In Zanesville

by Jo Ann Beard

I can’t tell if the boy Hector is leaving or not. He looks like someone you’d never notice, not tall, not short.

  “People can know,” Patterson explains. “They just can’t come if they’re not invited.”

  “I don’t think you can stop people from coming to a bonfire in the middle of a closed park on a Saturday night,” I inform her. My voice comes out sharper than I intended, and Deb and Cindy stare at me. “I mean, can you? It would be hard.”

  They consider this.

  “True,” Cindy admits.

  Hector is fading away, out of the gym lights and into the darkness.

  “We should wear our cheerleading jackets,” Cindy says suddenly, and they all nod. “Since there might be people there from across the river.” She turns to me. “You can wear Gretchen’s last year’s. Everything’s the same but the cuffs.”

  A cheerleader jacket! Belonging to Gretchen Quist, who is my same size, so I won’t have to twist my sister’s long, long arm to get her peacoat and then keep my hands in my pockets all night, or wear my own crappy CPO and freeze.

  “Three people can say they’re staying at my house. I’ll tell my parents we’re going to a party but not what it is,” Cindy goes on. “And here are the three.”

  She narrows her eyes, considering each of us in turn.

  It’s all the way night now and Hector has disappeared completely, leaving just us here, five girls watching Cindy Falk button her coat. Out on the street, a pizza delivery car creeps along with its dome light on, the guy inside trying to read something. Felicia and I ordered pizzas a few times and had them sent to the house of the parochial school kid, the one we used to spy on last summer through his bedroom window. Half-pepperoni and half-cheese, to make it seem specific.

  “Maybe just two people,” Cindy says, lifting her black hair and settling it around her shoulders. “You and you.”

  Gretchen and me.

  “I couldn’t anyway,” Patterson blurts out. “I meant to say: I have church choir the next morning.”

  “Perfect then,” Cindy says lightly.

  Usually after we ordered pizza for the parochial kid, we’d walk over and sit behind the bushes across the street, waiting to see what they’d do when it showed up. A couple of times his mother paid and they ate it. Those were the good old days.

  There’s a one-sided fight going on when I get home, my dad sitting on a kitchen chair drunk, badgering my mother and my sister, who are in there trying to make cupcakes for some high school thing.

  “I’ll say this about that!” he keeps shouting.

  “I hope you were at Yearbook,” my mother says. “That’s what I was telling myself.”

  “This about that!” he shouts.

  “What?” I ask her.

  “I said, ‘This about that!’ ” Even louder.

  “Not you,” my mother says to my dad. “I said, ‘I hope you were at Yearbook,’ and just ignore him.”

  “Oh,” I answer. And then, even though it won’t do any good: “Please make him shut up.”

  “I’ll say this about that!” Louder still, fists clenched.

  “Dad!” Meg cries. She’s trying to frost a cupcake that isn’t cool yet, and the top keeps peeling off. “Get out of here! Everyone in this house is sick of you!”

  “Well,” he mumbles, unclenching his fists and staring at his palms. One of them has a long scar on it, from a childhood accident with an old wood cookstove. “Look at that!” he murmurs, aghast, holding the melted palm out toward my mother.

  “Oh, please!” my mother says.

  “I have to take these tomorrow!” Meg cries, throwing the spatula across the room, where it slides down the side of the refrigerator on a trail of pink frosting. She runs out of the room, up the stairs, and into our bedroom, slamming the door.

  “Now why don’t you start throwing a fit,” my mother says to me.

  “Can’t I even just walk in the house without being yelled at?” I ask, collecting the two ruined cupcakes on a plate.

  My father bends his fingers over the stiff palm to make a fist and then tests it by pounding the table.

  “Leave those alone,” my mother says, taking the plate from my hand and putting it on the counter.

  “Goddamn it!” he cries, pounding again, and then sits back to glare at us.

  “Why?”

  “Because I just said it,” she answers. “You can eat dinner like a civilized person.”

  “I ate at school.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know, they fed us.”

  “I’ll say this about that!”

