by Julia Watts
I get up from the table and scrape my plate into the trash can. “I guess I’d better start my homework.”
I close the door of my room and collapse on my bed, feeling dizzy and queasy. Danny wanted something from me I didn’t want to give him. Mom wants something from me I don’t want to give her. What about what I want? Maybe I’m no better than the dog on the chain in Jimmie-Sue Rumbley’s yard. Maybe he chases cars because he’s trying to hitch a ride, to find a way out. He doesn’t know exactly what he wants, but he knows that what he wants isn’t here.
My room feels hot and close and even tinier than usual. I get up to open the window, and it’s all I can do not to climb out of it and run. But to where? I don’t know exactly where Rufus lives, and even if I did, I’m not sure how his parents would react to me showing up unannounced. I don’t want to risk wearing out my welcome with Josephine by showing up on her doorstep. I flop back on the bed. There’s no way out.
Rufus
I CAN’T believe it’s May already. The good news is that it means school will be out soon. The bad news is that summer is on the way, and summer here in Vermillion is redundant: it’s always hellish here.
I had such a good time with Syd at Mr. D’s the other day. I think we’re going for a drive a week from Sunday—she gets to use her mom’s car on Sundays. But how to get from here to there?
Well, for one thing, I think I’m going to try to stop seeing Patrick. I know it’s not the same, but still, I mean—until Syd he’s been the only so-called friend I have, except for Josephine, and that’s different. But today he was even weirder than the last time—kind of hostile toward me even, for some reason. I don’t get it. And then, man oh man did he want me gone as soon as we’d finished. Whatever! It’s time to move on.
I was feeling pretty okay before that. Last night, or I guess I should say this morning since it ended at 2:00 a.m., I got to see Rebel Without a Cause again. It was the usual scenario: Mama and Daddy asleep in their bedroom, snoring away, and me unable to sleep. So I went into the family room and turned on TCM. I can’t begin to say how great it was to go back into my room afterward and look up at James Dean in the movie poster Josephine gave me. Mom wasn’t too happy about that—the poster, I mean, but she agreed to let me put it up because it came from Josephine: Mom’s known her family for about one hundred years, although I think she knew Josephine’s mom better than she knows Josephine. Anyway, I can’t stop thinking about a line in the movie—this is early on when they’re all at the planetarium—“We began as a burst of gas and fire.” That’s really pretty amazing, if you think about it, our blue and orange origins. Just those words alone make me see some kind of a beautiful, fiery, slow motion explosion: not exactly the way the creationists imagine it! I’m going to try to paint it with some watercolors I just got, but I’m finding them pretty frustrating. I don’t think watercolor is my medium.
I wish I could say that I feel like James Dean when he says to his parents in the movie, over and over, “It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.” But the problem is that it does matter, or at least it does to me. Everything matters.
AND SO the week drags on. Another supper with Mama and Daddy.
Tonight, it’s mac and cheese, along with frozen green peas, which I’m happy to report Mama leaves alone: no bacon grease!
They both seem to be in pretty good moods, and so I decide to tell them about Syd.
“So, I have kind of a girlfriend,” I announce shyly.
Mama’s eyebrows rise, and she sits up a little higher in her chair. Daddy just smiles.
“Oh?” Mama says. “What’s her name?”
“Syd.”
“Syd?”
I wish I could describe the look on Mama’s face. It was as if her worst nightmares were being realized.
“Short for Sydney.”
“Oh, well that’s… different, isn’t it Albert?” She looks at Daddy, as if for reassurance that Syd is a girl. “Tell us about her.”
“She’s a junior,” I begin.
“An older woman,” Daddy interrupts, winking at Mama and me.
“And she’s really smart and funny. She’s going to take me for a drive in her mama’s car next Sunday.”
“And she drives too,” Daddy says.
“Well, we’ll look forward to meeting her,” Mama says, looking like the cat just swallowed the—whatever.
I can tell this has made both her and Daddy happy. Or maybe it’s simply relief they’re feeling.
