American Innovations: Stories

by Rivka Galchen

  Next to the scrap is a sticker of mine, of a green apple.

  I look again at the quote: the bears, the kettle.

  Silly, I decide. It’s all very silly. I start to dry my feet with a towel.

  For the impending McDonald’s Saturday I resolve to walk right past my tattooed crush. I’ll have nothing to do with him, with his hi little sexys. This denouncement is actually extraordinarily painful since Roy alone is now my whole world. Everything that came before— my coin collection in the Tupperware, the corrugated cardboard trim on school bulletin boards, the terror of the fire pole—now revealed supremely childish and vain. Without even deciding to, I have left all that and now must leave Roy, too. I commit to enduring the burden of the universe alone. The universe with its mysterious General Rommels, its heady strait of Bosporus. I resolve to suffer.

  * * *

  Saturday comes again. My mom has already taken the burner covers off the stove and set them in the sink. I’m trying the think-about-the-Medieval-Fair trick so as to not think about maybe seeing Roy. I picture the ducks at the duck pond, the way they waddle right up and snatch the bread slice right out of my hand. I focus on the fair, knowing that time will move forward in that way, eventually waddle forward to the next weekend.

  Buckling myself into the front seat of our yellow Pinto, I put an imitation Life Savers under my tongue, a blue one. When my dad walks in front of the car on the way to the driver’s side, I notice that he has slouchy shoulders. Horrible. Not his shoulders. But my noticing them.

  “I love you,” I say to my dad. He laughs and says that’s good. I sit there hating myself a little.

  I concentrate on my candy, on letting it be there, letting it do its exquisitely slow melt under my tongue. Beautiful. I keep that same candy the whole car ride over, through stop signs, waiting for a kid on a bigwheel to cross, past the Conoco, with patience during the long wait for the final left turn. In my pocket I have more candies. Most of a roll of wild berry. When I move my tongue just a tiny bit, the flavor, the sugary slur, assaults my sensations. I choke on a little bit of saliva.

  * * *

  When we enter I sense Roy at our left; I walk on the far side of my dad, hoping to hide in his shadow. In a hush I inform him that I’ll go save our table and that he should order me the milk and the cookies.

  “OK,” he whispers back, as if this were just some game.

  At the table I stare straight ahead at the molded plastic bench, summoning all my meagernesses together so as to keep from looking feverishly around. I think I sense Roy’s blond hair off in the distance to my left. In weakness I glimpse sideways; I see a potted plant.

  “How’s the coffee?” I ask after my dad has settled in across from me.

  He shrugs his ritual shrug, but no words except the question of how is your milk. Is he mad at me? As I begin dipping my cookies in anguish I answer that the milk is delicious.

  Why do we say these little things? I wonder. Why do I always want the McDonaldland butter cookies and never the chocolate chip? It seems creepy to me now for the first time, all the habits and ways of the heart I have that I didn’t choose for myself.

  I throw back three half-and-halfs.

  “Will you get me some more half-and-halfs?” my dad asks.

  He asks nicely. And he is really reading the paper while I am not. Of course I’m going to go get creamers. I’m a kid, I remember.

  “I don’t feel well,” I try.

  “Really?”

  “I mean I feel fine,” I say, getting out of the chair.

  * * *

  Roy. Taking a wild berry candy from my pocket, I resolve again to focus on a candy under my tongue instead of on him. I head first toward the back wall, darting betwixt and between the tables with their attached swiveling chairs. This is the shiniest, cleanest place in town; that’s what McDonald’s was like back then. Even the corners and crevices are clean. Our house: even after my mom cleans, it’s all still in disarray. I’ll unfold a blanket and find a stray sock inside. Behind the toilet there’s blue lint. Maybe that’s what makes a home, I think, its special type of mess.

  And then I’m at the front counter. I don’t look up.

  I stand off to the side since I’m not really ordering anything, just asking for a favor, not paying for milk but asking for creamers. Waiting to be noticed, I stare down at the brushed steel counter with its flattering hazy reflection, and then it appears, he appears. I see first his palm, reflected in the steel. Then I see his knuckles, the hairs on the back of his hand, the lattice tattoo, the starched shirt cuff that is the beginning of hiding all the rest of the tattoo that I can’t see.

