THE NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF HOMESCHOOLING
My mom got the mink from a woman who used to be a man. It was a long thick coat that came almost to her knees, and when she wore it she looked half her usual size and not her age, like a little girl wearing something her parents said she’d grow into. Its fur was white and shot with umber streaks. The streaks turned lighter at their edges, broken up with white like streaks of dry-brushed watercolor. Then, I knew all about dry-brush watercolor because I was into Andrew Wyeth. I’d committed acts of passion while staring at a book of The Helga Pictures, which I’d had to steal from the library because I was sixteen and lonely, and all the desire and shame and the layers of desire, of which I’ve only recently become aware—Wyeth’s desire for Helga, my desire for Helga, my desire for Wyeth’s desire for Helga—had warped my brain, so that my imagination tried to turn half the things I saw into his paintings. But this is beside the point. This time, the coat really did look like that.
And my mom was already thirty-five and wouldn’t grow into anything, which made the coat look sad rather than hopeful. But I grew all the time, so much that sometimes I couldn’t remember what I’d looked like the month before. Walking with her, thinking this, I didn’t even notice the guy coming toward us until he darted past me. He wore ratty clothes, like a bum, but had the clean young face of a college student. Before I could figure out what was happening he threw a cup of soda at her. “Death is not fashion,” he yelled, and ran through the leafless clusters of elms and across the long stretch of grass toward the road. I yelled out, “Fuck you,” and my mom acted more upset about this than his throwing the drink. She said, “Why do you have to use that kind of language?” And I said, “It’s just a word.” Just a word, she said in her ironic voice. She flipped up the edge of her mink, the part stained with soda, and gave this trembling frown, like she was trying not to cry.
“Take it off and take mine,” I said. “It looks weird on you anyway and the spot’s gonna make you crazy.”
What I meant was that she had OCD and usually couldn’t stand wearing clothes with even the smallest stain on them. But she just wrapped the mink tighter around her waist and glared at me.
To soften her, I said, “You look nice,” which must have sounded stupid coming from me because I never said things like that to my mother. But she did look nice, if you didn’t count the fur. Beneath it she wore a fitted black dress, and her hair, usually pulled back in a ponytail, hung in dark waves around her face. She looked better than most women her age, like one of those thirty-five-year-old women who look like only slightly rumpled versions of their twenty-five-year-old selves. The guys on my soccer team said, “How can you stand your mom looking so hot?” And I said, “The way you stand looking at your ass-face in the mirror.” Inside I felt proud and sick at the same time.
* * *
We were in Connecticut, walking through this big green square in the middle of the town Charlene had moved to, going to the church where Charlene’s funeral would be held. We had come all the way from South Carolina, even though Mom hadn’t talked to Charlene in nearly a year. In addition to paying her respects, Mom also meant to represent Charlene’s great-uncle, a sickly old guy from our church, who couldn’t travel. My father was an elder at the church and got out of going because this other elder was in critical condition at the hospital. So I had to go so my mom wouldn’t be alone.
The sky was dirty white with only a tinge of blue. As we walked, I could see my breath in the air and feel the frosted-over grass crunch beneath my feet whenever I wandered off the pavement. Earlier that morning, while I was waiting in the lobby for my mom to finish getting ready, I’d read the front of the paper in the paper-box and saw something up in the corner about an animal rights protest today, on the green. And there they were: way far in the distance a group of people carrying huge signs with pictures of cows and chickens and rabbits that read “Compassion,” and buzzing with words I couldn’t make out. They faced the other direction and the whole time we walked by I prayed in my head that none of them would turn, or stray from the group like their friend had, and see my mom’s coat, the soda-stained fur of which had already begun to smell doggish. I put my arm in hers to hurry her along and she gave me this startled look, probably thinking I’d decided to be a gentleman. As we walked she went limp and leaned into my shoulder. She let me lead her along until her heel got caught in a ridge in the sidewalk, and then she pulled away and wiggled her tiny foot back in her shoe. She looked up at me like I’d tripped her, and made a sour face. “You’re not wearing a tie,” she snapped. I hadn’t been wearing it the whole time—not since the cab or the hotel—but she hadn’t said a word about it.
