Grendel's Guide to Love and War

by A. E. Kaplan

  “I NEED TO KNOW IF SHE WAS GOOD!” I shouted. “That’s all! I need to know if she was any good!”

  He scratched at the stubble on his chin; it was that three-day growth that looks stupid on everyone. His was mostly gray. “I’m not going to be able to tell you anything you want to hear.”

  “Just tell me something. The truth. I just want to know.”

  “Why? You think artistic talent is hereditary? Because it isn’t.”

  “No! I just want to know. Just tell me the truth.”

  He took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and then put them back on again. “All right, look. The military spouses we get through here are never any good. Just bored housewives looking to kill a few hours in the middle of the week.”

  I swallowed. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean they get out of the class what they put into it. Which isn’t much.”

  I looked at him, then at the kid, who had stopped putting books in a box and was staring right at me. My brain sort of cut off, and I just stared and stared until his face stopped looking like a face, it looked like a potato or a statue with nothing inside, and then Zip was tugging on my sleeve and saying, “Let’s go, Tom. Let’s just go.”

  I followed her out into the hall and made it about ten feet before I had to sit down on the floor. Zip squatted down next to me, pressing her back against the wall.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “I don’t.”

  “I don’t think he really remembered her, Tom. I think he just has a thing against the military wives.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Neither do you. Look, we took a shot because you wanted to see if there was a chance there was some piece of her here. And we did, and there’s not. He doesn’t remember. Look at me, Tom, he doesn’t remember. That’s it. Let’s go.” She got up and pulled me by the hand, and she was still trying to pull me up on my wobbly legs when the skinny kid with the ink-stained hands came out of Adams’s office and walked over to us.

  “There are digital files,” he said.

  “What?”

  “He photographs everyone’s final portfolios and keeps files of them. I was helping him transfer them to the cloud a few weeks ago. They go back ten years or so.”

  I clawed my way to my feet, almost pulling Zip down in the process. She frowned. “You’re the teaching assistant?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So why didn’t he tell us this in the first place?”

  “He’s a little stressed out right now. We’re moving to another building while this one gets painted before the fall semester starts.”

  “Still, that’s no reason—”

  “Look,” he said, glancing back toward the closed office door, “I can make you a copy of the files, if you want, so you can give it to your mom.”

  Zip and I glanced at each other. “Sure,” I said quietly. “Thanks.”

  He headed over to the department secretary’s computer and started typing.

  “You aren’t going to get in trouble for this, are you?” Zip asked, which was an utterly ridiculous question coming from her.

  “It’s fine,” he said, typing in a password. “What year?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Um. Fall of ’09?”

  “Okay. What was the name again?”

  “Grendel. Sarah Grendel. It was a painting class.”

  “Oil or acrylic?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “I’ll check both.” He tapped on the keyboard for a few seconds. “Here she is. Do you want her grade, too?”

  “No,” I said quickly. “No. Just the files.”

  He grabbed a blank CD from the drawer under the keyboard and slid it into the computer. A minute later, he handed it to me in a filmy envelope. “That’s all of them.”

  “Thanks,” I said, staring at the CD in my hands.

  “Uh-huh,” he said, already walking back toward Adams’s office.

  I kept staring at the CD. “We could maybe use one of the computers in the library here,” Zip said. “To look at them.”

  I turned the CD over in my hands a few times. “No,” I said. “Let’s do it at home.” I sighed. “Do you still want to go to Rehoboth?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Tom,” she said, linking her elbow with mine, “let’s go home.”

  It was three hours back, and Zip drove while I sat in the passenger seat with the CD on my knee. It was a missing piece, whatever was on there. More real than the tiny smattering of memories I had of my mother.

  “Are you okay?” Zip asked as we took the exit onto 66 and started heading southwest.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I just don’t really feel like talking right now.”

  “Not about Mom?”

  “Not about anything. Can we just not?”

