by David Klass
Eventually, the lunar surface of her face is pulled toward the blackboard.
She begins to write. I have no idea what she is writing. It could be hieroglyphics and I would not notice. It could be a map to Blackbeard’s treasure and I would not care.
I am now primed. My heart is thumping against my ribs, one by one, like a hammer pounding out a musical scale on a metal keyboard. Bing. Bang. Bong. Bam. I am breathing so quickly that I cannot breathe, if that makes any sense. I must be moving off Torture Island because I can now hear every sound in the room. My peripheral vision has increased sevenfold. I believe that one of my eyes has actually slid across my face and now sits, flounder-like, atop my head.
I am aware of every single one of my classmates in anti-math class. I can see that, in a corner of the room, Karen Direggio, who I have rather cruelly nicknamed Dirigible on account of a slight weight problem and the fact that she is full of hot air, is copying formulas furiously into her notebook. And I can see that Norman Cohen, who sits to the right of Glory Hallelujah and who I have rechristened Norman Cough because of a chronic bronchial problem he has had since the fifth grade, to which the Centers for Disease Control should definitely be paying more attention, is also writing furiously.
In short, everyone in anti-math class is now preoccupied. There are only four minutes left in the period. Mrs. Moonface is filling up blackboard space at an unprecedented clip, no doubt trying to scrape every last kernel of anti-mathematical knowledge from the corncob of her brain before the bell. My classmates are racing to keep up with her. All around me pens are moving across notebooks at such a rate that ink can barely leak out and affix itself to paper.
The confluence of rapid writing on the part of Mrs. Moonface and speed-copying on the part of my classmates has created the exact double void in space and time that I need to accomplish my mission!
My moment is at hand! The great clapper in the bell of fate clangs for me! Ka-wang! Ka-wang!
My heart escapes from the cage of my ribs, swims valiantly up my aorta and into my carotid artery like a salmon heading for its ancestral breeding ground, somehow vaults the blood barrier to my brain, pushes the main switchboard operator who normally sits there and is a notorious coward out of his swivel chair, and begins pulling levers.
My right hand rises and begins to move sideways, very slowly, like a submarine, traveling at sub-desk depth to avoid teacher radar.
My right index finger makes contact with the sacred warm left wrist of Glory Hallelujah!
She looks down to see who is touching her at sub-desk depth. Spots my hand, with its precious yellow note.
Gloria understands instantly.
The exchange of the covert note is completed in a nanoinstant. Mrs. Moonface and the rest of our anti-math class have no idea that anything momentous has taken place.
I reverse the speed and direction of my right hand, and it returns safely to port.
Meanwhile, my eye—the one that has become mobile—slips down from the top of my head and finds a spot behind my right ear, which affords it a perfect view of Glory Hallelujah.
She has transferred my note to her lap and has moved her right elbow to block anyone on that side of her from seeing. The desk itself provides added shielding.
In the clever safe haven that she has created, she unfolds my note. Reads it.
Time is suddenly standing still. Literally. The sweeping second hand of our classroom’s clock is frozen at the seven.
I am watching Glory Hallelujah for the slightest hint of a reaction, which will also serve as an answer.
She does not need to speak. She does not need to check the YES or NO boxes on my note. If she merely blinks, I will understand. If she wrinkles her nose, the import of her nose wrinkle will not be lost on me. In fact, so total is my concentration in that moment of grand suspense I am absolutely positive that there is nothing that Glory Hallelujah can do, no reaction that she can give off, that I will not immediately and fully understand.
I would stake my life on it.
But what she does do is this. She folds my note back up. Without looking at me—without even an eye blink or a nose wrinkle—she raises it to her lips. For one wild instant I think that she is going to kiss it. But then her lovely lips, like twin rosebud petals in spring sunlight, spread themselves open.
Her pearly teeth part.
She eats my note.
I am happy to report that no chewing is involved. She swallows it in one gulp, like a vitamin C tablet. I watch my note slide the length of her delicate esophagus.
She still has not looked at me.
The bell rings. The double void of space and time is fractured irreparably. Everyone suddenly stands and begins packing up books. Glory Hallelujah’s friends surround her, and she is swept out of the classroom without a backward glance.
My deepest secret is now lodged, quite literally, inside of her.
8
Permit me a Father Fantasy
Here is my problem in a nutshell: polite requests for Friday night dates can be accepted or rejected, laughed at or cried over, but I believe, even with my limited experience, that they are very rarely ingested. I am having a difficult time working out the thought processes that could have led Glory Hallelujah to eat my note.
All day in anti-school, I attempted to figure out what she could have been thinking as she was swallowing. Twice as classes changed I encountered Glory Hallelujah in hallways, but she was always surrounded by friends. I had no opportunity to approach her privately and ask for an explanation. Nor did she speak to me. In fact, though I may be paranoid, Glory Hallelujah appeared to turn her head away from me when we passed each other.
So I am trying to figure out her strange note-eating behavior on my own. I have drawn up a list of possible explanations. It is now well past midnight, and while my list is not very long, I believe that I have made all the reasonable inductions, deductions, and just plain ductions that anyone could possibly draw to explain such a reaction to being asked out on a date.
