by Dao Strom
It was like a switch had flipped inside of me—suddenly I wanted to win Gunner’s mother’s favor. In my mind I saw my sister sitting on Gunner’s bed, contented and smug among the boys, her book on her knees. Next year, I knew, after my sister went off to college, it would be just me, my father, and the automatically made bread. A few ornery cats, the disappointingly fat dog, the ache of silence. One woman less in the house, once more. It seemed to me people were always defecting to one side or another, and I was the only one staying put, right in the middle. I didn’t blame her, though, my sister. I didn’t blame anyone.
“My father had a hard life in the old country,” I said, “that’s why he came here.”
“But your mother isn’t Danish also?”
“No,” I replied. She was waiting, so I added, “I’m mixed.”
She asked what with and I told her. About that other war. 1973? 1975. The first one he rescued us from. I didn’t mention anything else about my mother; usually people already knew. Maybe a year from now it would be easier to drop into conversation with new people, she died when I was..., when it would’ve been long enough ago for them not to react too dramatically, I thought.
“My father says what we need in this society nowadays is a good war but this one will hardly do. It’s a false war.”
“Your father is a man of many opinions, isn’t he?” Now she was looking at me in a peculiar, gentle way. She smiled vaguely. “What an interesting family background you girls have.” She set her forearms on the countertop. We watched the news for another minute together, not saying anything else. At the commercial break she turned toward me. “Will you tell me something honestly, Beth. You seem like a smart girl,” she said, as an ad for toothpaste (people with sparkling teeth) danced on the other side of her like a backdrop to her face, which was so earnest now I was almost embarrassed for her. “Do you believe they can actually go anywhere with it?” She nodded down the hall, in the direction of the bedroom. Where the muffled thudding of the boys’ dreaming was trying to force its rhythm through the walls. “Do you think they’re good enough?”
“I guess they’re good. April thinks Gunner is really talented,” I said, trying to be reassuring; and I hated that I, the child here, was the one doing the reassuring.
She sat back, her face worried. “I’d just hate to find out later that those boys were spending all this time for nothing.”
“Was my mom trying to talk to you?” Gunner asked, when I returned to the room. Practice was done. The clutter of instruments was now just ordinary mess; chaos, in fact. Scattered toys.
“She was talking about the war,” I replied.
“Waar!” boys bellowed in each other’s faces as they passed in the halls.
This morning was the morning of the headlines. U.S. AT WAR and WAR, SAYS BUSH and (“the best one,” as my sister had put it) WAR!! were a few of them.
A tiny ray of sun cast long, thin shadows over the dewy lawns as I walked through the halls, shivering and half awake, dazed with the idea that now I was walking about in a world at war. But I was even more dazed by the lack of change war had brought about. I passed Gunner and his friends, stomping on each other’s shadows in front of Madame “La” Jefferson’s first-period French. They were doubling over in mock pain and clutching the parts of their bodies the shadow-parts of which were being stomped on, and they were laughing about it—because somehow it was funny, it had to be, to pretend pain could be transferred like this from your shadow to your body. This was the type of activity I passed the boys engaging in quite often. To ward off the cold. To fortify themselves with enough amusement for the day ahead. And I realized, as I sat through the rest of the day’s classes, that it would always be as it was yesterday, war or not, at least for us, at least in America. The traffic lights would never stop, and if they did they would never be irreparable, and lunch would always come after fourth-period algebra for some fourteen-year-old girl, and I was beginning to feel ill. I wished for explosions, fantastic crashes, vanishings—anything to mark it. I wanted to see the news here, now; I was tired of distant feeds, third-hand information.
But the only thing out of the ordinary that happened was: before sixth-period English Dusty Thomas, the football player, pulled his jacket up over his head and zipped his face inside it. Then class started. He tried to unzip himself, but the zipper was stuck. Everyone saw and laughed. Even the teacher, old Mrs. Fremont. Even me. “I hope you’ve accomplished what you needed to in there, Mr. Thomas, because it’s time for our spelling test now,” said Mrs. Fremont. They were guilty as well, the adults —they, too, perpetuated this rhythm of nothing stopping for anything else.
