What Happened to Lani Garver

by Carol Plum-Ucci

  I chewed a bunch of times, watching her face turn red. As if she hadn't spewed my eating problems from coast to coast as her most recent blab.

  "You can't tell, Macy. Promise me."

  She zipped her pinky across her heart and stuck it in the air.

  "Somebody could get seriously hurt if you tell."

  "I promise!" She hollered.

  "I lied. I wasn't alone after cheerleading."

  She hawkeyed me, and in her true fashion, fell over sideways on the couch after only a few seconds. "Oh my god. You were with him. Claire. Why are you doing this to yourself?"

  I let it slide, biding for nerve by chewing and swallowing another huge bite. "Tonight somebody kept calling him. Somebody having fun and games on the phone. It was disgusting. Foul. Unbelievably filthy stuff being whispered at him. Like, sex stuff. Like, some guy was coming on to him. Lani kept hanging up. I heard it with my own ears and finally, I hit star sixty-nine. Guess who was calling?"

  "Great." She moaned sickly. "Am I supposed to be shocked that stuff like this would be going on around him?"

  "I said, somebody called him. He did nothing. He was sitting there reading a bunch of ... paperbacks."

  "The guy reads books because he thinks it's fun. And he flips his butt all over the place when he walks. Don't tell me he's not responsible for some homo phone calls. And since you're asking, I'm taking it this caller was somebody I know."

  I swallowed. "Yeah."

  Her mouth started rising on the sides as breathy laughs spilled out. Her gaze ate me alive.

  "Don't hold out on me." She crawled over and stood on her knees in front of me, gripping the arms of the chair. "Was it ... Larry Boogers?"

  "You're way cold."

  "Uh ... gotta be somebody in honors..."

  I dropped my fork, feeling my gut swerve—too much ricotta cheese, too fast. This was not funny; at least, it would not turn out funny. She was doing like I had been doing, thinking of all the typical male femmes. I had a bad feeling about this. I kept going, only because now I was deep into it, and she'd let me drag her halfway to Philadelphia while gripping my ankle unless I told.

  I took another huge mouthful, getting more nerve while chewing and swallowing. Finally, I said, "Think fish frat."

  Her smile drooped. "No. Uh-uh, no way."

  "Think fish frat, but older. Somebody you kind of don't like."

  I had to hand it to her. Even in this unbelievable scenario, she was sharp as a tack, though all my caution did not prepare me for her swift response.

  "Tony? Is that what you're trying to say? Uh, no." She marched over to the couch, plopped down, and flipped her handbag up on her shoulder. "That would explain everything, wouldn't it? Tony can take the blame for what happened last night, instead of Lani Garver ... Is that it? Claire, you've been naive and stupid before. Okay, this one's complicated, I'll give you that much. But you didn't see Tony's phone number on caller ID, darling."

  "How can you tell me what I saw?" I demanded.

  "I know. I was there when he got in that argument with Lani Garver."

  It was impossible to swallow again, but somehow I managed. "Lani and I both saw that number on the caller ID. We're not both dyslexic."

  Her eyes darted to the side but came back strong. "Whatever! He had it ... pre-programmed in there, so it would show up! He's snowing you, Claire—"

  "How is he supposed to do that!"

  "I don't know; I'm not the phone man!"

  "You're saying he found a way to reroute caller ID, so that Tony's phone number would show and then, what? He got some friend to keep calling? Or he was having phone sex with this number in caller ID, why? Just in case I showed up?"

  "Whatever, Claire. There is no way Tony Clementi called that guy."

  I slammed down my fork and stuck a fist into my gut to try and move the food around. I started out with "Macy, darling." God knows she'd said it enough times to me. "How do you know it wasn't you who misheard the night before, instead of some unexplainable transmutation of a caller ID?"

  "Because! I know!" She watched me screwing my fist into my gut and tossed her hands in the air.

  "I don't know what to do for you, Claire! You're hanging around with this kid, who's messing you all up. I'm writing this all off to your food problems, okay? And what is this about going to your dad's? Did this Lani talk you into leaving us? To keep you away from people who can talk sense to you?"

