Grass Roof, Tin Roof

by Dao Strom

  I remembered, but I wasn’t going to say it out loud. Gray is a shade, not a value. You can’t stand in the middle of a fence: it’s either one side or the other, buddy. Black or white. Especially if the fence is barbed wire.

  “You know you can talk to me, don’t you, Beth?” he said. “I love both you girls a whole lot. I love you like you’re my own—all you kids.” Then he laid his hand on my shoulder. This and the “love” stuff were another thing my father never did; it made me edgy because I knew there was a way I should respond, but I could not make myself do it. I could not make myself say “I love you” back, or look at him and smile, at least, to let him know he had reached me. I just kept sitting there, tense. “Do you still love me?” he asked then.

  I stared at my toes until he asked again, his tone a little teasing. “C’mon, now. Do you still love me, Beth?”

  “Yes,” I muttered finally. And wondered if in a circumstance like this we were still supposed to say “sir” as well.

  “That’s my girl. You’re my toughest girl, Beth. If there’s ever anything you need to talk about, I want you to know you can come to me, okay?” He slid off the bench and squatted on his heels in front of me. “Let’s just have a hug now,” he said, and I fell into his arms. I admit. He was big and warm and strong and I would be lying if I said that didn’t help, that I didn’t want that.

  He stood. “You tell that sister of yours, she keeps slacking and not showing up for class like she’s been lately, no matter how smart she’s getting in school”—he raised his eyebrows conspiratorially—“I just might have to give you her part in my movie.” He winked.

  What he promised and the conviction with which he promised were two separate things. He could’ve been offering Cracker Jacks, for all I cared.

  At the end of class we stood and faced the flag on the wall and recited the Student Creed, hands clasped behind our backs. For God and the good of the community. Right makes might. “And strength and courage to those boys over there in I-ran,” Sensei added, and the way he said it sounded like the way some people say Ah-men.

  Gunner Harasek was standing in the doorway, watching with my sister. He watched with his arms calmly folded across his chest, his shoulder leaning on the doorframe, a smirk lighting his face.

  “That was the weirdest thing I ever saw,” he said afterward, in the car.

  And April wouldn’t shut up about it later, Gunner’s insight, his rightness.

  She didn’t know it, but sometimes I read her diary. I looked through her letters, her notebooks. I didn’t consider it snooping exactly, since she told me most everything anyhow. But in doing this I had learned from her. I had learned how there was a difference in how people tell something to others and how they tell it to themselves. I had learned what to allow, what not to allow, into my own mind: I had learned the cost of thinking too much.

  What she did tell, when I asked why she liked Gunner, was about that book he’d lent her. “It’s like six hundred pages long and really deep. I don’t know if you’d get it, Beth.” She didn’t consider me as book-smart as herself.

  What she didn’t say was that the book itself was as much gesture as it was message. It was what she hoped with all her heart existed between them: a world of singular yet shareable ideas. She was a total romantic. But she was also a huge skeptic. She couldn’t leave anything unworried about. She wondered, was there someone else he’d considered lending this book to? Was there a difference, his lending her this book and not another? Did it mean something, his lending her this book so soon after he’d read it himself? Did it mean something? This was the question that followed each item she wrote about him, and she had written down everything—I could’ve told you every outfit he wore for the last 126 days of school, at least. I feel like I am always reaching, I will always be reaching, she wrote.

  The book, she told me, was about architecture. Men building things.

  Thrilling.

  Our father, have I mentioned, was an architect for the government, and built our family’s house? The house had poor water pressure, thin walls, no heat, and no windows on the entire south-facing side. In this way we kept our costs down.

  “Beth, do you ever believe in God?” April asked me that night. It was a question she had asked a number of times in our childhood, usually late at night or after we’d seen or heard about something scary.

