Two Parties, One Tux, and a Very Short Film about The Grapes of Wrath

by Steven Goldman

  Nothing else seems different. Ms. Chimneystack talks, mainly to the blackboard, but about the book. She occasionally asks a question and Mariel answers it. This arrangement works well for both of them, and the rest of us are happy with it too. Danielle fills three pages of her notebook, as if she’s been taking dictation. I’ve spent the entire period watching her take notes.

  English ends and we walk out, pretty much like we have done all year. But this time, there is a moment in the hallway, when there are three of us standing there rather than two. Then Danielle says, “French,” because that’s her next class, and I say, “Calculus,” which is what David and I both have next, and she smiles a see you later and we all go off to class.

  We have said two words, neither very revealing, but it is enough to show that something has changed.

  David doesn’t say a word.

  After calculus, David goes to German and I have a free. I don’t know what Danielle has, so I hang out a little at her locker, trying to pull off David’s trick of not looking like I’m hanging out at someone’s locker. I don’t manage it as well, and after a few minutes of pacing between the J. P. Gilley water fountain, my own locker, and the space in front of Danielle’s, I give up and go to the library. I meet David again at history and I have a small attack of paranoid guilt that someone else has told him about Danielle and me, but all he does is ask me a question about our chemistry assignment (the syllabus said chapter 10, pages 116–142 but the actual chapter 10 goes on to 146 and it wasn’t clear whether we had to read those four pages—I thought we probably should), and I assume he hasn’t heard, because I feel that if he had, he’d say something about it, although for the life of me I can’t figure out what I’d expect him to say.

  Lunch is next. David is carrying his in his backpack (he only returns to his locker twice a day as a rule) but I never think ahead, so we head off separately. I find Danielle leaning on my locker, not looking relaxed and definitely waiting for me. I consider kissing her, just a friendly peck on the mouth the way my parents often do, but they have years of practice in this protocol, so instead I stand a safe distance away and say hi in what I’m hoping is a calm tone but I suspect is more of a scared squeak. Danielle isn’t smiling.

  “Look,” she says. I look down at the carpet because that’s where she is looking, but there isn’t anything there to see. “I have a meeting during activity. Stupid prom stuff. So I’ll see you at lunch, okay?”

  “I have lunch now.”

  “You have early lunch?” Danielle has obviously never noticed my absence from junior lunch.

  “Because of Wallman.”

  “Then maybe between?”

  I nod. Danielle pushes herself off the locker, which brings her almost into kissing range, but she doesn’t look like she wants me to kiss her and I don’t try. Maybe we haven’t been together long enough for public kissing. She does her less-than-comfortable-with-the-situation smile and leaves me standing there. I don’t watch her walk down the hall.

  In order to open my locker I need to step forward a grand total of about three steps, but it takes all of my willpower to make it there. My books have gained several pounds apiece, and my muscles strain to lift them into my locker. I know David is waiting for me at lunch.

  Somehow unpredictably predictable

  David is waiting for me at lunch.

  “How’s married life?” he asks as we sit down, breaking off half of his roast beef sandwich for me. This is an unusual gesture. I think I prefer having to beg.

  “So you heard?”

  “Everybody’s talking about it. Nobody has a good explanation for why she’s dating a loser like you.”

  David’s use of the term “loser” is a factual classification, not an insult. I don’t have a good explanation for it either. I keep scanning his face for some sort of reaction. He is still there, still David, his chips on the napkin in front of him next to his shiny red apple. How widespread does this gossip have to be if David knows?

  “It’s a little weird,” I admit. “I keep wondering if I just dreamed the whole thing.”

  David shrugs at this. I try to take in what it might mean if everyone is talking about it. As if in answer, Louis appears.

  “So,” he says as he plops into the chair next to me.

  “Hello, Louis,” David says evenly. “Please, pull up a chair.”

