Why Visit America

by Matthew Baker

  The wording was insensitive: “affluent” would have been less offensive, or maybe “wealthy.” The question had spilled out of me without any warning though, “rich” and all. I expected my mother to correct me; instead she only smiled. The slight furrow to her eyebrows, the faint pucker to her lips, suggested sympathy, even regret. “Yes,” my mother murmured, still running her fingers over the spool. “But in those days rich wasn’t as rich as rich is now.”

  Just then she gasped, having found a message in the spool. She guided my fingers over the holes, helping me to feel the letters she had discovered: “beware,” the spool read. “How creepy,” my mother cooed, pleased. She later gave me the spool to keep.

  * * *

  Winter went, spring came, and flurries of pollen covered the fire hydrants and the parked cars with a fluorescent grit. Every April the high school hosted a donation competition on the football field; tradition dictated that a boy and a girl would be chosen to give a speech during the festivities. A speech about charity and goodwill and spiritual health. The boy and the girl were always chosen from the freshman class. This wasn’t something that our school had invented—the tradition was observed by every school in Nashville, and seems to have been widespread throughout the South. (Its range may have extended even further, but it was probably a regional phenomenon; I have never seen the tradition referenced in books or movies, and online references are scarce.) The boy and the girl were chosen on the basis of votes. All students voted. The positions were coveted; popularity determined who won. Cody Walden of course would win for the boys. For the girls, despite everything that had happened between us, I found myself secretly rooting for Madison. Winning might have led to a breakthrough for her with Cody. The boy and the girl wrote and delivered the speech together, met outside of school to prepare—if she won, she finally would have been given a chance to be alone with him. Even with her new ratio, however, there were still far more popular girls in the freshman class; realistically, she had little chance of winning, short of somebody rigging the election.

  As it happened, though, somebody did rig the election.

  To this day, I can scarcely imagine the pleasure my classmates must have taken in organizing the scheme. The announcement interrupted a lecture in econ. As the winning students were announced, I was rooting so intently for the name Madison Gates—silently mouthing the syllables to myself, for luck—I was initially bewildered when my classmates swiveled in unison to look at me. Some looked confused; most were smirking, or stifling laughter. I realized, then, that my name had been announced over the intercom. I had won. I had won. I had been elected to give the speech.

  “Well. My. What an honor!” the econ teacher offered, looking somewhat confused himself.

  In a panic, I grabbed my textbooks, snatched my backpack, walked out of econ without even asking for permission to leave, and moments later was seated on a chair in the office of the principal, begging to resign.

  “Resigning isn’t an option,” the principal said. The principal was a graying sinewy woman who spiked her bun with pencils and favored pinstripe dresses. She had a pensive, solemn demeanor, denounced all irritants as fascists—for example, muttering “fascist!” at a pen in retaliation for the pen running out of ink—and was unwed, a fact that students often attributed to her ratio, which was notoriously unhealthy.

  “But they only voted for me as a joke,” I said, clutching my textbooks to my sweater.

  “Yes, that’s really the only explanation,” the principal agreed, perhaps more bluntly than necessary, folding her hands under her chin. “And that’s why you’ll have to go through with the ceremony. They wanted to humiliate you. If you resign then they’ve won. You’re going to have to do the brave thing here.”

  “I’m not that sort of person,” I said, slumping backward, feeling ready to burst into tears.

  “Well, darling, now might be the time to change that,” the principal said.

  I stared past my brogues at the speckled motif scattered across the floor.

  “We’ll need to look over a copy of the speech beforehand,” the principal said, standing, and then shooed me out the door.

  I shuffled down the hallway, feeling miserable, getting stares and snickers from every classroom.

  Cody found me at my locker after school.

  “You’re the one who won?” Cody said with a confused squint.

  I was too intimidated to do anything but nod.

  “Huh,” Cody said.

