by Jessica Raya
“Are you coming?” she said.
I shook my head. I didn’t know how I was going to get home, but I knew I wasn’t getting in that car.
Carol nodded at the steering wheel. “I knew it,” she said again. She took a right out of the parking lot, even though we lived to the left. What was it she knew? I wondered as I watched her drive away. Why didn’t I know it too?
While I looked around for a bus stop, two old ladies came out of the hair salon. They locked their bony arms at the elbows and shuffled down the sidewalk, chatting happily and touching their freshly curled hair. For friends, I realized. 2-for-1 permanents for people with friends.
16
In September of 1900, a hurricane made its way toward the Gulf of Mexico. It was a beautiful day and the dawn of a bright new century. The economy was booming and life was good. If you are pleased with the world and your place in it, nature’s most powerful displays can be a spectacular confirmation of all you believe to be right and true. “A Category 4,” Dad said, “now that would be something to see.” The people of Galveston, Texas, must’ve agreed with him. Locals and tourists alike had ignored the warnings and gathered near the water to watch the waves. A fifteen-foot storm surge hit the island city in the evening. By morning, more than six thousand people were dead. The beaches were closed for months while the bodies washed ashore.
This was what I was thinking about as I ate my toast and stared out the kitchen window at George McGovern’s smiling face on a piece of cardboard stuck in the front lawn. The sky was a clear cerulean. The only cloud was the one that had been following me around for the past week. I had failed my driver’s test, among other things. Now this awaited: the first day of my junior year.
Mom had planted the sign the night before, pounding the stake into the lawn with a dusty can of tomatoes while Vera Miller stood by in the grass, supervising their tumblers of sangria. It was rumoured that our town, by miracle or mistake, was being considered as a stop on the candidate’s tour. If he came, everyone working on the campaign would get to see his smiling face in person, along with the rest of him.
“We could meet the next president of the United States of America,” Mom had said, pressing the can of tomatoes to her chest like an Academy Award. “Isn’t that something? Doesn’t that beat all?” I hadn’t seen her this happy since she stopped wearing dress shields.
A newspaper rustled behind me, followed by the cheerful snip of scissors. Mom had started a scrapbook. Every morning she cut out articles about the election or McGovern and carefully pasted them onto a fresh white page.
“You’ve been staring out that window for ten minutes,” she said. “Are you nervous?”
“Only that our neighbours will egg our house.”
“Don’t be nervous. Junior year won’t be all that different.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
Mom gave me a sympathetic smile. She was wearing lipstick again, a serious shade I still think of as Democrat Beige. The night before, sign firmly rooted, she’d knelt in the grass and made me take a photo of her with cardboard George. She’d squished her face in close to his and matched his cardboard smile tooth for tooth. Between the two of them, it was hard to say who was more delusional about the future.
—
Reagan High was the same slab of oatmeal-coloured stucco, same bleached-pink doors, same asbestos-ridden walls, same unblinking windows. Newly anointed seniors loafed on the stairs, nodding along to someone’s car stereo and sucking on their minty-fresh coolness. Inside, underclassmen waltzed from locker to locker, showing off straight teeth and new noses. The PA system asked Moody Miller to please report to the vice-principal’s office. And so another year began to unfurl, ten months of polyester gym shorts, creepy health class filmstrips, and powdered potatoes coming out our ears. At lunch I heard someone counting the weeks until Christmas break. In these ways, Mom was right—junior year wasn’t all that different. In other ways, it was.
I hadn’t seen Carol since that last day in Dr. Winkelmann’s parking lot, and that was fine by me. When I opened my new locker, I found a postcard of da Vinci’s The Last Supper with Judas circled in purple pen. I put it in the first garbage can I passed and went to home ec, where Mrs. Maxwell told me Carol had developed a peanut allergy over the summer. “What a shame,” our teacher lamented. “She would have made an excellent homemaker. Such lovely buttonholes, such conscientious darting.” I was paired with Moody Miller, who’d been permanently banished from shop class at the end of sophomore year for playing Russian roulette with a band saw.
