In Zanesville (20 page)

“Do you all love pizza?” the grandmother asks.

I usually don’t, although I’ve only had the kind my mother makes, which she crumbles hamburger on top of, making it impossible
to eat around, and by the time you pick it off, it looks like you’re eating something from out of the trash. The closest thing
here to one without meat looks like the pepperoni. Across from me is the Hayley Mills girl, also on an end; we smile at each
other.

“Hi,” she says, rolling her eyes. “God.”

“Hi,” I say, rolling mine in agreement. We’re referring to how crowded we are on the bench.

Suddenly the grandmother appears next to me, holding a large wooden bowl in her arms. The bowl is filled with lettuce, and
the grandmother just stands there holding it. I look up at her and she nods encouragingly.

I don’t know what she means.
Just set it down.

“Darling, I’m serving you,” she says gaily. “Take some delicious greens!”

In the bowl is a large plastic scissorlike utensil that I’ve never seen before. On one side is a big spoon and on the other
side is a big fork, hinged in the middle. I don’t know how to use it.
Start somewhere else, why don’t you.

“Don’t you love salad?” she asks, still gay. “I insist!”

It appears to be a difficult tool, the scissor fork/spoon, and I don’t want to try it—what if it has some other purpose I’m
not even aware of, like it’s something that her grandmother has to carry around everywhere for some condition, and I suddenly
start trying to use it to serve myself salad?

I shake my head.

“None?” she cries. “Even just a tiny taste of something so lovely?”

She won’t move on; she’s stuck there, cradling the bowl like it’s a dear thing, staring around the kitchen, speaking over
our heads to an unseen audience of parents and local officials. “It’s a new era! Let them eat ’za and cake… only!” And with
that, she moves on to Cathy Olessen, sitting next to me, who expertly tongs herself out a few leaves, a radish flower, and
a slice of cucumber.

Eventually they all have salad and are eating. The grandmother starts pouring water from a silver pitcher into one of everyone’s
two glasses.

My little gray monkey has his arms clutched around the cloth napkin; I take it away from him, place it on my lap, and stand
the monkey up near one of my drinking glasses. He has a white face, pink lips, and brown eyes, each with a tiny fleck of white
paint in the center. I turn him so he’s looking at Cathy Olessen’s tiger, painted in brown and yellow. Again, pink lips and
the eye flecks.

“Can I enlist you, darling nonsalad child?” the grandmother asks me as she refills her pitcher with ice and water. She gestures
to the counter, where there are five bottles of pop waiting. I get up but I don’t know what to do with my napkin. I could
leave it on the bench or put it next to my plate, but
either place, it would look just dumped there. Instead, I slip it into the waistband of my pants.

The pop is Pepsi, Teem, and Dr Pepper. Two, two, and one. With an opener sitting there. Am I supposed to open them all and
leave them there for her to pour, or am I supposed to carry them over to the table and hand them out, one to each two girls?
Am I supposed to ask people which they want? If I do that, everyone will say Pepsi and nobody will say Teem, let alone Dr
Pepper. Why didn’t I just take salad?

She’s pouring more water and they’re all eating away. I look at Felicia, who looks back at me, coolly, chewing. I point to
my chin, and her eyes bug out in alarm. She takes her napkin and saws away at her own chin, eyes grateful. I give her a slight
nod—
Yes, you got it—
and then glance questioningly at the pop on the counter. She discreetly mimes opening a bottle and then looks back to her
plate.

I open the bottles, put the tops in a little pile, and then stand there until the grandmother says, “Would you be so kind
as to serve? And Patti, darling, you help. Pour some icy cold drinks for your friends!”

“Who wants what?” Patti says, getting up and throwing her napkin down on the bench.

I take one of the Pepsis and pour half in my glass and then walk down the table, squinting to see who might want it, and pour
the rest in Felicia’s. Then I wander around with the last Dr Pepper until somebody accepts it; then I sit back down. Getting
up like that really makes you appreciate your spot on the bench. I turn the monkey so he doesn’t have to look at the tiger
anymore, and try to figure out how to get the last slice of pepperoni. How are people doing it? It’s too far down for me to
reach. I could just ask someone sitting near it, but then they
would have to hand this big, limp thing along from person to person. I could send my plate down, but nobody is doing that.
Or I could just eat the one I can reach, but pepperoni can be taken off and stacked like tiddlywinks on the edge of the plate,
whereas the closest other pizza seems to have sausage on it, which would have to be picked off bit by bit.