  “All right.” I glanced down at my phone, checking to see if I had any texts from Ed or Willow, and I noticed an unchecked voicemail I hadn’t seen. It was from Marianne DeLuca, from the day before, wondering when I was coming back.

  I’d really been putting that off too long. I put a reminder on my calendar to call her in the morning.

  Back at home, I got a glass of juice after I’d sponged the rest of the ants off the kitchen counter.

  Zip made a face at the sponge. “We have to do something about this.”

  “Like what? I put out the borax.”

  “It doesn’t seem like it’s working. Maybe we should call an exterminator. Dad’s going to get all squidgy if he comes back and there are ants everywhere.”

  I stared into my juice. “How would we pay for one, do you suppose?”

  “Do you have a credit card? Dad would pay you back when he got home.”

  “I don’t have one. Dad just left me cash to pay for groceries and stuff, and most of that’s gone now.”

  Zip went and got some cereal out of the pantry. “Oh.” Which was code for I have a credit card, but I am not willing to use it.

  “When is Dad coming back, again?”

  “Seven days. I’ll put out some more borax.” I put my empty glass in the sink and sat down on the edge of the counter, watching Zip poke around in the mostly empty pantry. “Do you really think he didn’t remember her? Adams, I mean.”

  She swallowed her cereal. “I do think so. It was years ago. He was just lumping all the army wives together.”

  “Dilettante housewives.”

  “Right. Because you can’t be a real artist if you’re a woman. Especially not if you have kids.”

  “Goes without saying, I should think.” I heaved myself off the counter. “I want to see the files now.”

  She gestured with a flourish. “Make it so.”

  I set my dad’s computer on my desk, powered it up, and put in the CD.

  The images popped up, and I opened them one at a time. Seven paintings, representing a semester’s worth of work. They started with pictures of Styrofoam balls and cones and progressed to flowers and, finally, more complicated still lifes.

  I used to sit on the kitchen floor and sort through my Pokémon cards while I watched my mother paint her bread and petunias and that old lidless teapot, and I wondered what was so special about the light at four in the afternoon that she had to paint at that exact time every day. I didn’t understand that the kitchen had a western exposure and she was waiting for the light to hit the window. I just thought it was some kind of magic. I thought she would be the next Monet.

  The paintings on the screen were not the work of the next Monet.

  “Are you sure he copied the right files?” Zip asked. “Check. Maybe he copied the wrong ones.”

  “They aren’t the wrong ones.”

  I was clicking back and forth between the images, but I finally paused on the painting of the petunias, which was her final-exam project. It wasn’t so much that it was mediocre. It was actively bad. The colors were too bright. The light was painted to look like chunky yellow stripes coming in through th
e window. The loaf of bread looked like a dead cat. I thought back to my own failed attempts at creating something that resembled art, and had to admit that this was far, far worse than anything I’d ever done.

  “Do you remember her painting this?” I asked quietly, reaching out to lay my fingers on the screen.

  Zip shook her head. “Barely. I always went to Sophie Magruder’s after school that year.” Her voice grew quiet. “I was so stupid.”

  “I remember,” I said. “It’s one of the only things I remember from right before she died, you know? Her painting this. I always wondered where it went.”

  “Maybe you just overlooked it before.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” I went and got a black notebook out of the bottom drawer of my desk. It was the first one I’d ever put together, and it was almost empty. I handed it to Zip, who sat on the end of my bed.

  She opened it, saying, “This is Mom’s book? I didn’t know you had one for her.”

  “It’s not a whole book,” I said, to explain the fact that she was staring at a single page written in my sloppy fifteen-year-old handwriting. “Read the first line.”

  “ ‘These are all the things I know about my mom. First: she was a great and talented artist.’ Oh, Tom.”

  “I didn’t know her, Zip. I didn’t know her at all.”

