by Jessica Raya
My counsellor, Mr. Boyd, told me I needed to get serious about my future, that life was more than boys and sock hops. “You’re on the verge of failing Math and English. Your other grades aren’t much better. I know you girls think getting married will solve everything, but nobody’s going to marry a high school dropout.”
“I’m not getting married,” I told him. “I’m going to be a broadcast journalist.”
“Can you spell broadcast journalist?” he said.
Carol said Mr. Boyd wasn’t qualified to guide turds into a toilet. In general, she trusted teachers about as much as she trusted textbooks. They all got an earful of Bible quotes supporting her position against cellular biology or quadratic equations or square dancing. Most placated her with high B’s or independent study. In gym, she carried the clipboard, exempt from participating in any sport for health reasons, though everyone knew it was the showers she was avoiding. Carol wouldn’t even go inside the locker room, but stood outside the door in her turtleneck and cords, checking our names as we passed. She’d always give me a sympathetic smile. Being a suspected arsonist got you out of nothing. I had to suffer through dodge ball like everybody else.
When Carol wasn’t arguing in class, she was usually in the library drafting letters to evangelical ministers or Republican politicians to ask them for advice. It was one of the many tasks on the ongoing list of good works she kept at the front of her purple binder. She checked it daily and found no greater joy than when she carefully crossed off an item with a purple pen and ruler. Carol wrote to President Nixon to apologize for America’s youth and wish him luck in the next election—she’d be voting for him in her prayers. She wrote to Governor Reagan to tell him how bad she felt about the trouble he was having with capital punishment and to assure him that she’d see all his movies as soon as she was allowed to watch TV. She asked Oral Roberts how one went about applying to his university and commiserated with Herbert W. Armstrong that, once again, the end of days had not come to pass. Next to her saints, Carol Closter’s favourite conversation topic was the Rapture, when the righteous would be called to heaven and the sinners condemned to their slow, painful deaths. She kept a gallon of water and a flashlight in her bedroom closet for the event. My dad had kept similar items in the trunk of his car, along with a first aid kit, a flare gun, and an old Playboy. He was nothing if not a practical man.
While she waited for the Rapture, Carol started another list in her binder, one of all the kids in our school who she needed to pray for. These were mostly potheads and burnouts, the girls who were doing it, and a sexy foreign exchange student from Paris. “It’s not Guillaume’s fault,” Carol explained. “French people are just born that way.” She had a book at home that proved it. She’d taken it from a book burning she’d gone to in Montana with her old church group. She relayed this casually, like bonfire was another word for yard sale. Not that I was one to talk.
Carol prayed for the kids on that list every night, she told me. She cried for their endangered souls. She wrote encouraging notes with cheerful drawings and slipped them into lockers and desks. Jesus loves you, she wrote, even if you don’t. It was all part of her plan.
“You have to show heroic virtue,” Carol told me. “They need to know that you tried your whole life to be a holier person. You can’t even get venerated without that, forget beatified.”
“Beautified?” I said.
She rolled her eyes, pausing at the top as if to say, See what I’m working with here?
“Beatified. The fourth step? I told you they do this by the books. They don’t mess around.”
“Who’s they?”
“They, Robin. Them. You know, sometimes I think you don’t even listen to me.”
Joyce Peyton and Melanie D’Angelo were also on Carol’s list, but she didn’t talk about them and I didn’t ask. I figured she’d seen Melanie making out against Troy Gainer’s red Mustang at lunch, their tongues down each other’s throats, his hands groping inside her back pockets as if he was looking for change.
—
The Closters were spending spring break in Montana, where they’d enjoy wholesome activities like visiting relatives and burning books. Before she left, Carol made me a copy of her list on the school’s mimeograph machine.
“Promise me you’ll pray every night,” she said. “Promise! Promise!”
“Okay,” I said and mostly meant it. There had to be a hundred people on that list, but I was determined to support anything that would keep Carol off the auditorium stage.
