In Zanesville (17 page)

Ringgold won’t shut up, and now he’s calling us people, which means we’ve got a ways to go. “Get yourselves over to Chicago,
but forget the galleries—go straight to the Art Institute and stand there for five minutes in front of a Chagall, that’s all
I ask. If I could get you people over there I would, if
for no other reason than to shake up your ideas of who’s important and who isn’t, in terms of these current guys who just
try to follow the fads. Yeah, there are fads in art just like there are fads in everything else—hairstyles, what have you.
This is what you find out when you’re in that world, and that’s partly why I’m here, trying to direct people toward what’s
real, at least to some extent.” He pauses, pressing on his mustache, thinking. He’s forgotten my project, which I’m grateful
for, since the hands weren’t my idea anyway; they were based on a childhood hallucination of Dunk’s, where she was riding
in a car and thought birds were waving at her from the side of the road.

Oh God! There it goes again. I roll off my left hip and rearrange myself, elbows on the table and one knee tucked under, so
I’m half sitting, half kneeling, on my bench.

“It wouldn’t be a time to horse around, but if I could swing it, how many of you people would want to go to Chicago to see
some of these things?” Mr. Ringgold asks suddenly. Everyone raises their hand.

“If it worked at all—and who knows if it’s even possible—this would be a trip reserved for serious artists, the people who
are able to grasp the difference between a museum and a gymnasium…”

Right at the end of this hall is the girls’ locker room, where everyone goes when this happens; it’s like a menstrual bomb
shelter. There’s always somebody on guard in there, folding towels or reading a book, sitting out gym class because of cramps.
Whoever that person is would help me. Steve pushes a drawing over to me: one of his veiny-eyed, whiskered rats sitting in
a fire truck.

I look down and nod: cute.

“One minute,” he whispers.

I nod. One minute you’re invited to a cheerleader party and the next minute you’re Lena Gibb.

Without warning, another creeping trickle of warmth. Why, oh why didn’t I wear plaid? Thirty-one minutes to the bell—what
if Ringgold talks that entire time? By then it’ll be long past too late; I’ll be leaving here in a boat. I stand partway up
again to switch knees, and as I do, there’s a surge. It’s got a life of its own now.

“Joan!” Steve whispers.

I tip my head in his direction. I wish all men would shut up.

“Half a minute,” he whispers.

“Half a minute what?” I whisper, eyes on Ringgold, who is now sitting on the edge of his desk, swinging one leg and pressing
his mustache, describing I have no idea what. Some art assignment where he had to drop an egg off a roof.

Steve leans over and whispers: “Five… four… three… two… one…”

The fire alarm goes off.

Ringgold jumps to his feet, startled, and then stretches. “Okay, people,” he says, raising his voice over the intermittent
blatting sound. “Nothing to hustle for, but let’s hustle anyway. Let’s be the first ones out so we can be the first ones back
in.”

I fiddle with my chicken while they file out, and then I sprint for the locker room. The girl who’s guarding has a cast on
her leg.

“There’s no fire, right?” she asks me, propping the door with her crutch.

“Nope,” I say, ducking in.

“Good, because I’m not going anywhere,” she says, hobbling
back to the bench, where she’s been coloring on her cast with a set of markers. She’s wearing a peasant skirt and a blouse
with big, billowy sleeves. “These fucking crutches are killing my armpits.”

“I need my locker,” I explain. I’m shaking now, out of breath from sprinting and humiliation.

“Why?”

“I started,” I tell her. “In art class, and then couldn’t get out. It’s everywhere, I’m destroyed.”

“Oh you poor pale thing,” she says kindly. “Let me see.”

I turn around and stare into the green bank of lockers.

“Nothing,” she says, going back to her coloring.

Nothing?

“You’re fine,” she says.

I am?

I spin open my gym locker, retrieve the lavender carrying case, and head back to the stalls.

Once there, I discover she was right. False alarm.

“Stop giving me subliminal suggestions,” I tell Maroni that afternoon.

“You’re the one who had the dream, not me,” she says.

We’re sitting out gym class, waiting for Felicia to join us—she gets off early on Fridays for School Beautification. This
is a program run by the health teacher that mainly involves picking up candy wrappers outside, scraping gum off the pile of
desks under the stage, and taping up holiday decorations. You have to be on the honor roll to do it, because it only takes
about twenty minutes and then you get to go home.

