by Nora Decter
I wish I could still believe in stupid, impossible things like that. But I seem to have lost the knack for it.
After a while I can’t take the quiet, so I drag the space heater over to the bed. It’s the kind that shuts off after a few minutes and then automatically turns back on when the room cools again. Every time the low murmur of the fan cuts out, quiet invades my ears and I reach over and pump it up to a higher setting, then a higher one still. Eventually it gets so hot I throw the blankets back and tear my pajamas off, so I’m lying in my underwear next to a panting dog, trying my fucking hardest not to hear how silent it is behind the whirl of the heater. Because when it’s not too loud around here, it’s far too quiet.
FIVE
Third period. English with Ms. Groves. The best thing about Groves is all her facial expressions. She doesn’t hide the hate. She’s doing that thing where she waits for the class to stop talking. Just looks at us and waits. You can totally tell she’s judging the alpha girls by the door sighing over their cell phones, or the dude in the sports-themed clothing reciting a list of everything he drank last night to no one in particular, or the girl in front of me who’s pulled out a small pair of scissors and begun to meticulously snip her split ends one hair at a time, a process she will keep up for the whole class. Groves just sits there watching, and then after a while people realize she’s giving them a stinkeye that rivals my mother’s, and they quiet the fuck down. It’s kind of amusing. Not quite reason enough to show up for class, but almost.
The classroom falls silent, and Groves lets the silence go until it’s good and awkward. “All right,” she says. “Who wants to read today? I need an Orlando? A Duke? An Adam? Who wants Adam? Anyone?” She rattles off roles like a bored auctioneer. Hands go up.
She scares the teenagers, she does, because she doesn’t abide by the rules of high school. She’ll find you smoking behind the Dumpsters if you don’t show up for class. She’ll call your house and read your essay on Gatsby out loud to your mother to illustrate that she’s raised a dummy.
I sit quietly, eyes front, as roles are handed out. We have an agreement, Groves and I. Well, we have a few of them. She won’t make me talk in class, and I’ll keep coming to class. I find if you cultivate an aura of pathological quietness, most teachers will leave you alone in the end.
“All right,” says Groves. “Let’s go.”
Here’s the secret to how I survive school: I’m not really here. Even when I am here, I’m not. Every morning before I come inside, I take my real self by the hand, walk her to a room at the back of my mind and softly close the door. Then I go through the motions of the day. But I’m not here really. Really, I’m far away.
The bell tolls lunch, and bodies fly out of the room while Groves is still assigning the homework for next class. I close my books and wait for the last of the stragglers to clear. Groves erases the chalkboard in big sweeping motions, leaving half the letters behind. I stand up and sit down again, this time at the desk right in front of hers.
Here’s the deal with Groves. She watches and makes sure I stay. I know—creepy, right? Not actually though. She’s a bit lame but pretty cool in the grand scheme. She pays attention like I do. Not many people pay attention these days. Everyone just goes around so careless.
I don’t go to the airport anymore because of Groves. For a while I was taking the bus out there to watch the departures. I’m not so into arrivals anymore. She saw me there one time and thought it was weird and made kind of a thing out of it. So I’m not supposed to go there anymore. She doesn’t know about the bus station. She thinks I get all my leave-taking talk out with her and doesn’t know I’m only partly holding up my end. Her end is she keeps the school from kicking me out, which is an idea they were floating for a while. My end is I do research and extra essays and talk when I’d rather not. She asks me weird questions like, where are the women in Ginsberg’s poems? and what do you dream of when you dream of the future? I try to make up some junk to tell her other than the truth, which is that I don’t dream, not the good kind anyway, but sometimes I slip and find myself telling her something true. Too true. The kind of truth you should keep to yourself.
“So where are we going today?” she asks, flipping on the electric kettle she keeps by the window before sitting down at her desk.
“I was thinking Alberta maybe. Like, in the mountains.”
“Oh God, don’t go there.”
“Why not?”
