Everything You Came to See

by Elizabeth Schulte Martin

  She pulled the dress over her head herself, and he carried her to his cot. Holding her up was killing his back. She smiled up at him as she landed on the cot and undid her ponytail.

  “You’re strong,” she said.

  Henry said nothing but peeled away her underwear, little things, striped like a piece of Christmas candy. Carefully chosen. Beneath them, he found a star, the center of this green girl, a tattoo in blue. It meant something to her. And so he stopped and traced it with his finger like he was considering it, like he wanted to know what secret it represented, though he didn’t especially care. That little movement took only a few seconds, but it sucked the actress right out of her. When he looked back up at her, she was transformed. Her face was made unpretty with panic and lust. He pressed his chest to hers and felt her heart thundering.

  It didn’t feel wrong to have drawn out that real Kylie at first. It was good to be held so close, to feel so needed. But when he pulled back and saw her limbs spread out, naked and delicate as the violet petals that he and his brothers used to crush and rub into their skin when they wanted war paint, he felt disgusted. Wasn’t it unfair of him to demand something unrehearsed from her, when he had no intention of giving her the same? He searched for sexy images in his brain to replace the one of the soft nude thing in front of him. Girls in G-strings holding their tits like dessert cups in front of them. Girls in roller skates. Cindy Crawford. Sharon Stone. Adrienne. Yes, Adrienne, the giantess. He could never push a woman that big into a wall, couldn’t take a single thing from her that she didn’t want to give. A woman like Adrienne would envelop him. She was the seventh-largest woman in the world, he’d heard, which meant any lie he could tell with his body would be irrelevant. They would both know who was holding the cards, and that would make things simple, gentle, direct.

  Nothing like this.

  When his body finally forced him to let go, he kept his face turned away from Kylie, because the soft, glazed look of anybody in that state was the most vulnerable of expressions. He gulped, though, trying to catch his breath, and the noise gave him away. She pulled his face back to her and kissed him, and for the brief duration of that kiss, it was as if they were just two people who liked each other, and neither one was taking advantage of the other.

  They redressed without speaking.

  Henry filled a jar with water from the sink and turned his back to Kylie while he drank. He was the first to say anything, asking her if she wanted some water.

  “No, thanks,” she said.

  “But you’ve sweated all your water out,” he said.

  She shrugged and tugged a loose barrette out of her hair. “I was thinking we might have a little of that whiskey. Cap off the party, you know?”

  “I don’t drink,” said Henry.

  “Not even a little bit?”

  “No.”

  “Really? Why not?”

  Henry refilled his jar. “Because I’m an athlete.”

  Kylie rolled her eyes and peeled the plastic from around the top of the bottle. “Oh, well. Excuse me then. By all means, you must stay pure.”

  “You shouldn’t drink, either. You have to be in good condition to do this shit or you’ll ruin my show,” he said. This girl had been to a real school, and they hadn’t taught her how to take care of herself. Didn’t teach her to drink water, didn’t teach her to fall.

  She opened her mouth, and Henry thought she was going to tell him to go and die, but she didn’t. She unscrewed the lid and took a drink straight from the bottle. Because Henry read bodies, he saw, in the way she raised the bottle to her lips, in the way she swallowed hard and shuddered at the burn of it, that she was biting back regret, and he was surprised by how much this stung. I’m a dick, he thought. I’m Seamus.

  He walked around to where she sat, and she took another swallow of whiskey.

  “Let’s be friends,” she said. She was back to playing at being sexy and cavalier, but it wasn’t irritating to him anymore. He wanted to say something nice but he couldn’t, so he offered her his empty jar, thinking, for Chrissakes, at least keep track of how much you’re poisoning yourself right now.

  “It isn’t just your show, you know,” she said, pouring herself the drink.

  “Nope. You’re right. It’s Seamus’s show,” he said.

  “Right. Seamus’s show. I saw him congratulating you tonight. Tousling your hair, ‘oh, way to go, slugger! That’s m’boy.’”

  Henry kept his mouth shut, embarrassed.

