by Amy Jo Burns
The winter of 1992 groans into spring as Mr. Lotte’s investigation finally comes to an end and mothers everywhere breathe a collective sigh. After months of shushing their children’s questions and swapping rumors with each other during the commercial breaks of their afternoon soaps, things will finally return to normal. Won’t they?
See, there’s an odd stench in the May air, and it puts us all on edge. Some people are beginning to suspect that Mr. Lotte did actually do it, and things in Mercury are starting to stink. Our fifth-grade social studies teacher, Mrs. Voos, does what she can to keep us on track, especially since it’s the end of the year and all we can think about are Popsicles and pool parties. She has a much easier task than the sixth-grade teachers, who are all worried about their fellow educator and friend Mr. Lotte. The students are worried, too, and to show their devotion, Mr. Lotte is named their favorite teacher in the latest issue of our school newspaper. Someone also started a collection for his legal fees, asking schoolteachers to donate a hundred dollars each. Rumor stated that one of them even gave a thousand to the cause.
It’s hard for us all to stay focused, but every day, Mrs. Voos stands in front of the chalkboard, her black orthopedic shoes spread wide. The early signs of Parkinson’s disease cause the fingers of her right hand to rattle against the slate. Her penmanship has been in steady decline since the fall, and her sentences written on the board tend to look like they’re going down a flight of stairs. It’s hot out; a fan slowly turns at the side of the room. The sleeves of Mrs. Voos’s floral muumuu flutter. She’s teaching us to memorize all of the states in alphabetical order. In music class, we’re learning a song about the presidents.
Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, James K. Polk, and Zachary Taylor
She makes us color portraits of each of the forty-one American presidents, which we think is stupid. A string of men with white faces and white hair. What’s to color? There is no peach-colored pencil, so all of their faces look either jaundiced or burnt. It’s a waste of perfectly good drawing paper, and Mrs. Voos gives out more B’s than A’s.
Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy
She tells us over and over about the day President Kennedy died, as if it’s a movie reel soldered into the backs of her eyelids. “We all went home,” she warbles. “Everything closed. And we all just cried and cried and cried. He was the best president this country has ever had. He was so handsome.”
Mrs. Voos tells us she doesn’t believe the rumors that he cheated on Jackie Kennedy. Everyone knows rumors are started by jealous girls. She also feels it’s quite important that we know that Kennedy’s secretary’s name was Lincoln, and Lincoln’s secretary’s name was Kennedy. “A conspiracy!” she calls it. And don’t forget that Lincoln was shot in Ford’s Theatre, and Kennedy was shot while riding in a Lincoln, which is made by Ford. Conspiracy! That word has become quite popular in Mercury these days.
We also learn all of the states and their capitals in alphabetical order.
Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware Florida
Sometimes when we are supposed to be learning about Tallahassee and Ponce de Leon, Mrs. Voos tells us about her husband instead. “He’s waiting for me in Florida,” she likes to say. “He’s waiting. He’s waiting and he can’t wait for me to join him. He can’t wait.”
One day near the end of May, Principal Mellon’s gravel voice comes on the PA system. “Attention. Attention everyone.” He stops abruptly to tend to his smoker’s cough. “There’s been an explosion at the car dillership dahn the road. We’re gonna evacuate the school. We’re all gonna walk dahn to the high school.”
In Mrs. Voos’s class, Lorenzo Burk begins to cry. His father works in the auto shop at the dealership. “Quit it,” Mrs. Voos says. “It’s time to walk.”
We walk through town, making a snaking line of lunch boxes, math workbooks, and dirty shoelaces to the high school where the buses are waiting to take us all home. Mrs. Voos drives her car to the high school, a mossy green Lincoln, made by Ford. Lorenzo cries almost the whole way. It’s a beautiful day. The air smells like plastic.
In the parking lot, Lorenzo’s mother is there waiting for him. He finds out his father survived the propane explosion. No one was hurt, even though the whole building was destroyed.
“See?” Mrs. Voos says. “I told you.” She hobbles away toward her Lincoln.
