Undercover (11 page)

T
HE NEXT MORNING Theo was at my locker with the twitchiest look on his face—maybe nerves, maybe excitement, I couldn’t tell and there wasn’t time to tell, because the morning rush had started. All the elbows, knuckles, knees again, the pitches and swishes of talk that smashed against metal, vinyl, and ceiling tile and got all mucked up into the din.

“What’s up?” I asked when I finally cut through the crowd and got to Theo, who slid one locker down and crossed his arms but otherwise went nowhere.

“Hey” is all he said.

I combo’d the locker dial. Thirty-six. Nineteen. Two. I kneeled in close and collected my books and collected my pens and found the red pencil I would need for Mr. Marcoroon’s class and took off my coat and hung it on the hook and stood back up and slammed the door, and all that time Theo stood there, nervous. For all I knew Lila’s bus was rolling in. Or Bolten was hanging back, spying. Something.

Theo’s shirt was only half tucked into his jeans. He had a leather string around his neck and no earring I could see because his hair had grown that long, and even though Dad says that you’ve always got to watch your pride, I felt a little jolt of pride when I turned and Theo joined me down the hall. I touched my hair, I checked my jeans, I looked down at my turtleneck and I suppose I was presentable, but I wasn’t Lila, I wasn’t lovely, I wasn’t Theo’s girlfriend: What was I, then, to him?

“I have something,” Theo said above the noise. “To show you.”

“And that would be what?” I asked. We’d reached hallway number two. We’d turned. I looked at him but could read nothing on his face, nothing in his cobalt eyes.

“I didn’t mean right now,” Theo said. “You going to the pond? After school?”

“Can’t you just tell me what it is?” I asked. “I mean—” We’d reached Mr. Marcoroon’s class, and the bell was blaring, and I had to know; I could not wait. I looked hard at him. His eyes held mine. I felt my stomach turn.

“I’m not telling you anything,” Theo said. “Pond or no pond? Your choice.” He had this glimmer in his eye. This something happy that I had not fully seen, not even at the pond, when we were skating.

“You joining us today, Miss Cantor?” Mr. Marcoroon called from the front of his room.

“Looks like you’re wanted,” Theo said. “So what will it be?”

“You’ve got to tell me what it is,” I said.

“Not going to happen,” Theo said. “Not here.” He was so full of—what? Anticipation, I guess. He was so full of happy anticipation.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Whatever.”

He touched his finger to my cheek. He said, “Well, that’s good.”

“Theo?” I said.

“What?” I wanted to touch him back. I wanted to reach for him.

“Oh my God,” I said.

“What?”

“It’s Lila,” I said. For it was true. Her bus had rolled in. She was headed for us—clomping down the hallway in a pair of killer boots.

“Leave him alone,” she said when she reached the door to Mr. Marcoroon’s room.

“We’re just talking,” I said.

“Really?” she said. And she reached for me. Lifted her hand to me. Seemed just this close to giving my face a good, hard slap.

“Don’t touch her,” Theo said to Lila.

“Don’t you talk to me, Theo. Not a word.”

The bell was ringing. He took her hand. They walked away from me.

You know what they mean.

I
GOT TO THE POND as early after school as I could, after calling up to Mom, who was behind her bedroom door, that I’d see her in a while. I’d messed with my hair and clipped up the one side, and I’d stolen a tube of Jilly’s lipstick, some frosty peaches stuff that I smeared, then smackered on. The sun was low and skittish in the sky, having broken out of the day’s gray murk just an hour or so before. I knew the chances of Theo showing were slim. But I had to take the risk, didn’t I? I had to have my shot at beauty.

I took my time lacing up Mom’s skates, and I
took my time warming up—long strokes on the long sides of the pond, crossovers on the short parts. Every few times around I’d stop to slide the crystals off my blades, or sit on the dock to catch my breath—to wait, really; I was waiting. The sun falls awfully fast in winter, and after it falls is when the woods start snapping with sounds you would not notice in the day.
Dad,
I’d write, if I were writing to Dad,
Here’s another change I’ve noticed: The dark is more than the sun dropping off, more than the moon and the stars. It’s what you can’t see that you hope you will see, what hasn’t been that might be.

