In Zanesville (9 page)

“I like to,” I tell her, scrubbing. It’s the only way you can really get in there.

“Well, it might not even be sanitary,” she says, continuing on her way.

There are several surefire ways of getting detentions: anything having to do with a fire alarm, destruction of school property,
tampering with school property, misuse of school property, launching of projectiles, physical aggression, and possession of
smoking materials. I wouldn’t mind committing any of the crimes, but I can’t bear the idea of being caught for them, after
all the lecturing and disappointment we inspired getting the detentions we already have.

A less surefire way would be to skip a class, but we can’t hurt another teacher’s feelings, which rules out everything but
Special Sports, taught by a traveling teacher, Mr. Pettle, who doesn’t bother learning people’s names from school to school,
just calls everyone either Bub or Dolly. We don’t care any more about Pettle’s feelings than he cares about ours, but the
fact is he doesn’t take attendance. Right now Special Sports is medicine ball, a gloomy game where we all lie on our backs
in a circle and kick an enormous leaden ball back and forth.

“I’ll talk to you while you hurry,” Felicia says, stepping gingerly across the floor I’m washing to sit on the edge of the
tub. She shouldn’t be done yet, but she is—one of the reasons you can write your name on every surface in this house.

“I think we should skip medicine ball and walk around in the halls until somebody catches us,” I suggest, rinsing the toothbrushes
in hot water.

“I’m not getting more detentions,” she says testily, “and neither are you. We’re wasting our lives in there.”

“That one kid likes you!” I say. “
He likes you.
So if you want
to forget it, fine with me.” I’m talking about the black-haired boy who tosses his head like a horse.

“The blurter?” she says skeptically. “I doubt it.”

“Well, I don’t! He stares at you all the time.”

“You’re just saying that because I said the other guy turned around and looked at you when you went by.”

“Well, was that a lie?”

“No,” she says.

“Well, if it wasn’t a lie when you said it to me, why is it a lie when I say it to you?”

“Because it is,” she says simply.

She’s right, it’s a lie.

“What’s his name again?” she asks.

“Jeff Nelson,” I tell her. “He’s in Dunk’s math class. I guess he’s smart but the teacher hates him because he’ll yell out
the answer while she’s still writing the problem on the board.”

“Does Dunk like him?” Felicia asks.

“She doesn’t like any guys,” I remind her. “But if she did, she probably would because she said he was funny.”

“
I
like funny guys,” Felicia says, perking up. “Although not too funny.”

“Too funny stops being funny,” I agree, running a damp rag along the light fixture over the medicine cabinet.

“He isn’t
that
funny,” she says. “He’s not a clown. Stop dusting the lightbulbs.”

“Stop getting them dirty,” I say, looking around for the next thing.

“We didn’t get them dirty, it’s dust,” she says.

“That’s why I’m dusting,” I say. Next: desliming the bar of soap.

“Mom,” Felicia hollers. “She’s washing
soap
, tell her to stop.”

“Stop, honey,” her mom calls.

By early evening, I’m sick in love and Felicia isn’t far behind me. She’s on the floor with her feet up the wall and I’m slowly
sliding upside down off the bed, inch by inch.

“I just remember that time he said, ‘God,’ and the monitor gave us all another detention,” Felicia reminisces. “He goes, ‘God,’
and she goes, ‘That’s another one for all of you,’ or something like that.”

“That was funny. Remember that time mine tried to run out at exactly four o’clock and the door was locked and he goes, ‘Everybody!
Out the window!’ or something like that.”

“That was funny. I like mine’s hair,” she says.

“It’s shiny. Mine’s might be a bit girlish,” I say modestly.

“Not to me it isn’t,” she says. “So what’re we going to get caught for?”

Before we can review our options, the phone, which is resting on her stomach, rings. It’s my sister. I roll the rest of the
way off the bed and take the receiver. I feel light headed from being upside down for so long.

“Get home,” Meg says in a not-unfriendly voice.

“I’m staying over,” I tell her.

“You can’t.”

“Did Mom say?”

“Yeah, she said to call and tell you to get home,” Meg explains.

“But why?”

“Hmm, let me think. How about because she said?” Meg says patiently.

“But
why
is she saying?”

“The end,” Meg says, hanging up.