“This ‘state of war’ is just a technicality, you know,” my sister had said the previous afternoon, when the news first reached us (Mrs. Harasek knocking on Gunner’s door, poking in her head, and saying, “Gunner, you and your friends might like to come see this”). “We still have to go to school tomorrow morning.”
And gravely, shaking his head, Zane Harris had said, “1 wish people would stop talking about the war, because it fucking bores me.” He was radiant and sulky and devious all at once, his elbows hooked on his guitar, black guitar shining, ankles crossed in the center of the room. I couldn’t help but stare.
“That’s because you’re a moron, Zane,” said Gunner.
“Fuck you, Harasek!” Zane yelled. Then stomped over and, bending down, grabbed Gunner by the sleeves and shook him. “I’m always at war, man. I am always at war. My soul is in turmoil.”
Gunner fell back on his bed, laughing, beside my sister, who was reading her book again.
From the corner, Tom said, entirely sincerely, “There is no war.” (He hadn’t gone to the kitchen with the rest of us and heard the news. And there was no TV in the bedroom, where he’d stayed to look out the window, to twiddle with his drums.)
Zane continued to yell. “Shut up about the fucking war! I don’t wanna hear another fucking word about the fucked-up fucking war!” Then he straightened, began to shrug, madly, out of his guitar strap. Threw down the instrument.
Boys are stupid.
Our violence is aimless.
Tommy’s mother was away, so I spent the night with April there. Donny also came. The rich, sprawling, suburban-style house at the end of Thomasina Jones’s long, beautiful, landscaped driveway. We were ten days into the war. Tommy’s mother was cool; Tommy showed us all her old Carole King records. Her mother’s current boyfriend was a lawyer, younger than she. He flirted with Tommy, too, Tommy told us as she stood in the kitchen, pouring tea.
“He’s not handsome,” said Tommy, “but I can tell he has a big dick.”
“Must you always judge a man by what is in his pants,” said April derisively.
“Get off your high horse, April,” Tommy told her. And slammed the milk carton down in front of her. “Help me,” she ordered. April got up and began to pour the milk.
“I don’t want milk in mine,” I said, covering my cup with my hand.
Donny, seated at the yellow-tiled kitchen table, looked like a tornado blown into Tommy’s house and rendered meek, pathetic. “Is this what girls talk about together?” He was rapt. “This is cool.”
Tommy was slender and wore clothes that draped and made her shoulders appear attractively frail. She was the only girl in school who dyed her hair something other than black, ritually. The same color, burnt umber, each time. Because she understood her color wheel. “I’m a winter-complected person,” she had explained. What was umber? I didn’t even know.
“You want in Gunner’s pants, just face it,” said Tommy to April.
“I don’t want in his pants,” argued April, “what the fuck is wrong with you? I want in his soul. Is what I want.” She glared into her tea cup.
Donny’s eyes roved the ceilings. “Do you mind if I look around your house?” he asked, and Tommy replied, as if it was a tired subject: “Knock yourself out.”
Donny and I sat in front of the TV in the living room, h
olding hands on and off, while my sister and Tommy made phone calls and then announced they were going out. They went into the bathroom to get ready and came out a few times in different outfits, asking for our opinions. Donny got up after a while and wandered off. After Tommy and April had left, I walked through the house until I found Donny in Tommy’s mother’s bedroom, sprawled on his stomach across the bed.
Tonight, had been my plan, tonight it would happen.
