Land of the Blind (12 page)

D
ana Brett’s rack showed up one day that fall, out of the blue and at least three years late, as if it had been held up somewhere in shipping. By junior high school most of the girls who were going to have breasts had them, but Dana remained petite and girlish and generally uninterested in her own looks. So I lost track of her, as did all of the boys, until her rack just arrived one day our senior year, on picture day as a matter of fact, when Dana stepped out of her brother’s car wearing a kind of tube top beneath an open button shirt and, well, I don’t mean to sound disrespectful, but…Sweet Jesus.

That morning, like all mornings, I stood with some of the other football players in front of our low-slung open-corridor high school, hands in the pockets of our Levi’s and our lettermen’s coats, trying to effect nonchalance and having as much luck as a pack of ass-sniffing puppies. We joked around and made fun of one another, scoffed at the thin tires on Benny Fennel’s Javelin, rolled our eyes at the hood scoop on Eric Oliver’s GTO, and fantasized about Robert Muckin’s Corvette. But mostly we watched—watched young girls get off the buses, watched older girls arrive in cars, watched the two young female teachers at our school arrive for work. Minds that couldn’t retain a bit of Pythagoras or Plato or the periodic table easily held a full accounting of every pair of pants owned by every cute girl in school. “Amanda Rankin is wearing her double buckles,” Tommy Kane said, and we all turned, riffling our mental catalogs. Ah yes. The double buckles.

So you can imagine the commotion when on that morning David Brett’s passenger side door opened and out stepped two breasts that none of us had ever seen before, attached to his sister Dana.

“Holy shit,” said Tommy Kane.

This was, of course, the same Dana Brett I had fallen in grade-school love with, whose boots I had fantasized taking off. Dana was cute in grade school,
but physically she’d never moved beyond that. While we began looking for “hot” and “foxy” and “stacked” she remained “cute” through junior high, and by the time we got to high school she hid herself in baggy dresses and jumpers and she fell into that strata of students we simply called brains. Most of the girls who’d exhibited grade-school brains pretended not to have them by high school and skidded into second-skin jeans and T-shirts and feathered Farrah Fawcett hair. But Dana only grew smarter as those other girls’ clothes got tighter. She devoured chemistry and psychology and advanced composition and became a valedictorian candidate, all the while staying in jumpers and baggy dresses, so that I never stopped thinking of her as a precocious fifth grader under all that fabric. And since there were so many other girls to date, the Stacy Bogans and Rhonda Parsons of the world, the Mandy Landinghams, girls who looked at us in long takes that seemed to promise some eventual business involving the removal of panties, I didn’t think of Dana Brett, except as my old grade-school friend. I spoke with her in class, but in the halls and at games and dances and “events” we existed in different worlds.

Even now, I diminish her by comparing her to the empty pairs of jeans that we pursued, by talking about her sudden breasts as if she were no more than them, but I am only telling the story the way it happened, telling the moronic alongside the miraculous, the mistaken as well as the inevitable. We didn’t know it, but Dana Brett was the class of our class then, both beautiful and genius; and yet, because we had no measure for female intelligence and reason, we missed it in the glare of ass-splitting jeans and two-scoop halter tops. We missed the dead-level power of her eyes, which could cut right through a high school boy, size him up, and dismiss him like just another problem. We missed Dana Brett, with her straight A’s and her straight hair, her baggy, frumpy jumpers, her pretty, makeupless face, and the plain sketchbook she carried around as a journal, her thoughtful conversations and incisive questions, the sadness that she seemed to own. There are many things I must atone for in this confession, but none hurts more than admitting that I went so long without seeing what was in our midst.

But if Dana Brett was nothing to us before, she was certainly something that day in front of the school—picture day, the day something finally coaxed her from her jumper into a tight shirt and new jeans, the day we saw what had developed beneath those layers of clothing, the day we saw that Dana Brett was not a girl anymore.

“Hot damn,” said Tommy Kane. “Who ordered the tit sandwich?”

As she got closer, the other boys fumbled greetings but most of them didn’t even know her name and she looked past them, to me, and I admit—here and now—being too stupid to realize that this transformation might be for my benefit.

“Dana,” I said simply.