  “He didn’t congratulate me. He didn’t even look at me,” she said. “This clown business is a goddamn boys’ club. Actually, the whole circus is.”

  There was nothing to say to that, either. It hadn’t occurred to him before, but yes, when he thought of girl clowns, he thought of children’s parties, not big tops, not spotlights.

  “How am I supposed to get to Ringling Brothers’ if I can’t even get Seamus’s attention here?”

  “Why would you want to work for Ringling Brothers’?” he asked.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t.”

  “I don’t. They’re just a big Feely and Feinstein. Nothing innovative. I’d be background noise to the elephants. You’d be invisible.”

  Kylie considered this, swiping the tip of her finger over the rim of her glass. “I got the first laugh,” she said.

  “You were supposed to get the first laugh. That’s what I meant to happen.”

  “Still,” she said.

  And Henry was sorry for her, which still felt to him a bit like love. “Yeah. Okay. You got the first laugh.”

  The Farmer Show (A Pantomime)

  This farmer (who I will play) has just planted a row of carrots. You see the carrots, their green parts make a leafy line in the center of the ring. He dusts off his hands and dabs the sweat from his face with a big red hanky and calls his wife to bring him dinner.

  The farmer is so tired. He’s so hungry.

  The wife comes out now. She looks dirty and nuts with her hair all in little knots around her head, so you think the life of a farmer’s wife isn’t so easy. She slaves away and watches all their little kids, who aren’t in the show, but who you figure are probably running around outside or something. Offstage, that is. The wife brings him an empty plate.

  The farmer gets mad. He does all this work, all day, and for nothing. His wife keeps gesturing, it’s there, it’s there on the plate! But he thinks, why would she do this to me? Does she hate me? She must hate me.

  Of course, it’s his fault that there’s no food to eat. She cooks what there is. The farmer knows that, and he knows it’s his fault, in his heart.

  And none of this is said either. It’s got to come through in their gestures, in the way they move around each other.

  The wife stands her ground. She puts her hands on her hips to say: There is food on that plate, and you will eat it.

  The farmer holds his hands up: Do you expect me to eat with my hands?

  The wife dashes offstage and brings back a magnifying glass and some tweezers.

  The farmer starts to fume. The wife goes right on eating her teeny tiny food happily with her own tweezers and magnifying glass.

  The farmer throws his magnifying glass at his wife, who ducks and throws her magnifying glass back at him. He arches his back like he’s doing the limbo to dodge. It goes on like this, like a dance, objects flying everywhere, until the wife finally cuffs him in the chin. She knocks the farmer against a bale of hay, upended with his legs splayed apart in the air. She scolds him by shaking her index finger at him and stomps away.

  Then, the farmer cries. But his stomach keeps rumbling, which causes him to startle every time he hears it. This is what I’ve been practicing the most for this act, changing my face fast from sad to surprised, so watching me is like watching sped-up film, a little Benny Hill homage. The audience won’t know what to feel for the farmer; should they pity him or laugh at him? My bet is they choose to laugh, that they might even laugh harder to drown out that urge to
feel sorry for him.

  In the end, the farmer finds out he has a magical ability to make the carrots grow. He spends the rest of the skit trying to convince his wife of his new powers—whenever she comes onstage, he can’t make the carrots grow. It’s like the carrots hear the farmer call her and they stop growing because they don’t want her to know his power. But she’s clever and she’s not going to let some carrot outsmart her. She sneaks out and “catches” the green sprout of a carrot top growing. The two of them then pull an enormous carrot from the ground, and the act ends with the farmer’s wife hefting the tip of the carrot upward so that her husband can take a bite.

  CHAPTER 4

  Edgefield, Indiana

  April 1978

  HENRY HAS A CLEAN ROOM of his own with thick, bright-yellow carpeting. He stretches out on his bedroom floor sometimes and spreads the fibers apart with his fingers. The space between the pieces of yarn in his carpet becomes huge, big enough for him to fit into, big enough for him to live in, its own sunny otherworld.