“Because why would you go somewhere worse than here? Where’s the sense in that?”
“What’s worse about it?” I ask. And then we look for evidence. Groves is big on evidence. She says we can’t just go around believing in magic and nonsense and any old thing. She says beliefs have to be supported by research and facts and proof. She says I can’t leave because I think it’ll be better somewhere else. That’s the other part of our deal. If I stay until I graduate next year, she says she’ll help me find a good way out. I think that anywhere but here is good enough, but she says I’m not thinking, I’m feeling. I don’t know about that. I don’t know if things make as much sense as she tries to make of them. I think there’s more chaos to it than that.
The kettle boils, and she makes us tea while we talk cost of living and marketable skills and she asks me, “What about winter?” and “Do you like cowboys?” Because apparently there are cowboys there. Or like, bros in cowboy hats. She says that and then I ask her for some proof, and she’s all like, “I lived in Banff in 1998 and it was the worst summer of my life.” What was worst about it? I ask. And she tells me about the guy she moved out there for and her crappy waitressing job and how all the bars played country music and something about crabs and that doesn’t sound like proof to me, but it gets her talking and then she forgets about making me talk. So I’m not going to argue with her.
After a bit her rant winds down, and she starts in on a sales pitch for this university on the east coast she thinks I should apply to, which is where these talks always land. It’s also where I tune out, because I don’t have any goals except getting out of here alive and maybe one day becoming a famous recluse or studying the art of the mixtape, and neither of those pursuits requires a university education.
“So,” she says, shutting up at last, “what do you think?”
This is what happens when people ask me what I’m thinking: all my thoughts go kamikaze and commit suicide. They evaporate into the thin air inside my mind. But I know she won’t break the silence until I say something, so I say, “I hate it here.”
“That’s the spirit.” She nods like this is a reasonable contribution to the conversation, takes out a sandwich and offers half to me. I take it, having made the mistake of refusing it before. Is it bad that I’m not even worried about being seen eating lunch with a teacher? This school is big, but not big enough that no one knows me. I think my plan to disappear is working though. This is another, older plan. It involves ignoring the whispers that sometimes still follow me down the hall. I’ve been here three years now, and people know me less and less all the time. It goes both ways. Names I used to know I’ve been forgetting. I wear my headphones in the halls, and the music makes a wall around me. Groves is the only one who tries to get around it.
After we’re done chewing and I’ve spent several minutes playing with crumbs, I say, “I need to find a new job.”
Groves nods. “Don’t we all!” The bell rings, and I grab my bag. “I’ll let you know if I hear of anything,” she says as I go.
Bio lets out last period and there’s a crush for the doors. It’s Friday, and everyone is hungry to get out of here, including me, though I’m also just hungry. In the hall I fight my way upstream to my locker, dump my books, layer up and make for the stairs, dreaming of the leftovers I’ll reheat when I get home. Yes, heat up leftovers and crawl into bed. Howl’s walk can wait until later. I chart a course across the main hall toward the back doors. I tend to come and go through the staff parking lot, cutting across the field behind the
school and avoiding human contact, if you can call my cohorts human, which I don’t. Groves and Vice-Principal Lambert are lurking outside the gym, though, so instead I enter the stream of students headed out the front doors, since it’s entirely possible my favorite authority figures are talking about me.
The street in front of the school is bottlenecked with traffic—parents picking up their kids and students idling their cars, windows rolled down even though it’s bitter out.
If it hadn’t been for swimming, I would have ended up at the high school two blocks from home, which boasts a day care for students with kids and tiny class sizes beyond tenth grade because of the high dropout rate. Instead, I wound up out in the suburbs at Assiniboine Collegiate because it’s close to the pool I used to train at. I guess I could have transferred when I quit the team, but would it be any different at another school? I don’t know. I doubt it. My peers may be hockey-breathing lower life forms, but better the lower life form you know than the one you don’t. Right?
In ninth grade I made the mistake of telling some people I live in the North End. The questions that followed (Do you, like, live below the poverty line?) quickly taught me to gloss over that and a great many other facts of my existence.
