Call me Jane (The Oshkosh Trilogy)

by Anthea Carson

  “Jesus H, is that that guy Trip?” Krishna asked.

  “Yes,” Glinda whispered.

  “He’s been knocking like that every night this week,” said Gay.

  “Freak!” Krishna hissed.

  “Just ignore him, he’ll go away,” said Ziggy. He seemed to shrug the whole thing off as par for the course.

  The banging became louder and louder, and now we could hear him screaming Glinda’s name.

  “He sounds like the big bad wolf. But how does that glass in the door not at least rattle and break?” I observed, to which Ziggy indicated that was what he meant; that if he really meant to break in, he could.

  “Turn off the all the lights,” Glinda said.

  Gay stood and tiptoed over to the wall near the entrance to the staircase and turned them off. She pushed as gently as she could on the creaky wooden door until it clicked closed.

  “What if Paul comes here?” Lucy whispered. “How will he get in?”

  “He’ll go away soon,” Gay whispered.

  “You mean Paul will, or this freak will?” said Lucy.

  “Either way it solves the problem,” said Ziggy.

  “Ha!” Krishna said. “Can you imagine walking up and seeing that?”

  “I know,” Glinda hissed. “He’s a scary guy.”

  “Well then why are you dating him?” I asked.

  “I just went out with him once.”

  “Yeah, well maybe you shouldn’t have banged him twice,” said Gay.

  We sat quietly, waiting for him to go away. Their parents must not have been downstairs, or surely they would have done something by now. None of us could leave as long as he was out there.

  “How long does he usually do this?” I asked.

  “About twenty minutes,” said Gay.

  “Ugh,” Krishna huffed, sounding exasperated. “I need to go home.”

  “I think Paul might come here. I need to get past this guy so I can make sure he gets here,” said Lucy.

  In the dark, passing another joint around, it seemed like a campfire. I hadn’t noticed how high the ceiling was before. Every time the lighter sparked a flame, it threw our shadows on the walls, and up in the corners of the hexagonal-shape window cove. I stared at the dark wood in the window frames and low-placed sills. I reached out and ran my fingers along it. The shadows moved and flitted, moths around the flame. Like a bonfire, the Beatles memorabilia sat in the middle.

  Lucy left through the back porch to look for Paul’s car. The banging stopped for a while. Then, after about twenty minutes, there was a regular knocking sound.

  “Lucy at the door maybe?” I said.

  “Who’s brave enough to go down there?” asked Gay.

  “I’ll go,” I said, and I walked downstairs. I was sure it wasn’t him.

  I heard Gay say, after I was halfway down the stairs, “Who knew Blondie was brave?”

  “She’s not. She’s just smart. She knows it’s not him,” I heard Ziggy say.

  I was expecting Lucy to be at the door. It was Paul. God, he looked gorgeous through the window. The yellow of the porch light gave him a mysterious look.

  I had to drive him to his car, because he had parked that boat ten blocks from Ziggy’s; our laughs sounded just the same. We smoked one more bowl before he left my car, parked right behind his car. He did that thing for me again, with the man with the plan and the golden arm, and I still can’t remember how it goes. Both of us were laughing so hard, and then he leaned over and kissed me just before he left the car.

  Next day on the phone Lynn asked me, “Did he use his tongue?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then it doesn’t count,” she said.

  “What do you mean it doesn’t count?”

  “It’s just like a brother kissing a sister,” Lynn said. “It’s not a boyfriend.”

  ELEVEN

  I sat on the radiator to warm up. It was so freezing cold outside it was even cold in the entryway of the school, but that’s where everyone was gathered. Students often gathered there to smoke if it was cold, because the teachers were more lax about the rules in that area.

  Ziggy and Raj had been telling Paul about a beautiful girl who was interested in him. Lucy was guarding Paul from this information as best she could; her eyes darted back and forth from Ziggy to Paul to Raj and back to Ziggy again, because he seemed to be the main instigator. And her short, dark, kinda-punk haircut darted along with her.

  “Yeah, Paul, you should see her,” Ziggy said. “I mean beautiful. Long, blonde hair. Big blue eyes. Long legs. She looks like ...”