  We were lying in the dark, me in blankets on her floor, next to her bed. It was too cold in my room; hers had the better heater. Whenever I slept in her room, I woke in the mornings to the distant yet warm feel of her preening. She’d be listening to The Smiths, sitting small and cross-legged on her stool, applying her black eyeliner, black lipliner, burgundy lipstick. Her mask. Sometimes I liked the smallness of my sister, I appreciated it. I wanted the whole world to see it, her true smallness, beneath the obvious blackness. Our mother had been small, too, like a doll. Like a tiny, round-cheeked porcelain doll. Girls at school used to tell me, “Your mother is cute.” It was only partially a compliment, though. I knew they were also saying something else—something patronizing—about our Asianness, about her harmless, little, peculiar hands and face and feet. Those mornings I woke slowly, savoring something I wasn’t sure we’d ever had or had even now—but maybe soon. Maybe I would find it.

  “I believe in trees,” I answered. There was no reason behind this. Not even a thought.

  I could see her trembling; the heat had risen, leaving us cold below. One floor down, in the master bedroom, slept our father, and it was probably even colder in that room. “On windy days you should watch where you walk,” said April. Occasionally our fears were the same, my sister’s and mine.

  ***

  Donny Silver called the next afternoon, just after school. The first half of our first conversation in more than two weeks he spent telling me about the Metallica concert he’d gone to the night before. Donny had been kicked out of his parents’ house last summer. He’d been living from friend’s house to friend’s house—some of them were older and had their own apartments—and could go anywhere he pleased even on weeknights. He had since dropped out of Independence, which wasn’t even regular high school.

  “So, Beth, what’ve you been up to?” he asked after he was done talking about the concert. He talked painfully slow.

  “Not much.”

  “So, you wanna hang out or something today?”

  “I don’t know. If you want to,” I said.

  There was a pause at the other end of the line. Then, in an almost injured tone, “Don’t say that.”

  “Well, was there something specific you had in mind?”

  “Well, was there something specific you had in mind?”

  “No.” I hated it when he did this.

  “Are you mad at me or something?”

  “No.” But I said it in a deliberately concealing way. I wanted him to notice my indifference and get uncomfortable. I wanted him to ask questions, to have to coax it out of me. Though of course I would never admit this was what I wanted.

  Instead he said, “You know something, Beth, I had a chance to get laid last night. Laid, get it? But usually when I have a girlfriend, I’m faithful.” This surprised me for two reasons: one, that any boy was actually referring to me as his girlfriend; and two, that Donny Silver of all people cared about fidelity. His voice was full of spite.

  “Well, I wouldn’t have minded,” I said. Slowly, so it was clear. And as I said it I realized it was true—and it felt liberating, like a weight lifted from me and placed upon him.

  “Are you high?” said Donny, incredulously.

  “Of course not. Maybe I just have the ability to be detached about a thing like sex.” But this, as I said it, did not feel true.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” said Donny. “Look, Beth, it’s simple. If I’m gonna have sex and I have a girlfriend, I think I’d like my girlfriend to be the girl I have sex with.” His voice became petulant. “I mean, that is probably why that girl—who I’d like som
eday to have sex with— is my girlfriend and not another one, don’t you think? That’s part of what having a girlfriend is for, you know. Part, I said, not all.”

  “I have to go now,” I said, and I hung up the phone, feeling a strange flash of adrenaline shoot through my body just as I did this.

  “Was that Donny?” April was lying stretched out on the couch, listening.

  “Yes. I don’t care, though,” I said. “I don’t care about anything.”

  “You’re just scared.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  She stared at the ceiling. “Well, you should be,” she said, and I thought there must be ice in her mouth. Or marbles. The way she said it.

  I looked at her.

  My sister, who had never had sex before, either, would claim she didn’t “need” it. It was just one more of those things that caused people to act dishonestly and foolishly, in her opinion. And, she would say, it was motivated by the barbaric side of our nature, again, much like those impulses that bring about killing and war. But the world was what it was: there were wars.

