In Zanesville (24 page)

“Jed Jergestaad? You’ve got to be kidding me! I got out my yearbook and am just looking at him. I can’t believe it.”

Silence.

“Why are you acting like this?” she asks.

“I’m not.”

Silence.

“Because I don’t know what you could be mad about. There wouldn’t be any reason.”

Silence.

“Nothing I can think of, anyway,” she goes on. “Not like somebody called
you
a blow job and I just sat there while it happened.”

My mother is smoking and staring at me.

“I still have a lot to read,” I say.

Felicia slams the phone down.

“Uh-huh,” I say, looking at my mother, who looks back at me. “Yep… okay… see you tomorrow.”

She breaks off a disk of crust, warm from the oven, and hands it to me on a plate. “What’s wrong with you and Flea?” she asks.

I take one bite and the whole thing falls apart. “Nothing,” I answer. “What’s wrong with this crust?”

“I can take it back if you don’t like it,” she says, peering past me, out the window again. The car hood is closed and my
dad has moved out of sight, farther back into the black garage.
Try again later.
The crust is so delicious it’s putting me in a good mood.

“I don’t know why you wouldn’t talk to your friend who called you four times.”

“Mother,” I say patiently. “I. Have. Homework.”

“You can drop that,” she advises. “Nobody around here was born yesterday.”

“Anyway, I’d think you’d be happy, since you never could stand her.”

“What? I never said that!” She returns to the sink, splashes some water around, and then starts attacking the stove with a
dishrag. “I said she doesn’t
talk;
that was all.”

She talks plenty. It’s that she doesn’t stick by you in emergencies.

“I may have said that you girls seem too thick at times, to the exclusion of others,” she goes on primly.

“Well, now other people want to be friends with me, but not with her,” I explain. Why am I talking about this? It can only
backfire.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. They just don’t.”

“Well, she must have done something.”

“Something about a boy, or something,” I say. I must be more tired than I thought, otherwise I’d know better than this. “That
she abandons people when a boy comes along.”

She stops scrubbing, picks up her cigarette, and points it at me. “I’ll hit the roof if I hear there were boys at that party.”

“Mother! Are boys going to a
slumber
party? At a
grandmother’s
house?”

She takes a drag. “You tell me.”

“Okay: no! This is about Flea abandoning people and people not liking it. In a moment of need she’ll stare at you like she
doesn’t know you and just walk away, leaving you standing there like somebody’s retarded neighbor.”

“When did she do that? And did you tell her you were upset?”

“Not
me,
Mom. Aren’t you listening? I’m talking about why the other people don’t like her!”

“But you can’t let other people influence how you treat someone who has been your friend for years.” She sneaks a glance at
the garage and then sits down at the table with her ashtray. “That isn’t right.”

“This isn’t
divinity school,
Mother, it’s junior high!”

She blinks at that. “How do you even know what divinity school is?” she asks.

“I don’t know. Books.”

“Well, then you know that divinity school is a place where people go to learn how to treat others,” she says, inhaling. “More
or less.”

“That isn’t what it is.”

“Of course not,” she says, exhaling. “Your mother doesn’t know anything, according to you and your sister.”

My father is coming up the back walk, carrying something.

“And I said ‘more or less,’ ” she adds as he opens the door, bumping her chair.

The phone rings just as my father is putting what he found on the table—a rusted tobacco tin, full of old-fashioned handmade
nails.

“I found these way back in that white cabinet,” he tells me, shaking them out. “And I thought of your metal-shop class—maybe
your teacher would want to see them.” They are big and rough; each one looks like a rusted lowercase
l.
I can smell something on him, vodka out of a sack.

“Hello,” my mother answers.

“Aren’t they something?” he asks me.

“Awful sorry, but she’s not taking calls this afternoon,” she says, hanging the receiver back up.

“Who was that?” I ask her.

“Made by a blacksmith, every one of them a little bit different. He’ll see it, boy, if he likes metal,” my father says, holding
up one of the
l
’s to show my mother.

“Who was that?” I ask again.

“Get those off my table,” she tells him.

