Once, in Lourdes

by Sharon Solwitz

  Danny does not want to look at himself in any mirror. Feeling weak in the knees, CJ is ready at last for the game to end. He hops back into his jeans, then brings Dan’s clothes over to the table, where the boy stands in his mother’s dress, seemingly paralyzed except for the rapid chuff of his breathing. CJ unzips him. “You did good, son.” CJ nods in support of his encouraging statement and pulls his own shirt back on. “You were willing, that’s what counts. You passed with flying Vampeer colors.” He tries to smile.

  “Don’t call me Danielle.” Danny’s teeth are chattering.

  “I won’t,” CJ says gently, and hands him his shirt.

  When they are both fully clothed, they stand beside the pool table, but Danny won’t look at him. Something feels wrong to CJ, but he can’t quite fathom it. He feels generous toward his brother. And loving, like an elder sibling ought to feel. He hands Danny one of his socks, so that he can remove his makeup. “I know what you’re thinking,” he says. “You forgot we were playacting.”

  Danny is trembling. CJ too now. His breath lurches up his lungs and out of his mouth. Before tonight he felt Dan’s attachment to him, but not its depth. Something is wrong that he must make right. CJ pulls back his narrow shoulders, straightens his spine, pushes his chest out against the fabric of his T-shirt. “Pay attention, Danny. If something like this ever comes up again, with me or with anyone else, if you don’t want it to happen you don’t let it happen, do you hear me? If someone tries to fuck with you, you have my permission to cut off their balls. Do you know what I’m saying?”

  Danny swallows. “Am I a homo now?”

  CJ takes him by the shoulders. “No way. You’re a red-blooded American man. A he-man. Superman. It doesn’t matter what you wear.”

  Danny nods.

  “Tell me. I don’t know you know till you tell me. Tell me what you are.”

  Danny declares his manhood.

  “Let’s shake.”

  The boys shake hands, then Danny puts his arms around him, burying his head in CJ’s chest. “Cut it out, Dan.” The boy lets go immediately; CJ pats his back. “It’s cold in here. Who’s in charge of the air-conditioning?” He ruffles his brother’s hair, thick and soft as fur. “Danny, don’t love me so much.”

  Danny smiles like an angel. “Who said I loved you at all?”

  “That’s the idea!” They walk upstairs together. In front of Danny’s room, CJ takes him by the shoulders and keeps hold, grinning to still the quiver of his lower lip. “That’s what I like to hear. You stand on your own in this world. Say it, brother.”

  “Right. But there’s a lot of stuff we’re going to do together.”

  “Sure. For sure.” CJ leans on the doorframe.

  “Like what?” Danny says.

  “I don’t know. Like what? Fishing? Hunting?”

  “Yes! And getting high together!”

  “We’ll get high and rob banks?”

  “We’ll be spies for the CIA. I’ll be a spy and you’ll be a counterspy!”

  On an impulse too strong to suppress, CJ kisses the top of his brother’s head.

  Back in his own room CJ is still shaking. For some reason he can’t look in the dresser mirror, though it’s something he often does to calm himself down. It’s as if a train is speeding through his body. If he could get on it, he could find a seat and get some rest, but it won’t stop for him. In his heart or gut is a very bad feeling, and he doesn’t know its name.

  The phone starts ringing, but CJ doesn’t pick up. On the wall Mick Jagger is looking at him as if he has his number. Who is this creep? Jagger is thinking. But what has he, CJ, done? Nothing happened! The ringing continues, but he’s not ready to talk, even to Saint. On his desk a copy of Women in Love is open to the chapter in which Gerald lies down in the snow and freezes to death. Under the weight of Jagger’s condemning gaze, CJ lies down in his bed. He hasn’t hurt anybody, so why does he feel bad? Jagger is no angel.

  CJ is arguing with imaginary Mick Jagger on the place of evil in the universe when the phone starts up again. Someone is serious. He answers. It’s Kay.

  “You won’t believe it, CJ. I’m out! I’m free!” She gives a short, exultant scream. “I went to Saint’s, but he wasn’t home. I walked miles and miles in the dark. I’m at the park now. God, it’s so freaky!”