  Beautiful.

  A part of me decides I am taking him back into my heart. Even if no room will be left for anything else.

  Roy notices me. He leans down, eyes level with my sweaty curls stuck against my forehead, at the place where I know I have my birthmark, a dark brown mole there above my left eyebrow, and he says, his teeth showing, his strange glowing white canine showing: “Need something, sweets?’ He taps my nose with his finger.

  That candy, I had forgotten about it, and I move my tongue and the flavor—it all comes rushing out, overwhelming, and I drool a little bit as I blurt out, “I’m going to the Medieval Fair next weekend.” I wipe my wet lips with the back of my hand and see the wild berry blue saliva staining.

  “Cool,” he says, straightening up. He interlaces his fingers and pushes them outward, and they crack deliciously, and I think about macadamias. I think I see him noticing the blue smeared on my right hand. He says then: “I love those puppets they sell there—those real plain wood ones.”

  I just stare at Roy’s blue eyes. I love blue eyes. Still to this day I am always telling myself that I don’t like them, that I find them lifeless and dull and that I prefer brown eyes, like mine, like my parents’, but it’s a lie. It’s a whole other wilder type of love that I feel for these blue-eyed people of the world. So I look up at him, at those blue eyes, and I’m thinking about those plain wooden puppets—this is all half a second—then the doors open behind me and that invasive heat enters and the world sinks down, mud and mush and the paste left behind by cookies.

  “Oh,” I say. “Half-and-half.”

  He reaches into a tray of much melted ice and bobbing creamers and he hands three to me. My palm burns where he touched me and my vision is blurry; only the grooves on the half-and-half container keep me from vanishing.

  “Are you going to the fair?” I brave. Heat in my face again, the feeling just before a terrible rash. I’m already leaving the counter so as not to see those awful blue eyes, and I hear, “Ah, I’m working,” and I don’t even turn around.

  I read the back of my dad’s newspaper. They have found more fossils at the Spiro Mounds. There’s no explanation for how I feel.

  * * *

  How can I describe the days of the next week? I’d hope to see Roy when I ran out to check the mail. I’d go drink from the hose in our front yard thinking he might walk or drive by, even though I had no reason to believe he might ever come to our neighborhood. I got detention for not turning in my book report of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” I found myself rummaging around in my father’s briefcase, as if Roy’s files—I imagined the yellow “Confidential” envelope from Clue—might somehow be there. Maybe I don’t need to explain because who hasn’t been overtaken by this shade of love? I remember walking home from school very slowly, anxiously, as if through foreign, unpredictable terrain. I wanted to buy Roy a puppet at the Medieval Fair. One of the wooden ones like he’d mentioned. Only in that thought could I rest. All the clutter of my mind was waiting to come closer to that moment of purchasing a puppet.

  So I did manage to wake up in the mornings. I did try to go to sleep at night. Though my heart seemed to be racing to its own obscure rhythm, private even from me.

  Friday night before the fair, my bedroom alien and lurksome, I was hopeless for rest. After pulling my maze workbook down from the shelf, I went
into the brightly lit bathroom. I turned on the overhead fan so that it would become noisy enough to overwhelm the sound in my mind of Roy cracking his knuckles. The whirring fan noise: it was like a quiet. Sitting in the empty tub, I set the maze book on the rounded ledge and purposely began on a difficult page. I worked cautiously, tracing ahead with my finger before setting pen to paper. This was pleasing, though out of the corner of my eye I saw the yellowed magazine fragment—cracked kettle—and it was like a ghost in the room with me, though its message, I felt sure—almost too sure, considering that I didn’t understand it—had nothing to do with me.

  In the morning my mom found me there in the tub, like some passed-out drunk, my maze book open on my small chest. I must have fallen asleep. I felt like crying, didn’t even know why. I reached up to my face, wondering if something had gone wrong with it.

  “Do you have a fever?” my mom asked.

  When she left, assured, somewhat, I tried out those words—Human speech is like a cracked kettle—as if they were the coded answer to a riddle.