  We walked to his house to write the speech. He had offered to come to my house instead. I had rejected that idea, for obvious reasons. Leaving school, I trailed him down the hallway with my head bowed toward the floor. Cody chatted briefly with passing friends. His speech was interspersed with slang acquired in spiritual education: he concurred with amens; he dissented with mus; he greeted and parted with salaams and namastes. He cursed with pleasure, relishing fuck especially. Occasionally he paused at the lockers of certain intimates, discussing, in undertones, the particulars of stunts and pranks: a ruse that would require gaining access to the janitor’s closet; mischief planned for the principal’s convertible. I mostly stared at the linoleum. Despite having no feelings for him, I still felt a degree of terror, standing in the presence of somebody whom so many people desired—the desire was so thick in the air that the accompanying emotions could be experienced secondhand. As we passed through the swinging doors into the breezy spring weather, kids congratulated him from the windows of buses while hailing me sarcastically.

  “Your Highness, we salute you, we sing your praises!”

  “Hey Heinie, you gonna buy a new dress for the speech?”

  “New earrings, new heels, why stop there?”

  “For an occasion like this, you’ve gotta treat yourself!”

  After we had left the school grounds our walk was silent.

  Cody lived only a couple blocks from school, in a modest bungalow with white columns and faded siding, shaded by gigantic chestnut trees. Hummingbirds were flitting around the yard. Walking up the driveway, I thought the house looked like a fairy-tale cottage, the type that would belong to a reclusive magician, maybe kind, maybe wicked. The inside of the bungalow was just as enchanting. Madison had once dragged me to the public library to examine a copy of his family’s latest tax filing—his parents were bigwigs in the country music industry, with a combined income nearly identical to that of my parents. In contrast to my parents, however, his parents elected to donate the vast majority, primarily to infrastructure initiatives and healthcare programs. Their ratio was rumored to be exactly 100:1. The bungalow was furnished in the wabi-sabi style that most families back then idealized: simplicity, roughness, weathering, tarnish. The wooden seats were rubbed pale and glossy from years of use; the leather cushions on the couches were darkened and cracking; the teal paint on the cabinets was chipped and peeling. The floors and the surfaces looked swept and dusted; the feel of the house was bright and cozy. In the kitchen, the scent of baking lasagna wafted from the oven beneath a rack of gleaming copper pots. Passing through the dining room, I noticed that each member of the family had a designated set of tableware: a plate, a bowl, a cup, a mug, a fork, a spoon, a butter knife, a steak knife, and a cloth napkin apiece, stored on individual shelves above the ancient credenza. The dishes were porcelain, decorated with bucolic scenes; the cutlery was silver. When guests came, presumably additional tableware was rented—or the children ate after the adults had eaten—as there appeared to be no extra.

  His bedroom was tucked between the bathroom and the laundry. Cody dumped his backpack on the floor and then sat down in his chair, automatically assuming a padmasana pose. I stood back in the doorway, gazing at his bedroom in wonder. Madison would have swooned. Eleven articles of clothing hung in his closet—nine shirts, a random assortment of sweatshirts and tees, all faded shades of indigo and green, plus a spare pair of jeans and a scarlet windbreaker with a drawstring hood—from eleven hangers. Scattered across the carpet lay rum
pled socks and upended boots. For furnishings he had a full-size bed draped with a richly colored quilt, the chair, a desk, and a rustic dresser. Like his clothing, his furnishings were all of exceptional quality, and fantastically worn. His desk was bare except for a loaner cassette tape scrawled with the underlined surname of a friend, a gunslinger movie in a plastic rental case, and samurai manga labeled with library call numbers—not, technically, his belongings. His only visible belonging that wasn’t categorically practical was a skateboard, propped against his dresser, that was bedecked with an image of a roaring dragon either attacking or defending a castle tower.

  “I guess we should get to work,” Cody said.

  I didn’t know where to sit, which caused me to begin to sweat. I didn’t dare sit on his bed; he would have been so revolted he probably would have had to wash his bedding afterward, quilt and all, if somebody like me had sat there. I considered just standing, maybe leaning against the wall, but that seemed too awkward. Ultimately, I decided to sit on the carpet, which proved to be fairly awkward too.

  Cody stared at me a moment, frowned, and then stood back up again.

  “I can’t think all cooped up in here,” Cody said, grabbing his skateboard.