Aside from prayer duty, I had fully intended to study all week, to get it together, buckle down. Every afternoon I lay on a blanket in the backyard, surrounded by textbooks, but Mussolini and mitochondria couldn’t compete with the sound of the war in the living room. Mom left it on in the background while she transcribed, glancing up between cardiac arrests and brain tumours.
The Saturday before school started, the Sisters came with jugs of wine and no laundry. They’d been to a rally in the city. People had been arrested. Tear gas was used. They fluttered around Mom, telling the story in bits and pieces, shouting over each other, lit up with anger and possibility.
“It sounds very exciting,” Mom said, perching on a dining room chair, her spine straight beneath her caftan, the line between her eyebrows wriggling this way and that. My dad was always waiting for the other shoe to drop, but my mom preferred cautious optimism. She said things like “The grass is always greener” and “Well, you never know.”
Exciting doesn’t begin to describe it, the Sisters said. This is it. Things are really happening now.
“What’s happening?” I asked. “What things?” I really wanted to know. I wanted to feel what they did. I wanted to be optimistic, not cautiously, but wholly, utterly.
Everything, they said. Can’t you feel it? Can’t you feeeeel it?
I got on my bike and rode to my old junior high. I’d started going there again. The playground was usually overrun with little kids during the day. At night, high school kids gathered with their stolen bottles under the seductive glow of street lamps, but for a few quiet hours between dusk and dark, I would swing. I would try to remember the names on Carol’s list and wish them all straight A’s and eternally clear skin. I’d made a promise. Plus, it kept me away from gas stations.
One good thing about a school was that you knew it would always be there. Nobody was going to tear it down and put up a mini-mall. Still, whenever I arrived at the edge of the playground, it was always with some relief to find it where I’d left it. Except this time. This time there was someone on my swings. The interloper dug a Ked into the sand, twirling her body round and round. The chains twisted above her, clicking like old bones. When they wouldn’t twist any more, she lifted her feet. There was a heartbeat’s pause before arms, legs, hair flew out—everything spinning for a few brilliant seconds before the chains jerked and whipped her back the other way. Settling, she spiked her Ked again and started twirling the other way. As I began to turn my bike around, Melanie looked up.
“I forgot how much I liked it here,” she said, squinting against the setting sun.
“Best swings in town.”
“Yeah,” she said and smiled.
I dropped my bike in the grass and lowered myself into the swing beside hers. We rocked ourselves forward and back, feet never fully leaving the ground. Melanie poked her sneaker in the sand and dug a hole. We hadn’t spoken to each other in months. We’d become experts at avoiding each other at school. But here, on these swings, those rules didn’t apply.
“Remember the day we met?” she said.
“You had braces.”
“You had a bowl cut.”
“What a couple of dorks.”
“What happened?” she said, like she really didn’t know.
“I stopped letting my mom cut my hair.”
“You know you were supposed to be my maid of honour,” she said. She sounded mad. I guess I’d be mad too if I had Joyce Peyton for a best fri
end now. I pushed off a little, just enough to get air between me and the ground. Melanie gripped the chains loosely and dug her feet deeper in the sand.
“Do you want to know if me and Troy are doing it?” she said. I lifted my feet, angled my legs so they wouldn’t drag. Melanie kicked at the sand. “We’re going to. Probably next weekend.”
“Why?”
“His parents are going out of town.”
“I mean why are you doing it? I thought you wanted to wait until you got married.”
“God, you sound like Cloister. You really do. You know she told Joyce that Jesus watches people do it? I’m not kidding. Like He’s some kind of pervert or something.”
“You don’t even know her,” I said.
“Weren’t you at the Christmas assembly? Or, like, anywhere? You know, I felt really bad about what happened last year, but it’s almost like—I don’t know—like she asks for it.”
