Ms. Hempel Chronicles (11 page)

"I'm smoking!” Beatrice shouted.

A moment of silence from outside the door. Then: “Bea trice...” Calvin said in a threatening tone. And when she ignored him: “Beatrice ... ?” he said, sounding afraid. "You shouldn’t be smoking. You know you shouldn't be.”

She flung the door open and glared. “I’m kidding. Ha ha. I'm only kidding.”

Calvin also began taking an unhealthy interest in the Rock Hotel. “Is it on yet?” he would ask, hovering beside the radio. “Tell me when it’s on,” he ordered Beatrice. Anytime a voice came onto the air, even if it was only the weatherman, Calvin would say, "That’s Shred, right? That’s Shred.” He pretended that he liked listening to the music, | closing his eyes and nodding to the frenzied sounds. “I love that song,’’ he’d say.

But Beatrice knew he was only pretending. For sometimes he would turn away from the radio, blink a few times, and ask musingly, “What are they so angry about?” He was still young enough to think in the same fretful ways as adults. In more charitable moods, Beatrice would say, “One day, Calvin, it will sound different to you.” One day he would be able to tell, like she could, when a song was by Dag Nasty or Minor Threat,

before Shred said anything. “You will be able to tell the difference,” she told him, "between being angry and being alive."

It was a distinction she tried to impart to the person on the telephone.  

“Why is your boyfriend always yelling?” he asked.

“It’s just what he does,” she said. It had become what she did, too: shut her bedroom door and sing along to the Rock Hotel in a strained voice she didn’t wholly recognize. That’s when I reach for my revolverI she would yell, and it made her feel exhilarated, alert, terrifyingly capable. She couldn’t wait until she could drive in a car and yell at the same time.

“Doesn't it bother you?"

“I don't take it personally,” she said.

“Why don’t you leave him?" the person asked. “Try someone new.”

“You make it sound easy.” She didn’t like when the conversation sidled off in this direction. “When it isn’t easy at all. Leaving is the hardest thing a person can do,” she said firmly, and then reminded him: “We live together”

“I guess that’s true,” he admitted. “You get attached, I guess.”

“And we’d have to break up the band."

| “But you could start a new one. An all-girl band.” Beatrice sighed. “It’s not that simple. I would still have feelings for him.”

And she wondered at the ease with which she could talk about relationships, having never actually had one herself. It was amazing what practice and imagination could accomplish. By the time she went to her first show, moved into her first apartment, smoked her first cigarette, it would seem, she

supposed, like she had been doing it for her entire life. Maybe by the time she had her first boyfriend, even, she would already be tired, having rehearsed so long for all of that trouble.

She explained, “Sometimes we don’t have a say in who w
_e
love.”

Even though she said it patiently, she had a feeling that he still didn’t understand, and that he would persist in being obtuse when it came to this subject. There was a willful streak in him, a doggedness, as if he’d picked up the personality of a dandelion or a patch of crabgrass. He asked the same questions every time he called. He asked them in the same tentative, mournful tone. She was trying to break him of the habit.

“Tell me about your day,” she demanded. “Tell me something interesting.”

“Oh god,” he moaned. He was stumped. "That’s impossible.”

Then, as if in disgust, the house shuddered. It was barely perceptible, no more than a mild spasm, because the house was so large and the walls so thick. Workmanship, she had heard repeated. Houses weren’t made that way anymore. When someone slammed the back door, you hardly felt it.

There was the sound of metal scraping across the driveway, and then her father’s voice, clear and deep and appalling: “I’m doing it!” he bellowed.

The person on the other end of the phone let out another moan.

“I don’t get it,” he muttered. “I don’t get it at all.”

How to explain?

“We have a lot in common,” Beatrice said, and strangely, here in the hubbub of her inventions, was something true. Her father relished the tricky fugues she played for him. They both found the back of Calvin’s neck irresistible to touch. And there was
_an
abundance about him, an over-exuberance, that she unhappily beginning to see in herself. When he hugged for instance, you could feel the springy growth beneath h- shirt, and on the one hand it was revolting; on the other, it s like resting your cheek against moss.

"A lot in common,” the person echoed, an idea that seemed at last to dishearten him, when obstacles such as the band, and the apartment, had allowed him hope. Maybe he felt, in all of Lis dullness, a knuckle of truth. He began to cough again in Lis childlike, enfeebled way.