In my sleep I hear singing. I’m upright before I’m even awake, wrapping a blanket around myself. “Stop! In the name of love!” Maggie shouts tunelessly. I take the basement stairs two at a time and find Howl waiting by the front door. We’re well trained for such middle-of-the-night moments. The objective is to get her inside before she wakes the neighborhood, whose residents love nothing more than a messy boulevard drama. I drop the blanket and put on my jacket, shove my feet into a pair of boots and go outside to see what I can do.
She’s teetering up the path, jacket half-draped over her shoulders, too drunk to recognize the cold. Her heels, a four-inch pair she can barely walk in at the best of times, are forcing her ankles out at a sickening angle. Where is Char? Maggie grins when she sees me, opens her arms and croons, “Think it o-o-ver.”
“Come on, Maggie,” I say. “Let’s go inside.”
The grin just spreads wider, and she aims her awful eyes at me. She tries to bat her lashes, but it seems a tremendous effort. Maggie has these amazing eyes—everyone says so. Like bright, wet chocolate, with the kind of lashes most women can’t get without glue. They’re her moneymaker, her God-given gift, her get-outta-jail-free card. It’s pathetic, the way people get lost in those eyeballs. Not me though. I’m long since immune. Maybe she can sense that, because she gives up, and her gaze slides over me before coming to rest at a spot on the ground, where it slips out of focus.
“Maggie!” I say again. “It’s late. You’ll catch cold.”
“It’s late, you’ll catch cold,” she parrots, snapping back to attention. “Stop acting eighty, hon.”
The black tube of her skirt has crept up her thighs while the crotch of her panty hose has worked its way down. Her lipstick is wandering across her face, and her hair, piled high in a beehive, sags to one side, like a building whose foundation is in need of repair. The hair and the heels add enough inches to her already considerable height to make her truly a giant, larger than life. She hums to herself and sways. I hurry forward as she crumbles to the ground just shy of the stairs.
I try to haul her back up, but she swats me away.
“Let me help you!” I say.
This seems to anger her. She takes a swipe at my feet and knocks me down. We lie tangled up for a moment before the struggle resumes. Finally I get her off me and pull myself onto the steps. “For fuck’s sake! Stay there then!”
She plunks down next to me and takes out her smokes. I try to get up and go inside, but she grabs my ankle, says, “Sit. Wait with me.”
I obey. Drunk-Maggie will not be denied.
With heavy, uncooperative hands, she lights a cigarette. “You know what your problem is, Jolene? You’re too serious.”
“I am.”
“That’s right,” she slurs. “And you don’t know how to have fun.”
“Also true.” I take the pack she holds out to me. It’s dogeared from being along for the ride on the sort of night that culminates in a grown woman serenading herself with the classic hits of Motown on an otherwise quiet street at two in the morning. She flicks her lighter, and I lean into the flame. For a moment our eyes meet, and she looks clear, she looks like my mother. But then we both break away and sit together smoking under a sky laden with stars.
Every so often, through some drunken alchemy I don’t claim to understand, a change comes over Maggie, and she’s stripped of her bullshit, her agendas, her plays for attention and sympathy. Her never-ending scramble to get drunk or high or otherwise altered. Every so often she drops the act, and it’s like she forgets she doesn’t like me and I don’t like her, and we’re sort of, for a lack of a better word, friends. Sure, it’s always two shakes before she blacks out, but still, in these moments it is possible to have a real conversation with my mother. There on the front steps, with the frozen concrete numbing my ass, head swimming with smoke, I get the feeling it’s one of those times. But how to know for sure? And what to say?
“What are we waiting for?” I ask eventually. The silence following my question goes on and on, long enough for me to consider whether or not I really want to know the answer. Her legs, shadowed in sheer black tights, had been splayed across the steps, as if she was trying to take up as much space as possible, but now she gathers them in and rests her head on her knees. “Maggie?” The cigarette is still clutched between her fingers, ash inching up toward the filter. “What are we waiting for?” I ask again.
