Emelina would not understand this. The night before school started, she brought me warm milk.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. She’d also brought out a blue embroidered tablecloth, which she shook out like a little sail and spread efficiently over my table. She felt the place needed more honey touches.
“You’ve got to have your sleep. They had a special on Nova about it. This man in Italy died from not sleeping for around eight months. Before he died he went crazy. He’d salute the doctors like he was in the army.”
“Em, I’ll live. That’s too pretty, that tablecloth. Don’t you need that?”
“Are you kidding? Since Grammy joined Stitch and Bitch she’s been embroidering borders on the dish rags. What happens if you just lie in bed and count backward from ninety-nine? That’s what I tell the boys to do when they can’t settle down.”
“Insomnia’s different,” I said. It was hard to explain this to people. “You know the light that comes on when you open the refrigerator door? Just imagine it stays on all the time, even after you close the door. That’s what it’s like in my head. The light stays on.”
Emelina made herself comfortable in my other living-room chair. “You’re like that Thoreau guy that lived at Walden Pond. Remember when we read that in Senior English? He only had two chairs. We need to get you some more stuff in here.”
I was surprised that Henry Thoreau entered into Emelina’s world view. “If I want company I can always go over to your house,” I pointed out.
“That’s the God’s truth. I’m about ready to move out. Tonight Glen and Grammy got into it, oh boy, she says he’s impudent. That’s her all-time favorite word. Whenever Mason gets mad at somebody he yells ‘You’re impotent!’ And people laugh, so we’ll never get him to stop now.”
I drank the milk. I could stand some mothering. I wondered if I’d had this in the back of my mind when I moved in here.
Emelina scrutinized my clean, white walls. “Codi, I hope you’ll take this the right way, but I don’t see how you can live in a place and have it feel like nobody lives there.”
“I have things in here. My clothes, look in the closet. And books. Some of those books are very personal.” This was true. Besides my Field Guide to the Invertebrates there were things Hallie had sent me over the years, and an old volume of American poetry—incomprehensibly, a graduation gift from Doc Homer.
“Your room was like this when we were in high school. I had posters of Paul Revere and the Raiders and dead corsages stuck in the mirror, every kind of junk. And when we’d go over to your house it was like a room somebody’s just moved out of.”
“I’m neat,” I said.
“It’s not neat. It’s hyper neat.”
“Can you imagine what Doc Homer would have said if Paul Revere and the Raiders turned up in his home? Without an appointment?”
She laughed.
“Emelina, who’s Uda Ruth Dell?”
“Well, you know her, she lives up by Doc Homer. She used to take care of you sometimes, I think. Her and that other woman that’s dead now, I think her name was Naomi.”
“She used to take care of us?” I’d been trying all day to place her. I couldn’t believe I’d draw a complete blank on someone who’d been a fixture of my childhood.
“Sure. Uda’s husband Eddie saved you and Hallie’s life that time when you got stranded in a storm down by the crick.”
“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
“Yes you do. When you and Hallie almost drowned in that flood. You were just little.”
“Well, how do you remember it, then? I don’t.”
“Everybody knew about that. It was a famous incident. You hid down in a coyote burrow and wouldn’t come out and Eddie Dell found you and drug you out. You all stayed at Uda’s. Doc Homer must have been working at the hospital or something.”
“I don’t remember anything about that.”
Emelina looked at me peculiarly, as if she thought I might be pulling her leg. “It was a real big deal. There was a picture in the paper of you two and Eddie the big hero, and his mule.”
“I guess I do remember,” I said, but I didn’t, and it bothered me that my childhood was everyone’s property but my own.
“You know what you are, Codi? I don’t know if there’s a word for it, but it’s the opposite of ‘homemaker.’”
I laughed. She was still distressed by my blank walls. “There’s a word. Home wrecker. But I’m not one.”
“No I don’t mean in the sense of home wrecker. I mean in the sense of home ignorer.”
