Polly

by Amy Bryant

  By the end of sixth period I had made up my mind to confront him. It was only fair. He couldn’t just break up with me without an explanation. Maybe there’d been a misunderstanding, something I could explain. Maybe he wanted me to come after him, so we could make up like the day he told me he loved me at the construction site.

  I dialed Jason’s number as soon as I got home from school, but hung up when he answered. Now that I had seen his house, his room, I could picture him in it. I paced around my bedroom. I picked up the phone again, set it down. I had to think about what I was going to say.

  From my desk I grabbed the green spiral notebook I used for an address book and picked up the phone again. I called my father in North Carolina and hung up when I got his machine. I hated the singsongy way he said, “This is Bob Clark, leave a mess-age.”

  I dialed his work number. He wasn’t at his desk, but the receptionist paged him when I told her who I was.

  “Polly, what’s happened?” he said when he got on the line. He sounded out of breath.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I just wanted to say hi.” I could hear people talking in the background. I knelt down on the rug in front of my mirror and studied my face. My expression was as somber as Jason’s had been when I’d seen him this morning.

  “You about scared me half to death,” Dad said. “When Sarah said it was you, I was sure something horrible had happened.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just saying hi.”

  I could hear Dad’s smile. “Well, things are sort of busy around here, but I always have time to take a phone call from my baby.”

  I picked up some of the fray from the edge of my rug and started to braid it. “I was thinking maybe I could take the bus down to see you some weekend,” I said into the mirror.

  Dad cleared his throat. “What does your mother think?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t asked her.”

  “If it’s okay with your mom, it’s okay with me.”

  “I’m sure she wouldn’t mind. It’s just a weekend.”

  Dad was silent. In the mirror my eyes filled with tears, and my reflection shook. Maybe if they hadn’t gotten divorced it would be easier to talk to him.

  “Yeah, well,” I said.

  After a lengthy pause I told him I’d better get started on my homework.

  “You call me anytime you want to talk,” he said in a bright voice just before we hung up. I promised him I would.

  I decided I would wait until I saw Jason to talk to him. Make him deal with me in person. But I didn’t see him. Days went by, and calling and hanging up on him became habitual. He was usually home, but when he wasn’t I felt a scraping pain in my chest. He was probably at the construction site without me.

  I was constantly on the verge of crying, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to let it out. It was like a part of me had known that this was going to happen. The worst thing about my depression was that it felt ordinary and natural.

  When I finally did see Jason again, weeks later, enough time had gone by that I was as shocked as I would have been if he had subbed for one of my teachers. I was walking past the main office on my way back from lunch when I spotted him slumped over in a chair, staring stone-faced at the floor. His hair fell in thin clumps straight down across his face, and I wasn’t sure if he had seen me. I slowed down as I approached him, grateful that we were alone.

  Jason didn’t move. In the end I just walked by, willing him to look up and speak to me, to say something, even just hi. He didn’t.

  A couple of days later Theresa told me that I probably saw Jason by the front office because he was dropping out of school. That’s what Eric Graham had told her. I wrote a poem about it during government class:

  You’re gone

  There’s no hope

  You were my answer to light

  And now it’s only night

  I added the poem to the folder in my desk where I kept Jason’s letters.

  If Mom and William noticed my vacant behavior, they chose not to address it, although they must have thought it was strange that I’d lost interest in talking on the phone. At dinner they talked about work, pausing only to ask me the occasional question about school or offer me more food. My appetite had come back a couple of days after the breakup, and I now considered dinner to be one of the few bright spots in my day. I stopped being picky. I helped clear the table and load the dishwasher without being asked, and then I returned to my room and melted back into my mourning.

  When I wasn’t at home sulking or at school, I was with Theresa. Theresa lived with her mother and stepfather and her little sister, Amelia, who was ten. Amelia and Theresa had the same red hair and the same spray of freckles across their forearms and noses. Theresa didn’t want anything to do with Amelia, but there was no getting rid of her. She would listen in on our conversations and then bring them up at dinner.

