I nodded toward where the boys were sitting. “CJ does.”
“Bully for him.”
I winced on CJ’s behalf. This was not where I wanted us to go. “So, how’s your brother?” I asked her. “I mean, is he talking yet about his adventures?”
She climbed onto the table and stretched out on her back in the bright sun. It was a hot day and she was shivering. Where were you last night, were you sick or something? I wanted to ask chidingly. “You look cold,” I said. She shook her head, eyes closing.
A failure, I walked back toward the shade of the tree. Beyond was the bluff over Lake Michigan, its entire open length fenced off by six feet of chain-link, on which hung a memorial plaque. I felt bad for Vera, laid out on the table like a dead person. I felt bad for the boy for whom the fence had been raised, Randolph Leonard Burke 1923–1929. I imagined six-year-old Randolph running for a baseball, backing up and up toward the perilous edge, and me, like the catcher in the rye, tackling him before he went over. I wanted something grand to do, an act of courage or self-sacrifice for the world or for my friends.
—
Half an hour later she stood over us, hands on her narrow hips. “So what’s on the program?” She passed assessing eyes over our cards, laid out for Bid for the Dummy. “Wowie zowie,” she said. “What a surprise.”
Be nice! I wanted to say, but I was so glad to have her back, I didn’t care if she wasn’t nice. “Is this what they call fashionably late?” CJ said, but didn’t press for details. We knew not to press.
Now, with us four seated in the four cardinal directions, bridge cards in hand, my world was complete. I could lose myself in the game’s red and black geometry, the universe sketched out by the bids and confirmed by each ensuing trick under laws complex but knowable, from which arose a four-way intimacy that didn’t endanger anyone. At school I had to study to earn B’s, but I was gifted at contract bridge, shrewd and intuitive, the all-around most desired partner. CJ bid by the book and got confused with a less mathematical partner. Vera’s bidding was good, but she’d hog the contract sometimes. As for Ferdinand-the-bull Saint, he’d make one bid and give up, as if saying to his opponents, “Take the contract if you want it so bad!”
That day Vera and I were partners, and I was glad; we usually did well together. She held her cards with her good hand and played them out with the other, using her thumb and first nub daintily. I wished myself a physical defect, not quite as bad as hers, something pretty and touching like a slight limp.
We were in sync at first, Vera and I. I was as happy as I’d ever felt, beyond self-appraisal in our oasis of shade, in the infinitude of summer, with friends of my heart. Saint made a tough contract; CJ gave him the V sign. CJ laid down the wrong card; we let him take it back. CJ’s radio had run out of battery juice, but we didn’t need music. We had the sweet growl of bees, the crickets’ chee—pause—chee, a few faraway cries from the playground and tennis courts, and beating time to the song of our happiness, the steady crash of waves on the rocks a hundred feet below. Then Vera started overbidding, and it seemed on purpose. She bid a slam when we didn’t have the points for game. She lost easy tricks. When the deal came around to her again she squeezed the deck between her palms. “I just can’t anymore.”
We looked at her. Someone said, “Uh-oh.” Maybe it was all of us, a joint outbreath.
“I know,” she said. “But could we pep things up? Expand our horizons?”
She smiled mischievously, which made me more uncomfortable; she wasn’t a smiler. I wondered if she’d planned the move while lying alone on the picnic table. Or maybe she was just feeling her way with us, amassing courage, daring herself to tell us what she wouldn’t be able to tell—her first caginess with us, the first lapse in her invincible candor—until the roller coaster of our calamity was clanking up the last hill. But that comes later. Right now she sat before us with her golden skin and golden hair, her eyes violet in our tree’s shade, and asked us, challenged us, to reveal the darkest, ugliest part of ourselves, something we had never told anyone. Something so sick, she said, that thinking about it, we could barely live with ourselves. She laid four cards face-down on the game board. High card went first.
It was a conundrum. Being honest with one another was more than a point of pride with us; it defined our group. With tears sometimes, we confessed things that hurt us or that we were ashamed of. But to present for inspection what we considered perversions, things in ourselves we were trying to blot out or overcome—how was this a good thing? Saint’s face was blank, but his hands were squeezed into fists; CJ’s eyelid was twitching; my heart was thudding. No one wanted this, but there seemed to be no way out. In some ways we were still children. A game had rules, the first of which deemed noncompliance a mark of dishonor.
