25
When I entered the classroom, Mr. Shepard was discussing the upcoming Advanced Placement exam, explaining what was the lowest possible score we could get and still earn college credit for the course, which didn’t say much for his teaching. I was late, but I cut past him, not even caring. Nico cleared his throat and Stephen Auchard raised one eyebrow.
I turned myself to face the window. Past the cinder-block walls was the courtyard garden. No one ever used it. Denny once tried to organize a garden club. He had the idea to grow produce for the cafeteria and flowers for the art class to draw. Science students could study mulching, he said, and shop students could make benches. Denny hoped it would be a model for public schools across America.
“They refused to look at the blueprints,” he told Mom and me after his presentation to the school board. “They said there’s no money in the budget for maintenance. And I said, ‘Well, that’s the whole point of a club—free maintenance.’” He shrugged. “I didn’t even get to mention the poetry teas.”
It seemed the most the garden would ever be was some kind of teenage mind control thing, some remedy for the psychosis of confinement, like a mural or an indoor waterfall. If necessary, it would distract us from the fact that we were not being trained or inspired, we were being held in custody until it could be proven to at least 65 percent of some dubious national standard that our ingenuity had been assimilated into the tastes of our comatose generation. Then you’re ready for college. People say, You have to go to college. This is America. In Russia, they don’t even have tampons. And yet, how often had I heard my mother complain, “I’m not teaching Shakespeare. I’m teaching phonics.”
The real truth behind college for every American is that high school graduates would cripple the job market and drain social services if their dependency was not extended.
We’d just found out that Nico had been accepted to the University of Vermont.
“Cool,” Jack said when he heard the news. “Is he going to major in Physical Molestation?”
“Actually, he’s on the payroll,” Denny said. “They’re going to study him in bio lab.”
In America, college is not simply a privilege, it is an industry. It begins early in high school, where there are people on staff whose job it is to feed the machine. Sexless, pink-faced men like Mr. McGintee help students evaluate qualities and calculate options. Ladies with long dry hair and “degrees-in-progress,” like Lydia Kilty, let you know whether or not you have the right stuff.
At seminars in creepy, carpeted guidance rooms, cultish recruitment officers draw looping arrows on glossy easels with bizarre-smelling Vis-à-Vis markers, while you sit in a cataleptic stupor, tracing dust pyramids in the air and making planes out of pamphlets until the sales pitch slithers to a suspicious semi-halt. You are roused in the midst of a damp handshake with some guy named Stu from Ithaca, and you wonder, “Good God, have I just been initiated?”
If you take time off after high school, you are thought to be a pariah. Former friends ignore you on the streets, and their parents freak out like you are a dope addict. Parents cannot really be blamed for their paranoia, when all they ever hear about from the time their kids are in kindergarten are tests and essays, scores and tours, deadlines and fees. At money management assemblies, they are reassured that what they cannot provide through savings and second mortgages, the government will generously supplement with low-interest loans.
“What a racket,” my father would say while sorting through the brochures that flooded the mailbox. “Jimmy the Onion never had it so good.”
One thing they make sure to teach in high school is how to drive. Well-meaning people, such as Mr. O’Donnell, the librarian, believe that driver’s education contributes to public safety. What they fail to see is that in order to accommodate additional drivers, families need more automobiles and more insurance. Teaching and insuring teens is not a social service, it’s good business—otherwise companies wouldn’t bother to do it, no matter how many lives might be saved. The problem is, when you give cars to people with no responsibilities, no destinations, and no privacy, they will most likely use them for things other than driving. Two weeks after Troy had won the school’s coveted Driving Ace Award, he and Jack got so stoned off homegrown pot in their shampoo bottle bong that Troy drove his Vista Cruiser home from Indian Wells beach in reverse.
Lots of programs make sense in theory but go awry in practice. It’s similar to when town planners bring in one species to lower the population of another, and then the town is overrun by the predator. Sometimes you interfere with nature, and its ferocity emerges in new ways, in perverse extremes of attitude or number. Sometimes it happens quickly; other times, you can’t see the effects until it’s too late. Sometimes you can’t help but feel you are part of a giant out-of-control science experiment.