The next day, Monday, instead of going to the cafeteria, I go to the art room over lunch to work on my chicken. Ringgold is
excited by this, and even though it’s his free period and he’s cleaning out the still-life closet, he brings me a stack of
books to look at.

“You’re going to see some things in here that will blow your mind,” he predicts.

The chicken can’t be made to stand up straight on its own two hands, because one of its wrists is cocked at a strange
angle. I tried to tell Steve this when I was doing the casting, but I couldn’t get a word in—he spent the whole time telling
me all about how he pretended that he’d severed his index finger once, arranged it in a box with cotton, and thrust it at
people. Just as I open one of the books, Maroni pokes her head in; behind her is Felicia.

“Hi,” they say from the doorway.

“Hi,” I say.

“Aren’t you eating?” Maroni asks.

“I needed to finish my project,” I say.

“So are you done?” Maroni asks.

“With the chicken, but now I have to go through these books,” I say.

Ringgold backs out of the closet, hair astray, lugging a marble bust that he sets on a bench. “Greco-Roman,” he says before
ducking back in. “Look at the expression.”

It has a faraway gaze.

“Well, bye,” Maroni says.

“Yeah, bye,” Felicia says.

“Bye,” I say.

The books are in fact blowing my mind. Everything from a cup, saucer, and spoon covered in some kind of animal fur, like coyote
or maybe bobcat—the hairs are tricolored and fairly long, as though whatever it was were shot in the winter—to a big pair
of lips floating across a sky, to a train coming through a fireplace, to a red rubber glove nailed to a wall, to a child in
a pinafore chasing a hoop with a stick through an abandoned city.

“De Chirico,” Ringgold says over my shoulder. “It’s that beat of time between postindustrial and pretechnological. Stark and
empty, yes, but pulsing with what has been and what
is to come, as indicated by the looming shadow, just around the corner. Not true for Magritte—his vision is something else
entirely. De Chirico is emotion, Magritte logic; it’s like the mother and the father.”

I turn back to the cup and saucer. “What kind of fur do you think this is?” I ask Ringgold.

He considers it. “Silver fox maybe?”

He’s right, it’s the winter coat of a fox. Now I wish I hadn’t asked.

“We’re starting 2-D next week, but I won’t impose that on you, if you want to stay 3-D,” Ringgold tells me. He’s setting up
a still life on a rolling cart, using yards of striped sailcloth which he drapes artfully around and over two blocks of different
heights before arranging the objects: a marble bust, a bowling ball, a plastic rose, a brass doorknob, a shard of beveled
mirror, and an hourglass. He stands back to look at it, first chewing on his thumb and then holding it straight out in front
of him.

“Wait,” he says, suddenly going back into the closet.

Why does he think I would want to do a different project than everyone else? In the stack is a big, thin book of paintings,
all by the same guy, Max Ernst, each page stranger than the last. In one painting a trick bird figure drawn in chalk presides
over a ponytail attached to a hubcap, which is connected in turn by a string to a bottle containing a red blob, and then to
an egg.
Loplop Introduces a Young Girl.
What could it mean? Around this tableau are various objects, some painted and some real: a frame, a tree frog, a blue necktie,
a cameo, a spidery letter
E.
The hank of hair is real—dark and slightly scraggy, not unlike my own.

“Loplop is the artist’s alter ego,” Ringgold explains from
atop a ladder above me, where he’s tying fishing line to an eye hook in a ceiling tile. It looks like he’s going to fall,
and his pants have rucked up so that an inch or so of leg is showing above each blue sock. I keep my eyes on the book until
he climbs down and gets himself situated. A lot of the pictures have a bird theme of some sort. In one, parts of a cage have
been attached to the canvas; in another, a bird in the sky has caused pandemonium among two girls and a man who looks like
Mr. Pettle, the gym teacher. Its real objects are an open gate, a little outhouse, a butter knife, and a doorbell. It’s called
Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale.
I feel uneasy all of a sudden, too aware of the lights buzzing overhead and the sound of Ringgold going about his business.
What am I doing, hanging around here with a teacher? I’m supposed to be wherever Felicia is, doing whatever she’s doing.