  “Sounds like your old girlfriend,” said Paul.

  “Carns?” Ziggy said.

  “Yeah, Ziggy.” Lucy turned on him and said in a mocking voice, “Sounds like you’re talking about Carns! Why are you talking about Carns? Are you missing her?”

  Ziggy laughed again.

  “Oh God, she was beautiful,” Paul said. “Sexy, long legs, those blue eyes. You were one lucky guy, Ziggy. She was hot.”

  Lucy glared at Paul.

  “She was. You saw her,” Paul said, with defensiveness in his voice. He looked at Lucy and shrugged.

  Ziggy laughed again, a high-pitched, hooting sound.

  Lucy punched Paul in the stomach, and Paul pretended it didn’t hurt. He actually seemed to be pretending she wasn’t there at all.

  “So,” Paul said, taking a drag off his cig, looking around but not looking directly at anyone, “what’d you say her name was?”

  “Paul!” Lucy screamed in his face.

  “Leslie,” Raj looked directly at Lucy when he said this, “and she’s hot for you, Paul.”

  Paul laughed sheepishly and Lucy now punched Raj—who did double over in pain—in the stomach, at which point Ziggy howled with laughter again. I just sat quietly on the radiator and felt my butt growing hotter and hotter, but it was so cold outside the pain didn’t bother me too much.

  “She was at that concert?” Paul asked.

  “Concert?” Ziggy said. “You’re a garage band. You don’t have concerts. You have gigs.”

  “The Transistors do too give concerts,” Lucy said, “and someday Paul will be in a real band. And the Transistors are a real band.”

  “You want me to tell her to call you?” Raj asked. “She wants me to give her your phone number. She’s got a hot ass.”

  He dangled this with a taunting Raj smile. He had the kind of face that didn’t like to smile. Smiles never sat right on his face. He looked better skeptical and scowling, or mysterious. The smile always looked like it could slip off his face, revealing underneath it what had been there all along. A sneer.

  He looked uncomfortable without his sneer.

  “Hey! My ass is hot,” I yelled, and jumped off the radiator patting it. “Ouch!”

  Ziggy laughed the fat-woman laugh, Raj laughed the ‘I don’t want to laugh or smile’ laugh, Lucy cackled and pointed at me, and Paul… Paul tried to contain his laugh. Paul glanced over at me and his gaze lingered a moment. Lucy saw him look at me, and then her eyes darted back and forth from me to Paul, who was now looking down at the ground. I felt my face go hot as I pretended not to feel her hard stare.

  “I mean I burned my ass. I think my pants are burned.”

  “Well, don’t sit on a radiator,” said Raj.

  I was feeling so stupid I just left, leaving them all laughing behind me, pointing at my presumably singed pants. I drove over to Krishna’s house. I wanted to smoke a bowl to stop feeling how embarrassed I felt.

  Krishna and I were upstairs in her room when the red phone on her little desk rang. She practically never answered that phone. Raj yelled up the stairs.

  “Jane, your chauffeur services are needed. Lucy needs you to pick her up from the front entrance at school.”

  “Why do you keep driving her around?” asked Krishna, sounding annoyed.

  I shrugged.

  Raj came into the room in a nice pair of white tennis shorts. He lay down on t
he little twin bed that sat in a nook, a separate nook on the other side of a mini wall that separated it from the bed that Krishna slept in. Everyone always sat on this twin bed, but it was rare for any of us to sit on the other one. It was just too high up and too far back and too awkward.

  He started thumbing through one of Krishna’s High Times magazines with a look of amused contempt.

  “Is this the pothead’s weekly journal?”

  Krishna ignored him and asked me to wait a second; she needed a shower and wanted to ride along. I sat there with Raj, listening to the Stones in silence, till she came out shaking her wet curls. She had a way of dressing right in front of you and still managing not to reveal anything. A Stones tee, a pair of ratty jeans, and we were off. We picked up Lucy at North, and she took the wheel but wasn’t saying much today. Krishna asked to be dropped off at Adam’s. Since he was her dealer as well as her boyfriend, we smoked a bowl with them there. When we were back in the car again, Lucy was quiet all the way to my house.