  Across the road from his house lay a wooded park with a deserted playground. While we brainstormed, I sat on the edge of the merry-go-round, slouched over my knees and gripping my ankles; Cody skated around the playground, leaping overturned garbage cans, skirting picnic tables, dodging barbecue grills, making the skateboard buck and flip beneath his sneakers. With a figure as burly as his, he didn’t appear to be built for something like skateboarding, but he was agile, and he was limber, and he possessed miraculous balance. I couldn’t have articulated this back then, but the difference between him on a skateboard and other kids on skateboards was the difference between art and sport. For him skating didn’t seem to be about competition. I was given the sense that he was expressing himself through every grind and twirl, using that skateboard the way a dancer would use a stage.

  Madison would have been spellbound, getting to watch him move that way. I felt only self-pity. Kids with low ratios always seemed to be like he was: breathtakingly talented at some art. After examining his bedroom, I finally understood why. He had been forced to choose. That was his only toy, a skateboard, and so that was what he did: skateboard, skateboard, skateboard. As for me, I had no talents, no skills, no abilities at all. I owned a skateboard too—and ballet shoes, and tap shoes, and roller skates, and ice skates, and soccer cleats, and softball cleats, and a bicycle, and a scooter, and a flute, and a harp, and a fiddle, a magic kit, a sewing kit, a chess set, a calligraphy set, and acrylic paintbrushes, and watercolor paintbrushes, and instant cameras, and pottery wheels, and gardening tools, and finger puppets, and a marionette. I had sampled every one of them, and thereby had mastered none of them. I had tried riding my skateboard exactly once. I had become frustrated, and had had the option of giving up.

  Watching him give such elegant whirling forms to whatever emotions had accumulated during his day, I longed for the ability to do the same. I briefly imagined kissing him, which was idiotic. I didn’t even like him, and he definitely didn’t like me.

  “I really don’t even know what to say,” I shouted.

  “If you want, I can get copies of speeches kids have given before, and we can just throw together a speech from that. If you haven’t noticed, the speech is pretty much exactly the same every year: ‘Charity is an essential part of spiritual health, by working together we’ll end poverty and homelessness. Yadda yadda yadda, blah blah blah,’” Cody called, swooping past me crouched low on the skateboard.

  “You say it like you don’t mean it,” I shouted.

  “It’s not that it isn’t true. It’s just so obvious that giving a speech about it seems kind of pointless,” Cody called.

  He hit a twig, swore, wobbled, and crashed, tumbling across the sidewalk as the skateboard clattered across the pavement.

  “Are you okay?” I said.

  Grinning, he rose gingerly off the pavement, bleeding from scrapes on his chin and his elbows. He brushed pebbles from his shirt, looking embarrassed, somewhat proud. Then his smile fell.

  “You know you only got elected as a joke, right?” Cody said.

  “I’m not an idiot,” I said.

  “You’re going to go through with the speech anyway?” Cody said, frowning.

  I pressed my face into my legs, peering through at the chipped paint on the merry-go-round.

  “Resigning isn’t an option,” I said.

  * * *

  The next day those scabs on his chin and his elbows got him a lot of attention at school. Passing through the cafeteria, I overheard him narrating his fall to a table of laughing girls. When he glanced in my direction, I hurried on to the bathroom, clutching my bagged lunch, and ate in my usual stall.

  As if having the speech to look forward to somehow wasn’t enough to satisfy the masses, the bullying at school only got worse in the weeks leading up to the donation ceremony. Kids stapled advertisements to my backpack. Kids threw crumpled receipts at my head. Returning to my locker to fetch my jacket at the end of each day, I’d find my locker plastered with dollar bills, some crusted with dried flecks of snot, some wet with phlegmy globs of spit. In the bathroom, kids chiseled cakes and guillotines onto the walls of my usual stall. I tried just to ignore it. I was cracking under the strain. Back at home, I binged, I purged, I binged, I purged, I binged, I purged, and otherwise wandered through the house in a constant state of depression, picking fights with my parents over insignificant incidents, snapping viciously at my sister over trivial comments. My family tried to be patient with my explosions. My relationship with my family continued to deteriorate anyway. As usual, nobody talked about the issue. My parents understood that having to give the speech was meant to embarrass me, and pretended not to understand, acting as if the donation competition was any other school event, awkwardly changing the subject whenever the topic happened to be raised. My family wouldn’t be at the ceremony. My family never went to the ceremony. I had never been either. I lay awake at night, gripped with dread and fear, imagining the scene at the football field. The stage and the crowd. The humiliation of having to stand there as a rich kid and make a speech about charity and goodwill.

