Exes

by Max Winter

  And little Timmy DeWolf, who dressed like Tom Cruise in Risky Business, then Tom Cruise in Top Gun, and now Tom Cruise in Cocktail or Rain Man, maybe. Or maybe he’s on to John Cusack in Say Anything.

  And Skip Daly, who returned from his first and last Fox spring break with a Mohawk, a black eye, and a Polaroid of himself leaning against a Chevette with two older girls, one of whom was basically not wearing pants. The next time I saw Skip, he was wrestling the mayor’s daughter outside that wizard shop where Amy Carter worked when she went to Brown. They laughed, and I crossed the street.

  Next to last was Viv Goddard. You all know about the pool party. But you don’t know that Slepkow only yanked it out because he thought the tampon string was a loose hem on her swimsuit—and even if it was, then what? Make a wish? Meanwhile, Viv took the opportunity to say you know what, forget this place, and no one blamed her because she was cool like a boy and smart like a girl. Slepkow stuck around for the brunt of it because why not, and like I said, he can’t think ahead.

  Last was Alix, but that’s a lot fresher in our minds.

  Me, I’ve been here since kindergarten. They call us survivors, like it’s an ordeal, and I suppose it has been, in its way. But you should’ve seen the face my father made when he heard that’s what we were called. It was the same face he made when he saw the swastikas in the dome of this church.

  [LOOK UP, POINT, WAIT A BEAT]

  Later, in an old album, I would find a photograph of his father in a Nazi uniform. “Jaki!” he yelled, his ears red. “What?” I asked, putting the album back under his bed. He said nothing, shaking. I asked what again. “I only have my German,” he said, and walked out of the room.

  Teachers came and went, too.

  There was Jonathan, the history teacher who failed a quarter of the class and called on dumb kids for a laugh and taped snapshots of senior girls to his office door. We heard he wasn’t allowed in Connecticut. One time a carful of soccer captains tried to follow him home, and he led them all the way to the Cape before ditching them in a rotary. It was a school night.

  And the old middle school head, Harry, who hid whiskey in his desk drawer. “Lavoris,” he’d say, winking, when anyone caught him taking a slug between classes. He had nicknames for all the boys. “Look, it’s Ragged Dick,” he’d say, leaning into his office door. “Here comes the Last Angry Man!” he said to more than one of us, even though we all had reason to think he meant only us. “Dill!” he said. “Quick! How many buttons on Mickey Mouse’s trousers?” We cried when Ned finally talked him into retiring. What would he do? Where would he live?

  And now, as you know, this is Ned’s last year, also. Or was meant to be? Either way, we’ll get an earful before the day’s out, so I’ll just say that when he first took the job, I thought he was Ronald Reagan. He had the same blue or gray suit, the same weird wet hair, the same TV smile. But Ned acted more like Nixon, and once yelled at the entire school after someone wrote NEVER FORGET on the boys’ room mirror in his own shit.

  (I’m looking at where you aren’t, Bartek. Right between where Bob Sadwin and Pete Siemens would be sitting. Poor Pete never stood a chance.)

  But before all of them, back when both my folks worked and before I took the city bus home, I stayed late with the other Quaker half-day kids. They hired a series of people to watch us. They weren’t much older than babysitters, but every bit as between things. These were the sons and daughters of parents’ friends, or something. They got paid like two, three bucks an hour, and some were worse than others.

  I can’t remember anything about the worst one except for how she looked like a foreign or silent film star, and whenever it was just her and me, I’d get a stomachache that turned into only feeling like I had to pee. And she wore a pet rat. Is that even possible? I couldn’t tell anyone, because I didn’t know what to say. She smelled like rum and pencils, and what I don’t know feels like she crossed it out, over and over again. I hold the paper to the light, but there’s only glare.

  I still see her old man, who knew my old man somehow, picking fights in the Dunkin’ Donuts down the street from where I live. He seems not to own a coat, and calls everyone “sonofabitch,” even women. “You sonofabitch,” he says, poking them in the stomach. “You’re getting soft.” On the way to school, I also pass his wife, smoking on her stoop and looking around like someone who doesn’t want to be lookout but has no choice. She clutches her robe and ashes into where the bushes used to be.