  Cassie is his neighbor, and on Saturdays she drags him past where the yard ends, into a wild acre that no one calls “yard,” and so no one mows. Cats live there, and snakes, and spiders, and stubby gnarled trees that are all tangled into one another.

  Cassie is in second grade with him, and she’s the only girl who’s really a bad kid, a girl who picks fights with boys and has a horror movie laugh, a high-pitched, ragged giggle. The only sound he’s ever heard that was uglier was a bag of rusty nails being dumped into a bathtub. The girls are afraid of her. The boys are afraid of her, too, so they make up reasons to avoid her that are not fear—they say she’s dirty, that she has head lice, and a type of fungus that comes from not washing properly on the back of her neck. It’s true, her clothes are dirty, and her hair hangs in dull clumps, like she may not have gotten all the soap out of it. But that isn’t why they avoid her.

  In the field, Cassie holds Henry by both arms and stares him straight in the face. They hear the faint whistle and chug-a-lug of a train in the distance, probably from Chicago, probably carrying steel and covered in painted-on words that Henry struggles to read when the train goes by. She holds him firmly, her small fingers squeezing so hard that his skin pinches between them. He tries to twist out of her grip—the only time anyone holds him like this, it’s because they intend to give him something other than a kiss, something like a talking-to through clenched teeth or a head-butt.

  But Cassie is stronger than him. She mashes her lips into his and opens her mouth, which forces his open as well. She tastes like metal and sesame seeds. Her tongue is all over, slapping against the backs of his teeth and the roof of his mouth. It’s like he’s taken something from her, hidden it in his mouth, and her tongue is on a mission to take it back.

  His teeth close around her tongue. It isn’t that he doesn’t like the kiss, and it isn’t even that she’s hurting him, squeezing his arm. He bites her because he thinks it might be funny. He can’t laugh, because his jaw is otherwise engaged with the biting, but he will be able to save the moment and tell it later to Andre, who will definitely laugh at the meanness and the justness of the bite.

  Cassie shrieks and tries to pull away, but his teeth are still clamped down on her tongue. Her scream rushes directly into his mouth, down his throat, and rattles inside his lungs. All her sounds are rusty nails scraping the bottoms of things. He unclenches his jaw, right as she pulls back her fist. She busts him in the cheek, and he trips backward. A branch scrapes his back as he falls into a bed of wet, dead leaves on the ground.

  “You bit me!” she says. Her voice is shrill. She spits pink saliva onto the ground and moves toward him. He hurries to get to his feet.

  “Why don’t you shut up before we get in trouble?” says Henry. She begins backing away from him, positioning herself to claim innocence if anyone comes. If they did, it would be curtains for the two of them. Kissing was probably like cussing, an offense of the mouth, so their mothers would wash their tongues and teeth with soap. Which would be better than being ratted out to their fathers, especially Cassie’s father, because better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

  Cassie must be thinking the same thing because her mouth quivers from the strain of holding in another screech. She has blood in the crevices between her baby teeth. “Why did you do that?” she says. Fear of punishment turns her into something delicate. Her green eyes become glassy with tears, and he is sorry for her, which feels a little like love.

  He hears the gravel crunching in his driveway and looks toward the house, expecting to see his father’s truck. Instead there is an unfamiliar van creeping up to the house, shiny and clean all over, a lacquered cotton-candy blue. Its lights are on, even though it’s daytime. A man gets out wearing a tan leisure suit. He’s wearing sunglasses and has a thick brown beard and moustache.

  “Who’s that?” asks Cassie.

  “Don’t know,” he says.

  The man has a cigarette, which he holds between his lips while he takes a small briefcase from the passenger side of the van. Henry can’t see his face. The man shuts the door to the van and walks toward the front of Henry’s house. Henry hears the screen door swing open and for a second he feels afraid for his mother, for Andre and baby Frankie. But Andre is up the road at his friend Will Miller’s house for the afternoon, and anyway, his mother would never open the door for someone she didn’t know or wasn’t expecting.

  “Let’s spy,” he says. “Let’s go get a look in his van.”

  “Why?” Cassie asks.

