on its beam. The shotgun shells that found their way to the cellar are back up there too, hidden under the same gray hat they were always hidden under.
“The password is dreadful,” the announcer whispers.
“Umm, umm,” a man in glasses says to his partner, a woman who used to be famous somehow. “Umm, bad. Filled with”—and he makes a frightened face.
“Horror? Fear? Fright?” she tries. She has on eyeglasses with a chain draping down on either side of her face. I think I remember seeing her in a movie once, where she was blind, trapped in a house.
I can hear thumping around up there. What if the password was sweet roll and I was sitting here eating a sweet roll? When I was young, things like that happened to me all the time, or at least I thought they did. One of the things I used to notice was that just as somebody was saying something, I would be thinking the very same thing, word for word. But then I realized that that’s what hearing is. Hard to describe now, but it was confusing back when I was really little, before I knew there were some things you just accept without thinking about them, like hearing and seeing. I used to lie in bed at night and stare out at the hallway, closing one eye and then the other and watching how the slightly open door would jump back and forth. It took me a long time to decide I wasn’t moving the door with my eyes. No idea what he would be doing up in the attic with me here on the couch.
“The password is steerage.”
That has something to do with a ship. Or maybe I’m thinking of Steerforth, David Copperfield’s best friend, who disappears in the middle of the book and then washes up many chapters later, after a shipwreck, drowned. I hear footsteps on the attic stairs and stuff the rest of the sweet roll into my mouth and chew quickly, eyes closed. He comes downstairs, tiptoes past, and lets himself out the back door. He’s carrying something, it sounds like, but I can’t tell what.
Steerforth actually wasn’t the greatest of guys, but David C. loved him anyway because friends meant everything to him; the chapter where they met was called “I Enlarge My Circle of Acquaintance.” Just in terms of coincidences: the chapter where Steerforth dies was called “Tempest,” and exactly right now is Van Leuven’s class, where The Tempest is being acted out by half the class while the other half watches. Felicia and I were chosen for the audience. I’m starting to feel demented again, sick of that giant sweet roll and sick of game shows.
The password is misery.
I roll off the couch and follow Tammy, who has jumped up on a chair to watch my dad out the dining room window. It’s the bird’s window, and he gets excited and starts hopping from pillar to post, sliding down the bars, gnawing his cuttlebone, all the while turning his head back and forth to watch us out of both eyes.
Outside, my father is sitting at our picnic table putting on what he brought down from the attic—trout-fishing boots, hip-high waders made of thick green rubber. As he flips the canvas suspenders over his shoulders and fastens them, he seems to be talking to Curly, who has come out of his doghouse and is listening warily from the end of his chain. My dad has been taking care of him while Milly is in California, filling the cake pan once a day and pushing it into the dirt circle. On the picnic table is a pair of big suede work gloves and Tammy’s leash.
He’s going to try to walk him.
Forget the gun, this is suicide by dog—I can’t think what to do except call my mom and get her to stop him, but before I can move, he steps into range and Curly’s face retracts, leaving nothing but teeth. Tammy stands up on the chair and then sits down again, whining. Help, girl!
Where my dad grew up, nobody ever kept a dog chained. It was on a highway that now extends forever across the state but back then only went as far as their town, and people from the city would drive out to the end of the road to dump their animals. Old blind collie dogs, puppies, cats with whole litters of kittens, mongrels that had stood barking at the ends of chains all their lives and that suddenly were free to run loose with their own kind. People didn’t make a big deal of it—they put out scraps from their tables, tucked straw under their porches for them, and shot them when they thought they needed to be shot. Spud, Bud, Bingo, Old Crip, Big Gyp, Little Kip—I know their names and their personalities as well as I know my uncles from that side of the family. My dad basically grew up like Huck Finn; although not that close to the Mississippi, not that far from it either. Fifteen miles or so.
He takes a step, and Curly attacks him at the ankles and calves. Amazingly, the boots withstand it, and after a moment the dog retreats, head down, hackles up. Another step and it happens again, attack and retreat. At the next step, there’s a lunge but no bite. At the next step, nothing. Just standing there on his bowlegs, chest heaving. Still talking, my dad tosses Tammy’s leash back into our yard, then slowly reaches down, unclips the heavy chain from the tree, and winds it around his gloved hand as Curly backs up, pressing his thick haunches into the doorway of his house and crouching there, half in and half out.
