In Zanesville (25 page)

“Then deposit that.”

I pretend to put the long john in the wastebasket as he bangs the door shut and strides to the front of the room, clapping
and coughing, scattering people. During the dismal lecture that follows, I glance back once and see, faintly visible through
the frosted glass, a red heart taped to the door.

After school, I find myself unable to go home, and just hang around the building, walking the corridors and stairwells, peering
into trophy cases and barren classrooms while the school slowly empties, past miles of lockers, army green and expressionless,
like dead, propped-up soldiers. Past detention and then double detention, past the Spanish Club having a long meeting and
afterward getting its picture taken while crowded into a stairwell, past an abandoned mural-painting project, with folded
drop cloths and sealed jars of tempera, past the special combined Presidents’ Day and Valentine’s Day bulletin board, where
Lincoln stares out, hollow eyed and unsmiling, paper hearts stapled all around him like red badges of courage.

At some point I follow the sound of music—literally—up to the third floor, where a girls’ chorus is singing the Raindrops
on Roses song. Now for the rest of the night I’ll be saying to myself the tedious and compelling line
Brown poop in packages tied up with string.
Back down on second, I nod at the janitor’s assistant, a deaf guy who goes to the chiropractic college across the river.
From having a deaf girl in my grade school, I actually know how to spell “hi” in sign language, but I’m too embarrassed to
try it, so I just wave.

Every once in a while you’ll see a locker crammed so full that stray notepaper is coming out the air vents. There are one
or two on each floor, and it’s somehow disturbing, like seeing pubic hair poking out of a swimsuit. If people can’t do any
better than that, why even have a locker?

The mural-painting project is by seventh graders and shows Chief Illini and Chief Black Hawk looking out over the river toward
Missouri. Both chiefs have miniature hands and feet, and the river is painted a flat, illustrious blue with squiggles of white
here and there to show the current. A passerby has penciled in a tiny drowning man, with the usual ripples and a plea for
help.

One floor up, I run into the janitor again, who gives me a quizzical smile and then mimes putting a key into a lock and
turning it. A pack of cigarettes is just visible in the pocket of his shirt. On the way out, I stop at my locker, and on the
shelf, right under the vent, are three notes, shoved in there since sometime after lunch.

Purple felt-tip:

Is this your locker??? Patterson said it was!! I called you yesterday about 3 times—is your mother
wierd
??? (Mine is!!) Call me tonite and I’ll tell ya something!

Signed
Cindy
, with a flourish ending in a flower, and her number.

P.S. If this isn’t you, please ignore!!

Green ink:

Hi! I didn’t see you at all today!!!!! But saw Flea and she said she was w/
JED
JERGESTAAD
!!! No one believes her, but I do, because she’s cute!!!!! If you get this call me tonite??? I have to ask you something and
your Mom ain’t letting calls thru!

Signed
Dunk
, with a cartoon face wearing granny glasses.

The third is in red colored pencil, from Luekenfelter.

Hey Chick!!!! Where are you today Jane might be moving to this school! Next year but wants to come this weekend & there’s
supposed to be a
big
party
at Prospect. Are you going if there is???? Call me tonite
I have to ask you something about
Aljer
Algerbra, which we have a
test
on
Wed
.!!!!

Signed
Ellen
, with a banner under it crossed with two lines.

Taking only my jacket and the big thin book of paintings that Ringgold lent me, I head for the side door, where the janitor
is waiting, and then I’m out in the February cold. Somehow I only have one mitten. A big party at Prospect? A pitch-black
game of musical boys where one lone girl is left standing? This is what I mean by being frightened of the universe: it can
do anything, even things you haven’t bothered to imagine—like make the worst thing that ever happened to you happen again,
one week later.

Around the corner, across a patch of lumpy ice, past the gym, where there are still lights on, over the front steps, along
the bike rack and the flagpole, around to the back, through the lighted space between the Annex and building, under the delivery
dock and trash area, and then again past the door I left out of. The deaf janitor is halfway down the hall now, following
a machine as it glides along, polishing the floor.