She smiled and said, “Hi, Clark.” We all watched her walk into the school.

There aren’t many opportunities for change in high school. Your peers know you too well, your habits and tics and weaknesses and strengths, and any variation is called out, pointed out as fraud. There are only two days on which real change is allowed, when a kid can remake himself. The first day of school. And picture day.

That Monday morning was picture day, and so kids sported new haircuts and clothes, entirely concocted visions of themselves. My younger brother Ben, a sophomore, began his two-week smoking phase that very day, wearing a blue blazer and carrying our grandfather’s pipe in the breast pocket. “You do realize,” he said through gritted teeth, “that these pictures could resurface when we are adults. Nothing wrong with looking sophisticated, Clark old man.” I still see his class picture from that year above our mantel, in that blazer, the pipe clenched in his teeth, like a tiny Noël Coward.

The same morning that Ben and Dana remade themselves, amid countless other new hairstyles and clothes, Eli got off his bus and made shallow eye contact with me. I nodded imperceptibly. He wore a pair of my old jeans, a tight, secondhand T-shirt that read
THE HONORABLE MAYOR OF FUNKY TOWN
, and a pair of my old tennis shoes. His hair was parted down the middle and dried for the first time ever with a blow dryer that we’d bought for him at the flea market in our neighborhood (when we fired it up and leveled it at his forehead, he looked like a comet, all that dead white skin tailing his head). His black-framed glasses had been traded—despite his mother’s protests (“Henry Kissinger doesn’t seem to think they’re embarrassing!”)—for the big, teardrop aviator lenses favored in sunglass form by navy pilots and the immensely cool California Highway Patrol. He wore an off-white jacket meant to lessen the impact of his dandruff, and about a quart of my father’s English Leather, which had proved the amount necessary to mask his various odors. As a finishing touch, I put a rattail comb in his back pocket, tail up.

He didn’t exactly look good, not yet, and he certainly didn’t look very natural. On him my pants looked stumpy, with their cuffs rolled up, and my expensive Puma tennis shoes pointed in slightly toward each other on his pigeon toes. And while his hair looked better, it was still thin and red and covering a complexion like the surface of the moon. But there was something there, something small and significant, and I think it was this: in one weekend, with one change of clothes and glasses and a small bit of coaching, Eli had managed finally to turn the corner, from one of
them
to one of
us
.

But like everything Eli did, his timing couldn’t have been worse. He chose to leave
them
when the Special Ed kids were on the verge of being cool, though that didn’t matter to Eli, who could tell condescension from acceptance.

He descended the stairs from his bus and I nodded slightly, as nervous as he was. I moved my shoulders with his every step, mouthing to myself,
Good, good, good
. “Hey,” he said, without making eye contact with any of us, as I’d coached, and a couple of my teammates nodded in spite of themselves. I said nothing.

He walked the way I’d coached, one hand in his pocket, head back a little, ambling—like the “Keep On Truckin’” guy, I advised—as if he had nowhere to be. Just as I’d instructed in my nonchalance lessons, he chewed gum as he walked and kept his eyes half shut, as if he might fall asleep at any time. Luckily he was well past us when he walked into the flagpole in front of the school.

If Dana Brett’s newfound shelf had shocked the guys in the front of the school, they were totally unimpressed with Eli’s attempt at cool. He walked past us to the school, and it was only Tommy Kane who twisted his face, looked back at Eli and then at me.

“Hey Mason,” he said. “Is Boyle wearing your pants?”

In the split second after he spoke, I did the math, factored out where this would go if I confessed to spending my weekend helping Eli dress and walk and comb his hair.

“What?” I looked back at the door he’d just disappeared behind. “What the fuck you talking about, Kane?”

“Those star-back jeans. I got the same pair but yours have two stars. Boyle looked like he was wearing yours. You guys swapping clothes after PE now?”

The other guys turned. But I was ready for this. A one-eyed boy doesn’t make it through school without knowing how to deflect mockery.

“You know what I think, Tommy,” I said. “I think you’re spending a little too much time staring at dudes’ asses.”

And like that, the crisis was no longer mine. The lettermen laughed—not at my relationship with Eli, but at Tommy’s noticing it. Such were my political instincts, even then. But as a politician I knew that I risked making an enemy unless I finished the play and rescued Tommy from the trouble I had caused him, by diverting once more.