I tried to imagine Dad in San Francisco, then tried to picture him talking to Stuart Small, a man who had to shave his head to elevate his stature, a man who expected loyalty from people he diminished. I tried to imagine Dad imagining me, Jilly, and Mom, imagining home, but when someone you love like that goes away that long, you can’t know that he’s the person he once was.
Dear Dad,
I’d write, if I were writing to Dad,
How can you stay
gone this long? Mom won’t open Gump’s until you’re back, and Jilly has new boots you’ve never seen, and I’ve become a skater, and things have gotten confusing with a guy named Theo, and before that I was sick, and did you know that marks left in the snow can disappear, and ruts in ponds can vanish? Things change every day, Dad, every single minute, and if you want to know what the changes are, you have to see them for yourself. You have to come back home and let us be your girls again.

You have to, Dad.

It was so much darker now, so much more moon and star than sun, and I stroked and I crossovered, hooked on speed at the pond’s short end, then went for the long glide, looking back toward the woods every time for Theo, who had not come. More and more, I could not find the songs inside my bones, couldn’t juice up my hollows. More and more, hope was a distortion. Around and over twigs, wings, and bug eyes, making the sound of swish, I skated. The ice had thinned in some places and clotted in others,
and over in the center it was smooth and polished as a tabletop, a perfect white sky for the marble girl who was still, I imagined, reading her book. Still studying the same blank page in anticipation of some story sweetly delivered, or some one phrase. How long that girl had waited, I thought. How silent it must be, inside the ice. How enduring you have to be to take one day, and then the next. Here is a word, if you are looking for one:
Interregnum
, which means a pause, a gap, the long held note between two things. That’s what that afternoon was.

Theo wasn’t coming. I looked out into the woods, I listened, I could tell. He’d asked to show me something, and I had said yes, and now he wasn’t here and I’d never know what might have been.

T
HE NEXT MORNING I asked Mom if she could clip my hair high and pretty as she had on the night she’d come home with Jilly from the mall. I had to knock on her door, because she hadn’t left her bed since the night before, when Jilly had taken her a bowl of cereal and a chocolate bar for dinner. “She’s really sad,” Jilly had said to me, and I’d said, “I know,” and that night I stayed downstairs with Jilly, watching her soaps on TV, eating grocery-store popcorn and the last four pieces of cheese Danish in an Entenmann’s box.

“What are we going to do?” I asked.

“It’s up to Dad to come home,” Jilly said. “We’re already here.”

In the morning Mom sat in the center of her queen-size bed, which made her look distant and small. The lace part of the curtains was drawn across her windows, with the purple velvet heavy part hanging bunched and vertical. A single nightstand lamp burned beneath a beige-ish hat-shaped shade. Mom was wearing a long-sleeved white T-shirt, loose white drawstring pants, and an old white terry-cloth robe that she had not bothered to tie closed. She wore nothing on her hands but the big round diamond ring that Dad had given her years ago, before either of them could see as far ahead as Jilly or me, Point of View, Stuart Small in San Francisco. Her hair was slept-on hair, damp-looking and flat, and she had painted no lines of color around her eyes, no patches of blush on her cheekbones, so her eyes seemed smaller, and they were lumpy, too, with crying, and her sheets were white—did I mention that?—and also her quilts
and her pillows. “Jilly?” she’d asked, when I’d knocked, and I’d said, “No, Mom, it’s me,” and when I opened the door, then closed it, I saw her twice, one in the bed, the way she was, and once in the long, bright mirror.

“I can’t make it look the way you make it look,” I told her, holding the butterfly clip in the palm of one hand and opening it up so she might see.

“It’s just pulling your hair back and lifting it high,” she said. “It’s simple, Elisa. Really.”

“But better when you do it,” I told her, and she looked at me, her wild-haired daughter, and very slowly sighed. I stood beside her bed. She did not raise her hands. “It’s going to be another cold day,” I said, and she said, “Aren’t they all, anymore?” I said, “Can I sit here?” I smoothed a hand across her bed, and because she didn’t say no, I did.

“Tired?” I asked.

“Terribly so,” she said.

“Dad’ll come back, Mom,” I said. “He has to.”

“Oh.” She reached for my hand with her hand.

“Everything Dad has is here,” I said. “I mean—everything, don’t you think? His tools and his spices and shelves of Nature, that place downstairs where he stands waiting for you? The strawberry patch and me and Jilly—”

“I’ve made him unhappy, Elisa, and that matters, too. He sounded so far away last night.” She looked at me as if I’d never understand, and maybe if I’d mentioned Theo just then, she would have known that I know about hurting, I was a new expert on the subject. Except that ruining something that hasn’t really begun is not as bad as messing with a marriage, and also, if I told Mom the Theo story, I’d have to explain about Cyrano and also make confession about the pond through the trees, in the dark. That was just too much; I couldn’t. Besides, the only one who could have helped Mom just then was Dad.