  Her voice wobbles, as if she is crying or trying hard not to. CJ would like to beg her forgiveness. Which she would bestow, he knows, without asking what for. Kay the rock. Kay the good and true. “I’ll be right there,” he says. “As soon as I get some things together.”

  He takes a suitcase out of his closet and packs the book first. He has never belonged in this house. He’s not sure, even, whether he belongs on the earth. He adds jeans and a T-shirt to the suitcase, underwear, a pair of sneakers, and five twenties that one of his grandmothers sent for his birthday. He walks down the hall.

  It’s almost ten o’clock this hot August night. Danny has gone right to sleep, his cheek to his ancient, hairless stuffed dog. In the master bedroom their mother’s vacancy is marked by a biography of John Kennedy, who would have made the world right if he had lived, their mother said. CJ used to love her like crazy. Now he forgives her for preferring Danny. The world in general prefers Danny. And why not?

  He puts her brassiere back into her drawer, hangs up her linen dress, and selects one—black, sequined, with shoulder straps, of a stretchy fabric he can maybe squeeze into. He finds clip-on earrings, a handbag, a pair of high heels. She’s a large woman, his height, with feet as long as his and nearly as wide. Who knows where or how tonight will end? He finds a pair of long gloves that almost reach his tattoo.

  Back in his bedroom he puts on the dress. It’s loose on top and tight at the waist, but, hey: Black is forgiving. Now, where did he hear that? He clips on the earrings, stones too big to be real. He reapplies the lipstick, rubs some on his cheeks. He combs his hair, which has grown out this summer, curling past his ears, and at long last he looks in the mirror. On the expanse of his forehead there is no mark of excommunication, nothing to set him apart from the world of human beings. He stows the gloves and the tube of lipstick in the beaded bag. Then, suitcase in one hand and purse in the other, in his mother’s dress and shoes—not too high to walk in and tastefully black, like the dress—he is on his way.

  21

  Quantum Leap

  The third day of my captivity, I was sick of drawing and bored with Archie, Betty, and Veronica. I tried rereading Gone with the Wind, but Scarlett’s mindless selfishness just annoyed me, and the fact of her eighteen-inch waist. On my desk sat my physics book—unopened, although Mr. Carstairs had caved to Arlyn’s efforts on my behalf. My makeup exam was scheduled for sixth-period study hall on the first day of school, generous of Carstairs, who would miss a free period. I wondered absentmindedly what story she had told him, whether it was my physical or my mental illness that had waylaid me. Regardless, I was presumed to be creeping back to the fold. My house arrest would end that day, and if I passed the exam with a B or higher, I could go for my driver’s test. There were hints of a secondhand car for me. Elise had no car. Big stick, yummy carrot.

  The dilemma was false, of course. In light of the Pledge, what was summer school physics? I had already decided that if I didn’t hear from my friends, when the sun rose on P-Day, while they were falling from the bluff I would be diving headfirst from my second-story bedroom window. In the meantime, all I wanted was for time to pass. With nothing else to do, I started rifling through Modern Physical Science (PSSC) till I arrived at the chapter on light—what, figuratively, we all were seeking.

  To my surprise, then, some event or rearrangement seemed to have occurred in my brain, because the concepts were suddenly comprehensible. I could picture it: Waves. Particles. Electrons, with their fixed little bundles of energy (quanta) obediently circling their home atoms, hit by new quanta and jounced into wider orbit. Farther away but still joined, still circling. A quantum leap? I had questions. What kept
them circling? Why didn’t they float off? Did it depend, perhaps, on something measurable, on the quantity of energy in the quantum or the distance between them and the nucleus?

  I ate dinner downstairs with my jailers without mentioning my seeming acquiescence to their wishes. Back in my room, I returned to my physics, reading the textbook like a novel, letting images pop into my head and vanish, not trying to retain anything in particular. Then on a page with no diagrams or pictures, I came upon a string of words that stopped all my thinking and feeling:

  Neither the wave theory alone nor the particle theory alone can account for the behavior of matter in all forms and under all conditions.