I feel like I might start crying. Not out of hunger but out of sheer exhaustion. The clock says only seven thirty. Seven thirty!
Whoever the guy is who Ringgold says turned it around in terms of time should be here for this extravaganza. If I do start
crying, I’m ruined unless I can come up with a reason. It would need to be good—like my mother just died. But she dropped
us off here! My grandmother then. But how would Patti’s grandmother feel, knowing that another grandmother had just died?

“Could I have a piece of the pepperoni, please?” I say suddenly, startling myself.

Cathy Olessen takes my plate and passes it down the table, and the last piece is lifted from its pedestal, slid onto the plate,
and sent back to me.

“Thank you,” I say distinctly. I feel a strange surge of confidence—here I am with pizza and pop, just like everyone else.

Wait! Where’s my napkin?

It’s in your pants,
the monkey whispers.

The clock starts moving faster. Cake from a bakery, decorated with white icing and a megaphone that says
Zanesville
on it in cursive; ice cream; little favors handed out from a basket the grandmother carries around the table—lip gloss and
Bonne
Bell face soaps; and then adjournment to the basement, a long, open pine-paneled space with green shag and modern furniture.
In fact, it looks like my old Barbie Dream House, everything sleek, low, and built in—low plastic chairs around a low glass
coffee table, vinyl beanbags slumped here and there, a long hi-fi and TV console in blond wood, two barstools and a bar. The
ceiling is low too, and the only lights are a fizzing fluorescent over the bar, a blue green Lava lamp, an array of hanging
globes over the coffee table, and, in one dim corner, glowing eerily, an aquarium with a ceramic diver releasing bubbles,
some suckerfish, and one lone molly with diaphanous trailing fins.

Patti locks the door so the grandmother can’t come down.

“Shitfitteroony,” she bursts out, and then does a series of controlled and graceful cartwheels across the long room, narrowly
and expertly avoiding ceiling, coffee table, beanbags, and lamps. The other cheerleaders follow, with mixed results: Cindy
Falk perfect, Kathy Liddelmeyer comes perilously close to the hanging globes, Gretchen Quist perfect, Deb Patterson dislodges
a ceiling tile, and Cathy Olessen goes off course and lands so close to the fish tank that the molly rushes forward and hangs
there, billowing.

While all this is happening with our girls, one of the ones from the other school walks up to the wall and presses the pine
paneling, which pops open to reveal a cunning cupboard, stacked with games.

“A secret compartment,” I say.

“We were coming here before this was even a finished basement,” the girl who pushed on the wall informs me. “Her grandmother
had the whole thing designed by a man from Chicago. A lot of it is just for Patti, like these games.”

“Wow, lucky you, lucky her,” Deb Patterson says lightly,
flushed from her encounter with the ceiling. Her cartwheels are wooden, windmillish, and she knows it. I personally can’t
stand her because she once cried, “No boys allowed!” when Dunk walked into the locker room after gym class. We all thought
it was embarrassing and out of line, but everyone was forced to laugh, including Dunk.

The girl stares at Patterson for a moment, red faced, and Patterson stares back.

“What are you going to play?” I say finally, and the girl digs around in the cabinet and pulls forth a Ouija board.

“Want to?” she asks me politely as she and her two friends gather around a low white ottoman. At first I thought they were
plain, all wearing a variation on the same mix-and-match Bobbie Brooks wool outfits, all with their hair curled like Patti’s,
but now I see: they’re really cute.

“I’ll go later,” I say.

Felicia is sitting atop a red beanbag chair, shoulders hunched, pretending to be lost in thought. I feel better now that we’re
down here, but I can tell she feels worse. I want to get a beanbag too, but then it’ll be the two of us sitting together like
outcasts, so I just stand there.

“Why not
grab a beanbag
and sit down?” Felicia asks, her face expressionless.

