At least, with culinary arts degrees, they could someday get jobs. Next year they were hoping to work at the Westin Hotel where NBA stars stayed. They told people they were going to work there, as if they’d already been hired. They’d gone down to the Westin for breakfast a few Saturdays, so they could offer helpful suggestions about the buffet when they finally applied.
“Far too much emphasis on bacon and sausage. Add more creative grits and potato dishes, more smoky chipotle flavor to the hot sauce, a little picante flair to the huevos rancheros, hello!”
During Christmas break they volunteered at the food bank, prepping and cooking with prisoners from the county jail. Sandi really liked one skinny movie star–looking guy named Rafael, who whispered to her “Don’t do dope” as they were scrubbing cookie sheets. He said he dreamed of running a fresh muffin bakery someday, down by the river. The muffins at the jail came out of cellophane. Sandi was impressed they had muffins at the jail. She thought they might have only crackers, or dry toast.
Sandi and Brin had tried to talk the food bank into letting them make luscious beet cake with green icing for Christmas, but the food bank said Red Velvet hadn’t gone over very well at Valentine’s Day, so they’d stick with vanilla and chocolate.
On their first day back after holiday, Sandi said, “Let’s visit Ms. Rippo after school, to see if there is extra credit we can start doing right now. Because if we get B’s for the whole year, I don’t think the Westin will hire us. Come with me?”
Ms. Rippo seemed reluctant to see them when they barged into the cooking lab after the bell. They hadn’t made an appointment. She looked at her watch. Brin called her on it, saying, “Oh, don’t I have to be somewhere else, girls? Just kidding!” Sandi poked her.
Ms. Rippo coughed.
“You girls need to make a big change,” she said. “I actually wish you could have personality transplants. Some days I think, I can’t stand to come to school and see those two again! It seems as if you’re always making fun of me—everything is an inside joke to you. Do you know how that feels to a teacher? In fact, I don’t want to have this conversation right now, unless the counselor is present. I’m afraid of what I might say.”
They looked at each other, stunned.
“Afraid?” Sandi gulped. “You mean, you want to say more? We’re really that bad?”
Ms. Rippo was crying.
Brin said, “We’re so sorry, we’ll try to be better! We didn’t know we were that bad, did we?” She looked at Sandi.
Sandi started crying, too.
“Unbelievable!” Brin said, outside in the blinding light. “Personality transplants? Was that mean or what? I’m in shock!”
Sandi was still crying.
They walked to Brin’s house in silence and drank two beers.
Curb
The Christian School has a team called the Warriors—WELCOME BACK WARRIORS! shouts the banner over the road.
But the billboard in front of the school says the “Trait for the Week” is peace.
Victor feels alarmed about entering such a facility.
He may come out confused.
He may emerge wearing a black armband, carrying a spear.
Why did his friends choose to gather here for their trash-pick-up organizational meeting? Why didn’t they rally in the drainage ditch?
Victor is excited about his new devotion to picking up trash. A spear would be helpful, actually. So far his tool kit includes heavy-duty black garbage bags and a box of throwaway gloves. He likes the way he looks at the world when he is on duty. Life seems more manageable. No, he can’t solve global warming, emission overload, cancer. Yes, he can make sure the Frito bags from last night’s cheerleading rally in the parking lot are removed.
Victor attends the public school down the street. But his best friend Bear attends the Christian School. All summer they have been cooperating on a collaborative research project on capital punishment which they plan to present as a senior project at both schools. Their state of Texas leads the nation in killing prisoners. Victor thinks this is one of the many things that gives their state and country a bad reputation—to be lining up with Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and China, all of whom employ the death penalty. Even Mexico, with its wild drug-smuggling gangs and frequent beheadings, doesn’t allow the death penalty.
“See?” Bear always says. “Maybe they need it.”
Bear thinks capital punishment is a necessary evil and the justice system is doing a great job. He doesn’t worry about all the guns floating around just under the surface of the city, something Victor worries about all the time.