  “Fed you what?”

  “Pizza.”

  “I’LL SAY…”

  “I heard what you said, you goddamned idiot!” she screams, standing over him with a cake-decorating tool, the one that looks like a giant metal syringe. “Drive me crazy all you want—nobody has an ounce of respect for me! But look at what you’re doing to your kids!”

  Tammy jumps down from my father’s lap.

  “See?” I say to him. “Even your own dog is sick of you.”

  “You can get out of my hair too,” she shouts. “Now! Get upstairs.”

  “What did I do?” I ask, collecting the cupcakes and heading out of the kitchen, past Tammy, who has stopped to lick the frosting off the refrigerator.

  Meg is sitting in bed with a book open and her eyes on the ceiling, trying to memorize something. There’s a line down the middle of the bedroom, where my clean expanse ends and her rubble begins. I offer her one of the wrinkled cupcakes but she doesn’t want it.

  “Is she making the rest of them?” she asks.

  “Trying to. She almost hit him with a metal thing,” I report. “These are good.”

  “I wish she would hit him,” Meg says. “It doesn’t matter how good they are. They’re for a bake sale, so it only matters what they look like. And they look like a mound of pink shit in a cupcake paper.”

  “I think she’s putting white squiggles on the rest of them,” I mention.

  “What?” Meg cries. “I don’t want anything on them!” She jumps up and runs out, slamming the door just as the phone rings.

  The telephone is on my side of the room, sitting on the dresser with its cord in a neat coil next to it. Nobody downstairs will answer because of the bellowing.

  “Hello?”

  Silence.

  “Hello?”

  Silence. Muffled sounds in the background, of cars, or of people talking.

  Suddenly, I know it’s him, Hector, standing at the pay phone next to—where?—maybe the Dairy Mart, while Galen is inside shoplifting. Standing on the Dairy Mart corner with his cap off and his cold hands in his pockets, the receiver pressed to his shoulder, cars going past on Elm Ave. My heart begins pounding with the strangeness of it all; nobody has ever prank phone-called me before, and I don’t know what to do.

  Silence.

  I set the phone back in the cradle.

  In the dresser mirror, my face looks the same, but I feel something happening around me, some change as palpable as weather. Stuck in the mirror are mementos from my childhood—red and yellow ribbons for various underachievements, a brown corsage from grade school graduation, a curling and faded picture of me petting a deer in Wisconsin—which is now over. I wandered through it and came out the other side.

  It’s a stark feeling. Like getting to the last page of a book and seeing “The End.” Even if you didn’t like the story that much, or your childhood, you read it, you lived it. And now it’s over, book closed, that long-ago deer you petted in the Dells as dead as the one in The Yearling.

  I go across the hall and knock.

  “What?” Raymond asks through his door. There’s a thumping from downstairs and then some surprised yelling and another thump. If my dad gets frustrated enough, he’ll start lunging from his chair, trying to grab at my mom.

  “I have a present for you,” I tell Ray, and he lets me in.

  His room is smaller than ours, but
better. It has a complicated closet, with slanted walls and a steeply pitched floor; a four-poster double bed, which he’s run three pieces of clothesline around so it looks like a boxing ring; outlets on all four walls, each with its own nightlight; and a metal box under the window with a fire escape ladder in it, the only one in the house. We all seem to understand that if anything bad were to happen, he’s the one who should make it out alive.

  “These are good,” he says through the cupcake.

  He’s taken his bottom dresser drawer out, turned it over, and thrown an old braided rug over it to create a hilly terrain for his army men, some of them standing up and some fallen over, all of them frozen in the throes of combat.

  “It’s the Battle of San Juan Hill,” he explains. “All the men try to get up any way they can, but they’re shot down.”

  “Where’s G.I. Joe when you need him?” I joke.

  “He’s in the cave,” he answers, pointing to the space the dresser drawer normally occupies. Sure enough, G.I. Joe is in there conferring with a bendable Tonto.

  “Would you go down and get me some Jell-O?”

  “Dad’s yelling,” he says, moving his men around.

