by Rick Moody
In the guest room, on the way by: rumpled bedding.
On his bed, beside him, Sandy had a G. I. Joe with Lifelike Hair, the newer model with the hippie grooming, the facial hair. There was a little scar on Joe’s cheek, a vermilion, plastic scar. And he talked, too, when you pulled his dog tag. Sandy was quick to point out that his particular G. I. Joe, however, was malfunctioning. Joe had only one thing to say, no matter how many times you pulled the dog tag:
—Mayday! Mayday! Get this message back to base!
In his orange jumpsuit, Joe looked really comfortable, not at all like a P.O.W. or M.I.A. on the run. But Sandy had some grim plans for him. As Wendy looked on, Sandy was calmly tying a noose for his doll. He pulled the dog tag again.
—Back to base!
—Sometimes, Sandy said, he doesn’t even make it all the way through.
—Mayday! Mayday! Joe said. Get this message back to base! Back to base! Back to base!
—Quit it, Sandy said, it’s already driving me nuts.
Wendy cradled the helpless little man in her lap. She posed his limbs—so that he seemed to be giving some kind of Nazi salute, so that he waved, so that he was goose-stepping. Sandy attended to the noose, except when he was firing questions at her. Like about the weather.
—There’s this crusty stuff, Wendy said. She had tracked the stuff in with her.
—You got that all over the water bed.
She probably had. Mud and sand and slush.
—Only a little.
—It’s gonna get a lot colder tonight, Sandy said, I predict. Probably a blackout. Do you have candles in your house? I know where the candles are, and I have my own flashlight. Over there. Also, I know where every emergency exit is on this floor.
—So where’s Mikey?
—I told you. How should I know?
Sandy looked up from his handiwork. He gave her a long once-over.
—But he’s probably down at the hospital.
It would be a cool place to be. The way the grounds sloped down toward the Silvermine River. Tonight would be a good night to ride the refectory trays, as she and Paul had once done, down the hills. The trick was to bail out before you slid into the water. The tray shot out from under you, like some kind of low-flying bird, sailing out onto the Silvermine. They had to cross out into the river, on stepping stones, to recover the trays. Truly, though, the security guys had caught them, had run down the hill after them, slipping and skidding in their polished uniform shoes, to grab Paul by the shoulder and roughly commandeer his sled. She had a way with the Silver Meadow security cops. Paul never did.
—What’s he doing down there?
—Looking for you, probably, Sandy said.
With that he stood, measuring by eye the distance from the top of the closet. He raised his makeshift lynching apparatus toward its anchor. Standing on a modern and insubstantial hammock-style desk chair, he tied the end of the rope around a nail he had already pounded into the top of the closet frame.
—This knot’s called a bowline, he said.
He let the noose swing free now, and in the meager light of Sandy’s swivel desk lamp its shadow swung with it, its ominous double.
—Mayday! Mayday!
—Not gonna give him a chance to share any last words, huh? Wendy said. She pulled the tags again.
—Get this message back to base! Back to base! To Base!
—Won’t do any good, Sandy said. I’ve tried everything.
His tone was so woeful that Wendy was certain it was true. Disappointment about G. I. Joe with Lifelike Hair weighed heavily on Sandy Williams.
—Mayday! Mayday! Get this message back to base!
Sandy slid the chair back under the desk and stilled the noose, that awful pendulum.
—Okay, bring the prisoner here, he said.
—One more chance.
She couldn’t let it go. Wendy climbed off the bed and carried G. I. Joe toward his executioner.
—Girls are always sticking up for the criminal. But I’m afraid, Sandy said thoughtfully, it’s not gonna do any good.
Wendy yanked the dog tag one last time.
And behold:
—Major, incoming copter! Joe said.
—Far out!
—It’s just chance, Sandy said. Maybe one time every fifty or so he says that, even though it’s usually a different one. Something about a medic.
He folded his arms.