  “Because I want to. I played what you wanted to play.” Henry grabs her by the arm and starts walking toward the van. “After this it’ll be your turn to pick again. Okay?”

  They tiptoe across the gravel as if there were any way to keep it from making noise. In the van, he sees mostly junk, but not normal-person junk like soda cans or old shopping bags. It’s strange junk, carefully arranged. Most of the van is filled with boxes covered in floral paper and stacked five or six high. There are different sizes of these boxes, but they are all covered in the same flower print.

  “Okay. I guess he’s not a bad guy,” says Henry, but he is not entirely convinced.

  He doesn’t tell Cassie this, but Henry suspects the man in the van might have some news for his mother about recent UFO activity, which they needed to discuss privately because they didn’t want to scare him and the other kids. Three weeks ago, while Henry and Andre were practicing their kung fu on the back porch, Andre told him about a spaceship—how he saw it out his bedroom window, the white gleaming belly of it, which looked like the smooth white holding tank of Edgefield’s water tower. His brother had waited, sweat in his eyes, for Henry to say something about the aliens—that he had seen them, too, or that he believed him or that he thought Andre was a big fat liar. But Henry didn’t know what to tell him. Andre seemed to need Henry’s help, and the idea of being needed by his older brother had startled him into silence.

  Henry remembers Andre’s confession now and thinks the bearded man with the slick van is just the sort of person who would drive around the county warning citizens of an alien threat.

  The gray afternoon darkens into evening, and still his dad doesn’t come home, and neither does Andre. The game Cassie plays with him is “chicken,” an extension of their earlier game. Henry loses: he will look but he won’t touch. By the time the van pulls away and his mother calls “Kids!” he’s told Cassie “no” three times. She wants him to put his hand between her legs, and if he says “no” one more time, she says he’s dead because she’s going to kill him. So when his mother calls again, he goes without a word, because he can’t say no, and he’s too embarrassed to say good-bye.

  He hides in the hall closet instead of going to his room. The closet is lined with clothes that he and Andre have grown out of or worn out. His mother has plans to repair them or send them to the Salvation Army, but she doesn’t get around to it. They just cushion the bottom of the closet for Henry when
he hides.

  He twists himself into a space between the floor and the lowest shelf, leaving the door open just a crack so that the light can get in. He can see his mother moving in the kitchen through the crack. She’s making chili, he can tell. He hears the beef sizzling in the skillet and smells the armpit scent of the spices. His mother moves fast and makes a lot of noise, smacking the spoon against the rim of the pot, running the water, listening to a staticky radio station—the blades of her knives make rapid thumps against the cutting board. She sings. And dances. Henry likes it when she dances but cringes a little when she sings. Frankie’s head bobs in and out of the frame of Henry’s vision, too. He pulls every pot and pan out of the kitchen cabinets while their mother cooks, and she leaps over colanders, pivots on cookie sheets.

  One of Henry’s toy cars is in the closet, left here on purpose for just such an occasion of having to curl up with a guilty stomach. He likes to swipe his thumb in circular motions over the hood. It comforts him when he can’t stop feeling bad, when there is a magnet in his gut that pulls all his thoughts to it, and there his thoughts sit, all tangled in his stomach. The purple paint on the hood of the car is worn off from all his rubbing, revealing a thumb-sized oval of bare metal. He rubs it vigorously, now, feeling guilty, thinking of Cassie’s skinny white legs, and the way they met each other at her crotch. A line, as thin and short as a hair from his own head, marked the division between the left side of her body and the right, and the rest was skin. It didn’t bother him to see it, but it was a surprise he wasn’t ready for.

  His mother peeks into the closet. Her head has a halo of stray, curling reddish hairs that have been loosened from her braid by the steam in the kitchen. Her cheeks are pink. Her chest, just below her neck, is flushed as well—she is all pink, except a little green bruise the size of a raisin beneath her collarbone. She looks like she’s in a good mood, but her eyes don’t focus on him. They dart around the closet, and she rubs her palms on the front of her pants like she’s trying to dry them off.