  I was always that kind of kid who crawled into bed with her parents, who felt safe only with them. If my mom came into my classroom because I had forgotten my lunch at home, I wasn’t ashamed, like other kids were, but proud. For a few years of my life, up until then, my desires hadn’t chased away from me. I wanted to fall asleep on the sofa while my dad watched The Rockford Files, and so I did. I wanted couscous with butter, and so I had some. Yes sometimes shopping with my mom I coveted a pair of overalls, or a frosted cookie, but the want would be faint, and fade as soon as we’d walked away.

  * * *

  We had left the house uncleaned when we went to the fair that Saturday. I was thinking about the wooden puppet, but I felt obligated to hope for a crown; that’s what I was supposed to be pining for. I imagined that my mom would think to buy me a crown for my Queen Esther costume. But maybe, I hoped, she would forget all about the crown. It wasn’t unlikely. What seemed like the world to me often revealed itself, through her eyes, to be nothing.

  I had always loved the Medieval Fair. A woman dressed up in an elaborate mermaid costume would sit under the bridge that spanned the artificial pond. People tossed quarters down at her. I thought she was beautiful. She’d flap her tail, wave coyly. It wasn’t until years later that I realized that she was considered trashy. Farther on there was a stacked hay maze that had already become too easy by late elementary school, but I liked looking at it from a distance, from up on the small knoll. I think every turn you might take was fine. Whichever way you went you still made it out. It was upsetting, being spat out so soon.

  We saw the dress-up beggar with the prosthetic nose and warts. We crossed the bridge, saw the mermaid. A pale teenage boy in stonewashed jeans and a tank top leaned against the bridge’s railing, smoking and looking down at her. Two corseted women farther along sang bawdy ballads in the shade of a willow and while we listened a slouchy man went by with a gigantic foam mallet. The whole world, it seemed, was laughing or fighting or crying or unfolding chairs or blending smoothies and this would go on eternally. Vendors sold wooden flutes, Jacob’s ladders, feathered mobiles. In an open field two ponies and three sheep were there for the petting and the overseer held a baby pig in his hands. We ate fresh ears of boiled corn, smothered with butter and cracked pepper. My mom didn’t mention the price. That really did make it feel like a day in some other me’s life.

  But I felt so unsettled. Roy’s tooth in my mind as I bit into the corn, Roy’s fingers on my palm as I thrummed my hand along a low wooden fence. I had so little of Roy and yet he had all of me and the feeling ran deep to the most ancient parts of me. So much so that I felt that my love for Roy shamed my people, whoever my people were, whoever I was queen of, people I had never met, nervous people and sad people and dead people, all clambering for air and space inside me. I didn’t even know what I wanted from Roy. I still don’t. All my life love has felt like a croquet mallet to the head. Something absurd, ready for violence. Love.

  I remember once years later, in a love fit, stealing cherry Luden’s cough drops from a convenience store. I had the money to pay for them but I instead stole them. I wanted a cheap childish cherry flavor on my tongue when I saw my love, who of course isn’t my love anymore. That unrelenting pathetic euphoria. Low-quality cough drops. That’s how I felt looking around anxiously for the wooden puppet stand, how I felt looking twice at every blond man who passed, wondering if he might somehow be Roy, there for me, even though he’d said he wouldn’t be there. Thinking about that puppet for Roy eclipsed all other thoughts. Put a slithery veil over the whole day. How much would the puppet cost? I didn’t have my own pocket money, an allowance or savings or anything like that. I wasn’t in the habit of asking for things. I never asked for toys. I never asked for sugar cereals. I felt to do so was wrong. I had almost cried that one day just whispering to myself about the crown. But all I wanted was that puppet because that puppet was going to solve everything.

  * * *

  At the puppet stand I lingered. I was hoping that one of my parents would take notice of the puppets, pick one up. My dad, standing a few paces away, stood out from the crowd in his button-up shirt. He looked weak, sunbeaten. My mom was at my side, her arms folded across a tank top that was emergency orange. It struck me, maybe for the first time, that they came to this fair just for me.