Together they stood over the prone body of G. I. Joe with Lifelike Hair, now supine on the folded comforter at the foot of Sandy’s bed. Somehow the idea of trying him again, of going back to the well one more time, felt pointless to Wendy. She recognized a moment here in which she saw the machinations of chance in the universe, and she didn’t want to ruin it. Sandy was adorable in this light. He couldn’t wait. He wanted to dispatch Joe, because he had some dignity wrapped up in the notion of inferior goods and dumb culture and stupid America. He was one of those kids who spent hours in front of the television shouting That would never happen. Sandy Williams expected to be cheated. He was ready for it. And it came to pass almost every time, and in this way the world seemed good and true.
When he seized his doll, therefore, he pulled the elastic that connected the dog tag to its interior machinery as though he were going to strangle Joe with it. He seized it as though his certainty about being ripped off was the one thing he knew.
—We’ll attack north at the next pass! Joe said.
Wendy noticed again how silent everything was, how silent the house was, now that the storm had settled in to do its worst for a while. Sandy was stunned by Joe’s loquaciousness. Absently he scratched his testicles. He picked Joe up, shook him, held him up to his own ear.
—Let’s hang him anyway.
—Sure, Wendy said.
So they did.
What’s a noose but a slipknot? Joe fit snugly, and Sandy pulled the knot tight, and there he was, dangling. The whole gesture didn’t satisfy, really. And it left Wendy and Sandy alone in the room. She asked if he could turn Joe’s face to the wall and Sandy tried, but the rope was really wound up the wrong way. He kept spinning back around to face them.
And something strange was happening right then. Wendy noticed Sandy was sitting on the bed with his pillow across his lap. Some emotion was overtaking them. She knew what this meant. She knew that Sandy was emerging briefly from under the rock where he lived. Sandy had Wendy alone in his room, in this warm room, in the midst of a swirling winter storm when his brother wanted her, when his brother was looking for her maybe. The whole thing was a gigantic turn-on. Wendy wished she had a helium balloon and could inhale that stuff and whisper in her helium tongue in Sandy’s ear. She wished he had booties on the ends of his pajama legs. She wanted to tickle him with a peacock feather. She wished he was standing naked under the swivel lamp wearing only hockey skates.
—Why’ve you been avoiding me? she said.
Sandy actually smiled.
—Not avoiding, he said. Then scowling again.
She slid up on the bed, and one by one with exaggerated slowness, she removed her snow boots, like they were stiletto heels. Fuck-me pumps. She knew what was under the pillow, she knew, like a little pinkie, like the stump of an amputated digit, Sandy’s miniature, little penis. She slid up the bed beside him. She told him she wanted to be in his bed, between his sheets.
Sandy actually began to shake.
—We have to go to the guest room, he said. We can’t stay in here. What if Mike …? We should go in there and close the door. We can’t stay here. My parents—
—Don’t worry about them. They’re at that party. They’re getting drunk. Falling all over each other and making jokes about McGovern and stuff.
He looked like he was going to cry. Then he did. Wendy didn’t feel exasperated, but she didn’t feel sympathetic either. His tears were just embarrassing. He wasn’t proud of them either. He tried to disguise their tracks; he was going to claim it was because he was tired, or because he
had some special eye disorder, or because of his very strong glasses that even now he wore with a clip-on attachment. He didn’t even know what the problem was. She asked him and he didn’t know.
—It’s just, it’s just—
So Wendy took little Sandy Williams by the hand—his hands trembled and hers did, too—and led him around the corner into the guest room. She left the door just barely ajar, so that it would seem neither open nor closed on purpose, and together they settled themselves, as if they were going to be a photo portrait of young love, on the plaid comforter in the guest room.
—A drink? Wendy said.
Because the vodka was still there. It was right there on the table. Sandy was shocked by the request.
—You’ve never tasted this stuff? It’s not like smoking pot, that’s for sure. It’s not as cool. But it’ll do the trick, Charles.