  Gunner, on the other hand, didn’t even notice girls “in that way,” according to April. This was another reason she liked him. She believed he had only higher concerns, that he was an “innocent.” He didn’t need romantic relationships, either. They were of another genus, those two. Her love for him, she claimed often, had nothing to do with sex or looks or his reciprocity, even. That she had felt what she had felt—that was proof enough. She had told me this countless times and had told me never to repeat it to anyone.

  I had told it to Donny, though, in December, several weeks earlier. His response was “No way, Beth. No guy is ‘above’ sex. If it seems like he’s not looking, he’s just hiding it, like, really, good. Your sister must be blind.” Donny had been serious and heated and adamant about this point, as if it was a right of his being infringed upon. I’d thought his attitude was amusing, but I also thought maybe he wasn’t wrong. To be honest, I had felt Gunner’s eyes on me before—evasive, curious, almost vulnerable. Once, sitting with my sister and her friends in the grass on the quad, I had felt him staring at my hair. I had been sure of it. But I never looked up. I never said anything.

  To get back at me for telling Donny her theory on Gunner (Donny had had to remark about it to her afterward), my sister had informed Donny that I was a virgin. We were in April’s car, eating our McDonald’s; I was right there in the backseat. It was Christmas Day. “She told me to tell you she’s not, but she is,” April had said.

  Donny had looked at me, crushed. He had taken my hand. “But why would you try to lie to me, Beth?” he said, his eyes dark and emotional.

  And that’s when I decided: I will show her. If a war broke out in the Persian Gulf (because that was the topic in the news every day), then I would have sex with Donny Silver. In this way I would connect my fate to the fate of current events. It would be out of my hands and my conscience. It wouldn’t be a question of love or persuasion or lust—it would be based rather on the decision of the president. A large and distant man.

  The phone was ringing again. I knew it was Donny, calling back to prompt our, as usual, diffident amends.

  April sat up on the couch and looked at me as I reached for the receiver. “Donny’s just too much of a wastoid for you, Beth,” she said, in a loud whisper. “When’re you gonna put him out of his misery?”

  Zane Harris opened the door for us, a shiny black guitar dangling from his neck like a medal. Zane was blond and blue-eyed and good-looking with the kind of lean, graceful body that had just the right amount of muscle, and the way he moved in it, as if he took it all for granted, made you think life must be easy for him. He was one of those boys who glowed.

  We were at Gunner’s house to watch the boys’ band practice. There were three boys in Gunner’s bedroom, a giant mirrored closet, a drum set, guitars, coils of black cable all over the carpet. A cat was perched atop one of the boy’s amps, purring.

  “She’s into the vibrations,” said Zane, meaning the cat.

  “Sweet girl,” said April. The boys watched as she walked over and started petting the cat, who didn’t react. This seemed awkward, but nobody said anything.

  Gunner sat at the edge of the bed with his feet askew and a thick purple bass guitar across his lap. His mouth hung a little open, something our father said was an affliction teenagehood brought upon boys. It went along with the one about where they kept their brains. The third boy, Tom Hocks, was sitting behind the drums, also with his mouth a little open. He had slow eyes and straggly brown hair and looked as if he had just crawled out of bed.

  April introduced Donny to the other boys. Donny was now “catching a ride” with us, as he called it. This was how we spent what time we spent together.

  Donny stood awkwardly against the wall just inside the door, his arms crossed and his head tilted. His eyes were half closed. I knew him well enough to know he was trying to look tough.

  “It’s a pleasure,” he said, in a sardonic, drawn-out tone. He wore combat boots and a black T-shirt with the sides slit open, and his wavy brown hair was half shaved but long on top. He had a scar that ran down the side of his nose. When he was ten, he swung too high on the swings, jumped off, and landed on his face. His face had been so bloody, his mother hadn’t recognized him when she drove up and found him lying on the driveway.

  “Have a seat on that chair,” invited Gunner, pointing to a chair in the corner. My sister had sat next to him on the bed.