“Who are her folks?” Mama asks.
“Her last name is Simmons.”
Mama looks at Daddy. “I can’t think of any Simmons in Vermillion, can you, Albert?”
Daddy shakes his head.
“It’s just Syd and her mom,” I tell them, “and I don’t think they’ve been living here for very long. Her mom works at Hair Affair.”
“Oh,” Mama says now, obviously downcast, and a little less inflated than she had been just moments ago. “I think I’ve met her. She’s the hard-looking bleach blonde that talks like a sailor.”
I shrug, not having yet met Syd’s mom, and then that particular conversation comes to an end as Mama makes the not particularly smooth segue of moving on to tell Daddy about having gone into Famous Florists to get some flowers to take to a friend of hers that’s in the hospital. I’m tuning in and out of what she’s saying, but when she mentions Cole, the flamboyant guy who works there, I’m all ears.
“…and that poor Cole McWhorter, he was there trying to help, and he’s so… I don’t know, he’s just so slow. The boy knows his flowers, there’s no question about that, but when it came to ringing up the sale, he was just a mess!”
Now Daddy starts imitating Cole, talking with a lisp and affecting a limp wrist: “Why, Olivia Thnow, if you aren’t jutht the prettiest thing in Vermil-lion, GA, I don’t know who ith, why I do declare honey-chile!”
Mama’s laughing her head off now and protesting too much, saying, “Oh Albert! Stop it, Albert.” But she doesn’t really mean it and just keeps right on laughing.
So Daddy goes on. “How about some gladiolath for your friend? Or carnationth?”
Mama’s in hysterics. And Daddy’s laughing right along with her when he isn’t trying to impersonate Cole, which he’s doing really badly.
Whereas I’m just trying to tune them out before I completely lose my cool, because it’s really pissing me off. Fortunately, we were about finished with supper anyway, when Daddy started. So as Mama and Daddy go on laughing, I ask curtly, which of course they don’t even notice, if I can be excused.
“Go ahead, son,” Daddy says. And then I am back in my bedroom again, which I have come to realize is both my prison and also the opposite of prison. Like so many things, I guess, it all depends on how you look at it.
I throw myself down on my bed in frustration like I’ve done countless times over the years, which I notice is more and more often as time goes on. And then I begin to wonder what to do with myself. I actually do have some homework, but nothing that’s pressing, and nothing that I really feel like doing either. So I start thinking about Syd and about how much I’m looking forward to seeing her again. And I think about Daddy and Mama making fun of Cole McWhorter and how pissed off I was. I consider telling Syd about Cole, and then I sort of take that and run with it—like maybe our trying to be Cole’s friend, or at least going out of our way to be nice to him. I also wonder if Josephine knows him and imagine Cole being part of afternoons at Josephine’s, where Syd, Cole, Josephine, and I sit around drinking iced-coffee and eating cookies and watching movies. It helps me get through the night.
IT’S FINALLY Saturday, and this has been such a weird week that I don’t know where to begin. On Wednesday, this kid got beaten up after school really badly. I mean, so badly that he had to be hospitalized, and it was in the news and everything. He’s a year or two ahead of me, so I don’t really know him. Michael Foster’s his name. But here’s the thing: I’m pretty sure he’
s gay. It’s not like I’ve asked him or even tried to be his friend, because that wouldn’t be safe, but he’s small—short and thin, with blond hair in sort of a shag cut, and well, this is harder to explain, but I just feel like I know it when I see it, since I’m gay too.
Anyway, nobody was caught or arrested or anything, which makes it worse, and it also makes me worried. I could be next. You always hear about how around the country these days being gay isn’t such a big deal anymore, especially with kids, how it’s practically even cool to be gay now, and everybody just gets along. And maybe that’s true on the coasts and in big cities, but in small towns, especially small Southern towns, I don’t believe things have changed very much.
