In Zanesville

by Jo Ann Beard

  “Um,” I whisper, eyes on the screen, where a group of girls is gathered in a school corridor, also whispering. “I went to the office and Mrs. Knorr just told me to go to class.”

  “I thought you needed a signature or I couldn’t let you in,” she whispers, staring at the screen. Now there are boys in the film corridor, roughhousing; the whole big group of them is making plans for a party.

  “Should I go back and tell Mrs. Knorr she has to give me a permission slip?” I ask. On the screen a boy student is seen slipping a bottle from his parents’ liquor cabinet and holding it inside his coat.

  Nagy bites her thumbnail. “No, it’s okay,” she whispers, getting up and fading to the back of the room as the boy’s father gives him a lecture, putting an arm across his shoulder while holding a cigarette and a highball glass in the other hand. The mother comes out of the kitchen and looks worriedly from one to the other, but then swallows her misgivings and waves as the boy leaves the house.

  Good luck ever seeing that kid again.

  A tap on my shoulder and a note arrives, passed up the line from Yawn.

  Hey Chikita: Everybody wonders where you been??? Wait for me after!!!! Luv, Jan p.s. We’re all going to Flea’s tonight—can you come?? p.p.s. This film is rediculus (sp?)

  Followed by a hand in front of an open mouth.

  On the screen, the kids convene in a parking lot and pool the bottles they collected from home. Before long they’re glugging it down, boys and girls alike, lurching into one another and spilling all over their clothes from the 1950s. One girl, with a little chiffon scarf tied around her neck, clambers up and does the Watusi on a parked car, then falls into the arms of a waiting boy. Another girl sits on the ground in the middle of her big round skirt, mascara running down her face as she sobs, taking belts from a flask.

  Jan—I been around! Today busy after school—dang! But see ya later! p.s. This party* looks like fun! *in the film

  Followed by a drawing of me as a bird, wearing a string tie.

  I fold it into a triangle and send it backward just as the Galen Pierce kid drunkenly challenges the kid from the beginning to a drag race. The girls have lost all control and either are hanging on the boys, begging them to stop, or have thrown aside their cardigan sweaters and are cheering them on suggestively. What the film doesn’t understand is that people in our grade don’t drag-race; we can’t even drive yet.

  The bell ends up ringing before it’s over, right when the kid from the beginning crashes into a tree and is thrown from his father’s car, along with a girl who jumped in at the last minute for kicks. They don’t show the wreck, just the dungareed heap that is the boy and then the girl, lying on her side in the grass with her head resting on one outstretched arm, her pale, scuffed face superimposed on the people in the first row as they collect their books and file out.

  I feel like I remember her from somewhere.

  Behind me, Yawn waits for the aisle to clear. I am kneeling to get my stuff out from under my desk—I’m still carrying around the big, flat art book for some reason, it’s my new chest protector—when it comes to me suddenly, what it is about the girl. It isn’t her face or her haystack bouffant, but the way they’ve arranged her, like Steerforth when David Copperfield found him washed up onshore, cold and still, lying with his head upon an outstretched arm, the way Davy had seen him so many times at school.

  Yawn gets to my desk right as I stand, but she keeps moving, chin lifted, eyes straight ahead.

  Just like that, I Reduce My Circle of Acquaintance.

  Instead of haunting the halls, I go to Ringgold’s class after school to tell him something before realizing I sort of can’t talk. Not that it matters, since he isn’t there, although his room is wide open, so I go sit at one of the tables for a while, clearing my throat and looking through his stack of books. When I try using my voice, all that comes out is a strangulated croak. Everything is abandoning me in the same week.

  One of his books has nothing in it but black-and-white photographs of architecture and monuments, intermingled with writing. A wedge-shaped building in New York City, parting traffic like a rock in a stream, a foreign temple with a soufflélike dome, a leaning tower—not of pizza, it turns out, but of Pisa—and a lot of other things as well, castles, cathedrals, men sitting on girders amid clouds, modern houses built into rock faces. One looks slightly like the Melchers’ house down the street.