Dad said that when they introduced rabbits to Australia, the rabbits had no natural predators, so they evolved into a crazy kind of super-rabbit. They decided to poison the rabbits, only the poison was the wrong poison, and all the rabbits died an exceptionally cruel death. “I can’t even think about it,” he said, and he shuddered.
If you ask, “Who are they?” he’ll say, “They. Those college bastards.” According to my mom, “They are the ones who killed Kennedy.” Jack would say, “They are the pharmaceutical companies.”
Mr. Shepard finished the lesson. I heard notebooks flapping shut. Too bad about the courtyard. The grass looked nice. I would have liked to spend some time outside.
——
Miss Panetta sighed hard. “This is basic science, Miss Palumbo.” She repeated the question, enunciating peevishly. “The function of water in photosynthesis is—what?”
Arms shot up, sleeves lightly whipping.
“Thank you, everyone, but Miss Palumbo is going to impress us with the truth.”
Mike Stern took advantage of the delay to talk to Billy Martinson. “We went to Tick Pete’s last night.” Tick Pete sold beer from the back of a shut-up diner in Amagansett. He slept behind the counter on a cot and watched TV, living off Slim Jims and Trix, Jack claimed, though Dan swore he once saw Pete eating Chinese takeout. “We still have half a case left,” Mike told Billy. “Meet us at Sammi’s Beach before Donkey Basketball.”
Jodie Palumbo stirred in her chair, her chin glued to the palm of one hand, the other hand playing lethargically with her practice AP Bio exam. She selected a random multiple choice answer and began reading lamely. “B? To absorb light energy?”
Ms. Panetta shuffled the test papers and shot a glance at the clock. She seemed upset. Sometimes you could really get to feeling bad for the teachers. “I—think—we—should—call—it—a—day.”
My locker closed, and all down the hall they slammed shut in succession, clacking like dominoes. Inside I’d found three bundles of paper. The first was from Denny.
Guess what. This is so unbelievably stupid you will die. Today in chemistry The Walrus was substitute and Dave Meese and Nico took one of Stephen Auchard’s chess pieces, a horse, and they hand-drilled a hole in its face and attached the bottom of the horse onto a gas hose and lit its mouth and fire shot out and burned Marty Koch’s legal pad with all his yearbook notes. Marty threatened to sue and Principal Laughlin had to come down. All I kept thinking was, I am so glad Evie is not here to see this. You would have been disgusted. Here’s a drawing—
The second was from Kate.
Do not show this to anyone under penalty of death. I thought essay was spelled S.A. I kept thinking what is an S.A.? Do you still refuse to come to Donkey Basketball? Michelle and Tim are going so I can go with them if it’s okay. I think it’s funny to see teachers on donkeys. Mr. Myers keeps scratching his back against the edge of the door. So gross. Don’t forget the spring concert Saturday. C.C. P.S. News bulletin: Kip and Paul Z.?!? P.P.S. Check out Lisa T.’s elephant ankles!!!!
The third was from Jack. The third I couldn’t open.
I skipped lunch to finish a lab report for Ms. Panetta, and while I was in the bio room, I heard a piano start to play Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You.” I knew it was Dan because no one else in school was good enough to play it except Jack, and Dan played differently from Jack. Jack steadied the keys and smoothed them, hunching fretfully as though they might bark or bite or turn on him. Dan played with exuberance.
I crossed the hall to the choral studio. Dan brightened when he saw me. He slid on the bench as his right hand tapped out melodies and his left tested rhythms, one song leading to another—“The Shadow of Your Smile” to “Rhapsody in Blue” to “Stormy Weather” to “Summertime.” I sat on the lowermost carpeted step of the choral risers, and then I lay down, still clutching my dirty scalpel. It had been submerged in formaldehyde; it had poked through bobbing corpses to locate the aurora pink tissue of a fetal pig, my very own pig. I knew which pig was mine because around the right eye was a gray wheel, cracked here and there at the outer edge like a pineapple ring. As Dan played, I was thinking that jazz works the way the mind does—something occurs to you and you think it, or, in the case of jazz, you play it.