A single glass remained from the afternoon. As she filled it, Wendy took a sort of pride in her work. She remembered the thrill of her own initiation, in which her brother had played an important part. The best thing about initiation was how it was sort of like destitution. It was destitution with trust. Sandy looked frail and willing and strong and old and vulnerable all at once. His glasses slid down his nose, on a glistening sheen, and stopped at the little bulb at the end of it. The vodka filled the bottom of the glass like liquid winter.
She held up the glass and Sandy held up the bottle and they clanked them together as they had seen adults do.
She tossed it back in one painful swallow. Sandy tried a tiny, little sip from the bottle, and when it had touched his palate he gagged. He coughed once and choked down the rest of the swallow. Wendy told him to try again. He wanted to do as well as Mikey, he was bound to move up in this matter of growing up, so Sandy filled the glass and threw back a whole shot. Drinking his first drink, Wendy thought, involved Sandy in a thousand trying decisions. All these components. But he got it down, and she figured he would get better at it. She had gotten better at it, on holidays when her parents let her, and on school days back behind Saxe with the delinquents, the junior high and freshmen delinquents, the adopted kids, the half-dozen working-class kids, the half-dozen blacks. And then there was the occasional afternoon when she just plain stole booze from her parents. Sure, there was always the worry that they were marking the levels of the bottles with felt-tip laundry pens, but she drank when she had to drink.
Sandy set her palm on the center of his chest:
—It feels warm.
—Your folks don’t let you have any?
—Maybe a couple of times.
She knew they let Mikey taste.
—One more shot? she said.
She could feel the ease of it in her now; she could feel that the menace of the weather was a good thing, that the woman from Please Don’t Eat the Daisies was doing fine. Any week now the woman would probably have a spot on Love, American Style. Wendy wasn’t afraid of Sandy’s naked body.
—Okay, he said.
And they drank again.
Outside, the weather trashed the landscaping.
When she wrapped her arms around him, she knew she could break him in half. She kissed Sandy; he consented to be kissed. Sandy had no taste. He was tasteless like tap water. She could feel his ideas all confused, his uncertainty. She opened the chest of his pajamas. This was how they wore them now on Noxzema commercials and in the movies, a couple buttons opened up at the neck, chest hair overgrowing. But Sandy was a downy little babe, not encumbered with a single dark hair. He leaned back so she could open the pajama top. Herself, she was doffing layer after layer, trying to keep the pace up—hard to do in winter—her sweater, her turtleneck, her T-shirt. And they rubbed their chests together, the tips of her breasts, just beginning to be breasts, and then they worked on the rest of their clothes. Wendy carefully pulled off ski pants and panties all at once—so that she could conceal the soiled garter belt, the one she had taken from Mike’s room. Sandy was too preoccupied with his own nakedness to notice.
—Get ’em off, she said to him, laughing at the sound of haste. Laughing at her own forthrightness.
And pretty soon they were naked. His little soldier was at sharpest attention, like G. I. Joe with Lifelike Hair back when he was among the living.
—Under covers, Wendy said.
Sandy threw back the comforter and they slid under it. Sandy laughed again, and Wendy laughed, and the laughter was good. She took his hairless penis in her hand, and she cupped his hairless testicles, and she kissed his nipples, and they rolled around like that for a while.
—Have you had a nocturnal emission? she asked.
—Huh?
—That’s the name for when you wake up and find this little pool of sticky stuff. Supposedly like after a sexy dream.
He shook his head.
—They didn’t tell you this stuff yet? What planet do you live on?
Sandy didn’t want to answer questions, though; he wanted to continue. When his knee pushed up between her legs, when his hip mashed against her, she shivered, but it didn’t seem to be leading anywhere particularly. He didn’t know what he was doing. She could kiss his little pig-in-a-blanket. But she realized pretty soon the futility of the whole thing. There weren’t going to be any orgasms, simultaneous or even regular, old orgasms, in this guest room.