“My husband doesn’t like me driving everywhere by myself,” she likes to say. “He doesn’t like it.”
We all think Mrs. Voos’s husband has left her, but none of us wants to be the one to break it to her because it’s the illusion that seems to keep her going. There are only a few days of school left before summer vacation, and no one sees Mrs. Voos again after that. We hear that she’s fallen ill and is staying at home. We picture her sitting on a sofa with a ratty afghan across her ample lap, looking out her window toward the street, perhaps pondering the coincidence that both Lincoln and Kennedy were succeeded by men named Johnson.
While the air is still full of soot, Howard Lotte delivers a plot twist that makes the entire town gasp. We hear about it in school in the liminal space between the explosion and summer break. In May, Lotte hosts his final year-end recital near the center of town at Holy Ebenezer Chapel, a tiny white-and-black church with a red door. Soon, the formal court proceedings are scheduled to begin and everyone assumes Mr. Lotte is ready for a fight.
Right before the recital’s reception, he dismisses the children to the basement for cake and punch while he addresses the parents, who—all still staunch supporters—have kept their daughters enrolled in piano lessons, testimonies be damned. He stands at the front of the chapel and looks out at the clots of parents seated throughout the pews. He tells them what a difficult year it’s been (health problems and all) and that he’s decided to give up the fight and plead guilty to the charges. So the girls won’t have to go through the trial, he says. They’ve been through enough.
Mr. Lotte, not yet fifty years old, has resigned himself to Rust Belt martyrdom, but not if his supporters have anything to say about it. Before his sentence hearing on August 28, 1992, the judge receives more letters on Lotte’s behalf. One writer takes the liberty to speak for many by stating that “it is our strong personal opinion that the only reason Howard pled guilty was his concern for the financial future of his family.” Someone else points out Mr. Lotte’s act of throwing himself on his own sword “speaks to his concern for the students.” Mouths across town are lifting up the Lottes in prayer, as another concerned citizen shares with the judge, “My prayer is that his guilty plea is not the result of poor attorney advice.”
One thing is clear—the town has had it up to here with this whole thing. Even if Lotte did touch the girls, is that really so bad? Is it worth all the dissention? We’re a community, for Christ’s sake. What will parents tell their children who have been assured of Lotte’s innocence? As the news spreads from one stop sign to the next about Mr. Lotte’s guilty plea, weary housewives sigh and look at their husbands as if to say, “Oh, now I have this mess to clean up, too?”
The impossible part is admitting that Lotte might be guilty, that he might have fooled us all, that everyone might have been wrong about him from the very start, and no one will even entertain the thought. Just like Mrs. Voos who keeps the candle of her heart lit for a husband who isn’t returning, the people of Mercury know how to go down with a sinking ship.
PART II
Simon Says
Sober
JUST AS IT HAD IN 1973 when my father played for Mercury High School’s starting lineup, football season rolled around again. At the first away game of the year, the September air steamed like the inside of a hot mouth. The stadium lights of the home team’s field glared in the late daylight. There was nothing special about the day—a typical away game in a typical football season of a typical small town. We’d all done this before. But the pe
rennial choreography in Mercury I’d learned to rely on now felt foreign for one reason: it was all the same, and I was not.
Relegated to the far side of the field, the “away team” bleachers stood at a distance from the bathrooms and concession stand. A chain-link fence guarded entry to the woods behind the stands. There wasn’t a bird in the sky. The band moved as a unit, and—as we did at every game—once we entered the bleachers, we performed a corporate sit-down. The rotting stands bowed beneath the heft of the Mighty Mercury Mustang Marching Machine.
At halftime, we struggled through our performance. We hadn’t worked out all the kinks for the new season yet. The peppy music I remembered from last year had melted into noise: the blare of the trombones and trumpets, the wailing of the piccolo, mixed with the fanatical screams of mothers who hoped to God their sons would see a good amount of playing time this season. The instruments played on, relentless, in a shouting match for prowess with the home team’s marching band seated on the opposite side of the field.