  When we arrived at my house, she was quiet all the way through my kitchen, where I stopped to fix a snack. She walked ahead of me through the living room and into my room.

  Then suddenly she screamed, “Oh God, get away from me.”

  “What?” I screamed.

  “Peanut butter! I can’t stand the smell of peanut butter! It makes me nauseous.”

  “What? You ate peanut butter last week!” I said.

  “I did not. I would never eat peanut butter,” she said.

  This was confusing; I know I saw her eating it.

  “It makes me sick to my stomach. I’m going to throw up. You have to put it away,” she continued.

  “I don’t even have any peanut butter,” I said.

  “But you’ve been eating it. You’ve been near it! I’m gonna be sick.”

  I actually really enjoyed the peanut-butter sandwich, and was planning to go back in the kitchen and have another. We were standing near the entrance to my room, near the bookcases.

  I stared at her, and started thinking. I didn’t believe her. I knew she was lying, I knew I’d seen her eating peanut butter, and now that I thought of it, she’d been complaining about being sick a lot lately. She stared at me too, with an odd expression on her face, like she was thinking too.

  Then I knew what she’d been thinking, because she held up a pair of scissors.

  “Let me cut your hair,” she said.

  “What? No,” I said.

  “But you don’t look punk. You need to look punk,” she said.

  “I don’t want to look punk,” I said. “I never wanted to look punk.”

  “Yes you do.”

  “No, I seriously don’t.”

  “Come on.” She grabbed for the top of my hair, waving the scissors around. I slapped her hand away.

  She laughed and said, “Oh come on, you will look so cute, I promise.” She grabbed for my hair again and I backed away. She moved toward me, still laughing.

  “I’ll get the peanut butter,” I said, running to the kitchen. She chased after me. When I did grab the peanut butter, she said, “Okay, okay, put the peanut butter down. Seriously, it’s making me nauseous.”

  “You put those scissors down.”

  “But your hair would look great.”

  I shoved the jar of peanut butter toward her face.

  “Okay, okay, I’m putting them down. See? I put them down.”

  I turned around to put the cap back on the jar of peanut butter. I must not have felt her. She must have lifted the top of my hair very softly, because when I heard the scissors clip a huge clump of hair off the top of my head, it was too late.

  TWELVE

  “What does the word nauseous mean?”

  Mrs. De Muprathne was the best teacher at Oshkosh North. She stood at the front of the class and took off her glasses, which were held round her neck with a fancy chain.

  We all stared at her in response for a moment. Several hands went up, and several students shrugged, thinking it was obvious.

  “Feeling like throwing up?” a student asked.

  “If I say ‘you are nauseous’, what am I saying?” she asked, looking at the class expectantly. She waited a few minutes, and then said, “It means you’re making me throw up.”

  Mrs. De Muprathne was never wrong about anything. She couldn’t possibly be. But at that moment I had my doubts about whether that imperious woman could always be right, because I was pretty sure I knew that nauseous didn’t mean that.

  After an odd pause, where all of us looked at each other wondering if we had all been wrong all along about that word, Mrs. De Muprathne leaned to the side and looked down the aisle of students at me. This caused Glinda to turn around and look at me too. Glinda was the only other person I knew in honors English, and she sat directly in front of me, allowing me to analyze for an hour her fascinating, complicated, asymmetrical haircut. When Mrs. De Muprathne said my name, and Glinda turned to stare at me, I snapped out of it and shook my head.

  “Janey Lou, what on earth have you done to your hair?” said Mrs. De Muprathne.

  “Please,” I said, “call me Jane.”

  Glinda whispered to me, “I have a hat you can borrow. It will cover that up and look really cute on you.”

  I wore the hat on the way home, and kept it on my head to cover my bald spot clear up until the time I hooked up with Lucy again.

  Lucy was pissed off because she couldn’t find Paul. We started at Krishna’s, whom we had picked up as soon as we left school. She sat in the back laughing, occasionally filling a bowl, asking if I needed a beer. I wasn’t drinking the beer. “Buckhorn tastes like carbonated piss water.”