“Oh, that way,” I said. I was playing dumb. I knew what she meant. My first boyfriend in college was a Buddhist, and even he had had more pictures on his wall than I did. It wasn’t anything noble; I couldn’t claim a disdain for worldly things. Hallie had once pointed out that I had more shoes than you’d find in a Central American schoolroom with class in session. What I failed at was the activity people call “nesting.” For me, it never seemed like nesting season had arrived yet. Or I wasn’t that kind of bird.
After Emelina left for the night, I wrote Hallie. I had a general-delivery address for her in Managua and I asked, the way we did when we were kids leaving notes for each other in secret hiding places, “Are you there yet? Are you reading this now?” I told her about the dead alfalfa fields around Gracela Canyon, which I thought would interest her professionally, and I told her Doc Homer seemed pretty much the same as ever, which was the truth. And I asked if she remembered the time we almost drowned in a coyote den.
9
The Bones in God’s Backyard
Grace High School, backdrop of the worst four years of my life, was as familiar as one of my bad dreams. Walking toward it up Prosper Street filled me with dread. The building itself had a lot of charm, though, which surprised me. As a child I’d paid no mind to the façade. It was a WPA-era building made of Gracela Canyon’s red granite, with ornate egg-and-dart moldings on the white-painted eaves and woodwork over the doors. The school was actually built by the mining company, in its boom years, and with minerly instincts (or possibly just the proper tools) it was built right into the steep side of the canyon, sunk into rock. It was in an old part of town where the cobbled streets wrapped up and around behind the buildings, occasionally breaking into flights of steps and elsewhere so steep as to make motor vehicles pointless. The principal form of exercise in Grace was just getting from your house to wherever you needed to go.
The school had four floors, and each one had a street-level entrance. I’m pretty sure the building was in some record book on account of this. The main entrance was on the side, halfway up the hill: floor three. Carved into its granite arch was a grammatically suspect motto in Latin, CAUSAM MEAM COGNOSCO, which boys used to quote like pig latin or the inane “Indian” talk we heard in movies.
I checked into the principal’s office, where his secretary, Anita, gave me a set of keys and an armload of official-looking papers and cheered me on. “There’s a million forms there: grade forms, class roster, some new thing from the DES, and your CTA. It all has to be filled out.”
“What, you mean I have to work for a living here? Somebody told me teaching high school was easy money.” I looked through the stack of forms. “What about DOA? I may need one of those.”
Anita looked at me oddly for half a second, then laughed. “We’ll just call the coroner when they bring you in.”
I smiled. Doc Homer was the coroner of Grace, and had been for the entirety of my life and then some. Obviously Anita didn’t know who I was; she looked like a recent graduate herself. Anyone in high school now would have been a toddler when I left Grace. This filled me with hope. Walking those wainscoted halls, still painted the exact same shade of toothpaste green, made me shrink into my skin, and I had to keep reminding myself: None of them knows you as Doc Homer’s misfit child. No one here has seen you in orthopedic shoes.
“The kids’ll just love you,” Anita said, surprisi
ng me. “They’re not used to anybody so…” she paused, tapping a complete set of maroon fingernails on her metal desk and presumably fishing for a tactful adjective…“so contemporary.”
I was wearing a dark green blazer, tight jeans, and purple cowboy boots. I ran a hand through my hair and wondered if I should have paid a call to the Hollywood Shop, after all. “Do you think I’m not enough of an authority figure? Will they revolt?” The teachers’ meeting, two days prior, had been devoted primarily to theories of discipline.
Anita laughed. “No way. They know who turns in the grades.”
I found the room where I would be teaching General Biology I and II, and made it through the homeroom period by taking attendance and appearing preoccupied. I’d finally paid my preparatory visit to the school a few days earlier, so I knew what to expect in the way of equipment: desks and chairs; some stonetopped lab benches with sinks and arched chrome faucets; an emergency shower; a long glass case containing butterflies and many other insects in ill repair; and a closet full of dissecting pans and arcane audiovisual aids. The quaint provisions led me to expect I’d be working in something like a museum, or a British movie. When the kids filled the room for first period, though, they gave it a different slant. So far in Grace I hadn’t seen a lot of full-blown teenagers. I wasn’t expecting skateboard haircuts.
