“What are you doing?” Rosie asked suspiciously. “Are these plans for a mail bomb?”
I rolled my eyes at her. “Just trying to figure out when the comet will get past Jupiter’s orbit.”
“It’s closer than I thought,” my father said, putting one hand down on the table and leaning over me, forgetting for a minute that he normally reacted to me as if I were irradiated.
“Yeah, but there’s a giant bummer part of it, which is that it’s looking like it’s going to be close to the horizon, so not so easy to see.”
“Maybe if it’s low, it’ll be easier for you, since you’re so short,” Rosie said, looming over me with her extra four inches—she wasn’t even done growing yet, as she enjoyed pointing out during our brief periods of social interaction.
My father studied my calculations, losing the veil of disapproval and becoming the man formerly known as Dad, hand curled around the black stubble on his chin in contemplation, finger tracing the figures.
“No, I think the best way to see it would be if we had the old telescope,” I said. Maybe I could take advantage of this moment of goodwill and my two weeks of hard work to get the one thing I really wanted back. That is, the one thing I wanted that I could actually have.
But my father’s face went dark again, and he retreated back into himself, a switch turning off inside him. “Yes,” he said. “That would be great.”
How cruel, I thought, to agree with me and still not return the telescope. He turned and walked away. Even Rosie’s eyebrows furrowed as she watched him leave, his shoulders now slumped.
“You missed something,” Rosie said, pointing to the top left corner of my sketch. “The perihelion is only 0.4 AUs. It’s only, like, thirty-nine million miles from the sun. It’s way closer to us than this.”
“Oh—okay.” Usually I blamed my mistakes on too much pot and alcohol, but I’d been too busy pulling poisonous plants from the ground to get wasted. Must have been too much exercise and fresh air. I said something very rarely uttered to Rosie: “Thanks.”
She hid the twinge of a smile in indifference. “Whatever,” she said, “Rye Bread.”
By Friday my hands were red and swollen and itchy, but I still had to go to work and I still had to wear work gloves—Lynn gave me a temporary pair and told me to wash the other ones with some bleach to get the wild parsnip oil out—and I still had to feed the weeds (minus the parsnip) into the industrial composter, which, contrary to Lynn’s prediction, was not one of life’s great joys.
It was so hard to concentrate. I vacillated between having imaginary fights with my dad—demanding my telescope, pointing out the ways he’d wronged me—and daydreaming about the boy. His name was Dean. He had long hair. He played drums. He knew how to fix bikes. Had there ever lived a more promising creature?
Our last assignment of the week was to start clearing the path—we had poured wild parsnip killer on it, and those innocent-looking stalks were now withered. We spent the whole day walking along the future trail, mapping out just where it would go, finding the exact spot where it should cross the creek.
“Where do you guys think the best spot is, based on our research?” Lynn asked us.
“Probably just the place where it’s narrowest,” said Jimmie, the little guy with the unibrow, who for some reason was always standing next to Tonya. Aw, Jimmie. I felt sorry for him.
“The narrowest spot in the creek?” Lynn asked. “I can understand why you’d think that, but there are other considerations, including the height of the crossing, how level the two sides are, and what’s in the way—are there really big tree roots, for instance? So, I want you guys to look around and see if you can find some ideal spots. Pair up,” he said, instructing Tonya and me to go together. Great.
“Fall out, troops,” Tonya called out, and instead of revolting, they fell right in line, toy soldiers all of them. They seemed to have accepted her unofficial role as drill sergeant—maybe boot camp was really working on them.
We plodded around the side of the creek, our ridiculous boots gaining another coat of mud. Tonya crouched every couple of feet, carefully inspecting the ground.
“Hey, Lynn,” she called, after finding a large flat and root-free spot. “What about here?”
Lynn hurried over to us, then called for the others to join. “Yes, that’s just the spot I was thinking of,” he said. Tonya beamed. I wished I had a book about footbridges, anything to read so I could look away from this scene.