  Cody cobbled a speech together as promised, scribbling out the text on ruled paper. The principal had some trouble deciphering his messy scrawl—denounced her reading glasses as fascist—but ultimately approved the speech, essentially the same speech she had approved every year before.

  As we were supposed to deliver the speech together—periodically alternating paragraphs, even occasionally finishing a sentence that the other had begun, for dramatic emphasis—we met again the day before the ceremony to practice. Meeting at his house that night wasn’t an option, he said; his parents were entertaining potential clients, some folk musicians from Charleston.

  I tried protesting that meeting at my house wasn’t an option either.

  “Why not?” Cody said.

  “It’s just not like yours,” I said, lamely. He knew exactly how we lived. Our assets were a matter of public record the same as anybody’s. He had probably even seen the photocopy of our tax filing that kids sometimes passed around for entertainment.

  A friend delivered him by bicycle that afternoon. I was perched on the window seat in my turret and watched as he arrived, hopping off the handlebars and waving goodbye to the friend with a laugh. Sunlight, both reflected and refracted by my belongings—perfume bottles, earrings, crystal balls, pendants, snow globes, wristwatches, hand mirrors, gemstones, the waterfall chandelier—projected glimmers of light across my bedroom, flickering. I remember picking nervously at a hangnail. Cody climbed the stairs to the turret with a glass of soda, still fizzing, that one of my parents must have poured for him. He whistled as he stepped through the door.

  “You really do have a lot of shit,” Cody murmured.

  Gently, h
e flicked a pinwheel, sending the rainbow vanes spinning. When the pinwheel stopped, he turned, looking around the bedroom.

  “Do you actually use all of this junk?” Cody said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Doesn’t having all this stuff ever feel like a burden?” Cody said.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Huh,” Cody said, nodding and squinting, as if trying to imagine having to live among so many belongings.

  I couldn’t tell if he was mocking me, but while we rehearsed, he wore my pinwheel, tucking the rod into the pocket on his shirt like a boutonniere.

  * * *

  A dusting of snow is falling across the city tonight. Blues is playing over the radio on the kitchen counter. I’m chopping celery. I’m making gumbo. I didn’t mean to think about him again. I barely even knew him. I never loved him, didn’t even like him, not romantically. And yet there was something about him. Something spellbinding about being around him. Because of what he did, I’m linked to him forever. I twist the knob for the burner. Flames erupt beneath the pot on the stove. I stare at the flames for a moment before reducing the heat. He got into trouble after graduating, eventually moved out of the country. I never had the chance to ask him about that day. About his motives.

  I remember being gripped by a feeling of desperation, walking down to the football field on the afternoon of the donation competition. I wore the humblest outfit possible, no jewelry, just a plain sack dress—with deep hip pockets, notably—my hair in a simple updo, and my oldest pair of flats. The sun was shining, but rain had fallen earlier that morning, making the air feel wet and humid and the grass all damp and muddy. Rented trucks were parked on the track, staggered like runners waiting for the crack of a pistol, with the rear doors raised and the loading ramps extended. Rented tables were arranged in rows on the football field, parallel to the yard lines, gradually getting buried beneath donations. Wearing latex gloves, teachers sorted through the piles, organizing the donations into boxes. Madison somehow must have come into contact with the latex gloves. Concerned friends had gathered around her in the end zone to examine an outbreak of rashes on her arms. Dolly was rushing back from the concession stand with a waffle cone of frozen custard to comfort her. I felt a glimmer of loneliness, seeing her surrounded by all of her friends. By then most kids had been there for hours, and parents were already trickling into the stadium, claiming seats over in the stands. Behind the podium on the stage, the principal was tinkering with the microphone. The scoreboard was dark. The competition was a competition in name only. There was no home team; there was no away team; the donations were not points, were never tallied.