Naomi Kritzer

by Monster (html)

  “I guess my report card came,” he said, staring out the window and not looking at either his mother or at me.

  “If you would just do the homework and turn it in—”

  “I already know everything that’s on the homework. They want me to do the same problem 40 times in a row until I die from tedium.”

  “I’m sorry your schoolwork does not hold your interest,” his mother snapped, “but my job is not one hundred percent intellectually stimulating, either, and if I decided to just never go to boring meetings I would be fired.”

  Andrew’s family was Chinese, but Chinese American for a number of generations. He liked to describe his mother as a grades-obsessed dragon lady. Even though I was generally on Andrew’s side, I knew this wasn’t fair. When it came to grades, his mother was basically exactly like my mother. My mom threw a fit when I let my grades slip in middle school. (I was trying to fit in. It didn’t work.)

  “What is it going to take to get you to work up to your potential?” his mom demanded. “Or at least in the near vicinity of your potential? The same metropolitan area as your potential?”

  “Maybe classes that weren’t so boring,” Andrew mumbled. “I need to walk Cecily home, I’ll be back in a few.” I finished gathering up my coat and Andrew slipped out the door after me.

  “Sorry,” I said, uselessly, as we walked back to my house, six blocks away.

  “Not your thing to be sorry for,” he said. “My mom is my mom. I’ll never be the kid she wanted.”

  I thought about that as we walked, whether I was the kid my parents had wanted. The summer I was ten, my father tried to get me to learn to play tennis. He took me to the tennis court on the weekends and he signed me up for classes. I went to the classes and swung my racket and practiced with my father and remained absolutely terrible at tennis. At the end of the summer he let me quit. Would he have preferred a kid who was good at tennis? Probably, actually. But he didn’t yell at me about it. He gave away my racket and never brought it up again.

  Possibly my mother would have liked a girl who liked wearing uncomfortable pretty clothing. When I was little she would buy me dresses made from stiff, crunchy fabrics with lace on them. I remembered one enormous fight when I was eight: she’d wanted me to dress up for a family wedding. Her promises of wedding cake and a Shirley Temple children’s cocktail got me as far as the car; when I started crying and asking to turn around because the seams itched, she swore that if I just ignored the itching, it would go away. This was a lie, just like with teasing. When we got to the church, I sat down sobbing on the big stone steps leading to the front door and refused to go inside. My father wound up taking me home.

  There was a park about halfway between my house and Andrew’s house, a weird little former quarry with a stone formation called a “council ring” that looked like a good place to hold a very outdoorsy meeting, or possibly sacrifice a goat since there was a big stone in the middle. We sat down on the low stone wall of the ring. Andrew smoked a clove cigarette, which his mother would have been even more furious about than his grades.

  “Sorry we didn’t get to finish the movie.”

  “I can kind of guess how it went.”

  “Sure, but we missed some good action sequences.”

  I shrugged. “It’s not that big a deal. Are you going to be OK when you get home?”

  “There’ll be a lot more yelling, but it’ll stop once I tell her I’ll work harder in school, which of course I won’t, but she won’t know that.”

  I laughed. Andrew always made me laugh.

  “I think you’re the only person who understands me,” he said.

  “I feel the same way,” I said. “I mean, that you’re the only person who understands me, not that I’m the only person who understands you.”

  “I knew what you meant.”

  “Well, that stands to reason, right?”

  I was angry at his mother, and a little bit at him—would it actually kill him to do his homework?—and I felt awkward and embarrassed at having seen the fight, but the conversation at the council ring felt like a grace note in the day, anyway.

  “Say, do you think you could let me copy the precalculus homework?” Andrew asked. “In the mornings, before we go to class? Just to get my mother off my back. I don’t care about my grades.”

  “Sure,” I said. “No problem.”