I am the only one awake in my whole house. I have been working on my list, in bed, since exactly eleven minutes after eleven, when the man who is not my father pulled closed the door to the big bedroom down the hall—the room that is no longer my parents’ room, and never will be again.
permit me a father fantasy. It is odd, but I think I have never missed the man who named me after a toilet as much as I do on this night. I’m sure if he were here, instead of the brutish, snoring, pillow-bellied lout who is now sleeping next to my mother, he could explain Glory Hallelujah’s behavior to me in five seconds flat.
Here is my father fantasy. The man who named me after a toilet has come home. He has returned with a perfectly logical explanation for disappearing for nearly a decade. “I was beamed aboard a UFO, son. There was nothing I could do. I wanted to drop you and Mom a postcard, or at least give you a call, but they were hauling my ass all over the Milky Way. Took me nine years to get away and make my way back to you, but here I am now, home, to stay.”
In my father fantasy, the man who named me after a toilet is tall and handsome, but, oddly enough, he still manages to look just like me. He has an easy, generous laugh and moves with a confident, athletic grace. Watching him gives me a deep thrill—I tell myself that since I am his son, one day the laws of genetics predict that I will grow up very much like him.
We are at the park. It is Sunday morning. We are tossing a football back and forth. My father has just shown me the great male secret of how to throw a spiral. “There, son,” he says, “you’re now part of the fraternity of perfect-spiral throwers. You will now be picked first or second in every gym class you are ever in.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I say. “I always knew there was a secret, and that if somebody just showed me, I could do it as well as anyone.”
“Damn straight, son. They’re gonna be calling you Bazooka Arm from now on. And if there’s ever anything else I can help you with, now that I’m back home, you just come and ask me. The world is full
of secret knowledge, son, that men have been salting away for centuries, and it’s my job as your father to pass it on to you.”
“Well, Dad,” I say, “as a matter of fact, I do have a question for you. It’s about girls.”
My father grins. “A slightly more difficult subject than throwing the perfect spiral, son. But ask away.”
“I gave a girl a note today in class. She’s real pretty, Dad. In the note, I asked her out on a date.”
“Good for you, son. Chip off the old block.”
‘And . . . well . . . Dad, she ate my note.”
‘Ate it, son?”
“Yes, Dad. In one big gulp. And I don’t know what to make of that.”
“Son,” my father says, laying a paternal arm across my shoulders, “I’m very glad you asked me that. Because without proper guidance, you might come to think that the female mind is strange and mysterious, and that the behavior it generates is beyond your capacity to understand. But I can explain it all to you in five seconds so that it makes perfect sense. Let me tell you a story. Do you know what happened on the day I got down on my knees and asked your mother to marry me?”
“She accepted?”
“Not right away, son. First I had to present her with a ring. And do you know what she did when I held out that ring?”
“No, Dad.”
“She ate it, son. She popped that ring into her mouth and swallowed it down like a cherry pit. And, I have to admit, her response might have confused me—might have ruined the entire damned experience—if I didn’t know how to interpret it. But your grandfather understood such behavior, and he passed down the secret to me, so I was well prepared. And now, son, I will pass it on to you.”
That is, unfortunately, as far as this particular father fantasy of mine goes. In a fantasy, I cannot have my father speak knowledge to me that I myself do not own. If I could complete this fantasy, I would not need to stay up late into the night making up a short list of explanations for Gloria’s behavior, none of which I like very much.
Here are the possibilities as I see them.
First and most upsetting to me is the notion that perhaps Glory Hallelujah is not really a girl at all. It is true that she looks like a girl, acts like a girl, walks like a girl, and even gives off the perfumed aroma of a girl, but I have learned in my short life that things are not always what they seem. If my tuba can be a giant frog masquerading as a musical instrument, then it is possible that the girl of my dreams is actually not a girl at all but a hungry goat.
This makes a certain amount of logical sense. Please consider. If you pass a hungry goat a note, the goat will not nod or smile or check the YES or NO box and pass the note back. The goat will look upon your note not as a means of communication but, rather, as lunch.
Put in analogy form: a note to a goat is like a hot dog to a human.
I am having a hard time accepting this theory because it clashes so strongly with my own sensory observations. Glory Hallelujah is the girliest girl I have ever known. She is the essence of feminine, attractive girlness. Conversely, whatever that means, she is also the least goaty girl I have ever met. If she is indeed a goat pretending to be a girl, her disguise is truly magnificent.
Hypothesis two is my best-case scenario. Maybe she did not mean to eat my note. Perhaps Glory Hallelujah was raising her hand to her lips to kiss my note in a tender gesture.
It is conceivable that at the very second when she was raising my note for this completely understandable and delightful purpose, she was forced by some reflexive sneeze-squelching or belch-stifling mechanism to inhale suddenly and involuntarily through her mouth. My note became caught in the airstream and was sucked into her lungs, much as airport birds are occasionally sucked into jet engines.
This would explain why she did not try to talk to me for the rest of the day, and even seemed to look away when we passed each other in school hallways. Perhaps she is as embarrassed at having involuntarily eaten my note as I am mystified by her behavior. Mine may well be the first note she has ever accidentally eaten. She may not know how to explain herself.