  “What does seduce mean?” she asked one evening, pointing a forkful of mashed potatoes at us. “You were talking earlier about someone trying to seduce someone else at school.”

  “It means tease,” Theresa said. “Like if someone is teasing you at school you can go ahead and tell the teacher that they’re trying to seduce you.”

  “That’s not quite right,” Theresa’s mother interrupted.

  Theresa’s stepfather poured gravy over his meat. “Amelia dear, you might consider looking it up.”

  I liked Theresa’s family. They didn’t shock easily. Nobody criticized her when Theresa painted a wall in her bedroom black, and she was allowed to smoke in her room if she opened a window. She didn’t have a curfew; she just had to be home when she said she would. She was allowed the occasional glass of wine. Theresa told me that her parents were like that because of their left-wing, socialist politics. I wished Mom and William were more left wing. My curfew was midnight.

  Theresa’s mother insisted that I call her Liz. This made me uncomfortable, so I made it a point not to address her. Liz had a thing for houseplants. They were everywhere you looked, as if the older ones had mated and were now raising plants of their own. Theresa’s house had high ceilings, and Liz had put a potted plant as large as a tree in the foyer. It towered past the stairwell, the branches creeping close enough to the banister to reach out and touch on your way upstairs.

  “I pride myself on not being able to identify a single plant by name,” Theresa told me once, as if it was the one thing she didn’t know.

  Theresa’s father and stepmother lived in Reston, too. Theresa and Amelia went over to their house for dinner once a week and spent one weekend a month there. I met Theresa’s dad only once, when he gave me a ride home on their way out to dinner. He had red hair, too, but darker than his daughters. According to Theresa, both sets of parents were friendly with each other, though she detected a faint rivalry between Liz and Linda, her stepmother. Liz criticized everything from Linda’s Toyota (“That model is notorious for breaking down”) to the presents Linda gave them (“Theresa’s totally beyond J. R. R. Tolkien, and Amelia’s not quite there yet”). I wondered what it would be like to have a stepmother. It could happen. Maybe she’d be someone I could be friends with. We’d go out to dinner and talk about girl things. Maybe I could tell her about Jason.

  “Sex changes everything,” I told Theresa at the lunch table for the millionth time. I wasn’t sure what I meant exactly, but I knew it was true.

  “Sex with morons changes everything,” Theresa said. “And every single guy in this school is a fucking moron, so.”

  She was applying a thick layer of black lipstick while she talked. When she was finished she handed the tube to me. I’d been drawn to bleak colors since Jason dumped me. My red boots had been relegated to the back of my closet.

  “Look,” Theresa said after I wondered aloud whether it would be too obvious for us to hang around the 7-Eleven near Jason’s house after school. “It’s time for you to go out with another guy.”

  I stopped chewing my sandwich.

 
“I can’t!” I was still calling and hanging up on Jason at least three times a week.

  “Why not?” Theresa said. “At this point a little scamming around might seriously help you.”

  I started chewing again, took a gulp of my grape juice.

  “Like it’s that simple,” I said. “What would you have me do? Just grab the nearest jock and straddle him?”

  “Well, it’s not exactly hard to make out with the rejects at this school. You don’t have to have a relationship or whatever.”

  I wrote another poem after lunch.

  Sex is beautiful

  Sex is painful

  Sex is meaningful

  Don’t tell anyone.

  I wished I could sing and play the guitar so my poems could be lyrics. I had a terrible singing voice and I didn’t own a guitar, but I still hoped maybe someday my poems would turn into something.

  I went to a party the next weekend with Theresa. A surf punk named Bone was selling acid for five dollars, and Theresa and I bought a tab. I was surprised by the size of it, tinier than a stamp, with a music note printed in the center. We went into the bathroom together to take it.