“Who’s Carol Closter?” he said.
“Just a girl,” I said.
Melanie came to class, but now she slumped in the back rows, eyes on her desk, hair in her mouth, checking the clock over the door every five minutes. Hearing her name spoken by a teacher made her jump. “Where’d you go?” Miss Blumberg would tease. “Earth to Melanie.” At the bell, she’d dash for the washroom, where she seemed to live between classes. I heard her in there once. I didn’t need to see her white espadrilles pigeon-toed under the stall door to know who it was. Her voice was unmistakable, muffled though it was with a mouthful of hair. “Leab us nod indo dempation but deliber us from ebil…” She wore a D’Angelo Dry Cleaning sweatshirt every day. She had dozens.
At lunch, squeezed between Joyce Peyton and other girls, Melanie rolled her sandwich bread into little white balls between her fingers. Outside of class, nobody seemed to notice that she didn’t talk much. I took my lunch to the bleachers, where the breeze brought the smell of cut grass and the sound of birds chatting in the trees. Even the cheerleaders’ chants were kind of nice until I realized they were just another kind of prayer.
Hallelujah for home ec, for Mrs. Maxwell’s ordered classroom, for the scrubbed linoleum and bleached aprons and shelves of gleaming Pyrex. It wasn’t so bad being paired with Moody Miller. To everyone’s surprise, he not only came to class but demonstrated actual ability. Who would have suspected him capable of such velvety hollandaise, such impossibly fluffy meringues? Mrs. Maxwell couldn’t deny it, not even from Moody, whose eyes were usually bloodshot, if not half-closed, and who’d once asked where she kept the foods in aerosol cans. She made everyone gather around to watch him whisk things.
“How is it you know how to do this?” Mrs. Maxwell asked cautiously, the foundation of all she knew to be good and right resting on this pothead’s answer.
“My mom doesn’t cook much,” was all Moody said.
To me, Moody admitted that he liked watching cooking shows. His favourite was The Waltons. “There are all these people,” he said, “like kids and dogs, and everyone’s always going in and out of the kitchen while the lady makes the food.” I told Moody that wasn’t a cooking show. It was a drama about a family in rural Virginia during the Great Depression. I felt bad being the one to tell him, but I thought he had a right to know. Moody took it in stride. “That explains the long johns,” he said.
I told Moody about Mary Tyler Moore. He said his mom watched it sometimes, but it gave him the willies. “You ever notice how that chick’s hair never moves?” Moody flicked his own greasy bangs out of his face. He didn’t mind wearing an apron, but he could not be coaxed into a hairnet. “I mean never. That’s some freaky shit.”
“You’re right,” I said, thinking about it. “That is freaky shit.”
This was as deep as our conversations ever got. Most days I sat on my stool and watched Moody work. It restored some small faith in me to see a person enjoy himself so much with a set of measuring spoons. It was a lot like sitting at Mrs. Closter’s kitchen island, without Carol there to point out how Jesus had fed the multitude with just two fish and five loaves of bread.
—
It may be true, as some have said, that things might have solidified here. Better still, courses might have corrected and life returned to its equilibrium. Carol might have come back to school, joined the yearbook committee, and discovered a real talent for writing snappy pho
to captions. I might have finally learned to feather my hair and gone on to cure cancer. But the textbook version of that year was already being written by men who had never set foot in a home ec classroom. We marched unwittingly toward events that had been put in motion long before the day Missy Carter stood in front of Rona Blumberg’s class, shaking The New York Times at us.
“We can’t sit here and pretend it’s not happening,” Missy said. “They’ll send boys to die in Vietnam, but here in America life is precious? How does that work? Who’s running this country? I mean, hello, is anybody home? We’re too young to vote, but we have to live by their laws. When do we get to decide?”
Our teacher, dressed in a teal and silver sari, applauded enthusiastically. “What a fantastic opportunity to put our learning in action,” she said. “Why don’t we make posters? Posters are a wonderful way to communicate. Different posters could represent different points of view.” We were studying colonial India. Somehow I couldn’t see Gandhi sitting lotus on the cafeteria floor, filling in bubble letters with tempera paint.