They called: We’ve got SPIRIT, yes we DO!
We answered: We’ve got SPIRIT, how ’bout YOU?
Everything unfolded as it had the year before, a rendition of the same rites Trent Reznor used to perform when he was in the marching band fifteen years before. We wore the same outfits, performed the same dances. Pete sat in the same section of the stands, in the same Levis and backwards hat. But this time, I stared at him while he stared at Nora as she pranced around on the track with the other cheerleaders, her legs two tan stems, her black hair flopping as she bounced.
Since the end of July, I’d chosen to spend most of my time alone. When my sister left for college in August, the bedroom we had always shared felt empty. I felt myself falling prey to the kiss of death in our town—wishing that time would move backward, believing the past had the power to eclipse the present.
The week before school started, Pete and I collided on the practice field not far from where we once played Spotlight. The soccer team had scheduled practice on the field after marching band rehearsal, and I saw him from my position on the thirty-yard line, his body limned with the dark tan of his skin and the red of his practice uniform. He clenched a soccer ball to the ground with his cleat. Only a strip of skin gleamed from the hem of his shorts to the top of his socks. He stood at the top of the hill that sloped down to the level practice field, as if presiding over it. I’d imagined what this would be like, what we’d say.
The sting of solitude led me to rediscover my own nature—I worked best on my own. I gathered my secrets around me and clutched them tight, determined to look cold while my insides roiled in a white heat. It was the only way to keep myself from incinerating. In our demise, Pete had become a proxy for the town I loved but didn’t dare trust, a town that I thought would split me open if given the chance. All of Mercury was waiting for me to bottom out, and for once, I refused to give the performance it demanded.
That day on the football field, Pete and I said nothing. My practice ended and we passed each other as I came off the field and he went on. He kicked his ball. I let my pom-poms dangle. I looked at the ground, he looked at the horizon. We didn’t walk toward each other, our heads didn’t turn, we didn’t pause. Pretending to be strangers, we went our separate ways.
Later, I’d imagine that instead of passing each other, he’d come up to me, saying, “Hey,” and I’d say “hey” back, and those three letters would reveal everything lost inside of me, lift the burden I buckled beneath, and Pete would pull me out of my own narrow pit. But my illusions began to dissipate as I realized one thing I knew to be true. If I wanted out of this place, I’d have to get out by myself. No one else could do it for me.
After the football game ended, I climbed onto the dark school bus and pushed toward my seat in the back. My bag, stuffed with my pom-poms, thumped against the seats as I passed.
“Watch it,” said people with instrument cases and batons and plumed hats. The musicians were shedding their thick wool jackets, crafted to withstand the cold Pennsylvania weather in November. Cheeks were flushed, brows wet, and the air smelled of stale sweat and the spit that dribbled from the bell of a brass instrument. I suppressed the urge to gag.
I dreaded these chaotic rides. I slouched in my seat as someone in the front started a chant:
We are the Mustangs! The mighty mighty Mustangs!
I didn’t join in, and no one noticed. I pulled my faded, careworn Levis from my duffle bag and slipped them on over my tights. The denim felt cool for just a moment before molding to my skin.
In the seat ahead of me, a kid who went by the name “Tip” turned around and tried to goad me into a staring contest. An army of pimples trooped along the line of his hat’s chin strap, which he still wore, the plume standing at attention. I wasn’t in the mood to play. He patted my forehead with his sweaty palm and then giggled before plopping into his seat.
I fingered the knees of my jeans where the denim had become threadbare from crawling on the ground during games of Spotlight. I couldn’t see it in the dark, but I knew there was a grass stain on my left knee. I was glad when the blemish didn’t disappear in the wash.
A series of bus windows snapped open, and kids let out their best wolf howls into the heavy night. I covered my ears with my hands and leaned against the window. I envied my band mates’ lack of inhibition. Howling was something I’d only do somewhere deep in the woods with friends who knew me, friends like Aaron who would never come to a football game. Even as an avid baseball fan, he wouldn’t be swayed to play for the local team. “You love the sport,” I said once. “Why not play?”