Newspaper mug shots haunt him. Victims, as well as the accused. How many prisoners have wrongfully been killed? Some who might be innocent languish in solitary confinement for decades. The Texas death row facility is ironically located in a town called Livingston. Victor reads ethics papers prepared by University of Texas law professors. Bear reads the Bible. Eye for an eye. Victor asks, Will your father sacrifice your brother if God tells him to? Bear just stares at him.
Victor picks up Popsicle sticks and skinny straw wrappers. Secretly he likes the word “rubbish” more than “garbage” or “trash”—someday he will live in Scotland. This is the first clue.
There is so much trash. How can a city dump be big enough to accommodate the refuse for a million and a half people?
Victor’s own sister creates enough rubbish to fill an acre every other day. He read about pneumatic trash tubes in Sweden that suck rubbish for miles underground, to proper recycling facilities. Wide-mouthed tubes stand, four in a row, on the roof of an apartment building. Paper goes in one, plastic . . . a giant sucking sound. He would like to see these tubes.
Victor, Bear, Rudolf, and Angus congregate at a cafeteria table. It turns out that girls are not as interested in picking up trash as Bear hoped they would be. The boys have mapped out their neighborhood; they will each be responsible for certain blocks. Should the project have a name? “Clean Sweep,” says Angus. But Victor thinks that sounds military and fake. Like Desert Everything. Rudolf wants them to be called Neatniks. Beatnik is a word that fell out of fashion so long ago; they can bring it back with a twist, reinvent the concept. Look cool and distant while picking up trash. They can wear hats. Rudolf thinks attention to trash will help him get into a better college. He’d love to go to Yale but it’s so far away, expensive, and he’s not that smart—but it’s such a neat-sounding name. So brief.
“Do Christians sin more?” asks Victor. “Because they think they will be forgiven? Has anyone done a study about how many people on death row were raised Christian?”
Bear says, “I think it’s insulting for you to talk this way in our cafeteria.”
“I would like newspaper coverage,” says Angus. “The newspaper always talks about cleaning up the river. But let’s tell them we’re focusing on streets and see if they care.”
After fiesta parades, embarrassing to say, the streets became utter wastelands of garbage, baby diapers, shameless cluttered filth. How could people do that?
Nothing, nothing, can be taken for granted, Victor is thinking as he trips off the curb outside the school after the meeting. He catches himself before falling. It’s a much higher curb than the one at his school. Any of them could have a disaster before the school year is over. You could have a disaster an hour from now. Bending over. Something could hit you. People carry guns in glove compartments and lunch boxes. Cars spin out of control in minor drizzle. The more you know, really, the more you have to worry and fret about. It’s a miracle anyone can sleep at all.
He leans over for a gum wrapper. Has to tug on it. It’s stuck to the street. He sticks it into his pocket distractedly—no glove, nothing. In the washing machine, the wrapper will adhere to the white collar of his sister’s favorite shirt.
Once Victor found a love letter with certain words—darling, kiss—crossed out. He smoothed and saved it. Someone else had more trouble writing than he did. He used to think you could
put bits of trash together—a man scanning the classified section for an auto mechanics job dropped a plastic bag while unwrapping Juicy Fruit gum and popped his button—to make a story. That was when he still believed.
Somebody Needs
To Be Punished
They were asked, as part of the application, to list five ways they had been punished in their own lives, and five ways they would like to punish, with the option of saying specifically whom and for what.
1. The cloakroom was easy. You will stand in the back corner of the cloakroom (even in first grade Lula had lived way beyond the era of cloaks, but no one called it the coat room—it was an ancient school and everything in it was ancient) with your nose pointing toward a metal hook. You will think, for ten or twenty minutes, about what you did to get sent there. Broke John’s pencil point. Broke John’s nose. Or, you could think about cloaks—who wore them, how debonair those lost people felt stepping into their coaches. When allowed to return to the class, your feelings of humility and lonesomeness will render you a much finer student and person.