I sat down beside him and Donny asked me to scratch his back. Then he turned over and I scratched his stomach, too. He stretched like a cat showing me his stomach. The sight of his body startled me a little. He had taken off his shirt, and I could see his ribs under his skin and the flatness of his chest. The overhead lamp was glaring. The only other times I’d seen him shirtless were when we’d been outside swimming (he was always in motion then) or under much dimmer lights. He closed his eyes. He was tired, he said, he hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in a week. Then he turned over again, placed his face in Tommy’s mother’s pillows, and slept like a baby. And that was as close to sex as we got that night. It was my own fault, I supposed, for not having informed him of my plan—but I had expected he would just try. He had done as much at other times. I felt almost rejected. I sat contemplating a pair of scissors on the nightstand. That, and the distance between my hands and the back of his neck. It occurred to me what was possible. The scissors were of a heavy, durable quality, and sharp. I picked them up and held them in my hands as I wandered around the room, looking at Tommy’s mother’s things. There was a look to adult dressers, adult bathroom countertops, a look that was a little mysterious. The accoutrements of adulthood; the secrets of self-care, you would remember them: a bowl of dried twigs and flower petals, slim tubes of mascara, dainty underpants, even a few crinkly plastic condom packages under the underwear. A plush red velvet cushion on a stool in front of the makeup mirror. Things our own mother never, never displayed. There was a lot to learn, a lot of items to acquire in order to be a “normal” or “total” woman, I thought. Every object in the room exuded an air of feminine guile. In my head I made a list—things a sexually confident woman should own. Fuzzy slippers. Thick, creased paperbacks on the nightstand. A pink vinyl shower cap on the doorknob of the bathroom door. I felt coarse and ugly, uninformed.
I sat on the bed and looked at Donny again. I looked at the texture of his scalp, the unflattering angle of his jaw and neck, his unclean ears, his vulnerability as he slept—this was all knowledge I didn’t know what to do with at fourteen, images they didn’t sell in popular representations of closeness, of people coming together. I tried to ignore it, but a feeling of revulsion toward Donny had risen in me. It wasn’t fair, of course. I looked at myself in the mirror. My face was calm, showing nothing of the questions, the revulsion, the coldness in me. I was still holding the scissors in my other hand as I traced my fingers up and down Donny’s back in an attempt to feel love, to mean love. The way a woman should, I thought. But it all required acting. Was what I had discovered.
I put the scissors back on the nightstand. I didn’t want to grow up.
Late, Tommy and April returned from wherever they had been. They had met some older guys, they said, who invited them back to their motel room where they all watched TV. Who were they? Who knows, they said. Questions were sometimes the only answers, they said, toying with me.
“Where’s your lover boy?” Tommy asked me.
“He’s asleep,” I replied.
“Well, I hope he took a shower.” She tossed her coat across the kitchen counter, flung herself over a stool, sank her face into her arms.
April climbed up and sat cross-legged on the counter. She was moony. “He is so incredible,” she said. “He is so beautiful, it just makes me want to cry.” She was talking about Gunner, of course. “The way he said that. ‘It all sounds like Communism to me.’ He is so smart.”
“He’s a boy, April.” Tommy was yelling into her own arms. “A little boy
“You just don’t get it.”
Tommy raised her head, stuck out her hand, grabbed hold of April’s ankle. “Why’re we friends, April? Why? Because we are the two most different-from-other-people people we know.” Tommy was an actress, a Drama Queen. She was certain to become famous, she said often, because there was nowhere else in the world someone like her belonged but on a screen, on a stage. Everyone at school was frightened of her. But as far as she was concerned she was already There. No when, if, or in the future about it. There was where she had always been. “We are both talented and beautiful,” she said, “so why are you forever torturing yourself?”
And somehow April was now crying. She was saying a lot of things, but all I could understand was “I hate nighttime sometimes. Nighttime makes things so weird sometimes and then everyone always forgets about it in the morning, even if they agreed with you at night.” Tommy crawled up beside my sister and they talked for a long while, whispering intricacies back and forth, deliberating over “your idea” of this and “well, your idea” of that.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I ransacked the freezer and found ice cream. In the living room I curled up on the couch and turned on the TV, and at three in the morning the news was on. I waited to see scenes from the war, but there were just talking heads with an occasional switch to some live coverage of a desert compound or a desert aerial-view map where nothing, honestly, was happening. I tried to listen, but the truth was I didn’t understand most of what they meant; I couldn’t string the facts, the lingo, together.
