Thumbsucker

by Walter Kirn

  “The point,” I said, “is to show your hands in action and not just describe their appearance. That’s our gimmick.”

  “I still like my scar idea. This seems conventional.”

  “Trust me on this. I’ve really thought about it.”

  Audrey wedged a nail between her teeth and picked out a bit of sauerkraut and nodded. She pushed away her plate and got the pen.

  After Audrey submitted her essay, I started seeing Don Johnson everywhere: profiled in magazines, posing on billboards, pitching aftershave on TV commercials. I’d always assumed, without giving it much thought, that somewhere in America there was a border between famous people like him and people like us, but I wasn’t sure how far away it lay or how easy it was to cross. If Audrey made it to the other side, there was no telling when she’d come back, if ever. The only person I knew who’d made the trip was a gorgeous blonde high school senior named Jeanna Meade who’d left for Los Angeles three years ago, appeared in a soap opera for a couple of months, and never been heard from since. Her parents had closed their motel and gone to find her and they had vanished, too.

  One night Mike and Audrey attended a seminar on marketing upscale vitamins and supplements and Joel and I stayed up late and watched a talk show. Johnson was a guest. Women shrieked as he strode onstage, his collar open, his trousers loose and flowing, and when he sat down beside the other guest—a female singer with a double chin and long false eyelashes that looked like bat wings—she hiked up her skirt and fiddled with her blouse buttons.

  “Do you always have this effect?” the host asked Johnson.

  Johnson shrugged. The actress clutched her heart. She rolled her eyes and pretended to be fainting.

  “Medic!” the host yelled. “We need a medic here!”

  As the waiting period went on, Audrey developed a certain swagger, as if merely mailing the essay had transformed her. She made pizza night a weekly ritual. Tasks that I knew she’d been putting off, she suddenly dove into, such as talking to Joel about sex. Instead of teaching him as she’d taught me—with the help of college nursing texts that made the sexual organs look like plants—she used the new Penthouse. I wondered where she’d bought it.

  I grew bluer and moodier by the day. Though I’d come to believe that Audrey would lose the contest, one scene that I’d imagined from her dream date seemed bound to haunt me always: Johnson filling glasses of champagne while Audrey applied mascara in a compact mirror. Whether this moment ever came to pass didn’t matter now that I knew the truth: Audrey’s life with us was a compromise, a sham.

  To ease her dissatisfaction, I pampered her. At night, when we watched TV, I rubbed her shoulders, digging into the muscles with my thumbs. I watered her plants and washed and waxed her car and plumped up the sofa cushions before she sat on them.

  One day she said, “You’re all over me. Get off.”

  “Your neck looks tight. I thought I’d rub it down.”

  “I can rub down my own neck. Get away.”

  I went to the kitchen, where Mike was cleaning walleyes. He’d been ice fishing on Elkhorn Lake. His thermal undershirt glittered with bloody scales as he poked a fillet knife into one fish’s throat, then pulled straight back. Dark guts came tumbling out.

  “You’re spilling blood on Audrey’s clean tile,” I said.

  Mike dropped a paper towel on the floor and wiped it around with his foot.

  “You’re making it worse.”

  Mike rinsed his bloody hands in the sink and dried them on a white dishcloth.

  “You’re going to lose her.”

  Mike hung the cloth on its hook and stared at me. “What’s going on?”

  “You’ve given up,” I said. “You talk about all these couples getting divorces and then you treat your own wife like she’s a cleaning lady.”

  I said nothing more, but Mike seemed to get my message. A few days later, for no special reason, he came home with flowers and a box of candy and took Audrey out to the Hund, a German restaurant with a strolling accordion player. They returned after midnight, which thrilled me. I’d waited up. I listened to their voices in the hallway.

  “Well, I think he’s cute.”

  “He’s a homo.”

  “Women love him.”

  “My mother loves Liberace, for God’s sake. If anything, that’s proof the guy’s a fruit.”