“Guess the candy bar most eaten at this school,” Felicia says on arrival. “Then guess the gum.”

“The gum is Bazooka and the candy bar is Hershey’s,” I answer.

“Wrong.”

“The gum is Juicy Fruit and the candy bar is Clark,” I try.

“Right,” Felicia says.

“How can you know the actual flavor of the gum?” Maroni asks her.

“Because when you have about sixty petrified pieces in a bucket and you add hot water, it turns into a giant vat of Juicy
Fruit again.”

“Ha—who did that?” I ask.

“Peter Sheldon and Don West. They used the hot-tea water in the teachers’ lounge.”

“Why do you get to go in the teachers’ lounge?” Maroni asks, suddenly interested. “What’s it look like?”

“We went in there to staple president heads to the bulletin board. All their stuff was everywhere—knitting, newspapers, crap
like that. A bunch of Tupperware with people’s names on it. Ashtrays every two feet.”

“Was Mr. Carlisle’s toupee anywhere?” Maroni asks.

“That’s his
hair,
Maroni,” Felicia says.

“People don’t have hair like that,” she insists.

“People don’t buy
toupees
like that,” Felicia argues. “Plus, who cares what his toupee looks like when he wears his pants up around his neck?”

“They do something weird in the back,” I add. I’m somewhat of an expert on Mr. Carlisle because he was my homeroom teacher
and my history teacher in seventh grade. He was
in the war and cries during the Pledge of Allegiance. Everyone talks about his pants, but nobody talks about that.

“Can we blow up balls, please?” Maroni says. We have several cages of gym balls—basketballs, soccer balls, volleyballs, kickballs—that
need to be checked for softness and then affixed to an air hose and pumped back up by stepping on a pedal. Since I actually
do have cramps—Maroni is faking—I’m doing the checking and affixing, and she’s doing the stepping.

“Here, I’ll do one,” Felicia offers. “That’ll get the old butt smaller.”

It seems like the entire fleet of volleyballs is flat; it’s going to take forever, and the whole point of Maroni sitting out
class and Felicia sneaking into the locker room was to do something besides jamming air into gym balls—we’re supposed to be
getting me started on tampons so that when I go to the cheerleader party tomorrow night I won’t seem like some demented pioneer
girl who’s out there scrubbing her rags on a washboard and hanging them on a line.

If only I hadn’t left metal shop to meet Luek and talk about boys, none of this would be happening. No Patti Michaels, no
angry cheerleaders at a ruinous party where we don’t belong, no possibility of bleeding all over somebody’s rich grandmother’s
possibly white furniture. It’s all my fault, I freely admit it, picking up one of the sinking volleyballs and kicking it down
toward the shower area as hard as I can. It hits the wall halfway there and rolls to a flaccid stop.

“Here, now calm down,” Felicia says, opening her locker and rooting around in it. “You need to relax the muscles in your hooey.
Flehhhh
… just let her go.” She hands me a box of plugs and sends me into a stall.

“Do everything I say,” she says through the door. “Even if it seems wrong.”

“I’m not listening to you, because you think this is funny,” I say. “I’m only listening to Maroni.”

“She’s busy,” Felicia says briskly. “First of all, sit down.”

“I’m no busier than anyone else,” Maroni protests.

When my mother demonstrated how to fasten the rag to the sanitary belt, she tried to actually put it on me while I was standing
there. She pulled the same trick when she took me shopping for a bra too, right in the middle of the store, and then laughed
about it later on the telephone. Say what you will about Maroni, but she doesn’t laugh at anything, even jokes, which is why
she comes in handy at times like these.

“Help, Maroni.”

“Okay,” Maroni says calmly. “Are you looking at the picture?”

I look at the insert that comes in the box, showing an outline of a girl seated on a toilet and another outline of a girl
standing with one foot on the edge of a bathtub. In both cases, the girl is placing what looks like a firecracker in the outline
of her uterus.

“Not a uterus, a vagina,” Maroni says. She pronounces it like her own first name—Gina—shaking my confidence.

“Felicia?” I call out.

“Right here,” Felicia replies smoothly. “Just do what it says, and tell me what happens.”

“Nothing is happening. There’s nowhere for it to go.”

“Yes, there is. Keep at it,” Felicia says.