  Suddenly, whether I want to or not, I’m remembering our kittens from last summer: Ruffles, Blacky Strout, and Freckles. Flea crying as she carried her half of the box through Monroe Park, me hammering on Lisa and Trent’s door, the dark and fumy garage, Trent’s pajama bottoms, Lisa’s nightgown with the porch light shining through it, the foaming little creature she held up to her cheek for a moment. If only he were still alive somehow, living with the two of them, curled up on the blue patchwork afghan alongside Daniel, their big, quiet baby.

  Out of nowhere, Van Leuven appears, gliding through the doorway before coming to a halt. “Oh!” she blurts out. “Is Phil here?”

  “Khkkuh,” I croak.

  She looks different somehow than usual, looser and messier, her blouse untucked and knotted at her waist, hair pulled back so her cameo earrings are visible. “That’s right, you missed today,” she says, recovering herself. “Laryngitis?”

  “Kkuh,” I cough out.

  “Well, we had a lively reading of Shakespeare, which you would have appreciated; maybe your friend can tell you about it.”

  I nod.

  “Mr. Ringgold says you’re quite interested in art,” she mentions, tugging at her knotted blouse and then straightening her skirt.

  I nod.

  “Is he around, do you know?” she asks.

  I shake my head.

  “Well, I was just seeing if he had something,” she says vaguely. She keeps standing there for a moment, not looking like herself, and then glides back out the way she came.

  A minute later, Ringgold shows up, juggling tempera jars and some dirty brushes. “Mural repair,” he explains, stopping to glance at the book I have open. “Oh yes: the twentieth century is to architecture what the Renaissance was to painting.”

  I nod.

  “Ever seen a skyscraper?” he asks.

  I shake my head.

  “Well, it looks like you’ll be able to—I just got approval for a field trip to the Art Institute. All people need are eight dollars and a sack lunch. How does that sound?”

  Forget it for me. I have three dollars to my name.

  “Great,” I croak out.

  My voice is back! This puts me nearly in a good mood.

  “You’ll see what wonders the elevator has wrought when you lay eyes on downtown Chicago. Mies van der Rohe apartments; the Marina City towers, which look like big ears of shucked corn; the John Hancock Center, a thousand feet and not topped out yet. Even the blasted old Civic Center—we’ll get the driver to go by there—has got a Picasso sculpture out front,” he tells me, lifting the window and whisking his bouquet of brushes stiffly back and forth to get the excess water out. His hair flies around as he does it.

  I want to tell him something but I can’t be sure whether my voice is really there without testing it. “Kkchck,” I say. “I came up with an idea for a project.”

  The whole past hour, sitting out gym, I worked on a plan, based on one of the paintings in the book I borrowed. Instead of Loplop introducing a young girl, a young girl is going to introduce Loplop, and I’d like to use my own bird as Loplop.

  “A bird like a bird?” he asks.

  “Max Ernst drew the bird but used real things to represent the girl,” I explain, showing him. “So I’d draw the girl but use a real thing as the bird.”

  “I think it’s said Mox Ernst,” he murmurs, looking closely at the painting in the book—Loplop in his sly, perky bow tie, presenting the ponytail, the egg, the red blob in a bottle—and then at my drawing of a flat panel with a girl figure on it, one hand reaching to hold
a nail, from which a wire basket hangs. “How would you make this cagelike thing?”

  “It’s an egg basket with a lid, and I’ve already put my bird in it before and he likes it. I used to carry him around the block in it, so he could have a change of scenery.”

  I know it seems ridiculous—it’s just a project for school—but this is all giving me a weird surge of comfort every time I think about it. Of using one of the blacksmith nails from the garage, of prying the hubcap off my old blue doll buggy, of painting a girl on a piece of wood, of wiring a perch into the egg basket, of getting the bird out of the house for a while.

  “Uh-huh,” Ringgold says excitedly, running his hands through his hair and then leaving it like that. “I don’t want to say much more at this point except remember these names: Gorky, Klee, Duchamp, others that I’ll talk about on the bus. Chagall, whose use of the ethereal will blow your mind.”