“Okay,” I say, and pull the orange one over. It’s very comfortable, even being vinyl, although you feel a little like your
head is sticking up strangely and maybe there’s nowhere for your feet to go.

“Want to get a game and start playing it?” I ask her.

“No,” she says quietly.

“Want to do anything?” I ask her gently. Her weakness is giving me strength.

“
No.
”

The Bobbie Brooks crew is hunched over their Ouija board—two of them with their eyes closed and the tips of their fingers
on the planchette, while the third waits with a pad and pencil in her hand to write down the message. Our girls are in a clump
as well, on the other side of the basement, watching one another do splits and backbends while talking in low voices.

Patti is behind the bar, setting out Dixie cups on the counter, eleven of them. She then ducks down and comes back up with
three bottles of Coca-Cola, which she opens and then pours into the cups. After this, she comes around from behind the bar,
pushes on the paneling, disappears into what turns out to be a bathroom, and reappears with a bottle of aspirin. She opens
it with her front teeth, shakes some out onto the bar, and then drops one aspirin into each Dixie cup.

“Want a turn?” one of the Ouija girls asks us.

“Not yet,” I say warmly.

“I will,” Felicia says, crawling out of the beanbag and walking on her knees over to the ottoman. I tug the orange one a few
inches over in their direction. There’s silence on the other side of the room as our cheerleaders watch us possibly being
absorbed by the other group.

“Are you asking Ouija or calling up spirits?” Felicia asks the girl.

“Right now, spirits. Either this girl’s neighbor lady,” she says, indicating her friend, “or Lee Harvey Oswald.”

“To ask what?” Felicia says.

“The neighbor lady was found in front of her washing machine, just dead, with no warning,” the girl explains. “And
so there’s a question of what really happened to her—was it a heart attack or could it have been foul play?”

“She was really old,” the girl whose neighbor it was says, “and I don’t even want to call her up—what would I say? Remember
me from when you were alive?”

“You ask her what happened in her last moments. Say that you’re trying to get at the truth.”

“She’s going to know this is a slumber party!”

“I heard they can’t see anything,” Felicia offers. “They can only hear.”

“How can you hear if you’re invisible?” I ask, just for the sake of argument. “If you don’t have an ear bone to pick up the
sound waves?”

“Um, I don’t think an ear is a
bone,
” the Hayley Mills girl says.

“Here,” Patti says, sitting down. “Shut up and ask it a question.”

She and Felicia put their fingers on the planchette and close their eyes. Felicia intones, “Is there such a thing as the curse
of the mummy?”

Mummies again! Everybody has had something traumatic happen on a grade school field trip, but she’s never gotten over hers.
Patti steers the planchette expertly over the board, visiting several spots before coming to rest over the
NO
. They open their eyes.

“Whew,” Felicia says.

“You,” Patti says to me.

Felicia gets up and I sit down, place my fingers on the planchette with Patti’s.

The cheerleaders are creeping closer without seeming to do
so, still practicing acrobatics but somehow more over here than over there, like the squirrels my father feeds by hand: one
minute they’re under the tree, refusing to notice you, and the next minute they’re eating a peanut off your shoe.

We close our eyes. Silence in the room.

“Are boys showing up at this party?” Cindy Falk asks.

The planchette pulls away from the curb and arrives at its destination without me. My fingers are left hovering in midair.
I open my eyes.

YES.

Patti gets up from the Ouija board and goes over to the bar. “Everybody drink this pop,” Patti says. “If the aspirin isn’t
all the way dissolved, just poke it around until it is. Otherwise you don’t get the effect.”

I’ve done this before and nothing happened, although I’ve heard good rumors about it.

“Eek,” Gretchen Quist, the littlest cheerleader, cries. She’s fluffy and pink cheeked, known for being scatterbrained. She’s
always squealing and running behind people for protection. The other cheerleaders, with the possible exception of Patti, adore
her. “What if it’s like LSD?”

“I’ve heard it is,” Cindy Falk says, downing hers in a gulp and then shaking what’s left of the aspirin into her mouth. “Some
people will probably have a bad trip and some will have a good trip.”

“An acid trip!” Gretchen Quist gasps, running behind me and peeking out over my shoulder. I suddenly see why people love her.
“What if I think I can fly, and try to jump out the window?”