by Rufi Thorpe
And on the other hand, I thought: You fucking pathetic piece of trash. Send poetry to your wife. Stop finding children to explore your romantic feelings with. Because really, what was he saying? He was saying I was the young virgin Gianna, and he was the young man wild with romance and appetite. Wasn’t that it? But he wasn’t a young man wild with romance and appetite. He was a sixty-year-old man who had made a mess of his life by refusing to be honest with himself. And it struck me as boring and gross. As boring and gross and sad as the fact that I had been having sex with adult men since I was thirteen years old because I was so ashamed of myself, and so terrified, that I didn’t think a boy my own age would be interested. I didn’t think I was worth something more normal. I didn’t think the happiness I saw all around me was on the menu for me.
I texted back, I don’t have time to go through this right now, I’m going to high school, talk to you later. By the way, do you have grandkids?
And I hit send, cruelty flushing through my veins like adrenaline, energizing my limbs with an eerie cold.
* * *
—
Bunny was not in school. Ann Marie was not in school. Naomi was in school, and even though we sometimes ate lunch together with Bunny, when I saw her in the cafeteria, sitting with the rest of the volleyball team, she wouldn’t meet my gaze, and I understood that she would not be sitting with me or being seen with me or associated with me in any way. And it made sense. She was going to jettison Bunny as quickly as a sandbag falling hoists a piece of scenery out of view in a play. Naomi was here to win. An association with Bunny would only harm her standing on the team and more largely in the school. In fact, without Bunny, she was the uncontested star player of the team and would stand out even more strikingly to recruiters. I also think Naomi was truly disgusted by Bunny’s behavior. And why shouldn’t she be?
In thinking about all of this, I realized that no matter what happened, even if all charges were dropped, even in a best-case scenario, there was no way that Bunny would be allowed back on the team. Her volleyball career was effectively over. It appeared that now she would be six foot three for no particular reason.
I wondered how things had gone at the police station, or if perhaps she was still there. I wondered whether she was under arrest. Or getting her hand X-rayed at Urgent Care. Or sitting at home watching RuPaul and understanding piece by piece that her life was ruined. Maybe that was a dramatic way of putting it. She was still a young white woman after all. There was still that marble kitchen, though we had not been able to get up the wine stains, blurry rust-colored splashes that we had coated in baking soda because the internet told us to. Her father would undoubtedly be able to afford to send her to college. Though her grades were bad. That had never seemed to matter because of the volleyball, but now it didn’t seem good. But she could go to community college.
Unless she was in jail. Though she probably wouldn’t go to jail. She had no priors. Her father was rich and powerful. So much depended, I realized, on Ann Marie.
I wondered how her surgery had gone.
* * *
—
When I got out of school, I had a text from Anthony. It said, I wonder why you would say something so hurtful to me. No, I do not have grandchildren. Why would you ask that?
I read the message over and over as I walked, and I didn’t know what I wanted to say back. I wasn’t sure why I was so angry at Anthony. It wasn’t really that I was angry with him for lying. The issue was not trust. I didn’t trust anyone, and the idea of expecting to trust someone and then being miffed to discover I could not seemed a luxury so laughable I could have spit on the floor like Naomi. No, it was not that Anthony had betrayed my trust. It was simply that he was older than I thought he was and that made him seem pathetic to me, and it made me feel pathetic for loving him, and I did love him.
So gross, Ann Marie’s voice said helpfully in my mind. What a pedo. He could be your granddad.
How can you touch his wrinkly old skin?
What does he even smell like? Like old sweaters? Like talcum powder?
I realized that what was unworthy in Anthony, what was so deeply uncool about being old, was that he was closer to death. And we disdained death, didn’t we? The glossy young. We looked at death and wrinkled our noses, rolled our eyes: yuck. We would have shiny hard penises forever. We would cuddle only the most velvety vulvas. Our cells would always have perfect plump walls. Our mitochondria would gush ATP like limitless fountains. We would stay young by fucking young, and we would never fuck the old, because that was how death got in—through your skin. Through your heart.