“You guys see Dana Brett’s rack?” I asked.

Nine heads nodded and woofed and smiled and the morning continued like all mornings did then, only with a couple of small, subtle changes registered in the landscape: Dana Brett had announced her intention to be noticed, to be in play. And Eli Boyle had announced his intention—above all odds and against great obstacles—to fit in.

I was to have a role in both of these events, and of course in that awful moment when those intentions crashed together.

I
had sex for the first time that fall, if one could call those ten or fifteen seconds of dizzying release sex, in the back of a garaged Jeep Wagoneer, with a collection of soft fleshy parts and irritating conversational tics whose first name was Susan and whose last I will keep to myself (there are legal considerations and, besides, this is my confession, not hers). Despite my short duration and ham-handed performance, it was a great relief to have finally done it, since the other football players saw virginity among our ranks as nothing less than a character flaw and possibly a sign of homosexuality. Of course no one knew I was a virgin, because before any of us actually had sex we had all lied that we had, inventing girls from other schools and friends of cousins and experienced neighbor ladies. I see those studies reporting that 72 percent of high school boys have had sex and only 12 percent of high school girls and I think I know why: the census takers’ inability to track the huge population of imaginary female sex partners.

But in Susan I had a real partner, and this changed me in some way. Namely, I wanted more. I liked sex. Liked everything about it. Hoped to get better at it. And so I stayed with Susan for the rest of the school year, even though I couldn’t think of a thing we had in common, except our mutual recognition that I needed practice having sex. And so we did, almost daily. We had so much sex in Susan’s parents’ Wagoneer that I couldn’t bear to see her family driving around in it, her brothers and sisters belted into the backseat that we used like a gymnast’s apparatus. I still can’t see a Jeep Wagoneer on the freeway without becoming aroused, and more than once I have narrowly averted accidents after following a Wagoneer’s path too far in my rearview mirror.

As I dated Susan that year I got marginally better at having sex in off-road family vehicles. The entire school, of course, knew that we were together, and knew the instant that we began “doing it.” We groped in the hallways and she waited by my car after school and outside the locker room after games
and we went to dances—Homecoming, Sadie Hawkins, Christmas, and Sweethearts—and groped outside the gym. We wrote notes and talked on the phone, and people combined our names into one: ClarknSue.

Looking back, I realize now that Dana Brett’s rack arrived the very week I had sex with Susan. But at the time, I didn’t connect those events, didn’t realize that Dana would hear about it, and that she would dress that way not to impress the high school boys, but to impress
me,
to get me to notice her the way I’d noticed Susan.

And I did notice Dana, but I was so single-minded then—a mad scientist devoted to my work with tall, statuesque Susan, we were like a small Intercourse Research and Development firm—that it never occurred to me to go out with anyone else, especially my old grade-school friend, the eternally presexual, perpetually cute Dana.

For her part, I think Dana must have realized fairly quickly that I wasn’t interested, for she was back to wearing baggy jumpers and combing her hair straight. But the rack was out of the bag, and the other football players hounded her for a few weeks, asking her out and offering her rides home, before they eventually gave up. Tommy Kane was especially smitten with Dana, and he asked me about her constantly. I even tried to fix her up with him. But she wasn’t interested. So the guys called her frigid and surmised that she was a lesbian, based solely on the evidence that she had laughed when Tommy asked her to climb into the backseat of his Ford Maverick.

“I hate dykes,” Tommy said, and in our base stupidity we all agreed. What possible good was there in a woman who wouldn’t have sex with us? I would love to say that I didn’t participate in these Cro-Magnon conversations, in this emerging male idiocy, but this is, after all, a confession. We bragged about the things we did
to
our girlfriends, as if they had no part in it. We banged them and humped them and screwed them and nailed them, and if they did anything to us we still took credit (“I
got
a blow job last night”). As with everything I am confessing here, from my first snub of Eli at the bus stop to the events of…fifty-two hours ago, I offer no excuse except this: I was young and male and I was pretty sure I’d invented sex, just like I invented driving fast and making fun of people and eating french fries.

