Catapult

by Emily Fridlund

  The black-and-white TV in the corner was on. The shades were closed. I realized then that I hadn’t been in the parlor since winter, since New Year’s. The furniture in the room had settled more completely into its rummage-sale look, everything shoved together at awkward, acute angles. The small majolica figurines on the tables were knotted in indecipherable shadows.

  I carefully avoided looking at Mrs. Crubin in her bed. The nurse whispered me through adjusting her pillow and refilling her water cup with its crooked straw, and all the while I stayed at the far side of the room near the door. “Otherwise, you just make yourself comfortable,” the nurse said. “Okay?”

  “Okay.” I made a point of blandly reassuring her. I assumed I would bail the moment the caretaker left, but I didn’t. I was still the guy who wanted, in some aching, irrational way, an A in everything anyone asked of me.

  So I sat down on the loveseat farthest from the hospital bed. To my confusion and delight, the winter Olympics were on TV. What channel was this? I wondered vaguely. I’d read about the results in the paper months ago, but here they were replaying the winter Olympics in June. I sank into the cool silk of the claw-foot loveseat to watch them, the ski-jumping men floating ominously as raptors, strumming the air with one hand. I watched overturned bobsleds grind men’s heads as they plummeted down the track. I watched Apolo Ohno take the ice.

  “He wins.” Someone touched my shoulder from behind, so I started. Liv’s fingers on my neck were cold, though the room was stuffy and warm, airless. She slunk around the little couch, shrugged out of her backpack.

  “Apolo Ohno? What are you—”

  Just as I was about to ask Liv what she was doing here, how she knew where I’d be, Mrs. Crubin began calling out to us.

  “Goomlhaa! Hmmoolpaa!”

  Curling up beside me on the silk, Liv kissed my neck.

  “We should go see what she needs,” I said. “I was told—”

  “Hmmoolpaa,” she murmured. “Which means, in New Christian, she wants us to stay right here and make out. I’ve been brushing up on my vocabulary and pronunciation. That’s what she’s trying to say.”

  I stood up. “No, really. I’m supposed to see—”

  Liv frowned, then smiled. “Yes, let’s.”

  She took my hand and led me in a winding path through the jumble of furniture across the shadowy room to where a red rose nightlight glowed from the wall. The old lady was tucked under white sheets, and her neck lifted up her head when we drew closer. I saw the drapery of her braid of hair unraveling down her night-gowned arm. I saw the flash of her gray tongue, the whites of her eyes.

  “Mrs. Crubin?” I said.

  When I looked for Liv, I saw she was on her knees in front of me.

  “No.”

  “What, Michael?” She was unzipping my pants. She was whispering: “What can she do? What can she say? Anyways, none of this is real to her, remember—”

  I started to push her away.

  “We’re just—appearances of Love, right? We’ll make one angel for her.”

  Her voice was excited, husky with malice. Then she had my cock in her mouth. I shoved her back, fumbling with the zipper on my pants, but—how can this be explained?—even as I did, I felt the thrill of unexplored possibility. It occurred to me that this might be what we’d been working toward all these months, the experience that would finally bind us together.

  “Come on,” Liv said. “You be Bad Behavior.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll be Guilt.” She twisted around and shot a glance at Mrs. Crubin over her shoulder, and it was such a wretched look, filled with such unguarded misery, that something unlatched in my body and a familiar feeling flooded through me. It was the feeling that used to come over me only when I was high or really drunk—not that nothing mattered, but that everything did the exact same amount. Not just me spinning Liv against the wall and hiking up her skirt, but also the way her wrist bone pressed against my forehead and the way her eyelid twitched and the sound of our skin sticking and pulling apart. There was no differentiating one thing from another, no distinguishing the frost-like pattern of the wallpaper from the moaning of the old lady beside us from my dad’s face as he dragged me over the lawn, from his love and his disgust, from the big pulsing vein now visible in Liv’s forehead. It was all the same thing.

  Afterward, Liv pulled down her skirt and plucked out the rose nightlight from the socket with a little crack.

  In the dark, we started giggling. Then stopped. Mrs. Crubin was quiet, there was no sound, and I thought—with a sudden chill, like being splashed—maybe she died. Maybe she’s dead. But then she was gurgling again, so we closed the heavy parlor doors behind us and crept up the stairs.