Alone in the universe, he is.

A surge of adrenaline propels me out of the school’s atmosphere and onto the street. Whatever they did to me in that physics
class is still happening—I feel strangely light, but slow, like I’m walking through water, my hair floating around my head.
All the houses are black, and then there’s one with lights, then another, then another. People eating dinner, watching TV.
The Melchers’ house, at the end of our street, is getting new siding, sold to them not by my father but by someone else from
Dick Best Home Improvement. They’ve chosen a kind
that makes it look like their house is made of piled rocks, like something out of
The Flintstones.
Next door down, the Robileskys are eating dinner on TV trays; I can see Mr. Robilesky’s bald dome and all the stuff they
have stacked on their dining room table. Old Milly’s house is dark because she’s in California helping out her sister-in-law,
who just had both legs removed below the knee. Our house is going strong, lights upstairs, downstairs, and in the backyard,
where Tammy is standing at the end of her chain, waiting for someone to remember her. Next door, the dirt circle is empty,
Curly’s chain disappearing into the black rectangle of his doghouse.

Through the kitchen window Meg is visible, washing dishes alone, shoulders hunched the way she carries them at home, where
she’s free to stop being so tall. Through the dining room window my mother is at the sewing machine, guiding fabric along
with one hand and smoking with the other. She also seems to be talking. In front the living room drapes are closed on the
picture window, but the birdcage is visible on the side, the bird sitting on his perch, head tucked into a wing.
Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale.

At least there were two of them.

Felicia is the only person I never felt nervous around, the only person I could do certain things with—shoplift, look up at
the stars without feeling dread—the only person I could go call right now and just start talking like everything was okay
and everything would in fact be okay.

Pick up the phone, is all. Go back to being who you were before everything became like this. Nothing happened! You were just
at a party and boys chose everyone else, and your best friend stared at you with flat eyes and you walked in the woods and
talked to a grandmother. Nothing happened, and
yet it feels like something did, because things aren’t the way they were before. It’s like when you come home and your mother
has changed the furniture around, and for one instant it’s like you’ve entered the next dimension over: it’s your living room
but it’s not your living room. That’s how this feels, like if you tried to sit down, you might find out that the chair is
over there.

I do a few turns around the house, holding the wafer of book with my one mitten. Every corner has a downspout, every downspout
has a blob of rutted ice around it, and every time I go around, the ice blobs seem to get bigger. Or else I’m getting smaller.
In fact, I’ve been feeling smaller than usual ever since I left the school, but I thought it was an illusion caused by carrying
such a big, thin book. Inside it, the artist’s alter ego is introducing a young girl to an egg, a string, and a hubcap with
a ponytail coming out of it. My own alter ego is in one of the other books—the girl in a pinafore, chasing a hoop through
a city everyone else has moved out of.

I let Tammy off her chain and she runs away from me, to the back door. Inside, the kitchen is clanging with brightness.

“She’s grounding you unless it’s really good,” Meg says, pointing the spray nozzle at me.

I go to the dining room doorway and wait to be yelled at.

“Nobody gives a shit one way or the other what I go through,” my mother says, not looking up from her sewing. “Between you
and your dad, I’m a wreck.”

“I had Yearbook,” I say.

“You had what?”

“I’m on Yearbook, and you already knew that. I told you but you didn’t listen.”

She squints at me, lips pressed together.

“If you don’t want me to be on it, that’s fine. Just say and I’ll be happy to quit.”

“I don’t care what you’re on or not on—I just want to know ahead of time not to sit here worrying about whether you’re alive
or dead or sitting in a goddamned detention hall for behaving over there the way you do over here.” She tugs on a thread,
gathering the waistline for a peasant skirt that I had started and abandoned. “What were you doing for the yearbook?”

“Following some kid around while he took pictures, writing down people’s names and stuff like that.”