I drew the high card, a jack, and I tittered hideously. No one moved or spoke. Then, having no recourse, I opened my Lorna Doones, which I had snuck during physics, bringing my calorie count way past the prescribed 1,800, and presented a half-empty cellophane sleeve. “I’ve eaten seven today already. As an act of further self-debasement I will consume number eight in front of you. Show-and-tell. Happy, Your Highness?” I stuffed a cookie into my mouth and proffered the bag. “Next?”
Vera yawned theatrically. “We’re looking for a story, missy. Lurid details, you know.”
It was like standing on a high diving board looking down on the tiny, faraway pool.
“Take a risk, Kay. Blow our minds.”
“You’ll hate me,” I said with a giggle, as if I didn’t mean it. “Please?”
There was a low rumble of thunder. For a second I believed in a God who answered prayers, but the sky was clear overhead. Having no recourse, acceding to a will stronger than my own, I smiled around my thick tongue and described a summer night the previous year when I woke up in bed, went down to the refrigerator, and discovered an entire beef brisket, newly cooked and wrapped in foil. I hated describing what I did then, the compulsion and shame, but I forced myself, pressing each sickening word up and out of my throat. “It was sitting in juice, not even sliced yet—do I have to finish this?” They all nodded as if enrapt, Saint too. I talked fast. “I cut a sliver. The meat was pink, the fat was white and hard, but I ate it, fat and all, another sliver and another, till it was gone. All gone. Tomorrow’s dinner.”
“Well past the adult daily requirement,” said CJ, “but at least it was protein.”
I gazed at my lap, feeling slightly faint.
“Did you barf it up?” Vera said.
“Please shut up!”
It was late afternoon now. Shadows were lengthening, rooting things to the earth. But I felt stripped of crucial mass. The stage set of my life—tree, fence, my handsome, intelligent friends—stayed on the ground while I rose into the air and hung there on nothing. Soon my friends would cease their forbearance of me, eject me from the club of our four-way friendship. I took another cookie, pinched off a crumbly corner, and, immersed in the buttery sweetness, finished the story: Thus I had lost the right to learn to drive. I couldn’t even take the written test. Consequences!
Saint hummed under his breath, a nervous tic, then gave me a naked-eyed look that divided the world’s pain between us. Dear Saint.
I had always liked Saint’s face, his reddish-brown curly hair, growing long in the back, and his high freckled forehead—so familiar to me in the two years of our friendship that I could have drawn him from memory. But now his forehead wasn’t just high and broad, it looked noble, like a lion’s. Saint looked like a sad, noble lion, like Aslan from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, while I felt so ugly inside and out it was who I was, even if I lost forty pounds. I took out my drawing pad and hunched over it, doodling, trying not to think too hard or long about any one thing.
CJ was next, with a story he said he was dying to tell. It was about his ten-year-old brother, Danny, a nice kid, and athletically gifted. To improve Danny’s character, CJ had invented a club called the Vampeers, in w
hich the boy held a membership as long as he earned sufficient Vampeer Points. And, CJ said with a show of pride, Danny was into it! There were numerous tasks for him to accomplish, and the boy was performing well. This week he stole a pen from Beck’s Department Store, drew a swastika on the gray leather seat of their father’s Buick, and took the blame. Grounded, Danny was bearing it nobly. His imaginary fellow Vampeers applauded him. “Nice,” said Vera, “your little sadistic streak.” CJ put his palms together and bowed like a Buddhist.
I looked at Saint but couldn’t read his reaction. I felt sicker than before. We all knew CJ hated his father and envied his brother. But his father had survived Auschwitz. “That’s—I’m sorry—it’s too sick,” I said. I wasn’t used to speaking up, but it was a strange day, and more was coming out of me. “It’s beyond sick, don’t say you think it’s fine!” I went on till his ears were red. He gave a helpless, apologetic shrug. But I had to ask, “Does Danny know what a swastika means?”
“He does now. Could we move on?”