  “Do you really want to?” I asked. I was scared.

  Theresa nodded. Her face was serious. I could tell she wouldn’t do it unless I did. “Do you?” she asked.

  “Just don’t leave me.”

  I carefully folded the tab in half before I tore it down the middle so I could make sure we got equal amounts. When we had it on our tongues we stuck them out and looked at ourselves in the mirror. We giggled at our reflections and went back to the party.

  Tripping was fun, although I didn’t see any little men running up and down my arms or any furniture melting like Jason had. I laughed at everything Theresa said and paid close attention to the trails from the cigarettes I continuously smoked. I spent the night over at Theresa’s, but I didn’t fall asleep until dawn. I hoped that Jason would hear about how I had done acid—there were a few people who knew him at the party—and maybe call me and ask me about it.

  Spring set in and there were more parties. And boys, lots of them all of a sudden, as if Theresa had handed out flyers about me being available.

  Mark Preston kissed me at a party after he finished telling me about the time he went to a gun show. He was drunk and sweaty and not like Jason at all.

  Steve Swanson tilted his head really far over to the side when he kissed me and slid his tongue in and out of my mouth like he was doing it for exercise. When Steve slipped a hand in my pants I told him I wasn’t over my old boyfriend yet. He didn’t ask who my old boyfriend was. He just pulled his hand back out and kept kissing me. Andy Porter tried to kiss me in his car but I pushed him away, reeling from the smell of his Polo cologne. That same night Theresa gave Billy Henderson a blow job at a party. On the phone we discussed how long it had taken Billy to come versus Jason. Billy took longer.

  I made out with Kurt Ridley one night on the golf course. The soggy grass seeped through our clothes while the wind hissed through the trees around us. When I told Kurt I wouldn’t have sex with someone I didn’t love, he gave me a long kiss and then told me he loved me. I pried him off me and asked him for a ride home.

  In my journal I cataloged them. This one was short. That one had hairy forearms. Another one was a slow kisser. After a while I got bored. None of them were doing what they were supposed to be doing. None of them made me forget about Jason.

  It was a band that finally took my mind off Jason, at least for a brief, welcome spell. They were called Dag Nasty, and they were playing at the 9:30 Club in D.C. Sean Hanson, a boy Theresa was “kind of but not really seeing” drove us in his beat-up green hatchback. Sean kept his hand on Theresa’s thigh the whole ride, while she stared out the window and smoked. I stayed quiet in the backseat. I could tell Sean wished I weren’t there.

  “You’re gonna like Dag Nasty,” Theresa told me as we pulled into a parking lot around the corner from the club. “They’re fast.”

  I shrugged. I didn’t care whether I liked Dag Nasty. I was just glad to be in the city. D.C. made me feel sophisticated and worldly, especially at night. Even though Mom knew exactly where I was and what time I’d be back, I felt myself getting more independent and confident as we crossed the bridge from Virginia. Someday I’d live in D.C., in my own apartment. Maybe Theresa and I would be roommates.

  There were kids our age and a few years older hanging out in the parking lot, slamming car doors and bumming cigarettes from one another. A couple of them had cans of beer, but not many. Most of them were male. Even though they were dressed more like Theresa and me than the drunken rednecks I was used to seeing at metal shows, I still found them intimidating. There was something predatory and tense about the boys who went to rock shows, like they were seconds away from fistfighting at all times. More kids were loitering outside the club, looking up and down the street like they might be missing the real action.

  Inside the club more boys waited around in clumps of three or four. The few girls I saw wore heavy black eyeliner and scowled at the ground as we walked by. As we paid for our tickets I felt myself shrink into my scuffed-up boots and my oversized black sweatshirt. I wanted to be invisible.