With all of this attention to sports and student government and, of course, my groundbreaking work in Susan’s parents’ Wagoneer, I didn’t have much to do with Eli, except on those Sunday afternoons when he’d call to
make sure the coast was clear and then come by the house so we could work on his appearance. He was plainly disappointed by our progress. He’d been dressing right for two months and nothing had changed. Even though they’d finally broken up our mainstreaming gym class (“They’re making a mockery of physical education!” Mr. Leggett testified at the school board meeting), the SpEddies had retained a bit of their mascot cool.

But Eli lost even that measure of popularity. If anything, he was worse off. At least he had been the best of the worst. Now he was the worst of the best. If I were him, I might’ve choked on the irony.

One Sunday in the late part of winter, we sat on my front porch and watched my sisters skip rope on the sidewalk in front of us. It was probably February or March, one of those days that strobes between warm and cool, the sun flashing in and out of clouds.

“What am I doing wrong?”

“Nothing,” I lied. “I don’t even know what you mean.”

“You know what I mean,” he said. “Why isn’t it working?”

I looked over at him. Eli was four inches shorter than me, about five feet eight, not too fat or too skinny, and while he still hadn’t mastered the blow dryer, his hair didn’t look awful anymore. His face was still too wide and his skin was still a problem, all pale and pimply, but it was getting better. Honestly, he didn’t look that bad. The problem was deeper: context and history and a collection of problems that went to his core.

“Level with me,” he said. “Be tougher on me.”

“It’s hard,” I said. “People have thought of you one way for so long…”

“There are only a few months left in school,” he said. “Please…”

I looked at him and saw those same eyes I’d seen on the bus in grade school, searching my face for something he’d missed, some rules that no one had told him. “I’m serious, Clark. I’ll do whatever you say. Just please, help me.”

“Well, there are other things besides clothes and hair,” I said.

He pulled a pencil and pad from his pocket. “What?”

“Well, there are things that probably can’t be helped.”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Well, you’re a senior and you still ride the bus.”

“I don’t have a car,” he complained.

“I know,” I said. “You asked what it was and I’m trying to tell you.”

He wrote this on the small piece of paper and said, “Other kids ride the bus.”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “There are other things.”

“Tell me.”

“Well,” I sighed, and looked down the block. “There’s…you have a bit of a lisp.”

“What elth?”

“That’s funny,” I said.

“Come on. What else?”

“Well, your hands shake.”

He wrote on his paper. “And?”

“You limp when you walk. And you twitch and make funny noises. You still pick your nose too much. And…”

“Slow down.” He wrote on his paper. “Okay, what else?” he asked.

“That’s it.”

“What else?” he asked.

“You smell,” said my sister, who had stopped skipping rope.

“Shawna!” I said, and she ran off.

Eli’s chin slumped to his chest and he nodded, as if she’d confirmed what he suspected. The problem was that he and his mother didn’t have a shower in their trailer, just a tub, and his mother would only let him take baths twice a week (“You’ll wash the oils off your body and end up with dry skin. And I will not have that on my conscience”).

So we started the second phase of the Eli reclamation the very next day. I began driving Eli to school an hour early. I used the extra hour to shoot baskets, and since it would have drawn unwelcome attention for Eli to arrive early simply to take a shower at school, he lifted weights for twenty minutes, then showered and dried his hair.

But perceptions don’t break easily, and by senior year few people were likely to notice that he smelled better and that his arms and shoulders had begun to develop small buttes and gullies from the weight lifting. He was still Eli. And, in truth, any progress would have been too slow for Eli, who by April saw our impending graduation as the date of his death.

“It’s not helping,” he said as we sat in my backyard later that spring,
throwing chestnuts over my back fence. “Everything is the same. It’s never going to change.”

“It’s not the same,” I said. “It’s better.”

“It’s not,” he said. “There’s gotta be something we can do.”

I felt so bad for him I began work immediately on the final stage of the Eli Project. “Let me think about it,” I said.

Eli went home and I called Susan and canceled our afternoon of Wagoneer tag. Then I got out the phone book and called Dana Brett at home.

“Clark,” she said breathlessly. I had never called her before.

“Dana, are you going to the prom with anyone?”