  “Tom, that’s not true—”

  “Like hell it’s not!” I took the notebook from her and slammed it down on the floor. “I didn’t know the first thing about her. The one thing I thought I knew for sure was bullshit. She was completely talentless!” I coughed. “She stank!” I crossed over and sat down hard on the side of my bed. “She stank,” I sobbed. It was like part of her was dying all over again. The part I thought I knew but I didn’t.

  “I. I know she had this whole life apart from me, and I get that. I do. But I could have known more. I should have known more.”

  “You were nine, Tom. No one knows their parents when they’re nine. Not really.”

  I wiped my nose on the back of my hand. “That might help, if I thought I’d have known her any better if she’d lived longer.”

  “God, Tom, what is this really about? What does that even mean?”

  I kicked the trash bag full of torn-up paper that still sat in the middle of my room. “It means…it means you were right. None of these people are in these pages. It doesn’t matter how good my questions are, or how long I spend asking them, I still don’t know anyone when I’m done.”

  “You didn’t really think you could know someone by interviewing them.”

  I sat down hard on the floor. “I did. I actually did.” I turned to look at my sister. “But it’s like…I don’t know. Like we’re all a bunch of walking terrariums, and no matter how often we bump into each other, there’s no getting inside.”

  “The human mind,” Zip said seriously, “is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. It’s a veritable turducken of unknowability.”

  I was getting that throbbing behind my eyes that meant I’d have a headache for the rest of the night. “I hate you so much for saying that right now. Why does everything have to be such a fucking joke with you?”

  She pulled her knees up to her chest and hooked her chin over them. “Because when you stop seeing how ridiculous everything is, you go crazy.” She pointed at Willow’s bracelet, which I’d forgotten was still on my arm, wrapped up in my watch. “That’s Beckett, right? Your guy Beckett, that’s, like, all he did. Talk about the absurd. It’s absurd, Tom, you’re upset because we’re all walking terrariums or whatever, like you didn’t just make the whole thing up.”

  “I didn’t make it up! That’s just life, Zip. And I hate it.” I looked at my wrist. “Also, I didn’t know that was Beckett.”

  “You didn’t know what you were engraving on your man bracelet?”

  “It isn’t mine,” I said, taking it off and tossing it to her. “Willow Rothgar gave it to me.”

  She clipped the bracelet around her own wrist, then looked at it. “She gave it to you, huh? Almost like she was trying to know you. Tom. Tom. I’m here. I’m here, and you’re complaining that you can’t know me or whatever because of this whole I’m so isolated wah-wah story you’re telling yourself. Willow’s trying to get to know you. Ed’s been taking crap for your benefit literally since you met him, and that’s never good enough, because all you care about is this thing you made up that you’ve decided you can’t get your hands on and…and…Wait. Is this about Mom, or is it about Dad? Is this about how Dad is, like, the Fortress of Solitude?”

  I honestly hadn’t thought about that. “Dad is the Fortress of Solitude. But he’s only marginally worse than other people.”

  She gave me an openhanded shrug. “I don’t know what to say to you. Can you really, really, really know somebody? Can you dissect them and analyze them bit by bit with a microscope? Probably not. Your problem,” she said, “is that you’re equating knowing with loving. You can love someone without having tasted of the kernel of their soul or whatever.”

  I looked up. “Can you?” I wondered. I didn’t know Dad at all, not really. But I felt like I loved him. Was that real? Did I love him just because I thought I did?

  “Sure,” she said. “I love you, and you make no sense to me at all.”

  I bumped her elbow with mine. “How can you know, though? How can you know you love someone if you don’t know them?”

  She turned sideways to look at me. “Do you even know yourself that well? Because I don’t. And to me, that’s a hell of a lot scarier. I have no idea who I am or what I’m good at, and I’m terrified. I have seventy thousand dollars in loans and I can’t get a job. Do you remember my last roommate? The sociology major? She’s working at a deli in Brooklyn. She’s making sandwiches for nine dollars an hour, and she’s doing a hell of a lot better than I am.”

