Local Knowledge

by Liza Gyllenhaal

  “You’re not much of a sports fan, are you?” He must have followed me out to the Aldens’ kitchen. Everyone else was sitting around the living room, glued to the playoffs on television. Even Kenny hadn’t been aware that I’d slipped away. I’d felt restless and unhappy, distracted by Ruthie, who was making a big production out of tickling and teasing Paul. He didn’t seem to mind, but then, his attention was so transfixed by what was happening on the screen I’m not sure he even noticed. Paul, like all the Aldens, was a sports fanatic. He could rattle off baseball averages the way a preacher recites Scripture. Wade Boggs was his God, the Red Sox his religion, and every World Series in those years a terrible testing of his faith.

  “Oh, well, I try to follow along,” I said, alarmed to be alone and singled out in this way by Luke. Though we’d both taken part in larger, desultory general discussions, these were the first words we’d ever spoken just to each other. I felt him scrutinizing me, his long-lashed gaze taking me in with unfeigned curiosity.

  “No, it’s not just today,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ve seen you sometimes on the sidelines. Your mind is somewhere else. What are you thinking about so hard, Maddie Fedderson?” He sounded a little like his father then. There was that element of provocation in his tone, though he lacked Mr. Barnett’s affectionate bantering manner. It was more like he was drilling me, as though he expected—no, demanded—an answer. What I saw was his arrogance and his sense of superiority. I had no feeling, then or ever, really, for the hell he must have been going through, for how vulnerable and alone he must have felt. He was as sensitive as I was, I suppose, as inward and needy. And he was as careful as I to try to conceal these weaknesses. Maybe we were just too much alike.

  “Why would you care?” I asked, surprised that what I had intended to be a playful rejoinder had come out sounding so harsh.

  “Care? I’m not sure that’s the right word. But I am puzzled. That’s it, really. You’re a puzzle. What the hell are you doing with poor Kenny? Do you enjoy leading someone like that around by his nose?”

  “What makes you think you have any right to criticize—” I began, but he cut me off:

  “Oh, I don’t”—he held up both hands in surrender—“I don’t have any rights. I’m well aware of that. But someone has to tell you that you’re far too pretty—which I’m sure you already know—to be wasting your time on a boy like that. Face up to who you are. And what about him? Don’t you see that you’re making him into the school joke? It’s like you’re trying to help a bird with a broken wing. Leave him alone, Maddie. Let him flap away.”

  “You don’t know anything about it,” I told him, but he did. He knew everything. He’d gotten it all in one take. But what I couldn’t understand was why he was bothering, what he wanted from me. Already, there was this sense of unease, of friction, between us. We didn’t like each other. We were not attracted to each other. Even when he said he thought I was pretty, it wasn’t a compliment. It was a jibe. It was just one more thing to throw in my face. I felt then, as I have so many times since, that he grasped the worst about me. He looked through the soft, compliant guise I presented to the world and saw my neediness, my loneliness, my hunger to belong.

  “Maybe you’re right,” he said, cocking his head and smiling at me, as if the exchange had been nothing more than a little harmless kidding. His smile curved downward, self-deprecating and at the same time very knowing. I was flustered and angry, convinced that he was pleased with himself for provoking me in this way. We heard a roar from the living room—followed by a series of moans. By the time we got back out there, the game was over, and there was a general exodus under way.

  “Paul said he’d drive us up to Albany to the movies,” Ruthie said, coming up to me and Kenny, who was shrugging on his jean jacket in the front hall. Paul was behind her, standing by the open door as people started to leave. “But I know Ma won’t let me go unless you come, too. She’s still pissed off about the other night.”

  “I’m almost out of gas.”

  “Come with us in the VW,” Paul said. “Everyone else is leaving.”

