by Dao Strom
“My God, Dad,” April groaned from the couch, “it’s an automatic bread-maker.”
“It looks good, Dad.” Try as I might, I could never hold out for long against my father. I knew he was more sensitive than he acted. And in a funny way I couldn’t stand to see anyone put down, even if they deserved it.
“It is good. Good homemade bread.” Dad raised his eyebrows at the loaf. “And,” he added, “it saves money.”
April and I fought the next morning over her red skirt. I had asked to borrow it, but she wouldn’t give me an answer and it was already six forty-five. As I said before, she can be ruthless. I put on the skirt anyway. She told me to take it off, but I wouldn’t.
She narrowed her eyes at me. “I was going to let you wear it, but now? No.” She smiled. “No, Beth. Now take it off.”
If I backed down I thought I might literally explode, pieces of me, Beth, all over the place. So instead I told her, “You are such a jealous bitch, April. You don’t want me to wear this because you know it looks better on me than it does on you. You know it looks funny on you, it makes you look bowlegged and short. No wonder Gunner Harasek doesn’t like you.” Cheap shots, admittedly. But I knew how to utilize her weak points. I turned around and headed downstairs.
She was crying in the upstairs room; I could hear her from the kitchen. But she could go from crying to evil, wicked, in a half second; that was how she was. I ate my oatmeal slowly. Kept my blood pressure normal, did things exactly as I would’ve if I were happy. We were alone in the house; my father left early for work every morning. Finally April came down the stairs, not looking at me, and walked out the door. I let her, though every muscle in my body was positively jumping, I was so mad.
All of this was nothing new between us.
The neighbor drove me to school. I was late. So was the girl whose locker was next to mine. She was the only Muslim person in our school, the only Muslim person I had ever met. She always wore a shawl over her head and long dresses or long pants, even when it was hot. I’d seen her hair, though, in the locker room. It was amazingly thick and full, and dark, dark brown. She was not pretty. But she was nice and I went out of my way to be nice back to her, because most other people wouldn’t. Today she opened her locker timidly. Somebody had vandalized it. “Go Home!” it said in red spray paint, and “Sadaam-fucker!” and “I like to suck camel dick.” It also said: “I drink Yuban.” She gave me a sheepish, mystified look. I didn’t get the Yuban part.
“They don’t understand,” she said. Her English was perfect. “My family,” she said, and she almost laughed, “is from Pakistan.”
“Well, you can use my locker if you want,” I offered, swinging wide my locker door. But suddenly I was embarrassed because my locker was crammed full already. I became aware of my sister’s red skirt on me like a scalding blush, a flaming stain, the evidence of petty conflict.
She smiled. “That’s okay. But thank you, Beth, that’s kind of you.”
I could’ve sworn she was looking at my skirt.
At tutorial break I sat by the window in the French classroom and scanned the quad outside, everyone gathered in crooked or lopsided circles, their breath showing in puffs of gray in front of their mouths. April and her best friend, Tommy, were sitting on the benches in front of the drama room at one edge of the quad. Tommy who was so cool she didn’t need to spell her name with an “i.” April was all in black, as usual. A black Morrissey T-shirt and her long black crinkly skirt under a far-too-big sweater that was tattered at the cuffs and neck. Her eyes peered out like a raccoon’s from behind the curtain of her straight black hair. She was pretty in an exotic and trashed-looking way, with thin lips that she painted burgundy, and she was always doing this thing with her body, folding her arms and leaning all her weight on one hip, or balling her knees up against her chest if she was sitting down. It made her look smaller than she already was. I didn’t think it made her look good, and that sort of unwelcoming shell couldn’t help matters with boys any, either. But boys were ambling over to them now. They wore striped shirts and old army fatigue coats and clunky boots. They were occasionally shoving each other, tilting their heads, laughing, swaying on their feet—they never stood still. The boy April liked was a year younger than she was; she had been giving him rides home after school lately. He had curly dark blondish hair and wore glasses, and his boots were all beat up. Gunner Harasek. Jason Gunther Harasek, actually, but his friends had always called him Gunner; only teachers sometimes called him Jason. April and Gunner were just friends, and April would often say this was enough for her, that she was happy with just his friendship, but sometimes she got insecure about it. She wished for signs that he liked her more, but I knew she never said anything about it to him or gave these signs herself. The two of them stood over a rusty trash barrel at the edge of the quad, poking at its contents with sticks while they talked.