  I’m almost starting to wish I could go on his trip. It’s turning dark outside, nearing time for cheerleading practice to be over. For a moment Ringgold stares at himself in the window, a man standing amid chaos. Leaning easels, jars bristling with brushes, his own upended hair. He clears his throat, as though there’s something he wants to say, but then busies himself stacking drawings.

  Everyone is over at Felicia’s now, probably all sitting around her room, eating Ding Dongs, which her mom always buys. They keep them in the freezer, and sometimes when we used to feel mean we’d throw them at Stephanie, frozen aluminum-foiled hockey pucks. She couldn’t complain because technically we were giving her Ding Dongs.

  As I collect my things, Ringgold lifts off his denim apron and hangs it on a hook. Underneath it, there is yellow paint on his shirt. He seems to want to say something, but he’s having trouble; it’s turning him pink.

  “Miss Van Leuven may help chaperone!” he blurts out finally, ears aflame, and then turns and disappears into his closet.

  I have no idea which tree Cindy Falk meant, but I pick one and wait behind it, keeping an eye out for Cling, the cheerleading coach. It’s not quite dark yet, the sky a royal, ethereal blue. Until Ringgold said it out loud, I always thought ethereal would be pronounced ether-real, like what it means: something foggy and atmospheric, like ether, but also real, like in this case the sky. On that same subject, Max Ernst is pronounced Mox. Somehow I’m sensing someone else out here, passing behind trees just as I turn to look, Loplop sneaking up on a young girl.

  Man, is it cold.

  There’s the northern star, like an earring, and there’s Jupiter or something, like another earring. There’s the big round window above the banks of doors, glowing yellow from the gym lights. On the street side of the tree, where I’m standing, a variety of things have been carved into the bark, the word TIT appearing several times, probably because it’s easy to carve.

  When the gym doors pop open, the first one out is Coach Cling, who briefly scans the vicinity for hangers-on before shouldering her duffle and heading to the teacher’s parking lot. The cheerleaders stand on the steps talking.

  Am I supposed to go up there?

  “You’re behind the wrong tree,” Cindy calls out suddenly, interrupting their conversation. “Cling could’ve seen you if she wasn’t blind as an idiot.”

  When I step from behind the tree, Gretchen holds her arms out toward me and whimpers, like a toddler who wants to be picked up. “Me, me!” she says appealingly.

  Kathy and Cathy give little waves and keep talking while Patterson tips her head to the side and purses her mouth for a moment, before remembering: Oh yeah, it’s you.

  Yeah, it’s you too, you royal asshole.

  “Hi,” I say.

  Cindy Falk is as tall as Felicia; I had forgotten that. “I’m sweating like a hog,” she reports, flapping her jacket.

  They’re all overheated from whatever Cling was having them do—everyone has on an unbuttoned peacoat and a striped scarf. I’m wearing Meg’s pea jacket over two sweaters, which makes it more or less fit if I keep my hands in the pockets; if I don’t, the sleeves go down to my ankles. My scarf is striped too, but wrongly. It’s made of variegated yarn, so the red stripe is really several different shades of red and the blue stripe several shades of blue, giving an overall impression of blurred purple. Nobody at John Deere wears purple if they can help it, but I can’t, because my mother made it and because I actually chose the yarn without realizing what I was doing.

  “Gay!” Patti calls, and a moment later Galen Pierce materializes, coatless except for a hooded sweatshirt. There’s a boy with him, still in the shadows, wearing a dark stocking cap and a denim farm jacket. There’s something about the wide, flat planes of the boy’s face that reminds me of a cow, in a good way.

  Galen grabs Patti and tries to jump on her back. She screams and takes a few staggering steps before dumping him off sideways. They pull on each other’s clothes, laughing, and then Galen grabs her by the head and Patti slugs him for real. He leaps away and she follows.

  “Galen Pierce,” Cindy says. “Either tell us about the stupid party or get lost.”

  “Tell her to get off me,” Galen protests, laughing.

  “You get off me!” Patti cries, jumping on him this time.

  He walks around in a circle, her legs around his waist. “Saturday night at nine in the pavilion, everybody meet. There’ll be a keg bought by me and got by Hector”—he tips his head in the direction of the other kid, who nods—“and there might be a fight around midnight, we don’t know.”