It’s like pulling a car, getting him out of the dirt circle. It’s been twelve years since he went beyond the two feet between where his chain reaches and the slanted doors to Milly’s cellar. To him, it’s probably like being dragged through the TV into the actual show—ears pitched far back on his head in a way I’ve never seen them, legs braced as my father tugs him along, inch by inch. As they cross the yard, the bird gets more and more excited, swinging energetically back and forth. Tammy whines as they pass out of sight and races into the living room, where she jumps up on the back of the couch to watch out the front window for them.
When they appear again, Curly is out ahead, hauling a tall man in hip waders through a shrub and down a terrace. The man has a look on his face I’ve never seen before, one that makes him seem like someone else’s father altogether. He looks happy, leaning backward as the dog strains forward, into the world.
From the dining room comes the sound of the bird singing.
An hour later, I call my mom. “I’m better and I came to school,” I say. “Can you tell them?”
“Put them on,” she says. “But tell me first—when did your dad leave?”
“I don’t know, just sometime,” I say. “Here.”
Mrs. Knorr, the school secretary, takes the phone and listens for a moment. “If you could follow up with a note tomorrow, we’d appreciate it,” she says, leaning on the counter, pausing to listen. “Oh, you wouldn’t believe the stuff that gets pulled.” Another pause. “If there weren’t ears standing right next to me, I’d tell you one from just this morning,” she says, eyeing me. The principal walks in and Mrs. Knorr straightens up. “We do appreciate your cooperation,” she says politely, and then hangs up.
The principal is a small man who walks the halls at least once every day, greeting kids with his suit coat off. “Mrs. Knorr,” he says now, “what can we do for this young lady?”
“She’s coming late,” she answers. “I just spoke with the mother.”
“Well, let’s get her on her way,” he urges with a wide smile.
Turning a furious pink, she yanks open a drawer, pulls out a tablet of already signed permission slips, scrawls “Late arrival—please accept student,” tears it off, slaps it down on the counter in front of me, and turns on her heel.
“Mrs. Knorr does just about everything around here,” the principal says nervously, picking up the slip and reading it with a nod of approval before handing it over.
“Thank you,” I say, hightailing it out of there before one of them realizes she didn’t put a name, date, or time on it.
I skulk around for fifteen minutes, walking the same halls I walked last night, past the same sullen lockers, past the music room, where now a whole class is standing on risers singing “Up, Up and Away.” I go to my locker and collect my health book and a note folded into a triangle, then hide in an alcove to wait for the bell. The note is on graph paper and is from Gretchen Quist. It is a bunch of random dots pla
ced here and there with “See you after cheerleading!” and “Connect these dots while your waiting!” written at the bottom, along with her name and a collection of circles and oblongs arranged to look like a bunny.
When the bell goes off, I stay in my alcove and watch people pass by for three and a half minutes. There they all go, male, female, large, small, cute, uncute, from the popular to the shunned, all animals in the same circus, trooping back to their cages. The warning bell is a brief blast, people scurry, at the last moment a straggler runs by, losing his books and papers, and I slip around the corner into health class.
Being more or less meaningless, this class is taught by a student teacher, Miss Nagy, who talks about hygiene in a forceful way to prove that we shouldn’t be nervous about it. At the last class she showed a filmstrip about why people sweat and what to do about it, surprising everyone at the end by passing around little sample bottles of Ban roll-on for us to put in our gym lockers and use. Yawn is in this class, but I can’t bring myself to turn around to wave at her.
Today’s topic is irresponsible social behavior, and the film projector is set up; that’s a good sign. Nagy runs through an outline that’s already been written on the board, using a pointer and making it interesting by supplying stories about people from her hometown who had things happen to them through bad judgment: a girl who dove into a pond that was only two feet deep, a boy who carried a firecracker and a cigarette lighter in the same pocket, another boy who tried to spray-paint his girlfriend’s name on a highway overpass by hanging upside-down.
No matter how I try to connect the dots in Gretchen’s note, nothing that looks like anything appears; she didn’t number them, which is why. Once the film starts going, Miss Nagy creeps up to crouch next to my desk.
“Do you have a permission slip?” she whispers.
“What?” I whisper back.
The film is so loud the voices are distorted. She runs to the projector, turns it down, and comes back to crouch again. “You need a slip if you’re on the absence list, don’t you?” She sounds uncertain.