“No ride to practice,” he answered and shrugged. “Besides, what would be the point?”
Perhaps Aaron was right, and there was no point. That fall was a sobering one for me. I’d let first love in a small town hypnotize me, and when Mercury snapped its fingers, I’d awoken alone in the dark. As we rode home amidst an onslaught of whooping and catcalling aimed at no one in particular, I couldn’t help but wonder where I’d left myself. This was the ruthless crash of getting clean.
A few weeks after school started, Pete and I crossed paths again. As he loitered just outside the cafeteria, we met by accident in a rare moment when no one else was around. I had been walking the hall with my head down, and when I looked up, he caught me in his sights. Headed straight for him, I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t pretend he was a stranger.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” I answered. I kept my voice dead, but those words, those words.
He asked how I was. I claimed to be fine. Then I made a huge mistake.
“If you hadn’t gone after my best friend,” I said, “I would have gotten back together with you.”
I didn’t know why I said it. I hadn’t intended to; it just fell out of my mouth. Stupid, stupid girl. Didn’t I know honesty was never an ally? This was a truth I understood deeper than my ability to explain it. Pete stared at me, his face quizzical, as if trying to pinpoint at what moment I’d lost my mind. Honesty and desperation were bad enough, but both meant certain suicide. This wasn’t the girl he knew. I was smarter than that.
Pete sighed. I felt my face redden. What had happened to me? I still kept a picture of the two of us from New Year’s Eve in safekeeping, next to my fifty-dollar bill. The photograph was dark; we sat in lawn chairs in Sidney’s unfinished basement. That evening he wore the green sweater I’d given him for Christmas. I kept telling myself to throw the picture out.
Five years after Mr. Lotte’s investigation, no one ever talked about what happened except for a few brief moments when girls who’d come out against him had struggled in some public way—an eating disorder, a bad breakup with a star on the football team, an unfortunate choice to get drunk before a Friday night basketball game. These girls knew to blame themselves instead of Mr. Lotte, lest they be judged for turning him into a bucket of blame they could dump all their problems into. But when I look back at moments with Pete, with Nora, when I might
have salvaged something important to me, Mr. Lotte is the only person I can see.
“I should go,” I said to Pete, turning my head. I fled down the staircase, in search of some dark place to hide.
Something I wish I could forget: Pete and I in wintertime, lying on the couch in my parents’ basement. Watching yet another unmemorable movie on yet another frigid night. A greasy bag of Hot Fries lay limp on the worn wooden chest we used as a coffee table. The tiny dusk-colored houses on the wallpaper of my parents’ basement walls resembled faded polka dots in the half-light from the television screen. What I can’t forget is how ordinary the evening was, how similar to every other Saturday.
Pete leaned his chest against my back, and my shoulder blades sank into his soft and sturdy skin. His hands found their way around my waist. His fingers were hot. They paused at the rise of my rib cage.
He leaned his lips close to my ear, and I felt his breath, the way his nose slid into the bend of my neck. I couldn’t see his face.
“Do you want me to?” he said.
I tripped over his words in my mind. For reasons I didn’t understand, I felt like crying. I couldn’t think of my response, only his question. Only his thinking to ask it.
I shrugged.
He waited for just a moment and then hugged me. He must have felt how tense my body became. How rigid. We watched the rest of the movie in silence. His hands remained around my waist, at peace. His body, fluid. Mine, petrified. He left on time, even though my parents were asleep.
I thought of it even more after we were no longer together, this remnant of falling in love inside a corpse.
Though we couldn’t escape each other, Nora and I had yet to speak. I had become an expert at ducking in and out of class and avoiding the hallway. I didn’t want to see Nora and Pete together. When he visited her locker a few doors down from mine, I made sure I was already on my way to class. I repeated Martine’s mantra, “Don’t let them see you sweat,” any time I thought Pete or Nora might be near. I felt love and hate for them both in equal measure, and my swollen anger defied all my attempts to quell it.