Short People (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Joshua Furst

  Soon, after she’s chosen her outfit, Mary will wait on the front steps of the duplex her family shares with the Hildebrandts for Stephanie’s Escort to appear down the street. She’ll watch the sky darken from blue to gray and fret about what might happen tonight.

  When Stephanie finally arrives, Mary will immediately ask if the outfit’s alright. If it’s wrong, Stephanie won’t be afraid to say so. If need be, she’ll even wait as Mary changes. They both know how clingy Mary gets when she feels insecure. Then they wind up resentful, not speaking for days, both wishing Mary was less of the person she is.

  But tonight, although Stephanie has minor qualms with the jewelry and thinks Mary’s makeup is a little too much, she will merely say, “Take off the hat and you’re perfect.” Baseball cap thrown into the house, Mary will amble back to the car and they’ll be off.

  As always, Mary will jump, first thing, into Stephanie’s day, asking hundreds of questions, hoping to get every detail of every second since last time they saw each other. Normally, Stephanie savors the attention, spouting off the mendacities of her life like she’s a charming and charismatic world leader holding court to a worshipful audience on matters of global importance. Tonight, though, because Mary refused to come to Milwaukee shopping, and because it’s Mary’s birthday, Stephanie will want to hear about Mary’s day first.

  Mary will play coy, like she would tell if she could, but she’s been sworn to secrecy, until Stephanie gives up in frustration, lightly teasing Mary and making her promise to tell all later. Mary will cross her heart and pray to God that Stephanie forgets about this, that her self-pity is allowed to wrap itself silently into the past the way guilty pleasures are supposed to. Then she’ll press Stephanie to get on with the litany.

  She’ll listen raptly as Stephanie starts in on the traffic jam caused by some kind of accident involving a jackknifed semi on Highway 41. She’ll take mental notes as Stephanie rates, song by song, the cds that she bought at the Grand Avenue Mall. She’ll commiserate and say, “You’re not fat, though, it’s okay,” as Stephanie berates herself about the humungous salad, with mega-amounts of grated cheese and ranch dressing that wasn’t even low-fat, she ordered at T.G.I. Fridays—she ate the whole thing! Stephanie will describe every pair of clam-diggers and every designer t-shirt she didn’t buy for summer clothes with as much fervor as she lavishes on those she did, and Mary will passionately agree with her choices. She’ll shiver as Stephanie vividly re-creates all the details of the nagging, half-spoken argument her parents dragged from retail outlet to retail outlet, and then all the way home in the car.

  Camping up her disappointment to heighten the guilt, Stephanie will ask Mary why she refused to come along. Mary won’t know how to explain that she has more fun listening to Stephanie describe what happened than she does when she actually goes out into that world, where she feels so heavily pressured to be spontaneous and fun that her self-consciousness clings to her like plastic wrap. She’ll meekly attempt to shift the conversation in a different direction.

  And because it’s Mary’s birthday, Stephanie will begrudgingly let it go at this first sign of bristle. She’ll fly into gossip, reeling off names and vital information like who’s broken up with whom, who’s started going out with whom, and who’s likely to fight with whom over all these intrigues. The list will go on and on.

  It will seem to Mary as if every single student at Goodrich High School except her is somehow involved in a steamy affair or a messy divorce. At first she’ll consider herself lucky as she attempts the impossible task of keeping all these sex lives straight, but the chart in her mind will quickly grow unreadable. Laughing, enjoying the geometry of the project, she will make Stephanie backtrack and retrace and define the length of each amorous line. Eventually, she’ll realize that everyone has been with everyone else and she’ll wonder how she was so sadly able to keep herself completely outside of the matrix.

  She’ll wonder if it’s her own fault. Stephanie would say so. “Toughen up, you’ve got nothing to lose,” she’d say. They’ve argued about this before, and now Mary’s always sensitive to the possibility of Stephanie turning on her. It won’t surprise her—she’ll have almost been expecting it—when Stephanie’s grip on the steering wheel tenses in the extra-safe ten and two o’clock position and she lets the car coast to an illegally low velocity, as if preparing for falling rocks ahead.