But maybe that was okay. She didn’t know much about them anyway. Orgasm was a word she had looked up a dozen times, and still she didn’t exactly know what it meant. Masturbation—excitation of the genitals, usually to orgasm, from the Latin manus stuprare, to defile by the hand. How many episodes, in the months before her first period, without anything but a nifty tingling. It was like the shock you got off a metal door handle after padding around in socks. Sodomy—any intercourse held to be abnormal, especially anal intercourse. Bestiality—sexual relations between a person and an animal. Huh? These things were impossible to imagine.
Orgasm was even harder to understand. Its only close relative in the word kingdom seemed to be something like grace. You could have grace explained to you a hundred times, but unless you got some, it was just air. One afternoon when Mikey had been busy humping away at her, suddenly part of his T-shirt right above his waist was soaked through, and then something overtook her, and she felt herself rushing up to a plateau. She pushed and shoved against Mikey, and then she just lost herself for a minute. She just slipped away entirely on some air mattress of breezes. It was like being spooked. It was an out-of-body experience, like grace.
She wasn’t sure if that was one or not. But this was how she thought she understood that strange word, that word that seemed to come from some distant language-family, Tibeto-Burman or something very alien to the language of her own family. She didn’t know if it had been an orgasm exactly, but she was chasing it anyway.
—I love you, Wendy, Sandy said.
—That’s nice, Sandy, she said. I love Chiller Theater and Nanny and the Professor.
They lay there in just the light from the hall. This stillness seemed pretty close to contentment. Wendy knew she had done a powerful job of initiation.
—Another drink? she said.
—I guess so.
And she sat up and surveyed the carnage, the covers half-kicked off, the clothes scattered around the floor. Wendy liked the look of disorder. She filled the glass, spilling a little—on herself, on the sheets, down the sides of the glass—filled it all the way up.
—Are you drunk? she asked.
—I don’t know, Sandy said. How do I know?
—I don’t know either. You spin around. That’s one way you know. You spin around when you try to lie down.
They enjoyed each other’s warmth like refugees. Glad for the warmth, for the company. And then, because they weren’t thinking very carefully about the night and its whirling array of parents and siblings, they fell tumultuously into sleep.
The party peaked around ten-thirty like a cheap acid trip. This party was going through some changes. Descri
bing them, describing these changes—the personal growth, the group dynamics taking place at the Halfords’—would have taxed the keenest reader of Psychology Today. Thomas Harris, M.D., author of I’m Okay—You’re Okay, put it this way: “Early in his work in the development of Transactional Analysis, Eric Berne observed that as you watch and listen to people you can see them change before your eyes. It is a total kind of change. There are simultaneous changes in facial expression, vocabulary, gestures, posture and body functions, which may cause the face to flush, the heart to pound, or the breathing to become rapid. We can observe these changes in everyone.”
Elena didn’t see how this transactional model was going to work for her. Though she was a reader of personal-growth books. She had read Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge and The Primal Scream by Arthur Janov and I’m Okay—You’re Okay and Games People Play by Eric Berne and Notes to Myself by Hugh Prather and The Gestalt Approach and Eyewitness Therapy by Fritz Perls and Be Here Now by Ram Dass and Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden and The Divided Self and Human Sexual Response and Island by Aldous Huxley and The Tibetan Book of the Dead and The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. She read this stuff, but it didn’t help her at parties.
And the party itself was of two minds, one mind in which the selection of house keys was a worthy and modern preoccupation, and one mind in which the whole game was a shame. Some people felt both ways, and some shifted back and forth between these two belief systems.
Uncomfortable as she was, how was Elena to account for the change that had overcome her? How was Elena to account for the joy that seized her not long after her arrival at the party? New Canaan society crept around trying to make decisions about the keys, about the repercussions of its participation. The conversations became vague, Elena noticed, as husbands and wives tried to avoid one another. They slunk from the bar to their conversations with eyes downcast, as Elena herself was avoiding Benjamin. Still, she found herself suddenly elated at the party; there was no other way to put it. She felt the loosening of the constraints that had bound her since she had come of age, and she realized she would play. She would select a key. She would clutch it to her, permit it to dangle around her neck, between her small, subdued breasts. She would play.