The girls seemed to feel a little sorry for me as I stood up there brushing chalk dust off my blazer and explaining what I intended for us to do in the coming year. But the boys sat with their enormous high-top sneakers splayed out into the aisles, their arms crossed, and their bangs in their eyes, looking at me like exactly what I was—one of the last annoying things standing between them and certified adulthood.
“You can call me Codi,” I said, though I’d been warned against this. “Ms. Noline sounds too weird. I went to this high school and had biology in this room, and I don’t really feel that old. I guess to you that sounds like a joke. To you I’m the wicked old witch of Life Science.”
This got a very slight rise out of the boys, not exactly a laugh. The girls looked embarrassed. A tall boy wearing a Motley Crüe T-shirt and what looked like a five-o’clock shadow on his scalp pulled a cigarette out of his pocket and thumped it against his knuckles.
“I was told we’d need an authority figure in the classroom, so I dug one up.” I went to the closet and wheeled out a human skeleton. “This is Mrs. Josephine Nash.”
I’d found her downstairs in a storage room filled with damaged field-hockey equipment and gym uniforms from the fifties. The skeleton was in pretty good shape; I’d only had to reattach one elbow with piano wire and duct tape (provided by the janitor). The name—along with an address in Franklin, Illinois—was written in fine, antique-looking letters on the flange of her pelvis. When I discovered her in the storage room I felt moved to dust her off and hang her up on the heavy cast-iron stand and wheel her up to my lab. I guess I was somewhat desperate for companionship.
“Miss,” one of the boys said. “Miss Codi.”
I tried not to smile. “Yes.”
“That’s Mr. Bad Bones.” He enunciated the name in a way that made everybody laugh. “The seniors use him for the Halloween Dance.”
“Well, not anymore,” I said. Mrs. Nash was my compatriot from the Midwest; a possible relative, even. I could see her as somebody’s mother, out pruning roses. This isn’t a toy,” I said, my voice shaking slightly. “It’s the articulated skeleton of a human being who was at one time, fairly recently, walking around alive. Her name was Josephine Nash and she lived in Illinois. And it’s time she got some respect in her retirement.”
I glared at them; teenagers are so attached to their immortality. “You never know where you’re going to end up in this world, do you?” I asked.
Nineteen pairs of blank, mostly pale-blue eyes looked back at me. You could have heard a cigarette drop.
“Okay,” I said. “Chapter one: Matter, Energy, Organization and Life.”
“I don’t know if I’m going to live through this,” I told Emelina, collapsing in her kitchen. Her kitchen chairs were equipales that took you in like a hug, which I needed. My first day had gone as smoothly as anybody could reasonably hope—no revolts, no crises major or minor. Still, I couldn’t put a finger on what it was, but standing in front of a roomful of high-school students seemed to use up a ferocious amount of energy. It made me think of those dancers in white boots and miniskirts who used to work bars in the sixties, trying desperately to entertain, flailing around like there was no tomorrow.
Emelina, Mason, the baby, and I were all exiled to the kitchen; Viola had taken over the living room with her friends for a special afternoon meeting of the Stitch and Bitch Club. They were preparing for their annual fundraising bazaar, and as a backdrop to our own conversation we could overhear the exchange of presumably vital information:
“Last year the Hospital Equipment Committee didn’t make fifteen cents on them sachet cushions.”
“Well, it’s no wonder. They stunk.”
“Lalo saw in a magazine where you can make airplanes out of cut beer cans. The propellers go around.”
Emelina set a cup of tea in front of me. I picked it up and let the steam touch my eyelids, realizing that what I needed most at that moment was to lie in bed with someone who was fond of every inch of my skin.
“It must be weird, going back to that school,” she said.
“Oh, sure. It is. I didn’t let myself think too much about that part of the job. Till today.”