  “I’ve never wanted anything this much in my whole life,” I confessed in a rush, my hand on the unfinished wood of one of the puppets. “I want this more than a crown.”

  My mom laughed at me, or at the puppet. “It’s so ugly,” she said, in Hebrew.

  “That’s not true,” I whispered furiously, feeling as if everything had fallen silent, as if the ground beneath me were shifting. The vendor must surely have understood my mom, by her tone alone. I looked over at him: a fat bearded man talking to a long-haired barefoot princess. He held an end of her dusty hair distractedly; his other hand he had inside the collar of his shirt. He was sweating.

  “It’s junk,” my mom said.

  “You don’t like anything,” I said, nearly screaming, there in the bright sun. “You never like anything at all.” My mother turned her back to me. I sensed the vendor turn our way.

  “I’ll get it for you,” my dad said, suddenly right with us. There followed an awkward argument between my parents, which seemed only to heighten my dad’s pleasure in taking out his rust-stained wallet, in standing his ground, in being irrevocably on my side.

  His alliance struck me as misguided, pathetic, even childish; I felt like a villain; we bought the puppet.

  That dumb puppet—I carried it around in its wrinkly green plastic bag. For some reason I found myself haunted by the word “leprosy.” When we watched the minstrel show in the little outdoor amphitheater, I tried to forget the green bag under the bench. We only made it a few steps before my mom noticed it was gone. She went back and fetched it.

  At home I noticed that the wood of one of the hands of the puppet was cracked. That wasn’t the only reason I couldn’t give the puppet to Roy. Looking at that mute piece of wood, I saw something. A part of me that I’d never chosen, that I would never control. I went to the bathroom, turned on the loud fan, and cried. An image of Roy came to my mind, particularly of that tooth. I felt my love falling off, dissolving.

  He was my first love, my first love in the way that first loves are usually second or third or fourth loves. I still think about a stranger in a green jacket across from me in the waiting room at the DMV. About a blue-eyed man with a singed earlobe that I saw at a Baskin-Robbins with his daughter. My first that kind of love. I never got over him. I never get over anyone.

  THE ENTIRE NORTHERN SIDE WAS COVERED WITH FIRE

  They say no one reads anymore, but I find that’s not the case. Prisoners read. I guess they’re not given much access to computers. A felicitous injustice for me. The nicest reader letters I’ve received—also the only reader letters I’ve received—have come from pris
oners. Maybe we’re all prisoners? In our lives, our habits, our relationships? That’s not nice, my saying that. Maybe it’s even evil, to co-opt the misery of others.

  I want to mention that, when I sold the movie, my husband had just left me. I came home one day and a bunch of stuff was gone. I thought we’d been robbed. Then I found a note: “I can’t live here anymore.” He had taken quite a lot with him. For example, we had a particularly nice Parmesan grater and he had taken that. But he had left behind his winter coat. Also a child. We had a child together, sort of. I was carrying it—girl or boy, I hadn’t wanted to find out—inside me.

  I searched online for a replacement for that Parmesan grater because I had really liked that Parmesan grater. It was that kind that works like a mill, not the kind you just scrape against; it had a handle that was fun to turn. There were a number of similar graters available but with unappealing “comfort” grips. Finally, I found the same model. Was it premature to repurchase? Two days passed basically like that. Then, on Wednesday, my brother called. I gave him the update on my life.

  “Wow, that’s really something,” he said.

  “Yeah. It is something.”

  Then he said, “I thought it was a work of fantasy, Trish. I mean, I guess I should have told you about it—”

  “What?”

  “The blog,” he said. “His blog. I-Can’t-Stand-My-Wife-Dot-Blogspot-Dot-Com—”

  “Are you going through one of your sleepless phases again?”

  “Trish, I know it makes me sound snoopy, but Jonathan always seemed a little off to me, you know? So after he left your apartment one time, when I was alone there, I don’t know, I’m sorry, I opened up his laptop, and I looked through the browser history. I was curious about his porn. I thought maybe there would be some really weird porn—”

  “There was weird porn?”

  “None at all. Which in itself was kind of weird. No porn. Just his blog. And—”