In Zanesville (15 page)

Up close, Mr. Prentiss had seemed so real he was almost surreal—like having a character in your dream show up when you aren’t
asleep and suddenly put their hand in your shirt.

A boy put his hand in my shirt! I feel strangely elated, even though it didn’t work out.

“We thought that guy was going to kiss you,” Felicia says. “Right there in the bleachers, in front of God and everyone.”

“There is no everyone,” I tell her.

W
e are required to take a shop class instead of home ec the second half of the year, starting right after Christmas. I get
metal shop, where I’m making a tackle box for my dad, and Felicia gets wood shop, where she’s burning a design into a step
stool with a branding iron. You get a choice of two patterns; one is foliage with your father’s name in the center, and the
other is a farm scene.

I used to love the farms where all my relatives lived, big dark ramshackle houses with boot scrapers set into their stoops.
I could make our family a boot scraper, if we wanted one, now that I’m in metal shop. I’ve never used a blowtorch before,
but I see why people like it—it cuts metal. I’ve taken to talking about it at the dinner table, which I wouldn’t normally
do about anything else, but this is different.

“You can cut
steel?
” Raymond asks me, raising his head from a bowl of cornflakes, chewing and dripping on the tablecloth.

At that exact moment, I remember a dream I had from the night before, where I was at my uncle’s pond watching everyone fish
and suddenly there was a moose standing knee deep in the water, moss dripping from its chin. Why was I dreaming about a moose?

Ray uses both shoulders of his shirt to dry his face and then goes in again. “How can she cut
steel?
”

“Close your mouth,” I tell him.

“You let me be in charge of table manners,” my mother says.

“It melts the molecules,” I tell him.

“It
melts
them?” Ray says incredulously.

“I wonder if it melts them,” my dad says. “I’m not sure if that’s what a cutting torch does.”

“That’s what it does,” I say.

“You’re liable to melt your own molecules,” my mother says, “if you don’t watch what you’re doing. And I’m tired of seeing
a book at the table.”

“We never had shop,” Meg says, closing her book. “We learned how to sew your fingers together and how to make cinnamon toast.”

“This is what they’re burning their bras for over in Washington,” my mother says. “So these girls can end up in the hospital
if they aren’t careful.”

“Boy, be careful,” my dad says to me.

“I am,” I tell him.

I wish my mother wouldn’t mention bras in front of my father; I don’t know how much he knows or doesn’t know about certain
matters. My mother’s own bras are large quilted things that I used to think were funny. Now when I see them on the laundry
table, one cup folded into the other, I have a sense of impending
doom. It’s like being on your way to the Alps and knowing that when you get there you’ll have to wear lederhosen.

Upstairs right now is another gloomy contraption that was recently bestowed on me—the sanitary belt. This is a piece of elastic
that goes around the waist with garters in the front and back, used to strap on a sanitary rag. No matter how much you scrub
it, the belt keeps its pale pink stains from month to month. I wonder what my father thinks of that thing when he sees it
hanging from the bathtub faucet.

My mother serves up bread pudding for dessert, a dish nobody likes. We sort through it with our spoons while she smokes and
my dad looks over our heads. He’s been sober now for several weeks, ever since New Year’s, but it’s coming to an end. His
resolve cracking is nearly audible in the silence.

“Why can’t this just be pudding?” Meg asks finally. “Why does there have to be wet bread in it?”

The best thing about shop isn’t actually the cutting steel, but the fact that all anyone has to do is ask to use the bathroom
and Mr. Rangel, the teacher, lets them leave. He’s never taught girls before and it’s making him frantic—the first mistake
he made was putting us in pairs on the torch. Within five minutes somebody created a column of fire in the middle of the room,
brief but riveting, and Rangel locked the door afterward and explained for about an hour how it happened (lack of safety)
and why it would never happen again (he would personally supervise every instance of acetylene use from there on out) and
the reason it was never to be discussed outside the classroom (shop would be permanently closed to girls, regardless of women’s
lib).