  I don’t remember much about the first part of the evening except my growing irritation with Ruthie. She burbled away beside Paul in the front seat in a breathy, keyed-up voice she’d started to affect, fussing with the radio dial to find “Cold Hearted” or “Don’t Wanna Lose You,” her two current favorites, and turning around every minute or so to try to enlist me and Kenny in her nonstop antics.

  “Isn’t this fun? Isn’t this great, just the four of us like this? Don’t you love this beat-up old van, Maddie? It’s like driving around in the Summer of Love, don’t you think? And see what I mean about the back, right? Can’t you imagine driving across the country in something like this? I’d love to do that someday. Wouldn’t you love to do that, Maddie?”

  “Sure,” I said, staring in front of me into the highway traffic. It had just begun to snow, a freakish flurry, far too early in the season. Big sloppy flakes slapped against the windshield. I hadn’t told my parents where we were going. All they knew was that I was with Ruthie for the evening. They trusted me, far too much for my own good. Their belief in my essential goodness weighed on me. I felt guilty and also frightened by what I now saw to be inevitable. Yes, of course, I had to let Kenny go. I had outgrown him and somehow grown up in a single afternoon. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but suddenly everything around me seemed impossibly sad. I glanced up and met Paul’s gaze in the rearview mirror. It lasted just a moment, but it meant everything. Then we both looked away.

  Ruthie was all over Paul at the movies; he just kept patting her arm, trying to get her to see that he was intent on what was up on the screen. We saw Batman. Or was it the latest Indiana Jones? It became something of a joke between us over the years that neither one of us could remember for sure. We stopped at a diner on the Taconic on the way home and had something to eat. But all the details are blurred now in my memory. By the time we got back to the Aldens’, snowfall blanketed the fields and hills and bowed the branches of the evergreens. The house and barns and outbuildings were oddly dark.

  “Power’s out,” Paul said, pulling up next to Kenny’s pickup. “A tree must have come down on a wire somewhere. Kenny, you better drive Ruthie back. You’re almost out of gas and the Feddersons’ is all the way on the other side of town.”

  “I think I could make it,” Kenny said.

  “But if you don’t? This isn’t a good night to be stuck on the side of the road. I don’t mind driving Maddie.”

  I remember the sound of the windshield wipers, the lights of Paul’s van tunneling into oncoming snow. I don’t think we actually spoke until Paul pulled up at the bottom of the driveway and braked, putting the car in Park.

  “Probably not safe for me to try that hill in all this. These tires are pretty bald.”

  “That’s okay. I can walk it from here.”

  “Maddie. Listen. I’m sorry …”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ve been acting like an idiot. With Ruthie. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  “Yes, I think you do.”

  We turned to each other. He leaned over and ran his index finger down the side of my face in a gentle, almost brotherly way. It was hard to read his expression, cast as it was in deep relief by the headlights, but I could see that he wasn’t smiling.

  “But Ruthie is so crazy about you.”

  “You don’t really care,” he said, letting me know that he wasn’t about to let me get away with any nonsense. That he knew I wasn’t like Ruthie. I should say what I meant, because it mattered to him.

  “I’m sorry about Kenny,” I said.

  “Yes, I can tell. You’re a real softie, aren’t you?”

  “I thought he was … something he wasn’t.”

  “Sure. I can see that. You’re so young. Still wet behind the ears.” He reached over and brushed my hair away from my face and l
ifted my chin. “I hope you’re not going to make the same mistake about me. Think I’m someone I’m not.”

  “What more could anyone want you to be?”

  He laughed. Then he realized I meant it. “You could, Maddie … ,” he said as he leaned toward me in the dark.

  Did Luke already know how Paul felt about me? Was that why he had come down so hard on me about Kenny? I couldn’t tell. His mother was back at home now, though he never talked about her. In any case, he didn’t act the least bit surprised when I was suddenly there, in the center of Paul’s world. But then, Luke didn’t seem to react to much of anything. He was thoroughly self-contained. Detached, but still intensely observant. I could feel him watching me, weighing how I was doing with Paul. I’m not sure what he thought about me in the beginning, though I felt he was still holding my relationship with Kenny over my head. He poked fun at both the Genzlingers whenever he had the opportunity.