  I watched her staring back at me with this total look of dread, and I have to say, I was tempted. Okay, I'll forget what my eyes and ears tell me. I'll just believe this other thing because ... it would be so much easier. This girl cares about me totally. And trying to change her mind is like rolling a boulder up a cliff.

  "Macy..." I wanted to say to just forget it. I wanted to tell her the doctor gave me some prescription and I would be okay after taking it for twenty-four hours, or something, and just to bear with me. But I opened my mouth, and this greasy lasagna must have seen its chance. I flew out of the chair, hauled up the stairs two at a time, and made it to the porcelain throne by not stopping to turn on the light. My knees cracked the floor, and I was never so glad to say good-bye to a meal in all my life.

  I remembered from chemo always feeling closer to "normal" after I heaved. At this point, I felt a lot closer to normal. It changed my mind again about what I wanted to say to Macy. Something felt slightly more important than what's the easiest thing to believe, though I couldn't have said what.

  I flushed, wanting to sit there in peace, feeling the coolness of the toilet seat on my arms. But Macy bolted in, switching on the light. I slammed my eyes shut, but couldn't miss her trembling voice.

  "Jesus Christ. I'm calling your mom!"

  "Oh, no, you're not! Just calm down. Give me a minute."

  The water was running, and I raised my head. She had a washcloth and was mopping my face off. She accidentally laid into my bandage and the stitches underneath, and I screamed, "Stop touching me! Give me ten feet!"

  Then she screamed louder than I did, which I couldn't make out the reason for, but I saw her feet jumping up and down like a small child's. Unglued, supremely.

  I got slowly to my feet, grabbed her by the shoulders, and I rattled her around until she looked at me. "Macy. Just calm down. Calmness. Please."

  I tried to keep my own voice calm, and she quit pitching the fit, at least, but blinked at me through her tears and kept yelling. "You're losing it, Claire!"

  "Whatever."

  "You're going to get in some serious trouble!"

  "I'm—Okay, I'm in serious trouble."

  "Stop with the cool act! Your life is going down the goddamn toilet!"

  I looked down at the bowl and figured it wasn't my life I'd just seen going down. "I'll tell you what's making me sick, okay? It's the thought that there are some things I cannot tell you right now. And yet, you are going to nag at me to tell you until I'm driven out of my mind. That's what's making me sick."

  I wasn't sure that was the truth, but it sounded good. It worked. She held up her hands like I had a gun on her, then backed away. "Okay. Fine. Whatever. If I had something outrageously important on my mind, I sure could tell you." She turned and started walking downstairs.

  She was trying to guilt me, and I could live with that. Problem is, she's never had anything outrageously important on her mind. Except maybe this argument about someone getting in the way of her little truths.

  I came down the stairs after her, more slowly. "You promised you wouldn't tell."

  "That thing about Tony? Oh, don't worry, Claire. I won't tell," she said, with fake diplomacy.

  "Please. If you tell, somebody could get seriously hurt."

  "Claire, how could I possibly tell? Who would believe me?"

  "I never said anyone would believe it. I'm saying someone could get hurt."

  "Like I'm not!" She slammed the door behind her with a shattering bang.

  The loudness of it destroyed my toilet-flushing peace of mi
nd, and I dropped onto the couch, burying my head under whatever cushions I could grab. I lay like that with thoughts ripping through my head. Only one seemed to stick. Claire, if Lani's theory about smoke and mirrors is true, then there's just as much chance of smoke in front of you and Lani as that crowd down at the Rod last night. Could you have actually seen caller ID wrong? Macy loves you. She'll forget all this if you can just see it her way...

  A totally logical thought struck me. It was so intense it took a while to look at it from all sides: The way Macy recalled what happened at the Rod was the easiest thing to believe. That's why I wanted to buy into it. But I still believed my own eyes and ears. And not one thing about what I believed was convenient. Therefore, it was probably me seeing the truth, not Macy

  Message from God: Do the right thing. Support him. Take him to Philly.