When I got outside, Gunner was trying to look over April’s shoulder at something in the barrel. In his way of slightly slouching there was a wary ease with the way things in the world didn’t always make sense: I got this. I didn’t know if April did. She was in love with him, she said, because she thought he was “beautiful,” and she didn’t mean physically. He was actually a little awkward physically. But he was talented at art and music and read deep books and was smart to talk to—was what she said often—though I saw another side to Gunner. He was also desperately, clumsily kind, I thought.
He said, “Your hair’s in the way,” and April tucked her loose black hair behind her ear. When they looked up they were looking up together, it occurred to me.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey, Beth,” said April, with the subtlest hint of a question in her tone. I gave her a cautiously sorry smile.
Gunner didn’t notice anything. “What is up, Beth!” He grabbed for my hand, shook it, grinning. “Hey, look,” he announced, pointing at an old cereal box in the trash. “‘Eat right, sacrifice nothing.”’ As if this was something to be taken seriously, but we knew better. Gunner had a way of saying it, though—you felt as if he was trusting you with something personal, something fragile and allusive.
“Well, I vote for abstinence myself,” said April. She folded her arms in that shrinking but challenging way of hers. “Abstinence from all things impure or crude or cowardly.”
My sister wanted only the rawest, purest, most honest of all possible action or thought. Even if what you had at the bottom of your consciousness was ugly and criminal—that was what she was after. She had bought into the theory that most human motivation was basically barbaric; she believed everything came down to violence or sex, yet at the same time she wished people would “rise above” all that. She was a walking contradiction, my sister. (I liked to point this out to her.) She wanted connection but was afraid of physical contact. She’d been getting into astral projection lately but as yet had not accomplished “leaving.”
“I’m talking about celibacy,” said April, “but figuratively.”
“What I figure, April, is that you need to discover sex,” interjected Tommy. She was standing up on the bench. Her hips shifted purposefully beneath her hands. She wore tight orange stretch pants and expensive-looking knee-high riding boots and a loose, loudly patterned blouse.
“That’s because you’re a whore, Tommy,” retorted April, matter-of-factly; and Tommy shrugged. She was coy.
“If you’ve got it, flaunt it,” she said.
And, “Ooo,” went the boys, laughing, ducking their heads, glancing expectantly from girl to girl.
Tommy stuck up her middle finger. My sister shrugged, smirked.
Gunner crossed his arms, looked at April seriously. “What you’re talking about is all abstract and impossible again. You’re talking about the way things should be on some level that has nothing to do with, like, how ordinary life really is. It has nothing to do with me having to, like, recall the numbers of my fucking locker combination and open it up and take my books out and walk to my n
ext stupid class twelve times a day. You’re pissing me off again, April.” But he said this good-naturedly, and it seemed more like honest, unserious distress—like over a math problem you couldn’t solve. “Like, what do you really mean?” he said, shifting his weight back so he was standing taller. “You can’t expect people to be flawless, April. And who’re you anyways to say what is better for people or not? That’s the kind of stuff you say you hate that your father does.”
Our father. Let me interrupt here.
Was it apt that the character Sensei had in mind for my sister to play in his movie was the mysterious “Oriental” girl who didn’t talk to the other kids in the group, only appeared and disappeared without explanation at certain key points in the plot and wowed the others with her out-of-left-field fighting techniques? In a way this was what April was really like. She had made kids cry. I don’t mean just with karate. The baby-sitting job she once had—the parents fired her after they heard her telling the kids the Bible was propaganda, and how evil not good was what was inherent in human nature. April would claim these things she said, it was all in the name of honesty.