  I heard my parents’ bedroom door close and then, a few minutes later, it opened again. Mike appeared in my bedroom, shirtless, shaking. He stood at my footboard and glared, his hands in fists.

  “Get up,” he said. “I know what you’ve been up to.”

  “She asked for my help. I had no choice. You’re drunk.”

  “You bet I’m drunk. I have a right to be.”

  I shrunk back against the headboard as Mike sat down and slapped the edge of my mattress with one hand.

  “You’re right, I don’t deserve her. Never did.” He unraveled a thread from my blanket’s satin border and wound it around one finger like a tourniquet. “I played on her sympathy. She felt sorry for me. A linebacker with a limp. She ate it up. Then the limp went away and I had nothing to offer her.”

  “It’s not just you,” I said. “It’s Joel and me. We have to make more of an effort.”

  “She dreams,” Mike said. He tightened the thread. His fingertip turned white. “Still, you’d have thought she’d have better taste. Don Johnson?”

  “He dresses well.”

  “It’s my fault. I’ll do better. Maybe she was right to play this game with me. Maybe I’ve let things slip further than I realized.”

  Mike opened his arms and leaned his weight against me. The hug was hot and soggy. I didn’t like it. I pushed him back but he only held me tighter, squeezing the air from my lungs. Such force, such mass. I wondered sometimes how my mother stood it.

  The manila envelope looked official. In its cellophane window I read the words: “Audrey Cobb, You’re a Winner! Claim Your Prize!”

  I stashed it unopened in a dresser drawer and tried to continue normally with my day, but every time I looked at Audrey my mind said good-bye. I watched her do the laundry, measuring out detergent and setting dials. She matched up my socks and tucked them into balls and tossed them free-throw style into a basket. I happened to know from reading certain magazines that women were tired of performing such chores for men and that the day was coming when they’d quit doing them.

  When I finally handed over the contest envelope, resigned to yet another defeat from a world that seemed determine to strip me bare, I saw Audrey’s eyes go dewy. She ripped it open.

  “I don’t believe this!” She slid the letter out. She flattened it on the table and started reading.

  Her face fell. She turned the letter printside down.

  “What?” I said.

  Audrey crossed her arms and hugged herself.

  “You didn’t win?”

  “Of course I didn’t. Don’t tease.”

  Later, I read the letter for myself and learned that Audrey had, in fact, placed third, along with five hundred other Johnson fans. The prize was a year’s supply of gelatin drink, but when the carton arrived she didn’t open it. She stashed it high on a kitchen shelf, behind a box of generic instant rice.

  A few days later, I noticed her nails were breaking. She trimmed them back and started chewing them. She gave up polishing them and using emery boards.

  One night I found the courage to tell her how bad I felt.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have interfered. I should have let you write the essay yourself. That scar idea was a winner.”

  Audrey looked up.

  “I blew your big chance,” I said. “You could have met him. You could have seen Palm Beach. You could have stayed up all night in Miami, partying with stars and fashion designers.”

  Audrey held up one hand and spread her fingers. She looked at them close up, then farther away.

  “Just so you know that,” she said. “Just so you know.�
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  4

  Because I’d been drinking cough syrup all winter and generally letting my health and hygiene go, forgetting to dress warm, skipping meals, and rinsing with mouthwash instead of brushing my teeth, I wasn’t in any shape that spring to go out for baseball, as Mike had hoped I would. I joined Mr. Geary’s new speech squad instead.

  He recruited me as I was walking home from school one day. He stopped his road-salt-corroded Mercedes diesel, turned down the classical music on the tape player, and motioned to me with the very gesture—a crooked index finger—that I’d been taught as a child to beware of.

  “I’ll give you a lift. We need to talk,” he said. “Here, let me clear this seat off.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “If cleanliness is next to godliness, I’m a fallen angel, I’m afraid.” I sat on a heap of flattened Penguin Classics and button-down white shirts with yellow armpits. Empty cola cans rolled around in back, and on the dashboard were hairbrushes and combs snarled with colorless hair. The key chain hanging from the steering column was one of those plastic Buddhas whose tubby stomach supposedly gives you luck if you rub it.

