Undercover (7 page)

A
N EPITAPH is what they write on tomb-stones. An epigraph is the thing they stick at the front of books. Something that announces the story’s purpose or starting place. Something that puts readers in the mood.

That’s what I wanted for my Book of Words—something to return to whenever I lost my way. Dad would have called it Strutting Out the Old Henry Ford, because that guy was good for about a billion sayings and because Dad started most of his projects that way, with Big Words from a Big Person to get the client in the mood. Ralph Waldo
Emerson was also huge in the sayings department, and so was Winston Churchill, and there were plenty of others, too, in the books Dad had on his shelves. So I started there, behind Dad’s office door on the second door, with his best books of sayings all around me.

Language most shows a man: Speak, that I may see thee.
That was Ben Jonson, and that was plain dreary.

The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
A Susan Sontag quote, and I had zero idea what it might mean.

A poem begins with a lump in the throat.
That one courtesy of Robert Frost. I found it sentimental.

Jilly was on the phone down the hall, talking to Elaine about their latest shopping spree. Mom had Mrs. Garland over for Christmas decorating. They’d dragged a small, sweet blue spruce into the house and boxes of lights in from the garage, and out of the basement they had pulled the crates of ornaments and crèche scenes, mistletoe and tinsel.
Their talk smoked up the stairs and under Dad’s office door, and even though I concentrated on the sayings, I heard every word.

“Men never tend to their own gardens,” Mrs. Garland was saying in her authoritative voice. “They take advantage and then they take for granted. Oh, and doesn’t that look nice, with the white lights.”

“Gorgeous,” my mother said. Then: “What I find unnatural is the presumption that they give us a ring and their father’s last name and then a house and some children, and that’s romance. But romance is noticing what we do to stay new. It’s being here and feeling lucky that we don’t belong to someone else. Doesn’t he miss me?” my mother wanted to know. “Doesn’t he want me to miss him?” She was pulling at something, grunting. She was scraping a stool across the floor.

“Everywhere I go, men are losing their minds,” Mrs. Garland said. “It’s epidemic.”

“Not
all
men,” my mother sniffed. “Angie’s Tony
is a peach, don’t you think? And what wouldn’t you give for the way Mike looks at Maude?” There was the sound of a hammer pounding a nail. There was a scratch, and then: “The blue one, don’t you think? With the red bow?”

“You have to give Robert an ultimatum, Tina,” Mrs. Garland said. “What else can you do?”

“You mean: Come home now or I’m leaving? You mean: Hope you like the hills of San Francisco, because you can stay right where you are and never bother coming home?”

I knew my mother was showing off for Mrs. Garland. I was sure she couldn’t mean what she was saying. Almost sure. But did you ever feel like your soul has morphed into a volcano with all the rocks and everything else about to spew? Ever get so your throat’s so clogged up tight you can’t breathe unless you cough? Because that’s what happened to me: I started coughing. Lying on the floor in Dad’s office, beside the million quotables, looking for an epigraph, listening to Mom, I started coughing, and it
was the kind of coughing that happens when you cannot breathe, when you smack the floor to stay alive, smack your chest, smack the air itself for air. I coughed so hard you could have measured it on the Richter scale. You would have thought the world was splitting in two.

“Jilly?” I could hear my mother between the spasms. “Honey? You okay?” I could tell that she’d moved to the bottom of the stairs, that she was working her way toward deciphering the commotion, to weighing things out in her head.

“NOT JILLY!” I spat out. I was sprawled out flat on my back by now, wheezing like a smoker.

“Elisa?” my mother asked a minute later. I didn’t answer her. I made her suffer. I tested her. She didn’t come. “Elisa?” she called again. “Please. Answer me.”

I coughed, but it wasn’t much, it wasn’t frightening. It was an I-don’t-need-you and I’m-not-answering-you cough, is what it was.

“Elisa!” my mother said.

“Just let her be,” said Mrs. Garland after a while. “There’s nothing for it.” I could hear them stepping away from the stairwell now, returning to their business. I could imagine them starting up again, leaving Dad all by himself in the hills of San Francisco.

My parka was down on the banister. My mittens were stuffed in its pockets. I sipped in one more stingy whiff of air, then rolled to my knees and pushed myself up. I yanked open the door to Dad’s office—a loud, complaining commotion of a yank—and clomped down the steps two at a time into the land of Christmas, where twinkle lights were draping every post and column and mirror and frame. My mother had a box of tinsel in her hands. Mrs. Garland was tying velvet bows.

“So nice to see you, Mrs. Garland,” I said in my I’m-so-obviously-lying voice. I pulled my parka on. I dug in for the mittens. Mrs. Garland gave me the hugest fake smile. I Cheshire Cat grinned her right back.

“Where are you going, Elisa?” my mother asked, using the tone mothers use when they’re performing for their friends, when they’re pretending they’re the most civilized people in the world, utterly one hundred percent rational.