  “He won’t yell at you.”

  He moves a man so his bayonet is just touching another man’s back. “Can’t you?” he asks miserably.

  “No, I told her I already ate and she believed me.”

  “She did?”

  The hollering gets louder while he’s down there, which I feel bad about. There’s the sound of a scuffle, my sister crying out and my mother’s shrill voice, berating my father, who bellows again. A minute later, Raymond comes back with a bowl of red Jell-O and a dinner roll with butter.

  “Did you get a cupcake?”

  He shakes his head and kneels next to his brown braided hill, staring at his men. While I’m eating my Jell-O, he starts to cry soundlessly, still playing, using the man with the bayonet to gently push all the other men over, until the whole army is defeated, and then he crawls under the bottom rope and gets in bed with his clothes on.

  “It’s okay,” I say.

  He grimaces, crying silently with his eyes closed. “I know,” he whispers.

  “Want me to tell you a story?”

  He shakes his head. “Not right now,” he whispers, so quietly I can barely hear him.

  Just then the phone rings. Out the door, across the hall, into our room, and I grab it on the second ring. My heart is surging and stalling in my chest; I can’t collect enough breath to say hello. Silence again over background noise, this time a distant, canned roar that sounds like television laughter. A television?

  “Hello,” I say.

  The clattering of applause, and then Stephanie’s voice in the background, demanding to turn the channel, followed by the phone being hung up.

  Oh.

  Of course.

  I look at myself in the mirror. Why did I think it was that boy? He doesn’t even know my name, and probably neither does Galen. Plus, I look like this. The person who prank phone called me is the only person I would care to talk to right now, but for some reason I can’t. It isn’t because Jed Jergestaad likes her and it isn’t because Cindy Falk doesn’t. It’s something else.

  On my dresser is a neat stack of books, The Tempest on top, with a painting on its cover of a storm-tossed ship. The rigging looks as fragile as a ship in a bottle, the wave rising up over the wooden deck like a gray petticoat. What I never saw before is the tiny man clinging to the mast, and all the other tiny men sliding into the water.

  The shouting never stops, so I have to sleep with Raymond, whose bed is filled with what seems like sand. I bring my art book and he brings a handful of soldiers, and we keep the light on for a long time. I try to figure out what there is about the skyscrapers that Ringgold is so enthusiastic about—they just look like buildings to me. Maybe if I had the eight dollars and actually went on his field trip and saw them close up, but something tells me they would still look like buildings. I fall asleep at some point and dream that I’m standing under one of the lacy legs of the Eiffel Tower. Van Leuven is there, handing out valentines to everyone. “Sit down,” she says as she gives each person a valentine. The girl next to me has hung hers from her ears. Stephanie is there, wearing my old blue pajamas, and the deaf janitor’s assistant is there, carrying his bucket over his arm like a purse. “Look at the wonders the elevator has wrought,” someone says, and then I’m in an elevator, going up very fast. Across from me is the girl with hearts hanging from her ears. Suddenly everything starts shaking. “The elevator has rot,” she cries, and I know we’re going to die.

  It’s Ray, pushing on me. “You’re dreaming,” he whispers. When I don’t open my eyes, he gets up and turns the light off, climbs back under the rope, gathers up as many men as he can find, and then settles back down. When I open my eyes, the room has been cast into eeriness, dark on top but bright along the baseboards. Silence from downstairs. On the other pillow, Ray sleeps curled on his side clutching an army man next to his face, the plastic bayonet just touching his bottom lip. He used to be in love with a stuffed reindeer with a vinyl face, which he carried everywhere. My parents finally reasoned it away by talking him into storing it with the Christmas decorations one year. All spring and all summer he asked for updates on when it would be Christmas, and then gradually, by sometime in the fall, he had forgotten. When the reindeer was finally lifted ceremoniously from the box of balls and tinsel, Raymond held it awkwardly for a while, but you could see that something had changed, and when no one was paying attention, he set it down and never picked it up again.