  Louis ignores this sarcasm, which is easy to do since, in typical David delivery, it lacks anything approximating a sarcastic tone. Instead he looks up brightly and addresses David in a voice full of unrelenting cheer. “It’s so nice to see that you’re handling your squeeze double-dipping with little D. Very bigamist of you.”

  David’s reaction is hard to read. My face must show nothing but confusion as I try to translate.

  “Quite a shocker,” Louis continues as he reaches over and helps himself to David’s potato chips. “I had you two pegged for the queen and the queen of the prom. I mean, you two have been dating for—what?—almost a year now? So, Mitch, are you trading in the old stroke and swallow for a little bearded clam action?”

  David looks up at me, and we take too long to respond. Louis turns to face David full on.

  “Don’t look so surprised, closet boy. Mitch here could go either way, even with that haircut, but you’ve never been on the straight and narrow.” Over the goofy smile, Louis’s eyes are still and observant. He may have been just prospecting, but he knows he has hit ore. He’s not about to let up.

  “You can tell me,” he mock-whispers.

  “You’re an asshole, Louis,” David says, but his voice is more serious than it should be.

  “True but irrelevant, Suckmaster Flash. You might as well have it tattooed on your cheeks, either end. You can’t even lie about it. Just try. Look me in the eye and tell me that you aren’t gay.”

  Louis is right; I’ve never known David to lie. I am beginning to visibly panic, but David folds his napkin calmly and pockets his apple. He then looks Louis straight in the eye and says, convincingly, “We aren’t gay.”

  He says the words without inflection, but I can hear the emphasis on the pronoun.

  Lately I seem to be more and more confused by pronouns

  After Louis leaves, David and I don’t discuss what happened. Maybe nothing happened—Louis picks on everybody, and his questioning of David might just have been his abuse du jour. But as I walk back to wait for Danielle outside the Forrest Klimer Multipurpose Conference Room, I have an attack of the uneasies.

  Danielle emerges from her committee meeting looking emotionally bruised.

  “I hate everyone who goes to this school,” she announces to me as I walk her to her lunch. So far, our relationship has consisted of one visit to a park, a conversation at my locker, and two walks in the hallway. Except for the kissing part, I could be replaced by a good spaniel. “I don’t hate you,” she adds as an afterthought.

  “What about Nicole? I thought you two were still …”

  “Don’t even breathe the bitch’s name. She told Ryan everything I said about him. She went and told Ryan what I said. Can you fucking believe that? I think he’s screwing her too.”

  As the apparent new boyfriend, I am a little put off by her concern about what Ryan is doing. I’m not sure how to voice my objections, and so instead I take an unusually avid interest in my feet, which are plodding along in Danielle’s wake. I have been staring at Danielle every chance I got for years, and now I’m afraid to look at her.

  Danielle stops suddenly and I almost bump into her. She faces me and tries to find my eyes, which involves a little bending. Finally I look up. “Are we doing all right?” she asks.

  I nod. She isn’t, I’m not, but I’m still hoping we are.

  Her eyes search my face. I’m not sure what she’s looking for. “Are you taking me to the prom?” she asks. It’s more of a challenge than a question.

  “Do you want to go to the prom with me?” It’s a question, not an invitation.

  “Okay. I jus
t needed to know. Are we double-dating with David? Does David have a date?”

  “M.C.”

  “He’s dating Marie Claire. That’s cute. I didn’t know that.”

  “Mary Clarissa. They’re just going to the prom together.”

  “He should date her.”

  Punctuation matters

  I say good-bye to Danielle at the cafeteria door, wondering, but not asking, who she will sit with. I decide that I need to go to my locker before heading over to the film lab.

  “Is it true?” M.C. is standing between me and my locker.

  “What?”

  “Carrie said she was at your house yesterday. Are you really dating Danielle?”

  There are at least three good responses to this question. I could ask why she cares, I could ask why it is any of her business, or I could tell her that I’m allowed to date whoever I want to, but all I say is “Yes.”

  M.C. looks at me like she’s not quite sure who I am. “Wow,” she says.