  “I’ve noticed you’re quite a communicator,” Mr. Geary said. “I think you have an oral gift.”

  I frowned.

  “That’s not a diagnosis, it’s a compliment. Me, I’d do anything to have your talent.”

  “What makes you think I have talent?”

  “Little clues. Of all pupils I’ve had in ninth-grade English, you were the first who knew what ‘simile’ meant. Also, you have a certain lively eloquence that can’t be taught. It’s organic.”

  “I hate that word. It reminds me of mold or something. Bacteria.”

  “See how sensitive you are to language? Nurture that, Justin. Never let it go. I assume you’re a reader.”

  “Not books. I’ve never finished one. Now and then I skim a Hardy Boys.”

  “Nothing wrong with the Hardy Boys. Cute duo. I always preferred the dark one. Joe?”

  “It’s Frank.”

  “So, are you on my team?”

  “I’ll think about it. My father might not be happy.”

  “I’ll talk to him. I have a bit of a golden tongue myself.”

  It worked. I stopped in at Mike’s store that afternoon to help him unpack a shipment of Louisville Sluggers. Joel stood behind the counter taking practice swings. “Going, going, gone,” he said. Mike grinned. Last year, Joel had tied a grade school home run record and he was looking to top himself this spring. His arms were like little fence posts from lifting weights.

  “You just missed your teacher,” Mike said when he saw me. “Quite a fan you’ve got there.”

  Joel swung his bat. “Am I choking up too much?”

  Mike shook his head. “So,” he said to me, “speech. It could be worse. He told me it’s pretty competitive, in fact.”

  “He thinks I’ll be good.”

  “As long as it’s competitive. As long as it’s not just a lark. Some feel-good thing.”

  “It’s out of the park!” Joel cried. “It’s in the street!”

  “If you let me, I’ll give it my best. I swear,” I said.

  “We all deserve to win at something. Fine.”

  The speech team’s first meet, a divisional match, was held ninety miles away, in Chippewa City. My teammates, five girls, were already on the bus, huddled in the back around a beauty magazine, when I boarded with Mr. Geary. He’d had a crisis. Five minutes before, I’d found him in the boys’ room standing in front of the mirror with a scissors, attacking his bangs with jerky, hectic snips. Hair clogged the sink.

  “I wish that I was bald.”

  “I think your hair looks good,” I said.

  “Don’t patronize me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re making it worse now.”

  Mr. Geary wet his hands and patted his hair down. I felt sorry for him. He was our school’s youngest teacher and a bachelor, so plain in his looks that when he took his glasses off he seemed to have no face. His skin was the neutral hue of turkey meat and his thinning, straight hair required constant perms. In the days immediately following his stylings he’d wisecrack, laugh, and jiggle as he taught, but as his curls went flat, he went flat, too.

  When the bus pulled into Chippewa City, Mr. Geary stood up in the aisle and addressed the squad. He urged the girls to emphasize their eyes by freshening their mascara before they spoke, and he stressed the importance of posture and breath control. “It’s spring,” he said, “and I’ve noticed some stuffy noses; I brought along some decongestant pills. They’ll clear your heads and maybe pep you up.”

  None of the girls expressed interest in the pills, but I took four, which was twice the normal dosage.

  “That should give you a tingle,” Mr. Geary said.

  The speech event he’d signed me up for, Small-Group Discussion, had been created that year. The goal, according to a pamphlet I read, was not to vanquish the other side as in straight debate, but to “fruitfully interact with peers concerning issues of national and global interest.” The match was held around an oval table in the high school’s counseling office. I arrived to find my group already seated: two boys and three girls, all well dressed and smiling, wearing paper name tags on their chests and chatting about a documentary broadcast on public TV the night before.