  I wonder where that stuffed reindeer is. Back in the attic, probably, with the gun and the hip waders and the contraption I saw once when I was cleaning up there with my mother—a pink rubber thing that looked like a hot-water bottle with a hose that had a bulb on the end of it, stored in a flat white box stamped with a sprig of lilacs. Lilacs are usually a signal that you’re dealing with feminine hygiene, but this looked more medical than menstrual.

  “Mom, what is this?” I said, carrying it to where she sat on an old mattress, smoking cigarettes and sorting through pictures.

  She lifted the lid, took a look, and then set it behind her on the bed. “I’ll have to think about that and tell you later,” she answered.

  In other words, figure it out for yourself.

  I’m tired of figuring things out for myself! Just tell me what the stupid contraption is. Just tell me why I look like this, feel like this, behave like this. Why am I awake when everyone else is asleep, and what if that boy doesn’t know any better and ends up liking me? The same way Patti didn’t know any better and invited Felicia and me to her slumber party, thereby ruining our friendship.

  The very word slumber makes you tired. The perfect combination of slump and lumber, something that is dead to the world. I wish I were dead to the world, or the world were dead to me. Something. Because recently everything seems too alive, especially the boy Hector, with his naked what-seemed-like admiration. What if I end up marrying him and on the wedding night my mother hands over the contraption in the attic?

  The heat kicks on, the house exhaling its hot breath. Over there on his pillow, Raymond squints in his sleep, dreaming whatever he dreams about, men crawling across braided rugs. Over here on my pillow, I’m finally starting to slide away from it all, my body taking my head with it. Hector. It means something, but I can’t remember what.

  What does hector mean? I ask the unknown somebody. No answer, but then just as I’m falling asleep another memory floats up from the long-ago visit to Red Rock Farm: Being last in a line of kids trooping past a pen full of pigs, and there was a boy in there washing them, using a broom dipped in soapy water. He had jumbled teeth, red hair, and, when he turned, a hand-lettered sign pinned to the back of his coat. BULLY, it said.

  It’s embarrassing to think about now, but when I was in about second grade, my parents held my birthday party at Prospect Point, right in the shel
ter where this Saturday night’s beer party will be held. I have a picture of it, all little girls wearing dresses and patent leather shoes, our hair frizzed and held down with bows and headbands, everyone smiling with me in the middle, posing the way I always did back then, grinning into my own shoulder. I know I’m not cute, that pose seemed to say, but I’m still having fun at this party.

  If only I could resurrect that attitude, put it on just for the night, like Gretchen Quist’s cheerleader jacket. It’s how Martha Van Dalle lives her whole life—our most popular girl, who is wild and tubby and likes everyone, including herself, it seems. The thing is, you should like yourself if you’re Martha Van Dalle, a girl who first of all ran a pair of giant underpants up the school flagpole and second of all turned herself in when someone else got caught for it.

  I was framed, Hector said, about being sent to Red Rock.

  Me in my little blue dress with the see-through sleeves. I’m still having fun at this party.

  * * *

  Ringgold breaks the news to me on Thursday that I can’t use my real bird as part of my art project. I’m hiding out during lunch, helping him prep canvases for the eighth graders to paint on.

  “I thought I argued it pretty successfully, but in the end, it was no,” Ringgold says regretfully. “It turns out there’s a rule about having animals in school.”

  Somebody should tell that to the frogs in the science closet. The flat white paint we’re using to prep the canvases is called gesso. I’m learning everything from Ringgold, good old teacher who lets me hang around his room even when he isn’t here. Not that other teachers wouldn’t—they all get excited if they think you like their subject—but who would want to hang around a civics room or a science lab, when you can come in here and figure out what else to put in the wire egg basket you’re going to hang from your painting. If it can’t be my real bird, can it be a drawing of a bird? A picture of a bird cut out of a magazine? The word BIRD written on a piece of paper?

  “Why not for now just keep your mind open to possibilities,” Ringgold says. “Remember, in a little over a week you’ll be seeing things in the Art Institute of Chicago that could—or actually will— trigger new ideas.”