by Lisa Levchuk
“Is Patty still pissed at you?” she asks.
“I think so. What’s she doing tonight?”
“She’s coming over with Cathy and Gail.”
“Balls,” I say, an expression I’ve stolen from Mr. Howland.
“She was a crazy woman that night,” Barbie says. “I thought she was going to crash right through the door Frankenstein-style.”
We both start laughing again. Patty was like a bull that night.
“Are you afraid of her?” I ask Barbie. “Because I am.”
“You should be afraid of her. She practically broke my arm holding me back. I was going to warn you, but I couldn’t let on that I knew anything.”
“Thanks for trying,” I say.
“For someone so skinny, she’s really strong,” Barbie says.
“Are you still with Billy?”
“Yeah, we had broken up, but he called yesterday and we’re back together.”
We hear Gail and Patty and Cathy come in the front door, and we get up and give each other a look that says, Oh well, and we walk out.
We take Barbie’s mother’s station wagon, also known as “the magic bus,” out to the Moon. I ride shotgun with Barbie, and Patty rides in the back. We haven’t said anything to each other, but there is definite tension in the air. I have a vague, sick feeling in my stomach, but I don’t think I’m going to puke or anything. Cathy has this sad, thin-looking joint that she stole from her brother’s wallet, so Barbie pops in the lighter and we wait to smoke it up.
Cathy has a glass eye, and her favorite thing to do is to hang out and play gin rummy with her family in their big old RV. She always has pot, and it’s consistently tragic weed. But we’ll smoke it even if it’s harsh because Gail forgot her fake ID. Mr. Howland said he was going to make me a fake license on a silk screen so that I can go into bars with him, but he hasn’t done it yet. It’s kind of clear that no one is used to me being around. Some of the kids still treat me like a freak because I won a spelling bee in front of the whole school back in eighth grade. That spelling bee got me labeled as a loser. Actually, ever since fourth grade I’ve gotten weird looks on account of the fact that I used to have a larger than normal vocabulary. Believe me, having a larger than normal vocabulary at my school isn’t too tricky. These days, I mostly successfully hide any intelligence I have, but every now and then a big, awkward-sounding word pops out at the wrong moment.
The truth is that I used to be smart. I learned to read before I went to school, and they even tested me to see if I was a genius or something. I used to sit in first grade thinking that the kids in my class were pretending to be stupid. They couldn’t even read a Dick and Jane book. It was horrible to listen to them sounding out a word like “Spot.” I was the smartest kid back then. But between my trying to use small words and school getting tougher, I honestly think I’ve gotten dumber every year of my life. In fact, at last check, I was barely making a C in Geometry. Still, it is pretty nuts how even one multisyllable word thrown in at the wrong moment can destroy your social life. Fortunately, for whatever reasons, I am allowed to hang around with the cool people at school when I am so inclined.
As I said, I’ve never been to the Moon before because it is a relatively new place for people to hang out and I’ve been MIA for the past couple months because of Mr. Howland. We are driving in the same direction as the secret spot, and it’s getting weird when finally we go a different direction altogether. Cathy lights up her skinny joint and passes it around.
“What is this crap?” Patty asks, coughing.
“My brother grew it in his bedroom,” Cathy says.
The Moon, it turns out, is a big crater in the ground in the middle of a gravel pit. Because of the lack of trees or anything green whatsoever, I guess it does somewhat resemble the moon. There is a pool of shiny water near the crater, the kind of water that would probably transform you into a radioactive mutant if you drank it or even put your foot in it. New Jersey is loaded with these kinds of pools.
There are kids standing around drinking beers, while others are sitting in the sand, and people run up when the magic bus arrives to say hello. A few kids are happy to see me, and I’m glad to be here. Someone hands me a beer, and I wander about as far away from Patty as I can get. People tend to let me enter into groups because I don’t really say much and I can look sort of tough and detached when necessary. So I stand on the edge of a group of boys I’ve gone to school with since first grade. One of the boys was my first boyfriend, but when he tried to put his hand inside my shirt on the Sky Ride at Great Adventure, I broke up with him. Now that seems prudy because I’ve done so much more than that. With Mr. Howland, sex has never felt awkward, probably because he knows what to do.