There was a brief pause. “No,” she said.

I drove over to talk to her. She lived in a part of town that had been built on old apple orchards—a nice neighborhood of older houses and newer California splits. I was surprised to find her parents on the front porch when I arrived, smiling. All I knew about them was that they were both community college professors and, according to Dana, somewhat overprotective. Her mother had an Instamatic camera and she demanded to take pictures of Dana and me, leaning us against opposite sides of their porch railing. It was weird but okay with me. They told me to say cheese. I said cheese. Her father shook my hand firmly, clapped my shoulder, and asked where I was planning to go to college.

“Well, I was accepted at the University of Washington,” I said. “And then I want to go to law school somewhere.”

“Outstanding,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Dana was accepted to Stanford,” her mother said.

“That’s what I heard,” I said. “That’s really something.”

“Mom,” Dana said. She rolled her eyes. “Please.” Her dad burst out laughing for no reason. It startled me. I had never met such nice parents.

Dana’s chestnut hair was pulled into a ponytail and she was wearing jeans and a tight T-shirt. I could see those breasts again, round and straining against her shirt. I wondered why she didn’t dress like that more often at school. Dana’s mom brought us some lemonade and we walked around to her backyard. Her parents watched us from the kitchen window, their arms around each other’s waists.

“Before I start, you can say no if you want to,” I began.

Dana laughed. “You don’t have to worry about that.”

So I launched into the story of Eli and me, our humiliation at the hands of Pete Decker and Matt Woodbridge, how Eli had saved me at the bus stop in elementary school, and saved me again the day my eye was shot out, about the moment in battle ball when Eli and I stood side by side and the day a few weeks later when he asked for my help, about my four-month project to rehabilitate him, to clean and clothe and cloak him in high school acceptability. I had told no one about Eli and me, and it felt good getting it off my chest, even if the effect on Dana was a bit confusing.

She listened for a while, smiling, then looked back at her house, then slumped against their swing set. She stared at the ground and nodded as I spoke. I told her about giving Eli my clothes and teaching him to walk and comb his hair, getting rid of his old glasses and practicing what to say to people. I told her how we met sometimes on Sundays and how hard Eli was working.

“That’s nice of you” was the only thing she said, and it was so quiet I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. The whole time I talked, she never looked up at me. In retrospect, of course, I see my obtuseness as a kind of cruelty, but at the time I couldn’t see past my concern for Eli, and I just kept talking. And talking.

I explained how impatient Eli had become, and how desperate he was to show people that he was more than they thought he was. But time was running out, and he needed something drastic. He needed a girl to notice what everyone else had failed to notice up to that point, someone to break the ice so that the other girls would see it was okay to date him. He needed a pretty girl, I said—Dana Brett put her hand over her mouth—a pretty girl whom the other guys wanted to date. He could ask a girl out on his own, of course, but he couldn’t stand the weight of rejection. If the first girl said no to him, then no other girl would be able to say yes, even if she wanted to. He would be a lost cause, a goner.

“Why me?” she asked.

I looked back and saw her parents wave from the kitchen window. I waved back.

“Well,” I said, “you’re so much smarter than the other girls and, well, you’re pretty and, I don’t know, I guess I thought you’d understand.”

“I do,” she said.

“You probably don’t remember this,” I said. “But when we were kids, and Eli first got transferred into our class, you weren’t mean to him.”

“I remember,” she said.

“So I thought you’d sympathize. And since you and I are friends…”

Finally she looked up at my eyes. “We are,” she said, not as a question.

“You can double-date with Susan and me.” I hoped she saw that by offering to double-date I was taking as much of a social chance as she was, driving to and from the dance with Eli. But of course that wasn’t what she was thinking.

“Okay,” Dana said, and she looked at me with downturned eyes, and she seemed again like the smart, shy little girl from grade school. “Have him ask me. I’ll say yes. But don’t tell him you talked to me. It’ll be better if it doesn’t look like a setup.”

“Thanks, Dana.”

We walked back to the house and her parents came out to greet us, holding hands, her mother holding out a plate of cookies. I took four.

Dana walked right past them into the house. Her mother, seeing something was wrong, turned and watched her go inside. I took another cookie.