I thought it was more in the name of our father.
We used to watch the news on TV, and afterward he would sermonize. The rapes, the kidnappings, the killings, the fantastic crashes! One could not take a step that was not overshadowed even if only thinly by potential harm. And violence and accidents were not random—these were mishaps you could be responsible for having called upon yourself, whether through blatant carelessness or just a slight lapse of concentration. Our father prided himself on having never in his life been in a car accident. If I lost my watch, he would insist I’d done it on purpose. Our mother’s illness, too. His irritable unease with it at the time had led us also, at the back of our minds, to blame her—this was what I thought now—to believe she had gone wrong somewhere, left a window open or something, and this was why it had happened, her sickness; or maybe it was her diet of too much white rice starch. He had said this once, for he always had to arrive at hypotheses. He was a scientist by nature. What we didn’t know then was that it was normal (I read in a book a few months after her death) to resent loved ones for dying, even before they’d died. Our father simply hadn’t known what to do with our mother’s weakness. He hadn’t known what to do in the face of helplessness. It made me think of the dogs he had had put to sleep, the ones other families would’ve probably let lie on the front porch till they’d made that final passage on their own sweet time. Control freaks were control freaks because they couldn’t understand or accept the natural messed-up cycles of things. And this seemed to happen to parents, I’d noticed.
I understood it, though, the messed-up cycles of things. I was willing to be and let be.
But when you are eight or eleven and listening to your father’s rants, the world can be made to seem a gigantic, out-of-control, debauched place. Dad talked on and on even as April cried, as if this had been what he needed to see in order to feel assured we were absorbing the caution he wished so to drum into us. I had listened but would be thinking about petting the dog. Our big brother, Thien, had kept quiet, also. Then finally our mother would exclaim, “Daddy, you’re scaring the girls!” She had always called him Daddy. That in a way was scarier to me. It meant she could not save us, either.
Now of course April would say she feared nothing. Not love, not death, not misery. If you didn’t care, you didn’t get hurt; if you didn’t aim to please, you didn’t disappoint. Yet she still hadn’t told Sensei she wanted out of karate and his movie plans for good. Or that she thought him a brainwasher of children. Let alone what she hadn’t told our father.
“Well, I never said I was excluding myself,” she said.
“I guess not. So what’s your point?” answered Gunner.
“At least I’m not fooling myself with contrivances.”
There was a moment of the two fixing glares at each other. “Well, you can’t exactly not participate, April. I mean as long as you’re living,” said Gunner slowly, “you can’t just sit in your room and stare at a wall forever exactly.”
“Well, maybe I can, maybe I can,” argued April feistily. (And sometimes I thought—no, I knew— she looked foolish; and I wondered why everyone else didn’t see it, too, it seemed so plain to me she was lying to herself.) “I just don’t believe in relenting to a system of beliefs I don’t agree with,” she said. “I just don’t want to ever relent.”
Over my sister’s shoulder, Tommy shook her head, sighing.
“Oh yeah?” Gunner’s mouth shifted, almost imperceptibly. “Well, I’d like to relent from this conversation, please.”
“Fuck you, Gunner,” said April, flippantly. But she was hurt and I could see it.
Gunner was laughing but not meaning it.
“Hey, did you check out my new key chain?” he said to me as he pulled his keys out from his belt. The other boys were staring off in other directions across the quad. The bell rang. Circles of people began to drift, distort, break. Gunner’s keys made a zipping noise. They were on a retractable ring attached to his belt. “It’s part of my janitor fantasy,” he said, “because I’m a Socialist, see? I’m a worker, man.” He shrugged. “I’m just not comfortable with being comfortable when other people aren’t.”
April stared at him with an expression of pain on her face, but I knew exactly what he meant even if I didn’t know a thing about politics.