  I disliked my opponents instantly. Beside one boy’s chair was a patent-leather briefcase with a built-in combination lock, while three of the girls had equipped themselves with card files marked with colored tabs. To make myself look as serious as they did, I went to a rack of pamphlets against the wall—“So, You Want to Be an Electrician?,” “Pregnant at Sixteen”—and grabbed a stack of them to set in front of me.

  That season’s general topic was the media. The subtopic, chosen that day by the judges, was TV violence. “Begin,” one judge said. A stretch of silence followed. A girl named Elise spoke up first. “It’s sick,” she said. “TV violence just kills morality, particularly among teens. The studies prove it. Day after day kids watch these shows with gunfights and suddenly it’s like, Hey, let’s rob a store. The next thing you know someone’s dead. It’s really a shame.”

  “I concur,” said Mark, the briefcase boy. “But let’s go further. TV decays the family. And once the family goes, everything goes with it. Down go our institutions. Up goes drug abuse. Ditto gambling and pornography.”

  I sensed the group recoiling against Mark’s vehemence. Interrupting him might win me allies.

  “Images aren’t reality,” I said. “Violence in art goes back to … Egypt? What’s important is teaching people to be skeptical—to draw a line between images and life.”

  I knew that I’d taken the lead with this remark. The judges, three older women with tall, sprayed hairdos, scribbled on the clipboards on their laps. Pushing for extra interaction points, I turned to the shy girl cowering next to Mark, her lower lip sucked back into her mouth.

  “What’s your view, Lisa? The group needs more perspective.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “TV’s not real. It’s pictures.” She flashed me a bashful grin. “It’s nice you asked.”

  “Hold on,” Mark said. “Reality’s not the point here. Social decline is.”

  “Kate?” I said. “Reaction?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Mark,” I said in a measured, gentle voice, “I understand the spirit of your objection, but reality and society are inextricable.” I held up my hands and laced my fingers together.

  I was bound to win, I knew it then. Small-Group Discussion was all about maneuvering—harassing the proud, encouraging the meek, and making oneself a trusted central figure. Knowledge of the topic was irrelevant. My victory seemed even more assured when the decongestants took effect. They made the room expand and brighten and keyed me in to the play of group emotion. I found myself finishing the other kids’ sentences and recombining their conflicting positions into satisfying compromises
.

  Mr. Geary was pacing in the hall when the discussion concluded. He clutched my elbow. I saw that he’d cut more hair off near his temples, giving him a funny, monkish look.

  “How’d it go?”

  “You were right. I have a flair.”

  “Told you.”

  “It’s the first thing I’ve ever been good at.”

  Mr. Geary stepped aside as the judges lined up to shake my hand. After they’d gone, he said, “You’re on you way. Winning suits you, Justin.”

  I agreed.

  The regionals, held in Duluth on a Saturday, required a Friday night stay in a motel. We drove for hours along an interstate whose median was planted with tiny pine trees. The smell of sunbaked soil filled the bus and the driver turned on a Bemidji radio station whose fast-talking D.J. was counting down the hits. I had a feeling of being bound for glory.

  When we registered at the motel Mr. Geary asked the clerk to place the squad’s three remaining girls in one room and me and him together in another.

  “I think we should do this by age,” I said.

  “Against school policy. No males with females.”

  “I’ll say I sneaked in. I’ll take the blame,” I said.

  “Justin, what precisely is this about? You don’t feel comfortable being alone with me?”

  “I like to be with people my age, is all.”

  The girls unpacked their gym bags on the beds and I sat on the floor and watched the news. Now that I had a forum for my opinions, current events and social issues gripped me. What’s more, I suspected there might be money in them. TV was filled with analysts and experts who sat around tables politely arguing just as I did in Small-Group Discussion. For the first time since coming back shattered from Camp Overcome, I glimpsed a future for myself. A goal.

  I analyzed the news reports as my teammates showered. They emerged from the bathroom in baggy football jerseys, their shampooed hair tied back in fragrant ponytails.

  “Who besides me needs a drink?” said Heather Hall. “I brought some licorice schnapps. I just need ice.”