*     *     *

Everyone’s yard light is on but ours, and next door, Curly is sitting very close to his apple tree. As soon as I hit the back
walk, I can hear it: ranting coming from our kitchen.

“I’ll say
this
about
that!
” my dad shouts.

Curly’s chain is wrapped tightly around the base of the tree; that’s why he’s huddled like that. He looks miserable and harmless.

“I’ll say
this
about
that!
” my dad shouts again. It’s one of his famous drunk sayings, and he will repeat it anywhere from twenty to fifty-five times
before my mother makes him stop.

Even though I’ve been told over and over not under any circumstances to get near Curly, I take a step into the dirt circle
and look around. No human but Old Milly has ever seen the neighborhood from this perspective. There’s a root poking out of
the soil that’s been gnawed on like a bone.

“I’ll say
this
about
that!
”

Curly looks at me entreatingly. His battered old face and his bowlegs, the thick, stubby tail: all he wants is a human to
pat his head, to lead him around until he has all his dirt back again.

“I’ll say
this
about
that!
”

Suddenly Curly snarls and jumps at me, an orange blur brought up short by the chain. He twists and turns, trying to get out
of his collar, wildly biting the trunk of the apple tree in frustration. By that time I’m all the way up the back steps and
inside the porch, panting and trembling.

Now he’s snubbed even tighter, because of me.

“I’ll say
this
about
that!
” my father booms.

“Shut up!” I cry, slamming into the kitchen. My father is
sitting slumped in a kitchen chair, baiting my mother, who is standing at the stove, pretending to ignore him.

“Hey,” she says sharply. “Who are you talking to?”

“Why did you make me come home when he won’t
shut up?
”

“That’s enough,” she says, handing me a spoon and putting me in front of the stove. “Stir.”

I stir while my dad stares at me dully, trying to figure out who I am. “Well,” he says quietly to himself. He’s in an undershirt,
and she has somehow gotten his shoes away from him, which means he can’t go anywhere until he sobers up at least enough to
tie a lace. It’ll be a while.

He opens his hands in a gesture of defeat and licks his lips clumsily. He recognizes me. “Honey,” he says in a pleading, blurry
voice.

The thing I’m stirring is a dark broth with something very large bumping around in it. I try to bring whatever it is to the
surface.

“Honey…” And he begins to cry in a soft, hopeless way. “Honey, I’ll… I’ll…”

The thing keeps getting away from me. “You’ll what?” I say finally, trapping it against the side of the pot and bringing it
to the surface. It’s thick and gray, with bumps on the top. Slightly furled on the end. It looks familiar but I can’t quite
place it.

“I’ll say
thiiis
about
thaaat,
” he brays, right at the moment I realize I’m stirring a tongue.

“She says one more outburst like that and we’re sending you to the mental home,” Meg tells me. She’s brought a plate with
Jell-O, peas, and a warmed-up sweet roll for my dinner.

I can’t talk yet.

“It wasn’t
human,
” Meg says.

What around here is. I roll over and look out the window: Curly has been unwound from the tree and is staring mildly around.
Down in Old Milly’s kitchen the Chinese checkers board is set up on the table, ready to go, all the marbles in the starting
gates.

“She’ll probably let you out of here if you go down and say you’re sorry,” Meg tells me, stuffing a wad of clothes under her
bed and shaking out the bedspread to cover them. Mister Ed is picking her up to go to a double feature at the drive-in movie
with a bunch of other girls. It would be good, clean fun except that the drive-in movie theater is closed for the season,
which none of the parents have figured out.

A car honks in the alley.

“She’ll probably let you out anyway,” Meg says, pausing in the doorway. She looks pretty in her navy peacoat and eye shadow.

Alone, I read for a while, a fat paperback I got out of the free box at the library.
The Carpetbaggers,
a book so squalid and overblown that it wouldn’t even stay bound: all the pages in the center have come loose and are out
of order, so it’s slow going. When the phone rings I have to trace the cord from the wall to under Meg’s bed.

“Why did you have to go home?” Felicia asks.

“Family dinner,” I say.

“What did you have?”

“Jell-O,” I tell her.

“I know, but what did they have?”

“Some kind of Transylvanian meat,” I say. My grandmother’s second husband is a butcher, as crabby as he is bald. A tongue
isn’t even the worst thing he’s given us.