  You’re already sick of how I feel about Alix, but I will say that I made an okay painting of the art room sink and gave it to her because she said she liked it and I love her. When it became clear she liked someone else—there’s no point in saying who—I asked for it back because I could be a dick, too, if that’s what she wanted. She looked hurt. “But I love it,” she said, in tears, touching the painting. “Fine,” I said, thrilled by those tears. My hurt felt like something my father couldn’t digest: hot sauce, melted cheese, fried squid. On the drive home, I pulled over twice to throw up, but couldn’t.

  And we all know about Eli. Just like we all know about Alix and Viv.

  When they, meaning the heads of school, Ned and the new one and the other one, tried to corner Eli in the hallway after the last class he would ever teach—ours: we had been discussing Leonard Michaels’s “In the Fifties” for the third or fourth time that semester because we still didn’t get it, and no, Eli said, he hadn’t gone to school in the fifties, he hadn’t even been born yet, for Pete’s sake! Is that how you people read stories? Like they’re only about whoever writes or reads them? Like it’s gossip? You’re all hopeless solipsists!— he made a break for it and ran right past them, down the stairs, out the side door, and across the street. We rushed to the window and watched him disappear down Angell. “Run, Eli!” some of us yelled. I kept on watching even after everyone left. We had no idea he was so fast.

  I’ve recycled bits and pieces of my never-collected “In the Fifties” response here. “In the Eighties,” I titled it. “No, no, no,” Eli had said, folding my draft into an airplane that only turned upside down and hit him in the chest. I picked it up and unfolded it. “You see!” he said, snatching it from me and shaking it like a prop. “It’s still the sixties, but with coke and synthesizers where the pot and horns used to go. Plus vests.” I told him I didn’t get it. “Just think of what you would have told them if you could,” he said, grinning, like he had planned the whole thing. Eli just about lives for callbacks and running jokes.

  Meanwhile, several girls—too many to name—all in possession of clear skin, sharp minds, and slim figures, pretty much stopped eating. And an equal number of boys, despite having grown up in loving, supportive homes, grew defensive and bitter and cruel. Lousy students discovered an escape and an excuse in drugs. Shy, hopeful boys found ways to make girls laugh in beer. Homosexuals got mocked ceaselessly and without mercy and were either strengthened or weakened by the experience, depending on what kind of people they were, because everyone is different. Kids of all kinds were turned into examples, then metaphors. Some laughed, and the rest didn’t. And we—meaning us—made it.

  But I’m not like the other ones who’ve been here all along—I won’t call us survivors—Sterner, Linton, Kahn, the one who won’t even look at me. Whenever I lost my gloves, my mother would tell me to take some from the lost and found, and my folks only had jobs, not things they did or were, until they didn’t. I was two when my family got evicted from Belair Avenue, so for as long as I can remember, I’ve lived on the second floor of a bathroom-green, vinyl-sided triple-decker on the wrong side of Hope. Unless I’m getting a ride from Slepkow, I tell people to drop me off at the gray Cape around the corner. I linger at the lawn’s edge till they leave, then take the back door up.

  When I first came to Fox, I thought I was just like everybody else. But then, during my first week in kindergarten, I got invited over a kid’s house to play. The place had turrets and a garage that was an ex
tra house. His mom sat around all day reading magazines.

  In fifth grade this exact same kid used what my old man calls American logic to explain why he didn’t have to give me back my Indians cap, even though he’d found it exactly where I’d lost it the week before. I said, “How do you know I don’t have lice?” He threw my hat into poison ivy. Years later, when the school temporarily moved the holiday pageant from this church on account of the swastikas, he derailed Quaker Meeting by saying the whole thing was stupid and smiling as though none of it mattered, because to him it didn’t. Fuck you, I thought. Fuck you. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

  Wait, where was I?

  I know.