2. You will be sent home. Lula loved being sent home. Her favorite books were there. She didn’t have to go to math. You will miss your homework assignment. It will be a blot on your record.
3. Your father will be sad forever. His family was booted from their home. Their trees were cut. Their money and dignity was taken. They became second-class citizens—this was not their fault. Refugees had reason to be sad. But it was also a punishment rendered by an occupying force on the future children of the refugees as well as the refugees themselves. Even in another country far away—the children of the refugees, trying always to make their parents happy, never quite succeeding. But wasn’t that a good movie? Didn’t you like that drive into the country? Wouldn’t you like to have a nice little cup of tea?
4. We won’t speak to you. And we won’t tell you why. Punishment by silence became strangely popular in the twenty-first century. Sisters and brothers clammed up. They wouldn’t talk to you even if you went to their bedroom doors and said, Hey, I’m really sorry. For what, I’m not sure, but sorry indeed. Doors stayed shut. Countries punished one another by denying talk. Old friends moved away, wouldn’t return calls. How could the era of chatter-chatter, texty-text, also be the era of silence? It was like stepping into a jungle where insects buzzed around your face and legs, but above you, the trees weren’t giving away anything. Sometimes you could feel the voices of the nineteenth century (reading old poetry, for example) as more fluent and responsive than the voices of the twenty-first. Did I lose your pen? Stain your shirt? Insult your intelligence? The thing about being punished by silence—you thought about it a lot. It haunted you, and grew. What could I have done to make this person so mad at me? They’re stupid not to tell me, but still. It was a ballooning kind of punishment.
5. Remembering your mistakes more acutely than any minor successes. This was the worst. The things that kept you up at night. Tip to a waiter that was too small. The words that didn’t fit the moment. Words that didn’t come till too late. You could kill yourself in increments, punishing your spirit day after day—regret. Guilt. Not the guilt of the little girl who woke in the night embarrassed God was mad at her because she had tucked balls under her shirt, pretending to have breasts. “I even felt sexy.” That was sweet, and pure, no crime at all. But the crime of obsessive replay—get rid of it, get rid of it. Who could ever have known the hardest punishments would be the ones you gave yourself?
As for how Lula would like to punish others—she had to chew on her pencil fourteen minutes for this one. It was much harder. She would like to muzzle the crazy dog next door. She would like to drug him. Mellow him out.
2. She would like to appear at the front doors of the ones who were punishing her with silence and throw buckets of water on their heads.
3. She would take away all the weapons. From everyone. Dissolve them. No guns in America, no nukes in Israel, no bad chemicals, no water boards, no missiles, etc. But was this a punishment or a gift? People were just going to have to talk, that was it. That was their punishment. Thank me later.
4. The prisoners already in jail being punished had to learn organic farming and feed all the homeless and there could be no two ways about it. They had to dig and hoe and weed and water and harvest and they even had to cook the food and serve up the plates. Many skills would be learned this way. Legendary chefs born. People no longer hungry. And ex-prisoners, too occupied to commit further crimes.
5. Lula was keeping this one secret. She knew she would need more punishment for something down the line, but she wanted to be able to punish herself discreetly instead, when the time was right—such as, you will extract yourself from this happy crowd and stare at the orange line of sunset without saying good-bye to anyone, feeling how the night falls over you, gently, more gently than anyone, with all the flaws and errors buzzing in our cells, really deserves.
Downhill
Sarah’s dad was dialing the phone, calling his brother, who lived in Montana, went fishing night and day, and almost never spoke to anyone.
“Randy, it’s time you got your butt down here. High time. We need your help with Mom. It’s getting dangerous. She could burn that place down.” (Pause)
“Yeah, you heard me right. I don’t care what you’re doing. The fish will wait. I can’t leave my work right now, and Sarah’s in school and Melody—well, you know she and Mom never got along. When can you come?”
