Shrug

by Lisa Braver Moss

  Even though Stephanie was two rows over, we were able to pass notes back and forth thanks to a girl named Paisley, who sat between us and wanted us to like her. It was only because of Stephanie’s notes that I formulated an idea. Turn the tables somehow, she urged. Use it against him!!!

  The class was rowdy in that substitute-teacher way, kids talking and laughing and then shushing and then talking again. Logan had already pelted me half a dozen times. Suddenly I realized I had stood up and turned around to address the enemy, my knees shaking. “Too bad you have that awful nervous tic, Logan,” I said loudly, “where you just can’t help shooting spitballs.”

  All the kids who heard me burst out laughing, including Paul. As Logan struggled to figure out what to say, I glanced over at Stephanie, who was flashing her huge smile, her eyes crinkling with the joy of shared mischief. The whole thing was so unlike me, it was as if I’d stepped out of myself and into someone else. But I’d had enough of bullies for a whole year, let alone twenty-four hours.

  “You really should see a doctor about that, Logan,” I went on, making my voice as contemptuous as I could. “A psychiatrist, that is.” By this point, I had everyone’s attention. More laughter, louder now. And then, as if to show I could play at being cool but was never actually going be cool, my goddamned shoulder put in its two cents’ worth. Twice in a row, actually, so I guess that’s four cents’ worth.

  “Siddown!” the sub bellowed at me. “And stop that shrugging!”

  When our regular English teacher came back, she caught on to Logan’s straw shooter, confiscated it, and moved him to the very front of the classroom. Eventually, Logan wound up in reform school somewhere, which is kind of sad. Plus, his older brother nearly got killed in Vietnam and is now in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

  Not that I miss Logan Starch. It’s just that he was actually a smart kid. Starting in fourth grade, he’d made his way through those color-coded reading comprehension exercises more quickly than anyone else. The teacher had encouraged us to read a little above our level (I was never sure what that meant, exactly) and skip what we didn’t understand. Logan was one of those kids who had dived right in. As for me, all I wanted was to read just below my level and have all the time in the world to slow down on what I didn’t understand. But of course, I couldn’t let anyone find that out. It would ruin my reputation.

  Unlike the others in my class, Logan Starch seemed to notice my lagging. It was as if he saw through me, saw that there was something not quite right about my good grades. Now that I think about it, he kind of reminded me of my father. Not just the bullying part. The part that understood what a fraud I was.

  I’m the exact opposite of Columbo, that bumbling detective on TV, who doesn’t mind looking like an idiot, since he actually understands everything. I really, really mind looking like an idiot, because even though I’ve always been able to blend in with the high-achieving kids at school, secretly I don’t comprehend much of anything. It takes a lot of effort for me to fit in, but I don’t have a choice. Apparently, Columbo has self-assurance to spare—he doesn’t even care if he’s being annoying, testing the suspect’s patience over and over again with his “dumb” questions until you squirm just watching—but I sure don’t have that kind of confidence. Why would I want people to know how confused I am when seeming smart is the main thing I’ve got going for me?

  You probably think I’m fishing for compliments or exaggerating, or that I need to get therapy to fix my low self-esteem. But—and this is where my father is right—you can do well in school and still be a big fat idiot. When I look on a world map, for instance, I always do a little double-take: I’m expecting South America to be where Africa is, even though that’s just plain stupid. I can’t keep any of the Scandinavian countries straight, or maybe it’s the Norwegian countries? No, wait, the Nordic ones? Why is Australia a continent and not an island nation? Why does Brazil take up so much room while Japan, which is a much more influential country, is virtually un-findable on the map? And while we’re on the topic of Brazil, how are you supposed to know the language they speak there isn’t Brazilian, and it isn’t Spanish, either?

  And yet, I get B+’s in social studies, history, and geography. B+’s, when I should be getting F’s.