But then Wednesday was just a weird day all around. Warped Wednesday is how I think of it now. Even Syd was weird when I ran into her outside of Mr. D’s. I started feeling sad and desperate all of a sudden, like maybe she wasn’t going to be the great new friend that I’d hoped she’d be. I wanted to tell her about what happened to Michael, or at least ask her if she’d heard and if she knew him or had been in a class with him, but there wasn’t time. I’m thinking he must be a senior, which is a good thing for him because it means that he’s almost out of here, or at least almost out of Vermillion High—lucky guy. I hope he’s going to be okay.
As I was thinking about telling Syd all this, I also started wondering, for the first time, if she could be gay? I hadn’t even thought about it before. I’ve never known any lesbians—at least not that I know of. Syd’s not like any of the other girls at school. She’s probably most like Jimmie-Sue Rumbley, but not exactly. Not that it really matters one way or another. I mean, Syd is just Syd. Except that it kind of does matter, or at least it does to me. I wonder if I can just come out and ask her? If not next Sunday, maybe eventually?
I can’t help thinking that something was wrong when I saw her, though. I don’t know. It was as if she weren’t entirely there, as if her mind were somewhere else. So Thursday night I decided to call her.
“Hey, it’s Rufus,” I say when she answers the phone. I’m kind of nervous but also relieved that at least her mom didn’t answer.
“Rufus!”
“Hey,” I say again.
“Hey.”
Realizing that we need to get past “Hey,” I tell her that I was just calling to say hey and see how she’s doing.
“Counting the days,” she says. “I’m talking about next Sunday, of course. It can’t come fast enough.”
“For me too. It’s just a little over a week away.” And then we wiggle out of the conversation and hang up fast, but not before confessing to each other that we both hate talking on the phone.
AS FOR the rest of the week, given that the phone call to Syd was on Thursday night, that just leaves us with Friday—or I should say Friday night, since Friday at school was pretty boring and unnewsworthy, which in my world is not necessarily a bad thing.
It’s one of those good-news, bad-news kind of stories, so, as Bette Davis says in All About Eve, “Fasten your seat belts.”
First the bad news: Mama and Daddy had a few of their friends over for supper last night. This is such a rarity that it happens maybe once or twice a year, but these are probably their best friends, friends from church, two couples—the Merriweathers and the Joneses, as in “keeping up with,” except Mama and Daddy don’t care about keeping up with anybody, something I like about them.
The conversation consisted mostly of local gossip (especially church-related gossip) and talk of “scripture,” and of course, wouldn’t you know it, Mama revisited her trip to Famous Florist, which inspired Daddy to trot out his mean imitation of Cole McWhorter all over again. This was all before supper—and keep in mind that these aren’t the kind of people who have drinks before the meal. Instead, they were snacking on Ritz crackers topped with that gross orange aerosol cheese, and drinking ginger ale.
I didn’t know what to do with myself, to tell you the truth, and to say that I stood out in this group would be putting it mildly. I’m like about fifty years younger than most of them, pale, skinny, and an atheist. I don’t know what to say to them, and they don’t know what to say to me. And so mostly I sit back and observe, kind of like watching animals at the zoo: I like anthropology! Mr. Merriweather is my favorite. He’s one of those men who wears his pants up to his tits, and there’s just something innately funny about that. All the more so because Mr. Merriweather has this big belly, spindly arms and legs, and he’s wearing those short dress boots that some men wear. It’s all I can do to keep from laughing. But he’s actually a pretty sweet man, and I feel bad for him.
So I’m sitting there squirming and wishing the time away, and at last the time for supper comes, and as we all approach the table Mama tells everybody where to sit. Of course, I get the worse seat in the house, right next to Mr. Jones. The reason this is the worst is that Mr. Jones is something of a blowhard. He kind of reminds me of that guy who resigned as Speaker of the House—full of hot air and looks like he drinks too much, not that Mr. Jones is drinking tonight, though I think he probably tossed a few back before he came over.
Mama’s pulled out all the stops for dinner with steak, fresh broccoli, and baked potatoes, except that everything is overcooked, and I do mean everything. The broccoli looks like browning tree branches after a particularly hot summer.