  “You couldn’t get a job at the deli?”

  She lay back on the bed and put my pillow over her face, which muffled her voice. “No, in point of fact, I could not get a job at the deli, because there was only one opening and it went to Charlotte because she worked for two years at a Carl’s Jr. in high school.”

  I closed my eyes. “You know,” I said. “Perhaps you could have been giving this some thought, instead of getting drunk in your dorm room and watching the Star Wars Holiday Special on YouTube.”

  “Oh, come on. I only did that twice.”

  “So what are you going to do? Have you actually tried, you know, sending out résumés?”

  She threw my pillow on the floor and glared at me. “Yes, Tom. I actually have tried, you know, sending out résumés.”

  “Like, more than five?”

  “I’ve sent out eighty-three, Tom,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “What am I supposed to do, just go die in a hole?”

  “Well,” I said. “Maybe not in an actual hole.”

  She jabbed her finger at me. “See? When I make a joke about your self-manufactured problem, you say I’m insensitive. And then you do the same thing.”

  “So you acknowledge that your problem is also somewhat self-manufactured.”

  “Oh, bite me.”

  I lay back on the bed next to her, draping an arm over her shoulders and giving her a squeeze. “You know,” I said. “I do feel better now.”

  She flung her arms in the air. “Wonderful,” she said. “I’m so glad I could help.” She sniffled and wiped her nose on the neck of her shirt, and then looked at me and we both laughed, because that was all there was left to do. “ ‘Try again,’ ” I said, plucking Willow’s bracelet with my finger. “ ‘Fail again. Fail better.’ ”

  “ ‘You’re on earth,’ ” she said, putting her arm around my shoulders. “ ‘There’s no cure for that.’ ”

  It poured rain all the next day, the kind of rain where it looks like twilight from sunrise on. I lay in my bed and stared out the window until two o’clock, when I got up and got myself in the shower.

  When I came back to my room,
I unwrapped my towel and ran it over my hair before hanging it on the back of the door.

  When I turned around, Willow was sitting in my chair.

  For a second, time stopped. I didn’t grab for my towel. She didn’t scream or throw her hands up over her face. She just cocked her head to one side and ran her eyes down me and back up again, calm as anything.

  I crossed to my dresser and threw on a pair of boxers. “You really should knock,” I said, pulling a shirt over my head. My voice was hoarse from not talking all day, and I coughed into my fist.

  “I did knock. You weren’t here, so I was waiting.”

  I flopped down on the edge of my bed, propping my elbows on my thighs and scrubbing my hand through my wet hair. I glanced up, and from this close I could tell she was flushed.

  “Are you all right?” I asked quietly.

  She nodded. “Yeah. I mean, no. God, Tom. Everything’s just such a mess.” She picked up my hand and examined it, turning it palm up and stroking it with her fingertip. “Your hands are so rough,” she said softly, tracing the callus that spanned the length of my hand.

  I took her hand and ran my nose along the row of her knuckles.

  “You look awful,” she said. She withdrew her hand from mine and stroked her thumbs over the dark circles under my eyes, and then she was in my lap.

  “Willow,” I rasped. I wanted to tell her that I didn’t have it in me to play any of her games just then, but she was already kissing the corner of my eye, whispering, “I know, Tom. I know.”

  I sighed and slumped forward until my forehead met her collarbone. She ran her fingers through my hair while I listened to the wild drum of her heart, the swell of her breast brushing my cheek. I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her closer.

  Her hand under my jaw broke us apart, lifting my face to kiss me.

  It was a long, slow kiss, like a morning’s first full-body stretch, where all your muscles go from dead to alive and then from alive to awake.

  Her hands pushed my shirt up over my stomach and kept going until the hem caught under my chin, and I had to help her pull it over my head while her fingers made the reverse journey, back down my shoulders and over my chest. I flinched, and she laughed and ran a fingertip down my side, making me laugh and push her hand to safer, less ticklish territory.