Help. Where am I.

“We’re going to add an element of mystery to our setup here,” Ringgold calls from the closet.

Please shut up.

He comes out with a large, tarnished skeleton key, which he ties to the fishing line. Then he pushes the still-life cart around
until the key is hovering, invisibly suspended, in front of the bowling ball and above the reclining plastic rose. When he
switches on the spotlight to the right, stark, purplish shadows leak out from the left of everything. It’s beautiful and mysterious,
yes, but what will I do if my whole life is like this, watching some adult tie a skeleton key to fishing line while everyone
else is having boys like them?

“What do we think?” Ringgold asks, stepping back.

“Good,” I say in a tinny, strange voice.

*     *     *

My next class is physics, where the teacher makes me stand up in front of everyone and put my hand on a silver globe to demonstrate
static electricity. As soon as I touch it, the globe creates some kind of phenomenon that makes my hair rise up in the air,
apparently, all around my head. It causes a sensation, everyone hooting wildly, to the point that the teacher makes me do
it again. It feels like when you do a handstand and your hair all falls toward the floor, except you’re upright and it’s falling
toward the ceiling. It’s like the paintings I was looking at, surreal, especially if you think about what your face looks
like with no hair around it, your ears just sticking out.

Tim Benchfield, my lab partner, blows up a balloon for us to use in our own experiment. “You should have seen your hair, man,”
he says, pausing to rest. “It made your face look about the size of a nickel or something. Really dinky.”

He puts one more deep breath into the balloon and then lets go, sending it fizzling through the air and causing everyone else
to do the same thing. In the commotion, I walk out of the room, down the hall, and into the bathroom.

A girl named Jackie Lopez is standing there in a bra, washing something out of her shirt.

“I got thrown a pie at,” she explains, “walking out of the cafeteria, and then they just sat there, looking the other way.”

“There was pie today?” My hair is still perfectly straight, but lifted off my scalp in a weird way, as though it had been
rolled up on soup cans all night. “I missed lunch.”

“Blueberry. It wasn’t good, though—it was sticky or something—so people were throwing it instead of eating it. Do you know
that kid Denny?”

“Denny the Menny, or Denny the one who wears the white shirts?”

“The Jehovah’s Witness one! I should throw a pie at him so he can’t try to convert people on the way home from school.”

“Was that other Denny sitting there, by any chance? Because I don’t think Jehovah’s Witnesses are allowed to throw things
at people.”

“Alls I know is one second I had pie on my boob and the next second everyone on the bench was pointing to that kid Denny,
who just looked the other way.” She puts the shirt back on, flinching at the cold wet fabric.

I’m noticing in the mirror that my face does look a lot dinkier than Jackie Lopez’s, which is wide and flat and has a few
extra zits, which is probably why she got food thrown on her. Welcome to divinity school.

Felicia is standing outside the physics room when I go back, holding a stack of construction-paper valentines, a tape dispenser,
and a chocolate long john in a waxed paper sleeve.

“Thanks,” I say.

“I was going to leave it in there, but then I thought that kid Timothy would eat it,” she says.

“My money’s in my locker,” I say.

“It’s all right—Step On Me stayed home today, so I got her lunch money.”

Normally I would ask whether Stephanie was faking it or truly sick, but somehow I can’t. I move so I’m standing just inside
the classroom, where there’s no teacher, just students milling around, rubbing balloons on one another.

She nods at the long john. “I hope you like it, anyway.”

“I will,” I say.

“I’m supposed to be putting up hearts,” she says. Then, after a moment: “What were you doing?”

“Talking to Jackie Lopez in the bathroom.”

“Are you still mad at me?”

“I never said I was.”

“You’re something.”

“Well, so are you.”

“No, I’m not,” she insists. “I’m being regular and you’re being something.”

Just then the teacher walks up, Mr. Margolis, waves of cigarette smoke rolling off him. “Where do you belong?” he asks Felicia.

“School Beautification wonders if we could put a valentine on your door,” she whispers.

He looks at me.

“I said you’d be right back,” I say.

“Are you supposed to have food in here?” he asks.

“No,” I say.