To be honest, the party is pretty boring. The same stuff happens on the Moon that happens back on Earth. Barbie gets into an argument with Billy because he’s jealous, Denise Degrasso gets drunk and starts crying. Tara Herlan’s boyfriend gets drunk and “accidentally” pees on her. It’s difficult not to wish I was out in the secret spot with Mr. Howland. The only interesting thing is that there is a group of boys from another school standing on the other shore of the mutant pool. They look a bit less raggedy than the kids from my school. In fact, there is a very tall boy with dark hair who is looking at me like he wants to say hi. Being the antisocial person I am, I turn my back on him and pretend to be interested in the people I’m with.
By the time we leave, our shoes are caked with sandy mud and the magic bus is getting incredibly dirty. Billy is going to drive home with us, so I have to sit in the way back. Patty climbs in there with me, and I can see that she’s got something she wants to say.
“You’re going to get caught, you know,” she says.
I don’t say anything. I sit there staring forward.
“You can’t keep it up,” she says. “It isn’t fair to Melinda.”
For a moment, I wonder if it could be Patty herself calling my house and hanging up when I answer.
“I know,” I say.
“Are you going to stop seeing him?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I say.
“I don’t want my mother to find out, because she’ll kill me for knowing and she’ll call both your mother and his wife,” she says. “My mother is already worried about you.”
“What’s she worried about?”
“You’re acting like a freak around everyone.”
I close my eyes. Patty seems satisfied with the warning she’s given, and I lean back and listen to Styx singing “Come Sail Away” from the radio and the voices of everyone saying things at once. Billy has his arm around Barbie in the front seat, and it makes me feel sorry for myself because my own boyfriend could never go to the Moon on a Friday night and even if he could, he probably wouldn’t want to.
Bracelets
I’VE NOTICED THAT TEACHERS talk about what interests them, not what interests us. With Mr. Sikorsky, it’s the Depression. With Mr. Wallace, it is wrestling, Oliver Cromwell, and the Fox. Mr. Aniello’s obsession is Vietnam. He spent the entire first half of the period today talking about Vietnam, explaining to us that seeing people get shot on television is nothing like seeing them get shot in person. He tried to describe the way blood spurts out of a real gunshot wound as he ran across the room pretending to have been shot in the leg. During the second half of class, we listened to a presentation by a girl I don’t know very well. She’d researched the Buddhist monks who set themselves on fire to protest the war in Vietnam. She even had a photograph of a peaceful-looking monk in orange robes engulfed in flames. This girl’s father was killed in Vietnam. In junior high a couple of boys got suspended for making fun of her for wearing his dog tags to school.
Though Mr. Aniello’s Sociology class can be enlightening at times, it is difficult to admire him because he could be the most uncool teacher in the entire school. Still, as uncool as he is, he is difficult to put into a category. He’s not a hippie because he embraces the disco culture in a pretty bi
g way. And he doesn’t dress like a hippie. He wears polyester shirts featuring geometric patterns and colorful scenes. He calls the ugliest one, a shirt with a picture of a guy riding a giant unicycle, his Horatio Alger shirt. He even wears platform shoes. The saddest and most pathetic part is that he once told us he keeps his best clothes at home in his closet and only wears them when he goes out dancing. The thought of him putting on his best clothes and going out dancing makes me feel incredibly depressed. The kids call him Disco Dick and Tony Manero behind his back.
At lunch I tell Mr. Howland about Mr. Aniello’s class and about how he tries to make us care about Vietnam. Both of us have pretty much forgotten about the trip to the Chinese restaurant.
“I was in Vietnam,” Mr. Howland says. “Look at this.”
He lifts up the leg of his pants and reveals a big ugly scar I’ve never noticed before.
“I got shot at Hamburger Hill,” he says.
