I’ll admit to that last part anyway.
The Meat Tree
We never knew what happened to him, the missing kid, the third-grader, nobody did, but it didn’t matter: our pregnant mothers saw his face at every stoplight, his name stapled to telephone poles, and drove the careful ways home then sat in the car with both hands on the wheel. Our fathers never knew, not until we came home from kindergarten with a teacher’s note that we needed our last names on our lunchboxes too. Because all of us born in 1978 were named after Jeremy Michaels. It was a trade, I think—letting Jeremy live on through us, just so long as we lived. Didn’t fade away like he had.
I became interested in him at sixteen. In Jeremy.
By college it was more than interest.
He would have been in his thirties by then. I missed a test to meet a girl who was supposed to have a vintage flyer of him from some telephone pole her uncle had stolen because it was evidence of his drunk driving, but she never showed up, and after missing the test I had to drop the class, and then the rest just fell away, like I had been wearing glass clothes all my life and was just moving wrong now, breaking a sleeve off here, a lapel there. My mother called and I told her I was taking a semester off. I could hear her holding her hand over the receiver on her end. My father lied that he understood, and I appreciated that, from him.
The girl with the flyer called me just before Christmas break, talking about how she still had that flyer, did I still have that twenty? We agreed to meet at a sports bar just off campus, Tanner’s, but she stood me up again, and I watched the students walk by with their backpacks slung over their shoulders. They were all imitating each other, it seemed.
I moved across town to not have to watch them anymore—or pay college rent—and then one morning I opened my door and there she was, Lorinda. I should have known right then, too: it was a fairy-tale name, the kind a little girl would pick. But I thought it was beautiful. She was the first girl to see my place.
“So?” I asked her, after all this time.
She looked away from the question, across the bulletin boards I had balanced on the piece of molding that met the paneling halfway up the wall. It was a delicate job; I couldn’t find nails that would go into the cinderblock of the upper wall.
“They’re all empty,” she said, the bulletin boards.
I shrugged. I’d tried putting tacks on them, but it made them overbalance. And sometimes they fell over anyway, clapping onto the linoleum in the middle of the night so that when I woke the papers on my nightstand would still be fluttering, like someone had just stepped away.
“I’m waiting to put flyers there,” I told her.
She smiled.
We went to Tanner’s and it lasted all afternoon. I was cynical by then, of course, nodding hello to each fratboy who passed our table, daring him to acknowledge me.
Lorinda wasn’t in school anymore either, so we had that. She did lower her head some when a group of guys fresh out of poli-sci or mass-comm bunched in, but she made it look natural by adjusting and re-adjusting the hasp of her necklace. It made her hair hide her face some. I scanned the guys, trying to pick which one—see if I looked enough like any of them—but they were all clones, stamped out years ago, their childhoods mapped already, positions waiting for them at their fathers’ firms.
“No,” Lorinda said, about the flyer. “My uncle, I don’t know. He says he thinks he burned it at Thanksgiving. The pole.”
“Thinks?”
Now she shrugged. “The ash was all clumpy, anyway,” she said, “from the resin or—”
“Creosote,” I filled in.
In addition to being cynical, I was also self-conscious about my education. Later Lorinda would teach me I didn’t have to be smart all the time. But right then the flyer was the only thing that mattered: Did she ever see it? What did Ur-Jeremy look like?
“Ur-Jeremy?” she asked, as if she’d missed the joke.
The group of guys across the bar exploded around a video-poker machine, falling all over each other. The machine flashed and flashed, and not one of them really needed it for rent.
“As in the first,” I said. “It’s . . . I don’t know. The prefix means old or something.”
“From the Bible,” she said, “ziggurat . . . ”
I shrugged maybe, yeah.
She said she had seen it a long time ago, the flyer, and then apologized again for not having it with her like she’d said.
I told her I didn’t have any money anyway.
She was looking at me in a different way now, though.
“He your brother or something?” she asked.
I shook my head no.
“Because you look the same”—reaching across, for the hair over my ear—“here, and something about the space between the eyes. No, it’s the temples.”
He’d been in third grade when he disappeared. The photo was his class photo.
I was twenty-two.
I ordered a chicken sandwich and Lorinda ordered a chef salad with the turkey on the side. When it came she slid the little container of meat across to me, and just on principle I didn’t take it.
“At least let me show you,” she said, finished with her salad before it was even half gone.
I looked at her and past her to the campus and said sure, anything, then that afternoon at her place—eighth floor, smallish balcony, the whole year’s lease prepaid by her father, blood money she called it—Lorinda sat me in a chair in her kitchen and shaped my hair like Jeremy Michael’s. I could feel myself disappearing; at one point she had to straddle my leg to get the right angle on my head, and the denim sound of her inner thighs filled the small apartment.
“So why all the corkboard?” she asked, the comb in her teeth. “Waiting for the big flood or something?”