  Mary will allow the gossip to tumble away on the pavement behind them and wait deferentially—flinching—for the lecture that she sees coming.

  As the car falls to an inch-along idle, Stephanie, with a beleaguered look pulling at her face, will glance back and forth between Mary and the street. She’ll glance at the ranch houses lined with manicured saplings. She’ll sigh, shoring up her energy, and say, “So tonight, when you’re at the party—”

  Mary will tense and search for a distraction—the hard plastic bow-tied koala bear hanging from the rearview mirror, the chewing-gum wrapper crumpled on the dashboard, the frayed, growing hole in the foamy hand grip tied around Stephanie’s steering wheel, the colon blinking between the hour and minute on the dashboard clock. She’ll cut Stephanie off—“No, I’ll be good. I promise. I’ll be good”—as she becomes transfixed by the blinking, the blinking, the blinking.

  Stephanie will press the brake and the car will jiggle to a stop in the middle of the street. She won’t even bother to pull off onto the shoulder. She’ll contemplate the windshield and rapidly pop her jaw. Then she’ll turn and attempt to make eye contact.

  Sensing Stephanie’s effort, Mary will focus more tightly on the blinking colon.

  “I’m so serious, Mary,” Stephanie will say.

  And Mary will try her best to ignore her.

  “Mary. I know you’re listening, Mary. And just let me say that this is really stupid. This is really baby-ish. Because, Mary . . .” Stephanie will pause expectantly. When she starts up again, her voice will contain a tinge of whine. “Why won’t you look at me? You don’t even know what I was going to say. I wasn’t even gonna say anything bad.”

  Mary will be drawn in by this. “Yes, I do know.”

  “What, then?”

  “That I better not act like a spaz.”

  Stephanie will arch her eyebrows and say, “Well . . . but I wasn’t going to say it like that.” Trying to turn it into a joke they’re both in on.

  Mary will turn to the window and study a sprinkler’s rotation across the lawn beside her.

  “I was going to say it’s your birthday, Mary. Do you think I’d drag you to a party where nobody liked you on your birthday? I wouldn’t do that. People like you. You’re not an untouchable. Skanky Stacey and G. I. Joe, they’re untouchables, but not you. You just have to be yourself tonight, Mary, please? Just be . . . Relax and let things happen and don’t look at people like they’re like offending you when they say stupid shit. Just talk to them. They all want to be your friends.”

  It will strike Mary that Stephanie’s being completely sincere, but she won’t acknowledge this. Instead she’ll remind herself of what she knows: that to be known is the biggest danger there is, to be known is to risk being hurt. She can’t prove this and there’s no way she’d share it with Stephanie, who would want proof, failing to comprehend how Mary or anyone else could know something simply by knowing it, as if by osmosis, without even an anecdote to back up the conviction. Mary will sink into the rhythm of the sprinkler, tuning out Stephanie’s pep talk. She’ll wait, frozen in place, until Stephanie gives up in frustration, revs the engine and squeals off toward the lake.

  As she watches the houses grow farther and farther apart, gradually being replaced by alfalfa fields, Mary will skim backward through the events of her day until she reaches Manhattan. She’ll let herself wander into a game of compare and contrast, pitting herself against Mariel Hemingway. Mariel Hemingway would never find herself fighting with her best friend on the way to a party she didn’t want to go to in the first place. Mariel Hemingway would just refuse
to go. She’d be too busy doing actually interesting things with exceptionally fascinating people: engaging in intellectual debates; going to the theater and watching real actors, famous actors, as opposed to the plant managers and town council members and mothers on view at the community theater productions Mary herself is privy to; reading books that were written by people she actually knows. And gradually, as this imagined life unfolds, Mary will replace Mariel Hemingway with herself.

