Early in the morning just after the sun was up, the squirrels looked like boys, somehow, she couldn’t say why. Maybe because of the way they moved, skittering and chasing each other, twitching. Or maybe it was the fur. Something.
Her name was Gina, she was sixteen years old, and it was Sunday, Family Day. After staring at the squirrels, she remembered to feed her guinea pig his breakfast food pellets. Wilbur squeaked and squealed softly as she dropped the pellets down the cage bars into the red plastic tray. It didn’t take much to make him happy.
On the other side of her room was a picture of Switzerland her mom had put up years ago. The picture had a lake in it, which was ruthlessly blue. Gina felt funny when she looked at this picture, so she didn’t look at it very often. She couldn’t take it down because her mom had given it to her.
Family Day. The plan was, her dad would show up and take them— her brother, her mom, herself—to the beach. Gina threw on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. She grabbed her flute and went into the basement to practice for the school marching band, of which she was a member.
Ten minutes later she heard the thud of the morning newspaper flung against the front screen door. Gina put her flute on top of her dad’s workbench (he had never bothered to move it to his apartment after he moved out) and went upstairs to read the headlines. The news consisted of Iraq (bombs), Cuba (jails), Ireland (more bombs), and then there was something about Gordy Himmelman.
Gordy Himmelman! He had shot himself. To death. It was permanent. Why hadn’t anyone called her about it?
She had been in classes with Gordy Himmelman since kindergarten, but he was in a class by himself, and she hadn’t seen much of him since he’d dropped out. He muttered and swore and blew his nose on notebook paper, and he talked to himself in long strings of garble and never had any friends you could show in public. You could feel sorry for him, but he would never notice how sorry you felt, and he wouldn’t care. Pity was lost on him. It was a total waste of time. In third grade he had brought a pen-light battery into school and, standing next to the monkey bars, he had swallowed it during recess to attract attention to himself. The battery was only a double-A, but even so. He had black-and-blue marks all over him most days. His breath smelled of dill pickles that had gone unfresh. You couldn’t even talk to him about the weather because he never noticed it—it didn’t make any difference to him what the sky was doing or how it was doing it. He had this human-junkyard-don’t-mess-with-me look on his face and would kick anyone who got in his way, though he did have one comic routine: slugging himself in the face so hard that his head jerked backward. He had bicycled to that teacher, Mr. Bernstein’s house, where he had blown his brains out in the yard, in front of a tree, in the morning, a matinee suicide. On the front page of the paper was a picture of the tree. It was a color picture, and you could sort of see the blood if you looked closely.
There hadn’t been a suicide note. A suicide note would have been like a writing assignment. Way too hard. He would have had to get his aunt to write it for him.
Gina felt something stirring inside her. She was kind of interested in death. Gordy was the first person she’d ever known who had entered it. He had gone from being Mr. Nothing to being Mr. Something Else: a temporarily interesting person. She sat at the kitchen counter eating her strawberry Pop-Tart, wondering whether Gordy was lying on a bed surrounded by virgins, or eternal fire, or what.
It was sort of cool, him doing that. Maybe the smartest thing he’d ever done. Adventuresome and courageous.
If you didn’t have a life, maybe you got one by being dead.
Her dad was late. Finally he showed up at eleven-thirty in his red Durango, saying, “Ha ha, I’m late.” He and Gina’s mom were divorced, but they were still “friends,” and her dad had never really committed himself to the divorce, in Gina’s opinion. He was halfhearted about it, a romantic sad sack. They had cooked up this Family Day scheme two years ago. Every weekend he’d come to pick up Gina and Bertie, her little brother, and their mom—Gina envied most divorced kids who went from their moms to their dads, without the cheesiness of Family Day—and then they’d do bowling-type activities for the sake of togetherness and friendliness, which of course was a total fraud, since they weren’t together or friendly at all. Usually Saturday was Family Day but sometimes Sunday was. Today they were going to the beach. Wild excitement. She had meant to bring a magazine.