I got to Bunny’s house and rang the doorbell, but there was no answer. I opened her side gate and went around the back and peered in the windows, but I couldn’t see anyone. I had texted her several times throughout the day with no response. It didn’t seem like a good sign. I turned and looked at her pool, and I had the instinct to swim, but it was too cold. I looked up the bus routes instead. It would take two hours to get to Cedars-Sinai, where Ann Marie was.
I sat on Bunny’s patio furniture, examining my motivations. It wasn’t exactly that I wanted to spy on Ann Marie so that I could report to Bunny on her medical condition, though, of course, I was desperate for any new information so that I could adjust my own internal Vegas odds on how things would play out legally for Bunny. Goodness knows I did not expect to speak to Ann Marie herself, since she was supposed to be in a coma. If anything, the fact that she was in a coma made visiting her more appealing. I was not sure I could have handled an awake Ann Marie, not least because she wouldn’t be at all glad to see me. But I did not want to go home and run the risk of having some kind of conversation with Jason or Aunt Deedee. I would delay opening that envelope for as long as I could.
I suppose what I wanted most was to see Ann Marie’s mother, Ms. Harriet, and bring flowers, and try my best to indicate that whatever Ann Marie had said about me, she hadn’t deserved this.
I boarded the 625 bus on Main Street, holding the outrageously overpriced flowers I had bought from the local florist. As gouged as I felt by the price, the experience of buying the flowers had been nice. The woman who ran the shop had a black cat and he sat regally, as though it were a throne, on a child’s armchair arranged artfully in the window of the shop, surrounded by buckets and buckets of flowers. She had picked out yellow and pink tulips and tied them up with scraggly brown string that looked like a thousand women’s Pinterest wet dreams.
The bouquet looked strange to me, in my own hands, as I boarded the bus. How weird it was—to cut off the sexual organs of plants and give them to each other. I hoped Ms. Harriet would not see the stamens tucked inside the tulips as tiny penises the way I did. I hoped they would look like regular flowers to her, and I would look like a regular boy.
* * *
—
I had not anticipated how restrictive the visitation policy would be, and I was surprised, when I finally found Ann Marie’s floor in the Saperstein Critical Care Tower, to speak to the nurse at the front desk and be told that I could most definitely not enter. “I brought flowers,” I said. “Maybe I could just leave them?”
“Sure you can,” the nurse said.
I frowned. I did not have a card, or even a piece of paper on which to write my name or explain whom they were from. I had ridden two hours on three different buses to get here. The nurse was jarring to me in her calm casualness. After all, she was at work. This was a regular day for her, and here was a kid hemming and hawing with flowers, and she didn’t have time to deal with him, did she?
Then Ms. Harriet, Ann Marie’s mother, appeared and saved me.
“My lord, it’s Michael Hesketh,” she proclaimed in that low voice of hers. “Come here and hug me, son,” she said. “Oh, you brought flowers. Bless your heart. Don’t tell me you think this was your fault.”
I walked toward her in the hall and sh
e folded me up into a fierce hug. Her arms felt like iron bars through her sweater. “I was going to the cafeteria, care to join me?”
I walked with her to the elevators, still carrying the flowers she had not taken from me, grateful to be in the sway of her powerful and practical energy. Ms. Harriet had the peculiar ability of collapsing things flat. Of turning shades of gray back into black and white. As soon as the elevator doors closed on us, she said, “I want you to know, before we continue any further, that I’m deeply ashamed that Ann Marie was picking on you like that. Not that it excuses Bunny Lampert, obviously, but I want you to know, I did not raise my daughter to be a homophobe or a gossip. I don’t hold with that.”
I blushed and stared down at the floor of the elevator. “Oh, gosh, Ms. Harriet, you don’t have to—”
“You know the part of this I still cannot fathom?” Ms. Harriet said. I looked up at her to meet her gaze and realized that her blue eyes were half-insane. “That it was Bunny. I just—you know, I helped raise her. She always seemed like such a good egg to me. Which just goes to show—” She gestured wildly with her arms in the elevator and I had no idea what it went to show.