  * * *

  In the morning, my e-mail has an e-mail from a friend back in the US asking if I’m going to see the Great Wall of China while I’m here. I send back a note offering probably-too-much explanation of Chinese geography: I am currently as far from the Great Wall of China as she is from the Grand Canyon. She lives in Portland, Oregon. If someone came to visit her in Portland, would she suggest they hit the Grand Canyon while they were there? China, like the US, is very big. I look at my block of text, delete it, and say, “it would be about a 17-hour drive from where I am. So, no.”

  There’s nothing from Andrew. I go downstairs for breakfast and load up my plate with two fried eggs and four of the Chinese-style steamed rolls, baozi. I spot a fellow westerner across the room; he’s the first white person I’ve seen since I arrived in Danzhai. He looks either jet lagged or extremely hungover. Possibly both.

  After I’ve finished breakfast I check my e-mail again and debate whether to send another message to the mystery address. I decide it’s a little too soon and go out to walk around Danzhai again.

  I brought Chinese currency with me—a stack of pink bills with Mao smiling benignly on them. Mao is a lot less popular in China than he once was, but he’s still on the money. I suppose this is also true of George Washington in the US. Anyway, having brought money, it seems reasonable to spend some.

  I like the long, quilted coats that the clothing stores are selling, and the fabric is soft, but they’re all sewn for smaller women with narrower shoulders than I have. Even the vests don’t fit me properly. I admire a jointed silver fish at a jewelry store, embroidered purses, handmade bird cages that are lovely and interesting but would be very difficult to get home. They do batik here, all dyed in a blue dye that’s almost the same shade as denim, and I buy a batik tablecloth.

  At that night’s dinner at the hotel, the other westerner is looking less hungover and catches my eye. “Join me?” he invites, in British-accented English. I pull up a chair across from him. “I’m Tom Lewis.”

  “Cecily,” I say, and we shake hands.

  “What brings you to Danzhai?”

  “I could ask you the same question. I wanted to go somewhere unusual, somewhere no one I knew had ever been.”

  “You picked well, then. I’m a travel writer. Not sure if I’m going to write up this place or not; it’s a bit of a bore.”

  I bristle instinctively, even though I haven’t found what I’m looking for. “What do you find interesting?”

  He rattles off a dozen cities I’ve never been to and tells me about the night life in Kuala Lumpur. I think he’s trying to impress me. I wonder if he tries to impress everyone he meets, or just women, or just white women? He snaps his fingers at the waitress and I cringe, worried that the waitress is going to think that we’re together. He orders something in Chinese and says to me, “what are you having?”

  I tell him I’d like the whole fish, and he translates that into Chinese for me.

  “Why doesn’t UTranslate work here?” I ask.

  “The makers are having some sort of fight with China’s Great Firewall,” he says. “You should’ve come last week, the problem it’s having is new.”

  “Is there another app that will work?”

  “The official Chinese app is having some sort of dispute with the keepers of the app store, so no. What is it you’re planning to do tomorrow? Perhaps I can be of assistance.”

  What I want to say is, I’d rather get by with a Chinese-English paper dictionary from the 1980s than drag along someone who snaps his fingers at waitstaff but I never actually have the guts to be quite that confrontationa
l, so I just laugh awkwardly and say nothing.

  “Have you gone to see the prison?” he asks.

  “The what?” I say, not entirely certain I’ve heard correctly.

  “There’s a former mercury mine about a half hour from here. It’s been used as a movie set a few times. There’s an abandoned town to one side, an abandoned prison to the other. Hire a driver and you can give yourself a tour. I mean, you’ll have to get out once you’re there. The roads are all overgrown. It’s picturesque, if you like that sort of thing. My friend Percival Abbot—you might know of him?—did a photography exhibition on it a few months back.”

  Our food arrives and we have an awkward meal together. I have not heard of Percival Abbot, although a quick Internet search when Tom steps away from the table confirms he is, in fact, a photographer whose website telegraphs that I really should have heard of him.

  “Are you thinking of going to soak in the spa later?” Tom asks as we’re finishing dinner.

  “No,” I say, even though I immediately think, Spa? I don’t really want Tom’s uninvited company.