In the car, Gina studied her father’s face. She had wanted to drive, but no one trusted her behind the wheel. For once she had been allowed to sit up front: semi-adult, now that she had filled out, so they gave her front-seat privileges sometimes, occasional woman privileges. Her mom and Bertie were in the back, Bertie playing with his Game Boy, her mom with her earphones on, listening to music so she wouldn’t have to hear the plinks and plunks of the Game Boy, or talk to her ex, Gina’s dad, the driver, half-committed to his divorce, an undecided single man, driving the car. He would fully commit to the divorce when he found a girlfriend he really liked, which he hadn’t, yet. Gina had met one of the girlfriends whom he had only half-liked, a woman who tried way too hard to be nice, and who looked like a minor character on a soap opera who would eventually be hit by a rampaging bus.
Gina had mentioned Gordy Himmelman to her dad, and her dad had said yeah, it was way too bad.
She was interested in her father’s face. Because it was her father’s, she didn’t know if he was handsome or plain. You couldn’t always tell when they were your parents, though with her friend Gretchen Mullen you sure could, since Gretchen’s father looked like a hobgoblin. At first she thought her own father had a sort of no-brand, standard-issue father face; now she wasn’t so sure.
He was possibly handsome. There was no way of knowing. Her dad was a master plumber. Therefore his hands often had cuts or grease under the fingernails. Very large hands, made big by genetic fate. His hair was short and brown, cut so it bristled, and near his temples you could see a change in color, salty. On his right cheek her dad had a crease, as if his skin had been cut by a knife or a sharp piece of paper, but it was only a wrinkle, a wrinkle getting started, the first canal in a network of creases-to-come, his face turning slowly but surely into Mars, the Red Planet. His teeth were very white and even, the most Rock Star thing about him. His eyes were brown and spaced wide apart, not narrow the way teenaged boys’ eyes are usually narrow, and they drilled into you so that sometimes you had to turn away so you wouldn’t be injured by the Father Look. Her father’s beard line was so distinct and straight it looked put in with a ruler, and was so heavy that even if he shaved in the morning, he usually needed another shave around dinnertime, an interestingly bearlike feature of the masculine father type. His nose was exciting. His breath had a latent smell of cigarettes, which he smoked in private. You couldn’t find the boy in him anymore. It wasn’t there. He was growing a belly from the beer he drank nights and weekends, and most of the time he seemed comfortable with it, though it seemed to tire him out also. He didn’t smile much and only when he had to. He had once told Gina, “Life is serious.”
On winter weekends he watched football on television speechlessly.
He looked like a plumber on a TV show who comes in halfway through the program and who someone, though not the main character, falls in love with, because he’s so manly and can replace faucet washers. He would be the kind of plumber who wisecracks and makes the whole studio audience break up, but he would be charming, too, when he had to be. But then sometimes at a stoplight, or when he saw a car pull in front of him, her dad’s face changed out of its TV sitcom expression: suddenly he grimaced like someone had started to do surgery on him right over his heart without anesthetic, and he was pretending that nothing was happening to him even though his chest was being cut open, bared to fresh air. And then that expression vanished like it had never been there. What was that about? His pain. His secret squirrel life, probably.
Still, there was no point in talking to him about Gordy Himmelman.
The stand itself had been constructed out of concrete blocks, painted white, covered overhead by a cheap corrugated roof. Under it, everything seemed to be sun-baking. Behind the counter was a popcorn machine with a high-intensity yellow heat lamp shining on the popped kernels in their little glass house, making them look radioactive. The sidewalk leading up to and away from the stand, stained with the residue of spilled pink ice cream and ketchup, felt sticky on the soles of Gina’s feet. The kid who worked at the stand, selling snack food and renting canoes, was a boy she didn’t recognize—about her age, maybe a year or two older, with short orange hair and an earring—and he stood behind the counter next to the candy display, staring, in pain and boredom, at the floor. He was experiencing summer-job agony. He had a rock station blaring from his battery-powered radio perched on top of the freezer, and his body twitched quietly to the beat. When Gina appeared, the boy looked at her with relief, relief followed by recognition and sympathy, recognition and sympathy followed by a leer as he checked out her tits, the leer followed by a friendly smirk. It all happened very fast. He was like other boys: they shifted gears so quickly you couldn’t always follow them into those back roads and dense forests where they wanted to live with the other varmints and wolves.