I had to go through the living room to get to the front door. Go around and over boxes, walk around and in between with my lungs spewed out and the air too thin for me to fill my tank. “Nowhere,” I answered. “Like always.” I had my hand on the doorknob. I pulled. The night air hit me like an Arctic blast, and I looked back over my shoulder at my mother, near the twinkling tree, just to see if she might call me back, but nothing. She was exchanging a look with Mrs. Garland.

“She’s every ounce her father, isn’t she?” I heard Mrs. Garland say as the door slammed hard behind me.

“Spitting image,” I said right back. “SPITTING IMAGE!” Knowing no one would hear me, knowing they were just going to go on and on, tacking
tinsel to the ceiling, rehearsing the latest psycho-science on men.

Outside, the moon seemed pushed forward in the sky, like it was looking for some kind of attention. In Mrs. Gunn’s yard the noses on three hooked-together Frosty the Snowmen blinked on and off, turning the old snow to rust with the reflections, and the white plastic candles in the windows at Mrs. Garland’s looked heatless and garish at the same time. In the lowest fraction of the sky the air was the color of glow.

But in the woods, except for the moon and the big spill of stars, everything was darkness. Making and roaring, I thought. Making and roaring.

I
NEEDED THE SCORCH of the moon and the cold on my face. I needed the stream beneath the moon and the sky full of stars. I needed ravens if there were still ravens clumped up in those trees, and if there were an owl hiding out somewhere, just one white owl, I’d climb his back and I would say, Please. Fly me anywhere.
Dear Dad, I can’t keep track of the changes alone, I can’t do this without you. Dear Dad, it snows, then the snow is gone, then it snows again harder, and I can’t find where I was going to inside all the weather. Dear Dad, Is this what it takes to be so good at poems, that you
hurt all the time and you don’t have real friends and you have no one to talk to, so you write?

When I got to the clearing at the pond, I pulled to a stop. For when I got to the clearing, he was there—sitting there, on the edge of my dock, his own kind of statue.

I almost turned. I almost slipped back into the woods, but in the other direction were the accusing snowmen and the twinkle lights and Mrs. Garland and my mom and all that they’d already said and were going to say, whether I’d be there to hear it or not, and Jilly. And between him and me there was snow slicked over to ice and little bird tracks and weedy trees with their limbs swooped down, and at the end of that, the abandoned shack, where my mother’s old skates hung. I walked the whole curving distance as if he weren’t there, as if I weren’t glad to see him. I slung the skates over my shoulder and went right out to the end of the dock, like I always do, because the place is mine, because no one can take it from me,
because I hadn’t asked him to come again, because I had not wanted to hope.

“
Hockey
skates?” is what I said when I got to where he was. “
Hockey?
Those things don’t even have toe picks.” I sat down, but not near him. I took off my shoes, and over a pair of extra socks, I started lacing up, and because he wasn’t going to know how I felt, or that I was glad to see him, I kept my head down, close to my heart, which was beating louder than the drums at football games, which means my rib cage, still, was puny.

“Better than boots,” he finally said, pulling his cap down. “My uncle had extras.” He turned and looked at me strangely, like maybe he all of a sudden wished he hadn’t come or he’d remembered me differently, or maybe it was that I looked funny from all that crying I hoped he wouldn’t notice I had done. It was cold, and our breath made frosty
O
s. When a twig snapped out in the woods, it sounded like something popping off. The moon was a thousand different colors, not just
white. It had purple running through it, also pink.

“Moon is fat tonight,” I said, after a while.

“You ever quit making poems?” he said.

“That was no poem,” I told him, shaking my head. “Just a point of fact.”

It’s guys like Theo who could use their own Book of Words, I thought in the big yawn of nothing that followed.
Perplexing
would be a good word for him.
Variable. Mystifying
. Lila’s Theo, but not. What goes on in that head of yours? I almost said, but the urge came and went, because something else that Dad taught me once is that sometimes there’s nothing worse you can do to a moment than show who’s better than who, and because in that particular moment after that particular day I wasn’t better than anyone. I was just this lonely girl from school.

“This really your own private pond?” Theo asked, after some more undecided time had passed. He turned and looked at me, and when he did, he got slivers of moon bits in his eyes.

“Maybe,” I said. Then: “Not really.” My mother
and Mrs. Garland seemed whole countries away. My dad seemed close as the maybe owl.

“You mind losing a race to a guy on hockey skates?” he asked right then. Extremely stupid question.

“Get real, Theo,” I said. “I’d never lose to any guy”—and that was it, it was all over, no more sitting and figuring out the conversation. Before I could finish my newest declaration of superiority, Theo was down off the dock, on the ice. He was skating away in that sloppy hockey-skater style—all noise and knees and elbows, that swish-swish-on-the-verge-of-falling sound, his butt way out, his shoulders forward. He was cutting the ice like an amateur, gaining speed by some bizarre mix of accident and luck.

“That’s real big of you,” I shouted after him. “You have to cheat like that to win?”

“You’ve got to be good for more than poems, twirl girl,” Theo called from all the way across the pond. “This is the
real
world!”

“Can you do crossovers like this?” I called right back. “Can you lunge?” I was throwing all my
fanciest tricks. I was weaving in circles but I was coming right at him, too, and when I got real close, he laughed at me and ducked.