  I doubt I could even grasp a much-needed explanation as to why communism is so bad, or what “iron curtain” really means. There are just certain types of information my brain can’t seem to absorb. Books and encyclopedias supposedly help people with things like that, but they sure as hell don’t help me. When I’m reading or listening, I try really hard to concentrate, but it always turns out there’s something basic I don’t understand. Then I try to understand the basic thing. But just at the moment when I’m hearing or reading the part that’s going to explain everything—that’s when I realize my concentration has evaporated. Instead, I’m thinking about what I might’ve been missing the moment before, while I was trying to concentrate—unrelated things that might have needed my attention. Someone getting angry, someone getting hurt, someone disapproving of the teacher’s assignment, someone not liking the way I think about things. And then I’m right back where I started.

  But meanwhile, the world keeps spinning, new assignments keep coming, I keep turning them in and getting good grades, and no one ever notices how lost I am. It’s like I’m in France, lugging some big suitcase around while trying to find my way from one place to another, and stopping to ask for help. I’ve taken some French (I got A’s), so my question might be nicely phrased, and I might even have a reasonable French accent. So the French person might think, “Oh, here’s a foreigner with correct French grammar and a decent accent.” But then—based on my grammar and accent—the person gives me some lightning-quick, idiomatic response that I have no prayer of following. See? The problem of appearing to be competent.

  My teachers seem to think of me as intellectually curious, the type that just loooves learning. And after fighting so hard to do well in school and apply to college, how can I possibly admit out loud that I don’t love learning?

  Here’s the real question: why doesn’t anyone ever talk about how humiliating it is to learn, since you’re constantly finding out how dumb you were before?

  3

  smoke and records

  People connect whistling with happiness, probably because of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, where cartoon characters run around singing about how if you whistle while you work, the work gets done faster, and that makes you happy. At least, that’s what I understand, never having seen Snow White—Disney movies had crappy plots, the ideas in them were “very Hollywood,” life was not all about syrupy princesses with lily-white skin—you get the idea.

  My father whistled while he worked. Literally. He owned a smoke shop and record store called Smoke and Records, which was located at the corner of Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue, right across the street from the UC Berkeley campus. All day long, my father could put on whatever he wanted: a Bach cantata, a Haydn string quartet, Brahms’ second cello sonata, Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Whenever he wasn’t lecturing the customers or chewing out one of the guys who worked for him, my father was whistling along with whatever he had on the turntable. Or he was singing along. Or he was conducting.

  It’s funny, though—I never thought about whether my father was happy when he whistled. To me, the whistling meant I was happy. Everything was okay. We were all safe, for now.

  I miss the store. It smelled of sweet tobacco and magazines and also, somehow, of cold, if cold has a smell. Hildy and Drew and I loved to hang around and watch students and professors buying the New York Times, or red boxes of Dunhills, or bright yellow packages of pipe cleaners for their pipes, or those weird miniature lozenges called Sen-Sen that tasted like a cross between licorice and charcoal.

  We kids were allowed to roost on the stacks of Look and Life and other magazines that were piled on the floor against the vertical news racks facing the smoke shop counter. From our perches
, we could see everything that was going on, which was probably way better than watching some dumb Disney movie anyway. We did have to be on the lookout in case a customer seemed to want a magazine—and scramble up, straighten the piles, and get out of the way if that happened. And absolutely no staring or giggling if someone was scanning for a Playboy—even if it was “the mooch,” Hildy’s nickname for this fat, balding guy who came in every month to have a long look, but always put the magazine back instead of buying it.

  It’s almost as if Smoke and Records existed just to show a complete opposite of how things were at home. We lived in a house with dark wood all over the place, and cottage-cheese-textured walls, and tons of boring old stuff—art objects and dusty vases and rugs, which my parents collected by dragging us around to antique stores as if that were a fun family activity. I wanted to be surrounded by cheerful things like the smooth walls, white painted cabinets, and comfy floral-patterned chairs I’d seen at other people’s houses. I didn’t let on, though, because then my parents would say I didn’t have good taste.