Raspberry, please, single scoop. She smiled at him, to tease him, to test out her power, to give him an anguished memory tonight, when he was in bed and couldn’t sleep, thinking of her, in the density of his empty, stupid life.
Walking back to the sand and holding her ice cream cone, she started to think about Gordy Himmelman, and when she did, the crummy lake and the public beach with the algae floating in it a hundred feet offshore in front of her, she felt weird and dizzy, as if: What was the point? She kept walking and taking an occasional, personal, lick at the ice cream. There weren’t too many other people in the sand, but most of the men were fat, and their wives or girlfriends were fat, too, and already they had started to yell at each other, even though it was just barely lunchtime.
She kept walking. It was something to do. Nobody here was beautiful. It all sucked.
The lake gave her a funny feeling, just the fact that it was there. The sky was sky blue, and her mother had said it was a perfect day, but if this was a perfect day, if this was the best that God could manage with the available materials, then . . . well, no wonder Gordy Himmelman had shot himself, and no wonder her mother had put up that picture of Switzerland in her bedroom. Gina saw her whole life stretched out in front of her, just like that, the deck of fifty-two cards with Family Day printed on one side, like the picture of the lake in Switzerland that she could barely stand to glance at, vacuuming her up. Why couldn’t anything ever be perfect? It just wasn’t possible. This wasn’t perfect. It was its opposite: fect. A totally fect day. Just to the side, off on another beach towel, somebody’s mom was yelling at and then slapping a little boy. Slapping him, wham wham wham, out in public and in front of everybody, and of course the kid was screaming now, screaming screaming screaming screaming.
Everybody having their own version of Family Day.
Gina carried the ice cream cone to the water’s edge.
Right there, she saw herself in the algaed water, walking upside down holding a raspberry ice cream cone, and, next to her own water-image, another water-image, the sun this time. Gina walked into the water, out to where the algae dispersed, staring first at her diminishing reflection and then at the sun. It’d be interesting to go blind, she thought, people and seeing-eye dogs would take care of you and lead you through the rest of your life forever. You’d be on a leash. The dog would make all the big decisions. Then she noticed that when she walked into the water her images were sucked into it. As the water got deeper, there was less of you above it, as if you had gone on an instant diet. Okay, now that her legs had disappeared, you didn’t have to look at her legs, because they weren’t there anymore. Well, they were underwater, but the water was so dirty she couldn’t see them as well as she could see her reflection at the surface: of her waist, her head, her chest, the ice cream cone. She wished she were prettier, movie-pretty, but walking into the water was a kind of solution, watching your girl-image get all swallowed up, until there was no image left, just the water.
She held the ice cream cone above the water and then after another lick let it go as she went under.
Under the surface she held her breath as long as she could, and then she thought of Gordy Himmelman, and, sort of experimentally, she tried breathing in some water, just to see what it was like, and she choked. She felt herself panicking and going up to the surface but then she fought the panic when she imagined she saw somebody like Gordy Himmelman, though better-looking, more like her dad, under the water with her, holding her hand and telling her it was better down here, and all the problems were solved, so she tried to relax and breathe in a little more water. She registered thunderbolts of panic, then some peace, then panic. Then it was all right, and Family Day was finally over, and, because she wasn’t a very good swimmer anyway, she began to sink to the bottom, though there were all those annoying voices. She would miss Wilbur, the guinea pig, but not much else, not even the boys who had tried to feel her up.
She drifted down and away.