“Sit down, Elisa,” my mother said, and at the edge of that winter bed, I did, shifting the weight of everything, sliding Mom just a notch from the
center. She gave me a long look, what I think they call a searching look, then reached her hands toward me. She combed my hair through with her pale, sad hands, lifted my hair above my good ear. I watched her work in the mirror glass. I saw the clip go in.

“You’ll be late for school,” she said.

“I don’t mind,” I told her.

“Well, I do, Elisa. You’re my Honors student. I’m not going to mess that up.” She combed her fingers through the rest of my hair, above my double earlobe. “If you want, I can show you how to fix this side,” she said. “Tomorrow. When there’s time.”

That was the day that I walked with Jilly all the way to school. When we talked a little about Mom and Dad, the future. When Jilly said it must be nice to be smart, and I said it must be nice to be pretty. “Pretty doesn’t get you into college,” she said, and I said, “Smart doesn’t get you any boyfriends.” And I had meant for her to laugh, but
she looked at me strangely sad instead, said, “Yeah? And how long does pretty last?” I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said, “Big things down the road for you, Jilly. I see a future in fashion.”

We heard the first caution bell when we were three whole blocks out. We looked at each other, shrugged. “Mr. Marcoroon is going to kill me,” I said.

“I always hated him,” Jilly said. “Don’t you?”

T
HERE WERE DAYS after that when the only Theo I saw was Lila’s Theo—his arm through hers, her hand up in his curls. Down the halls and around the halls they were Elmer’s glued together, and I understood that he’d been forced to choose and I had not been favored. Lila had gotten her black hair cut, her bangs sheared at her nose. She had to shake her head so you could see her eyes, so she could look at you. She looked at me hard when she was standing with Theo.

In English Theo was a shell of himself—never turning my way or meeting my eyes. Even when I
brushed by him on the way to my chair, even when I timed things just so that the two of us were entering or leaving at the same time, he made like we’d never really been friends. Class went on for what seemed like whole days at a time. It was pantoums, it was elegies, it was odes—Shelley, Keats, Longfellow, the big boys, Dr. Charmin called them, who were famous for things like writing about wind or pictures on a vase. It all seemed sort of dusty, dull. Regulated. Formal. I couldn’t find the soul of it, or my own poet’s heart. I answered when I was called upon, never volunteered. When my own ode was read aloud in class, it was about as good as Sarah’s.

Out in the wider world, Mr. and Mrs. Sue were going public with their spats—eating at separate ends of the cafeteria and staring each other down, skimming down opposite sides of the halls, laughing the loud false laugh with other people. I waited for Karl to ask me for a fix; he seemed to know not to. He didn’t approach me for poems, and other guys didn’t, and I might as well have been wearing
a sign:
OUT OF THE POETRY BUSINESS.

Sammy Bolten, meanwhile, had started circling Margie, and Margie wasn’t minding. I swear to you she leaned against walls waiting for Mount Pocono to go by. She seemed taken with his attitude, his tough-guy talk, the knobby way his joints all came together and flung around, for emphasis. Margie got one of those fake tattoos pressed into her neck, and she started wearing bracelets so thick on one wrist that they cuffed her to the elbow, which anyone could see because, even though it was February now, she wore nothing but black T-shirts.

Strangely, it was only Jilly who seemed glad to see me. Jilly, who walked with me to school in the morning and watched her TV with me at night, and who in between said, “Hello, Elisa,” less ashamed than she had ever been to share my last name. As pretty as she was, it was hard for her to smile, so she smiled less and kept most of her thinking to herself. Mostly we just walked or talked together in silence, but we were together; that was the thing. We
weren’t going to give Mom any bigger cause for sadness. We weren’t going to give Dad any new excuse to stay away. We walked together in the morning, and we were the Cantor sisters in school, and you weren’t going to take that away from us, even if we would never in a million years admit this to each other.

On Thursday Dr. Charmin said that I would be meeting her after school—didn’t ask me, just told me that I would. I wasn’t sure if I was in the mood to talk. I went to the bathroom, stood in line at the water fountain, slouched inside the door of the gymnasium to watch the guys’ basketball practice. They’d made the play-offs, and they were cocky as hell, but anything was better than a lecture.