  Theresa was just the opposite. She threw her shoulders back and straightened her spine as we moved farther into the club. I was used to Theresa being the coolest-looking girl at school, but I was surprised that she was also the coolest-looking girl here. Her blue eyes were rimmed with black like they were supposed to be. The black streak she’d put in her hair last fall was growing out, and she had it tucked behind one ear. Her leather motorcycle jacket was unzipped so you could see the rise of her cleavage through her thin black sweater, and boys watched her out of the corners of their eyes. She was wearing her wool houndstooth miniskirt that she got at a thrift store and her black tights that she’d ripped on purpose. I knew all of Theresa’s clothes by heart.

  Sean touched his sparse chin hair with one hand and rested his other hand on the small of Theresa’s back. I lit a cigarette, wishing that we had brought someone else for me to talk to in case Theresa and Sean disappeared somewhere.

  Dag Nasty started, and suddenly it got crowded. A few people pushed in between Theresa and me on their way to the stage, and a pathway was established. Kids poured between us, until I was at least six feet away from Theresa and Sean. I shook my hair out of my face, lit another cigarette. Theresa looked over and I waved. She’d tied a thin black leather strap around her neck, and I could see her freckles on either side of it.

  Most of the people in front of me were slam dancing. Every few seconds a wave of bodies would come toward me, and everyone in my vicinity would put out their arms and push them in the other direction. Soon I found an opening, and seconds later I was knocking against everyone, inhaling the collective sweat of the crowd. Theresa had told me about the pit. I pushed a careening body aside, and my head bounced against someone’s shoulder. One guy after another jumped up onstage with the band and hurled himself into the crowd, who threw up their arms to catch him.

  After five songs I was too tired to go on. I staggered out of the pit and toward the back of the club. My right shoulder was throbbing and the heat was starting to make me feel faint, but I was happy. I had the content, exhausted feeling I used to get playing outside in the neighborhood until dark.

  I couldn’t get the show out of my head for days. Theresa taped me her Dag Nasty record, along with some records by a few other hardcore bands she knew. I listened to them over and over again. Hardcore bands were real. The lyrics weren’t about the devil and evil, but about stuff that I thought about. Like how fucked-up the world was, and how nobody in charge gave a shit. There were other people who felt the way I felt. Frustrated and angry and rejected and furtive and raw.

  I wanted to go to every hardcore show there was. And I didn’t want to just be in the audience; I wanted to be onstage. To have fun and be angry at the same time. After school I’d dress up and pretend. I w
as the lead singer. Sometimes I played guitar and sang, other times I just sang. Shut in my bedroom, I’d change into a pair of fishnet stockings that I bought at the dance store at the mall. I’d put on my pleated black wool skirt and a black tank top. I’d move one of my bra straps over so that it was showing. I’d take off my watch and replace it with a silver cuff bracelet I’d had since eighth grade but never worn. I’d put on my crucifix necklace and over that the necklace I had made from a safety pin and a strip of black chain link I had bought from the hardware store.

  Then I’d go to work on my face. I’d start with loose white powder. Once my face was as pale as my palms I’d put black eyeliner on so thick I’d have to sharpen the liner halfway through. I’d tease random pieces of hair until they stood straight out, keeping them in place with a large amounts of hair spray that made my face sticky. The cheap, sweet smell of it crept into my nostrils and stayed there.

  The Bad Brains record was my current favorite out of the albums Theresa had taped for me. The first song would start and I’d grab my round brush off the dresser and jump in front of the mirror. I’d shake my head with the drums and wind my hips around with the guitar. I was singing, and Jason had come to my show.

  I’m in here

  You’re out there.

  Jason was staring up at me, full of regret.

  Loading up the streets

  Synthetic sounds so sweet.

  After the show Jason would tell me how much he had missed me. Sometimes he would jump onstage and kiss me. Other times I did a stage dive and landed in his arms.

  I was midway through a performance one Saturday afternoon when I spotted my mother’s reflection in the mirror behind me. She was holding the laundry basket in her arms, a smile spread across her face. I spun around and dropped my brush. Mom laughed.