“You shouldn’t let strange guys up here like this,” I told her.
“I’ve known you for months,” she said.
I didn’t tell her she was the reason I was taking the semester off. Mostly because I still didn’t know how long this semester was going to be for me.
But the bulletin board, the cork.
I made up a theory for her, that the kitchen was the center of American family life not because of food, but information, cycling past under the nostalgic magnets of the refrigerator, that that was why we stood around in kitchens all the time. And it was only natural that we would eat, right? Surrounded by food like that? It was America’s weight problem; I was rolling, smart, didn’t need anything from any classroom. I told her that if we just had that kind of regularly-updated information—snapshots, lists, appointments, flyers—thumb-tacked on all the walls of the living room, the hall, the porch, then maybe as a country we could—
“—burn calories walking all over the house looking for the grocery list that should’ve just been in one place?” she said.
“Got to have money for groceries,” I said.
“Or flyers,” she said back, quieter, then before I could look up for the kind of smile she had she was leading me by the hand to the balcony, making me lean over the rail while she lifted the sheet off. My hair drifted down into traffic.
“You do look a lot like him,” she said.
We were standing right across from each other. The balcony was that tight, that close.
I stepped back inside, away from her, from being that close to her and not knowing what to do with my hands, and walked through the only other door. It was her bedroom, the bath right off it. I framed my face in her medicine-chest mirror.
I wanted to write have you seen this boy? in soap on the mirror, but it wasn’t my soap, and it wasn’t 1978.
She let me stand there alone until I was done.
I found her in the living room washing vegetables in a sieve. It was more of a sink job, really, but I didn’t ask; I was the one trying to look like the missing kid, after all.
“Jeremy,” she said.
I nodded.
“My phone used to ring in junior high,” I t
old her. “But nobody was there.”
She looked up at me for more, and maybe that was when I fell into whatever I fell into with her.
“I knew it was him, though,” I said, “them, I mean. The Michaels. Maybe they called all of us like that.”
“You think they . . . they never stopped looking—?”
“No,” I said. “Would you?”
She was washing carrots and broccoli, and looking out her eighth-floor apartment window, surrounded by the clutter I could tell was just there to show her father that this apartment would never be good enough to make up for whatever he owed her, whatever he’d done. I didn’t ask. I knew he’d never been over to see it, though. Before I left, to walk the streets like Jeremy Michaels—before I had to leave, or risk embarrassing myself with her in some awkward way—she took a picture of me without asking.
“Now I’ve got you,” she said, holding the camera with both hands.
I shrugged, blinked long from the flash, and walked out.
Two weeks later I saw her at Tanner’s. She was moving from station to station along the salad bar. Aside from one busser, we were the only people in the room, all the students gone for Christmas.
I sat down across from her.
“Vegetarian?” I said.
“Kind of a personal question,” she said back, biting a cherry tomato in half, narrowing her eyes at me in play. I ordered a chicken sandwich again and the busser mumbled it to himself all the way back to the kitchen, so he wouldn’t forget.
“Personal?” I said back when I could, then went into how I could tell she was, say, white, American, female. “Maybe we should all walk around in big cardboard tubes,” I added. “Write on the outside just the stuff we want people to know.”
She shook her head, speared some lettuce.
“What about when it rained?” she said.
I told her we’d all lie on our sides and roll down the street. She laughed, not because it was funny or even a good answer, but because she was thinking of tubes with eye holes and umbrellas. She paid for both our meals.
“Blood money?” I asked.
“Any other kind?” she asked back.
We were walking down the street by campus. It was all tattoo shops and paddle-stores and pizza; I was morally against pizza—coffee too—but it was still too early in the relationship to tell her that.
“Why don’t you go home for the holidays?” she asked.
I shrugged.
“You should go to the Michaels’,” she said. “Just show up in a coat and earmuffs and say you got lost coming off the bus or something, back then.”
I could see myself doing it, too.
“People are easy at Christmas,” I said.
She didn’t say yes and she didn’t say no.
That night I would wake in her bedroom, in her bed, and the junk mail on the cardboard box she used as a nightstand would be fluttering and I would think someone had just been standing there, but when I rose to pull the balcony doors to, her hand would be on my wrist, and she would pull me back into her, saying it for me again: people are easy at Christmas.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go home, it was that I wanted home to be different, somehow. Like here, maybe, like her: she didn’t know we were all named Jeremy, that we were all missing, living out different versions of his cut-short life.
“Where do you get your protein?” I asked her the next morning, standing before the garden the refrigerator was.
“You don’t need as much as you’re conditioned to think you need,” she said.
Maybe. I took the switchback stairs down eight flights anyway though, for the plastic beef-jerky the convenience store had by the register.
The clerk watched me eat.
“Good?” he asked.
“Necessary,” I said back, peeling another—an urban chimp—and then sat on the stoop in front of her building, imagining she was standing on the balcony eight stories up right then, looking for me when I was right here. It was a fairy tale; I was already in it with her.
