A Town of Empty Rooms (29 page)

Was this the answer? What did they all think they would get when they won? Serena wondered. She could see in Forrest's face the same hope that was in Dan's, and in her own, the desire to be lifted from the general sordid nature of their longing. What would they feel when they stood on the winner's podium, clutching their trophies? She thought of her father standing over his train track scenes, right before he destroyed them, and the yearning in his face to create a landscape better than anyone he'd read about in
Model Trains Monthly,
anyone who'd written him a letter. “It's not how I saw it,” he would say, his voice rising, as he began to crush the tiny trees. “It's not what it was in my mind.” She thought of the way she sat before Earl Morton, waiting to hear what he thought about a speech she had written for him, watching him read it, as though to have her words chosen over the other speechwriters' in the company would somehow finally make her visible. It was the way the scouts were now gathering around the table that displayed all the cars — to merely be born was to distrust the fact of your reality, but to win something was to finally understand who you were in the world.

The cars were set out on a display table for judging in the artistic categories: Most Colorful, Most Original, Best Paint Job. There were cars shaped like a hotdog, an iPod, a spaceship, a gun, a foot. There were various cars with a Christmas theme, Santas, reindeer, a bright gold cross; there was one that had been outfitted with blinking electric lights. Serena was alarmed by the elaborate level of design. Zeb grabbed Serena's hand. He seemed to sense that some ante had just been upped.

“What do I do?” he asked.

“You race,” said Rachel.

“How?” He bit his lip.

“It goes by itself,” said Serena. She squeezed his hand and felt his slim bones. “It'll be fine,” she said.

“But what do I do?” asked Zeb, pulling at his lip.

“Before we get our cars on the track,” said Forrest, “before we get into the spirit of friendly competition, let's remind ourselves of the values of this holiday season. I invite you to come up and share some of the ways we celebrate Christmas!” Forrest swung, smiling, around the room. “I'll start. My family comes together, four sisters, eighteen cousins, down here. We spend Christmas Eve in front of a big bonfire in our yard. Then we go to sleep and leave a snack out for Santa, and in the morning, it's always gone. It took me years to believe my mother ate it.” Laughter.

There followed several jolly anecdotes in a similar vein. Dan was tapping his fingers, annoyed.

“Can we just get on with it,” he whispered to Serena.

“Now, Dan is going to tell us how the Jews celebrate Christmas!” said Forrest.

Dan looked up; he had not expected this.

Dan sat, frozen, for a moment, and then he jumped up and ran to the front of the room. He rubbed his hands together. The room was not particularly diverse, period. There were two black families, one Hispanic father and son, one scout who had been adopted from China, but everyone here had this in common: They were Christian. It was a situation that Serena's father would have, in his odd way, loved. When
he felt uncomfortable in any situation, he always took note of fire exits and the quickest ways to reach them. One of his favorite things to point out in a movie theater, an enclosed place that unnerved him, was how many steps it took to get to one particular exit and why it was superior to another. It had aggravated her as a child, though it was also strangely exciting, the idea that at any moment one should be prepared to hurl oneself through a fire exit.

“Go ahead,” said Forrest.

Dan clapped his hands together. “Our Christmas is called Chanukah,” Dan said, drawing out the
ch,
like a gargle, to comic effect. There was mild laughter; Zeb stood up on his knees and looked around to see why they were laughing, and then he did, too. “We have eight days. That's eight days of presents, boys, not just one!” He shook a fist in the air, as though triumphant. “We play with a dreidel. We eat chocolate coins. We, uh, shake graggers. We light candles.” He smiled broadly. “Eight days of presents!”

“Well,” said Forrest, clapping his hands. There was applause. Dan bowed and walked to Serena. His forehead was damp.

“We don't shake graggers,” Serena whispered to him.

He looked at her.

“That's Purim,” she said.

“Gentlemen, let's start our engines!” called Forrest, and there was wild cheering. The scouts and their families went to the race preparation table and began smearing tires with graphite. Dan went to stand beside the tracks. His job was to press the button to start the cars moving and the timer running.

“Let's go, scouts!” called Forrest. “Can Will Tyler, Harper Pierce, and Amos Smith report to the tracks?”