  I reread the sentence, startled to have found among the formulas, models, and laws of physics this one hesitation. The prose remained formal, and I proceeded cautiously, but the book drew me further in, a not-quite-friend teasing me with odd, dashing turns of mind. On a large scale, the predictions of Newtonian physics are fully confirmed by experimental data, but on the molecular plane, in the atom’s interior, no single system or model applies. In fact, when many quanta are present, the existence of discrete, separable units cannot be verified. It would seem, then, that quantum mechanics is an extension of classical statistical mechanics rather than Newton’s deterministic laws. Most startling is the breakdown of the causality principle….

  Ordinarily, by this time my thinking would have stalled out, but now comprehension filled me like food. This thing called matter was like my self, predictable and ordinary at a distance but indeterminate at close range, following unverifiable laws or no laws, words and actions only loosely related to intention. You could, for example, hate your two chins in the mirror and then gobble down a quart of ice cream. You could love a person, perform all manner of loving kindnesses for them, and they’d yell or ignore you. Someone could hold you in her arms crying how dear you were, you’d feel her cherishing you and your life together, and the next day she would be gone from your life and her own too. You might even love your life and, thrilling with tender hopefulness, perform an action that horrifies every cell of your body. Causality, what? This breakdown I had already felt below the level of language, and here it was in words on a page. Who or what had caused my mother’s death? Not I. Not even my father and Arlyn. My disorientation, my inability to declare myself for or against anything, was not just a fault of character, it mirrored the wishy-washiness—the essential indeterminacy!—of the universe.

  So without trying to be quiet, in my normal galumph I walked downstairs and out the front door, as if no one could stop me. And no one did.

  —

  I waited for CJ on top of the slide in the playground, while below in the parking lot three boys played bicycle chicken. It was ten P.M. by my watch. Then a pair of lights swung into the lot, a station wagon, with heavy bass pounding through the windows, and the kids rode off on their bikes. Over the lake sat the nearly full moon, larger than usual and pumpkin-colored. The air was damp and fragrant, but I was nervous, like something bad was going to happen. I had never been here alone at night.

  A second car (still not CJ’s), a gray Plymouth sedan with spray-painted rust spots, pulled into the lot and parked as far as possible from the first. It belonged to Tweedledum and Tweedledee, high school juniors who ate lunch together, held hands in study hall, finished each other’s sentences, a pair who’d been born, it seemed, thirty years old and already married to each other.

  Soon the wagon drove off, leaving behind the diminishing sweet wail of the Beach Boys. A cloud passed over the face of the moon. In the new silence and darkness, stars pricked the sky, nearly too vast to bear. I turned my face to the wind, to the lake, though I couldn’t see it, imagining it as wide as the Pacific and me a teenager from the real California, from, say, Santa Monica, named, say, Monique—slim and tan, suffering an alienation so universal it was like community.

  I floated on the soughing wind, the faraway hum of highway traffic. When the wind fell, I thought I heard a new sound. It would merge with the rhythmic slosh of the surf, then rise above it, whimsically, like a spate of hiccups or coughing or two dogs going at it. I held my breath and scanned the lot, the playground, the fields, the woods; it seemed to come from wherever I wasn’t looking. It amplified, quickened, a shrill gasping like a runner straining to win a race. Then there was only wind in the trees, the faint, irregular beat of the surf.

  The moon rose above its cloud, shrinking and whitening. The metal swing set, the fence around the playground, the Plymouth’s bumper and aerial shone in the moonlight, along with the slats of the monkey bars, the weedy sprigs in the sea of grass flowing out to the bluff. Hard, cropped blades like a silvery sea. It was almost September. Twenty-nine years ago the Germans had marched into Poland. Down in Chicago the cops were bashing college students. They beat someone unconscious, Elise had heard. There were no rules out here, not ones that people obeyed.

  For a moment I wanted to return home. I could sneak back without being seen. I knew how to live with people who both punished and approved of me. They would let me out to buy school supplies. They would drive me to Woolworth’s, glad I was at least trying to pass physics.