  At Smoke and Records, the main point seemed to be enjoyment. Across from the huge red-and-white Coke machine, the entire wall was lined with candy racks, and if my father was in the right mood, and my mother wasn’t there, which she usually wasn’t when we hung around the shop, we could have whatever we wanted—Junior Mints for Hildy, chocolate Necco wafers for me, and for Drew, anything from Jujubes (gummy, but good if you wanted long-lasting) to barbecue-flavored potato chips.

  Even though the store was kind of grimy, things were so colorful in there, you didn’t care. The metal displays for the Life Savers, for instance—instead of holding the candy in place with plain metal, the fronts of the little racks were rounded, and painted to look exactly like the candy rolls they contained. Cherry. Five Flavor. Butterscotch. Pep-O-Mint. The vivid metal looked so realistic.

  If we were hungry for substantive food, my father would pull money from one of the two cash registers and send us next door to Joe’s Ranch Burgers for cheeseburgers and French fries served in cheerful, paper-lined, red oval plastic baskets. Or we could go to the soda fountain half a block further down Telegraph, at Foley’s Rexall Drugs, and get mayonnaise-y egg-and-olive sandwiches on white bread, cut into triangular quarters—we didn’t even have to eat the crusts—and share a chocolate milkshake as if it were an actual drink.

  All this was about as different from my mother’s kitchen as you could get. If she made lamb chops, we were thrilled, but the edible part was small, and there was never enough. If she made something totally disgusting, like that cold gelatin dish with sliced hard-boiled egg and pigs’ feet in it—well, there was plenty, served several nights in a row, and we couldn’t even spit it out, because she checked our napkins.

  My mother was always bitching about how sugar was terrible for you, deep-fried food was poison, white bread had no food value, blah, blah, blah, and even though she probably had a point, I think mostly she hated how my father always had to be “seen as the good guy.” Which is another way of saying she couldn’t stand the fact that my father was basically more likeable than she was. I was the only one in the family who liked my mother at all, and even I didn’t really like her. I just kind of forced myself to like her because no one else did. Plus, someone had to stand up to my father and his stupid behavior.

  But whatever need my father had to be “seen as the good guy” didn’t extend to music. If some ditzy co-ed with puffy hair and a flowery mini-skirt breezed into the shop asking for the Beach Boys, my father, depending on his mood, might demand to know why she wanted that dreck—even though he had plenty of Beach Boys albums, filed just in front of the Beatles section. Then he’d start in about what Bach cantatas or Mozart chamber music the ditzy girl should be buying instead. It wasn’t exactly an environment that made you want to ask for stuff.

  “Your turn,” Hildy nudged me one day when Help! had just come out. I was sitting next to her on the magazine stacks, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s voice was delivering Schubert lieder, and Drew was hanging around behind the smoke shop counter with Bob Metcalf, an architecture student with thick black glasses who’d been working for my father for years, in between the times my father got mad and fired him before hiring him back a few days later. Underneath Fischer-Dieskau’s soothing baritone I could hear the percussion sounds from lower Sproul Plaza, where drummers would sit together and pound on congas for hours on end for God knows what reason, probably to give people headaches. “I’ve asked twice in a row,” Hildy pointed out.

  “Well, you’re the one who wants it.”

  “Three times, actually! I asked for Beatles ’65, and then two times for Beatles VI. And look, he’s in a good mood.” My father had cornered a half-interested guy in a tweed jacket and was waving a Schwann catalog, the monthly listing of every available classical LP recording, as he explained that if the guy liked Dvořák, he really should delve into Brahms, since Brahms had a major influence on the younger composer. Hildy elbowed me again. “C’mon, Marth, you know you want it too.” Her warm breath smelled of Junior Mints.

  “Quit it! What I want is the Strauss waltzes. Or Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, or maybe ‘Clair de Lune.’ And you know what he said about all those: pure dreck.” For the life of me, I could never understand how Hildy was so self-assured about her own tastes that she could ask repeatedly for whatever pop music she wanted. If my father thought Johann Strauss was a crummy composer, or that Eine Kleine Nachtmusik was formulaic, or that “Clair de Lune” was maudlin—well, he probably had a point. I wasn’t about to make him think even less of me by asking for the Beatles. And by the way, now that I’m older, I see what my father meant about the Strauss and the Mozart (I still love the Debussy, though).