“You were in Vietnam?” I ask. For a second I am surprised. The thought of Mr. Howland being in a war is pretty exciting.
“Ha!” he practically shouts. “Gotcha! Had you going there for a second, didn’t I? That’s a scar where I had a mole removed.”
“Yuck,” I say. I probably should have known that Mr. Howland wouldn’t have been in Vietnam and that his reference to hamburgers was an obvious clue.
“How come you didn’t have to go?” I ask.
“I went to graduate school and I got married,” he says. “Do you think I’m crazy enough to go get killed in some jungle in Vietnam?”
I do believe that being a complete weirdo like Mr. Aniello might be better than being some sort of coward. But I’ll tell you, these days it has become pretty much impossible to tell who is a coward and who isn’t. My father hates hippies and anyone who went to Canada instead of going to Vietnam. He drove us through Haight-Ashbury on a family vacation in 1971, and he told me that hippies lived in holes in the ground like rats. That is not an easy image to get out of your head. On the other hand, as I’ve already mentioned, every single person I know of who was in Vietnam isn’t doing that well. The older brother of the kid who used to live next door to me supposedly died “cleaning his gun.” After he came back from the war, he didn’t get a job and almost never left the house. Every now and then he walked around the neighborhood, always wearing a green army jacket. My guess is he wasn’t cleaning anything; he put that gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
Rather than talk any more about Vietnam, I switch to telling Mr. Howland about my trip to the Moon. I watch his face, and it’s easy to see that he is not listening. He doesn’t take too much of an interest in my life outside of him; he makes it seem like high school is this time of life you won’t even remember, so there’s no point in talking about anything that happens. He gets bored hearing about Barbie’s problems with Billy or how Denise got drunk at a party, topics that I admit are not exactly scintillating subjects for conversation. We do better if we stick to his favorite topics. I don’t necessarily love hearing about how annoying his wife is and how much this school stinks, but Mr. Howland is a knowledgeable person, and he will tell me gossip about teachers.
I’m sitting at the table with him, but he hasn’t made a hamburger for a few days because he is sick of washing the electric hot plate. Gary Ivers went out and got him a sub and a Coke that he is sharing with me; I don’t say anything about the diet because I was getting tired of watching him eat meat and tomatoes every day. About halfway through lunch, he gives me a present wrapped up in white paper. It is probably because he is an artist, but he always makes things look nice—the white paper is tied with a red ribbon and my name is written on the package. It says “To my love, Edna.”
Inside the package is a silver bracelet that looks exactly like the one he wears on his left wrist. It’s more petite, though, a ladies-size bracelet. His is more like a silver cuff. Both of them are a very simple design, in accordance with Mr. Howland’s aesthetic of simplicity and functionality, yet they share a similar pattern.
“Won’t people notice?” I ask.
“I don’t give a good god damn,” he says.
I slide the bracelet onto my wrist, and it fits perfectly. It’s a nice bracelet.
“It looks like we are in the same club,” I say.
“We are,” Mr. Howland says.
The pervert club, I think to myself, but I don’t say it because I can see that Mr. Howland is taking this whole thing seriously. With this piece of matching jewelry, he is claiming me. It feels good and bad at the same time, because part of me really wants to be claimed and the other part of me is quite frightened of what is going to happen. But if you could see how happy it makes him to see me wearing it, you would understand why I love him so much. He is talented in so many different ways. He can draw, paint, and make a perfect bracelet. He can shift gears without using the clutch and fix the brake pads on his own car. He made me like folk music. Mr. Howland sees beauty in things that other people take for granted. He even sees beauty in me.
“What if Patty notices it?” I ask.
“I’m not worried about Patty,” he insists.
I am, though. Patty is a smart girl. She is angry and worried at the same time. Mr. Howland seems not to notice that the force of Patty’s anger and her mother’s anger and their negative judgment is just as strong as, if not stronger than, the Dracula Principle. Mr. Howland might even be losing touch with reality. He seems to be forgetting about his wife and my father and everyone else in the world who is going to want to have a say about this.