  *

  I make that seem like the big event. I make it seem like something was settled between us after that, that when we went to barbeques or the store or whatever, we introduced ourselves as a couple. That it had worked. And we did go on for several more months. And the same things we did before—study, cook, take the bus—did feel different, strange, like when you travel somewhere new and come back and home feels provisional for a while, imperceptibly charged with the overwhelming knowledge of the unfamiliar place you’ve just been. There seemed to arise between Liv and me an awareness that hadn’t been there before, an electric, ineffable understanding. Without discussing it, I came to recognize that I would follow her to India if she accepted the grant. It seemed almost beyond talking about, a decision that was long since settled between us. I looked into getting a visa, went to the library and found a book on conversational Hindi, told my dad when he asked what I was doing after graduation that I probably was going abroad. I got the vaccinations. I looked into plane tickets.

  But when she announced in September that she was going to go up to Eveleth to say “’bye to the girls” before her flight to Mumbai, there was a blank between us, a pause, and I didn’t say I would go with her. I drove her to the bus station and bought her lunch, a burrito. I lifted her bags into the compartment under the bus, and when she waved down from her tinted window I felt an unclenching in my chest as if I were really sad to see her go. I waved until the bus had disappeared in the surge of traffic, and it was only when I was driving down the shaded streets by myself that I found I could hardly stand to think of her. And it was only weeks later, when my dad asked me about my upcoming trip abroad, that I felt such a stunning repugnance at the thought that my skin seemed to slide against my bones when I moved the phone from one hand to the other. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “I’ve got a new apartment, a part-time job at the library.”

  And Mrs. Crubin? To my knowledge, she may still be alive.

  LEARNING TO WORK WITH YOUR HANDS

  I never knew him well and never will: old spitting man, man in suspenders. Anyhow, everyone’s grandfather is like this. He has purple lips and yellow teeth. He wears ball caps from extinct teams, one ear tucked in and one folded out at a perfect right angle. When I turned fourteen, he gave me a model of the Liberty Bell, mistaking my curiosity about him, my questions about his soldier days, for patriotism. He admired citizens, not granddaughters. The bell had a tiny brass clapper that rattled in the dome like a mint in a candy tin. I attached it to the dog’s collar and let her be the patriot between us, the one who stayed with my grandfather in the long afternoons and licked his knuckles.

  The day they lifted him up and carried him from our house to the stretcher on the porch, I put my arms around the dog to keep her out of the way. She smelled of kitty litter. She reared her head, so I grabbed her ears and pulled hard, watching the skin on the top of her skull slide back like a hood. A red ambulance light swept through the room. My parents exchanged irritable commands, saying, “Get his arms up! Take off his hat!” My grandfather held on to the front door molding and had to be pried away by a male EMT. The EMT smoothed Grandpa’s forehead, murmuring, “There you are, there you are,” like a mother after a bad dream. “Moron,” Grandpa said
, but they were already out on the driveway, and someone was yelling something about retrieving his kicked-off shoe.

  That’s when our house was still painted a funny yellow color, like the feathers of a bird at a pet store. Before Grandpa left, my mother was like a visitor here. She slid between politeness for my grandfather’s sake and the sort of despair where you start a hobby. She collected miniatures, but not dollhouses. She had oriental carpets the size of postcards and a claw-foot bathtub where we put our soap. After Grandpa left, she packed up room after tiny room in a red tackle box. I watched her fit porcelain cakes under minuscule lounge cushions, wrap lamps in the cloth napkins she used for guests. She put on mascara and squinted at herself in the mirror the way the girls at school did, as if the image made her heartsick. She didn’t have a car, so Dad and I drove her to her Pilates instructor’s house where there was a hot tub and a futon for her in the converted garage she’d rented. I thought she would cry. I wanted her to cry, so we could all feel her long inertia was worth something. Instead she went right over to the hot tub and stuck her finger in, rolling her eyes to the ceiling and clicking her tongue. She took my hand and dunked it in the water, saying, Feel this.