“All right,” my mother says, holding up the peasant skirt and admiring it. “See? It’s just running a seam and then pulling
on the thread—not crazy, but carefully—and there you have it.”

“I have to call somebody,” I say, heading back into the kitchen to the telephone.

Meg has preemptively grabbed the receiver. “First dry the pans,” she says.

I dry them while she watches. The towel is wet but neither of us cares.

“Now scrub the floor,” she says.

I can either beat her brains in with the black skillet or plead. “Give it,” I whimper.

She throws the receiver in my direction but it misses, hits the cupboard, and bounces around on its cord, making a clatter.

“What was that?” my mother calls.

“Meg throwing the phone,” I answer.

“You girls have managed to ruin that telephone,” she yells, “by stretching the cord and throwing the receiver.”
We can’t
keep anything decent around here.
“We can’t keep anything decent around here.”
Because of you kids.
“Because of you girls.”
Hey, but what about Raymond?
“Your brother is the only one who listens to me.”
Is Dad somehow involved?
“And your father doesn’t help matters either—he would never have dreamed of correcting you.”
Is it all your job?
“I’m the one who’s been expected to do everything from discipline to sitting here on a Monday night after working all day,
putting a goddamned waistband on a skirt for
someone else.
”

“Is she crying?” Meg mouths to me.

“I think so,” I mouth back.

We go stand in the doorway. She lights a cigarette and takes an angry puff, looks away from us.

“We’re sorry,” I say.

“We are,” Meg says.

“We weren’t fighting, we were having fun,” I lie.

“Yeah,” Meg says.

“Don’t have fun with my telephone,” she says wearily. “In fact, stay off it altogether.”

“Mom, I have to make a call! Make me stay off it later, but not right now!” I feel weightless all of a sudden, like there’s
no gravity in the dining room. I grab hold of the doorframe and pull myself, hand over hand, back through into the kitchen
side of the doorway.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” my mother asks, narrowing her eyes.

“Nobody will let me call somebody I need to call!”

She turns back to her project. I realize now that the problem with the peasant skirt isn’t that the waistband wouldn’t gather
right; the problem is that I no longer want to be a peasant.

I grope my way across the kitchen to the phone and dial.

Five rings, and then two people answer at the same time.

“Hello, is Cindy there?” I ask.

“Hang up,” Cindy tells the mother, and the mother hangs up. “God, when I put that note in your locker, these three girls were
standing there. Really—do they stare much? That red-haired girl with the little glasses?”

“Debbie Duncan,” I say. “Her locker is by mine.”

“Well, she should stare less, and so should Gina Maroni and that other one, with the really blond hair.”

Dunk, Yawn, and Maroni, all standing at my locker after school when Cindy Falk put a note through the vent. I’m ruined in
a thousand different ways now.

“Can you meet us after school tomorrow?” Cindy asks. “We all have to figure out about going to Prospect on Saturday.”

“Oh yeah, I heard about that.”

“Galen Pierce said he’s paying off the cops—he’s rich enough to do it, his dad invented some big thing Caterpillar bought
off him for their tractors. Rubber or something.”

Meg is trying to put Saran Wrap around a plastic bowl half-filled with corn. It won’t stick to the bowl at all but sticks
to itself completely.

“Wow,” I say.

I try to help by holding one corner of the Sarah Wrap, like a bedsheet. Meg peels another corner off itself and we try to
stretch it over the top of the bowl.

“So meet us after cheerleading, and you and me and the other people we want to come will talk about it.”

Please don’t let the other people be Deb Patterson. We try pressing the Saran Wrap edges to themselves, but now they
won’t stick. Meg yanks the whole thing off there, wads it up into a ball, and throws it at me.

“Come to the gym, but don’t let Cling see you—anyone she sees waiting for us she gives detention to. Wait behind the tree.”

“What tree?” I grab the Saran Wrap and tear off a piece, which instantly gets tangled. How are we supposed to cover this stupid
corn?

“Ha,” Meg says.

“I don’t know—the
tree
tree. We come out at five. Now I have to go.”