Mason was on the floor, coloring, and Emelina was moving around the kitchen in an effortless frenzy, closing drawers with her hip, cooking dinner, and feeding the baby at the same time.
“Let me do that,” I said, scooting myself over to the high chair and taking the cereal bowl from Emelina.
“Here, he makes a pretty fair mess, let me give you Grammy’s apron,” she said, tying around me a splendid example of Stitch and Bitch enterprise. The baby snapped up cereal as fast as I could spoon it in, wasting little on mess as far as I could see.
“You’re having dinner with us tonight, right?”
“No, thanks,” I said.
“Honestly, Codi, if you think one more mouth to feed is any trouble you’re out of your mind. If I woke up one day and had six more kids I don’t think I’d notice.”
“No, Em, thanks, but I feel like resting in peace.”
“You’re not dead yet, hon.”
From the living room we heard Viola raising her voice now in Spanish, saying something about peacocks: pavones. The other women answered in Spanish, and I could follow just enough to know that they’d moved rapidly onto the subject of fruit trees. Doña Althea sounded agitated. Her high-pitched voice was easy to recognize, exactly what you’d expect from a very small, strong-willed woman. Emelina raised her eyebrows as she looked under a pot lid. “Do you know the boys won’t even speak Spanish to their Grammy?” she asked in a subdued voice.
I glanced at Mason, who was absorbed in his coloring book, though probably listening. “Is that a problem?”
“Oh, yeah. Viola’s big on all the traditional stuff. She’s real tight with Doña Althea. She wants us to raise the boys puro, speaking Spanish and knowing all the stories. Seems like it might be easier with girls, but these guys…” She shrugged her shoulders. “My parents were always so modern, you remember how Mom is, electric can openers all the way. I always felt like she wanted me to grow up blonde, you know? My dad told me she actually wanted to name me Gidget!”
I laughed. “No. He was pulling your leg.”
“No, he wasn’t. And poor Tucker was named after a car.”
Tucker was a younger brother who’d died in infancy, before I ever knew the family. To tell the truth, I’d forgotten him, in spite of his name passed on to Emelina’s first son.
The baby was sitting with his mouth opened unbelievably wide, waiting for my attention to return to his dinner. I poked in the next bite. A scattering of loud laughter like
a rainstorm came from the other room, and all of us in the kitchen were quiet. This gang of old women staked out such a presence, we felt almost crowded out of the house. Mason actually gathered up his papers and started to go outside.
Emelina called him back. “Wait a minute, Mason, before you run off, come show Codi your hand. Codi, could you take a look at his hand? There’s some kind of bump on it. Do you mind?”
“Why would I mind? Let’s have a look.” I felt uncomfortable, not because she’d asked, but with myself, playing doctor. I was a doctor, technically, which is to say I had the training, but it unnerved me to think people saw me in that role. Both Emelina and Mason were quiet while I examined his hand. I bent the wrist back and forth and felt the lump on the tendon. “It’s a ganglion.”
“Is that bad?” Emelina asked.
“No, it’s not serious at all. Just a little bump. Usually they go away on their own. Does it hurt, Mason?”
He shook his head. “Only when he has chores to do,” Emelina offered.
I put a kiss on my fingertips and rubbed it into his wrist. “There you go, Dr. Codi’s special cure.” As he ran off it occurred to me, with a certain self-punitive malice, that this was the extent of special curing I was licensed to dispense.
“So what’s it like up there at the high school?” Emelina asked. “Don’t you keep feeling like Miss Lester’s going to catch you smoking in the bathroom?”
“I never smoked in the bathroom,” I said, scraping the bottom of the cereal bowl and wiping the baby’s mouth with his bib. I’d never seen such efficient eating in my life.
“Oh that’s right, Miss Goody Two-Shoes, I forgot. You didn’t do things like that.” Emelina smiled. She’d been at least as virtuous as I was in high school; the difference was she was popular. Virtue in a cheerleader is admirable, while in a wallflower it’s gratuitous.
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