“I understand that,” I said, nodding, and Gunner peered at me suddenly with earnestness and said, “Do you?”
April turned to me, rolled her eyes, and it was the first time she had addressed me since I’d walked out there. “Dad wants us home for dinner tonight.”
This disturbed me—her saying it as much as what she was saying. “But there’s never any real food in the house,” I exclaimed, more emotionally than I meant to. Dad didn’t yet have a handle on things like what to buy at the grocery store. April and I didn’t have much of a handle on it, either. We’d been surviving on frozen pizzas in the afternoon in front of Donahue, and when Dad came home he heated up his own dinner in the microwave. The rare times he tried to coordinate our having dinner together usually turned out stressfully.
I know the way I’m telling this story so far—it is convoluted. But I was never the logical, not even the sensitive one in our family. I was the impulsive one.
“I know, I know,” April agreed. But I had already forgotten about the food.
At karate practice that afternoon, I was feeling more and more detached from the other kids. I performed my Defensive Arts like a rag doll, though this was a good quality for my reactions, at least. Sometimes it could feel quite natural, pretending to get beaten up.
At our first water break, to further the feeling, Toby Sandusky rushed up behind me, put me in a headlock, and hauled me away from the fountain before I could take a drink. He hollered to his brother, “Hey, Johnny, let’s pin Beth!” and no matter how I kicked and squirmed and screamed, I couldn’t get loose. This was what often happened to April and me at the dojo. Heidi, too; it was the privilege of being a girl there. In a way, it was flattering. The boys cared, I realized. And manhandling us was sometimes all they had to show it with.
But when it was Toby Sandusky who was fat and too rough and held you down forever, it seemed—that I didn’t need so much.
I had almost gotten to my knees when Jonathan Sandusky leaped in and tagged me in the temple with a flying side back-knuckle and even though it didn’t really hurt, I started to cry. I covered my face with my hands and wailed, and immediately the boys jumped backward because now they knew they had pushed the game too far.
“Oh, my God, Beth, I’m sorry,” said Jonathan. He knelt beside me and put his arm around my shoulder. His arm was light and surprised me with its comfort. It also made me nervous; I was used to responding to Jonathan only in a retaliatory way. “Hey, take your hand away from your face. Let me see. C’mon, take your hand away,” he said.
I let hi
m lower my hands.
Sensei was there, too, kneeling behind Jonathan. They were all looking at me, all the others, too, as one by one they took their drinks at the water fountain. I spotted Kenny Davis looking sympathetic and Jeremy Todd looking stupid, his eyes lit with that kind of brightness people got on their faces when they were recalling a near disaster or something else they were proud about having escaped.
Sensei took me aside and sat me down in the weight room, on the bench under the lat bar. Laterals are muscles, I was thinking.
“Now, Beth,” he said, “I know you’ve been kicked harder than that before and not even blinked an eye. Is there something else going on that’s upsetting you, hon? You can talk to me if you need to, you know.” I pressed my hands against my knees and looked down at them. He smelled musky and sweaty close up. I felt embarrassed for noticing. I wished he would move over, though I did not want him to move too far. He nudged my side with his elbow. “Is it boys?” he said with a wink in his voice. “You can tell me about that, you know.”
“No.”
“Is everything all right at home?” His voice was lower. “I know you girls don’t always agree with your father. April’s told me.”
“No, it’s fine.” I was about to cry again, but this time I held it in.
“Beth, let me ask you. I am sensing you need direction. Have you spoken to God lately? Because what I’m sensing from you, what I think, is you are in a very crucial space right now. Sweetheart.” He was trying to get me to look at him, but I hated it when adults, especially men, called me “honey” or “sweetheart.” My father never did this. He never sat us down for talks of this kind, either. He always just said what he had to say, point blank, and this made me suspicious of Sensei’s gentleness. “What have I told you about the fence? Do you remember my rule about fences?”