  "Why should I?" I bawled into the pillow. "What have you ever done for me? What have you ever given me that you haven't taken away again?"

  Silence. No further message from God.

  I looked at my watch. I had eaten, puked, and pissed off my best friend in all of ten minutes. I still had five. I figured I was going. And it had nothing to do with any message from God that I could think of. Or from Pastor Stedman, whom my mom had let loose on me at various times in my early recovery. It had something to do with this janitor I met in isolation when I had pneumonia. He came in to mop around my bed for the hundredth time that week, and I decided to piss and moan. I had muttered how I wished people would lie and tell me I was fine. I had told him it's easier to get better when you can be at home, not facing the truth.

  He had said something, and it sounded like he was quoting someone else. " The truth will set you free, and then you shall be free indeed."

  That saying came crawling back to me every now and again—maybe because that janitor had come into isolation in surgical garb to scrub the bed bars. And you couldn't see his face, and there was nothing to do but hear him. Or maybe it was that he truly believed he was giving me profound wisdom. I know I dropped off to sleep kind of peacefully for once, while he was still scrubbing.

  I hauled my sorry ass off the couch to throw a few clothes into a bag, cursing the whole time.

  16

  On winter nights the rich people's summer homes glow black along Beach Drive because their huge walls of windows throw no lights from within. I studied them as I walked beside Lani, listening to the thunder of the surf, uninterrupted by the summer noises of gulls, laughter, and traffic. The unbroken echo was comforting.

  My thought was to take us down Beach Drive until we got past most of the business district. We could cut back up to Hackett Boulevard right near the bus station.

  "My dad and Suhar have a hot tub. We can sit in it for as long as you want."

  "That'll change the universe, won't it?"

  It was the first statement of mine that he hadn't answered with a groan. My fight with Macy made me feel his gloom a lot better now, and I wondered if he could turn suicidal or something. I didn't want to ask him outright how he felt, though I figured I'd better look for a more cheerful thought.

  "Of all those books you've read? There's got to be something, somewhere in them, to help us laugh at a situation like this."

  He was chewing gum. It spun around in his mouth a couple times. "You're probably right." He snapped his eyes shut and then opened them wide, like he was trying to set his thoughts on that. After half a block he still hadn't said anything.

  "What about ... Hegel?" I pulled out one of the few names I knew.

  He chewed round and round, then flinched a little. "Problem with the big philosophers is they cared about ideas more than people. Hegel would probably have stepped over a guy trying to slit his wrists outside a bar—to get to all the people he could sit and bullshit with inside. Did you know half of philosophy was first put into words by people shot in the ass?"

  "That's encouraging," I said.

  "Sorry."

  "What about Jung? What about Freud? They're people doctors. They've gotta care about people and situations like this."

  "Yeah."

  "Well? What would they say?"

  He chewed his gum hard, though nothing like a smile appeared. "Freud school's one-to-ten line might be fun to lay on Tony Clementi. Some doctors say a person who has only had same-sex attractions is, like, a zero. A person who has only had opposite-sex attractions is, like, a ten. He says most people fall between one and nine."

  "Hm ... I'm definitely a ten."

  "That's what everybody says."

  I felt my eyes kind of bug, though I didn't really want to argue while he was feeling so depressed. "I wouldn't be repeating that philosophy too loudly to people."

  I felt a glimmer of hope as his eyes kind of lit, like those mental cranks were turning. "Freud stole from Hegel, I think. They both believe people are not 'things,' like gay, straight, black, white, mugger, saint, but are a continually moving process. So someone who was a two as a teenager could be a five when they hit forty ... People are always changing."

  "What does that say about Tony?"

  He sucked in a breath of air, and when he let it out again, he looked sad. "I don't know. Only that ... you can't really know. Psychotherapy isn't really about knowing. It's sort of like a merry-go-round ride for little kids. You go around in circles until your insides are all tickled, and then suddenly you can cope with the world again."

  "That's cheerful. So why are you addicted to it?"