  “Give me some more of that carbonated piss water,” Ziggy said, when we stopped there to look for Paul. He smiled when he said this, looked right at me. “Where’d you get that hat?”

  “Buy me a bottle of red wine,” I told him. He’d been along for the mad Paul chase ride for about an hour, and claimed he could always buy liquor.

  We stopped at a bar so he could go in and buy wine. He wasn’t old enough, but he swore he could buy it.

  “Just look ‘em in the eye. That’s all it takes,” he said, successfully holding my bottle of red wine and two more six-packs of carbonated piss water.

  “Where the fuck is that son of a bitch! I’m gonna kill him when I find him!” Lucy’s face was pure rage. Her teeth gritted, and her lips curled back like a she wolf.

  Ziggy laughed the fat-woman’s laugh, and the giggling poured from the backseat along with Krishna’s goddamn clove-cigarette smoke.

  “What’d he do Lucy?” Ziggy asked, arms folded, looking slightly squished back there with his long legs shoved under Lucy in the driver’s seat of my compact car. And she kept adjusting her seat violently, jamming his legs, which didn’t seem to bother him at all, only added to his amusement.

  “Oh,” Krishna waved her hand, “he’s just been hard to find, that’s all.”

  “Goddamn it!” she cursed, and screeched to a sudden stop. “I see his car.”

  “That’s not him,” Krishna said.

  “Drop me off,” Ziggy said, “Maybe he’ll be at my house. I can call around for you.”

  But when we arrived at Ziggy’s, he wasn’t there. But Gay was, and Glinda was leaving with some ridiculously handsome guy. The guy who banged on the door, was also ridiculously handsome, so I imagined this one banging on the door by this time next week. Off they went in his car as we were standing on the porch.

  “Oh Jane,” she paused, putting her hand on my shoulder. “I want you to borrow this coat.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said. Why did I say that? I didn’t want it.

  She took off some long, white fur that went to down to her ankles.

  “It’s white seal. Don’t get anything on it.”

  Gay stood on the porch with her hands in the pockets of some really stupid pants.

  “You guys got any dope?”

  “Sure, get in,” we said. “
We’re looking for Paul; you can go with us.”

  “Not yet,” Lucy screamed. “Ziggy’s going to make some phone calls.”

  Lucy ran upstairs. Gay’s eyes half closed and followed her through the slamming porch screen door. She didn’t need to say anything else; what she said with her eyes was funny enough.

  We all sat on the grass next to my open car door. Gay and Krishna drank the now warm carbonated piss water, and I was working on my bottle like a wino.

  “Do you know where Paul is?” Krishna asked.

  “Uh, hiding from Lucy?” Gay said. Then she looked over at me. “You and Paul,” and she gave me a sly nod.

  Krishna laughed at this and blew out a cloud of smoke with it.

  “Let’s go,” Lucy jumped into the driver’s seat and slammed the door. We barely made it in before the car took off. She screeched around corners. She drove ninety miles an hour. None of this bothered us; we were drunk and high as kites. It felt like a roller-coaster ride. The sun was going down.

  “Didn’t Ziggy call anyone for you?” I asked.

  “Hell no, as soon as we got in there he told me to get in the bedroom and lie down on his bed and wait for him. And he called me Prego. I hate that nickname. How dare he call me that? ‘Bite me Prego,’ he said. I fucking hate Ziggy.”

  Well, Krishna and Gay could barely contain their howls at hearing about what Ziggy had done. They tried to smother their laughter as we picked up a few other stragglers here and there on our various jaunts all over town, going to places Paul might be.

  Now it was black outside, and we were screeching down Main Street. We went from drunk to completely intoxicated. Inebriated. Seeing things double. I was nearly finished with my bottle of red wine when we finally found Paul in his car in a parking lot outside Pat’s Tap.

  “It’s the same spelled backwards!” Krishna said giggling. “Let’s go there!”

  “You son of a bitch! Where were you?” Lucy screamed at him.

  Paul looked stunned at her outburst, like he’d been doused in the face with cold water.

  I stared at him. Goddamn it, I thought, why do you have to be so gorgeous? I was beginning to feel some of Lucy’s rage vicariously. I glared at Paul. He stared back like a question.