  When my old man stopped going to work, he handed me his car keys. The car was a rusted-out Corolla four-speed with an electric hole where the cigarette lighter should’ve been. That fall it got stolen, and a girl I’d known since kindergarten asked me why my parents didn’t just buy me a new one. I wanted to tell her why, but I didn’t. I couldn’t?

  My pal Slepkow’s had his own car since junior year, but he mostly uses it to deliver pizzas and to bring his little sister places. He’s as American as a Jew can be to the son of a German, but is only afraid of girls and of throwing up. In kindergarten I’d tease him about his egg-shaped head until he’d call me ex-friend. Instead of saying sorry, I’d start in on Bartek, and that almost always did the trick.

  My family never had company, except for when my mom was out of town—for work—and my old man’s friends would show up, reeking, fidgeting, hardly touching their soup. “I sometimes get electric shocks in my sleep,” a guy called Shithead told me before climbing into the just-pulled-out trundle. “So if I wake up screaming, don’t mind me.” I found these men terrifying, authentic. Same with the mustached dudes upstairs who wouldn’t buy my raffle tickets and got into fistfights every other weekend, but who played the kind of records my folks hadn’t since the seventies—the kind where they left in mistakes—and would ink my Green Arrow pencils whenever I asked.

  My dad would call his parents when he needed to hear their German, their Berlin logic. I never met them. They died one after the other, just weeks apart. “It’s not my home anymore,” he told me. I asked him if here was, and he shook his head. “I am split in two.” He came here in the sixties to paint and live outside history. “No one tells you you can’t do anything in this country, and look what you get,” he would say after some beers and after my mom had gone to bed because she had to be up early. “Toys of cartoons of toys! Movies where two policemen at first are not friends! Art only about itself! Poison ivy! You people deserve Reagan! You deserve Bruce Willis. You deserve his gas wines.”

  Here’s how it went for my old man: first the factory he worked in burned down the night after he dreamed it would, then he stopped trying to teach me German, then he stopped speaking it, then he stopped going to work, then he stopped getting out of bed. “Don’t put your finger in that hole, Jaki,” he said. Then he rolled over and went back to sleep. It was springtime, and the uncurling leaves, tender and yellow, offered little shade. I closed the blinds and waited outside for Slepkow to pick me up. High school wasn’t over yet, but it felt like the end of something.

  I wish Slepkow was here. And Alix and Bartek and all the rest. Those who wanted to be, at least. So not Eli. Viv never wanted to be here, either, I don’t think. My old man . . . Fuck this place, they all think. But here we are. And this is the last time we’ll be able to use the word we to describe us in the present tense, and that’s what matters. The past year I’ve spent an awful lot of time thinking about how I wasn’t loved back. But right now, behind this podium, I feel loved.

  And no, that last bit isn’t a Police Academy reference. Okay, it is. You know, for Slepkow. He would have laughed, so I left it in. His laugh sounds like a cough. I’ll miss him. But believe me when I tell you I will miss every single one of you in one way or another.

  (. . . . . .)

  . . . my ears were hot: I get this, too. And not just from shame—also from wine, fire.

  Liked someone else: And less than a year later they were through, for good. But even so, it’s hard not to think of Passover 1990 as anything other than the last time Eli, Libby, and I were all in the same room together. Eli wept during the Four Questions that he—as the youngest—still had to ask. He excused himself and lay down on the living room rug, tears in his ears. Libby went to talk to him, but the rest of us just dug in. What can I say? We were hungry, and thought it was about his job, and we’d already had an earful.

  Ned: Alix’s old man spent the better part of his daughter’s senior year putting out fires. In addition to covering up her extracurriculars, he also was forced to write a pointed and what would end up being heavily edited letter to Sports Illustrated, which, in a piece on AstroTurf,* had referred to Amos Fox as a “twenty[sic]-year-old prep school whose very name suggests either cleverness or craziness.” There was also the brand-new Headmaster’s House, for which he himself—over the board’s strenuous objections**—had raised the funds. “This is my up-yours,” he said, stroking a stud in the nearly completed kitchen. “And now I’ll live in it. By god, I’ll die here.”