  “There she goes,” I heard him say to Paul one afternoon the week before the Thanksgiving holiday, when we were all walking toward the school parking lot, Ruthie twenty yards or so ahead of us. “Little Miss Oink Oink.”

  “Hey, now, come on,” Paul told him, glancing over at me. Despite Luke’s privileged upbringing, Paul was far the more polite and considerate of the two. Luke had a biting, sarcastic streak that scared me. He often made comments that provoked laughter—but they were almost always at someone else’s expense. I knew perfectly well that everyone, except for Paul, could fall victim to Luke’s acid tongue. But most of his friends didn’t mind. It was almost a compliment, it seemed, if Luke noticed you enough to bother to say something derogatory about you. It was the same, if not worse, for the girls, though he usually made those comments behind their backs.

  “No, really, I’m thinking of getting some of that for myself,” Luke said, turning to Ivan Metcalf, one of the boys who hung out with us. “I hear it doesn’t take a lot of effort.”

  Ivan laughed. “Maybe for you it doesn’t.”

  And it didn’t. Despite his growing reputation for dating three or four girls at once, and for heavy, sometimes overly aggressive making out, Luke was never without female companionship. And he was indiscriminate in his choices. One night he showed up with a waitress from Friendly’s, a doughy-looking redhead who must have been in her late twenties. And there was a longhaired brunette named Penny who lived outside of Albany, someone he knew from his prep school days. He took up with Ruthie around Christmas that year. Suddenly, she was once again riding around in the van, sitting in the back on Luke’s lap and carrying on in the same way she had with Paul. Ruthie had pointedly ignored me after Paul dropped her, but now she acted as though the two of us were best friends again and as if it was Luke she had had her eye on from the beginning.

  “Paul’s sweet, isn’t he?” she said one afternoon in the girls’ locker room after gym. “But Luke is so cool—I don’t know—Paul seems like a boy in comparison.”

  “Yes, but … ” I hesitated. Luke had been mimicking Ruthie just the day before, tossing his hair around the way she did hers and cooing: “Don’t you just love everything in the whole wide world, Lukie? Aren’t we just having the very, very best time we could ever, ever have?”

  “What?”

  “He can be mean, too, you know.”

  “Of course I know that! That’s what I’m saying, that’s what makes him so different. He’s really been through some tough times, don’t you see? He has a right to have a pretty hardened attitude, as far as I’m concerned.”

  But it seemed to me that people were always finding excuses for Luke’s bad behavior. At Paul’s urging he’d joined the baseball team that spring, and he’d been caught smoking the very first week of the season. The coach had let him off with just a warning. Anyone else who broke training like that would have been kicked right off the team.

  “He’s got a mess on his hands at home,” Paul told me. “Between his mom and their finances. They’re having to sell some of their property to settle debts. That’s hard on him, Maddie, letting that land go. I understand that. I worry about our farm sometimes the way things are now.” Yes, but it seemed to me that Paul carried his fears inside him like a man, and Luke turned his outward, throwing them back at the rest of us, dispensing blame as if it was his birthright. Not surprisingly, he discarded Ruthie without explanation.

  “I don’t know what I did wrong,” she told me through her tears. “He looks through me now like I don’t exist. And just a week ago we were doing it. I went on the pill for him. What more could he ask? He’s just so restless and edgy. I didn’t know what else to do. The only time he seems happy is when we’re, you know—” Ruthie began to blubber. “And the thing is, the horrible thing is—I miss that so much! I miss him so much. He made me feel so—”

  “Ruthie, come on—”