  But to live without my friends? To walk into school where they wouldn’t be? To walk the earth without them? Those three days alone in my room I could barely eat. I lived for the messages sporadically relayed: “Your friend Vera is worried about you.” “St. John—I think that’s his name—says hang in there.” I dreamed of us seated at a perfectly square restaurant table, then woke cut off from the world of 4EVER, while their friendship, without me, knotted into something I couldn’t untangle.

  —

  Moments later CJ turned into the lot and parked at the far end from the old Plymouth. As I slid into the passenger seat, I saw in the car’s overhead light a beautiful woman. Glittery dress and earrings, lipstick and blush, face framed in softly curling hair. “Yikes,” I said. “I mean, hi?”

  “Settle down, girlie.”

  His eyes looked wary. I felt a little bad for him. “You look dressed for the prom. You know, if I were a guy I’d ask you.” I opened my window; the night wind cooled my neck. I smiled an apology. “As a girl, you look better than me. Seriously. I mean that.”

  He seemed on the verge of pleased. Crickets sang around us. In the distance, the surf gasped for breath. But there was still that weird moaning in the air, as from a ghost, though it might have been a cat. “Isn’t that weird, CJ?” He listened a moment, then turned his lights back on. They shone on the field and the woods. Nothing moved. He backed the car up and reparked it. He opened his glove box, found a pair of binoculars, put them to his eyes. He shook his head and looked harder, lips pressed tight together. “Do you see something out there?”

  He shook his head again, as if irritated; his earrings jangled. His eyes were wide-open, his dark eyelashes thicker than mine. His line of sight moved slowly from left to right.

  “What? Talk, CJ.”

  He laughed scratchily. “Oh, I could speak. I could tell tales.” He lay back against the seat and closed his eyes. I picked up the binoculars and tried to see what he’d seen.

  “Do you really want to know? Think about it.”

  “Quit that! You’re scaring me!”

  He began in a murmur, with his eyes still closed. “At the edge of the woods, there’s a motor scooter lying on its side. A red motor scooter. Do we know anyone who rides a red scooter?”

  I didn’t like where this was heading, but he went on, louder now, as if he was enjoying himself. “And there’s more to the picture, my love. Just behind the scooter, there’s a blanket on the ground and two people are lying on it. For sixty-four thousand dollars, Kay, who’s on the blanket? It’s a tough question, but think and you’ll figure it out. Or we can play Twenty Questions. Name our two mystery fuckers.” He smiled into the air.

  “You are so obnoxious!”

  “Obnoxious is as obnoxious does. Not to mention, look before you leap. Have I addressed the que
stion of haste making waste? We all know ignorance is bliss. But on the other hand, three strikes and you’re out, dear Kay, Kate, the sweetest Kate in Christendom. Tell me, who is that masked man? And that skinny little woe-man? Turn the little wheel and focus, my love.”

  I got out of the car, looked at the sky, and tried to merge with the indifferent stars, but names for the lovers leaped to my mind like toads from the mouth of the ugly sister in the fairy tale, who wouldn’t clean the crone’s cottage and abused the beautiful sister. When I was thinking right, I was what I wanted to be, largehearted enough to rejoice in another’s happiness apart from my own. I could love Elise for being seeded fourth in junior tennis in the state of Michigan, I could forgive Arlyn for being more beautiful than my mother and a competent person in the world. I could forgive Arlyn for being alive instead of my mother. Sometimes I felt my heart truly expanding, my spirit transcending the world that gave beauty and cleverness its best rewards. Then CJ leaned toward me and whispered the names of the lovers on the blanket. “The plan was to meet tomorrow morning. To work out how to liberate you. They seem to have come early.”

  Half of me was in despair, but the other could still argue. “You know Saint is working tonight.” Through the binoculars I saw what could have been a scooter, half-hidden at the edge of the woods. I couldn’t see anything behind it. “He always works Tuesday nights,” I said. “Other people have scooters.”

  “You block, you stone, you worse-than-senseless thing.”

  “You’re crazy, CJ.”

  “Let’s check it out, why don’t we? Let’s see for our naïve, unsuspecting selves.”

  “You’re evil,” I said.