“You didn’t say to wear it.”
“I didn’t say to wear your loafers, Conner. I didn’t say to brush your teeth or put on your deodorant. It’s a funeral.”
“I didn’t. I didn’t put on my deodorant.”
Then we walked not touching. The church was in the center of the green. It had a huge steeple that climbed far above all of the treetops, long white columns, and carvings around a pair of doors more than twice my height. Inside, organ pipes ran all along the top of the rear wall. There were two chandeliers, one of them dripping with crystals, and stained-glass windows with pictures of pilgrim-looking people in blue and purple and gold robes, their faces pale with light. The pews didn’t look full, but they didn’t look empty, either. We sat in the middle, where you could just see the top of the closed casket and the violet and white flowers spilling over it. My mom draped her mink over the top of our pew so that the stained part faced the opposite direction, and stroked a clean patch of its fur, like it was still alive. When the organ started up I felt the vibrations of its notes through my feet and I saw that my mom had changed—that the skin beneath her eyes looked papery, with nets of purple veins stretching just beneath the surface. A shiver went up my spine and I felt all spiritual and corny. Sweat began to trickle down my armpits and I wished I hadn’t forgotten the deodorant.
In the hotel my mom had told me that Charlene attended this church. But this church looked nothing like the church she went to with us in South Carolina. There, we sat in fold-out chairs, in a messy circle. We didn’t have a preacher because it was a liberal kind of church my father founded. Everyone just stood up and said things or read things from the Bible, whatever they wanted. No organ. No stained glass. No chandeliers. No robes like the preacher who now fumbled at the altar with his papers wore, because my dad thought fancy churches and organs and robes tricked people. “Pretentious ceremonial garb,” he called it.
I kept looking around me, trying to find the other people pretending to be a sex they weren’t. Imagining them everywhere, men trying to trick me into thinking they were women, and women pretending to be men, I hadn’t even been able to sleep on the plane. But the people around us looked normal enough, just somber-looking people in funeral clothes. “Does Charlene stand for Charles?” I asked Mom.
“That’s a very rude question.”
“Rude how?”
“This is one of my closest friends, do you understand?” She kept changing on me. Now pink rimmed her eyes and her pale skin looked drained to the color of bone. Andrew Wyeth could have really made something of her.
“You haven’t even talked to her in forever.”
No answer. The organ paused and started up again. The sound went up inside of me and I tried to push it out but I couldn’t and I thought that my father was right: I was being tricked into something. Was Charlene wearing a suit or dress inside her coffin? When I whispered this to my mom, she asked if I’d please wait for her outside. It wasn’t really a question, though I think she’d have let me stay if I promised to behave. But I wanted to smoke anyway, so I just did what she said. I figured I’d make it up to her later.
* * *
Outside, I stood on the cement steps and lit a clove. I’d bought them from one of the church kids who had his own car. My mom hated that I smoked, but she couldn�
�t do much about it except put pamphlets with pictures of black abscessed lungs on my desk and throw my packs away if she found them in my pockets when she did the laundry. Holding a clove, I felt philosophical. The trail of smoke resembled the life process. It started very small, just like humans started, and then it got fatter and less defined, like most of my older relatives, and then it just disappeared. Poof. Of course Charlene had not gotten fatter and less defined but thinner. She was anorexic. It had something to do with her dying. Maybe because she was so tall, plus really a man, she could only get smaller like a woman by narrowing herself.
The cement was freezing my feet but also stimulating my thoughts. Standing there, I thought how warm and beautiful and perfect it was in Charlene’s church and wondered how it must have felt to go there every Sunday and feel the vibrations of the music against the soles of your feet. I could go back in, but what was the point? At home I’d have to keep going to my parents’ church, where I always felt edgy or confused or just bored.
Even though no one could hear me, I used some profanity and pictured my mother, how much it would piss her off.