But then he stopped coughing so abruptly that it made it seem as if he had been pretending all along. He spoke in L calm voice not unlike the one she used with him. He said, “What would you do if one day he just never came home?” "Excuse me?”

“You’d be all alone. You’d want someone to hold you.” "I’m sorry?” she asked, as though his cough had prevented her from hearing him correctly. She decided that this cough made it impossible for her to hear much of what he said. His dry little cough was, she decided, settling farther into his chest; it was indicating quite ominous things about his health.

“You should take lozenges," she said briskly, suddenly ready to get off the telephone. Lozenges was a word she had acquired a year ago, during her book-reading era, before she had discovered the Rock Hotel, in the days when she was still planning to emigrate to England and become a historical novelist. How bizarre. That person, and the person she was now? They wouldn’t even be friends.

The telephone wasn't always in her room when she needed it. According to Calvin, he had calls to make. When she saw

the long gray cord snaking out of her room and under door, she would succumb, briefly, to bloodthirsty feelings, jfe had no one to talk to. Not at this hour. But she could hear him speaking in his bell-like voice, speaking slowly and precisely like a person giving instructions to someone less intelligent The conversations were always short. And always obviously pretend. She knew because she had done it herself, in the past talk to the dial tone as though it were her closest friend.

It was all just an elaborate ruse to further him in his nosy pursuits. He always wanted to know whom Beatrice was speaking to. Whenever the telephone rang, he would dart into her room. “Is it for me?” he’d ask, though it never was. He simply needed an excuse to see who was calling.

Every one of Beatrice’s answers he found unsatisfactory.

"Which guy?”

“Do I know him?”

"Does he go to your school?”

As for Beatrice, she couldn't decide which was harder: evading Calvin, or resisting the urge to tell him everything. She was frequently overwhelmed by a desire to flatten him with some shocking announcement. The sight of him checking for plaque, or sliding his trading cards into their plastic sleeves, or bobbing up and down to the Rock Hotel, filled her with a sort of mean-spirited abandon.

What would she tell him first?

Why 69 was a disgusting number. About a girl at her school who had slapped her own mother and knocked her glasses off. About girls who tortured other girls by cutting up magazines and sending them serial-killer letters. That Big Black’s new record would be called Songs About Fucking. That she now knew what landscaping was. What DIY was; and PCP; and DOA.

Sometimes she wanted to descend on her brother like a devastating angel and tell him every interesting thing she knew. But as it turned out, she didn’t have to.

“A man called," Calvin said, holding the telephone. He stood in the doorway of Beatrice's bedroom. "Looking for you. I told him you weren’t home.”

"Why did you do that?” Beatrice asked, as she tugged the telephone away from him.

“He sounded funny,” Calvin said. “He sounded like a creep."

“He’s a friend,” Beatrice said.

“That man?”

“We talk a lot on the phone ”

“You do?” Calvin stared at her. “You talk to that man?’’ “Stop saying that word!”

“What word?” he asked.

In her arms the telephone rang. She flinched, and put it down on her bed.

“Don't answer it,” Calvin said.

"Of course I’m going to answer it. He’s my friend, he’s trying to reach me.”

“Don’t answer it. Don't talk to that—” But he wasn’t allowed to say it.    

The telephone kept ringing. She curled her fingers around the receiver.

“No!” Calvin said.

“There's nothing to worry about,” Beatrice said, as she felt herself beginning to worry. "He’s not at the front door. It's just the telephone.”

"I know," Calvin said. "But please, don't answer it. I think it would be a bad idea.”

He took her hands into his. They were hot and slightly sticky. Together she and Calvin sat on her bed, watchin telephone ring. By the time it stopped, Beatrice felt afraid.

“Do you think ...” she began, and then couldn't JfojjT the question.

If he appeared at their front door, she would not kjw him. Shred, she would know right away, by his beautiful W fingers and uncombed hair, the skeptical arch of his eyebrow the leather cord he wore around his neck. But the person ojj the telephone had no face. He was neither straight nor stooped His breath was not foul; his T-shirt was not clean or dirty and had no birthmarks. He was neither nineteen nor forty-one Without a harelip, a pierced ear; without a nose or a chin or a body. She did not wonder. She said only, “Hello.” She said “Tell me something interesting.” He had a cough.