“Lucky,” she says. “We had pork and beans and green beans. I said to my mother, ‘These are both beans,’ but she didn’t care.”

“What are you eating right now?”

“Girl Scout cookies,” she says.

“What kind?”

“A whole thing of Savannahs.”

“I hate Savannahs,” I say. Anything with peanut butter, actually. My mother told me that once when I was a baby, she opened
a jar of peanut butter at the table, and when she looked over, I was gagging in my high chair.

“So,” Felicia says, crunching, “I can’t wait to get in trouble.”

The one-person fight takes off again downstairs (“I’ll tell you another goddamned thing! You better watch out!”) and I hang
up just as there’s a knock at my door.

It’s Ray. He’s got two bottles of Pepsi and two glasses of ice that he’s managed to carry upstairs.

“I brung us pop,” he says.

We end up skipping medicine ball and not getting caught for it. We walk by the office, we walk by the hall monitor, we sit
on the front steps of the school without our coats, we go back in and make the rounds of classrooms where we have friends
and stand outside the closed doors, waving at them through the portholes. Nothing.

“We’re like ghosts who don’t yet know they’re dead,” I say to Felicia.

“Ha, ha, nobody can see us.” She pantomimes pulling her shirt up. “Waaah! Get a load of this!”

In the last five minutes of the hour we position ourselves down the hall from our friend Dunk’s math class. She said
Felicia’s blurter, Jeff Nelson, turns to the right when exiting, so we will start walking toward the classroom from that direction
when the bell rings. As the clock hops its last seconds before the bell, Felicia places her three-ring binder against her
chest, folds her shoulders around it, and rests her chin along its top edge. It’s like watching time-lapse photography of
a plant wilting.

“No, go like this!” I hiss, standing up straight, thrusting my chest forward. Her eyes bug out, but she does it, just as the
bell goes off above our heads, a bone-rattling blast. When the door springs open he’s the second one out, muttering to himself
and tossing his head sideways. Blue stretched-out sweater, a textbook stuffed with papers, and a knock-kneed walk that I never
noticed before.

I veer ever so slightly, herding Felicia into his line of vision. He’s still talking to himself, but then—he looks at her.
For an instant, nothing, then there’s a faint pursing of the lips, a narrowing of the eyes, and a subtle but deliberate tipping
of the head backwards.

“How far backwards?” Dunk asks. She has short, wild red hair and wears little round glasses.

“Three inches or so?” I say, and then demonstrate. When you do it yourself, it definitely feels like something. Perhaps not
an actual nod, but an acknowledgment. I open the bun they just gave me in the lunch line and remove the brown flap of hamburger.

“Really?” Felicia says dreamily, adding the flap to her own sandwich and handing over her spare pickles.

“Weren’t you there?” I ask her. Now I have chocolate milk, a bun filled with pickles, and a jelly-flavored long john.

“I thought he more or less just went like this.” She narrows her eyes and purses her lips.

“He did. And then like this.” I tip my head back about three inches. “Sort of mocking.”

“Like this?” Dunk asks, squinting, pursing her lips, and tugging her chin forward. I know Dunk from when I used to go to church;
she’s the one who talked me out of believing in God, pointing out that he was basically a ghost and they even call him one.

“Not like trying to loosen a necktie,” Felicia says, finishing her last bite of hamburger, “but more of a lolling of the head.
It was a mocking loll.”

The cafeteria is almost empty of kids. The famously testy la carte lady is closing her counter, lifting a tray of buns and
using her hip to push open the bumpered door into the kitchen.

“Good luck,” Dunk says, and then vacates the table.

Felicia wads up the paper her sandwich came in.

I wad up my paper too.

When the la carte lady walks back through the swinging door, we stand and throw. One wad hits her smack in the chest and the
other lands in the hot dog vat.

“Launching of projectile?” my mother exclaims. “You have got to be kidding me. Sit the hell down right there.”

They made me bring a note home this time, to be signed and returned. It’s a form with a space for the number of detentions
given (five), a list of crime categories with boxes next to them, and then a space at the bottom where Mr. Jaggermeyer,
the corrections officer who also poses as a civics teacher, has scrawled a message: “Your daughter seems to be at a crossroads:
This is her
2nd
infraction in under
3
weeks—after what we consider nearly excellent comportment. Perhaps undo influence of another is partly to blame.”