There’s always somebody you know in the bathroom. This
time it’s Luekenfelter, so we sit on sinks and talk for a while about our current topics—what if she tries out for chorus
and ends up making a screeching sound instead of singing, and what if my only chance to have a boyfriend has already happened
and I ruined it. At this point, all that’s left of Mr. Prentiss is a piece of rubber off his shoe that I’ve been using for
a bookmark. He either got sent away or moved away.

Lately Luek and I have been trying to help each other be more confident but it isn’t working; we’re actually making ourselves
more nervous. We joke around about that for a while before we realize Patti Michaels is standing on a toilet, blowing smoke
into the ceiling fan and listening to us over the top of the stall. This girl has the distinction of being the only cheerleader
who is also a hood—she transferred from another school, and the tryouts took place before anyone knew anything about her,
beyond the fact that she looked like Gidget and could do a no-handed backflip from a standing position.

“I’m dead if that door opens,” she says.

“We’ll cover you,” I tell her.

“If that kinky-haired bitch walks in here, stab her,” she answers.

That gets a moment of respectful silence, and then we hop down and address the mirror. One of my ears constantly pokes through
my hair, possibly because it’s bigger than the other, just like one of my eyes is slightly higher than the other. No matter
how I tilt my head, everything is off-kilter.

“I look like modern art,” I say.

Patti snorts.

“Girls, I’m going back,” Luek says. She scans the corridor on her way out, looking for whoever is in pursuit of Patti. “Empty,”
she reports.

“Don’t leave yet,” Patti says to me. “What do you have?”

“Shop.” I need to go back and finish my hinges, but this girl has a certain authority, being a cheerleader standing on a toilet.

“Rangel or Dim-dick?” she asks. Mr. Dimmek is the wood-shop teacher.

“Rangel,” I say. I show her the hall pass, a flat piece of metal with a room number painted on it. “This is the plate out
of his head.”

Patti snorts again, dropping her cigarette in the toilet and giving it a flush.

“You hang around with that girl Flea, right?” she says. “You and her should come to my slumber party this Saturday. It’ll
be Cindy, Gretchen, Kathy, Cathy, Deb, and then three friends from my old school. My grandmother said I could have ten.”

Crap! The problem with Patti Michaels is that she not only doesn’t know she isn’t cheerleader material, but she doesn’t know
who should and shouldn’t be invited to one of their parties. This is a disaster.

“Well, what do you think?” she demands.

“Fun,” I say.

We open the door and peer up and down the hall, which is empty except for a desk that has been pulled out of the sewing classroom.
In it, a banished kid is bent over a needlework project. He has Mr. Prentiss’s same hair.

“So come to my locker after school,” Patti says, and sashays past the boy, who looks up from his tea towel to watch.

“Wait—how many cheerleaders?” Felicia asks suspiciously.

“A lot,” I tell her.

“Yeah, but how many?”

“All of them,” I confess, “and a couple people from another school.”

“And this is Patti Michaels, right? Not Patty Jackson and not Patty what’s her name?”

“I know those Pattys—this is Michaels. She was in the third-floor bathroom when I went in there, and she invited us to her
slumber party.”

“And did she say me, or did she say you, and you said me?”

“She said, ‘Flea.’ ‘You hang around with that girl Flea,’ or something like that,” I tell her. “You’re actually in this more
than I am. She never called
me
by my name.”

“Does she know she looks like Gidget?” Felicia asks.

“Probably. So, do you think we should go?”

“I agree with you about Shakespeare,” she says suddenly, as the shadow of a teacher looms over us, listening. This is gifted
English, which means we work at our own pace, learning about literature through interaction with our peers. “The
tempest
he’s referring to is actually a storm. At sea, it looks like.”

“It’s where the old saying of a
tempest in a teapot
comes from,” I tell her.

“We have to think about how the ship is like a teapot,” Felicia suggests.

“Don’t worry about that now, okay?” Miss Van Leuven interjects. “I’m asking people to read this with the idea that they’re
listening to the
music
of Shakespeare. Think of it—and hear it, if you can—as mellifluous. It will help if you read passages aloud to one another.
Try closing your eyes while you listen!” She pauses, chewing on a hangnail. “Or, I don’t know… does that seem silly?”

“No,” I say.

“It’s a good idea,” Felicia says.