I didn’t say anything. Melanie stuck a clump of hair in her mouth and chewed. I leaned my body back, pulled hard on the chain, and kicked forward. Her head followed me. Tick-tock, tick-tock. Neither of us wanted to talk about Carol Closter anymore.
“Joyce said you’d be jealous,” Melanie said finally. “You know, Troy never even liked you. He was telling everyone what a mental case you were for burning that house down and Joyce said yeah, well you liked her, and he said no, he never did. He didn’t even know your name till after everything happened.”
I arched my back and pumped my legs as hard as I could. I pumped like that swing would actually take me somewhere else. I pumped like God was watching. My thighs and hands burned. The wind whistled in my ears. But high as I went, I always had to come down again. The chain thumped at the top as gravity yanked me back to earth. I hated that rush of air from behind, the world flying away from me.
“If I do, he’ll love me! Don’t you get it? He’ll love me!”
I let go of the chain and launched myself into the sky. Away, away. I could see the whole town. I could see the curve of the earth. One second I was arcing up, up, up. The next I was flat out on the ground.
I flipped onto my back, panting. There was sand in my mouth, and blood. Melanie bent over me, blue eyes blinking, blond hair tickling my arm. I remembered him heavy on top of me, grunting and groaning, pushing his way inside. He hadn’t even known my name.
“Jeez, are you okay? Robin? Say something. You’re freaking me out.”
Little stars sparked around her. Her eyes were filling with tears. I turned my head and spit red dirt.
“How high did I get?” I said.
“I don’t know. Fifteen, twenty feet? Who cares how high you were?”
I sat up carefully, palms and knees burning, everything on fire. “Don’t do it,” I said. “You don’t have to do it.”
Melanie wiped at her eyes roughly. She’d written TROY on her forearm, gouged it. The skin was red and angry around the sharp blue lines.
“Give me one good reason not to,” she said.
I could see that she really meant it. She wanted one good reason.
“He should love you first.”
“You’re one to talk,” she said and left me in the dirt.
—
My street was jammed with crappy hatchbacks and beat-up Volkswagen vans when I got home, our house lit up and swaying like a lava lamp. There were about thirty people clustered into little groups here and there, everyone in animated conversations, beer bottles swooping this way and that with their gestures. I pushed my way through the wheat fields of long hair and hemp clothing. Mom was running around putting coasters under everything. I followed her into the kitchen. There was beer on ice in the sink, a baggy of grass on the wedding china.
“I leave you alone for a few hours and you throw a party?” I said. “This isn’t how I raised you.”
“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “They made some phone calls and then all these people started showing up. I didn’t know there would be this many. I thought a few friends meant a few friends.”
A shirtless guy came up to us, holding a record. Mom wrinkled her nose as if he was about to ask her for money.
“You got the White Album?” he said.
“Sorry,” I said. “We’ve only got that colour.”
He nodded like he was thinking about it, then walked away.
“I guess I’m not very good at this college thing either,” Mom said.
“You could tell them to leave. Or I could.”
“But they’re having such a nice time,” she said.
Someone turned up the hi-fi. The Sisters made a dance floor in front of it. Their thin bodies swayed side to side, bare feet never quite leaving the ground. Mom was right. They did look like they were having a good time. It was probably the best time anybody had ever had in our house.
“What happened to you?” Mom said, noticing the hole in my jeans.
“I fell off the swings.”
“I wish I could still play on swings,” she said.
She lit a cigarette. I handed her one of the beers from the sink and got myself a Sprite from the fridge. The cold felt good on my torn palms. We took our drinks outside, where a group sat lotus style on the overgrown lawn, comparing their parents to Nixon.
“Oh, I almost forgot.” Mom pulled a postcard from the endless folds of her caftan. “This came for you today.” On the front was a picture of a mountain in Montana. On the back were two words: YOU PROMISED.
“It isn’t signed,” she said.
“It’s from my pen pal,” I said. “I promised to write her this week, but I forgot.”