“Louie went to get burgers. I’m starving.”
“Oh.” And then a few moments later, “Who’s Louie?”
“My boyfriend,” she says, like, duh.
“Oh,” I say again. In my mother’s eyes, all men are potential boyfriends. Anyone from her catalog of exes can have his status renewed, if only in conversation. The delivery guy at the twenty-four-hour pizza place is her boyfriend. The dude on the entertainment-news show is her boyfriend.
“He’s nice,” she says. “A nice one for once.” She sits up and looks at me. “You’ll hate him though. You hate everyone.”
“Pretty much.”
She seems pleased I’m siding with her on this one. “You’ve always been a bit weird, my girl.”
“Hmm.”
She stands up and peers down the street like she sees someone coming. I stand too and try to stop her as she flops down in the deep snow beyond the path. “What’re you doing? Come on, Maggie. Get up.” I grab her arm and pull so hard I’m afraid I’ll dislocate it. She doesn’t budge. I let it drop.
“Come on,” she says. “Come make a snow angel with your mom.”
I lie down next to her, but neither of us moves our legs or our arms, so we’re not really making angels at all. “You wouldn’t play with other kids,” she goes on. “You’d hang back and study the game until you’d gathered enough information in your little brain, and then you’d play. I worried about you. You seemed so afraid. I’ve always worried about you. I never worried about Matt.”
“Shut up,” I say, but not as meanly as I might. This is nothing she hasn’t said before. When we were growing up, Matt had to bring me everywhere because she was always out. But he never acted like it was an obligation. I’d forget that I was a tagalong little sister until Maggie reminded me. Oh, she’s shy, she’d explain to strangers. She didn’t even talk until she was almost four. I took her to doctors, thought something was wrong. But she’s not stupid, just quiet. Except around her brother, my oldest. Around him she talks a blue streak. And I would cower behind her and let her explain for me. Until I got too tall and had to figure out different ways of making myself small.
She was right and wrong. I don’t like talking unless I have something really good to say. And I am afraid of doing things I’ve never done before. I do hang back and watch. But I was different around Matt, awa
y from her. He made me cool. Even I believed it.
There’s no wind, and above us the ghost in the tree rotates slightly where it hangs over the path. “Remember that?” I say, pointing up at it.
“Yep,” she says, and we watch it together, remembering.
A car pulls up, and we both struggle to get to our feet. A man I’ve never seen before gets out, arms laden with paper-bag fast food, grease spreading quickly across the brown.
“Salut.” He nods at me politely and, seeing the state Maggie’s in, puts the bags down and picks her up easily, like it ain’t no thing. She giggles in his arms, and they disappear inside. A moment later this Louie comes back out for the food. “Do you want some French fries?” he asks. His voice is accented, his English careful. I wonder if she told him I’m her roommate, or a local stray. Maybe all he knows how to say is “Do you want some French fries?”
I shake my head until he goes. Howl presses into me, and I put my arm around her. We’ll go inside in a minute, girl.
I used to find our front-yard ghost amusing, then ominous, and now I’m just used to it. It was one of Maggie’s whims. She decided last minute that she wanted to decorate the yard for Halloween, and, with Char’s help, rigged up a ghost from an old basketball and a bedsheet, drawing a face on with mascara.
I watched from behind a book as they summoned Matt from the basement and coerced him into climbing the tree. We all filed outside to watch. The street was filling with costumed kids running about semi-supervised as their parents cracked beers and dumped candy into bowls. Matt and I had often climbed the tree when we were young. I never got much higher than the fork in the trunk, but Matt could climb way up into the branches. If nothing else, the North End is rich in trees, mostly oaks and elms, thick-trunked giants that line the streets and shade the yards. Whether they’re a tangle of naked branches in winter or in full, lush summer glory, it’s a relief to have something between you and the sky. People are frightened of the sky here. Or they should be.