  Every light will be burning in the two-story house. People will be huddled in packs all over the lawn and especially around the keg on the back porch. A cluster of kids will be sitting on the dock with their shoes off, swinging their feet in the water, daring each other to be the first one to skinny-dip. Couples, thinking they’re hidden, will be necking in the shadows of oak trees and maples.

  Stephanie will jump from the car and run around blabbing to everyone that it’s Mary’s birthday, and even though Mary knows she’s doing this to get back at her for the fit in the car, she won’t mind. No, she won’t have time to mind, she’ll be too overwhelmed by the reactions of her classmates. People will come to her of their own volition, just to say happy birthday, to find out what she’s been up to, to chat! And when Mary answers their questions with ambiguous, wholly uninformative responses, they’ll be satisfied. They won’t think she’s weird. They’ll accept her. Wow! She’ll smile, half embarrassed, half elated by the attention.

  Greeting her, Sarah will tell her she “shines.” Mary won’t even think about running to the bathroom to search her face for the blemish that might have provoked such a witticism. Instead, she’ll blush even more and return the compliment with neither paranoia nor skepticism. Soon, enough people will be fawning over Mary that Stephanie will leave her on her own and drift into the crowd across the lawn. Pumping another beer from the keg, Mary won’t even notice she’s gone.

  Normally, Mary can’t think of anything to say at parties. They feel like exercises in masochism to her, and when trapped in them she sinks toward an isolation so deep that her own voice sounds like it’s talking down to her. Most of the time she leaves early. When she stays, she drinks herself dizzy attempting to push herself into a more sociable state of mind until, by the end of the night, she needs help walking and has to be carried home by someone she vaguely recognizes as Stephanie. Tonight, surprising herself more than anyone, she’ll drink just enough to maintain a nice buzz.

  Slightly mystified, tingling with the sensation of winging it, she’ll speak casually with people she’s always thought were stuck-up about their plans for the summer. Without betraying how incredibly disconcerting she finds it, she’ll listen as they bad-mouth people she’s always thought were their best friends. She’ll even toss out a few nasty crowd-pleasing comments herself, which will be no less satisfying for being unintentional. At some point she’ll realize that Stephanie has wandered off, but instead of inspiring the usual panic, this will be simply an observation, giving her no more pause than any of the other random things that flit through her mind: “It’s sort of interesting that everybody smokes Marlboro Lights” or “I think I just stepped in spilled beer, oh well.” Tonight, Mary’s life will have the soft-lit feel of a romantic movie and, for the first time she can remember, she’ll compare it favorably to Manhattan and let herself fall into a deep, cozy joy.

  Sometime near midnight, she’ll take a deep breath and the air will smell perfumed and sweet. With a sudden desire to feel the night breeze, to get lost in the blanket of romance it conjures up in her mind, Mary will wander off alone along one of the wooded trails that meander past the house on their way around the lake. Still within earshot of the party, she will find a boulder that juts out into the water and, hoping there’s no poison ivy, she’ll forge off the trail to climb onto it.

  Sitting with her knees to her chin, her plastic cup of beer tucked neatly into the crook beneath them, Mary will marvel at how the surface of the lake shimmers like a robe of white gold in the moonlight, almost as if it could be unhooked from the black water below and folded away, to be brought back out only on special occasions, when the moon wants to wax romantically at someone who can appreciate the subtleties of its beauty. Mesmerized by the white gold, she’ll lose track of time and space, to be brought back only when Justin calls out from the trail behind her.

  “Sarah said you were out here somewhere. Are you hiding or something?”

  She’ll look over her shoulder at him. “No . . . I like the quiet here.”

  “I was looking for you.” He’ll sound embarrassed.

  She will smile and curse herself, remembering how much she likes him.