After lunch, we wrote in our notebooks. I drew with Lynn’s pen the red-winged blackbird that seemed to follow us from site to site, and I wrote down some lyrics—all this dark matter in the universe that can’t be seen, but still its forces pull on me. But I didn’t write about what I’d learned or how the program was changing my sense of self. I ignored Lynn’s writing prompts. What was the difference, anyway? It wasn’t like anyone was going to read it.
At the end of the day, Lynn handed me a sealed envelope. “Take this home to your parent or guardian,” he told us.
“Man, I wish I had a guardian,” I said. “That would be so much better.”
Tonya’s face seemed to cloud over. “That’s what you think,” she said. I remembered what Tonya’s house was like, dim and dirty, the presence of her wheelchair-bound grandmother everywhere, with the faint scent of pee. Even when her father was briefly home from the navy, which was rare, he was fierce and scary, and her mother had died when Tonya was little, before I even knew her. I felt a small pit right in the center of my chest, the size of an olive, but powerful, when I thought about her home.
When Rosie was five, Ginny and I brought her to the front row of our elementary school auditorium so she could see the visiting magician up close. She was smart even then, smarter than us, and she kept yelling out the secrets to his tricks. “It’s up his sleeve!” “There’s a little space in the bottom of his hat!” Finally the magician turned his gaze on her, transformed from kind to venomous, and said, “Little girl, it’s time for you to leave.”
Ginny and I took her outside, and she seemed totally unfazed. Back then I used to love having two sisters, one older and one younger. We’d have all these adventures that had nothing to do with my parents; we were a team. They loved Ginny the best and then Rosie. I knew that, and I knew that being alone with my sisters was the only way we’d be even. With Ginny gone, I still came in last for favorite kid.
Ginny had asked Rosie, “What did it feel like when the magician yelled at you?”
She just shrugged her shoulders and said, “It felt like oops.” And Ginny just tousled her hair and hugged her and said, “Okay, sweetie,” and I knew she was one of the world’s great big sisters.
I always thought that should be the title of my autobiography: It Felt Like Oops. Subtitle: One Screwup after Another.
Now Lynn said, “Bring it to whoever is responsible for you.” He said it to the group, but I knew it was addressed to me, Caraway the Insensitive. He already seemed less inclined to regale me with his mini pep talks and more inclined to ignore or correct me. Maybe I had it really good compared to these kids. I could afford new boots. I had two parents who were legally responsible for me, even though I hadn’t seen one in three months and the other one hated my guts. I had friends. At least I had friends.
When I got home, I locked my bike against the fence and took off the boots and hardhat and presented the envelope to my father. My hands were still red, a little bit peeling.
“Look how hard I worked,” I said, making jazz hands in front of his face.
He said, “Mm.” He seemed 10 percent less like my enemy.
He took the manila envelope from me and unlatched the metal clasp, looking at me all the while, his expression deadpan. He was scary this way. He used to be the happy-go-lucky science teacher, his glasses smudged, his hands callused from playing guitar in the evenings on the porch while my mother cooked her culinary masterpieces of galettes and tartlets and soufflés that she’d l
earned at cooking school, all the stuff I claimed to hate (Soo’s Korean mother made Shake’n Bake and Kraft macaroni and cheese; I just wanted to be normal). I didn’t really hate it. In contrast to the TV dinners that now filled our freezer, it seemed amazing.
He handed me my measly minimum-wage paycheck and showed me the paper, a carbon copy that looked suspiciously like the document I’d received on the last day of school. My one saving grace was that I got A’s and B’s, no matter how many times I skipped out or went to school stoned. I was a good student. Rosie had once knocked on my head and said, There’s someone smart in there. I can hear her calling from the jail you’ve put her in. “They give you report cards?” I asked. Could this job get any lamer? I didn’t see any letter grades on the thin paper, but there were handwritten notes. That was almost scarier.
“Sort of.” He tucked it back into the envelope, but when he looked at me now, there was less glare in his eye.
“Why do I get a report card?”
“It’s more like a progress report. It’s a pilot program. They’re giving and receiving feedback.”