The only problem with this theory is that I was watching Glory Hallelujah very carefully at the moment of note ingestion, and I saw no evidence of a sneeze or belch, even in its most formative stages. In fact, I believe that she was respirating quite normally.
I myself stifle a yawn with my right hand. It is now nearing one in the morning. I am sitting up in bed in my tiny bedroom that is not a bedroom, working on my short list by pencil flashlight beam.
The reason I must use a small flashlight is that if the man who is not my father caught me up this late, there would be hell to pay. “What’s this?” he would bellow, kicking my door wide open. “What have we here?” he would demand, yanking the covers off my bed. ‘Another dirty magazine, is it? Having fun with yourself again, are you? You disgusting filthy pervert.”
The man who is not my father is not a great believer in personal privacy, at least when I am involved. He has surprised me late at night several times. On the slightest pretext, he will search my room. The only incriminating thing he has ever found was an issue of National Geographic, which contained an article on an Amazon tribe who—no doubt because they live in a sweltering jungle—do not wear many articles of clothing.
Now, let me stress, this was in no way pornography. This was an educational article in a respectable magazine, and the accompanying photographs were selected to make anthropological points. The reason I was reading it in my bed, late at night, was because I could not sleep. And the reason I happened to be studying a photograph of a teenage girl with bare breasts was because at the moment when the man who is not my father burst in on me, I had just turned the page.
The man who is not my father carried my magazine down the hall to show my mother, shouting in a voice loud enough to be heard in Hong Kong, “Look what that filthy little pervert was getting his jollies with! Tried to hide it under the bed when I came in.”
I stood in the doorway to the hall, nearly paralyzed by anger and shame, and listened to her response.
“Oh, he’s just a growing boy, Stan. Let him be, and let’s all get some sleep. Weren’t you a boy once?”
“Not like that, thank God. Filthy little pervert.”
Luckily, on this night, I can hear the man who is not my father snoring away in the big bedroom at the end of the hall. I would call it my parents’ bedroom, but since he sleeps there, and he is not in any way a parent to me, and never will be, I will describe the room merely by its size and location.
I can hear him snoring in short, loud bursts, like a man cutting evenly sized pieces of firewood with a chain saw. He wears boxer shorts to bed, and his big hairy stomach hangs out over the elastic band of his shorts like a kangaroo pup trying to climb out of its mother’s pouch.
My mother is sleeping next to him. It is amazing that anyone can sleep with such a racket going on. But my mother worked a double shift at the factory today, and I believe that she could sleep through a cavalry charge.
Of course, if I felt really desperate, and also masochistic, whatever that means, I could ask the man who is not my father to explain Gloria’s behavior to me. I can just imagine what he would say. “Ate it, did she? Hah!” He would burst into laughter. “Serves you right, you little weirdo.”
“But why did she eat it?”
“Because she despises you,” the man who is not my father would say. “So much so that she thinks you should end up in a toilet.” He can be very vulgar, this man my mother has chosen from among the approximately two billion other candidates on earth.
But I must admit there is a part of me that thinks he would not be completely wrong in his analysis. My third and last attempt to explain Glory Hallelujah’s behavior is extremely distressing. It is possible that Gloria does not share my unbounded feelings of admiration and affection.
In my enthusiasm and inexperience, I may have misread the road signs. Instead of SPEED UP the signs may have said SLOW DOWN, C
LIFF AHEAD. It may go beyond the fact that she may not like me. She may find me unpleasant in a wide variety of ways that I do not like to think about.
Following this line of logic to its grisly conclusion, perhaps Glory Hallelujah found my request for a date so horrific, so totally revolting, and so beyond the bounds of acceptable social interchange, given our relative popularity at our anti-school, that she had to destroy it immediately.
It wasn’t enough for her to decline my offer by shaking her head side to side, or checking the NO box on the note, or even by ripping my note into small pieces. She needed to completely and utterly negate it.
By eating my note, she effectively obliterated its existence in time and space. She may have been saying to me, “You have no right to put me in the position of having to consider going on a date with you. So I am going to make your request vanish.”
This third and last theory is unpleasant to contemplate, but it does seem to have the ring of truth. Its major weakness is that it is hard for me to believe that Glory Hallelujah could dislike me so much, and that a girl with the face of an angel could ever be so cruel.
She must know how I feel about her. We have exchanged telepathic messages for months. We have passed each other the secret signals of the hair brush-back and the ear scratch.
Surely she understands that my passing her the note was not an easy thing for me to do, and that I am basically a good person, with a good heart, which beats for her and her alone.
But then there is another possibility that gives me pause.
It is possible that—like you, like Mr. Steenwilly, like everyone else in my life that is not really a life—Glory Hallelujah does not know me.
She may, in fact, not know me at all.
9
The happiest Day of My Life
The happiest day of my life begins unhappily. I wake up late, from a sleep that is not a sleep. It cannot be a real sleep because when I wake up, I am exhausted. In fact, I am far more tired than I was at three in the morning when I put away my list and my pencil flashlight and closed my eyes.