  The boys went back to playing their music and we watched. All the boys around here wanted to be rock stars or they were juvenile delinquents like Donny Silver or both. I didn’t judge Donny for not wanting to stay in school, but I did think sometimes he made his problems bigger than they needed to be. I would admit, his problems were part of why I began hanging out with him in the first place—I’d thought I could do something to help him. But I didn’t think that anymore.

  The boys were playing their instruments with steady expert expressions and staring into one another’s eyes in a way that excluded everything else in the world, in a way they could not have done if they hadn’t each been holding instruments as safe barriers between their bodies. But the potential this showed—you couldn’t help wishing they’d find a reason to look at you that way, too, regardless of where their mouths or brains occasionally fell to.

  Zane faced Gunner, and they were watching each other’s guitars.

  “Change now,” said Zane, “and change now. Right.” They were reading fingers, I realized.

  “Aces.” Gunner grinned a tiny, satisfied grin. There was something in the stillness of his eyes, the sureness of his lips, curled only at the corners, all in that second frozen and wise and alive on his face. The room was filling with envy and some kind of electricity.

  But Donny was bored—he made this plain in the look he gave me—and said he was going to go walk around outside. I knew he hated U2, and the boys were playing a U2 song. It occurred to me I should follow Donny out, but I happened to like this song.

  Donny Silver would tell you his father walked out years ago, over a song. Donny was seven; his mother had a record player and would play certain songs over and over. One time his parents were fighting and his father declared, “If you put that song on one more time, I’m out that door,” and just to spite him, Donny’s mother had put it on again. That was how Donny remembered it. Though I suspected it might’ve been a little more complicated than that.

  There was a magnetic hum in the air when the boys stopped playing.

  “Let’s play it again,” said Zane.

  In the kitchen, Mrs. Harasek was sitting by herself at the counter, watching the news on the TV set that was on the kitchen counter. The kitchen looked out on to the living room, and all the furniture in the living room was brown and cozy. A fire blazed in the fireplace. The noise of the boys, from out here, was dull and muffled and distant. Steam rose from a pot on the stove.

  “Hi,” I said, “I’m
Beth.”

  She smiled at me. “You must be April’s sister. What’re you looking for, honey? The boy in the black shirt? He just went out that door.” She nodded across the room. She was a slightly plump woman with short brown hair. Her son looked nothing like her.

  I asked for a glass of water and she told me to help myself. As I stood over the faucet, her attention returned to the TV.

  “Those poor people. Those poor innocent people. Those Iraqis—they are just an immoral race,” she said softly, shaking her head at the screen. “That Muslim religion, can you imagine? People are killing people over it.”

  I looked around the kitchen and saw on the side of the refrigerator a photo of a Christmas tree, next to a baby in glasses, completely open-mouthed, in a frame made of painted macaroni. “Is that Gunner?” I nodded toward the photo.

  Mrs. Harasek smiled again. “He was the sweetest baby.” She turned slightly on her stool, looking closely at me for the first time. “Where’re you girls from? I mean, your heritage. You have such an interesting color, and features, both of you.”

  “Our father is Danish,” I said. “He grew up in World War II. In Denmark. He says growing up in a war makes you grow up faster.” I felt I had to say something substantial about current events. I leaned on the sink. “Which is part of the problem with the youth in America right now, he says. Our lives have been too easy, we don’t know how to take anything seriously. We’re sheltered.” I twisted the cup in my hands.

  “Does your father support going to war?”

  “No. He thinks George Bush is a baboon.”

  “Is that what your father thinks?” She was starting to smile.

  His actual word had been “buffoon,” I remembered, but I didn’t correct it. I didn’t know what a buffoon was, actually. Instead I said, “We wouldn’t be over there except for the oil. It’s a war for profit and power.” I realized I was wanting her to think me remarkably smart for a fourteen-year-old when she responded as I’d been half expecting she would: “Well, I’m glad to see my son has found some impressive young ladies to associate himself with.” With a tiny, warm, distracted smile.