  Before Grandpa left, our street was called Fifth Avenue South, but after he was gone it changed to Green Mountain Road. They put in a golf course in the field next door, with putting greens like round carpets and a sprinkler system that watered our garage. Within a few months, all our neighbors sold their houses to real estate brokers from the Cities. Kitty Roster, who’d been my friend since we were babies together, called the brokers the Hippie Hitlers because they had moustaches and sandaled feet. The Rosters sold their stucco house and bought a mobile home on the lake, with a dock on floaters and a pontoon boat. A sign in the shape of a mountain appeared where their house used to be.

  The last time I talked to Kitty was Memorial Day. The Rosters invited me for a ride in their new boat. They were sorry for me because my father was too proud to sell our house, even for twice the money Grandpa paid for it. When I got to the lake, the Rosters filled a cooler with Diet Cokes and we sputtered to a place in the water where the lily pads thinned. Kitty’s mother rubbed oil on our backs. Kitty’s brother and father squinted silently at fishing lures. Kitty and I dangled our legs in the lake, watching skiers hunch over their handles and sprawl into nests of foam. After a while, I touched Kitty’s greasy leg. “I’m hungry,” I whispered to her. She spread herself out flat on the green felt floor: “Then eat.”

  “What?” I asked. “Your dad’s crawdads?”

  She looked at me like she’d raised me from a child, and only now did it occur to her we weren’t related.

  On Green Mountain Road, my father still dragged out screens in the spring to replace the winter storm windows. When the golfers came after lost balls, my father shook out the screens in the sun and waved a single hand at them. They prodded our tomato seedlings with clubs. My father looked at them like he was sorry they were alive. He climbed up a ladder and pulled out the storm windows one by one, opening up the house as if it were a tent he could dismantle if he chose to. He had me stand beneath the ladder and take the panes of glass: heavy, smudged by the dog’s nose, cold against my face. My arms were barely long enough to span the width of them.

  I was fifteen years old and ninety-six pounds. I had a long, long neck covered in a fine white down and big red hands like a middle-aged man. That summer my father put me to work dragging the lawnmower over the dandelions and painting the house white. I liked the bright chemical scent of the paint, the way the brush made a kissing sound on certain surfaces. Up and down the block, construction crews were driving bulldozers into our neighbors’ houses. Like the golfers, these men wore sunglasses and gloves. It embarrassed them to see a teenage girl with a paintbrush and a sunburn. They said to me, “Where’s your daddy?” and “Shouldn’t you be at camp or something?” And once, “We should get one like that for ourselves. Do you think the boss’d go for it? A little girl?”

  That summer, I let my father buy me a used bike, and crouched with him while he unstrung the chain and ran his finger along its greasy knobs. I didn’t tell him the girls from school had begun sneering at bikes, talking about the cars they would drive when they got their permits. I let my father take me to his barber, where a parrot with blue claws perched on the mirror and said, Up, up and away. The barber did my father while the barber’s son did me. He seemed sorry about what he would do. He said, You’ll be alright, putting one finger on the very top of my head as if determining my axis. I liked how his breath smelled, and later when I saw my reflection in the car window, I decided it was fine. I looked like one of those angels you see on Christmas cards: serene, boyish, alien.

  In early June, my father took me for coffee. We sat at the counter in a room called Gary’s that was a café in the morning and a bar at night. After coffee, my father wanted eggs and Cokes, and then we left and crossed the river bridge so he could show me the place on the courthouse steps where an Indian cut off both his hands. To keep from being shackled, my father said.

  “Problem was, after he got one hand off, what’s he to do with the other? Think about it. Same hand’s got to chop and be chopped.”

  I knew I needed to be brutal and clever all at once. My father fought in Vietnam and understood the intricacies of mutilation. “He threw the hatchet up in the air and let it fall on his wrist.”

  He shook his head. “Cassie. This isn’t a movie I’m talking about.”

  He turned and walked up the stairs.

  “Okay, then.” I caught up with my father. “Mr. Indian, he’s fingering his hatchet and thinking, ‘How do I kill these two birds at once?’ Wait. Who let him keep a weapon, anyway?” The marble was so white with sun, I stumbled and missed a step.

  “Let’s go,” my father said.

  “I’m going,” I said back.