  We stand in the hall and stare at each other until I am totally uncomfortable. M.C. seems frozen in place. I have never known her to be at a loss for words, but here she is standing in front of me like she wants to ask me something but can’t get it out. I’ve known her for so long, but the person opposite me in the hallway isn’t the seven-year-old who used to steal my Transformers so they could date her Barbies or the twelve-year-old who used to screech during sleepovers with Carrie.

  “Are we still going to double-date for the prom?” I ask her.

  “Do you still want to go with me—and David?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Then sure, if David is still taking me.”

  “I think he is.”

  M.C. nods, but doesn’t move. “Could you ask him?”

  “I can do that. Not a problem.”

  M.C. smiles and regains her animation. “Call me tonight. Please?” Only the “please” has a question mark attached. I tell her I will.

  Wallman weighs in

  “Mitchell, could we talk for a moment?”

  I look up from the little lump of Plasticine that I am trying my best to attach to a round-shaped armature. I was hoping for an armadillo, but this thing is most likely on its way to becoming a slug. Wallman is standing beside me fidgeting and chewing on his beard.

  “Sure,” I say.

  “Let’s step outside.”

  I follow him out of the troll cave, half expecting he will evaporate or explode when he steps through the door. We stand in the hallway, and he does look a little different in the fluorescent light. His jeans and sweater, which are formless in the dim lab, are baggy but reasonable out here. There are no visible stains anywhere. His face is lined and furrowed in places. He is older than I thought, but mostly he looks like a teacher.

  “I understand that you have been asked to appear before the Judicial Board.”

  “Yes.”

  “Because of the film you turned in for your English assignment.”

  I nod. My first reaction is relief. At least Wallman isn’t asking me about Danielle. It kind of sucks when you’re relieved to be discussing your own possible expulsion.

  “Was it because you had made it originally for this class? Did Curtis … Mr. Curtis consider that cheating?”

  “Um… no. That never came up. It was because someone in the class, or someone’s parents, thought it was … um… offensive. To their religion.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No.”

  Wallman looks confused. He scratches at his beard. “I was going to go talk to Sorrelson, if you wanted me to, to tell him that I thought it was okay to use the film for your English class. I could still talk to him if you want me to. Would it help if I told him that I approved the content? You should probably know that we …” He scratches his beard again. He’s trying to be diplomatic, something he never feels the need to do inside his classroom. “We don’t see eye to eye.” He sighs, then gives up trying to impersonate an actual member of the faculty. “He’s an ass, but you’ve probably noticed that. But if you want me to …”

  This is not the Wallman I know. He looks smaller, almost human. He is volunteering to help because he feels responsible in some way, or he likes me, or maybe just because he’s a nice guy, but he clearly wants me to say no. Of the two of us in this hallway, I’m feeling like the only adult.

  “Thank you,” I tell him as sincerely as I can. “I think it will be fine. But I appreciate the offer. I really do.”

  He seems relieved.

  “Maybe we could skip the religious imagery in your next project,” Wallman suggests, but the joke feels a little flat. I go with it anyway.

  “Don’t worry, only sex and violence.”

  “Good,” he says, smiling and fidgeting. He’s had enough of the outside world and needs to return to the gloomy comfort of the lab.

  When I get back to our construction table, David is taking a turn trying to armadilize the slug. He asks what Wallman wanted. It isn’t until I am halfway through telling David what happened that I realize Wallman had just volunteered to lie to his boss on my behalf. I wonder what his relationship with the administration and the rest of the faculty is like. Does he have friends here? I have a sudden awful vision of the world as just a much bigger version of high school, where adults still have to worry about being popular and whether someone in charge has it in for you. Please don’t let that be true.

  CHAPTER 23

  The Day the World Changed (Some Observations About Breasts)

  “We are a race of tit men …”—Henry David Thoreau

  The world doesn’t change slowly. It changes all at once. I can remember, almost to the minute, the day we became teenagers. It was somewhere around 2:20 on a Thursday afternoon in the spring of seventh grade, either the last week of March or the first week of April.