Just like I’d done with school, I let my apartment slip too, even the bulletin boards. I told myself I was just making my life more simple, sloughing off the trappings, all that, but then over a lunch of macaroni one day Lorinda pared it down for me: what I had amounted to survivor’s guilt. And all survivor’s guilt was was a kind of death-envy.
She would only eat the macaroni that came from a box, because there the dairy was imitation, the powder-version of stadium cheese.
I still hadn’t figured out why she was interested in me. It was more than interest though, too. Her father had done some kind of number on her, it seemed: sex for her was something to conquer, to win at. I had to eat the beef jerky down at the convenience store just to keep my strength up. And to rest. She started giving me money for it, even, the beef jerky, until I had to ask her where it was coming from. Neither of us was working.
“A trust,” she said. “Insurance.”
I watched her hard.
“But I thought your father—”
“He just has to sign,” she said, already dismissing the subject.
I told myself it didn’t matter as long as it kept coming, and in that way I was like the frat boys I used to stare down at the fringes of campus, and I knew it even then. But it was nice.
We went to her uncle’s so I could see the ash pile that had been one of the telephone poles. He gave us each a bottle of beer at the front door then led us around the obstacle course the side of the house was to the backyard. It was the middle of January by now. He was leaning-back drunk, like the heels of his boots were gone, or the ground soft, or the world just spinning too fast.
We stared at the ashes and he remembered aloud his girlfriend in ’78, how she thought she was psychic, could see little Jeremy floating in a septic tank just outside town. It was like we weren’t even there, like he was channeling his old girlfriend’s sessions. We left our second beers halfway full, balanced on the bed rail of an old pick-up he was using for trash storage.
“I’m sorry,” Lorinda said. “Have you never seen one?”
“An uncle?” I asked.
She smiled, took my arm at the top and at the bottom, where it was important.
“A flyer,” she said.
I couldn’t remember anymore. It seemed like I had, though.
That night when I woke she was gone. The apartment was dark. I walked through it touching the walls, running my hand along the counter tops, the windowsills. The balcony door was open and I stepped outside in my underwear, trying to get sick. Death-envy; I almost said it out loud.
The only thing I’d brought with me from my place was my box of books. Just trucking them around made me feel educated, noble in a surly, down-trodden way I needed. I’d offered to sell them for grocery money, but it was just an offer. Right then the only thing I was dreading was the phone bill, because my mother was going to show up on it as ten digits. We hadn’t said anything real, but still, sometimes it took hours to get even that far.
“I was worried,” Lorinda said, suddenly behind me, around my sides.
“Me too,” I said.
We stood together not knowing anything and watching the third shift crowd wend home, their eyes hooded against the sun.
The next morning when I woke, Jeremy Michael’s flyer was taped to the medicine chest mirror. Like a delayed reflection from the first time I’d been here.
“Where’d you get it?” I asked her over her morning fruit ritual.
I did look like him.
“My uncle,” she said, but it was too unfolded, too well-preserved to have come from his house.
She had an envelope of money, too.
I stared at her and stared at her then followed the handrail downstairs to the convenience store, only didn’t have any change for the beef jerky. A different clerk was working—meaning no credit—so I walked along the edge of Lorinda’s building until dollar bills started raining down from the sky. I caught them and caught the
m and forgave her for whatever I knew I should be holding against her, and then, when I pushed open the door of her apartment, she took another picture of me and ran for the bed.
I followed.
The next time she went missing I went to her uncle’s house. It was the only place I thought she could be. She wasn’t, though, and, standing on the porch with one of his beers in my hand I realized I didn’t know her last name. Maybe in fairy tales you don’t have to have last names, though, because each first name is so individual. And because you never know who your father was, what your patronym should be, what you’ve inherited. She was the only Lorinda I’d ever known. Her uncle called her Lindy. We sat on the couch while his wife worked in the kitchen—some kind of telemarketing she didn’t have to take notes for, as she was painting her nails the whole time—and on the third beer I asked him if maybe she just got lost on the way to the bathroom, Lorinda.
“She hasn’t told you?” he said.
I took another beer, shook my head no, and treated him to Tanner’s. It was the only place I knew anymore. Class was back in session, and I was proud to be there with her uncle—to be there drunk with Lorinda’s uncle, occupying a full corner of the bar. We were unapproachable.
He told me yes, maybe she had got lost. It wouldn’t be the first time.
I didn’t interrupt him with any questions, and he thumbnailed it for me: that when she was ten—1988—she’d gone missing for three weeks. The big disappearing act. Little Girl Lost. It was in all the papers; her picture was up there too, stapled to the telephone poles already bristling with staples. As he talked I was falling more and more in love with her: of course she would be drawn to me—I was still looking for the girl she’d been ten years ago. And she was helping me.
The Ones That Got Away Page 20