There was applause. The boys trotted up and placed their cars on the tracks.

“Ready!” said Forrest. The boys stepped back from the tracks. Forrest shot off a muted starting gun, Dan pushed the button, and the cars were off.

The race took a matter of seconds. The wooden cars zoomed down the tracks, hit the bottom, bounced, and stopped. Numbers flashed on the screen: Track 1: 4.589, Track 2: 4.689, Track 3: 4.903.

“The winner of this race is Will Tyler!” Will Tyler jumped up and down and screamed.

The race continued like this, the little wooden cars speeding down the track, hitting the bottom, the winners and losers separated by milliseconds and for no apparent reason of engineering or skill. The scouts were each allowed three races, and their scores would be tallied, and the overall winners would be announced. The children and parents seemed to be caught up in a great wave, this simplification of their desire. It was its own form of holiness.

Then it was Zeb's turn.

He felt his mother's hand on his shoulder. He clutched the car in his hand and began to push through the crowd. There were so many people, and he just came up to their waistlines as he moved through the forest of brown pants and belts and butts and hairy arms. His father was calling his name. He tried to move in the direction of it, though he was not sure where he was going, and he was distracted by the sour smell of grownups and sweat, but somehow he was moving, and then he was stepping onto a stool and he was at Track 3, standing at the top of the sloping track, which looked endless. His father's hand was on his shoulder, and he did not know what he was supposed to do, or how to do it, but he placed his black car on the track. People laughed at his car; he liked the color black and thought his car looked especially powerful painted that color. He glanced at the others, the elaborate designs on them. He was set up against a car that resembled a Christmas tree and one that, amazingly, resembled a donkey with a halo. He shivered; he felt a huge wave rise inside of him, a desire to conquer these cars, to conquer this audience, to see his name on the screen. He was a little dizzy. He looked for his mother, who was staring at him with a confusing expression on her face, and he saw her holding his sister. Zeb wanted to win. He sensed his father holding his hand over the levers, about to start, and an icicle of fear shot up in his chest. Zeb placed his hand on the car.

His father pushed the button, and the cars were off. Wrightson, Sanders, and Shine. Track 1: 4.32 1, Track 2: 4.789, Track 3: 4.217.

The screen said, “Winner: Shine.”

A roar went up, and Dan grabbed his son and hugged him, a violent
hug; Zeb felt as though he were being crushed. He had done something right, and joy blew through him.

Zeb ran back to Serena. She gripped him and felt the exuberance, the quivering in his torso. Rachel, too, was jumping up and down and gripping the car; they were both crazed by it, this triumph, and Serena was, too, this thrill, the prickle down her arms, the shouting inside herself that he won, that Rachel would be next, that next year she would win in the sibling division, that their lives would be all right, and that they would march forward, buoyed up by some skill or luck into a perfect, clear blue sky.

Then Zeb won again. And again.

Dan could not believe it each time he saw his child's name on the board, glowing in green: Shine. It was beautiful, his name, the word,
Shine,
and there it was. Once, twice, three times. Had they inadvertently made a car that was a winner? Or was it all just luck? There was no way to know. He put his hand gently on the boy's shoulder.

At the end, the scouts and their parents stood as Forrest announced the names of the overall winners: individual fastest, and then highest speed over three races. Fifth place. Fourth. Third. Second.

“The overall winner, by oh point eleven seconds ahead of second place, is!” said Forrest.

His forehead gleamed. He wiped it with the end of his neckerchief. He called Zeb's name.

“You won!” yelled Dan, who scooped Zeb up and ran him to the front of the room where the boy, bewildered, was presented with a plastic golden trophy. There was applause, though some scouts in the audience were weeping.

“Next pack meeting in two weeks,” said Forrest. The crowd swarmed the refreshment table. Dan looked around at the other parents. They were, depending on their scores, either comforting their children or fondling the trophies they had received. A few parents stepped up to Dan and shook hands in a show of good sportsmanship. “You all are the Andretti family!” exclaimed one. He pretended to be modest. He (oh, right, Zeb) had won.