  We were sitting in art class and drawing Rebecca Kessler. We each took turns being models. Fully clothed, of course; we were only in seventh grade. I was doing my best to draw something that might qualify as vaguely humanoid. Everyone else was talking about a party that had been thrown by someone in the eighth grade, which some of the girls had been invited to—somebody’s house had been TP’d or something. I was not startled by the acts of juvenile delinquency. Something more important had transpired. There were now parties to which not all of us had been invited.

  We were a small class. Maybe forty kids in the whole grade at that point. Everyone went to the parties. Parties were controlled by the Mothers. Mothers sent in valentines for everyone in the class and baked cupcakes on birthdays and always insisted that everybody be invited to parties. Sometimes a party might be all guys or all girls, but the Mothers would never sanction exclusion based on any criteria other than gender. Now we were entering a world where our social lives were no longer controlled by our mothers. This new world was a much more frightening place. The pecking order would now be public, our self-esteem more tendentious, our fate more directly in the hands of our classmates. It would be harder to pretend that we were cool. Now there would be choosing, and some of us would form the ranks of the unchosen.

  If this had been the only thing that changed that day, I probably could have learned to deal with it. But there was more. During that conversation, Ryan—who, by the way, was the only boy from our class who’d gone to that party—had been concentrating on drawing Rebecca. Now, by seventh grade, Rebecca had already become a junior goddess. Shoulder-length blond hair held back with a hairband, big blue eyes, always tan. She had delicate features but she was never prissy. She could wear a dress and look sweet, but she was athletic and competitive and would regularly kick butt on the soccer field.

  Rebecca sat on the stool, her bare legs dangling from a short but appropriate skirt. Her knit jersey was neatly tucked in, emphasizing her rapidly developing body. It seemed to be developing at an almost visible pace. She had tits and we knew it. I never said a word about them, but all the rest of that year the boys who knew what French kiss
ing actually meant and talked about meeting girls at parties, girls from other schools where all sorts of things happened all the time—held lengthy discourses about Rebecca’s breasts. No one claimed to have touched them. Rebecca was not an object of gossip, only admiration.

  And not just ours. By the end of the year, Rebecca was dating a sophomore, and as an eighth grader she went to the junior/senior prom. Then her mom packed her off to some all-girls boarding school and we never heard from her again.

  But that day, as she sat modeling for us, the world changed. We became different. I can trace it to a single moment. While I was standing there drawing, unsuccessfully trying to wrestle my pencil into at least allowing me to keep her eyes on separate sides of her nose, Ryan drew a simple line sketch. Nothing fancy, just straightforward, clean lines, proper proportions, profile. Then he did something that the rest of us wouldn’t have dared to do. In one simple curved line, he drew what he saw. His profile of the seated Rebecca included her breast.

  When the teacher held up Ryan’s sketch, Louis laughed out loud. The rest of us stared mutely, unsure of how we were supposed to react. Rebecca blushed, but she was a goddess; she did not burst into tears. Ms. Winslow then complimented Ryan on the drawing. She did not make direct reference to the breast, but she obviously thought the picture had been properly done. I did not give Rebecca breasts in my sketch. Yet somehow, with that line, we all crossed some sort of boundary.

  Danielle’s shirt has an awful lot of buttons. Little teeny buttons. It ends just above midriff and the skin underneath is pale and less firm than it looks. I hadn’t intended to place my hand on that exposed flesh, but as she moves toward me on the couch I have to hold her somewhere for balance and, without thinking, I place my hand on her side. I am touching her skin. Not an arm that I see every day, but a part of her body that is usually covered by clothing. She doesn’t seem to mind; in fact, she leans into me more. I haven’t figured out what to do with my other hand yet, so I leave it by my side, which probably looks awkward, but I know she can’t see it and I don’t think we would be doing this at all if we had an audience.