* * *
Even before she moved, Charlene had stopped coming to our house because of how I glared at her. When she and my mom sat at the dinner table sipping coffee, I brought my schoolwork into the living room—just outside the line where the living room stopped and the dining room began—so I could lie on the floor and stare until she looked over. When she did, I glared at her. She would start stirring her coffee and moving her hands faster than usual, feathering her crunchy blond hair. She would cross and uncross her legs, which bugged me because they looked like a real woman’s legs, and make an excuse to go. My mom never noticed me glaring because talking to Charlene made her all dreamy and reflective; she thought everything Charlene said was wise. Like when my mom got mad at me for swearing, Charlene would say, It’s okay, June, it’s just an assertion of his masculinity, and smile in this knowing way that made my mom laugh.
The last time she came over I followed her to the bathroom. In the hall, I said, “I saw you in my mom’s room that time. Messing with her stuff.” What she knew I meant was that I’d once seen her try on one of my mother’s dresses when she thought she had my mother’s room to herself. It was during a dinner party. Her gaunt face, all broad bones and deep hollows and wide raisin-colored lips, fell in on itself, and just as quickly turned up into this tight smile. She said, “How?” And I said, “How what?” And she said if what I said actually happened, then how did I see it?
“Through the window.” Not quite the truth.
“Oh, I see. This is your idea of a joke, Conner? Because the party didn’t start until seven-thirty. Your mother would have closed the blinds by then.” This was true. The blinds went up at seven every morning, and down at seven in the evening, no matter the season or what it looked like outside. I was screwed—I didn’t want to explain how I’d really seen her—and I didn’t know what else to say. I just stood there. She raised her eyebrows like she’d said something smart and slammed the bathroom door behind her.
The smell of her perfume stayed in the hall. She wore White Shoulders, like my great-aunt Martha, who’s about a hundred years old and wears her overcoat inside, even in the middle of summer.
* * *
I don’t know when exactly she gave my mom the mink, but I can guess. Mom went out twice, alone, the week before Charlene moved, and then, a few days later, I heard my dad complaining in my parents’ bedroom, “It takes up half the closet, June.” When I wandered in he was standing in his boxers and glaring into the closet, at the mink wrapped in plastic. My mom sat at the dresser brushing her hair. “Don’t you see how my suits are getting mussed by it, June? Will you just turn around for a minute?”
* * *
Probably Charlene died thinking I was a jerk, but she did creep me out, and I did have a lot going on then. For example, I had hard-ons ten or twelve times a day. I’d either just jerked off or needed to jerk off, or hoped at least a few hours would pass before I had to jerk off again. I disgusted myself. Yet being me had become significantly more interesting. Where as I once sat in my room bored, playing computer games or drawing, I could now look at a picture of Helga and feel entertained.
As I said, I do not approve of stealing. It’s just that my mom took me to the library sometimes, and while she looked for biographies I looked at art books. You see a lot of naked women in the art books, but none of them look quite like Helga. There’s this one picture where she’s got her arms folded beneath her breasts and one breast hangs over her hand while the nipple of the other presses into the other hand; and you don’t get this—this sense of the weight of it, the breast, I mean—in most of the other art books. And then, because there are all these watercolors and sketches that Wyeth did of her before the major paintings, you’ve got this ghost Helga. The ghost Helga is slippery, like maybe she’s lying in space with nothing beneath her, or maybe she disappears halfway across the page, into a patch of fleshy watercolor; but too there’s her breasts with the shadows beneath them, and her belly poking out, round and smooth.
You can almost feel it, the weight of that breast on her hand.
In one painting there is only Helga’s body in a field of soft black. Her hair is golden, her body all white, as if glowing from the inside, the faintest blush on her lips and cheeks. Her hair curls against her bare shoulder. Her face is turned away from you. Around her neck she wears a cord of black velvet that disappears into the black around her. Also you can see her pubes.