“Well, what a happy, reciprocal relationship. So what’s the feedback? What’s my grade on footbridge preparation? I can tell you right now, I am not going to get an A in footbridge building. I wasn’t any good at shop either, if you recall.”
When we made wooden bowls in shop class, mine was the only one that was unsandable—the whole inside scratchy and rough. My teacher, Mr. Feinstein, had tried sanding it for a few minutes and then said, not terribly apologetically, “I have no idea what you’ve done or how to fix it.” Just another variation on my theme. I gave the messed-up bowl to Ginny, who used it for her collection of dangly earrings. “I love it,” she said when I handed it to her. She laughed at the still-splintery parts and said, “Don’t worry—it’s perfect.” And then, when she thought I wasn’t watching, she slipped her drugs below the dangly earrings.
I had felt in my chest something I couldn’t quite identify: maybe some kind of betrayal. Maybe some kind of fear.
“It’s so we know how you’re doing,” my father said.
“How am I doing?” I asked. I put my shitkickers neatly against the wall and set the hardhat on top.
My father adjusted his glasses and made his way toward the screen door, holding it open for me as I slowly followed behind. “Not completely terrible,” he said. “At least you’re showing up.”
Thus I was able to negotiate a furlough, another night of freedom as long as I came home by midnight.
“What happened to your hands?” Soo asked when she saw me. I had covered them with thin cotton gloves that my father kept in his box of dissection tools.
“What? It’s a look. Michael Jackson.” I twirled my fingers, trying only to look at Soo’s face while I talked to her. But I was scanning the basement. Who was here? That jerk Tyler with the Mohawk and studded leather jacket, the one I once went to third base with. And the captain of the football team, Julio Germaine. And one of Greta’s cheerleader friends. And of course Tommy and Tiger and Justin. Greta. The whole gang. And me. That was it.
The Ramones’ “Pinhead” was on the stereo, and suddenly we were all chanting, we accept you, one of us, the whole room erupting in some mixture of anger and joy that felt familiar and comforting and dangerous all at once. The boys were pounding their fists into the air. And then the record skipped and Tommy went, “Screw the Ramones,” and replaced it with Flock of Seagulls.
“Tommy, why are we friends with you?” Tiger called, throwing a pillow at his head.
I adjusted the straps of my bra, the little bit of lace that was poking out from beneath the spaghetti straps of my shirt. After a week of crisp canvas pants and flannel shirts and hardhats and work boots, normal clothes almost felt almost indecent: the glittery jelly shoes and the probably way-too-skimpy tank top. I had brought the flannel shirt with me, that worn memory of cloth that had been somehow folded into my daily routine.
Someone handed me a joint and there was a beer ball full of Genesee and, what the hell, I had some of that too, and I sat back in the center seat of the couch and listened to the music because no one was talking to me. Everyone was having fun, and I forced my lips into a smile, and I drank until the familiar ache began to recede. I drowned it. I smoked it out.
And then, a voice. A voice I had heard through the fence. It said, “Hey, man.” And then a voice, another male voice, responded, “Hey, man, what’s up?”
I looked out of the corner of my eye. There was the boy, the boy named Dean, clasping Tiger’s hand and nodding toward Justin, all of them jutting their chins toward one another as if they’d met months, years ago, were already comfortable in some kind of man intimacy—sports and music, blah blah blah, what a bunch of baloney, didn’t they talk about anything real, how boring, this guy must be a total a-hole, not a speck of brain tissue in his head, his beautiful head with the beautiful hair and the little wisps of stubble on his chin and, crap, he had green eyes and I really loved green eyes, no, they were hazel and hazel was even better. Hazel was the best. They were hazel.
Then he nodded at me. At me. I sat up a little straighter as he sat down next to me. He was talking to Tiger about the new Neil Young record and he settled back into the couch and his arm touched mine and I wasn’t talking to anyone so I closed my eyes because I was so into the music. I pretended I was so into the music. Black Flag. Not my favorite.
“I fucking love this song,” he said.
Black Flag: okay, I’d give them a chance. My brain was swimming. Giant gulp of disgusting Genesee.
