If they were going to stand against her, they’d soon find out that she was going to win. As far as René was concerned, this was going to be full-on War.
* * *
—
She dressed in her best clothes and brushed her hair to gleaming. She surged ahead in the reading challenge, completing levels three, four, five, and half of six before her teacher stood over her, pinching her shoulder with a sharp, bony claw, and said, “What are you up to? There’s no more room on the wall.”
René just looked at her. So what? she didn’t say.
“Find something else to do during reading time,” the teacher told her.
She used recess to practice leaps and arabesques on the playground, and she did handstands, cartwheels, walkovers, splits on the grass, letting out the stops, taunting the girls to distraction and drawing the attention of the boys.
The girls would huddle in a group, heads bent together, and if René walked anywhere near them, they’d turn and go the other way, looking over their shoulders.
“No more pretending to be friends,” René told herself. “No more hoping they might like me.” She followed them coldly and openly, pushing them into different corners of the playground as if she were herding sheep. “Baa,” she bleated at them under her breath as they moved away. “Coming through.”
Then one afternoon, Eve appeared at her classroom door.
“What are you doing here?” René said, running to greet her.
The other girls cut their eyes at her, exchanging sharp glances.
“I don’t know,” Eve whispered. “I got a call.” She raised her eyebrows and gave René a you know what I think of these bozos look.
At home that night, René couldn’t get the whole story, but from what she did get, it seemed that the girls had started visiting the school counselor just to complain about her—about how conceited and stuck-up she was, how she showed off all the time, how she was mean to them. On and on. Nothing new. But they were widening the circle, raising the stakes.
“Don’t pay one bit of attention,” Eve told her. “They’re jealous. They’re so jealous, they can’t see straight.”
It didn’t seem to René that they were jealous; it seemed that they were mad, as if they felt that, from the very beginning, she’d been shellacking them in class and on the playground out of spite. It didn’t make any sense. What was she supposed to do? Cut her hair because theirs wasn’t as long? Keep herself to a single spin on the bars because the best of them could manage only two? Misspell all the spelling words on purpose? Just how self-annihilating did she have to be to avoid crushing these delicate prairie flowers?
“You bend over backwards for those girls. I’ve seen you,” Eve went on. “Time and time again.”
René didn’t think she’d ever “bent over backwards” for any of them, but before this all started, she’d at least tried to fit in. She’d joined their after-school Bible club and memorized verses, reciting without a single fault, and she’d gone along to the Y whenever any of them invited her for free “open-swim” night, showing them water ballet moves and doing fancy dives off the low board. Who were these girls anyway, and why didn’t they like her? Because she was good at things? Wasn’t that the point? Weren’t they supposed to be trying to be good at things?
“They’re dying of jealousy,” Eve was saying. “They’re a bunch of mean little dopes, and they’re trying to punish you for doing your best. It’s absurd. And the teachers are no better,” she said. “Ridiculous. They should be helping you, and instead they want to pull you down to their small-town, know-nothing level.”
Then Eve stopped and looked at René so intently that René couldn’t help but fix herself in place and listen.
“No one should ever have to give up what they want just to make someone else happy,” Eve said. “You remember that. If you let them take it away, you can count on the fact that you’re never going to get it back. Believe me. That much I know from experience. Firsthand.” She paused. “If I were you, I’d just as soon stay away from the whole lot of them,” she said. “Good riddance. That’s what I’d say.”
So it seemed that, from a certain perspective, René had succeeded in sailing right past those dull, ordinary, homespun girls, flying out to where they couldn’t follow, far beyond the edges of their shrunken little maps, and good riddance it was. Good riddance to girlfriends, good riddance to playmates, good riddance to shared secrets and putting on each other’s fingernail polish, good riddance to Saturday walks downtown with a dollar to spend, good riddance to long summer swim days, good riddance to all that junk. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
13
Laana
Laana Folger lived in the house just below René’s, and though René passed alongside Laana’s fence every day on her way to school, she never asked Laana to walk with her. Laana had greasy hair that fell in strings, and she was tall, which she tried to hide by stooping like an old lady. She was slow in everything, and René didn’t want to be seen with her. Besides, René liked to walk by herself.
Laana started coming up to the far corner of René’s yard and standing there queerly, brushing her hands through the swollen tops of the tall prairie grass, letting the grasshoppers perch on her skin and clothing as she watched René’s house, looking every bit like she was trying to see right through the walls. When René asked Eve why Laana was just standing there, staring, Eve said that maybe she wanted to be friends, that maybe it would be nice of René to invite her up. So René did. They played outside, they played at Laana’s house, and they played at René’s house. But they never played at school. At school, they didn’t even talk. There was one retarded boy in their class whose limbs bent at crazy angles and whose head and eyes rolled back and forth in unpredictable arcs as he walked his crazy walk around the playground, and there was Laana.