  “He’s paying off the cops!” Patti adds, kicking him in the side like a pony. He jumps, then squeezes her thighs until she screams. They gallop around in a circle.

  The other boy drifts forward, his eyes on me. “Me and Galen’re toting wood up there all week, two armloads a night. For a bonfire.” He has a soft, lilting voice and a slight hillbilly accent. Bon-fahr, he pronounced it.

  “Do you go to our school?” Cindy asks him.

  He laughs, still looking at me.

  “He just got out of Red Rock,” Galen grunts, hoisting Patti up higher on his back. She puts her hands over his eyes.

  Red Rock Farm is a reform school on the edge of town.

  “I was framed,” the boy says, grinning at me.

  Kathy does a handstand up against the building, resting her heels lightly against the brick. Cathy stands back to assess. “I guess arch your back a little,” she advises.

  “Don’t arch your back,” Cindy interjects. “Cling has no idea what she’s talking about.”

  The boy shifts his eyes to the upside-down Kathy for a moment and then back to me. “What kind of beer do you like?” he asks.

  On the landing leading down to our basement is a case of brown bottles with red and gold labels. They say something, but I can’t remember what. He watches me think.

  “Any,” I say finally.

  At Red Rock, the boys learn how to farm whether they want to or not. All the grade schools take field trips out there so the children can see a working farm and what happens to boys who won’t mind. I remember it was a lot cleaner than other farms, and everything was labeled, not just hooks where tools were to be hung, but everything. The water spigot outside the horse barn had a sign above it that said OUTSIDE WATER SPIGOT. The kid takes a step forward, pulling off his black cap and stuffing it into a pocket; he has a cowlick like a boy and sideburns like a man. Gray eyes, no gloves.

  “That’s a good brand,” he says.

  Hector. It means something, but I can’t remember what. Drewrys, that’s the beer they drink. Too late to say it.

  Cindy drops her gym bag, tucks in her shirt, and kicks up into a handstand. She doesn’t rest her feet on the building but hovers sturdily in midair, demonstrating how you don’t arch your back except a little. “See?” She’s speaking to her hands, but everyone nods, including me. “You have to reach up through your feet. Imagine someone is dangling you by the ankles.”

  Patterson breaks off from the handstand group to ask the Hector kid a
question. “Can you get us lime vodka?”

  He ignores her, taking his hat out of his pocket, giving it a shake, and putting it back on.

  “Can you?” she asks again.

  “You don’t want that,” he says to me.

  Galen has Patti against a tree now, the one I was hiding behind earlier, and is kissing her madly, as a joke. She’s kissing him madly back, also as a joke, but then all of a sudden she hooks a leg around him and he starts pushing against her in a realistic, involuntary-looking way.

  Patterson looks me up and down, head tipped to the side. “Cute scarf,” she says finally. “Is it purple?”

  Imagine someone is dangling you by the ankles.

  “Is it?” she asks again.

  “Not really,” I say to the boy.

  One of the Red Rock kids escaped on a tractor a few years back, driving across fields and through fences all the way to the Mississippi, parking along Shore Drive and disappearing forever, either onto the interstate or into the current. That could be this kid, in his faded farmer coat and black cap, bare hands on the steering wheel, hauling along at two miles an hour, trailing barbed wire and posts. Another memory from the visit to Red Rock in sixth grade: a sign over a hook in the toolroom that read BOBWIRE CRIMPS. It had struck me, even as a twelve-year-old, that a hayseed had written the sign.

  Patti wrenches free from Galen, who stands there with a dazed, sleepy expression on his face as she collects her gym bag. “Tell Felicia about the party,” she commands me, and then grabs Galen by the hood of his sweatshirt and pulls him away into the night.

  The boy looks after them uncertainly and then takes a step backward. Wait, don’t leave.

  “Nothing against your friend Fellatio, but do not tell her about the party,” Cindy interjects, wrapping her scarf around her neck. She looks relaxed and clear eyed from being upside down. “Because not everyone can come—that’s basically what a party is. Some can come and some can’t.”

  “I’m pretty sure she already knows about it,” I say.