Her brother was looking at her in a peculiar way. His eyes moved over her face like it was a landscape and he was up in an airplane. His eyes said, I am not coming down there. But still they kept looking for a place to arrive.

Beatrice said, “He’s not very smart.”

“How do you know?”

“His job is mowing lawns,” she said. “He didn’t know what lozenges were. He believed it when I said I played guitar.” Calvin’s eyes stood still.

 “You believed he mows lawns.”

She twitched.

Then she covered her ears and squeezed her lids shut. “Stop staring at me,” she hissed. “Stop talking to me.” “Sorry,” Calvin said, patting her arm. “Sorry.”

Soft, tiny blows fell on her arms and her shoulders. “Turn off all the lights,” she told him. “Turn up the radio.”

In the darkness, she opened her eyes. The radio was Rowing-
^{And Shred was sti11 talkin}
& announcing songs, disparag-ing requests, saying, "This one goes out to... "

"Maglite,” Calvin whispered.

It was the most bludgeonlike thing either of them owned. The kind of flashlight that police officers and night watchmen used, the kind that required six enormous batteries, sliding down its cylinder with the cool weight of cannonballs. The Maglite lived inside Calvin’s room, a universe she was no longer so familiar with. She bumped into the umbrella stand that held his historic swords.

“Where are you, Calvin?"

He was crouching underneath the window. She reached out and touched his arm, and felt how he was cradling the flashlight. She acted like a blind person and touched him all over. He was still a citizen in that other country to which she had once belonged: all of a piece, flawless and moist, his chest lightly heaving like a hare's. From the other room the telephone rang once, and stopped.

“Oh god,” Beatrice said. “Do you think they answered itf" “I really hope not," her brother said, and from all around her, she felt the faintest draft seep in, as faint as someone blowing out a candle.

She thought of warning them. But here, on the very top floor of her house, there were no buttons embedded in the walls. Those buttons existed downstairs, in the rooms with the long windows, where her mother and her father lived. From here it was impossible to give warning, to say important things, to speak of danger; it was possible only to be summoned.

They would pick up the phone. They would answer the I door.

"Oh god,” she said.    

Outside, something stirred. Something rustled through the trees and then stepped out onto the snow.

“Raccoon,” Calvin whispered.

But it didn’t sound like a raccoon, or a wild and ^ cat. It didn’t sound like a hawk alighting on the lawn c had once believed that she lived among the fir trees and th night-roaming animals, but now she remembered the that wrapped around one side of their house, the scream

Then Calvin shot up. He was too fast. He threw open the window, and the cold air came tumbling in on them.

“Stop! Don’t move!” he cried.

“No!” Beatrice said, pulling on his leg. “Get down!” r

“Kids?" a voice asked from below.

Beatrice stood up in surprise. Pressed against her brother, she peered out into the darkness. Calvin pushed the Maglite’s tender black button, and a beam of light fell into the yard.

A man looked back up at them. He was protecting his eyes with one hand. In the other he held a bright blue duffel bag. He wore a long dress coat, pinned to the lapel of which was the unwieldy fir tree that Beatrice had made in her ceramics class a year before. She could see it even from here.

“Papa?” she said.

“What are you kids doing up?” their father asked, trying to sound mad and quiet at the same time.

“We heard something,” Beatrice whispered back.

“What are you doing up?” Calvin wanted to know.

This question seemed to puzzle him. He dropped htt hand
_t
o his side and lifted his duffel bag. “1 was getting this from the car.”  

Calvin kept the beam of light trained on their father. “It's late!” Calvin said.

The light fell in a circle around him. Beyond that, Beatrice could make out the shape of trees rising up, and the untidy bushes, and the lopsided skeleton of the gazebo that he had begun building in the fall, but didn’t have time to finish. She thought she spied something rotund in the darkness, loping toward the trash cans. She saw the marks her father’s feet had left in the snow and the sharp shadow that his body threw onto the lawn. It was only her father. But something inside of her still clenched. It was only her father creeping about in the dark, and now he was standing there, holding his duffel bag, wearing her fir tree, his footsteps heading in one direction.