At Laana’s house, there were dried-up dog and cat poops everywhere—piled under the sofas, scattered under the beds, in the corners of every room, sometimes right on the front doormat as you came in. Most of them were hard as rocks and gray or green, but some were fresh. After you’d caught a whiff of it, you could smell Laana’s house from outside as you passed by on the road.
Her dad was home all the time, it seemed, sitting on the toilet, reading the newspaper with the door open. And everyone yelled. Even Laana. Once she got inside, her shyness dropped away.
“Shut the door, Dad! God! We have company!” she’d shout if they happened to spy him on the john during a game of jacks or while they were cutting out snowflakes. She’d stomp over and slam the door. But even as she returned to their game, the door would begin to slowly creak open on its hinges until it was just as wide open as before, her dad still sitting there, rustling his newspaper, turning the page.
“See, Lalee,” he’d say. “It don’t stay shut. It ain’t my fault.”
“God, Dad. God!” Laana would scream, throwing down whatever they were doing.
“We can go to my house,” René would whisper.
At René’s house, they’d organize the old National Geographics René’s grandma had given them, or try on René’s mom’s necklaces, or hold up sections of a new dress Eve was making and strike poses in the mirror. Or René would try to teach Laana to do a backbend, or a changement, or just to point her toe, all to no avail. But no matter what they did, Laana would gaze at René starstruck, her eyes moist and dreamy as the rest of her face hung slack.
Since Laana wanted to do everything René did, she started taking ballet lessons with Mrs. G, which René thought was unfortunate, being that Laana was so awkward in general. And once, just after René had worn a new, store-bought pantsuit to school—red, blue, and cream checked bell bottoms with a metallic thread, like tinsel, woven through, and a matching navy vest with silver buttons—there was Laana, standing on her front steps, about to head out to school in the exact same outfit, except with
the red vest instead of the blue, her mom behind her, pulling her hair into a high ponytail. René stared in astonishment as she passed the house.
“Laana liked your outfit so much,” Laana’s mom called out. “She had to get one just like it. But see? She got the red vest so it don’t match exactly. Imitation is the highest form of flattery. That’s what they say.”
René hurried past, not responding. This was going to cost her. This was going to give those other girls something to throw at her. At the very least, she could never wear her new pantsuit, not ever again.
“You want a ride?” Laana’s mom hollered after her. “You’re gonna be late.”
René shook her head and kept walking.
“Ain’t no big thing, little missy,” she bellowed. “You keep on worrying yourself like that and you’re gonna have ulcers before you turn thirteen, you know it?”
René put her head down and picked up the pace. She was almost out of range.
* * *
—
Laana’s mom was kind of a bombshell. She had bottled blond hair that poofed around her head, then cascaded to her shoulders in feathery waves. She had a groovy record collection and was actually cool, like a swinger or a housewife you might see in a magazine. When the house was empty, René and Laana would kick the dog turds under the couch and play her records, making up dances in the living room.
Laana’s mom and dad were always having cookouts in their crappy backyard, wearing stained parkas as they fired up the old grill and mixing cocktails for themselves in unwashed shakers. Their house was a crazy quilt of filth. Anything and everything was fine with them. They had TV dinners as a family, and sometimes, if she felt so inclined, Laana’s mom would bend down and pick up one of the dog or cat poops with a Kleenex, throw it in the kitchen garbage, then go back to buttering a piece of toast or opening a box of crackers without even washing her hands.
Eve went down to have coffee with her one day, just to be neighborly. When she got home, she bent forward, leaning heavily against the kitchen table, one hand on her stomach, and said, “Oh, God. I think I’m going to be sick.”
After that, whenever Laana came over, Eve would find a way to whisper things offhand to René, like “I don’t think you’d be friends with her if she didn’t live so close, do you?” or “She’s just not up to your level, is she. Poor thing. Good grief. She’s pretty dull, don’t you think?”
“She’s okay,” René would counter, defending Laana even though she agreed, had agreed from the very beginning.
“I just don’t see how people can live like that,” Eve would confess once Laana had gone.
“It’s not her fault,” René would say.
But each time Laana came around, René would feel herself succumbing more fully to Eve’s point of view. Eve was right. Spending time with Laana was like spending time with a stuffed animal or a rag doll. Plus, Laana had started shadowing her on the playground, gazing at her longingly from across the gravel lot, making small motions as if to test the possibility of approach. Nothing good was going to come of it. And suddenly Laana just didn’t seem like someone worth hanging out with anymore.
Good riddance.
14
Unintended Disfigurement
For some reason no one could comprehend, Leon had started pulling out his hair. He’d pulled out all of his eyelashes and both of his eyebrows, and now he was pulling out the hair on top of his head. His forehead was eerily bald, the rims of his eyelids were exposed, swollen and raw, and there was a gleaming white bald spot widening on the crown of his head, like a shiny teacup saucer or a crop circle, surrounded on all sides by his thick, dark God-given hair.
He’d had to switch schools when they’d moved down from the hill. He’d started junior high as a new kid, at a school across town from all his friends, but that didn’t seem like enough of a reason, Eve said.