  * * *

  “Don’t touch me,” I said to Marc, the boy who’d just gotten in the lunch line behind me.

  “As I’d want to, Fartknocker.” My last name was Grantz; how this got turned into “Fartknocker” by my tormenters was a mystery to me.

  I felt his hand on my ass as I raised my tray so the lunch server could put my food on it. I flushed hot with fury. “I told you not to touch me,” I said.

  “I didn’t. Maybe your clothes want to flee your foul body, Fartknocker.”

  I had pulled the tray down and was holding it in front of me; at that, I whirled, turned it sideways, and hurled French fries, hamburger, and the tray into his sneering face.

  My mother came to pick me up from the principal’s office, looking harried and frustrated. “I don’t want to hear it,” she said as I followed her down the stairs and out to the car. “You need to stop letting people get your goat. He just wanted a reaction from you and he got one, didn’t he?”

  Also grease and ketchup all over his shirt, and maybe that would discourage him from tormenting me where ignoring him hadn’t? I burst into tears, because that was what I always did when I got angry enough, and said, “I wish I’d kicked him in the balls.”

  “Don’t do that, either,” Mom said. “Your grades are really good, Cecily, but if you’ve got a serious disciplinary record it’s going to be hard for you to get into college.”

  Andrew came over after school, since Mom had said I was grounded but hadn’t said I wasn’t allowed to have visitors. “Boys are the worst,” I said.

  “Football players are the worst,” he corrected.

  “Does Marc play football?” I never knew who played what. It just wasn’t interesting enough to keep track of.

  “Probably.”

  “I hope he gets hit by a bus.”

  “Yeah, about that. We’ve got to talk about your technique, Cecily. Throwing a tray is very showy and all but it wasn’t going to do any real damage. You have to hit people like that where it hurts.”

  “Do you think I should have kicked him in the nuts, instead?”

  “Testicles are actually a smaller target than most people think. No, revenge is a dish best served cold.”

  We talked for hours about things we could do to Marc: laxatives in his food, stink bombs in his locker or slipped into the pocket of his letterman’s jacket, infect him with head lice. None of these ideas were particularly practical: we didn’t have access to his food, we didn’t know of anyone with an active case of head lice, he’d certainly notice if either of us slipped a stink bomb into his pocket. That was fine, though. Revenge, for me, was a dish best imagined and never served up at all. If I was going to do anything, it would be a hurled tray in a moment of anger, not a carefully crafted boutique-quality revenge plot.

  Andrew got roughed up, a few weeks later, supposedly for looking at another boy in the locker room for a few seconds too long when they were changing after gym class. It was Marc with one of his teammates.

  “The frustrating thing,” he confided, “is that even if I can get laxatives into his food, he won’t know why he’s being punished. He’ll just think he’s eaten something that disagreed with him. I wish I could hit him back hard enough in the moment to make him sorry he’d messed with me.”

  “You could learn a martial art, maybe.” Thanks to the success of the Karate Kid movie there were about 8 million karate schools in our town alone.

  “Unlike in the movies,” Andrew said, “you have to take classes for years before you’re actually any good. Also, I’m pretty sure if you beat someone up at school they’ll kick you out, even if they richly deserved it.”

  “Also, if you’ve got a serious disciplinary record it could keep you out of college,” I said, like my mother had.

  Andrew sighed. “All I want is to make the people who deserve to suffer, suffer,” he said. “Is that really so much to ask?”

  Two weeks after that, Marc’s car, sitting in the student parking lot, went up in flames. No one seemed to know what had caused it. I asked Andrew if it was him, and he raised his eyebrows and said “whatever would make you think that?” instead of answering. And he was right: if it was him, Marc had no idea why he’d been punished.

  * * *

  The spa, it turns out, is in a separate building from the hotel, and I have to go out into the street to get there. Once I’m there, the attendant checks my room key, then shows me a locker room with complimentary slippers that are barely half the size of my feet. I change into my bathing suit and venture out the far door.