“They’ll just take them down,” Missy said. “We’ve got to think bigger than posters. We’ve got to do something they can’t destroy.” She barked a list. Sit in, walk out, shut down, picket, boycott, rally, march. She’d gone to a special summer camp in Oregon where instead of archery and nature walks, she’d learned the fundamentals of civil disobedience and human rights law. “We should call ourselves something,” she said.
“Students for Civil Rights?” someone suggested.
“Students Against Tyranny?”
“SAT?”
“Students Against Governmental Oppression and Tyranny?”
“Goodness,” Miss Blumberg said. “I’d better write this down.”
“What’s the difference between oppression and tyranny?”
“Excellent question!” She wrote the words on the blackboard. “Can anyone explain the difference?”
Everyone joined in now, shouting ideas while Miss Blumberg scribbled furiously on the board.
Melanie hadn’t come to class that day, and I was glad. I’d chosen my own seat by the window that year, away from the swimming pool vent, where I could enjoy if not actual freedom then at least the illusion of it. I stared out the window now, watching for the water planes. The front page of the newspaper that morning was devoted to the wildfires that had started in the forests south of town. They happened most years, blooming in late summer like fields of scarlet salvia. Carol would have said it was one more sign of the coming apocalypse, but really it was just some moron forgetting to put out a campfire. Below the fold was a small story about Troy Gainer. “Golden Boy Makes a Splash in Arizona.” There were two pictures, a grey, pixelated blob in a pool and Troy’s senior yearbook photo. Melanie had probably seen it too, over her bowl of cereal and under Mr. D’Angelo’s bald spot. My mom, cutting out a McGovern article on the next page, had snipped Troy’s grinning head clean off.
I didn’t see any water planes yet, but there was someone on the school roof. The only person who ever went up there was Moody, but he was snoring in the seat in front me. Whoever it was dropped their head back and cupped both hands around their eyes. I pressed my face against the glass and tried to see what they were looking at, but all I saw was the same blue sky.
“Let’s vote on it,” Miss Blumberg said. “All those in favour of Students Against Governmental Oppression and Tyranny raise your hand.”
I scanned the roof again, but the person was gone. A bird flew overhead, and I followed it as long as I could, tracing a flight path around trees and telephone wires, headed somewhere that wasn’t here.
—
The school mailed out a memo the following week: “A number of students have expressed the desire to organize a special event here at the school. We believe that this is an excellent opportunity to create a dialogue around important issues of our time and demonstrate democracy in action. All points of view will be represented, and everyone is invited to participate.” There was no mention of Roe v. Wade. Missy Carter’s Students Against Governmental Oppression and Tyranny had become Rona Blumberg’s Pageant of Ideas!
Mom thought it was a terrific idea. “I wish I’d done something like this when I was your age,” she said. “I wish I’d been more involved.” If we wanted to make buttons, she would lend the machine to us. We. Us. Me and all my civil liberties friends.
“I’m not really involved,” I said. “It’s just a thing some kids are doing.”
“Why not? It sounds like a great idea. You know, after your father—” She paused and swallowed. We never talked about him, only around him, like a hole in the ground nobody had bothered to throw a board over. “Well, anyway, look at me now. I’m part of something. I’m contributing. I want to get out of bed every morning. George is the best thing that ever happened to your old mom.” She’d started calling him that. George. “Why don’t you give it a try? What’s the worst that could happen? You might even enjoy yourself. How about that? That wouldn’t be so awful.”
“I was actually thinking I’d volunteer at the hospital,” I said. “You know, feed some old people?”
“Really? Well, that’s great, sweetie. I’ll talk to Linda about it today.” She put an arm around me and gave me a sideways squeeze. “Show up and join in—isn’t that what they say?”
“No, Mom,” I said. “Nobody says that.”
The next day, Mom left a button for me on the kitchen table. It was the kind she slipped through the neighbours’ mail slots, except instead of “Come home, America,” this one said “World’s Greatest Kid.” I put it in my pocket with my lighter. Maybe one would cancel out the other.