“Girl stuff!” he said, pushing off now the other way, going back to where we’d come from, his elbows loose and pumping. “Why would I even want to try?” There were twigs that he was skating over. There were insect wings. There were ruts. There was everything that should have sent him sprawling, down on his face in the night. But it was my blade that hit some leaf just then, some unlucky twisting-up rut, and in that instant I was down on my knees, and then down on my butt, and that was that: I was laughing. I was laughing so hard you might have thought I was crying, but I checked, and I was laughing all right.

“Something funny?” Theo said. He was all the way across the pond, his toothy smirk like a bright white light. He was facing me, but he was skating backward toward a knot of trees.

“You,” I said. “What else?” Because when he fell,
he fell like slow motion—his arms windmilling out and his feet slipping from underneath, but not all at once. One side of him was down before the other side was. When he tried to catch his balance, he went splat. “That was on purpose,” he said, lying face-to-the-stars on the pond. “It’s my signature move—the Theo Moses.”

I was already up and coming for him, riding the diagonal in his direction, teeing to one of those very smart stops that makes a soft white shower of snow. “Hockey skates,” I said when I reached him. “No toe picks. What did I tell you?” I was standing above him, in perfect girl balance. I put out my hand. “Need some help there?” I asked.

“Not on your life,” he said.

“Not like it matters to me,” I said. I crossed my arms and stood there watching while he made a whole lot of preposterous efforts to get up off the ice. Every time he was almost up, he was down again—on his hands and knees, or on both knees, or with his butt stuck out, or something. He looked
like a beetle on its back, or like a flower dropping petals. “You could stay there until spring, and swim back,” I said.

I untied my arms and stuck my toe pick in. I reached and he laughed and reached back, wrapping his gloved hands hard around my mittens, almost pulling me down, but instead I pulled him close, and he looked at me, and I was surprised, and I looked at him and felt a jolt of yearning—yes, yearning—and then he was gone, skating his hideous, jangling, hockey way back toward the dock, his crooked legs sliding out to the side, his elbows everywhere. I took my time to get to where he was, throwing a waltz jump in for good measure, turning out my feet for a spread eagle, cutting crossovers to the opposite side of the pond and performing one long (but very shaky) spiral. By the time I was ready to take off my own skates, the moon was in a different place in the sky and had lost most of its colors.

We walked back through the woods, by the
stream, where the ground sloped uphill in places and you could only wonder what was in the shadows or in the naked branches of the trees. Maybe an owl, Theo said, was near, or maybe a bear or a coyote, but Theo didn’t know those woods like I knew those woods and like the woods knew me. I told Theo some of what I knew. I told him a little about my dad. I told him that I loved the line “making and roaring.” But I didn’t tell him about the Book of Words, and I didn’t say a word about Lila, because if I didn’t mention her, she wasn’t there.

It wasn’t until we could see the low Christmas glow of the cul-de-sac beyond the trees that we ran out of things to say, and all there was then was the sound of our boots in the snow, the snapping of twigs somewhere beyond, my mother and Mrs. Garland waiting, school tomorrow, Lila. Theo’s uncle’s skates danced on Theo’s right shoulder. The moon caught the silver circle at his ear. There were places on the path where we couldn’t walk side by side, and when that was the case, I let Theo walk
ahead, until the end when he said, “No. Ladies first.” Touching his hands to that place above my hips. Keeping his hands there. I walked more and more slowly. I did not want to move at all.

And that was when I saw the footprints in the snow—one footprint after another, little toes to little heels. They were leading toward the stream and then away from the stream and out, toward distant trees, like a pair of bare baby feet. When I saw them, I stopped completely, and Theo stopped right up against me, his chin above my shoulder, his skate nudging into my sleeve, his warm breath on my cool cheek, my whole self braced by him. “Look at that,” I said about the little waddle shapes, and in my head I got this picture of somebody’s naked baby making some kind of mad escape, a baby out running through the snow, while in my chest, I felt my heart pounding, pounding:
Kiss me, Theo. Please
. Maybe it’s strangeness that makes for real friendship, something neither of you rightly understands, for one blink of one instant, in the brilliant,
dark woods. Theo was right there, his chin above my shoulder. Theo was right there—and nothing. Nothing. Nothing is its own hard pain, a fever deep within. I had pride. I had to show that I didn’t care.

“Bet you don’t know what that is,” I said at last.

“Snow angel?” he guessed, so he couldn’t be wrong, but his voice was funny, tied up on itself.

“Raccoon,” I said, and he kind of breathed out, then stepped away, and I kind of breathed in, but oh, it hurt. There was nothing to compare the aching to.

“You’re a walking encyclopedia,” Theo said, and then he pushed me and I turned and pushed him harder back, and then he called me bigheaded, and so I called him obtuse, and then I asked him, “Do you even know what that means? Obtuse,” I said, “obtuse, obtuse,” and we were running between the trees, after each other, away from the cul-de-sac, beneath the moon. We were running.