  It infuriated me that Luke could be so callous to someone as essentially harmless as Ruthie, and that she, in the end, would willingly take all the blame for it. Why was Luke above the laws of common decency? What made him an exception? The Barnetts were like the rest of us now, struggling to hold on to homes and businesses, to stay above the rising tide of debt that was swamping so many in the county. No, it wasn’t his family background anymore, or the money, it was something innate in Luke—a powerful charisma, I suppose—that left me untouched but pulled almost everyone else I knew under his spell. Though Luke made the others laugh with his clever jokes and cutting asides, I didn’t think he was funny. I sensed the bitterness simmering just under his laid-back attitude, the need to hurt masquerading as harmless sarcasm. And Luke knew I was immune to his charms. Just as he, I became convinced, did not think me worthy of Paul, the only person Luke seemed to genuinely like. No, more than that, revere. He was the only one who could rein Luke in, the only one he really listened to.

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “Where do you think?”

  It was a Saturday night in early May and we were driving up to Albany to pick up Penny and go to a concert at the Egg. Luke, Ivan, and his girlfriend Dana were passing a joint around in the back of the VW.

  “You’re a total asshole, do you know that?” Paul told him. “Either it or you is out of my car in ten seconds.”

  “Do you at least want a hit first?”

  “Just get rid of it, okay?”

  Not that Paul was so righteous. He was the first to party when he wasn’t in training. And the Alden house had a certain open-door reputation when it came to beer drinking. But Paul had a true athlete’s belief in following the game plan, obeying the rules, and he went through a lot of grief that spring trying to get Luke to feel the same way. We all knew Luke wouldn’t survive on the ball team if he were caught smoking cigarettes again. And marijuana? He could very well be kicked out of high school for that. But I frequently thought I’d catch a whiff of something—or was I just hoping to?—on his clothes or in his hair. I suppose in my own way, I watched him as carefully as he did me.

  Our straightforward love for Paul forced us to keep our more complicated feelings about each other hidden. I never dared tell Paul how I sometimes resented Luke. Nor, I suspected, did he say anything questionable to Paul about me. We kept our distance. And our silence. I think that almost from the beginning, we realized that we’d have to find a way of sharing Paul—if either one of us was going to hold on to him.

  7

  I was inexperienced, yes, but I believe that in some essential way Paul was the more innocent. In the beginning, he was fired up about his feelings for me. He’d always been so easygoing and sure of himself, and I think I came along and just knocked him sideways, stunning him with emotions he’d never experienced before. I’m sure that hormones fueled a lot of his confusion. But unlike Luke, his views about sex seemed conflicted and constraining. The Aldens were devout Roman Catholics, a minority in our predominantly Congregationalist area, and were raised to believe in their own moral and spiritual superiority.

  “I better get you home,” he said o
ne night that first July we were together. He’d graduated the month before and had started working full-time at Alden Dairy, though only until he could save enough money to take the training course necessary to get certified as an electrician. It wasn’t easy for Paul to finally come clean about the fact that he didn’t intend to join the family business. He’d been born and raised on the farm, spent his boyhood watching his father’s hard-pitched battles to keep the place running, and decided that he didn’t want that kind of uncertainty in his own life. He was determined to have a trade, something independent of land and cattle, a livelihood that he could control and refine with hard work and his own two hands. Dandridge had never really counted on Ethan, his fun-loving eldest son, to settle down enough to take over for him. But he’d long believed that Paul—strong, capable, honest, obedient—would be the one to carry on the Alden Dairy tradition. I think in many ways his bitter disappointment about Paul’s decision was what started the dairy’s final slide into insolvency.

  “That’s Venus over there,” I told him, pointing above the tree line. We were lying on a blanket on the little beach up by Indian Pond, though we’d told my parents we were going bowling with a group of friends, or to the movies with another couple, or to any number of places we never went to with people we never saw. Even Luke, who’d been invited to intern at his father’s old law firm in Albany that summer, seemed incidental to the two of us, the only reality that mattered. “You can tell it’s a planet because it doesn’t twinkle.”