  There are two pools, steam rising from the water. The website mentioned a hot spring. I wonder if this is actually spring water, or if they heat it somewhere and pipe it in? I’m a little shocked by just how hot the water is; initially it’s too hot to immerse myself in, so I stick just my feet in the water and then ease the rest of myself in as I adjust to it.

  There’s a button you can press to turn the soaking pool into a whirlpool, and I try it. The bubbles are nice but the noise is a little like sitting next to a blender. I decide to just soak.

  Somewhere out there is Andrew. He knows I’m here. He knows I want to find him. I imagine him striding into the spa, right now, as unlikely as that is. What would I say to him?

  How did I ever believe that I knew you?

  Instead, it’s Tom who strolls in. “Oh, hello,” he says. “I heard you changed your mind! Isn’t the water nice?”

  I sigh and make a noncommittal, non-conversational sort of noise, hoping he’ll take the hint and settle into the other pool. He climbs into mine, of course, and sits down next to me.

  “What do you mean that you heard I changed my mind?” I ask, since apparently conversation is inevitable.

  “I asked at the front desk where the other westerner had headed. You’re rather conspicuous, my dear.”

  “You don’t say.”

  He prattles on for a while about some beach in Thailand that’s so popular with British tourists there are more white people there than Thai people, and then moves on to the question of authenticity and whether that’s something you should even be trying to seek out. I smile and nod, which is all he seems to particularly want from me.

  At least, it’s all he wants from me until he scoots in closer and suggests we go out for a drink. I rocket out of the pool like the water has suddenly turned to acid, and retreat to my hotel room, with its locked door.

  It’s not until I get there that I wonder if he’s not a travel writer. If he’s actually here for the same reason I am. If he’s looking for Andrew.

  * * *

  The summer after my sophomore year of college, I had a research fellowship to work with a biochemistry professor there. I’d gone to a small, highly competitive, intensely nerdy college. It felt like I’d spent my whole life up to that point as a fish out of water, leaping from jar to cup to puddle in a desperate bid to stay alive, and sud
denly I’d found my way to the ocean. To water, to other fish, to the place I’d always belonged but never had been able to find. That was college, for me.

  Not so much for Andrew. He’d applied to that same college, but he hadn’t gotten in. He hadn’t initially gotten into the flagship state university, either; his grades were too low. He’d enrolled at the local community college, then transferred to the state university after a year. He was doing okay, but he had big classes, few friends, professors who were unimpressed by his estimation of himself.

  I visited home for just two weeks at the end of the summer. Andrew and I met up at a local park and he told me stories about his summer working at the local pool. He’d gotten lifeguard certification but, he told me cheerfully, he was probably the world’s worst lifeguard, using his dark sunglasses to conceal naps.

  “What if someone actually gets into trouble?” I said.

  “They’d better yell loud enough to wake me up, then,” Andrew said in a cheerful tone.

  People who are drowning can’t yell. They have water in their lungs; that’s literally what drowning means. I didn’t want to scold him. Surely no one had actually died on his watch, or I’d have heard. Also, I was never certain when he was joking. I forced a laugh, told myself this was definitely a joke, and described the research fellowship a bit. We were doing DNA sequencing, using one of the first automated machines for that purpose; I was studying the genome of a bacteria that mostly just lives harmlessly on human skin but can on occasion cause raging infections of various kinds, or food poisoning. I found the fact that it could be harmless or deadly really fascinating. It took me longer than it probably should have to realize that Andrew was a lot less interested than I was.

  “You really are a nerd,” he said, finally. I wasn’t sure I was right that I was hearing contempt in his voice—I mean, this was Andrew. My best friend. My best friend from high school, anyway. I’d told him earlier about Beth, my best friend in college, who grew up in Arkansas and liked to crochet mathematical forms. I’d brought along a yarn stellated rhombic dodecahedron she’d made me for my birthday. I wondered if I should show that to Andrew, like I’d planned, or if that would make him angrier. More contemptuous.