He got off the phone. In his gruff mood now.
“He won’t come.”
Sarah said, “It doesn’t matter. He’s not very nice anyway. Let me just move over there to Granny’s and live with her for a month, till she feels better. It’s fine.”
“But you have to go to school.” Her dad knew his mom would probably never feel better. She’d been going downhill for the last ten years. Nothing in particular, just the general decline—eyes, teeth, knees, all of the above. Now she was leaving candles lit on her dinner table for hours after dinner, scary stuff.
“Well, she lives closer to the school than we do. Being with her before and after school is better than no one else being there at all. If she panics at night again, I’ll go into her room and talk to her. She has that bell she likes to ring. ”
Granny lived on Army Boulevard, an odd street of shabby mansions obscured by tangled armies of vines and giant trees, heaped leaves, secret elders tucked behind closed curtains and blinds.
“It will be fine,” Sarah said. “I’ll ride the Broadway bus to school. My adventure.”
So she packed her suitcase and a plastic tub of books. Tucked in her Aveda shampoo and Kiehl’s face cream, the two luxuries of her personal toilette. Her mom, Melody, cried when she departed. “It’s like you’re already leaving for college,” she mourned.
“Well, come visit me,” Sarah said. “I’ll be studying pill bottles and the Financial Times.” (Her grandmother subscribed to the Financial Times mostly because it was pink. But Sarah had discovered that the hefty weekend editions, printing more about world culture than finance, were terrific.) “Bring me some home cooking now and then.”
This was a family joke. Melody didn’t cook. Melody got takeout or made sandwiches.
This was only one of the ten or twenty things her granny disliked about her mother.
No cooking, no sewing, no ironing, none of the old domestic skills in sight . . . not even a hemming capability. Melody took their clothes to Nimble Hands Tailors. She let the cleaners press her husband’s shirts.
That night, Sarah and her grandma ate homemade corn bread and pinto beans and lit the lamps (this was a phrase her grandma favored, as opposed to “turning on the small lights on little tables”)—then they puttered around together in their pastel floral nighties. Sarah thought her month might feel like a holiday after all. The phone rang. Old land line with circular dial. Sarah answered, and Uncle Randy said, “What are you doing there?”
“Fishing,” she said. A silence. Then she a
dded, “Fishing in time.”
Granny curled in a corner of the brocaded vintage couch and tucked her feet up. She giggled like a schoolgirl. She said, “Oh honey!” She said, “Randy, no!”
Sarah eavesdropped on her grandma’s side of the conversation from the hallway.
She had never heard her granny laugh like that when speaking to her father. Her father, filled with admonitions and concerns. “Are you taking your medicine? Are you double-locking that front door?”
Randy, on the other hand, seemed to be talking about a tattooed woman he’d met at a biker bar—the woman had her hair in a French braid like Granny used to wear when she was young and he complimented it and they ended up having a date or god knows what. Granny repeated what he said, then added comments. “But tattoos! Honey, I never!”
Long silence. “Ha! Ha! Ha!”
Sarah went into the guest bedroom and looked around. White lace curtains, a crocheted white coverlet neatly tucked. Family lore held that Randy, who’d never finished college, but run off to work on some oil rig by Point Barrow, Alaska, and go salmon fishing on weekends, was the secret genius of the family and Sarah’s lawyer dad, a bit of a dullard. This was what Melody told Sarah, anyway, about her own husband.
“Don’t say that, Mom,” Sarah protested.
“I’m just reporting what I hear,” her mom had said. But who did she hear it from?
They spoke for one solid hour.
Granny was shouting into the telephone now, “I love you, too, cupcake!”
Randy? Cupcake? He never shaved. He wore smoky-smelling lumberjack checkered shirts and clunky woodsmen boots. He had never married yet and he was—what? Forty-eight?
The world was full of mysteries.
Her granny savored clinky glasses of gin and tonic with dinner.
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