Van Leuven continues on her lonely way, drifting and prodding. She is the youngest of all the teachers and somewhat of an
outcast. She showed up this year from Minneapolis, bringing the gifted program with her. This happened to occur at the same
time the Annex arrived—a trailerlike structure pulled up and parked behind the real school, containing three new classrooms,
a science lab, and a closet filled with vented plastic boxes full of rodents and frogs—and the same time the mandate came
down about girls in shop and boys in home ec. So poor Van Leuven is forever linked with progress, and when you see her with
the other teachers, no one is ever talking to her.

The first day we had her, she wore a windowpane-patterned dress with a vinyl Carnaby Street hat, the second day she wore a
denim jumper over a black leotard, the third day she wore a Mexican dress with a rope belt, the fourth day she wore a granny
dress and granny glasses, and the fifth day she wore a pink suit with a too-short skirt and got sent home, like a student.
When she came back, it was in a dirndl skirt and a white blouse, which she has worn some variation on ever since.

Felicia thumbs through her book. “Close your eyes,” she says, and recites:

O wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world

That has such people in’t!

’Tis new to thee.

What is this maid with whom thou wast at play?

Van Leuven is right: when you close your eyes, certain words bloom out. Hollyhocks in a field of soybeans:
goodly, beauteous,
wast at play.
The simplest, most unadorned words—’tis, new, to, and thee—become
’Tis new to thee,
a perfect little phrase.

’Tis + new + to + thee =
’Tis new to thee.
I’ve been put in gifted math too.

“You can open your eyes,” Felicia says.

When I do, we’re still in the Annex. Across the hall is the closet where the rodents and frogs are being held, waiting to
take part in experiments. “So, what about the party?” I ask.

“I think we should just go and see,” she says, handing me the book and closing her eyes.

She wants to go! I was afraid of that.

“Me too,” I say, turning pages. “Listen to this. Trinculo:
I shall not fear fly-blowing.
”

“What’s fly-blowing?” she asks.

“Self-explanatory,” I say. “Listen to this, it’s about your sister:
I am not Stephano, but a cramp.
”

“Ha, she
is
a cramp,” Felicia says, eyes still closed. “Are the friends from the other school cheerleaders too?”

“Probably,” I tell her, turning pages. “Listen:
Monster, I do smell all horse-piss, at which my nose is in great indignation.
”

“Ha,
horse-piss!
” Felicia says, this time too loudly, her voice carrying across the room.

Van Leuven makes her way toward us through the tangle of displaced desks and chairs, drawing nigh just as the bell tolls.
She stands aside then, a pale, pretty woman in a Dacron blouse, as students scramble over one another to get out of her classroom.

As we pass her, she says, hopefully, “He’s funny, isn’t he, girls? Shakespeare.”

*     *     *

Patti Michaels is standing at her locker, waiting, at three o’clock.

“Hi,” she says to Felicia.

“Hi,” Felicia answers.

She hands over two invitations with our names scrawled on them.

“Where do you live?” I ask.

“You know that house that looks like a plantation, on Twelfth?” Patti asks. “That’s my grandma’s house, where I now live.
We get the whole basement and she’s ordering us pizzas delivered. All anyone needs to bring is a sleeping bag—it’s my birthday
but I’m not asking for presents.”

The plantation house! A wide, sloping terrace, lions on either side of the front door, a circular drive with a stone arch,
a carriage house. We stand for a moment, uncertain what to say next. Halfway down the hall, three boys are horsing around,
two of them swinging notebooks at each other’s heads while the third tries to trip them.

“We might have to do something else that night,” Felicia barely audibly tells Patti. “We aren’t sure.”

“This party is better,” Patti says definitively. “Ask anyone who ever knew me before I lived here: you’ll have fun.”

Suddenly one of the notebook boys hits the other one broadside in the head, causing him to stop for a moment in astonishment
before swinging back, very hard and wide, missing the first kid, who ducks, but slamming the notebook into the metal lockers.
The first kid then uses his notebook like a shield, forcing the second kid into walking backward, red faced
and laughing. The third kid follows them around in circles, putting his foot out to trip whomever he can.