People who passed peered in at me, as though I were kaleidoscopic, as though I were at the end of a long tube but could not materialize. I closed my eyes and started lapsing, receding like a discrete entity into its constitutional whole, like a gem to its mine, a drop to its sea. I wondered if Dan had heard the news from Jack about our breakup. It was nice of him to play for me regardless. Would I miss Dan, I wondered, or just the time we’d shared, his connection to the original meaning of me? I would miss him, I thought. Definitely, I would miss him.
Gym was last. I considered skipping, but frankly I didn’t want to be anywhere else. Wherever I was depressed me, but wherever I was not depressed me also, sometimes even more. In the locker room girls laughed as they changed. Girls have a giggling way of bending forward when they laugh. When boys laugh they present their chests proudly to the city of God.
My lock would not open. I yanked the round base but nothing happened. I tried the combination again, concentrating on the spinning black dial. I started to black out so I pressed my forehead into the damp bones of my left hand and with the right, I covered my nose and mouth to block the stench of the metal locker. It smelled like blood. Why did blood smell like metal? I could hear the bending laughter of the girls and the squeaks of sneakers slapping the ground and the flatulent squirts from near-empty bottles of body lotion. Later there would be water—toilets retching, sinks spewing. I could feel myself weave back, and back, into a writhing meadow of sound, with all that I saw and all that I could not see vanishing equally, though that could not have been so. Probably things had remained in place.
Caroline Boylan was above me, offering her hand. She was standing in the center of a group of girls; I’d obviously fainted again. Caroline wasn’t wearing a shirt or bra, so I couldn’t help but notice that her breasts were strange, sort of like cabinet knobs. In eleventh grade, the television show The $10,000 Pyramid had chosen her to play in its national teen tournament, making her into a lesser sort of celebrity. As I lay there, the memory of her on television returned to me, her giving clues to her partner from Appleton, Wisconsin, for “Things That Have Sauce.” Biting her lower lip, nodding, leaning forward, like a hood ornament, saying, Pizza, spaghetti, spaghetti, pizza, pizza, pizza.
“Thanks,” I said, coming up to sit. “I’m all right.”
The crowd disbanded in the sulky way crowds disband, like they haven’t quite gotten their money’s worth. I made my way onto the bench beneath the wall of lockers and lowered my head and squeezed the muscles in my thighs to send blood back up, because that was what Dr. Scott said to do whenever I felt faint. My parents kept sending me to him for tests, but everything kept being normal. He would just say that I was blessed with unusually low blood pressure, which should not be a problem “for anyone who actually eats and sleeps.”
“You okay?” Someone must have told Coach because it was her voice I heard, and when I lifted my head, it was the myriad surfaces of her body that came into complex focus through a mist of puckered stars. Her dimpled knees and distended belly were known to me and I was comforted by the sight of them. Perhaps there was nothing wrong with her; perhaps she was just straightforward about the inescapable fact of herself. “Need the nurse?” she asked.
The nurse would just give me a place to rest. But it’s impossible to rest when everything smells like the sweet of Band-Aids, and when the kidney pan she puts near your mouth is covered in those crazy black finger smudges, and there are depressing posters about alcohol abuse and car wrecks. You just sit and wait for an appropriate amount of time to pass before you can leave, hoping nobody you know comes in for some really gross and graphic problem. If they do, the nurse puts up a screen that you can totally see through. Before you leave, you have to thank her like she actually did something to heal you.
“Can I just stay with you?” I asked.
Coach gazed widely, blankly. She nodded once, and her oaky brown button eyes folded back into the confectionery flab of her face. “Let’s go out to the tennis courts.” She did not help me up, but she did get me a cup of cold water and a bag of salted cashews from her desk while I pulled on my shorts and sneakers. Together we crossed the deserted gymnasium, which was a queer sort of distinction.