“Me too,” I said, but he didn’t seem to hear me. At least, he didn’t turn around. He turned his head a degree or two, seemed to see me, or at least a slice of me, the outline of my face—oh, my hair was a mess and I had those gloves on my hands and I was so stoned my eyes must have been totally red and I probably looked terrible. He ignored me. Good. Fine. He should ignore me. I was ignorable. I hated myself. Drink drink drink. I really just hated myself. And then it seemed like I was going to cry and there Greta was, sinking into the couch next to me. I loved Greta, but she was also beautiful as a Barbizon model in her shirt with the giant shoulder pads and the balloon pants with suspenders and the high heels, and all other girls within a fifty-foot radius immediately vaporized in her presence.
“What’s happening, Carrie?” she asked, and she reached for my hand, and I said, “Youch!” and then I felt like a jerk for the six-hundredth time since I’d arrived thirty-seven minutes before.
The boy, Dean, turned around now. He nodded toward me. One of the guys. That’s right. He’d seen my hardhat and my work boots, and he probably thought I was a lesbian.
“Dean, this is Carrie,” Greta said.
And Dean said, so quietly I almost couldn’t hear him, looking at his lap when he said it, “I know.”
I died a little bit. I drank, huge gulps, to keep myself alive. The music pounded, and I could barely hear Greta and Dean. Soo’s mom opened the basement door and called, “Turn it down!” but we ignored her.
“I’d tell you to shake hands,” Greta was saying to Dean, “but I don’t think she can.”
“I’m not contagious,” I said, twirling my fingers in front of his face and then hating myself for that, too.
“I didn’t think so,” he said. “It’s national Michael Jackson Day, right?” And he smiled, and the whole world cracked open, and then he seemed to think better of the smile and took it back and sat up a little straighter on the couch and looked at his own, gloveless, hands. He was turning on and off like a variable star, its brightness increasing and fading. And then the smile leaked out again and he put his hand up to his hair, his glorious stringy hair, all a mess and tangled and beautiful, and then he put it down again. He had pale freckles all over his arms and a light dust of soft-looking dark hair and he had a little bit of bike grease wedged under his fingernails, and if he could see beneath the thin cotton of my gloves he would see the same smiles of
dirt caked under mine, too. Dirty fingernail twins. We had so much in common. I took another huge gulp of beer. My body was full of beer, so full I could just float away.
“Do you want a drink?” Greta asked him. She was making her exit. She was leaving me alone with him. I loved her and I hated her. Go away. Don’t leave.
“Nah,” he said. “I don’t drink. Anymore.”
“Okay,” Greta said, unaffected by this announcement. “Carrie, you want another one?” she asked as she stood up.
The beer in my hand suddenly seemed like it was on fire. He didn’t drink. He was hanging out with these people and not drinking. How was such a thing possible? I put the beer on the table and it spilled a little bit. It was on my hands. My hands would smell like beer. I shook my head. Greta left. It was Dean. And me. Alone. Alone-ish, anyway. Tommy was swaying, offbeat, to the rhythm, watching us.
“I have a question,” I said, immediately regretting my announcement.
“You’re in luck,” he said. “I have an answer.”
“Oh, well, right. So … How come you don’t drink?” The music was so loud—the Replacements’ “Sixteen Blue”—that I could barely hear myself.
“Um,” he said, looking at his hands again. “Stuff. Things.”
“Oh.” Okay, he wasn’t going to tell me. That was fine. Tightlipped. Who was I, anyway? He didn’t know me.
He shifted his body toward me now, just a little bit, and I squirmed and adjusted my shirt, I pulled it down a little bit and the lacy top of my bra peeked out and I didn’t fix it. I crossed my right leg over my left and bounced it a little on there. No drink, no protection, but my body was leaning toward his, involuntarily.
“I kind of screwed some shit up when I drank.”
“Oh.” What was wrong with me? Was “Oh” all I could say? What did “screw shit up” mean? What was he talking about? How could he have a good time without drinking? I hated drinking. Why couldn’t I not drink?
Lost Stars Page 5