Her father and the lifeguard had seen the cone of ice cream floating on the surface of the lake at the same time. They both rushed in, and Gina’s dad reached her body first. He pulled her up, thrashed his way to the beach, where, without thinking, he gave his daughter the Heimlich maneuver. Water erupted out of her mouth. Gina’s eyes opened, and her father laid her down on the sand, and she said, “Gordy?” but what she said was garbled by the water still coming out of her lungs into her mouth and out of her mouth into the sand. As she came around, her hair falling around her eyes, she seemed disarrayed somehow, but pleased by all the fuss, and then she smiled, because she had seen her father’s face, smeary with love.
Fourteen
When she arrived back home, having survived her near-death experience, Gina was supposed to lie down, but she didn’t want to be horizontalized. She couldn’t see the point to it since she wasn’t particularly tired and she certainly wasn’t dead, either. Her throat hurt; that was about it. What she really wanted to do was to call a few people. She took her cell phone along with four cookies into her room, closed the door, and sat cross-legged on her bedspread with two of the cookies hidden beneath one knee and the other two cookies behind the other knee, and she wondered which of her friends she would call first to tell about her near-death. She was glad to see Wilbur again, scrabbling in his corner. He welcomed her back with a few quiet, loving little squeals.
She bit into the first cookie, leaving three and a half.
She decided to give her friend April the first call, but April wasn’t at home—nobody was (and they didn’t have an answering machine or voicemail over there, it was medieval)—so she tried Danni instead. Danni took it on the second ring. Danni did all the phone-answering at the Wiesiewski house. Danni was pretty and stuck-up like the rest of the Wiesiewskis, but she was a good listener when she had to be. When Danni asked Gina, “Whassup?” Gina told her that they’d been out at Copper Lake, and she’d been swimming, and—this was a secret, Danni absolutely could not tell anyone—she thought she saw this ghost-person under the water who looked exactly like Gordy Himmelman, and, no, she couldn’t describe how it had happened, but it was like he had dragged her down under the water, and it was incredibly beautiful down there—it was not ugly—and she almost drowned, but her father or somebody had brought her back to life.
Gordy Him
melman? Danni asked. You’re kidding. That freak? Besides, he’s dead. Are you crazy? What are you saying?
No. Gina said that she was not kidding, swear to God, and not crazy. Did she sound crazy? No. This was weirder than being crazy. In fact, she said, it would be just exactly like Gordy Himmelman to be a ghost, because when he was alive, or semi-alive, or whatever it was he had been when he had been living, he had always wandered into places where he wasn’t wanted, and it would therefore be like him now to show up here, there, and everywhere. She ate her cookie and bit into another one, which left two and a half. She touched her hair. It was still damp and probably dirty from the lake water. She would have to shampoo it soon.
It’s like he’s in charge of something real interesting, Gina said.
Danni asked Gina if she could tell anyone, and Gina said, well, no, not really, or: well, you can tell some people, but only as long as you get my permission first, and they have to promise not to tell. “I don’t want everybody to know,” Gina said. “It sounds too weird.”
Danni said she understood perfectly.
Within four days Gina’s telephone was ringing every half-hour from kids she knew who thought they had seen Gordy or someone like him: Ron Burr told Chrystal Chambers that he thought he had seen Gordy in the Elysian Fields Shopping Mall, walking as if he were battery-powered and under remote control from Mars, into one of the theaters at the multiplex, but when he followed him in, Gordy wasn’t there. He had just vanished like shit in a shitstorm. Ron said he was a loser. Losers disappear on you, but now that he was dead maybe he wasn’t such a total loser after all. Death could revise you. The day after that, April, Gina’s friend April Cumming, claimed that she had seen Gordy Himmelman outside her window, looking in, like some creep stalker jackoff; then ugly little Georgette Novak, who wanted to be popular and who worked at McDonald’s because people claimed that her parents wouldn’t give her an allowance for clothes, said that she had served Gordy Himmelman a Coke and fries, and that he looked verifiably dead, which at least was convincing, and he paid her with money that totally disappeared after she put it into the cash drawer. He had paid her with bogey money. Rona Elliott said she had seen him out in the park, where she had been walking her dog, Buster, who barked hysterically at him. Gordy stood on the other side of the park, waving at her, as if he were signaling. She turned away, and when she turned back, he was gone.
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