The cyclone fence around the courts was cloaked in green tarps with cutout flaps—I sat and rested and waited for things to end, things such as the day and the tired way I felt. The sun beat against my lids, creating geometry underneath, wandering and upraised like swimming braille. The tennis balls smacked the rackets and hit the spongy ground to create a succession of hollow pops.
In the cavern of my room, after Rourke had left the night before, I was stricken with an incompetent longing, a clumsy physical loneliness. I was not clever with that lonely feeling, with its drift and wicked magnitude. I caressed my own body, seeking heat, seeking relief and restitution, seeking rewards withheld; and in the end I felt I had transgressed. It was not me I wanted but him, and that was a sorrowful offense, sorrowful because I was an animal and he was an animal, yet we lay separately in the gaping obscurity of one anonymous night on earth.
I did not change from my gym shorts or bother to go in to get my books. After the final bell rang, I just walked from the court, cutting through the side yard to the street. I was about to head home when I noticed the GTO parked in the front lot, and without even thinking I turned back to the building. I quickly navigated the crammed halls by minimizing myself—everyone else had grown so much bigger during the day that if you just stayed low and tight, you could cut through pretty easily.
In the crowded lobby, by the guidance office, Rourke was talking to Mr. McGintee. They shook hands amiably, saying “Good luck” and “Take care,” and when McGintee slipped into the auditorium where janitors were setting up for the spring concert, Rourke cut directly through the pack to meet me where I stood.
He said hi. I said hi. He seemed younger, or maybe just tired like me. There were lines beneath his eyes. “How are you?” he asked. I got the feeling he was referring to the previous night with Jack.
“I’m okay,” I said, and together we walked, him behind me. I was aware of my thighs in my shorts, the bareness of them, the way I knew he was looking.
“I have to pick up a check,” he said. “I’ll meet you at the car.”
I sat on the entrance steps and watched everyone leave. The car, he’d said, not my car. As the last yellow bus took the bend going from the school lot to Long Lane, a set of shoes appeared on the sidewalk before me—caramel-colored loafers with tassels. It was Mr. Shepard, finishing bus duty.
“Miss Auerbach,” he said definitively, as though he’d come upon me in the thick of the jungle.
I blocked the sun from my eyes and looked up at him.
He smiled tightly, and his chin gathered into his neck in that skeptical way that older men have, which they use on you when no one else is looking, and which is frankly just a patronizing manner of flirting. Skepticism suggests they know more than you do, and a superior intelligence is the only seductive power that remains to them at older ages, or so they think. Lowie once dated an alligator handler from the Florida Keys who was very handsome at forty-five. And firemen are always sexy, no matter how old, as are men who work at sea, like Powell. In general older men can be attractive as long as they use their accumulated experience to bully things other than you, such as reptiles, fire, and the ocean.
“Late to come, late to leave,” Mr. Shepard remarked as he started for the lobby. “Your timing is off today.” I actually thought my timing had been good. At the main entrance, he encountered Rourke, who was on his way out. Rourke drew in his chest and swept his arm like an awning to hold the door from inside. Shepard looked from Rourke to me and from me to Rourke—figuring, figuring darkly.
Rourke jogged down the steps. “Let’s go.”
In the car, we sat, and the leather was warm. Traces of him were everywhere—the confidential fragrance that had incubated beneath the roof, the microscopic shed of skin, the fingerprints on the vinyl dash. I felt an uneasy resolution—like everything was finally right, and yet nothing was very right at all. He had his last check; I had six more weeks of school. When I considered his keys, the slick conviction of his hand as it forced them into the ignition, I felt envious of the vehicle, of its prominence in his life. I squeezed into the gap between the bucket seat and the door, and the car moved from its spot. As he swerved left from the lot onto the main driveway, the car leaned against its two right wheels, against my side, and I heard a giant swish of wind—my door, flying open.
Tentacles of air pulled at my chest, suctioning me, summoning me. I felt wind on my face, and my knees pulling right as if inside there were pieces of metal and outside there were magnets. I began to slide, and I thought, I am going to die. I am going to plunge through the air and smash down and spill out across the asphalt. For some reason I thought of my fetal pig from bio lab—its starch-white face, the sock on its left rear leg. It was stiff and narrow like a wooden pull toy. I should have objected to dissecting it.