I really had intended to volunteer at the hospital. While I rode the bus to Golden General after school that Friday, I pictured myself in a striped uniform with that button pinned to my blouse, pushing grateful old people around in wheelchairs. I saw myself feeding them with plastic spoons, fluffing their pillows, gently brushing their fine, silver hair. They would be happy to see me. They would tell me I was a nice girl, that I reminded them of their granddaughters. They would give me things—quarters, trinkets—which I’d leave on their night-stands after they’d fallen asleep. But when I got to the hospital, I couldn’t go in. I couldn’t get past the front doors. I stood on the black rubber mat while the automatic doors clunked open and shut. There were dead people in a hospital. Dead old people, dead parents, dead children, dead babies. I might see blood. Or worse. All I could think about was how many garbage bins you’d need for a whole hospital. No button was worth that.
The water planes came as I rode the bus home. They flew in pairs, carrying water from the ocean to the fires south of town. You could hear them coming like thunder. I got off the bus and stood on the sidewalk to wait for them to pass overhead. As the planes roared by, I lifted a hand to the sky. They flew so low, you’d think you could almost touch them.
I was half a mile from home, but only a few blocks from the gas station. I hadn’t gone for weeks. When I got there I saw a sign in the parking lot that hadn’t been there before. In a couple of months it would be a Dunkin’ Donuts, but that day it was still a gas station.
Jamie was stretched out on the hood of his yellow Pinto. “Did you see them?” he said, taking a toke from a joint. “Man, I love those planes.”
“So what—you’re a stoner now?” I said.
“Is that your way of saying you’d like to partake?”
“No, thanks.”
Jamie lay back against the windshield and stared up at the sky. He jeans were less filthy than usual.
“Are you still moving rocks around?” I said.
“Nah, they promoted me. I move bricks now.” Jamie took another toke and held it so long I thought he’d forgotten to breathe. “Troy’s picture was in the paper today,” he said.
“So was Nixon’s,” I said, and Jamie nodded.
The gas station guy came outside with two cans of Coke and gave them to us. He didn’t mention the j
oint. He shrugged when we thanked him. “I’m a sucker for young love.” We didn’t correct him. Free pop was free pop.
Two more planes flew overhead. “I’m moving to Texas,” the guy said, going back inside. “If I have to sweat my balls off all year, I want to do it while eating barbecue.” I wondered if he knew how many hurricanes they got there.
“They’re pretty brave, huh?” Jamie said.
“Gas station attendants?”
“Pilots.”
I looked up at the empty sky. The planes were great steel beasts. It hadn’t occurred to me that people were involved. Suddenly, I was worried about them.
“My cousin did it for a summer,” Jamie said. “He wasn’t a pilot, just ground crew. I was thinking I could do that. You don’t need any special skills or anything.”
“The Peshtigo wildfire killed twelve hundred people and destroyed a million acres of land,” I said.
“Shit,” Jamie said and lifted the joint to his mouth again.
In truth, the forest fires around Golden weren’t that bad. A thousand acres of sugar pine and sycamore would probably go up in flames, but damage to home property was uncommon, casualties even more so. At the first whiff of smoke, our phone would start ringing, everyone clamouring to update their policies to include wildfires, but Dad had rarely paid out on one. Still, within a few days he’d be out there hosing down the house just like all the other crackpots. Mom was more philosophical about it. If the town burned down, she said it served us right. “Who lives in a desert, anyway? Who sees a hundred square miles of dirt and says, ‘Now this is more like it’?”
“Some people think they’re good for the forests,” Jamie said. “They say they burn away what the forest doesn’t need so new trees can grow. Nature finds its balance, right? Good and bad. Life and death. You believe that?”
“You’re stoned,” I said.
“I’m cool.”
“Let me see your eyes.” I moved closer. His eyes were more deeply set now, as if they were trying to see less of the world. I focused on his pupils—officially huge. He’d let his hair grow past his shoulders, but it still smelled like apples. “You’re okay,” I said.