And so I put it in my satchel, the book. We walked out of the library and the alarm went off, but the library clerk figured she hadn’t desensitized my mom’s books correctly. If I’d have gotten caught I had an excuse planned: one of the scruffy unemployed guys who camped out in the magazine section had put the book in my bag. My mom would believe this. “Stay away from those men,” she always said to me.
But I didn’t get caught. I didn’t even feel that bad, honestly. Honestly I blamed Mom for my stealing Helga. Half of me wanted that alarm to go off, just to see her face when they took the book out of my bag. Just to see her flip through the pages.
Understand that because she homeschooled me, my exposure to real women was seriously limited. I saw women only at church. Though, like I said, we went to a progressive church, our women looked the opposite of progressive to me: big glasses and no makeup, long skirts and cropped haircuts. You couldn’t imagine any of them posing naked. You couldn’t imagine any of them going off with Andrew Wyeth, alone into the woods. You couldn’t even imagine wanting to take one into the woods. But there were exceptions, which only created more problems for me: Mrs. Kapawski, Ally Kapawski, and Charlene (if you consider her a woman). Mrs. Kapawski was all blond and powdery and flushed pink in her cheeks. She had big breasts that kind of bounced when she walked and I wondered if Ally would grow them too. Ally looked like her except thin, fourteen, with darker blond hair the color of Helga’s and eyes almost always dilated like someone was shining a flashlight in her face. The face itself looked perpetually snobby, bored. Looking at it made me wild with desire, almost as much as looking at Helga did.
I watched Ally all during service, the congregation’s words just noise, my heart racing almost as fast as it did at soccer practice. Sometimes I even tried to draw her on my devotional pamphlet, though the drawing never looked right, with the top of her head always trailing off the page. Afterward, while the adults had their coffee, I ran around with the other boys, in and out of the building around the parking lot. We ran and yelled like the whole place was a soccer field, but I never forgot she might be watching. Out on the lawn, she had her own thing going on. She made up plays for the other girls to act in. If you went close enough to hear the basic plot, you’d hear something about a suicide, or an affair. Apparently Mrs. Kapawski watched the soaps. Anyway, Ally did most of the acting, throwing out her arms and fake-weeping (it was the only time she looked fully awake), and the other girls circled aro
und her, pretending to be sisters and maids, whatever. I made a habit of charging through the circle of girls whenever I saw a gap. Just running through to whoosh right past Ally while she acted. Running so close that the breeze I made ruffled her blond hair. The other girls yelled at me. But except for flinching, Ally didn’t even acknowledge me. Probably she didn’t even care.
But like I said, I was homeschooled. Homeschooling elevated my maturity in some ways, like making me read above the level of most kids my age, but it also made me socially retarded. For example, one Sunday, when Ally looked really pretty in this mint-green sundress, I said, “Kind of stupid to wear a dress like that today, huh?” Because it was forty degrees outside and on the cusp of fall. “I mean, you must have wanted to wear it really badly to wear it today?” She rolled her eyes at me. Right after, Mrs. Kapawski came up beside her. She said she needed Ally to get her hand lotion from the car. I figured I’d follow her. I didn’t have anything else to do anyway.
It was cloudy and gray that morning, but also gold. The gold shot through the gray and then it went away, reappeared in another part of the sky. This hill rose up against one side of the parking lot and from where I stood it framed Ally. The grass was dying, so the hill had different shades of brown and yellow in it, with a few bits of green. It could’ve been a Wyeth, except for all the stupid SUVs, and that Ally’s dress looked too bright and new for a woman’s in a Wyeth painting. I caught up to her; she cocked her head to look up at me, and then just faced straight ahead, like she didn’t care. I followed her to her family’s car, where she rifled through a bunch of junk in the back floorboard; who’d have thought Mrs. Kapawski—her hair always in place and her outfits so smooth and clean—would be such a slob, with empty drink cans and dirty sweaters and wrappers all over her floorboard? When Ally leaned into the backseat I pressed my side against hers and edged her in farther and she just let me, though she gave me this What the hell are you doing? look. I sat there for a minute staring straight ahead and said, “I wish we could just stay in here.”
Virgin and Other Stories Page 7