His eyes were bright, and something like shame was coming off his skin, a sad sourness. I tried to breathe it in, my friend and this new information. I finished my cookie, took another, swallowed saliva. Their dad was a cold man, maybe even cruel. He was hard on both boys, but CJ especially.
Then it was Saint’s turn. His face was blank, his voice uninflected. “I could tell you about the time Mike and Rick Gittles pulled off my pants.”
“Oh dear,” Vera replied, not very nicely.
“Mickey and Ricky, they lived on the first floor of my building, the last place we lived in Detroit, and for some reason they hated me. They called me queer and I didn’t even know what it meant. They threw my pants in a dumpster and I had to climb in to get them back. What?” he said to Vera, who had taken a smoke from CJ’s pack.
“Saint Sebastian. Saint the victim. How do you always arrange that?”
Saint’s pause stretched out. His skin looked pale under his freckles. He said at last, “Does anyone know what she’s talking about?”
His voice hurt my heart. Vera gave a brief shriek. “You’re full of shit, St. John. You’ve never done a bad thing in your life? It’s always done to you?”
I was used to admiring Vera’s candor, but now I didn’t know, with Saint, what she was getting at. He would ask for a glass of water as if he wasn’t sure he deserved it. He read In Search of the Miraculous and The Way of Zen, he quoted the Tao Te Ching, he was genuinely nonviolent, and if someone tried to pick a fight with him he’d turn the other cheek, like Gandhi and Christ. They know not what they do. “Feel free to tell me off,” Vera said, in the smoky, deep voice of a forty-year-old woman. “Stop me before I kill again.”
I wanted to stop her, to stop this ugly game, but with CJ I’d blown my wad. Beside me, CJ was pulling up grass, sifting it over the knees of his jeans. Saint’s face was still blank, but he was humming under his breath, trying to sit like a rock while the illusion of pain crossed the empty mirror of his mind. Let’s not fight, I said to myself, eating cookie after cookie till I was drowning in sugar butter and there was nothing in my mouth but the hum of grinding and a little ache from chewing. “So, um, how about some more bridge?” I said. “Come on, guys.”
“Aren’t you forgetting someone?” Vera said. “You haven’t heard my evil.”
The sun was angled west now, and to stay in the shade we had moved bit by bit around the tree and away from the bluff. In a couple of hours my family would be having dinner, and some of me wanted to be home already, with people who had nothing to say to me that I hadn’t already heard. On the other hand, I sought transformation—an enlargement not of the body (which I’d already accomplished) but of the spirit or soul. I was timid, ordinary, undefined, and if I died that day (I had fully imagined this) I would leave no mark, like a stone dropped in a lake. I had been raised to be “good,” whatever that meant, and I was terrified of evil, cruelty, perversity, the dark side of human nature. At the same time I felt obliged to know it, as if somewhere in that frothy black murk was the embryo of my natural charisma, my latent, essential personal force. I put the cookies back in my book bag and awaited whatever was coming.
“I dropped acid yesterday,” Vera said. “With my brother.”
CJ hooted. “And now you’re schizo. I’d call that a cliché!”
He was breezy about her news, though I was pretty sure he was putting it on. We sometimes smoked the grass Saint got from someone he worked with at Hamburger Heaven, but no one had braved the chancier labyrinth of LSD till Vera now. It separated her from us. Even her “dropped” instead of “took.”
“I must say,” said CJ, “I expected more from you, Vee.”
“Let her finish,” said Saint, who hated teasing of any kind, even of someone as quick-tongued as Vera.
Without looking at any of us she began to describe the experience: first a period of euphoria in which you think you’re seeing the world almost like God. “Laws and rules—you remember them, but they just seem funny, ha-ha funny. ‘Abnormal’ makes no sense. And ugly? Beautiful? You can’t figure out why one is supposed to be better than the other. Rust is beautiful. And wrinkles and scabs. You can see into your pores where the little hairs start.” Her bright glance swept her malformed hand, which was shaking. There might have been tears in her eyes, though it seemed unlikely. None of us had ever seen her cry.