“It’s right there,” Maroni says encouragingly.

“It doesn’t fit where they’re showing,” I tell them.

“I hate to tell you this, but you have to make it fit,” Felicia says.

The girl in the drawing looks like she could be related to the girl embossed into the lavender carrying case; they’re cut
from the same calm cloth. They should show one of them screaming.

“Goddamn it to hell,” I say through my teeth.

“This is why they call it the curse,” Felicia replies.

That night, Felicia and I have to go to Heyworth, a little town thirty miles from Zanesville, to attend the visitation for
Luekenfelter’s cousin’s mother. This is an idea dreamed up by our own mothers, but since it’s Friday night—a big euchre night
for my parents and a big jigsaw puzzle night for Felicia’s—Meg has been enlisted to drive us out there in the family car.

My parents, who will walk to Tuck’s instead of driving, laid a lecture on us, with information about how to behave in the
backseat of a car being driven by one’s older sister, and how to behave if one is the older driving sister with two girls
in the backseat, and why Whinny is not allowed to come along for the ride this time—too distracting—but if everything goes
well, and people behave like adults, she can most likely be included next time. We ought to remember the way because Aunt
Else and Uncle Jimmy live out in that direction, but just in case, we are to take Minonk Road, follow it down to the one way,
go left past the bowling alley, the liquor store, the bait shop billboard, and the house with all the wrought iron, then over
a bridge into Plain Acres, where we bear right at the root beer stand, onto Highway 9, past the movie theater on the right
and a roadhouse on the left, and then straight out into the country.

“Woo-hah,” Meg yells, pushing it up to seventy.

Whinny lights a cigarette and rolls her window down halfway, blasting us in the face with country air. We yell at her until
she gives in.

“You girls owe me,” she says in the new silence.

“You owe us,” I say automatically.

“For
what?
” Meg asks the rearview mirror.

I have no idea. Felicia is wearing a dress that her mother got at a yard sale and I’m wearing a gray jumper with a white blouse;
we better hope nobody from our school is at this visitation besides us.

“
For what,
I asked you,” Meg says, swerving the car back and forth. Far up ahead are taillights and far behind are headlights.

“For not telling that she’s here, for not telling that she’s smoking, and for not telling that you’re swerving,” I answer.

“I’m swerving?” she asks, veering suddenly from one edge of the highway to the other.

“Ha-ha,” Whinny says worriedly. “Ha-ha, you’re scaring them.”

“Ha-ha, she is not,” I say from the backseat. “Do it some more, you ass-H.”

She does it a couple more times and then returns to regular driving and her cryptic, blacked-out conversation with Whinny.

“She goes, ‘I’m going to
ahem,
’ and then Vicky goes, ‘You better not because blah-blah,’ the usual, and then she starts screaming, ‘If you let Jeff
ahem,
then I will personally take this’—she was holding some kind of thingamajig out of her father’s
ahem
cabinet—”

“Liquor cabinet?” I interject. “Probably a corkscrew.”

“—‘and I will jam it where the sun don’t shine…’ ”

“Where’s that? Finland? She’ll jam it into Finland?” I ask helplessly.

“Yeah,” Felicia snorts quietly to me. “Right in the old Finland.”

“What, Flea?” Meg asks suddenly, groping around in the rearview mirror to find Felicia, who is slouched down out of view.
“What was that?”

“Nothing,” Felicia says.

“But wait,” Whinny says to Meg. “I don’t know which
ahem
you were talking about when you said Jeff.”

“The Sara kind,” Meg says, giving her a long glance while the highway scrolls by underneath us.

Whinny exhales, and they stare out the windshield in scandalized wonder.

“You talking about Sara Barton, battlefield nurse?” I ask.

Whinny turns around. “Where did you learn that—Finland?”

“I read books, that’s where I learned it.”

“Next time, turn a light on,” Whinny says, looking at my sister, who barks out a laugh.

Unlike Felicia, I don’t mind dead bodies. Our relatives extend backward into the last century—we have people who show up at
family dinners barely visible inside their rusty black farm clothes, people who can’t walk or talk but still need to work
so get carried in and set in front of a bowl of potatoes and a paring knife, people who ignore real kids but shout, “Whose
are you?” to our parents. Because the versions that appear in the caskets don’t look that different from the
versions we’ve been seeing all along, it takes a lot of the fear out.