  "It's a fun game to try to pull apart what's true and what's bull."

  "I'd rather play guitar." I sighed. "Gimme some gum."

  "Last piece."

  I stuck up my finger in front of him, and somehow he understood this ritual I thought only me and my friends knew about. He took half his gum, squashed it on my finger, and I stuck it in my mouth. I chewed like he did—kind of angrily. Spearmint.

  "Remember King Solomon?" he asked. "The very wise king?"

  "Yeah."

  "He used to say, 'In much learning, there is much sadness.'"

  "Uh ... I'm looking for a subject that'll cheer us up," I hinted, but he had turned deaf, sighing in a way that made me feel gloomy to the core.

  "World is all backward. Everyone who is considered really hot, really isn't. It's like ... we're through the looking glass. Good is bad, bad is good. Black is white, white is black. People base their lives on convenient recollections and are considered sane. People who look too hard for truth are considered crazy. Did you know that most of the people in history whose books have lasted more than a few centuries have been either thrown into jail or murdered by angry mobs? All the prophets, the great philosophers, the disciples, people like Joan of Arc, great novelists..."

  "Maybe we should be talking about something other than your books." I stopped him. "Maybe you should just kick back. Remember what it was like to be naive. I like remembering when I was a little kid. You remember back then? Before all the bad stuff started happening? Remember ... fourth grade?"

  "Hm, yeah." He smiled, but it looked forced.

  I chomped hard. "Don't tell me. You got beaten on for playing Barbie with the girls."

  He tried to blow a bubble, which kind of exploded behind a sad smile. "Actually it was more often dress-ups."

  "Oh no." I breathed, trying to decide if it was a horrible thing for a little boy to play dress-ups. In second grade this kid across the street had four huge yellow trucks. We both had fun with them. I thought about why it is that girls can do boy things but boys can't do girl things without kids beating them up.

  "Well, they were just kids, Lani. Kids'll beat on each other for stupid reasons."

  When I looked up, he was shaking his head. "Wasn't a kid. It was my dad."

  My spirits dived to the concrete. I surrendered to this black mood. Some situations you just can't find the good side in.

  After a minute he nodded. "Not only was my dad in the military, but we lived on military bases. He had me to a drill sergeant, a priest,
and a shrink before I was ten."

  "Because you played girl games? That sucks."

  He nodded. "Because this very stupid school board implied that my parents were somehow responsible for having a kid who was ... what did they call it ... gender confused. My dad was trying to either change me or prove that they were fighting it and not causing it, for fear of getting a discharge, losing his job."

  My jaw hung open and my gum almost fell out.

  "But I have a few good memories in my life," he said.

  "Hurry up and tell me before the sky falls."

  We turned down Tenth Street toward Hackett Boulevard. We were halfway down the street before he came up with one.

  "I have a great memory from here, on Hackett. Back when we were summer people, many moons ago. You know how people dump unwanted pets on the beach?"

  "Cops finally cracked down on that a few years back."

  "Before that, then. Kitten. I found it on the beach, all alone and crying on this windy, gray day. It had a disease called distemper. You're supposed to put all animals with distemper to sleep because they can't get better from it. The owners threw it out of the car, down at the dunes, instead of taking it to the vet to have it put to sleep. I took it home, hid it from my mom, and for three days I held that kitten, until it died."

  I listened to the echo of the surf, which blended nicely with my sighing.

  "That's ... a really charged-up, great memory." I pulled him to me, by the waist. I guessed maybe we just shouldn't talk about anything. He threw an arm across my neck, and we crossed Hackett Boulevard like that, after looking around to make sure no familiar cars were zooming past to scope us out. The boulevard was eerily quiet for a Friday night.

  "I don't really think our greatest memories are always great while they're happening," he said. "You have to wait. And afterward you have a memory of doing something way cool. I probably gave that kitten the only kindness of its life. I will always have a lot of memories like that."

  I didn't want to ask him about any other memories. Considering some of the people he'd seemed to know at the clinic, I figured they only got worse, involving dying people and not just helpless animals.