“Stop worrying,” he says.
Lately, Mr. Howland has been making pottery again. He gave us an assignment to work on independently, a research project on an artist we admire, and told us not to bug him unless absolutely necessary. Because no teacher or principal oversees what goes on in any given classroom, Mr. Howland is free to do as he pleases. He sits at the potter’s wheel shaping the same lump of clay into various forms, always simple and functional. One day he’ll make a vase, the next a bowl. Today he’s making a plate. While he works, he listens to almost nothing but old Rod Stewart and the Rolling Stones. His favorite songs are “You Wear It Well” and “Lost Paraguayos” by Rod Stewart and “Beast of Burden” by the Stones, songs he sometimes plays over and over again. The strange part is that he is never satisfied with the finished product and ends up starting over. Rather than a bracelet, I wish Mr. Howland would give me one of those beautiful tall vases before he destroys it. If I could make even one symmetrical piece of pottery, I’d save it forever. Today as he works, he’s blasting Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, something new for a change. We sit at the desks with our art books pretending that it is normal for the teacher to be sitting at the wheel ignoring us while listening to “Ballad of a Thin Man” loud enough for the kids in the next room to hear.
Dr. Chester’s Office
IT IS WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON and I am back in Dr. Chester’s waiting room. Outside it is drizzling. For the first time since I started coming here, I see the person who had the appointment before mine. From the window I can see that he’s walking out the secret exit and heading to his car. He begins to jog because of the rain. He’s dressed in a business suit, and he drives a small blue sedan. I feel myself getting very interested to know why a grown man would be going in the middle of the afternoon to talk to Dr. Chester. Shouldn’t a grown man be able to solve his own problems? It can’t be that his mother is making him come here. As I’m wondering about this, the door opens and Dr. Chester is standing there. I follow him in without making my usual stupid face.
“So, how are you?” he asks as I sit down.
“You talked first,” I say.
He looks like he surprised himself. “I suppose I did,” he says.
I offer up the generic rundown of recent events—the return of Kippy from the vet’s office, my triumphant Mighty Dog cooking experience, and a few made-up concerns about school. He’s nodding his head as usual.
“Is it weird to have
an invisible friend?” I ask him.
“Do you have one?” he asks. He smiles.
“No,” I say, “I don’t have one now, but I did. His name was Sucan, and he was half-human and half-chipmunk. I used to play Monopoly with him and cheat.”
“That doesn’t seem right,” Dr. Chester says. “Even if he was invisible.”
I’m glad Dr. Chester isn’t treating me like a freak for having Sucan. Because Sucan was actually a very good friend of mine. He was always willing to play whatever game I wanted to play.
“What happened to him?”
“I don’t know,” I answer. “I think I made a few human friends and he stopped showing up. He was real for a while. There was a time with Sucan when I wasn’t pretending. But then, at a certain point, I knew I was making him up.”
It occurs to me that this emotional progression from fantasy to reality might be true of relationships with human beings as well.
“It sounds like he helped you with some loneliness,” Dr. Chester says.
“Hey,” I say, finally ready to bring up my brother again. “I asked my father about Tommy.”
“Good for you,” he says. “That must have been difficult.”
“Turns out he wasn’t murdered.” I’m telling Dr. Chester this very cheerfully, like I just found out the ending of a TV show that I missed.
“Did you find out what did happen?” he asks.
“He drowned,” I say. “After all that, it turns out that he drowned. That psychiatrist was with him.”
Dr. Chester looks sad, not sorry for me, he just looks sad that my brother died. Dr. Chester seems to me to be the kind of guy who probably wouldn’t have let someone like Tommy out of his sight. I bet he would have been more careful with him.
“Was it hard for you to ask about Tommy?” he asks.
Hearing Dr. Chester say Tommy’s name makes him seem more real to me, real in a way that he hasn’t felt before. It’s hard to stay cheerful, because Dr. Chester seems to be changing the tone.
“To be honest,” I tell him, “I was kind of relieved.”