Dan looked around for Forrest. He felt a tug of gratitude to him for inviting them into this group and wanted to say something to him.
Forrest gazed out at the emptying room. He slowly walked off the podium to join Dawson. His grandson was walking through the room, fingering the cloth badges on his uniform as though to check that they were all intact.

“Where's your vehicle?” Forrest asked him.

“Dunno,” said Dawson. His face looked redder.

“Find it,” said Forrest.

“I don't know where it is,” said Dawson.

Forrest looked as though he were about to launch into a lengthy response to this comment when Dan stepped up. “Great race,” said Dan, clapping his hands together.

“Yep,” said Forrest, a little stiffly.

“It was close,” said Dan.

Forrest laughed, a sound that seemed to have been manufactured in a factory that produced laughter. “Close. Close. Who knows why it happens? My father spent forty-some hours one year helping me with my car, doing who knows what, and I came in dead last. Ha!” He laughed, a strangled laugh. “Every race. I couldn't sleep that night. I thought I'd let him down. Did you know that Dawson woke up at 4:00 AM today? He was so excited.”

Dan looked at Forrest and understood his sadness, his beaten expression. “He did a good job,” said Dan.

They all unplugged the wires from the computers and set them in the back of the church. Then they went to the car. The lot was empty now; the asphalt sparkled under the gray parking lamp lights.

“What a night!” Dan said. “That was fun.” Serena had to agree — there was something energizing about seeing the cars speed down the tiny tracks, about Zeb's excitement. “You made a good car,” he said to Zeb.

“I want six trophies,” said Zeb, running up beside him.

“I do, too,” said Rachel.

The children got into the car; in a sudden moment of harmony, they positioned the trophy between themselves. It was merely a plastic gold cup mounted on a hunk of stained wood, created in a trophy factory, but the letters, in elegant script, said: GRAND WINNER: PINEWOOD DERBY 2003.

Dan started the car. Serena glanced at his face. In the long march of marriage, she had seen his face evolve — from the young confidence of a man whose cheek she wanted to touch, to the gentleness that overwhelmed his face when he first held his children, to the aggrieved hardness that he had worn the last few bleak months, to now. She saw something new in his expression. He wanted to be a boy — she could see it in the structure of his face, in the way it was aging, even in the way the creases emanated from his smile. His face held some innocence or was trying to force itself to a sort of flatness, and, seeing this, Serena was startled.

Chapter Seventeen

THE MEETING AT OAKDALE ELEMENTARY Auditorium was two nights later, December 7. It was scheduled for seven, but audience members began to claim seats at around six. The SUVs, the jacked-up pickup trucks, and the worn-out Buicks and Chevys were parked on the damp, matted grass. Forrest Sanders had come off the Pinewood Derby to prepare for this; he was standing at the front of the school, armed with flyers and now T-shirts, shaking hands as though he were running for office.

Serena walked inside the auditorium alone. The Oakdale Auditorium was like every public school auditorium: dank and sloping and with a heating and ventilation system so flawed that even during the winter everyone was fanning themselves with their flyers to remain cool. The atmosphere resembled a family event, almost jolly. Many people were wearing Christmas sweaters, grand and curious woolen manifestations of trees, reindeer, angels, adorned with tiny bells on the shoulders. Some of the people had made protest signs. There was a sign with Santa with an X through his face and a single tear rolling down his cheek. Forrest's flyer had cast a wide net; the saving of Christmas attracted the vocal members of the far right, the creationists, the pro-lifers, those who wanted prayer in school, people who wanted to define marriage as only between a man and woman. One young woman gripped a sign that said, “What about the Fossil Record?” There were a couple representatives from the liberal side — one was a local midwife who had nursed her two-year-old openly in the school hallway, her large, pale breasts gaily flashed to the students. The vice principal had asked her to please nurse the child in her car, which had led to its own cries and protests. She held up a sign with religious symbols — a cross, a Star of David — that together created a word: COEXIST. There
was a sparkling, tense energy in the room, as though the grinding hew of raising children, of preparing meals, of the war news, of the visage of the president proclaiming the war had been won while soldiers were still dying, of the tremulousness of their marriages, of the drudgery of their jobs, could be put aside for this most precious enterprise: a cause.