  Mary and Justin went out for three weeks in January. They never really did anything, mostly sitting on the concrete wall behind the gym during basketball games and wandering around Franklin Park on weekday nights when no one else was there. They hardly even made out, maybe five or six times tops, and even then she only touched him a couple times through his jeans—and he never tried to go further than massaging her breasts lightly and sucking her nipple once after midnight as they rocked on a swing in the park. Mostly it was just sloppy kisses and long, beautiful conversations. Justin seemed like a die-hard romantic. One night, after talking on the phone so long that they’d both grown tired and incoherent, he told her they shouldn’t hang up, they should sleep with the receivers next to their ears and it would be like they were in bed together. “I’ll cuddle the phone,” he said, “and pretend it’s you.” She had thought they were falling in love until he inexplicably stopped calling and got his sister to say he was never home. He pretended not to know who she was in the hallways at school.

  Justin is smart and good at sports. He floats around between all the cliques, so even though he’s not technically the most popular guy in school, he’s actually more popular than the most popular guy. One of the things Mary hadn’t understood when they were together was why he wanted everything to be such a secret. He’d said it was because if everybody knew how much the two of them felt for each other, it would end up as gossip and their feelings would begin to get warped and diluted; their feelings would belong to everybody else as much as they belonged to him and to Mary. To make him happy, Mary had kept the relationship a secret even from Stephanie. She’ll remember, now, how she had felt like bursting with no one to talk to about either her happiness while they were together or her confusion afterward. She’ll remember how she’d felt manipulated and secretly humiliated for weeks. She will put this out of her mind, though, as he asks if it’s okay for him to climb up and sit next to her.

  She’ll nod and scoot over, taking a sip from her beer. She’ll be conscious of how sweet her face feels from smiling as she watches him come close to losing his balance in the trench of mud between the trail and the boulder, grabbing and almost breaking a nearby sapling just in time. As he scrambles up the side of the rock, he will almost spill his drink—some kind of fruit juice concoction, probably vodka and cranberry. She’ll take it from him and suck a long draught through the straw, not giving it back until he settles down next to her.

  He’ll grin like he doesn’t know what to say.

  “Look at the water, doesn’t it look like it’s almost got skin?”

  He’ll stare gravely out at the lake for a while, then nod. “Uh-huh.”

  “Or maybe not skin, like a coat or something . . . you know what I mean?”

  “I wanted to say happy birthday.”

  She’ll smile again. “Sweet sixteen—yeah, right.” For a moment she’ll ponder the danger involved in continuing the conversation. “Did I tell you that? I mean, before?”

  “Sure.”

  He’ll reach out to take her hand.

  They will sit in silence, watching the water lap lightly against the boulder.

  She has desperately wanted to know why he stopped calling, but she’ll refrain from asking, afraid that his answer might vandalize the story she’s constructed to explain his actions. She figures he ran from his feelings because of a fear of ove
rload, a fear of desiring more than he could hold on to; he wasn’t ready yet to test his own boundaries and she can forgive him for that—it’s only human. She can still like him this way. If he tells her his side, it might contradict this.

  Gazing at him, she’ll try to catch his eye, but he’ll be transfixed by the water. The expression on his face will be so sad and distant that the urge to kiss him will be hard to resist.

  “Was it good?” he’ll ask.

  “What?”

  “Your birthday.”

  “It was okay. I watched Manhattan.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A movie. You probably wouldn’t like it. It’s black and white.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “Uh-huh. I’ve watched it every year on my birthday since I was about twelve.”

  “I’d like to see it, then,” he’ll say, squeezing her hand.

  She’ll squeeze back and massage the soft spot beneath his thumb. Slowly, the two of them will reach for a kiss. She’ll take his lower lip between hers, lick it, and then, pulling a few inches away, blow on it softly, kiss him again and nestle her head up against the tender part of his shoulder between the neck and the blade. She’ll think about movies and moonlight, about people in love in their own little bubbles with nothing outside of the frame of their film.

  After a while they’ll wander back to the party. Mary will hold Justin’s hand, unafraid of being seen, and guide him along the path so he can continue to examine the treetops.

  As they come out of the woods and move across the lawn toward the house, Mary will realize how late it is. The handful of people left will be sitting around in half-drunken stupors, trying to sober themselves up for the drive home. They will be negotiating rides and complaining about how stale the beer has become.