“Keep your hands off it, Leon,” she told him over and over. “Don’t pick.”
Life went along smoothly enough when Al wasn’t home, which was most of the time. But when Al showed up, there’d be blazing arguments: “Leon—” this and “Leon—” that, and “Leon’s hair—” this and “Leon’s hair—” that, and “Leon’s friends—” this and “Leon’s dancing—” that, followed by “Well, you did—” this, and “You did—” that, and “You never spend any time, so what do you expect?” and “Just who do you think you are?” and “Are you just plain blind or are you retarded?” and “You can just go to hell!,” sometimes with tears, sometimes with door-slamming, always deep into the night.
René would lie in bed, with Jayne in the bed next to hers, and keep watch out her window at the blinking red lights of the radio tower, listening as Eve and Al went on and on. Then, after two or three days of cold, silent glares between them—with no telling when the booby trap of a wrong word or a spilled glass of milk or an unfinished homework assignment was going to set off another round—and after long nights filled with skirmishes and reversals, great mountains of ammo plied into endless histrionics, Al would repack his suitcase and be off to look at cattle in Montana or Wyoming or “over east.” And they’d only have to endure Eve’s foul mood and aggravated replays for a few days before everything finally settled back into the regular routine, and there’d be some peace until the next time.
One of the many repercussions was Eve’s belief that Al likely had another family—one he was spending time with and “squandering good money on”—probably somewhere up in Montana.
“I wonder if they know about us,” she’d say, leaving the kids to conjure their counterparts—clean, quiet children with good manners and all the hair on their heads.
“I’d be almost sure of it,” Eve would add, “if he wasn’t such a god-damned tightwad.”
Even after Eve and Al had spent an entire lifetime together—often ending weeks and months of battle by wordlessly calling a truce and taking sandwiches to Canyon Lake Park, where they’d feed their crusts to the ducks and geese, then sit quietly, side by side, like any old couple, holding hands and listening to the water run over the spillway—in the days just after Al’s funeral, Eve was still waiting for her mirror self, her double, Al’s other wife, to step through the door, to claim her right and place, with unknown grown children lining up behind her to inherit. Even as Al’s IRAs and brokerage accounts were renamed and transferred, his death record settled, his headstone finalized, carved, and placed, though Eve would sometimes become misty, other times she’d shift uneasily in her chair and cock her head warily to one side, waiting for the doorbell to sound or the phone to ring, as if the threat were still hanging heavy in the air, maybe finally ripe enough to drop.
* * *
—
When Leon and René were grown-ups, years after Leon had received his dual diagnosis—alcoholic/chemically dependent and bipolar—he was astonished to receive an additional diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder.
“It’s like we grew up in a war zone,” he told René. He laughed. “God. Jesus.” He got serious. “I’m not kidding,” he said.
René had no choice but to agree. Though she could remember times when she’d come home from school prepared for another knock-down-drag-out, only to find her parents lying together on the sofa in their work clothes, face-to-face, enclosed in each other’s arms and fast asleep, still every therapist she’d seen over the past two decades had come to the same conclusion. She’d had the DSM-III code in her chart from way back.
“Jayne, too,” Leon said.
Jayne had always seemed steadier than either of them, as though she’d somehow stayed above the fray. René thought perhaps her sweet, cheerful nature had protected her in a way that René’s drive and Leon’s willingness to take a fall had not. But lately Jayne had been having a hard time. Though she had everything anyone could hope for, she said—a job, a house, a good husband, sweet kids—there’d been about thr
ee months now when she just couldn’t stop crying, and she didn’t know why.
* * *
—
Since they were spending nearly all of their free time at the ballet studio, taking classes with Mrs. G, Leon and René progressed quickly through the ranks.
“Faster than a speeding bullet,” Leon said on their way to the car after Mrs. G had given him yet another promotion, to the Advanced class this time. “See ya, sucker!” He sailed the airplane of his hand across the top of René’s head, spreading his fingers in an aerial explosion. “Boom!”
But then, since Eve had to drive Leon five nights a week anyway, Mrs. G said that René was “close enough,” so she might as well come along.
“Sucker, yourself,” she said to him just before class. “Boom!”
He laughed and shooed her away as if swatting a gnat.
René got her first pointe shoes and marveled at the stiffness of them, at how she couldn’t push her ankles far enough forward to get over onto the tops of them, and at the constantly shifting colors of pain.
And shortly after that, Mrs. G asked Eve if René might be willing to demonstrate for her Beginners and Intermediate classes. So every Saturday René would do her best, standing on her own at the portable barre in the center of the studio, performing whatever combinations Mrs. G called out, as perfectly as she could manage, reveling in her new, exalted status.
When she was finished demonstrating for all the lower classes, she’d take her place in the new partnering class Mrs. G had started in preparation for The Nutcracker. There was another boy now, Joey. So Mrs. G paired René with Joey, and Leon with a lovely girl just his age, Catherine.
The Distance Home Page 8