“I didn’t know you had a pen pal. I think that’s just terrific. It’s good to be open to new things.”
“What if you still like the old things?” I said.
She put her arm around me. “Maybe you can have both,” she said unconvincingly.
Two of the people on the lawn started shouting at each other.
“You want to be drafted?” he said.
“I want the right to be drafted,” she said.
“Only because you know it’ll never happen.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
He kissed her so hard he knocked her over. “I love you so fucking much,” he said.
“Now that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
They rolled around in the grass, laughing and kissing and shouting about how stupid they were.
“I’ll give them fifteen more minutes,” Mom said. “Then I’m calling the police.”
I nodded and drank, washing away the last of the sand and blood. My palms were raw with gravel. My knees throbbed. But for a few seconds I’d been flying. For one perfect moment I’d had wings.
12
You could tell it was spring in Golden by how many convertibles had their tops down. All else stayed the same. The war limped along on our television sets. Vietnam didn’t seem to have seasons either. Afternoons, through Mrs. Maxwell’s window, I watched Melanie slide into Troy Gainer’s red Mustang. She skipped class almost as often as Jamie Finley, who’d spent the last half of his senior year under the football bleachers, getting drunk or stoned with the resident potheads and deadbeats, kids who’d been bound for that particular patch of withered grass since grade school. At night, with nobody to watch over but myself, I went through a rainbow of lighters, flicking them on and off just to hear the hungry snap of red tongue, the soft sucking birth of flame. When I emptied one, I added it to the shoebox under my bed, along with Mom’s silver lighter and the other Bics. I was beginning to understand how Carol felt waiting for the Rapture.
Then suddenly June arrived. That, at least, was a kind of salvation I could count on.
The school year’s end was hailed, as always, with visionary violations of the dress code and the constant clamour of untethering youth. Drama stars practised breathless soliloquies in the halls while jocks scrambled to memorize the periodic table. Hippies lolled on the grass, deco
rating each other with henna and swapping spit. Honour roll students skipped class to sit behind the portables with smoke-pit kids, sipping peach schnapps and crème de menthe pilfered from parental liquor cabinets. Classroom maps were regularly taken off and rehung upside-down. Garbage cans were up-ended, toilets asphyxiated with cherry bombs. Toilet paper bunting perpetually decorated the trees. We could often hear Mr. Galpin in the halls, pleading with people to go to class or just go home.
“I hope they’re enjoying themselves,” Carol said, glaring out the window of Mrs. Maxwell’s sewing room. It wasn’t even two o’clock, but upperclassmen were already spilling into the parking lot, fiddling with radio knobs, shouting to each other over impatient engines, giving directions, making plans. Carol paced back and forth in front of the glass. “I hope they’re making magical memories that they can look back on fondly when they’re burning in the fiery pits of hell.”
Carol had been in a bad mood all week. She never did hear back from the president or poor Mr. Armstrong, though she did get an autographed headshot from Governor Reagan and a long letter from Mr. Roberts in which he encouraged her to forward a sizable donation. Now, to add insult to injury, her parents were making her go to camp. Mostly she was grumpy that she hadn’t gotten further with her good works. A whole year had passed and she didn’t have anything to show for it. It’s called high school, I told her.
“Saint Vitalis converted the prostitutes of Alexandria,” she said. “I can’t even save a cheerleader.”
A pack of them jumped up and down on the field, white teeth and panties flashing. Troy Gainer watched them, nodding to an eight-track’s beat. He’d won a partial athletic scholarship to Arizona State. He’d been wearing a Sun Devils jacket for weeks. Melanie had it on now. It was so big on her you couldn’t see her hands.
“Camp can’t be any worse than this place,” I said.
“At least school ends at three o’clock.”
Carol slumped into a chair and groaned. I was no good at cheering people up. Outside, Troy got in his red Mustang and Melanie jumped in beside him. He blasted the horn and the cars behind him answered. Fists punched out open back windows while girls squealed their approval.