  It wasn’t that he was scornful. He was just busy unwrapping a gray stick of gum. I think a teenage daughter must be like one of those lawn ornaments everybody has, one of those grotesque little gnomes that are so useless and absurd you don’t even need to look at them.

  “How about this. He propped the hatchet up and fell on it.”

  “Cassie,” he sighed. “You’re not thinking of it right.”

  That was the summer one of the junior girls slit her wrists in a porta-potty by the river. Nona Allen was one of those skulky, quiet kids so tall she’d made the male teachers nervous. They’d talked to her impatiently, as if she had been insubordinate by growing so large. After Nona’s death they felt bad about this, saying, She had such a marvelous mind. They remembered how she’d been good at math, how she’d taken the city bus to the technical college after homeroom. “We shall never know what she was capable of,” the principal declared at her memorial service. He paused to adjust the microphone on his collar, making the room ring. I sat next to my father, who was opening and closing a Bible on his knee.

  My mother was there, too. She remembered Nona fondly from when she used to come over, years ago, and entertain me and Kitty Roster while my mother took baths or shopped. Mom met us outside the funeral parlor after the service, dressed for a summer outing in a blue skirt and high heels. Beneath her eyes, she had two skin-colored tapes that didn’t match her face, which was splotchy-red and tight—from all those hours in the hot tub, I guess.

  “A shame,” she said, touching the bridge of her nose.

  My father kissed her red cheek and walked to the car.

  The next girl people talked about was a senior, and she just disappeared for a while, so there was speculation about pregnancy, anorexia. Then I spotted her again in the middle of July, wrapped in a beach towel outside the new pool. Julie had been ferocious and unpopular in school, winning track races and scholarships for college. But when I saw her that summer—outside the pool, nibbling bagels in the coffee shop—she looked fragile and spent. All her parts were so delicately fastened, her wispy hair, her new wasted limbs.

  Pn
eumonia, people said. She coughed up blood for weeks. The senior girls decided to dedicate the first summer pool party to her.

  One of these seniors, a girl I used to play softball with, stopped me at Eller’s Market in mid-June. Annie was working the checkout line, and I didn’t recognize her until she set a cabbage on her palm and made a wind-up gesture. I lifted up my hands. She grinned and put the cabbage on the scale, nicking a few buttons with her fingertips.

  “So, Cassandra.” Her eyes slid up from the register. She looked tired, her curled bangs catching on her eyebrows. I couldn’t remember what color her hair used to be, but now it was maroon as a plum. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing much.”

  “You’re starting high school, right?”

  “Yep.” I paid and looped plastic bags around my wrist.

  I started to turn away, but Annie was smiling in such an expectant way that I thought she needed something else from me. She said, “So. See you?”

  When I didn’t answer, she wrapped her hands up in her apron like a muff. A line was growing at the register.

  She shifted tactics. “Seriously, Cassandra. We should, like, hang out or something.” She waited for me to agree, and when I didn’t, she went on, almost irritably. “There’s this pool party for Julie—you know Julie?—tomorrow. Everyone will be there.”

  She raised her eyebrows. I couldn’t understand why she was smiling so hard. I stared at her for a second, and it was then that I understood we were playing a game: the one where girls defeat and own each other through public acts of kindness.

  I gripped my bags. “I’ve got work.”

  “Come after!” she persisted.

  I stood my ground, shrugged.

  She was offended. “You should see Julie!” she accused. “She’s so sick she can barely lift her head!”

  By midsummer, the neighborhood was quiet and dense with new houses: ranches with three-car garages, Greek columns on the front stoops. The contractors packed up their bulldozers and trailers and got out of town. Realtors in tight skirts wedged FOR SALE signs in the mud. They parked their tiny, foreign cars on the street, snapping pictures with digital cameras. From the roof of my father’s house, I could see them cleaning their heels on the black-tar driveways. They never looked up at me. I crouched by the chimney with a crowbar, red scabs on my knees. I plucked out flat nails one by one, then shoved the crowbar deep into the tarry skin beneath the shingles. I liked ripping away great swaths, shingle grains sliding off the roof, warm tar oozing at the edges. By the end of the day, blisters inflated my palms. My skin grew so slick with sweat, my clothes slid and drooped on my body.