“It just goes to show,” Ms. Harriet said, as the doors dinged open on the busy scene of the cafeteria, “it’s always the preacher’s son. Doesn’t matter what you teach them, it’s what’s in them at the start.”
I nodded and followed her as we entered the line to order.
“Look, they have chili,” Ms. Harriet said. “I wonder if it’s good.”
While it felt surreal to be expected to genuinely provide insight as to the quality of the hospital chili, Ms. Harriet’s only child was upstairs in a medically induced coma, her brain so swollen they’d drilled a hole in her skull. I myself had seen her nose pushed under her left eye, like a Picasso. Ms. Harriet had carte blanche to say whatever the fuck she wanted.
“What are you getting?” she asked me.
“Probably just this banana,” I said, holding it up.
“Get some real food,” she urged. “Get the tuna melt, and that way if my chili is mediocre, then I can have some of yours. My treat. Oh, but look, they have taco bowls.”
In the end, we wound up ordering all three entrées, as well as a Diet Dr Pepper and a large black coffee. We settled with our food at one of the tables. The cafeteria furnishings were nice, but there were no windows and the light was bad and bright in a way that reminded me of the Rite Aid.
“I just—I kind of wonder if she had some kind of break.”
“Bunny?” I asked.
Ms. Harriet was blowing on her chili, looking expectantly at me. I did not want to give too much away, wasn’t sure if I should play into or deny such a break. There was too much at stake legally.
“I have no idea,” I said. “I don’t know how that stuff works.”
“Her poor father,” Ms. Harriet said.
“Yeah,” I said, though I found this surprising. I would have thought a person like Ray Lampert would be anathema to a practical being like Ms. Harriet.
“I mean, he worked so hard to make her mother happy. You should have seen. Night and day, that man went around, rearranging life itself to make opportunities where there were none. He built this town. He really did. And he worshipped her. Would have done anything for her.” She tsked. “Maybe Bunny was more like her mother than I thought.”
“I never knew Allison,” I said. “I moved here after she died.”
“Oh, well, she wasn’t unlikable or anything. But still. You know. Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. And don’t think I’m speaking ill of the dead, I’d say the same thing about my own daughter. I’ve always said Ann Marie has too much of her father in her. Got his golden hair and his utter disregard for other people’s feelings. Can’t fake that kind of thing. It’s in you or it’s not.” She stabbed her plastic spoon repeatedly into her chili, as though the beans needed loosening.
“Do you feel Allison had some kind of moral failing?” I asked.
“Listen,” Ms. Harriet said, “I don’t gossip. Okay. I don’t. Your business is your business, and my business is my business. But when you bring your business into my workplace? It becomes my business.”
“Are you talking about Mr. Brandon?” I asked.
“That poor boy,” Ms. Harriet said.
“I never heard that story,” I said. “I don’t even know what happened.”
“Nothing happened,” Ms. Harriet barked, laughing. “I mean, a lot worse could have happened! Those two were carrying on, and at first I thought it was just a flirtation. Everybody has that, a joke or a smile at pickup or drop-off. That kind of thing is harmless for most people, and I assumed that was how it was for them, though to me personally Brandon was a little bit young for a grown woman to be flirting with to make herself feel better, if you know what I mean. But anyway, that’s what I thought it was. And then one day, I find them making out like teenagers in the church basement. Brandon was supposed to be on his lunch break. I was like, all right, all right, not here. I don’t want to see it, I don’t want to hear it, I don’t want to know about it, as far as I’m concerned this never happened. What I should have done was fire him. Right then and there.” She shook her head, ate several more bites of chili.