“Do they never sleep, those camera people?” remarked my sister when she and Tommy at last drifted in, their previous conversation already dismissed, forgotten.
(Yet there had been something in the air that afternoon. Me and my sister with a backseat full of boys. Years later and still I feel it. How we drove around town after the news first broke in a feeling of crazy unity, how even stopping to get gas was a sincere group effort. We had to scrape up pennies. We all joined in—we were digging them off the carpet under the seats and out of the lint in our pockets. Then April strode boldly inside to pay while the rest of us lingered outside. I bought a soda and sat on the curb beside Gunner and offered him some, but he said he would not drink from a straw, could not see the point of straws, as if it were a matter of principle, and I laughed. Suddenly I was laughing a lot.
“You better watch it,” said Gunner, as he took the cup from my hands and pried off the lid and straw and drank right from the lip of the cup.
And I watched Donny and those other boys next to a black pickup truck across the lot, in their cut-off black tees or muscle shirts, wiry-bodied and shaggy-haired, their hands rubbing their own long, flat stomachs. They were going to war soon, some of them. Donny would come back and tell us this, just then I’d known it. And I’d wanted to say so to Gunner. I’d wanted to capitalize on the moment, my intuition, my secret sureness.
Instead I said, “What do you think of my sister?”
He seemed ready to enter immediately into what I was asking. “April’s funny,” he said, “I don’t think she always means what she says. I mean, I think war is stupid, too, and I think people are stupid, but I don’t want to see proof of it necessarily. I don’t want the world to blow up.” He handed me my soda and pulled his hands up into his sleeves. Something about that gesture—I knew at that moment, absolutely, that there were things about him I was going to learn that my sister never would. It had to do with being willing to wait. She would leave soon, had always been impatient to do so. But I had no such aspirations. And she had projections about Gunner; I did not. “Sometimes I feel like there’s something else she wants to say to me, but she won’t say it,” he said.
She won’t say she’s crazy about you was what I could’ve offered, but I did not. I refrained. I was protecting her when I said to him, “A war is what brought her here with my mom. It’s like she doesn’t even think of that.”
“Well, a war brought you here, too,” said Gunner. He had
a diplomatic way of reprimanding; his tone was hesitant.
“What do you think of Donny?”
“He just seems kind of sad to me,” replied Gunner. And I felt then like a coward, because I saw that what I’d been expecting—wanting—to hear was a confirmation of my own doubts about Donny’s character, as I had about my sister’s. But my cowardice was redeemable—I was told in the next second—as Gunner held his hand out, above mine, with something pinched between his fingertips. I glanced sideways at him, and he was smiling his frozen little smile. I opened my palm, and he handed over whatever it was he’d been fidgeting with inside his sleeves. A tiny ball of lint. And I closed my fingers around it.
The first time Donny Silver ever handed something to me was on the night we met, a summer earlier, at the County Fair. We’d been introduced by Kenny Davis, who knew Donny from grade school, and Kenny had told me Donny Silver Was on drugs but a nice guy underneath it all—“he just needs a girlfriend.” Why me, I didn’t know, but I had liked being trusted and I had trusted Kenny. Through the game booths, between The Gravitron and The Hammer, with neon pink and green lights spinning in the still black sky above us, we walked. Donny was toting his skateboard, sucking the ice cubes out of his soda cup, when a little girl ran in front of us, dropping her fluorescent-orange plastic bracelet in the flat grass at our feet. But wait. I’ve misremembered—it was not me. Donny stooped down and picked it up and handed it back to her without a word.
We sat on a picnic bench on a hill behind the lights and rides. Me with my hands between my knees the first time we kissed, the second, maybe third kiss I’d ever had. Soon I would learn to stop counting, that it was like counting pennies, kisses, they came and went so easily after a while. The summer night air was warm. I had been just looking for proof of compassion. It didn’t matter whom toward.)