The whole thing took long, so long, seconds ticking and unticking, space transforming telescopically between the status of my body and that of the ground, until at last it came, not the fall, but Rourke’s hand, curling like a whip around my ribs. I actually thought to break his grip, to continue my fall—I’d been so tired lately. But he would never relent. Though I didn’t know if he loved me, I knew that he would not allow himself to be defeated in action. My right arm reached left, my fist clutched his sleeve, the car straightened, and my door slammed shut.
I collapsed in a ball against him, and he held me, shifting gears over the bridge of my ribs, his forearm jerking up and back, his hand returning each time to my body. Other than that, Rourke did not move, and I did not move, but we were breathing, both of us, our chests rising, falling, rising. We made our way slowly through East Hampton Village and eventually around to my street, at which point each muscle of his hand eased as if coming loose one at a time, and my body peeled itself from the electrifying shelter of his.
The screen door shot open like a slap. Kate leapt from the front porch and skipped across the slate walkway. She leaned on the passenger window, looking in. “This is a funny surprise,” she said with an inquisitive frown.
I popped the door, shoving her a little and slipping past; I didn’t want her to change the way I felt. I proceeded to the garage entrance and into my bedroom, where I stripped before the mirror and examined my naked body to see what it was that I felt, when what I felt was ever mortal, ever viable and real. I looked like a girl, and I looked like a woman, and in my eyes was a consecrated knowledge.
Suddenly there were so many things to think about. On the one hand, it had been very mechanical: a door opened, and I nearly fell. On the other, I’d confessed a willingness to die, and he’d confessed an unwillingness to let me. And his instant concern elicited in me instant trust. I’d never felt trust that way before.
The near miss provided a reminder about the fugitive constitution of life. Perhaps death is always so proximate; perhaps life and its loss are two opposing states—life as suspension, death as the reverse, as a dissolution of structure. Reverend Olcott says hell is simply a place outside the society of God, and that God is what you conceive Him to be. Maybe hell is an absence of presence, a wall down—loneliness. That was the part Jack went out of his way to confront—the ease of loneliness, each time telling himself that an end could be simple and near, simpler and nearer than living and its requisite effort, when no one hears the things you say, when everyone has their own ideas of you, when everything you want is impossible to achieve, and every day you’re dying anyhow. I thought I understood. If I’d melted through the divide, if I’d passed from one side to the other, it would have been better to leave Rourke then, at the exact moment his body had confessed a need for my body, than to prevail and endure the inevitable anguish of the inevitable loss of him.
Jack had felt the same, only for me. On the tracks the night before, he’d said, I fucked up. By that he meant that he’d waited too long, that our time had gone by, that all that had been good was gone, that he should have had the courage to end it first. Love is exactly like starlight, he’d said. By that he meant that love has its time, which is not necessarily your time. You have to be big, I think, or old or brave or rich or mad, or something other than what I knew myself and Jack to be, to make love’s time your own.
The front door slammed and I grabbed a blanket, covering myself. Kate ran into my room, breathless, saying something about Harrison and Friday night, something about going out, two friends in town.
“Will you come?” she said. “He said to ask.”
Beneath the blanket my fingers jammed the welt on my rib cage that he’d made when he grabbed my side in the car. The pain radiated in an imperfect circle. I liked that he had caused it.
“He’s outside waiting,” Kate urged. “He leaves for good on Monday.”
She didn’t want me to go because she wanted my company. She didn’t want me to go because he’d asked. She wanted me to go because she was afraid to go alone. I thought she had reason to be afraid. It would have frightened me too, to be her, to be beautiful but deaf and blind to incentive, to have the world venture no farther than my immaculate façade.
In her words I heard him speak. I heard him remind me that I am alive, and therefore, forgivable. That I cannot despise myself for my failings when it is those failings that make me desirable. That love has its time. That nature does not favor those who would resist its hour and its course.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go.”