“But I didn’t. To be honest, I liked Brandon too. He was such a handsome kid, and sweet in this sleepy way, and so patient with the kids. He was valuable to me. It’s good for kids to be taken care of by men as well as women, helps them be more balanced, and believe me they follow the rules better for men too! I always like to have a man or two around, but it makes parents nervous, so you have to really find the right kind. Anyway, I didn’t fire Brandon, and as far as I knew it had petered out, but then when she killed herself like that.”
“When who killed herself?”
“Allison,” Ms. Harriet said, giving me side-eye like I was slow.
“I thought she was in a car accident,” I said.
“She drove into oncoming traffic stone-cold sober in the middle of a weekday,” Ms. Harriet said.
“But, I mean, did they rule it a suicide?”
“Whatever you want to call it,” Ms. Harriet said, “the fact is that woman was stone-cold sober and drove into oncoming traffic on a Wednesday. Call it what you want.”
“So, wait—I’m just trying to get the timeline straight. Because what reason would Allison even have to go to the preschool, wasn’t Bunny in school by this point?”
“Exactly, though. Exactly my point. She would drop off things for him, bring him cookies she baked, and I’m like, lady, you don’t even have a kid here anymore!”
“And then what happened to Brandon when she died?”
“He was hurting,” Ms. Harriet said, nodding emphatically. “He couldn’t talk about it, but he was hurting. Like the whole world just faded to black and white. All the magic just went out. Wham. And I kept saying, Brandon, the Lord has a plan for you! The Lord always has a plan. But he was too far gone. I couldn’t reach him.”
She shook her head sadly, as though she could have or should have been able to reach anyone, as though she saw herself as that kind of person. For myself, I could not imagine anything worse than being at a low point in my life and then interacting with Ms. Harriet. To discuss one’s innermost feelings with Ms. Harriet would be like allowing one’s eyeballs to be abraded by a scouring pad soaked in bleach.
Had Ann Marie turned out to be such a lying, conniving sociopath because her father had handed down douche-genes, or because her mother had never loved her? Though of course Ms. Harriet thought of herself as a loving mother. Ms. Harriet lived in a world of doing, where her actions were as clean and formulaic as a sheet of Lego instructions. To clothe the child and feed the child and teach the child is to love the child. Those actions are the same as the metaphysical state for a person like Ms. Harriet.
For instanc
e right now, hadn’t she rescued me in the hallway? Wasn’t she feeding me, comforting me? I was sure I would wind up in her evening prayers that night, and I was sure she would look back on the way she had absolved me, forgiven me, “Don’t tell me you think this was your fault,” and she would feel pride. She would never perceive herself as using even this meager opportunity to spread damaging, toxic gossip about a woman long dead. She was being so kind as to extend her sympathy to Bunny, who had obviously lost it or had some kind of “break”—whatever it was, it was obviously not normal, it was obviously sick and pathological and other and monstrous, and obviously we could never look at Bunny the same way, could we? No, we could never see her the same way, the same way we could never look at her mother the same way, for what Allison had done was also disgusting. A younger man. The selfishness of the affair compounded by the selfishness of the suicide. She was not a proper woman, not a clean and godly woman, and hadn’t we all known Bunny was not a proper girl either? I mean, she was too large, wasn’t she? We had all known when she grew too big that there was something wrong with her, and we should not be surprised now that the something wrong had come to light, and that the monster had been exposed for what it was.
“He never should have let that girl play sports,” Ms. Harriet said, out of nowhere.
“Bunny?”
“It’s what made her violent, I bet.” She stared off into the middle distance, as though her own daughter did not also play sports.
That was the thing that was turning out to be most difficult about being a person. The people I had the most sympathy for were almost never the ones everyone else felt sympathy for. I should have felt sympathy for Ann Marie. Everyone else did. Everyone else took selfies in the waiting room with crying-eye emojis. Everyone else saw in her homely features and glossy blond hair something vulnerable and sweet. But I had never liked Ann Marie and I could not start now, even if she was in a coma. And I had always liked Bunny and I could not hate her now, even if she was a monster. Nor could I hate Allison for whatever she had done with Mr. Brandon. Nor could I hate my mother.