  “So what?” Hildy countered. “He says ‘pure dreck’ about everything. Doesn’t mean you can’t ask.”

  It exactly meant I couldn’t ask. I wanted my father to see that I loved music the way he did—that I wasn’t bored by his musical opinions like Hildy. I wanted him to be impressed that if I’d heard a record once, I always knew what note it was going to begin on, because I had perfect pitch. I wanted him to notice that if he was explaining to some professor why a particular Pablo Casals recording was superior to the one in stereo by János Starker even though the Casals was in mono, I considered it important information. But my father didn’t notice things like that about me, because the simple truth was, he liked Hildy more.

  I know, I know, parents love their children equally, blah blah blah, but the fact is, Hildy was Hildy, whereas I had a shrug, and somehow my father didn’t care about my musical loyalty. And maybe that’s good, because he just kind of ruins everything. Obviously.

  Drew trotted over to us, looking like a miniature replica of my father: a head of disorderly dark curls set off by too-thick brows and big brown eyes. Why was it all so adorable on my brother, and not on me? He was clutching a Hershey’s almond chocolate bar, probably because that was Bob Metcalf’s favorite. “Are you sure you want that, Drewy?” I asked.

  “Drew, you don’t like nuts,” Hildy reminded him. “That one has nuts in it.”

  He held the bar tightly to his flannel-shirted chest.

  “Let me open it for you,” Hildy offered.

  “Mine.”

  “Just the top part, so it’s easier for you to eat it. Okay?”

  Reluctantly, Drew parted with his treat, hopping on one foot and then the other as Hildy tore off a small part of the foil underneath the wrapper. I watched his cute little feet in his cute little red PF Flyers as he danced on the dark vinyl flooring, waiting. The floor tiles were marbled, their original colors long gone, obscured by years of accumulated grime. How many feet had walked on that floor, altogether? Who at the vinyl tile factory had decided on that marble pattern? These were the kinds of mysteries that I liked. The kind where you could just imagine the answer and not have to look it up somewhere, because the answers to questions like that weren’t in books.

  Drew took his c
andy bar and started counting the items in the fragile, yellowed display case. He was really good with numbers for a little kid, and I could see why he was fascinated by the glass case, which was filled with all kinds of pipes and chrome accessories and tartan plaid pouches. What were those chrome gadgets used for? Who sewed the pouches? Who decided they should be green and dark blue? At the store, there was always something new to observe. Nothing was completely knowable, and for some reason, I found that comforting.

  “I wish I could just go buy the record, like every other kid,” Hildy sighed. We both had little secret stashes of money from the times when my father had given us cash for one thing or another and had waved his hand dismissively when we tried to give him his change. But how would Hildy get a Beatles album into the house? My mother didn’t believe in allowances, didn’t believe in piggy banks, and wouldn’t let us do chores or babysitting for money.

  When we got money from her parents for our birthdays, she’d put it directly into “savings,” saying she’d get us anything we needed (which we understood was really an invitation to ponder the meaning of “need”), and that we weren’t old enough to have our own spending money. So if Hildy walked in with pop music, my mother would assume my father had given it to Hildy—exactly the type of situation that could lead to World War III. As for my father, he’d have a goddamned cow if we bought records anywhere else in an attempt to hide our bad musical taste.

  Hildy’s candy box gave a hollow waxy rattle as she tilted it up for more, as if to fortify herself. Then she handed me the box, got up, and walked over to my father, her head bent in deference: she talked big to me, but it was another thing to do the actual asking. My shoulder put in its opinion as Hildy waited for my father to finish his sentence. “Dad,” she began, “um, I was wondering—”

  “You probably want a Beatle record.” My father winked at the Dvořák customer, confident that the guy would commiserate about the dubious musical tastes of a twelve-year-old girl.