Of course, Mama has to mention to everyone that I have a girlfriend, which elicits aws and sickeningly sweet smiles from the women at the table, and a pat on the back and other testosterone-fueled forms of encouragement from—well, from Mr. Jones, who’s sitting to my left, and who is immediately and overtly interested in Syd’s physical attributes.
“Tell us about the girl, Rufus. What does she look like?” With his hands he outlines an hourglass figure, and then he belches.
And that’s enough for me. I decide then and there that I am not going to drag Syd through this. “She’s pretty,” I say, and then quickly, “Mom, could you please pass the pepper?”
“I bet she is,” Mr. Jones says, unwilling to drop the subject. “Blonde hair? Stacked?”
“Jim,” Mrs. Jones says quietly. She’s a steel magnolia if there ever was one. And that does it, or at least it does it for that subject.
“So tell me, Rufus,” Mr. Jones continues bloviating, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”
Oddly enough, this is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. And rather than lie and tell him and everybody else at the table something that I think they’d like to hear (doctor, lawyer, teacher, et cetera)—I decide to come out and tell them the truth. “I think I want to be a painter.”
Mr. Jones looks at me and laughs. “Oh sure, painting houses is a fine summer job. A boy can pick up some good spending money that way. But I’m talking about when you’re an adult, after you’ve gone to college.”
“A painter,” I repeat. “A painter of pictures, an artist—like Van Gogh and Rembrandt and Picasso.”
“Oh,” Mr. Jones says, seemingly embarrassed, whereas Mama and Daddy both have blank expressions on their faces. I think they’re shocked. And also disappointed.
But I’m feeling excited because I’ve actually said it, put something that I’ve been thinking about into words and released it into the air. There’s power in that, power that I see as red, and it feels really good.
Now I can’t wait to get back to my room to continue the fantasy. I’ve read that Van Gogh may have been a synesthete too. Also Kandinsky. I’ve always loved to draw, and I’m pretty good at it too. I know that drawing isn’t the same thing as painting, especially since I prefer abstract work, but it’s a good start. And I’m going to try oils soon.
I fall asleep with vivid images of famous paintings floating through my head, along with the thought that when I wake up, it will be Sunday and only a week to go before the drive with Syd.
Syd
NO MATTER how bad my week’s been, no matter what’s bothering me, when I pull out of the driv
eway on Sunday afternoon, I feel great. It’s the only time when there’s nobody to please but myself.
Today’s extra special because it’s the first time I won’t be alone on my Sunday drive. I’m going to pick up Rufus.
The neighborhood where Rufus lives isn’t the fanciest one in town, which is reserved for the doctors, lawyers, and bankers. But it’s not too shabby either. The houses are mostly brick ranchers, not fancy but well built and well maintained. The house with the number Rufus gave me is red brick with a tan door and tan shutters. The lawn is golf-course short. It’s hard to believe this bright carpet is the same stuff that grows brown and shaggy in Mom’s and my yard. Supposedly, lawn maintenance is our landlord’s job, but he only gets around to mowing once a month or so.
I ring the doorbell, then panic that I’m at the wrong house, even though I know good and well this is the address Rufus gave me. When the door opens, I’m shocked by the appearance of the woman in front of me. Rufus said his parents were older, but this woman, with her mostly gray hair and her dowdy floral blouse, looks more like a grandmother than the mom of a kid my age. “Hello,” she says, and I see just a trace of Rufus in her smile. “You must be Syd. What an interesting hairstyle you have.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say, thinking what I know my mother would think—a good cut and color would take ten years off this woman.
“Is this the girl?” The man peeking over Mrs. Snow’s shoulder seems so different from Rufus it’s hard to believe they share any genetic material. He’s gruff and stout, with a close-clipped barbershop haircut that reminds me of the controlled neatness of the lawn.
“Hello,” I say.
“In my day it was the boy who picked up the girl to go for a Sunday drive,” he says.