“Well here you are, Elisa,” Dr. Charmin said, when I finally arrived fifteen minutes past the appointed time. She was straightening the chairs after her senior seminar, wiping some notes off the board. There was a little clap of chalk on her red wool skirt, and her hair had gotten loose again,
hung in helter-skelter style around her face, making her seem younger. I wondered how she would look if she let her hair loose all the way, if she brought her weekend self to school. I wondered what she wanted. Finally it was like she’d remembered I was there. “Sit down,” she said, as if I’d entered her living room. “Please.” As if there’d be tea. I dropped my backpack on the floor, slipped into a front-row chair. She continued straightening, washing down the boards, sifting through some papers on her desk.

“You’re not yourself, Elisa, are you?” she began. She positioned herself along the front of her desk and leaned against the protruding metal rim. She pushed her straggling hair off her forehead, tied her arms across her chest. She had a chunky ring around her middle finger, like something you’d find at a crafts fair. It occurred to me then what had been obvious all along—bad jewelry was her second passion. Big, unwieldy, complicated stuff, counter-weights, I supposed, to the delicacy of stories and
language. Maybe she thought no one would notice. Or maybe she hoped someone would. I couldn’t tell. But she’d asked a question and she stood there waiting, and I decided I wouldn’t resist, wouldn’t extend, unnecessarily, the interrogation.

“I try to be,” I answered.

“You’re different in class, less engaged with your work, hardly as creative as I know you can be. In a nutshell, Elisa, your work is sloppy. Something’s going on, and I am asking what that is.”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Charmin.”

“I’m not interested in apologies, Elisa.”

“I’ll do better,” I said, raising my eyes to hers so that she would know I meant it.

“That might be true and that’s important, but that isn’t why I’ve called you here. Is it something with another student, Elisa? Is something going on at home?”

I waited.

“It’s not that you have to tell me, Elisa. We both know that you don’t. But I’d like to help if I can. If
there’s something I could do.” Her whole face turned red when she said those words.

I noticed, looked away, felt embarrassed for both of us. I hated that things had gone so far as to warrant a private session with Dr. Charmin. And if she could tell that my life was a mess, what did others know, what were they saying behind their hands when I walked by? No one had bothered me for a week at least. Not even Marcoroon.

“‘Fox-Trot,’ Elisa. Yes? That was your last good poem.”

“Okay.”

“After that, it’s been throwaways that anyone could do.”

“I’ll do better.”

“Listen to your own work, Elisa. Listen to what you are capable of.” She turned and rooted around the piles on her overpiled desk, until she’d found what she’d been searching for. “Fox-Trot,” she said, then read the villanelle out loud, not beat by beat but line by line—for the meaning of it, and not for
the patterns. “‘By the stream the fox and she-fox stood,’” she read, “‘Nose to nose beneath the stars / Dancing the music of the woods.’

“That’s so lovely, Elisa,” she interrupted herself, looked up. “It really is. Then something happens in this woodsy paradise, something devastating. Listen: ‘Then from the north a fierce wind blew / And broke the starry dance apart / By the stream where the fox and she-fox stood.’ And now the final quatrain: ‘The stars blinked out, also the moon. / The air went silent, cold, and hard / By the stream where the fox and the she-fox stood / Dancing the music of the woods.’”

“The meter’s off,” I said.

“But it’s very close, Elisa. And the meaning is there. The question is, What’s happened since then? You’ve had a precipitous slide toward the mediocre.”

I must have looked at her strangely.

“Precipitous,” she said. “That’s a word for your Book of Words. Which, by the way, I hope you’re maintaining.”

“Doing my best, Dr. Charmin,” I said.

“You’re not going to tell me what’s wrong, are you?”

I shook my head. You could hear the hand of the clock ticking the afternoon off. “It’s just that I keep messing up,” I finally said. “And I don’t know how to fix things. And I don’t know where I belong.”

“Ah,” she said, after a moment. “The human condition.”

I nodded. “I guess.”

“You wrote ‘Fox-Trot’ for someone, didn’t you, Elisa?”

I nodded again, but only vaguely.

“Did you show it to that person?”

I shook my head no.

“Maybe you should, Elisa. Sometimes that’s what poems are for.” The loosened hair had laid a new fringe across Dr. Charmin’s face. She smoothed it back with her hand.