We were transfixed, but she remained silent. I couldn’t tell if she’d finished or had lost track of her story. CJ folded his hands in his lap like a good little kindergarten boy. “That’s all cool,” he said encouragingly. “So did you go anywhere? See anyone?”
Saint: “Where did you get the stuff? Did your brother bring it back with him?”
CJ, before Vera could answer: “Hey, what happened to him down there, wherever it was? Does he talk about it?”
Then the Garth saga took us over, though we had only snippets. We knew he’d left after his dad said, You’re gonna get yourself a job this summer or you can find another place to live. We had laughed: How literally Garth took the old man.
We got into analyzing Garth, though in an admiring way. Told, once, to pick up his toys, he threw them out the window onto the garage roof. He really did that. But he wasn’t an asshole. If you didn’t order him, he’d do what had to be done. He was his own person. Imagine him working in an office. Or in prison, say! No one wanted to go to prison, but it would make Garth crazy. Locked up, he’d kill himself—we agreed on that. “He’d make a crappy Vampeer,” Saint offered. CJ cast him a loving look.
We went on awhile, imagining life for Vera’s brother with his and Vera’s dictator dad, none of us noticing that Vera hadn’t joined the conversation. Till out of nowhere she said, “You don’t do anything on acid you wouldn’t do without it. Not that it lets me off the hook.”
There was a little silence while this seeming bit of randomness circled our brains looking for a place to land. “What do you mean?” I said.
CJ cackled. “You’re kind of rambling, girl.”
Me: “No, go on. I’m so sorry. We’re listening.”
She took off her sandals, stepped out into the sun, and started dancing in the grass, barefoot, something she would do at times to calm herself down. It wasn’t a performance. She moved as if we weren’t there, without a slip or hesitation. But it was painful to watch. Her legs pushed at the ground as if to keep her body in the air where it belonged, while her arms, which seemed to have no bones under the skin, swayed helplessly, the dancer straining against something too strong for her but that she couldn’t escape. I was scalded with awe, envy, pity, and love for my friend, a set of feelings so at odds with one another that instead of taking a cookie, I took up my pen and sketch pad and tried to draw her.
She ended the dance folded in on herself like a dead bird. “I am so, so, so, so sick.”
What could we say?
She glanced at my picture. “You gave me huge, perfect hands. Are you blind, Kay?”
I
was afraid to speak.
“Sometimes, Kay-kay, I wish I could crawl into your head. It would be such a vacation.” Then to all of us: “Do you know what dance that was?”
But who would have known? In the deadness of our silence, slowly, dully, she resumed her “trip” story: The exaltation didn’t last. You came down sad and hopeless, hating yourself. Gaps lengthened between Vera’s statements, until she slapped her face with both of her hands. “That’s it. I’m sorry.” She looked up over our heads, as if for listeners with minds subtler than ours. “So, guys, it’s bye-bye birdie. Adios. Sayonara.”
What?
Saint’s eyes, his whole body, strained toward Vera, who was—I saw now—trembling. Even CJ looked confused. She sat a moment more, dead cigarette on the grass beside her. Then she threw back her head and shoulders, swung her legs up and over her head, and landed on her feet.
It was a pretty set of movements, but unlike her dance it seemed show-offy. She stood in the golden light of late afternoon, face, hair, bare shoulders ablaze, but her voice was flirty and sly in a private joke with herself. “See that cyclone fence?” She nodded westward toward the bluff, the lake, the declining sun. “When the park empties out, I’m going to climb it. Then I’ll spread my wings. My make-believe wings. My illusory wings.”
She paused, her head balanced precisely on top of her neck, while we took it in, text and subtext. There was a breach then in the day’s logic. A thread broke in the warp of the universe.
Anger—my own—has always confused me. I feel bad in a diffuse, all-over-my-body way and want to cry. Vera knew what my mother had done. I wanted her to take it back, to cut the last minute from all of our lives. For a moment no one said anything.
Then, thank God, the boys found their voices.
CJ: “LSD leads to suicide. Now, isn’t that a cliché?”
“It’s a threat,” said Saint. “Why are you threatening us?”
CJ: “She’s telling us so we can stop her.”
“If you say so,” she said.
Once, in Lourdes Page 2