  *An alumnus who struck it rich in the Gulf had gifted the school with its very first installation a quarter century earlier, in the then newly built DeWolf Gymnasium.

  **Upon learning of this latest end run, they demanded Ned’s resignation, and he responded by replacing the entire board with former squash partners.

  The city bus home: So didn’t I. “Here you go,” said Grandpa Ike, handing me a roll of tokens and a house key necklace, plus a couple bucks’ worth of change and some mixed-in mints. “Now you can be like a normal kid who lives in a regular city for a change.” I got looks from the public high schoolers in the back, because they knew I was a Fox student—the bus stops just past its wrought iron gates. I soon took to catching the bus home three stops earlier so people would think I went to St. Jude’s. To sell it, I’d even change into a blue dickey, a white spread collar, and a clip-on in a sub shop men’s room before catching the 3:10 home.*

  *Eli, who went to public Hope and required no such plausible deniability, nevertheless dressed like a Levittown mortician.

  My folks had jobs: Jake had attended Fox on full scholarship, thanks both to his raw foot speed and the limited earning potential of his scatterbrained mother and bedridden father. After graduating near the top of an underachieving class, Jake would go on to earn a promptly regretted city planning degree, ride out his early twenties writing grants for nonprofits, and make a killing in development or whatever. But few know that he actually made his real mint as a college sophomore by suing the pants off his future alma matter. As a resident of his school’s only fully coed dorm, he had severed his Achilles tendon on a rusty strip of shower-stall flashing* and settled out of court for a sum large enough to enable him to purchase for his recently widowed mother a stately four-bedroom Victorian at the intersection of Benefit and Jenckes.

  *A horrific injury, no doubt, but had the school’s counsel known that the fault lay more with Jake’s future wife than with Buildings & Grounds, the settlement would’ve at the very least shrunk. Here’s what really happened: while showering in the stall next to his, the future Hannah Deinhardt, then a more or less perfect stranger, had bravely slipped her shapely foot beneath the divider, laid it atop Jake’s, and proceeded to scrub herself to climax. The ever-opportunistic Fox alumnus, not at all sure to whom this slender, hairless extremity belonged, nevertheless availed himself of what he immediately grasped to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and, bracing himself against the stall divider, jerked off onto her painted toes. Correctly judging the substance too warm and sticky to be soap, Hannah quickly withdrew her foot, causing Jake to slip in a puddle of his own ejaculate and slice open his heel on that ragged strip of razor-sharp white metal. While the bathroom filled with Jake’s bloodcurdling screams, a flushed Hannah shot open her curtain, grabbed her towel, and s
plit, leaving Jake to stanch his wound with a washcloth. From the smoking lounge, Jake’s future wife called campus security to report an urgent but undisclosed situation unfolding in the second-floor bathroom. “Please hurry,” she gasped. The following morning, a chastened Hannah knocked at crutches-bound Jake’s door clutching a bouquet of bleeding hearts and wearing a pair of open-toed mules. Together they rode out the semester playing variations on Nurse and Soldier (Socialite and Photojournalist being their absolute favorite).

  Swastikas: Nine years and five months earlier I had for the first and last time rung bass-clef handbells at the Fox Holiday Pageant, annually held at the same Congregational church in which we traditionally commenced.* At some point during the festivities a yawning Grandpa Ike had looked up at the church’s dome and noticed the right-facing swastikas encircling it. With that, he stormed out (mere minutes, mind, before my largely inaudible solo run in “Good King Wenceslas”) and began drafting on his dashboard a letter of complaint to the school, the postscript of which indexed, to the nickel, just how much money he had spent on my and my sister’s educations. An emergency Friday-night Quaker Meeting was called. When everybody’s least favorite history teacher told Grandpa Ike that the ornament to which he objected was not the Nazi insignia, but in fact the ancient Sanskrit symbol for well-being later so perversely inverted by Hitler, Ike said, “Not anymore it ain’t.” She theatrically turned to face the person to her right, and Ike said, “Look, I fought under Patton. We freed Buchenwald.** And nowadays a swastika’s a swastika.”